Juan Eduardo Cirlot Laporta (9 April 1916 in Barcelona – 11 May 1973) was a Spanish poet, art critic, hermeneutist, mythologist, and musician.
He was in Zaragoza until 1943; there he frequented the city's intellectual and artistic circles and associated with the painter Alfonso Buñuel—brother of Luis Buñuel—with whom he translated the poems of Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Antonin Artaud.
He composed music and worked with the artists of the Dau al Set, a Catalan group including, among others, Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart or Arnau Puig.
Beginning in the 1940s, Cirlot ascribed himself to the French Surrealist school and to Dadaism, soon assuming a very broad-horizoned spiritualist tradition of universal longing (Kabbalah, Sufism, and Eastern studies).
He conducted comprehensive studies on medieval symbology and hermeneutics, accruing an impressive collection of swords, and his prolific and varied poetic output—more than fifty books—remained independent of the trends that dominated the poetry of the postwar period because of their darkness and hermetism; nevertheless, his impact has never ceased to be reevaluated through continuous revisions, reeditions, appearances of unpublished works, and tributes.
Cirlot also cultivated aphorism in his book Del no mundo (1969), in which his thought can be traced back to its sources in Nietzsche and Lao Tse.
Written in 1953, it went beyond the conceptual trends of the previous decades and continues to be an essential reference for professors and students of the universe of the work of art.
As a scholar, Cirlot is known internationally from his Dictionary of Symbols, which continues to be successfully reissued in the wake of symbologists like Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gaston Bachelard, René Guénon, Gilbert Durand, and Paul Diel.