The Unknown Henry Miller by Arthur Hoyle

Author:Arthur Hoyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

In the same book, Miller frequently likens Mona/Mara’s profound impact on him to planetary influences. He links the microcosm of their union to the macrocosm of the heavens with surreal flights of language. “We looked out of the black hole of our life into the black hole of the world. The sun was permanently blacked out, as though to aid us in our continuous internecine strife. For Sun we had Mars, for Moon Saturn: we lived permanently in the zenith of the underworld. The earth had ceased to revolve and through the hole in the sky above us there hung the black star which never twinkled. Now and then we had fits of laughter, crazy, batrachian laughter which made the neighbors shudder.”

The title that Miller chose for the central work of his career as a writer, The Rosy Crucifixion, is rich in occult allusion and esoteric significance as well. As Rudhyar explains, “All the various energies and drivers of the natural life of a plant are harmonized and concentrated within the seed. When the seed germinates in the spring, this is crucifixion—Miller’s ‘Rosy Crucifixion’!” Rebirth. It was in this work that Miller set out to discover and disclose his essential self, what Rudhyar calls “the seed-pattern of a person’s individuality or … uniqueness of being” as revealed in the birth chart.

In a letter he wrote to Miller accompanying his horoscope, Rudhyar delved into the meaning of the rosy cross. The image comes from the Rosicrucians, a secret occult society founded in fifteenth century Germany by Christian Rosenkreuz. According to Rudhyar, “The essential symbol of the Rosicrucians is ‘the rose that blooms at the center of the cross’ i.e. where the vertical crosses the horizontal—the Zenith-Nadir axis, the horizon. In man, it points to the Brachial plexus of the spine which is ‘the center behind the heart’, perhaps the most sacred in the body, where the ‘Tone’ of the Self, the changeless vibration of the individual, is centered. It is a spiritual center, not a ‘great sympathetic’ Chakra.” Rudhyar’s explanation of the plexus echoes Miller’s own reference to this center in his essay on the film Extase.

Rudhyar considered Miller’s critique of American society as a reaction against its disregard of the cosmic view of man’s potential that astrology expresses. “Miller hates to see human beings and society vulgarized and liquefied into sham and amorphous meaninglessness; into what they really are not! If he criticizes so harshly our U.S. society it is because he sees in it so much that is the glorification of meaninglessness, formlessness, and thus seed-less-ness.” Rudhyar’s observation is consistent with what Miller had written to Keyserling from Paris in 1938: “the astrological view of man confirms the spiritual viewpoint, in the sense that only he is free who lives out to the utmost his potentialities.”

That Miller saw his personal evolution, obsessively pursued in the Tropics and The Rosy Crucifixion, as an astrological journey occurring in cosmic time as opposed to historical time, is suggested by the importance he

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