The Fairy Ship Sails Upstream

It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history of Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the more we study it the less it looks like any of them

I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end.

The Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed

At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. How complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal, we cars only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.

A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and the parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest fact about it; that it was a surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a surprise; because it seemed to most people like a river turning backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains.

In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was going slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast that was going against the stream. Both in fact and figure there is something deeply disturbing about this, and that for an essential reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship; but if the fairy ship sails upstream it is really rowed by the fairies.

G K Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, The Five Deaths of the Faith

Fields of the Blessed

The grief-stricken birds, the host of wild creatures, the flinty rocks and the woods that had so often followed his songs, all wept for Orpheus. The trees shed their leaves and, with bared heads, mourned for his loss.

Men say that the rivers too were swollen with their own tears, and naiads and dryads tore their hair, and pulled on black garments, over their fine robes. The poet’s limbs were scattered in different places, but the waters of the Hebrus received his head and lyre.

Wonderful to relate, as they floated down in midstream, the lyre uttered a plaintive melody and the lifeless tongue made a piteous murmur, while the river banks lamented in reply. Carried down to the sea, theyleft their native river, and were washed up on the shore of Lesbos, near Methymna.

Here, as the head lay exposed on that foreign shore, its hair dripping with beads of foam, it was attacked by a savage snake: but Phoebus at last appeared, and checked the snake in the very act of biting, turning its open mouth to stone, and petrifying its gaping jaws.

The ghost of Orpheus passed beneath the earth; he recognised all the places he had seen before and, searching through the fields of the blessed, found his Eurydice, and clasped her in eager arms. There they stroll together, side by side: or sometimes Orpheus follows, while his wife goes before, sometimes he leads the way and looks back, as he can do safely now, at his Eurydice.

Ovid, Orpheus in the Underworld

Walking on Water

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea rose because a strong wind was blowing.

When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and drawing near to the boat. They were frightened, but he said to them: It is I; do not be afraid. (John vi, 16-20).

And Peter answered him: Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water. He said: Come! So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out: Lord, save me! Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying: O man of little faith, why did you doubt? (Matthew xiv, 28-31).

Jesus Christ walking on water reveals still another mystery than that of the sun of the spiritual world, the centre of celestial gravitation. For not only did he stand on the water – which would suffice to reveal and demonstrate this truth – but he also walked on the water, ie, he moved in a quite definite direction in the horizontal sense. He walked towards the boat where his disciples rowed.

There, in his walking towards the boat, it is already contained in germ – essentially revealing it – his whole work, temporal and eternal, ie, his sacrifice, his resurrection, and all that is implied in his promise: “Lo, I am with you always, until the end of the world: (Matthew xxviii, 20).

The boat with his disciples is, therefore, and will be until the end of the world, the aim of the I am walking on the water. His enstasy, his profound centreing in himself, does not distance him from the navigation of the agitated sea of history and evolution, and does not make him disappear into the other sea – the calm sea of nirvana – but rather, on the contrary, it entails that he walks, until the end of the world, after the boat with this disciples.

Unknown Author, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XII, The Hanged Man

The Body, the Soul and the Tower

There is in man – notably in his soul, and not in his body – a seed of evil of his own, without which temptation coming from outside would not exert any action on him. Because temptation would be impotent if it did not find a terrain already prepared in the human soul.

The unfortunate misunderstanding locating innate human evil in the body instead of in the soul is due to a tendency towards a materialistic interpretation of our Biblical story of paradise and the Fall. It is the body which, rightly. has more reason to be ashamed of the soul inhabiting it, than the latter of the body.

For the body is a miracle of wisdom, harmony and stability, which does not merit scorn but rather the admiration of the soul. For example, can the soul boast of moral principles as stable as the body’s skeleton? Is it as indefatigable and as faithful in its sentiments as, for example, the heart, which beats day and night? Does it possess a wisdom comparable to that of the body, which knows how to harmonise such opposing things as water and fire, air and solid matter?

Whilst the soul is torn by opposing desires and feelings, this ‘contemptible’ body knows how to unite opposing elements and make them collaborate: the air that it breathes, the solid matter of food, the water that it drinks, and the fire (warmth) that it produces unceasingly within it….and if this does not suffice to change scorn into respect, admiration and gratitude, the one can recall, if on is a Christian, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, inhabited this flesh and that he honoured it to the point of uniting himself with it in the Incarnation.

Similarly, if one is a Buddhist or Brahmanist, one should not forget that Buddha and Krishna, also, inhabited this flesh and that it served them well in the accomplishing of their respective missions. Negative ascetisism, directed against the body and not for celestial things, is the practical consequence of the materialistic interpretation of paradise and the Fall. However, the fact alone that a Cherubim “was placed at the east of the garden of Eden, with a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis iii, 24), suffices to drive away any shadow of a doubt: here it is a matter of a plane higher than the terrestrial plane, and it was therefore souls who committed the original sin – and the body had nothing to do with it.

Unknown Author, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XVI, The Tower of Destruction

A Soul’s Journey Through the Time-Worlds

Thrown down from my origin, I have been nursed in this miserable world by a presence embodied in the motions of the sky.

She the same who cared for Adam, and led his children up through the scale of consciousness according to their capacities.

She is the whole within which all things grow, and the natural propagative power.

She calls to the cypress, and it rises up straight. To man, and her living fluid moves to make him erect.

So I was formed and wandered in the desert, and through the mountains haunted by wild animals around me and inside me.

Then a clarity woke in me, and I saw my soul’s face, and felt drawn upward, but I pulled down still too, by the other, contended for, bewildered, and without guidance, as I ran, as from a burning house, onto a narrow, upward-spiraling, path.

Dangerous cliffs, the summit far off. My only hope was to die.

Then, through that dim murkiness, I saw an old man with a radiant face.

“You are the moon!” I called out. “Where did you come from?”

“I am beyond substance and space. I am creation’s cause, here to lead you back to your home. Hold close, and let my fire consume you. Don’t be afraid of losing your strength here. This fire is one which has a spring of eternal water inside it. As your animal-soul dies, your new soul will be born. Live humbly with me, and I will raise you into majesty.”

He talked more to me in silence, without using syllables. He gave me love and light and eyes to see, and together we set out.

A Soul’s Journey Through the Time-Worlds, Sanai

Key Words

abyss air apollo artemis

beauty blood dawn divine

earth fire future god

gold golden heart heaven

human light love magic

magical

meditations

tarot mind moon mystery

nature power prayer reason

sea secret silver sky

soul spirit spiritual star

sun time truth vision

water wind wisdom world

The Principle of Evolution

What is essential in order that spiritual truth is not forgotten, and that it lives?

Hope, true creativity and tradition are the essential factors. The corroborating testimony of three ever-present witnesses – spirit, blood and water – is necessary. True testimony, through the spirit, through blood, and through water, will never fall into forgetfulness. One can kill spiritual truth, but it will resurrect.

Now, the unity of hope, creativity and tradition is the agent of growth. It is the concerted action of spirit, blood and water. It is therefore indestructible; its action is irreversible; and its movement is irresistible. And it is the agent of growth which is, in the last analysis, the subject of the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus.

“And as all things were by meditation of the One, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adaptation” – says the Emerald Table (Tabula Smaragdina, 3). Which amounts to saying: as the One is the creator of the essence of all things, thus there is a unique agent which adapts the existence of all things to their essence – the principle of the adaptation of that which is born to its created prototype.

This is the agent of growth or the principle of evolution. This is the agent of growth or the principle of evolution. It is engendered by the spontaneous light of hope (the sun) reflected in the movement of the lower waters (the moon), which produces the general impulse or ‘push’ (the wind), which bears priomordial hope towards its realisation in the material domain (the earth), which donaes it with its constructive elements (ie, nourishes or nurses it). Thus, the Emerald Table continues:

The father thereof is the sun, the mother the moon; the wind carried it in its womb; the earth is the nurse thereof (Tabula Smaragdina, 4).

Ocean Dragon; Penetrated Stone

As far as dreams go, it couldn’t have got much stranger, and that’s saying something. For a start, it was vivid – as real-seeming as the waking day – and for a second it was so utterly weird that it scared me the next day to even think about it. I thought I’d already out-weirded weirdness, but it seems not; my inner capacity to completely surprise myself is still very much intact. It began like this:

At the moment I became fully conscious, I found that I was travelling across the grey ocean at an incredibly rapid pace with the utmost sense of urgency. I wondered for a split second just how it was that I came to be travelling so quickly – surely I couldn’t swim that fast?! – but so very quickly was I moving, that before I had to think for longer, I’d arrived at the shore.

I know that I stood upright, and before looking ahead cast a glance back over my shoulder at the water, which was neither completely calm nor especially stormy; an ordinary day at sea, I would say. Why did I look back? Well, a very quiet voice in my head told me there might have been a whale in sight, but what Icaught sight of was a creature I called a ‘Dolphin’, but which in fact looked nothing like one of those creatures. The gigantic grey hump covered in upright triangular fins was actually more dragon like, resembling no other animal that I’ve ever seen before. I would have been surprised or looked for longer if I hadn’t become almost instantly – and acutely – aware of some terrible danger afoot on the shore.

As I looked ahead at the land for the first time, the sense of overwhelming urgency and danger struck me once again and it was then that I had first realised that the scenario was – even for a dream – remarkably surreal, for the simple reason, perhaps, that it seemed so palpably real. Somehow I was there, but what was I to do? My sense of being on some sort of undefined mission was as intense as the feeling that I must act with lightening speed. Why, I do not know. Here is what I saw in front of me:

It was broad daylight and the sky was blue. Directly in front of me was a wide but dusty path that together with the clarity of light gave me the impression of the desert or Middle East. Perhaps the sense of location was symbolic, because I had a definite impression of being in some kind of war zone, that I – or anyone else in the vicinity – could be shot down dead in an instant. Who by? Although I could not see the enemy – or fierce guardian of that dry territory – I had a definite impression of there being snipers that were lying in wait very nearby, but evidently out of view. This was not all I saw.

Directly ahead, standing partway along this path in the middle distance, was a man with short dark hair and a long white robe, who rather than looking at me, was staring into the middle distance. The site of him filled me with an unfathomable combination of awe and near panic, and all I knew was that I needed to negotiate the minefield in order to be myself where this uniquely statuesque spirit was standing immobile, watching the moving sea. As fast as it’s possible for one to move, I went in his direction.

The next thing I knew, I was inside a stone that was located just behind the place where he’d been standing. The stone was rectangular, like some kind of box, about the width of two people and high enough inside for me to crouch but not stand. A gap of about 10 inches at the bottom gave me light enough to look around at the inner walls of that cold, dry stone, and with a shiver I wondered if it was the kind of place where insects would be hiding. I nervously looked at the left wall, the ceiling and the right wall, noting with some relief that there did not appear to be any cockroaches keeping me company. At a certain moment I wondered if ‘he’ was still standing outside, in front of the stone, and bent my hand to look through the gap. Time to get out, I thought, registering a moment later that the coast was clear.

Mass of the Immaculate Conception

‘The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his ways. I existed before he formed any creature. I existed from all eternity, before the earth was created. The abysses were not yet and already I was conceived. The fountains had not yet come out of the earth; the heavy mass of the mountains had not yet been formed; I was begotten before the hills.

He had created neither the earth, nor the rivers, nor strengthened the world on its poles. When he prepared the heavens, I was present; when he confined the abysses within their bounds and prescribed an inviolable law; when he confirmed the air above the earth; when he balanced the waters of the fountains; when he shut up the sea within its limits and imposed a law on the waters, so that they should not pass their bounds; when he laid the foundations of the earth, / was with him and I regulated all things.

Mass of the Immaculate Conception

Retinue of Wisdom

Feminine forms are dancing

Beneath the red-robed figure in the sky,

Who walks with a retinue of wisdom.

From the wedding of water with fire

Breath takes the air of inspiration,

Watery fire fills with life,

Vivifying the dark Earth station;

Bringing from the deep space light.