The Passion of Judas: A Mystery Play (INSCRIBED)

SUARÈS, Carlo.

The Passion of Judas: A Mystery Play.

FIRST ENGLISH EDITION — INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR TO HENRY MILLER. Berkeley: Shambala Publications, 1973.

Octavo. 116 pp. Translated from the French (Le vrai mystère de la passion de Judas) by Micheline and Vincent Stuart. Publisher's black-and-white printed wrappers. Inscribed by Suarès on the half-title to Henry Miller: "Henry Miller, my friend, / giving you this book / is one of the happy / days of my life. / C.S. / Pac. Pal. 16 may 73." Very good in printed wrappers; light fading along the spine; minor age toning to covers.

A direct association copy linking two figures whose friendship ran through Henry Miller's intellectual life. Carlo Suarès (1892–1976) knew Miller from the Paris years of the Villa Seurat and Tropic of Cancer.  This copy was inscribed in Pacific Palisades on 16 May 1973 — Miller's home from 1963 until his death — making an in-person handover all but certain. The book belongs to Suarès's late Kabbalah cycle for Shambhala, following The Cipher of Genesis and The Song of Songs (both 1970). Its argument — that Judas was not the betrayer of Christianity but its trained agent in awakening human consciousness — is exactly the kind of esoteric, anti-institutional reading of the Gospels Miller had been drawn to since the Villa Seurat days.

Inscriptions of this length, warmth, and specificity from a named author to a named recipient — both established literary figures with documented decades of mutual reading — are uncommon. The wording is unguarded, and the place-and-date detail anchors it to a single afternoon at a known address. A foundational Miller-association object.

SKU TO-2026-038