The New Revelations of Being & Other Mystical Writings
by Antonin Artaud
Translated and with an introduction by Peter Valente
Illustrated by Martin Bladh
The New Revelations of Being & Other Mystical Writings includes a selection of texts and letters written by Antonin Artaud from 1933 to 1937 which explore astrology, alchemy, oriental philosophies, Christian ritual and magic, the Tarot, and the civilizations of India and Mexico.
Artaud’s extensive reading and thinking on metaphysics and religion produced essays such as “Notes on Oriental, Greek and Indian Cultures,” “Mexico and Civilization,” “The Eternal Betrayal of the Whites,” “The Life and Death of Satan the Fire” and “The Breath that Returns to God...” The central text in this volume is The New Revelations of Being. In this work, Artaud is the “Revealed One,” the madman and fool of the Tarot, who possesses secret knowledge that he believes will allow him to enact his apocalyptic vision of a world transformed through destruction.
These documents capture Artaud at the point in his life where he had nothing to lose and was about to embark on a journey which would change the trajectory of his life forever.
Now, no longer existing, I see what exists.
I really identified with this Being, this Being that ceased to exist.
And this Being revealed everything to me.
I knew it, but I couldn’t say it, and if I can begin speaking of it now, it is because I left reality.
It is a true Desperate One who speaks to you and who knows the happiness of being in the world only now that he has left this world and is absolutely separated from it
…
I am not dead, I am separated.
– THE REVEALED ONE
The New Revelations of Being & Other Mystical Writings by Antonin Artaud
Out 8 December 2023
Hardbound, 182 pages
190 x 148mm
ISBN 978-1-915908-05-6
Antonin Artaud's work has a world-renowned status for experimentation across performance, film, sound, poetry and visual art. In the 1920s, he was a member of the Surrealist movement until his expulsion, and formulated theoretical plans across the first half of the 1930s for his 'Theatre of Cruelty' and attempted to carry them through. He made a living as a film actor from 1924 to 1935 and made many attempts to direct his own film projects. In 1936, he travelled to Mexico with a plan to take peyote in the Tarahumara lands. In 1937, preoccupied with the imminent apocalypse, he travelled to Ireland but was deported, beginning a nine-year asylum incarceration during which he continued to write and also made many drawings. After his release in 1946, he lived in the grounds of a sanatorium in Ivry-sur-Seine, close to Paris, and worked intensively on drawings, writings and sound-recordings. He died on 4 March 1948. His drawings have been exhibited on several occasions, notably at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna in 2002 and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 2006.
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twelve full length books. His most recent books are a collection of essays on several of Werner Schroeter’s films, A Credible Utopia (Punctum, 2022) and his translation of Gérard de Nerval, The Illuminated (Wakefield Press, 2022). Forthcoming is his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan (Semiotext(e), 2024). He has shown twenty-four of his short experimental films at Anthology Film Archives.