Thirty years ago “Tartaria” was for me just a mysterious name that referred to stories like Dino Buzzati’s “The Tartar Steppe” (Il Deserto Dei Tartari).. and to that soldier, Giovanni Drogo, sent to a fort on the edge of nowhere with his small platoon. A kind of Italian “Waiting for Godot” in the form of a novel, with a lieutenant who ends up falling in love with his solitude and the waiting. A mythical enemy only imagined and never seen and then the gradual loss of interest in returning to civilian life, up to illness and death “in the trenches”….. Splendid!
But then, in a small trattoria on the port of Gabicce Italy, one winter evening when I was dining alone, I met the old run-down man, Alvise, who struck me immediately for being a little tipsy and for his very cultured and powerful talkativeness.
The inns of the coastal villages, which in the summer are filled to capacity with seaside tourists, always seem unmanned in the winter. The patrons look like veterans, some ill-seasoned “ex beach birro” (a hemp cord ring), some bachelor and pot-bellied hotelier or lifeguard, some pale couple of “out of season” tourists. The atmosphere is infinitely more beautiful and stimulating than in the summer, because it is intimate and encourages confidences and stories: every now and then, the chef comes out to chat or eat at one of the other tables, every now and then the waitress tells a few anecdotes and people talk to each other even among strangers, without a specific reason, perhaps precisely because of that sense of precariousness or demobilization.
That evening, I had with me and placed on the table a strange book, with the author’s name that looked like a printing error: E. Abbott Abbott, and the title Flatlandia (“flat land”).
After giving a show for a while between one dish and another with anecdotes and Latin quotations, Alvise came towards my table and pointing at it and then taking it in his hand he said to me: “This priest had talent!”
This surprised me, I remember, because I thought that, even if we had found ourselves in the good season when the coast is full of tourists, if I had conducted an investigation, I would have found perhaps no more than two people who knew what it was about …… and one, this evening, was here. So, while Alvise went back to get his flask and a glass to come and sit with me (without any invitation from my side,) I took the opportunity to say a few words about the book and the author.
The Reverend E. Abbott Abbott was a London erudite who alternated theology with a variety of other interests. His overall work is not of sublime value except for a small volume where he deals with the theme of the dimensions of the world around us: Flatland, precisely, which saw the light at the end of the 19th century. Its author imagines a fantastic life made up of lines, strokes, line segments, and flat geometric figures… and as lines he describes, like a good man of the church, women, creatures in his opinion devoid of a sense of complexity. The less well-off and evolved grades of the population are like triangles, then as you go up (along cultural and noble hierarchies) increasingly multi-sided figures such as squares, pentagons, hexagons and so on. In this two-dimensional world, rigidly divided into classes, one day a sphere will run in and it will be the most total confusion for everyone because it will inaugurate the possible existence of the Polyhedrons.
This booklet, which is certainly not a masterpiece of world literature, is usually of interest to students in the first years of mathematics or physics at university, because, dimension after dimension, it seems to evoke the transition to the “fourth” and further, to those that we do not we perceive but imagine as perhaps possible.
I remember that when Alvise returned, he asked me why the interest (among my others) in the book of a scientist-priest that he had read in the original language in the fifties.
I replied that it seemed to me that the thought that supported him was the same that had guided the hand of the Dutch engraver Maurits Cornelis Escher, whose loose plates I had with me along with many others and I was studying for my particular research of that period.
My words must have struck him particularly, giving him a burst of lucidity, as happens to chronically drunk. He stared at me for a long time with interest.
I murmured between my teeth: “Who did you think you’d find? A hotelier’s or lifeguard’s son… or an off-season tourist?”
He had to catch the sense of my gaze….he got comfortable and stretched his legs.
Do you believe me reader if I tell you that in that way one of the most interesting, panoramic and unusual chats (monologues) of my life began? A chat of the old man that lasted until dawn, during which, between credible and incredible, I learned a mountain of news and the chronicle of a fortune squandered on research trips and alcohol….in women I don’t know. He didn’t talk about it. But he didn’t strike me as homosexual, perhaps he was one of those who never bond with anyone, who cultivate their solitude as a gift. I’ve met several of them.
His family of large landowners was from that area. He was born in Urbino but had studied in Venice, his mother’s city. Since high school and then during his university days, he had started traveling around the world. He was passionate about ancient history, archeology and cultures far from ours. He enjoyed a prodigious memory, spoke five languages perfectly including Chinese and had never graduated.
He had returned to a small house, owned by him in Vallugola Bay, nearby, beacuse he was not well, feeling that his time was running out. So in the afternoon he would sit facing the Adriatic Sea, he told me, drinking sweet white wine and thinking back to South America or the Orient. And at night (since he suffered from insomnia) he went to inns until, with the first rare rays of light, the fishing boats set sail beyond the port. That was the time to try to go home for a few hours of sleep.
As for the matter of the relationship between Abbott Abbott and Escher, whose work he knew, he told me he wanted to understand better. So I took out some photographic reproductions of prints from a small folder and, in the dim light of the inn, I began to tell.
– All of Escher’s work, if you look closely, is the child of Flatland. The brilliant Dutchman must have meditated on that libretto for a long time even before leaving for our Italy. Certainly, in Italy, you find Flatland constantly inscribed in the landscape. Have you ever thought that all our architecture, from Rome onwards, is just an attempt to geometrize nature?
He nodded.
– Paved squares, paved streets, perimeter walls, towers, fortresses, palaces… As I move around the Apennines, I often find myself, from area to area, seeing where the experiment was successful best and where worst. You notice it through a sort of well-being or malaise of looks that sometimes seem to grasp a good rhythm, a sort of fertile dialogue between the spontaneous vigor of nature and human geometric thought. Something that becomes devastating in every industrial area and in the suburbs of every city. Our Montefeltro of villages on peaks, on the other hand, plays the relationship with wisdom and rhythm and maintains its elegance and dignity.
– Francesco di Giorgio Martini wasn’t a fool, said Alvise, Montefeltro is Adriatic Tuscany.
I understood that he was following me perfectly.
– Well, Escher geometrizes nature and does so starting from the Plan. I think his ability to make sense of both figure and background is unmatched in Western Art. In him, each chessboard carries a meaning and the way of intersecting geometries and figures constantly generates a slight dizziness for him to remove the concept of centrality from each panel. If the background has the same value as the figure, then you no longer know where to focus your attention, and reality becomes dreamlike and instead of a traditional meaning it begins to evaluate the weight of the spaces (which become concave or convex) and show (just as the brilliant Reiman teaches in his hypotheses on non-Euclidean geometries that must have intrigued both the London reverend and the Dutch printer) to contain unsuspected dimensions, which go well beyond the third. Escher creates slots on the sheet that third-dimensional reality does not contemplate and does not seem to be able to contain, for this reason the infinite seems to nest in his panels.
Alvise, I noticed, had listened to me attentively, but as I was preparing to elaborate further he spoke up:
– Maybe you don’t know that what inspired Escher. It was not only the landscape of Italy (which, just as you say, is a constant dialogue between geometry and nature and, where the balances are good, it generates a sense of harmony that excites!) but also an engraver who had a genius no less than his: Giovan Battista Piranesi!
From this point on, the old highly educated drunkard never let me speak again and in a flood of memories, meetings and travels and searches, he told me about his life in one night.
After all, despite having understood where he lived, I was careful not to look for him after that meeting. I learned that he had died two years later. And that he had asked to be buried in a Venetian cemetery. I learned about it from the manager in that same inn, on a summer evening when it was packed with tourists.
But the fact is that, as the saying goes, “too much cripples” and I felt “crippled” at dawn.
In order not to offer you too, reader, that sense of exhaustion and weariness that seized me at dawn, I will only delve into only one chapter among the many that he exposed to me: the one on Great Tartary (Tartaria).
– I had heard about Piranesi for the first time in Venice, in the printing and book shop of a Jewish scholar with whom I had made friends, Yossef.
It was that brilliant Jew (who ended up in Auschwitz) who told me that in life it is one thing to read the stories and one thing to verify them in person. And that nothing is as it seems as we know it, because above the infinite mass of people there has always been an elite of nobles, clergymen and bankers, which you can add up to a few dozen dynasties and which, disguising themselves a thousand times in a thousand contexts, have always remained the same and, in alliance with demonic beings to whom they have given their souls, they have distorted every truth of the news and every narration in order not to succumb, to survive the thousand upheavals of history! ….. the famous “lines of blood” who command history from the darkness, they are not a legend, they passed and pass through our lands!
Yossef had many Piranesi engravings in his workshop and spending the afternoons in his company was a delight. He shuttled between Venice and Rome for his trade in books and prints, and the long contact with prelates and nobles of the two cities had educated him on a quantity of narratable and unspeakable facts. It was only when he realized that, despite my unripe age, my passion for art and knowledge was authentic and solid in me, he began to speak to me freely.
– The city of the popes and the city of the doges (few know it) have always been twinned in the world of the occult. This is due to having raised an avalanche of parasites “around the two most powerful and long-lived ruling dynasties of the West”.
The same term “black nobility” designated all those families that popes and doges had made aristocrats and had enriched beyond measure. Those families who, with the appointment of new popes or new doges, were certainly not willing to lose privileges, offices and power, inventing or rediscovering genealogies of Roman or Byzantine origin from imperial times, believed they could enjoy forever the proceeds of charities and of trade by sea And, in that way, they built the most powerful apparatus of corruption that history records. A series of Chinese boxes or secret societies nested within societies to control the traffic of indulgences, usury loans and roles of hidden power, in every corner of the world.
They made use of religious orders, traveling like the Jesuits, supranational ritual lodges and agreed marriages, to reach where other enterprises had never gone and, for those who know nothing about it, which is very difficult to believe, to decide all the most important wars and revolutions on earth.
Mussolini, the chesty Mussolini, who in those years swaggered talking of empires under construction from the Roman balconies, was after all (like Hitler) nothing but a romper in their hands and of their own creation.
Do you believe me when I tell you that from my travels and encounters at every level I have only confirmed these words of the Jew Yossef? But it would be a long talk!
One who did understand these dynamics to perfection since the eighteenth century (even if he told us about it in a hermetic way) was Piranesi himself. The great Giovan Battista, who had trained in Venice and then landed in Rome.
There are some of his panels that Escher must have looked at a thousand times. There are in his so-called “Prisons” and “Ruins“… (I love this way of tackling a theme and developing it in every possible form for panels and panels) some that deal with space just like the Dutch engraver. They create structures that become guides for the eye of those who scrutinize them attentively, and lead them into impossible perspectives and labyrinths that defy logic, thus enunciating, like Escher and before Escher, further dimensions beyond the three that are known to us mortals . In Piranesi one always travels from the real to the dream but he does it not only for cognitive purposes, but also and above all “moral”. His two main strands, I was telling you, are that of the Prisons…… a sort of multi-level underground caves which, at first glance, you look at for a long time without being able to understand their meaning or nature. Then, leafing through more than one print and going back to the previous ones, you realize that even though they are gigantic, they are still places of captivity, claustrophobic places that you don’t go through with joy and expectations, labyrinth caverns that run in every direction without taking you anywhere, ramped stairs that go up and up, and they end in a ceiling. Tiny and magical semi-human presences that you discover here and there, increase your dose of suffocation anxiety as in those caves that you discover populated by sparse bats..
A dream state that turns into a nightmare or a compulsion to repeat the same stairs and corridors and footprints of prisoners that you feel are present, even if you don’t know where, perhaps sleeping in shadowy recesses. Thoughts inevitably turn to the Platonic myth of the cave and sometimes you just want to look away from the drawing, looking behind you as if you were looking for an escape route or a breath of fresh air.
The other cycle of prints is entitled Ruins and is no less surprising and disturbing than the first one.
As in the first one, you are assailed by a sense of anxiety and disproportion, and here also of dwarfism, yours as a spectator, in front of buildings that you discover are too big for you and not very habitable and difficult to understand for anyone. Those buildings that we sometimes walk in vain in dreams without arriving at a destination, without finding a living soul, without knowing why we entered. Gigantic ruins of vanished empires that are only partially Rome, much more mysterious or remote remains, uninhabitable, impassable and disturbing.
Here greatness is an element of alienation and not of wonder, like a language you’ve never heard and could never translate.
Here is all of the shady charm of Piranesi!
On the one hand, the awareness (reached by his very high attendances in secret circles of Vatican initiates) that the world has always been “a labyrinthine prison” reserved for the people, as desired by the so-called religious and noble elites. On the other hand, learning that every civilization grows on the ruins of a previous one, and that new political systems always try to erase the memory of the previous ones, especially if they were infinitely more advanced and liberal systems…..and civilization of great ruins to which Piranesi alludes is that of Tartaria.
Similar chats, in the company of the highly erudite Yossef – said Alvise – instilled in me the seed of research.
I left and traveled many years, not only to escape the fascist dictatorship and the imminent war already lost at the start, but to understand what Great Tartary really was. You kave to keep in mind that Yossef, from an ancient Venetian Jewish family, had never gone anywhere else than along the Venice-Rome railway line. All that he knew, he had learned from his boundless reading, from conversations with professors who came to visit him in the shop and from certain Roman cardinals who were loyal customers of him, perhaps dissident with papal policy.
How right Yossef was in his statements and investigations, I understood years later when, with documents cleverly falsified by me, I managed to penetrate from Tibet first to China and then to Russia.
The Great Wall was called “Chinese” by mistake. In reality it was not used to defend China but to defend Great Tartaria from China, whose main nucleus was located between Siberia and Mongolia. The gates, the walkways and the powerful merlons, placed to the West, protected from the East side. I was able to verify on the spot what the Jew had told me.
I learned from Yossef and from the monks in Tibet what was the Great Tartaric civilization. But I verified it by personally traveling. Of course, I gathered clues and sparse evidence. I gathered what the great coterie of which I told you before had failed to conceal, to make disappear from the face of the earth.
Then, what the Great Tartaria had been?
A Buddhist monk told me: a ghostly civilization, a jumble of peoples and civilizations that came from far, far away, but who first landed in the North of our Earth.
The poverty of materialistic and western culture speaks of our Earth as a planet that is the only one inhabited in the entire Universe. A planet on which lives a being who, having evolved from the monkey, would have spontaneously made a career by populating the continents and subjugating every other species of animal and plant. What a poverty of approach, what an egocentrism, what a stupidity!
There are hundreds of species of humanity that on Earth, from the billions of years in which it is habitable. They have arrived from other regions of the Universe to try the experiment of life … or rather … the number of souls is infinite (the monk told me) who, in the various eras of the earth, have chosen to incarnate themselves in the humanities who have lived here and who have given rise to multiple civilizations. The most known, those that have left the most marked traces in the great Akashi records, are the Polar, the Hyperborean, the Lemurian and the Atlantean races.
And the civilizations that have managed to transcend matter have ended up becoming angelic and free, while those that have not succeeded have remained slaves of the passions and demons that administered them.
Well, Atlantis, which in one phase of its history was very glorious and expanded to every corner of the globe, then failed in its maturity to free spirituality from the yoke of passions and made bad use of the great conquests achieved with ingenuity, since the ingenuity moves independently of morality.
But the Atlanteans were not a solid people. Within that civilization there were sects of very pure and redeemed people who with the great flood (arranged by the highest hierarchies of the cosmos) were brought to safety, some in the Hollow Earth, some in secluded and very high places in Tibet, the Andes, of North America.
But it was from mysterious communities that came to us from “who knows “where that a new global civilization, called Tartaria, set off which Western History deliberately ignores, perhaps because admitting it would mean that it has never been the only civilization present on the planet and has coexisted with races different and much more evolved?
In the late 1950s from Tibet (where I had learned the true story of Tartaria, of the colony of the Arij peoples of Aldebaran, which for eons had lived undisturbed in an intra-terrestrial city 52 under the prodigious Mount Kailash, and from the polar mouths of entrance to the boundless and very variegated Hollow Earth and to Shambhala) I managed to enter China and reach the icy borders with Russia.
What a dreadful astonishment assailed me in the days when, with my guides, I managed to visit two immense completely abandoned cities not too far from each other!
The deserted opulence of palaces, streets and squares, that seemed boundless beyond meaning that can be attributed to this word, had nothing to do with the architecture of the Chinese cities that grew like mushrooms in that post-war period and which appeared miserable hovels in comparison.
Buildings, six or seven high, with windows and doors through which gigantic beings could pass, lampposts of height and shape never seen before, paving stones as large as rooms.
We stayed for a long time walking through them, stopping under arcades or on the edge of squares. Not even a feral cat or stray dog around us. A scary desert. Well, we had come across a prison by Piranesi, an open-air prison which, however, under a leaden sky that weighed down on a flat and limitless landscape, which communicated the same sense of claustrophobia. They weren’t ruins around us. The place could have been abandoned for ten years or a century, it was not possible to figure out when. Only in one neighborhood did we find ruins, but not natural ones, like a demolition principle. One of the guides told me that the complete demolition of both cities was planned to recycle the very precious materials, as for other cities similar to these that were in Soviet territory and he had visited them.
Then, it was really talking to a Russian dissident I met years later in Paris that I understood how right the Jewish print dealer was and how much he knew more about those cities and the culture that had built them.
Yes, they were Tartar Cities! They had once been very populous. Not one civilization but multiple ethnic species and cultures made up the boundless fabric of the Tatar Empire. An Empire which had offshoots on every continent and which, being infinitely more advanced in technology and in spirit than us, tolerated the presence on earth of the homo sapiens species, as we tolerate the presence of rats (provided they are not too numerous or infesting).
In their cities (so anomalous compared to ours because they were populated by beings who often reached three meters in height and who coexisted peacefully with races that we would have considered affected by dwarfism, which hovered around half a meter in height) the energy was fruit of the unlimited and free ether. Being carnivorous was considered the worst of sins because animals enjoyed the same rights as humans, and working was optional because a dignified survival was guaranteed, by statute, to everyone.
We, the homo sapiens, knew little or nothing about them (a colony of monkeys, if asked about humanity, what can it say?). We were able to feel only a vague and sacred fear (admirably described by Buzzati – a visionary writer – in his story).
Instead, they lived in a mosaic of several species and had colonies of equal composition in Africa, Europe, South and North America. During my travels on every continent, but above all in Latin America, in ancient and unsuspected cities, I still found in the middle of the century palaces which, in size and workmanship, looked like “oxen in flocks of sheep”, which stood unmotivated among others: simply unrelated and abnormal, some then demolished, others transformed into strange monuments. But then an event occurred (which on a planetary level is defined as “fatigue of a civilization”).
Idleness, the easy life, and perhaps the boredom of those who believe they have achieved perfect mastery of fate, were the germ that infected them.
Instead of constantly questing for spiritual ascent, they sat down and indulged in hedonistic games of various perversions. Their souls rejoiced in their sojourn in their bodies and ceased to yearn for transcendence. It was then that the gap between highly evolved technique and neglected spirituality became clear in them.
Few of them realized the immense danger of a similar drift and withdrew to isolated and hermitic places to save themselves from the contagion.
It was this that made the Tartars similar to the Atlanteans: infinitely vulnerable.
Then the conquest campaigns of Napoleon in Russia and of the English and Spanish in the Americas were only to indulge the spirit of the times, eliminating the surviving Tartars, recycling and disguising the materials of their mighty civilization.
Hence all those photos from past centuries that fascinate connoisseurs and bear witness to objects and buildings and “not quite human” beings.
Guinness Book of Records material, strange geographical maps, widespread architectural anomalies, bizarreness of beings and of time, which the Western political-religious elites tried, as they could, to make them disappear from the face of the earth, in the name of our awkward and presumed uniqueness.
They didn’t manage. They learly failed to take command of the entire globe according to their dictates. Of course, having to admit, for these people rich in material goods and very poor in spirit, that until recently there have been civilizations more evolved than ours is a hard thing. Just as it will be a hard blow to digest the fact that the earth is subject to repeated resets, more or less violent….and that the reset of homo sapiens humanity, ours, is approaching.
A reset that, like the Atlanteans and the Tartars, will reject all the elites plus three-quarters of humanity. That foolish humanity that believed that a hedonistic sleeve of fake nobility, greedy prelates and fraudulent bankers had always worked for the good of all. Foolish mass-men and bagmen who have always obeyed without ever doubting, on the contrary, imitating their moves and that it is right that they end up like their masters.
This what the old and well-educated drunkard told me in one night. Of course, he also told me many other things, Alvise the globetrotter born in Urbino and buried in Venice. But this episode of Tartaria, a civilization that lived on earth and then vanished into the shadows completely ignored by the West, was a truly unknown theme to me, a theme that I bring back because, these days, it seems to me explanatory in its own way.
Although I am much more optimistic about the reset than Alvise was, because I have seen that many people have woken up in recent years, who change their lives and no longer believe in the old hierarchies, in the nonsense of TV and newspapers (almost all super corrupt and full of well-compensated bagmen) who still try to make the fools who consult them understand a sea of nonsense!
PS
On Alvise’s stocks, I have instead continued to deepen the comparative works of Piranesi and Escher over the years. From it, I made a series of lessons for some clever French friends who are in love with our Italy.
I carried out my seminars and studies moved by the passion that has always accompanied me for the discoveries of Father Ernetti, who, among other things, he had known in person, and about whom he told me truly surprising details!
It seems premature to make hypotheses now, but if considered from a certain point of view, I think it is not excessive to state that the two great engravers were of those strange beings which are called “time-travellers”, and that their works (or at least some of them) are litmus papers or ciphered spatial translations of those journeys. Hence certain figurative lemmas that recur in both, and certain, so to speak, traps for the eye, visual transgressions, well calculated deceptions of sight.
We will be back about it!
