Encounters of Miguel Serrano

Miguel Serrano collected works https://archive.org/details/miguel-serrano_202312

Encounters of Miguel Serrano

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound & the Angel

From the end of the 1930s to the mid-1940s and beyond, I was greatly interested in the personality of the American poet Ezra Pound. I saw a lot of myself reflected in him. Indeed, during the Second World War he was opposed to the government of his country and embraced the cause of Italy and Germany. I did something similar by opposing the position adopted by my uncle, Joaquin Fernández y Fernandez, Minister for Foreign Relations of President Juan Antonio Rios, who was also a partisan of Germany. My uncle broke off relations with the Axis, and for many years, I broke off relations with him.

Unlike me, however, the great poet was imprisoned by his own government, first in an animal cage in Pisa, then for thirteen years in a lunatic asylum in the United States, well before the Soviets used this technique to torture political dissidents in the USSR. All that happened to me is that the Allied Powers (i.e., a foreign power, not my own fatherland) kept me on a commercial “black list” for four years, which prohibited giving me work in Chile and, I suppose, the rest of the world. It was a disaster, but nothing comparable to what happened to Ezra Pound and Knut Hamsun, another great writer and a Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner who was also locked up in a lunatic asylum, in addition to the confiscation of all his goods and properties, also for expressing his support of Germany.

Many years passed, and I heard no more of Ezra Pound. I learned, yes, that he had been released, returning immediately to Italy. He declared: “I leave the United States, because this is an immense insane asylum” . . . And he settled in Venice.

One day my secretary at the Embassy in Vienna handed me a newspaper clipping with a photograph of Pound in London, where he attended the funeral of his friend, the poet T. S. Eliot, author of “The Waste Land,” a poem that Pound helped him compose. It also said that Ezra Pound resided at Venice.

I decided to go seek him out, traveling to this beautiful city on the Adriatic and checking into a well-known Venetian pension that had been recommended to me in India by the Italian Ambassador, Count Iusti di Giardino, owner of the famous gardens of the same name in Verona. His family resided in Onara di Tombolo. The ambassador was a great admirer of poetry and quoted Neruda in Italian from memory.

The pension that he recommended was called “A la Salute da Cici” and was in a district behind the cathedral of Salute, in Venice, close to the quays and factories where artisans created the famous Venetian glass. Only the inhabitants of the city went there, and simply giving the name of the pension was enough for the gondoliers and “vaporetto” drivers to treat you with a certain respect. Ezra Pound’s house, in Via Querini, was almost next door to the pension “Cici.” The owner, who gave me his address, told me that, yes, Ezra Pound received nobody.

I tried, without success.

I already told what happened in articles published at the time in El Mercurio. There is no need to repeat it here, since it is reproduced in the Anthology of Ezra Pound: Homage from Chile, of Armando Uribe Arce and Armando Roa Vial, recently published by the Editorial Universitaria.

The sympathetic owner of the pension finally facilitated a meeting with Ezra Pound, by advising me to pass by Udine on my return voyage to Trieste and to try to meet Mr. Ivancic, of the Italian nobility, who lived there in a palace of his family, built by the same architect as the cathedral of Salute and bombarded during the war. He was a young and spontaneous patron and friend of Hemingway, from whom he had unpublished manuscripts. He was the protector and patron of Ezra Pound, and moreover, he painted. He immediately called the poet’s house on the telephone. And I set out again that same evening for Venice, because Ezra Pound invited to me to have tea with him the next day.

I wrote of my interview in two articles: “The Cry of Silence” and “Celestial Signs in Homage to Ezra Pound.” Both were published by El Mercurio in Santiago and by La Prensa in Buenos Aires. Here I will concentrate only on the extraordinary phenomenon that I experienced there. Or rather, that we experienced there, Ezra Pound and I.

The poet kept totally silent; he did not speak; he did not say a single word. I was the one who spoke. I alone spoke, for more than half an hour. I even recited a poem of Hermann Hesse to him; I spoke to him about the war, the Cathars, the poen of Bertrand de Born, “The Praise of War,” which it would translate. Nothing; the silence was absolute.

Then, suddenly, as if by inspiration and recalling my childhood in the countryside in Chile, when “I” still did not exist and I floated above myself, “identified” with the “Guardian angel,” who watched me from above, this expression came to mind: “The second childhood of the old man.” It so happened that Ezra Pound had “left” himself and returned to his “Guardian angel.” Thus it was an error on my part to try to speak to “him,” here below, so I spoke directly to his “Angel,” there above. And then he answered me.

I will always remember what he said to me. They were prophecies, like those of Fatima, and they gave me the strength to remain firm “in the old dreams, so that our world does not lose hope…”

I was the one who made the main effort to erect in his honor the only monument to the memory of Ezra Pound on earth today, in the town of Medinaceli, in Spain. An enormous rock from the Cantabrian Mountains was brought on mules by the villagers. In bronze letters made by village blacksmith, it was inscribed the question that Ezra Pound had asked the Spanish journalist Eugenio Montes he had visited him in Venice: “Do the roosters of Cid still crow in Medinaceli?”

For the inauguration of the monument I arrived with Ivancic and the beautiful Olga Rudge, the faithful friend of Ezra Pound. My oldest son accompanied me too. I spoke there in a choked voice, almost inaudible, with the strong emotion of a comrade. Perhaps, in his memory, I should have spoken with the voice of silence, with the “cry of silence,” which is the best way to reach the Angel, who had already received him long, long ago.

The Death of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound died in Venice on 2[1]November 1972, less than five years after our interview. I was in Spain, traversing that hard and ancient land. I had visited Ronda, down South, the city over the abyss, where Rilke once lived for a time. I had been reading Pound’s letters in the small museum that Spaniards have opened in the hotel where he once lived—his love letters to Lou Salomé, also lover and muse to Nietzsche.

I meditated about the fact that Spaniards have paid homage to this universal poet, who once trod their soil of history and legend. I later carried on northwards, toward a tiny town, near Madrid—Medinaceli—, where the Cid once sought refuge during his exile—a town of stones and ruins, Roman and Visigothic, heavy with Iberian mystery, perhaps Celtic, Druidic. The town is on a steep incline, on a hill, and overlooks a dry, arid sea of grizzly, yellow, lunar waves, like a vision from a dead planet. At times, on the distant horizon, there appears a solitary tree, placed there by beauty, by that someone who takes pleasure in ordering the Castilian landscape in order to later contemplate it from the summit of Medinaceli through the old Roman Arch, remnants of an ancient fortification.

I learnt of Ezra Pound’s death in Madrid, via the newspapers. The Spaniards paid him heartfelt homage. Eugenio Montes related the burial in Venice, to which I transported myself again with my imagination, toward his little house in Via Querini, seeing him setting off on his last journey, on a dark gondola, through the canals, toward the cemetery in the island of San Michele. The journalist Eugenio Montes told that during the last interview he held with the poet—likely many years ago— the latter had asked him, “Do the Cid’s roosters still crow at dawn in Medinaceli?” And he added that Pound had visited Medinaceli in 1906, following the Cid’s route. Pound loved The Poem of the Cid, which he considered superior to the Song of Roland. He had visited Spain in order to retrace the Way of “The Champion”[2]. In this way he had arrived at that small village high up in the heights, which remains as it was during the Middle Ages.

Once again I found myself in a hotel room, now in Madrid. It was evening and I wanted to continue a conversation—cut short one evening in Venice—with my friend’s ghost, now loose forevermore. The ghost came and sat on a chair, I don’t know where, certainly not in that hotel room, and began talking—talking, like he once did so long ago. He was young again and recited cosmic poems; said immortal, beautiful, immense things, like the city of Venice, like the Castilian landscape, like the mountains on the moon. I listened and forgot. Because all such things are forgotten and must never be remembered.

Days later I returned to Medinaceli. I found that a man from Chile lived there, professor Fernando del Toro Garland. We talked. He also talked to me about the article by Eugenio Montes and about Pound’s words regarding the Cid’s roosters. It had occurred to him to suggest to the Spanish authorities to erect a monument to Pound in Medinaceli, which recorded there the quote from Pound and the passing through those parts, at the beginning of the century, of the great American poet. I encouraged him in his determination. From that moment we were in contact, personally or by letter. Thus I followed the ups and downs of his efforts. The town’s Spanish authorities and several friends in Madrid collaborated with enthusiasm. Carvers and stonemasons transported with their mules an enormous stone, desquamated by the millennia, from the Celt-Iberian hills, through the raw winter’s snow. Mediaeval blacksmiths forged old and simple letters to be affixed upon the stone, bearing the quote from Pound, “Do the roosters still crow at dawn in Medinaceli?”[3]

The most beautiful square was chosen in that town high up in the heights (‘Medina’ means ‘city’ in Arabic; ‘celi’ means ‘sky’), and there, below an aged tree, the stone was embedded. It would also be a fountain, for water would run over its creased and cracked surface. That stone is like Pound’s face during his final years. The 15 May 1973—St Isidor’s day and the date of the town’s annual festival—was chosen for the monument’s inauguration. I took it upon myself to ensure that Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound’s companion, would be able to attend. Olga was seventy-eight and never went anywhere. But she went to Medinaceli.

That day young Spanish poets came from Madrid, along with Jaime Ferrán, Pound’s translator. Also present in Medinaceli were a few American painters who lived there. And also all the townsfolk in their Sunday best, with their well-cared suits; their berets; their shepherd’s crooks; their staffs of pilgrims of the heights; their noble aspects, made out of Castilian rock; their sons; their grandsons, already departing for the cities on the plains, cities without poetry. They were all there to pay homage to that poet from another land, from another world, which they never knew, which they never read—because many cannot read—, but which they know from within, with their rock souls, which resemble the face of the dead poet, of the ecumenical poet. Also there were the dogs and mules that accompanied and brought the stone; also there was the smith, the town’s priest, the Civil Guard[4], and the wine and the water and the bread, the grass and the birds of Medinaceli, of Old Castile. Also there were the roosters of Pound and of the Cid. Of those vanished warriors.

I found out the day before that I was to speak during the homage ceremony; Olga Rudge wanted me to say a few words for the occasion. What words? What to say that could resemble the silence of Pound and of the City of the Sky? At dawn I went for a walk on the streets of the dead town, among the ruins. I arrived at the little square with the monument and I sat beneath the tree, next to the stone. I carried with me a book, recently published in Barcelona by Editorial Barral: Introducción a Ezra Pound, with translations and commentary by Carmen R. de Velasco and Jaime Ferrán. I opened and read: ‘the stone under elm … the curled stone at the marge … the stone taking form in the air …’[5]

It was Canto XC. I stopped, astonished. But… Here’s the stone and this is precisely an elm! Nobody thought about it before, nobody knew it. This was all done without human agency. But… was it truly done without agency? I remembered a quote by Nietzsche: ‘Things come to us eager to become symbols.’[6]And Rilke: ‘Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, invisible?’[7]

Or else, dreams become visible outside of us… This is what Jung termed ‘synchronism’, ‘coincidences’, and ‘acausal phenomena’, and Nietzsche, ‘chance laden with meaning’[8]. It was all ‘meaning’, all ‘magic’, all miracle—truly, all and nothing. Who orchestrated this? Who has ordained it? Perhaps Pound himself? Or that Being who composes the landscape, according to the highest sense of beauty; who makes a tree grow on the Castilian horizon, so that it may be contemplated from high up in the heights, through a ruined stone arch? That Being, moved, ‘touched’ by the beauty, by the depth of meditation, by the dreams, by the verses of a son of the sky and of the Earth, desires in this manner to manifest Itself as he returns to Its bosom. (‘Nature imitates art.’) The Being may be the Earth itself, Mother Earth, the Spirit of the Earth. When Jung died, the heavens exploded with a storm that was unheard of at that time of the year, and a lightning bolt struck the tree under which he used to sit, marking it forever. When Ezra Pound died, things—the stone, the tree, nature— recited one of his poems, organised themselves after one of his verses: ‘The stone under elm…’

And more still…

‘thick smoke, purple, rising / bright flame now on the altar / the crystal funnel of air / out of Erebus, the delivered, / Tyro, Alcmene, free now, ascending / e i cavalieri, / ascending, / no shades more, / lights among them, enkindled / and the dark shade of courage / bowed still with the wrongs of Aegisthus. / Trees die & the dream remains.’[9]

On the afternoon of the homage ceremony, before the entire town, as I have said, and also before Pound’s heroic companion, was lifted the Spanish flag that draped the monument, the ‘face’, the ‘stone under elm’. And then, up on the elm, sung a blackbird. And the town commented on this event and will continue to comment on it for a long time, because the dwellers of those ancient ruined cities, of the towns of yesteryear, are like the Greeks of legend, like the Celts, and the Druids; and discover in a birdsong, on a day of auspices, an event worthy of interpretation, which in this manner fills their lives until their deaths.

What else can a great poet wish for, other than to have things recite his poems? What else can he wish for, save for a blackbird to sign his homage? What other proof may be given that a man is great, that a poet is so, except for the sky, for nature, to confirm it by manifesting itself in this way?

A blackbird still sings in Medinaceli. And it sings for Ezra Pound.

Carl Gustav Jung

Hitler & Jung

C. G. Jung Speaking, by Professor William McGuire, has recently been translated into Spanish and published by Trotta, with the title Encuentros con Jung. Reproduced there is Jung’s account of the time he saw Hitler and Mussolini, together, addressing a mass audience.

While Mussolini was an ordinary man—“a human being”, so to say, even a charming one— Hitler was not, “lacking individuality, confused with his nation’s collective soul, and possessed by its Collective Unconscious.” And Jung would add: “Not even by the Collective Unconscious of a single nation, but that of an entire race, the Aryan race. And it is for this reason that the listeners, even those without knowledge of German, would, if Aryans, be gripped and hypnotised by his words; because he represents them all—he speaks for all of them. And if he does it shouting, it is because an entire nation, an entire race, is expressing itself through him.”[1] Thus, Hitler is the incarnation of the Aryan God Wotan. Hitler is possessed by him; he is no longer a human being. And Jung even compares him to prophet Mohammed, and to what the latter was and still is for the Islamic world.

I don’t believe Professor Jung would have read Kubizek’s book, The Young Hitler I Knew, the most important ever written about the German Führer, and which enlightens us like no other in confirming Jung’s assessments, recounting the extraordinary scene that took place one night in Kubizek and Hitler’s youth, having these two friends attended a rendition of Richard Wagner’s Rienzi in Linz. So great was the impression on Hitler caused by this opera (in which he sensed his future drama), that he walked with his friend in total silence in the evening gloom, down the streets and into the woods, in the mountains. And Kubizek relates that, once there, Hitler grabbed his hand and spoke, as if in a trance, with a voice that did not belong to him, listening to himself with astonishment. He spoke about Germany, about Germans, and about what he would do for that nation: a total revolution. And these declarations were made by an Austrian boy no older than sixteen, a complete nobody. Kubizek reveals that many years later, when Adolf Hitler was already Germany’s Führer, Kubizek reminded him of that extraordinary scene from that distant night in their youth. And Hitler said to him, “Yes, I’ve never forgotten it; because that’s where it all began . . .”

And Jung expanded on that experience, stating: “You know things that you yourself don’t know that you know and which I don’t know that I know either . . .”

Without a doubt, during the 1930s Jung was intrigued by the National Socialist phenomenon, what with its overwhelming force, threatening to extend itself globally. And he accepted the presidency of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, coming to replace Göring’s brother[2]. Moreover, his break with Freud had already occurred, and he would go on to develop his theory of the “Collective Unconscious,” handing over a formidable weapon to Nazism—one which the latter never used, owing to Hitlerism’s distrust towards anything that came from psychoanalysis and its terminology.

There is no doubt that the end of the war was a catastrophe for Jung, who feared his whole body of work would be destroyed, since it linked him to Hitlerism, even if in a “philosophical” fashion; and also because of its concept of the archetype, with its references to Wotan or Vishnu, so that Adolf Hitler, possessed by Wotan, became an avatar, “occupied” in this manner by an external divinity—one that was extraterrestrial, as would be said today. At the end of his days, Jung, for the first time, reveals in his preface to my book The Visits of the Queen of Sheba that the archetype is a superconscious Entity; that is, a God, and not a “representation of instincts,” as it was defined until then by his disciples.

Fearing the destruction of his entire life’s work, and his being linked to Hitler or Hitlerism, Jung suffered three heart attacks at the end of the war. Previously, he had advised the British and American Secret Services to “prolong the war; because Hitler was possessed by Wotan, God of the hurricane and of the storm (Blitzkrieg)—and a storm cannot last long; it gradually exhausts itself, self-destructing . . .”

In any case, the attitude of Jung, a Swiss, was diametrically opposite to that of Heidegger, a German, who stood firm as a supporter of Nazism until the end, without a thought as to what might happen to his life’s work.

And Heidegger would remind Ezra Pound: “Make strong old dreams, lest this our world lose heart . . . !”

Last Encounter with Carl Jung

It’s six in the morning, 8 June. I open the doors to my room in New Delhi—doors which open to a small white terrace, already fulgurating with sunlight. The tremendous June heat starts early in the day. I am partially naked, and in a moment I will begin my yogic exercises of sun adoration, “Suryanamaskar.” The trees’ incredible verdure, even in this weather, and the birdsong of infinity, greet me. A servant, who is from around these parts, approaches me with that measured step of the Indians and says to me, “Salam, Sahib.” It’s his respectful greeting. He hands me a piece of paper. It’s a telegram. I open it without hurry, almost absent-mindedly. I see that it comes from Zurich and it surprises me that this is the case. I begin reading and I am perplexed. The telegram reads as follows: “Dr. Jung died peacefully yesterday at noon. Best wishes.” It is signed by Beiley and Jaffe: the young lady that kept him company, who walked him home—an extraordinary woman—; and his private secretary, a Swiss citizen.

A great sadness immobilizes me right there—my eyes are moist, perhaps because of the intense sun, or perhaps not. It was so recently that I had been with Dr. Jung, at his house in Küsnacht, next to Lake Zurich. I might have been the last foreign friend to see him. The news has hit me in the depths of my soul. I have had the enormous fortune of having been prefaced by Jung—that, having been the first and last time that he penned a preface for a purely literary work.

I received a letter from him at the time of our last year’s earthquakes in Chile. He said, “Even if modern men of science will not accept it, there is a relationship between Nature and the soul. Mother Nature now attunes itself to our civilization and begins also to visit destruction. Unfortunately, it has been your country’s turn this time. I have thought of Chile so much lately!”

The remembrance flies, I see its image, it’s on my mind. So very recently I arrived at his house, amid a fine rain. Jung’s house is in the outskirts of Zurich, in Künsnacht. At the entrance’s portal there is a phrase in Latin that reads, more or less, “Think or not in God. He is always present.” Inside there are paintings and beautiful objects, antique engravings, mediaeval paintings. I was received by Ms. Beiley, who invited me into a small living room, where she served us tea.

We talked about Dr. Jung. She told that me he had not been well during the last few days, feeling very tired as a result of working intensively on a 80-page essay he had written in longhand, as usual, directly in English for an American publication, and due to appear soon with the title “Man and his Myths.” Ms. Beiley is very worried, as Jung has said to her, “I wish to go, but you tie me here.” She does not believe him, as she thinks that Dr. Jung is still interested in life and the Earth. He has told me that “to die is also to go to Jung’s collective Unconscious, only to then, from there, go back to the realm of forms, of forms . . .” Hesse has also told me that “Jung is a giant, a giant mountain in our time.” And he has asked me to forward Jung his greetings—“the steppe wolf’s greetings,” he has said.

Jung has been unwell, it is true, but he’s afflicted by no illness. That day he had felt better and even got up to receive me. Ms. Beiley asks that we go upstairs, but also that I don’t stay long so as not to tire him. We entered his study. And there was Jung, on a chair, next to the window facing the lake. He’s wearing a Japanese robe that makes him look like a Zen Buddhist monk, an old samurai, or a magus from earlier times. He is haloed by a crepuscular light, and he is surrounded by alchemical engravings and a great paining of the Hindu god Shiva on the summit of Mount Kailash.

He smiles with that smile of his, filled with cunning, wisdom, and benevolence. He reaches for his pipe, but fails. I tell him, “What a beautiful Japanese robe.” It is a ceremonial robe. Out of my pocket I take box from Kashmir that I have brought him as a present. He looks at it and says, “It’s made out of turquoise.” And then he adds, “I’ve never been to Kashmir. I traversed the South of India; Madora—all those very ‘interesting’ places.” He then talks to me about the Hindus and the Chinese; he makes reference to a book by a Chinese master of Zen Buddism, whose name I can’t remember now, and he tells me that it is the best he has read on the subject. I transmit Hermann Hesse’s greetings and I relate my conversation with that writer about death. I explain that I have asked him whether it is important to know that there is something beyond death. Jung meditates for a while and states that the question has been posted incorrectly—that I should have asked whether there is reason to believe that there is something beyond death.

I now ask Dr. Jung, “And what do you believe? Is there?” He answers, “if the human mind can operate independently of the brain, then it operates independently of space and time. And if it operates independently of space and time, it is incorruptible.”

And what do you believe, Dr. Jung? What do you think?

I have seen men wounded by bullets to the brain during the war who have a lost all brain function and who nevertheless have dreams and are able to remember them afterwards. What is it they dream? There are small children, who don’t yet have a defined self, whose consciousness is diffuse and spread over their bodies, yet who have deep and personal dreams that mark them for the rest of their lives. There is no self there. What is that other they dream?

Do you believe, Dr. Jung, that there exists something like a subtle body, an astral body, the “Linga-Sarira” of Hindu philosophy, which detaches itself upon death?

I don’t know. I have seen objects materialize and mediums move objects from afar without touching them with their physical bodies.

And Dr. Jung continues:

Sometime ago I was very ill, almost in a coma; everybody thought that I would die and maybe even that I was suffering greatly, because in this condition one’s body makes people believe that one is suffering. But in reality I felt as if I were floating and experienced a marvelous sense of freedom. I remembered it afterwards.

Dr. Jung always wore on his right hand a ring with a Gnostic gem. An Egyptian gem. We spoke about the meaning of that ring, and he explained, “All these symbols are alive in me.” His memory and culture, even at the age of 85, was incredible.

At times he spoke like a poet, like a magus, like a mystic. One time he said to me, “My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.”

Now I ask him:

What will happen to mankind in the coming technological supercivilization? Do you think that, in twenty years, anyone will care about the spirit of symbols, in the midst of the era of interplanetary journeys, with the Sputniks, the Gagarins, and the Shephards? Will not the spirit come to appear passé?

Dr. Jung smiles cunningly and states:

Sooner or later man will have to return to himself, even if from the stars. All this that is happening now is an extreme form of escapism, because it is easier to reach Mars than to find oneself. If man doesn’t find himself, then he faces the greatest of dangers: his own annihilation. On journeys into outer space there is also an unconscious attempt to solve the gravest of all problems that man will have to face in the future: overpopulation.

Dr. Jung was going to continue talking about this very important topic when Ms. Beiley entered the room to say that Dr. Jung’s daughter and son-in-law were waiting. I had not fulfilled my promise of a brief conversation.

But now I know it doesn’t matter, because mine was to be his last interview. And something perhaps told me that this was the case, for when I reached the door I stopped and turned my head. Jung sat there staring at me, with a soft smile and lifting his hand in a gesture of farewell. His last one. The hand with the Gnostic ring. I bowed, respectfully.

Hermann Hesse

The Falsification of Hermann Hesse

I had the good fortune of being friends with the great German writer. Even after his death, and having left the diplomatic corps, I lived for ten years in the old Camuzzi house, in Montagnola, in Italian Switzerland. Hesse’s first house was in the neighboring mountain village, Lugano.

It is absolutely absurd to believe that Hermann Hesse “went out of fashion,” as if a writer for the youth of forty years ago. In reality, Hesse was brought artificially “into fashion” and was used precisely in order to disorientate the new generations of the fifties and sixties. I remember very well that Suhrkamp Verlag, Hermann Hesse’s German publisher, was under obligation to sell forty thousand copies of Hesse’ oeuvre every month and, to that end, resorted to all forms of publicity and pressurizing of the young generations of that time. It was thus that in the United States was transformed and falsified Hermann Hesse, making him appear a “hippie,” a proponent of drug abuse, et cetera.

One day Hermann Hesse’s sons sought me in Montagnola to ask me about the imminent cinematic adaptation of Steppenwolf

. They wished to know my opinion on the matter. Accompanying Heiner Hesse was the film project’s producer and scriptwriter. I replied by telling them that I remembered very well a conversation with Ninon Ausländer, Hermann Hesse’s last wife, who revealed to me her husband’s position (which was also her’s) against any filming or televising of his work. Moreover, this was stipulated in Hermann Hesse’s will, with one consideration: he would only accept his sons’ adapting for the cinema one of his books if they were in a bad financial situation. I asked Hermann Hesse’s sons if this was the case. They replied that it was not, but that they accepted the filming in order to “help the world’s youth.” They bid farewell and left me with the manuscript of Steppenwolf film project. They charged me with giving them my opinion. I must mention that the script’s author was the same who directed James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was brought to the cinema.

I read the text and, with real surprise, I discovered the invention of long paragraphs that were never written by Hermann Hesse.

I telephoned Heiner Hesse and again we met with the scriptwriter in Montagnola. I made my opinion known to them. They accepted that the script was an elaboration, conscientiously done. Following that explanation there was nothing for me to do but return the script, stating that I was against the filming.

Steppenwolf was brought to the cinema without great success.

To Re-Read Hesse

Unfortunately, the deep writer and poet Hermann Hesse was falsified and vulgarized by a world in decline. He needs to be re-read today by the same eyes that were once shaken by his mystery.

Demian

, for example, was always understood by the readers of Hesse’s time to be a symbolic work, where, in addition, is reflected the Masonic legend of Eve and the “sons of the widow” (Demian, one of them), and of Sinclair (a name representative of the great hereditary masters of the Scottish Masonry), who also interprets the Jungian conception of the “Self” with the “anima” already linked to the Self; the Absolute Man. That is Demian’s character (the “Self” of Sinclair). Demian is also a follower of the Gnostic god, Abraxas, which unites opposites within him.

Now, Steppenwolf is a marvelous play on symbols along the lines of The Magic Flute

, by Mozart (a composer admired by Hermann Hesse). Mozart’s Tamino and Pamina, Papageno and Papagena, are in Hesse’s work Hermann (Harrier) and Hermine, the female equivalent of Hermann (unfortunately, in the Spanish translation Hermine’s name has been changed). That is to say, in this work is presented once again the mysterious and profound play on metaphysics of Mozart and Jung, of Orpheus and Plato: of the “anima” and the “animus.”

About Hesse’s transcendental work, The Glass Bead Game

, of which the Secretary General of the United Nations during the sixties, Dag Hammarskjöld, declared that, were he confined to a desert island, the only thing he would want to have with him would be this marvelous work. And Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer, wrote to me saying that for him Siddhartha was the most important book he had ever read, because it summarized in a few pages all of Zen Buddhism. And he told me, also, that on his headboard he always had the book C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, about my conversations with the writer.

Unfortunately, he had not been able personally to meetHermann Hesse, because, having gone to visit him in Montagnola, he found on the front gate to his house a sign in German that said “Bitte keine Besüche.” Miller knew German and was able to translate it: “Please, no visitors.” Fortunately, I knew no German and was able to enter, to be received by Hermann Hesse, and until today feel that I was graced, blessed by the gods, for having been able to know him and honor myself with his friendship.

In memory of those great times and that mystery, I have desired to write these lines, showing that Hermann Hesse is a writer for eternity, not for a particular time, but for immortality.

Yes! We must read his books again. And resurrect him . . .

Nimrod de Rosario

Letter of Miguel Serrano to Nimrod de Rosario

Chile, October 30, 1985

I received your letter and your book some time ago, but was unable to concern myself with them earlier, to give them the appropriate response due to sorrowful family issues that even prevented me from going to Cordoba, where I was going to go but had to hurry back.

I must tell you that all the joy that I felt upon receiving your work was inhibited and even destroyed by the surprise letter you sent me with your book.

I do not know what you are speaking about there, because the only valid matter between us should be our personal correspondence. What I have written to you has always been with the best intentions and meant to meant to collaborate in or help with what I thought could become a joint Work, on both sides of the great mountain or spinal column of the Andes.

Remembering the first thing I said to you was that in these territories the lie is not permitted, even were the lie in a novel, because Aryans do not lie, unlike the Jew, marking the essential difference between them. And so, even in a work of fiction, we may not place in the mouth of the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, long speeches of such Gnostic flavour and that he never said, because everything that today smells of Gnosticism. dualism, as well as monism, is within the great Jewish business.

Alfred Rosenberg said: “The truth of the Jew is the organic lie.” With this, he meant that horrible racial mixture, that miscegenation and bastardry that defines the Jew anti-race. Nothing true can come out from that. Their truth is the lie. So, whoever fights against the Jew, or defends himself from them, has the duty to stand against the lie, their extruded waste product. Therefore I also struggle, synchronistically, against the lie of the Jewish Holocaust. To state that this holocaust is true, as you do, is to collaborate with the Jew, putting aside all those sophisticated interpretations you told me about. The combat is within and outside, sychronistically. This is Magic. And to shun this exterior combat can take various interpretations and justifications, but has only one name: cowardice.

In that letter I said to you that, in what you call Hyperborean wisdom, “invention or lies can never fit.” We are not allowed to invent things and then attribute them to a “Hyperborean wisdom revealed by the Siddhas,” nor much less attribute it to the SS, to the Thulegesellschaft, to Adolf Hitler, Esoteric Hitlerism or to National Socialism. Remember, too, I have been very careful not to say anything that could create a conflict. So when someone asked to know my opinion about Tantrism, for example, I delayed any response until knowing what you would send me about the “Lilith Woman.” Unfortunately, I can not agree with all that black magic with prostitutes, with that muck, but I remained very careful about giving my opinion. I wanted to collaborate, adapting to the waves, and you must recognize this effort in my most recent book, which was almost finished when our relationship began.

On first being sent your works, I was told you sent them to collaborate with me in the work I was then engaged and that “the work would be dedicated to Rudolf Hess and me,” because you had already read “The Golden Band: Esoteric Hitlerism,” although you now claim and state the contrary. Understanding the import of was happening, I kept the strictest confidence and I believe did not ever mention to you directly anything about the matter of the Druids, despite knowing well what the source was of your to and fro lucubrations, the book “The Other Atlantis” by Robert Scrutton, where a possible English Freemason, theosophist or something of the sort, has published “The Chronicle of Oera Linda,” also of doubtful authenticity.

There Scrutton speaks on his own, referring to the “Golen,” who the Frisians met in Asia Minor. He says they were invited into Europe and England. From there you, on your own account and starting from such dubious sources, conclude that “Golen,” Druid and Celt are one and the same, adapting thereby to an imaginary construct that, nevertheless, coincide like two drops from the same waters with an international plan that has been put into place for several years now already in order to try to evade somehow the unique and total responsibility of the Jew for the great conspiracy.

Thus we have been able to see, in a book already cited by me, “La Race Fabuleuse” by Gérard de Séde, the alleged attempt of making the Merovingians appear to mix with Jews; suddenly, some investigators hired by the BBC in London publish a Best Seller, “Holy Grail and Holy Blood,” in which they claim the same, now attributing “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to a synarchic entity, the “Priory of Sion” that claimed to install a “King of the World” of Jewish-Merovingian blood. And in Canada a book has been written, although not published, but whose draft I hold in my hands, blaming the Great World Conspiracy to the “Welsh,” in other words, to the Gaels. The same as you. In some way the Jew would be “softened” and finally absolutely freed of all culpability, on being replaced by a Gallican “next root race,” or some other Masonic-theosophist absurdity of the sort.

And this Jewish plan, inspired from without, almost telepathically, or by hypnosis from a distance, complements and works perfectly with the lie of the six million Holocaust, gas chambers, “lampshades and soap made from Jewish skin” in Nazi concentration camps, so that we can no longer remember the only government in this world that gave a just solution, ending the slavery of interest of capital, Jewish black magic that has enslaved the peoples of this America. I see all this lie, that does not seem to affect you, because “one would crumble if it were true,” (as if any Jewish lie has ever collapsed even once in the history controlled by them, without the Aryans having to fight to make it so) but does affect me because there are comrades who are imprisoned and tortured for the mere fact of having risen against that lie.

I find the term “Berserker,” or “Furor Berserker” has been taken by you from the same book, “The Other Atlantis,” written by that doubtful Anglo-Saxon “globalist” character.

Now as well, to return to the topic of the “organic lie,” every time I hear mention of the concept of “root race,” “race spirit,” or the “Spirit,” that “is above blood and biological race,” etc., then some irrepressible suspicion enters me about the origin as such of whoever raises such ideas. And to paraphrase Goebbels, saying: “When I hear ‘spirit’ spoken about I draw my revolver.” And not because I do not believe in Spirit, as you capriciously attribute to me, but because I come to doubt the precedence of those who claim those things. I already explained in my most recent book my suspicions about Evola and Claus for expounding their “traditionalist” and “psycho-ethnic” theses, about the “races of the soul,” “the spirit,” etc.

In truth there is no more than one race that can express what we are calling Hyperborean Spirit, and that is the white Nordic race and the Aryan Nordic blood, because only in that way can we express the Spirit, like with a Stradivarious violin can best play Bach. And the Mongol, for example, is no more than an inferior racial mix of the animal-man, the Negro with the yellow, or at most the yellow with the white. And in that way the “Hyperborean Spirit” will never be incarnated. “Look ourselves in our faces” said Nietzsche, “we are Hyperboreans!” Well, let us look in a mirror and there we will know if we belong to the Aryan white race, or if we are Mongols, Indian mestizos, or even mulattoes.

I remember that I also referred in one of my letters that you were using my entire terminology, even the spelling errors I committed in “The Golden Band.” There, in your writings, appears “the Mirror of the Princess Papan,” the concept of “A-mor” (I am sure to be the only one who has used it world-wide), “Minne,” “Virya” (written Vîra) and also “Golden Band,” “Catena Aurea,” “Vril,” “Vajra,” “Kaula Tantrism,” “Lilith,” etc., etc. Almost all these concepts of mine have been stolen by you and, then, changed from the sense that I attributed to them. And finally, after receiving your letter, I felt I could at least wait for you to make reference to where and from whom you had found these terms, that you had plagiarized and plundered.

Comically, in your letter you have the nerve to warn me about the need to cite the source for them in your work, “if I should refer to them, because there may be rights at stake.” I see, then, the necessity for me to give you this warning, in case of an actual publication, or in the form of a book of yours, since plagiarism and falsification of the meaning of terms used by an author is punishable by law, there being a very strict Intellectual Property Law in Chile, enabling the claim to be established without being affected by national borders.

I never thought to have to write all this. You forced me to do it, as a reaction to the unexpected attack you saddled me with and that, of course, I can not ignore. And how still accept that terribly strange “aggression pact” you proposed to me, when you started bashing me? Why and for what? In such essential areas there is no “compromise,” which you propose. This is not “Orthodox Judaism” or some similar gibberish, but an essential opposition, an opposed different Weltanschauung. Yours absolutely does not agree with mine, with that of Esoteric Hitlerism, nor with that of exoteric National Socialism.

This has nothing to do with the struggle of the hero, the Vîra, in the Yuga of Heroes. Everything you visualize is a shameful escape, a way out, because in your Gnostic dualism (that has nothing to do with Hitler, nor with the S.S.) this whole world, the entire Universe is a prison, a Demiurgic creation. For Esoteric Hitlerism, for me, there is only a corruption on the surface, a bad copy clothed over with a film of Maya. And, at bottom, we find a beautiful pure nature, so full of nostalgia as are we ourselves, who are crying out to us to redeem them, to transfigure them, that “we make them invisible within us,” as Rilke exclaimed. Hitler and the S.S. believed in the possibility of reversing entropy. And that was the origin of the conflict of Rosenberg and the S.S. with Spengler. In any instant of the Yuga of Heroes it is possible to rebuild Thule, return to the true Golden Age of First Hyperborea, not to the copy of the Demiurge, to defeat the Enemy, straighten out the Axis of the Earth, transfiguring her together with our mutation, or with our heroic death in combat. “For the blood of heroes comes closer to Wotan than the prayer of the saints,” than the “flight” into an onanistic self-realisation. And because the Heroes who died fighting for the just cause of the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, will be remade in Valhalla by the Valkyries and thus attain immortality.

That is, the struggle is synchronistic, outside and inside, for the redemption of the world and ourselves. So here we volunteer to fight, not to escape from a hopeless Universe, from a prison, but to prevent the “plagiarism” (The Devil and the Jew always plagiarise, falsify, corrupt) and so the corruption not continue to expand along with this corrupted Universe, at the expense of the Universe of the Divyas, or Siddhas, at the expense of Hyperborea. To fight here, on the same field as the Enemy. This is the Magic Idealism of Novalis, that of the S.S., Hitler and his National Socialism. And for that, too, the Nordic Aryan, of pure biological race, pure biological blood, loves Nature (because both possess Nostalgia, Minne). The beauty of Nature has its origin in the identical Nostalgia. And therefore, the Jewish anti-race hates Nature.

The plan of the Jew and Demiurge, the Demon, the Enemy, is to preach escapism. He has done so in many different ways in our time: with drugs, the “hippies,” with “universal love,” with homosexuality, lesbianism, Orientalism, Gnosticism, “Tantrism,” “U.F.O.ism,” the artificial boom and forgery of the works of Hermann Hesse and C.G. Jung. And also now, on a minor scale, but equally dangerous, with you. This deflects and distorts the struggle of youth (and not just youth), while at the same time taking them right out of the fray in this world, weakening the struggle, degenerating it, in order to be able to leave in the sole hands of the Jews the control of the total situation on the planet (and not only on the planet).

I repeat: the clouding over of the Vîra, the hero, due to the “racial sin,” to the mixing with the daughters of the “animal-man,” miscegenation, with regeneration still being possible, attempting to return by walking backwards, the way of the Leftwards Swastika, urdaveretar. “The sin against the blood and race is the original sin and marks the decline of humanity that pays for it.” And these are indeed words spoken by the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler (“Mein Kamph”).

No, here there can be no compromise agreements. There are many young lives involved, in Argentina as well, on both sides of the Spinal Column of the South Pole, home of the devil, for the moment. The Führer also said it: “Only politics supports compromise; the Weltanschauung, the worldview, no.” And only what Hitler said, in everything referring to Hitlerism, especially, is true for us. We can not, for that, invent words and statements for the Führer nor for the S.S. Nor for the Siddhas, even though we please ourselves with asserting them on behalf of an alleged initiation, or a “Tirodal” Order newly invented, “Knights of the Republic of Argentina,” or something else like that.

We can therefore be assured that I will not enter into more polemics, or into an epistolary exchange, with which I am now definitively terminated. I do not have time exterior or interior for it, although this letter may circulate among the same people you shared the ones you sent me. I shall always maintain the most absolute secrecy and confidentiality in all that has to do with our communication, despite them being important to me in the surprise of their early days. Good! Things have come to a different pass at present, and not by my fault. My original interest centers rather on the desire to preserve the purity and transparency of my struggle, my concepts and my experiences, and may not grant anyone the right to plagiarize and distort them to a different sense from what I shall give.

On "Integral/Radical Traditionalists" and Julius Evola

The "Integral Traditionalists" ask themselves: How could traditional society fall, being perfect from its origins, with the Golden Age of Hyperborea, that Terrestial Paradise, lacking internal contradictions? Julius Evola resorts to a metaphysical circumstance that could be decided from without, a sort of entelechy or fate.

It is a mystery, Claudio Mutti assures us, and therefore incomprehensible. In all this, from some side, the Christian Jew dialectic is infiltrating with its concept of original sin and temptation. And the traditionalists end by exonerating the Jew from part of his guilt, saying the conspiracy and subversion is much more vast; the Jew comes to constitute only a portion of it, spending his dissociative mission on ending the "Third State" and beginning the "Fourth," or what is now approaching, "when the Bolshevism of the East exceeds even Judaism itself."

Illusion, vain hope, sleight of the magician to relieve the Jew of his main role, even though, as we have been able to see, the Marxist system of the Soviets belongs to him from birth and continues firmly controlled by him. The whole problem of the "division of evil" must be seen in the continuous light we have thrown in dealing with the incarnation of the Hyperborean Archetype of the Fuhrer, the Avatar, the Tulku: even when not incarnated in one alone, a center is required by which to radiate their greatest power, whether this be an individual, a people, a race. In the case of the Archetype of the Lord of Darkness he requires an anti-race.

I can not fail to consider that, in this attitude of eminent Latin writers, since no German National Socialist is to be found among the Integral Traditionalists, beneath the appearance of wishing to show broad criticism, magnanimity, objectivity and "Olympic" detachment, to use their words, one only finds the desire to somehow ingratiate the all- powerful Jew, to be pleasing to him at the same time that they declare him their enemy.

Evola dares to write "in Hitler there was an element of unhealthy fanaticism in his opposition without concessions to the Jew." Despite my admiration for the Italian writer, I must distance myself from this position. Hitler, as always, had reason.

In my interview with Julius Evola, in his apartment on the Via Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, he told me Mussolini had asked him to write a new racial theory in order to counter that of Rosenberg. It would be the "Fascist racism," different from "Nazi racism." (As if there could be more than one racialism).

And thus that entire brilliant Evolian concept of the "race of the body," the "race of the soul" and the "race of the spirit" was born that he labeled with the antipathetic term of "traditional." Something churned within me when I heard this word, as if before the presence of an intellectual social-climbing, a literary vulgarity.

This concept has been taken by Evola from Guenon, attributing it to Aryan Hinduism that mentions other bodies distinct from the physical that could be components of man, because if they only exist potentially they are virtual, being developed through the practice of yoga.

They are bodies that are astral, mental, spiritual, etc. Being German, Clauss, the creator of psychoanthropology, never called his theory "traditional" or "traditionalist." He was married to a Semite which explains his attitude towards biological racism that he tried to outflank with his psychic racism, his "race of the soul." The "traditionalist" Rene Guenon also ended his days converting to Semitic Mohammedanism. The brave and clear Claudio Mutti does something similar. Nevertheless he could still return to the Hyperborean Wotanism of his Lombard ancestors. Because he, thank the Gods, is still alive.

If the theory of Evola and Clauss on the races of soul and spirit can be accepted as a comfortable element of exposition, in the end they are not necessary, only complicating things, serving only to speak of racism among hybrid and mestizo people without hurting their feelings, since a mulatto or an Indian among us could always think that even though his body is coloured, his soul might not be.

There is the suspicion that Evola has just invented everything to speak about race to the Southern Italians and Mussolini. Yet, although their pride remains standing, reality does not change. The truth goes another way, as has been seen primarily by the Jews and Esoteric Hitlerists, too late for the latter, unfortunately.

In Vienna it was possible for me to read an internal communication among several SS centers in which they recommended Julius Evola not be given facilities to expound "his esotericism."

I understand this was just since Evola would have generated confusion. In Italy herself he was not given better facilities. Those were times of struggle and they had to simplify. Yet the beautiful "race of the body" of the Italy of today is a result of the racial selection that was then done in the last years of Fascism, carried out under the influence of Hitlerism. I wish that something like that would have happened in Spain.

Evola tells us in his philosophical memoirs "Il Camino del Cinabro," that shortly before the end of the war he was in Vienna investigating (of course in the SS archives and it may be in those of the Convent of Lambach and the Heilingenkreus) global subversion. And it was then that he was caught in a bombing, leaving him an invalid for the rest of his life. I met him in a wheelchair. Evola tried to penetrate the occult cause of his fundamental accident, intending to find it "in a decision taken before this physical incarnation." He tried to remember it and could not. With the accident the possibility for further research was likely to end.

Sometimes he would refer to "this World-wide Conspiracy surpassing even Judaism," within which the Jew is only another element, even though important. And he returned to his "traditionalist" concept of the eras of Hinduism and the inevitable fatal road towards the nadir of the Kali Yuga. Accordingly subversion would be directed from outside this world by a Prince of Darkness. The idea, by its fatallsm, would become something like a "spiritual Spenglerianism."

. . .

Evola speaks of a global conspiracy that will overcome Judaism and would include non- human elements. He mentions a Prince of Darkness. And in this he is right. After all, what are the Jungian Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious?

They are inhuman entities. The ancients called them Gods and Demons. And what is the Collective Unconscious? It is the "Memory of the Blood," or rather, a "memory that goes through the blood," that acts on earth by means of the blood.

There is nothing more mysterious than blood. Paracelsus saw it as a condensation of light. I believe the Aryan, Hyperborean blood is not the light of the Golden Sun, of a galactic sun, but of the light of the Black Sun, of the Green Ray.

It is not the "light of the Akashic Archives," but of another universe. The Akashic Archives belong to the Enemy. If the Hyperborean Memory of the Blood can be penetrated, then the Voice would awake and recover the Vril, thus breaking the Eternal Return. For this Shastriya, Brahamanic and Esoteric Hitlerist India aims to conserve the purity of the blood, to be able to "remember" more effectively and win the Great War. The Jews do something altogether different, in the opposite extreme with their "anti- blood."

So it is understandable there is no way to fight freely against the Dark Lord if we do not conserve the purity of the blood, by means of "pagan biological racism," that Evola and the traditionalists, through ignorance of the real terms of the conflict, even if they want to say the same thing, would refute. The true esoteric racism of Gunter, Rosenberg and the SS initiates. In a word, GERMANIC racism.

As we have seen, by saying "Aryan race" we say it all. Because this term is esoteric, referring to an initiation that permits men to be born anew, for the second time. The name "Aryan race" was chosen and adopted by Hitler. And by ancient Hinduism.

The SS were conforming to their own racial vehicles so that the Hyperborean Archetype of the Aryan Collective Unconscious would express itself. Giving these vehicles a renewed life, the Archetype could incarnate here below. They were Sonnenmenschen, Sun-Men, Supermen, Man-Gods, Total-Man, Magician-Man.

The new aristocracy of the Aryan race and not that traditional degenerate aristocracy that Evola made his own and defended. (He told me he was not a fascist or Hitlerist and his ideal was Metternich). Forming here the vehicle of pure blood, the next step would consist in a pact of white magic with the Hyperborean Archetype, an evocation or invocation that would make possible his "incarnation" in the totality of the Aryan Folk, the truly chosen. Once having reached this stage, the dichotomy of a "race of the body" without a "race of the spirit," or without "race of soul" is not possible.

This can only come to pass in the actual state of things, in this racial chaos, where the comparison given by Evola of the Dutch or Danish "race of body," lacking horizon or destiny because it does not possess a "race of soul" or "race of spirit." That example has no relevance in Hitlerist society where the Archetype of the Aryan-Hyperborean "Collective Unconscious" was incarnating itself (and had reached Holland and Denmark). My suspicion is that Esoteric Hitlerism lacked time to realize the Pact of White Magic to renew that Ancient Pact with the Hyperborean Archetype God, the authentic Lord of Hosts.

Understanding things in that way one understands furthermore that all that "traditionalist" argumentation is against a non-existent biologist or materialist "pagan" understanding. The matter is profoundly spiritual, metaphysical, relating to the incarnation of a Hyperborean Archetype on earth, among us. Jung psychologicized, already forced as we have said by an ancient Mystery: that of Tulku, Boddhisatva, Avatar.

But Jung helped us to understand and penetrate the Mystery. And he has been the only one in our time who has referred to Hitler in this way, even though, after the war that he also lost, he wanted to unsay it, to forget what he had said with contradictory unhappy declarations. Silence would have been better.

There is no way to understand the Great War without rising towards these positions, reaching these distances by means of analysis. From there one can furthermore know on which side we stand. And whether we choose good or bad, here lies the possibility of a conscious choice.

When Hitler said "the race of the spirit ('racial breeding') was more solid and enduring than a purely biological race," taking as example the Jew himself, "the farthest from the animal on earth," perhaps he was referring to this very thing, to this "Pact" he would not himself come to achieve fully: "Because the lack of time did not permit us to realize our dreams fully and, therefore, the results of this war will be in consequence." (See "The Golden Band"). He could not do more than win by losing, for now.

We repeat, unfortunately Julius Evola did not understand the enormous favor Jung gave to Aryan man with his idea of the two Collective Unconsciousnesses, the most valuable tool given to Esoteric Hitlerism. He also did not understand Esoteric Hitlerism. Perhaps he was too close to the Avatar in space as well as in time.

So great was the energy that emanated from his vortex that only adoration or rejection were possible, never indifference. Humility and voluntary detachment are necessary from the self to be able to be an unconditional partisan of the Fuhrer Prinzip, essential Aryan idea that only emerges from the greatest depths of the "blood memory."

Evola ended taking refuge in the distance of "integral traditionalism" and an aristocracy more of class than of race.