Of paintings and portals
DEAN BALLINGER looks at one of Salvador Dalí’s late paintings and asks if it contains clues that the artist was an initiate of a secret esoteric society.
In 1965, Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) produced one of the major works of his late career. The Railway Station at Perpignan is a massive painting (2.95m x 4.6m/9ft8in x 15ft), which appears to depict a transcendent vision of some kind. At the centre of the composition is a Greek cross, superimposed over the translucent head and torso of a crucified Christ. The central point where the vertical and horizontal arms of the cross meet has been rendered as a square, refulgent with a celestial gold. Four rays of golden light shine from each corner of the square to the corresponding corner of the canvas, giving the impression that we are looking at a doorway into Heaven or some other empyrean realm. The figure of Dalí himself is depicted, from a feet-first perspective, being uplifted or sucked into the doorway, with the same figure repeating at the top of the image, above a railway carriage looming out of the canvas above the top of Christ’s head. The rest of the canvas consists of a wispy cloudscape of golden brown, within which a variety of other figures and objects are positioned, notably (on the left and right sides) the figures of the praying man and woman from JeanFrancois Millet’s 1859 painting The Angelus, a Dalían obsession that was referenced in many of his works.
For most viewers and critics, this painting can be readily interpreted as a representative piece from a period in which Dalí was explicitly engaging with religious, particularly Catholic, iconography (examples include The Sacrament of the Last Supper
(1955) and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus
(1958-1959). However, Dalí himself explained the painting as an expression of a genuine mystical experience he had undergone at Perpignan station in the 1960s. The backstory to this experience lies in the late 1940s, when Dalí and his wife/muse Gala returned to Spain after several years living in the USA. A proud Catalonian, Dalí resettled in the provincial fishing village of Port Lligat, near the coastal town of Cadaques (his house there is now preserved as a tourist attraction). As the major French town closest to the Catalonian border, Perpignan became well-frequented by Dalí as a place where he could use the train to despatch his paintings to his art dealers in Paris, or occasionally despatch Gala and himself to the French capital in
“The Universe is similar in its structure to Perpignan railway station”
order to sample its delights.
Over time, Dalí became aware that there was something creatively invigorating about the environs of Perpignan, especially its railway station. As described in his typically modest 1966 tome Diary of a Genius, “it is always at Perpignan station, when Gala is making arrangements for the paintings to follow us by train, that I have my most unique ideas. Even a few miles before this, at Boulou, my brain starts moving; but it is the arrival at Perpignan station that marks an absolute mental ejaculation which then reaches its greatest and most sublime speculative height.” This creative high would stay with Dalí afterwards, declining relative to the distance he travelled away from the station. This trend reached an apotheosis on 19 September 1963, when Dalí had “a kind of ecstasy that was cosmogonic and even
stronger than preceding ones. The Universe, which is one of the most limited things that exist, is, all proportions being equal, similar in its structure to Perpignan railway station…” (sans the station’s ticket office, which had been replaced in the vision by the image of an obscure sculpture which Dalí was fixated upon at the time).
By this stage of his career Dalí was an international artworld celebrity whose public image was that of an incorrigible mythomaniac proffering outrageous assertions about his life and work. The ‘ecstasy at Perpignan’ could therefore be readily dismissed as yet another example of Dalí’s wacky theorising. This interpretation was reinforced by other public comments Dalí made on the subject, such as during a 1978 address to a major French art institute. Describing Perpignan railway station as “the gravitational centre of our Universe”, Dalí argued that if it hadn’t been for the geological heft of Perpignan as the pivot linking Spain to the rest of Europe during the æons of continental drift, the Iberian peninsula would have “drifted to Australia and [the Spanish] would now be living amongst the kangaroos – the most dreadful thought conceivable…”
However, corroboration for Dalí’s initial claim to have had a genuine mystical experience at Perpignan station is presented in the ‘occult autobiographies’ of British writer Patrice Chaplin. In City of Secrets (2007), Chaplin presented a new take on the Rennes-le-Château mythos. Eschewing the ‘Priory of Sion’ fabulations, Chaplin claimed that Bérenger Saunière was implicated in an esoteric society preserving Cabalistic knowledge, a society based in the mediæval Catalonian city of Girona (FT226:46-52). This premise is elaborated further in The Portal (2010), in which Chaplin describes undertaking an initiatory pilgrimage through a hidden ‘sacred landscape’ spanning Pyrenean France and Catalonian Spain (FT268:62-63). Chaplin’s guide leads her on a convoluted route through 11 locations, beginning at Girona and ending at the Pyrenean peak of Mt Canigou, which corresponds to the positions of the stars in the constellation of the Great Bear. All of these locations are described as marking points of Earth energy that, in most instances, are strong enough to serve as portals to spiritual realms that co-exist with our mundane human reality. If suitably prepared – through training in occult disciplines like the Cabala, for example – an initiate can access these portals and undergo profound mystical experiences. Among other revelations, it is disclosed that Mt Canigou is the midway point in a north-south line of Earth energy connecting Rennes-le-Château to Girona; and that the tower built by Saunière in Rennes-le-Château was designed to complement an ancient one built in Girona, in order to enhance the spiritual energy of Canigou.
Upon arrival in Perpignan, location number 10 on the pilgrimage, Chaplin’s guide brings up Dalí’s experience:
“It seemed that here Dalí had experienced another place altogether. He had quite inadvertently stepped into another time and space, and it affected him profoundly, as one might expect. He spoke of an apocalyptic vision” – one that he put into his work (whether this included paintings other than
The Railway Station at Perpignan is not specified). In the ensuing discussion, it is implied that Dalí’s artistic sensitivity, combined with his deep identification with the Catalonian landscape, had rendered him receptive enough to ‘tune in’ to the mystical energy of Perpignan and, through the portal there, experience a vision of the centre of the Universe: the kind of ineffable ‘cosmic consciousness’ experience that can perhaps only be adequately conveyed through a non-textbased medium like painting. The guide reveals that she had personally known Dalí during this period, and had suggested he visit location number eight, the village of Perillos, north of Perpignan, which had long been deserted due to the negative energy of the area perpetually unsettling the inhabitants in forms such as recurring collective nightmares. The guide’s description of Dalí’s experience of Perillos – that he was deeply disturbed by the feeling of the place and came away from it “completely changed”, the “layers of reality and dimensions” of the location being something that affected him for the rest of his life – can perhaps be read as indicating that Dalí had other experiences of landscape mysticism alongside his Perpignan vision (albeit, in this instance, of a less beneficent nature).
These revelations led Chaplin to surmise that Dalí was not just a sensitive but an initiate: someone who had undergone the ritual training in the sacred wisdom of the area. In both books, Chaplin states that the region has long attracted artists and writers, many of whom have become affiliated with the esoteric group responsible for safeguarding its occult knowledge. A notable figure in this respect was the French filmmaker and poet Jean Cocteau, who met the teenage Chaplin in Girona in the 1950s, and who she also believes was one of the participants in a ritual she stumbled upon at the time. (Cocteau was also appropriated by Pierre Plantard as one of the ‘Grand Masters’ in his Priory of Sion hoax; FT212:4450). Chaplin’s assumption that the philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco was similarly involved is somewhat surprising in light of his academic stature as a postmodern sceptic; a position reflected in his 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which is a withering satire on secret societies and conspiracy theories. Although Chaplin questions her guide about the extent of Dalí’s esoteric activities – especially wanting to know if he, too, undertook the pilgrimage to Mt Canigou – a definitive answer is not forthcoming. Chaplin thereby validates The Railway Station at Perpignan as a genuinely visionary work, and adds some provocative new shadings to Dalí’s complex mystique. At the very least, art historians are provided with a novel framework for considering the meanings of Dalí’s oeuvre post-1965.
REFERENCES
Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius,
Hutchinson, London, 1966.
Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, Faber & Faber, London, 1997.
Robert Descharnes & Gilles Neret, Dalí, Taschen, Cologne, 2004. Patrice Chaplin, City of Secrets, Quest
Books, Wheaton, IL, 2007. Patrice Chaplin, The Portal, Quest
Books, Wheaton, IL, 2010.
2 DEAN BALLINGER teaches media studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He has previously written for FT on Stanley Kubrick, David Bowie, Mark E Smith and the Beatles.