French poet, alchemist, graphologist, philosopher and astrologer.
Carteret’s father had several textile shops in Northern France. Jean experienced his family of father, mother, two sons and a daughter a closed environment: no strangers entered the house. At age 8, he got his first violin lessons. Jean felt in love with the musical language, a poetical language better than language he said. His violin teacher acknowledged the boy’s talent, and advised the father to sent Jean to the conservatory in Nancy. But the father had more practical plans with his eldest son. Jean should become a textile seller. Being forced to become a merchant instead of a “going with the flow ” violin player, placed him in his first existential crisis, of which the book cover of his friend George Bode would say:
“Jean Carteret (Charleville-Mezieres, 1906 ? Paris, 1980) was busy his whole life, from crisis to crisis, to structure his phenomenal capacity to see analogy?s. This journey brought him in the fields of metaphysics, astrology and kaballah, and many other fields where analogical thinking is an essential component. To him the most important thing was language. From the start he tried to discover where the hidden structure of the language had its beginning. The flashing speed of his thinking and his need for a direct dialogue inhibited him to write, but he did leave many of his thoughts on tape”.
In 1921, growing fast because of puberty, Jean left school. Seven years, from 1921 till 1928, he sold textile in one of his fathers shop. But he became most interested in the typology of the clients in the shop. Instead of dressing them like his father, he psychologically undressed them, he told later. Jean did have a Platonic relation of six years with a conservatory student named Beatrice. He kept platonic till age 21 and 3 months (summer 1927).
In 1928, Carteret broke with his family, left the textile shop, finished the preparatory examinations and went to Paris to study psychology at the Sorbonne.
At that time psychology was not yet a well-defined discipline. Because of its affinity with philosophy and letters, philosophers like Henri Bergson gave lessons. But Carteret was disappointed stating that Bergson was not a psychologist, and that this psychology (thinking) was a strange approach to the human condition. After finishing some early (bachelor like) examinations, he refused to do any examinations, as he felt they were unreal, just showing that you just had learned the correct views and words of a cultural cohort.
Carteret became interested in the sources of the words and the hidden structure of language. He would say: I do not invent anything, I discover things. He developed a new language, in which he opposed normative thinking, goal oriented and planned existence, against the meanders of natural life (la vie).
When some years later, his parents visited him in Paris, his landlady spoke the prophetic words: “Your son is not destined for trade, he has munch more potential, and it is your duty to help him”. Thereafter his parents respected his choice and sent him a monthly stipend of 1000 francs. Before that, Jean had tried several urban jobs, but without success as he indeed did not look and behave like a commercial person all his life.
Thanks to his small stipend, Jean got time to study by travel, instead that he had to care for his survival. In 1933 he visited the more rural Mediterranean Balearic Islands and in 1934 the Canary Islands and Morocco.In 1935 he made a grand European city tour via Paris, Naples, Athens, several Mythological Greek Islands, Istanbul, Constance, Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Strasbourg and back to Paris. In 1936 he returned to Mediterranean Greece, but also visited for three months polar Lapland, to which he would return for ten months in 1937.
Lapland would become for him a kind of Arcadia, a place where reindeer shepherds lived and moved in harmony with the seasons. This paradise he contrasted with city life, where man manipulated after the fall of Adam his course of life; not any more going with the flow, but planning life directions.
He kept may souvenirs liker snows from Lapland in his Parisian apartment as the writer Anna‹s Nin described in her diaries. She thought it was kind of fetishism, the attribution of religious or mystical qualities to inanimate objects, known as fetishes. But for him it was also a way of re-remembering the past to be present and thus not be forgetful or ignorant in another present time.
Between his travels, he got acquainted with many in Paris living intellectuals (jet set) like Ana‹s Nin, Henry miller, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, R‚neville Albeti, Tristan Tzare, Henri Michaux and Picasso. He also met and was influenced by the French psycho-analyst and astrologer Ren‚ Allendy, who analyed his friend Anna‹s Nin and the “mad” (poŠte maudit) Ren‚ Artaud and wrote books about “Le problŠme de la Destin‚e” (1927) and “Paracelse, le m‚decin maudit (1937)”.
The French poet, alchemist, graphologist, philosopher and astrologer Jean Carteret became one of the earliest and most authoritative sources of the “black ligths” Lilith and Priapus in Astrology. To explain the unexceptional life of artists and outcasts like Rimbaud, he used hypothetical planets.
In the morning of 27 June 1980 at 10 AM, after another night of philosophical work with friends, Carteret wanted to go to his Parisian appartment. The first two taxi drivers he asked to take him home refused him, as their taxi could not inhabit badly dressed vagabonds with fleas and other dirt. But a taxi driver of African descent was willing to bring him home on his last travel. He died that same day.
Link to Wikipedia biography (French)