Robert Liris, chercheur de mystères, Entretiens avec
Claude Arz. Les Enchanteurs no. 2
Paris :
Les Editions de l’Œil du Sphinx, 2018/2021. pp. 166. Profusely illustrated.
Reviewed by Norman Simms
More than a series of interviews, this
book contains many brief essays and aperçus
on a variety of topics that Robert Liris has been interested in throughout his
life. As the title informs us, Liris has for a very long time been a researcher
into mysteries—strange historical coincidences, unexplained archaeological
sites, modern emergences of archaic and ancient images. In addition, he has
been a teacher, a poet, an art critic and good friend to many. Where others have turned away from
controversy, Liris has faced it square on and pursued it through its smallest
details, using not only his powerful intuition but cameras and light filters.
And other high-powered optical equipment. He calls himself a psychohistorian,
someone who not only looks for what happened, or how it happened, but why it
happened—the emotional and the psychic forces that run through history.
Liris’ key places and themes have
centred on Glozel, its discoverer Emil Fradin, but also the so-called
Shepherds’ Table nearby in the Bourbon region: in each of these places,
professional and official scientists and government agents have glanced and
dismissed these places as not worth any further attention. Liris has looked,
studied, visited and revisited and
talked the ordinary people nearby, and finds them each portals into a world of
energy and insight beyond textbooks and publicity brochures. That Vichy should
have been chosen as the seat of Marshall Pétain’s collaborationist government
during the Nazi occupation he takes as no mere accident: a convenient spa town
with lots of hotel space into which a phoney bureaucracy could be placed. Vichy
is a place of historical energies flowing through it for millennia and when its
propaganda symbols and posters are examined closely he finds the strange
connections to archaic phenomena. Even in an apparently superficial similarity
between Tarot cards and videos of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers
in New York City, Liris discovers something more than fact or fake news:
uncanny affiliations which lead us to ponder in a new way the world we live in.
Like what happened to Claude Arz, when I
first met Robert Liris at the railway station in Vichy, he asked me if I were
interested in seeing an archaeological site. That very first day at Glozel
changed my life. Many visits over the
next decade continued to open my eyes to several important mysteries, and as
the years went by Robert took me around to see many other mysterious places in
the region of Vichy and Bourbon: small churches built over underground rivers,
images of monkeys going up and down strigilated lines on the inside and outside
of the building, and a castle where its pre-Revolutionary owners had installed
long clay pipes so he could listen in to the talk of strangers asking for
entry. Most of all, over those years—even
when I could no longer visit Robert and Pierette Liris-we kept in touch my
letters and email. It was always challenging to hear his ideas and examine the
latest pictures he had taken of rock art, small clay and bone objects from
Glozel, and his theories of psychohistory. Though we always did not agree, the
conversations were rich and provocative.
Now others can share in these ideas and
their challenge to received opinion and often stultifying official ideologies. There are things I didn’t understand when
Liris first mentioned them or when I didn’t have occasion to ask. Why, for
instance, the Vichyites and then the Nazis didn’t use Glozel as a propaganda
tool for their irrationalist ideologies, and what did Emil Fradin do during the
war? Well, while Laval did once visit the little hamlet and museum at Glozel,
he was not made very welcome, and during the German Occupation Fradin favoured
the Resistance. That is good to know and
also reassuring to see how even in his last days he did not fall for the supernaturalists
and the right-wing racialist versions of the findings at Glozel.
The most important part of the book for
me are Liris’ speculations on the nature of the objects found at Glozel and his
insights into prehistoric art in general. Though not systematically
presented—they come and go with the flow of the conversation with Arz, they do
come together in the reader’s mind as a profound meditation on our earliest
ancestors and their engagement with their own minds. In one sense, Liris is sceptical about the
dates given for the various materials found at the site—bones, horn and clay;
accepting, it seems, the conservative readings of C14 and Thermo-Luminescence
that they are relatively late, sometime between 1500 BCE and 800 CE, rather
than some pieces thousands of years earlier and were only collected and perhaps
re-written on later. Yet he seems to accept the late Hans-Rudolf Hitz’s view
that the “alphabetical” marks constitute an early set of proto-Celtic languages
found elsewhere in the Alpine regions of what is now France and Switzerland,
the messages being interpreted as simple ex
voto and ownership statements; rather than marks of a more hieroglyphic
nature, later re-touched to conform to those proto-alphabetic ciphers. All of
which still leaves us with the mystery of what the site, with its storage
tunnels, and setting across the plains to the volcanos near modern-day
Claremont Ferrand is –burial grounds for sacred objects, museum or reliquary of
people in the tragic sense of their own historical disappearance between Gaul
and Rome, or Aladdin’s Lamp Cave for early medieval thieves and forgers.
In another sense, Liris feels and sees
with mystical insight some deeply spiritual meanings in the artefacts, their
markings and contiguity, as though it were the phantoms of the deep and dark
past speaking to us out of the ground, in the old-fashioned glass cabinets in
Fradin’s museum, and in the inexplicable controversies and even hostility
generated by the uncovering of the field, the exposure of unheard of objects by
mere peasants, school teachers and amateur prehistorians.
Other than those complete deniers and
sceptics who find it hard to grant any significance to the objects found in
Glozel or to the site itself, now known to be associated with a Gallic
settlement on the other side of the river, in whose banks the tunnels full of a
mixed collection of materials have been found. Visitors to the miniature (one
room) museum set up by Emil Fradin have marvelled at the startling variety on
display: carved and etched bone and reindeer miniatures, clay models of faces
and bisexual beings, tablets full of some mysterious kind of proto-writing. The
walls of the museum also have photographs of famous visitors, including men of
the stature of Salomon Reinach, celebrities and royalty from around Europe, as
well as newspaper clippings of the controversy that happened from the early
1920s to the end of that decade.
After the Second World War, when new
kinds of testing became available, a more scientific controversy broke out,
about how far to trust the dates that showed a bizarre variation of presumed
times of creation for the organic and inorganic artefacts. The real question
was not how could such a juxtaposition be taken seriously, but rather when were
the collected items gathered together and when were they added to over by more
of the same nearly a millennium? If there are obviously some that cannot be
considered either prehistorical or proto-historical, then why were they
gathered from different sites and buried in Glozel? How could they so closely resemble, at times,
cave and rock art from distant regions and extremely older periods? Some of
these works of devotion, ownership, atropaic or prophylactic meaning may have
been made on the spot, perhaps imitating older models, and yet not within the
last thousand years. Who in Celtic iron
age times would have kept away all metallic objects or items that required iron
age tools? How would medieval devotees and pilgrims have been attracted by
clearly pre-Christian idols and relics without re-imagining them in
ecclesiastical or cultic terms? Though
the ruins of a glass works from the late Middle Ages has been found near the
site of Glozel and has been blamed for interference with the dating of materials
buried beneath it, there are no objects made of glass, neither imitating the
archaic objects or being inspired by them.
All in all, despite all the aspersions
cast against the site, sometimes doing more than insinuate that Emil Fradin and
Dr. Antonin Morlet, concocted a gigantic, grotesque hoax, the integrity of
these two men has not been disproved: and each in his way attempted to check
his enthusiasm over most of their lives. There have been rumours, affirmed
partly by Robert Liris, that both Fradin and Morlet—and Liris himself—has kept
some of the treasures or artefacts hidden from public view because of the
continuing controversies. But nothing suggests that what is not on view in the
little museum—and even what was from time to time stolen from the display
cabinets by opponents of the discovery and what it implies for the origins of
written scripts and the supposedly normative ways archaeological digs should
look—is of a completely different order.
If there is anything grotesque about
Glozel it is the utterly irrational reaction by official and professional
archaeologists and prehistorians. As much they tried to pollute the area
examined by international committee, including inserting false imitations into
the ground, or claiming to have found pottery-making tools in a nearby
farmhouse—nothing does sway with the actual mystery: the emotional attraction
that Glozel holds for some professionals, for amateurs like Liris who has made
himself an expert by his many years of association with Emil Fradin and the
circle of Friends of the Museum who even turned themselves into a more academic
body in the last few years, holding annual conferences and publishing the
proceedings thereof. Glozel, bolstered by his own training as an historian and
his experience as an art critic.
Then Liris deals with other sites and
other mysteries. La Table des Bergers
is located way up in the mountains of the Bourbonnaise, at a place where
shepherds transferred their flocks from one area to another in the process of
transhumance. The Table of the Shepherds show a variety of geometric markings
and signs, probably indicative of a point of magnetic shift in what looks like
a simplified compass or a child’s drawing of a hopscotch square on the pavement
of an urban street.[1]
There are other signs similar to those found in Glozel, cupules, patterned lines
and scrapings chipped into the rock and pre- or non-alphabetic signs. Liris
would probably have much to say if he looked at analogous places and signs
found at the southern and eastern parts of Europe. For instance, in the many
studies of the Romanian ballad of Mioriţa
(The Little Ewe Lamb), a mythologized and even later literary son that
exists in thousands of versions throughout the region, refers to the long
journeys undertaken by shepherds across and back down from the mountains in
tragic terms, with death, suicide or transmogrification occurring at key places
and centred on the relationship of the lonely pastoralist and a new-born lamb.
\
It is likely, too, as Liris and Arz his interlocutor suggest, that many of the
large cliff-face walls across the whole of Europe which are marked by often vast
numbers of wordless signs,[2] left by and for passage by shepherds during
transhumance. Tese record symbolically
changes in the lives of rural people over many centuries, and may give advice
to their fellow shepherds in how to avoid catastrophes—being caught in
blizzards, falling into crevasses, warnings to hide from hostile robber bands
and so on—as well as the unknown dreams of countless generations who feel
inspired by and feel the need to respond in kind to the carvings found there
since time out of mind. Crosses,
circles, hatched lines and gouged holes along with hundreds of other signs
attest to these places as lieux de memoire¸ where powerful memories of traumatic
experiences accumulate
These energies, Liris postulates, may be
actual (natural) magnetic fields, geological forces vibrating underground from
unseen rivers deep in the earth, rumblings of volcanic eruptions, tremors of
low-level earthquakes that sporadically are felt in certain configurations of
boulders and echoes of explosive contacts with celestial bodies that disintegrate
on impact. Human events, For groups, large and small, even individual families,
repressed memories be triggered by visualization of these signs, the release of
long dormant traumatic shocks, and thus, when rediscovered during transhumance,
produce responses in dance, song and mythical narratives: or silent catatonic
absorption into the shared collective memory.
As Arz and Liris continue their
conversation—reconstructed and organized for this book—many other topics are
covered, ranging from the phenomena associated with UFOs and the special
relationship Robert finds with his wife Pierrette, Black Madonnas and black icons
of Christ, alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone, and historical coincidences
that place national leaders, scientists, charlatans and celebrities into
strange seemingly mutually-illuminating patterns.
As a psychohistorian, Robert Liris knows
that such things are matters of hallucination, returns of repressed images and
sounds, and collective anxieties manifest in all sorts of ancient and modern
social media. However, he also entertains other explanations, such as spiritual
forces and a Jungian kind of archetypes virtually written into the DNA of
modern humans. His meeting with Lloyd deMause in New York at a meeting of the
Psychohistorical Association proved to be almost as much of a life-changing
event as his introduction to Emile Fradin and Glozel. Nothing is simple and a cigar is never just a
cigar. As Freud shows, whether in dreams, jokes or clips of the tongue, there
are always hidden motivations, secret connections and sudden eruptions of mental
energy in close encounters with seemingly trivial or meaningless people,
places, things and ideas.
A conversation with Robert Liris is
never just an exchange of pleasantries: it is an exciting entry into a
many-branched Palaeolithic grotto, a descent into the abyss of darkness, out of
which there sparkles rare crystals, sparkling jewels and explosive fireworks
from somewhere deep inside the earth, When he meets a painter like Slobo
Jevitic, their personalities click, they understand one another, and they spark
each other into new thoughts and understandings of art and the universe. But that’s not all. When he sees photographs
of the Twin Towers collapsing in New York City of 9/11, he also sees the towers
painted on Tarot cards, out of each of these catastrophes there are figures of
people falling from the heights into the earth; and when he watches the latest
pictures of Notre Dame de Paris burning and its steeple collapsing, the mystery
is expanded, not a mystery of what is
unknowable and rationally improbable, but the enigmatic and bizarre connections
between different happenings in different times and places, connections that
cannot be confined to formal historical protocols or sensationalized in popular
manuals of dream interpretation.
[1] The Opies
conclude that in a very special sense children’s activities are museums of
human culture. Brian and Iona Opie, The
Language and Lore of School Children (1959).
[2]
Jean Ablet, Signes sans mots (Paris:
Hachette, 1986). Also see Robert Hirigoyen, La
pierre et la pensée : la Vallée des Merveilles—les gravures rupestres du
Mont Bego (Paris : Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1978).
