ELIE-CHARLES FLAMAND ON THE TRAIL OF THE DAUGHTER OF THE SUN

par Patrick Lepetit

March 29, 2020

It is important to reiterate and maintain here the 'Maranatha' of the alchemists placed at the threshold of the Work to stop the profane
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism

If one keeps in mind the memory that surrealism is, among other things, the constantly renewed quest for the marvelous in everyday life, by all means, one gives oneself the means to understand the early attraction of surrealists to the so-called traditional sciences in all their forms and particularly to alchemy – which moreover resonates with their pronounced taste for analogical thinking. Is it not, indeed, as early as 1929, in the Second Manifesto, that Breton – a Breton who thinks that the expression "alchemy of the word" must "be taken literally" – explicitly declares 3: "I ask that one observe that surrealist research presents with alchemical research a true analogy of purpose: the philosopher's stone is nothing other than what should allow man's imagination to take brilliant revenge on everything and here we are again, after centuries of domestication of the mind and mad resignation, attempting to definitively free this imagination through the 'long, immense, reasoned derangement of all the senses' and the rest". And one will not fail to observe, with 4 Jacques Van Lennep, that surrealism has, "like alchemy, sublimated minerals, operated mutations of kingdoms, spoken the language of elements" and even used the "language of birds" 1… One will perhaps better understand thus why Elie-Charles Flamand, who presents within the movement the rare particularity of not dismissing transcendence, which perhaps explains why he was one of the rare French surrealists not to abruptly reject Jung, author, in particular, of a masterful 5 Psychology and Alchemy 2, writes, in his book The Meanders of Meaning 3, these lines which seem to me, with their multiple implications, to ring absolutely true 6: "I am always deeply sensitive to the marvelous that is concealed under the everyday aspect of things. Breton initiated me to this quest for troubling gleams emanating from pure Reality that burst forth – but only when one brings to them an attention constantly on the alert – in the sudden fissures of appearances, the interferences of events, the fringes of existence, the halos of objects. These signs, intuitions and presentiments bring us a part of true knowledge and make us aware that, very often, reason is far from being right. Then life rises to a sublime intensity. As much as knowledge, wisdom begins with wonder"…

7 Elie-Charles Flamand, born in 1928 in the capital of Gaul and died in Paris in May 2016, is a perfect illustration, like the British Ithell Colquhoun across the Channel 8, of this current of surrealism which has always conceived poetic practice as a spiritual exercise, as a journey toward inner Light, as one can read in the poet's Wikipedia entry, that is to say that he is part of those who have looked closely, very closely sometimes at esotericism. Having entered the group in 1952 thanks to Jean-Louis Bédouin who introduced him to André Breton, Elie-Charles Flamand will be notified of his exclusion in May 1960 for "ruiniform esotericism", practically the same reason that E.L.T. Mesens had used in April 1940 to exclude Ithell Colquhoun from the London group. Elie-Charles Flamand, who, as Jean-Clarence Lambert 4 says in the General Dictionary of Surrealism and its Surroundings, "brings together until the symbiosis of surrealism and occultism", thinks that "the world is in truth only an illusory form under which the Absolute can appear" and his position on alchemy, as he expounds it in Erotic of Alchemy, has the merit of being clear 9:

"Alchemy," he writes indeed, "affirms the necessity of a material base for the edification of a spiritual work. According to its conceptions, the transformations that the alchemist makes his primary matter undergo are analogically linked to the initiatory process that operates spiritually within him. Due to Involution, matter seems to be what remains most distant from the Divine. Yet it is in the depths of the fallen hylean mass that the operator will find the spark of uncreated Fire and will then be able to transmute spiritually by communing with transcendence"…

The "master in the Art of Hermes" of Elie-Charles Flamand, in a certain way his life master, was Eugène Canseliet himself, met thanks again to René Alleau, and whose "noble figure" he thus evokes in The Meanders of Meaning, this book, a "return to oneself", whose first part, on the Bastie d'Urfé, fits fully – and for good reason – into the spirit of The Philosophical Dwellings: 10 "I relive the moments of initiatory serenity that I spent at his side in the laboratory where his athanor burned. With meticulous care, collected gravity, the solemn gestures of one who accomplishes a sacred rite, he skillfully dosed the substances after having weighed them with the help of a precision balance, handled tongs and crucible, regulated the fires and, for my wonder as well as for my spiritual Awakening, he showed me the rising of the Star of the Magi over the Philosophical Sea, then many other operations applied to maternal matter and the salvific Spirit it reveals. Thus he charitably handed me Ariadne's thread and incited me to personal labor". "His presence," he adds, in 2004, then, "is cruelly missed to guide me in my quest"… 11 And even if Canseliet, who knew him very well, affirms in the preface he dedicates to him in 1970 that the author of Erotic of Alchemy never "worked at the furnace", the "alchemical work at the living athanor" 5 although it had not been crowned with success, was not so foreign to him, as certain indices confirm and as, moreover, he lets it be understood himself. With these few verses, for example, taken from the poem "The vagabond of the improbable", subtitled "essay in lyrical autobiography", published in 2009 in The Strata of the Instant by the one who, in Canseliet's opinion, "knowing the mother aspir(ed) to reach the cradle of the son for the star of the magi" 6:

"The universal panacea: man, animal, vegetable, mineral Perfect remedy of the entire cosmos. Yes he made the Sulphur spring from Mercury But doubtless the stars were not at the rendezvous. The Donum Dei cruelly abstained"…

In an interview with Gwen Garnier-Dupuy, published in the online journal Recours au poème, Elie-Charles Flamand becomes explicit: "The transmission of the Art of Hermes is done orally. The master verifies that the disciple meditates with sufficient application the numerous classical texts which are cryptic. (…) The student sometimes succeeds, at the price of many difficulties, in finding Ariadne's thread and in identifying first the Materia prima. He is then guided in the long and complex manipulations in the laboratory when he has been able to guess their meanings and their exact sequence. Thus can he hope, if he is worthy of receiving the Donum Dei, to arrive at transmutation (alas, this is not my case). Obviously, all this is accomplished in secret". But he does not fail to specify: "I have qualified as cryptic the alchemical texts, which are enigmas to solve. Those of poetry cannot be thus designated, which functions otherwise". And regarding this Donum Dei, which makes here, if I dare say, its appearance, this "necessary illumination" that Breton too had awaited in vain, doubtless it is not superfluous to recall what Bernard Roger says about it in his Paris and Alchemy: 12 "This 'great secret' of the hermetic art, which no text ever reveals because it belongs to the domain of the sacred", it is not surprising "that one can only have the revelation of it beyond the bridge, that is to say beyond our clear consciousness, in some crepuscular region at the confines of night where the spirit of the 'plowman' would risk falling and getting lost, if he were not guided by his good star"… "Poet of the High Margin, of the Quest and the Mysteries of Light", according to Jacques Simonomis, Charles Flamand, who will add, without ulterior motives, he says, Elie to his first name to distinguish himself from a Belgian namesake, doubtless did not need that to become, by following, as Marc Kober 7 says so well, a "moral trajectory", this remarkable "metaphysical poet", "living and true", of whom Julien Starck 8 also speaks. And here we are back very close to this "moral truth" evoked by Breton of which I spoke above… Which is not at all surprising insofar as, to take up the words of Yves-Alain Favre 9, of the University of Pau, "poetry often presents itself as a spiritual approach, as an asceticism that aims at an inner transformation of being", then setting "the same goal and proceeding in the same manner as alchemy": "the maneuver of language and the quest for the absolute remain(ing) profoundly linked to one another", "the poet, like the alchemist", he adds, "therefore practices a double operation: poetic creation transforms him inwardly and spiritual metamorphosis directly influences the writing of the poem". One should not forget moreover that alchemical practice, indeed, which requires work of every instant of a nature to discourage anyone who could not or would not be firmly decided to devote themselves to it body and soul, is founded on the impossibility of dissociating the operative from the speculative, ora et labora – even, as in the 13 Mutus Liber: "Ora, lege, lege, lege, relege, labora et invenies" – being well the two facets and more of the Artist's quest. In fact, as evidenced by a response to André Lagrange, in 1993, published in the text "Entry of the medium" 10, the objectives that the poet sets for himself testify to his degree of exigency: "… to encounter the unpredictable, to attempt to incarnate eternity in the instant; to apprehend true reality by rediscovering the harmonic laws of correspondences between the Material plane and the Spiritual plane; to receive the fecundating energies of the Word; to modify my being by drawing from the vast reservoir of sacred Knowledge that alchemists call the Universal Spirit; to experiment through the path of poetry the stirb und werde, die and become, of Goethe; to share with others what one has discovered best in oneself, to give them a little serenity or well to trouble them by revealing to them the intimate conflicts that inhabit them…"! It is moreover also more or less what Yves-Alain Favre affirms when he observes: "Poetry, for Elie-Charles Flamand, possesses an essential analogy with alchemy. It does not dissociate work on language from spiritual quest and inner metamorphosis".

Recently made somewhat accessible by the publication of 14 Ember of Unity 11, this anthology of all his collections published until 2015 which constitutes the authentic "logbook of a traveler from within" attached to "rekindling the triple star of being", Elie-Charles Flamand, after having begun studies in geology, mineralogy and paleontology under the direction of Jean Viret, joined the surrealist group in 1952, thanks to Jean-Louis Bédouin whom Pierre Seghers had introduced to him. Now, by his own admission, Breton, very symbolically, appreciated the "evolutions at large so harmonious", similar "to those of a dolphin" – and one cannot help but think here of that of the Mutus liber, again – of the young poet. And one will not fail to note, in passing, that Fulcanelli, whose works Breton, as no one ignores, knew perfectly, presents, in The Mystery of the Cathedrals, this "mysterious fish" as "the royal fish par excellence", specifying that "this is our precious sulphur, the newly born child, the little king", "living quintessence hidden in water", adds the anonymous author of the article "The blazon, alchemical crucible"… Breton, without any doubt, loved the poetic collections of Elie-Charles whose first, 15 To a Coal Bird Perched on the Highest Branch of Fire, illustrated by Toyen, had been published in 1957. And, although he did not oppose his exclusion from the group in 1960, for cause, then, of "ruiniform esotericism", it is very clearly a "path in which he had nevertheless vigorously incited him to engage", according to the words held by Flamand in his interview with Lagrange, and he had even welcomed with benevolence the little story with the transparent title written in August 1958 at Saint-Cirq Lapopie, On the Trail of the Daughter of the Sun, 16 of which he had the good fortune to be the first reader and which will only be published in … 2002! Contrary however to what had happened about ten years earlier with Maurice Baskine, Breton retains his friendship and Flamand, who says he has retained from "this surrealist adventure" the idea that "poetic creation is not a gratuitous literary exercise, but that it engages the entire being", notes still, in The Meanders of Meaning: "Very dear André, you are doubtless the man I have loved most and the so vigorous psychic link that formed between us is not broken, I am convinced of it. In the Eternal Present, you remain beside me". And, considering still, more than thirty years later, that Breton was, "as regards his intellectual approach, the Great Awakener", he adds to his address 17: "Whatever our differences of opinion, I do not believe I have betrayed the best of your message whose essence, as you recalled one day, was not to compromise with these three causes: poetry, love, freedom". In the interview with André Lagrange, he explains thus: "He taught me, among so many other things, that poetry is not a literary diversion but a means of liberation and regeneration, a search for the 'supreme point', and that reacting against rationalism, stifling and rigid norms, stupid conventions, is necessary to break appearances, glimpse hidden truths, even to reach a form of illumination"… A word that he is accustomed to link directly to the virtues of the Philosopher's Stone! "Obviously", notes Kober, "this poetry is initiation and alchemy. It is alchemical trajectory, 'initiatory maze of the ends of the earth', following the poet's image. It is the poetry of labyrinths and journeys in the far reaches, of getting lost in the meanders and of arriving safely in port". An opinion shared by Matthieu Baumier who writes very beautifully: "Flamand's poetry is an alchemist's march toward the star", and "reading him, one hears the rumor of André Breton's step, going to René Alleau's in the company of Eugène Canseliet"… But, if Elie-Charles Flamand nevertheless refutes, as André Pieyre de Mandiargues had already done in his preface to 18 The Leafed Moon in 1968 already, any exclusively alchemical reading of his texts, always regarding his third collection and the "verbal alchemy, dazzling with coruscations" that unfolds there, Eugène Canseliet himself, in an article published at the end of 1968 in the journal Atlantis, judges it good to recall: "The leafed moon designates this other world of the 'immaculate doves of Diana' of which Eyrénée Philalèthe speaks in his Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King and from which it seems well that Elie-Charles Flamand drew inspiration with the most perfect happiness". "Author who belies the received idea according to which surrealists would be less erudite than others" 12, the latter is the first to remind us, that in "all poetry worthy of the name", it "is obviously not a question of taking from the Philosophical Art a certain number of its most specific symbols (…), then of arranging them in a pseudo-hermetic manner", nor of "attempting to create a coded writing where would be expressed didactically knowledge of the Art of Hermes", but well "essentially" of "Purification (and) Sublimation of language" – and one will note that here again he uses two words belonging precisely to alchemical vocabulary. "Even if", he adds in his interview with Lagrange, "notions borrowed from a Wisdom come from the depths of the ages and an initiatory experience are incorporated into my work and can therefore confer esoteric extensions on it, my poems are not constituted of cryptograms veiling precepts, a hermetic teaching, as some critics alas! have been able to imagine in error"… After having specified for his part that "the poetry of Elie-Charles Flamand shows us perfectly the links that can be established between alchemy and poetry", Yves-Alain Favre details its nature: "First of all", he writes, "his poetry draws its inspiration from alchemy and borrows from it images and symbols which, before even being used by the poet, already contain a strong charge of meaning and are thus overdetermined: phases of the Work, precious stones, gamahès 13 and Rose-Cross allow by their symbolism to better illuminate the poet's experience". But he takes great care to mark his remarks by adding that "one could not speak of alchemical poetry, because Elie-Charles Flamand transmits no doctrine and his poems do not contain a coherent hermetic knowledge that they would have the function of communicating to initiates". "Let us say", he completes, "that the ritual and images that alchemists use allow him to better account for his itinerary and his inner experience"… In short, he is content to "express his personal journey toward the absolute and to use alchemy as an already constituted symbolism that allows him to mark his itinerary". At most the poet comes to recognize, always in his interview with André Lagrange, that his "poetry borrows more particularly from alchemy the principle of Transmutation, verbal at the same time as spiritual, in its various phases". It remains no less true, indeed, that, as Kober still observes, "behind the accumulation of 'slag', in the flow, the gold-panner poet discerns 'wisdom chips'" . In a text from February 1979 extracted from 19 Stoking the Crucial Rose, "The quest for the verb", subtitled "essay on hierophanic poetry", which he goes so far as to qualify as "quasi manifesto" 14, Elie-Charles Flamand in person, in the concern to "show that poetry is a spiritual experience very close to an initiatory or mystical approach", "set in motion on the Path of Light", delivers some of the principal keys to reading his work. "The vital energy of the Logos", he explains first of all, "exercises itself in nature by means of the Universal Spirit, mediator between the uncreated One and grave matter. This agent half-corporeal, half-spiritual diffuses itself in the smallest parts of the universe of which it maintains harmony. It puts beings and things in communication; it is also a link between man and the powers of subtle planes. It is through its intermediary that everything signifies and that everything speaks to the poet's soul, on condition that he has known, by feeling and intuition, to accord himself with the vibratory state of this ethereal ocean of force that beats under the bark of appearances"…. "The work of expression", he adds, "will consist in stripping language of its impurities to make the spiritual charge that it conceals in its depths spring forth. There is there a similarity with the hermetic Great Work during which the alchemist opens the vile and gross primary matter, for a passive mercurial substance imprisons there the pure and active Sulphur, which is none other than the divine spark".

"The poet, for his part", concludes Elie-Charles Flamand, "endeavors to collect the igneous blood of the dragon of speech. He dissolves the common idiom then coagulates a little of the essential Word that this dark mass contained. He thus spiritualizes the matter of language in order to better materialize its Spirit".

Salamander it arrows At the end the lake of Hermes,

can be read in 1979 in conclusion of the poem "Solve et Coagula" in the collection Youth of a Terminal Sun… 20

But a text, from my point of view, occupies however, insofar as it seems to describe a journey toward the Great Work, a special place in Elie-Charles Flamand's work and poses the question of knowing to what extent one can follow him when he affirms transmitting nothing. I am of course alluding to this little book that I have already briefly evoked, On the Trail of the Daughter of the Sun, which bears the following dedication: "To the memory of André Breton who encouraged me / to write this story and was its first reader" – and ends with the mention: "Paris/Saint Cirq Lapopie – August 1958". The opuscule of thirty-eight pages, is divided into five chapters, and it is preceded, besides the dedication to Breton, by the motto, "Solus, per solum, ad solem", of a certain René Sol, of whom one will very quickly understand that he is the principal character of the story. Each chapter, illustrated, by a work of Obéline Flamand, is introduced by a poetic quotation, somewhat in the manner of the emblems of the New Alchemical Heraldry of Jorge Camacho and Alain Gruger 15. The first chapter is thus placed under the sign of an isolated fragment of Arthur Rimbaud, "Take heed, O my absent life!". The epigraph of the second chapter is constituted by a quotation from the Dadaist and surrealist Jean Arp, "He who awakens his soul makes the empires of silence grow. He reposes like the sky on the voice of death". The third part is introduced by the last tercet of the sonnet "Golden Verses" by Gérard de Nerval,

Often in the obscure being dwells a hidden God; And, like a nascent eye covered by its eyelids, A pure spirit grows under the bark of stones.

It is Novalis that one finds opening the fourth chapter of the book, with no less than eight verses:

For us now, to love is to live!
Like the elements, we mingle
Intimately the flows of existence,
Bubbling, heart against heart.
Lascivious, the currents separate,
For the struggle of elements
Is the most intense moment of love
And the heart of our heart.

Finally, the last passage opens with a Greek quotation from an extract of the XXth hour of the Nuctéméron of Apollonius of Thyana (sic), literally The Day of the Night, accompanied by the translation that was given of it, in the XIXth century by the great initiate 21 Eliphas Lévi, the Abbé Constant, "Here are accomplished by fire the works of eternal light".

In summary, the different parts of the work are placed under the sign of four poets, Rimbaud, the surrealist Jean Arp, two romantics, the French Nerval and the German Novalis, as well as the thaumaturge and Neopythagorean philosopher of the 1st century Apollonius – or Apollonios – of Tyana, in the translation of one of the principal French esotericists of the XIXth century, Eliphas Lévi whose influence on the poets of his time is known, beginning with Hugo, Baudelaire or … Nerval – and even later on Breton.

But what does this little book tell? After having crossed a door "entirely of black and gleaming wood, ornamented with barbaric motifs of which no archaeologist could have fixed the age nor the provenance", adorned on its lower part with "a broad heraldic sun with negrescent radiance" and, on the upper panel, with a high-relief where figures "a group of sphinxes mingled in an inextricable combat, beating wings, erect breasts, mad eyes, fiercely tearing each other with their leonine claws", the hero, René Sol, undertakes a journey in "chaos, the cave where mysteries are celebrated", at "the limits of himself", "before the fossilized sponge of his former body", "geode of dead flesh" that he destroys by throwing at it his "enclosed soul" in "the warm ball of his breath"… One will remember here, in passing, that the "chaos of the sages" is none other than the Prima Materia… It is then that he sees born "a tutelary star whose scintillation guides him" – and that we other readers are gratified with typically alchemical notations, in italics, worthy assuredly of the treatises of the XVIth or XVIIth centuries – such as this one:

The morning star has dislodged its cursed sister and reigns in the new sky. From its green eye falls a ray that makes coagulate in me a drop of dew, crystal of a true wisdom, promise of a limpid universe that will shelter the vertebral oak. From the crucible of the abyss rises slowly the carbuncle of the first day

– perhaps the Rebis of the philosophers, 22 the primordial Androgyne who is born from the Materia Prima and indicates to the Adept the appearance of opposite principles …

In the same manner, one can read, a little further on, still in italics:

Here rolls the rose window of Iris; In its course, it gemmifies the light of deliverance. From the highest, it comes to place on me the seal of union. A nascent stem shivers in the diapered wind.

Now, in alchemical texts, the wheel or rose window that appears after the death of the Crow – which represents the Nigredo or first stage of the transformation of the Philosopher's Stone – has eight compartments of which seven correspond to the metals and colors of the work.

Black, for example, is the color associated with Saturn, while ash gray corresponds to Jupiter and white to the Moon. For Venus it is an azure green going toward pale red, and for Mars, a dark reddish yellow tending toward red while the Sun is associated with a light yellow going up to the intense purple of dawn.

The whole of these colors constitutes the so-called palette of the Peacock's tail and corresponds to a phase called irisation, by reference to the nymph Iris and of course to the colors of the rainbow. To master the colors is to master the Alchemists' fire to obtain the Philosopher's Stone…

Sometimes, these maxims are of a more directly gnomic type, as evidenced by this one: "A sign manifests itself and the way is illuminated, consumed life is renewed in phoenix, the inert can germinate on your palm"…

The pursuit however of the description of René Sol's journey and the trials he undergoes, illustrated by a phrase like: "I have passed and my double burdened with its gangue, has remained nailed to the sterile reef of the other shore", seems well to correspond to this expression of a "personal journey toward the absolute" using alchemy as a "already constituted symbolism that allows him to mark his itinerary" of which I indicated above that it was representative of Elie-Charles Flamand's work.

To the "too violent clarity" which, at the end of the second chapter, forces our hero to protect his eyes echoes, at the beginning of the third, the evocation of the "splendor of the day" where it would doubtless be very difficult not to see a subtle allusion to 23 the Splendor solis 16 dear to the children of the Art… But this third chapter detailing the arrival of René Sol "at the threshold of an abandoned curiosity cabinet" with its collections "arranged according to the method adopted by ancient naturalists", a "world extinguished, (…) kneaded in the canonically prepared earth of a disintegrated self", is not without reminding us also that Elie-Charles Flamand himself first received, as he explains in The Meanders of Meaning, a naturalist's training. All the more so as a few lines further on, the character finds himself, another striking coincidence, in a "place outside of time" that strongly resembles an alchemist's laboratory – like that, which he frequented then, of Eugène Canseliet… Then, at the end of a meditation doubtless intended to recall that the door is inside, 24 after having found the key in a hearth adorned with a salamander, he reaches a vast rotunda lit by a "stained glass window cut in a six-branched star" – the seal of Solomon, "the brilliant star of the macrocosm", as Eliphas Lévi says, symbolizing moreover the 4 principles – hot, cold, humid and dry – issued from the 4 primordial elements, fire air earth and water … In this theater bathed in a glaucous light, René finally finds himself in the presence of a "woman draped in a robe of blue moiré, undulated and shimmering", adorned with a "green gem with dazzling reflections" "in ferronnière on the forehead", the one "whom he had pursued for so long, from tormented dreams to ardent vigils, without ever being able to embrace her"…

Finally, the last part tells how René Sol, at the end of an authentic initiatory process that has seen "the most obscure corners of his being illuminate (…), for he has drunk the milk of the moon", finds after a race through "a majestic forest like a sanctuary", after having descended the rapid course of a river, "The one whom he has come to name the Daughter of the Sun", who against the background, precisely, of the rising sun, draped in a red cape awaits him to accomplish the union of mercury and sulphur, the incarnation of the spirit, the Work at red…

And, in perfect illustration, it seems, of André Lagrange's remarks affirming that "E.C.F. borrows from alchemy 'its language and its symbols' – as a starting point on the spiritual path; blossoming of being, not in search of any philosopher's stone, but of a poetic recreation", the text ends with this phrase where seem to blend romanticism, symbolism and surrealism "I am no longer but a tear of the green lightning mask that glows"!

One will not fail, in conclusion, to recall that in alchemy, as in other initiatory traditions, discretion is in any case the rule. It is a question of respecting the motto of 25 the chemical man, "To Do", this famous ποιεῖν of which Fulcanelli and Canseliet speak, "to push aside the thick veil of the intellect", as Elie-Charles Flamand says in Stoking the Crucial Rose, "to follow the ways of poetry", and "to be silent", to observe "the most religious silence"… But one must however note that Elie-Charles Flamand, like Eugène Canseliet and their friends René Alleau, Bernard Roger, Jorge Camacho, Alain Gruger and Maurice Baskine, those whom I name the alchemical surrealists, for reasons that belong to them and which, moreover, are doubtless very diverse, passing over the motto "to do and (to) be silent", have, whatever they may sometimes have, opened in their manner as Artists paths for the profane and worked to transmit. Which dispenses in nothing from the exigencies of "internal navigation" 26…

1 Jacques Van Lennep : Art et alchimie. Editions Meddens, Bruxelles.1966.

2 C.G.Jung : Psychologie et alchimie. Buchet-Chastel, Paris. 2004.

3 Elie-Charles Flamand : Les Méandres du sens. Dervy, Paris. 2004.

4 Dictionnaire général du surréalisme et de ses environs, d'Adam Biro et de René Passeron, PUF, Paris. 1982.

5 Marc Kober : « Caresser avec amour les pétales de l'univers », dans le dossier Elie-Charles Flamand publié par la revue La Sœur de l'Ange, n° 13. Printemps 2014. Editions Hermann, Paris.

6 Texte d'une dédicace d'Eugène Canseliet à Elie-Charles Flamand.

7 Marc Kober : « Le trésor d'Elie-Charles Flamand », postface à Elie-Charles Flamand, Braise de l'unité, Recours au poème éditeurs, décembre 2014.

8 Julien Starck : « Sur l'œuvre d'Elie-Charles Flamand », Poezibao, mai 2015.

9Yves-Alain Favre: « Alchimie et poésie dans l'œuvre d'Elie-Charles Flamand », communication au IIème Colloque du Centre de Recherches sur le Merveilleux et l'Irréel en Littérature (Université de Caen, 2 septembre 1989). Repris dans Le Merveilleux et la magie dans la littérature (sous la direction de Gérard Chandès, Rodopi, 1992) puis dans A propos de la poésie d'Elie-Charles Flamand (La Lucarne Ovale. 2011).

10 André Lagrange : « Entrée du médium », Jointure n° 38. Eté 1993. Repris dans A propos de la poésie d'Elie-Charles Flamand, op. cit.

11 Version électronique chez Recours au poème éditeur et version papier à La Lucarne Ovale, 2015.

12Marc Kober : « Caresser avec amour les pétales de l'univers », op. cit.

13 Selon Stanislas de Guaïta, il s'agit de pierres sur lesquelles l'action de la lumière astrale a tout naturellement gravé des figures. Pour E.-C.F., dans Sur les pas de la fille du soleil, ce sont « ces mystérieux 'jeux de la nature' dont l'étude est dédaignée de nos jours ».

14 Dans l'entretien avec Gwen Garnier-Dupuy publié dans Recours au poème (http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/).

15 Jorge Camacho et Alain Gruger : Héraldique alchimique nouvelle.

16 Très célèbre traité alchimique allemand du xvieme siècle dans lequel on trouve, par exemple, une splendide illustration du Donum dei.