Dido and Aeneas

All were attentive to the godlike man,

When from his lofty couch he thus began:

Meantime the rapid heav’ns roll’d down the light,

And on the shaded ocean rush’d the night;

But anxious cares already seiz’d the queen:
She fed within her veins a flame unseen;
The hero’s valour, acts, and birth inspire
Her soul with love, and fan the secret fire.
His words, his looks, imprinted in her heart:

“He who had my vows shall ever have;
For, whom I lov’d on earth, I worship in the grave”

“O dearer than the vital air I breathe,
Will you to grief your blooming years bequeath

Think you these tears, this pompous train of woe,
Are known or valued by the ghosts below?”

still the fatal dart sticks in her side, and rankles in her heart.

He tells it o’er and o’er; but still in vain,
For still she begs to hear it once again.
The hearer on the speaker’s mouth depends,
And thus the tragic story never ends.

Himself, meantime, the softest hours would choose,
Before the love-sick lady heard the news;
And move her tender mind, by slow degrees,
To suffer what the sov’reign pow’r decrees:

is the death of a despairing queen
Not worth preventing, tho’ too well foreseen?

“See whom you fly! am I the foe you shun?
Now, by those holy vows, so late begun,
By this right hand, (since I have nothing more
To challenge, but the faith you gave before;)

For you alone I suffer in my fame,
Bereft of honour, and expos’d to shame.

Justice is fled, and Truth is now no more!
I sav’d the shipwreck’d exile on my shore;
With needful food his hungry Trojans fed;
I took the traitor to my throne and bed:
Fool that I was—— ’tis little to repeat
The rest, I stor’d and rigg’d his ruin’d fleet”.

All-pow’rful Love! what changes canst thou cause
In human hearts, subjected to thy laws!
Once more her haughty soul the tyrant bends:
To pray’rs and mean submissions she descends.
No female arts or aids she left untried,
Nor counsels unexplor’d, before she died.

“A short delay is all I ask him now;
A pause of grief, an interval from woe,
Till my soft soul be temper’d to sustain
Accustom’d sorrows, and inur’d to pain”.

Nor sleep nor ease the furious queen can find;
Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind.
Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart;
Despair and rage had some, but love the greater part.

Thus Hermes in the dream; then took his flight
Aloft in air unseen, and mix’d with night.

Downward the various goddess took her flight,
And drew a thousand colours from the light;
Then stood above the dying lover’s head,
And said: “I thus devote thee to the dead.
This off’ring to th’ infernal gods I bear.”
Thus while she spoke, she cut the fatal hair:
The struggling soul was loos’d, and life dissolv’d in air.

Virgil, from The Aeneid, Book IV

The Cosmic Unity

“The Cosmic unity, until now obscure, was opened, and in the heights appeared the heavens with all their mysteries. The earth, hitherto unstable, grew more solid beneath the brightness of the sun, and stood forth adorned with enfolding riches. All things are beautiful in the eyes of the Divine, even that which to mortals appears uncomely, because all is made according to the divine laws. And the Divine rejoiced in beholding His works filled with movement; and with outstretched hands grasping the treasures of nature. “Take these,” He said, “O sacred earth, take these, O venerable one, who art to be the mother of all things, and henceforth let nothing be lacking to thee!”

With these words, opening His divine hands, He poured His treasures into the universal font. But yet they were unknown, for the souls newly embodied and unable to support their opprobrium, sought to enter into rivalry with the celestial Gods, and, proud of their lofty origin, boasting an equal creation with these, revolted. Thus men became their instruments, opposed to one another, and fomenting civil wars. And thus, force oppressing weakness, the strong burnt and massacred the feeble, and quick and dead were thrust forth from the sacred places.

Then the elements resolved to complain before the Lord of the savage condition of mankind. For the evil being already very grievous, the elements hastened to the Divine the Creator, and pleaded in this wise–the fire being suffered to speak first.

Kore Kosmou

Pros Theon

If one goes deep enough in atomic physics one ends with a situation of pure chance (John Fowles, The Magus)

The Master sighed, deep in thought, and approached an overloaded bookcase standing against the Eastern wall of Mysteries’ upper room, near to the point where horoscopes were cast.

Dazzling sunlight rendered a large cross-section of the case invisible with its blinding rays, while the lower parts were swathed in darkness, forming a vivid chiaroscuro on the rich mahogany canvas.

The lovingly burnished bookcase was home to a myriad esoteric masterworks and timeless classics. Ancient volumes interspersed with lavishly illustrated fairy tales and poetry written in the green language were stacked two-deep in places, upside-down in others.

It would not be a simple matter to extract from all of this the book that the Master had in Mind. Indeed, at that moment in time it would be impossible.

Scanning the shelves intently, following the words on each well-worn spine with a neatly-nailed forefinger, all but that which the Master sought was readily apparent, the longed-for item merely absent.

The shadow of a home-spun dream catcher – hypnotically swaying above the open window – crept inexorably along the ceiling like a spider’s web as minutes passed by into an hour of fruitless seeking. Church bells began ringing in the middle distance, herald of both an end and a beginning with their call to evensong.

Tension mounted in the upstairs of Mysteries with disturbing alacrity, causing a very mild sweat to break out on the Master’s furrowing brow. Thoughts from what was by any standards a wide-open brow chakra permeated the charged atmosphere with a note of concern.

Where on Earth IS the magic book?

No immediate answer to this question was forthcoming but the brain-racked Master ploughed on undeterred.

Didn’t I see it just after Halle Bop showed up in ’96 and the moon was side by side with Jupiter?

Or perhaps it had been Venus….

Again there was no answer, but the Master now felt sure this was when the rare and ancient copy of ‘Pros Theon’, which translated into English as ‘By the Gods’, had last been consulted.

Twelve years…. an entire Jupiter-return ago! But where is it now, for heaven’s sake?

Who could say?

Wheels of Time

‘Then discern the Gods, Goddesses
That the one so named, ‘Orion,’
Calls to mind his ancient history,
Sees the wheels of time that move on.

‘‘Here’s the truth.’ He thinks in silence:
‘Now I comprehend my story.
Memories of the tears of Isis
Come and thus reveal my glory.

‘‘More than all the Gods of Greece
Could muster. Pales the golden fleece;
And yet that rogue – the Lord of tricks –
Has caught me in a spell of Nyx.

‘‘Something must rejoin the fragments
Here in time of Egypt’s ruler.
He’ll release the captured psyche
With a force that’s unifying.’

The Temple of Humanity’s Future

When in the life after death one has passed through the cosmic midnight hour, the midpoint int he soul’s path after death, then one stands before the possibility of a definite temptation.

One says to oneself: “I live in the spiritual; spiritual light surrounds me. It would be possible for me to incorporate into this spiritual light everything that I bear within myself, to unite with it so that everything in me that is imperfect would be transformed into perfection.”

This is the Luciferic temptation. It means inwardly to break away from, and refuse, the whole further development of humanity. A temptation can be so great that a human soul cannot withstand it. Such a temptation is therefore concealed by the gods, but nevertheless it is effectively present in the world.

The element of temptation here does not consist in one’s being offered the possibility of, say, dominion, or of realising evil intentions, or the temptation of egoism in the worldly sense; no, the possibility offered is that of remaining pure and holy in the spiritual world.

But in that case what is imperfect – and yet, as potential perfection, is still present in human nature – will not be developed, even if what is already developed in human nature were to remain forever in the light of purity and holiness. The temptation, then, is to renounce the great ideal of the future. In return, one can attain to a high degree of beauty and light in one’s being, insofar as this is now developed.

Thus every human soul stands at one time before the choice of becoming wonderfully holy or else at soem time the future – by working through many, many imperfections – of attaining a far-off ideal, wherein all undeveloped faculties implanted in human nature by the gods will come to fruiton.

Valentin Tomberg, Inner Development, Indian Yoga in Relation to the Christian Rosicrucian Path

The Homeric and Orphic Creation Myths

Some say that all gods and all living creatures originated in the stream of Oceanus which girdles the world, and that Tethys was the mother of all his children.

But the Orphics say that black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe, was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and that Eros, whom some call Phanes, was hatched from this egg and set the universe in motion.

Eros was double-sexed and golden-winged and, having four heads, sometimes roared like a bull, or lion, sometimes hissed like a serpent or bleated like a ram.

Night, who named him Ericepaius and Phaethon Protogenus, lived in a cave with him, displaying herself in triad: Night, Order and Justice. Before this cave sat the inescapable mother Rhea, playing on a brazen drum, and compelling man’s attention to the oracles of the goddess. Phanes created earth, sky, sun and moon, but the triple-goddess ruled the universe, until her sceptre passed to Uranus.

The Homeric and Orphic Creation Myths, Robert Graves

Mysteries in the Middle Ages

We have to remember that the Mysteries of ancient times were of such a nature and character that in the Mystery centres an actual meeting with the gods could take place. In the lectures recently given at the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I described how the human being who was an initiate or was about to receive initiation did truly meet with the gods.

And it was actually possible in those times to discover places that by their very locality were expressly fitted to induce such meetings with the gods.

The founding impulse for all the more ancient civilisations arose from such centres. Gradually, however, they disappeared, and from the fourth century onward were no longer to be found in their original form. Here and there we may come upon survivals, but the knowledge is no longer so exact or reliable. Not that initiation ever ceased; it was the form in which the candidates found their way that changed.

I have already indicated how things were in the Middle Ages. I have told you how here and there were individuals, living simple, humble, unpretentious lives, who did not gather around them a circle of official students in one particular place, but whose students were scattered in various directions in accordance with karma – with the karma, that is, of humankind or with the karma of some people or nation. I should like to tell you of a typical example, on that had very great influence, lasting from the twelfth and thirteenth, on into the fifteenth centuries:

Around AD 1200, there were a great number of people, especially younger people, who felt within them the urge for higher knowledge, for a union with the spiritual world – one may truthfully say, for a meeting with the gods. And the whole situation and condition of the times was such that very often it looked as though a person who was searching and striving in this way found his or her teacher almost by chance. In those days one could not find one’s teachers through books; it could come about only in an entirely personal way. But although it might look from without like a chance happening, in reality deep connections of destiny were at work in the event.

Rudolf Steiner, The Secret Stream, Hidden Centres of the Mysteries in the Middle Ages

Prosperine’s Threshold

I approached the very gates of death and set one foot on Prosperine’s threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt through all the elements.

At midnight I saw the sun shining in its brilliant radiance;

I entered the presence of the gods of the under-world and the gods of the upper-world, stood near and worshipped them.

Apuleius, ,Transformations: The Golden Ass