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The Fearful Mirror of Apollo

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The Fearful Mirror of Apollo The Fearful Mirror of Apollo Andrew Childs Between rationalism and mysticism there is … a certain complicity. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Though it is not at all usual, I wish to step outside of the Albigensian crusades (1209-1229), which effectively domain of critical research for one moment and into the ended the spread of Catharism.2 realm of speculation (fig 1): The Cathari (derived from katharos, the Greek word It is late in the morning of August 27 1965. A man stands meaning ‘pure’) followed a distinctly eastern Gnostic on the balcony of house E1027 at Roquebrune, Cap theology, the origins of which can be found in early Martin. Looking at this man we know as Le Corbusier, dualistic heresies such as Manichaeism, in which is he appears lonely, tired and embittered. His dreams are proposed an eternal conflict between light and darkness, haunted by an aphorism, a casual sentence he once good and evil. Like Manichaeism, Catharism entailed an scribbled down from a book long forgotten: explicit dualism. According to Cathar theology, creation is divided between the material world, governed by an Many die too late and some die too early. Yet still the dictum evil principle (known as the demiurge), and the spiritual may sound strange: Die at the right time.1 domain, ruled by the absolute good god. Within this dualistic cosmology, the goal of life was to achieve It is already too late. salvation by escaping from the cycle of reincarnation that He makes a decision; walking back into the house he binds the soul to the material world. The Cathar carefully selects several red coloured barbiturates adherents were divided into the credentes, whose prescribed for insomnia and adds benzodiazepines obligations were very light, and the perfecti (‘perfected prescribed for depression. He swallows them as he walks ones’), who were expected to lead a life of extreme down the steep path to the azure waters of the asceticism. Their one sacrament was the consolamentum Mediterranean sea (fig 2). He has always been a strong and their final act of faith the endura or ritual suicide. The swimmer, and this occasion is no different from any Cathar perfecti, believed that by choosing how and when other. to end their lives, they could break the cycle of transmigration, and thus free their spirit from the (fig 3) Le Corbusier’s accomplishments, particularly at inherent evil of material form. The Cathari also believed Ronchamp, Chandigarh and La Tourette were the work in a doctrine of negative virtue, virtue that consisted of of a complex spiritual visionary who combined an not doing wrong and which had as its reward peace of idealistic aesthetic philosophy with an ancient dualist the soul. theology. Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds on October 6 1887, Charles Edouard Jeanneret was raised a Calvinist The Catharist legend had long been part of the culture of Protestant. The Jeanneret family proudly traced their the Jura region. Albert Jeanneret in a personal ancestry back to the Cathars, a heretical Christian sect conversation with Paul Turner spoke of the connection which flourished in the southeast of France during the between the Jura and the Heretics. 12th and 13th centuries, and to the French Huguenots who fled to the Jura region following the revocation of The Jeannerets, classified as inhabitants of Jura, came to France the Edict of Nantes in 1685. In Languedoc the Cathari at the moment of the religious persecution of the Huguenots. I were known as the Albigensians. Pope Innocent III, think the Huguenots, like their ancestors the Cathari, were alarmed by the threat posed to the authority of the disciples of Manes, living in the southeast of France, against Roman Catholic Church, ordered a crusade which was whom the Pope unleashed the cruel Albigensian crusade3 (fig 4). begun in 1209. This was the first of the so called INTERSTICES 4 The Fearful Mirror of Apollo 1 While there is little historical evidence to suggest that two different revelations of the same divinity. Dionysus the early Calvinist Protestants, known as the Huguenots, represented esoteric truth, the heart and interior of things - followed a theology derived from Manichaeism, the Jura accessible to the initiates alone. He held the mysteries of life, of region did however receive a great number of exiles past and future incarnations, of the relationships between soul escaping the religious persecution in France which began and body, the heaven and earth. Apollo personified the same in the early part of the 13th century and continued until truth applied to terrestrial life and the social order. Inspirer of the end of the 18th century (fig 5). According to Albert poetry, medicine, and law, he represented science through Jeanneret, his brother first became interested in la divination, beauty through art, the peace of peoples through question Cathare at the age of sixteen or seventeen and he justice and the harmony of soul and body through purification. maintained this interest throughout his life, reading In a word, for the initiate, Dionysus meant nothing less than everything he could about Catharist history, doctrines the evolving divine spirit of the universe, and Apollo his and purported mysticism.4 Le Corbusier’s sketch-books manifestation to earthly man.9 contain several references to the Cathari. He mentions, for example, the routes followed by the exiles, the places Le Corbusier for his part was especially interested in the where they sought refuge and the parallel experiences of chapter on Pythagoras, heavily underlining and the Jeannerets. Later in life Le Corbusier explicitly annotating passages, particularly descriptions of identified with the Cathar ‘Parfaits’ noting that: Pythagorean numerology and the principle of the four divine numbers – the Tetrad. According to Schuré, the Jeannerets, the Janret [family] = truly the “perfect ones” of Pythagoras perceived in the Tetrad the synthesis of the Languedoc.5 Universal Triad with its totality, the Monad. The universal threefold law or the Triad was identified as the Le Corbusier clearly considered himself to be descended essential law of all things and the key to life, both human from the Cathari and to have inherited their mystical and divine. Just as the divine threefold law (Father, Son spirit, as Paul Turner points out; “whether or not this and Holy Spirit) is contained within the one, i.e. God, so really was true seems to be less significant than the fact too the human threefold law (body, soul and spirit) is that Le Corbusier believed it to be true.”6 contained within the will which sums up the whole, ie. the consciousness of self. In this way Pythagoras Edouard Schuré’s 1889 book The Great Initiates: A study of conceived of threefoldness and unity (the three and the the Secret History of Religions, was inscribed by one) as symbolically constituting the sacred Tetrad.10 L'Eplattenier as a farewell gift to Le Corbusier in 1907.7 Schuré was profoundly influenced by German Idealism. Pythagoras pursued the teaching of numbers still further. In The necessity for a spiritual revival and the rejection of each of them he defined a principle, a law, an active force of the materialism together form the main underlying theme of universe. But he said that the basic principles are contained in The Great Initiates. Schuré held the extreme Platonic view the first four numbers, since in adding and multiplying them that matter was merely an inferior reflection of spirit. one finds all the others.11 His personal quest for the spirit traces the lives and exploits of the mystical prophets who transmigrate Schuré's descriptions of Pythagorean numerology parallel throughout the ages. Eight of the greatest prophets are Le Corbusier’s own numerical system, le Modular. In a examined: Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, typical passage taken from his book on the Modular, Le Pythagoras, Plato and Jesus. Aside from the Corbusier proclaims that mathematics embraces accomplishments of the prophets themselves, of specific interest in Schuré’s book is the notion of an elite – a both the absolute and the infinite, the understandable and the chosen group of initiates who are privilege to know the forever elusive … sometimes there is a door: one opens it– profound mysteries of life. Schuré divided the initiates enters–one is in an other realm, the realm of the gods, the room into four categories: the instinctive, the passionate, the which holds the key to the great systems. These doors are the intellectual and the archetypal man – the so-called great doors of miracles. Having gone through one, man is no longer initiate – whose “will acquires an almost unlimited the operative force, but rather it is his contact with the universe. strength, an all-pervading, creative magic.”8 Schuré’s In front of him unfolds and spreads out the fabulous fabric of philosophy picks up on the Apollonian/Dionysiac duality numbers without end.12 (fig 6) that was popularised by Friedrich Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy. But rather than seeing Dionysus and Conceived as a comprehensive and harmonious Apollo as two opposing principles or forces, Schuré proportioning system, the Modular is ostensibly based on insists that they are in fact the ideal man (oddly enough a six-foot tall English policeman), divided by a series of golden sections, known as the Fibonacci series. Beneath its superficially INTERSTICES 4 The Fearful Mirror of Apollo 2 rationalist justification lies Le Corbusier’s barely the bull metamorphosed into the moon, the cloak of disguised conception of le Modular as a mathematically Mithra transformed into the vault of the sky, from the transcendental mystical system; that there exists tail of the bull sprang grain and where blood had touched universal formal principles capable of achieving perfect the ground grapevines appeared (fig 9).
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