At the end of the Picrocholine war, the giant Gargantua wished to reward his comrades and the first of them, Brother Jean des Entommeures. The latter refused to accept of the two richest Benedictine abbeys in Anjou, Bourgueil and Saint-Florent, as well as that of Seuilly.
« How can I govern others when I cannot govern myself? » said the monk to Gargantua, who granted him the privilege of to found an abbey in his image and to his specifications (to his motto).
This Abbey, named desire, or will – according to Greek etymology – is an anti-convent built on the inversion of monastic values and rules: enclosure, chastity, poverty and obedience.
At Thélème, there are no walls, no timetables, no separation of the sexes, or celibacy: the place is mixed and only an elite of young women and men, ladies of hault paraige (sponsorship) and noble knights have access and are free. There was no poverty. The luxurious costumes were reminiscent of court festivities. All their lives were regulated not by laws, statutes and rules, but according to their will and their free will.
The Thelemites are governed by a single rule : « DO WHAT YOU WANT », motho that opposes monastic asceticism. Everyone tries to do what pleases all and all what pleases everyone.
Utopia has limits. Indeed, the initial perfection summed up by the slogan, seems to be thwarted by the conformist attitude of the Utopians.
While Thélème can be seen as an architectural dream, an ideal humanist academy, the lifestyle of the Thelemites was nothing more than a parody of courtier life. This abbey-castle next to the river Loyre, is a hundred times more magnificent than Bonnivet, Chambord or Chantilly. For it has nine thousand three hundred and thirty-two flats (…) between each tower, in the middle of the main building, was an interrupted spiral staircase whose steps were
part porphyry, part Numidian stone, part serpentine, twenty-two feet long […].
From the arctic tower to the icy tower were the great libraries in Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish, divided between the different floors according to language. Description exudes luxury through the materials chosen for its construction and, above all, by the emphasis placed on historical, literary and geographical knowledge, which is disseminated in libraries, reading rooms and galleries.
The word Utopia was coined from Greek by the English humanist Thomas More (1478-1535), in his novel of the same name published in 1516. He attributed it to an imaginary island: Utopia. In More, Utopia is both ou-topia (land of nowhere) and eu-topia (land of happiness) and it’s in this double sense that the humanists understand it.
Rabelais was the first French author to use the word in our language. First, in Pantagruel, where the novel takes place in the kingdom of Utopia, Gargantua at the age of four hundred and ninety-four years begat his son Pantagruel from his wife Badebec, daughter of the King of the Amaurotes in Utopia.
With Thélème, he installs a piece of utopia to close the victory of the giant on Picrochole. For Thélème, Rabelais drew inspiration from Poliphilo’s Dream for the luxury of the setting, and from the Book The Courtesan by Castiglione for the life of the Thelemites and Plato’s Republic.
The inscription on the door of Thélème defines who is excluded and who has the right to enter:
Cy n’entrez pas, hypocrites, bigotz Old matagotz, marmiteux, borsouflez Torcoulx, more badaux than were the Gotz Ny Ostrogotz, precursors of the magotz Haires, cagots, caffars empantouflez befflez, enflez, fagoteurs de tabus go elsewhere to sell your abuses […]
The rejected are these monsters of anti-nature, the false devotees, the real impostors, the crooked lawyers, the avaricious usurers (bankers) non-human face that the male more in this step defeats you.
The accepted ones are, on the contrary, founded on beautiful moral qualities and spirit:
Cy entrez, vous et soyez venuz And come, all you noble knights Great and small, all be thousands My friends, serfs and peculiars Frisks, gualliers, merry, pleasant, cute In general kind companions.
