The murder at the end of the little essay in the “information balloon” above is intriguing. “I like it, le murder, because this is courage,” Dali told Victor Bockris in a 1974 interview. He was talking about murder in general, of course.

“It is anti-bourgeois. Le murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming rrrremords de conscience [remorseful], one prays, one opens le sky, and le angels say, ‘Good morning!’”

The French news media were the first to pick up on the coincidences between Dali’s paintings and the murders in Perpignan of 19-year-old Moktaria Chaib, found in December 1997 with face to the ground and both breasts cut away, and 22-year-old Marie-Helene Gonzalez, discovered six months later with some of her internal organs placed in a box and head and hands missing, and the subsequent disappearance of 17-year-old Tatiana Andujar.

Stephen Bourgoin, dubbed by the press France’s leading expert on multiple murder, discounted any link, but he put the case this way: “Dali has done his work of art. Now the serial killer of Perpignan is doing his gruesome work of art.”

Still, the murder at the railway station is a mere red herring in the great Dali saga. Far more intriguing — and merely hinted at in the typo-marred Jpg-image balloon created for Google Earth — is the matter of Europe’s abduction, the imminent catastrophe, and the mystery of the abandoned village of Perillos.

Dali’s pronouncements about the centre of the universe and the continent’s coming destruction were not about to be left alone, and several writers have carried the ball from there.

Philip Coppens, who looks hopefully into all manner of supernatural beliefs, has a relatively measured essay on Dali’s “scientific” approach to life’s mysteries on his website, and between him and André Douzet, whose Société Perillos maintains the online guide Perillos.com, you can venture far into Da Vinci Code territory with Saunière, Rennes-le-Château and the Priory of Sion.

There’s a ruling dynasty with secrets to hide and, seemingly inevitable in these ventures, the tomb of Jesus, right outside Perpignan. Has anyone even notified Dan Brown?

In this photo from Le Point magazine, Dali and Gala visit the station in a din of excitement in August 1965, two years after he had his “precise vision of the constitution of the universe” there. And this is where the universe would begin to converge.

Cynics will insist that, by “centre of the universe”, Dali meant that Perpignan station was where his artwork originated — the place from which he shipped everything out to the world, since the Spanish red tape at Figueras station was too fussy. It’s clear, though, that Dali meant far more than that.

Coppens bases his observations on the writings of Roger Michel Erasmy, who investigated Dali’s prediction of an apocalypse of sorts being born in the region. Erasmy cited the “catastrophic writing” that Dali jotted in a 1982 booklet and his revelations the following year to his childhood friend and final companion, Antonio Pichot.

On Halloween 1983, Dali dictated to Pichot the details of four hallucinations he’d had at the end of ‘82. In one of these René Thom, pictured here, a mathemetician he admired and had once met, had appeared and told him of the upcoming catastrophe, a matter of Europe’s “disappearance, or abduction”, beginning at a spot between Salses and Narbonne.

After making the films “The Andalusian Dog” and “The Golden Age”, Dali and Luis Bunuel planned but never carried out a third, called “Babaouo”, which had to do with the legend of Babau heard in Rivesaltes, and there’s another, similar yarn about Babaos that’s linked with Perillos.

The hero of both stories is one of the lords of Perillos (influential advisers to the kings of Aragon, despite meagre earnings from their estates), who was victorious over some terrible monster. Erasmy noted that the postal code for the region of Rivesaltes and Opoul-Perillos is 66600, but there’s better evidence for a genuine occult mystery here than a fleeting allusion to the Mark of the Beast.

Dali once visited Opoul, signing the guest book at the mayor’s office, but nothing is recorded about his reason for being in the area.

Also in 1983, Dali painted “Topological Abduction of Europe — Homage to René Thom”, in which one of Thom’s mathematical equations appears on an otherwise near-blank grey field. Two lines bisect the canvas, and a cross, or “X”, is marked.

Erasmy realised that the line on the right mimicked the route of the A9/E15 motorway between Salses and Narbonne, and the one on the left that of the smaller D611 between Tuchan and Durban-Corbières. If this were a map, the “X” would be close to Perillos.

Below is the area as seen on Google Earth, and below that the same view with the painting superimposed and the “X” highlighted. It’s not easy reconciling the lines on the painting with the roads, but the are “close”, just as the “X” is close-ish to Perillos.

Erasmy asked Pichot if Dali had painted with a map in hand and was told he did not. And from there the story drifts far and wide, without ever coming close to explaining what Dali suspected about Perpignan.

Coppens and Erasmy seem to think Dali was, right from youth, a genuine mystic visionary who could “download” information from some other realm. Coppens goes as far as to suggest that the “madness” ascribed to the maestro in his final years — his alleged suicide attempts — could have been information overload. “Was the gate from the other realm wide open and was Dali unable to regulate it?”

Noting Dali’s fascination with Thom, Einstein and Heisenberg, Coppens wonders if Dali’s science might have also extended to alchemy and the occult arts, and whether he was an initiate.

In the 1979 painting “Searching for the Fourth Dimension”, writes Coppens, “we see the alchemist at work: there are allusions to Einstein’s space/time theories, by means of the wheels next to the cave — both concave and convex — and the sprawling soft watch.

“But what to make of the couple with their backs to the painter, a reference to Plato and Aristotle in ‘The School of Athens’ by Raphael — which in itself has a rich history of esoteric acclaim?

“And why did he believe that Europe would be ‘abducted’ from Perpignan, where centuries before an apocalyptic preacher, Vincent Ferrer, made similar claims … claims apparently supported by the exiled pope Benedict XIII?”

Again, there are no answers forthcoming.

On the Opoul plateau are two castles, one in the village itself and the other, the castle of Salveterra, shown above, on a rock outcrop overlooking it, with a view of the Mediterranean Sea. The latter has been there since at least 1172, and the village since 1246, once known as Salveterra and with a small chapel whose remains still exist.

From the plateau you can see the tower of the castle of Perillos, probably a deliberate line of sight in the event of invasion, so that warning fires could be lit. Below, an aerial of Perillos.

Every May 1 people get together on the plateau for the Chronodrome, a welcoming party for any time travellers who might be arriving from the future. Perillos.com (though it’s not clear if this is André Douzet writing) says a satellite known as KEO was to be launched into space in 2005, bearing “a numeric library containing the sum total of our current knowledge and the cultural history of humanity.

“At the end of the 50,000 years, KEO will land on Earth and our distant descendants will hold in their hands the keys to our civilisation … I am wagering that in the distant future our descendants will have discovered the medium to travel through time. Therefore, we are inviting them to leap back to our epoque and give us some small sign that they have received our message.

“To ensure that they are not mistaken in either the time or place, we have indicated a precise spot — the castle in Opoul — and a date — the 1st of May with a margin of 50 years. Thus the contact could take place any 1st of May between the years 2000 and 2050.

“What we expect from the ‘chrononauts’ is at least a visual ’sign’ in the sky above the place reserved for the Chronodrome. The advantage of a visual sign is that it should have a minimal impact on our physio-chemical environment so as not to have any effect on theirs in the future. The appearance of a hologram, a light, or any sign of contact would represent a veritable victory.”

This is a god’s-eye view of a distinctly Dalinean flourish in the local landscape.

Curiously, the astronomer Cassini of the Observatory in Paris spent more than a year in the area in the 17th century making a map, on which Perillos is identifed as “white space”, a designation normally used for unknown territory.

Nearby is Tautavel, one of Europe’s oldest settlements. In the cave called the “caune de l’Arago” the remains of pre-Neanderthal people were found in 1971, including the skull of “Arago XXI”, 450,000 years old.

There’s another artist in the picture here: the French-Catalan sculptor and painter Marcel Gili (1914-93). Just down the road from Perillos is a museum dedicated to him.

“Discovered” by Maillol, the stone cutter’s son exhibited his work in Perpignan in 1932 and the following year in Paris, where he met abstraction-creationists Delaunay, Leger and Dufy. He became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Superior de Paris.

THERE’S STILL MORE TO THIS STORY: Continue to “Roger Erasmy, the ‘Heirs of Dali’ and the Perpignan railway car”.

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As to the painting, “The Mystery of the Railway Station at Perpignan”, it was first exhibited in New York on December 18, 1965. Nearly a decade later it was back in the Big Apple, as the centrepiece of a show at the Knoedler Gallery.

For the record, the full title is:

“Gala Looking at Dali in a State of Anti-Gravitation in His Work of Art ‘Pop-Op-Yes-Yes Pompier’ in Which One Can Contemplate the Two Anguishing Characters from Millet’s ‘Angelus’ in a State of Atavistic Hibernation Standing Out of a Sky Which Can Suddenly Burst into a Gigantic Maltese Cross Right in the Heart of the Perpignan Railway Station Where the Whole Universe Must Begin to Converge”

Louis Markoya was at the time Dali’s protegé, and the maestro asked him to paint “the picture of his name for the Knoedler window”. He used his variant on “Markoya”.

“Mark Oil, you are to paint the picture which will welcome the world to my new show. It is to be painted in black and white, in the style of Andy Warhol, and it should be six feet by four feet. It shall say DALI and that is all, though you should sign it like it was typed by a typewriter.”

Louis’ next assignment was trickier: Dali handed him a drawing showing a field of wheat with the written note, “Wit cret Luis”, meaning “Wheat to be created by Louis”. (Seen below is a Dali ink sketch, “Long Live the Station at Perpignan, Long Live Figueras”, from 1979.)

Dali saw wheat as the food staple on which the economies of some nations depend, Louis has explained, and utilised it in his art in the form of sublime loaves of bread and the body of Christ. But for this exhibition, Dali wanted a waving field of grain as a frame for his masterpiece — and he wanted artificial wheat.

“Dali wanted me to procure thousands of shafts of plastic wheat. The wheat was to be attached to tiny springs and the springs were to be attached to small mounting plates.

“Nowhere was plastic wheat to be found. El maestro was getting more and more pissed, when I decided I’d show up with reams and reams of real wheat stalks, which he could not believe, in that day and age, could be had (as opposed to plastic).

“But he was pleased. The wheat field was installed directly in front of the painting. The Knoedler people were turning blue when Dali had workers drilling holes in the hardwood floors to install the shafts.”

The final phase of the plan didn’t pan out: large fans that would toss the wheat to and fro as if in a farmer’s field. This notion proved just too impractical.

A refreshingly lighter reminder of Perpignan’s link to Dali, its close neighbour, came in January 2009 when Lluis Colet sat down at the railway station and talked non-stop for 124 hours — mostly about Dali, his fellow Catalonian — to break the world record for the longest speech.

The 62-year-old civil servant nattered on for five days and four nights to cap the previous Guinness record by four hours.

More about mystery in Dali’s art, an extension of this post.

In online blurbs and press releases, self-styled “Dalinean researcher” Roger Michel Erasmy continues to churn out “explanations” of Dali’s supposed magical or psychic precognition.

He earns his living writing books, though. “Le mystère de la gare de Perpignan” (1985), “Codex Dalianus” (1989) and “L’Apothéose du Dollar” (2004) present a more or less apocalyptic vision drawn from cryptic messages inferred from Dali’s canvases.

“Topical Abduction of Europe” (1983), from the elderly Dali’s “catastrophe series”, seems to be Erasmy’s launching pad, and Erasmy sees his oracle proved right in the politico-economic grappling of the European Union, with France’s May 2005 rejection of the European Constitution treaty being crucial evidence.

Dali, says Erasmy, foresaw the fall of the Nazism in “The Enigma of Hitler” (1939, detail here, with the Fuhrer circled) and the collapse of communism in both “The Enigma of William Tell” (1933, detail below), with Lenin knelt at his own coffin, and “Partial Hallucination — Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano” (1931, shown further down).

Dali also predicted the 9/11 attacks (though I haven’t been able to identify in which artwork) and, as read in the “emblematic table” seen in “The Apotheosis of the Dollar” (1965, also further down), the disaster of the US-led war in Iraq.

Andrew Roberts, in “A History of the English-speaking Peoples Since 1900″, pointed out that the “newspaper” Dali once briefly circulated, the Dali News, had on November 25, 1947, published prophecies for the coming 10 years.

“The painter predicted such forthcoming occurrences as ‘The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas shall be revised by the atom cooked three times’ and ‘An American art critic of Irish blood shall win fame defending the Dalinian theory of painting.’

“He also predicted,” Roberts wrote, “that ‘Belgium shall know glory in legislation and finance’. Sure enough, 10 years later, that country became the focus for a new Great Power in the world.”

The European Economic Community came into being with a treaty signed in Rome on March 25, 1957, and the Belgian capital, Brussels, became the centre of the new European Union’s legislative and financial power.

Erasmy seems to believe that the figure sitting back from the piano keyboard in “Partial Hallucination” is Boris Yeltsin (it looks more like Max Ernst to me). The overall message is a warning about Russian aggression, he claims, drawing a line to Moscow’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and the intervention of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then also heading the European Union. Ukraine, however, remains vulnerable, Erasmy has noted.

“The new geopolitical order described by Dali does not correspond at all to the hegemonic ideas of President Bush, nor to the futuristic designs of the eurocrats of Brussels,” Erasmy wrote in 2007.

“Tuna Fishing” (1967) evidently foresaw the European Union’s 2008 decision to shut down Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishing, which caused an uproar in France.

The interpretations that Erasmy has shared for free on his Dali Décodé website and blog haven’t always enjoyed the success he claims his three books have met with the reading public.

The Frenchman’s divinations of the prophetic meanings in Dali’s art failed signally in 2007 when French voters chose Sarkozy as president over Ségolène Royal.

What made Erasmy so sure that Royal would win the election?

Because the other Dali painting on which he’s built a career — “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan” — supposedly contains the “code” 229 CL 66.

This “message” Erasmy transcribes (by means I don’t understand). via the date of modern France’s founding, September 22, 1792, to Royal’s birthdate, September 22, 1953.

And then there was this postage stamp Dali designed in 1978, depicting Dante’s Béatrice, which Erasmy said presents the “myth-sign of Marianne”.

The stamp went on sale on November 17, 1979, he pointed out — and on the 27th anniversary of that date Royal was nominated as her Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency. (Wikipedia says Royal was nominated on the 16th.)

Dali, Erasmy continued, produced no fewer than 64 variations on Millet’s popular painting “The Angelus” and insisted that the woman in the picture was a dominating “praying mantis” ready to crush the man. (Shown here are the left and right components of the stereoscopic “The Eye of the Angelus” from 1978.)

This woman, said Erasmy, is Ségolène Royal, who hails from and is president of the Poitou-Charentes region, where the repetition of the Angelus prayer was first introduced in 1318.

Dali Planet has much more about Dali and the Angelus in this post.

Finally, Erasmy noted, Cécilia Sarkozy — then still the wife of the eventual president — is the great-granddaughter of the celebrated Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz, for whom the city of Barcelona built a “palace” in 1929.

Forty years later Dali was asked to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the Palauet Albéniz (see this post), and did so with the coming reinvestiture of King Juan Carlos in mind. He called his mural “The Hour of the Monarchy” and this, in Erasmy’s mind, was a nod to Ségolène “Royal”.

Erasmy was surely on safer ground forecasting Barack Obama’s election on the basis of Dali’s “Poetry of America” (1943), which contains an acknowledged allusion to the evolving acceptance of racial equality.

Far less convincing is his claim that Obama’s effort to save the US auto industry was somehow foreshadowed in “The Appearance of the Town of Delft” (1936), with its vegetative car rotting from the roots.

And who has the energy to argue when he says the 2009 financial crisis was there for everyone to see in “Apotheosis of the Dollar”, and perhaps in “The Basket of Bread” as well?

The full title of the former painting is “Salvador Dali in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar in which You Can See on the Left Marcel Duchamp Masquerading as Louis XIV behind a Vermeerian Curtain which Is the Invisible Face, but Monumental, of Hermes by Praxiteles”.

Dali traced the moire patterns from an image projected on the canvas, just as the Old Masters had done in previous centuries to ensure precise measurements and perspective.

Although Erasmy didn’t specify which version of “Bread”, it’s a safe guess he was referring to the 1945 one (they’re quite similar anyway). The basket, he said, forms “a notation symbolic of the stock exchange” and the nub of a loaf suggests a severed penis. Thus the fiscal crisis marks the end of “a system built on phallic capacity, from now on threatened by the emancipation of women” (Erasmy champions Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel as well as Royal).

Erasmy seems to have done Dali’s admirers a more palpable service in locating the railway coach that was depicted in “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan”.

He claims to have found the car in 1986, abandoned behind the station and occupied, suitably enough, by a “tramp”. He talked the local transport firm Raymondis, which owned it, into letting him convert it into a “cultural platform”.

By 1994 Erasmy had the railroad coach in the “Dali Triangle” and the following year publicly inaugurated it in front of the press with the help of television celebrity Marlène Mourreau, who Erasmy said was “selected as godmother” to the project on the basis of her physical assets, “in conformity with the erotic phantasms of Salvador Dali”.

When last heard of — there were no updates on the website about this the last time I looked — the “Dali Wagon” was headed for Wolnzach in Bavaria in October 2005 for an exhibition of the work of 10 Eastern European surrealist artists calling themselves the “Heirs to Dali”.

This collective had been assembled by a German painter who goes by the names Angerer-DER-Aeltere and Ludwig Angerer the Elder and also includes Frenchmen Jean-Pierre Alaux, Jean Bailly, Yo Coquelin, Lukás Kándl, Jacques Resch, Jean Reus and Eli Tiunine, Miguel Garcia-Diez of Spain and Michael Maschka, another German.

What exactly happened to the Heirs’ proposed exhibition in May 2005 at the Place du Pantheon in Paris’ fifth arrondissement isn’t quite clear from Erasmy’s website. The event appears to have been originally planned to coincide with the centenary of Dali’s birth in 2004 and, with the Dali Wagon included, was deemed part of a project called “Train of Fantastic Art” (TAF 2004).

Art dealer Stephan Gissinger and Yo Coquelin, one of the Heirs, made the arrangements with the Town Hall, but everything fell apart, Erasmy claimed, due to “jealousies and meanness” involving a “cabal” that opposed him. Nothing seems to have happened in 2005 either.

Architect and painter Angerer designed a logo for the project from a likeness of Dali. His striking painting shown alongside it below is titled “Moderne Schoenheit 2″.

The 10 Heirs did manage to hold a show in 2007, however, at the thermal springs in Mont-Dore, west of Lyon. Michael Maschka won a trophy called the “Apocalypse Dore” for his painting “Travels to the Crystal Mountains”.

“The Black Mass”, 1974

Getting back to Dali himself, and along the same spooky lines, the maestro’s superstitions are well documented, but there’s room for speculation as to just how much he delved into the supernatural, apart from its utility to any hard-working surrealist.

Amanda Lear has recorded that anything green meant bad luck to Dali, and he “hated” green parrots as a result. Ill fortune also came from peacock feathers and starting a journey and marrying on a Tuesday.

He always carried a wooden talisman “wrapped in a sock and secured with a rubber band”.

Gala, he wrote, “believes in my wood — a piece of wood that I found at the beginning of our acquaintance among the rocks of Cape Creus, under extraordinary circumstances. Since then we have never been without this ‘pure Dalinian fetish’, though we have lost it on several occasions.

“Once we lost it in Covent Garden in London, and found in again the next day. Another time it had been taken out with the bed sheets. It was necessary to go minutely over the whole laundry of the Hotel St Moritz, yet we finally found it.

“This piece of wood has assumed in my mind the form of a compulsive maniacal neurosis. When I get the idea that I ought to go and touch it, I cannot resist doing it. At this very moment I am forced to get up to go and touch it … There, I have just touched it, and with this my anxiety, which otherwise would only have grown agonizingly, has been calmed.”

Gala had a chunk of wood just the same, and when she died, Dali gave it to Lear.

On one occasion when Lear’s love life was in turmoil, Dali went hunting for a particular carbuncle that would put things right.

In a 1939 letter to Luis Bunuel, Dali wrote: “For three years now I’ve been occupying myself passionately with all matters relating to ‘objective chance’. Destiny, prophetic dreams, interpretation of the smallest events in daily life in order to act in consequence, chiromancy, astrology, etc etc.”

At the Dali Museum in Florida in 2008, lecturer Vickie Brunner focused on “Dali, Women and the Occult”. She began with Lydia (often spelled Lidia) Noguer, the so-called “last witch of Cape Creus” to whom Dali referred in his autobiography “The Secret Life” as the “Godmother of my madness”. Noguer told biographer Ian Gibson that she was “the witch responsible for the whole business of Dali and a whole lot more besides”.

“Lidia de Cadaques”, 1954

Pictured here is the cover of a local history about Lydia published in 1954 by the celebrated author Eugeni d’Ors, featuring illustrations by Dali including the one above.

Noguer, who died in an asylum, was the person Dali turned to in 1930 after his father disowned him. He needed a place to live, so she sold the 26-year-old a fisherman’s derelict hut in Port Lligat, and it became his and Gala’s home — and the basis for the house they always kept, now the Dali House-Museum.

Dali wrote sentimentally about Lydia in his 1942 autobiography, recalling his and Gala’s return home after their second pre-war trip to the US. He refers to her using Eugeni d’Ors’ compliment, “La Ben Plantada” — the “well-planted woman”. Earlier he’d attached the description to his beautiful childhood neighbour Ursula (see this post).

“We arrived in Port Lligat toward the end of a very bright December afternoon. Never had I understood so well how beautiful the landscape of Port Lligat was …

“Already from afar we perceived the figure of Lydia ‘La Ben Plantada’, dressed in black and seated on the threshold of the door to our house, awaiting our return.

“When we got close, Lydia got up and came to meet us. She was weeping. We went inside, and she confided to us that her life with her two sons had become unbearable.

“Her sons no longer went fishing; they spoke only of their [imagined] radium mines; they spent most of the time lying on their pallets. Sometimes they would weep; sometimes, taken with dreadful fits, they would beat her. She showed us a scar on her head, pulling aside two strands of her white hair, and let us see the blue marks all over her body. A week later her two sons were sent to the madhouse in Gerona.

“In the afternoons Lydia would come to the house and weep. Port Lligat was solitary. A violent and persistent wind prevented the fishermen from going out to fish, and only the famished cats would skulk around our little house.”

Lydia puts in an appearance in the post about the Lligat house as well.

Much has been written about Gala’s talent with the tarot deck. Dali believed she could read the future in the cards and, according to Tim McGirk and Meryle Seacrest’s book “The Wicked Lady”, she did indeed foretell the day the day Nazi Germany would invade France.

She would consult the oracle every evening under an olive tree in their garden (or every morning, according to another source), and Dali would decide accordingly whether it was appropriate to do some painting that day or the next.

Gala’s engagement in such things had early on piqued the interest of the surrealists, who sought to channel the subconscious through hypnosis, thought-transference, seances and automatic writing.

While she was still living with Paul Eluard, before Dali arrived from Spain, there were weekends of group experimentation, and they tried to interpret each other’s dreams. The poet Robert Desnos would writhe around in a trance and then begin automatic writing.

Rachel Pollack’s book Salvador Dali’s Tarot” claimed it was Gala who “nurtured his interest in mysticism”, and to repay her he produced a deck featuring original paintings. But Amanda Lear, in “My Life with Salvador Dali”, says Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, commissioned the cards, and Dali in fact put her in charge of the designs.

Broccoli, wrote Lear, was making “Live and Let Die”, which had a black-magic theme, and Dali accepted the commission but soon bored of it, so he turned to her. She did the research and made collages from reproductions of Dali works in his books.

Pollack noted that the Dali Tarot, with Hebrew letters on the trump cards, drew on the Jewish Kabbalah. The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet corresponded to the 22 trumps of tarot’s Major Arcana, four worlds of existence and 10 stations on the tree of life to the four suits of 10 numbered cards.

When Gala and Dali moved to Arcachon in the south of France in 1939, distancing themselves from the onslaught of war, their next-door neighbour was Leonore Fini, an artist even more eccentric than Salvador. She was involved in alchemy.

Amanda Lear described her at a restaurant outing in Paris as bringing “her own court” and wearing a full-length gown topped by a magician’s cape”.

“She had stars in her hair and carried a wand like a scepter.”

In 1939 Fini was a close friend of Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst’s partner, and the three of them shared an interest in alchemy and ritual magic. In answer to her question, Dali said he too believed in magic.

“It is the most primitive of all the religions,” he told her. “Man will always need magic. Superstition is simply the application of magic to everyday life.”

“I am not a mystic,” Dali was quoted as saying in Carlos Rojas’ book “Dali or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”.

“I think I may be a pre-mystic, for since my childhood I have been in a state of pre-mysticism. I was impelled towards celestial things, even via evil [posession].”

On the other hand, it depends. In 1960 he told a New York Herald Tribunes reporter, “I am not only a mystic, I am also the reincarnation of one of the greatest of all Spanish mystics, St John of the Cross.”

He had vivid memories of being St John and could recall the experiences of the monkhood as well as “divine union”. He did indeed depict himself as a Franciscian monk in “Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”.

An admirer of St Theresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, Dali felt that Christian mysticism might offer a door to the unknown.

Fleur Cowles, who wrote “The Case of Salvador Dali”, said he told her in 1957 that the “idea of an angel” stimulated him immensely, and he saw protons and neutrons as angelic elements. While he’d played a game called Seeing Angels as a child, which involved pressing against the eyeballs hard enough to produce phosphene images, he now believed in real angels, often embodied as people he loved and admired.

Amanda Lear recalled Dali spending an “entire winter researching old volumes regarding the study of odours. He theorised that the saintly odours of certain martyrs (such as the scent of violets) were directly related to the moral quality of the individual.” Only mystics were free of body odour, he speculated, and, since Lear didn’t perspire, she was “angelic”.

“Dali at the Age of Six Lifting the Skin of the Water to Observe a Dog Sleeping in the Shadow of the Sea”, 1950

At age four Salvador was enrolled the State Primary School in Figueras, where the headmaster, Esteve Trayter, proved to be a lasting influence.

In sixth form in 1919 he was at the grammar school in a 19th-century former monastery since renamed the Ramon Muntaner School in honour of the author (1270?-1336) of the “Crònica”, which has guided historians ever since about military and political affairs in the kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia.

In his 1942 autobiography Dali offered a fascinating account of his visits to the home of Senor “Traite”, as he called him, although the episode is filed under “false childhood memories”, suggesting it might never have happened.

Other sources indicate it was true, though, that the eccentric teacher’s den was “a magic cave” of overflowing bookcases and shelves of curiosities he’d amassed, including a statuette of a demon who hoisted a pitchfork up and down and a dead frog suspended on a string that could forecast the weather.

Salvador was most taken, though, with Trayter’s “magic theatre”, described elsewhere as a “French stereoscope” and “an early form of slide projector”. The painting here, done on wood and glass, is “The Little Theatre”, from 1934.

“As I remember it,” Dali wrote, “one saw everything as if at the bottom of and through a very limpid and stereoscopic water, which became successively and continually coloured with the most varied iridescences.”

Among the visions he witnessed was a snow-covered Moscow with a little girl riding a sleigh. By 1942 he was convinced he’d been given a precognitive glimpse of Gala.

Despite Salvador’s fascination with Trayter, he was booted out of the school after two years and signed up instead with the Hispano-French School of the Immaculate Conception, and this is where he learned to speak French.

Salesian and Marist monks shared the responsibility for his secondary education and, in the autumn of 1916, Salvador also attended classes taught by the regionally celebrated engraver Juan Núñez Fernández at the Municipal Drawing School in Figueras.

By 1919 he’d co-founded and was writing poetry and prose for a student publication called Studium, including essays on El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Dürer, Michelangelo and Leonardo.

The following year he published a collection of poems under the title “Quand les Bruits s’endorment” (”When the Noise Goes to Sleep”).

Dali also contributed to the humour magazine El Sanyó Pancraci, for which he concocted the imaginary portrait of Mr Pancraci, the proprietor, shown here, and he began keeping a diary that he titled “My Personal Impressions and Private Memories”.

The story is told that, at the end of November 1920, a travelling hypnotist named A Bally d’Onofroff performed at Figueras’ Garden Theatre. Well known from Barcelona to Madrid as a mentalist, they said he could pacify crazed bulls, but he once also put a woman so deeply into a trance that she didn’t reawaken for two decades.

So it was a full house in Figueras, and Dali was there, reviewing the show for a youth newspaper, perhaps Studium. It was “interesting” seeing volunteers from the audience made to scratch themselves like monkeys and remove clothing because they’d been convinced it was very hot, he reported, but he wasn’t completely convinced.

Somehow Dali and his friends at high school convinced Onofroff to give a lecture on hypnosis the following afternoon. He hypnotised one of the boys and evidently chased away all lingering doubt.

“Two Gypsy Lads”, 1920-21

Salvador was skinny-dipping in the Bay of Rosas, just up the coast from Cadaques, when he first noticed he’d grown pubic hair, he recalled in “The Secret Life”.

He pulled out the longest so he could “marvel” at the length it had achieved without him seeing it. He formed it into a ring and wet it with saliva, forming a transparent membrane in the circle. It “thus resembled a lorgnette, with my pubic hair as the frame and my saliva as the crystal. Through my hair thus transformed I would look with delight at the beach and the distant landscape.”

Not long afterward Dali began actively cultivating an aura of mad audacity, born of a desire to prolong his spoiled childhood in the face of life’s changes.

At school he sat behind a desk “buying” five-centimo coins from classmates for 10 centimos each. He began abruptly assaulting youngsters he didn’t know, slapping or kicking them and then running off.

On one occasion, Dali claimed in his autobiography, he knocked down a child musician and jumped up and down on his violin. The bigger boy beat him up, and when the teacher who intervened demanded an explanation, Dali declared, “I have just crushed his violin to give a final irrefutable proof of the superiority of art over music!”

The professor said this made no sense. “I can assure you,” Dali retorted, “that my shoes have quite a different view of the matter!”

By the mid-1950s Dali’s fellow Spaniards had all but forgiven him for his pre-war iconoclasm and his wartime absence. They’d been bitter when he came home in 1948, but now they were ready to let bygones go. On September 29, 1956, he was given a hero’s welcome at Park Güell, the occasion being a celebration of Antoni Gaudi, who Dali had championed decades earlier in the pages of the surrealist magazine Minotaure.

In Gaudi’s elastic, molten architecture, there can be no doubt, lay the germ of Salvador Dali’s soft watches.

The Friends of Gaudi invited Dali to put on a show of some sort, and it was subsequently dubbed Barcelona’s first “happening”. He opted to put his faith in random chance, saying if his plans went off well, that was good, and if things went askew, even better.

To abet the likelihood of crazy mishaps, he hired a herd of sheep “to create harmonic accidents” with their uncontrolled meandering. The herd never showed up, so things got off to a terrific start.

With 5,000 people cheering “Ole!”, Dali and Gala were introduced as the king and queen of Port Lligat. Dali supervised the assembly of a Xiquets de Valls, one of the towers of bodies also known as castells, for which that Catalonian city is famous. But he somehow set off a huge cloud of smoke that blinded the climbers and sent them tumbling. Their second attempt was successful.

Dali then took hold of two hoses rigged to spray tar and, with great effort, “painted” a silhouette of the Holy Family on a vast dropcloth. As the finished work was hoisted aloft by a crane, he declared, “I have just killed the serpent!”

“Velazquez was a Spanish genius,” he also intoned, “and Gaudi became another Spanish genius. And now, Generalissimo Franco is the greatest head of state in Europe!”

In 1912, at the end of Dali’s second year at Immaculate Conception, the family moved down the road to another apartment at Carrer Monturiol 24. It was on the top floor of a new building designed by one of Figueras’ leading architects, but they no longer had a long balcony with a view of lush gardens.

Instead, Salvador found beauty in the complete set of Gowans’ Art Books his father had given him. Published in 1905, they were richly illustrated, each volume offering 60 black-and-white pictures of the great works of European art.

The boy Dali’s first studio was one of the two enclosed laundry rooms on the roof of Monturiol 24 that were unused except for storage.

“Sweetheart, what do you wish?” his mother asked him one day (for the millionth time, you suspect). A studio on the rooftop terrace was his answer, and the maids were promptly dispatched to clear out all the items stowed around the great concrete washing cistern in one of the rooms.

“It was so small that the cement tray took up almost all the space except for the area strictly indispensable for the woman who washed the clothes to stand in,” Dali wrote in “The Secret LIfe”, but the tiny closeness delighted him — it was like being back in the womb again.

He put a chair inside the washing vat and across half the top edge laid a wooden plank as a table on which he could draw and paint.

“Occasionally on very hot days I would take off my clothes. I then had only to open the faucet and the water filling the tray would rise along my body high up my waist.

“This water, coming from a reservoir on which the sun would beat down all day long, was tepid. It was somewhat like Marat’s bathtub.”

He gradually covered the walls with pictures he painted on the pliable wood covers of hat boxes “stolen” from his Aunt Catalina’s millinery shop. One oil was “Joseph Meeting His Brethren”, a completely original scene, and another a depiction of Helen of Troy, “to a certain extent plagiarised” from a book illustration.

Here too Dali made his first sculpture, in clay — the Venus de Milo — and here “the first pinches of salt and the first grains of pepper of my humour were born”.

“I was vaguely, confusedly aware that I was in the process of playing at being a genius. O, Salvador Dali! You know it now! If you play at genius you become one!”

When visitors to the house asked his parents where Salvador was, they’d explain that he had a studio on the roof. “He spends hours and hours up there!”

“Up there!” Dali would write years later. “That is the wonderful phrase! My whole life has been determined by those two antagonistic ideas, the top and the bottom. Since my earliest childhood I have desperately striven to be at the ‘top’. I have reached it, and now that I am there I shall remain there till I die.”

Like “Landscape Near Figueras”, seen here, Salvador’s earliest known paintings were actually done when he was probably only about 11 — small, undated landscapes on cardboard. He rendered green fields and fields of poppies, a snowcovered mountain and this place shown below, the Romanesque Saint Mary of Vilabertran Church whose 12th-century bell tower he could assess from his classroom at the Christian Brothers’ school.

A marvel of mediaeval architecture, the church has a trapezoidal cloister laid out like a ship’s deck. The transept and funeral chapel of Rocaberti were added later, but a planned second belfry was never undertaken.

These photos come from the website of the village of Vilabertran, which is justifiably proud of the 1.6-metre-tall silver crucifix seen in the inset, made in the 14th century and kept at the church.

“Vilabertran”, 1913

“Vilabertran Church Tower”, 1918-19

“Boat”, from about 1918, on the left, and “Port of Cadaques (Night)”, done in 1918 or 1919