The Second Coming (Do What Thou Wilt)

About

A full three centuries after William Conolly purchased Montpelier Hill, the Hell Fire Club celebrates a second coming in County Dublin. For a few months between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox, from a week before Litha to a week after Lughnasadh, the temple is open anew to the public within the galleries at Rua Red in Tallaght. Although, the Hell Fire Club never closed and has continued to run, discreetly and through the underground stream of our imaginations, from urban legend to popular culture, until this very day, now, for the first time since the 18th century the flame burns bright again for all to behold.

You are invited to join us with your eyes wide, or shut, the open call to attend the burning of the mysteries, to be initiated into joining the Orders of the Third Circle, a secret society of famous people who include actors, musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, statesmen, millionaires, gamblers and Casanovas.

The Second Coming is an exhibition that brings together, once more, the poet William Butler Yeats, with his Daemon and anti-self, the Berber son of Muhammad who was born in Granada 1494 as al-Hasan and grew up to become Leo Africanus. They first met at a séance in Cambridge House on 9 May 1912 when Leo spoke with a strong Irish accent, giving Yeats the keys to unlocking the doors of his perception. From that encounter Yeats understood that:

The Second Coming is a Temple of enlightenment in the form of an exhibition, a gallery of Solar consciousness sent through the prism that is the dark side of the moon “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” (Through the friendly silence of the moon). Following Yeats’ strict instructions “It is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will I hope interest you as a form of poetry.”

In an age of materialism and artificial acceleration, an age defined by extremes in which things fall apart and anarchy is loosed upon the world, art is our only hope. In an age in which innocence has been drowned and in which the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, art is our only enlightenment.

The role of the artist is to make the invisible visible. In the words of Joséphin Péladan “Artist, you are a priest, a king, a mage, for art is a mystery, the only true empire, the great miracle…” To which Rimbaud responded “All forms of love, of suffering, of madness.”

The rules of the temple and Holy Grail are strict and without exception. Only they who look beyond seeing are permitted to enter the Second Coming of the Third Circle of the Hell Fire Club! Only the pure of art may cross the line.

The doors of perception that permit crossing are guarded by the sphinx beneath the sign that warns against curators, consultants, cynics, hypocrites, bigots, the pox-ridden, Goths, Magoths, the straw-chewing law clerks, usurious grinches, old or officious judges, and burners of heretics.

There are no clocks because time is less than space and the liberty is open to both monks and nuns, free men and womyn. Inside the eye of the pyramid a flame burns bright, a licentious brilliance of moral decay. Good is evil when the rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem and with it “Daemon est Deus inversus” (“The Devil is God inverted”.)

There is only one simple law inside the Temple of the Second Coming.

DO WHAT THOU WILT!