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What Might a Necropolis Be Hiding?
What if a cemetery was never what we've been told it was? What if it was merely a facade, and what if the true thing that it buries is a history that the world is no longer capable of dealing with? Perhaps the only way to see into such mysteries is through the eyes of an altered state of consciousness, though in this case no medicinals are required. The great secret of psychedelics is that they aren't necessary to those who simply look at the world not as one has been taught to see it but as it obviously is at face value. Could a memorial garden bury an entire hidden history? A rather mind-blowing example might be the most famous and elaborate cemetery in the world, the French necropolis called the Père-Lachaise. It's "the non-certifiable Frenchman's asylum," as Frederick Brown calls it in his book Elysium as Real Estate, for to understand the place as a cemetery is to enter into a madness of marble and granite, a surreal architectural dream of megalomanics. But what does it look like if freed from preconceptions? What we see with fresh eyes is an entire Greek or Roman city in miniature, with labyrinthine cobblestoned lanes lined with 6-foot-tall columned houses featuring ornate front doors and windows and porches. The so-called necropolis sports pyramids, obelisks, ziggurats, domed basilicas, miniature Gothic cathedrals, sphinxes, standing stones, and a lighthouse. There are iron-railed gardens, statuary, and graves most certainly, but what if we assume that the graves date only to the early 1800s, when Napoleon established the district as a burial ground? The wording in the histories is interesting, with frequent mention of the acreage being "transformed" into a neoclassical, neo-Gothic, Byzantine-revival cemetery. Might not the landscape architect credited with the designing the place have been more of an excavator, and might not the neoclassical buildings in fact be genuinely ancient? Looking past the newer graves, we see what looks for all this world and the next like a real city of tiny houses, churches, and government buildings. Carolyn Campbell, an historian of Père-Lachaise, observes that the layout of the cemetery is "very urban—a cityscape with winding streets and directional signs." What's more difficult to imagine — a cemetery designed as an inconceivably expensive fake antiquated city for delusional egotists, or an actual antiquated city being redressed and repurposed by, granted, delusional egotists? Let's follow the money. Why invest in building a fake antiquated memorial to your self-importance when you can seize one that's already there and merely carve your name over those worrisomely ancient Roman numerals? Interestingly, an 1839 article in The New Yorker noted that Père-Lachaise "has not the soothing contemplative tranquility which should hallow a spot sacred to the repose of the dead. ... It echoes the voice of the great city. ... It savors more of the region on this side of the grave than of the awful realm, the shadowy kingdom beyond." In other words, it doesn't feel like a cemetery at all. The article adds, "The tombs of Père-Lachaise seem rather tricked out for show." "Tricked out" perhaps sounds synonymous with the "redressing" I previously suggested.Simultaneous to "transforming" the polis into a necropolis, the site's true history was effectively erased, and it has now been centuries since anyone might have remembered who exactly once lived in the miniature city. It's been so long that the true histories have "transformed" into our legends and mythologies. But the folklore of Germany and Scandinavia yet acknowledges the dwarven peoples famed for their craftsmanship, who lived in stones and mounds and around megaliths. And of course folklore from across the world acknowledges the existence of a race of "little people." Ancient Egypt even had dwarven deities. In more recent times, they're understood as Christmas elves, Hobbits, Smurfs, little green men, and Oompa-Loompas. The ethnobotanist Terence McKenna met elves while under the influence of magic mushrooms, but as we suggested at the start, the clear eyes of seeing the famed Parisian necropolis for what it looks most like, a dwarven city, is its own mind trip. Now let's also practice our clear ears of hearing, with extraordinary vocalist Sem Ortiz's song "Oh, Inverted Sun," about losing our heads in the village where the little people sleep and where we can see, from a flipped perspective, the sun turned upside down and the leaves floating up to the trees, and why we'll be glad we did.https://semayem.bandcamp.com/track/oh-inverted-sunOrtiz has revealed for us a passage into a walled city we had built in a dream, through a gap in the wall unnoticed until disclosed by a breeze. The lyrical words metalimnion and thalweg of course refer to the waters in between that separate warmth from coldness and to the deepest part of a riverflow. Only an inverted sun can illuminate the liminal layers and those profoundest courses that otherwise chill our marrow. Take a trip with Ortiz on the album Therapy is Working.
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