Theatrum Chemicum: Ayahuasca, conjuro, alegoría (Ayahuasca, spell, allegory) by Enrique Flores takes its name from an ancient compendium of alchemical writings published in the middle of the Baroque period: a work that compiled a hybrid collection of treatises, essays, poems, letters, and notes from various sources, three centuries before Antonin Artaud’s The Alchemical Theater. This book brings together a set of materials that, like a constellation, revolve around the magic spells compiled by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, the magic lantern of Sor Juana’s Sueño and her Loa al Dios de las Semillas, and the Auto sacramental do Santo Daime, an unfinished work by the Argentine poet Néstor Perlongher and a project of Eucharistic transgression, theophagic, ritual, and sacrificial, transubstantiated in the hybrid, mixed, Indo-African, Amazonian, mystical, syncretic, and mestizo religion of ayahuasca, yagé, and Santo Daime.
Flores plunges into the darkness of the waters of these imaginations. Baroque, neo-baroque, neo-baroque, trans-baroque: a crossroads of operations; a rhizomatic proliferation in progress. It drifts through its meanderings, at times as if it were a poem or song intended to be recited performatively. The philological (and poetic) sensitivity of the works gathered here is striking. His sensitive handling of sources goes beyond criticism and historians. He articulates a network of connections between poetics, ethnology, and psychoanalysis capable of entering and exiting multiple levels of reality. The real, the imaginary, and the symbolic interweave its knots. To read Theatrum chemicum is to open oneself to an unknown and endless experience. It is a way of being in language and moving toward experience. In other words, it is a form of knowledge (and not necessarily of representation).
Enrique Flores (Mexico, 1958) holds a PhD in Literature from El Colegio de México. He is a researcher at the Institute of Philological Research and a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the UNAM. He is a specialist in colonial literature, ethnopoetics, and avant-garde poetics. His published works include La imagen desollada: una lectura del “Segundo sueño” (The Flayed Image: A Reading of “The Second Dream”), Los tigres del miedo (The Tigers of Fear), El fin de la conquista (The End of the Conquest), Sor Juana chamana (Sor Juana the Shaman), Etnobarroco: rituales de alucinación (Ethnobaroque: Rituals of Hallucination), and Papeles de Tebanillo González: Inquisición y locura a fines del siglo XVIII (The Papers of Tebanillo González: Inquisition and Madness at the End of the 18th Century).
Theatrum Chemicum, Enrique Flores
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
CDMX, México. 2020 (208 pages)
