MIGUEL SERRANO: THE LONG LIFE OF A LONG SAGA

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

MIGUEL SERRANO:

THE LONG LIFE OF A LONG SAGA

Written by: Criss Salazar

Translated by: Franz Berg

Last February 28th dawned cloudy and rainy. Lightning bolts cut the day, roaring from the starry realms and trying to terrify men with divine wrath, something they have not feared now for centu- ries past. An unusual, unwonted eventuality; something unex- pected in midsummer Santiago de Chile.

It was nevertheless a beautiful day on which Don Miguel Ser- rano Fernandez took his exit and parental leave of the Fatherland for which he had dreamed and fought so much, fiercely believing in his Idea. He always believed in synchronicities.

Such was one summer day though with rain and lightning bolts falling from the sky, in a storm filled with the blows of Thor’s Hammer, that was then using the celestial vault of heaven like an anvil.

Serrano always lived in the exception, in dissent, in rebellion: in what can not be, but is. He rowed against everything and everyone, without skimping on the consequences this would bring to his ca- reer, his prestige and his recognition in the world of letters, valuing only a handful of loyal writers and professional colleagues. He also loved our city, our Santiago del Nuevo Extreme, as only he could: its nooks and corners, through which he travelled and went round as if for the first time among them:

“I feel nostalgic every day, he once declared when inter- viewed by the website Nuestro.cl. Yet Santiago still exists, secret, the little neighbourhoods, the old barrios, Avenida Matta, Mapocho. In every part secret places, secret plazas. Despite the skyscrapers. The Barrio Concha and Toro, Val- paraiso. Carmen Street, Marcoleta Street. Santa Lucia Hill. I am nostalgic about conversations in the bars until dawn, the meaning of friendship.”

The same people who helped sweep the horrific Odes by Pablo Neruda to the crimes of Stalin under the rug, or handled with opaque silk gloves the incendiary speeches of Volodya Teiteilboim fanatically justifying the massacres of Bolshevik tyranny, would even so never forgive Serrano his “incorrect” political affiliations. They preferred to present him as the mad Nazi, clutching one straw after another to maintain the anathema that in fact only existed to deny him the possibility of any awards or recognition for his work. Thus Serrano was a stranger to literary prizes, but not to the affection of those who knew him. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety among those attending his last Adieu: intellectuals, artists, musicians, poets and, of course, his circle of comrades. His death may perhaps have brought forth the same unanimity as sur- rounded his life, even when some found this incomprehensible, af- fected as they were by the prejudices that revolved around his per-

son like the planets around the blinding brightness of the sun.

THE LITERARY GENERATION OF ’38

Miguel Serrano Fernandez was born on September 10, 1917, on the street with the name Santo Domingo de Santiago de Chile, in the city from which he could never release himself in any definitive way even when several times he had to leave her: “Next to the high peaks of my country”, as he would say, describing an intimate con- nection with the meaning of the name of Chile’s capital city. He lost his parents at an early age and was enrolled in the Barros Arana Boy’s School, where he studied together with several other boys who would be among the most important figures in the world of the arts and culture. Another curious coincidence, in fact.

His youth was incubated within a miraculous flower of our cultural and artistic history: The literary generation of 1938, per- haps the most prolific and valuable in the entire chronology of Chil- ean literature. Serrano was part of a kind of Round Table of literary friends young and old, who were permanently reunited sending volcanic creative outpourings of fresh lava during their daily meet- ings in San Diego Street and the Avenida Matta. Hector Barreto, Teofilo Cid, Juan Emar, Guillermo Atias, Braulio Arenas, Enrique

Gomez Correa, Jaime Rayo and Eduardo Anguita were there, among others. Each among them shaped the features in Chilean lit- erature and poetry they would make their own, something that would in the eyes of many make them the most relevant among the generations of our written arts.

Although he was the favoured nephew of the foremost Chilean poet of the time, Vicente Huidobro, and several of the writers and poets were sympathisers of the Spanish Republican cause (with the outbreak of the Civil War), Serrano did not adhere to those tenden- cies until 1936, when his young friend the writer Hector Barrto fell dead in a skirmish between Socialists and Nazis in one of the res- taurants frequented by young writers, a fight that had ended in bul- lets, with Barreto dead. After that Serrano dabbled in drafting pol- icy papers with a political orientation, taking part in several social- ist journals. He never abandoned his effort to rescue the dead poet’s work, becoming virtually his ambassador to the world of the living. This flirtation with the Left allowed him to meet the resident Uru- guayan poet in Chile, Blanca Luz Brum, who would also tend to- wards more Nationalist ideas in his later years.

Though he was a loner, this Steppenwolf, apart from groups of poets such as “Mandrake” or “David”, Serrano not only formed an essential part of this generation, but he helped to forge it with the publication of his work “Anthology of the Realist Short Story in Chile” in 1938, when he was only 21 years old. This work is consid- ered, in its value and transcendence, to be among the greatest mile- stones in the national literature. With an audacity that caused great controversy among his professional colleagues, he included among them the stories of several of his young friends who were almost unknown at the time, except among themselves.

Professional writers such as Carlos Droguett ferociously dis- puted Serrano’s right to make such particular judgements, but time has proven the correctness of the author. Anguita would say of his “Anthology” that throughout this anthology Serrano “would claim to establish the absolute axiom by which the short story genre was to be the exact and exclusive way of being Chilean.”

NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND ESOTERICISM

That same year, on September 5, 1938, took place one of the most horrific events in Chilean history: The Massacre of the Seguro Obrero, in which 59 young National Socialists, inspired by the Third Reich and opponents of Government of Arturo Alessandri, were brutally assassinated in the Worker’s Insurance Building (cur- rently the Ministry of Justice in Constitution Square), with an in- sanity and violence that caused a stir in Chilean society, to the point that the official Presidential candidate, Gustavo Ross Santa Maria, saw his chances of victory in the next election undone in favour of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who narrowly won.

Serrano was shocked by the events of the Seguro Obrero and sought contact with one of the movement’s leaders, Carlos Keller, seeking some explanation for what had occurred. The conversation he had with Keller made a deep impression on the young writer who, after pondering over what had been said, offered his support to the then “Boss” of Creole Nazism, the lawyer Jorge Gonzalez Marées, with an exchange of letters published in the press. From that moment, Serrano was convinced of the National Socialist Idea and declared his adherence to Germany, ardently taking part in the newspaper “Labour”, the official voice of the Movement.

Meanwhile in 1939 he published his work “A Discourse on South America”, based on a speech he had pronounced in the Hall of Honour at the University of Chile.

There the original matrix of orientations of the Serrano dis- course would first take shape, championing a national identity and predicting the great changes that were then entering history.

At the outbreak of the Second World War he did not hide his sympathy for Hitlerism, coming to appear on the “Black Lists” that the Allies circulated in Chile during the great conflagration. Ulti- mately this would condemn him to the ingratitude and contempt of the official circles of national culture, depriving him of every award or recognition as punishment for the controversial choice he made for himself and to which he nevertheless remained loyal throughout his earthly existence, motivated by energies and con- victions from other worlds, and from other lives.

With this Idea already set up in his person, Serrano wrote in 1941 one of his most important works: “The Darkest Era”, pub- lished under the seal of the Editorial Zig- Zag. Huidobro defined this book as “the most remarkable in the entirety of modern litera- ture”, before later falling out with his nephew for political reasons. Moreover for many this book of short stories is one of the those that set the identity of the Generation of ’38 in motion. During the world war he also published the magazine “New Age” in which he dealt with totally new and controversial themes on the deep roots of the European conflict, motivated by an intimate confrontation between the elementary principles of the world, repeating a cosmic battle that goes back to beginnings of Creation. Concepts that, strange as this may sound to many at present, were to become pop- ular many years later, although in a more whimsical manner,

through such authors as Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier.

In later years Serrano admitted that having received initiation from an esoteric master, he then turned to an eclectic and philo- sophical discipline that he never ceased to practice, so that his pub- lications during those troubled years were only his first forays into Esoteric Hitlerism, which would henceforth implicitly or explicitly remain the central line of his writings.

His books that were most committed to the theme were never- theless much later: “The Golden Band”, “Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar” and “Manu: For the Man to Come”, about which more be- low. For many the apology for Esoteric Hitlerism and vindication of the swastika made in this trilogy was what ended his career and condemned him to disdain and the heavy burden of those who pre- fer to judge him for his thought rather than for his work. Still it should be noted that these convictions of Miguel Serrano have al- ways been based on esoteric knowledge, some shared with his readers and some stored in the depths of his Creed. “Only myth inspires me,” he has said in his writings, always constructed with poetic ethereal prose, made of worthy figures and metaphors, and in which codes, symbols and languages of specialised jargon are much appreciated.

CONTINGENT ACTIONS

Despite the Pagan-philosophical orientation that dominated much of his social role and political vision, he was no stranger to the is- sues related to the serious contingencies of his day: For example, he attempted to convince Chancellor Joaquin Fernandez y Fernandez not to consent to the breaking of relations with the Axis Powers. In vain, since President Juan Antonio Rios had to cede to the pressure from the Allies at any cost.

This break with the Axis and the submission of the Govern- ment to the will of the United States, principal interested party in the isolation of Germany and Italy, was taken badly by the Chilean military who, urged on by their Argentine counterparts in the Pe- ronist Movement, seriously considered the toppling of Rios. But Serrano and other Nationalists at the time did not support that or subsequent seditious attempts, as we shall see.

By then Serrano was working for the Panagra Press Agency in Huerfanos with Morande, employment secured for him by Blanca Luz who, as we have said, went from the Left towards Nationalism, much the same as Serrano. The director of Panagra was married to the poetess. At this stage in his life Serrano denounced and thwarted an intended military coup led by officers allied with Gen- eral Ibanez del Campo and secretly directed by Argentine Nation- alists who, in 1948, would attempt the overthrow of Chilean Presi- dent Gabriel Gonzalez Videla.

This plot, known as the “Legs of Pork”, was described by Le- onidas Bravo in his well-known book “What I Learned as an Audi- tor of War”.

“If not for my intervention,” Serrano wrote, “the plot would have succeeded. I saw the President and he received me at his office in La Moneda. I had been arrested and he released me; and Oscar Jimenez and Sergio Onofre Jarpa as well. I stood in for Oscar’s total loyalty. He would never betray anyone. I de- cided to go back to see Gabriel Gonzalez Videla and visited him in the Castillo Cerro Palace, in Villa del Mar. He was

sprawled in a chair, almost like a boy, nervously listening to my opinions and quickly interrupting me to declare:

‘Look, do not talk any more, say no more. You are a pure young man, knowing nothing about politics. This is very dirty and I’m up to the neck in mud…’

He made a quick gesture with his hand. We said goodbye. And we would never see one another again.”

This event would mark a break between Serrano and another man concerned with Chilean National Socialism, Guillermo Izquierdo Araya, who had signed up with the conspirators. Despite everything Serrano never soiled the prestige and memory of his for- mer comrades on the Left, for whom he professed great admiration.

ANTARCTICA

On January 27, 1947, the construction of the first Chilean base in the Antarctic Territory began, the boundaries of which had been de- clared during the government of Aguirre Cerda. The base was named “Sovereignty”, later renamed “Arturo Prat” and was de- signed by architect Julio Barros Ripamonti with a dock and a pre- fabricated cabin, to one up the Navy. Built in Bahia, Chile, on Greenwich Island in the South Shetlands, the base had antennas, warehouses, radio stations, kitchens and permanent heating, being officially inaugurated on February 6 by the Commodore of the Ant- arctic Flotilla, Federico Guesalaga Toro.

A large number of civilians of renown took part in this exploit together with the uniformed military, such as the future Director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute, Oscar Pinochet de la Barra; the dis- tinguished ex-ambassador Jose Miguel Barros and the journalist Oscar Vila Labra, author of the book “Chileans in the Antarctic”, prefaced by the writer Francisco Coloane, also a participant in these expeditions.

Miguel Serrano assisted as a reporter for Zig-Zag magazine and “El Mercurio” newspaper (Translator: the foremost and most prestigious newspaper in Chile).

Years later Serrano admitted he had joined this expedition con- vinced one could draw near the mythical “polar entrances” to the Inner Earth in which, according to legend, the Führer and his most loyal followers had taken refuge at the end of the Second World War, awaiting the End Times. Serrano, of course, knew the details concerning the enigmatic German Antarctic mission by Captain Ritscher ten years earlier, and therefore his hopes.

The extraordinary experience of the author during that legend- ary expedition has been the subject of profound inspiration throughout his vast work and those of other analysts of Antarctic Myths. (Translator - this was the famous occasion on which Serrano first met Adolf Hitler in person.) Thus was born his lecture “Ant- arctica and Other Myths” from 1948. In “The Compass of the Soul Points South”, he recalls those adventures and constantly returns to the theme of Antarctica. “Antarctica is the sexual organs of the world” and “Chile is near to the Muladhara Chakra of the earth”. With this the poet explained the reason for the highly sexual orien- tation of Chilean society.

In recognition of his participation in the expeditions, Miguel Serrano also had an Antarctic mountain named after him during the voyage. But as part of the destruction and punishment meted against the author, the name was later changed.

The magic journey of Serrano then ushered in another gem of Chilean literature: “Invitation to the Icefields” from 1957, one of his books of greatest international distribution, despite having left in- conclusive the most mysterious highlight of the story. Here the au- thor writes, for example, with an incomparable poetic sweetness:

“With eyes focused, mesmerised, the image was fixed of the ice over my head. An immense chunk tilted over, reverberating in the sun. Above, the ice ended in battlements. The light broke into deep tones of dark greens, yellows and blacks. Fear and the sensa- tion of beauty became intermixed. I did not know whether that wall was moving, but I knew that something of great intimacy was drawing towards me, more and more. Then I heard a small rustling, like sighs and snaps, and several drifting small white plumes began to fall from the castle parapets, that on crossing through the light

glowed fantastically iridescent, assuming strange shapes. They fell over me, caressing me, millions covering the small beach. I ceased my fear. The vision was so unreal that it would have been good to die in that instant. Everything was covered with little souls of ice, drenched in the cold of that extra-human light, weeping with emo- tion. And amid tears, I heard a hidden music made of sighs, crack- ing from the parapet and the flight of those crystals, water vapour solidified in the dry, cold air. Why did I not die in that moment?”

Below, we shall see that Serrano had a powerful inspiration as he wrote those words, based not only in his Antarctic memories. We will see that the Antarctic theme would also concern him dur- ing his diplomatic activities.

CITY OF THE CAESARS

During this period the writer began to write this third work: “Nei- ther By Land Nor By Sea”, a book that would remain incomplete when published in 1950, until the appearance of its sequel, “Invita- tion to the Icefields”.

Thus baptised by alluding to a phrase of Nietzsche (“Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans”), this is one of the greatest books produced by and known to Chilean culture, one that writers such as Enrique Lafourcade have cited as among the best works produced by Chilean authors.

In this magnificent publication Serrano narrates - what a chronicler of the soul - his own discovery of Chile, sharing this with his colleagues among his literary gatherings with old friends in Santiago, and then travelling to the South, confronting the myths, mysteries, legends of an almost wild country, where the two horns of Mount Melimoyu, the magic mountain of southern Chile, stand to the heavens beneath the Venusian light of the Morning Star. Be- ing convinced that earthly or external trips are reflections of the voyage of the soul to its own inner being, through sacred geography, he writes thus:

“Chile is like a hollow in the mountains. Who falls here can no longer escape. An anguished and penitent cavity. The slippery walls do not allow climbing. Legs and hands are wounded in the

attempt and one’s nails are shattered on the rock. What to do? Why are we here? But we owe everything to this land. And seeing our brothers in distress we feel solidarity. In their misery and bitterness, there is a greatness that is not found anywhere else in the world. A silent aspiration, an unconfessed faith. The sickness of Chile is like the terrible red diseases of dreams, like sacred diseases that destroy and kill; but that a little before the end create geniuses or saints. Chile is like a sacred and penitent hole that destroys but intensifies consciousness to the extreme of allowing an understanding and depth nonexistent elsewhere on earth. Anything that in Europe re- quired centuries to mature in the minds of men, here under the mortal influence of the earth can be realised in the time of a gener- ation. Life is short, but deep. The years and centuries are fulfilled inwardly, revealing the cosmos in the depths of a drop of water, or in a grain of soil detached from the mountains.”

His path is nevertheless what leads him to the mythical City of the Caesars, the Caleuche:

“The legend lives and feeds on a deep emotion. An event that affects the roots of the imagination, surviving, expressing itself in symbols spanning ages. In the most distant past of this world there was certainly a catastrophe that dismembered the land. By the ac- tion of Providence some men escaped in boats. Perhaps a primitive “dalca”, some farmer’s boat, that was covered by the raging waves most of the time, sailing almost under water, and this was the Ark of Salvation. And those who were saved would see floating boats manned by the dead, swept away by the currents of the ocean.”

“…The Legend of the City of the Caesars was joined with that of the Caleuche. Father Mascardi searched for the City through the lakes and mountains of the South. Can anyone find it? The Caleuche sails like a submarine. Will she cross beneath the ice of the South Pole? Is that where one will find the immortal City?”

WITH HESSE AND JUNG: THE HERMETIC CIRCLE

Commissioned by “Panagra”, Serrano had to travel to Europe in 1951 for the first time in his life, as part of the delegation that was in charge of covering the World Congress of the Press in France.

This was an enriching trip for the poet, enabling him to spy out those corners of the Old World where the conflicts of the Second World War took place, places that he had until then only known and felt the excitement of from a distance.

And it was on this adventure that he was inspired to visit Casa Canuzzi in Montagnola, Italian Switzerland, where the writer Her- mann Hesse lived at a time when the world had only recently dis- covered him, despite his having received the Nobel Prize a few years earlier.

It was July 1951. The meeting was amazing: both authors were not only able to understand one another, overcoming the limita- tions of language, but they also began a solid friendship that would endure through space and time in an almost supernatural way, ex- changing correspondence until the day of the death of the great German author in 1965.

In this way Serrano was able to access hitherto unknown ma- terial about Hesse, concerning his memories, his biographical sketch and his works. A treasure of incalculable value. He became a great opponent of the artificial interpretation of Hesse in the West, adapted and accommodated to shifting movements prevailing mainly in American society. For example, he opposed the filming of “Steppenwolf”, completely adapted and modified contrary to the original, and which passed unnoticed through the cinemas of the world without shame or glory. He devoted part of his labours not only to deny such misrepresentation, but, and for that reason, to rescue the essential meaning of the writer. One of his most recent efforts in this regard was published in “El Mercurio”, Arts and Let- ters section, March 10, 2002:

“Unfortunately, the profound writer and poet Hermann Hesse was falsified and vulgarised by a decadent world. He needs to be reread today by those who once shuddered with his mystery. ‘Demian’, for example, was always understood by the serious read- ers of that time as a symbolic work reflecting the Masonic legend of Eve and the ‘Sons of the Widow’ (Demian among them), and Sin- clair (name representative of the great hereditary masters of Scot- tish Masonry), which also interprets the Jungian concept of the

‘Self’, or Oneself, with the ‘anima’ already attached to Oneself; the Absolute-Man. This is the character of Demian (the ‘Self’, of Sin- clair). Demian is also a follower of the Gnostic God Abraxas, who unifies the opposites within himself.”

It is no coincidence that Serrano resorted to Jung to interpret Hesse: After his experience with the German author, a further step remained to close the circle of destiny, towards the end of 1959, when his life intersected with the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

How powerful this meeting between the two must have been, so that their archetypes seemed to merge into the coincidence of the East Indian lands where they then happened to be, and Jung in an act he never again repeated in his life, offered to write the Prologue to a book by Serrano that was about to appear: “The Visits of the Queen of Sheba”. Below we shall have more to say about this expe- rience of Serrano in India. Jung meanwhile died soon after in 1961, but left an undeniable influence on the Chilean poet.

Having been associated with Hesse and Jung was something decisive for Serrano, who felt himself to be a link between the two authors, so influential in our time from their respective disciplines. That was why, in 1965, he wrote one of his most beautiful and in- ternationally disseminated works: “C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships”, in which he presents a series of rev- elations with dialogues, documents, anecdotes and materials never before published concerning both figures.

It was definitely one of the books that assured Miguel Serrano his international recognition.

THE ULTIMATE FLOWER

His symbolic-existential experiences with both authors are also re- flected in the poetic content of books such as “The Ultimate Flower”, from 1969, illustrated by Julio Escámez, and that has been praised by other writers such as Armando Uribe, Hernán del Solar and Hernán Diaz Arrieta (Alone), no less. Serrano’s pen glides beautifully with his passion for landscapes and their sacred geog- raphy, as we have said:

“I believed in the Queen; I still believe in her. I knew I was about to enter into the City. Because of this I never became discour- aged. When, after stubborn wanderings over peaks and chasms dis- couragement pressed hard around me, the vision of her dark eyes sustained me, urging me on…”

“I went halfway around the world spellbound by the City, or by those eyes, almost without knowing. I discovered waters no one had seen, summits on which strange plants and lilies of fire flow- ered, plains of pure sonorous light, snows like silver froth. I dove into the waters of Lake Nahuel Huapi, cold as death, in which an- gels washed their wings. And in the nights I prostrated myself un- der lost beeches and conifers, about to discover a sign of Our Lord in the sky, a friendly light.”

“Nothing, no one, not even San Javier knew how near the city was; at times I thought I was treading upon her. I encountered a lone traveller in Patagonia. A white dog was at his side. He was far away but I called out to him. He was Spanish. I asked him whether he wanted to make confession. He looked at me strangely; his eyes reminded me of the Queen. I remember his words: ‘Who needs con- fession is you, although not with a priest of your class, but with another I know. You go in search of something that can not be seen in our time. Make confession to yourself, but tell the truth, say that you are an Ancahuinca…”

The Ultimate Flower is thus an archetype of immortality. Non- existent, but more real than the flowers of every flower in every garden in the world. As the author himself explains, in an interview in the jour- nal “Ercilla” of December 23, 1970, the origin of the concept would be the following:

“…it had its origin in what Jung called The Self, and defined as an ideal point in the person equidistant between the conscious and unconscious, something that does not really exist, but that is more real than everything that does exist. It is the dream, myth, the ideal, the legend. They are ghosts, the dream of eternal love, for which some sacrifice their lives, and in the moment of losing their life they doubt. And nevertheless the doubt is no longer able to distort des- tiny. That is the Ultimate Flower.”

ELELLA: THE TRAGEDY OF ETERNAL LOVE

Love touched Serrano with tragedy. A tragedy so great, so painful, that he only dared to tell it in its entirety many years later, in his “Memoirs of He and I”. A tragedy nevertheless become antholo- gised and the archetypal myth of true love like Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Jason and Medea, Osiris and Isis… “The Arche- type of Eternal Love,” as he himself would say.

Serrano formed a friendship with a beautiful young German woman named Irene Klatt. A most beautiful woman with golden hair and eyes of diamonds, “transparent, illuminating the night in that room.” We would like to reproduce the images of a beautiful woman here, but out of respect for the book in which the author did so, we resist this desire. Only Serrano had the right to present her as she was, with her golden divine beauty.

Despite her youth and healthy life which enabled her even to be a horse riding champion, Irene suffered a complex respiratory disease and, in fact, Miguel had known her in the Sanatorium of San Jose de Maipo. He approached her only in October 1951, when he needed her assistance translating some texts of the Czech writer Gustav Meyrink, through the recommendation of his friend Nino Corradini, or at least with this excuse to go to the house of Irene, in the old quarter of Avenida Suecia, in Providencia.

Irene was a woman of extraordinary intelligence, moreover possessing incredible culture and sensitivity. She painted and sculpted, especially “works extraordinarily strange for their extra- terrestrial beauty,” as Serrano said. We prefer to save the adjectives in order to leave the masterful depiction of this angel to the author himself. This, combined with a charm and a wonderful sweetness, ended with the writer hopelessly in love… Or more than that, even. And with both in reality sunk in one of the stories of most dolorous true and tragic Love that has ever been told.

“Princess Papan,” he called her, alluding to the sister-beloved of Emperor Moctezuma who, in his famous onyx mirror, predicted the return of the Gods, those being confused with the Spanish Con- quistadors. Serrano, who was married and had children, simply lost himself in this dream relationship, from which he recognised

the concepts of “He” and “She”, now united in the magic of “He- She”, the alliance of love between a man and a woman, between lovers.

The author had begun writing “Invitation to the Icefields”, as the continuation of “Neither By Land Nor By Sea”. Every time he wrote some pages he would read them to Irene sitting in the patio of her house. The book, then, was conceived in the spiritual fecun- dity of love. But it was also condemned to be rendered inconclu- sive: Irene’s health worsened, before the anguish of her family and the desperation of Serrano. Drownings and bloody sputum, specific to tuberculosis. The bitter details of this amazing story of love and agony, heartbreaking, almost unbearable, have already been re- lated by their own author, as we have said, so it is not for us to touch on them here. The drama can not be explained in words other than those already used by he who lived it.

Irene’s death in March 1952 was a catastrophe, a rupture in the life of Serrano. He never fully recovered. The beautiful history of love was sealed in tragedy. He never completed “Invitation to the Icefields”, but from then on archetypal love, the idea of He-She, would be present in his works as the most powerful principle of the esoteric alliance between man and the divine. Only tragedy could open the way for this knowledge and only through them could be proposed the fulfilment of the promise “to resurrect” Eternal Love (A-Mor, which means Without Death).

The book he dedicated entirely to this magic of immortal love and Tantrism is entitled “ELELLA: Book of Magic Love”, from 1973, and there he says:

“The knight discovered the face in the rock of the grotto, in the darkest place. It was a woman’s face with loosened hair and, in her gaze, in everything, he felt a primeval touch that filled him with recollection. The design of the face was realised by the indentations and promontories in the wet rock. Perhaps drawn by the ice of a lost age, or by the men of a dead race. There was something that drove him to adore the image. He made his sanctuary in that corner of the cave.”

“The torrent flowed on in the distance. In the solitude of the nights he heard voices, as coming from the most distant times. The words were incomprehensible to him, but they were there, as though suspended in the humid air.”

Clearly, the influence of Jung allowed him to develop his mar- vellous interpretation of magic love, following the tragic death of Irene. “Never again will I ever love anyone like that. I only loved Irene,” he wrote in his Memoirs.

VOYAGE TO INDIA

By 1953, President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo appointed Serrano as Trade Representative to India, later promoting him to Ambassador. Serrano had earned this award for himself, with secret personal connections as we shall see, but without neglecting his diplomatic mission, successful in every way. And it was owing to him that the first commercial treaty between Chile and India was reached.

In fact, this voyage achieved and matured the esoteric vision of the poet, opening doors of unique knowledge to him, the birthplace of his teachings. In the first place he learned of the sacred Mount Kailas, spiritual antipode to Mount Melimoyu. “I came from Melimoyu to Kailas,” he would say in his speech when presenting his ambassadorial credentials, Melimoyu also being the actual geo- graphic antipode to the mysterious Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

Almost as soon as he touched down in New Delhi, he im- mersed himself in the mysterious lands of Brahmanism, in the sym- phonies of the waters of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. There he witnessed firsthand the exile of the then adolescent Dalai Lama, to whom he offered the first helping hand after his painful departure from Tibet, occupied by Red China. He opened the gates of the em- bassy and gave him refuge during moments when no one would assist the small and vulnerable Lama for fear of the Chinese reac- tions. The same nations that now claim the symbol of the struggle and freedom of the Dalai then refused any such recognition for many years, when the Tibetan leader only counted on the meagre assistance proportioned to him by his friends, as he in his limited

way had done for the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, an- other Nazi who would write of his experiences in his famous best- seller “Seven Years In Tibet”, relating the visible part of the strange mission he undertook in the name of his country in the Himalayas, in some way confirming the esoteric motivations that hovered within German National Socialism.

The Dalai Lama never forgot the gesture made by Serrano, ac- knowledging his friendship with him and even provoking an inci- dent during his first trip to Chile 40 years later and after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, advancing to greet Don Miguel present at the Santiago Airport and bypassing the official delegation, in 1992. Although the government security guards forced Serrano to retreat, the world’s cameras recorded the unusual scene.

It was there in India, too, where Serrano received visits from travellers like his friend the painter Julio Escámez, who illustrated some of his books, and the poet and future Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. He was also visited by such international figures as the beautiful actress Jennifer Jones and even the guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara during his mission through Asia, with whom he shared several yoga sessions, as later recounted. However the lu- minaries among his milieu were no doubt the local figures of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the immortal Man of the Rose, and his daughter, the memorable statesman Indira Gandhi, a great friend of Serrano. Her son, Rajiv, played on his knees in those meetings with the great woman. Ironically, mother and son became leaders of their country, both dying under the same circumstances, as vic- tims of political assassinations.

Jung, meanwhile, would enter into the fullness of his innova- tive ideas on the psychology of spirituality, through those blessed lands. When Serrano fell ill with malaria, for example, Jung noted that his fall coincided with the devastating earthquake in Valdivia. Hence both were prostrated by the “synchronicity” existing be- tween Serrano and his homeland.

Serrano wrote two other works that embody this harmony with landscape through his colourful mix of prose and poetry, ex- quisitely rendered: “The Visits of the Queen of Sheba” and “The

Mysteries”, both from 1960, and “The Serpent of Paradise”, from 1963. “The Mysteries” is moreover one of Serrano’s least known works, originally published on fine handmade paper from Nepal with designs by Escámez. “The Serpent of Paradise” is better known and more popular. It relates his experiences in India, his spiritual travels and completes the “Trilogy of the Search Through the Exterior World” (together with “Neither By Land Nor By Sea” and “Invitation to the Icefields”), which the author published in one volume with the same title in 1974. He writes there about the birth- place of Hinduism:

“The external fire can not melt opposites. There is a great dif- ference between the androgynous Elephant God and the hermaph- rodite youths of Chandni Chowk. One has surpassed man, the oth- ers have denied man.”

“Several times I have found myself amid processions advanc- ing through nights of fable, dripping stars, sweat and smells. And I have gone with them without knowing who I am, where I go or whether one day I would be able to return to my homeland.”

SERRANO “SAVES” ANTARCTICA

In addition to the rich adventure Serrano lived in this surreal at- mosphere, the Chilean representative would see himself involved in the vital defence of the rights of Chile in the Antarctic territory, thus establishing at the same time a truly magic triangle between three blessed mystic poles of three continents that in the archaic past had already been united: From the Andes to the Himalayas, and from the Himalayas to Antarctica. We shall see what this is about.

Meanwhile it happened that the representative of India to the UN, Krishna Menon, made an official proposal for the internation- alisation of Antarctica. The idea could count on the sympathy of countries without Antarctic rights that did not recognise the alleged claims of other nations, in part motivated by the riches of the con- tinent. Alerted to this dangerous situation, the Argentine Ambas- sador to India, Vicente Fatone, unsuccessfully sought a meeting with the authorities in New Delhi.

Neither could the North American representative, John Sher- man Cooper. Washington D.C. decided to send Ambassador Cabot Lodge as its extraordinary delegate to persuade India to withdraw the proposal. None of this worked.

Noting the responsibility that rested on his shoulders, Serrano wanted to persuade the Indian government to withdraw from the project. At first he obtained no better results than the rest of the diplomatic corps. But using his friendship with the unforgettable Indira, he was able to get an interview with her father, Prime Min- ister Nehru.

The Man of the Rose listened attentively to the words of the Chilean, for whom Menon’s proposal would destroy years of Chil- ean efforts to achieve the recognition of territorial rights over Ant- arctica, a land with which Serrano himself as well as his beloved Chile maintained intimate and indescribable ties, as we have de- tailed above. The Indian leader understood the message. Nodding, he placed his own signature red rose in the lapel of the ambassador, by way of sealing the agreement and as his next act he ordered the proposal withdrawn. This extraordinary meeting between the two very important men is detailed by Serrano himself, in his autobiog- raphy “Memoirs of He and I”.

Obsessed with his proposals, Menon tried to present the pro- ject at least once more. Nevertheless Nehru insisted on the final withdrawal. The representatives Cabot Lodge and Fatone formally thanked Serrano for this achievement, since in practice Antarctica was saved from what would have been her immanent internation- alisation and submission to a chaotic regime, which would have dragged the continent into the larger planetary conflicts and made her subject to the interests that would gain from the exploitation of her resources.

While permanently putting a brake on the attempt to make Antarctica a no man’s land, the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, extended an invitation to the 12 participat- ing countries of the International Geophysical Year for a conference on the future of Antarctica. Hence, on December 1, 1959, the twelve participating countries signed the Antarctic Treaty, forcing them to

submit the territory to peaceful purposes and preventing installa- tions with military or armed characteristics. The continent remains open to wider international scientific research and leaves the terri- torial claims of each signatory nation frozen as a status quo for the duration of the treaty, with recognition of their respective territorial pretensions, thereby blocking the emergence of new territorial claims by other nations.

Nor was any special recognition given to Miguel Serrano for this administrative achievement, noted as among the few major transcendent diplomatic successes accorded to Chile in interna- tional diplomacy.

CLOSE OF HIS DIPLOMATIC CAREER AND LIFE IN EUROPE

After being ambassador to India, Serrano held diplomatic posts in Yugoslavia, during which he managed Marshal Tito’s visit to Chile. His last work in diplomacy was as the representative of Chile to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, and to the United Nations Agency for Industrial Development.

The intrigues and actions of his enemies nevertheless forced him to leave the diplomatic field. On the coming to power of the Popular Unity government, through dark manoeuvres made by the then Chancellor Clodomiro Almeyda, he was retired from active service.

Pensioned off under such unfortunate circumstances, he trav- eled to Italian Switzerland where, from 1972, he resided in the fa- mous and ancient Casa Canuzzi in Montagnola, where among oth- ers Hermann Hesse had also lived, as we have seen. Despite still defending his Esoteric Hitlerism, many international authors associ- ated Serrano with the New Age Movement of those years, drawing him near to the style associated with the inspirations of Timothy Leary or Aldous Huxley, towards whom Serrano never expressed much confidence or empathy. Even so, visitors to Casa Canuzzi were well received by him, especially those who came with the de- sire to know the former residence of Hesse.

In this prodigious environment for creation, he wrote “Nie- tzsche and the Eternal Return” in 1974, where he realised an inter- pretation achieved with the maturity of his consciousness and knowledge, based on Nietzscheanism, Brahmanism and Jungian symbolism, as well as universal mythology and Pagan theosophy, his main strands of inspiration (Translator: not to mention the great wealth of inspiration he derived from his compassionate Wagneri- anism and aristocratic Esoteric Kristian Catholicism as well):

“I feel a knot tightens around my throat. Will the memories of my youth return at once? No, it is something that comes from some- where outside of me, because ‘this noble human figure’, who was once here, is become a sign up above that does not darken, to be taken up by the chain of successive generations, thought again with urgency so that the species does not sink destroyed by machines and vulgarity, so that the male seed is not annihilated.”

Forty years later, in 1978, the first part of his great trilogy, loved by some and hated by others, “The Golden Band: Esoteric Hitler- ism”, was born. On this occasion his entire philosophical heritage gives him a definitive role as prosecutor for Esoteric Hitlerism, but his “racist” vision will be far from the white supremacist and Aryan fever that some charge him with at present, with ignorance of what were the true dictates of his Idea (Translator: an Idea absolutely con- trary to the materialist biological determinism of Darwinism and classical liberal Freemasonry!):

“So now, we the South Americans, the mixed races, belonging to this “armpit of the world” on the earth’s surface, to use the ex- pression of the Peruvian writer Antenor Orrego, the ploughed un- der, i.e., the Nordics of the South, the Great South, what are we to do in all this, what part do we represent in the Great Game?”

“…The answer lies in the assertion that the race which this en- tire cosmic theme concerns is a Race of Spirit and Legend. Nothing in this refers to biology, to the purely physical of the sciences of the exterior earth. Myth and Legend are indivisible, as is the Arche- type. One certain point of the planet does not take possession of this more than another point except momentarily and then only to in- vest it inside and out within the same Unus Mundus. Only during

certain historic times do they perch on some centre of the living body of the earth and, working from there, are embodied in men, to deliver their message within Destiny as the White Spirit or Ghost my Maestro saw leaving Germany, having exhausted the exact part in the Drama.”

The years in Europe allowed Serrano small and great personal achievements. He met the great philosopher Julius Evola in person, and the great poet Ezra Pound as well, probably the greatest poet of the Twentieth Century in his genre, yet punished harshly at the end of the Second World War for his adhesion to the Nazi-fascist phenomenon. In fact Serrano followed through with the only exist- ing monument of Pound in the world, in Medinaceli, Spain, in 1973. Many years later he recalled this tribute, in the “El Mercurio” of November 2, 2002, the day of the 30th anniversary of the death of Pound:

“What more can a great poet wish than that his poems are re- cited by things? What more could he want than a blackbird singing in his honour? What greater proof can be given that a man is great, that a poet is so, than that the sky, or nature, thus manifests to con- firm him?”

“A blackbird still sings in Medinaceli. And he sings for Ezra Pound.”

Only in much later times, already relatively free from the de- monising prejudices of politicking, has the work of Pound begun to be revealed and rescued from the oblivion that was intended for it. Serrano was perhaps the first to propose such clarity.

RETURN TO SANTIAGO DEL NUEVO EXTREMO

Oblivious to the grave political ruptures strangling his homeland, he returned to Chile in 1980. He arrived in a divided country that at times left him a stranger. His friends were no longer there, nor their meeting places of yesteryear. Nor were the lights, the shad- ows, the colours. Still, he loves Santiago, the Mapucho River, Santa Lucia Hill, the Alameda. He can not get away from them.

Following the Nietzschean and Hindu line, that year he pub- lished “Nietzsche and the Dance of Shiva”. It then becomes clear

that Serrano has definitively opted for ideological literature, a deci- sion for which many of his closest associates would reproach him forever, unable to explain such a sacrifice for his poetry.

Avoiding difficulties, he went to live in the beautiful old neigh- bourhood of Santa Lucia in the Boat Building, in Merced, designed by the architect Sergio Larrain with his characteristic Bauhaus forms. Now they call the neighbourhood Barrio Beaux Arts. In his apartment on the sixth floor the walls of the main room are green. Around this arises a museum of his life, his memories, his adven- tures, his enviable experiences of the rest of the world. Various peo- ple visit him. With singular patience he serves them all. Later he alternated days at his house-castle in Valparaiso, Avenida Ale- mania, where he has his sheepdogs and also keeps many of his memories.

Despite everything, he has not lose touch with the Old World. For example, in 1984 he traveled to Madrid. He met in person the Belgian hero of the Second World War, Leon Degrelle, with whom a friendship would endure longer than life. Like Degrelle, Serrano would also make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, one of the most potent symbols of Hyperborean emigration that Serrano would read in the maps of the antediluvian world, where his trou- badour chronicles live. He always emphasised the meaning that linked his city Santiago del Nuevo Extremo to Santiago de Compo- stela, in the Mother Country, convinced of a symbolic thread that united them beyond the merely heraldic.

Over here, in this Santiago, he is usually seen walking daily through the streets of his neighbourhood, watching the transfor- mation of the city with his eyes the colour and brightness of emer- alds. People recognise and greet him. He does not deny his hand to neighbours or shopkeepers, or drivers or the many waiters serving the bars and restaurants along those streets. People who live or work in the area always find him circling the hill, with his dapper trousers and walking staff. A good- natured, sympathetic man, so different from the cartoon monster many of his enemies try to fab- ricate. He never lacks a clean transparent smile.

Nevertheless we shall see that his short notes and reflections on the patrimonial value of Santiago must be combined with the energetic activity he undertook shortly after completing his first decade back in town, before the territorial threats would then hold the country in a delicate diplomatic situation. Serrano participated actively organising meetings, get togethers and lectures and writ- ing a string of letters in the press presenting with his particular style a passionate defence of Chile in the disputes with Argentina, from his nationalist and esoteric perspective.

During the same maturity when other men prefer to pass their lives in repose and tranquility, Serrano raised his fists to fight tire- lessly for his country, despite the wear of such a burdensome busi- ness, as we shall see.

DOCTRINAL AND IDEOLOGICAL WRITINGS

Following the publication of “The Golden Band”, Miguel Serrano had no reason to soften or hide his fervent sympathy for the Third Reich and for the reflection the international phenomenon had in his country. Thus he began to publish books that have been catego- rised as more “rabid”, falling inevitably under anathema as Anti- Semitic and racist.

In 1981 he published the controversial work “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its Application in Chile”, where he expands on one of the themes that has been a pillar of international Anti- Judaism, although he claims not to be “anti-anything” when they hang those labels on him. And the following year he launched the second book of his Esoteric Hitlerist trilogy, explicitly titled “Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar”. There he maintains a revisionist view of the history of German Nazism and the relationship of Chile with the international phenomenon, from his esoteric perspective clearly stating that the Führer occupies the role of the Tenth Avatar or ul- timate incarnation of the god Vishnu, who for him is none other than the god Wotan or Odin. He emphasises the esoteric roots of Aryan India.

His Luciferian worldview has a pessimistic orientation: We are in the Kali Yuga, in the Darkest Age, the Age of Kali according to

Hinduism. He sees the germ of self-destruction in the Latin Amer- ican peoples, devastated by decadence, abused by globalist forces and the vice within their societies. In “The Chilean Racial Cycle”, 1982, he senses the Chilean race, the same race that Nicolás Palacios once praised, has already entered into an inevitable cycle of self- destruction. Although in part defending the ideal of the Chilean mestizo that Palacios proposed (he would even help with the re- publication of Palacios’ work “Chilean Race”), his forecasts are not encouraging. Later, in 1986, he extends his critical view of the re- gion, in his “National Socialism, Only Solution for the Peoples of South America”. These books express in the clearest sense Serrano’s opinion on the issue of race, ethnicity and human culture, based on studies such as those of Jacques de Mahieu:

“It is not for us to detail here a description and commentary on the circumstantial investigations and discoveries made concerning a prehistoric American world populated by a race of white giants, demigods and whose legend is still preserved in traditions and doc- uments, before the arrival of Columbus and the Jesuits to these lands. The natives, the coloured peoples of this continent, called them “White Gods”, transposition of Weisegoten, or Visigoth”.

Serrano does not abandon his Esoteric Kristian roots, nor his passion for myth. This same year he published “The Resurrection of the Hero”, one of his most philosophical works. There he says:

“Alchemy enables the Hero, the God here imprisoned, to es- cape from the prison, taking some comrades with him (like the Torch Bearers Cautes and Cautopates) and even a few beings native to this concentration camp Other Universe, those redeemed through the sacrifice of miscegenation, or a ‘racial sin’, accepted as strategy. (This is the ‘descent of Kristos into Hades’). And the re- ward will be precisely the perpetuation of a terrestrial ‘I’, the im- mortality of the consciousness here acquired, the possibility to give a Face to the undifferentiated Monad, a Face and a terrestrial vis- age, of a man, become the Star into which the Hero transmutes. Thus he will be more than the Gods. More than the God who enters here and divides into many equals. Because only one of those many will be immortalised. Into an ‘I’, into a ‘Self’.”

In the following year, he resumed the speech with a new work: “Against Usury”, where he returns to vindicate his beliefs and spe- cifically the abolition of speculative capital. His defense is primarily concentrated on the work of the German economist Gottfried Feder, which he reproduces in the book, perhaps with the greatest emphasis on the social question of any published by Serrano:

“Although big moneylender capital deliberately tries, as the personification of the principle of charging interest, to conceal the right of its lust for absolute dominance, more than anything through every legislation based on Roman Law, or rather the right to protection money to service a plutocracy, which has been infil- trated into the consciousness of our people, the destruction of the interest slavery of money must come as the only solution to the looming economic enslavement of everyone by the Gold Interna- tional, as the only means to expel the venom of Mammonism that infects and degrades the mentality of our time.”

The critical discourse is repeated in his controversial book “The Andean Plan”, also from 1987, where he asserts the existence of a plot to establish a new republic on the present Patagonian territory.

This is a period when his writings are principally committed to spreading ideological propaganda. In 1989 he published “The Leuchter Report”, which reproduces the controversial results of in- vestigations into the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz done by the engineer Leuchter, made as part of the defense in the trial of a revisionist. One should recall that Serrano had long before main- tained his incredulity about the alleged Holocaust, earning the scorn of many more in the long list of his eventual enemies. He even wrote in his Memoirs that, had he ever seen some Jewish friend en- tering a gas chamber, “I would have gone in with him”.

In this climate, he closed his Esoteric Hitlerist trilogy in 1991 with the book “Manu: For the Man to Come”:

“The storyline of History is archetypal. Already experienced and suffered in another Round by 'someone' who also felt himself 'I' as I feel myself today; the difference of form, if there were one, in truth does not matter, since I have become conscious of an Eternal

Motif through myself. And the Archetype, being one and indivisi- ble, though dividing itself into several, makes the self incarnated in the time of another Round be 'I' myself, in the Self, the Selbst, in the Eternity of the Archetype, now become conscious, now attained, touched. And thus as reincarnated inside the Eternal Return a fixed number of times, also with archetypal numbers, given to that and me correspond to my Noontide and are my Tuning Fork. Within them is given me to conquer or disappear. Within them I play Res- urrection and Immortality. These fixed reincarnations by my Num- bers are my Family House, my Lineage, which has now reached its Full Noontide in the Nietzschean Revelation on the Rock of Zara- thustra. And if I do not go forth in a 'sigh of Time,' by the blinking of Kronos, reaching something never dreamt of, then it is possible but not certain that the Archetype would return to incarnate once more in the same Self, 'possessing it' in the immensity of another Kalpa, another Manvantara or another Yuga. But with less force.”

POLEMIC DENUNCIATIONS

Although Serrano never identified with the military regime, the ad- vent of the concertationist democracy (Translator: a political con- sensus in which the Chilean political parties have agreed simply to alternate in power no matter how the voters may choose to vote) caused him deep suspicion, especially when he learned about the efforts of powerful international magnates in the South of Chile to amass vast tracts of land including private monopolies over some of the largest aquifers on earth, a situation which in his judgement proved that warnings about conspiratorial plans for Patagonia were absolutely real. For that reason in 1991 he published “The New World Order and Patagonia”, reproducing his speech before the Monument to the Martyrs of the Worker’s Insurance Building Massacre in the Cementerio General, on September 5, 1991. The fol- lowing year saw the publication of “Defend Our Patagonia”, in the same style.

In 1992 the Five Hundred Year Anniversary of the “Discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus led to a heated atmosphere of historical revisionism that then took hold of Hispanic American

intellectuals, especially concerning the human and cultural cost the continent paid for the ensuing Conquest. That year Serrano pub- lished “We Do Not Celebrate the Death of the White Gods”, in which he defended the theory that ancient Nordic settlers had col- onised the Americas prior to any other culture, and that every ves- tige was eventually destroyed by the arrival of the European Con- quistadors. Interestingly, this theory based on the findings of De Mahieu has been substantiated in recent years by several archaeo- logical discoveries.

The realities of parallel worlds intersect in the author’s works: In 1993 he published “The U.F.O.s of Hitler Against the New World Order” in which he argues these ships were the legacy of the Ger- man Third Reich, a theory by no means only supported by him but also by numerous other scholars of the Second World War, strange as this may seem. The following year, returning to doctrinal scrip- tures, he published the first complete edition of “Mein Kamph” translated into Spanish. On the death of his friend Leon Degrelle, he wrote “Our Honour is Called Loyalty” as a tribute to the leader of Belgian Rexism, in 1994.

This was a difficult year for Chile: An unfortunate agreement between Presidents Aylwin and Menem had ceded the settlement of the territorial dispute over Laguna del Desierto to a totally partial international tribunal created in the interests of the Argentine side of the dispute. Accordingly the judgement of 1994 was completely averse to Chile and based on criteria indifferent to the original de- limitation of the area, for which reason Serrano, alongside his friends and comrades Juan Diego Davila, Dr. Jorge Vargas and the Academician Erwin Robertson made a controversial public state- ment in the Hotel Tupahue, protesting the partiality of the court’s ruling and placing the blame on the Chilean Foreign Ministry and La Moneda (Translator: the Presidential Palace). This thrust Don Miguel into the public spotlight.

Given the circumstances, Serrano believed this again con- firmed his suspicions regarding a conspiracy against Patagonia which he repeated in his “Globalist Conspiracy and the Betrayal of Chile” and “Globalist Conspiracy II: Laguan del Desierto and

N.A.F.T.A.”, based mainly on the loss of the Laguna Desert. His in- numerable letters to the media were summarised in a paper entitled “Correspondence to Prevent the End of Chile” in 1995. In 2001 he again dwelled on the subject in “Chile is Finished” and then “The Surrender of Patagonia” in 2003, in which he warns in a dramatic, almost desperate, tone:

“The Apocalyptic Vision is such that, even considering the su- icidal mentality of the Chileans, we find it impossible to think the matter is so simple as to attribute it only to stupidity, ignorance, cowardice or appeasement. Especially since we have felt deep in- dignation, bitterness and rage with the humble and simple Chilean people who have accepted the decision to deliver a territory that belongs to them.”

The format of the pamphlets with his controversial denuncia- tions are repeated in several of the author’s titles, such as “Imitation of Truth”, from 1996, in which he critiques the unreality of the In- ternet, the virtuality and cancellation of personal relationships in the digital world. Bewildered by the political manipulation that be- came the Valech Report, he published “Hypocrisy: Torture in Chile”, in 2005.

RETROSPECTION: HIS MEMOIRS

In parallel, already partially retired from public life and in the ma- turity of a man’s life, Serrano then decided to begin his memoirs, in an originally planned three- volume series, but actually divided into four. To many these are the best memoirs any national writer has ever published in Chile.

The first of these books appeared in 1996, entitled “Memoirs of He and I, Volume One. Emergence of the Self. Withdrawal of He”. He reviews his childhood and youth with an abundance of docu- mentary materials, through his years in the Barros Arana Boy’s Boarding School and his entry into the prodigious Generation of ’38. The title of the book is an esoteric concept of ubiquity: the Self has two states, one lower and earthly, and the other superior, a re- flection of the spirit. This book is bound in black because it symbol- ises the black phase, the Nigredo in the Alchemic Opus.

In the next volume, “Memoirs of He and I. Volume Two. Adolf Hitler and the Great War”, from 1997, Serrano strolls through the main part of his conversion to National Socialism, from his literary generation, his Antarctic adventure and his tragedy of love with Irene. The Massacre of the Worker’s Insurance Building and the coming to power of the Popular Front are highlighted. It almost seems a retelling of the history of Chile during and after the Second World War. His voyage to Europe and his friendship with Her- mann Hesse are vivid and detailed portraits. It is an intense, dra- matic and nostalgic book, perhaps with the most innovative con- tents of any autobiography ever written, since it reveals his own hitherto unpublished life history and environment. (Translator: Adolf Hitler!!!) The drama of Irene, his beloved “Princess Papan”, appears there. The colour of the book cover is white, Albedo in the Alchemic Opus.

The next memoir will be red, Rubedo, the last step in the Opus of Transmutation of Alchemy. It is the most anecdotal, perhaps be- cause it covers the most awarded stage of Serrano in his travels: “Memories of He and I. Volume Three. Mission in the Trans-Him- alayas”. Published in 1998, names such as Jung, Indira, Nehru, the Dalai shine brightly, together with the heights of Kailas and the wa- ters of sacred rivers. With almost boyish excitement he relates his attempts to find a lost Esoteric Order that once supported Adolf Hitler from the secret recesses of the mountains of Tibet, the actual motivation of this voyage to these sacred lands.

Finally in 1999 his “Memoirs of He and I. Volume Four. The Return” saw the light, recounting his personal experiences with President Allende, the military junta, his diplomatic mission in Yu- goslavia, his trip to Austria (also motivated by Hitlerism) and his life in Montagnola. He tells the details of his return to his native land, his frustrated projects to colonise Melimoyu and insists on de- nouncing the sacking of Patagonia in the hands of powerful inter- national businessmen. The colour of this publication is gold, sym- bolising the final transmutation into gold, the alchemic aureum.

ULTIMATE PUBLICATIONS

While his memoirs ended with the fourth volume, there was still something of introspection in his book from 2003 entitled “Son of the Widower”, where he made a synthesis of this entire esoteric thought, summarised as Pagan Esoteric Kristianity against the offi- cial Roman Christianity that he considered a Judaic impostor. He also reviews the esoteric roots of the S.S. and Islam.

His last book was published in 2005, after “Hypocrisy: Torture in Chile”. The title was “Maya: Reality is an Illusion”. There he ad- heres to the theory of the ability of the scientists of the Third Reich to produce exact “doubles” of people, and that these duplications would be done on the leaders of the regime. For example, he recalls a night in Austria, with a most special person:

“It is night. The city is in darkness. We walked until a pallid light appeared, it was a poorly lit kiosk with a large door embla- zoned with a Coca-Cola sign. I feel that we have lost our way, that this cannot be our destination. Inside the kiosk is a man in shirt- sleeves, folding newspapers on a table. Mund introduces me: He is the secret weapons engineer and this is the only work he can en- gage in without divulging his identity. He received me in a cordial manner, as though he had already been informed of my coming. To my question as to what he believed about Bormann, he responded in a most unexpected and strange way, with another question: ‘Who was Hitler?’

Rather surprised, I answered: ‘Of course I know him! How would I not?’

‘No,’ he told me, “you cannot because no one knew him, no- body knew him for certain... Did you know that in the bunker un- der the Chancellery building in Berlin they found fourteen corpses of Hitler, each the same? The one who left for Antarctica? The same with Martin Bormann and Rudolf Hess. Who was the real Bor- mann, the one in Chile or the one in Moscow?”

While this was happening, he did not lessen his perseverance in sending letters to the media, especially concerning his opinions on the preservation of the heritage of Santiago. For example, he pro- posed the conservation of the trails around Santa Lucia Hill, or

warned against the desecration of the Mapocho River by aggressive new road projects that did not respect the sacred geography of the city he loved and which he defended to the final twilight of his powers. “Santiago de la Nueva Extremadura, unique in the world, with two haunted hills: San Cristóbal (Tupahue, Abode of God) and Santa Lucia (Huelén, or Pain),” he wrote in one of his letters to the national newspapers.

He never let go of this neighbourhood: He sold his beautiful house in Valparaiso; in Santiago he only moved a few blocks away from the Boat Building to the Maximo Humbser quarter, taking only a few paintings with him, yet always residing on the slopes of Santa Lucia Hill, his dear and beloved Huelén.

NEGATION AND PUNISHMENT: AN OPINION OF URIBE

Obviously, Serrano’s declared National Socialism had costs for him in a visibly adverse cultural and political milieu. Besides the lack of public recognition, he was sometimes subjected to direct persecu- tion, as when his home was ransacked and destroyed in the early nineties when important documents of his unpublished works were stolen. Curiously. He was also never forgiven for having un- dertaken a crowded meeting in El Arrayán on the centenary of the birth of Hitler, in 1989, whose images still roam the documentaries of the world. Whereas those who annually celebrate the bloody and brutal Russian Revolution received awards and public recognition denied to him for “politically correct” reasons, for the same cyni- cism.

Ostracised and regarded almost as a necessary evil in bookstores, one will understand why Serrano was never awarded the National Prize for Literature, which he had earned twice, thrice or quadruple times over for the length, depth and significance of his work, compared with other authors who leading a much more modest life easily received an award sometimes severely politicised and due to paid favours. Only a few braved the cynicism of the me-

dia and publicly acknowledged his work in various letters or arti- cles, like the poet Christian Warnken, who invited him to his well- known television program, “The Beauty of Thinking”.

Armando Uribe, poet, former ambassador of Allende and wor- thy recipient of the 2004 National Book Award, meanwhile also de- cided to break the government hypocrisy and challenge the system. So he wrote a beautiful letter to Miguel Serrano, read on the day of his 88th birthday (2005), in a mystical ceremony attended by the foremost Chilean literary elite:

“THE POET MIGUEL SERRANO FERNANDEZ

Miguel Serrano is a poet of prose. Do not confuse him with authors of ‘poetic prose’, outbursts of lyricism in the midst of prose, using the more conventional and hackneyed clichés: flowers, love, stars and other vague fumes that seem to raise the spirit to a world dis- tinct from the everyday.

Serrano’s poetry comes from the plot of his stories and the sur- prising naturalness of his unusual characters.

While reading a book of this poet of prose, his reasoning from another world, with perfect rational syntax expresses what would be unspeakable to any other writer, convincing the reader so that he becomes an inhabitant of the unique world of Miguel Serrano, natural to his planet. He is the truest poet.

In the totality of his work, created almost ex nihilo (but with strong ties to history and geography, and recognising his predeces- sors, forging his own implicit genealogy) his mythological Chilean universe.

He raises a magic Chile to the universal. I believe he is the only poet among us that, having this tremendous ambition (making its home in our country that took the name Chile in the Sixteenth Cen- tury), has been able to do so on the grand scale.

One must consider Serrano’s work as a whole, a cosmos of his offered to us as a gift, giving his Memoirs in four volumes a high literary, emotional and intellectual place. His experiences are facts. His fantasies are as well, such is the force of his words and phrases, his prose and the poetry of his prose.

Today celebrating his passage marked by time, we render an act of human justice and, one must repeat, poetry.

Armando Uribe Arce, September 10, 2005”.

But, despite the vote of Uribe, the awards continued to be de- nied to him, completing almost 30 years (or more) of evasions and fear.

WHO WAS THE REAL MIGUEL SERRANO?

Don Miguel Serrano Fernandez died on the morning of Saturday, February 28, 2009, due to a cerebral stroke. His remains lie buried in the Cementerio General in the city of Santiago; the same city in which he was to be born, to leave, to come back and to die.

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Of course the better part of his work runs the risk of being only superficially studied, with the permanent supply of anathema which also weighed on Pound and Evola, his friends, his comrades. The effort to demonise will emphasise in his individuality the por- trait of the monster some have used to hide the significance of “con- demned” literature. This is nothing new: To deny the prize to Maria Luisa Bombal it was necessary to emphasise her drinking vice. To deny recognition to Lafourcade he was accused of “lack of serious- ness”. Huidobro was too young and presumed to have a pact with the Devil; Teillier was also deemed guilty of the bottle. And Serrano, well, it costs nothing: He was a Nazi, that’s enough, because the National Prize for Literature has become a reflection of good polit- ical behaviour to exalt the clique that makes scant contribution to letters or, conversely, give a blind eye to the compromised extra- literary curriculum of the prizes. Hence every author who incon- veniences is the expiatory scapegoat, like Serrano.

Some will say he was a crazy old man stuck in antiquated fan- tasies; the same “madman” who nevertheless, without raising his voice in the neighbourhood restaurants, monopolised the volun- tary attention of everyone present, mesmerised by the amount of knowledge, his culture, the vastness of his language, by the ration- ality of his judgements. Others will never let you forget his racial

statements, recalling words against Jews, Negroes or Indians… And they will never know what was happening in his home when he cordially received young men of Jewish origin visiting him seek- ing information or guidance; or when justifying the Mapuche race, considering it the bastion of our Chileanness, active in our national miscegenation. Not even the warm recognition he gave to the qual- ity of authors of Jewish origin like Paul Rée, Gustav Meyrink or Stefan Zweig, nor the friendship he maintained with Volodya Teiteilboim until his death, free him from the absolutist drama when quoting various lines of the most polemic text he could have written.

For my part, I will forever remember there in Lastarria or Vic- toria Subercaseaux, walking in his brimmed hat, while passing dogs celebrated as if he were their owner. In fact, the only official prize he could receive for his work was a simple recognition that came from the Society for the Protection of Animals, after publish- ing in Argentina a beautiful writing for his Himalayan dog Dolma, when she died. He treasured this simple award as a testament to his love for animals.

Or I can remember well drinking a glass of the digestive liquor, the “Araucano”, that he enjoyed, always inviting guests to taste some in his green room full of symbols, flags, portraits and a beau- tiful sword Excalibur hanging on the wall. An octogenarian who never felt uncomfortable with his young friends and admirers, in the “Leopard”, or the literary cafe “Mosqueto”, with Christian Warnken, where there was a time the curious could find him almost daily. I had after all the privilege to meet him in person, through chance, symbols, paradoxes or whatever that great will of his ar- ranged. Also to know his nicotine fiend tendencies at a popular res- taurant “Lili Marleen”, in Providencia, where the talks stretched until dawn. Some of the nearby diners offered to take us back downtown, where most of us lived in the same neighbourhood, when the opportunity arose. There, in the small car, Don Miguel went cheerful and laughing as one among close companions, cele- brating the surprised faces of passersby who managed to recognise

him among the packages, tangled hair and acrobatic positions within the moving vehicle.

It is clear Serrano won an honourable place in the national arts, beyond what many dwarves intended when they went attempting to deny him burial while his body was still warm; but it is clear that the seat of honour was denied him throughout his existence. As with Pound, perhaps a long time must pass to accept that geniuses of literature are not required to think for the charm of tickling the fancy of we who, just barely, are his readers. Just barely readers.