Mabus
on the Thames in his Oxford days.
Alchemical Illuminations
A Mabus Timeline
Raymond Mabus's disturbing comic method dates back to 1976 shortly before he was incarcerated. On 15 December 1976 Mabus was arrested and subsequently incarcerated in Saint Albans Federal Mental Institution. Before this time he was practicing his mysterious "Subud Working." Little is known about this doctrine but that it involved the recording of dreams, astral projection, and divinatory games such as "Alchemical Illuminations."
Mabus placed great importance on the singular results he attained from this game. One subject draws a series of figures with blank areas for words. The second subject writes lines to fill in the blanks without seeing the drawing. Mabus was very interested in seeing how the "linguistic and physical spaces overlap."
Mabus traced this method back to ancient Egypt claiming a link between his illuminations and heiroglyphic pictograms in the tombs of the Pharaohs. The Arabs who first discovered these tombs in the seventh century believed that invisible treasures of a tomb could be materialized by "heiroglyphic incantations." Note that the word alchemy comes from al keme (keme meaning "black land," the Arabic name for Egypt, taken from the fertile soil along the Nile), the name the Arabs called this invisible treasure.
Numerous causes have been invoked to explain the unusual effects of alchemical illuminations, including:
- Psychic ability--some form of telepathic ability is attributed to at least one of the subjects.
- Synchronicity--Carl Jung noted a seperation between causual & acausual events. He defined synchronicity as an acausual connective principle.
- Pheromones--the human body gives off consciously undetectable scents that convey archetypal information.
- Chi--stories are transmitted by the flow of chi energy between the participants.
- Subconscious messages--finished comics are the result of previously sublimated messages between players or from an outside source...