“For darkness is not the absence of light, but the terror lucis, the fear of light. It wanders around the boundaries of insight, and plays out every possibility, so that it may avoid the one it truly needs to face.” ~ Franz Baader [i]

When one encounters an artist who transcends the phases of illumination and takes on universal life tasks and existential problems through their work, someone who makes the synthesis of immanent and transcendent aspects of existence the core of their artistic journey, they must avoid the clichéd verbosity that hides the essence. József Gaál’s art fits within the grand framework of humankind’s universal spiritual archetype. His life’s path, the arc of his creative activity, is one of metanoia – a turning back, a form of inner emigration. His paintings, graphics, and sculptures capture the ontological differences between the spiritual and the corporeal, using the resurrection of forgotten forces to attempt to transcend the self. These are primarily consciousness processes that enter into a pact with the somber magnificence of primal fear. His art stands at the center of the imagination of life, where he deconstructs the boundless illusions imposed by the unlimited complexities of demonic forces. His activity is an ascetic practice, where the external infinity, in unity with the internal infinity – encompassing the facts of the universe – identifies with each other. The grotesque realism that lines up on the cold-breeze porch of the intermediary existence reveals a process that reflects the fractured vision of the self. His sense of mission depicts Adam Kadmon, the First Man, arising from the lessons of “descending to the anti-intellectual instinctive level of self-expression” [ii]. His visions are an artistic revelation of the alchemical transmutations of the homo insipiens. The decoding of the world-explaining analogies revealed through his works does not promise a comfortable journey. The path he has chosen is a radical mode of the construction-destruction struggle: the recreation of our lost innocence, the harnessing of the energies of sin and decay for our service, the sacred and mystical re-transformation with divine intelligence, the rediscovery of higher realms of our degraded consciousness through the regions of insight, leading through the agonizing torments of existential longing to the horizon-independent endpoint of transcending the self. József Gaál’s works, equivalent to initiation, present the possibility of stepping out of the eternal cycle, made accessible through painful revelations realized in art, culminating in the death of the self, a cleansed self-consciousness.

Metaarchaism – I’mmortal

“When everything that was important was lost, when the entire world disappeared, and only a few sheets of paper fought with their conspicuous whiteness, then nothing could be done but to devise signals, permanently mixing possible and impossible worlds, reconstructing traces of memory, leaving the mark of the present on the paper in black ink, for example [iii].” József Gaál’s self-constituting art theory is metaarchaism, an anamnesis of humanity’s spiritual progress. During the tectonic movement of the mind’s deeper layers, the reconciliation and elevation of the disappeared unified world-creating forces, and the polymerised, alienated components of culture, into the dimension of spiritual and cultural cultivation. The meta-arché, the essence that touches essential points of the human being, is extracted through creative activity that articulates the higher levels of plastic art. Its content shapes the ontological hermeneutics of life, the complex morphogenetic field of the collective psyche [iv]. It resides in the mutual interpenetration of the identity poles. The core of its theme and its referential relationships lies in the interaction among death, being, and non-being. Its timelines are Kronos and Kairos (linear and qualitative time), especially in the creative activity that forms archaic art, carrying its mythical meanings into the present. József Gaál’s individual character is expressed through his method of associative concept- and image-making, based on an intense sensitivity to being. “His idea is contextual creation that goes beyond knowledge and understanding, where fragmented and poorly fitting, or already obsolete cultural residues play a role and are activated during the creation process in the shared existential space [v].” Its starting point is the awareness of the common origin of the process and reality that understands and illuminates the world, the primal principle, from which all is derived. The unfolding of the arché, arkhé, and arkhai is communicated in many cases through the techniques and methods relating to the phenomena of eternal reality (alétheia). Therefore, in the holistic system of universal spiritual history, there are no decisive differences or insurmountable boundaries. The psychophysiological and biophysical processes that traverse humanity open the same doors (“The doors of perception [vi]”), and thus thoughts are created along the patterns of imagination, independent of space-time. Scientifically phrased: “The extensive continuum is the general relational element in experience, by which the current existents and the unity of experience itself merge in a single, common world [vii].” To put it simply, the Navajo Indians use sand mandalas for healing, just as the Tibetans do [viii]. József Gaál’s form language, thanks to his mnemonic base, recalls the universal uniformity of ‘cross-cultural hermeneutics’, a comprehensive view of reality. Béla Hamvas calls this tradition. “There is an invisible uniformity among all peoples of the earth, and the further back in time humanity descends, the greater it becomes. The similarity is not to be understood as all architecture leading back to a single protoarchitecture, all religions to a single primordial religion. Such protoarchitecture, primordial religion, or ancient spirit never existed, just as there were no protopeoples, protoraces, or protolanguages. In pre-historical times, all peoples of the earth drew from the primal source of being. They were similar to each other because each lived from the same spirit. Independent of each other, sometimes close to each other, sometimes far apart, similar races, similar languages, or different races and languages, but each of them took their ultimate thoughts from the same ancient spiritual revelation. This ancient spiritual revelation was the foundation of the order of states; it was the basis of the similarity of religions, life orders, and societies. Its purity was preserved over many generations and passed down from one generation to another. This was the shared metaphysics of all the ancient peoples of the earth. The Celts, Aztecs, Hindus, Tibetans, Hebrews, and Greeks all drew from and lived by the same ancient spirit [ix].” We can observe the descending and ascending symbolic level chains of this ancient, lost metaphysical revelation in József Gaál’s art.

“Meta-tron omega”

“If one wants to be a piper, one must go to hell and learn how to blow the pipe there.” ~ Attila József

In József Gaál’s art, there is no dominant genre. His works cannot be confined to a single category, nor should they be. His oeuvre – including his written works – gradually uncovers the layers of consciousness. Through this, he identifies clear connections and correspondences related to humanity’s primordial mode of existence, exploring the cultural intertwining of its unspeakable mysteries, wandering across the homeomorphic web of external and internal stages of existence. “Indra’s web is the universe itself, with reflecting and interconnected formations and the flow of images nourished by one another [x].” His depiction technique, following this organic weave, seeks and resolves those focal points that can explain the present-day degradation of humanity, its forgetfulness of existence, and ontological corruption, which most people, almost without exception, want to avoid or escape. Delving into the deepest recesses of the mind, descending to the roots of the Tree of Life, the forced casting processes of the spirit’s creations, locked in matter, emerge under the crossfire of his artistic gestures and brushstrokes. These are erroneous associations that merely cover up, obscure, and lock in the soul. His works, oscillating between extremes, attempt to find that superposition in which, through the brutal intervention of inorganic installations, sentient beings who have forgotten themselves can restore their archaic heritage, and thus themselves. The symbolism of József Gaál’s works [xi], by revealing the dialectic of the hidden-unhidden, the apparent-visibility, exposes the upward-trending immaterial possibilities of perception, using the technique of counterpoint to lead humanity towards the essential determinations of its life. The psychosomatic misery of the psyche, detached from its true self, reveling in self-excess, the uncertainty of its existential limitations, and the murderous vulnerability of its coarse physical manifestations of mental energy, are familiar to all the ‘great minds’ (Goethe, Dante, Verdi, Beethoven, Lovecraft, Hieronymus Bosch, Munch, Lucian Freud, Delacroix, Francis Bacon, Zdzisław Beksiński – the list is almost endless). Writers, with their pens dipped in the midnight black ink of their souls, try to write out the corrosive root causes of humanity’s lost and wasted golden age. Visual artists, through sounds, drawings, sculptures, and buildings, respond to the dimensions of darkness, surpassing them, guiding the decayed and corrupted human mind through its delusions toward enlightenment. Our modern age, magnifying the Industrial Revolution by multiples, seeks the apotheosis that dissolves the cosmic dissonance of existential relations increasingly far from spiritual-metaphysical ascension – setting aside art itself – and sees it primarily in technology.

Polyesthetics – Moloch eats the Trojan Horse in a Robot’s Hand

“Excess in all things leads to sin.” ~ Boethius

Through his works, József Gaál presents the ‘Age of Penance’, depicting a journey to Canossa, in which humanity, having learned from the mistakes of history, must reckon with itself and take action. Art, culture, science, religion, and faith are redirected to confront the existential crisis, leading to a metaphorical breath of metaphysical air. However, during this struggle, new traps emerge, for humanity cannot simply replace itself within the frameworks of pure life’s principles (The Golden Rule, the Golden Mean, the Golden Ratio). It calls upon technology, seeing it as a potential for transcending the sedated consciousness. Yet, the idealistic solutions to existential issues offered by practical acts merely provide crutches. The geometric center of life’s architecture is covered by another layer of meaning, pressing down heavily on humanity. From the chaotic pile, easily accessible items are selected (cultural fragments, original ideas, ‘visible protrusions of thoughts’, etc.), in an attempt to form a clumsy, often ill-intentioned self-actualization. “The total design system of the telecommunication world, independent of the actual, social, natural reality… culminates in the industrial-technological polyesthetic spectacle within the digital quasi-universe. This second reality is no longer a window to the world but a quarantine designed for endless use, increasingly enclosed by filters, directed towards the natural world and the invalidated cultural past [xii].” The singularity of Silicon Valley’s information technology [xiii], the processes preparing the full-scale technological-biological transhumanism of social engineering, directly leads to the impersonal pseudo-reality of the Transhuman Fetish’s induced madness. The protoplasmic mass, with its independent enzymatic system, generates impulse signals that ‘figuratively’ enter a virtual space connected to a network of monitoring machines (computer-generated collective consciousness), creating an artificial world that makes the fundamentals of reality even more malleable. The human mind thus becomes merely a “ghost in the shell” [xiv] – “a spirit in a shell”. As József Gaál puts it: “A rootless hybrid prosthetic being, quasi-transcendental, suffering from cultural amnesia, metaphysically amputated, an autonomous body biomass [xv].” This is one of the pivotal phenomena of the Kali Yuga period, which he integrates into the discussion. The Hindu Iron Age is characterized by the general dissolution of consciousness movements – thus also the architecture of the extensive world, where humanity’s true being – body, soul, and spirit – is reduced to an avatar [xvi], a symbolically shaped entity, or more precisely: a “hybrid intelligence biometric avatar” (HIBA) [xvii]. “On the way to the posthuman ‘Brave New World’ [xviii],” humanity is no longer a reflection of God (creatio evanata), but rather an eternally cyclical process (Samsara), a vegetative life form incapable of reflecting on its own fate, transformed into a symbol. Homo sapiens becomes homo insipiens, ‘hybrid’, meaning dual, ‘diabolical’ (double-being), painfully heterodetermined in dualistic form. Driven primarily by the fear of death, humanity places its faith in technology. “It will fix it.” “It will help.” The escape from authentic self-creation, driven by external influences, ultimately turns the ‘faith’ in technology into the executioner of one’s own life. The mass-produced, patched-up fakes of the prototype of Adam and Eve. From the ruins of the original archetype, the elements of the world are gathered, reassembled, but only into a phantom-like imagination. We mean well, but we do it poorly. “The capacity to concentrate is the organizing and controlling force that prevents the individual structure of the original organization from being dissolved by the chaotic accumulation of assimilated elements. This is a tendency that creates a common point of reference [xix].”

József Gaál pays significant attention to this issue in both his writings and creations. His masked prosthetic beings, trapped in the previously mentioned space-time loop, send out warning signals, alerting the viewer: the unrestrained expansion of technology, with its ever-delayed innovations, leads to the endless polarization of our attention. As a result, reality once again reaches humanity through broken, interfered projections. This polyesthetics takes on the counterproductive, self-nullifying ghostly image of the world’s chaotic and tangled versions, replacing the original archetype. Humanity avoids confrontation with itself, driven by the comfort technology provides (“comfort is the pillow of Satan”), and, as a result, falls under the primal forces of reality’s raw, pure formative processes.

Damnatio memoriae

“I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity… [xx]” ~ William Blake

There is a very distinctive ‘József Gaál-like motif’ in this metaarchaic metaphysical revelation. “The accumulated ornamentation (horror vacui), with its complicated stylization, neutralizes the seemingly terrifying world, which appears as inexplicable and inscrutable. In contrast, the essence of expressive ornamentation is the revelation of the destructive temptation, the gap, the absence, the exposure of error, the dissonance created by the impossibility of reconciling prostheses. When the elegant ornamental shell disintegrates, the archetypes surface, and only through the imbalance can they become recognizable [xxi].” The attitude of the philosophia perennis (perennial wisdom), which frequently employs Eastern terminology or incorporates the visions of mythological eras, is measured by the cruelty of inciting vigilance. “The tragedy of raw expression dismisses the pleasure and joy sought in beauty, which is, in reality, an escape [xii].” For József Gaál, ‘ecce homo’ emerges in the prison of existential plunder, the last convulsions of a consciousness far removed from metaphysical-theological synchronicity. Something surpassed, a homeless melancholy flows from his works. Cast shadows, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet murmurings, stealthily slide across his creations. Whatever he creates, the atmosphere of his artworks is shaped by the low-frequency atonal vibrations of bygone eras. His creations aggressively invade the viewer’s mood. The spreading horror then freezes the space-time, the hysterical bodies’ bantering creates a muffled vacuum in the atmosphere, throwing the viewer into the infernal world of internal introspection, at the gates of untold phenomena of our fate – “Hannibal ante portas.” The human eye scans through unknown form-initiatives. Sculptures, images, graphics, busts, and creatures populating Dante’s Inferno, or Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, evoking the profane Calvary of uncreated life symbols. As if the troubled, earth-born sorrow tried to participate in the forces that hold worlds together, creating itself from accumulated cultural–historical–theological experiences, but ultimately, it becomes nothing but an awkwardly assembled, grotesque biomass. József Gaál’s beings are pushed to a point where the fabric of illusion (the maya veil) tears apart around them. Due to their fear of light, this revelation, however, turns the manifested reality into an ocean of torment, often dragging the artist along with it. Creatures born from the subconscious regions, revived visions from the artist’s journey through hell. Almost all of them are characterized by underdevelopment and incompleteness. Misfortunate, stunted, grotesque, visionless creatures begging for existence. To escape the cage of impermanence, they sell their dreams, their feelings, but all the while, they find themselves trapped in the same chaotic, pre-creation forms of external and internal manifestation. They remain earthbound. Often faceless, headless, with awkward limbs, vacant gazes. Strangers in their own bodies. Stumps, tentacles, the informal chaos of phenomena. Empty, without ancient wisdom, devoid of moral norms, they forget about cosmological parallels – “as above, so below [xxiii]”. The destructive fury of fear sweats a manic, stimulated life through simulated realities. Their movements are uncoordinated, their gestures devalued into gnome-like figures, fused into the spirit body. Their clumsy, withdrawn characters sink into the muck of cultural realisation, the abstract, aberrant language of dichotomies. Unity disappears, and the ability to connect is lost. Instead, we observe the suffocatingly terrifying catastrophe of scattered, obscene Homo Humus phenomena, with fragmented identities.

The Immortals

Ever reeking from the vales of earth

Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,

Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,

Smoke of death meals on the gallow’s verge;

Greed without end, imprisoned air;

Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;

Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm

Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,

Breathing blessedness and savage heats,

Eating itself and spewing what it eats,

Hatching war and lovely art,

Decking out with idiot craze

Bawdy houses while they blaze,

Through the childish fair-time mart

Weltering to its own decay

In the glare of pleasure’s way,

Rising for each newborn and then

Sinking for each to dust again.

But we above you ever more residing

In the ether’s star translumined ice

Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,

Wear nor age nor sex for our device.

All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,

Your murders and lascivious delighting

Are to us but as a show

Like the suns that circling go,

Changing not our day for night;

On your frenzied life we spy,

And refresh ourselves thereafter

With the stars in order fleeing;

Our breath is winter; in our sight

Fawns the dragon of the sky;

Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,

Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.

~ Herman Hesse

The Labyrinth of Memory – memento mori

“Creation is the source’s painful exit from itself.” ~ Jakob Böhme

The processes that sought to conceal the true nature of life become the main information running through the neural networks of the collective psyche, assembled from the individual’s forgetfulness of existence. The sabotage of this information, the interrogation of the comfortable states applied to the diminished spirit systems, is a defining characteristic of József Gaál’s art. His deeply autodeterministic mode of expression does not take on the characteristics of an aesthetic vision that seeks to inspire, but rather avoids comforting illusions. It does not lull, it does not let rest, and it avoids pious hypocrisy. Viewing his works, a compelling discomfort emerges, urging the exploration of the enigmatic signs of existence. It offers the ghostly forms, existing silently in dreams, the opportunity to notice themselves within the twin-mirror labyrinths he creates (“as above, so below”) and to recognize their existence as fragmentary beings. His artistic force unrelentingly lifts the veil from their empty visual orgies, from superficial activities, and from impersonal quasi-self-transcendence. The mission of this highly unique intermediary art is to trap the self-deceptive nature of consciousness and dissolve the spiritual-corporeal energies of human instincts, drawing them into the intimate sphere of remembrance of death. His works attempt this by invoking alertness without any calculated sentimentality. The immersion into the existential limits with a naked soul and bare brain thus cannot transform the age of atonement into an enlightened spiritual advancement. Man can step from the chaotic and disorderly pre-creation state of the Hebrew origin myth, Tohu va Bohu, through the labyrinth of remembrance and the intermediate existence (creatio creativa) into the ‘Nirvana’ state. Through the conscious creation (creatio formativa) of inner forms from the disunity of the uncreated ‘anyone’, the many become one. (”Hiába fürösztöd önmagadban, csak másban moshatod meg arcodat.” [”in vain you bathe your own face in your self; it can be cleansed only in that of others.”] [xxiv]) In the empty gaze, the eternal glance appears, overflowing beyond the grasping (subject) of the grasped (object) through the soul’s presence and becoming self-reflective through the dissolution of distinction (samadhi). The bare source-consciousness appears in a fusion accompanied by silent awe. The Adam Kadmon, stepping out of the icon with the smile of Arlequin (the clown), transcends the processes, becoming the superhuman, both within (enstase) and without (extase).

The anthropological motif of death is fundamental, but what is no longer certain is whether we transcend death during our lifetime. The human who possessed full consciousness of death was once the shaman. His task was to act as the connector between the lower and upper worlds – he travels and maintains contact between the two. The shaman tells those who seek his help which advice to follow. He fulfills his role in spiritual education, spiritual protection, bringing repressed issues to the surface, discussing them, and healing. This calling, in this mediating order, often aligns with the artist’s task. The transcendent spiritual human’s metaphysical mission is to awaken and recreate human consciousness to its maximum using the toolset adapted to his talent. “His process consists of the fact that re-recognition detaches from the contingencies of the first encounter and ascends to the ideal level. We all know this. In re-recognition, it always acknowledges that we now have a more authentic understanding than we could have had during the initial encounter, in the moment of its temporary bias. Re-recognition sees the eternal in the transient. The true function of the symbol and the symbolic content of artistic languages is to carry out this process [xxv].” This is what Géricault did with his painting The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse). There is a dual boundary here. One is how the boundary between life and death is balanced – the other is the ancient prohibition: “Do not eat your companion,” morally, when it is permissible to cross it. The two boundaries merge. Morally, this boundary can only be crossed when there is a direct life-threatening danger. Laws and customary social expectations pertain to rather everyday matters, situations, and events. This is very interesting because the human psyche also adapts to these general cases. But if, for example, someone spends an extended period on the front lines, once they are sent home, they need to undergo re-education and trauma treatment because they would essentially be a danger to themselves and others, as they have been trained for months, years, to violate the Ten Commandments. The question is: how does the Mosaic Ten Commandments function in such a situation? Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa was essentially a manifesto, shaking the foundations of rationality, classicism, and the Enlightenment’s cool argumentative system and its striving for perfection. No one had ever thought about why it was wrong to eat a person. József Gaál’s art can also be seen as a manifesto. His works tackle very tough, harsh topics. His tools and expressions are highly provocative. His recipes often do not generate popular effects, just as the healing with spider venom in the past did not prioritize increasing comfort but rather the process of healing. At the same time, the key to understanding the mechanics of events lies in dismantling the self-deception of the person wrestling with himself and in throwing away the crutches used as prosthetics in every area.

József Gaál’s constructed world’s roots penetrate back into the unconscious regions. In many cases, there are no specifics, only intuitions, hunches. As with the famous Fermat’s conjecture, here it is also impossible to know or prove whether the proposition is true, but it certainly works [xxvi]. Since neither words, nor picture frames, nor material can fully capture a true reflection of reality, artists have always used various tricks to transcend the limits of material, tools, and vocabulary, returning these overflowing meanings to the material through their creations, thus expressing their original message – the hidden histories of the world. In painting, this is exemplified by anamorphosis. If we view József Gaál’s art this way, we can say that his distorted images gain their true form, message, and call from a particular angle, thereby breaking free from the narrow confines of exomorphological determinism of the human form. The infinite manifestations of the ana-morphé point to its ana-logos, with which, on a meta-level, the completeness of human existence receives new meaning, while being preserved. From the right perspective, with the right spiritual disposition, the original character of the distorted, elongated – initially unrecognizable images, and the key to their messages, becomes easily readable.

Notes

[i] Damnatio memoriae – A Latin phrase meaning ‘damnation of memory’, referring to the ancient practice of erasing someone from history by destroying their statues, images, or records. This act effectively renders the person non-existent in collective memory.

[i] Béla Hamvas: Antikrisztus. (lit. Antichrist.), http://hamvasbela.uw.hu/Antikrisztus.htm See also: https://archive.org/details/vorlesungenbers00baadgoog/page/n771. 66-67.

[ii] József Gaál: Vezeklések kora. (lit. The Age of Atonement.), MMA, Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2018. 7.

[iii] József Gaál – Attila Jász: The Signs of the Moment, Hommage a Henri Michaux. Published by Arcus Gallery, 1999 – József Gaál’s calligraphy with Attila Jász’s prose poems, 1.

[iv] József Gaál calls this the common “existential space”. Rupert Sheldrake, an English biochemist, uses a broader interpretation, referring to it as morphic resonance, or a morphogenetic field.

[v] József Gaál: Vezeklések kora. (lit. The Age of Atonement.), MMA, Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2018. 8.

[vi] Reference to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.

[vii] Whitehead, Alfred North: Process and Reality, An Essay in Cosmology, The Free Press, New York, 1978. 72.

[viii] Rupert Sheldrake suggests that there exists an energy-level morphic resonance (homeomorphic network) that connects all beings. Sheldrake, Rupert: Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. New York, Riverhead, 1995.

[ix] Béla Hamvas: Scientia Sacra, Magvető Publishing House, Budapest, 1988, 85-86.

[x] József Gaál: The Age of Atonement, MMA, Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2018. 21.

[xi] “A symbol is something we recognize anew” – Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful.

[xii] József Gaál: Vezeklések kora. (lit. The Age of Atonement.), MMA, Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2018. 17-18.

[xiii] Refers to the technological and biological enhancement of the Nietzschean Übermensch, the preparation for posthuman conditions (artificial intelligence, virtual reality, non-binary gender societies, “HIBA”, eternal life, etc.).

[xiv] Reference to Hilary Putnam’s work, Brains in a Vat.

[xv] József Gaál: Vezeklések kora. (lit. The Age of Atonement.), MMA, Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2018. 18-19.

[xvi] In Hinduism, ‘descent’ refers to the manifestation of a deity in human or animal form. In the digital realm, it refers to an image, symbol, or piece of information.

[xvii] https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/920081/speech-thought-communication-artificial-intelligence-siri-alexa-HIBA

[xviii] József Gaál: Vezeklések kora. (lit. The Age of Atonement.), MMA, Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2018. 43., also referencing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

[xix] Lama Anagarika Govinda: The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy.

[xx] William Blake: A Memorable Vision

“As I walked among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I gathered a few proverbs, thinking that just as the proverbs of a nation reveal the character of the people, so the Proverbs of Hell reveal the nature of Hellish wisdom more than descriptions of buildings or clothes. Returning home, at the abyss of the five senses, where a smooth cliff rises before our current world, I saw a huge Devil wrapped in a dark cloud, floating at the edges of the cliff. With consuming fire, he carved the following words into the rock, which mankind now reads with the inner eye: ‘Who knows, perhaps every bird up in the air’s paths / A boundless, happy world, what the five senses have locked in a cage.’”

[xxi] József Gaál: Hagyomány és átváltozás. (lit. Tradition and Transformation), Museum of Applied Arts, Hopp Ferenc East Asian Art Collection, catalog, Budapest, 2013. 43.

[xxii] József Gaál: Vezeklések kora. (lit. The Age of Atonement.), MMA, Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2018. 10.

[xxiii] Reference to Hermes Trismegistus’ teachings.

[xxiv] Attila József: Nem én kiáltok (lit. No Shriek of Mine), a fragment from the poem. Closely related to the theme, see also Nietzsche: “Therefore we must learn to emerge from impure relations in a pure way, and if necessity demands it, we must be able to wash ourselves clean even in dirty water.” Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human, Szeged, Szukits, 1929. 179.

[xxv] Gadamer: The Relevance of the Beautiful, Athenaeum, 1994, 73.

[xxvi] The famous Fermat’s Last Theorem was recently proven after nearly 400 years.