“We Indians know the One true God, and that we pray to Him continually.” 1 —Black Elk
Millions have been inspired around the world by the life and spiritual legacy of the Lakota holy man Hehaka Sapa, more commonly known as Black Elk (1863-1950). It is in large part through John G. Neihardt’s book BLACK ELK SPEAKS, first published in 1932, that Black Elk became widely known and revered.
Even though numerous books have been written about the Lakota wicasa wakan or holy man, Harry Oldmeadow’s book is indispensable as it not only corrects the historical record through drawing upon recently discovered sources, but situates Black Elk within a universal context that extends across the world’s religions. This engaging account by Oldmeadow explores the fascinating life of Black Elk, his visions, his relationship with Catholicism, and his diligent efforts to revive the First Peoples religion. This book contrasts the misguided notions of “the vanishing Indian” and that the First Peoples are relics of history to be viewed solely in museums or in the anthropology aisles of the library as reminders of a distant and romanticized past. In fact the opposite is true.
The First Peoples are still here and, although not generally known, there is a growing revival of the American Indian religion. It is without a doubt that the trauma of colonialism, racism, and forced assimilation has caused irreversible damage to the First Peoples, and it is with great sensitivity and respect that we recall anew the important reminder of Joseph Epes Brown (1920-2000), a renowned scholar of Native American traditions and world religions:
“We are still very far from being aware of the dimensions and ramifications of our ethnocentric illusions. Nevertheless, by the very nature of things we are now forced to undergo a process of intense self-examination; to engage in a serious re-evaluation of the premises and orientations of our society.” Oldmeadow suggests that a key obstacle with understanding the American Indian or any First Peoples religion is that “The extirpation of indigenous cultures is, essentially, not a clash of ‘races’ or even ‘civilizations’ but of Tradition and modernity.”
Oldmeadow presents his three convictions for preparing this book on Black Elk: First, the spiritual heritage of the Plains Indians deserves a more honored and more fully understood place among the world’s great religious traditions; second, Black Elk’s account of his early life, his Great Vision, and the principal rituals of the Lakota comprise an eloquent expression of the heritage and one of the most radiant spiritual testimonies of our time; third, the Lakota visionary and his tradition offer the contemporary world profound lessons of the most urgent importance.
Oldmeadow clarifies from the onset that this book is not intended to be “a full-dress biography, nor a history, nor a systematic account of Lakota religious life.” The book consists of seven chapters and of three appendices that contain excerpts and selections from letters that help further situate Black Elk’s life and important mission.
Oldmeadow proposes that any research conducted on Black Elk requires the following three books: BLACK ELK SPEAKS (1932) by John G. Neihardt;THE SACRED PIPE (1953) by Joseph Epes Brown; and THE SIXTH GRANDFATHER (1984) by Raymond DeMallie. He additionally examines the controversies that surrounded Black Elk and his collaborators, Neihardt (1881 1973) and Brown. While Neihardt’s book provides a fascinating narrative on Black Elk and his remarkable visions, Brown’s provides a more articulate presentation of traditional Lakota metaphysics, cosmology, and ritual life. DeMallie’s book brings to light for the first time the transcripts from Neihardt’s interviews with Black Elk obtained in 1931 and 1944 that formed the basis for BLACK ELK SPEAKS and WHEN THE TREE FLOWERED(1951). As well-intentioned as Neihardt was, DeMallie’s book presents how Neihardt introduced and omitted information that was not as Black Elk shared with him. Yet it is safe to say that without Neihardt’s book, non-Native peoples would know much less about the pre-reservation days and the sacred traditions of the Lakota. Black Elk’s conversion to Catholicism was surrounded by controversy and often misunderstood. Oldmeadow points out that there are three distinct schools of thought pertaining to Black Elk’s relationship to the Christian tradition: “(a) no more than an expedient stratagem and that he remained true to the ancestral ways; (b) deep and sincere, entailing a repudiation of his old beliefs; or that (c) he somehow blended and reconciled Lakota tradition and Christianity.” Brown corresponded with anthropologist and one-time student Michael Steltenkamp about Black Elk’s involvement with the Christian tradition: “I have felt it improper that this phase of [Black Elk’s] life was never presented either by Neihardt or indeed by myself. I suppose somehow it was thought this Christian participation compromised his ‘Indianness,’ but I do not see it this way and think it time that the record was set straight.” Some have suggested that Brown had deliberately structured his book by drawing a parallel between the seven Lakota rites and the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, but this assertion according to Oldmeadow appears to be little more than a coincidence. Brown provides a cogent account of Black Elk’s “conversion” phenomenon through a lens that both situates the uniqueness and embraces all the sapiential traditions of the world: Throughout virtually all indigenous American Indian traditions, a pervasive theme has been that all forms and forces of all orders of the immediately experienced natural environment may communicate to human beings the totality of that which is to be known of the sacred mysteries of creation, and thus of the sacred essence of being and beings…. Such conditioning to openness of mind and being towards manifestations of the sacred makes it understandable that for these peoples religious matters of whatever origin are not open to either question or argument. When, therefore, the Christian message came to the peoples through dedicated missionaries who led exemplary and sacrificial lives, the people easily understood the truths of message and example due to the profundity of their own beliefs; it was not difficult for them to adapt new expressions of values into the sacred fabric of their own culture. The historical phenomenon is thus not conversation as understood in an exclusivistic manner by the bearers of Christianity, but rather a continuation of the people’s ancient and traditional facility for what may be termed non exclusive cumulative adhesion. If this process of polysynthesis can be accomplished with neither confusion nor dissonance, it is ultimately due to the ability of American Indian peoples to penetrate and comprehend the central and most profound nature of all experience and reality.
While it is true that Black Elk does at times make exclusivist claims suggesting that Catholicism replaced the old beliefs and practices of the Lakota traditions, these statements need to take into consideration the Jesuit disapproval of the book BLACK ELK SPEAKS and how this condemnation impacted Black Elk. American anthropologist Raymond DeMallie explains: The publication of BLACK ELK SPEAKS put Black Elk in an awkward position in relation to the Catholic Church. His reputation on the reservation was built as a Catholic catechist, not as a native religious leader. The Jesuit priests at Holy Rosary Mission were shocked and horrified at the suggestion that one of their most valued catechists still harbored beliefs in the old Indian religion. For them to accept BLACK ELK SPEAKS at face value necessarily called into question the genuineness of their success in converting the Lakotas to Catholicism. Rather than accepting the book as a true representation of Black Elk, they blamed Neihardt for telling only part of Black Elk’s story. The priests objected most strongly to the epilogue portraying Black Elk as a believing, practicing “pagan” praying to the six grandfathers when he knew well that the Christian God was the only source of salvation. Ben Black Elk told the missionaries, no doubt truthfully, that he and his father had not realized that Neihardt intended to include the final prayer on Harney Peak in the book. Although the old man was embarrassed in front of the priests… he never denied the sincerity of his final appeal to the six grandfathers. Brown’s arrival that was anticipated by the holy man himself is a continuation of where Neihardt’s work left off, yet Brown’s work is centered on establishing a resurgence of Lakota spirituality. Michael Oren Fitzgerald notes the relevance of Brown’s letters that have recently been made available: They provide a final chapter to Black Elk’s life because of their sharp contrast to the despair in Black Elk’s closing words in BLACK ELK SPEAKS, “you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”
These words were spoken at a time when most American Indian traditional ceremonies were still outlawed…. Joseph Brown’s arrival in 1947 was a catalyst that provided Black Elk the practical support to work toward perpetuating ancestral spiritual traditions, both through the recording of his account of the seven sacred rites of the Lakota and through Black Elk’s efforts to reestablish an “Order of the Pipe” for his tribe. We are informed by Black Elk’s daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, that during his last days, far from rejecting the traditional Lakota spirituality, Black Elk had emphasized that “The only thing I [Black Elk] really believe in is the pipe religion.” Brown recounts that “Black Elk says he is sorry that his present action towards reviving Lakota spiritual traditions shall anger the priests, but that their anger is proof of their ignorance; and in any case Wakan Tanka [the Great Spirit] is happy; for he knows that it is His Will that Black Elk does this work.” A missing link that is little known is Black Elk’s association with Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), foremost spokesman for the perennial philosophy, and how this relationship aided in the larger context of the Lakota holy man’s mission. It was Schuon who, after reading the book BLACK ELK SPEAKS, felt that Black Elk had more to reveal about his religion, and asked his collaborators if there was someone who could try to find Black Elk. This proposition was discussed with Brown, who agreed to it and was able to find Black Elk in South Dakota in September 1947; again, Brown’s arrival was anticipated by the holy man himself.
Brown lived with Black Elk and his family for extended times over a two year period. During this time, Schuon corresponded not only with Brown but also with Black Elk himself. We are told that the reason that Black Elk chose Brown to record the sacred rites of the Lakota was because he was sent by a “holy man from the East.” Lucy Looks Twice (1907-1978) recalled to Brown about the Lakota holy man’s final weeks, as Brown informs readers: Every afternoon at about the same time he would go into something of a trance as if he were talking with some unseen person. Once he scolded his daughter-in law for entering the house at that time, for he said that she had made the man leave. When they asked him who it was who came to talk with him (more precisely this person came to pray for Black Elk, saying that he knew he was soon to die, and he wished to help him in his suffering), he said it was “a holy man from Europe.” His relatives were frightened by these experiences, and Mrs. Looks Twice, noticing a large wooden rosary which always hung over his bed—a Moroccan one that I had given him because of his fondness for beads, and for the barakah—took this away from him, and according to her after this he did not talk anymore with the “strange man.” At Black Elk’s death, possibly thinking that it had not been right to do this, she saw that this rosary was buried in the coffin with him. Schuon had written an introduction to the first French edition of THESACRED PIPEand when parts of this introduction were read to Black Elk by Brown, he is reported to have been “extremely pleased.” Additionally, it is not generally known that Black Elk was also in correspondence with Schuon’s brother, Erich Schuon, who was a Trappist monk known as Father Gall (1906-1991). Black Elk adopted Father Gall as his son, whom he named Lakota Ishnala or “Lone Sioux” and “[Black Elk] said that he had told you that you shall always be a Lakota, for when you die your body, which is of earth, shall remain with the white man, but your soul shall return to us.” Frithjof Schuon was adopted into both the Lakota and the Crow tribes.
The late doyen of the world’s religions, Huston Smith (1919-2016), situates the First Peoples religion as one of the religions of the world:“The Native American religion embodies the Sophia Perennis [or perennial philosophy] in its own distinctive idiom.” It is in this universal and metaphysical light of the perennial philosophy that the First Peoples religion needs to be situated, as Brown writes: It has long been necessary to situate correctly the so-called primitive religions in the context of the world’s historical religions, and in so doing to recognize that in spite of many elements unfamiliar to the outsider, Native American traditions, at least where there has not been excessive compromise to the modern world, are in no sense inferior, but indeed are legitimate expressions of the philosophia perennis. In the great vision, Black Elk is taken to the center of the earth, where he sees the “whole hoop of the world” where all people and sentient beings are interconnected and all is rendered sacred in Wakan-Tanka:
And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. The Great Spirit, as Black Elk informs us, is both transcendent and immanent: We should understand that all things are the work of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things; the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, all the four-legged animals and the winged peoples; and even more important we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples.
According to Lakota metaphysics,transcendence becomes immanent at the center of the human being, allowing the Great Spirit to dwell within. As described by Oldmeadow, “The Great Spirit as Creator orders the cosmos through the seven directions (the four cardinal points, zenith, nadir, and the center where they all meet). The Lakota holy man discusses his motivation underlying the book THE SACRED PIPE, which could be said to also indirectly refer to the book BLACK ELK SPEAKS:
I [Black Elk] have wished to make this book through no other desire than to help my people in understanding the greatness and truth of our own tradition, and also help in bringing peace upon the earth, not only among men, but within men and between the whole of creation.
One of the most celebrated and honored Lakota Sun Dance chiefs of the twentieth century, Fools Crow (1890 -1989), describes Black Elk’s role in preserving the First Peoples religion: My uncle, the renowned Black Elk, has earned a place above all of the other Teton holy men. We all hold him the highest. I have never heard a bad word about him, and he never said a bad word about anyone. All he wanted to do was love and serve his fellow man… . [I]n the Indian custom, he was also a father to me. I stayed with him quite often, and sometimes for long periods of time. We also made a few trips together, and over the years talked about many things. I learned a great deal about Wakan Tanka, prophecy, and medicine from him. While many books have been written about the Lakota wicasa wakan, none have arguably explored the entirety of Black Elk’s life and the centrality of his universal vision as this book by Harry Oldmeadow. I am confident that this work will assist with correcting the historical record and will draw more interest to the life and legacy of Black Elk. This book depicts how the spiritual legacy of Black Elk is instrumental in representing the ancestral traditions in the pre-reservation era, their destruction, and subsequently a powerful revival that continues into the present-day. It is in this light that Black Elk, the Lakota holy man, needs to be regarded. Through the timeless wisdom of the First Peoples religion, a corresponding universal metaphysics can be found that is at the heart of all religious and spiritual traditions of the world. It is through the Lakota saying that it is imprinted in the hearts and minds of the people that we can identify the sacred unity within the created order, Mitakuye oyasin—“All my relatives” or “We are all related.”
Brown examines the animals common to the Oglala Sioux and their significance in the Oglala value and belief system, ceremonies, and arts. His primary thesis is that the Oglala’s conceptions of various animals serve as a prime medium through which core values of the Oglala culture could find expression. As such, these conceptions provide a window into the Oglala religious experience. In other words, by understanding the way the Oglala view certain animals, we gain an understanding into how they view their world, practice their spirituality, and understand themselves.
This book serves as a detailed examination of one aspect of Oglala spirituality that Brown outlined more-generally in his earlier work The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian.
Forty Rules of Love – Persian Sufi – Shams of Tabriz 1185-1248
Rule 1 How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.
Rule 2 The path to the Truth is a labour of the heart, not of the head. Make your heart your primary guide! Not your mind. Meet, challenge and ultimately prevail over your nafs (self, psyche, soul) with your heart. Knowing your ego will lead you to the knowledge of God.
Rule 3 You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for him: in the heart of a true lover.
Rule 4 Intellect and love are made of different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much ecstasy’, whereas love says, ‘Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!’ Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble. But treasures are hidden among ruins. A broken heart hides treasures.
Rule 5 Most of problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstanding. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language, as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.
Rule 6 Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is the best to find a person who will be your mirror. Remember only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.
Rule 7 Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied.
Rule 8 Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to look at the end of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
Rule 9 East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.
Rule 10 The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new self to be born, hardship is necessary. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.
Rule 11 The quest for love changes user. There is no seeker among those who search for love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for love, you start to change within and without.
Rule 12 There are more fake gurus and false teachers in this world than the number of stars in the visible universe. Don’t confuse power-driven, self-centered people with true mentors. A genuine spiritual master will not direct your attention to himself or herself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self. True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the light of God pass through them.
Rule 13 Try not to resist the changes, which come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
Rule 14 God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
Rule 15 It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human being with all their imperfections and defects. Remember, one can only know what one is capable of loving. There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God.
Rule 16
Real faith is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure water, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.
Rule 17 The whole universe is contained within a single human being-you. Everything that you see around, including the things that you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you in varying degrees. Therefore, do not look for Shaitan (devil) outside yourself either. The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within. If you set to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness.
Rule 18 If you want to change the ways others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.
Rule 19 Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That is the hardest part and that is what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Don’t go with the flow. Be the flow.
Rule 20 We were all created in His image, and yet we were each created different and unique. No two people are alike. No hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Therefore, disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others is an amount to disrespecting God’s holy scheme.
Rule 21 When a true lover of God goes into a tavern, the tavern becomes his chamber of prayer, but when a wine bibber goes into the same chamber, it becomes his tavern. In everything we do, it is our hearts that make the difference, not our outer appearance. Sufis do not judge other people on how they look or who they are. When a Sufi stares at someone, he keeps both eyes closed instead opens a third eye – the eye that sees the inner realm.
Rule 22 Life is a temporary loan and this world is nothing but a sketchy imitation of Reality. Only children would mistake a toy for the real thing. And yet human beings either become infatuated with the toy or disrespectfully break it and throw it aside. In this life stay away from all kinds of extremities, for they will destroy your inner balance. Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.
Rule 23 The human being has a unique place among God’s creation. “I breathed into him of My Spirit,” God says. Each and every one of us without exception is designed to be God’s delegate on earth. Ask yourself, just how often do you behave like a delegate, if you ever do so? Remember, it fells upon each of us to discover the divine spirit inside and live by it.
Rule 24 Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy or fight someone we tumble straight into the fires of hell.
Rule 25 Each and every reader comprehends the Holy Qur’an on a different level of tandem with the depth of his understanding. There are four levels of insight. The first level is the outer meaning and it is the one that the majority of the people are content with. Next is the Batin – the inner level. Third, there is the inner of the inner. And the fourth level is so deep it cannot be put into words and is therefore bound to remain indescribable.
Rule 26 The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone’s back – not even a seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space and they will come back to us in due time. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One man’s joy will make everyone smile.
Rule 27 Whatever you speak, good or evil, will somehow come back to you. Therefore, if there is someone who harbours ill thoughts about you, saying similarly bad things about him will only make matters worse. You will be locked in a vicious circle of malevolent energy. Instead for forty days and nights say and think nice things about that person. Everything will be different at the end of 40 days, because you will be different inside.
Rule 28 The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
Rule 29 Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore, to live everything to the fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance. The music of the universe is all pervading and it is composed on 40 different levels. Your destiny is the level where you play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands.
Rule 30 The true Sufi is such that even when he is unjustly accused, attacked and condemned from all sides, he patiently endures, uttering not a single bad word about any of his critics. A Sufi never apportions blame. How can there be opponents or rivals or even “others” when there is no “self” in the first place? How can there be anyone to blame when there is only One?
Rule 31 If you want to strengthen your faith, you will need to soften inside. For your faith to be rock solid, your heart needs to be as soft as a feather. Through an illness, accident, loss or fright, one way or another, we are all faced with incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgmental and more compassionate and generous. Yet some of us learn the lesson and manage to become milder, while some others end up becoming even harsher than before…
Rule 32 Nothing should stand between you and God. No imams, priests, rabbits or any other custodians of moral or religious leadership. Not spiritual masters and not even your faith. Believe in your values and your rules, but never lord them over others. If you keep breaking other people’s hearts, whatever religious duty you perform is no good. Stay away from all sorts of idolatry, for they will blur your vision. Let God and only God be your guide. Learn the Truth, my friend, but be careful not to make a fetish out of your truths.
Rule 33 While everyone in this world strives to get somewhere and become someone, only to leave it all behind after death, you aim for the supreme stage of nothingness. Live this life as light and empty as the number zero. We are no different from a pot. It is not the decorations outside but the emptiness inside that holds us straight. Just like that, it is not what we aspire to achieve but the consciousness of nothingness that keeps us going.
Rule 34 Submission does not mean being weak or passive. It leads to neither fatalism nor capitulation. Just the opposite. True power resides in submission a power that comes within. Those who submit to the divine essence of life will live in unperturbed tranquility and peace even the whole wide world goes through turbulence after turbulence.
Rule 35 In this world, it is not similarities or regularities that take us a step forward, but blunt opposites. And all the opposites in the universe are present within each and every one of us. Therefore the believer needs to meet the unbeliever residing within. And the nonbeliever should get to know the silent faithful in him. Until the day one reaches the stage of Insane-I Kamil, the perfect human being, faith is a gradual process and one that necessitates its seeming opposite: disbelief.
Rule 36 This world is erected upon the principle of reciprocity. Neither a drop of kindness nor a speck of evil will remain unreciprocated. For not the plots, deceptions, or tricks of other people. If somebody is setting a trap, remember, so is God. He is the biggest plotter. Not even a leaf stirs outside God’s knowledge. Simply and fully believe in that. Whatever God does, He does it beautifully.
Rule 37 God is a meticulous clock maker. So precise is His order that everything on earth happens in its own time. Neither a minute late nor a minute early. And for everyone without exception, the clock works accurately. For each there is a time to love and a time to die.
Rule 38 It is never too late to ask yourself, “Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?” Even if a single day in your life is the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one-way to be born into a new life: to die before death.
Rule 39 While the part change, the whole always remains the same. For every thief who departs this world, a new one is born. And every descent person who passes away is replaced by a new one. In this way not only does nothing remain the same but also nothing ever really changes. For every Sufi who dies, another is born somewhere.
Rule 40 A life without love is of no account. Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western. Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water..
Shams Tabriz, Rumi’s Teacher
Shams-i-Tabrīzī (Persian: شمس تبریزی) or ‘Shams al-Din Mohammad’ (1185–1248) was a Persian Muslim, who is credited as the spiritual instructor of Mewlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhi, also known as Rumi and is referenced with great reverence in Rumi’s poetic collection, in particular Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrīzī (The Works of Shams of Tabriz). Tradition holds that Shams taught Rumi in seclusion in Konya for a period of forty days, before fleeing for Damascus. The tomb of Shams-i Tabrīzī was recently nominated to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
According to Sipah Salar, a devotee and intimate friend of Rumi who spent forty days with him, Shams was the son of the [Ismaili] ‘Imam Ala al-Din’. In a work entitled Manāqib al-‘arifīn(Eulogies of the Gnostics), ‘Aflaki’ names a certain ‘Ali as the father of Shams-i Tabrīzī and his grandfather as Malikdad. Apparently basing his calculations on Haji Bektash Veli’s Maqālāt (Conversations), Aflaki suggests that Shams arrived in Konya at the age of sixty years. However, various scholars have questioned Aflaki’s reliability.
Shams received his education in Tabriz and was a disciple of ‘Baba Kamal al-Din Jumdi’. Before meeting Rumi, he apparently traveled from place to place weaving baskets and selling girdles for a living. Despite his occupation as a weaver, Shams received the epithet of “the embroiderer” (zarduz) in various biographical accounts including that of the Persian historian ‘Dawlatshah’. This however, is not the occupation listed by Haji Bektash Veli in the ”Maqālat” and was rather the epithet given to the IsmailiImam Shams al-din Muhammad, who worked as an embroiderer while living in anonymity in Tabriz. The transference of the epithet to the biography of Rumi’s mentor suggests that this Imam’s biography must have been known to Shams-i Tabrīzī’s biographers. The specificities of how this transference occurred, however, are not yet known.
Shams’ first encounter with Rumi
On 15 November 1244, a man in a black suit from head to toe, came to the famous inn of Sugar Merchants of Konya. His name was Shams Tabrizi. He was claiming to be a travelling merchant. As it was said in Haji Bektash Veli’s book, “Makalat”, he was looking for something. Which he was going to find in Konya. Eventually he found Rumi riding a horse.
One day Rumi was reading next to a large stack of books. Shams Tabriz, passing by, asked him, “What are you doing?” Rumi scoffingly replied, “Something you cannot understand.” On hearing this, Shams threw the stack of books into a nearby pool of water. Rumi hastily rescued the books and to his surprise they were all dry. Rumi then asked Shams, “What is this?” To which Shams replied, “Mowlana, this is what you cannot understand.”
A second version of the tale has Shams passing by Rumi who again is reading a book. Rumi regards him as an uneducated stranger. Shams asks Rumi what he is doing, to which Rumi replies, “Something that you do not understand!” At that moment, the books suddenly catch fire and Rumi asks Shams to explain what happened. His reply was, “Something you do not understand.”
There are countless mosques located on the territory of Istanbul, Turkey. Some of them were built hundreds of years ago, while others appeared only recently. We would like to tell you about one modern construction, the Marmara University Faculty of Theology Mosque. Despite the young age of the building, sure it will be of interest to all connoisseurs of unusual architecture.
The iconic structure was built on the site of an earlier mosque that had been present here for thirty years. The reason for the radical rebuilding of the previous building was its non-compliance with seismic resistance requirements.
Construction of the modern mosque was carried out from 2012-2015, and the complex was inaugurated by President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The architect behind the mosque project was Hilmi Şenalp, who had worked on other religious buildings before.
Despite its modest size, the building can accommodate 4300 people. The complex includes not only the visible parts above ground, but also lecture halls, exhibition rooms, a library, and a cafe located beneath the mosque. Drawings of the building can be found online, revealing that the underground section dwarfs the size of the main prayer hall.
The mosque minarets soar over 50 meters high, and the dome rises above the ground by nearly 35 meters. The structure is made of steel, with approximately 500 tons of alloy used in the construction phase.
The building looks modern and remarkable from both the outside and inside. The walls of the main prayer hall are composed of glass archways with intricate lattice work. This design allows natural light to illuminate the building even on cloudy days. Sunrays penetrate the structure through the apex of the dome, which is itself a work of art and looks simply fantastic.
The Hassa Architects designed this mosque with a sense of tradition and used a lot of fractured geometry which is crucial to Islamic art. Modern construction techniques let us build the most intricate designs with ease. The motifs that are inspired by natural forms were transferred to steel, glass and glass fiber reinforced concrete in 3D.
The mosque is on the university’s Bağlarbaşı campus on the Asian side of İstanbul and sits on 30.000 square meters of area. It can house 5.000 people. It was planned as a social attraction center with classrooms, conference rooms, exhibition areas, theatre rooms and cafes.
This mosque is the first steel mosque in the country. Its steel structure sits on a decahedral cement base.
“The motifs that are inspired by natural forms were transferred to steel, glass and glassfiber reinforced concrete in 3D.”
One of the most attractive elements is the 1000 year old traditional wooden bridge wing which was constructed with steel, glass and GRC / GFRC this time. The central dome has a diameter of 35 meters and this 35 meter high central dome rests on twelve steel carriers.
There were also used for the Turkish triangle forms that tied the columns to the dome. The stepped helix structure was placed on the steel ridge ribs sat on the main steel beam. Each one of the materials used to dress the helix formed dome was prepared with specially constructed moulds. The geometry that was constructed by 22 different planes that were placed on top of each other comprises panels the sizes of which are between 7.84 and 3.81 meters.
The side windows of the mosque are reminiscent of Anatolian Seljuk architecture and the sunlight screens brought the inner and outer spaces together. The sunlight screens were carried over a special system of 7.39×7.57 meters of distance and were connected to the main steel construction. The same system was repeated at the mosque porticos. The carrier steel frames were hidden behind the sunlight screen panels and created the impression that the structure was hanging in the air.
Note: Frisian patterns are very comparable to Islamic Patterns. They express the same Thruth “Haqq” in Arabic and these patterns lead to the Truth. All Frisian would agree with Goethe who says:
“The supreme madness is to see life as it is and not as it should be,
things are only what we want to believe they are ...” Jacques Brel
Big fish eating small fish
A broadside criticising the exploitation of political power by alluding to the proverb of big fish eating small fish; with an engraving with motives after Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel showing in the centre a table with a large dish of small fish, around the table are sitting five large fish with human arms, dressed in clothes and devouring the small fish, the table scene surrounded by various scenes of larger fish being cut open, revealing smaller fish, in the background small fish hanging on the gallows; with engraved title and text.
Light and Dark Personal Mythology in Current Events
These days we ponder what should be the “new myths” in light of our modern-day reality, but upon reflection we can see that many already exist and are playing themselves out on the public stage, in the form of people’s “personal myths” that drive their words and actions. In our Internet age, “personal mythology” is not merely a private matter of each person’s individuation process. The manifestations and consequences of personal myths are often bizarre, tragic, and dangerous to society. We have seen this recently: in the minds of the shooters in the massacres in Charleston and elsewhere, the takeover of Oregon’s Malheur wildlife refuge by an armed self-styled militia, attitudes toward Muslims, the debate over immigration, race relations, and in much of the rhetoric of the current presidential campaign. In order to understand events and control our future, it has become more urgent than ever that we be able to recognize and understand myths when they see them, which is the first step both to controlling their dark side as well as to developing healthier new myths that will inspire individuals and society in a more positive way.
Masquerades played a big role in the carnival festivities and contributed to the reverse practices. Masks frequently evoked animal or even demonic faces and revealed the dark tendencies of being. Indeed, each person used to choose, without even realizing it, a disguise and a mask that best reflected the lower tendencies. Far from hiding his face, the individual put on a mask revealing the darkest face that he tried to hide under different social masks in everyday life.
The mask (from the Latin “persona”) actually concealed the various external and changing appearances of the social character and revealed the real personality of the individual.
Like carnival practices, the Italian theatre of the “comedia dell’arte” gave the actors a mask that hid their face and removed any possibility of expression other than that of the character.
Let us note in passing that the Chinese (Chan) and Japanese (Zen) Buddhist traditions consider that every being has an original face, the face of his or her true being, under the mask of the apparent face. So, the mask can both reveal the dark aspect of the being during the carnival time and hide the luminous aspect in everyday life.
James Ensor is in line with the Flemish painting and Jerome Bosch in particular. Like Jerome Bosch, he did not try to paint men according to their outer appearances, but as they were inside. And there is no better way than the Flanders’ carnival parties to unveil the other side of the picture.
The carnival mask did not only conceal the appearances of the social figure, it also revealed the hidden face of the being carrying it. Each person chose indeed, subconsciously, a mask (From the Latin “persona”) which best reflected his or her true personality. Far from hiding the face of the person, the mask let appear, on the contrary, his or her true face.
The grotesque faces of these masks revealed the desires that animated the being: jealousy, cupidity, concupiscence etc. If these desires were not counterbalanced by opposed tendencies such as love, generosity, non-attachment and so on, they generated anguish: the anguish of losing what one has, anguish to lack, anguish to die etc. Desires are always sources of torment. And at the time of Jerome Bosch, the supreme desire consisted in accessing Paradise and the supreme torment to end in the flames of Hell. Two dangers threatened any being by the end of the Middle Ages: Death and Devil. That theme often came back under the metal point or brush of James Ensor.
Devil (from the Greek “diabolos”, which means disuniting, splitting, dividing) symbolizes beforehand all our own inner demons. Desires and anguishes often conceal the other tendencies of the being. Othello only saw Desdemona through Iago’s eyes; jealousy masked his love for his wife. The being forgets this side of himself that unites him to the other and maintains his inner unity. He is disintegrated, split up and let people only see a hideous facet of himself because it was deprived of its complement.
The features revealed during the carnival parties are not specific to a particular being, but characteristic of the gathered crowd. James Ensor was always haunted by crowds and insect hordes, which share the same conditioning and know only one destiny, to follow their instincts.
Note: Krampus or Spiritual “winter” of the modern world
In Catholicism, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children. His saints day falls in early December, which helped strengthen his association with the Yuletide season. Many European cultures not only welcomed the kindly man as a figure of generosity and benevolence to reward the good, but they also feared his menacing counterparts who punished the bad. Parts of Germany and Austria dread the beastly Krampus, while other Germanic regions have Belsnickle and Knecht Ruprecht, black-bearded men who carry switches to beat children. France has Hans Trapp and Père Fouettard. (Some of these helpers, such as Zwarte Piet in The Netherlands have attracted recent controversy.)
Krampus’s name is derived from the German word krampen, meaning claw, and is said to be the son of Hel in Norse mythology. The legendary beast also shares characteristics with other scary, demonic creatures in Greek mythology, including satyrs and fauns.
The legend is part of a centuries-old Christmas tradition in Germany, where Christmas celebrations begin in early December. Krampus was created as a counterpart to kindly St. Nicholas, who rewarded children with sweets. Krampus, in contrast, would swat “wicked” children, stuff them in a sack, and take them away to his lair.
According to folklore, Krampus purportedly shows up in towns the night of December 5, known as Krampusnacht, or Krampus Night. The next day, December 6, is Nikolaustag, or St. Nicholas Day, when children look outside their door to see if the shoe or boot they’d left out the night before contains either presents (a reward for good behavior) or a rod (bad behavior). (
HERE FOLLOWETH THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY OF OUR LORD AND OF THE THREE KINGS from Golden Legends
On this day we are making King cakes . They come with cardboard “crowns” to be worn by whoever gets the slice with the token and becomes monarch of the event.
The Bear, the Harlot, the Magician and the King by Lloyd D. Graham In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the seduction of the wild man Enkidu by Shamhat the harlot symbolically causes his death as an unreflective animal and his rebirth as a human – an Eden-like fall into self-awareness. Created as a match for king Gilgamesh of Uruk, Enkidu goes on to become the king’s beloved friend. In European folk traditions, the Wild Man is interchangeable with the bear, and parallels can be drawn between Enkidu and the Candlemas Bear associated with Carnival. Since Enkidu symbolises our pre-human nature, one can perceive a figurative truth to the pan-European folk belief that people are descended from bears. Thematic overlaps exist between some Gilgamesh narratives and European folk-tales about a Wild Man whose father was a bear (the Bear’s Son / Jean de l’Ours motif) or about twin boys, one of whom was raised in the wild by a female bear (Valentine and Orson). Perhaps surprisingly, the roots of Santa Claus lie in the Wild Man. So too do the origins of Merlin, the wizard of medieval Arthurian romance. Merlin has elements in common with Enkidu, while King Arthur can be seen as a metaphorical “Bear’s son.” Over time, the status of the Wild Man has changed from a wholly inhuman monster to a “noble savage” who today might even be cast as a salvific ecowarrior. Read here
“The crisis in sense, meaning, and identity doesn’t just push people into cults and conspiracy theories, it also makes mainstream belief systems more cult-like.”
A dark mirror shows features one would rather not see. You gaze at the repulsive visage in the picture frame, the caricature of everything despicable, only to realize with dawning horror that you are looking not at a portrait but at a mirror.
The political defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election is a crossroads for the quasi-political movement grouped loosely around the QAnon conspiracy myth and, more broadly, around Trump himself. Because the man and the movement were a dark mirror for the whole of society, it is also a crossroads for society. Read more here
Traditionalism and Folklore
Among the Traditionalists, Ananda Coomaraswamy and René Guénon touched upon folklore, but never made an extensive study of it. And Martin Lings, in the anthology Sword of Gnosis, did a metaphysical exegesis of a Lithuanian folk song. That’s about the extent of the Traditionalist treatment of folklore, though Rama Coomaraswamy told me that his father Ananda had made a collection of folk songs with a view toward a metaphysical treatment of them, but never finished the project. Among Sophia Perennis titles, Cinderella’s Gold Slipper: Spiritual Symbolism in the Grimms’ Tales by Samuel Fohr deals with this neglected area, as does Tales of Nasrudin: Keys to Fulfillment by Ali Jamnia, as well as Mining, Metalurgy and the Meaning of Life: A Book of Stories by Roger Sworder.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy had this to say about the metaphysical dimension of folklore:
[By] “folklore” we mean that whole and consistent body of culture which has been handed down, not in books but by word of mouth and in practice, from time beyond the reach of historical research, in the form of legends, fairy tales, ballads, games, toys,crafts, medicine, agriculture, and other rites, and forms of organization, especially those we call tribal.
This is a cultural complex independent of national and even racial boundaries, and of remarkable similarity throughout the world. . . . The content of folklore is metaphysical.
Our failure to recognize this is primarily due to our own abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and of doctrines are received by the people and transmitted by them.
In its popular form, a given doctrine may not always have been understood, but so long as the formula is faithfully transmitted it remains understandable;
“superstitions,” for the most part, are no mere delusions, but formulae of which the meaning has been forgotten. . . . We are dealing with the relics of an ancient folk metaphysics its technical terms. . . . Folklore ideas are the form in which metaphysical wisdom, as valid now as it ever was. . . . We shall only be able to understand the astounding uniformity of the folklore motifs all over the world, and the devoted care that has everywhere been taken to ensure their correct transmission, if we approach these mysteries (for they are nothing less) in the spirit in which they have been transmitted (“from the Stone Age until now”) with the confidence of little children, indeed, but not the childish self-confidence of those who hold that wisdom was born with themselves.
The true folklorist must be not so much a psychologist as a theologian and metaphysician, if he is to “understand his material”. . . . Nor can anything be called a science of folklore, but only a collection of data, that considers only the formulae and not their doctrine. . . .
René Guénon, who died in 1951, also dealt with the folklore as the transmission of the Primordial Tradition, in his book Symbols of the Sacred Science:
The very conception of folklore, in the generally accepted sense of the term, is based on an idea that is radically false, the idea that there are “popular creations” spontaneously created by the mass of the people….As has been rightly said [by Luc Benoist], “the profound interest of all so-called popular traditions lies in the fact that they are not popular in origin”; and we will add that where, as is almost always the case, there is a question of elements that are traditional in the true sense of the word, however deformed, diminished and fragmentary they may be sometimes, and of things that have a real symbolic value, their origin is not even human, let alone popular.
What may be popular is solely the fact of “survival,” when these elements belong to vanished traditional forms…. The people preserve, without understanding them, the relics of former traditions which go back sometimes to a past too remote to be dated, so that it has to be relegated to the obscure domain of the “prehistoric”; they thereby fulfill the function of a more or less subconscious collective memory, the contents of which have clearly come from elsewhere.
What may seem most surprising is that the things so preserved are found to contain, above all, abundant information of an esoteric order, which is, in its essence, precisely what is least popular, and this fact suggests in itself an explanation, which may be summed up as follows: When a traditional form is on the point of becoming extinct, its last representatives may very well deliberately entrust to this aforesaid collective memory the things that otherwise would be lost beyond recall;that is in fact the sole means of saving what can in a certain measure be saved.
At the same time, that lack of understanding that is one of the natural characteristics of the masses is a sure enough guarantee that what is esoteric will be nonetheless undivulged, remaining merely as a sort of witness of the past for such as, in later times, shall be capable of understanding It.
The mummers were costumed actors who participated in midwinter festivals in ancient and medieval Europe, largely in pantomime, though songs also formed part of the performance.
In the Middle Ages they performed at Christmas; the tradition of the Christmas mummers in England was revived in perhaps the 18th century.
Their plays included such motifs as the duel, death-and-resurrection, and the triumph of St. George over the dragon.
The word “mummer,” though derived from the Greek word for “mask,” is the likely origin of the English word “mum”; to “keep mum” means “to act like a mummer, a mime”—though the word “mime” comes from the Greek mimesis, “imitation; art”, which is related to the Sanskrit maya, the magical or dramatic power by which the Absolute manifests Itself as the universe. The universe, like a mask, both veils and reveals the mystery of the Absolute Reality. The symbolism found in “Nottamun Town” also suggests that the mummers, at one point in their history, may have had some relation to the tradition of Christian Hermeticism.
It is interesting, however, that the first two lines of stanza five, perfectly accurate in their context and entirely at one with the genius of the song, were written by Jean Ritchie herself (she tells me), following a vision she had, while walking in the woods, of the procession that appears in that stanza—proving that the ancient but always-new lore of the Primordial Tradition is transmitted by inspiration as well as memory, even if the one inspired is not entirely certain about, or necessarily even interested in, the intellectual meaning of the gift he or she has been given.
So René Guénon’s idea that the folk act as no more than a passive receptacle for metaphysical ideas received and transmitted by the esoteric sages must clearly be supplemented by the understanding that “the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,” that artists working consciously within folk traditions can sometimes be inspired by the same Source that the sage himself also acknowledges and serves; no-one can put their copyright on Wisdom, or their brand on Truth.
In traditional cultures, silence, like any essential human gesture, is not neutral. It indicates not simply the subjective desire not to speak, but the objective presence of a “mystery,” an initiatory secret; the Greek word for “mystery,” mysterion, is closely related to the verb myo, which means “to shut the mouth”, to “keep mum.” And to judge from “Nottamun Town,” the silence of the mummers was symbolic in precisely this sense, indicating that they were the transmitters, perhaps at one time the conscious transmitters, of mystical or alchemical lore in cryptic form.
In any fully traditional culture there is always a give-and-take between initiatory mysteries on the one hand and popular religion and/or folklore on the other, whether or not this exchange is mediated by an established “church.”
To take only one example, the Hindu Mahabharata may be viewed either as a mass of folklore which has collected around the core of a sophisticated literary epic, consciously designed to transmit a mystical doctrine in the guise of a semi-historical legend, or as a consciously-composed mystical epic which has drawn upon a mass of mystical and/or historical folklore for its raw material. This ambiguity and tension between the two poles of aristocratic literature and folk legend is expressed in the epic itself through the figure of the sage Vyasa, who is at once the poet who composed the Mahabharata and a character appearing within it. And this two-way flow of lore between the folk and the literati seems to have taken place in the mummer-tradition as well, where established poets would compose libretti for mummer-plays based on folk material—literary ballads which, after a generation or two, might themselves be transformed into folk songs.
The mystical truth which is realized in the sage is virtual in the folk.
If the folk are the field, the sage is the fruit of the tree which grows in the center of it, a fruit which, even as it takes its place in the eternal domain of God’s attributes, also cyclically returns to the field from which it grew, via its seed, to propagate wisdom.
Note: Fulk is an old European personal name, probably deriving from the Germanic folk (“people” or “chieftain”). It is cognate with the French Foulques, the Italian Fulco and the Swedish Folke, along with other variants such as Fulke, Foulkes, Fulko, Folco, Folquet, and so on. However, the above variants are often confused with names derived from the Latin Falco (“falcon”), such as Fawkes, Falko, Falkes, and Faulques. Folquet de Marseille, fulco minstreel Fulk, King of Jerusalem
The folk correspond to the Aristotelian materia, that which receives the imprint of forms, and the sage to forma, that which shapes or “informs” the material which allows it to appear.
And the tree corresponds to Tradition in the sense employed by French metaphysician René Guénon: that body of spiritual Truth, lying at the core of every religious revelation and a great deal of folklore and mythology, which has always been known by the “gnostics” of the race since it is eternal in relation to human time, representing as it does the eternal design or prototype of Humanity itself.
A traditional culture permeated by half-understood mystical lore on the folk level is a fertile matrix for the full development of the gnostic, the sagacious individual, who, by means of his darshan, his willingness to allow himself to be contemplated as a representative of spiritual Truth, returns the seed of wisdom to the folk who venerate him.
Such a sage may also compose tales, ballads, riddles, plays, proverbs and dances impregnated with mystical lore rendered into cryptic form, which can be subconsciously assimilated by the folk without breaking the seal of the mysteries.
A great deal of Sufi lore, for example, has been transmitted in this way. And if mystical truths may be shown to ordinary people in dreams—who will be unable to consciously understand and assimilate these truths in the absence of a traditional hermeneutic and a mystagogue who can employ it, unless God wills otherwise—then we can also say that there is a constant two-way communication between the enlightened sage and the people via the subtle realm, or between God and the people via the sage—a communication which, however, only the sage is fully conscious of. The voice of the people may be the Voice of God—vox populi vox Dei—but only the sage can hear what, precisely, this Voice is saying.
At the most basic and broadest level, a myth can be thought of as nothing less than our psyche’s construction of reality, or parts of it.
As psychologists have shown, myths, like dreams, are essential to our psychic well-being; we can’t do without them. The challenge becomes how to tend them.
Historically, myths were developed, taught, and ritualized in a public manner, so that everyone in a community shared the same myths and therefore the same essential vision of reality. Myths thus bonded societies together and served to enforce society’s rules and control its members. But this is no longer the case in our modern world where the old myths have lost their hold on most people. Among other things, science now explains things formerly explained by religion and myths; globalization has taken hold, breaking down the cultural walls that supported traditional religions and mythologies; technology and media have a dominant role in culture; there has been unprecedented migration and intermixing of cultures and of people themselves; and the rise of women has been unsettling and threatening to many men. The pace of change in society and culture has accelerated, to the point where it has outpaced the possibility for the traditional kind of public myths to develop and take hold.
Many elements of this process have been going on in Europe for centuries, where the various nations with differing languages and cultural traditions and myths lived closely together and worked out and minimized their differences at the cost of many wars, followed by integration.
But in the USA we were more isolated from this dynamic. Even after WWI when we emerged preeminent on the world stage, we imposed on others’ cultures rather than exchanged with them, and the Cold War rendered our relationship with the rest of the world rather one-dimensional. We have felt the shock more acutely since the end of the Cold War. Without a superpower enemy to unite us, we had to look more inward to find our identity. For this we needed new mythmaking, but in the new era the traditional public mythmaking could no longer work so well. Enter personal mythology, which when practiced at its best is what Joseph Campbell called “creative mythology” (see below).
“Personal mythology” is one way to describe the result of a person’s psychological individuation process (or failure in that process) as visualized by Carl Jung. As a mythologist, I like looking at individuation in terms of mythology, because it results in one’s own “story.”
This perspective begins by recognizing that our view of the world, including ourselves, is shaped fundamentally by common unconscious patterns within our psyches called archetypes (together forming our collective unconscious), together with elements of the unconscious accumulated from our personal experience, especially from childhood. This is the ultimate source of mythological symbols and motifs.
Our waking, ego consciousness, interacts with what wells up from the unconscious to produce a somewhat coherent (to ourselves) narrative or construction about ourselves and the world. In that process, our shadow asserts itself, with our ego rejecting what doesn’t match its image of our self (suppression/repression), resulting in corresponding projections of the same onto the external world (e.g., scapegoating). If this process is left to proceed on its own, we become passive prisoners of our archetypes and are carried through an unaware, unenlightened life, living according to corresponding myths, with pernicious, destructive consequences to our psychic balance and the outside world (in Star Wars terminology, going over to the dark side, which indeed has power).
Historically, when myths were imposed by society, they served to control people’s individual actions, while resulting pernicious behavior was often collective (e.g., witch trials, the Inquisition), but when the controlling function of the old myths is lifted in society at large, anti-social individuals with their own destructive mythologies can more easily surface to wreak their damage directly, which we see increasingly today.
Not only Campbell (from the perspective of the mythologist) but also a number of psychologists including David Feinstein, Stephen Larsen, Stanley Krippner, Rollo May, and Jean Houston recognized the problem and developed methodologies for proactively developing one’s personal mythology along a more enlightened path.
This is a centering/individuation process that involves identifying what one’s initial personal myth has been, as well as competing myths, integrating them, and then living out the new vision (Feinstein and Krippner). At bottom, this is an exercise in self-mastery. Such well-balanced, self-aware, integrated individuals in turn can help generate a healthier society. Campbell agreed. He wrote that creative mythology springs “from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to his own experience” (pp. 6-7, emphasis mine). Such people are able “to relate to the wealth of mythological images and meanings in a creative and life-enhancing way” (Larsen, p. 15). In the end, argued Campbell, the new myths will come from such inspired individuals, who most commonly will be artists. Jung viewed this process as the most fundamental and important thing a person can do, and in fact described his whole lifelong journey as one of finding and developing his personal myth (Jung).
Don Quixote following his errant personal myth.
Returning to the course of history, we can see how chaos in our public myths results, at least initially, in chaos in our personal myths. The roots of this unsettling process go back at least to the Renaissance, and it is interesting to compare today’s situation with the similar impact this chaos had on people’s psyches centuries ago. As an example, Joseph Campbell, in his bookCreative Mythology, used Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote,as interpreted by him, with help from José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Quixote.
Campbell observed that by 1600 when Cervantes was writing, the Renaissance and science had just changed the world, but Quixote would not and could not recognize the cold facts of this new outer reality. Rather, he was a captive of old myths and his personal myth. Riding for the honor of his lady Dulcinea (a projected, imaginary form of his real-life farm-girl neighbor), he sees (projects) windmills as enemy giants to be overcome, but in the event he winds up in a heap. His aide Sancho Panza cries, “Anyone could have seen that these are windmills – not giants – unless he had windmills in his head!” But Quixote’s myth still drives him, creating a scapegoat shadow figure: “I am sure it was that necromancer Frestón who transformed these giants into mills, to deprive me of this victory. He has always been my enemy, this way. However, his evil arts will have little force, in the end, against the virtue of my sword” (my emphasis). Quixote’s will, remarked Campbell, had become “reality in itself” (p. 605).
The Perfect Individual, as a perfect reflection of God, is given special status in the world. The Perfect Individual is the only creature that manifests all the Names or Attributes, of God, and therefore is the only creature that fully manifests Being. The question arises: “if the Perfect Individual perfectly and completely reflects God or Being, then is this individual somehow more ‘real’ than other individuals?” The answer to this question will always be yes and no. The reason for this paradoxical answer/non-answer is evident within the mirror analogy employed by Ibn al- ‘Arabi. Read more here
Polishing your heart, Virtues Ethic for a modern Devotion in our times
Ego rules the world: Anti-“God”, Anti-“Humanity”, Anti-“Nature
Our civilization is in decay. Because we have blown-up our ego. Cosmic Balance has been disturbed. The Origin – Cosmic Womb/Vacuum – “doesn’t tolerate” this. With the help of Her two Cosmic Forces of “Death and Rebirth” (“Stirb und Werde” – “Die and Become”-J.W. von Goethe) She breaks down our ego-accumulations, thus restoring the Original Balance.see Crisis of the modern world and The Sorcerer’s ApprenticeCurrent decadence, greed, evil, falsehood, corruption, violence, injustice, exploitation, thus have a Cosmic undertone. It is a “Cosmic Law” that civilizations which have become megalomaniacal will inevitably collapse. Because all levels of existence are corroded – including the religious realm – only a Dimension that is beyond – META – God and the world can redeem us. “God hasn’t created the world out of nothingness, but Nothingness (Cosmic Womb) is giving birth to God and the universe, the latter continuously returning to the Origin”.One of the many disastrous consequences of an ongoing repression of this trans-personal Ground of Being – and the mistaken assumption of the Absolute by a relative entity or self – is epitomized in our techno-industrial pursuit to convert the earth into one large global factory – reinforced by multinational monopoly. Herein, nature is viewed simply as exploitable “raw material” for a “manufacturing” process aimed at churning out “products” for the “consumer.” This apparent narrowing of human perspective is the logical result of paradigmatic trends linking back to the so-called Age of Enlightenment. Read more here
l’Home de la Mancha ” Jacquel Brel ” De Munt Brussel 1968.( in Dutch)
” l’Homme de la Mancha “Jacques Brel 1968
Amerikaanse musical met ouverture door Mitch Leigh. Libretto op tekst van Joe Darion. Vertaling naar het Frans van de Broadway versie door Jacques Brel. Inleiding. De man van La Mancha is een Amerikaanse musical gebaseerd op de door Cervantes geschreven roman. De vernuftige edelman Don Quichotte is de man van la Mancha. De eerste versie was een toneelstuk van 1 h 30 met als titel ” Don Quichotte ” , in productie gebracht voor de Amerikaanse TV in 1959. Men paste het werk aan om op het podium te kunnen brengen, maar regisseur Albert Mane raadde Wasserman aan er een musical van te maken. Voor het toneelstuk werden nu liedjes geschreven door Joe Darion die de basis zouden worden van het toneelstuk en die werden op muziek gezet door Mitch Leigh. De nu originele Amerikaanse versie ging nu in première in 1965 en werd meer dan 2000 keer opgevoerd in Broadway. De belangrijkste rollen waren Cervantes/Don Quichotte door Richard Kiley, Dulcinée door Joan Dienes en Sancho Pancho door Irving Jacobs. In 1968 heeft Jacques Brel deze musical op Broadway gezien en was er zo door gecharmeerd dat hij er een Franse vertaling en bewerking van maakte onder de titel van ” l’Homme de la Mancha “. Brels versie zou op 4 oktober in première gaan aan de Koninklijke Muntschouwburg te Brussel en Brel zou zelf de regie voor zich nemen en de hoofdrol vertolken . Op 11 december ging ook de première van start te Parijs aan de ” Olympia “. Synopsis. Het is de laat zestiende eeuw. De mislukte schrijver-soldaat-acteur en belastingsgeld-inner Miguel de Cervantes is door de Spaanse Inquisitie, samen met zijn onafscheidelijke vriend en bediende Sancho Pancho in de kerker gegooid. De twee hebben al hun bezittingen bij zich. In de kerker worden ze door medegevangenen, onder leiding van de gouverneur en de cynische hertog gedwongen deel te nemen aan een nepproces. Als Cervantes schuldig bevonden wordt zal hij zijn bezittingen moeten overdragen. Cervantes stemt hiermee in , maar wil een kostbaar manuscript achterhouden. Hij wil zich daarom in het proces verdedigen. Hij wil dit doen in de vorm van een toneelstuk waarin alle gevangenen hun rol zullen spelen. En dit wordt geaccepteerd. Cervantes transformeert zich in Alonso Quijana, een oude heer die veel boeken van ridderlijkheid heeft gelezen. Hij heeft zoveel nagedacht over onrecht dat hij niet meer normaal kan denken en nu van mening is dat hij als dolend ridder verder moet gaan om het onrecht te bestrijden. Hij hernoemt zich in Don Quichot van la Mancha, hij wil samen met zijn vriend als wapenknecht, Sancho Pancha de wereld verbeteren. Als ze op stap gaan ziet hij een windmolen aan voor een reus en wil deze verslaan, een herberg aanziet hij als een kasteel en eenmaal aan de herberg aangekomen neemt hij het scheerbekken van de barbier voor een speciale helm die de drager onoverwinnelijk moet maken. In de herberg ontmoet hij zijn droomprinses Dulcinea, maar het is in werkelijkheid een meisje van lichte zeden Aldonza, Don Quichot is heel vriendelijk tegen haar, maar ze begrijpt er niets van. Vertwijfeld vraagt ze aan Sancho waarom hij Don Quichot volgt, zij is niet gewend dat mannen aardig tegen haar zijn. Sterker nog, voor weinig geld moet ze naar bed met de muildierdrijvers. Het kan haar niks schelen met wie, uiteindelijk wordt Pedro uitgekozen. Ondertussen is met Antonia ook kennis gemaakt, een nicht van don Quichot, zijn enige erfgenaam. Zij en haar verloofde Dr. Carnasco ( de hertog) zijn uit op zijn geld en willen hem weer normaal maken. Ze proberen dit door een pastoor in te schakelen, die echter erkent dat ze een droom najagen. Don Quichot verzoekt de herbergier( die wordt gespeeld door de gouverneur) om hem tot ridder te slaan, maar dan moet Don Quichot eerst buiten een nachtwake doen over zijn wapens. Hij doet dit met Aldonza die nog steeds niet met Pedro naar bed is geweest, omdat ze worstelt met de aandacht die Don Quichot haar gaf. Don Quichot zingt hier dan de wereldsong ( ” La Quiete – l’imposible réve “). Pedro komt ook naar buiten en slaat Aldonza, omdat ze hem zo lang laat wachten. Don Quichot komt tussen beiden en begint met Pedro een gevecht. Samen met Aldonza, Sancho worden Pedro en de inmiddels toegesnelde muildierdrijver verslagen. Don Quichot moet de herberg verlaten en wordt door de herbergier nog wel tot ” ridder van de droevige figuur ” geslagen. De wetten van het ridderschap eisen volgens Don Quichot, dat de slachtoffers weer op de been geholpen worden. Aldonza doet dit omdat Don Quichot daarvoor te zwak is geworden, maar de ezeldrijvers slaan haar, verkrachten haar en nemen haar mee. Dat laatste weet hij niet want hij hoort dat pas als hij Aldonza terug ziet vol met blauwe plakken in de herberg. Don Quichot en Sancho moeten terugkeren naar de herberg omdat ze hun bezittingen in bewaring hadden achtergelaten bij de moorse dansers. Don Quichot wil Aldonza wreken, maar zij wil met niets meer te maken hebben. dan komt een ridder binnen met zijn gevolg met spiegels als schilden. Die beledigt Aldonza en Don Quichot verdedigt haar en valt de ridder aan. Don Quichot kan echter niets uitrichten want hij ziet in de spiegels alleen zichzelf en deinst daarvan terug, hij schrikt er zo van . De ridder in de spiegels blijkt Dr Carasco te zijn, de toekomstige echtgenoot van Antonia. De Carasco wil Don Quichot weer bij zinnen brengen en als Don Quichotte instort vertelt hij hem dat de enige mogelijkheid was om hem terug tot zichzelf te brengen . Don Quichot geraakt echter in coma en ontwaakt hieruit door een vrolijk lied van Sancho. Don Quichot is nu volkomen normaal en herinnert zich zijn dwaas bestaan als een droom. Dan komt Aldonza binnen die niet meer kan verdagen dat ze Dulcinea niet is. Eerst herkent Don Quichot haar niet maar zij zingt Dulcinea en een aantal regels uit de song (l’Impossibele rève ) en Don Quichot herinnert zich nu alles weer en wil uit bed stappen om zijn weg als ridder te gaan vervolgen. Echter gedurende het zingen van de tweede reprise van het titelnummer ” l’Homme de la Mancha ” kreunt hij en valt hij dood neer. Aldonza verklaart dat ze nu Dulcinea is en dat voor haar Don Quichot altijd zal blijven leven. De Inquisitie komt binnen om Cervantes mee te nemen naar het proces. De gevangenen vinden hem niet schuldig en geven hem zijn manuscript terug. Het is nog zijn onafgewerkte roman over Don Quichot de la Mancha. Als Cervantes en zijn dienaar ten slotte de trap naar hun naderend proces betreden zingen de gevangenen als afscheid ( ” l’Impossibele rève “).
Jacques Brel says: “The supreme madness is to see life as it is and not as it should be, … things are only what we want to believe they are ...”
“I can’t Breathe” is the expression of the Crisis of the modern world.
But this protest, this Cry show us the real problem of the Modern man:
Modern man is a human without Soul, without the “Living Breath”.
The protest is the expression of his deep spiritual Crisis in the times of deep ignorance..
Modern man suffocates and cries: “i can’t breathe” , because a human without “the living Breath” is always dying. It is his only certainty in life, man shall once die and all traditions in the world teach us to take care of our Soul, our “Living Breath”, always in our daily life, but sure at the moment when we are dying. Modern man is the only one of all the traditions of the world who dares to think that he is right to live without his soul and without his “Living Breath”. What an arrogance and Vanity! But remember Vanity is the quality of being vain, something that is vain, it is always empty, or valueless. Read more here
Free yourselves from mental slavery – part 1
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery: The origin and meaning behind Bob Marley’s Redemption song.
We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”“Redemption Song” by Bob Marley
Those words are widely associated with the lyrics in “Redemption Song” by Robert Nesta (Bob) Marley:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.The Work That Has Been Done, Marcus Garvey, October 31, 1937, Sydney Nova Scotia
Few know those sentences and thereby the song’s true meaning. Those words can be traced to Marcus Garvey. In fact though Garvey’s movement was disparaged as being a “Back to Africa” movement, Garvey and his supporters refer to it as a movement for “African Redemption,” which has a reference in the song’s title. The earliest known reference to the concept of “African Redemption” can be found in a letter written by Benjamin Lundy on May 28th, 1833. The letter was addressed to the Annual Convention of Free People of Color Convention due to meet in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lundy’s words to that effect are as follows:
A new era has opened upon the world! The “dark age” of African oppression is drawing to its close; and the happy “millennium” of African redemption is near at hand! Let the inhabitants of that ill-fated continent rejoice, and her children wherever scattered, sing praises to the Most High, on the “banks of deliverance.”
In Garvey’s only work that can be considered an actual book “The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey” Volume 1 is “Dedicated to the true and loyal members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the cause of African redemption.”
Thereby it can be claimed Bob Marley paraphrased Marcus Garvey’s speech “The Work That Has Been Done” for not only that key lyric, but the song’s title as well. The speech is presented in its entirety below. Read more here
Modern-day Quixotes living out their errant myth.
Fast forward to the recent siege in Malheur, Oregon, where we have: a self-styled militia visualizing themselves as heroes and patriots, knights if you will, in cowboy hats instead of a knight’s helmet, fighting not for an imagined lady but for an imaginary version of the Constitution and against an imagined tyranny, attacking not a windmill but an empty federal wildlife sanctuary building, riding in pickup trucks and SUVs rather than on the imagined steed Rocinante, and wielding, instead of a lance, an American flag on a standard and automatic weapons.
They imagined that ex-Navy Seals and other veterans would rally to their cause and join them, but no one came, and their self-perceived heroic exploit likewise ended up in a messy heap. While their actual motivations have been shown to be selfish economic ones, they were able to suppress that fact into the background and instead created and elevated for themselves and to the public their own dark myth, or more accurately became the prisoners of it. Their angst and that of like-minded people is an outcome the accelerated breakdown of their old myths and inability to adjust, prompting them to project enemies everywhere and construct new myths, which seem not to have been developed or held in a self-aware manner.
Because the underlying process is psychological and largely unconscious, the manifestations are varied and in the end constellate into a whole complex of interchangeable vehicles that reflect the same underlying fears, leading such people to rally to multiple, interchangeable causes to vent them. Thus, for example, one of the Malheur militia protesting federal “tyranny,” Jon Ritzheimer, also maintains an anti-Muslim website and recently led an anti-Muslim rally in Arizona wearing a t-shirt saying “F**k Islam.” We can multiply the examples of (and vehicles for) tragic wayward personal and group myths, such as that in the mind of the crazed Charleston shooter, Christian (and Islamic, and Jewish) fundamentalism, Confederate flag lovers, extremist gun culture, the Tea Party, climate change denial, rising religious intolerance, and proposals to ban immigration by targeted ethnic and religious groups.
So looking ahead to the near future, it becomes important, for example, to evaluate the messages of the current presidential candidates in the above mythological terms, dysfunctional myths become more dangerous when held and promoted by those in power. What dysfunctional myths does Donald Trump hold and ask us to buy into when he wants to ban Muslim immigration (and throw them out of his political rallies), stereotypes unauthorized Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists and proposes sending them back to Mexico, characterizes various people as “losers” (and himself as a winner), and more vaguely vows to “make America great again”? (What mythological America is that?) And what about the evangelical Ted Cruz seeking to reinstate the old religious myths? But, then, what underlying myth has caused Trump (at least in some polls) to enjoy nearly as much or more support than Cruz among evangelicals? (Since seemingly competing manifestations derive from the same underlying myth, cognitive dissonance can be at work so that both of them can be held, even if one of them, well, trumps the other.) So beware not only of Greeks bearing gifts, but also of politicians bearing myths. And let’s do our myths the right way.
2 February: the mythology and ritual behind groundhog Day by Arthur George”
Groundhog Day is our first holiday that formally looks forward to spring weather, optimistically reminding us that it will come sooner or later, the interesting question being which it will be. The equivalent holiday worked likewise for our ancestors centuries ago, with one difference: Technically the date actually was the beginning of spring. Today we regard this holiday as quaint and secular, but in centuries past it was mythological and religious, featuring rituals that were taken seriously. This holiday, Carnival, and Valentine’s Day are actually related, as we shall see, so this is just the first in a trilogy of posts about our interrelated February holidays.
The importance of what is now the beginning of February goes back even to Neolithic times. In Ireland we find in Neolithic monuments alignments for the rising sun on this date, which became the festival of Imbolc. According to the Irish myth Tochmarc Emire(“The Wooing of Emer”), the maiden Emer named the calendar points of the year, including Imbolc, when setting up a challenge to her half-divine suitor, the hero Cú Chulainn, to remain awake for an entire year in order to win her. She divided the seasons of the year according to the four days which fall roughly halfway between the solstices and equinoxes (called cross-quarter days), now the first days of February, May, August, and November.
Emer called the opening of spring Imbolc, after the lactation and milking of ewes which began at that time of year . Thus, for Ireland anyway, was created what is commonly called the Celtic calendar. Our practice of dividing the seasons at the equinoxes and solstices is relatively recent, coming to full fruition only in the 20th century, following the lead of America. But even today in America, we still have at least three holidays marking the old seasonal divisions: Groundhog Day, May Day, and Halloween. (The first-fruits or harvest festival of August 1 is not observed here in our industrialized society, but it continues in some places, such as Lughnasa in Ireland.)
In Irish mythology, the Lughnasadh festival is said to have begun by the god Lugh (modern spelling: Lú) as a funeral feast and athletic competition (see funeral games) in commemoration of his mother or foster-mother Tailtiu.[
Before the advent of the Gregorian calendar, this beginning of spring occurred on February 14, which is now assigned to Valentine’s Day .
All four cross-quarter days were considered days of transition, when the veils between the normal and supernatural worlds were thin. So it was natural that people practiced divination on these holidays, which pertained not just to when the warm weather would arrive, but also more generally to the season’s crops, prospects for marriage, and other matters of concern. People also sought supernatural blessings for protection against sickness, blight, evil spirits, and other nasty things. For this purpose, protective fires, in the form of bonfires, torches, and candles were also part of rituals. In Christian times the Irish thought that St. Brigit traveled around Ireland on the eve of her holiday (Christianized Imbolc, called St. Brigit’s Day, thought of as her birthday, appropriately at the start of spring), conferring blessings on people and their livestock, and visiting their homes. Accordingly, the Irish had home rituals designed to welcome her into their homes and receive her blessings
When it came to divining the weather, people used various mediums to determine what was coming, including animals, which is natural: Any farmer or herdsman can predict the weather by watching the animals. Most important were hibernating animals, which emerge from their winter sleep in the spring.
In Ireland, just to see a hedgehog (the European holiday equivalent of our groundhog) on February 1 was a good sign ; not surprisingly, the hedgehog came to be connected with St. Brigit, and its behavior on her day was thought to predict the weather. The focus on the hedgehog (or badger) for divining the weather was most pronounced in Germany, however, which is how this holiday ritual made it to America via the so-called Pennsylvania “Dutch,” which was originally “Deutsch” since these immigrants were really Germans (who then used the American groundhog as the oracular animal). It was from Germany that the idea spread that the animal seeing his shadow on February 1 meant a continuation of winter for several weeks, whereas seeing no shadow meant that the warm weather was about to come, in which case the animal should remain out of hibernation.
People are often puzzled why a sunny Groundhog’s Day, when the groundhog sees its shadow, means that winter will continue, but cloudy or bad weather portends that spring weather is nearly upon us. Doesn’t this seem backwards? The answer, I suspect, lies in the original mythology lying behind the holiday ritual.
The people playing the bears either dress in costumes made of straw, or are actually wrapped in straw. The straw used may be that of wheat, rye, oats, spelt or peastraw; twigs and modern artificial materials have also been used. The bears may be relatively realistic in appearance, with detailed masks,[1] or fully rounded headpieces,[2] or they may be more abstract, with narrow heads like a long, tapering sheaf.
Only when the population of bears in Europe was diminished did people resort to hedgehogs as a substitute for divination on this day. Bears were the largest, most powerful and magnificent creatures in Europe, the king of beasts, like lions in the more southern climes. Venerated since prehistoric times, the bear was the oldest zoomorphic deity (Campbell, p. 127), and they have figured prominently in myths, folktales, and art. Some of their traits are similar to humans, so they were viewed in anthropomorphic (including totemic) terms, often viewed as the ancestors of humans. They also could move between worlds, and thus were thought even to instruct shamans. Importantly, they also were considered spirit or soul animals, and their shadow was thought of as their soul.
The process of hibernating in the winter and emerging back into the world in the spring was thought of in terms of death and rebirth , much like the seasonal death and rebirth of plants.
In the winter, life goes back into the womb of the earth (death), only to be reborn. When the bear “dies” and for so long as it is dead before it is ready to be reborn, its soul must remain in the underworld. So, if it emerges from hibernation (its “little death” ) on February 1 and sees its shadow (soul) on earth, this emergence is premature: It must return for a few weeks because it has not yet completed the sleep of death and rebirth, so spring weather must await. On the other hand, if he sees no shadow, then he has truly completed the full cycle of death and rebirth, so spring can begin and he can remain above ground. Such seasonal, cyclic processes of nature also resulted in spiritual analogues in the form of ancient mystery rites such as the Eleusinian and Mithraic mysteries, where candidates were initiated in underground caverns and experienced (spiritual) rebirth.
In the Film Groundhog Day, the “dead” Phil undergoes rebirth like the holiday animal and the season according to the original mythology of the holiday, but not before he/the groundhog (literally together, and “driving” the point home) enter into the abyss.
The above hibernation mythology helps us to understand the meaning of the famous and insightful Bill Murray film, Groundhog Day.There Murray’s character is equated with the groundhog: He is named Phil, like the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, and like the groundhog he is a weatherman. But appropriately he fails to predict the wintry weather that descends upon him that day, setting up his personal ordeal. Phil is stuck in Punxsutawney in the winter in a hotel, so he is figuratively in hibernation, in a state of spiritual death. This is paralleled by the groundhog in the film seeing his shadow. In one scene in the breakfast restaurant, when another customer learns that the weatherman’s name is Phil, the customer says, “Watch out for your shadow.” This is a psychological reference: In order to escape his fate Phil must confront his own shadow.
Thus, while potentially Phil could emerge from his self-induced plight on Groundhog Day in accordance with the mythology, he is not yet spiritually ready to do so. Therefore, he is fated to re-emerge from his hotel-room lair each morning to re-live Groundhog Day over and over again, like the bear whose soul has not yet undergone transformation. He must keep returning to re-hibernate until he gains in wisdom and is worthy, such that his old soul can be left behind when he emerges into the outdoors on holiday morning. His process is much like that of karma and reincarnation; indeed, in one phase of the film, he literally does die each day and is reborn each next morning, only to keep trying until he figures out how to live. In the end, by eventually learning to love and be authentic, he is finally reborn, both physically and spiritually, into a new day and a new way of life.
Today, Groundhog Day is but a shadow (so to speak) of its former self: It is no longer observed at the beginning of spring, there is no bear, the original mythology has been lost, and the ritual is simply taken in jest. But at least we have a fine film to remind us in part of what this occasion originally meant to people, and what the holiday can still mean for us.
14 februari : St Valentine
The most original and enduring symbol of Valentine’s Day is a heart pierced by the arrow of Cupid, Eros in ancient Greece. It is not obvious, however, what this pagan image and the mythology that lies behind it should have to do with the third-century CE Christian martyr St. Valentine. The road from Eros to the Saint and then on to our holiday that bears his name is as tortuous as it is fascinating. As we shall see, at all points along the road – except for Valentine himself! – the ultimate idea has been about celebrating the spring season and the various themes that it has evoked in myth, literature, philosophy, and art, love being not the only such theme.
In Greek myth Eros was not originally the cute cherub that people visualize today. In fact, originally he could not be visualized at all because he was not even a deity, and so at first was represented simply by a herm. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Eros self-generated into existence once Chaos and Earth came into being (lines 116-23). Eros was the driving force behind the universe responsible for every other created thing, the motor of generation and procreation. Eros is usually translated as “Love” because Eros as a force manifests itself in humans as the passionate desire that drives physical love, and hence procreation. Eros was thought to strike our hearts because in the ancient world the heart was considered the repository of thought as well as of the affective powers (e.g., emotions, intuition, wisdom), as evidenced by our heart pounding when we are excited and inspired. The primal power of Eros was overwhelming and could not be resisted by humans, gods or goddesses, or anything else. The result is what we see in nature: fertility, life, and the seasons.
Eventually Eros came to be represented as an Erote, a type of winged sprite (ker) that both symbolizes and mediates the coming of life, and so also spring. Hence Theognis (Eleg. 1275) wrote:
Love [Eros] comes at this hour, comes with the flowers of spring, . . Love comes, scattering seed for man upon earth.
Indeed, Eros as an Erote was usually depicted holding sprigs of foliage or sprays of flowers, and also could be seen watering flowers in a garden (Harrison, pp. 633-35). Eros later evolved from an Erote into a fully formed, handsome youth (ephebos) with golden wings, and his power was then represented by the arrows that he sent into the hearts of humans and gods alike.
Eros portrayed on a red-figured cylix, holding a spray of flowers, as the creative spirit moving upon the waters. Cf. Genesis 1:2, and so likewise Sophocles (Ant. 781): “O rover of the seas, O terrible one/In wastes and wildwood caves,/None may escape thee, none.”
The Greek philosophers also got ahold of Eros, making him the inspiration of lofty philosophical ideas. The most famous example is the discussion about the nature of Love (Eros) in Plato’s Symposium. To understand that dialogue properly we must put aside our contemporary notions of love and appreciate that Plato’s symposiasts were debating the question against the traditional mythological background of Love as Eros; Hesiod’s above-mentioned creation myth is even quoted at near the beginning (178b).
At the end of the dialogue, the prevailing idea emerged that the primal power of Eros can serve as a starting point to inspire and guide a person in realizing beauty in earthly nature, and from there shed these illusions and eventually realize pure, heavenly beauty – “beauty’s very self” – so that when such person “has brought forth and reared this perfect virtue, he shall be called the friend of god, and, and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him” (211e-212a). Somewhat analogously, in the Orphic tradition (where Eros had similarly self-generated, but from the cosmic egg), Eros as a fertility figure played a key role in Orphic mysteries, mediating the initiations .
Having discussed Eros as leading to an experience of God, we can turn to that man of God said to lead to love, St. Valentine. In fact we know almost nothing reliable about this murky figure. Most probably he was a bishop in Terni, Italy, who was martyred about 269 CE, supposedly on February 14. Catholic tradition also posits a second St. Valentine, a priest in Rome who also was martyred the same year, also on February 14. The prevailing view among scholars today is that the bishop of Terni is the real historical personage, but that his figure was then cloned in Rome and mythologized onto that of the nonexistent Roman priest. The stories about this priest were then attributed back to the bishop, which explains why the oldest stories about them are so similar. Both were said to heal people, whom they converted, thus arousing the ire of Roman authorities, as a result of which they were beheaded, both on February 14, which became the Saint’s feast day.) But none of the earliest stories, nor those of the next thousand years or so, contained or even prefigured any of the love and matchmaking themes and customs that we now associate with Valentine’s Day. We had to await the genius of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), who has been called “the original mythmaker” in this instance , to make the connection and put us back on the path to Eros.
Chaucer put Valentine’s Day on the map in his poem, Parliament of Fowls, in which birds gather on February 14 to choose their mates:
You well know how on Saint Valentine’s day, By my statute and through my ordinance, You come to choose your mates, As I prick you with sweet pain, And then fly on your way. [Lines 386-90]
Scholars over the centuries have tried long and hard to figure out how Chaucer got the idea to link the Saint with the coming of spring, but they have never been able to find an earlier tradition that he could have relied upon . The troubadours, for instance, wrote about love, birds, and the spring, but never mentioned or made a connection with St. Valentine. Rather, it seems that Chaucer’s creative genius simply combined existing bird lore and traditions of spring with the coincidence of St. Valentine’s feast day falling on the appropriate date of February 14. There was already a tradition of spring beginning on February 1, while other medieval calendars and sources marked the beginning of spring in mid-February when the sun moved into Pisces . Indeed, by then signs of spring were appearing, not only birds singing and mating but also some spring flowers, and some farming activity such as the pruning and grafting of trees. An observant poet like Chaucer would not miss this.
Once Chaucer had penned his poem, a cascade of other literature followed connecting the Saint with love. John Gower (1330-1408) and John Lydgate (1370-1451) both wrote that birds choose their mates on Valentine’s Day, Lydgate also making Valentine a type of poem. Sir John Clanvowe (1341-91) wrote The Book of Cupid. Soon members of the aristocracy in England and France started writing love notes on Valentine’s Day, and the custom had reached the commoners by the mid-to late 17th century. From the outset these valentines were decorated, most commonly with hearts and cupids.
Once Valentine’s Day had become a holiday and tradition, further mythmaking about the Saint followed. For example, while an old 5th or 6th century account told that the Saint had healed the blind daughter of his jailer and then converted the whole family to Christianity, now a detail was added that on the eve of his martyrdom the Saint wrote a farewell note to the young lady (implying that he was in love with her), thus accounting for the origin of Valentine notes.
As another example, the idea of connecting the origin of some Valentine’s Day traditions (matchmaking and love-notes) with the Roman pagan mid-February festival of Lupercalia also surfaced, beginning in a 1756 century book by Alban Butler and embellished in 1807 by Francis Douce, a notion that scholars disproved long ago but which nevertheless persists in contemporary books and on the Internet .
Quite apart from what Saint Valentine really did, today we have an image and dynamic of Valentine’s Day that harks back in important ways to the Greek concept of Eros. The occasion of this holiday can encourage us not only to celebrate our bond with our beloved but also to turn the force of our love and compassion toward the highest spiritual ends. At the same time, and quite apart from themes of romance, history shows us that the holiday is also a celebration of the coming of spring, like Groundhog Day and Carnival.
The Bear, the Harlot, the Magician and the King by Lloyd D. GrahamIn the Epic of Gilgamesh, the seduction of the wild man Enkidu by Shamhat theharlot symbolically causes his death as an unreflective animal and his rebirth as ahuman – an Eden-like fall into self-awareness. Created as a match for kingGilgamesh of Uruk, Enkidu goes on to become the king’s beloved friend. InEuropean folk traditions, the Wild Man is interchangeable with the bear, andparallels can be drawn between Enkidu and the Candlemas Bear associated withCarnival. Since Enkidu symbolises our pre-human nature, one can perceive afigurative truth to the pan-European folk belief that people are descended from bears.Thematic overlaps exist between some Gilgamesh narratives and European folk-tales about a Wild Man whose father was a bear (the Bear’s Son / Jean de l’Ours motif) or about twin boys, one of whom was raised in the wild by a female bear (Valentine and Orson). Perhaps surprisingly, the roots of Santa Claus lie in the Wild Man. So too do the origins of Merlin, the wizard of medieval Arthurian romance. Merlin has elements in common with Enkidu, while King Arthur can be seen as a metaphorical “Bear’s son.” Over time, the status of the Wild Man has changed from a wholly inhuman monster to a “noble savage” who today might even be cast as a salvific ecowarrior. Read here
It is the story of twin brothers, abandoned in the woods in infancy. Valentine is brought up as a knight at the court of Pepin, while Orson grows up in a bear’s den to be a wild man of the woods, until he is overcome and tamed by Valentine, whose servant and comrade he becomes. In some versions, the pair discover their true history with the help of a magical brazen head. The two eventually rescue their mother Bellisant, sister of Pepin and wife of the emperor of Greece, by whom she had been unjustly repudiated, from the power of a giant named Ferragus.
Early Modern Versions
The tale is probably based on a lost French original, with Orson originally described as “sans nom” i.e. the “nameless” one. A 14th-century French chanson de geste, Valentin et Sansnom (i.e. Valentin and “Nameless”) has not survived but was translated/adapted in medieval German as Valentin und Namelos (first half of the 15th century).[1]
The kernel of the story lies in Orson’s upbringing and wildness, and is evidently a folk-tale the connection of which with the Carolingian cycle is purely artificial. The story of the wife unjustly accused with which it is bound up is sufficiently common, and was told of the wives both of Pippin and Charlemagne. The work has a number of references to other, older, works, including: Floovant, The Four Sons of Aymon, Lion de Bourges, and Maugis d’Aigremont.[1]
Like nearly all popular romances of chivalry of the period, the French chanson de geste was adapted into a prose romance by the end of the 15th century;[2] several versions from the 16th century are extant; the oldest prose version dates from 1489[1] (published in Lyon by Jacques Maillet).[2] An English-language version, The Historye of the two Valyannte Brethren: Valentyne and Orson, written by Henry Watson, printed by William Copland about 1550, is the earliest known of a long series of English versions – some of which included illustrations. One such illustrated variant of the tale was prepared by S R Littlwood and accompanied by the illustrations of Florence Anderson when published in 1919. It is known that Richard Hathwaye and Anthony Munday produced a theatrical version of it in 1598.
Other Renaissance versions exist in Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch,[1] German, and Icelandic. The number of translations show a European success for the tale.[1] The works of François Rabelais have a number of echoes to the romance.[2]
Carnival
The festival’s inventive costumes, float parades, and jovial and irreverent atmosphere was not only great fun but also piqued my interest in the holiday. As it turns out, a lot of myth underlies Carnival’s rituals, and also explains why this holiday originated in southern Europe. Carnival is usually thought of as a last chance to feast and make merry before the privations of Lent, but the roots of the holiday’s rituals are deeper and older. Carnival also has to do with the seasonal transition from winter to spring. Carnivals typically include such rituals as an irreverent parade/procession, excessive feasting and drunkenness, masks and costumes (masquerade), contests, sexual license, and role reversals in which people of lower social rank gain stature and authority and are free to speak their mind and are served by their usual masters who now must obey them. This reversal also typically includes the temporary removal of the ruler and appointment of a temporary mock ruler, who is then ousted at Carnival’s end (in some ancient cultures he actually may have been killed as a sacrifice).Holidays having such rituals are known as festivals of dissolution (or of reversal or inversion). They normally occur during a seasonal transition from one state of being into another, whether astronomical in nature (e.g., solstice, equinox) or in terms of human activity (e.g., sowing, harvest). The biggest and most important of these festivals of transition and dissolution is the New Year’s period, but they also occur at other times of year, including the transition from winter to spring, when we witness the rebirth of nature and the increased light of the sun. The concept behind festivals of dissolution derives from ancient creation myths. The ancients conceived of the creation process as one of instilling order and structure to the cosmos, which features pairs of opposites, multiplicity, and hierarchy. In the human sphere this meant, among other things, social distinctions and stratification, and in particular the institution of kingship, thought of as a form of order that keeps order. Before the creation existed chaos, which was eliminated as a result of the creation. Thus, for example, Genesis 1:2 depicts a formless and dark void existing before God begins the creative process. The annual progression through the seasons and astronomical alignments was thought of as a journey through distinctive stages and modes of being. The coming into being of a new stage (e.g., a new year, spring) also was viewed as a new creation, though a more modest one in terms of the particular seasonal changes that occur. But in order for such a new creation to be possible, the prior stage (e.g., the old year, winter) had to be dismantled and reduced to chaos. This recurring pattern of a reversion to primordial chaos and new creation in mythic rituals/holidays is known as “the myth of the eternal return” (Eliade). Such are festivals of dissolution. -Mariage of May queen and May king in Folklore: “Boerenbruiloft” in Venlo,Holland The most fundamental holiday ritual is that of New Year’s, which in many ancient cultures was literally considered to involve the re-creation of the entire cosmos. The classic case was the New Year’s festival in ancient Babylon, celebrated near the spring equinox. Its rituals featured elements of dissolution, including the confining of the creator god Marduk in the underworld among criminals, resulting human chaos in which the populace roamed the streets looking for him, the temporary humiliation and removal of the king, the eventual battle for creation in which Marduk defeats the chaos monster Tiamat, and finally a triumphal procession and the restoration of Marduk’s and royal power (i.e., order). Other seasonal transitions constitute miniature versions of re-creation, so their festivals also feature elements of dissolution. Carnival has its origins in the ancient Greek and Roman world. In Greece the principal festival of dissolution was the Kronia, held after the summer harvest and thus representing the transition into the post-harvest regime of life heading towards winter. It is named after the Titan Cronos, who according to myth ruled the universe during the Golden Age of mankind, where there was no hunger, death, sickness, or social distinctions or oppression. But then Zeus established the later order of the cosmos by defeating Cronos in battle. Zeus imprisoned Cronos for a while in the underworld realm of Tartarus, but eventually let him out and assigned him to rule over the Elysian Islands, a paradise of the dead where, among other things, again there was a primordial equality with no social distinctions, and other features of the Golden Age. Kronia reflects this legacy of Cronos (as well as perhaps his originally being a harvest god – he did, after all, wield a sickle). During the festival the usual order of society was suspended. Among other things, slaves banqueted and played games with their owners, who waited on their slaves, who ran riot through the streets making noise. This represented a reversion to the Golden Age of Cronus when oppression and social distinctions did not exist . At the end of the festival, a criminal who had previously been condemned to death (a mark of chaos and disorder) was led out, given wine, and slain. This marked the end of dissolution and the moment of transition into the next seasonal modality of being. The Romans identified their god Saturn with Cronus (an exile after being defeated by Zeus, landing in Italy (Virgil, 8.320-25)), who as a historical matter may have landed in Rome through Greek influence on Etruria, where he may originally have been an agricultural deity, especially of sowing. Saturn’s festival, called the Saturnalia, was traditionally December 17-23, which was both just after the winter sowing and at the winter solstice. After 153 BCE, when the civil New Year was transferred from March 1 to January 1, the Saturnalia also served as the winding down of the old year. As a result, the holiday became the classic Roman festival of dissolution. At the start of the festival in Rome, the cult statue of Saturn, who was bound by woolen fetters all year, was released, signifying a time of liberation. After a sacrifice to him and a banquet open to all people on December 17, the celebrations became a festival of reversal, which like in the Kronia was a reversion to the Golden Age. Masters waited on their slaves, who ate before their masters did. The formal toga was shunned in favor of colored Greek-style clothing (the synthesis), and both master and slave wore the conical felt cap (pilleus) which was the mark of a freedman (i.e., slaves, being not free, could not normally wear it, meaning that he was “free” for the period of the festival). Slaves were also entitled to free speech, and they could disrespect their masters. Slaves and masters played gambling games together, and there was also gambling on the streets. Women played a more prominent role than usual. People also wore masks and costumes. Overeating and drunkenness was the rule. In the imperial period (though not before), a mock “king” (actually princeps, perhaps in response to this informal title adopted by Augustus) was appointed for the duration of the festival, whose orders had to be followed.
Portrayal of Roman Saturnalia
Rome also had another old festival in late-February, the Regifugium (“flight of the king”), tied to the coming of the traditional March 1 New Year and the coming of spring. There the real king (this was the ancient time of the kingship) temporarily abdicated in favor of a mock king, who at the end of the festival fled (or originally might have been sacrificed). During the festival people held costumed celebrations and dances . This was also the time of year when epagomenal days were inserted after the end of the year in order to readjust the calendar, thus creating a liminal period out of normal time. (Originally, the Romans had no months between December and March.) This period of the Roman calendar, the same time as European Carnival, appears to be the true Roman source of the Carnival-type rituals that later appeared in the Saturnalia after January became the beginning of the civil New Year. The European Carnival originated in Italy and harks back to these local traditions. When Christianity took hold, the Lenten season leading into Easter matched the transition into spring in timing and in spirit. Carnival became an institutionalized pre-Lenten festival of dissolution. At the practical level, it was an opportunity to eat up the last winter stores of meat which would soon be spoiling. (The word Carnival probably comes from the Italian carne levare, meaning to take away meat )). Likewise, it was a last chance to eat cheese, milk, and eggs, which were forbidden during Lent. This was accomplished by making pancakes for the occasion, which also symbolized the spring sun. Carnival spread form Italy into southern France (of which the Nice Carnival is a legacy) and the Iberian Peninsula. From France it spread to New Orleans (Mardi Gras) and from Iberia to Rio. On Mardi Gras, we still have a mock king who rules the French Quarter of New Orleans until midnight on Ash Wednesday. In the north of Europe, Carnival as such did not become such a typical tradition, but equivalent rituals of dissolution, including masquerades, developed on Shrove Tuesday, especially in the British Isles. The Jewish festival of Purim gained its masquerading and general dissolution tradition among Jews in 15th-century Italy, influenced by Carnival there. So as we don our Carnival masks, it is instructive to remember that the mask entails not only our own personal temporary transformation into another archetypal being in sacred time, but also that doing so sets the stage for (and according to older mythical thinking, assists in) a more fundamental transformation of the season and stage in our normal life.
Carnival, an upside down world
Carnival corresponds today to the period reserved to diversion, between Twelfth Night (Epiphany) and Ash Wednesday, first Lent day. It reaches its climax at the end of the festivities, which means on Shrove Tuesday (“carnevale” in Italian) and is followed by a sudden return to the ordinary life. How far do carnivals as known as those of Venice in Italy, Nice in France, Cologne or Munich in Germany, Bale ou Zurich in Switzerland, Binche in Belgium, Rio in Brasil or New Orleans in the United-States, reflect the origins and foundations of festivals which gave birth to them ? Carnival and celebrations which gave birth to it constitute festivals of a strictly social character. These festivals do not aim at creating harmony of the being with the Cosmos, but the contrary as they systematically appeal to a reversal, an inversion of the cosmic world tendencies. Of course, such practices were an excellent catharsis for beings whose lives were rigidly regulated and offered a guarantee to the authorities regarding the maintenance of the social order. However, if these practices have fallen into disuse and if carnival is reduced today to an exhibition role where mocking the authorities is still a social outlet that is probably, as underlined by René Guénon, because the means of release, far from being limited to defined periods, have become part of the ordinary life. A life which has even taken on board the witch manifestations when the Halloween feast was brought into line with the style of the day, so far away from the upside down practices of the “Sabbath”.
Read also:Personal Inversion: Damnation or Redemption?
A brief but wide-ranging illustrated essay on being upside down, a recurring magico-religious motif. Negative in its earliest and most widespread forms, positive interpretations emerged within gnostic and patristic Christian traditions. Read Here
The Hanged Man. Trump card from the Liguria Piedmont Tarot; Italy, 1860. An Ox […] Became a Butcher. Central panel from an early/mid-18th century Russian “World Upside Down” broadsheet.14 State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Inversion of the Hanged Man. The man is now a dancer performing a jig.
Free yourselves of mental slavery – part 3
Meister Eckhart, a Mystic for Our Time
The scenario is bleak: Consumerism and materialism dominate all aspects of social life. Older people look with alarm at the crumbling of civic and religious institutions. Young people view the future with a sense of foreboding. Politicians appear self-interested, religious leaders hypocritical, business people ever more corrupt. Violence is escalating at home and abroad, with no ready solution in sight. Alienation and disorientation are pervasive. Whatever similarities we may find in our contemporary predicament, the society I’m describing is 14th-century Germany. As in 21st-century America or the world, many people of the time, feeling battered by the world around them, sought spiritual wisdom and a more profound connection to the divine. In the early 1300s, this meant that a large number of practicing Christians, laypeople and clerics alike, were searching for a more direct and satisfying experience of God’s presence than what they found in familiar institutional practices. The potential chaos embodied in these grassroots, subjective movements alarmed some Church leaders. From his seat in Avignon, Pope John XXII, while mostly concerned with matters of state, sought to rein in both the “radical” Franciscans, who preached the importance of apostolic poverty, and the women known as beguines, who formed what we would today call intentional religious communities — groups of spiritually likeminded laypeople, rather than members of a formal religious order, who lived and prayed together. In the midst of this tumult, many Christian seekers in the Rhineland of what is today western Germany found life-altering wisdom in the preaching of a Dominican friar, Eckhart von Hochheim, better known as Meister (“Master”) Eckhart. An acclaimed scholar trained at the University of Paris, Meister Eckhart sought to bring the fruits of his many years of theological and philosophical study and contemplation to lay audiences — an unusual aspiration among priest-scholars, who typically considered such matters beyond the comprehension of average people. Even more revolutionary was Eckhart’s message. Unlike most preachers of the day, who focused on sin and eternal punishment, he described a process he called “the divine birth,” in which true believers could experience God directly within them. The key lay in letting go of all worldly things, all desires and preconceptions — even one’s image of God himself: “The more completely you are able to draw in your powers to a unity and forget all those things and their images which you have absorbed, and the further you can get from creatures and their images, the nearer you are to this [divine birth] and the readier to receive it.” Then, he said — “in the midst of silence” — God would come within the soul. Read more here
Note: The Masks of God:
The Masks of Godtraces mankind’s history as a search for meaning through ideas, themes and quests of culture and religion.
The Masks of Godis the summation of Joseph Campbell’s lifelong study of the origins and function of myth. In volume 1 of the series, The Masks of God, Campbell examines the primitive roots of spiritual beliefs among our ancient ancestors. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology and psychology Primitive Mythology confirms the fundamental unity of mankind (not only biologically but in shared spiritual history).
In volume 2 of the series, Oriental Mythology, Campbell examines Eastern mythology as it developed in the distinctive religions of Egypt, India, China and Japan. Campbell examines Eastern mythology as it developed in the distinctive religions of Egypt, India, China and Japan. While Western religions dwell on good and evil, Eastern religions focus on the promise of eternal life. Oriental Mythology explores how Eastern religions came to manifest their varying modes of thought and expression.
In volume 3 of the series, Occidental Mythology, Campbell examines the themes that underlie the art, worship and literature of the Western world. , Campbell examines the themes that underlie the art, worship and literature of the Western world. Occidental Mythology traces European consciousness from the Levantine earth-goddesses of the Bronze Age and the subsequent tribal invasions that shaped Judaic and Greek myth before examining the influence of Persia, Rome, Islam and Christian Europe on ancient beliefs.
In volume 4 of the series,The Masks of God, Creative Mythology, Campbell examines the entire inner story of modern culture, spanning its philosophic, spiritual and cultural history since the Dark Ages and investigating modern man’s unique position as the creator of his own mythology.
Creative Mythology deepens our understanding of the post-medieval culture we have inherited. The Masks of God traces mankind s history as a search for meaning through the ideas, themes and quests of culture and religion.
A new collection of essays by the great traditionalist/perennialist Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. This collection has been edited by his son, Rama Coomaraswamy, who is well known for his writings on the Christian tradition. The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy contains 21 essays on topics reflecting the vast scope of Coomaraswamy’s intellect, including those topics with which he is most associated, such as symbolism, Eastern vs. Western thinking, mythology, literature, metaphysics, traditional art, folklore, and even more! For those new to Coomaraswamy’s writings, this is an excellent survey, and for those who cannot find some of his out-of-print essays, this collection may be the solution. The introduction by Rama P. Coomaraswamy includes a wonderful biography of his father with many details and from a perspective that have never been available before. Arvind Sharma wrote the foreword.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was a multi-talented researcher, scientist, linguist, expert on culture and art, philosopher, museum curator, and author. He was the first well-known author of the modern era to expound the importance of traditional arts, culture, and thought as more than simply relics of a bygone past. Dr. Coomaraswamy is often credited with reintroducing the concept of the “Perennial Philosophy” to a West dazed by the endless multiplicity of the modern world.
1. A Figure of Speech or a Figure of Thought? 2. The Bugbear of Literacy 3. On the Pertinence of Philosophy 4. Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 5. Beauty and Truth 6. The Interpretation of Symbols 7. Why Exhibit Works of Art? 8. The Christian and Oriental, or True, Philosophy of Art 9. Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life? 10. The Nature of Medieval Art 11. Ars sine scientia nihil 12. Imitation, Expression, and Participation 13. Samvega: “Aesthetic Shock” 14. What is Civilization? 15. The Nature of “Folklore” and “Popular Art” 16. Primitive Mentality 17. The Coming to Birth of the Spirit 18. Quod factum est in ipso vita erat 19. The Hindu Tradition: The Myth 20. The Hindu Tradition: Theology and Autology Glossary of Foreign Terms and Phrases Bibliographical References Biographical Notes Index Read here Free download
According to Professor Henry Corbin, one of the 20th century’s most prolific scholars of Islamic mysticism, Ibn ‘Arabî (1165–1240) was “a spiritual genius who was not only one of the greatest masters of Sufism in Islam, but also one of the great mystics of all time.” see The humandivinedotorg-Golgonooza
Imagination (khayâl), as Corbin has shown, plays a major role in Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings. In the Openings, for example, he says about it, “After the knowledge of the divine names and of self-disclosure and its all-pervadingness, no pillar of knowledge is more complete”.
He frequently criticizes philosophers and theologians for their failure to acknowledge its cognitive significance. In his view, ‘aql or reason, a word that derives from the same root as ‘iqâl, fetter, can only delimit, define, and analyze. It perceives difference and distinction, and quickly grasps the divine transcendence and incomparability. The term “al-‘aql” in Arabic is derived from the root word “ql,” which means to bind. In Islamic thought, it is used to describe the faculty that connects individuals to God. It is usually translated in English as intellect, intelligence, reason or rational faculty. Read more here
A visual rendition of the Islamic model of the soul showing the position of ‘aql relative to other concepts based on a consensus of 18 surveyed academic and religious experts.
In The Alchemy of Happiness, Al-Ghazzali describes the human being in the following metaphor:
The body is like a country. The artisans are like the hands, feet, and various parts of the body. Passion is like the tax collector. Anger or rage is like the sheriff. The heart is the king. Intellect is the prime minister. Passion, like a tax collector using any means, tries to extract everything. Rage and anger are severe, harsh and punishing like the police and want to destroy or kill. The ruler not only needs to control passion and rage, but also the intellect and must keep a balance among all these forces. If the intellect becomes dominated by passion or anger, the country will be in ruin and the ruler will be destroyed.
Rumi echoes the same theme when he describes the role of Conscious Reason in keeping a balance among our various desires:
God has given you Conscious Reason as an instrument for polishing the heart until its surface reflects. But you, prayerless, have bound the polisher and freed the two hands of sensuality. If you can restrain sensuality, you will free the polisher…. Until now you have made the water turbid, but no more. Do not stir it up, let the water become clear enough for the moon and stars to be reflected in it. For the human being is like the water of a river: when muddied you cannot see the bottom. The river is full of jewels and pearls. Do not cloud the water that was pure and free. [Mathnawi IV, 2475-2477, 2480-2482]
The attractions of the outer world are only a small distraction compared to the promptings of egoism which distract us from within. Bayazid Bistami said, “The contraction of the heart comes with the expansion of the ego, and vice versa.”
In contrast, properly disciplined imagination has the capacity to perceive God’s self-disclosure in all Three Books of creation. As Ibn ‘Arabî remarks, when God speaks—and he speaks because the Infinite Real cannot but display its qualities and characteristics—he voices three books, each of which is made up of signs/verses: the universe perceptible to the senses, the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual Perception, and – existing between them – an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of “immaterial matter”. The world of Imagination, of media.
The symbolic and mythic language of scripture, like the constantly shifting and never-repeated self-disclosures that are cosmos and soul, cannot be interpreted away with reason’s structures. What Corbin calls “creative imagination” (a term that does not have an exact equivalent in Ibn ‘Arabî’s vocabulary) must complement rational perception.
‘Aql or reason, a word that derives from the same root as ‘iqâl, fetter, can only delimit, define, and analyze. It perceives difference and distinction, and quickly grasps the divine transcendence and incomparability”. The rationalising, analytic left hemisphere does not understand the imaginative and holistic right hemisphere, which comprehends and contains it. “The natural man understandeth not the things of the Spirit of God: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14)
In Koranic terms, the locus of awareness and consciousness is the heart (qalb), a word that has the verbal sense of fluctuation and transmutation (taqallub). According to Ibn ‘Arabî, the heart has two eyes, reason and imagination, and the dominance of either distorts perception and awareness.
The rational path of philosophers and theologians needs to be complemented by the mystical intuition of the Sufis, the “unveiling” (kashf) that allows for imaginal—not “imaginary”—vision. The heart, which in itself is unitary consciousness, must become attuned to its own fluctuation, at one beat seeing God’s incomparability with the eye of reason, at the next seeing his similarity with the eye of imagination. Its two visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture, al-qur’ân, “that which brings together”, and al-furqân, “that which differentiates”.
These two demarcate the contours of ontology and epistemology. The first alludes to the unifying oneness of Being (perceived by imagination), and the second to the differentiating manyness of knowledge and discernment (perceived by reason). The Real, as Ibn ‘Arabî often says, is the One/the Many (al-wâhid al-kathîr), that is, One in Essence and many in names, the names being the principles of all multiplicity, limitation, and definition. In effect, with the eye of imagination, the heart sees Being present in all things, and with the eye of reason it discerns its transcendence and the diversity of the divine faces.
When Ibn ‘Arabî talks about imagination as one of the heart’s two eyes, he is using the language that philosophers established in speaking of the soul’s faculties. Like the philosophers, Ibn ‘Arabî sees the human soul as an unlimited potential and understands the goal of life to lie in the actualization of that potential. But he is more concerned with imagination’s ontological status, about which the early philosophers had little to say.
Here his use of khayâl accords with its everyday meaning, which is closer to image than imagination. It was employed to designate mirror images, shadows, scarecrows, and everything that appears in dreams and visions; in this sense it is synonymous with the term mithâl, which was often preferred by later authors. Ibn ‘Arabî stresses that an image brings together two sides and unites them as one; it is both the same as and different from the two.
A mirror image is both the mirror and the object that it reflects, or, it is neither the mirror nor the object. A dream is both the soul and what is seen, or, it is neither the soul nor what is seen. By nature images are/are not. In the eye of reason, a notion is either true or false. Imagination perceives notions as images and recognizes that they are simultaneously true and false, or neither true nor false. The implications for ontology become clear when we look at the three “worlds of imagination”.
The Personal and Impersonal Godby Harold Bloom
Why pray to the Stranger God? He is so alienated from our cosmological emptiness that he could never hear us. We might want to pray for him, but to whom? As for believing that he exists: we have no term for his wandering on the outer spaces, so existence does not apply. What matters most is necessarily either too far outside us or too far within us to be available, even if our readiness were all.
What is the use of gnosis, if it is so forbiddingly elitist? Since the alternatives are diseases of the will and of the intellect, why invoke the criterion of usefulness? Prayers are a more interesting literary form than creeds, but even the most impressive of prayers will not change us, let alone change God.
And nearly all prayers are directed anyway to the archons, the angels who made and marred this world, and whom we worship, William Blake warned, as Jesus and Jehovah, Divine Names misapplied to our prison warders. The Accusers who are the gods of this world have won all of the victories, and they will go on triumphing over us. History is always on their side, for they are history.
“the angels who made and marred this world, and whom we worship, William Blake warned, as Jesus and Jehovah, Divine Names misapplied to our prison warders”
The Nature of Imagination
Henry Corbin with Carl Jung, c. 1950
Here we shall not be dealing with imagination in the usual sense of the word: neither with fantasy, profane or otherwise, nor with the organ which produces imaginings identified with the unreal; nor shall we even be dealing exactly with what we look upon as the organ of aesthetic creation. We shall be speaking of an absolutely basic function, correlated with a universe peculiar to it, a universe endowed with a perfectly “objective” existence and perceived precisely through the Imagination.
Today, with the help of phenomenology, we are able to examine the way in which man experiences his relationship to the world without reducing the objective data of this experience to data of sense perception or limiting the field of true and meaningful knowledge to the mere operations of the rational understanding. Freed from an old impasse, we have learned to register and to make use of the intentions implicit in all the acts of consciousness or trans-consciousness.
To say that the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an “object” which is proper to it, no longer smacks of paradox. Still, once the full noetic value of the Imagination is admitted, it may be advisable to free the intentions of the Imagination from the parentheses in which a purely phenomenological interpretation encloses them, if we wish, without fear or misunderstanding, to relate the imaginative function to the view of the world proposed by the Spiritualists to whose company the present study invites us.
The Intermediary World of Archetypes, or ‘Images’
For them the world is “objectively” and actually threefold: between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of “immaterial matter.” This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible world; it is an intermediate universe “where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,” a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial.
The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality.
We shall try to show in what sense this Imagination is creative: because it is essentially the active Imagination and because its activity defines it essentially as a theophanic Imagination. It assumes an unparalleled function, so out of keeping with the inoffensive or pejorative view commonly taken of the “imagination,” that we might have preferred to designate this Imagination by a neologism and have occasionally employed the term Imaginatrix.
Avicennism identifies it with the Holy Spirit, that is, with the Angel Gabriel as the Angel of Knowledge and of Revelation.
Imagination as the Holy Spirit. Hence the Annunciation of Gabriel, as the medium or image of imagination, to Mary, heralding the incarnation of a new or more radical sort of archetype or image: “the very foundation of the prophetic philosophy”.
Allegory vs. Imagination
At this point we must recapitulate the distinction, fundamental for us, between allegory and symbol; allegory is a rational operation, implying no transition either to a new plane of being or to a new depth of consciousness; it is a figuration, at an identical level of consciousness, of what might very well be known in a different way.
The symbol announces a plane of consciousness distinct from that of rational evidence; it is the “cipher” of a mystery, the only means of saying something that cannot be apprehended in any other way; a symbol is never “explained” once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again, just as a musical score is never deciphered once and for all, but calls for ever new execution.
“The Last Judgment is not fable, or allegory, but vision. Fable, or allegory, is a totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry. Vision, or imagination, is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable, or allegory, is formed by the daughters of Memory. Allegory and vision ought to be known as two distinct things, and so called for the sake of eternal life” (Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment).
Active Imagination and the Burning Bush
The Avicennan angelology provides the foundation of the intermediate world of pure Imagination; it made possible the prophetic psychology on which rested the spirit of symbolic exegesis, the spiritual understanding of Revelations, in short, the ta’wll which was equally fundamental to Sufism and to Shi’ism (etymologically the “carrying back” of a thing to its principle, of a symbol to what it symbolizes). The ta’wll presupposes a flowering of symbols and hence the active Imagination, the organ which at once produces symbols and apprehends them.
The conviction that to everything that is apparent, literal, external, exoteric (zahir) there corresponds something hidden, spiritual, internal, esoteric (batin) is the scriptural principle which is at the very foundation of Shi’ism as a religious phenomenon. It is the central postulate of esoterism and of esoteric hermeneutics (ta’wil).
The active Imagination guides, anticipates, moulds sense perception; that is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs. In order that Moses may perceive the Burning Bush and hear the Voice calling him “from the right side of the valley”- in short, in order that there may be a theophany – an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed.
“in order that there may be a theophany an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed”
Since the Imagination is the organ of theophanic perception, it is also the organ of prophetic hermeneutics, for it is the imagination which is at all times capable of transmuting sensory data into symbols and external events into symbolic histories.
Our meaning is expressed in the following anecdote which we owe to Semnani, the great Iranian Sufi: Jesus was sleeping with a brick for pillow. The accursed demon came and stopped at his bedside. When Jesus sensed that the accursed one was there, he woke up and said: Why hast thou come to me, accursed one? – I have come to get my things. – And what things of thine are there here? – This brick that thou restest thine head on. – Then Jesus (Ruh Allah, Spiritus Dei) seized the brick and flung it in his face.
Naming God
Thus the true name of the Divinity, the name which expresses His hidden depths, is not the Infinite and All-Powerful of our rational theodicies. Nothing can better bear witness to the feeling for a “pathetic God,” which is no less authentic than that disclosed (as we have seen above) by a phenomenology of prophetic religion.
Here we are at the heart of a mystical gnosis, and that is why we have refused to let ourselves be restricted to the above-mentioned opposition. For Ismailian Gnosis, the supreme Godhead cannot be known or even named as “God”; Al-Lah is a name which indeed is given to the created being, the Most-Near and sacrosanct Archangel, the Protokistos or Archangel-Logos. This Name then expresses sadness, nostalgia aspiring eternally to know the Principle which eternally initiates it: the nostalgia of the revealed God (i.e., revealed for man) yearning to be once more beyond His revealed being.
This mediating faculty is the active or creative Imagination which Ibn ‘Arabî designates as “Presence” or “imaginative Dignity” (Hadrat khayallya). Perhaps we are in need of a neologism to safeguard the meaning of this “Dignity ” and to avoid confusion with the current acceptance of the word “imaginative.” We might speak of an Imaginatrix.
“This Form may be a sensible figure which the Imagination transmutes into a theophanic figure”. Image: Angel of the Divine Presence Bringing Eve to Adam, by William Blake. The real God is not the God you can ‘know’ with the rational mind, but only with the intuitive heart – a God of “pathos”, sympathy. Just as the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, including the manipulating right hand, so the right hemisphere controls the left side, including the feeling heart.
Here the spiritual aspect, the Spirit, must manifest itself in a physical form; this Form may be a sensible figure which the Imagination transmutes into a theophanic figure, or else it may be an “apparitional figure” perceptible to the unaided imagination without the mediation of a sensible form in the instant of contemplation.
Thus the experience of mystic love, which is a conjunction (“conspiration”) of the spiritual and the physical, implies that imaginative Energy, or creative Imagination, the theory of which plays so large a part in the visionary experience of Ibn ‘Arabî. As organ of the transmutation of the sensible, it has the power to manifest the “angelic function of beings.” In so doing, it effects a twofold movement; on the one hand it causes invisible spiritual realities to descend to the reality of the Image (but no further, for to our authors the lmaginalia are the maximum of “material” condensation compatible with spiritual realities); and it also effects the only possible form of assimilation (taskbrk) between Creator and creature.
And on the other hand the image itself, though distinct from the sensible world, is not alien to it, for the Imagination transmutes the sensible world by raising it up to its own subtile and incorruptible modality. This twofold movement, which is at the same time a descent of the divine and an assumption of the sensible, corresponds to what Ibn ‘Arabî elsewhere designates etymologically as a “condescendence” (munazala). The Imagination is the scene of the encounter whereby the supersensory-divine and the sensible “descend” at one and the same “abode.”
“This twofold movement, which is at the same time a descent of the divine and an assumption of the sensible”.
Thus it is the Active Imagination which places the invisible and the visible, the spiritual and the physical in sympathy. It is the Active Imagination that makes it possible, as our shaikh declares, “to love a being of the sensible world, in whom we love the manifestation of the divine Beloved; for we spiritualize this being by raising him (from sensible form) to incorruptible Image (that is, to the rank of a theophanic Image), by investing him with a beauty higher than that which was his, and clothing him in a presence such that he can neither lose it nor cast it off, so that the mystic never ceases to be united with the Beloved.”
For this reason the degree of spiritual experience depends on the degree of reality invested in the Image, and conversely, it is in this Image that the mystic contemplates in actu the full perfection of the Beloved and that he experiences His presence within himself. Without this “imaginative union” (ttisiil jl’l-ltkayal), without the “transfiguration” it brings about, physical union is a mere delusion, a cause or symptom of mental derangement. Pure “imaginative contemplation” (muskakadat ltkayallya), on the other hand, can attain such intensity that any material and sensible presence would only draw it down. Such was the famous case of Majnun, and this, says Ibn ‘Arabî, is the most subtile phenomenon of love.
Indeed this phenomenon presupposes that the fedele d’amorehas understood that the Image is not outside him, but within his being; better still, it is his very being, the form of the divine Name which he himself brought with him in coming into being. And the circle of the dialectic of love closes on this fundamental experience: “Love is closer to the lover than is his jugular vein.” So excessive is this nearness that it acts at first as a veil. That is why the inexperienced novice, though dominated by the Image which invests his whole inner being, goes looking for it outside of himself, in a desperate search from form to form of the sensible world, until he returns to the sanctuary of his soul and perceives that the real Beloved is deep within his own being; and, from that moment on, he seeks the Beloved only through the Beloved.
In this Quest as in this Return, the active subject within him remains the inner image of unreal Beauty, a vestige of the transcendent or celestial counterpart of his being: it is that image which causes him to recognize every concrete figure that resembles it, because even before he is aware of it, the Image has invested him with its theophanic function. That is why, as Ibn ‘Arabî puts it, it is equally true to say that the Beloved is in him and not in him; that his heart is in the beloved being or that the beloved being is in his heart.
This reversibility merely expresses the experience of the “secret of divine suzerainty” (sirr al-rubublya), that secret which is “thou,” so that the divine service of the fedele d’amore consists in his devotio sympathetica, which is to say, the “substantiation” by his whole being of the theophanic investiture which he confers upon a visible form. That is why the quality and the fidelity of the mystic lover are contingent on his “imaginative power,” for as Ibn ‘Arabî says: “The divine Lover is spirit without body; the purely physical lover is body without spirit; the spiritual lover (that is, the mystic lover) possesses spirit and body.”
“It is in this Image that the mystic contemplates in actu the full perfection of the Beloved and that he experiences His presence within himself.” The remarkable friendship between the Sufi poet Rumi and his spiritual mentor Shams-i Tabrīzī beautifully illustrates the process described by Ibn ‘Arabî.
In this Quest as in this Return, the active subject within him remains the inner image of unreal Beauty, a vestige of the transcendent or celestial counterpart of his being”. The same process that Ibn ‘Arabî describes was also drawn on by the philosopher Plato in his theory of Forms, and the progress from the particular embodiment to the Ideal Form. Unfortunately, the already hyper-rationalising nature of Greek philosophy had misunderstood this as a process that leads away from the body and into abstraction, rather than one that leads inside, into the heart, into the imagination itself. “In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven/And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within/In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow” (Blake).Plato’s Cave
Image and Magic
“The notion of the imagination, magical intermediary between thought and being, incarnation of thought in image and presence of the image in being, is a conception of the utmost importance, which plays a leading role in the philosophy of the Renaissance and which we meet with again in the philosophy of Romanticism” (Alexandre Koyré). This observation, taken from one of our foremost interpreters of the doctrines of Boehme and Paracelsus, provides the best possible introduction to the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image, the very type and model of magical action, or of all action as such, but especially of creative action; and, on the other hand, the notion of the image as a body (a magical body, a mental body), in which are incarnated the thought and will of the soul.
“the doctrines of Boehme and Paracelsus provide the best possible introduction to the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image”. Illustration showing the generation of the three “worlds of imagination”, the “three books” of God’s self-disclosure, each of which is made up of signs/verses (from Freher’s illustrations to The Works of Jacob Behmen)
The Imagination as a creative magical potency which, giving birth to the sensible world, produces the Spirit in forms and colors; the world as Magia divina “imagined” by the Godhead, that is the ancient doctrine, typified in the juxtaposition of the words Imago and Magia, which Novalis rediscovered through Fichte.
Accordingly, everything will depend on the degree of reality that we impute to this imagined universe and by that same token on the real power we impute to the Imagination that imagines it; but both questions depend in turn on the idea that we form of creation and the creative act.
Adam’s Dream: The Creation of This World
But between the theosophy of Ibn ‘Arabî and that of a theosophist of the Renaissance or of Jacob Boehme’s school, there are correspondences sufficiently striking to motivate the comparative studies outlining the respective situation of esoterism in Islam and in Christianity.
On both sides we encounter the idea that the Godhead possesses the power of Imagination, and that by imagining the universe God created it; that He drew this universe from within Himself, from the eternal virtualities and potencies of His own being; that there exists between the universe of pure spirit and the sensible world an intermediate world which is the idea of “Idea Images” as the Sufis put it, the world of “supersensory sensibility,” of the subtile magical body, “the world in which spirits are materialized and bodies spiritualized”; that this is the world over which the Imagination holds sway; that in it the Imagination produces effects so real that they can “mould” the imagining subject, and that the Imagination “casts” man in the form (the mental body) that he has imagined.
“the world in which spirits are materialized and bodies spiritualized” (Image: The Creation of Eve by William Blake)
In general we note that the degree of reality thus imputed to the Image and the creativity imputed to the Imagination correspond to a notion of creation unrelated to the official theological doctrine, the doctrine of the creatio ex nihilo, which has become so much a part of our habits that we tend to regard it as the only authentic idea of creation. We might even go so far as to ask whether there is not a necessary correlation between this idea of a creatio ex nihilo and the degradation of the ontologically creative Imagination and whether, in consequence, the degeneration of the Imagination into a fantasy productive only of the imaginary and the unreal is not the hallmark of our laicized world for which the foundations were laid by the preceding religious world, which precisely was dominated by this characteristic idea of the Creation.
The initial idea of Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystic theosophy and of all related theosophies is that the Creation is essentially a theophany (tajalll). As such, creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic Imagination. The Active Imagination in the gnostic is likewise a theophanic Imagination; the beings it “creates” subsist with an independent existence sui generis in the intermediate world which pertains to this mode of existence.
The God whom it “creates,” far from being an unreal product of our fantasy, is also a theophany, for man’s Active Imagination is merely the organ of the absolute theophanic Imagination (takkayyul mutlaq). Prayer is a theophany par excellence; as such, it is “creative”; but the God to whom it is addressed because it “creates” Him is precisely the God who reveals Himself to Prayer in this Creation, and this Creation, at this moment, is one among the theophanies whose real Subject is the Godhead revealing Himself to Himself.
Image as Veil
“the Appearance (and transparency) beneath which He manifests and reveals Himself first of all to Himself”
The Creature-Creator, the Creator who does not produce His creation outside Him, but in a manner of speaking clothes Himself in it as the Appearance (and transparency) beneath which He manifests and reveals Himself first of all to Himself, is referred to by several other names, such as the “imagined God,” that is, the God “manifested ” by the theophanic Imagination (al-Haqq al-mutakzayyal), the “God created in the faiths” (al-Haqq al-makluq fi’l-i’tiqadat).
To the initial act of the Creator imagining the world corresponds the creature imagining his world, imagining the worlds, his God, his symbols. Or rather, these are the phases, the recurrences of one and the same eternal process: Imagination effected in an Imagination (takhayyul fl takhayyul), an Imagination which is recurrent just as – and because – the Creation itself is recurrent. The same theophanic Imagination of the Creator who has revealed the worlds, renews the Creation from moment to moment in the human being whom He has revealed as His perfect image and who, in the mirror that this Image is, shows himself Him whose image he is.
That is why man’s Active Imagination cannot be a vain fiction, since it is this same theophanic Imagination which, in and by the human being, continues to reveal what it showed itself by first imagining it. Thus creation signifies nothing less than the Manifestation (zuhur) of the hidden (batin).
The Twofold Dimension of Beings
The initial imaginative operation is to typify (ta’wil) the immaterial and spiritual realities in external or sensuous forms, which then become “ciphers” for what they manifest. After that the Imagination remains the motive force of the ta’wll which is the continuous ascent of the soul.
“the mysterium coniunctionis which unites the two terms”
In short, because there is Imagination, there is ta’wll; because there is ta’wll, there is symbolism; and because there is symbolism, beings have two dimensions. This apperception reappears in all the pairs of terms that characterize the theosophy of Ibn ‘Arabî: Creator and Creature (Haqq and Khalq}, divinity and humanity (lahut and nasut), Lord and vassal (Rabb and ‘Abd).
Each pair of terms typifies a union for which we have suggested the term unio sympathetica. The union of the two terms of each pair constitutes a coincidentia oppositorum a simultaneity not of contradictories but of complementary opposites, and we have seen above that it is the specific function of the Active Imagination to effect this union which, according to the great Sufi Abu Sarid al-Kharrllz, defines our knowledge of the Godhead. But the essential here is that the mysterium coniunctionis which unites the two terms is a theophanic union (seen from the standpoint of the Creator) or a theopathic union (seen from the standpoint of the creature); in no event is it a “hypostatic union.”
The organ which establishes and perceives this coincidentia oppositorum, this simultaneity of complementaries determining the twofold dimension of beings, is man’s Active Imagination, which we may term creative insofar as it is, like Creation itself, theophanic.
On this point I awaken you to a sublime secret, from which a number of divine secrets are to be learned, for example, the secret of destiny and the secret of divine knowledge, and the fact that these are one and the same science by which the Creator and the Creature are known. These ideas are strictly related: When you create, it is not you who create, and that is why your creation is true. It is true because each creature has a twofold dimension: the Creator-creature typifies the coincidentia oppositorum.
“the Creator-creature typifies the coincidentia oppositorum“
The Science of the Imagination
In a chapter of his great book, the Spiritual Conquests (or Revelations) of Mecca, Ibn ‘Arabî outlines a “science of the Imagination” (‘ilm al-khayal) and provides a schema of the themes involved in such a science. The organ of Prayer is the heart, the psycho-spiritual organ, with its concentration of energy, its himma. The role of prayer is shared between God and man, because Creation like theophany is shared between Him who shows Himself (mutajalll) and him to whom it is shown (mutajalla lahu); prayer itself is a moment in, a recurrence par excellence of, Creation (tajdld al-khalq).
We witness and participate in an entire ceremonial of meditation, a psalmody in two alternating voices, one human the other divine; and this psalmody perpetually reconstitutes, recreates (lrhalq jadld!) the solidarity and interdependence of the Creator and His creature; in each instant the act of primordial theophany is renewed in this psalmody of the Creator and the creature. This will enable us to understand the homologations that the ritual gestures of Prayer can obtain, to understand that Prayer is a “creator” of vision, and to understand how, because it is a creator of vision, it is simultaneously Prayer of God and Prayer of man. Then we shall gain an intimation of who and of what nature is the “Form of God,” when it shows itself to the mystic celebrating this inward liturgy.
We witness and participate in an entire ceremonial of meditation, a psalmody in two alternating voices”. Kurth and colleagues (2015) used neuroimaging to examine the impact of mindfulness meditation and found that it enhanced integration and greater connectivity between the hemispheres. Their research revealed “altered inter-hemispheric integration”. McGilchrist refers to the two hemispheres as the “Master” and the “Emissary”, further deepening this notion of dialogue and integration.
Understood and experienced in this way, Prayer, because it is a muniljat, an intimate dialogue, implies at its apogee a mental theophany, capable of different degrees; but if it is not unsuccessful, it must open out into contemplative vision.
“Once, the young artist George Richmond, finding his invention flag during a whole fortnight, went to Blake, as was his wont, for some advice or comfort. He found him sitting at tea with his wife. He related his distress; how he felt deserted by the power of invention. To his astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly and said : ‘It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together, when the visions forsake us? What do we do then, Kate?’ ‘We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake’.” (Gilchrist, Life of Blake)
Here then is the manner in which Ibn ‘Arabî comments on the phases of a divine service that is a dialogue, an intimate dialogue which takes as its “psalm” and foundation the recitation of the Fatiha. He distinguishes three successive moments which correspond to the phases of what we may call his “method of prayer” and provide us with a good indication of how he put his spirituality into practice. First, the faithful must place himself in the company of his God and “converse” with Him. In an intermediate moment the orant, the faithful in prayer, must imagine (takhayyul) his God as present in his Qibla, that is, facing him. Finally, in a third moment, the faithful must attain to intuitive vision (shuhud) or visualization (ru’ya), contemplating his God in the subtile center which is the heart, and simultaneously hear the divine voice vibrating in all manifest things, so much so that he hears nothing else.
This is illustrated by the following distich of a Sufi: “When He shows Himself to me, my whole being is vision: when he speaks to me in secret, my whole being is hearing.” Here we encounter the practical meaning of the tradition which declares: “The entire Koran is a symbolic, allusive (ramz) story, between the Lover and the Beloved, and no one except the two of them understands the truth or reality of its intention.” Clearly, the entire “science of the heart” and all the creativity of the heart are needed to set in motion the ta’wll, the mystic interpretation which makes it possible to read and to practice the Koran as though it were a variant of the Song of Songs.
“The entire Koran is a symbolic, allusive (ramz) story, between the Lover and the Beloved”. Image: Rumi and Shams-i Tabrīzī, Face to Face.
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Love
If God, Almighty and Exalted, opened the Essence of His Divine Love, everyone on earth would die from that love Mawlana Sheikh Nazim
This book is a compilation of sohbets about Love delivered by Mawlana Sheikh Nazim. “Love is the water of life. God created Adam from clay and water. If it were not for water the clay would hold no shape. Divine Love is what binds our souls together. That is why people become so miserable when they feel unloved. It is a feeling that something essential is missing from one’s life, that life itself is incomplete, and in the face of this ache, people set out in search of love with the desperation of a man dying of thirst. Love is an attribute of God Almighty which binds His servants to Him eternally. The Lord created us and loves us; that is why everyone loves love. No one complains of love or wants it to be taken from him, but all want to be loved more.”Read Here
Sufism frequently uses the image of the bird to symbolize the higher or heavenly soul, a spiritual motion or inspiration, principles and states of Being. The birds are almost always associated with flowering trees, and one can see the symbol of spiritual degrees (birds) in the Divine Reality (the tree), or the symbol of the Sufi saint (the tree). ) and its inner realities (birds). The bird is associated with the soul, its cage with the body, its flight to the freedom of the spiritual consciousness flying in God.
Calligraphy_in_the_shape_of_a_hoopoe-bismillah_ar-rahman_ar-rahim(in_the_name_of_God,Most_Gracious and Mercifull…
The Wise Hoopoe King Solomon, Queen Sheba, and the Hoopoe: Once upon a time, says the Quran, a Hoopoe was King Solomon’s personal messenger. Read more here
“Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God,” wrote Hildegard von Bingen of her extraordinary achievements. A 12th century German abbess, saint, composer, healer and Christian mystic, she was gifted with visions throughout her life and her works describe a visceral connection to the divine.
Symbolism of the feather
The concept of maat is central to understanding ancient Egyptian culture. In its simplest form, the term means something equivalent to ‘rightness’ and ‘orderedness’. The hieroglyphic sign for maat is a feather, and the concept was personified as the goddess Maat, who was usually depicted as a female goddess with the feather hieroglyph on her head.
From early in Egyptian history it was believed that the king’s chief responsibility was to ensure that maat was maintained in the world – i.e. in Egypt. He had to be seen to be carrying out this responsibility by, for example, defeating the country’s enemies. So, a depiction of a king engaging and destroying enemies in battle does not necessarily indicate that he himself did any real fighting. It might simply symbolise his maintenance of maat.
Egyptian temples represent the establishment of maat on earth: within their walls all is ordered correctly, whilst outside lies chaos, conceived of as a watery waste. For this reason, the walls of Egyptian temples are constructed in undulating courses.
As well as depictions of the king in battle, temple walls also frequently carried scenes showing the king presenting maat to the gods. By Ptolemaic times, 304–30 BCE, maat was believed to have come down to earth from the sky. It seems that it was thought of as a gift presented to the world by the gods, maintained by the king and returned by him in a good state.
Because he maintained maat, the period following the death of a king was potentially a very dangerous time. The next king had to take the throne as soon as possible, so that the forces of chaos could have no time to seize control.
Non-royal people were also expected to behave in a manner consistent with maat. After death, the individual would be held to account at a judgment, in which his or her heart was weighed in a balance against the feather of maat, in the ‘Hall of the Two Maats’. Those who came through the judgment process successfully were designated maa-kheru (‘true of voice’). This phrase eventually became synonymous with ‘deceased’.
The Feather of Truth is a feather used in the Hall of Judgment in the land of the dead to determine if souls of the deceased are worthy for the afterlife. If your soul weighs more than it does, you are unworthy, and Amit the Devourer eats your soul. If you lie or act untruthfully while in possession of the Feather it will burn you up. Mortals are not allowed to possess the feather.
NATIVE AMERICAN FEATHER SYMBOLISM
Natural symbolism is very important in Native American culture, and the feather is a very powerful symbol for many tribal nations. Feathers are widely believed among North American Indians to signify the connection between The Creator, the owner of the feather, and the bird from whom the feather came. Deeply revered, the feather symbolizes high honor, power, wisdom, trust, strength, and freedom. As such, feathers are seen as gifts from the sky.
Eagle Feathers
Different types of feathers represent different things to Native Americans.
The most highly esteemed type of feather is that of the eagle – the bravest and strongest of all birds. The eagle flies higher and sees better than any other bird and has an unparalleled connection to the Heavens. Eagle feathers are believed to carry strong medicine and guide the mind, body and spirit towards courage, strength, and hope. Traditionally, Native American warriors were awarded an eagle feather for notable bravery (like fighting a bear) or battle victory. Only after a victory was approved by the tribal court could the feather be placed in the headpiece, and only warriors, braves, and chieftains in many tribes were awarded eagle feathers. Those who received eagle feathers wore them with pride and, to this day, eagle feathers are cared for greatly by recipients.
The highest honor to be bestowed on an American Indian is to be given the feather of a Golden or Bald Eagle. They are so highly prized, the law in the USA even recognizes the significance of eagle feathers in Native culture, tradition, and religion. While eagles are highly protected under US law, Native Americans are allowed specific exemptions to acquire, possess, and pass down eagle feathers. Only members of Federally Recognized Tribes may possess Eagle Feathers. According to current US law, unauthorized people possessing an eagle feather may be fined very large sums. As such, sometimes turkey feathers are dyed and substituted for eagle feathers for commercial purposes.
The eagle feather is considered with the same level of respect as the American flag – must be handled carefully and never allowed to drop to the ground. Feathers may be held over a person’s head as a blessing for happiness, prosperity, peace, and courage. They are also used to adorn the sacred peace pipe as a symbol of the Creator or Great Spirit.
No feather falls expectedly or without some important meaning, and feathers of all birds are valued. Symbolism includes:
Crow = balance, skill, and cunning
Falcon = speed, movement, and soul healing
Dove = kindness, love, and gentleness
Bluebird = happiness
Hawk = guardianship and far-sightedness
Owl = wisdom
Raven = creation and knowledge
Turkey = pride, fertility, and abundance
Woodpecker = self-discovery
Wren = protection
Swallow = love and peace
Kingfisher = luck
Feathers are worn, hung in the home, or otherwise displayed, as is it disrespectful to hide them away. Feathers feature heavily in dream catchers, to adorn infant cradles, to balance arrows, and hung from the home’s entrance to invite good spirits and repel bad spirits.
Here we Are: The many psycho-cosmological and cosmo-physiological angels which transform the human body into a microcosm. “We who dwell on Earth can do nothing of ourselves; everything is conducted by Spirits, no less than Digestion or Sleep” (Blake, Jerusalem).
What are the “Angels of the microcosm”? Here again we find an intimation of a “subtile physiology” resulting from psycho-cosmology and cosmo-physiology, which transform the human body into a microcosm. As we know, since each part of the cosmology has its homologue in man, the whole universe is in him. And just as the Angels of the macrocosm sprang from the faculties of the Primordial Man, from the Angel called Spirit (Rūḥ), so the Angels of the microcosm are the physical, psychic, and spiritual faculties of the individual man.
Represented as Angels, these faculties are transformed into subtile centers and organs; the construction of the body envisaged in subtile physiology takes on the aspect of a minor, microcosmic angelology; allusions to it are frequent in all our authors. It is in relation to this microcosm transformed into a “court of Angels” that the mystic performs the function of lmam.
The Godhead is in mankind as an Image is in a mirror. The place of this Presence is the consciousness of the individual believer, or more exactly, the theophanic Imagination invested in him.
Becoming alive and transparent, the Temple reveals the secret it concealed, the “Form of God” which is the Self (or rather the Figure which eminently personifies it) and makes it known as the Mystic’s divine Alter Ego.
Thus the being who is the mystic’s transcendent self, his divine Alter Ego, reveals himself, and the mystic does not hesitate to recognize him, for in the course of his quest, when confronting the mystery of the Divine Being, he has heard the command: “Look toward the Angel who is with you and who accomplishes the circumambulations beside you.” He has learned that the mystic Ka’aba is the heart of being. It has been said to him: “The Temple which contains Me is your heart.” The mystery of the Divine Essence is no other than the Temple of the heart, and it is around the heart that the spiritual pilgrim circumambulates.
The Master Self and Emissary Self
“Accomplish the circumambulations and follow my footsteps,” the mystic Youth now commands him. The Youth’s point of emergence situates him as the homologue of the Angel in respect of the mystic; he is the mystic’s Self, his divine Alter Ego, who projects revelation into him. Then we hear an amazing dialogue, the meaning of which seems at first to defy all human expression. For how indeed is it possible to translate what two beings who are each other can say to each other: the “Angel” who is the divine self, and his other self, the “missionary” on earth, when they meet in the world of “Imaginative Presence”?
The story which the visionary tells his confidant at his bidding is the story of his Quest, that is to say, a brief account of the inner experience from which grew the fundamental intuition of Ibn ‘Arabî‘s theosophy. It is this Quest that is represented by the circumambulations around the Temple of the “heart,” that is, around the mystery of the Divine Essence.
But the visionary is no longer the solitary self, reduced to his mere earthly dimension in the face of the inaccessible Godhead, for in encountering the being in whom the Godhead is his companion he knows that he himself is the secret of the Godhead (sirr al-rubilblya), and it is their “syzygia,” their twoness which accomplishes the circular processional: seven times, the seven divine Attributes of perfection in which the mystic is successively invested.
“The Godhead is in mankind as an Image is in a mirror. The place of this Presence is the consciousness of the individual believer, or more exactly, the theophanic Imagination invested in him”. There has been a sustained and concerted attempt in the last few centuries, under the dominion of the Urizenic rationalising agency, to “de-centre” humanity from its centre of being. The people who try to do this are themselves profoundly de-centred and dissociated. Human consciousness is rooted in and a reflection of – indeed a realisation of – divine consciousness, that is to say of the consciousness of Being itself. As Meister Eckhart noted, “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me”. The realisation of God itself is dependent upon the realisation of the God within humanity, the Human Imagination. The realisation of the Telos of history, of reality itself. Those who seek to de-centre Humanity, de-centre God.
One does not encounter, one does not see the Divine Essence; for it is itself the Temple, the Mystery of the heart; into which the mystic penetrates when, having achieved the microcosmic plenitude of the Perfect Man, he encounters the “Form of God” which is that of “His Angels,” that is to say, the theophany constitutive of his being. We do not see the Light; it is what makes us see and what makes itself seen in the Form through which it shines.
Never can the zawahir (manifest, visible things, phenomena) be the causes of other zawalzir; an immaterial cause (glzayr maddiya) is required (cf. in Suhrawardi the idea that that which is in itself pure shadow, screen, barzaklz, cannot be the cause of anything).
The “Temple” is the scene of theophany, the heart where the dialogue between Lover and Beloved is enacted, and that is why this dialogue is the Prayer of God.
Find your Centre: the centre is where your divinity and your humanity become one, and you become a Son of Man. In the Hermetic philosophy this alchemical process is called Self-Realisation.
Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a philosopher, theologian, Iranologist and professor of Islamic Studies at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, France. Corbin is responsible for redirecting the study of Islamic philosophy as a whole. In his Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964), he challenged the common view that philosophy among the Muslims came to an end after Ibn Rushd.
The three major works upon which his reputation largely rests in the English speaking world were first published in French in the 1950s: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, and Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, from which the above extract is taken.
Corbin was an important source for the archetypal psychology of James Hillman and others who have developed the psychology of Carl Jung. The American literary critic Harold Bloom claims Corbin as a significant influence on his own conception of Gnosticism, and the American poet Charles Olson was a student of Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital.
Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabl
First published in French as L’Imagination Creatrice dans le Soufisme d’Ibn ‘Arabi this profoundly moving and beautiful volume stands as one of the great works of theology and comparative philosophy of the 20th century.
“Henry Corbin’s works are the best guide to the visionary tradition…. Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a scholar of genius. He was uniquely equipped not only to recover Iranian Sufism for the West, but also to defend the principal Western traditions of esoteric spirituality.” From the 1997 Introduction by Harold Bloom
Among the more than 200 critical editions, translations, books and articles published in his lifetime, his magnum opus is without doubt the four volume En islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1971-73. But this has not yet been translated and its scope and magnitude make it ill-suited as an introduction to his work. Creative Imagination is the most comprehensive and accessible guide to the profoundly important and powerful spiritual treasures to be found in his writings. It is indispensible for those seeking a deeper understanding of the religious imagination and the relations among Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the modern world. Indeed, a close reading of this text may provide something of an initiation for those hoping to enter into the visionary tradition which Corbin’s work represents.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1. Between Andalusia and Iran: A Brief Spiritual Topography 2. The Curve and Symbols of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Life 3. The Situation of Esotericism PART ONE: SYMPATHY AND THEOPATHY Ch. I. Divine Passion and Compassion Ch II. Sophiology and Devotio Sympathetica PART TWO: CREATIVE IMAGINATION AND CREATIVE PRAYER Ch. III. The Creation and Theophany Ch. IV. Theophanic Imagination and Creativity of the Heart Ch. V. Man’s Prayer and God’s Prayer Ch. VI. The “Form of God” EPILOGUE
-Sufi landscapes of the Heart by a Calligrapher of Nature: Photography book 50 pages ( free download)
The Skills of Soul Rapture. Mawlana Rumi himself says: “I have studied a lot of science and have worked hard to offer rare and valuable things to researchers and scientists who come to me, it is God the Supreme who has decided so”. He said also to his son: “O Bahâ-ud-Din, my coming into this world has come to prepare yours, for all the words that I say are speeches, but you, you are my action.” It is a message for all times, a revelation of wisdom for our time. free download
Dear Beloved Son / Ayyuhal Walad Al Ghazali
“I seek Allahs refuge from the knowledge which is of no benefit”. This disciple of Imam Ghazali (RA) kept thinking along these lines for a few days and then wrote a letter to Imam Ghazali (RA) with the view of getting an answer to his dilemma along with some other questions. Furthermore, he asked in his letter to Imam Ghazali (RA) for some advice and to teach him a supplication that he could always recite. He wrote in his letter that although Imam Ghazali (RA) has written numerous books on this issue,this weak individual is in need of something that he could always study and always act upon its injunctions. In reply to his letter, Imam Ghazali (RA) sent him the following advices. free download
Because the underlying process is psychological and largely unconscious, the manifestations are varied and in the end constellate into a whole complex of interchangeable vehicles that reflect the same underlying fears, leading such people to rally to multiple, interchangeable causes to vent them. Thus, for example, one of the Malheur militia protesting federal “tyranny,” 
The key lay in letting go of all worldly things, all desires and preconceptions — even one’s image of God himself: “The more completely you are able to draw in your powers to a unity and forget all those things and their images which you have absorbed, and the further you can get from creatures and their images, the nearer you are to this [divine birth] and the readier to receive it.” Then, he said — “in the midst of silence” — God would come within the soul. 
Path to the Maypole of Wisdom 