Bottled Poetry.

We found time this past weekend to work in our simple little garden that fills the space between the house and outbuildings at Annefield.  We recall reading someplace that this most ancient design — the classic symmetrical four square arrangement with two cross-walks — actually represents Paradise, where the paths symbolize the four rivers rising from Eden named in the Book of Genesis: Pishon, Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates.   The form goes back to ancient Persia, where the form is called Charbagh or Chahar Bagh, and came down to us through Islamic traditions, often with a rill of water emanating from a central fountain and coursing through the center of the four paths, such as in the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra at Grenada, Spain.  In these parts observers call it an “English garden,” but its much more than that — yes, the English used the form, as did the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish and so many other cultures.  How could something so ancient and fraught with symbolism inspire something so simple?

A few weeks ago Adrian Higgins wrote in The Washington Post about an elaborate classically inspired garden in Orange County, Virginia, at a place called Mount Sharon that the owners were opening to the public the weekend of Mother’s Day.  The closing paragraph was quite striking:

I too like the urn terrace, whose floor of turf and walls of hedge bring the eye to the plump and ornate stone urn held like a Faberge egg in its space.  But the power here is in the crafting of the void, the negative space around the urn.  It brings home the idea that Mount Sharon is, at heart, about sculpting the air.

The poetic phrase “sculpting the air” reminded us of a place we saw in Portugal a few weeks ago, where long dead artists sculpted ground under a magical garden into the very antithesis of this notion at the gardens at the Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal.

The Quinta da Regaleira

Sintra is a Romantic, strange and mysterious place, with its palaces and palm trees dotting the mountains.  On our second day in Sintra we visited the Quinta da Regaleira, the summer residence of the family of Antonio Augusto de Carvalho Monteiro (1848-1920), who acquired the property in 1893 and commenced an elaborate building scheme unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.  Antonio Augusto de Carvalho Monteiro was a capitalist born in Rio de Janiero — a graduate in law from the University of Coimbra, he was a distinguished bibliophile, collector and philanthropist.  The main house is in the French neo-gothic style, designed by theatrical designer Luigi Manini (1848-1936), who also designed the extensive gardens beginning in 1898.  They worked together for 12 years.

The garden is ambitious, and it succeeds.  Even the most rudimentary garden is an expression of man’s dominion over nature, and ironically when they aren’t maintained, its laughable how quickly nature reclaims it, but this garden was conceived as the representation of the Cosmos, with imagery depicting the quest for paradise and mundus inferus, the metaphysical quest for being.

Imagine Dante’s Inferno, as Dante followed Ariadne’s thread so one can make the way back from the underworld.  Each garden feature is a stop on the initiate’s journey along the way to the vera peregrinatio mundi where you are to experience the Harmony of the Spheres.  The gardens present the metaphysical quest for enlightenment that is found in the great epics.  Symbolic objects throughout incorporate refences to Greek mythology, the works of Virgil, Dante, Milton and Luís de Camões.  It doesn’t stop there, for it also includes references to the mission of the Knights Templar (who, according to legend, were the keepers of the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant; the order was disbanded in the 14th century) and its successor order in Portugal, The Order of Christ; and the writings and work of great mystics and magicians, such as the alchemical treatise, Ars Magna by Ramon Llul (1232-1315).  Heady stuff.

Close to the house are several formal gardens; one, called the Promenade of the Gods, is an avenue linking the Pisoes Loggia to the main house and features statues of classical gods such as Fortune, Orpheus, Venus, Flora, Ceres, Zeus and the like.  From there the garden reveals itself as one explores an increasingly confounding series of mysterious places.

The most striking feature in the garden is the most diabolical, one hidden from view — the Initiatic Well, a subterranean tower that sinks 99 feet into the earth but is open to the sky and ringed by a monumental spiral stairway, along which are 22 niches that symbolize the 22 major Arcana of the Tarot.  A series of tunnels link this space to other features in the garden: the Unfinished Well, the Lake of the Waterfall, the Grotto of the East, and the Portal of the Guardians.  This last entrance fronts on a ceremonial plaza defined by twin towers and a fountain, directly opposite the Terrace of the Celestial Worlds.

Boca do Inferno — The Mouth of Hell

The afternoon before we stopped to see another mysterious place near Sintra at Caiscais, where we visited the Boca do Inferno — “the Mouth of Hell,” a site renowned for the otherworldly, booming noise that rises from the waves as the the water crashes into the rocks.  We spied a small white plaque mounted on rock that referenced Aleister Crowley and the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa — there was no English translation, but we noted the word “suicido.”

This is an intriguing and obscure find, and after some research learned that the mystic and occultist Aleister Crowley, an early 20th century mystic and occultist (some think he was a madman) had visited the place and created a scandal.  In 1930 Crowley visited Mr Pessoa in Portugal, and Pessoa helped Crowley the fake his own suicide, which included a suicide note left at the Boca do Inferno.  Pessoa even told the press that he’d seen Aleister Crowley’s ghost the day after his supposed suicide, when Crowley was actually in Spain enjoying the media scandal his prank generated.

Crowley is best known today as the creator of a Tarot deck he called The Book of Thoth; he designed them, but the images were painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943.  The deck remains in print.  Like the garden at the Quinta da Regaleira, it incorporates symbols from every conceivable tradition.  Given his interests, one would expect Crowley to be drawn to a place called Boca do Inferno.  It’s a shame that Montiero died 10 years prior to Crowley’s visit to Sintra; had they met, no doubt they would have had a lot to talk about.