Felice: The great writer in his Memoirs remembers his thoughts as he begins to explain that he is going to write a commentary on his life says: “The life of man is an intended recomposition. One can only consider it to be a prodigious thing qualitatively. It is ephemeral, something so insufficient it’s a miracle that it can assist at something that can outlive it. This has impressed me when directly merited and not to die a natural death has appeared a miracle to me. “Life has appeared to me,” says Jung, “like a plant that lives through its rhizomes so that its own life is not perceptible, hiding in the rhizome, something visible on earth for only a summer. Then it goes away. It is an ephemeral thing. If one meditates on the infinite becoming and appearing of life and cultures, one gets an impression of absolute nothingness. But I have never lost the feeling of something that lives and abides through the eternal change. What one sees is the flower that perishes. The rhizome remains.” And at the end he says: “At bottom the only events in my life worth telling are those the immutable world has rendered up through the mutable surfaces. Therefore he spoke mostly of internal events, since my dreams and imagination remain there. Moreover this constitutes the primary matter of my scientific work. Compared with internal events the other recollections travel away with one’s surroundings.” And in order to speak of these narrations of this immutable world and that other mutable one, the interior and the external world, between myth and reality, and to grapple with Professor Jung who wrote the prologue for this book that was edited for the first time in Chile, before being printed elsewhere, this book “The Visits of the Queen of Sheba,” by Miguel Serrano, I have him here in the studio for this conversation. Thank you, Don Miguel, for being here with me.

Serrano: Thank you, Christian, for inviting me.

Felice: To begin, how did you come to hear about this thought of Jung on life and the two lives.

Serrano: Very well, the special relationship that was established between us is due precisely to “The Queen of Sheba.” It was she who made it possible to establish this and have such a special relationship. I esteem him warmly and in my autobiography, with regards to Professor Jung we can see that he was of great and heavy importance to me. But that is the truth. And it is recalled that at the end of his life Jung received no one, not relatives nor disciples, but he always received a young Chilean writer with whom he discussed things and who was then known by no one. And this is something that is in the Prologue by Professor Jung (translator – to Miguel Serrano’s book ” The Visits of the Queen of Sheba”) when he refers to the archetypes. And, in the first place, he makes it known that the archetypes were not a product of the unconscious, but rather of a super-consciousness, that is to say, of the Gods of antiquity.

Felice: And the Queen of Sheba is this, perhaps what led to this interview, no?

Serrano: But first I must say, by the way, that it pleases me very much to be here because this is evidence of something that existed in those days: one studied then the Religion of Mystery, in my generation of ’38, in the Thirties, Forties and even through the Fifties. Then it did not matter what one might think. The Mystery was the main thing. (translator–This was the Kultmysterium of Dom Odo Casel, the Chosen Priest of Adolf Hitler, as embodied unto PERFECTION in the Roman Breviary of 1960 and the Roman Missal of 1962). And all this tradition has been lost in Chile and what tied it all together was the Mystery. Very well, so to return to our theme, the Queen of Sheba. What is the Queen of Sheba? What was the Queen of Sheba? She is an archetype, of love, of the Eternal Feminine. The Archetype abides and then sometimes incarnates. And, curiously, this cannot happen until there is a Revelation, and this has occurred in Chile, and perhaps in the world, only in our time. Where was the legend of the Queen of Sheba born? Precisely in Arabia, in Mecca where the Ka’aba is located. This is something most extraordinary, something that was never known before. How is this? The legend says that Abraham, who came to pray with his son Ishmael, in the exact region where Mecca is located, in order to establish a special cult of worship to Him. And there they found in a cabin a woman who was a widow, by the name of Shiva. And she said she would admit him into this house on the condition that what he would build there would be kept in the possession of her descendants. And the descendants who lived there, because of the widow, called themselves the Sons of the Widow. So they had a stone there, a very ancient stone that the Greeks wrote about, called the Ka’aba, “cave,” which in its root is the name of the Great Mother. In my book the first name I give to the Queen is the Great Mother, precisely.

Felice: Is this the same Great Mother as the one written about by Hermann Hesse in his book “Damien”?

Serrano: It is the same Universal Mother, that is in this case present in order to reach the Ka’aba, this cave that is the symbol of the Mother, the refuge to be exact, of the Great Mother. And to enter this cave there was a door named Shiva. All of this was in contact with legendary India and the God Shiva. In English she would be the Queen of Shiva. This is all the same story. The God Shiva is an androgynous God of Love. As is the Queen of Sheba. To have something that can be touched I have here this…

Felice: A little Pagan object.

Serrano: A lingnan, this is a lingnan with a yoni, (translator – an object made of black stone) the sexual symbols of male and female in one single symbol of union. Which is exactly what the Queen of Sheba represents. She is Kali as well.

Felice: I have a portrait of the Queen of Sheba here, but it is from Ur.

Serrano: This culture appeared in Ur.

Felice: Which means this is Sumerian, right? In the Islamic world.

Serrano: That would be Iraq.

Felice: Interesting how this all comes together. Who is the Queen of Sheba? Because on reading the book there is a feeling of tremendous nostalgia for the loss of the Queen of Sheba and on the other hand an understanding that the Queen of Sheba must be lost together with this encounter, loss, decline, remembered little by little as the story is told. What kind of love story is this?

Serrano: It is the representation of the feminine, the Eternal Feminine, that on coming into contact with this world incarnates herself. But it also produces an era of catastrophe, the desire of fusion, of union, that incarnates continually and that comes and goes to separate itself. But there is something else. To touch on this more closely, there is something interesting about Islam. Islam: Allah, “El-Ella,” (translator — He-She). When Abraham went there (to Mecca) he found there this Ka’aba, this black stone inscribed with many names, the names of Shiva, Kali and many Gods, but among them the name Allah. And he manipulated that name. Why? Because “El” and “Ella,” “El-Ella,” “Allah,” “He-She.” And the most extraordinary is that all this is known, but known in a very secret and esoteric Order that is the foundation of Islam. “Is-lam” is Isis and “lam,” the way of the Goddess Isis. This is also Egyptian.

Felice: This is a mystery cult. The cult of Isis.

Serrano: And the Sufis are part of this story. There exists an Order that is not spoken of nor heard about: The Order of the Black Stone or the Black Sun that is spoken about so much. And there existed back in the Thirties and Forties a relationship between this Order and George Steiner, Stein, Sonnen (Sun). At that time a secret contact was made with Islam.

Felice: Well, this story of the progress of the soul or anima has an exterior story as well as an interior story that connects with the Sufis and also with Saint John of the Cross and with his Dark Night of the Soul, isn’t that so?

Serrano: Totally.

Felice: In what way is this story, a tale of the love of a woman, since one can read this story in that way; in what way is it also a story of divine love? Isn’t this true?

Serrano: It is quite interesting that it’s said this cult for a woman doesn’t repeat itself, but it has been repeated. For example, in India the Moguls were able to build the Taj Majal for divine love, and at that same time the wife, the beloved, was put into purdah enclosed in a castle or palace so that no one could touch her. She was enclosed within walls where none saw her. And I remember that one day, on the way to the Taj Majal, I met the Rani Terrigar Ibal (tr. – spelling uncertain), a princess or queen who was a widow. In the Kali Yuga they had introduced democracy into India, so therefore she was a Member of Parliament. There was an election and that day she was on the road to make propaganda for the election campaign then underway. We sat together under a tree and she said: “I would so much rather pass my time instead in purdah. I don’t care for democracy or Parliament at all. I would so much rather go to be with my husband to make poetry and discuss philosophy and religion such as we could do.”

Felice: This secret sacred love is connected in your book “El-Ella” (“He-She”) with the tradition of the Cathars, that esoteric tradition that was persecuted. So how does this conception of love connect with the Cathars? Where does this come from?

Serrano: This love comes from India at bottom. In essence it derives from Tantrism, from Hindu Tantrism. It comes from the superb old Hindu temples. It goes out from there.

Felice: What is the concept of Tantrism, Don Miguel, for those who do not know?

Serrano: Tantrism is power. It is to realise and use sex. To use the libido which is at the base of the Kundalini. This serves a love that is not physical only. I just saw a very curious film named “The Destroyer.” It was set in the future and the people there were put into boxes where they would look at each other but without physical contact and that would be everything because, they would say, physical contact would be gross. And I think this is something that has a point because there doesn’t exist any organ specifically for sex. The body does not have an organ exclusively for love. The sexual organs also exist for other things. Nature or Mount Meru goes flying out overflowing with things for man, with a great fruitfulness by which a grain throws out thousands of seeds, or in a lifetime millions of sperm. Yet nevertheless no organ exists solely for love. They exist for touch, the mouth for eating, the eyes exist to see. This is an idea that Tantrism understood in this way from the start, that for Tantric Love it is not necessary to be able to touch. Because this is truly a limitation that techniques, which are repeated again and again in a variety of situations, can overcome and thereby those techniques can replace what man had before.

Felice: That exterior technology can replace what is interior by using these techniques over millennia.

Serrano: They can replace it with what the Hawaiians call “mana,” the mind. For that a man must love a woman with all his chakras, with all his being. The Japanese have long done this by sitting next to each other. They are seated, him here and her there, and they come to a situation that is like an orgasm, as we say. Therefore the gypsies say that for love there are three great pleasures in life: to eat well, to speak and to die.

Felice: Because the key actions are sexual actions.

Serrano: Yes, such is what they have (in Tantrism).

Felice: In this beautiful Cathar story, this beautiful story we have been running through, in the part about India, in the end the Queen of Sheba is lost, the protagonist is lost. The story appears in an autobiographical form. In what sense is the story an autobiography?

Serrano: To begin with, to meet with the Queen of Sheba is very difficult, it is a privilege. It was a great event in the drama of his life when Professor Jung discovered (the Archetype of) the Queen of Sheba. In his biography that Jung wrote with Toni Wolfe he was married to her and she went away. That is because if one has the great privilege to meet the Queen of Sheba, then it is not in order to have sexual relations with or marry her, because that will end in destruction. If a man meets with the Queen of Sheba, then it is a doorway to loyalty. He cannot buy her. That cannot be. The Queen of Sheba is for A-Mor, not for marriage. What is A-Mor? It means Without Death.

Felice: If we discuss real concrete life where we marry and we die, is it possible to marry with A-Mor? Is this an impossible dream or must there be a definitive separation between marriage and A-mor?

Serrano: One cannot approach things this way because one cannot find her here. One must go to where she is, elsewhere, in a very precarious condition. One may be able to be with her if one keeps remaining there.

Felice: In this idea we separate this world from the other. This makes it very difficult. What is the practice in the real world? How to qualify this vision…?

Serrano: One can stimulate this with the love of the Cathars, the Troubadours, and the love of the Troubadours is Platonic love, the idea. And the ideas when they incarnate downwards are then lost in this world of matter. Because this world is of matter and here we are making everything, we do not have things. We are converting things, but with this matter as its relationships go lower, then everything corrupts to some extent. Therefore it is necessary to return. From the moment of the explosion, the Big Bang, there is a war, and this is the evil. Implosion, inwards, permits us in some way to return, to recover what was lost. The Queen of Sheba is found there within implosion and recovery.

Felice: And what do the Cathars say? How do they resolve this?

Serrano: The Troubadours no, but the Cathars yes. There was an entire technology, a technique. For the Troubadours she, perhaps the Queen of Sheba, was always inaccessible. They saw her and they remained smitten with their eyes, exactly during visits when they would go to the mountain or the caves. They sang and they had a secret place to go, like their nests, where they gazed at her and went to see her. So they would only look at her in order to know her. They would go there at night to gaze at her and had a vision of the ancient cosmic body of the woman. These things happened at night. This Tantrism was also practiced in India at the same time. On one side there would be the Kaula practitioner with her on the other side and a wall separating them. This was the Asag, the Test of Asag. The Magi did this then. When they told King Arthur his wife Gwinevere was in a cave together with Lancelot he walked into there and his men were going to kill them, but they were back to back, so King Arthur said no, they should not touch them because that would be a bad reaction.

Felice: the flames already consumed them.

Serrano: The flames consumed them much better and much more. In India there was the practice of Maithuna, magic coitus, which is coitus without the sharpness. In the moment of coitus itself all of this fire would circulate through the blood and develop the chakras in such a way they would develop their vision (translator — Serrano indicates the Third Eye). This could never be developed without the woman, but only a woman Tantric initiatress. This is Alchemy and Jung said there were never any alchemical books written by women. This is because the role of women alchemists is so important that writing books did not interest them. They had to pass the metals to the initiate man so that the feminine energy could enter into them and he could then drink them and thereby construct the Absolute Man, which is exactly that, totality. This is Shiva Parvati, because he must resurrect his She. As Jung said, the soul of men is feminine, the anima, and the masculine soul of women is the animus. One must take possession of oneself with one’s appropriate counterpart, because there was a partition that separated in the Big Bang and disintegrated the soul. To recover the man’s soul wants to have its face, to have the face of She, and the woman helps him to enable this to happen so that two persons have one personality.

Felice: In the conversations you had with Jung, when he came to visit you in Locarno, he recounts in a medical circular he left with you something very interesting about separation. He says that in time the masculine and feminine must separate and that is the first tragedy. The second tragedy recounted by Professor Jung is the separation between the conscious and the unconscious.

Serrano: Interesting.

Felice: What did Professor Jung tell you about this separation, this separation that has been so incarnated in the Occident?

Serrano: He told me something very curious, very interesting about what happened in the Occident. Our world, our development went forward quite naturally through Paganism. It was interrupted by another civilization that imposed itself on the Pagan Occident and cut off its advance. Namely, the Roman Empire and Christianity with Charlemagne and all of that. This cut away the possibility of developing the Pagan civilization. Wotan was put away as something apart that could not be touched. This produced in the blood of the unconscious of this Folk a break by which another was imposed onto it and this dichotomy was an internal conflict. Catholicism produced this with the concept of sin. This was terrible because it produced, according to Professor Jung, a type of schizophrenia, which caused an explosion of wartime and terrible wars.

Felice: All of this returned through the unconscious that had been suppressed.

Serrano: …that had been suppressed. We discussed this for an entire day. All this was suppressed because it was in opprobrium. But this allowed an incredible advance that had never occurred before, perhaps in the universe, the awareness of oneself, the consciousness of self, the Selbst.

Felice: Perhaps others did this. The Hindus, for example.

Serrano: No. The case of the Hindu Folk is curious. It is certain that for the Hindus the world went forward from the beginning with a mythology, living it. They do not have this problem, but they have had another. Individuality did not exist in India. For example, an Italian tells me about adventures he has in that country, a woman he meets in the town square with whom he had an adventure in Rome. Something very Italian, but so it is.

Felice: (Laughs with amusement.)

Serrano: Jung noted the Hindus do not have ideas. Rather the ideas appear to them.

Felice: So how do the Hindus think?

Serrano: They don’t think. The ideas come to them, they just appear to them. They develop and depend on a center that is again and again like an open carriage in comparison with the Occidental mind. In India they do not get bored but watch everything like a dog or cat that comes and goes because they are immersed in the collective unconscious.

Felice: There seems to be a distinctive manner in all that.

Serrano: Yes, they think from different centers. In the Occident the Westerner creates technology with that and they are more right there present in particular things. This produced something most interesting in the Europe between the Thirties and the Fifties. They relived the Pagan Cult, but consciously, in a way never produced before in Roman history. That is to say, Paganism in a conscious form. The Gods, man began to become like Gods and to illuminate his own Creator, according to Jung. As Hölderlin said, before the ancient Gods never thought or felt anything by themselves. Someone else felt for them: the poets. In this case the Occident created a self, an individuality. This is unique in the world because they could restore all this and, therefore, when I had been in contact with Jung, I wrote to him from India that the abandonment seemed to me to be like the Crucifixion of the Self, but he said to me that, no, on the contrary, one must not crucify the self, one must reinforce it. The Way of our Occident is to achieve the Absolute Self, very interesting, as Hermann Hesse said to me. When consciousness dies, when the conscious and the unconscious are on the point (of dying), then there is the arrival of the Self or Selbst. This is the way of the (tr. – Aryan) man and in essence of the Ka’aba (tr. – the Black Stone) and the cave as well.

Felice: We have been saying through this program that there are these ways of thinking. You have been applying them in many ways. For example, the Greeks had a way of thinking, the Hindus have a manner of thought. How do we think? Would we be thinking for ourselves or something else?

Serrano: There are many centers for this among us humans, but in the Occident we have only used one, the chakra of the intellect, the forehead. Among the Hindus there are centers in the knees, in the solar plexus, in the heart. They have names for them all in Sanskrit and they have their mantras to develop them. There is the serpent, kundalini, coiled up in the lingnan and coiling through so many centers for the various types of Tantric love. And these are centers of consciousness. They are not centers of energy, but centers of consciousness and they are distinct. How do the Japanese think, for example? With the Manipura chakra. They must want this because each has their own usual kind of mind. So how do we think?

Felice: It is a broken work, no?

Serrano: We now think with the chakras of sex, the Muladhara, because we are at present in a sexual world.

Felice: They have chakras to which they refer and to which geography refers as well.

Serrano: Geography, and with this geomancy. It has to do with this: We have not continued developing our chakras because we have been thinking only with precisely those chakras that do not accord with the chakras of the North or Europe, with their centers. And this is exactly what produces the sexualism that takes root so much in our country.

Felice: The obsession for the sexual, for pretty young girls, for sensation, for whatever.

Serrano: Because one does not develop all the chakras so that they recollect and agree with each other.

Felice: What would be the way to use these in a particular way, in a distinctly Chilean or South American way? In comparison with Greeks or Hindus, what technique would our be our own way to think in a different manner?

Serrano: There are Japanese or Italian ways to do this, to plant their garden and built a hut, it is true. This is discussed by Carpentier, a man born to do this…

Felice: Alejo Carpentier. (tr. – a White Latin and the most famous writer of the Cuban Revolution.)

Serrano: …Carpentier or (tr. -Augusto Roa) Bastos, who was also a friend. In this moment a Japanese man has raised a most extraordinary question about this, but it is too late. There is no time. This would be of the greatest extraordinary interest to the young men, but they have lost all this. We are too far into the Kali Yuga, which is Kali, the Queen of Sheba. Right now we are on the edge of a catastrophe that is building up in order to make a new beginning. There is already no more time, unfortunately.

Felice: So we have failed in our destiny?

Serrano: Collectively, but not individually. Individually one must stand his ground, wherever it may be, to the end in order to achieve the Absolute Man through the Secret Order of the Black Sun or the Black Stone. March forward and this can happen.

Felice: In this book (tr. – El-Ella or He-She, a Book of Magic Love), which consists of three parts, there is a very original connection made between events, reincarnated or the same, that occur in Malaya, then in the world of the Cathars, signs impressed among them, and then in the Andes, in Chile. There is an obsession. What distinct points connect these three places in Malaya… the Andes. What contour relates them?

Serrano: The Eternal Return. This book is based on the Eternal Return.

Felice: There is Nietzsche, then.

Serrano: They are identical events in distinct places in the world. This very conversation we are having here we may have had elsewhere, perhaps in Malaya, and in a hundred years in some other place we may have it again.

Felice: This idea has been poorly understood and applied, a secret, and you revealed it in this book while writing about it in the same place where Nietzsche first expressed it, in the Engadin (tr. – in the Swiss Alps).

Felice: …What happened to Nietzsche with the Revelation of the Eternal Return, with his vision of it up in those mountains? What happened to Nietzsche in relation to the Eternal Return?

Serrano: This Revelation of the Eternal Return was very curious because we can say this origin was in Buddha. Nietzsche was very knowledgeable about all of this, but there is also Parzifal, “Persian,” Farsi. Zoroaster. His Maestro is Zoroaster. This played a tremendous role in his psychology because the Eternal Return is essential to that nightmare. A man who was much interested in this was Peter Ouspensky who wrote a book named “The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin” that deals with the Eternal Return. The Eternal Return occurs there and he discusses it. Yet it is very curious that he philosophized that…

Felice: Nietzsche encountered the mystical in that place.

Serrano: It was an experience among those rocks (tr. – a Divine Revelation both for Nietzsche and for Serrano). He was so terrified that, when Lou Salomé met him a short time afterwards, she recounted in her Memoirs that he was trembling violently (tr. – literally, “trembling in terror”). And then he said to her that one must rise to great altitudes (tr. – above sea level) to be able to be seared by it, to have this Revelation impressed into one’s flesh. Whether this results in sons or not is only something poetic. Do not commit this error. The fact is the Eternal Return does not require a soul to reincarnate. It is not reincarnation.

Felice: It is distinct from reincarnation?

Serrano: Totally.

Felice: What is the fundamental impression that makes this so difficult to comprehend?

Serrano: Well, Nietzsche said the following: Time is infinite but energy is limited. Birth is limited. Creation is limited within the universe, so time keeps cycling round until it arrives at the same point and everything repeats. This is something phenomenally vast but it returns in the end.

Felice: Enormous!

Serrano: The thing is so enormous, but to take the philosophy into oneself is more so. Buddha spoke of reincarnation but when asked about the soul he fell silent and very possibly this referred to the Eternal Return. This idea that Nietzsche had is something tremendous, but there is a possibility in the universe that even the highest mountain climber has never been able to touch, because it deals with a universe with other laws and No Law. To go out from the Eternal Return. This is the treasure, perhaps what Buddha called Nirvana. To go out from the Eternal Return. Something completely foreign to everything in this universe and this is possible. But perhaps it does not interest our contemporaries.

Felice: And with this I came across a photo taken at Montagnola with Hermann Hesse. We will look at this photo from the book. In what year did this meeting take place?

Serrano: In 1951.

Felice: And on entering the house of Hermann Hesse you wrote a famous poem that says:

“When one has finished his life and finished his mission one has the right perhaps to face the idea of death. One does not then need shadows because one has known so many of them in this world. What one then needs is peace.”

You went to visit and see this man often and took part in everyday get-togethers. But you crossed his threshold often not to take part in banalities but to discuss magical and illuminating things. What do you remember of the moment when you met Hermann Hesse?

Serrano: It was curious because Hermann Hesse was in a class not well known in England, for example, but in Our America, yes, he was read in Chile, in Argentina and Mexico. And, when I went to Europe invited to an international conference of journalists in Evian as representative of the newspaper Mercurio and the Zig-Zag publishing house, there was a Chilean ambassador in France named Joachim Fernandez who invited me there to France, but he said he did not know Hermann Hesse. I went to get to understand Europe and therefore I asked them where the high representative of Chile was in Switzerland, so I said to them that I wanted to go there because Hermann Hesse was living in Switzerland.

Felice: What did you think of the book about Abraxas when you read it, a book that influenced many people so much?

Serrano: Damien impressed me because the book is magical, filled with keys, the sons of the widow, for example, the sons of She.

Felice: What is the message, the most important secret of Damien?

Serrano: The meeting with himself, because more profoundly Damien is the internal part of himself, the being, because Sinclair, the principal hero of the book, the protagonist, meets with Damien in college, a place where he develops a great interest in Damien because at base Damien is himself. Damien says to him he will return because there isn’t the distance of a hair separating them.

Felice: This is Abraxas, isn’t it?

Serrano: The God Abraxas.

Felice: And why is this so important?

Serrano: Because he is a God that includes everything. He includes the poles, what is called obscurity and light. Jung has taken up this theme too. Jung is the one who discusses Abraxas.

Felice: Jung speaks about the shadow of the imaginary and how it is a mistake not to incorporate the shadow, not to take it up into oneself.

Serrano: Certainly. This is what we have been talking about: incorporation. I told Jung this causes the sense of being unique in the world because one overcomes the rest (tr. – the obstacles). Awareness, developing consciously. How to say this? The right side of the brain has atrophied because of materialist uses of the mind. The atrophied side represents intuition, mythology, tradition and all that remains on the other side represents the rational. This intuition is something the Pakarati (a family of Easter Islanders) have. And more, Felice, Ka’aba is cave, stone, an dark stone, a funerary meteorite only the tribes could have seen. But what did the Hindus say about them? They called them vimanas and said they were flying vehicles made of stone. Therefore they were of an extra-terrestrial origin. They exist! And that’s why the Pakarati speak about them and, when asked what moves them, they say they are moved by mana, by the mind. So they have been said to be moved by wings since very ancient times.

Felice: Now speaking of the meeting with Hermann Hesse. How old were you when you had that meeting?

Serrano: 1951… I need a calculator for that. (Felice laughs) Let’s see… I was born in 1917. How many years to 1951?

Felice: 34 years had passed.

Serrano: Nevertheless I had gone to Europe and gone then to Switzerland, but no one in the embassy knew anything about Hermann Hesse or where he was living. But then a woman knew. It is always the women who know these things. She was a secretary in the embassy, Violetta, and she said he was living in Castagnola. Ah, but where was “Castagnola”? It was Montagnola. Then we took the last bus remaining that another woman had left there on the side. We travelled and then I went into a cottage and asked where Hermann Hesse lived. I said I was an employee and he was my employer, apparently from Yugoslavia or somewhere, since they would always have some special skills or other. Then I came to the house and there was nothing left to do but throw up my hands because a sign there said, “Do not enter” in German. “No visitors,” it said. And I entered. Something happened then that was absolutely incredible. She let me in! That left me astounded. It was an incredible thing. I had come upon the Queen of Sheba!! Jung had spoken and written to me over the years about this woman that had cost him some considerable labours and then the years passed, I had published my book “The Queen of Sheba” and I was living in Switzerland in the old house of Hermann Hesse, the Casa Camuzzi, and a letter arrived saying “I was reading your book translated into German and you write of a person who I believe is the grandmother of my wife, Toni Wolff.” And she leaves behind a series of things, films, documentaries, what have you, that allow people to tell me they’re going to recount their histories with her that were just like in those films and what they didn’t see of her was to them still just as they would have imagined. As if she were at that time sending me the gift that her grandmother would be exactly as I had written the Queen of Sheba would be.

Felice: It is the meeting with She.

Serrano: It is the life that lives in a form that does not die but is real. The consequence is that in the end we have unknown friends who come to the aid of those who are alchemists.

Felice: In this meeting with Hermann Hesse, in this conversation, then what happened?

Serrano: Next I entered through the gate, to put this in sequence, and I was not wearing a regular jacket but a blanket that hung over the shoulders woven with a wool all in white, with elegant threads perhaps. And there was a mist that was whirling around everywhere. He saw me and said in an animated voice: “Parsifal!” in French, because there one spoke in French or Italian, since that was in the Italian part of Switzerland, and he said, “Pardon me, but with this overcast weather, I would have thought today we were in the Engadin, or perhaps in Sils Maria,” which was precisely where Nietzsche had lived.

Felice: What is the most important thing you take away from this conversation?

Serrano: That for those who have not had such good fortune, my woman was then a widow woman, so the time may come for you even if you haven’t reached it yet. Well, the most important thing, and I was such a young man then, was Montagnola where the Voice of God could be heard. And the most interesting thing was the mountain range, like a painting shining in the light of the moon. That is the Remembrance of Montagnola that I have from everything there.

Felice: Having met Hesse, as you also met Jung, what is the sketch, the atmosphere you have of him?

Serrano: He realized himself to the depths, through that struggle as well. He was often out in nature. One day I went there with an actress, Jennifer Jones…

Felice: Quite a beautiful woman. We have her photo here. She looks like the Queen of Sheba, no?

Serrano: There is a close resemblance. I took her with me when I went to meet with Jung.

Felice: Who was she?

Serrano: She was a fantastic actress in films such as Duel in the Sun, A Farewell to Arms, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, films that I love. She was most extraordinary! She went to India and I was told to show her India, so I took her around India along with Rossalini.

Felice: Well, which Rossalini? There are more than one…

Serrano: Roberto Rossalini, who I had already come to know in India. And she wanted to experience Mount Kailas. I would say to her “to Kailas or not to Kailas, that’s India to you.” That is how we put it. Then I went away with her to see Hermann Hesse and we travelled there but he was time and again out on a walk or away travelling or starting out again at the end. And I went to see him one day after his wife had died, Ninon Auslander, also an extraordinary woman. It grieved him much that she had died and the son called me to the house. And Hermann and I always spoke a lot about death. It is not a problem for me. And where is Hermann now? He is here, everyplace, in the air, in letters and he comes to me. I have two small pages of paper here and when I give one of them to you I have handed over a page of Miguel Serrano to you. Hermann came one day to see me in the Chaco outback. A most endearing man.

Felice: As for death, what is your vision of death? What is your perception or understanding of death?

Serrano: Ahh, very well, one can resurrect. That is the principal matter, truly. To resurrect so that one goes flying on one’s own … He is Christ. He revived and came up from the good earth. The Way is something like that.

Felice: But are those reasons and feelings to be taken in the Catholic meaning of the flesh or another reason…?

Serrano: Meaning the flesh, but everything necessary is there. What is called the physical body and going to the negative of the photo, to the astral body in so far as that can be received. And when Christ went on the Road to Emmaus, when the disciples had fled, immediately when someone spoke they said “He speaks like the Maestro” but they did not recognize Him because the resurrected look like the living but are not the same. Everything has changed. To begin with, the equalized masses are not eternal. Therefore they recognized him by the way he broke bread. He told them he is the Maestro but not to touch Him, “no me tangere, don’t touch me,” because the power of the risen chaste Aryan renders him terrible.

Serrano: The Chinese, the Daoists, they have taken the road there already. The Daoist magicians are placed in the earth and do not die. They are buried in the tomb and placed in a creche to be resurrected, I believe thereby untouched by death. The majority simply disappears. Hence it is so important to work to revive. So that in that manner those who are with the body can come so that the relatives can view it for a specific time and grieve for the dead one, for the death of this body. What does not die is the subtle classroom of the propitious events of what has passed. And the curious thing is that in the yoga of India everything is burned, everything is cremated. To burn is an Aryan custom, good, but in the highest yoga one is not burned, one is entombed. Why? Because it is possible that one is resurrected.

Felice: It interests me that in your books there is a way of magic and a way of mysticism. There is reference to your way of magic and a way of the mystical. How do you distinguish between the ways of magic and the mystical?

Serrano: The mystical is like what is called the ancient philosophy of India, which is to say to tend to merge with the Father, to tend to merge with the Creator, for the self to disappear. He who numbs himself does not know himself. To merge oneself, to make oneself disappear in the Great Self. As is said in the following words of Jesus Christ: “The Father and I are the same person (translator–from Latin: “persona” or “mask”).” And Jung, when he wrote thirteen years after the War, as he wrote in his Memoirs, as a man sitting with crossed legs meditating over his own life, said that to diffuse/disseminate is to appear, because who is the Father? He was He, and therefore he was not I, to differentiate himself. Therefore resistance (against oneness) is to stand back. And curiously Christ says “I died for myself and for many.” He died for a precise number of the dead, when all will have already died. Well, when Christ, when Jesus Christ is crucified, because the Crucifixion is mystic death, the death of the magician, which is to say they leave in the astral body in order to live on another planet. So therefore while he was still on the Cross he said to the Thief: “Tonight you will be with me at the right hand of my Father.” Already he does not say to be one with my Father, but separated from my Father.

Felice: As an “I,” we say.

Serrano: As an “I.” And this self is able to give to the Father a personality the Father did not have. Because it happens the Gods are unaware of themselves. They are aware of what they are doing, what they are creating. What they keep is not awareness of themselves but of what the Son is doing. But the Son on making himself is going to be what Jung said in his Testament letter, what was well-expressed in this letter, this letter that I had when he died.

What do I take away today from all this treasure I have gained from the experience of my life? To shatter it, until with it I am able to illuminate the creativity of the Creator.

Felice: How beautiful this is. How beautiful. It says that you are singular…

Serrano: In my Memoirs there are He and I. He is this Being such as He is, truly. And I, that which goes developing up to what I have reached.

Felice: This book is a thrust that looks for what is characterized as organizing, living through books, a mythology achieved through this thrusting. It is the ambiance, the generality of this literature, an ambiance of its own. A question is: What is Chile, what archetype is Chile? In fact, Chile is from the environment of the south as an Antarctic State. Simplifying, it is from the whiteness in the sky of the magic selcnam, no doubt. (Translator–”selcnam” is the unique selfness of the Native Chilean Indians, the Araucanos, with their mysterious Indo-European origins similar to the Ainu of Japan.) I ask myself what is this magic Chile you are always touching that has ended, yet has flourished throughout your books, since you have always travelled as a pilgrim.

Serrano: Chile is… This magic consists in the giants within the rocks. There are the rocks, which are the giants that are within the mountains.

Felice: What is the white island within the sky?

Serrano: It was the island of Antarctica. This is what it has been. But all of this has been corrupting, becoming mechanical. Chile was Nature. The Chile I knew, that my generation used to know, that Chile, that extraordinary Santiago of low houses, with two floors at most, of adobe, with a pure sky, the mountains visible all day long. We lived then without knowing what we had and would lose with the smoke and contamination. Because of that I say a paradise existed before it was lost. Then it existed and those who lived in that paradise did not know it before they lost it. And they cannot recover that paradise nor will we ever recover the Chile of that time. Because of that I say I do not believe in Chile, since together with this, or rather in the first place, man has been corrupted. Because men who have been thrown aside and lost destroy everything. I have lived this and today it is very difficult to get back to the beginning of all this. They had loyalty, then everyone went around denying what they had believed before.

Felice: And what made that Chile possible, that exterior Chile that one saw and then was lost. What was the treasure that Chile carried in the interior and that was the unique meaning of that country, as we would say?

Serrano: The magic sense of life and the possibility in each of the Total Man, the Absolute Man. The possibility, so to speak, that the Araucano Indians normally had and for which they built their distinctive huts so they would not be a nothing, so they could build their spirits. And when the man went off to war the woman remained behind. The Araucano, that’s to say the man, developed himself totally and put all his substances/agencies/bodies (“instancias”) into his activities. That’s the possibility there was in the Chilean countryside. But, a magic vision of life. Life could become magical. That was communication with the giants that are within the rocks. That are in them that come out from them. They come out, but flying, protecting, helping, because we are bombarded every day, every day, by malignant projections, psycho-electronic, etcetera, that are managed from a center in Chile. They come and go so that then we do not have the name of their headquarter building when they are in this form. And now we reach the most atrocious thing about these signs mean for us: They go away elsewhere we know not where. These are all subliminal messages to stupefy our people and disarm them with this idiocy.

Felice: Don Miguel, this is a long conversation that will not end or break off even in a parallel world.

Serrano: Taj Majal, Taj Mahal (was such a conversation) previously. The Taj Majal was made into a poem in marble, in precious stone, to Eternal Love. Because Eternal Love, she exists.

[A brief discussion follows about the generation of '38, focusing on a very wise woman with whom the translator is not familiar.]

Felice: And as for the straw: “There is a people,” he says, “a people of fleeting love built on something everlasting in man that becomes transparent in this fountain of multiple portraits that is nevertheless completely single and one. In this burning away of straw that removes the contingent accidents from my being I contemplate the essential on the other side of the obstacle that weighs on my brow. But, having become accustomed to my bad habits, I do not bring out the fire of my being for lack of the strength to leap through the waterfall that comes between man and God, the only access to whom is through our nightly death (translator–meaning the little deaths of sleep and the great death of the long sleep that awaits a possible Resurrection).

Felice: Many thanks to Don Miguel for this conversation and for having taken the essential being of this continent from the other side to this side, this Chile. Many thanks for this conversation.

Serrano: Thank you as well.

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