Man is lord even of the Sabbath

Christian Hermeticism itself can only be knowledge of the universal which is revealed in the particular. For Hermeticism there are no ‘principles’, ‘laws’ and ‘ideas’ which exist outside of individual beings, not as structural traits of their nature, but as entities separated and independent from it.

For Hermeticism there is neither a ‘law of gravitation’ nor a ‘law of reincarnation’, there is only the attraction and repulsion of beings (atoms are beings also) in so far as gravitation is concerned, and only the attraction of beings to earthly life, with its joys and sorrows, in so far as reincarnation is concerned.

Laws are immanent in beings, as logic is immanent in thought, being part of the very nature of thought. And true progress, true evolution, is the advance of beings from life under one law to life under another law….it is thus that the law ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is in the process of gradually being replaced by the law of forgiveness. It is thus again that the law ‘the weak serve the strong, the people serve the king, the disciple serves the master’ will one day give way to the law shown by the Master through the act of the Washing of the Feet.

According to this higher law, it is the strong who serve the weak, the king who serves the people, the master who serves the disciple – just as in heaven, where Angels serve human beings, Archangels serve Angels and men, Principalities serve Archangels, Angels and human beings, and so on. And God? He serves all beings without exception.

Thus the ‘law’ of the struggle for existence that Darwin observed in the domain of biology will one day cede its place to the law of cooperation for existence which exists already in the cooperation of flowering plants and bees, in the cooperation of different cells in an organism, and in cooperation in the human social organism. The end of the ‘law’ of the struggle for existence and the future triumph of the law of cooperation for life has been foretold by the prophet Isaiah:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
And the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
And a little child shall lead them.

This will be, because the new ‘law’ – ie, a profound change in the psychic and physical structure of beings – will replace the old ‘law’, firstly in consciousness, then in desires and affections, then lastly in the organic structure of beings.

‘Law’ succeed one another and change. They are not immutable metaphysical entities. It is the same wiht respect to ‘principles’ and ‘ideas’. The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath (Mark ii, 27028) – here is the relationship between beings, on the one side, and laws, principles and ideas, on the other.

Meditations on the Tarot, Letter IX, The Hermit

The constant formation of the universe

I am telling you facts, facts that are connected with the intentions not only of certain individuals who are joined together in brotherhoods but also of other beings who influence such brotherhoods and whose influence is also sought by those brotherhoods, beings who are not incarnated in the flesh like human beings but ones who have their body in the spiritual world…

Those brotherhoods who know about the spiritual impulses at work in human evolution saw the approach of that important event of the early 1840s, the battle between certain spirits and some other higher spirits which ended in 1879 when some spirits of an angel nature, spirits of darkness, fell victim to the event that is symbolised as the victory fo Michael over the dragon. On seeing this, those brotherhoods had to decide how to react to it and had to ask themselves: What is to be done about it?

….it was out of good intentions that spiritualism was launched in the world during the 1840s…..well-meaning spiritual mebers of the brotherhoods held the erroneous view that by using mediums they could convince people of hte existence of the spiritual world all around them; and they thought on the basis of that conviction it would then be possible to teach them about higher truths as well…..

….It will be up to humanity during this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in world evolution….a certain degree of evil must be placed at the service of world evolution in a good sense….

The fact that there are beings invisibly amongst us who are so closely related to human beings, and that human beings are prevented by the way forces of evil play into their lives from recognising the spirit with their reason, means that there will be many opportunities for people to succumb to obscure errors and suchlike…..the human being must be a warrior for the spirit.

What people lack today is the courage to embark properly on researching the spiritual world. …during [this] period the time is approaching when humanity will have to deal very carefully with certain great life questions that have thus far been hidden, in a way, by the wisdom of former times.

Endeavours are to be undertaken to place the spiritually etheric element in the service of external, practical life….

….certain groups of people working in egoistically occult ways are making efforts in certain directions. Initially it was necessary for a specific kind of knowledge to retire into the background for humanity…This knowledge had to disappear, be slept through, so that people no longer had the possibility of drawing soul qualities out of their observations of nature but were instead more thrown back on themselvs. So that human beings could awaken the forces of their own being it was necessary for certain matters to appear first in an abstract form which must now take on a concrete spiritual form…

…a certain quarter seeks to remove the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha from the world by bringing in another impulse from the West, a kind of antichrist, and that coming from the East the Christ-impulse as it appears in the twentieth century is to be paralysed by distracting people’s attention from the coming of Christ in the etheric realm….

…More than anything else, that quarter will strive to make use of the electricity, especially the earth’s magnetism, to bring about effects all over the world. I have shown you how the forces of the earth rise up in what I have termed the human double. People will discover this secret. It will be an American secret to use the earth’s magnetism in its duality, the northern and southern magnetism, in order to send controlling forces across the whole earth, forces that work spiritually.

What lies in store for humanity is that cosmic forces will be won for humanity in a dual way that is wrong or a single way that is right. This will bring a genuine renewal to astrology, which is atavistic in its old form – a form in which it cannot continue to exist. Those who know about the cosmos will struggle against each other….for the remainder of earthly existence the dead will collaborate with us to a high degree.

The moment you penetrate fully into all the secrets of the double, you will find yousrelf able to assess the value of brains that are merely lumps which you have placed on a scale, lumps which can be brought to life solely by the double.

You must come to realise that all the wishy-washy talk of ‘cosmic religosity’ or ‘how powerful the yearning for it is’, and so on is nothing other than a means of spreading fog over these matters which ought actually to be entering the world in clarity and which, above all, ought only to be carried in clarity into human life as practical moral and ethical impulses.

Rudolf Steiner, Individual Spirit Beings and the Constant Foundation of the Universe

The Fountain of Life

Note, lastly, what the Truth must be;

1. In the first Hierarchy:

evoked by the utterance of prayer, work of the Angels;

heard in study and reading, work of the Archangels;

announced through example and preaching, work of the Principalities.

2. In the second Hierarchy:

joined with refuge and place of indulgence, work of the Powers;

apprehended through zeal and emulation,

work of the Virtues;

conjoined with self-deprecation and mortification,

work of the Dominions.

3. In the third Hierarchy:

worshipped through sacrifice and praise,

work of the Thrones;

admired through ecstasy (going out of oneself)

and contemplation,

work of the Cherubim;

embraced in kiss and dilection (amplectanda per osculum et dilectionem),

work of the Seraphim.

Note diligengly what I say here,

because this is the fountain of life.

St Bonaventura, De triplici via, iii, 14

The Knight

Wisdom in His eyes does shine serenely,
On the understanding of His lady,
Strength in victory brings to pass their dreaming,
From creative force foundations laid He.

Endless though it was her endless waiting,
Faith eternal, hope and love defeated
Time. And now her knight reveals a true king,
Witness of the virtue oft entreated.

As the faerie queen revised all history,
Every female spirit was encompassed,
Eve from Adam, then the rest, her sisters
Fell as one into Earth’s fiery suntrap.

Mary – stellar priestess, light of heaven –
Body, mind and soul, the one uplifted,
Holds within her hand a starry seven,
All who see her light above are gifted.

Just as Jacob found his soul in Rachel,
So the dove with she at last is rising,
As Sophia stands beside Saint Michael,
Angels all surrounding, deep are sighing.

So the miracle that’s even greater –
More than even Moses made in Egypt –
Over and above the Red Sea parted,
More than manna dew-lit in the desert.

More than all the plagues that conquered Pharaoh,
More than Aaron’s staff that blossomed newly,
Just as Isaac came from out of Sarah,
So the soul-mates knew themselves and truly.

Writing on the Walls

I saw no more through that window and moved through the door into my room. It was then that I saw the writing on the walls. I had never before been given cause to think about the writing on the walls until this time.

The room was its usual shape with all the regular features firmly in place, including my own empty body on the bed, wearing a light blue sweatshirt. I saw my body just out of the corner of my eye and did not study it too closely lest I became frightened by the sight of myself. In any case, the bedroom walls presented me with something far more fascinating than my sleeping self ever could.

I might have been anywhere at any time as I watched the multi-coloured words began to form and multiply, so rapidly that in an instant it seemed that every surface was covered. I discerned again the rainbow, literally because of the myriad colours displayed in the writing. The subject was again one of love and love’s longing for paradise. The only word, in fact, was Love, repeated over and again on every plane.

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE

All of history contains tragedy in proportion to joy. I was overwhelmed and found myself lying on the bed in the position I had left my body in. I turned my head to look at the mirror hanging over the radiator, which had somehow transformed itself into a window, through which I could see into another window in another house.

I was fully aware that this change in my usual surroundings had taken place and, whilst unafraid, I was perplexed. I saw two middle-aged women who appeared to be washing clothes, both wearing dark dresses and with dark hair tied up into top-knots, like widows. They were looking in through my window at the place where I lay, talking about somebody who seemed to be me but was actually this man.

They spoke of this man who lay (or had lain) on the bed in the room, and discussed his sadness to themselves as if he were dead. I realised that my astral projection, vision, dream, whatever it might have been, was losing coherence, and I regained ordinary consciousness a second later.

Imagining Orpheus: enchanting the landscape

Imagining Orpheus is a different matter. Most people can recall two things about him: that he was a musician, and that he went down to the Underworld to fetch his wife Eurydice. His story is the archetypal myth of the power of music.

With the lyre that was the gift from Apollo, Orpheus could move everything in creation, from stones, trees, and beasts, through humans, to daimonic and even divine beings (whom we might call angels and gods).

Armed only with his songs, he charmed the denizens of Hades and persuaded Pluto and Persephone to let him take Eurydice back.

Orpheus was a prince of Thrace, the land to the north of Greece. His mother was Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. Some say his father was Apollo, and certainly Orpheus stands under the patronage of that god. Apollo also had northern connections, either coming from Hyperborea (the land beyond the north wind), or else visiting that far northern land after his birth on the island of Delos.

Where was Hyperborea? As it was said to contain a circular temple to the sun, some have identified it with Britain, and its temple with Stonehenge, a monument far older than any in Greece.

Stonehenge, and the people who constructed it, were Apollonian in the sense of being dedicated to the sun, to astronomy, mathematics and music. A number of modern researchers have penetrated beyond the limitations of academic prehistory to reveal, through intuition, the bases of this ancient science.

John Mitchell, the pioneer in this regard, has reconstructed the diagrams and dimensions that seem to lie at the basis of megalithic design. Jean Richar has shown that there is an imaginary zodiac whose twelvefold symbolism links mythology with the geography of the Aegean area. Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller have traced a plethora of Apollonian sites in geometrical alignment, all the way from Ireland to Palestine.

Mitchell, in addition, has traced the myth of ‘perpetual choirs’ maintained at ancient sanctuaries for the purpose of what he calls ‘enchanting the landscape’. If one is attentive to such findings, it is clear that there was a high and orderly civilisation well established by the third millennium BC, of which the archaeologists know almost nothing.

This enchantment of the landscape is exactly what Orpehus is reputed to have done with his music, casting a benign spell over nature and bringing peace among men. As part of his mission, he reformed the cult of Dionysus and tried to persuade his followers to give up their blood sacrifices. In place of Dionysian orgies, Orpheus founded the first Mysteries of Greece. The purpose of these, as far as we can tell, was to transmit some kind of direct knowledge that was helpful in facing the prospect of death.

Orpheus’s journey to the Underworld to fetch Eurydice should be understood in the context of the Mysteries. In the earliest versions of the myth, he did succeed in restoring her to life.

Joscelyn Godwin, The Golden Thread, The Orphic Mysteries

After the Deluge – Temperance

The tragic ‘almost’ is a poignant commonplace of epic literature. The Iliad tells how the Trojan War was almost brought to a close by a single combat between Paris and Menelaos. How many lives would have been spared had not Apollo intervened, and for the most petty of reasons!

Paradise Lost shows us Satan seriously considering whether he is making a huge mistake by initiating the temptation in the garden….but, alas, he decides to go ahead with it after all. But nowhere is this motif more forcefully present than in the biblical narrative.

Since the Fall of Adam humanity has come close to ultimate fulfillment and redemption on several occasions. Even now just one small righteous action may be all that separates us from reentering Eden. Noah certainly had his chance to restore humanity. The Flood was like a huge mikveh – a ritual bath for all creation, in which evil was subjected to a series of irresistible hot and cold ‘washing cycles’.

Rabbi Yehuda said that in Gehenom the wicked are punished with water for six months and with fire for six months. Why, during the flood were they punished only by water for twelve months? Six months should have been enough. Rabbi Yosi told him that they were sentenced to both punishments: water and fire. They water that fell upon them from above was cold as snow. And they were also punished by fire because the water that spouted from the deep was scalding.

Thus, they were punished for twelve months, receiving the full sentence of Gehenom. This continued until they were completely removed from the face of the world. During this time, Noah was hidden in the ark. As a result, the Angel of Darkness did not approach him, and the ark roamed upon the waters, as it is written: “And they bore up the ark, and it was lifted above the Earth.” (Genesis 7:17), The Zohar, Vol. 2, pp. 388-390.

But when at last the waters had receded, Noah made a tragic mistake. It was, in fact, the same mistake Adam had made, and it came about in much the same way. Popular belief to the contrary, the forbidden fruit that tempted Adam and Eve was not an apple. it was a grape.

Come and behold: Adam’s wife pressed him grapes and bought death upon him, Israel, and the whole world. When Noah came upon these grapes, he was not well guarded, as it is written: “He drank of the wine, and was drunk; and he was uncovered within his tent.:” (Genesis 9:21)

After the Deluge: Temperance, The Essential Zohar, Rav P S Berg

Bride of Adonis

Put now your ear to the seashell of memory,
Walk through the glistening rainbow of promise,
Sun on the ocean makes ripples of magic,
Star of the sea and pure bride of Adonis.

Then will the sea-priestess, white in the starlight,
Raise up her arms at the moon gliding by,
Sing the enchantment that harnessed the ocean,
Dance in the circles that meted out night.

Sea nymphs are whispering ‘Shayla remember…’
Mesmerised mermaids and undines glide
Deep in the moonlight of hypnotised sailors;
Drawn by the current that governs all tides.

Whispering ‘Shayla, return to your kingdom,
Sister and daughter, rejoice with your kind…’
Shimmering crystal, the doors of the palace
lay on the seabed, beguiling still waters.

She who sells sea shells upon the sea shore,
Walked through the turquoise and paused at the entrance
Looked through the shimmering aqua at kinsmen,
Heard that the voices were soft but relentless.

Soft as the breeze on the salt of the ocean,
Gentle as rustles the wind through the trees,
Whispering over and over her secret,
Meaning; she hailed from the palace of dreams

Stopped at the threshold the fairytale maiden,
Thought of a promise once made in the spring,
Called to remembrance the angel who loved her,
Said: I relinquish the realm of the sea.

Go, little mermaid, they turned away weeping,
As she, the self, was set free and made mortal.
As you lie dreaming of rainbows in summer,
Seeking the memory, then think of this portal.

Sister, oh sister, how sorry we are now…
So went the whispers, the shadows of light.
From the unconsciousness reason found mercy;
Words without doubt put magicians to flight.

Three that give birth from the fiery water
Seven the spheres and reflective of heaven,
Twelve that encircle and bring to completion,
Doubles in number of holy eleven.

Queen of the silver beam, king of all, golden,
Red the blood flowing through milky-white rivers
Bring generation to life in your nature,
Die by the heat but in hope be uprisen.

Light came aurora and pinker than sapphire,
Orange as anything orange is yellow,
Redder than berries of green in the meadow,
Bluer than dawn is, an indigo fire.

Promises, promises, rainbows and birdsong,
Speak of the vow that just cannot be broken
Time has no meaning and space is illusion,
Born is Creation, by God’s word is spoken.

Taman Shud

Indeed the Idols I have loved so long

Have done my credit in Men’s Eye much wrong:

Have drown’d my honour in a shallow cup

And sold my reputation for a song.

Indeed, indeed, repentence oft before

I swore – but was I sober when I swore?

And then and then came spring, and rose in hand

My threadbare penitence a pieces tore.

And much as wine has play’d the Infidel,

And robb’d me of my Robe of Honour – well,

I often wonder what the Vintners buy

One half so precious as the goods they sell.

Alas, that spring should vanish with the rose!

That youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close!

The nightingale that in the branches sang,

Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

Would but the desert of the fountain yield

One glimpse – if dimly, yet indeed, reveal’d,

To which the fainting traveller might spring,

As springs the trampled herbage of the field!

Would but some winged Angel ere too late

Arrest the yet unfolded roll of fate,

And make the stern recorder otherwise

Enregister, or quite obliterate.

Ah love! could thou and I with fate conspire

To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,

Would we not shatter it to bits – and then

Re-mould it closer to the Heart’s desire!

Ah, Moon of my delight who know’st no wane,

The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again:

How oft hereafter rising shall she look

Through this same garden after me – in vain!

And when thyself with shining foot shall pass

Among the guests Star-scatter’d on the grass,

And in thy joyous errand reach the spot

Where I made one turn down an empty glass!

Taman Shud (it is completed)

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Hidden Stargates

Marked these words, the quill of Hermes:
Raise the green-lipped youth Adonis.
Listen well, as if to Eros,
See the truth within his promise.

Through the self, a solar system
Metes out time. The planets singing,
Seal in lines the great revision.
“Light!” The cosmic bells are ringing.

Truth reflects within the like minds,
As are scanned the skies sky for giants’
Astronomic temples; sun-signs
Trace the thread of ancient science.

There in orbit turn the star-lings,
Planets binding, suns inclining,
In such ways that whole dimensions
Fold inside the vaults of Heaven.

Angels watch the hidden stargates –
One from North, a second South-side –
East and West. The seal is six-faced.
Secret form – a cube, shaped inside.