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”.

“Thought”, 1925

In 1907 Dali’s sister Ana Maria was born. Seen here in his 1924 portrait, she would be almost the only female model in his paintings until he met his wife Gala in 1929. In 1949 she published a memoir, “Dali as Seen by His Sister”.

Dali was, by his own ready admission, thoroughly spoiled by his family. Apart from being barred from fraternising with the household staff in the kitchen, he wrote in “The Secret Life”, “I was allowed to do anything I pleased. I wet my bed till I was eight for the sheer fun of it. I was the absolute monarch of the house. Nothing was good enough for me. My father and mother worshiped me.

“On the day of the Feast of Kings I received among innumerable gifts a dazzling king’s costume — a gold crown studded with great topazes and an ermine cape; from that time on I lived almost continually disguised in this costume.”

Perhaps inevitably, his sister would suffer as a result of Salvador’s elevated status in the household. When he was six, in 1910, he recalled, the appearance of Halley’s comet created quite a stir. When everyone rushed up to the terrace of the house one day upon hearing that it was visible, Dali remained paralysed because someone had suggested its tail might touch the earth and destroy it.

When he finally set out to join them he noticed Ana crawling through a doorway.

“I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.

“But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down into his office, where I remained for punishment till dinnertime.

“The fact of not having been allowed to see the comet has remained seared in my memory as one of the most intolerable frustrations of my life. I screamed with such rage that I completely lost my voice.

“Noticing how this frightened my parents, I learned to make use of the stratagem on the slightest provocation.

“On another occasion when I happened to choke on a fishbone my father, who couldn’t stand such things, got up and left the dining room holding his head between his hands. Thereafter on several occasions I simulated the hacking and hysterical convulsions that accompany such choking just to observe my father’s reaction and to attract an anguished and exclusive attention to my person.”

Salvador’s brutal kicking of his sister didn’t prevent him from lunging to her defence when the family doctor came to the house to pierce her earlobes. Reacting to what he perceived as “outrageous cruelty”, he waited for the doctor to settle into position to perform the operation.

“Then I broke into the room brandishing my leather-thonged mattress beater and whipped the doctor right across the face, breaking his glasses. He was quite an old man and he cried out with pain. When my father came running in he fell on his shoulder …

“Since then I loved to be sick, if only for the pleasure of seeing the little face of that old man whom I had reduced to tears.”

In “The Secret Life”, Dali happily chronicled his horrendous childhood behaviour. It should be stressed, however, that biographer Ian Gibson found little that was bizarre in Dali’s youth, the suggestion being that Salvador deliberately invented myths to enliven this era and cast himself in a cruel and macabre light.

Dali remembered catching a bat and biting it nearly in two, and at school — the Immaculate Conception primary school, run by the Brothers of the Marist Order — deliberately throwing himself down stone staircases just so he could relish the attention he received.

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream”, 1945

Earlier in his autobiography, Dali described another cruel episode. He was five at the time, and walking alongside a smaller boy on a tricycle, pushing him along. They were on the edge of the village of “Cambrils near Barcelona”, he wrote, and came to a bridge under construction.

Salvador was suddenly seized with the impulse to injure the boy. He made sure no one was watching and pushed the child over the edge, sending him five metres to the rocks below.

The boy was laid up for a week “with a badly injured head”, but in the initial commotion back at the house, Dali sat in a parlour chair quietly eating cherries. “I don’t recall having experienced the slightest feeling of guilt over this incident,” he wrote.

“There is no doubt that Dali really committed this atrocious deed,” Carlos Rojas and Alma Amell insist in their 1993 biography “Salvador Dali, Or The Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”.

They note with surprise, though, that “as if his superego censored at least a symbolic part of these memories, he gives the wrong name for the place”.

Since he places the location near Barcelona, they say, it couldn’t have been Cambrils, which is in Tarragona, but Cabrils, some 120 kilometres away. Below is a almost surrealistic Google Earth image of houses on a hill in Cabrils.

Rosa Salleras, another Figueras native, was a childhood friend of Dali’s, six years younger but a frequent playmate, “a kind of younger sister”, as Ewen Carmichael described her in a 2004 article for the Scotsman, a recollection of meeting her before her death two years earlier.

Their parents’ summer homes were next to each other in Cadaqués, and when Rosa was nine and Dali 16 he painted her “standing high above the Bay of Cadaqués”.

“On first glance it appears raw and amateurish,” Carmichael wrote, “but on closer inspection the true genius of Dali shines through. It is an extraordinary painting for one so young and captured the mood of the child-woman.”

Rosa said Dali, always short of money and materials, painted a landscape on the reverse side.

It’s not clear what painting they’re discussing, but the 1918 canvas above — “View of Port d’Alguer, Cadaqués” in the collection of the Dali Museum in Florida — was originally owned by “Rosa Salleras de Naveira”, and then by Barcelona’s Galeria Maragall, where Eleanor and Reynolds Morse purchased it.

Below, two canvases that might “stand in”, but painted much later and hardly “amateurish”.

“Girl of Cadaques”, from 1926

“Portrait of a Girl in a Landscape (Cadaques)”, circa 1926

Rosa remembered Dali — who she characterised as timid, shy and always blushing in front of girls — teaching her to catch bats by tying white cloths to the top of poles and waving them around until the bats fell exhausted to the ground.

Dali’s father, she said, “was a sort of dictatorial man” who reminded her of Mussolini.

And Rosa remembered, as well, Ana Maria’s dismay when Gala arrived on the scene.

Dali’s sister “was furious”, she said. “And she was hurt. I think she was very jealous because she was always in the front row. Whenever Salvador was invited, Ana Maria was invited. She was the first lady. Then when Salvador met and married Gala, Ana Maria didn’t have any place.”

Every January 20, the feast day of Saint Sebastian, the more pious citizens of Cadaques climb a steep path in a 90-minute procession up Mount Pení to the Sant Sebastià Hermitage, an old house perched in the midst of cork oak. The photo below was posted by lluiscanyet on Panoramio.

I’ve read that it’s owned by Sebastian Guinness, a scion of the Irish brewing family who owns a gallery in Dublin named for him. For its opening in 2008 Guinness produced the “lost” Warhol portrait of Farah Diba Pahlavi, the exiled empress of Iran, claiming he’d bought from the Warhol estate.

At any rate, the structure partway up 600-metre Mount Pení is privately owned and opened to the public only on January 20. From the property you can pick out fragments of the landscape that Dali painted in his youth. Just to the south is the Pichot family’s summer house.

In earlier centuries the hermitage doubled as a talaia — a look-out from which the villagers could watch for approaching pirates, whose harbour raids were a frequent menace.

Dali was 16 or 17 when he painted “Fiesta at the Hermitage”, above, and with a detail below, on one side of a piece of cardboard and “The Fair of the Holy Cross at Figueras”, show a little further down, on the other.

The first depicts a celebration of feast day of Saint Sebastian. Dali included himself chatting up a pair of young women who are arm in arm.

Dali biographer Dawn Ades glimpsed his political interests in “Fiesta at the Hermitage”, a “subtle sense of social division” in the isolation of the gypsy in a headscarf in the centre.

The second side, the verso, has the annual fete of the title on the feast day of the Holy Cross in May, for which Dali was hired to paint posters. It’s chaotic, and Dali probably deliberately tried to tone this down in his later, simpler, less populous pictures of town fetes.

Here he was trying to capture what he termed the “living bazaar, a great music box” that during the festivities engulfed Plaça de la Palmera, where his family lived (Dali was by then in Madrid). Footballers and bullfighters mingle with gypsies and circus performers, bashful girls and shameless boys.

Football was just catching on in Figueras, and two of Dali’s schoolmates, Jaume Miravidles and Joan Maria Torres, played for Unió Esportiva. He did portraits of both, and shown here is that of Miravidles.

Both sides of the double painting of the festivals are finished works, together now on view at the Dali-Theatre Museum, but the “Hermitage” side was originally shown along with seven other paintings Dali contributed to the Catalan Students Association exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona in late January 1922.

The dual painting was shown publicly again a few months later, at the Exhibition of Empordà Artists in Figueras, though it’s not known which side.

Critics found them derivative, but even if Dali winced at perceived allusions to Nogués and other artists, he took them overall as a compliment.

Dali’s sister Ana Maria described the church festivals in her 1951 book “All Year Round in Cadaqués”.

On the feast of Saint Sebastian, to this day, the parish priest carries a baroque statue of the saint in procession up a hill, through the olive groves, to the church, leading a band of musicians and the faithful.

“Romeria — Pilgrimage”, from 1921

“The young girls, with red, blue, magenta and yellow dresses, seem like flowers amidst the earthy greyness of the old ladies’ dresses,” Ana Maria Dali wrote. “Just like an allegory to the earth and the flowers born of it.

“Everybody carries bags, baskets full of meat, wine bottles, baskets of sea urchins. The odd dog, of the sort that they call around here ‘basket dogs’, because they have the job of guarding the food bag while the master works, follows along friskily and absent-mindedly. The very young couples hang back a little behind the others, holding hands.”

At the top of the hill by the chapel a luncheon of seafood and ribs is prepared as music for sardana dancing is played, while inside the church “the Saint Sebastian songs are sung”.

Soon after his decommissioning from the army in 1927, while summering in Cadaques with Garcia Lorca, Dali wrote a poem titled “Saint Sebastián” that was published in L’Amic de les Aris and the newspaper El Gallo.

The cleverly poetic prose sent a ripple through Catalan literati. Dali concocted a metaphor between the arrow-riddled saint finding armour in his faith and the artist patiently letting his painting “ripen”, and elaborated on his ideas about painting being more precise than photography.

The painting shown here is “Saint Sebastian” from 1982.