Les Voies du Paradis

Les Voies du Paradis brings together what remains of a lost work: the only footnotes to a missing text, left by a researcher after his death and edited by Peter Cornell. These notes and their illustrations form an incomplete whole, which can be read here through its gaps. A thread – Ariadne’s? – is woven between the diagrams, the figures of spirals and labyrinths – from Cesare Ripa to Ernst Josephson and Robert Smithson, from the Templars to the Spiritists and Surrealists – that run through the text and echo each other, like elements of an enigma or esoteric figures. The ‘Paradise’ referred to here is the dream of absolute knowledge, the grasp of the hidden order of things, to which poets and artists as well as mystics and scientists aspire…

Published in Sweden in 1987, Les Voies du Paradis has acquired the reputation of a cult book. In it, Peter Cornell offers an original perspective on the links between art, literature, spirituality and the occult, in a text that is halfway between essay and fiction, erudition and mystification. The will to know is presented as a quest caught in the trap of the irrational; the notes are assembled by associative logic, an eclectic programme that is still trying to find a lost centre – like the algorithms that have been entrusted with the fantasised task of putting human knowledge in order.