Chiara Fumai’s wall mural originally conceived for the Si Sedes Non Is exhibition in Athens is a work of dynamic ritual inspired chiefly by the manuscript, Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches. The artist’s ritual intent was to expose and dismantle forces of patriarchal oppression through the art of ritual magic.
I. ARADIA
Aradia is a text written by folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland in 1899. Its contents were provided by his acquaintance with the spiritualist Maddalena, who claimed a magical pedigree deriving from an ancient line of Tuscan witches. In the manuscript, the Greek goddess Diana is depicted much like the Gnostic goddess Sophia, as the true creator of the universe who has been obscured by her demiurge offspring – an inferior god driven by tyrannical impulses whom the Gnostics equated with the biblical Jehovah.
In the narrative, Diana commands her daughter Aradia to descend to earth to instruct the enslaved masses in the arts of witchcraft so that they may be liberated from their oppressors.
This theme resonated deeply with the political and spiritual themes prevalent in Chiara’s work. Her expansions upon Feminism and Socialism were erudite in their intellectual proficiency, driven by an emotional urgency to repair the injustices of the prevailing culture. Magic was the force through which she roused a spirit of subversion and conveyed her ethos.
II. MAGIC
Chiara Fumai’s artistic practice included several works of performative ritual magic as well as channeling either by physical invocation of historical/mythological personages or automatic drawing. She also evoked and bound elemental spirits charged with the carrying out of specific tasks. As a preamble to these workings, Chiara often employed an incantation from The Mass of Chaos published in Peter Carroll’s Liber Null and Psychonaut, a book from which several motifs of the mural are derived.
The incantation forms the outer delineation of the mural drafted in Chiara’s calligraphic style of automatic drawing. In Carroll’s words:
This rite may be performed as a sacrament of invocation to raise a particular manifestation of energy for inspiration, divination, or communion with particular domains of consciousness. It may be performed as an act of enchantment in which spells are projected to modify physical reality.
Other tropes in the mural drawn from Liber Null are instructional. In an earlier version of the work, these instructions were rendered as leaflets, originating in the two-dimensional confines of the wall and then distributed outwards as materialized pamphlets traversing dimensional space. This style hearkens back to the dissemination of Marxist ideas or mimeographed copies of S.C.U.M. Manifesto – prominent inspirations for many of Chiara’s compositions. The multiple dimensions occupied by the material signify the magical correspondences between multiple planes of psychic existence.
By creating this work, Chiara assumes the role of Aradia as educator. These instructions are laid out ritual procedures much like those inscribed on the walls of the Mithraic and Eleusininian Mystery Schools. These include methods for the construction of magical sigils, the invocation of spirits, and the restraining of enemies.
III. PROTECTION
The enemies that the mural intends to restrain are Patriarchal, Ecclesiastical and Political hierarchies. At the time of the mural’s construction, the obfuscations committed by these institutions weighed heavily upon Chiara. Like Diana as depicted in Arantia, she felt keenly their oppressive suffocations upon the human predicament and sought means of rectification.
The Paleochristian symbolism scattered throughout the mural exposes the ancient use of symbol to enslave the subconscious. Chiara understood the parallels between magical evocation (i.e. the binding of spirits and elementals) and political tactics employed for domination and enslavement over women and the general masses. Her magical grasp of the significance of symbol in ritual practice elucidated its powerful presence in political propaganda and religious obscuration. She believed that the spiritual birthright of humanity, which she expressed skillfully in her studies of occultism, had been deliberately suppressed by religious dogma. The female aspects of divinity had been silenced and defiled. These developments heightened her loathing of injustice, poverty, and sexism.
Many instructional elements of the mural are intended as spells of protection against social and spiritual conditioning. Diagrams for the construction of auric force fields and circles of protection are illuminated for this purpose. In effect, the dynamic power of the piece serves as a talisman of protection against destructive and oppressive forces.
IV. DIANA
The vocabulary of myth is essential to the working of ritual magic. It comprises the whole of the language of the subconscious mind, and magic deals exclusively with the macrocosmic-microcosmic matrix of the subconscious.
In Arantia, Diana is regarded as Creatrix of the cosmos. Gender is a dualistic condition distinct only in the realm of matter, it becomes more diaphanous and eventually dissolves completely in ascending to the higher planes. In Gnostic mythology, the lower gods created this rift dividing mankind from “the things above.” Just as Jehovah asserted sole dominance over his creation. Diana grieves for the ignorance unleashed upon humanity and the servitude with which it has been cursed. In the mural, too, Diana is personified as Truth.
Chiara portrays the body of the goddess as dismembered and scattered. The chief implication of this dismemberment is the inversion of the Solar Deity myth toward the female principle. The severed body of Diana mirrors the severed body of Osiris in Egyptian mythology whose various members were hidden by the fratricide of Set (Ignorance, Darkness, the Underworld.) In the original myth, it is Isis who collects the various members enabling the resurrection of her husband-brother.
All slain and resurrected gods are solar gods, symbolizing the circadian cycle, where Diana is inevitably lunar. The inversion of a mythological complex is a powerful act of both postmodernism and magic. It subverts the material framework of the subconscious to affect profound change. It replicates the formula essential to alchemy whereby the male and female polarities are conjoined and thus obliterated. Through the transmutation accomplished by the mural, Diana becomes the Sun. And the artist assumes the dual roles of Isis as orchestrator of resurrection and Arantia as light-bringer.
Micki Pellerano
New York, USA
8TH December 2018