Hauntology, coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, has been defined by cultural academics as ‘a nostalgia for lost futures’. In relation to Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat we are confronting our own lost future: the inevitable decay of our human form and the dissolution of all certainty and knowing. Julian Wolfrey has said that ‘to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts’ and in the Rubaiyat the ghost that is invoked is our own inevitable shadow self: our being beyond the grave. In Sullivan’s illustrations, inspired by the quatrains of the Rubaiyat, we encounter this shadow self in the forms of omnipresent skeletons, mocking the folly of our earthly lives, ever watchful. The illustrations are saturated with a layered code of decadence, decay, and death where we see specters behind every tavern door, in the reflections in our wine.
Edmund Sullivan was a poet and painter who produced the haunting illustrations that accompanied Edward Fitzgerald’s famed 19th century reworking of the ancient Persian masterpiece, written by poet-astronomer Omar Khayyam in the 11th century. His illustrations are latent with melancholy, a visual fable of biblical dimensions. They are a veritable caravanserai of occult symbolism. The drawings have been crafted in the spirit of the Tarot card, with layers of allegory and a reference to the hermetic tradition in astrology, alchemy, and myth.
I have selected some of the most compelling illustrations from Khayyam’s Rubaiyat for you to savor, analyze, and explore.
