The Devil's Pleasure Palace Read Online Free

more it rushes toward him. This paradox is the dilemma of modern Western man emerging from the abattoir of the twentieth century’s battlefields, understandably shell-shocked and conflict-averse, and it is also one of the central themes of every tale from Gilgamesh to Disney’s animated version of Tarzan. Only by embracing his doom—to use the old English word—and facing down his greatest fears, fears far more terrifying than the actual combat will eventually prove, can he overcome his broken humanity and become godlike.
    We like to think that, as Aristotle teaches in his doctrine of mimesis, art imitates life, that our all-too-human creations of drama, poetry, theater, and literature are reflections of the human condition, scenes glimpsed through the glass darkly of imperfect understanding. But what if the opposite is true? That far from being mere imitation s of deepertruths, art is born deep in the unconscious and shaped according to historical principles of structure and expression, and is God’s way of leading humanity to a deeper understanding of its own essential nature and potential, and of its own fate? What if art is not so much imitation or reflection as it is revelation and pathway? What if it reveals deeper truths about the essence of humanity than narrow science ever could; and that the twentieth century’s belief in the primacy of materialism (invested with such explanatory numen as to become indistinguishable from faith) has misaligned the natural order and imbued us with a false consciousness of reality (to use a Marxist term)?
    Art, as I will argue in these pages, is the gift from God, the sole true medium of truth. The nineteenth-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel famously declared that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” meaning that in growing from embryo to adult, the individual organism goes through stages that mimic the evolutionary stages of the species. The stages that an individual passes through in his lifespan from fertilized egg to maturity (ontogeny), will “recapitulate,” Haeckel theorized, all the stages that the species itself passed through in the course of evolution (phylogeny). But perhaps it is, in an artistic and religious sense, precisely the opposite: It is phylogeny that recapitulates ontogeny. The evolutionary development of the species—its teleology—was adumbrated in the first moment of life. Think of art, therefore, as the Big Bang Theory applied to the soul instead of the body; by imagining the creative process in reverse, we can approach the instant of our origins and then beyond.
    The key to time travel is to move faster than the speed of light, for from the movement of light (at 186,000 miles per second) comes our notion of time; to travel faster than light moves us not through space but back in time. Rolling the Big Bang all the way back would end, at least temporarily, in the winking out of a spark, and then nothing: infinite, eternal void, no space, no time, no being. But if that is true, then where did the spark come from? Or has the universe, as current theory is now beginning to favor, existed eternally, raising the possibility that the universe is itself God?
    It’s a question that artists have been trying to answer longer than scientists have. “ Ich schreite kaum, doch wähn’ ich mich schon weit ” (“I’ve hardly taken a step, yet it seems I’ve already traveled far”), observes the “perfect fool” Parsifal to Gurnemanz in the first act of Wagner’seponymous opera. “ Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit ,” replies Gurnemanz (“You see, my son, here time becomes space”). The context is Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail—the lasting symbol of man’s quest for truth and something that he can attain only in a transcendental dimension where time and space are one and the same thing.
    The search for the originating spark of