ILilith was the first wife of Adam who was created at the same time and from the same clay as Adam. Lilith coupled with the Archangel Samael and left Adam and the Garden of Eden, refusing a role of subservience. In this woodcut, Lilith is depicted as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden – an assignation which, if viewed in the light of certain occult traditions, would be testament to her liberating power.
Chiara often said Lilith was her muse. She thought of Eve as the popular conception of woman, the conventional female protagonist of Western Art. Lilith is the rejected – patroness of abortions, and masturbation – and yet, whereas Eve is a secondary creation, submissive to Adam, Lilith is crowned. As Chiara would have explained it: Because Lilith was queen of the “anti-world”, she does not wish to dominate nature but to coexist with it, to interact with its forms to will her own universe into being. These very objectives convey the essence of magic, and they also shed light onto the relationship between the magical act and the creative act.
The archetype of Lilith was rejected from the patriarchal religions, but remained prevalent in their esoteric folklore. Chiara felt strongly that the sanitized and skewed mythologies that uphold the foundations of our society were contaminated by a veil of deception. She sought to champion the disempowered female through her keen understanding of politics, art history, and occult philosophy.
Her creative sentiments found resonant correlation between the simultaneous suppression of the occult sciences and of women. And she actively utilized magic as a means of self-empowerment and rebellion against oppressive constructs.
Chiara was aware of the significant role of occultism in shaping the evolution of art. And while illuminating her contributions to this lineage, it is important to trace the foundations from which she derived her material and inspiration.
OCCULT PHILOSOPHY AND ITS ORIGINS
It is important to first explain that occultism is is a highly eclectic term encompassing a broad range of traditions, philosophies, iconographies and practices. It can, however be defined as having a specific historical trajectory. Its aim has always been to understand the nature of reality and the relationship between the internal psychic condition of the individual with the external cosmos in which it dwells.
Theoretically, it combines the two particular branches of philosophy…
Metaphysics: the examination of the fundamental nature of reality, time and space, the relationship between mind and matter, and between potentiality and realization.
and Perrenialism: a perspective upholding that an unmanifest singularity underlies reality and observes certain metaphysical laws.
We can detect its resonance in modern developments such as Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious. And we can identify its examination of different planes of existence and potentiality with aspects of Quantum Field Theory.
The origins of occultism derive from antiquity two main categories of sources:
Greco-Egyptian traditions such as:
Hermeticism – Whose famous maxim “As Above, So Below” explores the connection between macrocosm and microcosm through agencies such as Astrology and Alchemy.
Pythagoreanism – Which observed the structure of the physical universe through mathematmatical abstractions and ratios.
Neoplatonism – Espousing the unity of all things and the spiritual aspiration of the individual to merge with that unity.
In the East:
Taoism – Also denoted the concept of the “one thing” that is the source, pattern, and substance of all existence.
Tantra – Encouraging an active approach through ritual and purification to integrate the practitioner with the divine.
Vedanta – Pursuit of Knowledge of the unchanging material cause and instrumental cause of reality.
SUPPRESSION
In practice, occultism contains the core objective of the evolution of the potential for spiritual experience through examination of and interplay with the vast regions of the human psyche. Therefore, as patriarchal religious and political structures rose to supremacy, its study and practice were violently suppressed. Hence these traditions, and many others, were bundled together and obscured under blanket terms like “occultism” or “esotericism” – indicating that they are concealed, unattainable, or reserved for special elites. In the process, pantheons and nature religions that extolled female principles of divinity were driven to extinction.
The Alexandrian Libraries, estimated to house over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, and India were burned.
The Neoplatonic philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, revered as a precursor to feminism and a martyr of philosophy, was abducted by an angry Christian mob to the Cesaerian Church where she was stripped naked before her eyes were torn out and the flesh was scraped from her body with oyster shells.
Also in the 4th century CE, The Gnostics, a variety of cults with many Hermetic attributes popular enough to compete with ecclesiastical Christianity at the time, emphasized personal mystical experience over emerging church hierarchies, and worshipped the female divine principle as Wisdom, or Sophia. Their numbers were decimated and all their literature destroyed.
Chiara was preoccupied with the narrative of oppression and marginalization of knowledge, its implications of the political machinations of the male ego and the simultaneous rejection of the feminine. These fueled her artistic passion, her intellectual curiosity, and her spiritual practices. And, quite naturally, they plagued her with horror.
In 1947 a series of Gnostic texts were discovered including the Thunder Perfect Mind. Wherein a female deity describes herself in a series of contradictions. In a performance at the ICA in Philadelphia in 2015, Chiara narrated excerpts from the manuscript. Poignantly, the text illustrates many of the dynamics inherent to her own identity. Chiara’s work combined wrathful vengeance with refinement. Intellectual precision with spontaneity and chaos. A transcendence of gender, and a vision that spanned the temporal and the cosmic.
[THUNDER PERFECT MIND]
What few Gnostic ideas survived into Medieval Europe flourished in the Languedoc in the 12th Century in the emergence of Catharism. This sect upheld non-violence, vegetarianism, and a distinctly proto-feminist esteem for women, who were awarded its highest religious positions.
But they were short lived. In 1209 Pope Innocent III sanctioned a crusade against the Cathars, a massacre of every man woman and child to be burned at the stake, quartered by horses, or tied to trees and used for target practice.
The patriarchal anxiety around both women and magic reached a zenith during witch craze that spanned from 1460 to 1710. This phenomenon has guided many artists to recontextualize witchcraft from the surrealist period to the contemporary. Philosopher Silvia Frederici was quoted in Frieze magazine article November 2018 saying: “The witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline.”
While the peasantry lived in abject terror of the depraved tortures of puritans and priests, the late Renaissance and Enlightenment Eras gave rise to many developments in art and occultism inspired by a major resurgence of esoteric thought. Yet, pagan as they were, these were either reserved for social elites or confined to male-dominated organizations such as Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.
THEOSOPHY
The movement brought esoteric knowledge into the modern era and into popular consciousness with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s establishment of Theosophical society in New York in 1875. It was an esoteric religious movement that spawned the modern occult revival and the cohesion of a formal Western Esoteric Tradition, although the bulk of the spiritual traditions it encompassed were Eastern. Theosophy had a major impact on art as modernism sought modes of expression that were psychic rather than representational. The movement inspired artists like Hilma Af Klint and Olga Frobe-Kapteyn to engage in mystical practices yielding work of praternatural and vanguard imagery.
SPIRITUALISM
Spiritualism was popularized in the late 19th century alongside the rise of Theosophy.
The practice of Spiritualism held a prominent place in Chiara’s work. She used it as a vehicle to conjure obscure personalities, often tragic, galvanizing them with powerful agencies of revolt that were deprived them in the eras during which they lived. It also created a platform for one of Chiara’s greatest talents.
Chiara used channeling as more than a theatrical motif to retell stories or revive forgotten personalities. She actually allowed herself to surrender the ego and allow her body to be re-inhabited. She said that another of her muses was Eusapia Palladino, a famous spiritualist who was wildly popular among intellectuals and the aristocracy. She was also from Puglia which is why she was dear to Chaiara’s heart.
She celebrated her in her show at Apalazzo Gallery “With Love From $inister” along with many other of her favorite “alter egos.”
Chiara was amused by the frauds committed by Palladino. She thought they were hilarious and she applauded Palladino for the theatrical tricks that she would use to make tables levitate or produce photographs of ghosts that were obviously paper cut outs. But Chiara had a talent that Palladino lacked. She truly had a gift to channel. When she performed you could feel the commanding presence of something truly otherworldly. Her eyes, her voice, her gestures could shift in manners that were truly supernatural.
She used this gift to “bring back” historical personages and endow their stories with new meaning and gird them with new weapons.
In the gallery was also displayed a case containing a discarded skin. This to me is where she concealed the esoteric secret of the show. Just like Nicholas Poussin would conceal inverted pentagrams in his paintings. The discarded skin signifies the shedding of the artist’s ego whereby a genuine invocation of a transdimensional being can occur.
She did all of this in the abode she constructed of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale Witch which she transformed into an interdimenional portal where the spirits could come and go as she willed them. Here she is dressed as Annie Jones, the bearded lady from PT Barnum’s freak show.
Zalumma Agra, was another of these transdimensional beings, was fetishized invention of PT Barnum displayed as a sideshow attraction of Cicassian Beauties, these were women of legendary beauty coveted as concubines for their rare elegance and kept as slaves by Persian Sultans and Italian nobility. Combining pain of female slavery and objectification with the fetishized delusions of side show pornography – Chiara could restore Zalumma Agra in a whole new way.
At Documenta 13, Chiara managed a double channeling, first by channelling Zalumma Agra – who always remained silent in PT Barnum’s exposition – and have her “demonically possessed” by art critic turned feminist, Carla Lonzi, into reciting the manifesto “I say I” of Rivolta Femminile, a the feminist group she founded in Rome in 1970. In this way she could these so-called “freaks” from their confinement and granted the gift of speech for the first time.
ASTRAL PROJECTION
Theosophy intrioduced Astral Projection to popular consciousness. The core concept was that the physical world is material manifestation of an invisible world that exists parallel to it. This dimension is accessible though dreams, the realm of the subconscious. The human body also has an astral counterpart, or “astral body.” Through the training of the mind the astral body can disengage from the physical body with its consciousness intact, and explore the realms of the astral.
There was the idea of the Akashic Library. These represent a compendium of all human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred in the past, present, or future. They are believed by theosophists to be encoded in the astral plane of existence.
Chiara was fascinated with “gaps” in the historical record. She delighted in these by filling up the gaps with new interpretations that she could create and take control over. But she was also fascinated by the potential astral projection afforded to discover the secret or suppressed nature of events that have been erased from history.
For the US performance “There Is Something You Should Know”, at Microscope Gallery in 2016 Chiara initiated the audience as the secret society SIS (Scuola Iniziatica Smithiana) in the form of an esoteric gnostic group seminar, in an attempt to bring back the spirit of the underground cinema pioneer Jack Smith, and channel one of his obscure performances through subconscious time-travel.
Here are some excerpts:
Secret societies (initiatory orders) are groups of people that preserve and gradually transmit among themselves a knowledge that is [neither] easily comprehended, ]
[nor] accessible . That knowledge is often transmitted through initiation (i.e. personal experience, rituals, symbolism).
The SIS modus operandi is based on a metaphysical approach as [are those of] most of all the [nearly all] secret societies. SIS trains the imagination of its followers in order to let them experience that performance in their subconscious.
SIS has chosen the lobster as its main symbol: a holy animal representing the values of a society operating against the spectacular regime of the visual and materialistic culture.
This is an advise [Please by advised]: Tonight some of you will enter in contact with the astral sphere, experiencing vivid mental images.
[IT IS] UP TO YOU TO DECIDE WHETEHER OR NOT TO PARTICIPATE.
WE CAN START
CLOSE YOUR EYES RELAX AND LISTEN TO MY WORDS
Montezland belongs to a 5dimensional space that can be reached through various methods of astral projection and lucid dreaming. Do not be afraid to leave the body at night because, while we sleep we always do it and nothing bad ever happened to anyone.
NOW VISUALISE MONTEZLAND
Montezland should be imagined as a huge huge thoughtform generated by the audience. The land is composed by high mountains on the top and a huge central plain area.
Visit the market: try the exotic jewels on, and taste the exotic wine, in a longneck bottle. You never saw bottles with such a long neck before.
Now you see a marble lion, ride it.
Concerning the wildlife of Montezland, several Smithians who have already experienced the out of body trip disagree with each other. However, the list of animals that there has [have] been seen during the visualisation processes are (in order): sirens , penguins COVERED WITH JEWELS, lobsters, camels and cobras. The lobster is a holy animal in montezlandic culture. They are dedicated to the saint giving name to the island, Maria Montez. Please visualize the animals and pick up one that you consider holy among them, it will be your guide to the island.
Visualize the holy montezlandic animal
And say softly one time
“O Maria Montez, give socialist answers to a rented world!”
THE GOLDEN DAWN AND MAGICAL EVOCATION
The hermetic order of the golden dawn was created in London by extracting and emphasizing the occult aspects of freemasonry through an initation system that included women. Annie Horniman, Molina Mathers, and Oscar Wilde’s wife were among their membership.
The Golden Dawn synthesized the various traditions that had informed Western Occultism for centuries into one cohesive structure. These included primarily Hebrew Qabalah but also Astrology, Tarot, and the magical practices of Elemental Evocation. A key element of Chiara’s practice.
In a lecture once, Chiara displayed this still from Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. It features Marjorie Cameron
CHAOS MAGIC: AUTOMATIC DRAWING
CHAOS MAGIC: THE CREATION OF SIGILS
The incantation forms the outer delineation of the mural drafted in Chiara’s calligraphic style of automatic drawing. In Carroll’s words:
This rite may be performed as a sacrament of invocation to raise a particular manifestation of energy for inspiration, divination, or communion with particular domains of consciousness. It may be performed as an act of enchantment in which spells are projected to modify physical reality.
ARADIA THE GOSPEL OF THE WITCHES AND THE MURAL AT ISCP
Aradia is a text written by folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland in 1899. Its contents were provided by his acquaintance with the spiritualist Maddalena, who claimed a magical pedigree deriving from an ancient line of Tuscan witches.
So the concept of this piece are informed by both Witchcraft and Spiritualism.
In the manuscript, the Greek goddess Diana is depicted much like the Gnostic goddess Sophia, as the true creator of the universe who has been obscured by her demiurge offspring – an inferior god driven by tyrannical impulses whom the Gnostics equated with the biblical Jehovah.
In the narrative, Diana commands her daughter Aradia to descend to earth to instruct the enslaved masses in the arts of witchcraft so that they may be liberated from their oppressors.
The tropes in the mural drawn from Liber Null are instructional. In an earlier version of the work, these instructions were rendered as leaflets, originating in the two-dimensional confines of the wall and then distributed outwards as materialized pamphlets traversing dimensional space.
By creating this work, Chiara assumes the role of Aradia as educator. include methods for the construction of magical sigils, the invocation of spirits, and the restraining of enemies.
III. PROTECTION
The enemies that the mural intends to restrain are Patriarchal, Ecclesiastical and Political hierarchies.
The Paleochristian symbolism scattered throughout the mural exposes the ancient use of symbol to enslave the subconscious. Chiara understood the parallels between magical evocation (i.e. the binding of spirits and elementals) and political tactics employed for domination and enslavement over women and the general masses. Her magical grasp of the significance of symbol in ritual practice elucidated its powerful presence in political propaganda and religious obscuration. She believed that the spiritual birthright of humanity, which she expressed skillfully in her studies of occultism, had been deliberately suppressed by religious dogma. The female aspects of divinity had been silenced and defiled. These developments heightened her loathing of injustice, poverty, and sexism.
Many instructional elements of the mural are intended as spells of protection against social and spiritual conditioning. Diagrams for the construction of auric force fields and circles of protection are illuminated for this purpose. In effect, the dynamic power of the piece serves as a talisman of protection.
IV. DIANA
The vocabulary of myth is essential to the working of ritual magic. It comprises the whole of the language of the subconscious mind, and magic deals exclusively with the macrocosmic-microcosmic matrix of the subconscious.
In Arantia, Diana is regarded as Creatrix of the cosmos. Gender is a dualistic condition distinct only in the realm of matter, it becomes more diaphanous and eventually dissolves completely in ascending to the higher planes. In Gnostic mythology, the lower gods created this rift dividing mankind from “the things above.” Just as Jehovah asserted sole dominance over his creation. Diana grieves for the ignorance unleashed upon humanity and the servitude with which it has been cursed. In the mural, too, Diana is personified as Truth.
Chiara portrays the body of the goddess as dismembered and scattered.
The chief implication of this dismemberment is the inversion of the Solar Deity myth toward the female principle. The severed body of Diana mirrors the severed body of Osiris in Egyptian mythology whose various members were hidden by the fratricide of Set (Ignorance, Darkness, the Underworld.) In the original myth, it is Isis who collects the various members enabling the resurrection of her husband-brother.
All slain and resurrected gods are solar gods, symbolizing the circadian cycle, where Diana is inevitably lunar. The inversion of a mythological complex is a powerful act of both postmodernism and magic. It subverts the material framework of the subconscious to affect profound change.
It replicates the formula essential to alchemy whereby the male and female polarities are conjoined and thus obliterated. Through the transmutation accomplished by the mural, Diana becomes the Sun. And the artist assumes the dual roles of Isis as orchestrator of resurrection and Arantia as light-bringer.