Gibran’s Orphalese, the Erotic City

Abstract

This chapter investigates Gibran’s erotic spirituality and his conception of space and body. God, space and body are but one entity, and space creates and defends (sexual) identity, and gender. Images and symbols are tightly related to the spiritual life of Gibran (1883-1931) and his religious experience. Is this not a reason why he has always been in search for the terrestrial heaven through his travels and geographic migrations? Symbolism resides deep in the strata of his subconscious and manipulates him. As a result, the man lives in a symbolic world aiming at recreating either the primordial time or paradise where the perfect man, Adam, before his Fall, once lived happily. There is certainly nostalgia for that remote time when man used to live in the bosom of his Mother, Nature. We are, from a psychoanalytical perspective, in the midst of the Oedipus complex. Is that the essence of man’s quest for heaven? Gibran Kahlil Gibran articulates transgression, liminality and a rite of passage to achieve spiritual Enlightenment in the erotic city of Orphalese. Is this the reason why he wants to recreate the lost paradise and reenact the sacred past? It is certainly a plausible reason to which we can add the overwhelming influence of starting psychoanalysis, sciences, rationality, and other cultures. Let us not forget that in this ‘fin de siècle’ occultism, there was an eager need to revisit lost civilizations, unimagined lands and weird places for a better society, with primitive cults and beliefs, paganism, free love and an openness to homosexuality. Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) leads us in the mystical Orphalese from the mountain, to the temple, to the body. The name of the city suggests both Orph(eus) + ales or Ur + phallus. Therefore, space equates temple and body.