Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Psychedelic Gnosis and the Imaginal Double with Laurence Caruana

Full Transcript: 

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MATTHEW DILLION: Greetings listeners, and welcome to the Pop Apocalypse. I'm your host, Matthew Dillon. And before we dive in, I want to say how about that intro music? My sincere thanks and gratitude to Trey Spruance of Secret Chiefs 3 for allowing us to use the songs the Owl in Daylight and the End times, both of which come off their mind blowing album, Book of Horizons.

If you're listening to this and you're not familiar with Secret Chiefs, you're going to them. So I highly recommend you just jump on whatever your streamer is and take them for a spin. You can dive in anywhere. It's all fabulous. Today, we welcome Laurence Caruana to the show. Laurence is a visionary artist, teacher, novelist, historian of ideas and many other things.

After growing up in Canada and then graduating from the University of Toronto, Lawrence lived as an itinerant artist venturing from places like Malta and Paris to Munich and Vienna. He practiced under the great artist Ernst Fuchs and has trained countless artists in the techniques he learned from him both independently and through the Vienna Academy of visionary art, which he ran and taught at from 2013 to 2020 when the global pandemic began.

Laurence is the author of several books, including The Manifesto of Visionary Art, Enter Through the Image, The Novel the Secret Passion, and most recently, Sacred Codes. Now, I first came upon Laurence's work while researching my dissertation, which was on the religious reception of the Nag Hammadi Codices in the 20th and 21st centuries. Now, while Laurence does not claim to be a scholar, he doesn't read the text like a scholar, he knows those primary sources as well as any layperson I encountered while working on the project.

We're talking hundreds of case studies. Laurence is also an ideal pairing with Alex and Alison Grey. Those three artists have known each other for about 20 years with the Vienna Academy and now the Apocryphon In Chapel, which we talk about towards the end of the interview. Laurence has helped foster the sort of visionary art community that the Greys did with Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

As you'll hear in the conversation, Laurence brings incredible depth and thoughtfulness to the ideas we are most interested in on this podcast, the place of the spiritual in art, how Gnostic experience reflects the experience of creating and meditating on art, how scholars of esoteric Buddhism have impacted contemporary culture, the ontology of the imagination, and much, much more. It's a great conversation. I hope you all enjoy.

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MATTHEW DILLION: So it is my immense pleasure to have on Laurence Caruana who wears many hats, author, artist, historian, lecturer, teacher, et cetera, et cetera. Where are you podcasting from because I see this amazing print behind you. It sort of feels like you're coming from the pleurona, right? You're sort of appearing.

LAURENCE CARUANA: Thank you. I'm in my studio. And my studio is this gabled chamber. I have kind of a gabled roof. And the painting that you see behind me reaches up to the ceiling, so it's three meters tall. And I moved back here about three years ago in 2020 because of the pandemic. And I had spent seven years in Vienna before that. But we always had this farmhouse out in the burgundy region of France. And so I'm speaking to you from my studio, basically.

MATTHEW DILLION: Oh, wonderful. So we will wind our way through your trajectory and arrive in France and then talk about the painting that you have behind you towards the end here. But I wanted to start with your background as a visionary artist. Specifically, you studied under one of the great surrealist visionary artists, Ernst Fuchs. And I was wondering, how did you come to meet Ernst? In what ways did working under him and guiding or catalyzing some of your later work?

LAURENCE CARUANA: Meeting him was one of the most fortuitous moments of my lifetime in terms of my path as an artist. Because I am born in Toronto, grew up in Toronto, studied there. And I had no idea how I would ever learn classical techniques of painting from someone who is really a master of those techniques. And I did manage to fund myself to get to Vienna for a year when I was in my late 20s, 27, 28.

And in Vienna, I discovered his work. This is before the time of the internet, so it wasn't easy to just access it online. And it was a revelation to see his work. It really set me on my path. But I came back to Toronto. I moved to Europe. And fast forward about five years later, I'm living in Paris with my wife. And I'm still very intrigued by the work of this man and his technique. And on my own, I'm trying to figure it out, out the technique that he uses, which is a combination of [? atempera ?] and oils and varnish and so on.

And at the same time, the whole visionary aspect of his work, which I was seeing was very intriguing and important to me. What happened then is when I was 38 years old in the year 2000, a friend of mine happened to be working with him in a chapel in the South of Austria. And he, this friend of mine said, you should come and work with us here in this chapel. So I dropped everything, went from Paris straight to south of Austria and met Ernst Fuchs that evening.

I had a painting of mine with me that I brought along. And basically, he and I hit it off very fast that he could see right away from my work the painting I brought with me. And the work I was doing and the conversations that we had that somehow there was a really strong connection. So I ended up working there in this chapel in the south of Austria for a couple of months. And then apprenticing with him, he had studios at this time in Monaco and outside of Monaco, a place called Castillon in the south of France.

So even though he's from Vienna and is mostly known in Vienna and has a museum of his work in Vienna, basically, I worked with him in the south of France. And that was really for me, the time in which I became, in my mind, an apprentice to a master. And I was happy about that. In other words, I think in the contemporary art tradition, we don't speak of masters and apprentices anymore. But I was very much of the mindset that I wanted to become a link in the chain of transmission of these classical techniques of painting.

And what I discovered during the time I was working with him is that it's also not just the transmission of techniques, which are very, very important, but the way those techniques develop vision, and so this whole idea of visionary art. And I actually wrote something called The Manifesto of Visionary Art the time that I was working with him in the year 2000, 2001 as a way to put it together in my own mind what is this visionary art, which is something that I kind of came across as a term Alex Grey and other artists had used it.

But it wasn't a very common term in the year 2000. And so that's where I started on my visionary path as an artist in the sense that he gave me a clarity of direction in what to do. And now, it seems obvious that there is this thing called visionary art where there's hundreds of people practicing it and so on. We can get into that. But Ernst Fuchs was very much for me the inspiration to follow this path and use this technique called the mesh technique that I use and I teach to my students as well.

MATTHEW DILLION: Wonderful, wonderful. So I want to drill down a bit and then ask so what is the visionary? And what makes this particular art form visionary as opposed to something else? What sort of keeps it this tradition or this cohort of artists bound together?

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah. One thing I often do is make a quick distinction between psychedelic art and visionary art. Because there is an overlap that psychedelics can be a part of visionary art. But the purpose of the art is not specifically to capture those states that we experience with psychedelics. Visionary is more a term. And it really goes deep into the idea that the visionary realm exists and that we can access it and that the art itself is working with the visionary realm.

And in my experience, because now I've taught many students, and so I've encountered many artists, young, late teenagers in their 20s all the way up until there are 50s, 60s 70s, people access the visionary realm in different ways. And some people are very gifted. Some people maybe have a strong imagination. In my case, what I've come to realize is that our cultural bias towards the imagination is something that prevents us sometimes from respecting the images that emerge within our own consciousness or unconsciousness.

So lately, my reading is tending towards Henry Corbin and the mundus imaginalis and this idea, and I've come to really respect this idea that there is this intermediary realm where we can access the visions. And we do it through dreams. We do it through the imagination. We do it through guided visualizations. One of my stranger practices is that I meditate or contemplate paintings.

And by that, I mean I will sit still in the same way that a meditator sits still. But rather than sitting still with my eyes closed or half closed, I have them open. And I'm gazing at a sacred image. And I'm entering into a state, which allows me to find a place of stillness. And when I do that, the painting, which is the support ceases to be a painting. And you kind of see through the painting. I use the expression from the Nag Hammadi texts, I enter through the image.

And once I enter through the image, I enter into this visionary realm. It can be still. But I become more interested in the way it moves. And the reason why I say that is because when I think about the mundus imaginalis, I think of Plato and his idea of the realm of the [? iday, ?] the realm of beings and archetypes. And usually, he describes that as stilled, the realm of being. In contrast to the realm of becoming, and the material world of becoming goes through generation and corruption.

And so there's a lot of movement within the realm of becoming. Now for me, the mundus imaginalis is that intermediary realm between being and becoming, being very still and becoming being in movement so that you're in a place where it feels timeless. It feels expansive. It feels like childhood where there's no measures of time or space or conceptualizations that limit you. But it's still such that things happen.

And I give the example that the lion devours the lamb, but neither feels hunger or pain and that the lion can become the lamb, the lamb can become the lion. And we free ourselves in this realm, in this intermediary realm from our self, the sense of I. And we just simply become everything that's there. I'll go deeper into it in this conversation because it gets kind of deep, but that gives you a taste of what visionary is for me now in my development as a visionary artist.

And all of the visionary artists I know, they have their practice, they have their way, they have their access to those realms. And then they're bringing it out into their paintings and bringing the paintings out into the world. And many people then see those paintings and relate to it. But we're in a different place because the art market, the art world, and this idea of buying a painting and putting it on the wall or putting it in a gallery or putting it in a museum, we're trying to subvert that total paradigm.

And what I mean is sacred art always had a much different purpose. in other cultures. And we see ourselves as creating sacred art, art that transforms the viewer, that transforms their perception, that gives them a different way of relating to their own life. So of course, we had to put a price or dollar value on what we're doing. But we're not playing the art market game were just in the process of creating these sacred images.

And the way people respond to those sacred images is what we're doing as artists.

MATTHEW DILLION: Excellent. It's really interesting to hear you bring up Corbin in that we just held a conference about Corbin here last year. And in addition to people like Elliott Wolfson and Jeff Kripal giving presentations on [? Valter ?] [? Honaker, ?] we also found this is particularly my dear friend [? Hardy ?] [? Fakouri ?] that his impact on, by which I mean Corbin, his impact on the arts is massive. So we brought in another painter whose name skips me now.

We brought in a playwright who was deeply inspired by him. And the most exciting part personally having Trey Spruance from Secret Chiefs 3, whose work is just filled with references to Corbin which is formed based on Corbin. He also does the intro music and outro music for this podcast, always stuns me to hear the sort of rich reverberations that Corbin thought and work have had in the art realm.

LAURENCE CARUANA: And if I could.

MATTHEW DILLION: Go ahead.

LAURENCE CARUANA: This is the way it works for me as an artist is Alex Grey had the essay, The Imaginary and the Imaginal, I believe it's called. He photocopied it, this is 20 years ago, photocopied, it sent a copy to Andrew Gonzalez, he was painter who invited me in the end to go to Klagenfurt to work with Hans Fuchs. And Andrew Gonzalez photocopied it and sent it to. Me we were passing around photocopies of Henry Corbin because it was like, you have to check this out.

This is really something interesting and different and special and unusual to take the imaginary so seriously that it becomes the imaginal, it becomes a whole other realm of being for us to exist in. And I think that in our culture, it was this how can I say, underground radical concept that we were vibing with to continue in our work. And as a visionary artist, I think you can see the correspondence between say, Corbin's writing and what we're doing.

MATTHEW DILLION: Absolutely. I like that idea of photocopied Corbin being passed around from hand to hand like secret wisdom, and that's really wonderful. So I want to get back or stay as it is within this realm, this realm of the imaginal but come at it from a different path, specifically dreams. So in your great book, Enter Through the Image, you wrote extensively about your experiments with dream work, how you've kept a dream journal for what, 40 plus years now?

Yeah. So this is going to be a very big question, so bite whatever part you can into it. How do you understand dreams work now? What is their nature? What is their epistemology?

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah, I mean, I definitely have read a lot. I've researched dreams in the different approaches to dream work and so on. And you can't ignore the pioneers like Freud and Jung. And I still hold both of those in high esteem. I'm less interested in the cognitive scientific approach and things like that. What happened to me is it was actually Joseph Campbell and reading his work that gave me a key that was kind of missing from the others.

And the key was this that he is interested in mythology and the similarities between mythology and the dream world. And he realized that in our culture, Campbell, that what's missing is rites of passage to move from one life stage to another. And he very often talks about thresholds, the hero's adventure, the hero crosses over a threshold of adventure or threshold of initiation and so on.

So I started to think about that and how dreams provide us with those kind of initiations and threshold crossings that we don't really have in our culture anymore in the sense that when an adolescent has to become an adult in more primordial or tribal societies, they undergo a traumatizing rite of passage, which makes it clear that there are no longer a child or youth and have now moved into adulthood.

And I believe that initiation was like a kind of a death and rebirth that you cannot really go back to the person you were before. Whereas the neurotic in our culture, and we are a neurotic culture, is the one who can't let go of the traumas in their childhood or whatever and is kind of stuck and unable to move forward across these life thresholds. So dreams, as I looked at my own dreams over and over again, the most important dreams, of course you can have hundreds of dreams and half of them can be nonsensical.

But the most important were titanic dreams were the ones that were concerned with the life threshold crossing that I was confronting at that moment in my life. And I don't say crossing it. Because I was just confronting it. I was moving up against it again and again and again. And so in my 20s, this was both the marriage threshold and the profession threshold, what will I do with my life? Will I find a partner? And that was the main focus of my dreams.

And then as I eventually got married and had a source of, I became sure, let's say, of my path in life, my vocation, then it was having a child, building a home, these became more thresholds. Now, I've just turned 61, and I'm confronting death all around me. My brother died. My mother died a few years ago. And I just have to cross over those thresholds of people close to me passing away.

So I believe that each stage of life has its threshold crossings, illness. And when we look at dreams, it's like I'm intrigued by the fact that usually, dreams do have narrative structures. A well formulated dream has a narrative structure where it often brings us to an image that is very close to the threshold that we're confronting right now. And I call that a threshold image. And very often we wake up just as we come upon that threshold image as if the dream is saying, OK, here it is. Here's where you are you. Have to do the rest.

In the book that you mentioned Enter Through the Image, I become fascinated by this idea of an image language and that dreams as well as art and myth play with an image language, which is to say that we're able to think through images in ways that are different from the way we think through words. And I've often asked myself, so what is the grammar or the logic of this image language? And towards the end of the book, I start to look at the various ways in which dreams put the images together.

And it's quite fascinating how there can be, for example, a regression where even though we're moving forward in time in the dream, as we go from, say one room to the next, we're going in a temporal regression into our own lives or there's juxtapositions. Freud talks about condensation, and so how things are juxtaposed, which seem strange at first, but then we realize there's actually a kind of poetic relationship between those two different things that have come together in the dream.

And I can go on, but there's a whole language of dreaming, which can come out in painting, can come out in a storytelling, film, you name it when we're sensitive to the way in which we think through images in dreams.

MATTHEW DILLION: Oh, that was very, very rich. Thank you. So but the idea of a language and a syntax and these images come together in a certain form implies a speaker, somebody who uses the language, somebody who is putting those things in narrative. So I'm wondering how have you reflected on this idea of what is it in me? What is it in general that's bringing these images together in that way?

And if it's helpful or interesting to you, how does that relate to the experience you have when you enter through the image of a canvas, go through the painting, and find yourself in an imaginal realm? So is the person behind that dream language similar to the person inside that imaginal realm or different?

LAURENCE CARUANA: [LAUGH] It's funny, but I can't in the same way that we're overlapping with Henry Corbin that is we're also overlapping with Charles Stang in his book The Divine Double because I've been reading that book. And it's just one of those books that has put together so many pieces of other things that I've seen. And it's like of course, why didn't we see this before? So this idea of a divine double or a higher self is, again, one of those things that when you see it, it explains so much.

And now, I realized that the one speaking through the dreams is the higher self, the divine double. That would be my short answer. But let me give an example. I mentioned that I met Ernst Fuchs, my master. And this was thanks to another artist and so on. There's a longer side to that whole story, which I have trouble understanding. And this is the fact that he started, Ernst Fuchs folks started showing up in my dreams a good 10 or 12 years before I met him in person.

And it was a whole series of interconnected dreams where one dream would end off, a new one would carry on from there months or years later. And at the time, I kept on interpreting it by saying to myself oh, he's just kind of an ideal that you have in your head of an artist. And so it's just a reflection of yourself, and I was interpreting it in that way. Meanwhile, I was given details in those dreams where, for example, I'm told by a member of his family that I should go to such and such a cafe to meet him, and then the dream ends.

And then I'm going towards the cafe in another dream. And finally, I see him. He stands up, we shake hands, the dream ends. Next dream, he's inviting me to come to his place where he works, right? And I find myself standing on this metal mezzanine over his studio. And I'm now working with him as his apprentice. And this all happened years before I met him. Now, when I did finally meet him, and I went to his studio, which I'd never been to before, it wasn't a metal mezzanine, but he had this marble balcony that overlooks his own studio.

And I was standing there and thinking to myself, how is it possible that I'm now in this place, which I only dreamed of before, not in precise details, but in enough of a way, because also, every time I met him when we shook hands, he would kind of look over his glasses and give me this look that just reminded me immediately of shaking his hand in the dream. And we talked about it. And he said yes, he shows up in lots of people's dreams. [LAUGH] But--

MATTHEW DILLION: Before he's met them? So oh wow, wow, so he's a dream roamer.

LAURENCE CARUANA: He painted people that he would meet later, which is interesting.

MATTHEW DILLION: Yeah, that's fascinating.

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah, and so what I learned from him is to open myself up, to let go of that rational side of myself, which is very strong and open myself up to the imaginable possibilities of things. And so for example, those dreams then that I had, the series of dreams where I was being a bit Jungian about it and saying, oh, it's just kind of persona and ego projection and so on, it was like, well, no. I mean, things can actually happen in the imaginal realm that we don't understand at a rational level.

And maybe it is our higher self. Maybe it is our divine double whose got this overview of our life that we don't have because we're down here doing the work and who's giving sending us these messages and so on from the dream world. And so I do approach my own dreams now with a much more open mind in the sense that any way I try to interpret them is only going to be like an augury. You get half of what the augury is telling you. And then it reveals its other half once the event has occurred. Yeah and that's the true nature of augries, I think.

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MATTHEW DILLION: We can go a lot of different directions from here, but one of the things that I wanted to be sure to ask, so this visionary realm, the imaginal, timeless self divine double within more popular discourse these days tends to bring us to the subject of entheogens or psychedelics, right? And so you've reflected many times on the use of sacred substances in your life and work. The first thing I wanted to ask, though, is what brought you to them at a relatively late age?

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah, 33, I was 33 in the sense that I had experimented before, but it was more a childish kind of oh look, the music sounds different and things are funny, and yeah, so in other words, at the age of 33, I had a transformational experience that set me on-- that changed my path in life and set me on that path ever since. And I think then it was the case, I have to put it in context.

I was in Munich. I was living on my own. It was I guess the year 1993. So again, without the internet, you're very much isolated when it comes to those kind of experiences. This intense mystical experience, you can turn to books to find other historical people who've experienced such things. But you're not going to bump into someone in the street who's had such a profound mystical experience. And then as a painter though, it took me a while.

But I did eventually find other painters who had had the similar kind of experience. And again, it was this process of sharing in a whispered way what had occurred to us because it seemed so out of this world. And I think it was important for me that I was 33 because my ego had kind of solidified by that point in time that I was more, I can't say I was wandering artists, so I didn't have that much structure or grounding.

But at least I had the maturity to be able to experience a complete dissolution of the ego without being traumatized by it. And instead, it was an opening up to the divine and opening up to, and this is the mystical part, the ultimate oneness of all things. And I've come to, we're going to have to of course, come to the subject of the Gnostic texts. Because those were the ones that explained it to me the best and this transformational way of looking at things.

But just to continue on the subject of entheogens, so by the time the internet came around in the year 2000, it was quite revolutionary because now all those closet [? entheonauts ?] were reaching out to each other across the net. And I was very much a part of that and one of the first spokespersons on the internet as an artist who was saying yes, this is important to me. And at the same time, I was going along that path, having followed the path of dreams up until then.

Now, I was willingly trying LSD, trying mescaline, trying ayahuasca, and allowing the transformations that occur to happen in my life. Yeah, because each one of those became a change in my direction in my path. It's not just a simple like oh, let's do this for fun. It was more that I knew, and I did it ceremonially in the sense that with deep intention and so on that each time it became a kind of a revelation and a life changing experience.

And so I can kind of document the steps of going from this one to that one to that one to arrive at where I'm at now. And I'm still on that path, I have to say.

MATTHEW DILLION: Interesting. So let's transition just a little bit. You brought up the Nag Hammadi library and these ancient Gnostic texts. And so we initially met, or I first came upon your work while researching, what at that time was my dissertation, reception history of the Nag Hammadi library. And I mean, I have read way too much, hundreds of authors for this book and watched countless documentaries, listen to podcasts, et cetera.

And I still don't think there's somebody who is as deeply saturated in the texts as you in the sense that you've very clearly spent a lot of time with them and thought them through and understand them on a very deep level. So I want to know what was it that spoke to you so deeply about the Nag Hammadi library and these Gnostic texts when you first found them? What was that moment like? How did that sort of serve as a gateway into everything that's come after?

LAURENCE CARUANA: And it happens in stages. And the earliest stage, which we talked about this for your thesis. I grew up in a very Catholic environment, my parents coming from Malta, a Mediterranean island. And the Catholicism in that culture is very pervasive. It's very strong. And I went to church every Sunday. So I grew up with this very strong, now I call it a mythology. But at the time it was a worldview that surrounded me.

And that Catholicism became constricting by the time I was in my early 20s. And I was able to use, I was studying philosophy at university, and I even studied hermeneutics and biblical interpretation in my final years. And that allowed me to change my perception of those sacred texts to understand that they were texts, then they could be interpreted as literature or mythology. But still, I was struggling.

And when I came across the Gnostic, texts which were just grouped in as nonn-canonical versions of the life of Christ, it gave me that passage out, that little doorway. And it was a heretical one, and I interpreted it as heretical but in a good way. The heresy was exactly what I needed to be a little bit rebellious while still being still within that Christian outlook. I tried to become an atheist, and I didn't succeed. [LAUGH]

Intellectually, I tried to be an atheist, but in my soul, I still felt and dreamt and so on that Catholic world in which I had emerged. So what the Nag Hammadi texts did over time is they allowed me to continue living within that Mediterranean world of my ancestors while broadening it. And broadening it, now, I can see towards ancient Egyptian or hermetic or alchemical or even tantric kind of traditions, which were still moving through the entire Christian framework or Judeo Christian framework.

And now, as I continue to move through life, I have to stress something, which is that I as an artist, I respect all sacred traditions and try and work within all sacred traditions. And so I don't see myself exclusively as Gnostic. But I keep on finding in the Gnostic texts explanations for things that I don't find elsewhere. And to give another important example was this expression enter through the image, which appears just as a line within the gospel of Philip.

And I took that. I wrote it on a little piece of paper. I put it over my drawing board, and I didn't even understand what it meant. And for years, I was just puzzling over enter through the image, enter through the image. Well, it was really when I had my transformational experience at the age of 33 that I entered through the image, is I was able to meditate on a painting, and the painting became this doorway into the visionary realm.

And I was like, ah, now, I'm starting to see a deeper level to these texts. And now I have to take another step forward, which is we talked about how entheogens and psychedelics can change your perception of the world. So with ayahuasca, which is probably one of the strongest vision inducing substances, plants that you can experience, I was in this realm of pure vision for about six hours straight.

And it was hard. It was hard because I became aware that whatever thought, whatever feeling was rising up inside of me was manifesting itself in front of me as a vision and including unconscious as well as conscious. And it wasn't-- I've been in lucid dream states before, where you can kind of control where you go in the lucid dream state, but this was much different where it was very difficult to navigate that experience.

And what I realized is I'm in a mirrored sphere. And it was the only way I could conceptualize it to myself properly that I'm in a mirrored sphere. And whatever I think appears before me and is reflected back to me. And when you read the Apocryphon of John and the way the creation takes place in the Apocryphon of John, it's very much the same model that divinity thinks and thinks of thought, and the moment of divinity thinks a thought that thought, that object is materialized before it as an image in the watery light.

And it sees. Then there's the reflexive act of seeing itself in the watery light, seeing itself in that image. And this way of thinking, which is very unified because whatever you see reflects you and becomes an image of you is only experienced, I think, in these extremely mystical states. But once you've experienced it, you can start to make it a model for the way that you experience the world.

And so now, I continue to be intrigued by this whole idea that somehow those people who wrote those texts had these kind of mystical experiences where everything I see, I see as if it's within a mirrored sphere, that everything reflects me to myself. And of course, you have to be careful. Because when I say me, whatever egoistic desires and passions and so on I put into that is going to get reflected back to me.

So the me I'm talking about here is I have to be very careful of whatever I put into the mirror sphere will eventually reflect itself back to me in some shape and form. So that's my way of understanding the Gnostic texts now. And as I'm saying is they're just articulating for me what my experience was. And I feel an intense sympathy with their world outlook because it explains to me so much of what I've experienced in these mystical or visionary states.

MATTHEW DILLION: I appreciate how there's within your thinking, there's both this reflection of oneself in the watery light as we see [? a ?] [? D ?] in the opening of the theogony of Apocryphon of John and then also the entering through the image because that's the other way images play within the Nag Hammadi text that we become transformed into the image that we see. You see that in gospel, of Philip gospel of Thomas. By envisioning it, that's what transforms you, so going, using that as a portal into the imaginal realm.

So that was really interesting to hear. I also wanted to hear you discuss, because in addition to Enter Through the Image, you wrote a life of Jesus Yashua reimagined through the Nag Hammadi texts. So first off, what brought you to what you've called the Gnostic Q project? And what was the impetus behind doing that Gnostic Q project first?

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah, I mean, as I said, I had studied hermeneutics at university and [? Schliemaher ?] who was one of the theologians I studied who put forth this idea that there was a Q list of sayings that Matthew and Luke had based their Gospels on Mark but also on a Q list of sayings. And I like this idea that you have the sayings, and then you have the story. And you need to kind of do both, respect the sayings and also construct the story around them.

So when I wanted to write that novel, I needed to respect the texts, which is to say the Nag Hammadi texts. And I didn't want to get stuck in the kind of dividing it all up and saying, OK, this one is Sathyan, and that one's Valentinian and so on because that would have been too much of a maze. So I basically respected the corpus of the Nag Hammadi texts plus those other texts that have been found, the Brutus Codex and so on.

And then I created my own Q list in the sense that I would say garment. And then I would take as many as I was reading through those books over and over again, creating my own little glossary for the word garment or for the word redemption or resurrection. And eventually, it's interesting how one passage from one text can illuminate another passage from another text and bring out its very particular meaning.

So resurrection being a very interesting one because to me, I eventually realized that when they're speaking of the resurrection, it wasn't this historical resurrection of Christ, but rather a ritual in which they, themselves were probably ascending through the cosmic framework and that they were experiencing the resurrection in a vision. It's a very different way of interpreting that word. So I constructed this Gnostic Q as I called it.

And then from there, I started to write the novel and trying to respect the myth themes the [? mythologyms ?] where Christ's crucifixion is seen at least three or four different ways by the end of the novel because the Nag Hammadi text presented in so many different ways. And the other thing I want to emphasize is that what I realized while writing it is that the Christ, which I grew up with in my Catholic tradition was very much a redeemer, was very much a savior figure sacrificing himself for our sins.

And in the Gnostic texts, he's more of a revealer, that his fundamental function is to reveal. And when I got that, it was foundational for me. Because I realized that the crucifixion, how do you interpret that fundamental event? Well, it relates back to Genesis. And then what did they do? They reinterpreted Genesis to reinterpret the crucifixion.

You see what I mean, that once you reframe Genesis and what sin is and eating this fruit of knowledge that if eating from the fruit of knowledge is not a sin, then how do you-- that forces you to reframe the crucifixion as well. And so in the end, my novel emphasizes the visionary or revelatory aspects of this Christ figure. I also do tend to differentiate between Jesus or Yashua and the Christ, that I see Jesus is very much a man.

The Christ is very much this figure that existed in the upper eons before the creation of the material world. And so this Christ descends into Jesus as part of the novel, as part of the baptism actually during the moment of the baptism, that's when Christ descends into Jesus. So yeah, you end up taking the traditional story and adding new layers, new levels, new, which is exactly what I was kind of looking for in those early readings of the non-canonical texts is the heretical sides to the Christ that allow you to see in a different-- have a different perspective on what that story is about.

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MATTHEW DILLION: You brought up the Resurrection and not just Christ's Resurrection, but the idea that the Resurrection was what amounted to a preparatory ritual for what occurs after we die, a sort of navigation through the spheres. And there's different ways in which that's framed depending on if you're talking about [? Sethian ?] texts, Valentinian texts, they use different language around that. But it's very much a mapping of what occurs after you die.

And I know you were reflecting earlier on death. And I'm sorry to hear both about your brother and your mother. So I'm curious first, having read all these afterlife visions, do you have your own, I mean, I guess there's no gentle way of framing this your own experience of these realms or something that occurred within you that leads you to think oh, I like the Gnostics of old or like the [? Hermitis, ?] have experienced what will happen to the soul after death?

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah, and it comes back to the mirrored sphere that you, now that we're alive We're in the body. And because we're in the body, we have our senses, and we have our feelings, which have to pass through linear time in order to become manifest. But I believe that once we pass over to the other side, we still have our consciousness. But now, we have our consciousness in those envelopes that we were familiar with from our lifetime.

So let's call it the emotional body. Let's call it the physical body. But those are really constructs, mental constructs. And a lot of traditions from Tantrism in the East to these Gnostic traditions and hermetic traditions in the early stages of our culture try to formulate a cosmos, a world view in which that which is above is that which is below. In other words, the cosmic framework if we can understand the cosmic framework, we can also understand the energies that are operating here below in our emotional and physical bodies.

And what happens in hermeticism and many other traditions is that they interpreted the cosmic framework as basically seven visible planets plus the imperium of the fixed stars. And then the material world was the ether holding in the fire, air, water, and earth. And that's the whole cosmos. You have the five material realms and the seven cosmic realms, which tend to relate to the deities. And those deities tend to relate to passions.

And so I call these the passions of the soul that basically Venus relates to desire and the passion of the soul, that's desire. Mars relates to anger and the courage of-- that's something else, there's positive and negative characteristics associated with each. But I don't need to map them out precisely. Let's just say that there are seven passions of the soul and that there are five elemental parts to the body.

And so now, we have our conceptualization, our map. Now we have our way of understanding the mirrored sphere. Because what I'm talking about is you are here in the middle of your body is those five spheres within spheres that I just discussed, earth, air, fire, and water, and your emotional body is influenced by the planets above as this constant shifting of your passions, desire, , anger other things like that.

Then of course, the Apocryphon of John for example, says yes, there's those 12, but those 12 are simply the material reflection of the invisible higher 12 eons. , And invisible higher 12 eons of the mind are understanding memory, grace, form, and they go through a whole list of which Sophia wisdom is the last. But that mind has its own mirrored sphere of the 12 states of mind that are described in the Apocryphon of John.

So now, I've got this cosmos, which has five material elements, seven passions of the soul, and then 12 states of mind that give me the structure of both without and within. Because at each level, it has a very human component. And it has a more cosmic component. So I believe that this whole idea is when you leave the body, and you are a consciousness, you need to reorient yourself in time, in space and so on.

And so they were teaching how to do that by giving mental maps, by giving, and mental maps based on something fairly concrete, like the structure of the cosmos and the body as they knew it at that time period and the soul. And so now, you. Can navigate now you can say, OK, and the cosmic ascent as they describe it is going, you're leaving behind the garments of the body. So let's say there's five bodily garments that you're leaving behind.

And then you're taking off the garments of the soul, the seven soul garments that are the seven passions until you can reach to that higher level, which is pure mind. And within mind itself, you then have to free yourself, really of those conceptual garments that you have, which are things that, how can I say? It's entering through the image. To remove the garment is to so to speak pass through it. And so you move through these higher states of mind until you're free of them all.

And then you are one with divinity at the source and origin of the cosmos. And that is the moment, that is the moment of revelation, the moment that you are striving for, the gnosis. And you can then use a whole bunch of beautiful symbols and metaphors, or how can I say, use the image language to describe that experience, which is as a wedding, as a marriage, as the marriage of Christ and Sophia and so on to describe that mystical experience.

So I think it's known that the mystery traditions in ancient Greece like [? Edusus ?] was practice for what will happen to you in the afterlife to prepare you for the afterlife. And definitely in the Egyptian tradition, the priests over well thousands of years were mapping out what they considered to be the afterlife territory, the 12 gates that the boat would pass through and so on. So the Gnostics were doing something similar. They were mapping it all out, mapping out the afterlife territory.

And now putting it into a Christian context, that's where it gets kind of interesting for me is putting it in the mouth of Christ. And Christ is saying in the dialogue of the Savior for example, when you come upon the first archon, be ready. Do not fear. And so--

MATTHEW DILLION: But you also need to learn all their names so that you can have power over them. And yeah, it's a very meticulous.

LAURENCE CARUANA: Exactly, yeah, it becomes meticulous in that. But all those traditions were, even the Egyptian tradition and so on, it was so complex and so rich with passwords and magical words, and but that's where my study branches off into theurgy and theurgy with all the different not just words, but sounds that they use to the vowel sounds and the consonant sounds.

And I started to realize that this is not just fun and games that if you really are in a highly elevated mystical visionary state, and you like a good Buddhist, you suddenly go om, and in tone this very deep tone, that's going to have a profound influence on your inner state because your inner state is what's constantly influencing what you're experiencing in the visionary realm.

And so navigating is really about having posture, having breathing, , having syllables that you can intone in order to I can't say control it, because you're moving through it, but to help you to move through it, to help you to navigate through those visionary realms. And so all of this ancient lore is there as if they were practicing these things and we're kind of going oh, now, I understand what those theurgists were going on about and those Gnostics with their [NON-ENGLISH] and these other kind of expressions that we use to describe these bizarre vowel sounds like a gospel of the Egyptians is the perfect example.

So yeah, I feel like with experience and time, I've come to understand better through visionary states what kind of visionary states they were experiencing with the soul ascent and with the rituals that they were constructing to prepare you for this whole ascent.

MATTHEW DILLION: So first, thank you. That was so rich and interesting. I wanted to just drop a little anecdote here in reference to vowels in theurgy actually. So in 2017, Rice held a conference called Gnostic America, which was just gnosticism in America. And April [? Taconic, ?] scholar of ancient gnosticism, invited a vocalist and musician who played a variety of instruments primarily drumming and basically put these ancient rituals to song.

And one of them was from the Gospel of the Egyptians. And so there's the [NON-ENGLISH] and all of these things, and then the vowels start. And it's just beautiful and soaring. And you just have these very sort of profound, rich experiences just hearing that. And afterwards, Greg Shaw, the scholar of theurgy who was there. He said, as scholars, when we get to the vowel part, we always skip them. We're like OK, we can skip to that. Let's get to the meat.

But when you hear it, you realize the vowels are the best part, right? The vowels are what transports you. It's what brings you from sphere to sphere to speak metaphorically, right? Anyway, they ended up making a CD out of it. I can point you in listeners to it because it is actually really enchanting. So--

LAURENCE CARUANA: And there is a book by his name will come back to me, but there are seven vowel sounds in Greek language. And then there's also seven tones in the musical scale. It seems too much of a coincidence in a way that the relationship to the seven cosmic spheres, that there are seven vowel sounds, seven musical tones that it becomes cohesive. It becomes very much a complete system to move through those sounds.

And then, as I mentioned in my novel, The Hidden Passion, which I thought I'd find fascinating, if you read Marsanes deeply that text, that the consonant sounds are very much related to the body, which makes perfect sense that [CLICKING] is all of those body sounds, which are harsh. But the spirit, the [? peuma ?] is what rises up through the vowel sounds. And so of course, you want to have the ah, oh, E, ooh, ah, and so on as the sound of the spirit, whereas the sound of the body is very much those consonants, yeah.

MATTHEW DILLION: So we've found ourselves sort of circling the Apocryphon of John, which clearly brings us to the Apocryphon and Chapel Project. So I could set this up a number of different ways. But I just want to hear how you came to the idea for this Apocryphon Chapel, and how do you envision it eventually being constructed. And I'll be sure to put a link to the Apocryphon Chapel and the whole project within the show description.

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah, well, it was a number of different factors coming together. And one was definitely every time I read those texts, I realized that no one had come forth to visualize them in the sense of creating serious paintings for what's going on there. And it just seemed like the perfect most propitious time to do that. Those texts, as you know came into our culture. Well, they were discovered in '45 but didn't really emerge until the '70s in translation.

And here we are now 2020, 2022, 2023, and they're still in the process of becoming integrated into our culture. And we don't have a visual program to experience those texts. And the Apocryphon of John to me is like a core text. It seems to be the one that gives us the beginning, the middle, and the end in a fairly clear way. I'm not restricting myself to that text, but I'm using it as a guide.

And so I do have quite a-- I've worked out the program the way that 13 paintings will be laid out actually 12 paintings in a central triptych. And so the passage that leads into the Chapel, the main area with the baptismal font and the triptych, which is like an altar piece behind it and then the passage out. And so it's really the soul journey through the creation into the baptismal space, which is where ritual occurs and then out again, which would be, of course, the soul ascent and the apocalypse or that happens with the end of the archons and the marriage of Christ and Sophia and so on.

So I have a whole program. I have all these large paintings. And I had worked it out starting 20 years ago, maybe 15. And what happened in the meantime is life took me on another path, which is the creation of the Academy of Visionary Art in Vienna. And so for seven years, because of my relationship to my master, Ernst Fuchs and to that city Vienna and so on, I was kind of called there as it turned out in the last two years of his life.

So I was able to reestablish a much different relationship with him, no longer apprentice, , but more of like a colleague if I can say that, where he was coming into my academy and looking at the students work and seeing how I was carrying on that tradition of the techniques that I'd learned from him and the vision and so on. So those seven years of the academy were surprisingly necessary to prepare myself for the chapel.

I didn't realize it at the time, it seemed like a kind of a digression or detour. But basically, I started to understand the practicalities of actually creating the chapel, , of meeting all the people that I needed to meet because it's such a large project that I can't just do all these paintings myself, so I need to collaborate. And I need to find collaborators who are at a certain level that they can genuinely collaborate, which is to say that I have a program, but it's got space.

And so people can contribute what they have to contribute. And so I frame it in two different ways. When I first met Ernst Fuchs, I met him at the Apocalypse Chapel in the south of Austria. So that was important. He was spending 20 years of his life creating this chapel in the south of Austria on the apocalypse. And he was filling wall after wall with his imagery of the apocalypse. And that was my introduction into this whole path that I'm on.

I worked as his apprentice. Other people who are now my colleagues who worked as his apprentice in that chapel. And we were told to kind of paint his way, respect his style. You could see that I did this, someone else did that, but it's kind of invisible. What I want to do now is create a chapel where I want each artist that I work with to bring their style, bring their vision, bring their way of doing things into that section or piece or part that I, as the architect kind of design and plan out. So there's that aspect.

And then I was going to mention Alex Grey and Alison Grey as well with their Chapel of Sacred Mirrors because we've known each other now for more than 15 years. And they've come to my academy and be in it to teach. I've gone to their different spaces in New York to lecture and teach. And we have a good relationship. And I have tremendous respect for what they're doing.

I mean, what I really share with them is what emerged in the final years of the academy, which is to say that we had a cultural space. And in that cultural space, which was two large rooms. One was the gallery space on the ground floor, and the other was the temple space, which was somewhat underground. And we put the paintings on the walls, but otherwise allowed people to come in who basically rented the space.

But they, those people who came in and rented the space they got it. They understood what the space was all about, which is soul healing, to really go through experiences that allow for healing to happen in the soul. And there's lots of different ways of doing this. It could be sound healings or women's circles of sharing, drumming. We had so many different exploratory activities.

And the Greys are doing something similar in their space, . Often leading it themselves whereas for me, I just want to put the paintings on the wall and work with other people who are more specialized in the soul healing aspect, in leading the soul healing. And so it'll become a space that has the art, which is very, very important, the art that's evolving and evolving through the work of me collaborating with my colleagues and apprentices.

That's part of the vision, but paid apprentices that I have to take on apprentices that I actually pay. This is important to me so that the circle goes round. I was a paid apprentice working with Ernst Fuchs, a paid assistant, basically. And that is the way it's always worked between master and apprentice is that the master pays the apprentice. The Academy, the student paid. But this, I want to break that structure. And I want to pay the student. [LAUGH]

And but I don't say student, I say apprentice. Because that person has to be very, very at a level of commitment where I will pay them for their talent and their work and so on and my collaborators, so who probably would volunteer their time more than it's worth. I would still pay them, but I'm sure they would give more than I would ask. And so that's the vision is creating this chapel.

And I'm now in a position, I think, where I wasn't say seven years ago that I know the people, and I the business side of it because I ran the academy that I can probably pull it off. So what's missing at this point is the space, that I don't have the clear vision even of where it will be, which is strange, whether it will be in the countryside, whether it be in the city, whether it would be in Vienna, whether it would be in France, whether it be some other place that I don't know of yet that I've been able to move around all my life and integrate myself into pretty much any culture.

And I'm not worried about that side of it. So it's more about finding the space, the place where it can happen and making it happen, yeah.

MATTHEW DILLION: Wonderful. Well, I hope you find that space because the more I hear about the project and seeing the sketches that you have for the paintings that would go on the wall and then seeing, as I understand it the hall that you have behind you, that's going to be the background either of the walls or in the nave, or is it something separate?

LAURENCE CARUANA: No, what I'm doing is I'm making the first painting myself. And so that's just what your listeners can't tell, but behind me is this large painting it's three meters high. And it has what's basically the background, but the background is a kind of mystical version of the chapel itself. And but on top of that, you're going to see the mother and the father and Christ and then the Anthropocene the 12 upper eons as these allegorical figures and then Sophia at the bottom.

So the only way I can make this chapel happen is to just paint the painting, the first painting. Because that's been the way it's kind of worked my whole life long, is make the painting, and the painting itself takes you on a journey. , I had this one painting Christ Alchemist with me when I met Ernst Fuchs. And he looked at it, and he was like, OK, you're going to work with me. And that same painting is the first time I actually entered through the image to the vision beyond it.

So each painting becomes a doorway or a step, a new movement in my life. And you just have to invest all of your time and energy into that painting. And once it's finished, it will do its work by bringing me to the next place I need to be. And I can't see what it is, but I just understand that once it comes to exist, there's another stage to its manifestation. And that is where it will bring me in this path.

And so I have to make the first painting myself, basically. I'm here full time working on it. But the vision is then to open it up to collaborators and so on.

MATTHEW DILLION: Excellent. Well, I'm sure even if Laurence, the ego doesn't know, your divine double knows, right? So pay attention to your dreams. Pay attention to those premonitions. At some point it'll spit out. Oh, you need to go back to Malta or wherever it happens to be.

LAURENCE CARUANA: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Malta because it's been in the back of my mind a lot lately is another potential space for this chapel, and yeah. But I don't want to become fixated on any one place, but thank you mentioning that.

MATTHEW DILLION: Yeah, but wherever it lands, it's going to be wonderful. I cannot wait to see it. And just again going through the architecture, I'm really excited about the space that you're developing. So thank you so much. This has been an incredibly rich, far ranging, and deep conversation. Look forward to talking with you again down the road.

LAURENCE CARUANA: Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Matthew, for this interview. You're one of the few people who I feel really has the depth to listen to what I'm saying and having that intense experience of conversation and listening and being heard is a true gift. So thank you for that.

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MATTHEW DILLION: Well, I hope you all enjoyed that far reaching conversation. Laurence and I covered everything from birth to the afterlife, dreams, psychedelics, the imaginal, ancient Gnostic scriptures, all the way up to contemporary art. There was a lot in there. It's very rich. I hope you enjoyed. Anyone curious to learn more about Laurence or to take in his artworks, to go to his website lcaruana, that's C-A-R-U-A-N-A.com. There you will find a link to the Apocryphon, Chapel which we discussed towards the end of the show. And you'll also find opportunities to read parts of and purchase his books.

Henry Cobin came up towards the beginning of the show. Anyone, again, listening to this show or familiar with the CSWR knows he is a distinctly important figure in TNT and what's happening here. If you are unfamiliar, or he is uncharted terrain for you, the best place to start is probably The Man Of Light in Iranian Sufism. For those who are a bit more daring, Alone with the Alone is one of last century's, by which I mean the 20th, great mystical texts full stop.

And it's also a genius examination of the imagination of Ibn Arabi, great Sufi mystic. Those who get a taste for philosophical phenomenology and its approach to imagination and dreams might also want to read Elliott Wolfson, specifically Through a Speculum That Shines, one of his early books and [? Oniro ?] Poiesis a Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, which is one of his later books. Neither are easy sledding, but they're all very worth it.

Charles Stang's Our Divine Double, he came up. Laurence appears to be reading that right now. And that book examines the dividual or what [? Kripal ?] calls the humanist [? two ?] in the ancient Mediterranean. Another great study of this idea of the humanist [? two ?] is Gananath Obeyesekere's The Awakened Ones, which is much more wide ranging in the sense that it goes all the way from Tibetan treasure text to contemporary lucid dreaming. And it's also very long, but very good.

I also mentioned that we had a Gnostic America conference at Rice. It was not 2017, though. It was 2018. But time is a solid and not real. So what does that one digit matter anyway, right? In any case, the performance of music from the Nag Hammadi Codices that came up in conversation can be found on an album entitled Gnosis in Spirit and Song. The songs are largely written and composed by the great scholar of ancient Gnostic sources April DeConick, who is a professor at Rice University and by Dr. [? Motor. ?]

The performers on the CD include Sonia [INAUDIBLE] and Craig Haskell. I hope I'm pronouncing those correctly. You can find that album streaming on any of your platforms of choice Thank you again, to Laurence for his time and a very rich conversation. We should be back with another pair of conversations within a few weeks. Until then, stay weird.

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