John Moriarty stands apart as one of Ireland’s most singular and significant writers. Yet, while his work has received much acclaim, he remains a peripheral figure.
Brian Lynch described Moriarty’s first published book, Dreamtime (1994), as ‘one of the most extraordinary books ever published in Ireland’, representing ‘a milestone in contemporary Irish literature and thought’. Aidan Carl Mathews is equally unreserved in his praise of Nostos (2001), Moriarty’s autobiography, stating: ‘John Moriarty’s masterwork Nostos tells the story of his own life and the life of all those stories that our species has been sharing since the first annals of the primal savannah. It is a great book this, the greatest Irish book since Ulysses.’ According to Paul Durcan in his article ‘Moriarty on Bare Mountain’ (2006), Nostos ‘is to Irish literature what Thus Spoke Zarathustra is to German philosophy’.1 Moreover, with unabashed use of hyperbole, underscored by playful irony and deadly seriousness, Durcan goes on to envisage the following:
Strange to surmise that in twenty years from now almost all the current icons of Irish cultural life will be in the process of being forgotten, while in the universities there will be courses devoted to John Moriarty, and movie-makers will vie for the rights to make a film on his life. One will see in TCD, under the severe, genial eye of Bishop Berkeley, the new John Moriarty Chair of Wisdom Literature, endowed by the Bank of Ireland, while outside the GPO cinema in O’Connell Street queues will be forming nightly to gain admission to the latest Oscar-winning movie from Ang Lee and Annie Proulx, Moriarty on Bare Mountain.
Lavish praise of Moriarty’s writings has been coupled with recognition of his work by NUI Galway, who conferred upon him an honorary Doctorate of Literature on 23 June 2006. At the conferral, president of the university, Professor Iognáid Ó Muircheartaigh, declared that during his eight years in office, the two greatest individuals he had conferred honorary doctorates upon were Nelson Mandela and John Moriarty. Concluding his address, he remarked:
… it is our great pleasure and indeed privilege to acknowledge today, in the traditional spirit of the precious mission of the university to protect and nurture, among other things, original, radical and non-conformist thinking, the extraordinary generous, humane, and utterly civilized manner in which John has lived a unique and indeed a uniquely courageous life.2
Professor Ó Muircheartaigh’s closing words are noteworthy, for Moriarty disclosed his initial opposition to this accolade due to the subversiveness of his writings. Only when representatives of the university visited Moriarty to persuade him that it was for the very nature of his ‘original, radical and non-conformist thinking’ he was being honoured, did he graciously accept the award.3
What entitles Moriarty to such laudation? Many aspects of his work warrant it: his ability to challenge and bring into question habitual modes of Western thought and perception; his willingness and courage to act as a cultural shaman for Western humanity; his innovative philomythical and metanoetic search for wisdom and truth; and his original interpretation of Christ.
Animum debes mutare, non caelum4
Collectively and individually, Moriarty’s books can be considered powerful antidotes to the contracted habits of Western eye and mind. In Nostos, Moriarty turns to William James who famously compared a habit to a sheet of paper that has been folded, for once creased or folded, it has developed a tendency ‘to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds’.5 On the back of James’s illustration of what a habit is, Moriarty wonders how folded into European ways of seeing his own mode of seeing is, and how folded into European ways of thinking his mind is. Wondering also if his sight and mind had become crumpled things, he poses two crucial questions:
Could I uncrumple, could I unfold, sight in me?
Could I uncrumple, could I unfold, mind in me?6
Uncrumpling and unfolding the creases and folds of European ways of seeing and thinking is no easy task. As Moriarty observes: ‘Once educated, a mind is no longer as transformatively available to alternative modes of thinking, intuition, and perception as it originally was.’7 James is no less sceptical about the possibility of transforming human habitual behaviour, since habit is ‘second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington said, it is “ten times nature”’. He also notes how, ‘in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again’.8
What habits of eye and mind does Moriarty identify as being constrictive? How does he set about loosening their hold?
Primarily, Moriarty takes issue with reductive economic, religious, philosophical and scientific modes of perception and discourse. In a broader sense, he combats the entire ‘sensory-intellectual tool-kit of Europeans’.9
Rather than engaging in sustained philosophical argumentation, he mounts this audacious challenge mainly through myth, poetry and metaphor, and by way of philosophical, philomythical, shamanic, poetic, religious and mystical insights. These insights are for the most part mediated through poetic prose.
For Moriarty, how we perceive things determines our behaviour towards them.10 He claims our Western perception of things is largely oppressive, and most acute when viewed from a utilitarian-economic perspective, that is to say, perceived solely in terms of their use and benefit for humanity. When a perspective of this nature holds sway, Moriarty asserts, our senses and faculties turn malignant; our ears become hammers and anvils, and our eyes become economic brain tumours. Consequently, when looking at a cow we see only milk and meat, when looking at a tree we see only timber, and when looking at ourselves we see only labour and manpower.11 Moriarty enlists Thomas Traherne, William Blake and Wallace Stevens, among other poetic visionaries, to establish a more enlivened, courteous mode of perception. Through Traherne he realizes corn is ‘orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown’; with Blake he undergoes an exodus from perceptual captivity, whereby ‘… every sand becomes a Gem/ Reflected in the beams divine’. He comes to see:
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.12
Battling the Balor and Cyclops in us, Moriarty turns to Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, in which multiple ways of perceiving are brilliantly articulated, thereby expanding our vision of things. By extension, for Moriarty himself, vision is visionary: ‘I see things as mirabilia and so it is in turn that I so often experience myself as Miranda in nature and name.’13 The word mirabilia derives from Latin and means ‘wonders’, ‘marvels’ or ‘miracles’. Miranda is the name of Prospero’s daughter in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and from mirandus, meaning ‘admirable’ or ‘wonderful’, Miranda can be semantically linked to the Spanish words mira, ‘sight’, and the verb, mirar, ‘to look at’. In Dreamtime, this broadened manner of seeing things clearly manifests itself:
Every bush is a burning bush,
Every river is a medicine river.
Every stone is an a-stone-ishment
turned inwards on its own rose window wonders.14
Can pitting visionary against utilitarian-economic perception, undermine the dominance of the latter? If it is possible for visionary perception to succeed, it is sure to be a protracted battle, for the roots of this utilitarian-economic mode of perception run deep. Vestiges of these roots can perhaps be traced back to the opening passages of the Bible, in which God is accredited with giving man permission to hold dominion, ‘over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’. Retaining a belief in such a God only serves to preserve a way of being in the world that was redundant from the outset.
Deeply aggrieved by and opposed to Genesis 1:26, 28, in which the mandate for human dominion over the Earth is said to be sponsored by God, Moriarty is also averse to biblical creation and creationism:
We sin against what is, be it universe or pluriverse, when we think of it as having come into existence as a consequence of conscious Divine Fiat.
Our sense of what is as the work of a God who consciously creates, consciously sustains and consciously brings to a foreordained conclusion – that sense of things is our sin against morning and evening the first day, against evening and morning the first night.
We believe in a God who consciously creates, consciously sustains, consciously choreographs towards a final tableau because of our dread of unconsciousness, our dread of wu-hsin, wu wei, mo wei, our dread of miraculousness.15
For Moriarty, to think of the universe or pluriverse as something created or made, or as mere handiwork, is entirely offensive and inappropriate, given the stupendousness of what is: ‘It is defamation of the universe to say of it that it was made. Chairs are made, not furze bushes, not stars.’16 Moriarty maintains that the notion of a created universe betrays an anthropocentric bias, a prejudice originating from humans being endowed with cerebro-manual dexterity and opposable thumbs, which enable humans to be tool users and make possible the art of craftsmanship.17 Physiologically conditioned, this way tends to promote an understanding of the universe as something created or crafted. If a dolphin could imagine how the universe came into existence, Moriarty supposes it would diverge radically from something created or made.18
Dread of unconsciousness; wu-hsin, ‘no-mind’ or ‘no-thought’; wu wei, ‘non-action’; mo wei, ‘nothing does it’ or the ‘causeless’; and miraculousness, arises because these ideas threaten to undermine our deep-seated attachments to egocentric and anthropocentric perspectives. According to Moriarty, our biblical choreographing God is required as protection against these intrusive and disruptive notions, providing a ‘bulwark against miraculousness’. Furthermore, he declares: ‘In the yu-wei works and days which we ascribe to him, our biblical God is our sin against the Divine.’ This diminished sense of God, as some type of demiurge or master craftsman, is something Moriarty seeks to ‘desuperimpose’ from the Divine Ungrund.19
Maintaining the West is beset by a corrupted lust for explanation, Moriarty confronts reductive philosophical and scientific estimations. He strongly resists the ‘ghostly Platonic’ understanding of things, as mere imperfect representations or copies of immutable and perfect Forms, and Descartes’ grasp of things, as elaborated in Discourse on Method and Principles of Philosophy. In these particular texts, Descartes’ interpretation of corporeal matter is confined to quantitive descriptions of arithmetic and geometry, involving nothing more than ‘divisions, shapes and movements’.20 Additionally, he thinks of the material world as an indefinite series of variations in the shape, size and motions of the homogeneous matter he calls res extensa (extended matter or substance), a concept Moriarty vehemently rejects, for whom ‘matter’ is ‘mind in hibernation’. Expanding on this he cites a passage from the Hermetica, in which Hermes instructs Tat on the nature of the cosmos, saying: ‘ho de sumpas kosmos houtos … pleroma est tes zoes’, translated to mean: ‘this whole cosmos … is a pleroma of aliveness’.21 Disputing Descartes, Moriarty argues that the cosmos or universe is chiefly characterized by aliveness, adding: ‘since it is sometimes alive in the contrary ways that it is alive, we will always need to call upon myth as well as upon math when we attempt to talk about it’.22 So strange and marvellous is the universe, according to Moriarty, that it justifies myth or the ‘folk-tale as much as it justifies science, it justifies the fairy-story as much as it justifies maths-physics’.23
Moriarty constests the compositional scientific estimation of things in Dreamtime: ‘Water isn’t H2O. It might be composed of H2O, but it isn’t only what it is composed of. Once it has come into existence it is no longer composed. It isn’t a compound,’ and turns to the Buddha’s Flower Sermon in which he smilingly and silently held up a white flower.24
By holding up a flower rather than delivering a speech, is the Buddha gently and peacefully destroying an addiction to ingrained, long-established habits of mind that are not even recognized as habits? Is the Buddha guiding onlookers to direct beholding rather than to a truth mediated by language and thought? Moriarty seems to suggest that the Buddha’s sermon is capable of dismantling the habitual pursuit of scientific and linguistic explanation: ‘Be true to your eyes, not to the desiderata of science or language. Zen Buddhists know it: there is a seeing that is the same thing as satori.’25
Challenging the habits of eye and mind, Moriarty attempts to free things from economic, religious, philosophical and scientific reductionism, to liberate things from our oppressive perceptual and intellectual regimes:
Standing before pharaoh in Egypt, Moses said, ‘Let my people go.’ And now addressing the pharaoh in ourselves, we say, Things, let things go.
Let us liberate the last of the things that need to be liberated – things themselves from our utilitarian biblical estimation of them, from our ghostly Platonic estimation of them, from our res extensa Cartesian estimation of them, from our compositional scientific estimation of them.
The Bastille Day of things, of eyes with which to see them, of minds with which to know them.26
Not limited to something as narrowly conceived as human liberty, the Bastille Day Moriarty has in mind relates to all things.
The lesser shaman heals individuals. The great shaman heals his people as a whole. He heals them in their founding and constituting charter myths. He heals them in their founding and constituting intuitions, orientations and practices.27
—John Moriarty, What the Curlew Said
In a journal entry dated 11 May 1848, Kierkegaard notes: ‘From now on the human race will no longer be led by prophets and judges but forced back by martyrs, who will run headlong against that human discovery, progress.’28 How far, and to what, does the human race need to be forced back? Taking on the role of a cultural shaman, Moriarty ventures deeper than Western humanity’s original charter myths, and presses the human race back roughly 17,000 years, to a cave near Lascaux in south-west France, in order to confront, suffer and heal one of its earliest, most visible transgressions.29 The great transgression depicted has various names, including; ‘The Lascaux shaft scene’, ‘The Scene of the Dead Man’, or simply ‘The Pit’. The scene shows a falling, phallically erect birdman, being toppled by a speared bison bull who is in a hair-raised rage. Heinously wounded, the bison has been speared through his anus and genitals, whilst his innards can be seen spilling out from his underbelly. Speared in the generative roots of his being, Moriarty contends that this spear-cast not only destroyed a realm but a world, creating a chasm between human history and evolution: ‘Pulling apart since the big, ecumenical calamity so memorably recorded in the pit in Lascaux, history and evolution are like ships going their separate ways, ships already too far apart for loud-hailing communication with each other. Almost daily now, the distance between them deepens and widens. On the Moon widens, will widen when we get there on Mars.’30 As a consequence of this increasing rift, it becomes crucial for humanity to realign itself with evolution and the Earth.
Moriarty imagines Paul Cézanne in ‘our herdless Serengeti’, painting the hand that buried the spear in the bison’s backside and genitals: ‘Before anything else, Paul, paint the hand that paints. Paint the hand that launched the lance into the Bison Bull’s genitals. Being the Master of Animals, that Bull is in a sense all animals.’31 Could seeing the hand that speared the Bison Bull force humanity to confront the us-and-them divide, the human-animal divide, that was visually and violently inaugurated in the pit, in a way hitherto unimagined? Could such a painting induce humanity to suffer with all animals, to suffer with Nature? If so, would it compel us to see the human hand in the way Macbeth sees his?
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.32
If Macbeth’s regicidal and bloodied hand can incarnadine the multitudinous green seas, can humanity’s collective bloodied hand incarnadine the Earth, incarnadine the universe? Extraordinarily, what is visible to Macbeth remains invisible to most. For it appears as if humanity is largely protected against the immeasurable suffering it inflicts upon Nature. This is perhaps due to the prevalence of a pathological individualism, that is, an individualism characterized by a deluded belief in one’s ability to prosper and flourish independent of, and irrespective of, one’s interrelatedness to and dependence upon Nature.
Moriarty attempts to break down the insularity of human behaviour by presenting us with hard, unavoidable facts about ourselves.33 Through Melville/Ishmael, he makes us look at ourselves, ‘vicariously in the mincer … dressed in the flayed pelt of a sperm-whale’s penis’:
Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done, he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.34
The grandissimus, Melville refers to, is the gigantic whale phallus, ‘longer as a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base’.35 The mincer, whose job involves slicing whale blubber as thin as bible leaves in order to ease the process of boiling it down for precious whale oil, can be seen carrying the whale’s enormous penis to the forecastle deck, where he sets it down to skin. Once the dark pelt has been removed, the mincer turns it inside out and stretches it until it is almost double in diameter; he then hangs it in the rigging to dry. After some time, he takes the pelt down and removing three feet of it, he slits two arm-holes in it. Clothing himself in his newly-tailored cassock, fashioned out of whale foreskin, ‘The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.’
Like the pit in Lascaux, this typifies yet another, more modern, ‘Great Transgression’, whereby, ‘the generative and regenerative power of Nature’ is once again perversely violated. For Moriarty, a transgression of this magnitude will inevitably have ‘Waste Land consequences both natural and cultural’. He further surmises that this act can or should ‘bring the universe down around us’:
I think of it: the flayed phallus, meat-raw and meat-red, lying for now on the bloody boards of the forecastle deck.
Not now an orgasm of generative pleasure, it is a ship-shuddering orgasm of accusation.
More: it is a world-shuddering orgasm of accusation.
More again: it is a universe-shuddering orgasm of accusation.
There are, I believe, kinds of human moral enormity that can or that should bring the universe down around us. And the sperm-whale’s flayed phallus is one such enormity.
Literally, the word ‘catastrophe’ means a bringing down, a coming down, a falling down, of stars.36
One of the ways Moriarty strives to make amends for these transgressions is to reintroduce big medicine myths, namely, myths capable of generating great and collective healing. To this effect, he immerses himself in a myth told by the Blackfoot Indians, which tells of the coming of the Buffalo Dance. This story has the potential to foster a state of commonage consciousness or what he more poetically calls ‘we-awareness’, in which the us-and-them divide ceases to exert its influence.
In the original version of the Blackfoot Indian myth, their tribe is nearing extinction due to starvation. However, through a young girl’s willingness to become wife to a buffalo bull, the buffalo are in return prepared to become food for her people. Christening the young girl Gets Up Off Her Tepee Floor, because of her ability to rise from tribal prostration, Moriarty sees her as someone who had the courage to stand in the difficult chasm that exists between humans and animals. Managing to hold her ground in this precarious gulf, she endured a reversal of humanity’s declension into us-and-them awareness back into a state of we-awareness.
The story concludes with the buffalo teaching Gets Up Off Her Tepee Floor and her resurrected father the Buffalo Dance. The buffalo teach them this dance having seen that they too could suffer greatly, even though they were human.
Moriarty views Gets Up Off Her Tepee Floor’s deed as healing us from the ‘Waste Land West that we still live in’, and from the continuing calamity we inflicted upon Nature and ourselves in the pit in Lascaux:
Gets Up Off Her Tepee Floor coming to her feet in Montana is Birdman coming to his feet in the pit in Lascaux. In that she stood in the rift, she stood in that pit within our psyches and, putting Blackfoot hand to it, she drew out the bleeding lance, so self-reproductively lodged in the world’s generative and regenerative powers. That lance pulled out, the Bison Bull turns to the Birdman and says, Now we give you our song and our dance, that the song and the dance of ecumenical we-awareness. And in this surely we are refounded, not just sociologically but in the deep places of our psyches.37
Imagining Gets Up Off Her Tepee Floor easing the spear out from the Bison Bull’s behind and genitals, out from the wounded human psyche and out of the ‘world’s generative and regenerative powers’, with her Blackfoot hand, allows us to go back into and come forward from an alternative Palaeolithic past.
Not done there, however, Moriarty seeks to confront, suffer and heal some of the West’s most transgressive acts and myths, which continue to influence and perpetuate its misguided ‘psychles’ of history. Part of this enterprise involves him confronting the Mesopotamian murder of Tiamat and Huwawa, the ancient Egyptian murder of Apophis, the Canaanite murder of Yam, the ancient Greek destruction and suppression of Typhon, Titan, Lamia, Lion, Centaur and Minotaur, among others, and Christendom’s ‘infernal confinement of the old anarchic Dragon, now called Satan’.
Put succinctly, ‘dragon-slaying, repression, lobotomy and extramural exclusion’, which characterize the Western way, have not worked. Hence, explicit in his countercultural stance, Moriarty seeks nothing less than the refounding and radical transformation of the Western psyche.38
… myth not math is mother tongue.39
—John Moriarty, Nostos
On Good Friday, in the person of Jesus, European philosophy moved house. It moved, it passed over, from metaphysics to metanoesis.40
—John Moriarty, ‘Passover’, Dreamtime
In his search for wisdom, it isn’t at the feet of Socrates in the stoas of Athens, or in Plato’s Academy, nor in Aristotle’s Lyceum, that you would encounter Moriarty; instead you’d more likely discover him sitting at the hooves of Cheiron, high up in his Mount Pelion cave, listening to great healing myths being told.41
Mount Pelion is known as the ‘healing mountain’, for its slopes abound with medicinal plants and herbs. Heeding this, Moriarty imagines healing herbs hanging in Cheiron’s cave and healing myths hanging in his mind: ‘Myths he has lived. Myths that have lived him.’42
Turning more readily to myth than to philosophical and dialectical discourse, Moriarty pursues wisdom philomythically. This means he is more inclined towards philomythos or philomythy than philosophy. ‘Philomythos’ is a term invented by Aristotle and it implies that the lover of myth is a lover of wisdom. Early on in Metaphysics Aristotle observes how wonder gives rise to philosophizing. Yet, he also remarks, ‘a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders)’.43 Given this regard for myth, it is unsurprising to find Aristotle in his latter years disclosing in a letter to Antipater how he is increasingly drawn to it: ‘The more solitary and isolated I am, the more I have come to love myths.’44
Although only a small word, the term ‘myth’ carries a vast freight of varied meanings. Broadly speaking, Moriarty tends to deal with creation myths, ‘myths that institute the basic elements of culture’, such as fire and bread, and ‘myths that are self-portraits, self-enactments, of our instincts’.45 While these three different types of myth all play a vital role in his writings, Moriarty is especially concerned with those that act as self-portraits of the human instincts. Examples include the Minotaur myth, the myth of Actaeon, Oedipus, Herakles, Hippolytus, Persephone, Aphrodite, Perseus, Medusa, Andromeda, Clytemnestra and Iphigeneia. For Moriarty, to endure these myths is to endure their knowledge of who we phylogenetically and prepolitely are:46 ‘To go ashore into these myths is to go ashore into Galapagos, it is to go ashore into who we phylogenetically are. Indeed, these myths set fin-fraught foot on Galapagos long before Darwin did. What Darwin came so laboriously to know they already intuitively knew.’47 By intuitively illuminating humanity’s phylogenetic and prepolite nature, Moriarty claims these myths oblige us to prefix the Greek word deinos, meaning ‘terrible’, ‘uncanny’, ‘strange’, ‘inordinate’, that and more, to the Greek word anthropus, meaning ‘human’; thus forming the noun ‘deinanthropus’ and the adjective ‘deinanthropic’. In creating these neologisms, Moriarty is emulating palaeontologists who prefixed deinos to saurus, to form ‘deinosaurus’ or ‘dinosaur’, meaning ‘terrible lizard’.
According to Moriarty, ‘Greek myth-logos’ provides a logos about who we deinanthropically are, and not about who we anthropically are. Hence, he considers certain Greek myths to be the embodiment of an enlightenment, for they enlighten us about ourselves. Nevertheless, he acknowledges how myth is unable to fully grasp or comprehend what it means to be human. Moriarty cites Heraclitus to demonstrate this: ‘You would not find out the boundaries of the soul, even by travelling along every path: so deep a measure does it have.’48
Initiating us into a deinanthropic sense of ourselves, Moriarty claims Greek myths interrogate and call into question humanity’s suitability and fitness for civilization, arguing that myth’s ability to speak to us in our impoliteness, that is, ‘before the polis polites us’, is one of the ‘blessings of myth’.
At ease with his impoliteness, Cheiron did not seek citizenship. Yet he was still regarded as a great and wise teacher. Distinguishing between goodness in Cheiron and politeness in Plato, Moriarty states: ‘Cheiron knew what not to ask or expect of himself. No. Goodness in Cheiron is not the same thing as politeness in Plato. Goodness in Cheiron smells of horse. In Plato, utterly transcending the senses, it has no smell at all, not even the odour of sanctity.’49
Noting how the Greeks enrolled with Cheiron in his cave before enrolling with Plato in his Academy, Moriarty declares it was only when they enrolled with Plato and not also with Cheiron that they lapsed into ‘sick civility’. He proclaims Greek myth should warn and inform the ‘Rousseau in us’, that a social contract between citizens does not entail a ‘psychic contract between who we civically are and who we phylogenetically are’.50 This implies a return to Cheiron in his high mountain cave, in order to explore and endure myths in their deinanthropic revelations could be worthwhile, because they ‘can and do help to accommodate the psyche to itself and to the world’.51
Nonetheless, Moriarty is wary of overstretching the significance of myth, for even when it does aid us in seeing and accepting who we are, ‘we can still mismanage who we are. Culturally, we can get off to a bad start as … we in the West did.’52 Not naïve to the dangers and misuses of myth, he contends myth can mean moha, a Sanskrit word signifying ‘delusion’: ‘So there we have it: myth can mean moha and in our century moha has cast a very nasty, nationalist-socialist shadow called, for short, Mein Kampf.’53
Mindful of the dangers and delusions inherent in myths, and aware of how they can be perniciously misused and manipulated, Moriarty does not shy away from critically assessing the implications of the West’s charter myths. But although there exist many pitfalls when working with myths, engaging with them remains an essential task for Moriarty, since, ‘often without our knowing it, myths and the detritus of myths are forms of our sensibility and categories of our understanding’.54
In his endeavour to ‘alter mind which in its altering alters all’, he seeks to harrow and transform those myths and their assumptions that condition the mind to think violently, repressively and dominatively. Similar to Blake, who in ‘The Mental Traveller’ says, ‘For the eye altering, alters all’, Moriarty supposes altering myths can bring about an altered culture.55 However, he not only harrows Western myths, he reimagines them, instilling them with new meaning and significance. This is exemplified in his brilliant retelling of the Minotaur myth in the second volume of Turtle.56 Besides harrowing and reimagining myths native to the West, Moriarty also imports more exotic and unfamiliar Inuit, Maori and Native North and South American myths, in order to help bring about a new way of being in the world.57
Through myth and parable, Moriarty appeals to the deeps of the psyche and the heart in a way that philosophical arguments, no matter how substantiated, coherent and persuasive, cannot. Sowing new and reimagined myths into these seldom-spoken-to depths, he nurtures and brings to life what Wallace Stevens would call a new intelligence.
In keeping with his unconventional quest for wisdom or his ‘very uncommon kind’ of philosophy, Moriarty also has recourse to mysticism.58 He calls his philosophico-mystical pursuit of wisdom ‘metanoesis’. For Moriarty, metanoesis means beyond mind or going beyond the thinking mind. Although he believed he had coined this term, it can in fact be found in a work published in 1946, entitled Philosophy as Metanoetics, by the esteemed Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime. Expounding upon the term ‘metanoetics’ in greater detail than Moriarty, Tanabe writes:
‘Metanoetics’ carries the sense of ‘meta-noetics’, denoting philologically a transcending of noetics, or in other words, a transcending of metaphysical philosophy based on contemplation or intellectual intuition achieved by the use of reason. ‘Meta-noetics’ means transcending the contemplative or speculative philosophy of intellectual intuition as it is usually found in the realms of thought based on reason.59
According to Tanabe, philosophy as metanoetics involves following ‘the path of metanoesis self-consciously’. Additionally, he remarks, ‘It is not a philosophy that seeks to describe metanoesis as an object, but a philosophy based upon Other-power enabling me to practise metanoesis subjectively.’ More radically he claims philosophy attains ‘its ultimate end only when it becomes the metanoesis of philosophy itself’.60
When explicating the meaning of metanoetics, Tanabe’s text diverges significantly from Moriarty’s understanding of it. Tanabe is more deeply steeped in Buddhism and he places a greater emphasis on the Western philosophical tradition, entering into extensive dialogue with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Moriarty on the other hand pursues metanoesis through Christ and the testimonies of Christian and non-Christian mystics. He also avails of parables drawn from Hinduism, Sufism and stories he himself wrote in ‘Tenebrae Now’, found in the first volume of Turtle. Furthermore, Moriarty claims metanoesis can be practised by way of the Christian ritual known as Tenebrae.61
Identifying Christ as the pioneer of metanoesis, Moriarty asserts that on Good Friday on Golgotha, European philosophy moved house from metaphysics to metanoesis. This signals a move from what is beyond the physical to what is beyond the reach of the thinking mind. As a consequence of this significant philosophical event taking place, Moriarty comes to view Golgotha as the new Ionia, and Christ looking down into his own and Adam’s empty skull as an alternative Thales. In light of Christ’s inauguration of metanoesis, he regards traditional philosophers from Thales to Heidegger to be outmoded or ‘out of date on the first Good Friday’.62
Moriarty considers the founding of metanoesis to be a Copernican revolution, ‘bigger and more confronting in its consequences’, than the one established by Kant almost eighteen hundred years later. For on Good Friday on Golgotha, when ‘European philosophy looked down into its own empty skull’, it learned it was possible to overcome dualistic thinking and all sense of selfhood.63 Accordant with this mystical interpretation of Good Friday, Moriarty describes Golgotha as a ‘Nunatak that rises up above dualizing mind and, all sense of selfhood in abeyance, above self-seeking’.64
Thus, for Moriarty, the most daring philosophers are those who are willing to suspend all sense of selfhood and abandon ‘self-seeking’. Consequently, the mystics acquire a new philosophical relevancy; for they are the ones prepared to adventure into nothingness or the Abyss without the desire or need to retain a sense of selfhood. Moriarty cites passages from Upanishadic and Buddhist texts, and from Muslim mystics such as Al-Hallaj, Al-Niffari and Al-Din Attar Farid, to show how many have sought and succeeded in venturing beyond selfhood and the dualizing mind. Christian mystics also come to the fore in his texts, particularly Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler, Marguerite Porete, Julian of Norwich, St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, Jean Pierre de Caussade and Francois de Fénelon.
What Moriarty finds so surprising and remarkable about the testimonies of these mystics is that the nothingness or Abyss they describe is not a meaningless or nihilistic nothingness. Rather the nothingness they reveal is what Walter Hilton would dub a ‘rich naught’. Eckhart articulates a sense of this rich naught:
Comes then the soul into the unclouded light of God. It is transported so far from creaturehood into nothingness that of its own powers it can never return to its faculties or its former creaturehood. Once there, God shelters the soul’s nothingness with his uncreated essence, safeguarding its creaturely existence. The soul has dared to become nothing, and cannot pass from its own being into nothingness and back again, losing its own identity in the process, except God safeguarding it.65
Importantly, for Moriarty, Eckhart’s account of nothingness along with other mystical interpretations of it, have ‘rehabilitated our sense of the naught’.66
The Hindu, Sufi and self-authored parables he recounts can be thought of as both enactments and pre-enactments of the metanoetic journey. A very brief Sufi parable relating to Mulla (Master) Nasrudin, narrated by Moriarty, is indicative of a story that pre-enacts the metanoetic adventure. The parable tells of Nasrudin walking home in the dead of night, only to discover on reaching his house that he has lost his key. He sees a street lamp close by, shedding a very precise circle of light on the ground. Entering the narrow sphere of light, he begins to walk in and around it, searching for his key. A policeman comes along and assists him in his search. Getting down on their hands and knees they go continuously around the light, searching meticulously for the key. Not finding anything, the agitated policeman asks, ‘Are you sure you dropped it here?’ Nasrudin replies, ‘No, of course I didn’t.’ ‘Where did you lose it then?’ asks the policeman. ‘Somewhere out there in the dark,’ says Nasrudin. The policeman retorts by asking, ‘Why are you not searching out there?’ Nasrudin answers, ‘Because there is no light out there.’
For Moriarty this parable reveals the futility of searching for God within the ‘confining circle of sensory-intellectual light’, and this in turn indicates a need for the seeker, in this case Nasrudin, to enter the darkness.67
Tenebrae is the Latin for ‘darkness’, and for Moriarty it is a purely mystical term. It is also the name given to a Christian ritual performed after midnight, over the last three days of Holy Week. Moriarty describes its significance and its affect on him as follows:
There is, probably, no religious ritual quite so tremendous as it. I only have to think of it and I am silent as I was before I existed. As salt is soluble in water so, I imagine, would I be soluble in it. Physically soluble, and soluble also metaphysically, for there must be a limit to what an isolated, separate soul can live through.68
The traditional performance of Tenebrae involves a hearse or harrow: a triangular stand, with seven candles on each ascending side and one on the apex. The hearse provides the centrepiece to the Tenebrae ritual. Nocturnes of lamentations and tragic psalms are chanted antiphonally back and forth, while candles are gradually extinguished at appropriate intervals. This continues until only the apex candle is left lighting. The hearse with the one remaining lighted candle is then taken beneath the altar to a tomb or cave, ending the ritual in complete darkness.
As the ritual re-enactment of the darkness of Good Friday and the Passion and death of Christ, it is no ordinary darkness that prevails. Moriarty relates it to the darkness that descended on Good Friday from the sixth to the ninth hour:
Erat autem fere hora sexta, et tenebrae factae sunt in universam terram usque in horam nonam. Et obscuratus est sol: et velum templi scissum est medium.
And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened: and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst. (Luke 24:44–45)
Not only laying upon all things, Moriarty describes this pervading darkness ‘laying hold of them in their deepest empirical inwardness’. He notes: ‘Now come upon us from within as well as from without, is the dark that was before the world was.’69
Moriarty equates the extinguishing of the candles with an extinguishing of the human senses and faculties, and speaks of the denuded soul going forth into darkness. By way of making Tenebrae more accessible, he provides the following anecdote:
I noticed it one night: crossing my kitchen to the light switch by the far door, I could see the moonlit sea through the picture window. Having switched on the light, I returned to the table and sat down, but now, to my great disappointment, I couldn’t see the sea. The light I had switched on was eclipsing it. […]
Switching off the light I had switched on, I went back to the table and sat down and I looked for hours at the moonlit sea.
Sitting in Tenebrae, my senses and faculties suspended, I see.
Sitting in Tenebrae, the eclipsing light of my mind reabsorbed, I see.70
Realizing the mind, in its consciousness and unconsciousness, ‘is the blind not the window’, Moriarty comes to regard its workings as being as little able to bring us to God as the workings of the spleen.71 Deeming the mind in all its luminosity and brilliant brightness to be an obstruction, he undergoes Tenebrae to suspend, if only temporarily, its eclipsing influence.
… made flesh, The Word was verbally unhoused.72
—John Moriarty, Dreamtime
Key to Moriarty’s understanding of Christ is the Triduum Sacrum. Not thinking of it as a series of external events, he regards it instead as a transformative private initiation. Although as natural and native to us as puberty, Moriarty believes many fail to undergo this tremendous initiation because ‘we are so mortgaged to life’ and to ‘an image of ourselves’ that we don’t allow it to happen. Nevertheless, he maintains it is possible to undergo the Triduum Sacrum in the same way as insects undergo metamorphosis. However, while metamorphosis in insects involves ‘a change of form: a caterpillar becomes a butterfly … The Triduum Sacrum in human beings is a going beyond form. It is ego-centred form losing itself in the Formless Divine.’73
Moriarty makes a distinction between an exoteric and an esoteric or mystical interpretation of the Triduum Sacrum. Exoterically interpreted, the Triduum Sacrum refers to Holy Thursday in the Garden of Olives, Good Friday on Calvary and Easter Sunday in the Garden of the Sepulchre. Mystically conceived, the Triduum Sacrum becomes Holy Thursday in Gethsemane, Good Friday on Golgotha and Easter Sunday on the shore of Turiya-Tehom or the Abyss.74
According to Moriarty, Christ’s crossing of the Kedron, into humanity’s ‘transtorrentem destiny’, pioneers the way for the enormously significant evolutionary event known as Gethsemane.75 His notion of a ‘transtorrentem destiny’ springs from the Latin translation of St John’s Gospel, 18:1:
Et egressus est Jesus cum discipulis suis trans torrentem Cedron.
And Jesus went forth with his disciples over a torrent called the Kedron.
Although only a small torrent, Moriarty claims Christ crossed ‘Colorado-river deep in his own and in the world’s karma’, when traversing the Kedron.76 In doing so, Christ not only absorbed his own and the world’s karma, but, according to Moriarty, he also went on to successfully inherit and integrate it, in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘the place of the olive press, the press that presses all that you unconsciously are into full consciousness’.77 It is for this reason he will say: ‘Psychologically, the highest word that it is given to us to speak is Gethsemane.’78
For Moriarty, Christ encounters and suffers the archaic vastness of human inwardness in Gethsemane and in the process comes into most frightful and dreadful contact with who he instinctively, animalistically and phylogenetically is. Shedding light on what Christ endured, he cites a number of major figures who have ventured into the dark and unlit abysses of their being. Ironically, one of the most enlightening citations comes from Nietzsche, an avid critic of Christianity. For Nietzsche attains vital insight into who and what he is in The Gay Science:
How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer.79
Nietzsche has uncovered something astonishing here. He has discovered within himself that all life going back through the Kainozoic, Mesozoic and Palaeozoic continues to invent, love, hate and infer in him. This implies crocodile, dinosaur and trilobite are still in some way active within him, meaning the human mind is Eocene, Jurassic and Silurian. Nietzsche’s insight helps Moriarty to watch with Christ in Gethsemane. To watch with Christ is not simply to observe, it ‘isn’t only to look on, it isn’t only to be a spectator’, rather it is ‘to undergo, in a separate red solitude, what he is undergoing’.80
In his remarkably original reading of the Gospel accounts, Moriarty emphasizes the importance of his walking away three times from Peter, James and John, only to return each time to find them asleep. Sleeping out of a necessity to protect themselves from the enormities of Christ’s sufferings, Moriarty imagines that the first time Christ walked away he sank down into the Kainozoic depth of himself and the Earth, the second time he sank down into the Mesozoic depth and the third time he sank down into the Palaeozoic depth. By sinking down into these depths Christ began to be, in the words of St Mark, ‘sore amazed and to be very heavy’. As Moriarty interprets it, Christ’s descent is accompanied by the simultaneous surfacing in him of ‘earthly bad blood’, of ‘Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, Kainozoic bad blood’.81 Boiling over in him, Christ began to sweat out this blood, as St Luke writes: ‘And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground.’
Making use of extraordinary imagery, foreign to traditional exegeses, Moriarty attempts to reveal the immensities of what Christ underwent in Gethsemane. He imagines Christ descending Bright Angel Trail to the floor of the Grand or Karmic Canyon in Arizona, in the south-west of North America. Prayerfully going down ‘into the lowest parts of the Earth, down below humanity, down below mammal, down below reptile, down below amphibian, down below fish, down below ammonite, down below alga, down below the first protein’, Christ descends to the very floor of the Karmic Canyon. Moriarty notes: ‘In him, as he stands there, the Earth in all its geological ages is psychologically synchronous.’ By descending this far, he understands Christ to have reached a depth ‘where I is we’. 82
On the floor of the Canyon, Moriarty envisages Bright Angel pointing to a rockpool, mirroring ‘thirteen and three-quarter miles of stratified karma’. Directing Christ to drink from it, he is overwhelmed by what must be suffered and endured, saying, ‘Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.’ Not removed, the cup remains for Christ to drink: ‘Going down on his knees, Jesus cups his fin-fraught hands down into the water. When the water in this improvised chalice has settled and is again mirroring the karma of the ages he brings it to his lips and drinks it, to the lees, leaving nothing to wring out.’83
By Christ taking into himself and sanctifying the Earth’s karma, ‘its unredeemed, dark impulses and energies’, Moriarty believes it is possible for the Earth to be deemed an evolutionary success. Through Christ’s accomplishment, he sees the Earth rising over its karmic horizon as Gaiakhty or what he more frequently calls Buddh Gaia.84
He invents the term ‘Gaiakhty’, from the words Gaia and akhty. Calling her Gaia, ancient Greeks thought of the Earth as a goddess. Akhty, on the other hand, stems from ancient Egyptian religion and means ‘horizon’, as in Horakhty, that is, ‘Horus-of-the-Horizon’. Horakhty is the sun god in his morning form rising above the eastern horizon, he is typically depicted as falcon-headed. Thus the name Gaiakhty signifies a divine planet emerging through and over its karmic horizon.
‘Buddh Gaia’, another term coined by Moriarty, has similar connotations to Gaiakhty. It is a compound of the Sanskrit Buddh and again the ancient Greek Gaia. Buddh Gaya, is the name of a temple built on the spot of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Buddh is etymologically related to the Sanskrit words for ‘enlightened one’ and ‘enlightenment’. Echoing Buddh Gaya, Buddh Gaia suggests the Earth is both enlightened and divine. Seeing Buddha Gaia rising over its own karmic horizon provides a vision of the Earth as both enlightened and divine – futurally, presently and back through all its geological ages.
Read exoterically, Holy Thursday in the Garden of Olives leads to Good Friday on Calvary, whereas through Moriarty’s esoteric reading Holy Thursday in Gethsemane becomes a portal or gateway to Golgotha. Differentiating between the two, he remarks, ‘In the gulf between Calvary and Golgotha our rock of faith becomes an abyss of faith.’85
In Hebrew Golgotha means ‘the place of the skull’ but in accordance with Moriarty’s more unorthodox understanding of it, it is the place of Adam’s empty skull at the foot of Christ’s Cross. Through the lens of Hinduism, he sees it as the Hill of the Koshaless Skull.86 Kosha is Sanskrit for ‘veil’ or ‘obstruction’. A koshaless skull signifies the absence of the veiling power of the senses and faculties. For, as Hindus conceive of them, the human senses obfuscate rather than reveal Brahman, that is, ultimate reality. When seeking the Divine, Moriarty advocates the practice of going beyond the senses and all empirical and intellectual apprehensions of reality. Practised ritualistically this is Tenebrae.
Christ depicted on the Golgotha Cross, looking down into Adam’s empty skull or his koshaless skull, provides a vivid visualization of him transcending his senses and sense of selfhood. Going beyond all sense of selfhood, Christ lets go of all he inherited in Gethsemane. Such imagery points the way to Christ entering the Abyss or what Moriarty calls the Divine Ungrund. Relying on the testimonies of many mystics, Christian and non-Christian, he declares that on Good Friday we learn ‘the Abyss is “much more God’s dwelling-place than heaven or man”’ .87
Yet the Triduum Sacrum does not culminate with Christ abiding in the Abyss, like the Zen saying, ‘First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then again there is a mountain.’
Returning on Easter Sunday on the shore of Turiya-Tehom, Moriarty sees Christ returning as Jivanmukta Jesus:88 Christ returns as someone wholly liberated in this life, with the good news that the Great Deep is Divine Ground.
Wonderfully imagined, Moriarty envisions Christ as Jesus Anadyomene coming ashore on an empty skull.89 Arriving ashore on Easter Sunday in the Garden of the Sepulchre, Moriarty supposes Christ to have returned from the Abyss with a new way of seeing and a renewed capacity for ordinariness.
Willingness to surrender and live beyond selfhood and the threat to selfhood, as evidenced in Christ, can for Moriarty lead to an acceptance of human mortality and the world in all its inherent hostility, danger and terror. He maintains that venturing beyond selfhood cultivates a greater capacity for ordinariness and lessens the desire to modify the world, thus negating the longing for a new heaven and a new Earth. This in turn fosters the possibility of a Blakean perception of reality erupting among us:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.90
Happening inside of our eyes, Easter morning does not bring about a new world for Moriarty, rather it begets a new way of seeing the world we already exist in. Awakening to the miraculousness and wonder of what is given, to what is, Moriarty holds that on Easter morning we learn to be wholly incarnate, and as a result experience the sufferings, joys, plenitudes and poverties of an incarnate existence.
Questioning Christianity’s attentiveness to the mystical significance of the Triduum Sacrum, Moriarty asks:
Is Christianity asleep to Christ in Gethsemane?
Is Christianity asleep to Christ on Golgotha?
Is Christianity asleep to Christ in the Garden of the Sepulchre?91
Given the scope and magnitude of what Christ endured and accomplished in the course of the Triduum Sacrum, Moriarty describes him as ‘verbally unhoused’. This statement reveals the difficulty of understanding and accommodating Christ, and it also suggests that he remains unaccommodated by traditional forms of Christianity.
In light of the Triduum Sacrum, Moriarty considers Christ to be a neotype and teleotype, requiring ‘a new Bible all to Himself’. Interestingly, he observes how ‘Mallarmé was of the opinion that our age is seeking to bring forth a new holy book’. Moriarty supposes such a book would be about Christ in the Canyon.92
With this in mind he ushers in the epoch of Canyon Christianity:
And so, if someone else doesn’t do it, I will. Making the sign of the cross upon myself, I announce a new Christian epoch, the epoch of Canyon Christianity, the epoch in which we know that Jesus is still at work, still claiming the whole Canyon for culture, the whole psyche for sanctity, the epoch in which Bright Angel Trail is ambulatory, the epoch of final adaptation, the epoch in which we adapt to ourselves as potential jivanmuktas and to the Earth as Buddh Gaia. 93
In announcing the epoch of Canyon Christianity, Moriarty reveals the extent to which traditional forms of Christianity need to catch up with Christ, ‘who continues to grow and outgrow among us’.94
Despite the inventiveness and significance of Moriarty’s writings and the challenges they pose, no substantial engagement with his work has been forthcoming. Positively construed, the lack of secondary literature means his texts preserve their thunder, that is, an undomesticated vitality. Since the scalpel of critical analysis has not yet been applied to his body of work, one retains the sense of entering into an unexplored, multidimensional Mundus Novus when reading his books.
No doubt tempering their thunder, this Reader attempts to make Moriarty’s works more approachable. As a consequence, some of the richest and most complex passages from his oeuvre are absent from the current Reader. To encounter such passages within the context of a Reader would be similar to being confronted by the Himalayan mountains on the plains of Kildare, that is to say, they would appear as monstrous protrusions in an alien and unfitting landscape. In saying this, the passages chosen are of themselves deeply challenging and fertile, and worthy of serious attention.
Western physics has gone east to China. A wonderful thing it would be if Kuo Hsi’s painting called ‘Early Spring’ were to come west into Europe. It would recreate our eyes and minds. It would liberate rocks, mountains and rocks, from our Medousa perceptions of them. And it would un-petra-fy our languages, turning all their nouns into verbal nouns, so that our daily speech and therefore our daily awareness might at last catch up with Heraclitus and Einstein.95
—John Moriarty, Nostos
Seeking to open a way into Moriarty’s writings, the extracts chosen for this Reader cohere around two questions that subliminally underlie the entire text. These questions that go hand in hand read as follows: is it possible for humanity to experience itself anew? and is it possible to seek the Earth anew? More explicitly, the selections chosen for the Reader relate to a motif made apparent in the painting ‘Early Spring’ (1072), by Kuo Hsi, a painter of the Northern Sung Dynasty in China. Kuo Hsi’s word for mountain was ku fa, meaning ‘backbone’.96 Backbone to this book, ‘Early Spring’ prepares the way for what follows.
The extraordinary nature of Kuo Hsi’s Daoist inspired painting means its significance appears to exceed its ‘representation’ or ‘depiction’ of a mountainscape.97 Hans-Georg Moeller, in his refreshingly lucid exposition of Daoism in Daoism Explained, observes how contrary to traditional forms of Western aesthetics, Daoist artists are not chiefly concerned with representation but are instead attentive to how a piece of art is made and its ‘effects’. By way of distinguishing between a traditional Western and a Daoist conception of art, Moeller recounts a legend about the miraculous abilities of Wu Daozi, a master Daoist artist, from the eighth century CE. The story relating to one of Wu Daozi’s landscape paintings reads as follows:
About Wu Daozi it is told that he once painted a huge landscape on the inner walls of the imperial palace. Only when he had finished the painting did he unveil it for the emperor. He pointed towards a grotto and clapped his hands. Thereupon an entrance opened and the painter entered the painting he had created and disappeared along with it right in front of the emperor’s eyes.98
Vanishing into his painting right before the eyes of the emperor, Wu Daozi’s work of art reveals itself to be more than a mere representation or imitation of Nature. Real itself, Wu Daozi’s masterwork allows him to enter the painting and disappear along with it. In this case the gulf between the creator and what he creates is bridged and even dissolves.
Exploring the artistic principles underlying this extraordinary legend, Moeller reveals how Daoist art does not attempt to replicate Nature in its inimitable reality. Aware of the futility of such an undertaking, it tries instead to bring ‘reality “on the Way”’. Hence, Moeller contends that the accomplishment of a Daoist artist lies in his/her ‘giving way’ to something real or natural. Differing from the ancient Greek’s mimetic approach to art, Moeller describes Daoist art as auto-poietic, ‘in that it tries to generate something real itself, not only a good depiction of something real’.99
Facilitating this Chinese and Daoist understanding of art is the notion that a landscape painting is ‘permeated by exactly the same Qi’ (or ch’i), that pervades an external or ‘normal’ landscape. A landscape painting and an ‘externally real’ landscape are thus said to be infused with the same stuff, energy or vitality. More radically, Moeller maintains a good landscape painting can in fact bring the energies of Qi into a perfect harmony, thereby rendering it ‘“better” than a landscape “out there”’, just as ‘a rock garden can be more “intense” than rocks “out there”’. He further writes: ‘Daoist landscape paintings are real insofar as their brush strokes, the constellations of mountains, streams, and vegetation, and even the sparse buildings and the rare human beings who sometimes are seen in some distant valleys or on some distant banks are not merely portrayed but indeed made or “reproduced”.’100
This Daoist appreciation of the work of art permits the artist as well as the onlooker to ramble and roam around a scroll or painting, in a way that one would wander around an external landscape. Acting as a type of portal into these tremendous apparitions of landscapes and mountainscapes, it isn’t only the masterful Wu Daozi who can disappear amongst the streams, waterfalls, forests and mountains of a painting, any willing onlooker is capable of adventuring into these painted scapes of Nature.
Moeller’s insightful interpretation of Daoist art is very much in keeping with what Kuo Hsi has to say in An Essay on Landscape Painting. In this essay, Kuo Hsi states that human nature abhors the ‘din of the dusty world and the locked-in-ness of human habitations’, and much prefers the ‘haze, mist, and the haunting spirits of the mountains’.101 Although writing over nine-hundred years ago, Kuo Hsi specifically addresses those who have limited access to these landscapes and suggests journeying into a great landscape painting can compensate for a lack of contact with the natural world. In a passage that has grown exponentially in significance since it was first worded, Kuo Hsi writes:
Having no access to landscapes, the lover of forest and stream, the friend of mist and haze, enjoys them only in his dreams. How delightful then to have a landscape painted by a skilled hand! Without leaving the room, at once, he finds himself among streams and ravines; the cries of the birds and monkeys are faintly audible to his senses; light on hills and reflection in the water, glittering, dazzle his eyes. Does not such a scene satisfy his mind and captivate his heart?102
Kuo Hsi claims that a landscape painting by a skilled hand can lead the Nature-starved individual back among streams, hills and ravines, where the cries of birds and monkeys can be heard. For Kuo Hsi, a great landscape painting makes re-immersion in the natural world possible, without the need to leave one’s room.
Seeing or investing more significance in ‘Early Spring’ than even Kuo Hsi would dare to, Moriarty contends it can recreate our European eyes and mind, and ‘un-petra-fy our languages, turning all their nouns into verbal nouns’. Having read somewhere that in Chinese, all nouns are verbal nouns, Moriarty considers such a possibility to be truly wonderful.103 The prospect of nouns becoming verbal nouns in all European languages is of huge import, as it would radically transform our linguistic sense of things, releasing things from their sense of thingness. For instance, while a speaker of English would see a rock as static, Moriarty imagines Kuo Hsi, a speaker of Chinese, would see a rock as ‘an event, or better, as an eventing, as a happening, as an action’, and conjectures that this might be one reason why he painted mountains as though they were clouds.104
Moriarty’s regard for ‘Early Spring’ gathers further weight in ‘Mona, Our Moses’ in Dreamtime, and ‘Mona Melencolia Europa’ in the first volume of Turtle.
In ‘Mona, Our Moses’, Moriarty imagines a modern scientist being asked to make a statement about the universe at large. In response to this request, he supposes the scientist would more than likely say, E=mc2, whereas if Moriarty were asked to make a similar statement about the universe, he claims he would almost certainly say, Early Spring.105
Although proclaiming an unwillingness to provide a verbal equivalent or even a description of the painting, Moriarty does offer some noteworthy insights into this work of art. Describing the ‘high shoulders’ of mountains appearing in ‘Early Spring’ as apparitions of mountains, he wonders if they could be the Void’s memory or dream of mountains. He professes we cannot tell until the mist clears:
But the mist of course will never clear. And the Void could wake up or could sink into dreamless sleep and then they’d be gone and we who perceived them, we too would be gone, no apparition or memory of us remaining. But that would be no loss to us or to the Void because the Void is as full when it is empty as it is when innumerable universes have sprouted in it.106
He also pays close attention to the gorges, ravines, rockwalls, waterfalls, streams and the fierce wizened pine trees, all present in ‘Early Spring’. He focuses too on the little wisp of a man crossing over a causeway. For it is little wisps like he, who having surrendered to Dao, have gone on to build ‘geomantically perfect’ monasteries, like the one nestled high up in the mountains.
Imagining a Daoist monk meditating in this monastery, Moriarty envisages him sinking down into womb-breathing and effortlessly returning from yu wei to wu wei, he sings:
Learning consists in adding to one’s stock day by day;
The practice of Tao consists in subtracting day by day,
Subtracting and yet again subtracting
Till one has reached inactivity.
But by this very inactivity
Everything can be activated.107
A transition from deliberate, self-conscious action (yu wei) to nonaction (wu wei) does not signal a lapse into complete passivity, but it is instead a paradoxical way of allowing the most effective and perfect action to transpire.
Interweaving seminal extracts from the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) into ‘Mona, Our Moses’, Moriarty supposes that the Daoist philosophical principles underlying these passages could help da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to move aside, and allow the mountains she is obstructing to come to the fore. He envisions Mona coming down from her high, humanist chair and returning to the mountains she has turned her back to. By returning to the mountains she has been blocking for centuries, Mona becomes a new Moses, leading humanity out of its egotistical, narcissistic and anthropocentric way of being in the world:
Out of the exile into which we conjured you,
We will follow you.
Out of the exile into which we conjured you,
We will follow you
into
Early Spring108
In ‘Mona Melencolia Europa’ (a title which conflates da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Dürer’s ‘Melencolia’), Moriarty consciously dreams of being alone in the Louvre at night. Standing before Mona Lisa, he unhesitatingly tells her what a fine and grand woman she is, finding her eyelids, eyes, smile, veil and hair to be as marvellous as everyone else finds them to be. Yet, despite her beauty, Moriarty asks Mona if there is any chance she could move to one side, as she is eclipsing his view of the world behind her:
For centuries now you’ve had your back to the world. ’Twould do you good I’m sure to turn round and look at it. To walk back into it. Back into the mountains. Back to where thunder is. And wonder. And water. Water in streams. Water in rough rivers. Water in gorges. Water in waterfalls. I imagine you walking back. Growing smaller and smaller. In the end you are only the size of your own first footprint. It is turned the other way now. You are walking into the mountains. Into Tao. In the mouth of the final valley you look back and I know what your smile means: the human head blocks the view. It was never meant to fill the whole frame.109
As Mona unblocks the view, Moriarty pictures her first footprints becoming her chrysalis, her boatman and boat, carrying her into the wild mountains she has turned her ‘high Renaissance back to for so long’.
In this dramatic transformation, he envisions Mona Melencolia Europa regenerated: healed at last from the delusional desire and need to dominate the Earth.110
Yet, Moriarty’s call for Mona Lisa to return to ‘Early Spring’ does not involve a romantic return to Nature, nor does it entail going back to some idyllic past. Instead, his recourse to ‘Early Spring’ is a summons from an unrealized future, in which humanity has evolved beyond its dangerously narcissistic and virulent way of being in the world.
Virulent in its behaviour, Moriarty compares humanity to the AIDS virus. Through its unremitting exploitative activity, he claims humans are breaking down the Earth’s immune system, postulating that the Earth is HSS Positive, or, ‘Homo sapiens sapiens positive’.111 Wreaking ecological havoc upon the Earth, he wonders if we as a species have lost evolutionary legitimacy, that is, if we ever acquired it in the first place.112
To counteract the ecological damage we continue to cause, Moriarty proposes:
That the weed’s way of being in the river
Should be our way of being in the world.113
This metaphor is inspired by Uvavnuk, an Inuit medicine woman, who sings:
The great sea has set me in motion
Set me adrift
Moving me as a weed moves in a river.
The arch of sky and mightiness of storms
Have moved the spirit within me
Till I am carried away
Trembling with joy.114
The metaphor of the weed in the river attempts to enact a shift in emphasis from our ‘yu wei works and days’ to a wu-wei way of being in the world. At odds with a Daoist understanding of these notions, Moriarty claims this metaphor does not ‘preclude prayerful recourse to the transcendent Divine’. He also notes that it is not ‘blind to all that is brutal and terrible in Nature’.115
Flowing with the currents of the great universal adventure, Uvavnuk’s song is sure to challenge Mona’s dominance.
However, even without listening to Uvavnuk’s song, Mona has already been narcissistically wounded, and should have been coming down from her silly, untenable, humanist height long ago.
In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), Freud highlights three incisive narcissistic wounds inflicted upon the ‘human mania of greatness’, by Copernicus, Darwin and a ‘third … most irritating insult’, he himself exacted. Humanity’s sense of greatness was lacerated by Copernicus when he discovered the Earth was not the centre of the cosmos but only a minute speck in a seemingly infinite universe; by Darwin when he discovered man was not made in the image and likeness of God but was a descendant of the animal kingdom; and by Freud who discovered that the ‘I’, ‘is not even master in its own house, but is dependent upon the most scanty information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life’.116
There is, however, a fourth narcissistic wound that Freud failed to acknowledge. He didn’t come to realize what Moriarty came to know, that is, the human mind, both conscious and unconscious, ‘is the blind not the window’. Through this insight Moriarty deciphers the meaning of Mona’s enigmatic smile: ‘the human head blocks the view. It was never meant to fill the whole frame.’
Nevertheless, Moriarty does not seek the diminution of humanity. Unlike Montaigne in ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, he does not claim that, ‘man is no better than the animals’; nor does he attempt to ‘bring us back and join us to the majority’.117 Instead, Moriarty endeavours to reveal humanity’s highest possibility, and initiate its greatest adventure. This great venture involves the realization of humanity’s Buddh Gaian nature, and a journey to the Earth as Buddh Gaia.
The four narcissistic wounds take on further significance, for as is made evident in his autobiographies, Moriarty suffered and endured these wounds in the fullness of their painful implications. Having come through these wounds, Moriarty came to embody the new intelligence and new way of being in the world that he identifies in ‘Early Spring’. As he interprets it, this new intelligence and new way of being in the world is chiefly characterized by wu wei; visionary vision and apperception; we-awareness, or an awareness of the inter-connectedness of all things, that is, a knowledge of a sumpatheia ton hollon – a sympathy deep down in all things with all things; a deinanthropic sense of who we are; an overcoming of selfhood and an adventuring beyond the eclipsing mind.
Embodying this new intelligence, Moriarty becomes as the little wisp of a man crossing the causeway into the wild apparitions of mountains created in ‘Early Spring’. Passing wizened bent trees, hunkering gnarled trees, strong-rooted upright trees, plunge-pools, falls and cascades of water, he is sure to make his way to the monastery high up in the nebulous mountains. As Moriarty feels what is now needed on Earth is a critical number of people who leave behind the ‘bubonic noise of our time’ to live in ‘small monastic communities each with its own pure bell calling them to con-son-ance with star and stone … Given that, our planet might still have a chance. Given that, it might continue to be the evolutionary success it already is.’118
Since Moriarty’s writings epitomize this new intelligence and new way of being in the world, what D.H. Lawrence says in ‘We are Transmitters’ can be heard to ring true: ‘we can transmit life into our work’.119 Unsparing in the bestowal of his wisdom, Moriarty transmitted all of who he was into his work. Emerson could have added him to the list of writers who have jumped bodily into their books: ‘The old writers such as Montaigne, Milton, Browne, when they put down their thoughts, jumped into their book bodily themselves, so that we have all that is left of them in our shelves; there is not a pinch of dust besides.’120 Indistinguishable from his books, Moriarty imparted all of his ‘life-giving, invigorating, uplifting, enlightening thoughts and feelings’ into his writings. And so the fire has been rescued, ready to be carried forth.
This Reader is based on extracts from Dreamtime, the Turtle trilogy, Nostos and What the Curlew Said, six works intimately interlinked. In an interview with Paul Durcan in 2002, Moriarty explains how his autobiography Nostos is closely connected to his earlier works. He states that Nostos is not quite an autobiography, as it began as an attempt to clarify the ideas expressed in Dreamtime, and the three volumes of Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, by setting them in a biographical context. Describing Nostos, he notes: ‘It’s scandalous to say it, but I think I’m trying to heal Western culture.’121 His attempts at healing Western culture and his commitment to that task underpin the six works found here.
In Dreamtime, Moriarty sinks down into Éire’s, Europa’s and Ecclesia’s Dreamtimes. Going walkabout within these Dreamtimes, he imaginatively and creatively engages with their old myths, axioms and ideas, seeking to re-emerge with a reimagined sense of who we are and can be. Given the extent to which the modern human being is electronically and technologically congested, and therefore cut off from such Dreamtimes, the need for the poet–philosopher to drop down into our cultural past to re-realize who we are becomes increasingly important: ‘Our past we have always with us. Our past we must always re-realize. And to do this we need people who can live in our cultural Dreamtime, people who go walkabout, creatively, within the old myths, people who go walkabout into the unknown.’122 Re-realizing our past and venturing into the unknown, Moriarty proffers an alternative experience of the present and reveals future possibilities to grow into.
The Turtle trilogy can be considered cradle texts that ‘crazily’ attempt to nurture a new humanity on an Earth newly discovered as Buddha Gaia.123
From a certain perspective the first volume, Crossing the Kedron, can be interpreted as Moriarty’s Engwura or right of passage, in which he struggles with the Abyss and his dark, repressed and recalcitrant nature. Unable to rely on his own resources to cope with who he is, he is dependent upon the Divine for assistance: ‘Personally, I know of no other than a religious response to the stupendous risk of being human. My humanist bluff has been called. I need, needing help with my humanity, to be open to the Transcendent.’124 With Divine assistance he crosses the Kedron with Christ, into Gethsemane. Delving into his esoteric depths, Beast and Abyss erupt within him, but through a big re-inaugurating dream that dreamed itself in him, he realizes they are not as hopelessly hostile as imagined: ‘We don’t need to slay the one or to set up bars and doors against the other. The repressing grid can go up, the restraining bars and doors can give way, and we aren’t destroyed.’ He considers this discovery to be good news for humanity, as it means we can live from the ‘oldest phylogenetic roots of who we are’.125
In exploring the esoteric nature of his own mind, Moriarty manages to journey down into the secret quarters of all minds. As Emerson observes: ‘[Man Thinking] then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.’ Shedding light on these secrets, Moriarty reveals the human mind to be inhabitable in its darkest, most volatile and inhospitable depths.
In the second volume, Horsehead Nebula Neighing, Moriarty breaks free from Western demiurgic cosmologies and through a variety of exotic myths and reimagined myths native to the West, he comes to reinterpret the origin of the universe in terms of emanation rather than creation. Advocating a mo wei understanding of the universe, he suggests no one or nothing created the universe: in the beginning, a happening but not by way of occurrence, process or event and at the heart of it all a Horsehead Nebula neighing: yatra na anyat pasyati, na anyat srinoti, na anyad vijanati, sa bhuma.126
The notion of a mo wei universe is vital to Moriarty’s confrontation with ‘Promethean humanity’s’ way of being in the world, which seeks to shape the world to suit itself. For while biblical creationism serves to justify and embolden Promethean humanity, the idea of a mo wei universe in no way engenders, grants or authorizes human dominion over the Earth.
The final volume, Anaconda Canoe, strives to show how not only the mind but predatory Nature in all its hostility can be on our side. For Nature to be on our side, Moriarty proposes we desist from slaying or subduing all that is inwardly and outwardly primeval, and enlist its help instead. Hence the image of an Anaconda, the great constrictor opening itself up as a canoe or lifeboat, ferrying us up the primordial river into vita nouva. With vita nouva in mind, ‘emerging with not from our phylogenetic past’ will enable us to ‘come forth by day’.127
As in Nostos, Anaconda Canoe draws to a close with an account of Moriarty going walkabout to the centre of Ireland to plant the groundplan for a Tenebrae Temple, beseeching the Earth and the heavens to help humanity find a centre that will hold. Providing architectural, good-shepherding shape to the mystical journey, the temple also gives guidance and form to who we deinanthropically are. In Christian terms, the Tenebrae Temple offers architectural good-shepherding shape to the Triduum Sacrum.
Recounting Moriarty’s fall out of his master narrative, Nostos charts his perilous homecoming adventure to who and what he is, and to the Earth now revealed as Buddh Gaia.
An early encounter with Darwin’s geological and evolutionary discoveries enfeebled Moriarty’s biblical sense of things, leaving him marooned in a universe indifferent to his existence, his sense of inner and outer exile deepened by Kepler’s and Pascal’s awareness of our astronomical insignificance, Newton’s epistemological conjectures and Coleridge’s dejection, Nietzsche’s illumination of the psyche’s archaic profundities and Arnold’s poetic disclosure of a godless world.
Like Ishmael, Moriarty suffers the fate of ‘man overboard’, his Western adventure having foundered in seas in which one can ‘only hear, its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. This leaves him wondering if he must forever resign himself to a state of forlorn homelessness:
Can there be a nostos for Ishmael?
Having harpooned the world illusion, can there be a nostos for modern western humanity?
Ever since Descartes and Newton, our God has been a deus absconditus and the objective thing we naively knew has been a res absconditum. So we have no home to come home to. In a dreadful sense, our nostos is a nekuia. It is an endless, aimless wandering in an Absence.
Where a personal God was, Absence.
Where the naively known thing was, Absence. … Nostos now is a voyage from Saturn’s grey chaos to a shingle shore that might or might not present itself, to a shingle shore where the divine might or might not re-emerge.128
Refusing to flounder in a state of homelessness, Nostos evolves from a story of man overboard into a tale of someone who consciously and courageously jumps ship. At the age of thirty-three, Moriarty chose to abandon the modern Western adventure, and in baptismal assimilation to Christ he sought to pioneer an alternative way of being in the world. However, he did so not through any traditional form of Christianity but through Canyon Christianity.
What the Curlew Said picks up from where he left off in Nostos, documenting his life-story from 1982 to a few months before he died in 2007. While What the Curlew Said retains some of the sufferings and hauntedness of Nostos, a different mood appears to permeate it. Profound wonderment underlies much of the work, especially in meticulous descriptions of gardening in Connemara. Moriarty conveys this wonder without naively eulogizing the sublimity and splendours of Nature, as he pointedly acknowledges the terror, ferocity and undisclosable dimensions of the natural world.
The sense of weighty wonderment pervading What the Curlew Said is accompanied by the realization of the new intelligence mentioned earlier, an intelligence typified by wu wei; visionary vision and apperception; we-awareness; a deinanthropic sense of who we are; an overcoming of selfhood and an adventuring beyond the eclipsing mind. Fostering this new intelligence, Moriarty acknowledges that it does not translate easily into everyday life. As a gardener in Connemara using pick, spade, fork, shovel, secateurs, long-handled cutters, axe, hatchet and bowsaw to maintain and give shape to the gardens he worked in, he recalls: ‘Yet here I was, more Prometheus than plankton, not at all a lily of the field, a man titanically obstructing Tao, a man imposing his will on the world, forcing his yu-wei way through two clumps of bamboo.’129
Despite admissions of betraying this new intelligence, it manifests itself in startling ways, particularly when Moriarty travels to Montana, North America, to re-enact the Native American ceremony known as the Horse Dance. Performed by Black Elk over a hundred years earlier to help liberate his oppressed people, Moriarty sought (but failed) to have it enacted as a world-historical event on behalf of all peoples and beings. Thinking of the Horse Dance as a counterpart to Ragnarok, he saw it as a Ghost Dance capable of healing the Earth, ‘restoring it to how it originally was before we, collectively Vritra, misappropriated and polluted and poisoned life at its source’.130
Moriarty, who was dying of terminal cancer, believed his impending physical death paled in significance to the ‘mystical death’ he must undergo. For physical death did not remove ‘the obstructing “I am”’. Proclaiming he had not yet undergone a mystical death, he passionately practised and prepared for it:
I go for broke, leaving all that I naturally and supernaturally am, leaving all I in any way am, behind me in trackless dark Infinity.
Over to you, God.
In the meantime, Nostos.131
‘In the meantime, Nostos,’ is an important caveat. It indicates the homecoming adventure to the Earth continues. For Buddh Gaians on Buddh Gaia, it is an adventure that has just begun.
Moriarty’s attempts at healing Western culture in Dreamtime, the Turtle trilogy, Nostos and What the Curlew Said reveal him to be a great image-thinker. As if in symbiosis with anima mundi, he garners images, metaphors, myths and philosophical insights from the world’s soul, and releases their medicinal qualities, allowing the genius latent within these forces to live itself out in him in a radically original way.
A magnanimo who relentlessly challenges dominant modes of Western thought and perception, Moriarty does not seek to construct an elaborate theoretical framework or establish a set of strict moral laws. Instead his writings inspire readers to embark on their own quest for a greater vision of the world by calling into question their own inherited ‘sensory-intellectual tool-kits’. Setting out on such a quest, a way might one day open into Early Spring.
NOTES
1. Durcan’s comparison acquires greater relevancy in the light of what Martin Heidegger has to say in a public lecture delivered 8 May 1953, entitled ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’: ‘Toward the end of the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra appears a section with the heading “The Convalescent”. That is Zarathustra. But what does “convalescent”, der Genesende, mean? Genesen is the same word as the Greek neomai, nostos, meaning to head for home. “Nostalgia” is the yearning to go home, homesickness. “The Convalescent” is one who is getting ready to turn homeward, that is, to turn toward what defines him. The convalescent is under way to himself, so that he can say of himself who he is.’ (Martin Heidegger, ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’ in Nietzsche, vol. 2, trans. David Farrell Krell [New York: HarperCollins, 1991], p. 212.)
2. Professor Iognáid Ó Muircheartaigh’s address on the conferring of the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, on John Moriarty, can be found at http://www
.johnmoriarty.info/pdf/PhD_speech.pdf.
3. In conversation with John Moriarty, July 2006.
4. This is a Latin proverb, inspired by Horace, and can be found at the beginning of Dreamtime. It loosely translates as: ‘Change your state of mind, not the sky.’ More unconventionally, Moriarty interprets the proverb in the following manner: ‘It is yourself as perceiver of the world, not the world, that you should be attempting to change.’ This is his motto in his fight against perceptual and intellectual reductionisms, and against the ‘it-world we project into the living world’. (Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 248.)
5. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 223. William James writes: ‘Our nervous systems have (in Dr Carpenter’s words) grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.’ (Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals [London: Press of Geo. H. Ellis Co., 1910], p. 65.)
6. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 223.
7. Ibid., p. 462.
8. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), p. 121.
9. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 248.
10. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 114.
11. Ibid., p. 214 and Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 206.
12. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation (New York: Cosimo, 2007), p. 152; William Blake, ‘Scoffers’, Poems of William Blake, ed. William Butler Yeats (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), p. 108. Henceforth, Poems of William Blake. See also Moriarty, Dreamtime, pp. 207–8; Nostos, p. 210; What the Curlew Said, pp. 14, 124.
13. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 374.
14. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 169.
15. John Moriarty, Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume Two: Horsehead Nebula Neighing (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1997), p. 15.
16. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 316.
17. Plato’s introduction of the Demiurge in Timaeus, a deity who shapes the material world from pre-existing chaos, also reinforces this understanding of a created universe.
18. In conversation with John Moriarty, March 2006. See also Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 316.
19. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 15. The notion of the Divine Ungrund plays a prominent role in Moriarty’s writings. It is derived from Jacob Boehme, and Moriarty construes it to mean the Ground out of which all things emanate, as the no ground or nothingness that grounds. (Ibid., p. 250.)
20. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller & Reese P. Miller (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 77. See also Moriarty, Dreamtime, pp. 51–3 and pp. 98–100.
21. Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica: the ancient Greek and Latin writings which contain Religious or Philosophic teachings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, ed. & trans. Walter Scott (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), p. 233. See also John Moriarty, Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume One: Crossing the Kedron (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1996), p. xviii.
22. Moriarty, Turtle I, pp. xvii–iii.
23. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 250.
24. Ibid., p. 249.
25. Ibid. Sometimes described as a lightning or sudden flash of enlightenment, it is difficult to precisely define what satori means. Eluding intellectual scrutinization, D.T. Suzuki explains it as follows: ‘Satori may be defined as intuitive looking-into, in contradistinction to intellectual and logical understanding. Whatever the definition, satori means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistic mind.’ (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism [New York: Grove Press, 1964], p. 58.)
26. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, pp. 214–15.
27. Ibid., p. 315.
28. Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, ed. & trans. Alexander Dru (London: Fontana Press, 1959), p. 145.
29. See Georges Bataille’s The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2009), for an interesting interpretation of the Lascaux cave paintings.
30. Cf. John Moriarty, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2006), p. 279 and Moriarty, Nostos, p. viii.
31. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 344.
32. William Shakespeare, ‘Macbeth’, The Alexander Text of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 1059. See also Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 36.
33. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 37.
34. Herman Melville, ‘The Cassock’ in Moby-Dick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 375–6. Henceforth, Moby-Dick. See also What the Curlew Said, pp. 247–8 and pp. 345–51.
35. Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 375.
36. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 248.
37. Ibid., p. 193.
38. Moriarty, Night Journey to Buddha Gaia, p. 7.
39. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 277.
40. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 145.
41. In Greek mythology, Cheiron was the renowned and wise centaur, who was skilled in many arts. He was a revered teacher and some of his most prodigious pupils included Apollo, Asclepius, Ajax, Aeneas, Actaeon, Caeneus, Theseus, Achilles, Jason, Peleus, Telamon and Heracles, among others.
42. Moriarty, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, p. 588.
43. Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. W.D. Ross (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 692. See also John Moriarty, Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume Three: Anaconda Canoe (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1998), p. ix.
44. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 321.
45. Moriarty, Nostos, p. v.
46. Elaborating this insight, he notes: ‘It is only because we are phylogenetically constituted that we can regress, as Pasiphae did, to bovine all-fours. It is only because they have evolved from fins that the fins in them can outcrop in our feet, as they did in Oedipus, that, not the spikes, being the real Sphinx-reason for his precipitous unsureness of phallus and foot.
It is only because the animal is already in us that it can outcrop in us as it did in the Minotaur, that it can engulf us as it did Actaeon. And we know how hippoluted Hippolytus was by his own so suddenly insurgent centauric instincts. And few they are who will have passed through life never having had a reason to say, Andromeda is my night name.’ (Moriarty, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, p. 60.)
47. Ibid., p. 61.
48. Ibid., p. 63. Cf. Heraclitus, The Presocratic Philosophers, eds G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 203.
49. Moriarty, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, p. 54.
50. Ibid., pp. 412–13.
51. Moriarty, Nostos, p. x.
52. Ibid., p. vi.
53. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 166.
54. Moriarty, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, p. 497.
55. Blake, Poems of William Blake, p. 126.
56. Moriarty, Turtle II, pp. 136–9.
57. He refers to the Inuit story of Takanakapsaluk (Moriarty, Turtle III, pp. 18–24); a Maori song of origins (Moriarty, Turtle II, pp. 81–2); various Native North American stories, one of which is told by the Blackfoot Indians (Moriarty, Turtle III, pp. 12–17); and a tale told by the Desana Indians of South America (Moriarty, Turtle III, pp. 3–11).
58. Moriarty, Turtle I, p. xxxi.
59. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori (California: University of California Press, 1986), p. 2.
60. Ibid., p. 22.
61. Moriarty, Turtle I, p. xxxi.
62. Cf. Moriarty, Nostos, pp. 528 and 549.
63. Ibid., p. 549.
64. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 332.
65. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 694.
66. Ibid.
67. Idries Shah, The Sufis (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), p. 70. See also John Moriarty, Slí na Fírinne (Kerry: Slí na Fírinne Publishing, 2006), p. 146.
68. Moriarty, Turtle I, p. 91.
69. Ibid., pp. 91–2.
70. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 44.
71. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 549.
72. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 40.
73. Ibid., p. 35. He adds an important caveat: ‘The Triduum Sacrum is, however, wholly incommensurate with either puberty or metamorphosis. And it isn’t, of course, inevitable in any one incarnation.’ (Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 119.)
74. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 45.
75. Moriarty, Nostos, pp. 596–7.
76. Moriarty, Dreamtime, pp. 37, 44.
77. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 522.
78. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 262.
79. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 116. See also Moriarty, Nostos, p. 56.
80. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 133.
81. Ibid., p. 133.
82. Moriarty, Slí Na Fírinne, pp. 9, 20.
83. Ibid., p. 20.
84. Ibid., pp. 20–21.
85. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 40.
86. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 135.
87. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 63. Moriarty is quoting from Johannes Tauler here.
88. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 221.
89. Moriarty, Turtle II, pp. 113–14. For an explanation of the term ‘Anadyomene’ see the Glossary.
90. Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, Poems of William Blake, p. 90.
91. Moriarty, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, p. 266.
92. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 324.
93. Ibid., pp. 323–4.
94. Moriarty, Slí na Fírinne, p. v.
95. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 483. In the more common Pinyin transliteration, this Chinese artist’s name is Guo Xi, not Kuo Hsi. Since Moriarty uses Kuo Hsi, I have stuck with this name to avoid confusion.
96. Michael Tobias, A Vision of Nature: Traces of the Original World (Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1995), p. 88.
97. By using the term ‘Daoist’ instead of ‘Taoist’ I have gone with the modern Pinyin transliteration of the Chinese ideograph: 道. Moriarty relies on the older Wade–Giles system of transliteration, hence he uses the terms ‘Taoist’ and ‘Tao’. At odds with the approach I take with the name Kuo Hsi/Guo Xi, I have chosen to go with the modern Pinyin transliteration for the terms ‘Daoist’ and ‘Daoism’ because of my reliance on Moeller’s Daoism Explained.
98. Hans-Georg Moeller, Daoism Explained: From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory (Illinois: Open Court, 1994), p. 114.
99. Ibid., p. 115.
100. Ibid., p. 116.
101. Kuo Hsi, An Essay on Landscape Painting, trans. Shio Sakanishi (London: John Murray, 1935), p. 30.
102. Ibid., p. 31.
103. Chinese does not distinguish between nouns and verbs the way we do in the West. Many ideographs have one meaning as a noun and another quite different meaning as a verb. The most famous example is dao, ‘the way’ and also ‘to say’.
104. Moriarty, Nostos, p. 483.
105. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 100.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid., p. 101.
108. Ibid., p. 103.
109. Moriarty, Turtle I, p. 122.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid., p. xi.
112. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 175.
113. Moriarty, Turtle I, p. 7.
114. Ibid., p. 6.
115. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. xx.
116. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. G. Stanley Hall (New York: Horace Liveright, 1920), p. 247.
117. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ in The Complete Works of Michel De Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003), pp. 401, 408.
118. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 258.
119. D.H. Lawrence, ‘We are Transmitters’, D.H. Lawrence: Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 449. Henceforth, D.H. Lawrence: Complete Poems.
120. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 391.
121. Paul Durcan, The Irish Times 21 March 2001. The article can be found at: http://www.johnmoriarty.info/pdf/Journey%20of%20the%20magus_nostos.pdf.
122. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. viii.
123. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. lii.
124. Moriarty, Turtle I, p. xvi.
125. Ibid., p. 32 and Moriarty, Slí Na Fírinne, p. 103.
126. Moriarty, Turtle II, p. 3. Taken from the Chandogya Upanishad, this translates as: ‘Where nothing else is seen, nothing else is heard, nothing else is thought about, there is the Infinite.’ See also Turtle II, pp. 12, 15.
127. Moriarty, Turtle III, p. 112.
128. Moriarty, Nostos, pp. 88, 90.
129. Moriarty, What the Curlew Said, p. 39. He also compared himself to a butcher as he hacked down bamboo that had grown across the Romantic Walk: ‘In the meantime, Leitirdyfe Wood was bleeding white blood today and, the colour not counting, I might as well have been a boner in the slaughterhouse opposite the railway station in Galway.’ (Ibid., p. 37.)
130. Ibid., p. 176.
131. Ibid., p. 376.