The obscenities in Henry Miller’s books made them sensations in the 1960s, after the trials that finally allowed them to be published—but they obscured his essentially religious task.

Miller synthesized his ideas from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, fromCarl Jung, and from Otto Rank.  In his opinion, there was a creative spirit—what Bergson called an elan vital—inside each human being.  This spirit leads to the creation of religion, of art . . . and of sex.

The vast universe itself, he suggested, was a sprawling, undirected mélange of things and energy.  Each person needs to become awakened—enlightened, a la the Eastern mystics—in order to understand this energy and channel it correctly.  His books were about his own struggles to overcome the inhibitions and blocks in his life, to come fully awake so that he could be free and creative, so that the energy could flow through him unimpeded.  Sex, in this sense, was not instrumental, not merely for reproduction or pleasure, but was a sacred act, and, when performed correctly, between two connected people, holy.

The land of fuck, he said, was Cockaigne: the Medieval land of plenty, when all pleasure was at hand, when everyone lived fulfilled lives, freed from the shackles of work and the rigid caste system.

He told Nin in the 1930s, “Here is the crux of the matter: art is not the translation or the representation or the expression of some hidden thing.  It is a thing in itself—pure, absolute, without reference.”  It, like sex and religion, was the highest output of humankind.

But Miller saw himself as more than just an example for his readers.  Beginning in the 1930s, he started fashioning himself into a guru.  “The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite.  Parents talk a lot about truth but seldom bother to deal in it.  It’s much simpler to dispense ready-made knowledge.  More expedient too, for truth demands patience, endless, endless patience.”  Miller was a purveyor of truth, he thought.    

This was a way of reconciling two parts of himself: he was a common man, from a working class background, never attended college, and had a well developed distaste for elite toffs.  (Admittedly, astrology was far from the man of the street, but it took account of all, high and low.)  Miller was also an intellectual.  Being a guru allowed him to raise the quotidian to the level of enlightenment.

Borrowing from Nietzche, Miller thought himself a Dionysian artist, that is, an artist fully in touch with the emotions of life (as opposed to the Apollonian personality, who is intellectual, reserved, controlled).  And like Dionysus—like Jesus—he needed to die, at least symbolically, and be reborn—hence his Rosy Crucifix series, in which he was crucified.  That death fertilized the what T. S. Eliot called the modern “Wasteland.”  Miller did not like Elliot’s work, or that of the other moderns, Joyce and Pound, which was all too Apollonian.  He wanted something messier, and his works were supposed to offer Gnostic knowledge—Rosicrucian knowledge—Theosophical wisdom—for a world that was too mechanical.