Don Quixote and the Brilliant Name of Fire: Qabalah, Tarot and Shakespeare in the Greatest Novel

By Michael Buhagiar

Don Quixote and the Brilliant Name of Fire reveals for the first time the true extent of the esoteric dimension of the classic Spanish work. References to cards of the Tarot deck, a means of progression on the inner journey, have long been noted in it; but Don Quixote and the Brilliant Name of Fire will show their full extent, as well as demonstrating spectacular visual representations of Hebrew letters of the Qabalah, and the strict allegory of psychic transformationin the way of the Shakespeare playsin which these symbols have their place. The close kinship of Don Quixote and the Shakespeare First Folio becomes plain, and their origin in a common author, neither Will Shakespeare nor Cervantes.

www.thegreatpesher.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 4, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469101651

Michael Buhagiar

Michael Buhagiar was born in 1954 in Sydney, Australia. He spent several years at Sydney University, studying Medicine initially, before graduating with a first-class honours degree in Science. He has had poems, book reviews and articles published in leading journals, all deriving from an intense enthusiasm for symbolism and the written word. His first book, Ugly Dick and the Goddess of Complete Being (2003), is a sequel to the late Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, extending and completing Hughes’ demonstration of the psycho-allegorical dimension of the Shakespeare plays. Don Quixote and the Brilliant Name of Fire is his second published book

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

THE SHAKESPEARE PESHER¹³

CHAPTER TWO

THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

CHAPTER THREE

EPIPHANIES OF THE TAROT

CHAPTER FOUR

THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER FIVE

DON QUIXOTE AND THE HIDDEN HEART

CHAPTER SIX

THE GETTING OF WISDOM

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE HOLY LETTER

CHAPTER EIGHT

AROUND THE CAMPFIRE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

for Anne

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mary Murnain, for opening up to me new worlds of esoteric thought and experience

Lawrence Gerald, for his generosity and support, especially in the provision of the cover photo of Don Quixote and Sancho

Elias Ibrahim, for imparting to me a just a little of his endless knowledge of comparative religion, which changed the course of this book

Ian Drummond, for his general support, in particular the provision of a resource at just the right time, in a remarkable case of synchronicity

Jo Kay, for her artistry and expertise in designing the cover

Anne Paterson, my partner, most of all, for her unfailing support and enthusiasm for this project. It would not have happened without her.

After the plodding bipeds of historiography have given up the chase it is for the speedy hounds of philosophy and metaphysical speculation to try and run down the fox . . . Theology (the study of Godly things) is mightily aided in the quest by placing its credence in the axioms of Revelation, which set it high on the mountain-top for a commanding view of the plane, but it is Theosophy (the wisdom—or, if you prefer, the opinions—of the Gods) that shows one the way into the very labyrinthine lair of the beast . . .

Jereer El-Moor, The Occult Tradition of the Tarot in Tangency with Ibn ‘Arabi’s Life and Teachings, Part Two

INTRODUCTION

fig.1.tif

‘The Brilliant Name of Fire’ is an epithet of the Tetragrammaton, the famed IHVH, or Yahweh, in Hebrew הוהי, the very name of God, which was held so sacred that it was forbidden to be pronounced. IHVH maps directly to the Tree of Life (above), the visual framework of the Qabalah, the immensely ancient mystical system which had such a profound impact on the West after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, whence it landed ashore in Lorenzo de Medici’s Florence, to inspire such Renaissance luminaries as Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and Johannes Reuchlin, and then, at some decades remove, Giordano Bruno and Sir Francis Bacon. It is the glorious Qabalistic journey from ignorance to divine enlightenment, tracking the spoor of truth upward through the radiant paths of the Tree of Life, that Don Quixote follows in the novel that bears his name.

Mather Walker, one of the foremost Elizabethan scholars of our time, has beautifully discussed the magical aspects of Don Quixote in his articles on the sirbacon.org site.¹ Spain, as the esoteric capital of the world in the long centuries of its occupation by the Jews and Arabs, provided the perfect setting for the tale of the Great Work, the hero’s journey toward mastery of his own inner life and destiny, that is Don Quixote. Walker points out Templar, Grail, and Sufi mystical influences. Yet he falls some way short of the final goal, catching only glimpses of the marvel at the rainbow’s end. It is the purpose of the argument to come to elucidate the wonders of the esoteric plane of Don Quixote in all its radiance and glory. Much of its intricate detail will fall under our spotlight, which will further reveal, beneath the surface of the literal plane, the schema of a consistent and tightly wrought allegory.

This exegesis will have a dual fascination. The pages to come will present for the first time the spectacular visual representations in Don Quixote of Hebrew letters of the Qabalah, and unveil new portrayals of cards of the Tarot Major Arcana; and, further, reveal the pesher framework (see below) in which they have their place. Two memorable examples among many are the Countess Trifaldi, with her triple train of black, as symbolic of the Hebrew letter Shin, ש, of such immense Qabalistic importance (Ch.7); and the Don hanging upside-down from the stirrup of a horse, following his near drowning in the previous episode, as references to the Hanged Man card of the Tarot deck, and its immediately ancestral card the Drowned Man (pp.121-2).

The Qabalah and Tarot, systems of psychic transformation in themselves, run all through the book, underpinning and enriching it. Many a reader has noted the presence of the Tarot in Don Quixote, but this will be the first rigorous and extended examination, so far as I am aware, of the architectonic primacy of the Qabalah-Tarot in its organisation. The Qabalah was presumed in Renaissance times to have originated with the Jews, and the Tarot maps tightly onto the Tree of Life: so that the presence of the Qabalah-Tarot in Don Quixote is entirely consistent with its setting in Spain, home of the Jews for so long. The Don’s quest is an instance of the path of ascent, several paradigms of which are described in Qabalistic texts. The closest fit is to the Way of the Saint, as portrayed below.

fig.2.tif

At times Don Quixote follows the Way of the Saint loosely, at times extremely closely; but always the general trend is upward, from Malkuth (the grossly material world) to Kether (the ineffable Godhead):

And this path it is which goes forever onward. Its way proceeds undeviatingly forward and forward, upward and upward, unto that goal which has neither beginning nor ending, start nor finish, but journeys eternally in every direction and dimension into infinity.²

Another key reference is to the Rosicrucian path of enlightenment, wherein the subject is initiated into the lowest grade of Zelator (corresponding to Malkuth) and then proceeds to advance through the higher grades, finally to reach, if (s)he be one of the rare few, the rank of Ipsissimus (corresponding to Kether). The Tarot is an integral part of this path.³

There is a further most intriguing aspect to this investigation. This is its rigorous demonstration of the close kinship of Don Quixote as allegory with the Shakespeare plays; and there can be no doubt that both of these pillars of the Western literary tradition were products of the Rosicrucian enlightenment, the key manifestos of which were Fama Fraternitatis (1610) and Confessio Fraternitatis (1615).

Shakespeare criticism took its feet in 1992—before then it had merely crawled—with the publication of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. This epochal work convincingly showed the great tragedies to be psycho-allegories of Will Shakspere’s surrender to, and subsequent recovery from, a colossal nervous breakdown which had stricken him after some time of enthrallment by Puritanism. In my sequel to Hughes’ work, Ugly Dick and the Goddess of Complete Being,⁴ I show this allegory to be organised strictly and indefectibly as a pesher, an allegory along Biblical lines in which each element—character, place, event, and so on—is yoked invariably to a specific value, to create an allegory of immense richness and sophistication. In Chapter One I will discuss my work and its implications in some depth, to prepare the ground for the revelations to follow.

The pesher is a Biblical technique for encoding a hidden level of content beneath the immediately obvious literal plane. Certain elements bear a special pesher meaning to which they are yoked at their every appearance without exception. This last quality should be emphasised, because it lends a suspected pesher to rigorous proof. For example, when we see the word ‘word’ (logos) in the Greek New Testament, we know that it refers to the heir of David when he was outside the monastery, bringing the learning of the monasteries to the villages while he lived there during his marriage. In Acts 6:7 and 12:24 it is used of Jesus himself. Just so do the literal contents of Don Quixote and the Shakespeare plays secrete their peshers, and they are similarly susceptible to proof. The queen of modern pesher studies is the great Australian scholar Dr. Barbara Thiering, and I cannot put it any better than she, in The Book That Jesus Wrote:

While the use of the devices may be suspected in particular passages, the case is only proven when it is found that these rules are always applied, in every instance, and that the concealed history emerging is consistent with itself, with the overall history, and with what is known explicitly from other sources. Consistency is the essential criterion for testing.

Precisely. And it is this indefectible consistency of the Shakespeare plays as pesher that, building on the epochal work of Ted Hughes, I have demonstrated, as exhaustively as is reasonably possible, in my Ugly Dick and the Goddess of Complete Being. The twin Rosicrucian manifestos Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis were also written in the pesher style, to an incredible degree of sophistication,⁵ with which only the First Folio may compare. Allegory is also a key feature of Sufi literature, whose influence on Don Quixote was considerable.

The hero of the Shakespeare First Folio is Will Shakspere of Stratford, while its mentor figure is Sir Francis Bacon. It is Shakspere’s quest that is described therein. The hero of Don Quixote is of course the Don himself. His quest is identical, at its core, with Shakspere’s, as we shall see, and Don Quixote shares many of the allegorical symbols and techniques of its cousin germane. For example, the wood or grove or forest or even single tree bears always without exception in the First Folio the pesher value of the written word, that prime therapeutic tool employed in Will Shakspere’s recovery; the torch or flare, the visual imagination, the inner fire which, acting on the written word, can enable the transformation of the psyche; the arras, the boundary of the conscious ego and the unconscious, so that the four instances in the First Folio of a character’s concealment behind it (the most famous being Polonius’ in Hamlet), together with a further two in Don Quixote, represent the first descriptions in Western literature of the psychological principle of the repression of the libido, some three centuries before the advent of Freud, who is popularly, and erroneously, as we know now, credited with its discovery.

It is hardly surprising that the visual imagination as a principle should be so prominent in the Shakespeare and Don Quixote peshers, for its primacy was a preoccupation of Renaissance philosophers. The Renaissance can indeed be said to have been predicated on it. This was the ‘phantasmal’ age, when forms created on the inward mirror were acknowledged to confer understanding of the given world, and the wisdom that flows from it. Marsilio Ficino, of the Florentine golden age of the 1490s, is eloquent on the impossibility of knowledge without the conversion of sensory data to phantasmal language (sine conversione ad fantasmata):

Using the senses, [spirit] grasps the images of external bodies; now, the soul itself cannot perceive those images directly, given that incorporeal substance, superior to that of the body, cannot be induced by the latter to receive images. Omnipresent in spirit, the soul can easily contemplate images of bodies, reflected in it as in a mirror. It is through those images that it can appraise the bodies themselves.⁶

And it was precisely this principle of the imagination that was anathematised alike by the Protestant Reformation—especially its evilest dysfunctional child, Puritanism—and the post-Reformation Roman Catholic Church, its holy objects confiscated and smashed like their external kin. I cannot put it any more eloquently and passionately than the late Ioan P. Couliano in his magisterial Eros and Magic in the Renaissance:

Hence, one of the goals of the reformation was to root out the cult of idols from the Church . . . ultimately, the Reformation led to a total censorship of the imaginary, since phantasms are none other than idols conceived by the inner sense [author’s italics] . . . By asserting the impious and idolatrous nature of phantasms, the Reformation abolished at one stroke the culture of the Renaissance . . . But, we ask, what was the reaction of the Catholic Church? . . . Far from consolidating the positions assumed by Catholicism during the Renaissance, this movement severed itself completely from them and went in the same directions as Protestantism. It was along the lines of severity and harshness that the Reformation developed, from the Protestant as well as the Catholic side.⁷

And no less vehement and impassioned is the invective against Puritanism in the Shakespeare plays, and Catholicism in Don Quixote. Couliano’s perceptive mention of ‘severity and harshness’ reminds us that the goal of the Qabalistic journey is the attainment of the middle pillar, where the opposites of the right and left pillars are balanced. Thus, the Pillar of Mercy is brought to bear against the unbalanced Pillar of Severity, so typical of Puritanism and Post-Reformation Catholicism, in The Merchant of Venice, as exemplified in the speech ‘The quality of mercy is not strained . . .’⁸ In defending the visual imagination with such vehemence, the genius behind the Shakespeare plays was defending the Renaissance, with all its ennobling achievements, against the depredations of the post-Reformation ideologies; and its vehicle in the Shakespeare and Don Quixote peshers is the torch or flare or Watch.

We shall note, in Chapter Four, the key importance also in Renaissance philosophies of the heart as a subtle rather than grossly physical organ, as the seat of the emotions and the soul. For example, the heart is the organ of association of Tiphareth, the central Sephirah of the Tree of Life of the Qabalah, which was the philosophy of Rosicrucianism, the dominant esoteric movement of that era. This is the pesher value of Cardenio, the root of whose name derives from the Greek kardia, ‘heart’, in the Brown Mountain (Sierra Morena) episode. These two definitive Renaissance values of the imagination and the heart are enshrined in the Shakespeare sonnet 24, which certainly did not proceed from the pen of Will Shakspere of Stratford, but rather from his mentor and saviour:

Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d

Thy beauty’s form in the table of my heart;

My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,

And perspective it is best painter’s art.

For through the painter must you see his skill,

To find where your true image pictur’d lies,

Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,

That hath his windows glaz’d with thine eyes.

Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done.

Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me

Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun

Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee.

   Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,

   They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

When I began my work I agreed with Ted Hughes in seeing no reason to depart from the orthodox line, that the Shakespeare works were written largely by the man from Stratford; and I presumed that he must have pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, in a titanic and successful effort to overcome the demons which had driven him to the brink of psychosis. However, it became apparent to me after some time, from the allegory explicating itself before my eyes, that he must have had aid, from a mentor and saviour who helped effect in him the psychic transformation required, from the Puritan darkness to Gnostic enlightenment, and who was primarily responsible for the plays. The conclusion I drew as to his identity has been abundantly confirmed by my subsequent reading. It could only have been Sir Francis Bacon. One of the great tragedies of modern literary scholarship is that the staggering corpus of high quality work done on the Bacon-Shakespeare question in the 19C and early 20C became buried under the weight of the First World War, and the desperate need felt by Britons for the power of myth to strengthen them in successive mortal crises—the myth of the ‘spear-shaker’, the warrior figure and sun god and greatest Englishman of all, the Romulus-Remus archetype of the foundation age of modern Britain.

There is a vast amount of evidence to suggest that Bacon was indeed the principal author of Don Quixote. Principal, though not sole, in line with the works of Shakespeare, which incorporate contributions from his ‘good pens’, including his brother Anthony, Thomas Kyd, Fletcher and Beaumont, Will Shakspere from Stratford, and others. Bacon led an atelier in the true Renaissance manner, from which emanated, in all likelihood, over six hundred literary works of the Elizabethan era.⁹

The argument to come will focus on the first forty-three chapters of Part 2 of Don Quixote, as well as the affair of the Sierra Morena and the novel of ‘The Curious-Impertinent’, extensive sections which are located