Mallarmé suggests in Offices that liturgical figuration is an aesthetic model: its stylized gestures point to the divine "self" which, hiding in our inmost being, cannot be apprehended in the trivial ways of rationality and social life. The terms related to hermetism, aristocracy and elitism are metaphors of that constitutive separations. The liturgical gesture in the poem cuts off a sacred time and a sacred space from the everday life, for instance the island of prose, the pane of les fenetres, the dreamed embrace of politics or the opening through the branches in weihe. This magical circle is a fictitious Eden where things recover their virginity and where the world is subjected to an idealization which performs its superposition with the inner sky of the soul. The poem is an analogue of the religious festival : its function is to rejuvenate the world through the liturgical gesture. It permits a return to a dreamed childhood of the earth, it cancels the outcome of the fall, understood as the gap between dream and reality, in an attempt to grasp the original self through the myth and to recognize it in the symbolically revived, glorified and crowned banality. The kantian theory of schematism sheds light on this process of idealization which involves two forms of abstraction: a dematerializing and a schematizing one, insofar as the scheme carries out the passage, in both directions, between abstractedness and concreteness. The scheme is an instrument of indirect suggestion and of mythic figuration which ensures the participation of the visible in the invisible. Thus, the poetic gesture discloses the ideal form of things through their volatization and brings about a correspondence between the idealized world and the "essential rythms" of the dreaming part in man. Several poetical figures and schemes are scrutinized accroding to this conception of liturgical and mythical abstraction.
