Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, 1915-23. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels separated by glass strips mounted in a wood and steel frame, 277.5 x 175.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest, 1953. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022

La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (figure 1), by the influential French/American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), may be the most sophisticated and mysterious work of art created in the modern era. Duchamp began making studies for his masterwork, better known as The Large Glass, in 1912, first in Munich and then Paris. Three years later, in the United States, he began fabricating the piece, which consists of two large panes of glass “painted” with materials including lead wire, dust, and silver mirroring. He abandoned it, “unfinished,” in 1923. The Large Glass did not enter public view until 1926, when Duchamp showed it at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme, for which Duchamp served as Secretary. The Glass was shattered during return transport to Dreier’s Connecticut home. Duchamp laboriously repaired it ten years later, when he declared himself delighted with its pattern of cracks added by chance. It was not until 1954 that the work, which stands over nine feet tall, finally went on permanent public exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Hidden as it was for such a long time, The Large Glass is an esoteric work of art in two ways: first, its private nature, and second, its coded content. La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même is usually translated into English as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. But only as an adverb does même mean “even.” As an adjective, même means “same, self.” An alternate translation—The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Herself [1] —emphasizes the integral, hermetic nature of this pivotal work, which has long been shrouded by confusing and sometimes conflicting interpretations. This undertone of esoteric eroticism is further emphasized if “même” is heard as m’aime: “loves me.”[2] Of course, when it comes to Duchamp, no interpretation is completely wrong. My aim is not to furnish a detailed key or step by step guide to Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass as others have attempted to do,[3] but rather to provide a wider global context for interpreting The Large Glass and assessing its cultural significance.

1. The Art of Life

In 1912, the same year Duchamp started thinking about The Large Glass, his friend Guillaume Apollinaire predicted Marcel Duchamp would bring together art and the people. Apollinaire cited two earlier instances of such a union: one, an example of religious art; the other, the art of technology. The first was Cimabue’s fourteenth-century Santa Trinita Maestà, which was “paraded through the streets” of Florence on its way to be installed in the Rucellai Chapel. The second was the airplane in which French aviator Louis Blériot flew the English Channel in 1909, which had similarly been paraded through Paris before being installed in the deconsecrated chapel at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Blériot’s airplane carried, according to Apollinaire, “the weight of humanity, of thousands of years of endeavor, of necessary art.”[4] The endeavor in question was Leonardo’s: to fly, to be free. Art that serves as a vehicle for consciousness, Apollinaire implied, is a kind of mental flying machine. Almost fifty years later, Duchamp’s friend and first biographer, Robert Lebel, picked up Apollinaire’s airplane metaphor, writing that Duchamp aspired to the condition of “lucid delight, … and each time the break occurs he rejoices like an aviator attaining unhoped-for altitudes.”[5]

Figure 2. Interior, Musée des arts et métiers, Paris. Foreground: Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s model for Liberty Enlightening the World, 1878. Suspended in background: Airplane in which Louis Blériot flew the English Channel in 1909. (Photo: Jacquelynn Baas)

Though he would cite the “social value” of art in his own essay, “The Creative Act,”[6] Duchamp scoffed at Apollinaire’s implication that The Large Glass was intended to revive art’s social function. The fact that Apollinaire wrote those words suggests he and Duchamp had talked about the need for art to reclaim its traditional socio-religious role, which had been co-opted by science.^[7] At Arts et Métiers, Blériot’s plane occupies airspace above Bartholdi’s original model for Liberty Enlightening the World, better known as the Statue of Liberty (figure 2). It is no coincidence that Duchamp’s Surrealist friend André Breton would adopt the Statue of Liberty as a trope for The Large Glass in his essay “Lighthouse of the Bride” (“Phare de la Mariée”), published in the journal Minotaur in 1935.[8] In 1869, Bartholdi had proposed a lighthouse entitled Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia to be built at the entrance to the newly completed Suez Canal. He did not receive the commission, perhaps because his massive, draped figure holding a torch was more artistic than practical. Bartholdi then adapted his lighthouse idea for a Statue of Liberty (1878), which he entitled Liberty Enlightening the World.[9]

According to Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, with whom Duchamp had an intellectual, spiritual, and erotic relationship,[10] his attitude toward art, “sprang quite naturally from the imperatives of an imperious reason, from a logic sustained and carried through to its ultimate consequences and which at their furthest horizons could well, at some point, have encountered those of the most rigorous mysticism. … Above all, here we can find an ironic rationale for the masterpiece conceived from inspiration and divination, for an art which is trance-like and mysterious.”^[11]

Buffet-Picabia drew an implicit parallel between Duchamp’s disciplined approach to artistic expression and disciplined meditation practice. Breathing—the foundation of meditation practice in every Asian tradition^[12]—is the literal meaning of “inspiration,” a word Buffet-Picabia deliberately paired with “divination” in the quotation above to account for Duchamp’s trancelike process of creation. Duchamp made a similar comparison when he told an interviewer: “If you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.”^[13]

When he was asked toward the end of his life what he considered his greatest achievement, Marcel Duchamp replied: “Using painting, using art, to create a modus vivendi, a way of understanding life; that is, … trying to make my life into a work of art itself, instead of spending my life creating works of art in the form of paintings or sculptures.” He continued:

“I now believe that you can quite readily treat your life, the way you breathe, act, interact with other people, as a picture, a tableau vivant or a film scene. … These are my conclusions now: I never set out to do this when I was twenty or fifteen, but I realize, after many years, that this was fundamentally what I was aiming to do.”[14]

Duchamp’s art of life frames the artist as someone who chooses to engage the world in a creative way. How might Marcel Duchamp have come to develop this radical view? His New York gallerists Harriet and Sidney Janis provided a clue when they recounted what Duchamp had told them about his creative process:

“He identifies the means of working, the creative enterprise, with life itself, considers it to be as necessary to life as breathing, synonymous with the process of living. … Merging the impulse of procreation with that of artistic creation, there apparently accrues for Duchamp a sense of universal reality which interpenetrates the daily routine of living.”^[15]

Duchamp’s art of life thus had two aspects: first, identification of the creative impulse with the erotic impulse (“merging the impulse of procreation with that of artistic creation”) and, second, a resulting vivid awareness of absolute reality hidden within everyday reality (“a sense of universal reality which interpenetrates the daily routine of living”). What philosophy and/or religious practice might combine these two, apparently disparate things?

It may seem odd to use the term “religious” in connection with Marcel Duchamp. When interviewer Pierre Cabanne asked him what he believed in, Duchamp responded curtly, “Nothing, of course!”[16] “Nothing” can be interpreted in a number of ways,[17] but most would interpret Duchamp’s response as an assertion of atheism. Like his famous Door, 11 rue Larrey, which could be simultaneously open and closed, might Duchamp have been both atheistic and religious? What teaching can be understood as both theistic and atheistic, while at the same time mingling immanence with transcendence?

Figure 3. Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918. Oil on canvas with bottlebrush, safety pins, and bolt, 69.8 × 303 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.

One candidate is the radical nondual Śākta-Śaivism of Kashmir, in which Reality is Consciousness, you are Real, and thus you are Consciousness; or, if you prefer, you are Śiva, God. So am I. You are also me—the title of Duchamp’s “last” painting from 1918, Tu m’ (figure 3). The apostrophe in the title promises a verb that begins with a vowel. Tu is the intimate form of “you,” so the most natural extrapolation of Tu m’ would be Tu m’es: “You are me,” which is what Tu m’ sounds like if you say it. (More on Tu m’ below.)

Evidence that Duchamp thought of his art as a socio-spiritual practice surfaced in 1949 at the Western Round Table for Modern Art in San Francisco, where he proclaimed that “while many people have taste, only a few are equipped with aesthetic receptivity” to be “capable of an aesthetic emotion”—which he described, interactively, as “an aesthetic echo”:

“Taste presupposes a domineering onlooker who dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into beautiful and ugly when he is sensuously pleased or displeased. Quite differently, the “victim” of an aesthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love, or of a believer, who dismisses automatically his demanding ego and, helpless, submits to a pleasurable and mysterious constraint. While in exercising his taste he adopts a commanding attitude; when touched by the aesthetic revelation the same man, almost in an ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.”^[18]

Here is the same elision of art, eros, and religion that emerged in the Janises’ quote, above. Duchamp’s comparison of the engaged art participant with a man in love or a believer is typical of his tendency to describe aesthetic experience in language normally used for erotic or mystical experience. For Duchamp, the two were identical: art as revelation.

Duchamp’s “aesthetic revelation”—his continuum of aesthetic, erotic, and mystic—is consistent with the rasa theory of nondual Kashmir Śaivism’s primary exegete, Abhinavagupta (ca. 950–1020). In Indian aesthetics, rasa is the “juice,” or “essence” associated with experiencing works of art. For Abhinavagupta, rasa “is revealed by a special power, … the power of revelation—to be distinguished from the power of denotation. … This power has the faculty of supressing the thick layer of mental stupor occupying our own consciousness.”[19] For Duchamp to say that “only a few [people] are equipped with aesthetic receptivity” may sound elitist, but it accords with Abhinavagupta’s notion of the sahṛdayin: literally, “one who has heart,” or empathy, and who thus is equipped to experience rasa.[20] Might Duchamp’s Cœurs volants—“Fluttering Hearts,” three superimposed, alternating red and blue hearts that generate optical vibration (figure 4)—have been inspired by the concept of sahṛdaya? Vibration is a feature of Kaśmirī Śaiva ontology, as we shall see.

Figure 4. Coeurs volants / Fluttering Hearts, cover design for the magazine Cahiers d’Art, 11, 1/2, Paris 1936. Silkscreen print on paper, sheet: 32 x 24.6 x 1 cm. Inv. D 1993/561, publication 7. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatsgalerie, Stuttgard, Germany / Art Resource, NY

Abhinavagupta was a great synthesist and exegete, but he was equally renowned as a poet, aesthetic theorist, mystic, and guru. He was also a Tāntrika, who understood the process of creating and experiencing works of art as personal versions of Śiva/Śakti’s cosmic erotic play. Abhinava’s rasa theory helps explain a puzzling passage from T. S. Eliot that Duchamp quoted in his well-known essay, The Creative Act: “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”[21] According to the contemporary scholar and teacher of Kashmir Śaivism Sthaneshwar Timalsina: “The same emotion, whether it stimulates pain or pleasure in its ordinary condition, is processed as pleasant—indeed, blissful—when the experience is transformed into rasa.”[22]

How might Duchamp have acquired such knowledge? Late nineteenth- early twentieth-century Western esotericism was rife with tantric conflations of mysticism and eroticism originating in India.[23] From information available at the time, Duchamp could have investigated a range of Asian practices, from Daoism to Tantric Buddhism, to Advaita (“nondual”) Vedānta, to Tantric Śaivism. Based on circumstantial evidence, however, as well as on correlation (similarities and mutual connections), Duchamp’s most important inspiration appears to have been a modern iteration of Kaula Trika, a medieval nondual Śaiva/Śākta tantric tradition from Kashmir. Kaula Trika combined a tradition—kaula (whose rituals emphasized erotic union)— with texts and teachings pertaining to triads—trika. Due to the secret nature of these teachings, and the secretive nature of the practices, documentary evidence that Duchamp was initiated into a modern form of Kaula Trika practice is highly unlikely. But whether or not he was a practitioner of this tradition, Kashmir Śaivism can nevertheless provide a helpful lens through which to view both Duchamp and his Large Glass.

2. Kashmir Śaivism

The term “Kashmir Śaivism” designates a sophisticated array of religio-philosophic perspectives and tantric practices that developed between the eighth and twelfth centuries in northern India. Tantric traditions in general aim to harness the powers of the human body—primarily the energy of desire (kāma), together with the senses (the cognitive means by which we know the world)—to effect liberation from physical and mental limitations.[24] The term Kashmir Śaivism is taken from the title of the first scholarly book on the subject, written by J. C. Chatterji and published in 1914.[25] The term can be confusing, because in addition to this nondual form of Śaivism, there were also dual and dual/nondual forms of the Śaiva tradition in medieval Kashmir. Modern iterations of the practice include mid-twentieth-century exports from India to the West such as Siddha Yoga and Transcendental Meditation.

The medieval “householder” (non-renunciatory) practices of nondual Śaiva/Śākta tantric yoga differed from the renunciatory tradition of classical yoga, as well as from Buddhism’s emphasis on overcoming suffering by dismantling the ego. In Kashmir Śaivism, ego is simply the assembly point for the self. Suffering is alchemically transformed into bliss through an array of meditative and energetic practices designed to generate ecstasy. In this way, Kashmir Śaivism is more like the Chinese Daoist practice of internal alchemy (neidan), which aims at immortality.[26] Kashmir lies near the border with China, and cultural exchange between the two goes back eons. Yoga was exported along with Buddhism from India to China, where it influenced the development of Daoist neidan. Chinese internal alchemy in turn affected Indian alchemy, and with it the development of tantra within Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.^[27]

Kashmir Śaivism both absorbed and affected co-existing religious philosophies and practices, including Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta, and Vaiṣṇavism, as well as other forms of Tantra,[28] to create a grand synthesis centered on the theological doctrine that one supreme Consciousness is the singular source and cause of all reality. In the West, a similar unifying ideology is perennialism—a syncretic philosophy acknowledging common patterns or archetypes that views each of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions as stemming from the same underlying metaphysical given. Rooted in Renaissance Neoplatonism and its idea of The One from which all existence emanates,^[29] perennialism was popularized in the early nineteenth century by the Transcendentalists and adopted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by the Theosophical Society, which published Asian as well as Theosophical texts. Aldous Huxley further popularized it in his 1945 book, The Perennial Philosophy.^[30]

It is important to understand that what we in the West call perennialism is the underlying perspective of Hindu philosophy. Scholar Mark Dyczkowski writes:

“Freedom, the attainment of which is the fulfillment and meaning of all of life’s travail, is only possible by overcoming … ignorance of knowledge. How this knowledge can be attained and what it reveals may vary; nonetheless it remains a constant factor which serves to lend coherence to the wide diversity we find in Hinduism and hints at the underlying unity which Hindus generally feel lies at the base, not only of the many sects and schools of Hinduism, but of all religions.”[31] 

The Kashmiri philosopher, mystic, poet, and aesthetician Abhinavagupta studied with no fewer than seventeen gurus from a variety of lineages. But it was only when he was initiated by Shambhu Nātha—a master of both Kaula and non-Kaula forms of the Trika—that Abhinava was graced with śaktipāta, in his case, “complete and permanent expansion into all-encompassing blissful nondual awareness, expressed and grounded in embodiment.”[32]

IDENTIFICATION OF THE CREATIVE IMPULSE WITH THE EROTIC IMPULSE: In Kashmir Śaivism, Consciousness (Śiva) is personified as masculine; Power (Śakti) as feminine. The highest stage of divinity is their sexual union: Śiva/Śakti. Creation emerges from the blissful erotic vibration of Śiva’s visarga-śakti: “Emissional Power.” The esoteric concept of mātṛkā-śakti, the “mother” or womb of manifestation, is characterized in the Śiva Sūtras as the great Vortex Wheel of Power—a concept that may have inspired Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (figure 5). Mātṛkā is the matrix from which everything arises and through which everything returns. Returning to the source via mātṛkā-śakti is a powerful path to realisation of oneself as Pure Consciousness.

Figure 5. Marcel Duchamp, Roue de bicyclette / Bicycle Wheel, third version, 1951, after lost original of 1913. Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Initiation into the tradition bestows knowledge of the initiate’s identity as Śiva/Śakti. This experience is deepened during tantric yoga practice, which can include a number of different practices, but is grounded in silent repetition of mantra—a short string of vowels or words that make no logical sense, but that act as a powerful cleansing energy. The mantra is repeated, usually silently, to effect purification of consciousness over time. Mantra practice foregrounds the foundational Indian concept of Vac—Word as creative power. Vac points to the esoteric concept of mātṛkā-śakti, the “mother” or womb of manifestation, the source of vibrational sound. Mātṛkā is the matrix from which everything arises, including language as consolidator of human consciousness.

Phonic vibration—sound—is complemented by photic vibration—light, symbol of Consciousness. Cinema is the art of light. Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (figure 6) is a film of rotating disks that alternate between spirals that move sensuously in and out around a bright center, and spiraling word strings that evoke the Śākta-upāya, or power-method, of mantras as pulsating energy packets that have the power to draw awareness back to its source in Pure Consciousness.[33]

Figure 6 (a & b). Stills from Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, 1926 (with Man Ray and Marc Allégret). Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou/Paris/France. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo by Herve Veronese: © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

This practice powers a process of refinement of conceptualisation that gradually removes mental and emotional barriers to the experience of one’s true nature, generating a profound sense of liberation or freedom.

“Entering the fire of Bhairava” is a metaphor for entering the heart of, becoming one with, the fierce manifestation of Śiva associated with annihilation and, in the Kaula Trika system of Abhinavagupta, Supreme Reality.[34] The heart of Śiva is also the womb of Śakti.[35] The erotic implication of entering the heart of Śiva to obtain release is clear, as is the non-erotic implication of the vulva at the “heart” of Duchamp’s diorama, Étant donnés (figure 7), here understood as mātṛkā-śakti. The odd form of this vulva, which resembles a tear or rent, is reminiscent of the tromp l’oeil tear or rent in the two-dimensional surface reality of Tu m’ (figure 3).

Figure 7. Marcel Duchamp, interior, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage . . . / Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. . . , 1946-1966. Installation, mixed media, 242.6 × 177.8 × 124.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969, 1969-41-1. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022

The word “Yoga” is derived from the Sanskrit root Yuj, meaning to yoke, join, or unite—union of mind with Absolute Consciousness. The yogic traditions in general are renunciatory. But in the tantric Kaula Trika yoga tradition, mental yoga merged with various physical practices to create an ascetic tradition (from the Greek verb askein: “to work”) that transformed rather than repressed erotic energy.[36] The Kaula and a related lineage group, the Krama, emphasized practices that were transgressive of cultural norms in general and Brahman orthodoxy in particular, including ritualistic sexual behavior and consumption of forbidden substances, such as alcohol and sexual fluids. The goal was not to scandalize, or even simply to enjoy, but to achieve a state of consciousness beyond ordinary states of judgment and disgust.[37] Duchamp’s submission of a urinal entitled “Fountain” to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists might be thought of as a modern example of Kaula practice (figure 8).[38]

Figure 8. Alfred Stieglitz, Fountain by R. Mutt. The Blind Man (No. 2), May 1917. Published by Beatrice Wood, in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché. Edited by Marcel Duchamp with editorial participation by Man Ray. Periodical with paper covers, 27.9 x 20.3 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-1053. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022

Historian of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal defines the Erotic as “a dimension of human experience that is simultaneously related both to the physical and emotional experience of sexuality, and to the deepest ontological levels of religious experience.”^[39] In India, sexual rituals go back to the time of the Vedas. According to Mircea Eliade: “The sexual act is a sacrifice that must be performed with the same rigor and precision as any other ritual. The identification of woman with the elements of the sacrifice is clear: She has pelvis as altar, [pubic] hair for grass, skin to press for soma [Vedic ritual drink].” Eliade went on to stress that—in contrast with ancient Vedic practice, which focused on the sacrificial element—in tantric practice the sexual act “becomes a means of meditation and a technique for achieving oneness with divinity.”[40]  To engage sexually from a perspective of Absolute Consciousness takes training and total focus. It requires initiation and teaching, followed by months, if not years, of tantric meditation practice. For advanced tantric practitioners in Kaula-influenced systems, sexual union is an effective add-on to meditative concentration through which Emissional Power can be harnessed by initiated sexual partners.[41] Together they can realize themselves as all-encompassing Consciousness (“Śiva”) and deploy their creative Power (“Śakti”), thereby achieving a condition of complete creative freedom.

AWARENESS OF ABSOLUTE REALITY HIDDEN WITHIN EVERYDAY REALITY: India’s classic yogic tradition aims to achieve union of the mind with Absolute Consciousness by means of an introversive flow of awareness. Kashmir Śaivism’s contribution to the Indian yogic meditation tradition is the equal weight placed on extroversive flow—descending the staircase, in Duchamp’s parlance. What distinguishes Śaiva/Śākta tantric yoga is precisely this bi-directional gaze, which practitioner and scholar Jeffrey Lidke describes as: “the liberating experience that the outer world and one’s own consciousness are co-extensions of the one, unified field of divine consciousness that is at once self and other, inside and outside.”[42]

Did Duchamp ever portray his meditation process? In 1913, he gave the collector who had purchased Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (figure 9) the drawing Once More to This Star (figure 10), which shows the head and shoulders of a man in a meditative pose.

Figure 9. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Oil on canvas, 147 x 89.2 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-59. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022

Figure 10. Marcel Duchamp, Encore à cet astre / Once More to This Star, 1911. Graphite on wove paper, 25.1 x 16.4 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-57. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022

The collector—San Francisco Asian art dealer Frederick Torrey—may or may not have known what to make of the drawing, which shows vibrating lines emerging from the midsection of a naked woman toward the head of the man. Another figure emanating rays of light ascends three steps within the man’s torso. It is hard to make out details of the upper portion of this figure; s/he could be starting to turn for a descent. Its head contains a vertical rectangular shape, like a door or window, foreshadowing the three window-like “Draft Pistons” in the upper portion of The Large Glass (figure 1).

In Nude Descending a Staircase, a figure of indeterminate sex is returning down what is presumably the same mental stair. The “nude” in Duchamp’s inscription of the title along the bottom left edge of the painting is the neutral NU, not the feminine NUE. Duchamp told a reporter that the descending figure in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is neither a woman nor a man.^[43] The nondual duality of Śiva/Śakti is personified by Ardhanārīśvara, “Śiva, the Lord Whose Half Is Woman” (figure 11). The Duchamp image that perhaps comes most readily to mind is his modified Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q. (figure 12). And Rrose Sélavy—the creator/artist aspect of Duchamp’s split personality—may have emerged as a personification of Śakti, the emissional or creative Power of Śiva.

Figure 11. Ardhararishvara and the Descent of the Ganges, India, ca. 1820. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, image: 22.4 × 16.4 cm; sheet: 30.2 × 23.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald, 1959, 1959-93-70 (Note the chute de l’eau, “fall of water,” on Śiva’s head.)

Figure 12. Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. Lithograph of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with mustache, goatee, and title added in pencil, 19.7 x 12.4 cm. Private Collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: Bridgeman Images

FREEDOM: The apparent contradiction that we are both the same as and separate from Absolute Consciousness is explained by Kashmir Śaivism’s three interrelated malas, or limitations: The malas mold our individuality as persons—a concept that may well have informed the Malic Molds of Duchamp’s Large Glass. In Latin, the root mal means “bad”; in French, mal means “evil.” In nondual Kashmir Śaivism, however, the malas are not bad; they are simply three aspects of limited knowledge of our true nature, which is veiled by ignorance.

These “three sheaths” are described in L. D. Barnett’s 1910 translation of Abhinavagupta’s Paramārthasāra, verses 24-25.[44] The first limitation, aṇava mala (ignorance), is our view of ourselves as an independent individual consciousness. Anava mala generates a sense of incompleteness, which in turn generates erotic desire. The second, māyiya mala (delusion), is our misconception that the physical body is our true Self, separate from other physical bodies and objects. Mayiya mala creates our sense of separateness and difference. The third, karma mala (agency), is the belief that our actions emerge from our small “s” self. Karma mala limits our freedom through attachment to results.[45]

The malas can be dissipated, but usually only gradually through patient application of the three upāyas: Śāmbhavopāya (will or intention to abide in pure Consciousness), Śāktopāya (cognition), and Aṇavopāya (action). Aided by the three upāyas, the practitioner re-ascends the stair of tattvas, or stages of manifestation, all the way up to the incandescence of Śiva/Śakti in blissful, fecund union.[46] The manifestation of the tattvas, their maintenance, and their dissolution back into Consciousness is an ongoing, cyclical process. Over time, the practitioner comes to replicate this process, repeatedly returning to a state of samādhi until s/he achieves recognition of small self as all-encompassing Self—Parama Śiva; and then, empowered and free, returns to the world to manifest the art of life.

Humor and play are important elements here. Śiva loves to play—something that would have appealed to the mischievous Duchamp. “Ultimately, the entire notion of limitation is a cosmic joke, or play (līla),” Jeffrey Lidke writes. “In the final analysis, Śiva is never bound, and in the moment of this re-cognition, the [practitioner] is awakened. At that point, … delusion is shattered. Then, there is the condition of embodied liberation” in which the practitioner achieves a continuous condition of incandescent wisdom.[47] In this mystical process, Consciousness becomes aware of its own reality—the essential reality of the Self. But the conquest of delusion must be complete, including the refinement and eventual eradication of traces of past actions or saṃskāras: imprintings that cause a person to be reactive, rather than responding skillfully and creatively to life’s challenges. This eradication extends to dismantling the malas—limited knowledge that leads the self to misunderstand the nature of the Self as Absolute Consciousness.

From this hard-won perspective, there is no difference between self and other. Desire is transformed into love of Self, which is, by definition, love of All—sahṛdaya, empathy. “You Are Me,” Tu m’ (figure 3) asserts. Duchamp described Tu m’ as “a sort of résumé of things I had made earlier, since the title made no sense. You can add whatever verb you want, as long as it begins with a vowel, after “Tu m’.”^[48] The title thus encourages viewer engagement, thanks to the missing verb between its subject—Tu, “you”—and object—m’, “me.” The most literal translation of Tu m’ would be “you-me.” As Duchamp pointed out, the apostrophe promises a verb that begins with a vowel. Tu is the intimate form of “you,” so the most natural extrapolation of Tu m’ would be Tu m’es: “You are me.” (What Tu m’ sounds like if you say it out loud; consonant endings are normally silent in French.) Duchamp’s title for his résumé of things made earlier—a title that, like the work, “made no [intellectual] sense”—emphasizes connection, continuum, nonduality.

It is no coincidence that Tu m’ was commissioned by Duchamp’s patron Katherine Dreier, a Theosophist who believed in a third, “spiritual” eye capable of seeing through ordinary reality.^[49] Threes and multiples of threes (Trika) are ubiquitous in Tu m’. For example, the three wavy, overlapping planes that we see in the bottom left corner of the painting, which allude to Duchamp’s experimental 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14). Duchamp incorporated Stoppages’ three horizontal lines in a number of works, including the Capillary Tubes that feed into the Sieves of The Large Glass (figure 1). Three horizontal lines is the emblem of Śiva. They represent, among other things, Śiva’s threefold, mala-busting Śakti-Powers of Will, Cognition, and Action.

Emerging from the upper left corner of Tu m’ is a dynamic stack of square shapes that suggests the tattvas—levels of reality in the process of manifestation.[50] The top square is yellow—the same color and shape as the tantric sign for Earth, the thirty-sixth tattva, here symbolized by a yellow square secured by an actual brass screw. To its immediate right is a trompe-l’œil tear in the canvas that ruptures its two-dimensional surface reality. Emerging from this virtual tear is an actual bottle brush, which is both phallic, and suggestive of cleansing or purifying. Directly adjacent to the bottle brush is a luminous painted screen, beyond which multi-dimensional, multi-colored waves and linear shapes flow and spiral back into pictorial space toward the cosmic freedom of ultimate consciousness. 

3. Double View

How and when might the young Marcel Duchamp have begun his investigations of consciousness? We will never know for sure, but there are clues. Duchamp’s friend and first biographer, Robert Lebel, wrote a fictionalized account of Duchamp’s early explorations in the form of a novel with a short story appended that he entitled La double vue, suivi de L’inventeur du temps gratuit (“Double View, followed by The Inventor of Free Time”).[51] The novel offers first-person experience within the esoteric milieu of early-twentieth-century Paris, while the story portrays a lively artist-philosopher-yogin living in Lower Manhattan in the early 1940s. Published in 1964, La double vue, suivi de L’inventeur du temps gratuit was awarded the Prix du fantastique the following year. The story has been translated and published in English more than once;^[52] not so La double vue, which remains relatively obscure.

The novel’s plot involves an alienated young painter attempting to refashion his artistic identity by attaching himself to the charismatic “gardienne” of a derelict piano factory who presides over subversive underground meetings. He learns that she spent her early adult life in India: “It was said that after a career as a tutor in the East with one of the last governors of French India, she had become a disciple of Śrī Aurobindo and received Vedantic and Tantric initiations.”^[53] The painter begins attending her gatherings and becomes a ninth member of the gardienne’s inner circle of adepts (corresponding to the nine Bachelors at the lower left of The Large Glass). The belief systems of the gardienne’s followers run the gamut of Western occult traditions, but the painter’s religion remains his art.

Finally, the gardienne invites the young artist to be initiated and taught by her. Through their “hypostatic” (essential) union,[54] he experiences a transcendent Self, beyond male or female:

“I soared after her without hesitation toward unknown regions that she pointed out to me, murmuring, “Look.” I was free from any physical anxiety in the aura of this blossoming body, which revealed itself fully. … We were like two hereditary enemies finally making peace after centuries of inexpiable massacres … freed both from the inevitability of mechanical coupling and the mental gangrenes that derive from it. …

Escaped from my emotional prison, I could finally rejoin the gardienne on the impersonal plane where she welcomed me with a smile, inciting in me an endless orgasm of ecstasy without object. … It was as though my existence split into two distinct registers: I had double sight, with one focus fathoming the inexpressible, while through the other the real never disappeared from my field of vision.”^[55]

This last sentence would seem to allude both to what the Janises described as Duchamp’s awareness of Absolute Reality hidden within everyday reality, and Kashmir Śaivism’s bi-directional gaze.

The artist’s experience with this powerful woman generates a new motivation: “Soon I was furiously taken up with my new problem: how, without trickery, to introduce into my painting this light that signaled itself to me, which I did not believe was either revealed or celestial, but where I had caught a glimpse of another dimension, unexpectedly placed within my reach.”^[56] This ambition, Lebel implies, was the origin of The Large Glass. Among other things, Lebel describes a now-lost preparatory sketch on a plaster wall that Duchamp traced and later documented via reproduction in The Green Box.[57] Lebel also alludes to Duchamp’s 1914 painting Network of Stoppages (figure 13), and even manages to bring in Apollinaire’s Duchampian metaphor of the flying machine:

Figure 13. Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages, 1914. Oil and pencil on canvas, 148.9 x 197.7 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund and gift of Mrs. William Sisler. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

In the cracks of a wall before which, always the artist, I had planted myself, I saw engraved the diagram of my connections with the guardienne. I was able to follow even in the most infinitesimal crevices, as on the control panel of an airport, the circulation of scattered fluid, each flight and each landing marked by a warning flash, emphasizing the analogy of arrival and departure.[58]

This equation of hypostatic union with enlightenment is reflected in comments Duchamp made to interviewer Pierre Cabanne:

“Duchamp: “Portrait of Chess Players” … was painted by gaslight. It was a tempting experiment. You know, that gaslight from the old Auer jet is green; I wanted to see what the changing of colors would do. …

Cabanne: It’s one of the rare times when you were preoccupied with problems of light.

Duchamp: Yes, but it isn’t even really the light. It’s the light that enlightened me.”^[59]

Both novel and story vacillate between ironic farce and mystery, profundity and humor. But La double vue, which feels more like historical fiction, was written almost two decades after “The Inventor of Free Time,” which was written in New York in the early 1940s.[60] Lebel’s Inventor of Free Time lives in an “extraordinarily cluttered warehouse” in lower Manhattan reminiscent of Duchamp’s studio—notorious for its creative chaos.[61] The unconventional opinions of this thinly disguised Duchamp character fascinate the narrator, and the story is dominated by his pronouncements, such as: “Everything announces a passage to go through, a rupture to realize.”^[612 The emphasis on potential passage to another level of reality by way of the everyday echoes the novel’s account of double view, where one focus is on the quotidian, the other on the numinous. It also calls to mind Tu m’, with its ‘passage’ to another dimension.

In 1957, André Breton published “L’inventeur du temps gratuit” in his journal Le surréalisme, même. Seven years later, Lebel appended it to La double vue—a juxtaposition that positions the novel as a first-person account of the early years of the mysterious “inventor” of the story. Lebel’s model may have been a similar pairing of novel and story: Stella and An Unfinished Communication by fourth-dimension maven Charles Howard Hinton, British mathematician and author of “Scientific Romances.”[63] Stella and an Unfinished Communication contains a number of references to India. Its through line is reincarnation, and it concludes with what is in effect an extended discussion of the three upāyas. The main character in “An Unfinished Communication” is the Duchamp-like “Unlearner”: “one who relieves others of the burdens of knowledge.”[64] The style in which Hinton’s and Lebel’s stories are written, their main characters, even the opening scenes—both of which take place in a derelict quarter of New York—are remarkably similar.

From the parallels between the plot of La double view and the career of the young Marcel Duchamp, it seems clear that Robert Lebel intended his novella to account for the dramatic changes that occurred in Duchamp’s art between 1909 and 1912. There are too many similarities between Lebel’s roman à clef and Duchamp’s life for La double vue to have been either Lebel’s own semi-autobiographical account, or a complete fiction, as some have claimed.^[65] In a 1966 review of the book, Art historian and critic Patrick Waldberg, who was a close friend of both Lebel and Duchamp, noted parallels between the deserted, quasi-industrial settings of both novel and story. Waldberg specifically mentioned Duchamp only in connection with “The Inventor of Free Time,” writing that its hero “cannot fail to evoke Marcel Duchamp, both in his ‘ironism of affirmation’ and in his art of withdrawal.” He made it clear, however, that the two accounts are connected, and that Lebel’s description of Parisian esoteric activity was not a complete fantasy. Summarizing the plot of La double vue, Waldberg wrote:

“A patient investigation leads [a young painter] to discover the existence … of a secret society of a stupefying nature. … The passage into this other universe, with its escape from time and from common laws, is reflected in his manner of painting by suddenly endowing him with a sort of double sight, thanks to which a premonition that had long haunted him is verified: ‘That painting essentially aims at the representation of ecstasy’.”^[66]

4. Alfassa and Theon

La double vue, suivi de L’inventeur du temps gratuit provides convincing hints that, early in his career, Duchamp explored Western esoteric forms of Asian energy practices that he proceeded to use as resources for his art practice. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the female guru in Lebel’s novel was modeled on Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), a Parisian artist who studied tantric yoga, presided over a mystical study group during the 1910s, traveled to India in 1914, and eventually become famous as The Mother, the spiritual collaborator of Śrī Aurobindo (1872–1950). The daughter of a Turkish-Jewish father and an Egyptian-Jewish mother, her family had migrated to France from Egypt in 1877, the year before Mirra was born. In 1893, at the age of 15, she became a student at the Académie Julian, which Duchamp’s friend Frantisek Kupka attended briefly in spring 1894 before transferring to the École des Beaux-Arts later in the year. That same year Alfassa too joined the École des Beaux-Arts, where she acquired the nickname “The Sphinx”—a subject treated by Kupka in his series Path of Silence (1900–1903). She married a student of Gustave Moreau in 1897 and was very much part of the art world of the time.^[67]

Around 1903 Alfassa became interested in the Cosmic Philosophy of the Polish-Jewish Kabbalist and occultist Max Theon (Louis-Maximilian Bimstein, 1848–1927) and his wife Alma (Mary Chrystine Woodroffe Ware, 1843–1908). According to scholar of Western esotericism Christian Chanel, Max Theon’s ideas were “thoroughly modern: the primacy of love and liberty, the quest for progress and individual development, … mistrust of political and religious ideologies.”^[68] In 1904, Alfassa began editing Theon’s Revue Cosmique, a journal begun in Paris in 1902 at Alma’s instigation. Once Alfassa took over as editor, Revue Cosmique adopted an overtly feminist orientation.[69] Alfassa met the Theons in person when they visited France in the fall of 1905, and she and her husband spent three months with them at their home in Tlemcen, Algeria, from mid-July to mid-October 1906, returning for another three months in 1907. Alma died in Paris in 1908, and Alfassa’s relationship with Max Theon ended around that time.

Theon was even more secretive than most occultists. Alfassa did not know his age or nationality, but she did later say that he had studied in India and had a thorough knowledge of Sanskrit.[70] “Pathetism” (not to be confused with pantheism) was Theon’s term for intense empathy—deep, unselfish love. The concept was similar to Abhinavagupta’s notion of sahṛdaya: having heart, empathic. The Theons’ practice of “union pathétique,” or “duality of being” (dualité d’être), was intended to generate in both partners a state of “dynamic balance” or equilibrium.^[71] Based on the key role played by Alma, and their emphasis on unity-in-duality, the tantric practice the Theons taught would seem to have been grounded in a nondual Śaiva-Śākta tantric tradition. Alfassa was probably initiated by Alma Theon and would in turn have initiated her own qualified followers into the practice of union pathétique.

The Buddhist explorer and writer Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) was a regular participant in Alfassa’s study group. Néel later told a journalist: “We spent marvelous evenings together with friends, believing in a great future. At times we went to the Bois de Boulogne gardens and watched the grasshopper-like early aeroplanes take off.”^[72] Here again, as in Apollinaire’s account and Lebel’s roman à clef, we see the ubiquitous metaphor of flying. It seems significant, therefore, that one of the first works of art Duchamp made in Munich in 1912 was Airplane (figure 14). Based on its mechanistic bottom half and airy upper half, Airplane may have been an early conceptual sketch for The Large Glass. As suggested by the faint, upward-aiming arrow on the right, its subject would appear to be breaking free from gravity and taking off—flying.

Figure 14. Marcel Duchamp, Aéroplane / Airplane, 1912. Ink and pencil on paper, 22.9 x 12.7 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022

The correspondences between Lebel’s semi-fictional accounts and Duchamp’s career are more numerous than I can convey here. There is little question Lebel intended La double vue to suggest an esoteric origin for Duchamp’s Large Glass. But La double vue is a novel, after all. Perhaps in Mirra Alfassa Lebel found a historical personage who suited his literary purposes. Perhaps Alfassa was Duchamp’s guru, but he had more than one guru. Might there be another potential source for developments in Duchamp’s art between 1909 and 1912? As it happens, there is: Jagadish Chandra Chatterji (ca. 1871-1960), a Kashmiri Brahman educated in England, also known as Jagadisha-Candra Chattopadhyaya and (in Theosophical circles) Brahmacharin Bodhabhikshu.

5. J. C. Chatterji

J.C. Chatterji defined religion as the art of leading one’s life[73]—a definition very like Marcel Duchamp’s characterization of his art as the art of life. A brilliant Kashmiri scholar and tantrika who may have thought of himself as an heir to Abhinavagupta, Chatterji possessed “a keen capacity to translate the ‘East’ into western mediums and minds.”[74] He was the author or editor of many books on Indian philosophy and religion, yet he is similar to Max Theon in that there is little available information on this important figure in the first wave of Indian gurus to the West. Chatterji is best known today as the author of Kashmir Shaivaism [sic], published in 1914.[75] But the introductory material to a modern edition of that groundbreaking, mysteriously incomplete book tells us very little about its author.[76] The only published description of J. C. Chatterji’s life appeared in an obscure Bangla biographical dictionary containing this brief entry:

“Jagadīśacandra Caṭṭopādhyāya, 1278-1367 BS [= ~1871-1960]. Studied first in Banaras, then went to Cambridge University where he earned an MA. Earned recognition as a Professor of Indian Philosophy at University of Rome. Author of “Hindu Realism,” etc.”[77]

From his own writings and from fragmentary mentions elsewhere, J. C. Chatterji would appear to have been an energetic, well-traveled scholar and lecturer with an alleged tendency to embezzle money from his institutional employers.[78]

A different Chatterji emerges from the research of Mriganka Mukhopadhyay, a scholar of Hermetic Philosophy currently writing a dissertation on Mohini Mohun Chatterji (1858-1936), a Bengali attorney and scholar and an important early member of the Theosophical Society. Mukhopadhyay reports that J. C.’s life during the 1890s is “quite traceable, thanks to Theosophical sources.”

“He was connected to the Theosophical Society from a very young age. … his father was also an employee of the princely state of Kashmir and the rulers of Kashmir were the patrons of the Theosophical Society. Chatterji married the daughter of another prominent Bengali Theosophist, G.N. Chakravarti. … Chatterji was a key figure in developing the Theosophical movement in Rome. His visit to Rome and Florence garnered much attention in the local press. This was around 1899-1900. … Chatterji played a similarly significant role in establishing the Theosophical movement in Brussels.”[79]

Chatterji’s involvement with Theosophy would not have been seen as a conflict by his fellow scholars. Indeed, according to Mukhopadhyay, “It was quite common among Indian Theosophists to shrewdly integrate their own perspectives and philosophical standpoints into Theosophical texts.” He cites as an example Mohini Chatterji, “a follower of Shankaracharya’s philosophy and a Vedantist” who integrated Advaita Vedanta into his Theosophical writings.[80]

In 1898, J. C. Chatterji went on a lecture tour to Brussels and Paris on behalf of the Theosophical Society. We know this thanks to two resulting publications: an article, “Religion from a Scientific Point of View,” published by Revue Théosophique Française, Paris;[81] and a bestselling book, La Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde, published first in Brussels and then in Paris, where it went through a number of editions.[82] It may or may not be coincidence that the paper cover of the 1909 Paris edition of Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde is green, like Duchamp’s Green Box.

Chatterji’s Philosophie Ésotérique became something of an international bestseller: in addition to French, it was published in German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, and Bulgarian. Oddly, it seems never to have been published in English, although the Theosophical Society was active both in England and the United States, and Chatterji’s lecture was originally delivered in English. The anonymous translator into French of Philosophie Ésotérique wrote in the preface that the book was based on “notes taken on the spot.”[83] Chatterji must have worked on the manuscript, however, for in addition to translator’s footnotes citing Theosophical sources, the book contains scholarly footnotes that could only have been written by Chatterji himself. The contemporaneous Revue Théosophique Française article—also the published version of a lecture—makes no mention of translation issues. Why would Chatterji want to obfuscate about his authorship of Philosophie Ésotérique? It remains a mystery.[84]

In Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde Chatterji outlined the basics of nondual tantric yoga philosophy (or “psychology,” as he preferred to describe it), using scientific metaphors westerners could understand. His vivid descriptions include elements of Kashmir Śaivism’s Triad (Trika), Vibration (Spanda), and Sequence (Krama) systems, and its philosophy of Recognition (Pratyabhijñā). But the culmination of the book is a focus on practice (defined as karma or action), which, over time, gradually moves the practitioner closer to the condition of wholeness—the realization that there is a single Reality in the universe, a Reality of which everything that exists is the phenomenal manifestation. According to Chatterji, “The Self of man is essentially identical to ‘That’.” The goal of life is the realization in action—the experience—of this essential identity:

“Diversity exists on all levels of manifestation but exists only on these levels. To go towards Unity, this diversity must disappear; in other words, we must eliminate egoism from our nature. A disinterested life is therefore also an absolute condition for growth. … It is desire which blinds our discernment, and which leads us into this realm of illusion where everything is seen upside down, in this inextricable labyrinth of time and space, where everything seems different from everything else. Desire must therefore be suppressed if we want to know the Truth and win our Freedom.”[85]

Precisely how does one eliminate egoism, sublimate desire, know the Truth, and win Freedom? True to Tantric tradition, Chatterji recommended such a one seek the guidance of a spiritual teacher, or guru: “As for those who want to go further, when the time comes, meditation methods will be given to them. For the moment, there is no point in talking about it.”[86]

Chatterji’s Theosophical publications, if not his travels, dwindled after the turn of the century, when he was appointed Director of the Research and Publication Department of Kashmir State, a center for philosophic and historical investigations established by one of the maharajas of Kashmir in the 1850s. According to Swami Shantananda’s foreword to the 1986 edition of Kashmir Shaivaism: “Though the center had been founded years before, it did not start functioning effectively until 1902. Under Chatterji’s inspired direction, the center began, in 1904, to edit and publish manuscripts on Shaivism.”[87] The first Kashmir State publication that bears Chatterji’s name as editor—The Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī—was published in 1911. The last was Abhinavagupta’s Paramārthasāra, published in 1916. Both are in Sanskrit, with lively introductions in English by J. C. Chatterji. Both had already appeared in English by the time Chatterji’s Sanskrit editions were published—Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī in 1908/1912, Paramārthasāra in 1910.[88]

However “inspired” his leadership of the Research Department, Chatterji did not stop traveling and lecturing in Europe. The only documented lecture seems to have been in 1907, when the General Report of the 32^nd Convention of the Theosophical Society recorded that he had delivered a lecture entitled “Spirit of the Upanishads” in Paris.[89] In fact, Chatterji must have spent considerable time in Europe: In his preface to Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī (1911), Chatterji lavished praise on the Pandits in Kashmir who had compiled the Sanskrit text from five separate manuscripts, adding peevishly:

“during my absence in Europe, … a confusion has been made as to the use of the signs of punctuation. The old Sanskrit Mss. never used such signs and the old type Pandits are generally unacquainted with their meanings. It will thus be seen that in certain parts of the text a comma has been used where there should have been a semi-colon, while the latter has been substituted by a comma.”[90]

Clearly, Chatterji had been missing in action; yet he seemingly justified his director’s salary based on the fact that only he understood proper English punctuation.

An even stranger anomaly turns up in Chatterji’s introduction to Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī, which must have been written well in advance of its publication in 1911. He begins by informing readers that, “An account of the history of the Shiva Sūtras and its Commentary, the Vimarshinī, together with that of the general Shaiva Literature of Kashmir, has been given elsewhere, namely in ‘The Kashmir Shaivaism’ forming the second published volume of this series.” However, that book would not appear until 1914, after publication of the actual second volume of the series—Ksemaraja’s Pratyabhinjnā Hṛdaya (“Heart of Recognition”)—published in 1911 as “volume III” in the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies. Chatterji goes on to explain in a footnote that his Kashmir Shaivaism “was originally intended to be published in one volume with The Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī, as a general Introduction to the System. But the idea had to be given up for two reasons: (a) the two together would have made the volume rather too bulky and (b) it was thought desirable to publish the Sanskrit text separately to suit the needs of the old type of Pandits, who mostly do not know English and would like to get the Sanskrit text only, without being obliged to pay for an Introduction in English, for which they have no use.”[91]

Kashmir Shaivaism would finally be published in 1914, seemingly under duress: Missing is Fasciculus II, with information on the malas and the upāyas, or “methods,” along with the appendices referred to in Volume I. In 1962, the Kashmir State Research Department would publish a reprint of Kashmir Shaivaism that included a two-page table omitted from the 1914 edition; pagination thus differs by two pages beginning with page 37. But still there was no Fasciculus II.

Why would Chatterji have withheld the “how-to” section of his long-promised Kashmir Shaivaism? He may have been uncomfortable publishing what he regarded as esoteric teachings, but it would also have been more lucrative for him to have withheld this information. While his Pandits labored away in Srinagar, Chatterji was spending time in Europe, lecturing and perhaps initiating acolytes into tantric yoga for westerners.[92] As long as the vital information remained unpublished, those who wanted to “go further” needed to get it directly from the guru himself. Yes, information was slowly beginning to be available in English: first the Shiva Sūtras in 1908, then Abhinavagupta’s Parmārthasāra in 1910.[93] But oral teaching is paramount in Kashmir Śaivism. According to Douglas Renfrew Brooks: “the esoteric language of a Hindu tantric text is designed to prevent the uninitiated from gaining entry into its meanings.”[94] These texts would have remained theoretical, except to those initiated and taught by J. C. Chatterji.

Whatever Duchamp’s exposure to the Śiva Sūtras and Paramārthasāra, if Chatterji was his teacher, Duchamp would have known them. The fact that Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī was Chatterji’s very first publication as Editor for the Research Department, Kashmir State, suggests that he viewed these Aphorisms of Śiva as foundational for nondual Śaiva-Śākta tantra. And indeed, the very first sentence of Kashmir Shaivaism reads: “The first beginnings of what has been called ‘Kashmiri Shaivaism,’ to distinguish it from other forms of Shaivaism known and still practiced in different parts of India, may have to be traced to the Shiva Sūtras.”[95]

Numerous correlations in Duchamp’s work suggest the Śiva Sūtras served as a resource for his thinking. An example is sutra five of book two—the middle book, which focuses on shaktopaya, the engine or (in Duchamp’s visual language) the airplane of enlightenment. Iyengar’s 1912 translation reads:

“Vidyā-Samutthānē Svābhāvikē Khēcharī Shivāvasthā: On the Natural Rise of Knowledge, Khēcharī, The Shiva-State.

[Up]on the natural rise of knowledge … is produced Khēcharī-mūdrā. Khēchari is derived from ‘Khē,’ in the ākāsha [sky] (of consciousness), ‘Charati; (what) moves. What kind of Khēcharī? The manifestation, the uprising of the bliss of the self, which is the avasthā [state] of Shiva, the Lord of Chit [Consciousness].”[96]

In other words, when knowledge of Absolute Consciousness arises, there occurs a lightness, a sense of soaring within the space of Supreme Consciousness. Robert Lebel observed in his biography of Duchamp that he aspired to the condition of “lucid delight, … and each time the break occurs he rejoices like an aviator attaining unhoped-for altitudes”[97] (figure 14). What Duchamp may have been aiming for was the Khechari state, as described in the Śiva Sūtras.

According to Abhinavagupta’s concise practice manual, the Paramārthasāra, the path to this experience of Reality begins with initiation and the descent of Śakti-Power (śaktipāta).[98] Abhinava’s metaphor for realization—eventual recognition of the Self as Śiva/Śakti—is the mirror.  “As a face is revealed in a mirror free of impurity, so it (the Self) shines in its radiance in the element of Intelligence purified by the visitation of Śiva’s Power,” reads L. D. Barnett’s 1910 translation of Parmārthasāra, verse 9.[99]  In Jeffrey Lidke’s translation: “As the face is revealed in a spotless mirror so This (Self) is revealed as light in the mind … purified by śaktipāta.”[100]

In 1964, Marcel Duchamp signed the backs of three mirrors by scratching his name into the silver coating. “I am signing readymade future portraits,” Duchamp remarked as he signed the three mirrors.[101] One might say this was just typically playful Duchamp. But I have looked into one of those mirrors, well before I knew anything about Kashmir Śaivism. Recognizing myself as realized by Marcel Duchamp gave me a jolt of insight not unlike śaktipāta. This is art as revelation.

In his introduction to Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī J. C. Chatterji wrote:

The main, indeed the only, purpose with which the Sūtras were promulgated was … to show men a practical way of realizing by experience the fact that man is essentially—i.e. in his real and innermost self—no other than the Deity himself; and of enabling him, in virtue of this realization, to attain … to absolute freedom from all that limits him.[102]

Chatterji emphasized that direct experience is central to Tantra, reinforcing my thesis that he initiated and taught Marcel Duchamp nondual Śaiva-Śākta Tantric Yoga. Whether or not that was the case, it would have been Duchamp’s own practice that unleashed the creative power of Śakti within the creator of The Large Glass.

6. Potential Visual Inspiration from China

In addition to the Kashmir Śaiva/Śākta system, there were other Asian models of esoteric knowledge circulating in the European literati circles of Duchamp’s day. Among these was alchemical Daoism. The primary indigenous religion of China, Daoism is a mostly esoteric complex of traditions that developed over several millennia.^[103] In the Daoist worldview, when the Universe began there was only the Dao, the “One”—a void pregnant with possibility. Dao generated swirling patterns of cloudlike qi (pronounced “chi”) energy that evolved into two complementary aspects: yin, which is dark, heavy, and “feminine,” and yang, which is light, airy, and “masculine.” Yin energy sank to form the earth, yang energy rose to form the heavens, and when their energies harmonized, human beings developed. The human body thus contains both masculine and feminine energies that can be gathered, circulated, nourished, refined, and ultimately transformed through the alchemical process of neidan: internal alchemy.

There are many parallels between neidan and nondual Śaiva/Śākta tantric yoga—too many to explore here. But one widely known Chinese visual map of neidan practice deserves mention in this discussion of possible esoteric sources for The Large Glass. The Neijing Tu (Diagram of Internal Pathways) is a Daoist “inner landscape” schematic of the human energy body that was probably intended to be used as a visual aid for meditation (figure 15).[104] The image was engraved on a stele dated 1886 preserved in Beijing’s White Cloud Temple.[105] In an inscribed colophon, the engraving’s donor, Liu Chengyin, stated his rationale for providing a matrix for publishing rubbings of this image: “This diagram has never been transmitted before. The fundamental reason for this is because the Way of the Elixir is vast and subtle, and there are obtuse people who do not have the ability to grasp it. … I had it engraved on a printing block (so that it might be) widely disseminated.”[106]

Figure 15. Neijing Tu / Inner Landscape, Chinese, Qing dynasty, 19th century. Ink rubbing on paper, 133 x 56 cm. Photo: Courtesy Louis Komjathy, Daoist Studies Archive, Center for Daoist Studies

Generally interpreted as a chart or diagram of neidan energy centers and channels for circulating vital qi energy, Neijing Tu “reveals the internal landscape discovered and actualized through Daoist cultivation,” according to Daoism scholar Louis Komjathy.[107] Natural and technological symbols relating to yin and yang energies intermingle within the three dantian— elixir fields—in the head, upper torso, and lower torso. Elements in common with Duchamp’s Large Glass include a chute de l’eau (“fall of water”) in the upper dantian; a spinning wheel in the middle dantian; and water wheels in the lower dantian. This is not to say Duchamp took the composition or any specific element of Neijing Tu as a model; only that there would have been a biological-technological schematic for an Asian energy practice available to Duchamp as a potential prototype for his Large Glass.

Reinforcing this notion is Duchamp’s use of red pigment resembling cinnabar to define the forms of the Bachelors in the lower portion of the glass. Cinnabar is a red ore mined in China that, when heated, yields mercury—a prime alchemical ingredient.[108] In Chinese internal alchemy, mercury represents semen. The lower dantian is the “Cinnabar Field,” where Jing, Essence, sexual energy, resides. The language Duchamp used to describe his transmuting Essence—spangles, splashes, drops—is descriptive of liquid mercury or “quicksilver.”

7. Duchamp’s Looking Glass

No one can know precisely what was in Duchamp’s mind as he created The Large Glass. Nor did he, based on his description of the creative act, a description we can probably assume was autobiographical:

“The artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.”[109]

Note how Duchamp’s “labyrinth beyond time and space” parallels J. C. Chatterji’s “inextricable labyrinth of time and space,” quoted above.[110]

Duchamp’s first biographer, Robert Lebel, believed that Duchamp’s art emerged from a realm of metaphysical experience accessed through a focused mental effort that was in no way intellectual:

“Duchamp had mastered two separate realities, and he was equally at ease in both. … Through the disturbance of all senses once recommended by Rimbaud, he reached a state of super-awareness, which raised him to the level of the great visionaries of all time. … Behind [Duchamp’s] works, another world really exists. … His access to a separate reality [was accomplished] without the use of psychotropics, by an unwavering effort of will, courage, and imagination.”^[111]

As we have seen, like Lebel, Duchamp’s close friend Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia believed that his art came from a place that was “trance-like and mysterious.” The Large Glass, which may be a record of Duchamp’s peregrinations though his own psycho-somatic labyrinth, tends to be experienced as mystifying by viewers with limited knowledge of states like those described by Lebel and Buffet-Picabia.

In 1944, Marcel Duchamp’s friends Katherine Dreier and Roberto Matta published the first analysis of The Large Glass in English: Duchamp’s Glass: An Analytical Reflection.[112] (Matta’s contribution would seem to have been limited to reproduction of his 1943 painting, The Bachelors Twenty Years Later, now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) Duchamp himself edited the essay, which describes but does not detail “the deep philosophical truths which underlie all his works.” The essay presents for the first time Duchamp’s view that “the image is not a thing. It is an act which must be completed by the spectator,” who must be able to “first of all fulfill the act of dynamic perception.”[113] This is clearly an invitation to consciously engage with The Large Glass. It also provides context for the contemporaneous L.H.O.O.Q. (figure 12), whose title, sounded as an English word, orders us to “LOOK.” As for those spectators who cannot perceive the philosophical truths underlying the Glass, they can at least have a good laugh: “Humor, which is the violent reaction to something unknown, will be the only experience that we will get out of a ‘Glass’ by Duchamp, if we refuse to follow him into his ‘monde en jaune.’[114]

The phrase monde en jaune—world in yellow—is in French in Dreier’s essay, reflecting the fact that it was taken from one of Duchamp’s notes for The Large Glass. (In the earliest Green Box publication in English, it is the very first note.[115]) In the manuscript version of Dreier’s essay, the phrase reads: monde jaune…plutot d’ (“yellow world…rather than—”).[116] Duchamp added the “en” in pencil, but he left unchanged, “…plutot d’,” which disappeared only in the final edit.[117] Monde en jaune would seem to refer to a way of seeing, an all-inclusive luminosity, a bright filter akin to rose colored glasses. In Kashmir Śaivism, this golden glow signifies Bhairava Consciousness: experiencing everything as everything. According to Śiva Sūtra III.8, “He is one who is always awake … and in whom the world appears as his effulgence of light.”[118]

World in yellow may also have been an allusion to Vassily Kandinsky, who published Yellow Sound, a “stage composition,” in the Blaue Reiter Almanac in Munich in May of 1912, one month before Duchamp arrived in that city for a three-month stay.[119] Yellow Sound suggests vibration or frequency that is at once photic and phonic. Klang, “tone” or “sound,” was Kandinsky’s word for the vibrational life-force.[120] Klang evokes Para Vac, the visioning Word that is the source of the manifest universe and all concepts within it. Duchamp’s painting Tu m’ (figure 3) features a pointing hand signed “A. Klang” at bottom center. The painting was commissioned by Katherine Dreier, who idolized Kandinsky. (Duchamp and Dreier visited Kandinsky in Dessau in 1929.) Dreier’s Large Glass essay closes with these words from another Duchamp Green Box note: “Condition of a language. Search for prime words—divisible only by themselves and by unity.”[121] This linguistic conclusion to an essay about a work of visual art suggests that (on one level at least) The Large Glass is about returning to Para Vac, the source of creativity.

To begin to penetrate the “deep philosophical truths” that underlie The Large Glass, we need to engage with the Glass on its own terms. Duchamp reversed the artistic conventions for esoteric art pioneered by nineteenth-century Symbolists like Odilon Redon, whose work he admired.[122] The images in The Large Glass are not overtly esoteric or mystical; on the contrary, they are as crisp and precise as those of any machine. It should not be surprising, then, that art historians tend to miss the esoteric content perceived by contemporaries like Lebel and Dreier, who wrote of the Glass: “Duchamp has found the key whereby to liberate the images from their common meaning and to represent the object by an image which is pliable to the mechanism of sight and expands the consciousness.”[123]

One reason Duchamp may have adopted transparent/reflective glass as his support was to depict a process taking place in consciousness, which has similar qualities of transparency and reflectivity. In this way, the Glass is heir to the luminous screen in Tu m’ (figure 3). That screen reflects the commentary to Śiva Sūtra I.6, where Śakti—Śiva’s Potency of Freedom—projects Reality for Her own enjoyment onto herself: “It is this Svatāntrya Śakti [Free Will] that on her own screen (i.e. in herself) displays the play of manifestation.”[124] Śakti’s divine play manifests within the consciousness of the realized practitioner as on a glass or mirror.

Glass is slightly green, from the iron oxide used in its manufacturing process. Many works by Duchamp attest to the importance of green in his creative life, including The Green Box, his 1934 collection of sutra-like notes for The Large Glass. Duchamp used three edgewise horizontal strips of green-tinted glass to form the horizon line that both connects and divides the upper realm of the Bride from the lower domain of the Bachelors.[125] In the same way, a horizontal green neon tube both connected and divided sky from ocean in Duchamp’s Rayon vert (“Green Ray or Flash”)—his installation for the 1947 Paris Surrealist Exhibition (figure 16).^[126]

Figure 16. Marcel Duchamp, Le rayon vert / The Green Flash, 1947. Photograph and green neon tube, International Exposition of Surrealism, Galerie Maeght, Paris. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: akg-images / Denise Bellon

The green flash is a traditional metaphor for enlightenment, due to the rarity and element of chance associated with seeing this prismatic optical effect. Green is also associated with the life force: Eros. Whatever else it may be, The Large Glass is clearly about Eros, and the debate surrounding this work has mostly been about how this might be so. The consensus has been that it is somehow about frustrated sexual desire, an explanation that has always felt too small for the portentous Large Glass. Opening our Western eyes and minds to the traditions of other cultures allows us to understand Duchamp’s “clearing” beyond time and space as Mātṛkā-śakti, the womb of Śakti, the matrix of Creation. Those willing to follow him into this space will encounter a cyclical psycho-somatic process whose initiation and refinement is depicted in the Bachelor Apparatus below, while its origin, return, and blissful “blossoming” are represented in the Bride’s Domain, above. The implied action thus goes in two directions: downward, via the Bride, who drips Her essence d’amour (“love gasoline”)[127] into the nine Malic Molds; and upward, in a process of dissolving back into Consciousness via the Oculist Witnesses, Mandala, and Shots—the Bachelors’ essence after its refinement by way of the Water Mill, Chocolate Grinder, and Sieves.

Figure 17. Leslie E. Bowman, Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier in Katherine Dreier’s living room, 1936–37. Background: Tu m’; foreground: The Large Glass. Gelatin silver print, image 19 x 23.5 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier, 1953.6.204. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery

To summarize: what we see taking place in coded visual language in The Large Glass is a process of manifestation, refinement, and dissolution through various levels of reality into ecstatic union with Unitary Consciousness. The sequence is in fact the same as in Tu m’ (figure 3), where the action flows from left to right, due to the need for the painting to fit into the horizontal space over Katherine Dreier’s bookcase (figure 17). Walter and Louise Arensberg were patrons of The Large Glass; Tu m’ may have been created for Dreier as a tailored rendition of the same themes. Later, when the Arensbergs moved to California, Dreier would purchase the Glass from them. In the end, she owned both works, plus the Small Glass (figure 18)—a study for The Large Glass.

Figure 18. Marcel Duchamp. À regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un œil, de près, pendant presque une heure / To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour, 1918. Oil, silver leaf, lead wire, and magnifying lens on glass (cracked), mounted between panes of glass in a standing metal frame, 51 x 41.2 x 3.7 cm; on painted wood base, overall, 55.8 cm high. The Museum of Modern Art, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Like Tu m’, The Large Glass is full of threes—most prominently, the three wheels of the Chocolate Grinder at bottom center, which may have had their origin in Kashmir Śaivism’s three upāyas or methods for refining consciousness. The three Oculist Witnesses at bottom right could represent Witness Consciousness: Pure Awareness, free of any object. The small circle that hovers above them is labeled “Mandala” in Arturo Schwarz’s 1969 Notes and Projects for The Large Glass (21d in figure 19).[128] (A mandala is a geometric image that represents the universe and is intended to be experienced as multi-dimensional.)

Figure 19. Oculist Witnesses and Mandala. Detail of diagram of The Large Glass in Marcel Duchamp, edited Arturo Schwarz, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass (New York: Abrams, 1969), page 13. Key reads: “Oculist Witnesses. 21a, b, c, Oculist Charts. 21d [Mandala] (should have been a magnifying glass to focus the Splashes).”

Duchamp’s Mandala thus would seem to be a pivotal element of The Large Glass. Oddly, this mandala/keyhole was omitted by artist Richard Hamilton in the flow chart of The Large Glass for his 1960 typographic version of The Green Box.[130] Lebel, Hamilton, and Schwarz all worked closely with Duchamp. So why is Lebel’s keyhole missing in Hamilton’s 1960 flow chart, yet is not only present, but provocatively labeled “Mandala,” in Schwarz’s 1969 diagram? Another mystery.

Arturo Schwarz cogently observed that “each element of the Glass has more than one function and can be interpreted in different and quite often antithetical ways.”[131] Duchamp himself told an interviewer in 1961: “When I made this Glass, I did not intend to make a picture to be looked at, but a picture in which one could simply use a tube of paint as a means and not as an end.”[132] The Large Glass might simply have served Duchamp as the Neijing Tu served Liu Chengyin —as a diagram for tantric meditation practice. Perceived through the lens of Kashmir Śaivism, however, the Glass can also be understood an ambitious attempt to record the origins and simulate the processes of manifestation, maintenance, and dissolution back into Pure Consciousness. La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même might then be interpreted, “Creativity Unveiled by Her Own Creation”—the creative Power of Consciousness revealed by the creator of The Large Glass.

Figure 20. Marcel Duchamp, exhibition poster with Duchamp’s hand in the “Fear Not” mudra, Galerie Claude Givaudan, Paris, 1967. Lithograph. Private collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022

……………………………………

[1] Translations from the French are author’s unless otherwise noted. Duchamp himself made this point, albeit obliquely; see Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967),  69.

[2] Thanks to art historian and artist Joel Isaacson for this observation.

[3] See Arturo Schwarz in Marcel Duchamp, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass (New York: Abrams, 1969), 11-13; Richard Hamilton, in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds. Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 57-67; Jean Suquet, Le Grand verre rêvé (Paris: Aubier, 1991).

[4] Guillaume Apollinaire: Les peintres cubistes, ed. L.C. Breunig and J.-Cl. Chevalier (Paris: Hermann, 1965), 90–92. Blériot developed and manufactured the first practical automobile headlamp, a device that inspired Duchamp’s preliminary conception for The Large Glass: “the headlight child will be the instrument conquering this Jura-Paris Road” (Schwarz, Notes and Projects, 32).

[5] Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 69.

[6] Duchamp delivered The Creative Act as part of a session on the creative act at the convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas in April 1957; reprinted in Jacquelynn Baas, Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 309-311; this quote, 310.

^[7] This attitude helps to explain Duchamp’s scorn of “retinal” art like that of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists. His own early models were Symbolists like Odilon Redon.

[8] Published in English in Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 88-94.

[9] See https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.6761.html (accessed June 23, 2022).

[10] Buffet-Picabia told Malitte Matta that she had initiated (dénaisé) Duchamp, an event that took place during a night spent together at a train station in the Jura mountains in 1912 (interview published in Paris-New York [Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977], 54–62). For more on their relationship, see Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 105-110, 212.

^[11] Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, “Marcel Duchamp: Fluttering Hearts,” trans. Nigel Gearing from an essay originally published in Cahiers d’Art 11, nos. 1–2 (1936); republished Duchamp: Passim, ed. Anthony Hill (London: G+B Arts, 1994), 15–16.

^[12] See Livia Kohn, Meditation Works in the Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist Traditions (Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press, 2008).

^[13] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Rod Padgett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971; reprinted Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1987), 72.

[14] From a 1966 interview for Belgian television by Jean Antoine, trans. Sue Rose, published The Art Newspaper, April 27, 1993:

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/archive/life-is-a-game-life-is-art-interview-with-marcel-duchamp

(accessed June 23, 2022).

^[15] Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist,” View, Vol. V, No. 1 (New York, March 1945): 23-24; reprinted in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 311. Emphases added.

[16] Mais à rien! Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967), 168.

[17] As in Daoism and Zen Buddhism; regarding Duchamp and Daoism, see Baas, MDAL, 143ff.

^[18] West Coast Duchamp, ed. Bonnie Clearwater (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1991), 110.

[19] Gerald James Larson, “The Aesthetic (Rasāsvadā) and the Religious (Brahmāsvadā) in Abhinavagupta’s Kashmir Śaivism,” in Philosophy East and West, Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1976): 371-387; 375. Emphasis added.

[20] See Kathleen Marie Higgins, “An Alchemy of Emotion: Rasa and Aesthetic Breakthroughs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 43–54.

[21] Baas, MDAL, 309 (for Duchamp’s relationship with the young Eliot, see 57-60).

[22] Sthaneshwar Timalsina, “Savoring Rasa: Emotion, Judgment, and Phenomenal Content,” in The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Emotions in Classical Indian Philosophy, ed. Maria Heim et al. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 255-275; this quote 270.

[23] See Gordan Djurdjevic, India and the Occult: The Influence of South Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

[24] Hugh B. Urban, The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2001), 7.

[25] J. C. Chatterji, Kashmir Shaivaism [sic] (Being a Brief Introduction to the History, Literature and Doctrines of the Advaita Shaiva Philosophy of Kashmir, Specifically Called the Trika System) (Srinagar, Kashmir: The Research Department, Kashmir State, 1914). See William Barnard’s Preface to the 1986 SUNY Press edition, where Barnard attempts to fill in the missing pieces of Chatterji’s mysteriously unfinished account (J. C. Chatterji, Kashmir Shaivaism, preface William Barnard, foreword Swami Shantananda [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986]). For an overview of Śaivism, see the entries under “Śaivism” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (London: MacMillan, 1987), 6-20. For a more detailed history, see Alexis Sanderson, “Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions,” in The World’s Religions, ed. Stewart Sutherland et al. (London: Routledge, 1988), 660-704. For a helpful summary history and description of the situation in early twentieth-century Bengal, see Kathleen Taylor, Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal (London: Routledge, 2001), 154-173.

[26] Grateful thanks to Livia Kohn for her writings and teachings regarding Daoism, to Sthaneshwar Timalsina for his brilliant teachings on Kashmir Śaivism, and to Paul Muller-Ortega and his colleagues for their teachings and guidance in Neelakantha Meditation.

^[27] Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5, Part 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 257–288; David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 61ff.

[28] Kashmir Nondual Tantra influenced, among other things, the development of Tantric Buddhism (Vajrayana) and Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedānta (via Vaiṣṇavism).

^[29] The term philosophia perennis was first used by Agostino Steuco (1497–1548), who drew on the fifteenth-century Neoplatonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. For an in-depth analysis of this complex historical notion, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6ff.

^[30] Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York and London: Harper, 1945).

[31] Mark S. G. Dyczkowski, The Stanzas on Vibration (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 4. Emphasis added.

[32] Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition (Petaluma, CA: Mattamayūra Press, second edition 2013), 295. There are many degrees of śaktipāta.

[33] See Barnard, preface to Chatterji, Kashmir Shaivaism (1986), xii–xiii.

[34] See Paul Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heart of Śiva; Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989).

[35] Ernst Fürlinger, Touch of Śakti: A Study in Non-dualistic Trika Śaivism of Kashmir (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2009), 153.

[36] See Wendy Doniger, Śiva, the Erotic Ascetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

[37] See Jeffrey S. Lidke, “Interpreting Across Mystical Boundaries: An Analysis of Samādhi in the Trika-Kaula Tradition,” in Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005), 143-179; and Gavin D. Flood, Body and Cosmology in Kashmir Śaivism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993).

[38] Fountain is considered from a Daoist perspective in Baas, MDAL, 143-155.

^[39] Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23.

[40] Mircea Eliade, Yoga: essai sur les origins de la mystique indienne (Paris: Geuthner, 1936), 232. His source, Brhadaranyaka-upanishad (6.4.3), reads: “Her vulva is the sacrificial ground; her pubic hair is the sacred grass; her labia majora are the Soma-press; and her labia minora are the fire blazing at the center. A man who engages in sexual intercourse with this knowledge obtains as great a world as a man who performs a Soma sacrifice” (Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upanishads: Annotated Text and Translation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 155).

[41] Abhinavagupta described the physical practice in chapter 29 of his Tantrāloka; see Lilian Silburn, Kuṇḍalinī: The Energy of the Depths (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), and John R. Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, The Kula Ritual as Elaborated in Chapter 29 of the Tantrāloka (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2003). For a modern description, see: Ajit Mookerjee and Madhu Khanna, The Tantric Way: Art Science Ritual (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), 163-195.

[42] Jeffrey Lidke, “The Potential of the Bi-Directional Gaze: A Call for Neuroscientific Research on the Simultaneous Activation of the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems through Tantric Practice,” Religions 7, No. 11 (2016): 132–149.

^[43] American journalist Nixola Greeley-Smith wrote in the The Evening World (April 4, 1916): “M. Duchant [sic] told me last week that “The Nude Descending a Stairway” is not a woman. Neither is it a man” (Rudolf E. Kuenzli, New York Dada [New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986], 135).

[44] L. D. Barnett, “The Parmārthasāra of Abhinava-Gupta,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 1, No. 1–2 (July 1910): 707–747; 727-728.

[45] To work for the pleasure of working without thought of fame or blame is a well-known karma yoga teaching from the Bhagavad Gītā to which Duchamp ascribed. Duchamp’s advice to his brother-in-law Jean Crotti: “[I] counsel you not to judge your work. … Quite simply, do less self-analysis and work with pleasure, without being concerned about opinion, your own or that of others” (Letter of August 17, 1952, reprinted in TABU DADA: Jean Crotti and Suzanne Duchamp, 1915–1922, ed. William A. Camfield and Jean-Hubert Martin [Kunsthalle Bern, 1983], 8).

[46] For a chart of Kashmir Śaivism’s 36 tattvas see Wallis, Tantra Illuminated, 124.

[47] Jeffrey S. Lidke, “Quintessence of The Highest Purpose: A Translation, Introduction and Analysis of Śrī Abhinavagupta’s Paramārthasāra,” Journal of Indian Research, Vol.1, No.4 (October-December 2013): 1-24; 7.

^[48] Cabanne, Dialogues, 60.

^[49] Dreier laid out her views in an essay, “Intrinsic Significance in Modern Art,” in Three Lectures on Modern Art (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 1–30.

[50] It is hard to tell, but there could be thirty-six—Abhinavagupta added eleven tattvas beyond Patanjali’s original twenty-five.

[51] Originally published in 1964 by Le Soleil Noir, the book was republished by Deyrolle in 1993 with a preface by Alain Fleischer and an afterword by Patrick Waldberg.

^[52] Translated by J. H. Matthews and published in The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 150–160. Translated by Sarah Skinner Kilborne with Julia Koteliansky and published in the online journal Toutfait, http://toutfait.com/the-inventor-of-gratuitous-time/ (May 1, 2000, updated July 13, 2016, accessed August 23, 2021). Both Matthews and Kilborne translate the title as “The Inventor of Gratuitous Time.” I prefer “free” time (from the Latin grātuīt-us: free, spontaneous voluntary).

^[53] Lebel, La double vue (1964), 56.

[54] Works by Duchamp’s lovers Beatrice Wood and Maria Martins appear to portray similar “hypostatic” encounters. See Baas, MDAL, 289, 286-287.

^[55] Lebel, La double vue (1964), 74–78. Emphasis added.

^[56] Lebel, La double vue (1964), 81.

[57] See Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000), 581, no. 269.

[58] Lebel, La double vue (1964), 108-109.

^[59] Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens, 41.

[60] Regarding the dating of these works, see Baas, MDAL, 67-68.

[61] Georgia O’Keeffe described a visit to Duchamp’s studio in the early 1920s: “The room looked as though it had never been swept—not even when he first moved in” (D’Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 213).

^[62] Lebel, La double vue (1964), 135.

[63] Charles Howard Hinton, Stella and an Unfinished Communication (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co New York: Macmillan & Co, 1895). Regarding Hinton and the fourth dimension, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), passim; and Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 84.

[64] Hinton, Stella and an Unfinished Communication, 117. Hinton’s geometry of higher dimensions involved exercises in direct perception based on a process of memorization and visualization similar to tantric mandala practice; see C. Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (London: S. Sonnenschein: New York: J. Lane, 1904); 1912 edition: http://archive.org/details/fourthdimension00hintarch (accessed June 21, 2022).

^[65] Paul Franklin described La double vue as Lebel’s “semiautobiographical text” (Paul B. Franklin, The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare: The Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel [Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016], 56, note 13); Arturo Schwarz characterized it as an “imaginary autobiographical novel” (Schwarz, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 845).

^[66] Patrick Waldberg, “Robert Lebel, ou les complicités ambiguës,” Preuves, No. 181 (March 1966): 81.

^[67] Biographical information on Mirra Alfassa comes primarily from the first four volumes of Sujata Nahar, Mother’s Chronicles (Paris: Institut de Recherches Évolutives, 1985–1995), along with Georges Van Vrekhem’s The Mother: The Story of Her Life (India: HarperCollins, 2000). There is a great deal of material available online, including: Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirra_Alfassa); Collected Works of The Mother (https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/mother/writings.php); and Mother’s Agenda (http://www.auroville.org/contents/527), all accessed June 23, 2022.

^[68] Christian Chanel, “Théon, Max,” in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1112–1113. See also Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 351, 378; and Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John P. Deveny, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1995), 6–21, 214–215.

[69] E.g., “On the Shackles of Women,” Revue cosmique: consacrée à la restitution de la tradition originelle source commune des traditions religieuses et philosophiques, Vol. 3 (1904), 750  (https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hnv5ij, accessed June 23, 2022).

[70] Mother’s Agenda, Vol. I, 146 (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9DdtF_uMk05VWRyMzhIUzZpVmc/edit?resourcekey=0-1V418OHrefzr-lDc360RAw, accessed June 23, 2022).

^[71] Godwin et al., Hermetic Brotherhood, 13–14, 214.

^[72] From an interview by Prithwindra Mukherjee, The Sunday Standard, June 15, 1969; quoted in Prema Nandakumar, The Mother (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1977), 9–10.

[73] La Religion, c’est l’art de conduire sa vie physique, sa vie morale et sa vie mentale. J. C. Chatterji, “La Religion au point de vue scientifique,” in Revue Théosophique Française, Le Lotus Bleu, Vol. 9 (March 1898-February 1899): 321-26, 365-69; 323.

[74] Personal email from Jeffrey Lidke, October 12, 2021. Warm thanks to Prof. Lidke for his helpful suggestions and corrections and to the colleagues with whom he put me in touch, who kindly provided valuable information regarding the elusive J. C. Chatterji: Mriganka Mukhopadhyay, who deserves special thanks; Wouter J., Hanegraaff; Brian Hatcher; Jeffrey J. Kripal; Marco Pasi; and Hamsa Stainton.

[75] Chatterji, Kashmir Shaivaism, Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, Vol. II, Fasciculus I. (Fasciculus II, which was to have contained information on the malas, the upāyas [or “methods”], and the appendices referred to in Fasciculus I, never appeared.)

[76] Chatterji, Kashmir Shaivaism, Preface William Barnard, Foreword Swami Shantananda (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986). This edition reversed Chatterji’s order, placing “Main Doctrines of the System” first, “History and Literature” second.

[77] Thanks to Professor Brian Hatcher, who shared this information via Jeffrey Lidke (personal email, August 29, 2020).

[78] Regarding allegations of embezzlement, see Dean Accardi, “Orientalism and the Invention of Kashmiri Religion(s),” in Hindu Studies 22 (2018): 424; and Robert Love, The Great Oom (New York: Penguin, 2010), 232.

[79] Personal email, September 9, 2020, which concludes: “As far as I understand, JC Chatterji remains quite understudied. Although he traveled widely and left his footprints in various places, it is quite a challenge to track down all his activities. There could be a lot of information on him in the archives of Kashmir, but given the current political situation in Kashmir, I wonder how accessible those documents are.”

[80] Personal email, September 15, 2020.

[81] See note 72.

[82] Brâhmachârin Bodhabhikshu (J.-C. Chatterji), La Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde (Brussels: Georges Balat, 1898; Paris: Publications Théosophiques, 1903, 1909, 1917). There may also have been a 1899 Brussels edition and additional Paris editions.

[83] “The speaker only speaking in English, we had to interpret his words as we went along. It is according to notes taken on the spot that we attempt, at the request of many listeners, and in the absence of the lecturer, this reconstitution, necessarily insufficient” (Chatterji, La Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde, 1898), 5.

[84] Another oddity: I managed to obtain a copy of the original 1898 Brussels edition, which is supposed to have as its frontispiece a photographic portrait of the author. When the book arrived, it looked as though the paper cover had been removed and reattached, and the frontispiece was missing. So even what J. C. Chatterji might have looked like remains a mystery.

[85] Chatterji, Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde (1909), 107-109.

[86] Chatterji, Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde (1909), 124-125.

[87] Swami Shantananda, “Foreword,” in Chatterji, Kashmir Shaivaism (1986), xxiii.

[88] P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar, “Shiva-Sūtra-Vimarshinī, with the Bhashya of Kshemaraja,” in The Theosophist, Vol. XXIX (Madras: Adyar, 1908), passim. Iyengar’s translation comprised book one of Śiva Sūtras and the first three sutras of book two; in 1912, Iyengar published a complete translation of all three books along with Kshemaraja’s commentary (originally published Allahabad; reprinted Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 2007).  L. D. Barnett, “The Paramarthasara of Abhinava-Gupta,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 1, No. 1–2 (July 1910): 707–747.

[89] Personal email from Mriganka Mukhopadhyay (September 16, 2020), who reported that “The exact month is not given, but would be sometime between November 1906 and November 1907.”

[90] J. C. Chatterji, The Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī, being The Sūtras of Vasu Gupta with the Commentary called Vimarshinī by Kshemarāja. The Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, Vol. I. (Srinagar: The Research Department, Kashmir State, 1911), ii.

[91] Chatterji, Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī (1911), iii.

[92] Swami Vivekananda’s Râja-yoga (ou Conquête de la nature intérieure), was published in Paris in 1910 and was read enthusiastically within Parisian esoteric circles as soon as it appeared. Vivekananda had died in 1902, but Chatterji would have been more than qualified to expound its kundalini yoga techniques.

[93] See note 87.

[94] Douglas Renfrew Brooks, The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Śākta Tantrism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xvii. Emphasis original.

[95] Chatterji, Kashmir Shaivaism (1914), 1.

[96] Iyengar, The Shiva-Sūtra-Vimarsinī, 28.

[97] Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 69.

[98] See Lidke, “Quintessence”: 1-24.

[99] Barnett, “Parmārthasāra”: 722.

[100] Lidke, “Quintessence”: 10.

[101] Schwarz, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 841.

[102] Chatterji, Shiva Sūtra Vimarshinī (1911), iv-v. Emphases original.

^[103] For more on Daoism and Duchamp, see Baas, MDAL, 151-154, 278.

[104] Louis Komjathy, “Mapping the Daoist Body Part One: The Neijing tu,” Journal of Daoist Studies, Vol. 1 (2008): 67-92, 73, 76.

[105] The present stone stele may not be the original, which may have been wood; see Komjathy, “Mapping”: 74.

[106] Komjathy, “Mapping”: 71.

[107] Komjathy, “Mapping”: 71.

[108] The red pigment in The Large Glass has yet to be analyzed. It has been described as red lead, a less expensive version of ground cinnabar that also has alchemical associations. Regarding esoteric alchemy, see David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

[109] From Duchamp’s lecture/essay, “The Creative Act,” delivered at the convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston. Texas in April 1957; published in ARTnews, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Summer 1957): 28–29.

[110] Chatterji, Philosophie Ésotérique de l’Inde (1909), 109.

^[111] Lecture delivered February 21, 1974, at the Museum of Modern Art, published as “Portrait of Marcel Duchamp as a Dropout” in Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, No. 7 (2006): 73–74.

[112] Katherine S. Dreier with Matta Echaurren, Duchamp’s Glass: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. An Analytical Reflection (New York: Société Anonyme, 1944). Dreier’s manuscript, with edits in Duchamp’s hand, is in the Beinecke Library, Yale University: Katherine S. Dreier papers, Société Anonyme archive, Box 43, Folder 1287. Warm thanks to Nina Hubbs Zurier for sharing this information.

[113] Dreier and Matta, unpaginated (10, 3). Emphasis added. Duchamp later elaborated in “The Creative Act” (see note 108).

[114] Dreier and Matta, (6-8). Emphasis added.

[115] Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton, design Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (London: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1960), unpaginated.

[116] Beinecke ms., 2.

[117] In Duchamp’s note from which the phrase was taken, a blotted-out word appears after plutot d’ (reproduced Schwarz, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass, 46-47). Presumably in consultation with Duchamp, Schwarz and others would translate this line: “preferably in the text.”

[118] Jaideva Singh, Śiva Sūtras: The Yoga of Supreme Identity (Delhi: Motilal Bandarsidass, 1979), 151. Emphasis added.

[119] See Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1994), 267ff. Regarding Duchamp’s time in Munich, see Baas, MDAL, 85ff.

[120] Klänge (“Sounds”) was the title Kandinsky gave his book of fifty-six woodcuts and thirty-eight free-verse poems that he began writing in 1909, the same year he wrote On the Spiritual in Art; see Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 66-69.

[121] Condition d’un langage. Rechercher des mots premiers—divisibles seulement par eux mêmes et par l’unité. Dreier and Matta, (11); Schwarz, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass, 60-61.

[122] Duchamp mentioned Redon as an influence more than once; his early painting Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree (1911), may have been modeled on Redon’s Buddha in His Youth; see Baas, Smile of the Buddha, 42, 81, 257 n8.

[123] Dreier and Matta, (8).

[124] Singh, Śiva Sūtras, 33. This visual metaphor resonates with the first sutra of the Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam, the Heart of Recognition Scripture: “The Goddess Citi [The Absolute] manifests herself as creation by painting herself onto her own canvas” (thanks to Jeffrey Lidke for this observation).

[125] This is harder to see today due to the metal framing added during repair of the piece in 1936.

[126] For more on this installation, see Baas, MDAL, 253-55.

[127] Schwarz, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass, 22-23.

[128] Schwarz, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass, 12-13. “Mandala” was probably suggested by Duchamp; Richard Hamilton retained it when he adapted Schwarz’s diagram for D’Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 64-65.

^[129] Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 44.

[130] Duchamp, design Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare, unpaginated.

[131] Schwarz, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass, 8.

[132] Alain Jouffroy, Une Révolution du regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 114; quoted by Schwarz, Notes and Projects for The Large Glass, 7. Emphasis original.

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Art, Creativity, Culture, Imagination, Mind, Religion