MIGUEL SERRANO
On his 85th birthday, 10 September 2002
Martin Schwarz
This is an extraordinary life. It is like a dream within other dreams-and, one might say, a highly poetic one. We could add to our own version of the words of C. G. Jung, which preface one of the master's most beautiful books: that it demands an extraordinarily creative gift to transform the 20th century into a dream, into a poetry that describes the rise of a new world amid the destructions and downfall of the old. To a task of this magnitude, only the language of myth is adequate. Thus Don Miguel has created a myth of the twentieth century that is radically opposed to the dominant myth, encompassing the whole matter of modern mythology and recasting it in a single mold; embracing religion, science, philosophy, and art. "His experience, whatever form it may take, brings with it an approach to wholeness, and it is precisely this experience that our modern civilization lacks. It is the way of access, the via regia to the Unus Mundus." These words of C. G. Jung actually refer to the unconscious, but they can be interpreted to apply to the Chilean poet of wholeness, who manifests as nothing less than the collective unconscious activated and concentrated in a single man: through him, the suppressed and the forgotten are poeticized, enriched with the motives of everyday civilization, and elevated to a symbolic world which discloses itself to all and to none.
Voyaging between clairvoyant vision and daydreaming, between the masculine will to power and a feminine enthusiasm, between the steadfastness of the eternal past and the elusiveness of the eternal future, Miguel Serrano has not simply invented a myth, has founded no religion, but has pointed the way to an esotericism which deserves to be judged on its own plane, not as a blow struck for historical revisionism. The literary quality of his writings and the significance of the contemporaries whom he knew, from the Himalayas to the Alps and the Andes, stand firm and unassailable, just as much as his demonization in his self-chosen heretical world of the most politically incorrect. The tantric wedding - giving birth to the perfect androgyne - is the leading thread, without whose accomplishment the golden band of A-MOR cannot embrace the reader. The eternal marriage of Being, as it resounds in Nietzsche's songs of the eternal return, is its cosmological expression; and the avatar is the human-superhuman epiphany of the perfect world-ruler.
In order to enter the Hermetic circle of "esoteric Serranianism" and to attain its center, its unmoving pole, we must turn our back on the world of sciences, with all its technologies and techniques, and find a science "that allows us to travel in other universes, not with gross material machines which are visible to the fleshly eye, and not in outer space, but in the inner space that is the true dimension of the stars." (Nietzsche and the Eternal Return) This voyage to the inner starry heaven by means of "the great ideas, inspiration, ecstasy, poetry," is simultaneously the entrance to the mandala of the inner realm, Shambhala, whose warriors are readying themselves to sally forth from the inner, imaginal world, to conquer the outer world with the sword and to set up the peaceful world dominion of cosmic justice, of which Cathars, Tibetan lamas, and the Persian mystics of illumination dreamed. "Melchisedek rested his head on his hands and began to speak: 'So far and no further can we go. But it is also dangerous to go no further, for in all eternity this miracle is only possible one single time.'" (The Visits of the Queen of Sheba)