“Whosoever implores my aid shall receive it’.—St. George
The purpose of this paper will be to examine the pattern of the eternal return (anakuklêsis) in relation to a particular archetypal entity—in the present case, St. George; and then to see, both how it happens that, and what the consequences are when, “myth” declines into desuetude.
….. Christianity’s conflict with the various paganisms it encountered can thus in part at least be explained as a rivalry between the classic spatial or periodic perspective and the newly revealed temporal or historical one, which—independently of other considerations—being more “timely” was precisely bound to prevail. Yet the bane of historicity is secularization, and man being what he is, it suffices but a subtle shift in focus for “the measureless and perilous world of forms and of change,” hitherto regarded as something negative to be rejected, now to be seen as something positive to be espoused. The outer world becomes reality, matter assumes an increased importance, and man experiences a Renaissance marked by humanism with its concept of indefinite progress and human or worldly perfectibility. This entails in consequence a loss of contact with higher states of being, mythology is relegated to a realm equatable with the incredible, while sacred history itself in turn becomes “myth.” Islam, the last of the historical religions, actually seizes hold of time itself as a sword with which to destroy all time: the Shahâdah or Witness “Lâ ilâha illa ‘Llâh—There is no divinity if not the Divinity” destroys through a transformation that refers and ultimately renders everything back to its Origin; the Event or Final Day or Judgment is not only ceaselessly proclaimed as immanent, Islam itself is in a way already that Event or Judgment. The past and the future are more geometric than temporal; Allah “is the First and the Last, and the Outward and the Inward”; there is purely the desertic fatality of the omnipresent Now, and this Now belongs to God
For the Muslim believer, the world is thus in part illusion and in part theophany, but at all events never more than a veil (hijâb) covering Reality.
It goes without saying that the Christian believer (wherever he still exists) is likewise no secularist: he is the first to “let the dead bury their dead” and is more predisposed than not to turn his back on the world itself as the personification of evil. He is a man who only endures history while awaiting the glory of the Kingdom to come. Read more here
At that time there lived in the Grinzer Pein (Friesland) a young man who was called out that he was not afraid of anything. When a ferry had to be dug, he got a job there. He joined the team with twenty westerners. Those twenty westerners were as lazy as duckweed. They wanted him to do the work, so he got into trouble with them. Then they said, “If you don’t work, we’ll cut you in pieces.” But the young man laughed and said, “You should try that first.” And then those twenty westerners came up to him with open knives , but he knocked them down one by one, for he was not afraid. And that same evening, near the new ferry, one of the Westerners was found cut into strips. But that joung man had not done that, his own comrades wanted to get rid of that westerner. And because the young servant had fought with him, they thought, he will be blamed.
That turned out to be the case, because the nineteen westerners testified that he must have been the murderer of their comrade. He went to court, and because he would not confess, he was put on the rack, but he maintained his innocence, for he was not afraid of anything, not even the pain. Desesperate, they called a wizard, a real wizard. He had to scare him so he confessed. The wizard had him tied on a chair; then he was powerless. But they had tortured him so much that he could hardly speak.
And then he was given a cup of warm milk to drink. The magician looked straight at him and said, ‘Look at the ground in front of you!’ And then the young man noticed that his ten toes had turned into ten snakes. They grew out of his toes, they grew bigger and bigger and came closer and closer to his head. But he made those snakes drink one by one from the hot milk from the cup he had in his hands. The snakes writhed together again and fell asleep at his feet.
The wizard asked, “Aren’t you scared yet?” But he replied, “You haven’t got any of those beasts yet, because my cup isn’t empty yet.” Then the wizard turned the boy’s hair into flames and said that he would be consumed by these flames. But the young man asked: ‘Do you have tobacco in your pocket? I don’t have any tobacco with me, but my pipe does. Stop it in front of me for a moment, so I can at least light it on the flames and don’t have to use a match’.
And the third was that the sorcerer sat before him and said: If you will not confess, you will be sent to hell. ‘But the young servant laughed, for he was not afraid. The wizard looked straight at him and then the young man noticed that his body was turning into a skeleton. The magician said:
“Aren’t you scared yet? Remember – this is how you go to hell and stay there!” “Oh,” he said, “why should I be afraid? Such an old charnel house as I am now – there is no one in hell who knows me.” And he did not bow the neck.
However, he was sentenced to death. The executioner appeared and he was to be cut into four. He was already on the block to be chopped in four, then they asked him if he wasn’t scared yet. “No,” he said, “why should I be afraid? Our father always said I was worth more than four others. And if you cut me in four here, you’ll be dealing with not one, but four men in a minute.’ And he was not quartered, but they took him back to the cell.
That same night the devil came to him and left nothing to frighten him. He told him the most horrible stories and transformed himself into the most horrible forms. The devil became an old woman, with teeth as large and as sharp as razors, and threatened to bite his throat. The devil became a dragon with seven heads that spewed fire at him. He became a very large snake, with a mouth so wide that it could eat it in one sitting. But the young servant was not afraid. Only when the devil finally asked him if he felt any fear at all did he say, “No, I don’t, but you do!
And he began to tease him so furiously, he made such hideous noises, and he drew such crooked faces, that even the devil became frightened and threw himself to the ground and blew the retreat.
The judges came to the conclusion that a person that even the devil fears can never be a murderer. And he was acquitted…
BEADS OF FAITH: Pathways to Meditation and Spirituality Using Rosaries, Prayer Beads and Sacred Words REVIEWED BY SAMUEL BENDECK SOTILLOS
The Name pronounced even once is a benefit, whether one is aware of it or not. Prayer is not verbal, it is from the heart. To merge into the heart is prayer.
RAMANA MAHARSHI
This book BEADS OF FAITH, which comes with a DVD of the documentary film that was previously released under the same title, examines both the “outer” and “inner” meanings of the use and function of prayer beads that have been instrumental in prayer, recitation, invocation, and meditation found throughout all of the world religions. The book begins by confirming that prayer beads have their origin in the divine, and simultaneously acknowledges the uses of prayer beads across spiritual traditions: “The use of prayer beads is not a practice recently invented or introduced, but is archetypal in nature, and common to every great faith tradition.” It will interest readers to learn that the etymology of the word “bead” reinforces the transcendent function of prayer beads, taken from the Sanskrit buddh, which means “to awaken,” referring to the Buddha or “The Awakened One,” and simultaneously connected to the Saxon verb bidden—“to pray.”
Modern man
This work acknowledges the universal and perennial uses of prayer beads and guides the seeker into the sacred dimensions of varied faiths by introducing the spiritual methods employed with prayer beads. The allegory of terrestrial existence is likened to “a rope thrown by God to a drowning man,” much like this “rope” of prayer beads comes from the spiritual domain and offers a spiritual method acting as a sacred funiculus umbilicalis or umbilical cord connecting the practitioner to the divine via revelation—“from Himself to Himself”—that is from the Divine to the Divine. The myriad practitioners are said to be as diverse as the paths leading up a mountain or points around the circumference of a circle traveling like radii to the center, yet they all converge at the summit or the center, confirming the true purpose of sapiential existence—union with the Self or the Divine.
This “summit,” which is transcendent, is analogous to the “center” that is immanent, described in the text as it pertains to prayer beads “…the very act of pausing on a bead brings you back to the centre of where you are and who you are.” Both the book and the DVD are filled with beautiful and contemplative imagery depicting the diverse ways that prayer beads are employed by spiritual practitioners of all traditions. The comparative approach of both mediums assists the reader in understanding each tradition via the wisdom found in the other.
The book begins with “The Universal Rosary” and then continues to explore the different uses of prayer beads through the world religions: “Catholic Rosaries,” “Orthodox Rosaries,” “The Jewish Tefillin.” “Hindu Malas,” “Buddhist Malas.” “The Muslim Tasbih,” “Native American Beads.” And “Amulets and Meditation.”
Prayer beads known as rosaries have been integral to the act of prayer within the Christian West or the Roman Catholic Church since the Middle Ages. Some possible origins of the Catholic rosary, from the Latin rosarium or “rose garden,” date back to the twelfth century during the Holy Crusades or in Moorish Spain and stem from Islamic uses of prayer beads. Another origin is thought to be connected to St. Dominic. who received the Holy Rosary from the Blessed Virgin Mary, as affirmed by Pope Leo XIII. It was during the sixteenth century that rosaries took their current form that they are known today by. The rosary allows the practitioner to pray throughout the day no matter what activity is being engaged in, thus creating a divine precinct within the heart. St. Augustine writes, “Do thou all within. And if perchance thou seekest some high place, some holy place, make thee a temple for God within.” The text also explains the recitation of Hail Mary (Latin: Ave Maria), meditating on the Mysteries of the Rosary, and other key prayers. The rosary within the Christian East known as the Eastern Orthodox Church is a woolen rope of knots that is used to recite the Jesus Prayer or the Prayer of the Heart. Quintessential to the Prayer of the Heart is the command of St. Paul, “Pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17). The text also describes how to enact the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”—which is continuously repeated while integrating the breath and can also incorporate prostrations that resemble yogic postures or asanas. In the film, one can observe a monk of Mount Athos performing this practice of the Prayer of the Heart.
The Jewish tradition uses prayer straps known as the tefillin, rather than prayer beads, which are worn on the head and the arm. The tefillin contain passages from the Torah that when worn on the forehead and the arm closest to the heart sublimate the desires of the heart, body,and mind as mandated by King Solomon, “Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart” (Proverbs 7:3). The text also explains the methods of praying with the tefillin in order to bind the words of God to man. In Hinduism (sanatana dharma) prayer beads are known as malas, and are used to repeat a mantra or Divine names, which is a devotional practice known as japamala. The purpose of repeating the Divine names is articulated by Swami Ramdas, “Om tunes the entire human being with the eternal music of the Divine, bringing the soul in direct contact with the in-dwelling and all-pervading Reality.” The book elucidates the spiritual method of japamala as used by three spiritual masters of the Vedanta: Ramakrishna (1836–86), Swami Ramdas (1884–1963), and Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950). The DVD takes one into the presence of some of the great spiritual masters and sannyasin of India, including the sounds of that world. The book describes how prayer beads or malas and chanting are used by the different schools of Buddhism known as the three “vehicles” or yanas— Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana. The text provides details on how one of the most widely used invocations is practiced: Om Mani Padme Hum—“O, thou ewel in the Lotus, Hail”—and how constant repetition of this invocation offered to the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara or Chenrezig can release the practitioner from the clenches of samsara—the cycles of birth and death leading to liberation. There is also an introduction to Jain Malas at the end of the section. Some of the exquisite footage in the DVD takes us on a visit to Burma—to Pagan, a city of temples, and to the great stupa of Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, and it also invites the viewer to enter the world of a Burmese Buddhist master, among other sacred sites.
The Islamic tradition as well as Sufism, its mystical expression, refers to prayer beads as the tasbih, which is reaffirmed in the prophetic traditions, “Repeat the Tasbih a hundred times, and a thousand virtues shall be recorded by God for you, ten virtuous deeds for each repetition.” In Sufism this process of remembrance or dhikr allows the seeker of truth to reside with God whenever and wherever God is remembered. A common recitation is: la ilaha il-Allah, “There is nodivinity but the Divinity,” illuminating the quintessential Sufi doctrine of the “Unity of Being” (wahdat al-wujud). Found at the end of the section are useful pointers for praying with the tasbih. The DVD takes us into the world of remembrance (dhikr), sound, and imagery of some of the great Sufi saints as well. The uses of beads have a primordial origin for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Huichol Indians of Mexico, the Ojibwin of Canada, and the Iroquois of North America (Turtle Island) use beads as a spiritual vocation, which is similar to the use of the rosary. Beading allows the artist to experience the “heartbeat of creation” while simultaneously participating in the craft or sacred art that connects the individual with the spiritual realm. The various forms of traditional prayer are described, such as: the sweat lodge (Inipi), the vision quest (Hanblecheyapi), and the act of praying with the sacred pipe (Chanupa). The last section devoted to amulets and meditation draws attention to the ancient uses of beads not only as a form of religious devotion, but as a way of centering and quieting the mind to assist with worldly concerns and dispel fear. The film concludes with a demonstration showing step by step how to make a rosary from rose petals by Brother Paul Quenon, a monk from the Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky, who was a novice under Thomas Merton. We welcome BEADS OF FAITH as an addition to other works dedicated to inter-religious dialogue in order to better understand the world’s religions in an age where diverse traditions are asked to peacefully coexist. It is through the “transcendent unity of religions” that an authentic understanding and mutual respect for different spiritual traditions can take place, which this book acknowledges.
May Day (May 1) is a holiday rich in history and folklore, celebrating the return of spring! Learn about some of the fun traditions, from May Day baskets to dancing around the maypole.
Origins of May Day
Did you know that May Day has its roots in astronomy? Traditionally, it was the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice! In ancient times, this was one of the Celtic cross-quarter days, which mark the midway points between the (four) solstices and equinoxes of the year.
As with many early holidays, May Day was rooted in agriculture. Springtime festivities filled with song and dance celebrated the sown fields starting to sprout. Cattle were driven to pasture, special bonfires were lit, and doors of houses as well as livestock were decorated with yellow May flowers. In the Middle Ages, the Gaelic people celebrated the festival of Beltane. Beltane means “Day of Fire.” People created large bonfires and danced at night to celebrate.
NLD-20010430-TEXEL: Over het gehele eiland Texel branden op de laatste avond voor de maand mei tal van hoog oplaaiende vuren, Meierblis genoemd. Jongeren poffen hun aardappelen en velen stoken er kleine vuurtjes omheen. Het is een gebruik dat lijkt op de Twentse paasvuren en is bedoeld als blijdschap voor de terugkerende lente.
May Day has a long history and tradition in England, some of which eventually came to America. Children would dance around the Maypole holding onto colorful ribbons. People would “bring in the May” by gathering wildflowers and green branches, weaving of floral hoops and hair garlands, and crowning a May king and queen.
The Maypole Dance
Did you ever dance around the Maypole as a child? Wrapping a Maypole with colorful ribbons is a joyous tradition that still exists in some schools and communities.
Originally, the Maypole was a living tree chosen from the woods with much merrymaking. Ancient Celts danced around the tree, praying for the fertility of their crops and all living things! For younger people, there was the possibility of courtship. If a young woman and man paired by sundown, their courtship continued so that the couple could get to know each other and, possibly, marry 6 weeks later on June’s Midsummer’s Day. This is how the “June wedding” became a tradition.
In the Middle Ages, all villages had Maypoles. Towns would compete to see who had the tallest or best Maypole. Over time, this Old English festival incorporated dance performances, plays, and literature. People would crown a “May Queen” for the day’s festivities.
The strict Puritans of New England considered the celebrations of May Day to be licentious and pagan, so they forbade its observance, and the springtime holiday never became an important part of American culture as it was in many European countries.
Interestingly, from the late 19th century through the 1950s, the Maypole dance and festivities became a rite of spring at some U.S. colleges. Seen as a wholesome tradition, this celebration often included class plays, Scottish dancing, Morris dancing, a cappella concerts, and cultural dancing and music displays.
In the 1960s and 1970s, interest waned; the May Queen and her court became more of a popularity contest. Today, the Maypole dance is mainly celebrated in schools (from elementary though college) as a fun spring activity.
The Maypole Festival: Courting and Declarations of Love
In Germany it is still celebrated: the Maypole festival. The tree is planted in the village square or the market at the end of April or on May 1. In Limburg and the Achterhoek, a maypole is still placed at the highest point of new houses. In this case too, the maypole symbolizes prosperity and fertility.
Read more about the old traditions and courtship during the Dutch Maypole festivities here:
The Maypole festival occurred in Western Europe, but the festival was also known among the Germanic and West Slavic peoples. The festival heralds the beginning of summer with the accompanying growth and blossoming of nature. The maypole symbolizes fertility. The tradition got a Christian touch during the Middle Ages, according to the church the maypole symbolized Mary, but the original Germanic version survived. That is why there was mainly partying and drinking during the Maypole festival. In the Netherlands, the tradition lasted until the 19th century.
The May Guild and the May Count
The May Guild organized the party, this guild was led by the May Count. He could be recognized by his green crown. The day was dominated by may fires, may songs, parades (‘Meynachten’) and waldhorns made from the bark of a willow or alder. Horns (but also whistles) were blown to chase away the witches and evil spirits.
The green crown
The maypole was colorfully decorated with ribbons, wreaths, crowns, green branches and flowers. It was tradition for the mayor to sit at the maypole, whereupon the girls of the town or village stood in a circle around the tree and sang a maysong. The Maygrave then decided who was his May Countess (also known as May Queen) by throwing his green crown at a girl.
Courtship and Rejection in the 18th and 19th Centuries
In addition to the symbol of prosperity and fertility, the maypole was also seen as a symbol of love. Boys therefore planted maypoles ( maybranch) in front of the houses of the girls they liked. The way the tree was decorated expressed exactly how the boy felt about the girl. This could sometimes be disappointing: if the tree was decorated with thorny flowers, this meant that he thought the girl was haughty. Read Here Jonkheid, venstersvrijen, spinnen ( Importance of social cohesionn for community) – in Dutch
Riotous girls
An elder in the maypole meant that the girl was seen as licentious. The cherry branch meant that the girl in question wasn’t particularly picky. A straw doll meant that the girl had fooled a previous love and there were many more symbols. However, the premise of the maypole planting was to declare love.
Well in front of my sweetheart door
I plant, as a lover’s pawn,
The Maypole, sweet with fragrance,
And offer her heart and hand;
And tell her, “Sweet! come happy
Now standing in front of your window;
The sweet May tide,
Oh! done so quickly.”
A new spring and a new sound
A new spring and a new sound: I want this song to sound like the whistle, That I often heard before a summer night In an old town, along the water canal – It was dark in the house, but the quiet street Collected twilight, the sky shone late Still light, a golden white shine fell About the facades in my window frame. Then a boy blew like an organ pipe, The sounds shake in the air so ripe Like young cherries, get used to a spring wind disappears into the bush and begins his journey. (p. 11)
Een nieuwe lente en een nieuw geluid: Ik wil dat dit lied klinkt als het gefluit, Dat ik vaak hoorde voor een zomernacht In een oud stadje, langs de watergracht – In huis was ’t donker, maar de stille straat Vergaarde schemer, aan de lucht blonk laat Nog licht, er viel een gouden blanke schijn Over de gevels in mijn raamkozijn. Dan blies een jongen als een orgelpijp, De klanken schudden in de lucht zoo rijp Als jonge kersen, wen een lentewind In ’t boschje opgaat en zijn reis begint. (p. 11)
….This is the beginning of Herman Gorter’s great epic Mei, which appeared in March 1889. The first line is perhaps the most famous line in Dutch literature. Herman Gorter had been working on his May in solitude for months. The great narrative poem Mei has no fewer than 4381 lines of verse. Although he had already written some poems and a shorter epic, ‘Lucifer’, the May was his official debut. It was pre-published in De Nieuwe Gids, the magazine of the Eighties, and made a huge impression at the time. Read here in Dutch
When we begin to look at some of the other elements of the George myth a completely different picture begins to emerge. One of the most telling clues to the genuine mystery behind the George phenomenon is in the name itself.
The word begins and ends with the root Ge. This is one of the oldest words known, occurring in Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek and Indo-European languages. It means Earth. Everyday words still in common use such as Ge-ology or Ge-ography show how persistent this root has been over at least the last six thousand years.
The etymology of George thus appears to show that he may originally have been an Earth-God connected with fertility, whose widespread worship in the ancient world was absorbed by Constantine’s attempts to make early Christianity into an all-inclusive religion that would become a vehicle for Roman bureaucracy. To reinforce this view the Greek translation of the name means ‘Earth-worker’ or ‘Tiller of the soil’.
A MEDIEVAL VILLAGE IS THREATENED BY A FIRE-BREATHING DRAGON. HUMAN SACRIFICE APPEARS TO BE THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP THE MONSTER AT BAY. LOTS ARE DRAWN TO DECIDE WHO IS TO SUFFER THIS DREADFUL DEATH. AND THEN, ONE DAY, IT IS THE TURN OF THE KING’S OWN DAUGHTER…THAT IS, UNTIL A BRAVE KNIGHT APPEARS…”
This thrilling and engrossing legend about good and evil is brought to life in a visually theatrical way in an immense open-air spectacle in Beesel in Limburg on the 12-13-14-18-19-20th August 2016.
Snorting steeds; a rebel-rousing rabble and , of course, a terrifying dragon take you back to a mythical age in the past. Different storylines guarantee a varied, fascinating and lively performance with music, song, fights, drama and comedy. With more than 400 actors taking part you will be immersed in the Middle Ages. Share the experiences of the villagers, the army and the royal court – will they be able to defeat the poisonous dragon?
History The legend of St. George and the Dragon has been performed in Beesel since 1736. Once every seven years the entire village finds itself involved in the eternal battle between Good and Evil. What began as a short play performed by a small cast has evolved over the years into an Open-Air Pageant enjoyed by 15,000 spectators on six occasions during the month of August. A mature theatre production with a rich background.
Historical Procession On Sunday 21st August, for the third time, a colourful historical parade will thread its way through the streets of Beesel. The parade starts at 14.00 hours and the costs are €3,50 per person. Spectators will find themselves “time-warped” into bygone days – entirely in the atmosphere of “Dragon-slaying”. Thanks to the interactive nature of this historical parade it’s as if you are actually back there in the Middle–Ages.
Picture of St. George, Debre Berhan Selassie Church, Gondar, Ethiopia
Tarasque – France and Spain
Throughout Provence, the most southerly part of France, there was a strong medieval tradition that the region was converted to Christianity soon after the death of Jesus, not by one of the apostles but by his personal friends – the family from Bethany, consisting of Mary Magdalene, Martha, and their brother Lazarus, together with two unrelated Marys mentioned in the gospels (the mother of James and John, and Mary Salome). They had all come to live there, fleeing from persecution. At Tarascon, a town near the Spanish border, attention was focused on St Martha, to whom the local church is dedicated. Read more here
The earliest Life of St Martha was written in Latin at some time between 1187 and 1212. One episode tells how, soon after coming to Tarascon, she heard that people there were terrorised by ‘a huge dragon, part land animal and part fish’ which lived in a forest beside the Rhône and had killed many people passing the spot or crossing the river. Attempts to destroy it always failed, since it would hide underwater. The description of the monster is vivid and detailed, and by no means that of a conventional dragon:
It was fatter than an ox, longer than a horse, with a lion’s face and head, teeth as sharp as swords, a horse’s mane, its back as sharp as an axe, bristling and piercing scales, six feet with bear’s claws, a serpent’s tail, and a shell on either side like a tortoise.
La Tarasca (del francés Tarasque, y éste del topónimo de la localidad de Tarascón, en Ariege, Francia) es una criatura mitológica cuyo origen se encuentra en una leyenda sobre Santa Marta. See here
More than four others – Frisian Folkstale
At that time there lived in the Grinzer Pein (Friesland) a young man who was called out that he was not afraid of anything. When a ferry had to be dug, he got a job there. He joined the team with twenty westerners. Those twenty westerners were as lazy as duckweed. They wanted him to do the work, so he got into trouble with them. Then they said, “If you don’t work, we’ll cut you in pieces.” But the young man laughed and said, “You should try that first.” And then those twenty westerners came up to him with open knives , but he knocked them down one by one, for he was not afraid. And that same evening, near the new ferry, one of the Westerners was found cut into strips. But that joung man had not done that, his own comrades wanted to get rid of that westerner. And because the young servant had fought with him, they thought, he will be blamed.
That turned out to be the case, because the nineteen westerners testified that he must have been the murderer of their comrade. He went to court, and because he would not confess, he was put on the rack, but he maintained his innocence, for he was not afraid of anything, not even the pain. Desesperate, they called a wizard, a real wizard. He had to scare him so he confessed. The wizard had him tied on a chair; then he was powerless. But they had tortured him so much that he could hardly speak.
And then he was given a cup of warm milk to drink. The magician looked straight at him and said, ‘Look at the ground in front of you!’ And then the young man noticed that his ten toes had turned into ten snakes. They grew out of his toes, they grew bigger and bigger and came closer and closer to his head. But he made those snakes drink one by one from the hot milk from the cup he had in his hands. The snakes writhed together again and fell asleep at his feet.
The wizard asked, “Aren’t you scared yet?” But he replied, “You haven’t got any of those beasts yet, because my cup isn’t empty yet.” Then the wizard turned the boy’s hair into flames and said that he would be consumed by these flames. But the young man asked: ‘Do you have tobacco in your pocket? I don’t have any tobacco with me, but my pipe does. Stop it in front of me for a moment, so I can at least light it on the flames and don’t have to use a match’.
And the third was that the sorcerer sat before him and said: If you will not confess, you will be sent to hell. ‘But the young servant laughed, for he was not afraid. The wizard looked straight at him and then the young man noticed that his body was turning into a skeleton. The magician said:
“Aren’t you scared yet? Remember – this is how you go to hell and stay there!” “Oh,” he said, “why should I be afraid? Such an old charnel house as I am now – there is no one in hell who knows me.” And he did not bow the neck.
However, he was sentenced to death. The executioner appeared and he was to be cut into four. He was already on the block to be chopped in four, then they asked him if he wasn’t scared yet. “No,” he said, “why should I be afraid? Our father always said I was worth more than four others. And if you cut me in four here, you’ll be dealing with not one, but four men in a minute.’ And he was not quartered, but they took him back to the cell.
That same night the devil came to him and left nothing to frighten him. He told him the most horrible stories and transformed himself into the most horrible forms. The devil became an old woman, with teeth as large and as sharp as razors, and threatened to bite his throat. The devil became a dragon with seven heads that spewed fire at him. He became a very large snake, with a mouth so wide that it could eat it in one sitting. But the young servant was not afraid. Only when the devil finally asked him if he felt any fear at all did he say, “No, I don’t, but you do!
And he began to tease him so furiously, he made such hideous noises, and he drew such crooked faces, that even the devil became frightened and threw himself to the ground and blew the retreat.
The judges came to the conclusion that a person that even the devil fears can never be a murderer. And he was acquitted…
Spring Festivity at Steigra – Germany
One of the four historical labyrinths in Germany is situated at Steigra in the Burgenlandkreis district in Saxony-Anhalt. It is also named Sweden Ring or Troy Town.
The layout is the classical type with 11 circuits. The exact time of origin is uncertain. Much points to the 17th century, in addition, an older origin would be conceivable. It lies beside a hill grave.
In the neighborhood one made world-wide unique archaeologically finds in the last years: The 7000 years old sun observatory of Goseck, the 3600 years old sky disk of Nebra.
The turf labyrinth of Steigra kept over centuries. Nowadays it is maintained annually by the confirmands of the locality. The patron saint of the parish church is St George, and there is even a tavern St George.
Annually on Saturday after April 23, the day of St George, takes place a spring celebration at the labyrinth. This year that was on April 26, 2008. Read more here
Sun Danceof the Native Spirits
The Sun Dance is a ceremony practiced by some Native Americans and Indigenous peoples in Canada, primarily those of the Plains cultures. It usually involves the community gathering together to pray for healing. Individuals make personal sacrifices on behalf of the community
“Our only purpose is to give our love, respect and service to God but if given the opportunity every person would be a pharaoh. His ego would declare itself the highest lord. We must kill the dragon that is our ego and then we will find Allah with us and around us and within us” Sheikh Nazim al Haqqani
Looking to the Spiritual vertical way, as the Maypole do, gives us an opportunity of discerning an understanding between Non-Virtues and Virtues, developing Spiritual values needed in our times :. Read here: Maypole the Principle of verticality
Ash-Shams (Arabic: الشمس, “The Sun”) is the 91st surah of the Qur’an, with 15 ayat or verses.
BY the Sun, and its rising brightness[18] by the moon when she followeth himby the day, when it showeth its splendorby the night, when it covereth him with darknessby the heaven, and him who built itby the earth, and him who spread it forthby the soul, and him who completely formed itand inspired into the same its faculty of distinguishing, and power of choosing, wickedness and piety: now is he who hath purified the same, happybut he who hath corrupted the same, is miserable.
1-That just as the sun and the moon, the day and the night, the earth and the sky, are different from each other and contradictory in their effects and results, so are the good and the evil different front each other and contradictory in their effects and results; they are neither alike in their outward appearance nor can they be alike in their results.
2-That God after giving the human self powers of the body, sense and mind has not left it uninformed in the world, but has instilled into his unconscious by means of a natural inspiration the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, and the sense of the good to be good and of the evil to be evil.
3-That the future of man depends on how by using the powers of discrimination, will and judgement that Allah has endowed him with, he develops the good and suppresses the evil tendencies of the self. If he develops the good inclination and frees his self of the evil inclinations, he will attain to eternal success, and if, on the contrary, he suppresses the good and promotes the evil, he will meet with disappointment and failure. Sahl al-Tustari (d. 896), a Sufi and scholar of the Qur’an, mentions, “By the day when it reveals her [the sun],He said:This means: the light of faith removes the darkness of ignorance and extinguishes the flames of the Fire.[20][21]
The spiritual influence of Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) is increasing among people of diverse beliefs throughout the western world. Rumi is now recognized here in the West, as he has been for seven centuries in the Middle East and Western Asia, as one of the greatest literary and spiritual figures of all time. Rumi is a spokesman for the religion of love in the language of the heart. Recent translations of Rumi’s work have brought forth a variety of different qualities, exploring the subtlety, grace, and electricity of his verse. This book presents his spiritual teachings concisely and comprehensively, in a translation that touches heart and mind.
The Mathnawi, from which these selections have been taken, is one of the greatest spiritual masterpieces ever written. Its content includes the full spectrum of life on earth, as well as the vertical dimension to the highest levels of metaphysics and cosmic awareness.
AFTER eleven years of turning to the Mathnawi of Jelaluddin Rumi for “light,” the idea came that this light might be made more readily available to more people in the format of a “daybook.” Rumi: Daylight comes to you as an offering, as a tool, as a possible source of insight and refreshment, support and encouragement. It may be used from the first day of the year to the last to deepen a whole cycle or at special moments, opened randomly.
May your hand be guided as you turn the pages; and may the voice within these words soothe and strengthen your soul. For the way is only difficult until it becomes easy. Moments of ease, though, may come and go numerous times before one arrives and learns to live in a new land. The verses are presented here in the order in which they would be found within Books I and II, which hold roughly a third of the 25,632 lines of the whole six books of the Mathnawi.
Although other possibilities presented themselves, keeping true to the pattern woven in the Mathnawi seemed best. As when one walks along the shore of the ocean, one finds treasures in the sand, so here, too, one may look down and discover a precious piece to hold close for awhile. In making this selection, I attempted to choose short sections that would stand alone and elucidate our lives. I recognize though that any selection is limited to time and place, and that were I to journey through the same two books of the Mathnawi now, I might surface with different lines to share with you, or if you made that journey yourself, you might choose different words. Those published here are a beginning and will, I hope, give a strong taste of the guidance and wisdom that comes through the vehicle of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, may God preserve his secret, and help us all to recognize
the shop of Oneness, the Ocean that has many harbors, yet where there is no division between man and man, or woman, but only a unity of souls in the process of return to their Creator, Whose breath lives inside each one and helps to guide us home.
Many thanks flow out to all who have lent support to this project—many helping hands and hearts have been involved in the process, among them are Lora Gobel, Tom Goldberg and George Witterschein who helped in editing.
What a blessing it has been to work together with my husband, Kabir. We are grateful for the extensive groundwork established by R.A. Nicholson in his full translation of the six books of the Mathnawi. Kabir and I hope to continue our work with the Mathnawi and bring kernels from the remaining four books to you soon. Continually sustaining us has been the presence of Sheikh Suleyman Hayati Dede, may God preserve his secret. He mirrored to us in reality the beauty and breadth of Mevlana Jelauluddin Rumi, witness of God. May we take Mevlana as an example and open to the whisper of God in our own hearts that our words, too, may become fragrant and full of nourishment.
True Life of a Monk: showing demons attacking the monk with passions
The Crucified Monk | Icon of the Monastic Life
Around the entrance of refectories in Orthodox monasteries, there can sometimes be seen a shocking image of a monk being crucified. The unnamed monk silently reposes on the cross, whilst around him he is assailed by terrifying demons and skeletal figures. Just as shocking as the image itself is the inscription which accompanies it: The True Life of a Monk
Monasticism is an ancient Christian practice which developed in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D., around the time when Christianity became legalized in the Roman Empire and persecutions practically ceased. This has sometimes been given as a reason for the rise of monasticism: the desire for zealous Christians to flee from the world where living the Christian life was suddenly comfortable, “easier”, and even fashionable. However, all the greatest monastic saints, in their writings, give one source for their motivation for entering a monastery: the Gospels.
A perfect example of this is from the life of St Anthony the Great. In his hometown church, Anthony heard the Gospel reading proclaimed, as if spoken to him directly: “If you would be perfect, go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and come and follow me.” And so Anthony was inspired to live a life which became the foundation for monasticism, putting forward the basic motivation for monks and nuns ever since.
St Anthony By BreughelSt Anthony by Bosch
With such a basic Scriptural motivation for monasticism, this way of life becomes a lot more interesting for every Christian.
The Icon: “True Life of a Monk”
The image of the crucified monk is didactic: an icon for contemplation, not veneration. The subject of the icon is not a named Saint, but an unnamed, generic figure of a monk – or a nun if it is found in a female monastery. In its fullest form, the image looks as it does in the picture above from an Athonite fresco. Initially quite confusing, the image is replete with inscriptions which fully explain what is going on, and the only barrier to understanding is not being able to read the language of these inscriptions.
Draw a monk crucified on a cross, clothed in a tunic and a monk’s hat, barefoot and with his feet nailed to the footrest of the cross; his eyes are closed and his mouth shut. Just above his head is this inscription: “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips”.
In his hands he holds lighted candles, and next to the candles is this inscription: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father, which [is in heaven]“.
On his chest he has a tablet like a hassock, which says: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
On his stomach is another scroll, like a title, with these words: “Do not be led astray, O monk, by a full belly.”
Lower down on his body is another scroll which says: “Mortify your members which are upon the earth.”
Lower down again, below his knees, is another scroll which says: “Prepare your feet in the way of the Gospel of peace.”
Above, in the top arm of the cross, make a title nailed on with this inscription: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of my Lord.” On the three arms of the cross make seals, and in the right one write this: “He that endures to the end shall be saved.” In the left-hand one: “He who does not renounce everything is not able to be a disciple of Christ.” On the seal above the footrest of the cross: “Strait and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life.”
To the right side of the cross paint a dark cavern with a big dragon in it coiled up, and write: “The all-devouring Hell.” Over the mouth of the dragon is a naked young man with his eyes bound by a cloth, he holds a bow and shoots at the monk. On his bow is a scroll which says: “Maker of lust.” Write this inscription above him: “The love of harlotry.” Above the cave put many snakes and write: “The cares.” Near to Hades put a devil dragging at the cross with a rope and saying: “The flesh is weak and cannot resist.” At the right-hand end of the footrest put a spear with a cross and a flag and write on it: “I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me.”
To the left of the cross make a tower with a door, out of which comes a man sitting on a white horse, wearing a fur hat and robes woven with gold and trimmed with fur. In his right hand he holds a cup full of wine and in his left a lance on the end of which is a sponge; a scroll is wrapped around the lance which says: “Take delight in the pleasures of the world.” He shows them to the monk. Write this inscription above him: “The vainglorious world.” Below him put a grave out of which Death is coming holding a large scythe on his shoulder and an hour-glass in his hand, and looking at the monk. Above him is the inscription: “Death and the grave.”
Below the hands of the monk on either side put two angels holding scrolls; write on the scroll of that on the right: “The Lord has sent me to help you.” And on that on the left: “Do good and fear not.”
Above the cross represent heaven with Christ in it, holding the Gospels on his breast open at the words: “Whosoever will follow me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” In his right hand he holds a king’s crown, and in his left a crown [of flowers]. Below him to either side are two angels, looking at the monk and showing him to Christ, and holding between them a long scroll with these words: “Fight that you may receive the crown of righteousness, and the Lord will give you a crown of precious stones.”
Then write this title: The life of the true monk.
Athonite Fresco
Some versions of this icon will be simplified, or will show demons surrounding the crucified monk firing arrows at him (see the first image of this post). The arrows and spears directed against the monk will be identified by inscriptions as various “passions” (vainglory, lust, gluttony etc). see The seven deadly sins
Romanian Fresco in Bucovina (modern-day Ukraine) Romanian Fresco in Bucovina (modern-day Ukraine). The angel holds the inscription: “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord of Sabaoth”; the fresco also shows God the Father (right), the Son (left), and the Holy Spirit (dove at centre)
Rosprom refectory of the Trinity Monastery in Alatyr
The image painted for monastics to contemplate and therefore properly belongs in a monastery. The “true life of a monk” is not necessarily the true, Christian, life for all of us. If we are not monks or nuns, we should not pretend to be so. Yet insofar as the monastic life is based in the Gospel and instructs all Christians on how to live a Christian life, the icon of the Crucified Monk can be useful. While ever “lay” Christians read monastic literature like “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”, retreat temporarily to monasteries, or in other ways draw on the monastic experience, they can also gain benefit from this icon.
Especially during Lent, when the life of all Christians becomes that little more ascetic, we can see the image of the “True Life of a Monk” as the image of the “True Life of a Christian”.
Modern Icon
The birth of Jesus in man
In Sufism, the four traditional forms (white, black, red and green) of this initiatory death represent the practices which aim to extinguish spiritual lusts as well as carnal concupiscences read here in French
The Green death: Death to the universe. Death thus understood, death with regard to the universe, becomes, with the desire to enter the path, the first step of the itinerants towards God. In Sufi thought, it has four aspects: a white death, a black death, a red death and a green death. The white death is hunger, which is akin to enlightenment. The black death is realized when the Sufi practices and succeeds in enduring the evils caused by men or even all evil in an absolute way, which is likely to sadden the self/ego which becomes darkened. The Red Death consists of subduing him, which ends up killing him.
Finally, the green death consists of wearing the dress which becomes, by dint of being patched, variegated like the earth in spring. Spiritual death here below is therefore the supreme privation. But, for Sufism, there exists, here below also, another death, this one eminently positive: death with regard to the universe, which is rebirth and which is access to the first home of the other. -of the. Such death results in life, it is itself life. The words of Hallâj are eloquent in this regard: “Kill me, my comrades, it is in my murder that my life lies! My death, it is to (over)live; and my life is to die!”
Eternal Spring
We change Reality by changing our Perception of it
There is much to be learn about Eternity by living in Time
There is much to be learn about Time by living in Eternity
Before the modern-day obsession with social and political issues, the strand of learning often called Sufism played a major if not predominant role in all Muslim societies. What distinguishes Sufism from other approaches to the Islamic tradition is the fact that it considers the transformation of the soul the goal of human life, while looking at dogma, ritual, and law as means to this end, not ends in themselves. (Sufism is a problematic and controversial term, but probably more adequate than “mysticism” or “esotericism”, both of which carry too much baggage to apply in any more than superficial ways to the vastly diverse assortment of teachings and practices that are directed toward spiritual transformation in the Islamic tradition). In keeping with the worldview established by the Koran, Muslim scholars addressed three major issues: activity, understanding, and transformation.
Activity became the specialty of the jurists, the experts in the Shariah, who took it upon themselves to define right and wrong deeds. Understanding was the specialty of various schools of theology and philosophy, ranging from the dogmatic to the mystical and metaphysical. Transformation was the specialty of spiritual guides, many but not all of whom came to be called Sufis.
If we want to choose one word to designate the process and goal of transformation, we can not do better than “love.”
To explain why this is so, I will summarize the understanding of love as it was discussed from early times. Specifically, I want to look at two issues that run through all the discussions, namely the ontological and moral imperatives.
The ontological imperative means that all things love by nature.
The moral imperative means that human beings, by virtue of their own specific nature, must refine and perfect their love or suffer the consequences.
Any thinking that can be called Islamic grounds itself in tawhīd,the notion of unity. Briefly, tawhīd means that all reality is utterly contingent upon the one supreme reality, called God by theologians and the Necessary Being by philosophers. What imparts a specifically Islamic color to this universal notion is the idea that Muhammad was the last in a series of 124,000 prophets sent by God.
Strict attention to unity brings us face to face with the ontological imperative:
Everything is exactly what it must be, for all things are under the control of the One. Among the many Koranic proof texts cited in support of this imperative is the verse «His only command, when He desires a thing, is to say to it “Be!”, and it comes to be» (36: 82).
Theologians called this word “Be” the creative command (al-amr al-khalqī).It is eternal, which is to say that, from the human point of view, it is re-uttered at every moment. As a result, the universe and all things within it are constantly renewed. Read more here
Stupid that everyone in his case Is praising his particular opinion! If Islam means submission to God, We all live and die in Islam.” Goethe (West-East Divan)
As Paul Kingsnorth in 50 Holy Wells say: “Who knows what the future holds? Not me. But as the chaos of the Void accelerates, a parallel spiritual longing deepens. We need truth. We need God. People still come to the wells to speak to Him. I can see, if only in my dreams, a future in which more and more people come looking here. A future in which the wells are still tended and the prayers grow in numbers, the well rounds revive and the sacred landscape of ancient Ireland begins to awaken from its slumber. A future in which we remember that all things are soaked in God. A future in which the lessons of the modern hermit St Joseph the Hesychast are remembered by us worldly Christians today:
God is everywhere. There is no place where He cannot be found. Within and without, above and below, wherever you turn all things cry out: “God.” We live and move in Him. We breathe God, we eat God, we clothe ourselves in God. All things praise and bless God. The whole creation cries out. All things, living or inanimate, speak with wonder and glorify the Creator.
Verily He is the One Who will revive the dead…
SURAH 30- AR-RUM AYAT 48-50 48- Allah is He Who sends the winds, so they raise clouds, and spread them along the sky as He wills, and then break them into fragments, until you see rain drops come forth from their midst! Then when He has made them fall on whom of His slaves as He will, lo! they rejoice! 49- And verily before that (rain), just before it was sent down upon them, they were in despair! 50- See, then, the tokens of Allah’s Mercy: how He revives the earth after it is dead. Verily He is the One Who will revive the dead. He has power over everything. see here
Note:Sufism is different from monasticism. Sufism is based on Quran and Sunna. Allah says in Quran:
Then in the footsteps of these Messengers, We sent (other) Messengers and We sent ‘Isa, the son of Maryam (Jesus, the son of Mary) after them and gave him the Injil (the Gospel). And We created kindness and mercy in the hearts of those who were (the true) followers (of ‘Isa [Jesus]). And they themselves invented the innovation of monasticism. We did not prescribe it for them. But they (introduced this innovation of monasticism) merely to seek Allah’s pleasure. Then they could not practically keep and maintain that check which was its due (i.e., could not continue its spirit and discipline). So We paid those of them who believed (and continued the innovation of monasticism to seek the pleasure of Allah) their reward. And most of them (who left it and changed their ways) are disobedient. (57: 27)
In the aforementioned verse, word “Rahbaniya” (monasticism) is used which means fear. Rahbaniya means the religion of fear. It means that a person, due to fear (regardless of whether it is the fear of someone’s cruelty or the fear of his own weakness), flees from the worldly life and takes refuge in the forests and mountains.
Monasticism in Christianity
Monasticism is deeply rooted in Christianity. The Christian church did not adopt monasticism for about two centuries after Jesus. But it would not be wrong to say that the germs of monasticism were present in Christianity from the beginning. They considered asceticism and dervish life to be superior and preferable to married and business life. It was considered undesirable for those who performed religious services in the church to be married, have children and maintain a household. By the third century, monasticism had taken the form of a contagion and it started to spread around like a pandemic.
The main reason for the popularity of monasticism in the ancient polytheistic Christian society was moral depravity, lasciviousness and worldliness. In order to break this growing wickedness, the Christian Church preferred intensity and extremism instead of adopting the path of moderation and imposed a way of life in which worldly relationships, marriage, wife and children, business, even drinking and eating was reduced to bear minimum. Some of the things that Christian ascetics used to adopt included:
Torture one’s body
Staying dirty, avoiding cleanliness and water
Prohibiting marriage
Severing ties with relatives
Going against human nature
Sectarianism
Due to sectarianism, many sects and groups started to arise in the Christian community. All these sects had strong differences and hatred towards other sects. By the fourth century, around 90 sects had born in Christianity. A brief history of some of Christian priests is described here:
Incidents of Christian Ascetics
St. Macarius used to carry a weight of 80lbs at all times. For 6 months he slept in a swamp and poisonous flies kept biting his body. It is written about a group of 130 nuns that they never washed their feet. Taking shower was like death for them.
St. Vitus was the father of two children. When he became an ascetic, his wife wept, but he separated from her. According to St. Jerome, severing marital relations was the foremost duty of a Christian ascetic. The darkest reality of Christian monasticism was that it separated blood relations. According to the priests, it was a sin to have soft feelings for blood relations. St. Jerome says about it, “If your nephew puts his arms around your neck and clings to you, if your mother tries to stop you, if your father lies down in front of you to stop you, even then, leave everything behind, run towards the flag of the cross without shedding a single tear. On this path, ruthlessness is piety.
St. Simeon Stylites spent 27 years away from his parents. His father died from the shock of separation. When his mother found out about him, she went to see him but he refused to meet her. For three days and three nights she kept waiting there and finally she died lying there.
The religion that goes against human nature, nature takes its revenge. The Christian religion is a prime example of this.
What is Renunciation of World in Sufism?
Mostly people incorrectly portray the concept of ‘Tark-e-Dunia’ (renunciation of world) in Sufism and try to link it with monasticism. Thus, diverting people from Sufism. Sultan ul Ashiqeen Sultan Muhammad Najib ur Rehman says in his book Sufism – The Soul of Islam:
“The critics and deniers of Sufism heavily scandalised the term ‘renunciation’ and labelled it as monasticism and un-Islamic. In fact, the term renunciation has never been understood in its true sense. According to the philosophy of Sufism, renunciation means renouncing the lust of worldly pleasures inwardly.”
Daata Ganj Bakhsh Ali ibn Usman al-Hajveri says:
The more a man gets fed up with the world, the stronger becomes his relation with Allah. It does not mean that he must leave his home and family to start living in a jungle. Rather, it means that he should remove the love of the world from the inward. Live in the world but do not become worldly. It is the very excellence of Sufism, not to be drenched while remaining in the river. This is not courageous to avoid going near a river and keep boasting about not getting wet. To the Sufis, renunciation of the world is in fact spiritual rather than physical. The excellence is to live physically among the creation being spiritually away from it. (Kashf-ul-Mahjub)
Sultan ul Faqr VI Sultan Muhammad Asghar Ali says:
Live in the world like a boat floats on water. Consider the boat as your esoteric self and the water as the world. The boat is safe until the water enters it. When water enters the boat, it definitely sinks. You are like a boat and the water is like the world. Save yourself from the world and its love.
If you have wealth but you do not foster love for it and spend it generously for the sake of Allah, it is not worldliness. However, if you make worldly things your priority then all these things would become worldliness. Thus, evade yourself from the appetite of material things while living in this world, just as a wild duck lives in water but does not drown. Get your destiny from the world like a crane who while living on a riverside gets livelihood from it but does not drown.
Do your business of the world but for the sake of Allah; eat from your livelihood but for the sake of Allah and move in the world but again for Allah. I do not suggest alienate yourself from the world but you must continue to remember Allah while doing everything. Your inward should be attentive towards Him while your hands are busy in the worldly affairs. (Sultan-ul-Faqr VI Sultan Mohammad Asghar Ali-Life and Teachings)
Sufism Discourages Monastic Life
Monasticism means to leave the worldly life in a way that you go to jungle or in isolation, away from the people. Whereas, Islam is the religion which is complete and perfect way of life because it satisfies all the needs and aspects of life. It gives perfect guidance to every individual and social affair.
Islam teaches rights of Allah as well as the rights of human beings. That is the reason there is no concept of things like monasticism in Islam.
The life of our Prophet (pbuh) is perfect example and guide for us. He used to remain intensely engaged in spreading the message of Islam and at the same time he gave lessons on excellent and fruitful ways of spending our worldly life whether it’s individual or collective.
Cutting ties with worldly means is against the nature. The essence of renouncing the world is to fulfil the worldly responsibilities and duties whilst keeping one’s inward enlightened with the remembrance of Allah. This is what renunciation of world means according to Sufism. Allah says in Quran:
The life of this world is nothing but sport and pastime and the Home of the Hereafter is the only (true) life. Would that they knew (this secret)! (29: 64)
The Holy Prophet (pbuh) also declared the love of the world a danger for faith. He said “The love of this world is the root of all evil”. (Ibn Majah 4112)
The System of Khanqah in Sufism
(Khanqah is the Arabized form of the Persian compound noun “Khan-gah” made up of two parts of “khana” (house) and “gah” (place). The term “khanqah” means a house where Sufis, dervishes and shaykhs live and worship. Khanqah is also called “sawmi’a”, “ibadatgah”, “ribat”, “tikiya”, “zawiya”, “qalandar”, “dergahg”,”langar”, “duwayra” and “jama’at khana”. Also, the name of some villages in Iran is Khanqah.
Residing in Khanqah for training has some commonality between Islam and Christian monasticism. However, they are fundamentally different to each other. The key difference is that in Christian monasticism, people who reside in a Khanqah sever all kinds of family ties and worldly affairs. Whereas the Sufi Khanqah which flourishes under the supervision of a perfect spiritual guide does not teach the seekers to leave worldly life. Instead, they are inculcated to renounce the world inwardly whilst discharging their worldly duties and responsibilities. And this is accomplished under the supervision of a perfect spiritual guide. By the blessings of his spiritual sight and esoteric attention, the spiritual guide, cleanses the spiritual self of sincere seekers.
By gaining closeness to the perfect spiritual guide, his blessings and favour, his inspired knowledge (ilm-e-Ludduni), the seeker gains freedom from attachments, love of this world and its lusts. There is no room for heresy, monasticism or anything that goes against Sharia in a Sufi Khanqah. The importance of Khanqah is proven from Quran. The Holy Prophet (pbuh) laid the foundation of the system of Khanqah from the platform of al-Suffa. Allah says in Quran:
(O Beloved Prophet!) Stay tenaciously in the companionship of those who remember their Lord morning and evening, ardently seeking His pleasure. (18: 28)
Companions of al-Suffah
Shaikh Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi writes in his renowned work Auarif-Al-Ma’araf:
The Companions of al-Suffah have a special place in Islam who stayed and got trained at the platform of al-Suffah. For them, this was their first school, where faith (Iman) was entered into their inwards and Islam spread in the whole world.
The rank of Companions of al-Suffah is so exalted that Allah mentioned them in Quran. Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) gave them glad tidings. He said: “O Ashab al-Suffah, glad tidings to you that those of you who remain steadfast on these qualities that you have adopted here and would remain content on this state, would be raised and remain closest to me on the day of Judgement (Auarif-Al-Ma’araf).
Khanqah is the only place where people of same point of view and thoughts live and remember Allah. They don’t become oblivious to remembrance of Allah even for a moment. They live there day and night. Whilst residing there, they fulfill the tasks and duties assigned to them by their spiritual guide which in turn cleanses their inwards. By being in Khanqah it is not at all meant that the seeker will turn away from his duties towards his mother, father, sisters and brothers nor will he become negligent towards the family. Rather, Khanqah teaches beautiful way of life of Islam and the golden rules which when seeker applies to his life will succeed in both the worlds.
Khanqahs in Sufism are according to Mohammadan Sharia
Following the Sunna of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh), the perfect Fakirs in every era established Khanqah for enlightening the souls of the seekers of Allah.
Here, the seekers of Allah get their inwards cleansed and enlightened under the spiritual guidance of the spiritual guide. Their (inner) self progresses from an-nafs al-ʾammārah (inciting self) to an-nafs al-muṭmaʾinnah (self at peace). By remaining in blessed company of our Perfect Spiritual Guide, the seeker’s inner (self) and outward being is enlightened with Divine light.
Monasticism in Islam
There is no concept of monasticism in Islam as the Holy Prophet (pbuh) said in a hadith:
There is no monasticism in Islam.
In another hadith, the Holy Prophet (pbuh) emphasised that Islam prefers Jihad over monasticism.
Abu Saeed al-Khudri (r.a) narrates that a man came to me and asked for advice. I said: I had asked the Holy Prophet (pbuh) the same question and he said, “I advise you to fear Allah Almighty because this is the foundation of everything. Hold Jihad firmly since it is the monasticism of Islam. And remember Allah and recite Quran. Since it is the source of blessings in the sky and the remembrance for you on the earth. (Masnad Ahmad bin Hambal: 8982)
We can infer from the aforementioned hadith that monasticism in Islam means Jihad in the way of Allah and the best Jihad is ‘Jihad with one’s self’ i.e. training and purifying one’s inward. In order to achieve this goal, sitting in company of a perfect spiritual guide became permissible for the seekers in Khanqah because the main purpose of the Khanqah is to purge seekers’ inciting self.
In the end, we mention this beautiful saying of Ghawth al-Azam Shaikh Abdul Qadir Jilani:
“O servant of Allah! Adopt the company of Saints, because their glory is that when they look and pay attention to someone, they revive and enlighten their inward. Whether that person is a Jew, Christian or worshiper of fire.” (Al-Fath Al-Rabbani)
You are invited to adopt the company of the perfect spiritual guide of this age. So that you may purify your soul, attain the closeness and gnosis of Divine Essence and presence in Mohammadan Assembly which is real success in this world and hereafter.
What is the difference between Sufism and Monasticism?
The main difference between Sufism and monasticism is that in monasticism the monks sever their ties with blood relations. They stop all kinds of engagements with worldly life such as business, family etc. and subject their bodies to torturous endeavours.
Whereas in Sufism, the perfect spiritual guide trains the seekers to remove the world and its desires from their inward whilst still living a normal life. They discharge their duties as a son, father, husband etc. but inwardly they remain attached to Allah Almighty every moment. The source of guidance and example to follow is the life of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) in Sufism.
– Questions to Mawlana Shaykh Nazim
Sultanul Awliya as-Sayyid Mawlana Shaykh Muhammad Nazim ‘Adil Al-Haqqani An-Naqshbandi ق sohbat, 14 December 1994
GUEST: Mawlana I see that among our brothers, there are some foreign people. There is for sure a wisdom in opening your arms to these people. How come? How do you win a non-Muslim person? How are they honoured with Islam?
MAWLANA: Are they not Allah’s servants? I don’t collect them from the moon and stars. They are the people of the Earth. They are servants of Allah. Not people of the heavens. If you don’t appreciate Islam, Allah makes the Europeans to appreciate it. He takes out the sword and disciplines you. They will teach you Islam. The manifestation is on them now. There is a hadith: “The sun will rise from the West.” Its meaning is authentic. No need to translate it but if we translate it, it is a sign that Islam’s sun will rise from the West again. These are the new seeds of Islam blooming in Europe. They will come here in waves. They will insult people, who insult Islam here. Guidance is from Allah, not from us. We are a means.
GUEST: I asked because in other jamaats, among the brothers, the followers, I had never seen foreigners. Is it that you have an exceptional quality? How is it?
MAWLANA: It doesn’t belong to me, Allah gave me that quality. If I talk with the Pope, he becomes a Muslim. If I talk to a preacher, he becomes a Muslim. If I talk to Jesuit, he becomes a Muslim. If I talk to a Wahhabi, he gets more stubborn. I can’t communicate with arrogant Muslims. I can’t make them leave their arrogance. But these people (non-muslims) are inclined to Haqq (Truth). When you talk about Haqq their conscience immediately runs to accept it. It is not difficult. There is nothing easier than making them Muslim.
People who come to Europe for inviting (to Islam), either from here or other Muslim countries, they are arrogant. So these people don’t listen to them. If you approach these people humbly, respectfully, with love they give their lives for you. They too are Allah’s servants. He isn’t an ordinary man, he is a professor. This man is a German professor, doctor. A gentleman. He has high education. Jamaladdin also. Each one of them is a university graduate. They have professions. They aren’t ordinary people. We can’t deceive them and draw them to religion. No!
GUEST: Mawlana, there are various jamaats in Turkey. What do you advise the followers? What is your view on them?
MAWLANA: I’m tired of this variety. This variety is like partly cloudy. Each cloud is loaded with blessing. Divine order doesn’t let them rain. When they unite, blessing descends. I have no other advice. They should leave these names, unite under the name of the everlasting empire that their ancestors established. Our ancestors the Ottomans united all the Muslim nations under one identity. They succeeded in uniting them. Unfortunately now, there are Arabs, Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Egyptians, Sudanese, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans. All sorts. Even the Arabs can’t own their identities. They can’t say we are the Muslim Arabs. They are divided under fake names, titles. That’s why they have no value.
GUEST: By the way, Mawlana some people are busy preparing. Very busy preparing, as you may well know.
MAWLANA: Is it yellow fever?
GUEST: New year is coming. They celebrate the birth of ‘Isa ‘alaihi salam. They mark it as the first year and they celebrate the new year. What do you think about New Year?
MAWLANA: There is nothing to think. What can you expect from a community forced in this direction for 70 years? Expect them to approve the integrity of our Prophet’s ﷺ birthday? For 70 years, they say it is brain washing, not brain washing but brain spoiling. Each suggestion made makes people away from Islam, meaning, spoils their brains instead of washing their brains. Unfortunately their brains are spoiled with Christmas for over 70 years.
Let alone being religious, there is no religious tradition left. Now they adopted these Christian traditions. Tradition, new tradition. They intend to continue it. Headache. It is certainly unacceptable. “I celebrate it at home.” Don’t. “I eat chicken instead of turkey.” Don’t eat turkey either. Eat bread and olives that night. At least if we look at it from a religious perspective, when his mother gave birth to ‘Isa ‘alaihi salam she became hungry. With Allah’s order she shook the branch of the date tree and the dates fell down. At least if they put dates on their tables it would be consistent with the Holy Quran. They can calculate it and if it is ‘Isa’s ‘alaihi salam birthday, they can eat dates. I’m not saying that they should do this, but if they did it might be accepted.
We, Muslims don’t believe in the correctness of the day that Christians claim is the birthday of ‘Isa ‘alaihi salam. It is absolutely incorrect. That isn’t the day. But Christians have made this religion fake. It is a religion of showing off. They haven’t left anything related to reality so we can say, do this, do that. No need. Because the Saudis, whom you assume to be practicing sharia, reject the celebration of our Prophet’s ﷺ birthday. It is prohibited by the Saudis. So many ignorant ones, with titles of ‘Doctor’ are educated by Saudis.
They also reject the Mawlid. They prohibit the Mawlid-i Sharif reciting in the month of Mawlid. They say it is prohibited, bid’a (innovation), etc. They are the ones making bid’a. For this reason within this year this yellow fever won’t leave them. But this yellow fever makes them uncomfortable. These people busy with New Year preparations, should be ready for yellow fever within that year, that they call ‘New Year’.
“Love is beautiful for our Lord and His servants. Do everything with love, it must be accepted by your lord and he will do it with pleasure. Allah says; I don’t need your worship, I only seek the Love with which it is offered. Now we are trying to do all the practices but forgetting to ask for Divine Love, so we are becoming like robots, or like doing gymnastics.
If our worship makes the love for Allah grow in our hearts, then we should keep that practice and continue.”
The undeniable truth is that for Christianity Jesus is the personification of the central sun of our solar system. Perceived from the northern hemisphere, and particularly from between the latitudes of the Tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle, the celestial arc-shape path of our Light Bringer becomes in the fall each day a little smaller. But on (about) December 21, this daily shrinkage comes to stand still. In other words, the daily changing in the size of the Risen Savior’s arc has then stopped, or “died”. However, after three natural days, in which the nights lasted the longest of the year, this heavenly motion comes back to life again, starting with the sunrise on December 25. We celebrate this annual rebirth of Jesus with the Light Feast as a continuation of the Germanic Midwinter Festival.
As the Roman deceivers want this to be hidden from the uninitiated, they moved Jesus’ day of death from December 21st to “Good Friday”, that is, the Friday before Easter, which is today. Furthermore, they changed the meaning of this Passover to the resurrection of the Savior, which in reality occurs every year on December 25th.
Just like Christmas, also the Passover is originally a Germanic feast. As we celebrate during the Midwinter Feast our survival of the year’s darkest part, we celebrate during the Eostre Festivalthe fact that within a natural day the day time period has again become longer than the night time period. In other words, the light of the day has again overtaken or passed by the darkness of the night. The official version of the origin of the name “Passover” tries to fool us by pointing to the Hebrew word “Pesach”, but that is like putting the world upside down. In reality, the name “Passover” originates from the old Germanic verb for ‘passing by’. Somehow ‘passing by’ and ‘taking over’ merged into “Passover”. Another myth is that the name “Easter” is referring to the East. This is nonsense, as it is derived from the Old English “Eostre”. Actually, it is all quite straightforward, only by examining these names.
This (long) weekend, we celebrate the fact that the daily lighter period has taken over or passed by the nightly darker period. In other words, the entire period of natural day is again ruled by Light, and no longer by Darkness. We can also examine the way we still use the verb ‘pass’ in our contemporary language. For instance, we pass a deed. After this deed is passed, the previous owner passed it on to the following one. Similarly, we also pass a ball from the previous player to the next in various ball sports.
When we imagine a full year as a circle, then the straight lines that connect the starting points of opposing seasons form a cross within that circle. This is the true Cross of Jesus, as shown in the figure on the right-hand side. Opposite to the beginning of winter on (about) December 21st lies on this circle the beginning of summer on (about) June 21st. These two points are called ‘solstices’ from solstitium in Latin, literally meaning ‘solar standstill’. However, it is not the standing still of the Light Bringer, but the standstill of the daily growing (or shrinking) of its arc-like path. Likewise, opposite to the beginning of spring on (about) March 21st lies on this circle the beginning of autumn on (about) September 23rd. These two points are called equinoxes from aequinoctium in Latin, literally meaning ‘night getting even’ (with day). On these two days a year, the nocturnal darker period and the diurnal lighter period indeed get even.
Furthermore, in case you want to learn more about the original Germanic holidays, then study the Germanic Moon Calendar.
Resurrection and the Feminine Divine The Christian holiday of Easter is the archetypal summit of the year, where rebirth and resurrection are venerated in the mystery of Jesus Christ’s awakening from the tomb. In Christian orthodoxy, Easter is known as pascha, the Greek and Latin term referring to the Jewish Passover. The Apostle Paul uses this word as a title for Christ, “For Christ our Passover lamb [pascha], has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5.7). By the end of the first century CE early Christians had reinterpreted the Exodus story and the Passover ritual as a prototype for the sacrifice of Christ.
The word “Easter” itself, however, is Old English, from Eastre or Eostre, a title derived from an old English month now known as April. Christian Easter is celebrated on the first Sabbath after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This holy-specific day most often occurs in April and is representative of the most fertile time of the year, when sun, moon, and earth are all in their phases of rebirth and awakening. Easter is therefore the day of resurrection, in heaven and on earth. And this heaven-earth relationship is only an archetypal symbol for the heaven-earth awakening that occurs in the soul of God, or in the spirit and breath of each mortal man and woman. In Christian rite and belief, every soul will arise like the sun, moon, and earth, to a new immortal dwelling. Despite this traditional context, historically, Easter had feminine roots. Significantly, the old English month of Eostre was itself named after a goddess whose rites of rebirth were celebrated at the same time among the early inhabitants of Britain and Northern Europe. Eostre was a Germanic goddess whose name is cognate with the Proto-Germanic austrôn, meaning dawn or to shine. This deity belongs to a long line of female divinities who are goddesses of the dawn, and are found in various forms throughout Indo-European cultures as beings who bring light and life to the world. For thousands of years before Christianity the divine being who brought forth resurrection was represented as a goddess. Inanna, Isis, Rhea, Cybele, and Demeter are beings with the divine stewardship over rebirth.
The Japanese Amaterasu is a goddess of the dawn who also brings light and life to the world. While these deities were seen as the powers behind the fertility of all things on earth, they also held stewardship over the mysterious cosmic principle of heavenly life. In the Greco-Roman mystery religions, the revitalization of the initiate was promised via the gifts and boons of the goddess. This should make sense as in fact it is only woman who can bring forth life from her womb. In many respects, the rites of rebirth analogized the tomb with the womb, so that those going into the beyond could be reborn by a Heavenly Mother whose womb was the cosmic precinct of immortality.
The Goddess in Prehistory “As far back as the Paleolithic Age,” writes Maarten J. Varmaseren, “one finds in the countries around the Mediterranean a goddess who is universally worshiped as the Mighty Mother” . From 30,000 to 10,000 BCE, adds Joseph Campbell, “the [Goddess] is represented in those now well-known little ‘Venus’ figurines” . A limestone relief found in southwestern France in the Pyrenees is illustrative in this regard. Dating to 25,000 BCE, an engraved Venus image is shown holding a bison horn inscribed with thirteen vertical strokes. This is the number of nights between the first crescent and the full moon .
The Goddess figure is holding her swollen belly with her other hand, suggesting that at this early date, the lunar and menstrual cycles were connected, and that the Goddess figure was symbolic of the whole archetypal complex of the feminine divine: life, birth, and death.
According to Joseph Campbell, the goddess has three functions:
“one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization” Read more here
– The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments
Who really built Europe’s finest Romanesque monuments? Clergymen presiding over holy sites are credited throughout history, while highly skilled creators remain anonymous. But the buildings speak for themselves.
This groundbreaking book explores the evidence embedded in medieval monasteries, churches and castles, from Mont Saint-Michel and the Leaning Tower of Pisa to Durham Cathedral and the Basilica of Santiago de Compostela. Tracing the origins of key design innovations from this pre-Gothic period—acknowledged as the essential foundation of all future European construction styles—Diana Darke sheds startling new light on the masons, carpenters and sculptors behind these masterpieces.
At a time when Christendom lacked such expertise, Muslim craftsmen had advanced understanding of geometry and complex ornamentation. They dominated high-end construction in Islamic Spain, Sicily and North Africa, spreading knowledge and techniques across Western Europe. Challenging Euro-centric assumptions, Darke uncovers the profound influence of the Islamic world in ‘Christian’ Europe, and argues that ‘Romanesque’ architecture, a nineteenth-century art historians’ fiction, should be recognised for what it truly is: Islamesque.
– the diverse roots of medieval architecture
A beautifully-illustrated account of the Middle Eastern influence on Europe’s great buildings
The wooden ceiling of Peterborough Cathedral was created using techniques then unknown in Europe.
From Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved capitals from a Roman temple and relics of St John the Baptist transferred from the church it replaced. The cross-pollination extended from design and materials to people – the shimmering gold mosaics that cover the interiors of both buildings are attributed to the Byzantine master craftsmen whose forerunners decorated the churches of Constantinople and Ravenna.
This sun-drenched historical patchwork could seem a long way from the gloom of early medieval Europe. But in Islamesque, cultural historian Diana Darke sets out to show Islamic art’s influence on Europe’s Romanesque monasteries, churches and castles, via a very similar story of surprising borrowings and occasional thefts. It is a companion to Darke’s previous book, Stealing from the Saracens, which argued that European masterpieces from Notre-Dame to St Paul’s took inspiration from the Muslim world, and whose eye-catching examples included Big Ben’s resemblance to the 11th-century minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo.
Islamesque begins with equally sweeping claims of a “controversial, revolutionary” thesis: that Islamic influence has been less “forgotten” than deliberately suppressed by chauvinists and culture warriors. But the true focus of the book lies at the other end of the scale, in the micro-details of archivolts and muqarnas, squinches and joggled voussoirs.
Doorway, North Mimms, Hertfordshire, England, ca 1300
Ali Akbar Isfahani. Muqarnas vault, entrance iwan, Royal Mosque, Isfahan, Iran. 17th c.Hosios Loukas Katholikon (nave, North West squinch)Joggled Voussoirs from Arch of Kiziltepe Building
To research it, Darke covered a staggering amount of ground, visiting “hundreds of Romanesque buildings scattered across England, Wales, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Sicily, not to mention scores of sites across North Africa, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey” – many of them shown in 150 beautiful colour illustrations.
Darke’s starting point is an exploration of a zigzag motif she traces from the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “water” through Coptic (Egyptian Christian), Islamic and western architectural traditions to the courtyard of the Ottoman merchant’s house she bought and restored in Damascus. The book then itself zigzags – sometimes disorientingly – through space and time. There is a fascinating chapter on the Fatimid architecture of Cairo: the buildings created by the Isma’ili Shia dynasty that founded the city and made it the centre of a caliphate that in the 11th century stretched from Sicily to the Hejaz in the Arabian peninsula. Darke is clearly an enthusiast and it is a pleasure to follow her from the exquisite shell-like facade of Cairo’s tiny al-Aqmar (“Moonlit”) Mosque, rich in esoteric symbolism, to the defensive bulk of the Bab al-Futuh and Bab al-Nasr city gates. (The book is loaded with intriguing digressions including, here, one on the highly decorated Coptic desert monasteries that inspired Celtic Christian art. By the sixth century, so many Irish monks were travelling to visit Egypt’s monks and hermits, Darke writes, that a guidebook was written for them, today preserved in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale.)
So how did the advanced geometry, engineering and artistry needed to create buildings like these make its way to comparatively backward Europe? Darke identifies several portals, first among them Sicily. By the end of the 11th century the island had been seized from its Muslim rulers by the Normans, who razed its palaces and mosques and constructed hybrid Arab-Norman-Byzantine replacements.
In Spain, meanwhile, as the extent of Christian and Muslim territories waxed and waned, buildings such as Córdoba’s Mezquita changed hands and the boundaries between languages and cultures blurred. Through these routes – along with the Crusades and trade with the Italian entrepots of Venice, Genoa and Amalfi – Christian Europe drew on the superior knowledge and skills of the Islamic world and its craftworkers to create its own monuments.
The results spread even to the damp islands at the other end of the continent: Darke cites Wells Cathedral, where 13th-century stonemasons labelled sculptures with Arabic numerals centuries before their use became widespread, and Peterborough Cathedral, where carpenters created an intricately jointed and decorated wooden ceiling using techniques then unknown in Europe. Islamesque doesn’t need to be “revolutionary”; it offers an enjoyable and eye-opening reminder that Europe’s heritage has far more diverse roots than we assume.
Mirror of moder man: The drawing shows the five-headed and four-legged monster. This monster has the heads of Avarice (Avaritia), Stupidity (Stupiditas), Deceit (Fraus), Sedition (Seditio) and Opinion (Opinio). In his hands, he bears attributes of Envy (Invidia) and War (Bellum). Under his feet, he tramples the Innocence and Peace (Pax) and Justice (Justitia). With inscriptions in Dutch and Latin. (1616)
To start our Migration to the Spiritual Land of Peace , we look at an old text known as papyrus 3024 from the Berlin Museum, known as “Man arguing with his Soul” or the “Rebel in the Soul” we can perhaps study one of the earliest accounts of the confrontation with the ego.
– Rebel in the Soul: An ancient Egyptian dialogue between a Man and his Soul
This controversial text, that was meant for initiates at the threshold of the Ancient Egyptian Inner Temple, speaks to us with intriguing relevance to the problems of today. Taking the form of a dialogue between a man and his soul, this sacred text explores the inner discourse between doubt and mystical knowledge and deals with the rebellion and despair of the intellect at a crucial stage of spiritual development. The first complete and consistent translation of the Berlin Papyrus 3024, which is thought to be nearly 4,000 years old:
“The man’s soul tells him that men of greater value than he have suffered from the world, and advises him to gain an insight from his attitude and search to overcome his despair.
It is An Egyptian temple text, related with the God IAI, an aspect of the Solar God, the stubborn donkey. It shows the intellectual rebellion of our Ego.
“The stubborn, passionate, long-suffering ass is the perfect natural symbol of our rational personality. It bears, like the ass, the weight of all our suffering, and carries us through life. It is stubborn, selfish and refuses to go where we think we best…
….Yet paradoxically, it is the same stubborn ass, and only the ass, that can carry the Rebel to salvation; mounted upon the ass, man is mounted upon his own rebellion. The ass is the father of all rebels, but also the carrier of redemption.”
In Ancient Egypt, Iai, the Great Ass, is the aspect of the Sun God with Ass’s ears. This is Osiris in his listening state; listening equalled wisdom to the Ancient Egyptians. The Book of the Gates depicts the progression of the sun through the night. The Twelve Hours of Night are depicted as regions of the Underworld. Each region is an Hour, and each Hour has its gate through which to pass. To pass, we must know the name of the gatekeeper, or guardian.
This is the same as identifying the layers of egos we each have within – an ego is what others might call one of the deadly sins, Pride, Envy, Greed…all those different aspects of the personality that can prevent us from progressing through the gates or stages of spiritual development. When we look inwardly at the aspects of our personality that rule or affect our lives, we need to recognise what is affecting our spiritual progress; if we learn to use it wisely and become its master, instead of it being master over us, we then recognise the Guardian of that Gate – can name the Guardian, and can “pass through the Gate”. Consciousness moves from Gate to Gate.
In the argument with his Soul, the man is bargaining for the right to die because he can no longer face the suffering of living in this world without his mentor. In Ancient Egypt, it was believed that a man and his Soul would be judged together in the afterlife; the Soul can make appeals on his behalf. So the man is arguing with his Soul to persuade it that killing himself is the correct thing to do, as he wants it to accept his reasons, and agree with him so that it will stay with him after death and make favourable appeals. However, his Soul has other ideas..
“I spoke to my soul that I might answer what it said:
To whom shall I speak today?
Brothers and sisters are evil and friends today are not worth loving.
Hearts are great with greed and everyone seizes his or her neighbor’s goods.
Kindness has passed away and violence is imposed on everyone.
To whom shall I speak today?
People willingly accept evil and goodness is cast to the ground everywhere.
Those who should enrage people by their wrongdoing
make them laugh at their evil deeds.
People plunder and everyone seizes _his or her neighbour’s goods.
To whom shall I speak today?
The one doing wrong is an intimate friend and the brother with whom one used to deal is an enemy.
No one remembers the past and none return the good deed that is done.
Brothers and sisters are evil
and people turn to strangers for righteousness or affection.
To whom shall I speak today?
Faces are empty and all turn their faces from their brothers and sisters.
Hearts are great with greed
and there is no heart of a man or woman upon which one might lean.
None are just or righteous and the land is left to the doers of evil.
To whom shall I speak today?
There are no intimate friends
and the people turn to strangers to tell their troubles.
None are content and those with whom one used to walk no longer exist.
I am burdened with grief and have no one to comfort me.
There is no end to the wrong which roams the earth.
When we consider the age of this text, from XII Dynasty Egypt (approx 1991-1783 BC), we can see that the nature of the woes and troubles of humankind have changed very little.
The man’s soul tells him that men of greater value than he have suffered from the world, and advises him to gain an insight from his attitude and search to overcome his despair. It tells him some allegorical stories – the first being the “mythical field of transformations”; both the field AND the plough are to be found within man. The field is the ground; the earth, where the soul of the man dwells, and is to be cultivated by the ploughman – the man must “cultivate” himself.
The harvest is what is then offered back to the soul. The “harvest”, what is left of the man after his life, is in dangerous hands if left uncultivated. It is exposed to a “storm from the North” said to indicate the Head (Reason); the storm is consciousness threatened by intellectual rebellion.
The man at this point in the story, when his Rebel/ego is arguing for survival, is not yet ready to let the wisdom of his heart rule his intellect, and this is symbolised by the crocodile. The man’s heirs, in the story he is told by his soul, are eaten by a crocodile whilst still in the egg, before they are fully formed, before they have lived, and will never realise their potential. See The Rebel in Soul by Bika Reed and here The Rebel in The Soul: The Wisdom of Ordinariness
Brueghel : the apocalypse within
The Fall of the Rebel Angels or The Archangel Michael Slaying the Apocalyptic Dragon, Dulle Griet or Mad Meg, and The Triumph of Death.All three panels are again the same overall size. The link is provided by the Apocalypse.
Notwithstanding the “predilection of his age for symbolism and allegory”, the eulogy of Ortelius that Bruegel ‘depicted many things that cannot be depicted’, the search for hidden truths, and the idea that this artist was deliberately obscure and cryptic, considering the dangers inherent in being openly critical, a degree of circumspection is only to be expected. With these three works, here we also have Bruegel’s major excursion into the world of Jheronimus Bosch. The first, the Rebel Angels, was at one time attributed to Bosch, the formal language of the second, Dulle Griet, is distinctly reminiscent of Bosch and the third, the Triumph of Death, has all the apocalyptic power of Bosch – and more; a landscape of death, one where the promise of redemption and resurrection is absent. God is nowhere to be seen. Or is it more we, our ego denies the existence of God?
Is the Message of Brueghel more like this: There is no God … But God? Recognising the eternal struggle in the soul of man between the sinful earthly being or nature, dominated by earthly wisdom, and the divine nature of God,Brueghel asks us a total submission.
The 1560s was no time for children’s games. Amused by each of these spectacles of humanity, people miss the underlying seriousness of Bruegel in everything he does. Bruegel transports us back over four centuries to a time when everyone looks to be having fun. Where did all the good times go? Within 50 years of this painting the European world appears to be have been struck by an epidemic of depression that plunged young and old into months and even years of morbid lethargy and relentless terrors. We seem to have been living with it ever since. The decline in opportunities for traditional pleasures is later reflected in John Bunyan’s march to a life free of fun. In Pilgrim’s Progress carnival is the portal to Hell, just as pleasure in any form, sexual, gustatory, convivial, is the devil’s snare. It seems that while the medieval peasant enjoyed the festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.
Progress came with a price. The new world had not yet made a Faustian pact with the Devil to gain its brilliant advances in science, exploration and industry but it had swept away some of the traditional cures for the depression that those achievements brought in tow.
But still, the old world had its own demons to fight. As visitors to the museums where this group of three pictures hang, smile, laugh even, and check those inventories of activity, the link between laughter and spirituality goes unnoticed.
The ability to laugh can help us through the best and worst of times. Its importance for our spiritual wellbeing is generally neglected.
Brueghel used the personnage of “Dulle Griet’ to express this kind of stubbornness as the stubborn donkey of the Egyptian papyrus from 4000 years ago. It shows the intellectual rebellion of our Ego.
Modern Man with all his “economical grow- energy” knowledge and scientifical research based on rebellion against his Soul, wants to find (without his soul) the solutions to all the problems he createdand is landed in an apocalyptic “theather” prophesying the complete destruction of the world.
an as stubbornness of the intellectual rebellion of our Ego so acting as “Whore of Babylon” discribed in the Book of Revelation.
Only by killing earthly wisdom and the lusts and properties in his soul would man enable Christ to be reborn within himself and be united with God, thereby restoring that `oneness’ referred to at the beginning of the Theologia Germanica:
“Sin is selfishness:Godliness is unselfishness:A godly life is the steadfast working out of inward freeness from self:To become thus Godlike is the bringing back of man’s first nature”.
Christ as Child in the Heart of the true believer.
What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
Saint Augustine
In the 5 cirkels is written: “Gave van Barmhartigheid“: Gift of Mercy , “Gave van Genade’: Gift of Grace, “Gave des Levens” ( in the heart): Gift of Life, ” Gave van Medelijden”: Gift of Compassion, “Gave van sterkte“: Gift of strength.
The Spiritual Message of Bruegel for our Times
Bruegel’s Philosophical Circle
Bruegel the man – as opposed to his paintings – remains more or less invisible to history. There is nothing written by him and, with one exception – Abraham Ortelius’ remarks in his Album Amicorum which will be discussed below – there is nothing by his contemporaries that provides a glimpse into his intellectual, psychological, philosophical or spiritual outlook. But those with whom he is known to have associated are among the most brilliant and outstanding men of their time; many of them were men of renown in the world. The writers, artists and religious thinkers whose names are linked with Bruegel were men of the humanist movement who, inwardly at least, rejected the politics and dogmatic rigidities of conventional religion in favour of a search for such philosophical and mystical truths as can be approached through methods of contemplative spirituality.
Like the gnostics before them they cultivated the art of complete inner freedom from conventions and preconceptions. Outwardly, like Lipsius, they could maintain the appearance of conformity, even if lightly. Others like Niclaes, the founder of the House of Love, more openly declared themselves „filled with God‟ and set themselves up as teachers, though Niclaes himself encouraged his followers to disguise their innermost convictions and let themselves be counted among the Church’s faithful.( A practice known as Nicodemism, a position whereby Christians could hide their dissenting beliefs while conforming to mainstream religious rituals).
Theirs was a form of gnosticism in that they gave priority to the action of knowledge granted by the Spirit over the disciplines of conformity to church regulations. It can be argued that they were students of esoteric Christianity and heirs of the Perennial Philosophy. Read more here
Mutiny of the Soul
Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new.
When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I’m not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.
The notion of a cure starts with the question, “What has gone wrong?” But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, “What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?” When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?
The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, “Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?” When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, “Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?” Read More Here
The Spiritual Land of Peace:
Look and behold: there is in the world a very unpeaceable Land and it is the wildernessed land wherein the most part of all impenitent and ignorant people do dwell and in which is, the first of all needful for the man; to the end that he may come to the Land of Peace and the City of Life and Rest. ( from Terra Pacis by Hendrik Niclaes of the Family of Love,)
The same unpeaceable land has also a City, the name of which they that dwell therein do not know, but only those who are come out of it, and it is named Ignorance.
The “Dulle Griet” as “whore of Babylon” , in the land of Ignorance by Brueghel:
Dulle griet is the representation of the Whore of Babylon living in a land of Ignorance.
The Whore of Babylon or Babylon the Great is a symbolic female figure and also place of evil mentioned in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. Her full title is stated in Revelation 17 (verse 5) as Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth.
The word “Whore” can also be translated metaphorically as “Idolatress“.[1] The Whore’s apocalyptic downfall is prophesied to take place in the hands of the image of the beast with seven heads and ten horns. There is much speculation within Christian eschatology on what the Whore and beast symbolize as well as the possible implications for contemporary interpretation.
Dulle Griet is the model of modern man’s Rebellion against his soul and Anger against it. How can Dulle Griet find a way to calm her anger?
She can looks in the mirror and see herself,making more “selfies”, so seeing more anger as the portait of vanity of Hans Memling shows us. The lady see only more vanity The message of Memling is in his Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation focuses on the idea of “Memento mori,” a Latin phrase that translates to “Remember your mortality.” Memling’s triptych shockingly contrasts the beauty, luxury and vanity of the mortal earth with images of death and hell. In the time of Breughel and in our times the message is that Vanity is not the solution. see: Nothing Good without Pain: Hans Memling”s earthly Vanity and Divine Salation
The phrase “All is vanity” comes from Ecclesiastes 1:2 (Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
Don’t change the world in hopes of changing yourself,
change yourself so the world changes because of you.
In this land of Ignorance, for the food of men, there grows neither corn nor grass.
The people that dwell therein know not their original or first beginning; neither do they know from whence, or how, they came into the same. And moreover then, that they are altogether blind, and blind-born.
The forementioned city, named Ignorance, has two Gates. The one stands in the North, or Midnight, through the which men go into the city of darkness or ignorance.
This gate now, that stands to the North, is very large and great, and has also a great door, because there is much passage through the same; and it has likewise his name, according to the nature of the same city.
Foreasmuch as that men do come into Ignorance through the same gate, therefore it is named Men Do Not Know How to Do. And the great door, where through the multitude do run is named Unknown Error; and there is else no coming into the City named Ignorance.
The other gate stands on the one side of the City, towards the East or Spring of the Day, and the name is the Narrow Gate, through the which, men travel out of the city and do enter into the Straight Way which leads to Righteousness.
Now when one travells out through the same Gate, then does he immediately espie some Light, and that same reachs to the Rising of the Sun.
Here the symbolism, taking up the theme of the ‘bread of life’, i.e. spiritual nourishment, employs the images of ‘corn’ and ‘seed’ whose esoteric meaning was discussed earlier and which will be met again in the paintings by Bruegel of the Harvest and the Ploughman (Fall of Icarus).
The importance of spiritual nourishment – or rather the lack of it – is discussed in the section dealing with the Peasant Wedding Feast( in construction)(Marriage at Cana) where the lack of wine is shown to correspond, by rhetorical imitation, with famine imagery in the Old Testament where the sense is that of ‘famine for the word of God’.
‘Landscape With The Fall of Icarus.‘ It is the only painting Bruegel did with a non-Biblical mythological subject. W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ describes it:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully a long; …
In Bruegel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash. the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.
Had somewhere to go and sailed calmly on.
The painting shows Icarus, barely discernible, already submerged but for his legs. The ploughman in the foreground, the fisherman with his back to us, the shepherd leaning on his crook staring at the blank sky , his back to Icarus, the ship sailing away from Icarus to the horizon as the tones of earth and water fade toward the splashing pastels of a setting sun on the horizon, all underline Bruegel’s comment on the folly of human ambitions.
The painting represents a rendering of the German proverb: ‘No plough comes to a standstill because a man dies.’ As such, it establishes a continuity of myth and the times, but rather than make the event tragic he makes it inconsequential next to the mundane pursuits at hand. We come upon the actors in tableau , frozen as in a movie still about to come into action; the splash frozen too – creates a tension but one soon to be exhausted and consumed by the natural splendor of the sunset.
Here the painter has produced an eidetic effect: he has captured the event’s meaning while at the same time debunking its grandiosity.
The mundane elements of work and subsistence capture our attention, until as an afterthought we notice pale Icarus about to disappear. All of this is cradled in nature so that the painting becomes a pageant of indifference with a sense of cosmic irony. It is the scale of nature which makes the scene great though the actors in both harmony and tension with nature are unaware of the forces at work.
Hence, Bruegel’s ‘throwing away of the title ,’ a technique borrowed from the mannerists whom this painting debunks as well. Here Bruegel has entered a controversy over the desirability of Italian painting that raged among Flemish painters at the time. The realism of the Flemish plowman, anticipating in style and flavor Thomas Hart Benton’s rural apotheosis, the barely discernible corpse in the wooded area in the left middle ground , the theme of the fall, and the fragile make-believe classicized buildings moving toward the horizon to which all goes and from which everything comes, all point to a rejection of the hegemony of classicism, the debunking (relativizing) of mythologies superimposed from the outside, and an identification with indigenous Netherlandish elements represented by the peasantry.
When we consider the age of this text ( The Rebel in the soul), from XII Dynasty Egypt (approx 1991-1783 bc), we can see that the nature of the woes and troubles of humankind have changed very little. This is where the text can also be read as a text of initiation.
The man’s soul tells him that men of greater value than he have suffered from the world, and advises him to gain an insight from his attitude and search to overcome his despair. It tells him some allegorical stories – the first being the “mythical field of transformations”; both the field AND the plough are to be found within man. The field is the ground; the earth, where the soul of the man dwells, and is to be cultivated by the ploughman – the man must “cultivate” himself.
The harvest is what is then offered back to the soul. The “harvest”, what is left of the man after his life, is in dangerous hands if left uncultivated. It is exposed to a “storm from the North” said to indicate the Head (Reason); the storm is consciousness threatened by intellectual rebellion. The man at this point in the story, when his Rebel/ego is arguing for survival, is not yet ready to let the wisdom of his heart rule his intellect, and this is symbolised by the crocodile. The man’s heirs, in the story he is told by his soul, are eaten by a crocodile whilst still in the egg, before they are fully formed, before they have lived, and will never realise their potential.
The ‘heir’ in the egg symbolises what the cultivated man could become. Here we can see it as an unborn Akh.
The Man’s Ba is teaching him that The Great Ass, the ego and False Self, must be sacrificed to the crocodile. Unless this sacrifice is made, the man cannot travel further through the Hours of the Night to the light of dawn; he will never integrate with his mystical body and be re-born.
Anubis, the god of the Underworld, is also the god of helping us realise our full potential, as protector of the Soul in its journey through the Underworld.
Reed tells us:
“The Ancient Egyptian Myth which describes the birth of the redeemer, Anubis, gives us an insight into this dramatic turning, or birth into higher consciousness. In this myth, the jackal god is pursuing Seth, the Enemy of Light, who takes the form of a panther and escapes the dog.
But the mother dog, Isis, sees the panther and catches up. Terrified of the wild bitch, the panther transforms himself into the dog, his own pursuer. But Isis digs her teeth into his back. Caught, Seth cries, “Why are you pursuing this poor dog who does not exist?” The myth then says “And this is how he became. HE BECAME (IN PU) is the Egyptian name for Anubis, the first Priest of Osiris. The Redeemer (IN PU) only comes to life by seeing his own “inexistence”
In other words, we will only reach our full potential when we ‘pursue’ ourselves, and by doing this – the Work on the Self: cultivation, we will understand the need to sacrifice our false identity. Our ego will argue for its own survival, and this Rebel will put up the greatest fight, until we recognise it for what it is – a false non-existent self – and are born into higher consciousness, as our own “heir”.
The man shows he has understood:
In truth, he who is yonder will be a living god, punishing the crime of him who does it.
In truth, he who is yonder will stand in the Bark of the Sun, making its bounty flow to the temples.
In truth, he who is yonder will be a wise man, who cannot, when he speaks, be stopped from appealing to Re !
His Ba answers:
Throw complaint over the fence, you my comrade, my brother! May you make offering upon the brazier, and cling to life by the means you describe! Yet love me here, having put aside the West! [the West is where the deceased goin the Ancient Egyptian belief system]
But when it is wished that you attain the West, that your body joins the earth, then I shall alight after you have become weary, and then we shall dwell together!”
Stretching 21 metres (69 feet) in length and standing nearly 13 metres (42 feet) high, practically every surface of Rosslyn Chapel is carved in an outstanding display of craftsmanship.
There are literally hundreds of individual figures and scenes carved around you. Here are just a few of our favourites.
Farmers wife rescuing a goose from the jaws of a fox
This carving appears on the outside wall of the Chapel, near the entrance door. It tells us of the farming community which was based around Rosslyn in the fifiteenth century.
Knight on horseback
A possible representation of William ‘the Seemly’ St Clair, the first of the St Clairs to settle in Scotland
William is said to have brought a portion of the True Cross or ‘Holy Rood’ to Scotland. An alternative theory is that the figure holding a cross behind the knight may represent Queen Margaret whom William escorted from Hungary to marry Malcolm Canmore, King of Scotland, in 1070.
Maize
Surrounding a window are carvings of maize or Indian Corn
The presence of this plant carving in the Chapel raises many questions: not only is it an exotic plant but it originates from North America, a country traditionally thought to have been discovered by Columbus in 1492, almost 50 years after Rosslyn Chapel was built.
Lucifer
One of the many Masonic carvings in the Chapel
Hanging upside down and bound with rope, this is the fallen angel Lucifer. It is one of the depictions of angels in unusual positions in the Chapel which are significant in the rites of Freemasonry.
The Star of Bethlehem and the Nativity
Representation of the birth of Christ
This hanging boss encompasses the eight-pointed Star of Bethlehem carved with figures of the nativity. Clockwise around its sides are the Virgin and child; the manger; the three wise men; and three shepherds.
Green man
One of the best examples of over 100 ‘Green Man’ carvings in the Chapel
Rosslyn is renowned for its many carvings of the Green Man, historically a pagan figure. The vines sprouting from his mouth represent nature’s growth and fertility, illustrating the unity between humankind and nature.
Angel playing the bagpipes
One of the many carvings of angels playing musical instruments
The carved angels in the Lady Chapel are celebrating Christ’s birth with music. Bagpipes first appeared in Scotland from the mid-1400s and this is thought to be one of the earliest depictions of the instrument.
Musical cubes
Carved cubes that protrude from the arches of the Lady Chapel
Each one of these cubes is unique, carved with individual symbols made up of lines and dots. Various theories suggest that these may represent keys to a secret code or be musical notes. The Rosslyn Motet has recently been composed as one ‘solution’ to the code
The Dance of Death :A string of figures caught in the ‘Dance of Death’
Characters from all walks of life are each accompanied by a skeleton, Death. The dance springs from the skeletons pushing and pulling the reluctant people off to meet their fate and symbolises death’s inevitable triumph over life. See also The Dance of Death: A warning for our Times
Apprentice Pillar The most elaborately decorated pillar in the Chapel
This pillar contains one of the most famous and fascinating riddles of the building. An apprentice mason is said to have carved the pillar, inspired by a dream, in his master’s absence. On seeing the magnificent achievement on his return, the master mason flew into a jealous rage and struck the apprentice, killing him outright.
Seven Virtues
On the south aisle, you will see the seven virtues. Starting from the left, there is a bishop then, left to right, helping the needy; clothing the naked; looking after the sick; visiting those in prison; avarice (misplaced from the seven deadly sins, see below); feeding the hungry; burying the dead, then the reward for virtue, St Peter waiting at the gates of heaven with a key in his hand.
Seven deadly sins
Also on the south aisle, opposite the seven virtues, you will find the seven deadly sins. Starting from the left, there is a bishop, then left to right, pride; gluttony; charity (misplaced from the seven virtues); anger; envy; sloth; lust, then the punishment for sin, the devil emerging from a monster’s mouth and stretching out a hook towards the whole group.
The Rosslyn Stave Angel – Music Cipher’
Melody deciphered in the chapel
Like a plot from “The Da Vinci Code,” a team of code breakers claims to have found music hidden for 500 years in intricate carvings at the church where author Dan Brown set the climax of the best-selling book.
Father and son team Thomas and Stuart Mitchell say they deciphered a musical code hewn into stone cubes on the ribs supporting the ceiling of Rosslyn Chapel in the village of Roslin, near Edinburgh.
“Breaking the code was a true eureka moment. It’s like we have been given a compact disc from the past,” said Stuart Mitchell, 41, a music teacher from Edinburgh. “But unlike the fiction of ’The Da Vinci Code,’ this is a tangible link to the past.”
The music has been recorded, and will get its official premiere in the chapel May 18.
Musical experts reserved judgment, but did not dismiss the Mitchells’ theory.
“We have 213 cubes (at Rosslyn), and the possibility that they have something to say is by no means implausible,” said Warwick Edwards, an expert on early Scottish music at Glasgow University. More research is needed, he said.
Cube carvings on the chapel’s arches believed to be a musical score are seen at Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, Scotland May 1, 2007. A former Royal Air Force codebreaker and his composer son believe they have deciphered a musical score which has remained hidden for nearly 600 years in the carvings on the walls of Rosslyn Chapel which was a major feature in the book and film ‘The Da Vinci Code’
Gordon Munro, an expert on Scottish church music from the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, said, “I have heard the music and it is not impossible, but it can only be a reconstruction that is open to interpretation.”
Ground Zero for symbolism The elaborate decoration and the mysterious symbolism have inspired many legends, among them that the building is a replica of Solomon’s Temple and that it is the resting place of the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant or even the mummified head of Jesus Christ.
Brown’s novel, based on the theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and founded a dynastic line which survives today, climaxes at Rosslyn Chapel. “Symbology heaven,” Brown called it.
The Mitchells’ research centered on the ribs of a ceiling in the Lady Chapel. Rows of carved angels play instruments above the columns of cubes.
The elder Mitchell, 75, who was a code breaker for the Royal Air Force during the Korean War, said he spent 25 years working at the puzzle.
“Many of the angels had musical instruments and some were arranged as a choir, but there was one angel we couldn’t work out,” he said. “Then we realized she was carrying a musical stave, the lined blueprint for musical composition, and therefore we were looking at a coded piece of music.”
The five-line stave that Mitchell believes the angel is holding came into general use in the 16th century in the West, music historians say.
the science of sound If the Mitchells are right about the meaning of the shapes, the people who built Rosslyn Chapel between 1446 and 1486 knew something about the science of sound that wasn’t generally known in the West until the 1700s.
The Mitchells believe the patterns on the cubes are Chladni patterns — created by vibrations of musical pitches.
The patterns are named for Ernest Chladni (1756-1827), a German musician who is also remembered as the inventor of the glass harmonica.
Chladni spread fine sand on metal or glass plates, then used a violin bow to make the plate vibrate. Sand gathered in parts of the plate which were not vibrating, creating patterns unique to each pitch. Although the patterns are associated with Chladni, the effect had been noted a few decades earlier, by the English scientist Robert Hooke in 1665.
The Mitchells assert the effect was also known by Gilbert Haye, one of the chapel’s builders, who died in 1513. “The Cymatics/Chladni patterns were inspired and found in the art of the ancient Chinese gong making which Sir Gilbert Haye would have discovered during his time in the Far East,” said Stuart Mitchell.
The Apprentice Pillar
The extraordinary ‘Apprentice Pillar’, as it is known today, is probably the most famous and unique feature at Rosslyn Chapel. It is a column of stone, ornately decorated with vines that climb up its trunk in a helix pattern. The top of the pillar is bursting with a profusion of different plants, and at the bottom are eight dragons encircled around the base, chewing on cords that come out from the pillar.
The pillar is made from sandstone, and was carved using simple tools such as a mallet and chisels. There is a famous story about how the pillar was made by an apprentice boy, hence its name ‘Apprentice Pillar’ The pillar is at the south east corner of the Chapel, partitioning the smaller Lady Chapel from the main part of the building.
The pillar dates from between the founding of the Chapel in 1446 and 1484, when building work stopped.
The precise meaning of the pillar is a puzzle that has teased many brains over the last 500 years. One theory is that the pillar represents the mythical Tree of Life, which connects and nourishes all forms of life. This tree is a widespread idea, found in many cultures and traditions around the world.
In Christianity and Judaism, the tree is the source of eternal and infinite life and it stood in the paradise that was God’s Garden of Eden. (Eternal and infinite mean outside the world of time and space as we know it, with no end or limit.) In Norse myth, the tree is called Yggdrasil, and there is a dragon underneath called Niðhöggr which is trying to destroy all life by gnawing through the tree’s roots.
The Apprentice Pillar seems to be honouring both traditions – the Chapel is a Christian church designed for Christian worship and the pillar is surrounded by carvings referencing the Bible – in fact, the Chapel has been described ‘A Bible in Stone’.
As the Alhambra in Spain is called a “Quran in stone”:
Just as the Tree of Life was in God’s Garden of Eden, surrounded by all the life God created, so the pillar stands in the Chapel surrounded by Biblical carvings and depictions of flourishing plant life. However, the eight dragons gnawing the roots at the bottom suggest that the pillar is also the Norse tree Yggdrasil, and this may be because Sir William St Clair, the founder of the Chapel, had Norse ancestry and was very proud of it. He and his forebears were Princes of Orkney, which was Norse before it became part of Scotland, and the origins of the St Clair family itself were Scandinavian
On the other side of the Chapel is another ornately carved pillar, popularly called the ‘Mason’s Pillar’. Unlike the Apprentice Pillar however, the plants do not climb in energetic spirals, but in rigid vertical rows. While the Mason’s Pillar is a fine example of stone carving, the Apprentice Pillar is generally held to be a more beautiful and superior work of art.
In medieval times, a skilled craftsman was called a master. A Master was at the top of his profession, and respected for his work. This master would train up young boys in his trade, and in time they might become Masters too. This took a long time and a lot of hard work. When these boys were in training, they were called ‘apprentices’. An apprentice would start his training young, at the age of about thirteen, and he would be at the beck and call of his Master until he was twenty one years old.
The story goes . . . There was once a Master Mason in charge of building Rosslyn Chapel. This Master Mason had an idea of how marvellous the Chapel could be, and he planned to make a beautiful pillar decorated with all sorts of wondrous leaves and vines. But when his pillar was finished, he was dissatisfied. He knew it could have looked even better – more beautiful and more alive – but it was his own skill and craftsmanship that had fallen short. What he needed to do, he felt, was to travel abroad and see the amazing cathedrals of Europe. If he could study them, he would be able to come back with the knowledge needed to create the pillar of his dreams for Rosslyn Chapel. Sir William St Clair gave him permission to travel, and he left. He was gone a long time. Years, in fact. And while he was gone, a lowly apprentice boy had a vision, in which he realised how this amazing pillar could be made. He set to work, and created the feat of stone carving that you see today – the famous ‘Apprentice Pillar’. When Master Mason returned, he felt he finally had it in him to create the pillar he wanted. Into Rosslyn he came, full of ambition and plans. Imagine his feelings, when he saw the Apprentice Pillar, standing there already in all its glory! And then imagine his anger when he discovered that it was not even a craftsman of high status who had made it, but a lowly apprentice! He flew into a rage of jealousy, picked up his mason’s mallet, and struck the young apprentice on the head, killing him outright. His fellow craftsmen and Sir William were appalled. The Mason was taken to trial for the murder and was hanged according to the law of the time, but the other masons felt this unishment was not enough. They created an image of the young apprentice’s head, with the gash on his forehead, and placed it on the Chapel wall as a memorial. And they made an image of Master Mason as well, and placed it where his gaze would rest on the Apprentice Pillar for eternity
The murder story of a mason and apprentice exists in many medieval cathedrals and churches across Europe, not just at Rosslyn. Furthermore, the pillar was called the ‘Prince’s Pillar’ before it became known as the Apprentice Pillar. However this story has been told at Rosslyn since at least the 17th century, so it certainly has a long association with the building.
Of the many mysteries and legends which envelop Rosslyn Chapel few can be so well known as that surrounding the ‘Apprentice’ Pillar. The legend concerns the murdered apprentice with its overt references to the initiation rituals of ancient guilds of stonemasons which stretch back to the murder of Hiram Abif, the master mason, at the time of the building of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Thus, the murder of the apprentice at Rosslyn is seen as a symbolic re-enactment of the murder of Hiram Abif which, today, has immense spiritual and emotional connotations for the world-wide fraternity of Freemasons.
Another robust legend that may connect Rosslyn with threshold sacrifice is the widespread belief that the chapel’s groundplan is based on that of Solomon’s Temple, although skeptics point out that Rosslyn’s is identical to that of Glasgow Cathedral, which, except for the enormous difference in scale, is true.
But what if the similarities between Rosslyn and Solomon’s Temple, at least for Freemasons, were meant to be more symbolic than actual, and that both skeptics and true believers have been looking at things the wrong way? In Albert Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry is the following entry: “Over the Sacred Lodge presided Solomon, the greatest of kings, and the wisest of men; Hiram, the great and learned King of Tyre; and Hiram Abif, the widow’s son, of the tribe of Naphtali. It was held in the bowels of the sacred Mount Moriah, under the part whereon was erected the Holy of Holies. On this mount it was where Abraham confirmed his faith by his readiness to offer up his only son, Isaac.
Here it was where the Lord delivered to David, in a dream, the plan of the glorious Temple, afterward erected by our noble Grand Master, King Solomon. And lastly, here it was where he declared he would establish his sacred name and word, which should never pass away — and for these rea-sons this was justly styled the Sacred Lodge.”
Might not the floor of Rosslyn Chapel be symbolic, then, of a place that predates Solomon’s Temple – the threshing floor of Araunah and a place of great Biblical sacrifice, which in many ways it still is? Claimed as a holy place by Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the rock over which now stands Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock has become, over millennia, a most costly piece of real estate.
Clockwise from upper-left: the apprentice, the apprentice’s mother, the master mason, the Dome of the Rock, the Stone of Destiny, the Foundation Stone. Center: The murder of Hiram Abiff, as reenacted in a Masonic ritual
Also revered as “The Foundation Stone,” the rock from which the world was made, it was the place where Biblical patriarch Jacob is said to have dreamt of a ladder reaching to Heaven, with angels ascending and descending – which brings us to Scotland’s unique connection with the place. Whether or not the block of stone now safely enshrined in Edinburgh Castle is Scotland’s fabled Stone of Destiny, one of its popular monikers is “Jacob’s Pillow.” And then there is the theory that the Scots are, in fact, a “lost tribe of Israel.” When historians, Biblical scholars and adherents to British Israelism debate that theory, things get noisy.
In the Rosslyn story The master mason was so inflamed with rage and passion, that he struck him with his mallet, killed him on the spot, and paid the penalty for his rash and cruel act.
The goal of a master mason is to control his passions and so to realize a death to the world: The world” is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.”
Note: Pontius Pilate offering to sacrifice his own son in the place of Jesus
Written in the Coptic language, the ancient text tells of Pontius Pilate, the judge who authorized Jesus’ crucifixion, having dinner with Jesus before his crucifixion and offering to sacrifice his own son in the place of Jesus. It also explains why Judas used a kiss, specifically, to betray Jesus — because Jesus had the ability to change shape, according to the text — and it puts the day of the arrest of Jesus on Tuesday evening rather than Thursday evening, something that contravenes the Easter timeline.
The discovery of the text doesn’t mean these events happened, but rather that some people living at the time appear to have believed in them, said Roelof van den Broek, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who published the translation in the book “Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem on the Life and the Passion of Christ”(Brill, 2013).
While apocryphal stories about Pilate are known from ancient times, van den Broek wrote, with Pilate offering to sacrifice his own son in the place of Jesus.
“Without further ado, Pilate prepared a table and he ate with Jesus on the fifth day of the week. And Jesus blessed Pilate and his whole house,” reads part of the text in translation. Pilate later tells Jesus, “well then, behold, the night has come, rise and withdraw, and when the morning comes and they accuse me because of you, I shall give them the only son I have so that they can kill him in your place
In the text, Jesus comforts him, saying, “Oh Pilate, you have been deemed worthy of a great grace because you have shown a good disposition to me.” Jesus also showed Pilate that he can escape if he chose to. “Pilate, then, looked at Jesus and, behold, he became incorporeal: He did not see him for a long time…”
Pilate and his wife both have visions that night that show an eagle (representing Jesus) being killed.
In the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, Pilate is regarded as a saint, which explains the sympathetic portrayal in the text, van den Broek writes.
The reason for Judas using a kiss
In the canonical bible the apostle Judas betrays Jesus in exchange for money by using a kiss to identify him leading to Jesus’ arrest. This apocryphal tale explains that the reason Judas used a kiss, specifically, is because Jesus had the ability to change shape.
“Then the Jews said to Judas: How shall we arrest him [Jesus], for he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man …” This leads Judas to suggest using a kiss as a means to identify him. If Judas had given the arresters a description of Jesus he could have changed shape. By kissing Jesus Judas tells the people exactly who he is. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]
This understanding of Judas’ kiss goes way back. “This explanation of Judas’ kiss is first found in Origen [a theologian who lived A.D. 185-254],” van den Broek writes. In his work, Contra Celsum the ancient writerOrigen, stated that “to those who saw him [Jesus] he did not appear alike to all.”
The Kiss of God: Mystical Death in Judaism
this study discusses spiritual and mystical death under three rubrics: the first is entitled,
“`If you wish to live then die’: Aspects of Death and Desire in Jewish Spirituality”; the second is “‘For Your sake we are killed all day long’: The Sanctification of God in Love”; and the third is entitled
“‘As if he sacrificed a soul’: Forms of Ritual Simulation and Substitution.” Read here
The name Maccabee[4] is often used as a synonym for the entire Hasmonean dynasty, but the Maccabees proper were Judas Maccabeus and his four brothers. The name Maccabee was a personal epithet of Judah,[5] and the later generations were not his direct descendants. One explanation of the name’s origins is that it derives from the Aramaicmaqqəḇa, “the hammer”, in recognition of Judah’s ferocity in battle.[6] The traditional Jewish explanation is that Maccabee (Hebrew: מכבים Machabi) is an acronym for the Torah verse that was the battle-cry of the Maccabees, “Mi chamochaba’elim YHWH“,
Who is like You among the heavenly powers, Lord!”,] as well as an acronym for “MatityahuhaKohenben Yochanan” (Matthias the priest, son of John). The correlating Torah verse Exodus 15:11, The song of Moses and the Children of Israel by the Sea,[7] makes a reference to elim, with a mundane notion of natural forces, heavenly might, war and governmental powers. The scholar and poet Aaron Kaminka argues that the name is a corruption of Machbanai, a leading commando in the army of King David.[9]
Note: In Freemason ritual of the Master Degree the concept of the lost Word which it is always difficult to understand , Rene guenon says it a question and an answer:
question:(MKBI:Who is like You among the heavenly powers, Lord!from the song of the sea and the answer : AIN BLTK( Nobody but YOU) it is the same meaning asThe meaning of ‘La ilaha illa Allah’ in Islam :“there is no God but God
( MKBI was bastarded in a corrupted and totally without meaning “mac bebenac”” and AIN BLTK became … “bltk ain” also nonsens for ignorant of Hebrew so it became “Tubalcain””
The Compagnons du Devoir, full name Compagnons du Devoir et du Tour de France, is a French organization of craftsmen and artisans dating from the Middle Ages. Their traditional, technical education includes taking a tour, the Tour de France, around France and doing apprenticeships with masters. For a young man or young woman today, the Compagnonnage is a traditional mentoring network through which to learn a trade while developing character by experiencing community life and traveling.[1] The community lives in a Compagnon house known as a cayenne and managed by a mère (mother) or maîtresse (mistress), a woman who looks after the well-being of the residents,[1] of which there are more than 80 in France. The houses vary in size from a small house for five people to a larger one with more than 100 people living together.
It is relate with the Woman and the seven sons who was a Jewish martyr described in 2 Maccabees 7 as the mother of seven sons who, like her, were arrested by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and forced to prove their respect to him by consuming pork. When they refused, Antiochus tortured and killed the sons one by one in front of the unflinching and stout-hearted mother.
The Ballad of Hannah and her Seven Sons tells a story well known from the Apocrypha II Maccabees 6:12-17. During the persecution of the Jews in Syria at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (d. 163 B.C.E.), the seven sons of Hannah were commanded to worship an idol. Each refused, and each in turn was slaughtered. The Babylonian Talmud Gittin 57b sets the story in the time of “Caesar,” that is, at the time of the destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E. The ballad follows the medieval version of Jossipon in its account of the mother’s death. The Judeo-Arabic ballad based on this story appears to have been very popular, and like so many of its type, is “known only in its variants.” It is found throughout the eastern dialect area extending from Libya to Iraq, and the western dialect area has a different ballad on the same theme. In the past century or so, the eastern ballad has been printed in such far-flung spots as Calcutta, Bagdad, Aden, Tiberias, Leghorn, Tripoli and Tunis. The version translated here is that printed in Tunis in 1910 by Mardochée Uzan and brother, and sold by him at his “modern bookstore” in Rue Sidi Mardoum, Tunis. At that time Tunis had a large Jewish population, perhaps as much as one third of the inhabitants of the city. Occasionally, I have preferred a reading from a different edition to which reference is made in the notes.
The Ezekiel Mural at Dura Europos
Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: Abridged , his volume presents the most important portions of Erwin Goodenough’s classic thirteen-volume work, a magisterial attempt to encompass human spiritual history in general through the study of Jewish symbols in particular. Revealing that the Jewish religion of the period was much more varied and complex than the extant Talmudic literature would lead us to believe, Goodenough offered evidence for the existence of a Hellenistic-Jewish mystic mythology far closer to the Qabbalah than to rabbinical Judaism.
To Goodenough, the art and layout of the synagogue suggested a group with a “mystical” orientation to worship, specifically involving the liturgical experience of heavenly ascent.10 Eminent Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner sees such a development at Dura as no surprise, given that in this region around AD 220–50 other significant religious movements with strong mystical components were also taking form.11 It should be remembered, however, that detailed descriptions of corresponding ideas relating to “Jewish mysteries” were already to be found centuries earlier in the writings of Philo—writings whose core elements may go back to the First Temple period and arguably relate to its distinctive rites and theology .Read
The Seven Sleepers between Christianity and Islam: from Portraits to Talismans
This article deals with the particular role played by the “Compagnons of the Cave” (Ashāb al-Kahf ) in saint veneration, considering that they were among the first figures in Islam to be regarded as “friends of God” (walī, awliyā). Particularly interesting is the case of the dog Qitmīr who protects them and was regarded by some authors as a manifestation of some great figures, such as the Prophet Khidr, ‘Alī ibn Abū Tālib, or Salmān. This study also explains why the portraits (drawings, paintings, miniatures) of these saints were so attractive, to the extent that they became protective objects or talismans. Though these talismans are geometrical figures (with a focus on circle and/or hexagon), and more precisely “geometric portraits,” they take shape in a variety of ways, especially in the form of ships or trees, all being explained by the Qurʾānic story of the Companions or by the Muslim tradition about them. No wonder that Qitmīr is given a key position in this talismanic art. Read Here
Craft guilds were made up of craftsmen and artisans in the same occupation, such as hatters, carpenters, bakers, blacksmiths, weav ers and masons.Guilds are defined as associations of craftsmen and merchants formed to promote the economic interests of their members as well as to provide protection and mutual aid. As both business and social organizations, guilds were prolific throughout Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. A significant part of the skilled labor force in medieval cities was structured around the organization of guilds, which provided economic, educational, social and religious functions, based on the Christian tradition :Spiritual Ethics,Virtues and Uprightness, the seven heavenly virtues combine the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude with the hree theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. These seven capital virtues, also known as seven lively virtues, contrary or remedial virtues, are those opposite the seven deadly sins. They are often enumerated as chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility. These virtues were often explained in the admittance of the guild through a ritual of admission as the Operative Masonry rituals and the example of Rosslyn Chapel.
But these Craftmen shape for 500 years all the beautifull architectures and Art not only in Europe but over the all world:
all the maps are coming from the Atlas of Medieval Man – Covering the years between AD 1,000 to 1,500, an illustrated volume includes information on the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and the spread of Islam.
The decline of guilds after the sixteenth century took place for both economic and religious reasons. Industrialization and the existence of new markets greatly weakened the control of craft guilds. As societies moved from feudalism to emerging forms of capitalism, the monopolistic practices of guilds and the hereditary structure of many apprenticeships became outmoded. With industrialization, the structure and control of guilds were difficult to maintain. In addition, the Reformation resulted in the suppression of guilds in Protestant nations because of their religious functions.
As a stonemason grew in his craft, he was entered into the appropriate rank: apprentice, journeyman (now called Fellow Craft) and master mason. At each stage, the craftsman was entrusted with the secrets of each level, which include passwords and grips (or handshake) made known to him only upon due inspection of necessary proficiency by a master of the craft. This way, as stonemasons migrated across Europe to the next job, each man was assured proper pay and privilege commensurate with his skill level, and clients were assured of the quality of work. (The only three degrees of a Mason)
The speculative freemasons of our modern time lost all these crafts, all the Wisdom-knowledge and are ignorant of their own ignorance. ForgettingPlato’s Cave and promoting the madnees of Democracy, they became a “secret society” and the actors of an Inverted Spirituality, becoming a “moral” code of behavior for “”all the conquest of the West” convincing the elites of the colonial world that avarice, pride; gluttony,anger; envy; sloth; lust ( the 7 deadly sins), the best way to function in a “modern”society” and inflated their ego with 30 degrees of pubertal prideness . The Wisdom of the guilds which provided economic, educational, social and religious functions, based on the Christian tradition, but also present in all spiritual traditions, was totally lost.
While the crisis of modernity has progressively escalated into a global meltdown and the masses are besieged by—the tyranny of mindless distractions, obsessive consumption of unnecessary goods, the insatiable thirst for unrestrained quantity, exploitation by illogical mechanisms of fear, the assault by hostile economic policies devised by the corporate hegemony virtually bloodletting the populace, the endless perpetuation of the war machine, the ever quickening of time, and the collapsing ecosystems of planet earth to name only a few—these are none other than reflections of the inner disarray, if not an utter eclipse of the human microcosm itself.
Modern man is a human without Soul, without the “Living Breath”.
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.
Our protest is the expression of his deep spiritual Crisis in the times of deep ignorance..
This text seeks to uncover the early Jewish, Scottish and Stuart sources of “ancient” Cabalistic Freemasonry that flourished in “Ecossais” lodges in the 18th and 19th centuries. Drawing on architectural, technological, political and religious documents, it offers real-world, historical grounding for the flights of, accomplished through progressive initiation, are found in Stuart notions of intellectual and spiritual “amicitia”. Despite the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty in 1688 and the establishment of a rival “modern” system of Hanoverian-Whig Masonry in 1717, the influence of “ancient” Scottish-Stuart Masonry on Solomonic architecture, Hermetic masques, and Rosicrucian science was preserved in lodges maintained visionary Temple building described in the rituals and symbolism of “high-degree” Masonry. The roots of mystical male bonding by Jacobite partisans and exiles in Britain, Europe, and the New World. Read Here
Islam and Freemasonry , from fascination to hatred
The first Masonic lodges in the Muslim East were founded on the initiative of diplomats, merchants and foreign residents. From Morocco to Indonesia, they were numerous and prosperous as long as the power in place – weak or in the hands of Europeans – tolerated or supported them. For a long time, the initiation of natives remained unthinkable or rejected because of differences in religion, level and method of education or the status of the country. This obstacle was overcome at the beginning of the 19th century. Belief in a single God, sometimes designated by the ecumenical expression “Great Architect of the Universe”, was shared, the neophyte being able to demand the presence of the holy book of his choice upon his reception. Notables and even sovereigns (Turkey, Morocco, India) thus entered the Order. The astonishing similarity of certain oriental doctrinal entities (Bektashism), always established and accepted, with the practices of the lodges, facilitated this expansion. The relationships were reversed with the emergence of three combined factors: the suppression, by the main French obedience, in 1877, of the obligation to believe in God and in the immortality of the soul – and the extreme radicalization of oriental political regimes hostile to any meeting or organization acting under the seal of secrecy. Masonic rites and myths being largely inspired, even in the high grades, by the Old and New Testaments, the suspicion, spread by abundant anti-Masonic literature, according to which Freemasonry is a Zionist tentacle, did the rest. Today, lodges only exist in four of the countries where Islam is predominant: Turkey, Lebanon, Malaysia and Morocco. See Summary here in French
Secret Practices of the Sufi Freemasons: The Islamic Teachings at the Heart of Alchemy
Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff (1875-1945) was a Freemason and practitioner of alchemy. In 1900 he moved to Turkey where he met the Jewish Termudi family, who introduced him to Rosicrucianism and led to his initiation into a local Masonic lodge. In 1910 he founded a lodge of the Bektashi Order in Constantinople. Returning to Germany, in 1917 he founded the Thule Society, an occult organization that led to the German Workers’ Party–joined in 1919 by Adolf Hitler, who transformed it into the Nazi Party. Sebottendorff left the Thule Society as it became increasingly political, fleeing to Turkey.
Stephen Flowers studied Germanic and Celtic philology and religious history at the University of Texas at Austin and in Goettingen, West Germany. He received his Ph.D. in 1984 in Germanic Languages and Medieval Studies with a dissertation entitled Runes and Magic.
Anti-Tradition—secularism and materialism—opposes religion; Counter-Tradition inverts it; and the esoteric essence of Counter-Tradition is the Counter-Initiation.
Charles Upton expands on this concept, recognizing the action of the Counter-Initiation in such areas as the politicizing of the interfaith movement, the anti-human tendencies in the environmental movement, the growing interest in magic and sorcery, the involvement of the intelligence communities in the fields of UFO investigation and psychedelic research, the history of Templarism and Freemasonry, and the de-Islamicization of the famous Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi.
In the mid-16th century, Bruegel’s paintings are coveted conversation pieces. That they still elicit conversations and admiration 450 years later is no coincidence, according to Manfred Sellink. “There are only a few artists in history whose oeuvre has such a scope that you can spend a lifetime working on it, without getting bored,” says Manfred Sellink (director of the KMSKA in Antwerp and Bruegel expert) , who devoted the lion’s share of his career to Pieter Bruegel the old. “When he died in 1569 in Brussels, he dominated like no other, the image ofthat pivotal period in the Southern Netherlands, the mid-16th century developed into one of the most creative regions of the known world.”
Much like the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others. His work often represented mankind’s ignorance and insignificance, emphasizing the futility of ambition and the absurdity of pride. See Bruegel : Discerning Wisdom from Folly
In PETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER AND ESOTERIC TRADITION , we have explored the idea that traditional sacred art and literature are vehicles for transmitting knowledge of what philosophers associated with the Perennial Philosophy regarded as eternal truths. We have also examined the idea that such knowledge comes veiled in symbolism and allegory.
Bruegel: the Tower of Babel:The paintings depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which, according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, was built by a unified, monolingual humanity as a mark of their achievement and to prevent them from scattering: “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.‘” (Genesis 11:4).
“Death is not the opposite of life. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” — Eckhart Tolle
What if the story of Jesus isn’t about Jesus at all?
To re-cast a famous Joseph Campbell saying, what if each of us is the dying god of our own lives? What riches are uncovered if we read the dying god stories not as literal, historical events but as metaphors for our own evolution from material, biological beings bound by instinctual conditioning into spiritual beings of awakened consciousness? Is it any wonder then that the dying god is so often born of a virgin or through some other non-biological process? Horus was conceived as his mother Isis hovered in the form of a hawk over the dead body of her husband Osiris. Mithra was born spontaneously from a rock. Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Jesus, Quetzalcoatl and many others were born of virgins. The hero, the gift-giver and the dying god live and have their being in higher consciousness, not in the lower realms of ego, competition and conflict. In the Gospel of John, when Nicodemus asks for Jesus’ advice, Jesus simply says, “you must be born from above.” In other words, each of us must shift from lower consciousness to the higher plane of God-consciousness within. The virgin birth signifies that each of us, at the level of our divine essence, was not born from the union of sperm and egg but are identical and unified with the eternally Real, what Krishna called “the unborn” and what Jesus called “everlasting life”. Shifting out of body and ego identification is the work of every spiritual tradition.
If the purpose of myth is to teach us how to live our own lives, then what have we learned?
In Buddhism the central metaphor is that of awakening from the sleep of ignorance, suffering and conditioning. In Christianity the central metaphor is death and rebirth, coming out of our animal nature with its instinctual drives of acquisition and conflict and rising into the unitive experience of God-consciousness, transcending all boundaries and limitations. Resurrection is transformation. Rebirth signifies death to the ego, to limitation, to space and time. Rising from the “grave” of our lower nature embodies the realization of awakening.
Beneath the crests and troughs of the ocean’s waves lies an immense stillness, a stillness that is both the source of the waves and their destination. Is it not true that we “die” every night? Were it not for sleep, this cyclical, recurring “death”, this immersion into the sea of unconsciousness, our life would cease. Just as the silence between notes makes music possible, so too the empty formlessness of the Void makes possible the vibrant fullness of our conscious, waking life. In the end, the inner and the outer are the same. The surface mirrors the depth. The tomb is a womb. Nirvana is samsara, and the kingdom of heaven is lying all around us, only we do not see it. Not only is there a correspondence, there is an identity. Life, in essence, is synonymous with the eternal Ground of Being, the Real, what we in the west call God, and as such it is ultimately untouched by death. “Death is not the opposite of life,” Eckhart Tolle writes in Stillness Speaks. “The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” Despite centuries of theological calcification it is still possible for us to exhume the universal spiritual wisdom of the Christian story, that each of us is the presence of God-consciousness in the field of forms. Only, as Buddha pointed out, we don’t know it. Like the sun breaking over the horizon at countless sunrise services throughout Christendom this Easter, we too are gradually dawning to the truth of our divine nature. Dare to say it out loud. Let your sun rise. Let the wisdom within you shape your thoughts and words and actions. Become, finally, who you really are. This is the hidden meaning of Easter.
The Blessed Virgin Mary fell asleep on Mt. Rahel, Jesus came to her and asked; Mother are you asleep? I did sleep but you my Son awakened me, said the Blessed Virgin Mary.
She continued telling him this; I saw you in the Garden, stripped of your clothes, you were led to Caiphas to Pilate, from Pilate to Herode. There your Holy face was spat on (upon) and they crowned you with thorns.
“Death is not the opposite of life. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” — Eckhart Tolle
What if the story of Jesus isn’t about Jesus at all?
To re-cast a famous Joseph Campbell saying, what if each of us is the dying god of our own lives? What riches are uncovered if we read the dying god stories not as literal, historical events but as metaphors for our own evolution from material, biological beings bound by instinctual conditioning into spiritual beings of awakened consciousness? Is it any wonder then that the dying god is so often born of a virgin or through some other non-biological process? Horus was conceived as his mother Isis hovered in the form of a hawk over the dead body of her husband Osiris. Mithra was born spontaneously from a rock. Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Jesus, Quetzalcoatl and many others were born of virgins. The hero, the gift-giver and the dying god live and have their being in higher consciousness, not in the lower realms of ego, competition and conflict. In the Gospel of John, when Nicodemus asks for Jesus’ advice, Jesus simply says, “you must be born from above.” In other words, each of us must shift from lower consciousness to the higher plane of God-consciousness within. The virgin birth signifies that each of us, at the level of our divine essence, was not born from the union of sperm and egg but are identical and unified with the eternally Real, what Krishna called “the unborn” and what Jesus called “everlasting life”. Shifting out of body and ego identification is the work of every spiritual tradition.
If the purpose of myth is to teach us how to live our own lives, then what have we learned?
In Buddhism the central metaphor is that of awakening from the sleep of ignorance, suffering and conditioning. In Christianity the central metaphor is death and rebirth, coming out of our animal nature with its instinctual drives of acquisition and conflict and rising into the unitive experience of God-consciousness, transcending all boundaries and limitations. Resurrection is transformation. Rebirth signifies death to the ego, to limitation, to space and time. Rising from the “grave” of our lower nature embodies the realization of awakening.
Beneath the crests and troughs of the ocean’s waves lies an immense stillness, a stillness that is both the source of the waves and their destination. Is it not true that we “die” every night? Were it not for sleep, this cyclical, recurring “death”, this immersion into the sea of unconsciousness, our life would cease. Just as the silence between notes makes music possible, so too the empty formlessness of the Void makes possible the vibrant fullness of our conscious, waking life. In the end, the inner and the outer are the same. The surface mirrors the depth. The tomb is a womb. Nirvana is samsara, and the kingdom of heaven is lying all around us, only we do not see it. Not only is there a correspondence, there is an identity. Life, in essence, is synonymous with the eternal Ground of Being, the Real, what we in the west call God, and as such it is ultimately untouched by death. “Death is not the opposite of life,” Eckhart Tolle writes in Stillness Speaks. “The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” Despite centuries of theological calcification it is still possible for us to exhume the universal spiritual wisdom of the Christian story, that each of us is the presence of God-consciousness in the field of forms. Only, as Buddha pointed out, we don’t know it. Like the sun breaking over the horizon at countless sunrise services throughout Christendom this Easter, we too are gradually dawning to the truth of our divine nature. Dare to say it out loud. Let your sun rise. Let the wisdom within you shape your thoughts and words and actions. Become, finally, who you really are. This is the hidden meaning of Easter.
The large carved stone sarcophagus lid in the Temple of Inscriptions is a unique piece of Classic Maya art. Iconographically, however, it is closely related to the large wall panels of the temples of the Cross and the Foliated Cross centered on world trees. Around the edges of the lid is a band with cosmological signs, including those for sun, moon, and star, as well as the heads of six named noblemen of varying rank.[18] The central image is that of a cruciform world tree. Beneath Pakal is one of the heads of a celestial two-headed serpent viewed frontally. Both the king and the serpent head on which he seems to rest are framed by the open jaws of a funerary serpent, a common iconographic device for signalling entrance into, or residence in, the realm(s) of the dead. The king himself wears the attributes of the Tonsured maize god – in particular a turtle ornament on the breast – and is shown in a peculiar posture that may denote rebirth.[19] Interpretation of the lid has raised controversy. Linda Schele saw Pakal falling down the Milky Way into the southern horizon.
Germinate osiris:
Beginning in Dynasty 18, beds were made on which soil was molded into the shape of the god of regeneration and ruler of the dead, Osiris. Thickly sown with grain and kept moist until the grain sprouted and grew, then left to dry again, these figures were created as part of a ritual carried out in association with the Osirian Festival of Khoiak. They magically expressed the concept of life springing from death, symbolizing the resurrection of Osiris. Some examples are also seen in tomb contexts, as the deceased was identified with this god.
In later periods, pottery Osiris bricks were most likely used during the Khoiak Festival as planters; this example was empty, but others contained soil mixed with cereal grains and linen. Here Osiris is shown in his typical form as a mummy, wearing the tall crown of Upper Egypt flanked by ostrich plumes. In his hands he In his hands he holds the crook and flail of kingship. See : The Corn Osiris of Isis Oasis
Many scholars suggest that Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica (also known as the Feathered Serpent), the Maya Maize God, and Jesus Christ could all be the same being. By looking at ancient Mayan writings such as the Popol Vuh, this theory is further explored and developed. These ancient writings include several stories that coincide with the stories of Jesus Christ in the Bible, such as the creation and the resurrection.
The symbol of the serpent has long been associated with deities of Mexico and Guatemala. In the Aztec language, the word “coatl” means serpent. By placing the Aztec word “quetzal” in front of the word “coatl” we have the word, “Quetzalcoatl”. The word “quetzal” means feathers. A beautiful bird, native to Guatemala, carries the name quetzal. Quetzalcoatl, therefore, means, “feathered serpent,” or serpent with precious feathers. (See our web site for illustration} The word quetzal is the name of the coin in Guatemala and also is the national symbol of the country.
Throughout pre-Columbian Mexican history, scores of individuals, both mythological and real, were given the name or title of Quetzalcoatl. Attempts also have been made to attribute the name Quetzalcoatl to only one person. The following quotations are indicative of what is said about Quetzalcoatl
The role that both Quetzalcoatl and the Maize God played in bringing maize to humankind is comparable to Christ’s role in bringing the bread of life to humankind. Furthermore, Quetzalcoatl is said to have descended to the Underworld to perform a sacrifice strikingly similar to the atonement of Jesus Christ. These congruencies and others like them suggest that these three gods are, in fact, three representations of the same being. Read more here: Quetzalcoatl the Maya Maize God and Jesus Christ
In the sacred history of Meso-America, a Christ-like figure dominates the spiritual horizon. His name is Quetzalcoatl, which means the Plumed Serpent. Quetzalcoatl is one of the most ancient concepts of God in this region. He reconciles in himself heaven and earth. He is the creator of humankind and the giver of agriculture and the fine arts.
In the tenth century, a Toltec priest named Quetzalcoatl acquired a large following in the Valley of Mexico. He opposed both human sacrifice and warfare, promoting instead the arts and self-discipline as a means for coming closer to God. This made him many enemies among the ruling classes. They brought about his downfall, but he confounded them by rising from the dead, after being consumed in a sacred fire. His heart became the morning star, and he himself became young once again. He promised to return one day to his people.
The stories of Quetzalcoatl and Christ are so similar that it is easy to see one in the other. In this icon, both Quetzalcoatl and Christ are depicted in the same guise. It is a resurrection icon, with their heart ascending from the flames of death and rebirth. Around the edge, in gold leaf, is an ancient Aztec depiction of the Plumed Serpent. Red and black are the colors the Aztecs associated with the morning star.
Quetzalcoatl and Christ bring us the same timeless message: God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. In both their lives, our human condition has been joined inseparably to the divine. Each proclaims to us a simple gospel of compassion, and invites us to dance with God in the divine fire burning in each of our hearts.
The traditional calendar of Bulgarians in the past had several important dates in the transitional period between the change of seasons. Climatic conditions on Bulgarian lands quite naturally split the cycle of nature into two major parts. The first part starts on May 6th, or Saint George’s Day, when spring arrives and all nature awakens for life. The second borderline is October 26th, or the Day of Saint Demetrius. This is deemed to be the end of the active agricultural season, the start of winter, evening gatherings and engagements of young couples. Just as every new beginning, Saint Demetrius’ Day was a source of much hope. On this day, people would make predictions as to the future fertility, health, love and the weather at the coming Saint George’s Day. Because in folk beliefs, George and Demetrius were twin brothers, that is why the predictions made on Saint Demetrius’ Day were valid for the day of his twin brother.
Saint Demetrius’ Day is a big Christian holiday. On this day, Bulgarians traditionally venerate the memory of the holy martyr Demetrius who was born in Thessaloniki in the 3rd century AD. He died as a martyr for the Christian faith, and upon his grave in Thessaloniki a small church was erected. At the place of this small church, a magnificent basilica stands today, where the relics of St. Demetrius are kept. This is, in a nutshell, his official Christian role in Bulgarian beliefs. In Bulgarian folklore, however, St. Demetrius has been given a special place, and the whole month of October is sometimes called the Month of Demetrius.
In folk beliefs, Saint Demetrius is the elder twin brother of St. George. Both are strong, beautiful and fearless men. Along with St. Theodore and St. Elijah, they are the Christianized equivalent of the brave men in Bulgarian mythology. Strong and dexterous in the battle, with their fast horses they can jump over mountains, conquer evil, and fight dragons. In folk tales and legends, the two saints have the power to open and close heaven, make rain and snow and ensure fertility. The task of St. Elijah was to protect the fields of corn from the evil creatures who stole the harvest. His brothers, twins George and Demetrius, were also strong enough to defeat the mythical monsters. They are represented as warriors and victors also in Christian iconography. Saint George is riding a white horse and Saint Demetrius a red one, both holding a spear in hand. Read more here
Symbolism of Holy Grail and Sir Gawain and the green Knight
The Symbolism of the Holy Grail by Rene Guenon
In connection with the Knights of the Round Table it is not irrelevant to show the meaning of the “Grail quest”, which, in legends of Celtic origin, is represented as their principal function. Every tradition contains such allusions to something which, at a certain time, became lost or hidden. There is, for example, the Hindu Soma—the Persian Haoma—the “draught of immortality” which has a most direct relationship with the Grail, for the latter is said to be the sacred vessel that contained the blood of Christ, which is also the “draught of immortality”. In other cases the symbolism is different: thus according to the Jews it is the pronunciation of the great divine Name which is lost; but the fundamental idea always remains the same, and it will shortly appear to what, exactly, it corresponds.
The Holy Grail is said to be the cup used at the Last Supper, wherein Joseph of Arimathea received the blood and water from the wound opened in Christ’s side by the lance of Longinus the Centurion. According to legend, this cup was carried to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea himself along with Nicodemus;2 and in this can be seen the indication of a link established between the Celtic tradition and Christianity. In fact, the cup plays a most important part in the majority of ancient traditions, and this, no doubt, applied particularly in the case of the Celts. The cup is also to be observed in frequent association with the lance, the two symbols then becoming in a certain way complementary; but it would take us far from our subject to enter into this.
ESTOILE INTERNELLE
Perhaps the clearest expression of the Grail’s essential significance is found in the account of its origin: it tells that this cup had been carved by the angels from an emerald which fell from Lucifer’s forehead at his downfall. That emerald strikingly recalls the urnā, the frontal pearl which, in Hindu (and hence in Buddhist) symbolism, frequently replaced the third eye of Shiva, representing what might be called the “sense of eterni ty”. It is then said that the Grail was given into Adam’s keeping in the Earthly Paradise, but that Adam, in his turn, lost it when he fell, for he could not bear it with him when he was driven out of Eden. Clearly, man being separated from his original center, thereafter found himself enclosed in the temporal sphere; he could no longer rejoin the unique point whence all things are contemplated under the aspect of eternity. In other words the possession of the “sense of eternity” is linked to what every tradition calls the “primordial state”, the res toring of which constitutes the first stage of true initiation, since it is the necessary preliminary to conquest of “supra-human” states. What follows might appear more enigmatic: Seth obtained re-entry into the Earthly Paradise and was thus able to recover the precious vessel; now the name Seth expresses the ideas of foundation and stability and, consequently, indicates, in a certain manner, the restoration of the primordial order destroyed by the fall of man. It can therefore be understood that Seth and those who possessed the Grail after him were by this very fact, able to establish a spiritual center destined to replace the lost Paradise, and to serve as an image of it; thus possession of the Grail represents integral preservation of the primordial tradition in a particular spiritual center. The legend tells neither where nor by whom the Grail was preserved until the time of Christ; but its recognizably Celtic origin leaves it to be understood that the Druids had a part therein and must be counted among the regular custodians of the primordial tradition. The loss of the Grail, or of one of its symbolic equivalents, is, in brief, the loss of tradition with all that the latter includes; nevertheless, the tradition is, in truth, hidden rather than lost; or at least it can only be lost as regards certain secondary centers, when they cease to be in direct relation with the supreme center.Read more here
St John the baptist
For The Legend of King Arthur: The Once and Future King and his Knights of the Round Table, the mysterious Grail – a legend which is wide spread over Europe and even beyond, makes people want to know even more. Look here
René Guénon and the Heart of the Grail:
Looking around him, describing and deploring the effects of modernity, René Guénon found an answer in the Grail. More than that, he believed that it could light our way back to the Terrestrial Paradise, to the kind of communion with the divine enjoyed by our primordial parents in Eden. It may even offer us deliverance from the world completely, carrying us beyond the cosmos until we are so utterly transfigured and transformed that we are no longer merely human. As Guénon is undoubtedly one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century, we may find it fruitful to meditate on these ideas. They may not set us on the path to transformation (as Guénon would wish), but they may reveal a truth which is not generally appreciated: that at the very centre of Guénon’s challenging thinking, the place where the Grail is to be sought, is a heart overflowing with joy and love.Read here
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight :
During a New Year’s Eve feast at King Arthur’s court, a strange figure, referred to only as the Green Knight, pays the court an unexpected visit. He challenges the group’s leader or any other brave representative to a game. The Green Knight says that he will allow whomever accepts the challenge to strike him with his own axe, on the condition that the challenger find him in exactly one year to receive a blow in return.
Stunned, Arthur hesitates to respond, but when the Green Knight mocks Arthur’s silence, the king steps forward to take the challenge. As soon as Arthur grips the Green Knight’s axe, Sir Gawain leaps up and asks to take the challenge himself. He takes hold of the axe and, in one deadly blow, cuts off the knight’s head. To the amazement of the court, the now-headless Green Knight picks up his severed head. Before riding away, the head reiterates the terms of the pact, reminding the young Gawain to seek him in a year and a day at the Green Chapel. After the Green Knight leaves, the company goes back to its festival, but Gawain is uneasy.
Time passes, and autumn arrives. On the Day of All Saints, Gawain prepares to leave Camelot and find the Green Knight. He puts on his best armor, mounts his horse, Gringolet, and starts off toward North Wales, traveling through the wilderness of northwest Britain. Gawain encounters all sorts of beasts, suffers from hunger and cold, and grows more desperate as the days pass. On Christmas Day, he prays to find a place to hear Mass, then looks up to see a castle shimmering in the distance. The lord of the castle welcomes Gawain warmly, introducing him to his lady and to the old woman who sits beside her. For sport, the host (whose name is later revealed to be Bertilak) strikes a deal with Gawain: the host will go out hunting with his men every day, and when he returns in the evening, he will exchange his winnings for anything Gawain has managed to acquire by staying behind at the castle. Gawain happily agrees to the pact, and goes to bed.
St John the Baptist
The first day, the lord hunts a herd of does, while Gawain sleeps late in his bedchambers. On the morning of the first day, the lord’s wife sneaks into Gawain’s chambers and attempts to seduce him. Gawain puts her off, but before she leaves she steals one kiss from him. That evening, when the host gives Gawain the venison he has captured, Gawain kisses him, since he has won one kiss from the lady. The second day, the lord hunts a wild boar. The lady again enters Gawain’s chambers, and this time she kisses Gawain twice. That evening Gawain gives the host the two kisses in exchange for the boar’s head.
The third day, the lord hunts a fox, and the lady kisses Gawain three times. She also asks him for a love token, such as a ring or a glove. Gawain refuses to give her anything and refuses to take anything from her, until the lady mentions her girdle. The green silk girdle she wears around her waist is no ordinary piece of cloth, the lady claims, but possesses the magical ability to protect the person who wears it from death. Intrigued, Gawain accepts the cloth, but when it comes time to exchange his winnings with the host, Gawain gives the three kisses but does not mention the lady’s green girdle. The host gives Gawain the fox skin he won that day, and they all go to bed happy, but weighed down with the fact that Gawain must leave for the Green Chapel the following morning to find the Green Knight.
New Year’s Day arrives, and Gawain dons his armor, including the girdle, then sets off with Gringolet to seek the Green Knight. A guide accompanies him out of the estate grounds. When they reach the border of the forest, the guide promises not to tell anyone if Gawain decides to give up the quest. Gawain refuses, determined to meet his fate head-on. Eventually, he comes to a kind of crevice in a rock, visible through the tall grasses. He hears the whirring of a grindstone, confirming his suspicion that this strange cavern is in fact the Green Chapel. Gawain calls out, and the Green Knight emerges to greet him. Intent on fulfilling the terms of the contract, Gawain presents his neck to the Green Knight, who proceeds to feign two blows. On the third feint, the Green Knight nicks Gawain’s neck, barely drawing blood. Angered, Gawain shouts that their contract has been met, but the Green Knight merely laughs.
The Green Knight reveals his name, Bertilak, and explains that he is the lord of the castle where Gawain recently stayed. Because Gawain did not honestly exchange all of his winnings on the third day, Bertilak drew blood on his third blow. Nevertheless, Gawain has proven himself a worthy knight, without equal in all the land. When Gawain questions Bertilak further, Bertilak explains that the old woman at the castle is really Morgan le Faye, Gawain’s aunt and King Arthur’s half sister. She sent the Green Knight on his original errand and used her magic to change Bertilak’s appearance. Relieved to be alive but extremely guilty about his sinful failure to tell the whole truth, Gawain wears the girdle on his arm as a reminder of his own failure. He returns to Arthur’s court, where all the knights join Gawain, wearing girdles on their arms to show their support. See: The Journey to the Self: Stages of Trauma and Initiation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
” This is the vera sentenzia of ‘losing one’s head.’ It is called a ‘secret’ and a ‘mystery’ not because it cannot be stated in words, however enigmatically, but because it must remain incomprehensible to whoever has not taken even the first steps on the way of self-naughting, and never having sacrificed is still ‘unborn.”‘ Whoever, like Gawain, searches for the Master Surgeon, to pay his debt, and submits to this Headman’s axe, will find himself, not without a head, but with another head on his shoulders; just as Gawain, having lain down to die, assuredly stood up again a new man. That is what is enacted in the ritual, in which the sacrificer himself is always identified with the victim, – ‘and verily, no sacrifice whatever is offered that is not the Pravargya for the Comprehensor thereof. And, verily, whosoever teaches, or participates in (bhaksayati) this Pravargya enters into that Life and that Light. The observance of the rule thereof is the same as it was at the first outpouring”
The Imitation of Christ , by Thomas à Kempis, is a Christian devotional book first composed in Medieval Latin as De Imitatione Christi (c. 1418–1427).[1][2] The devotional text is divided into four books of detailed spiritual instructions: (i) “Helpful Counsels of the Spiritual Life”, (ii) “Directives for the Interior Life”, (iii) “On Interior Consolation”, and (iv) “On the Blessed Sacrament”. The devotional approach of The Imitation of Christ emphasises the interior life and withdrawal from the mundanities of the world, as opposed to the active imitation of Christ practised by other friars.[1] The devotions of the books emphasize devotion to the Eucharist as the key element of spiritual life.[Read here
What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
Saint Augustine
In the 5 circles is written: “Gave van Barmhartigheid“: Gift of Mercy , “Gave van Genade’: Gift of Grace, “Gave des Levens” ( in the heart): Gift of Life, ” Gave van Medelijden”: Gift of Compassion, “Gave van sterkte“: Gift of strength.
The Great Schema in the Orthodox Church requires the traditional monastic vows, plus special spiritual feats. According to Archpriest G. S. Debolsky: “In the understanding of the Church, the Great Schema is nothing less than the supreme vow of the Cross and death; it is the image of complete isolation from the earth, the image of transformation and transfiguration of life, the image of death and the beginning of another, higher, existence.” As a monastic dignity, the Great Schema has been known since the 4th century. According to an ancient legend, this dignity was inaugurated by St. Pachomios the Great. However, as a form of monastic life, the Great Schema goes back to the origin of Christianity. Those who followed Christ’s teachings on supreme spiritual perfection by voluntarily taking the vows of chastity, obedience and poverty were called ascetics to distinguish them from other Christians. They led a harsh and secluded hermit’s life like St. John the Baptist, or like our Lord Jesus Christ Himself during his forty days in the desert.
According to the Rule of St. Pachomios, the act of acceptance into a monastery had three steps and consisted of (a) “temptation” (trial), (b) clothing, and (c) presentation to the starets for spiritual guidance. Each of the three steps undoubtedly had its own significance. They marked the beginning of the three stages in monasticism which have become deeply embedded in the life of the Eastern Church: first, the novice (or rasoforos); the second, the monk (known as a monk of the Lesser Schema); and the third, the monk of the Great Schema. Read more here
IN THE WILDERNESS of Northern California, Monks John and Damascene searched in hopes of finding a way to reach out to the Punk scene, which John had escaped. Seeing that the scene was full of kids that were sick of themselves and crippled by nihilism and despair, the Monks set out to give them the same hope that they found in Ancient Christianity. To do this, they decided to submit an article about Father Seraphim Rose in the popular magazine, Maximum Rock and Roll. When Father Damascene read over the magazine, he knew that they would never publish something like it. Struggling to show truth to the darkened subcultures, they tried again, but this time only placing an ad for Saint Hermans Brotherhood. They got a response from the editor, saying “What the @#*% is a Brotherhood?” and the Monks were told “We only run ads for music and ‘zines*.” A light bulb went on and thus, Death to the World was born. The first issue was printed in the December of ’94 featuring a Monk holding a skull on cover. The hand-drawn bold letters across the top read “DEATH TO THE WORLD, The Last True Rebellion” and the back cover held the caption: “they hated me without a cause.”
“The world” is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.”
In Sufism, the four traditional forms (white, black, red and green) of this initiatory death represent the practices which aim to extinguish spiritual lusts as well as carnal concupiscences read here in French
The Green death: Death to the universe. Death thus understood, death with regard to the universe, becomes, with the desire to enter the path, the first step of the itinerants towards God. In Sufi thought, it has four aspects: a white death, a black death, a red death and a green death. The white death is hunger, which is akin to enlightenment. The black death is realized when the Sufi practices and succeeds in enduring the evils caused by men or even all evil in an absolute way, which is likely to sadden the self/ego which becomes darkened. The Red Death consists of subduing him, which ends up killing him.
Finally, the green death consists of wearing the dress which becomes, by dint of being patched, variegated like the earth in spring. Spiritual death here below is therefore the supreme privation. But, for Sufism, there exists, here below also, another death, this one eminently positive: death with regard to the universe, which is rebirth and which is access to the first home of the other. -of the. Such death results in life, it is itself life. The words of Hallâj are eloquent in this regard: “Kill me, my comrades, it is in my murder that my life lies! My death, it is to (over)live; and my life is to die!”
Eternal Spring
We change Reality by changing our Perception of it
There is much to be learn about Eternity by living in Time
There is much to be learn about Time by living in Eternity
Before the modern-day obsession with social and political issues, the strand of learning often called Sufism played a major if not predominant role in all Muslim societies. What distinguishes Sufism from other approaches to the Islamic tradition is the fact that it considers the transformation of the soul the goal of human life, while looking at dogma, ritual, and law as means to this end, not ends in themselves. (Sufism is a problematic and controversial term, but probably more adequate than “mysticism” or “esotericism”, both of which carry too much baggage to apply in any more than superficial ways to the vastly diverse assortment of teachings and practices that are directed toward spiritual transformation in the Islamic tradition). In keeping with the worldview established by the Koran, Muslim scholars addressed three major issues: activity, understanding, and transformation.
Activity became the specialty of the jurists, the experts in the Shariah, who took it upon themselves to define right and wrong deeds. Understanding was the specialty of various schools of theology and philosophy, ranging from the dogmatic to the mystical and metaphysical. Transformation was the specialty of spiritual guides, many but not all of whom came to be called Sufis.
If we want to choose one word to designate the process and goal of transformation, we can not do better than “love.”
To explain why this is so, I will summarize the understanding of love as it was discussed from early times. Specifically, I want to look at two issues that run through all the discussions, namely the ontological and moral imperatives.
The ontological imperative means that all things love by nature.
The moral imperative means that human beings, by virtue of their own specific nature, must refine and perfect their love or suffer the consequences.
Any thinking that can be called Islamic grounds itself in tawhīd,the notion of unity. Briefly, tawhīd means that all reality is utterly contingent upon the one supreme reality, called God by theologians and the Necessary Being by philosophers. What imparts a specifically Islamic color to this universal notion is the idea that Muhammad was the last in a series of 124,000 prophets sent by God.
Strict attention to unity brings us face to face with the ontological imperative:
Everything is exactly what it must be, for all things are under the control of the One. Among the many Koranic proof texts cited in support of this imperative is the verse «His only command, when He desires a thing, is to say to it “Be!”, and it comes to be» (36: 82).
Theologians called this word “Be” the creative command (al-amr al-khalqī).It is eternal, which is to say that, from the human point of view, it is re-uttered at every moment. As a result, the universe and all things within it are constantly renewed. Read more here
Stupid that everyone in his case Is praising his particular opinion! If Islam means submission to God, We all live and die in Islam.” Goethe (West-East Divan)
As Paul Kingsnorth in 50 Holy Wells say: “Who knows what the future holds? Not me. But as the chaos of the Void accelerates, a parallel spiritual longing deepens. We need truth. We need God. People still come to the wells to speak to Him. I can see, if only in my dreams, a future in which more and more people come looking here. A future in which the wells are still tended and the prayers grow in numbers, the well rounds revive and the sacred landscape of ancient Ireland begins to awaken from its slumber. A future in which we remember that all things are soaked in God. A future in which the lessons of the modern hermit St Joseph the Hesychast are remembered by us worldly Christians today:
God is everywhere. There is no place where He cannot be found. Within and without, above and below, wherever you turn all things cry out: “God.” We live and move in Him. We breathe God, we eat God, we clothe ourselves in God. All things praise and bless God. The whole creation cries out. All things, living or inanimate, speak with wonder and glorify the Creator.
Verily He is the One Who will revive the dead…
SURAH 30- AR-RUM AYAT 48-50 48- Allah is He Who sends the winds, so they raise clouds, and spread them along the sky as He wills, and then break them into fragments, until you see rain drops come forth from their midst! Then when He has made them fall on whom of His slaves as He will, lo! they rejoice! 49- And verily before that (rain), just before it was sent down upon them, they were in despair! 50- See, then, the tokens of Allah’s Mercy: how He revives the earth after it is dead. Verily He is the One Who will revive the dead. He has power over everything. see here
In Sufism, the four traditional forms (white, black, red and green) of this initiatory death represent the practices which aim to extinguish spiritual lusts as well as carnal concupiscences read here in French
The Green death: Death to the universe. Death thus understood, death with regard to the universe, becomes, with the desire to enter the path, the first step of the itinerants towards God. In Sufi thought, it has four aspects: a white death, a black death, a red death and a green death. The white death is hunger, which is akin to enlightenment. The black death is realized when the Sufi practices and succeeds in enduring the evils caused by men or even all evil in an absolute way, which is likely to sadden the self/ego which becomes darkened. The Red Death consists of subduing him, which ends up killing him.
Finally, the green death consists of wearing the dress which becomes, by dint of being patched, variegated like the earth in spring. Spiritual death here below is therefore the supreme privation. But, for Sufism, there exists, here below also, another death, this one eminently positive: death with regard to the universe, which is rebirth and which is access to the first home of the other. -of the. Such death results in life, it is itself life. The words of Hallâj are eloquent in this regard: “Kill me, my comrades, it is in my murder that my life lies! My death, it is to (over)live; and my life is to die!”
Eternal Spring
Faouzi Skali in his book Jesus and the Sufi Traditon explains in the 10 chapter,The birth of Jesus in man:
The soul of the mystic, Rûmi teaches us, is similar to Mary: “If your soul is pure enough and full of love enough, it becomes like Mary: it begets the Messiah”.
And al-Halláj also evokes this idea: “Our consciences are one Virgin where only the Spirit of Truth can penetrate”
In this context, Jesus then symbolizes the cutting edge of the Spirit present in the human soul:“Our body is like Mary: each of us has a Jesus in him, but as long as the pains of childbirth do not appear in us, our Jesus is not born” ( Rumi, The Book of the Inside, V).
This essential quest is comparable to suffering of Mary who led her under the palm tree (Koran XIX, 22-26): “ I said:” 0 my heart, seek the universal Mirror, go towards the Sea, because you will not reach your goal by the only river! ”
In this quest, Your servant finally arrived at the place of Your home as the pains of childbirth led Mary towards the palm tree “(RÛMi, Mathnawî, II, 93 sq.)
Just as the Breath of the Holy Spirit, breathed into Mary, made him conceive the Holy Spirit, as so when the Word of God(kalám al-haqq) enters someone’s heart and the divine Inspiration purifies and fills his heart (see Matthew V, 8 or Jesus in the Sermon of the Mountain exclaims: “Blessed are pure hearts, for they will see God! “) and his soul, his nature becomes such that then is produced in him a spiritual child (walad ma’nawî) having the breath of Jesus who raises the dead.
“Human beings,” it says in Walad-Nama ( French translation, Master and disciple, of Sultan Valad andKitab al-Ma’ârif the Skills of SoulRapture), must be born twice: once from their mother, another from their own body and their own existence. The body is like an egg: the essence of man must become in this egg a bird, thanks to the warmth of Love; then it will escape its body and fly into the eternal world of the soul, beyond space. ”
And Sultan Walad adds: “If the bird of faith (imán) is not born in Man during its existence, this earthly life is then comparable to a miscarriage.”
The soul, in the prison of the body, is ankylosed like the embryo in the maternal womb, and it awaits its deliverance. This will happen when the “germ” has matured, thanks to a descent into oneself, to a painful awareness: “The pain will arise from this look thrown inside oneself, and this suffering makes pass to beyond the veil. As long as the mothers do not take birth pains, the child does not have the possibility of being born (. Rumi, Mathnawî, II, 2516 sq.) (…) My mother, that is to say my nature [my body], by his agony pains, gives birth to the Spirit … If the pains during the coming of the child are painful for the pregnant woman, on the other hand, for the embryo, it is the opening of his prison ”(Ibid., 3555 sq)
Union with God, explains Rûmi, manifests itself when the divine Qualities come to cover the attributes of His servant:
“God’s call, whether veiled or not, grants what he gave to Maryam. 0 you who are corrupted by death inside your body, return from nonexistence to the Voice of the Friend! In truth, this Voice comes from God, although it comes from the servant of God! God said to the saint: “I am your tongue and your eyes, I am your senses, I am your contentment and your wrath. Go, for you are the one of whom God said: ‘By Me he hears and by Me he sees!’ You are the divine Consciousness, how should it be said that you have this divine Consciousness?Since you have become, by your wondering, ‘He who belongs to God’.
I am yours because ‘God will belong to him. Sometimes, I tell you: ‘It’s you!’, Sometimes, ‘It’s me!’ Whatever I say, I am the Sun illuminating all things. “(Mathnawî, I, 1934 sq).
Once the illusion of duality has been transcended, all that remains in the soul is the divine Presence:the soul then finds in the depths of its being the divine effigy.
It has become the place of theophany. This is what Rumi calls the spiritual resurrection: “The universal Soul came into contact with the partial soul and the latter received from her a pearl and put it in her womb. Thanks to this touch of her breast, the individual soul became pregnant, like Mary, with a Messiah ravishing the heart. Not the Messiah who travels on land and at sea, but the Messiah who is beyond the limitations of space! Also, when the soul has been fertilized by the Soul of the soul, then the world is fertilized by such a soul “( Ibid., II, 1184 sq.).
This birth of the spiritual Child occurs out of time, and therefore it occurs in each man who receives him with all his being through this “Be!” that Marie receives during the Annunciation: “From your body, like Maryam, give birth to an Issa without a father! You have to be born twice, once from your mother, another time from yourself. So beget yourself again! If the outpouring of the Holy Spirit dispenses again his help, others will in turn do what Christ himself did: the Father pronounces the Word in the universal Soul, and when the Son is born, each soul becomes Mary (Ibid., III, 3773.)
So Jesus can declare: “O son of Israel, I tell you the truth, no one enters the Kingdom of Heaven and earth unless he is born twice!By the Will of God, I am of those who were born twice: my first birth was according to nature, and the second according to the Spirit in the Sky of Knowledge! » (Sha’ranî, Tabaqat, II, 26; Sohrawardî, ‘Awarif, I, 1)
The second birth corresponds to what we also gain in Sufism as the “opening (fath) of the eye of the heart“: “When Your Eye became an eye for my heart, my blind heart drowned in vision ; I saw that You were the universal Mirror for all eternity and I saw in Your Eyes my own image. I said, “Finally, I found myself in His Eyes, I found the Way of Light!” (Rumi, Mathnawî, II, 93 sq.)
This opening is the promise made by God to all those who conclude a pact with the spiritual master, pole of his time, like the apostles with Jesus or the Companions when they pledged allegiance to Muhammad: “God was satisfied with believers when they swore an oath to you under the Tree, He knew perfectly the content of their hearts, He brought down on them deep peace (sakina), He rewarded them with a prompt opening ( fath) and by an abundant booty which they seized ”(Coran XLVIII, 18-19).(The abundant loot indicates Divine Knowledge (mari’fa).Read more here
It is the End of the World as We Know It – and we feel fine: The illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur
Some of the most remarkable, wonderful and unsettling images of hell and damnation from the middle ages are found in a 15th century manual describing illustrations and are available to view here. This seems to have been the second volume of a larger, two part work, completed the apocalypse (the end of the world) produced by Carthusian monks in France known as Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur (The Book of the Vineyard of our Lord). Now held by the Bodleian LIbrary in Oxford its some time before 1463 in France. Its author and illustrators are unknown. It’s thought to be Carthusian because one illustration depicts two Carthusian monks.
These images depict the Antichrist and his war on the Church, the signs of the coming of the end of the world, the Last Judgement and then, in full gory detail, the sufferings of the damned.
The whole point of this blog is to argue that our ideas of heaven and hell owe far more to the imaginations of writers and artists in the middle ages and Renaissance than to the bible and here we get a really good feel for the kinds of ideas that were shaping the thinking of Christians bout the afterlife at this time. They are fun, shocking, amusing and very, very interesting.
Satan being judged by Christ as the apostles pray for him. From Le Livre de la Vigne nostre half 15th century. France. Bodleian Library MS Douce 134 Seigneur. First fol. 67v.
Will the real Antichrist please stand up?
The book begins with a description of the nature and activities of the Antichrist, who is shown here with his two faces, one revealing his true, devilish nature and a more acceptable ‘human’ face which proves attractive to the human population. See Inauguration of Total Ego-Madness at the Capitol
double character of the Antichrist revealed to people wearing an assortment of interesting headwear. Fol. 4r
The book then portrays this creature in the different stages of his career as he seduces the world and turns the populations of earth against the Christian church. Interestingly, written a hundred years before the Reformation by Catholic monks, the Antichrist is depicted here, arriving in Jerusalem as a false pope!
The Antichrist arrives in Jerusalem dressed as the pope. f 6r
With the Antichrist now in charge it’s not long before the persecution of the true followers of Christ (those who won’t bow down to the Antichrist) begins.
The persecution of the church begins. Clearly not an easy time to be a churchgoer. Fol. 30r
Thankfully, God has everything in hand and soon brings an end to the activities of the Antichrist.
The Antichrist being ‘zapped’ by God while the Devil takes his soul. People seem distressed. ‘Funny weather we’re having’.
Fifteen Signs
Following the destruction of the Antichrist comes the end of the world itself. First however, the population of earth have to endure 15 ‘signs’ of The End, each of them terrible enough in themselves. These are beautiful, striking images, full of imagination and, worryingly seem all too relevant to features of our own global crisis!
he first sign the sea rises to the level of the mountain tops. Folio 41v
Then the seas dry up and disappear altogether Folio 42r
Then all the sea creatures and monsters are gathered together (in the air apparently!) Folio 42v
And then the waters themselves burn with flames. Folio 43r
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And so it goes on, with one world crisis after another. here ís the depiction of the cities and towns of mankind, their pride and joy, broken down and ruined
The sixth sign. Towns and cities are ruined and fall to the ground. Fol. 44r
And then of course comes ‘The End’ and the great final judgement. After the world is flattened, earthquakes, the raising of the dead and the death of the living the angels blow their trumpets and all the dead are raised together to face judgement. This is depicted rather wonderfully as both the opening of the tombs (this is a bodily resurrection of course) and the emptying of Death, pictured as the mouth of the Leviathon (the great biblical sea monster) .
The bodies emerge from their tombs (top) as their souls emerge from the jaws of death (bottom) to be greeted by the angels. Folio 50v
Standing under judgement
Christ appears in the sky/heavens attended by angels to judge the blessed and the damned. You can easily spot the damned – they are dark-skinned. I am not sure how relevant it is to judge a previous era in terms of concepts like racism that we use now. The damned were often associated with ‘the heathen’ (who were usually foreign) but here it could simply be a way of ‘spotting the difference’, with the darker shade a symbol of their wickedness. White is usually seen as a colour of purity. These associations of course raise their own issues about skin colour and its perception. Jesus of course is very ‘european’ and whiter than white!
Christ (or at least his head) appears in the sky ready to separate the blessed and the damned. Angels bearing the symbols of his passion attend him while church big wigs watch with approval. Some of those waiting below have clearly been cramped up in death and are taking the opportunity to do some exercise. Folio 57v
As the women and the apostles pray for the souls of the dead, Christ judges them. The right arm is raised in blessing, the left stretched out in condemnation.
Jesus (all of him), perched precariously on a rainbow, prepares to sentence the damned among whom, it appears, are a pope and a king! Fol. 63r
But of course the judging must be fair and according to an ‘official’ standard, so scales are employed and Michael, the chief angel, is given the job of weighing the souls. This idea of the weighing of souls is not found in the New Testament but was an idea taken over by the church from Egyptian mythology. It became a stock feature of medieval and Renaissance depictions of the Last Judgement.
How much do you weigh? Michael the Archangel prepares his equipment for the final weighing of souls. Folio 73r
But Christ does not judge alone. After all he promised the 12 apostles that they would rule with him, so at the Last Judgement they will sit in judgement with him like a celestial 12 man jury.
The 12 apostles sit in judgement of sinners, (including a pope, a monk and three people doing complicated dance moves) and devils. Biblical basis for the 12 man jury system perhaps? Fol. 75r
And so, at last, the souls have been weighed, the jury has deliberated and the sentence is passed. With the words “depart from me, accursed ones, into everlasting fire” (Matthew 25.41 Vulgate) Christ banishes the damned from his presence.
Christ delivers judgement on the damned. “Discedite maledicti in ignem eternum”. Fol. 76r
And so the Antichrist has been defeated, the end of the world has come and the dead have been raised (bodily please note!), some to everlasting life and some to everlasting damnation. For the monks reading this amazing book, the text and these marvellous illustrations would have both terrified them (after all, everyone involved seems to suffer) and reassured them. The various wars and rumours of wars, plagues, famines, earthquakes they experienced and knew of and the failures of popes, priests, kings and emperors could all be read, not as random, chaotic events without meaning, but as signs of The End, which the book told them was in the hands of Jesus, their Lord. They could find comfort and hope in that.
But that isn’t the end of the book. It goes on to describe in graphic detail the horrors awaiting those who are sentenced to perdition. The torments of the damned are portrayed in their full horror.
Following judgement the wicked and the devils are consigned together to the ‘pit’ of hell. The devils look rather pleased about it. From Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur. 15th century; France. Bodleian Library MS Douce 134 fol. 77v
In the previous post I looked at some of the illustrations from LeLivre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, a 15th century French manual describing the end of the world, the last judgement and the punishment of the wicked in hell. It’s an amazing document and the illustrations are quite remarkable and beautiful. The illustrations show the activity of the Antichrist, the signs of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgement. After the Last Judgement the illustrations show in graphic detail the terrible punishments and tortures that lie in wait for the damned. In this post I want to show you these illustrations, not just to revel in the twisted imagination of these Renaissance monks as they imagined the unspeakable horrors of damnation (although I do!) but to think about what they tell us about the Renaissance view of sin. A warning before we begin – this is not for the faint hearted or the sqeamish!
Being ‘sent down’.
The damned are ‘sent down’ to hell through what appears to be a giant mouth-shaped hole in the ground. This imagery isn’t surprising as both death and hell (or Sheol/Hades) are pictured as living monsters in the bible and in subsequent Christian imagery. The damned are accompanied by the demons who will torment them for the rest of eternity who seem very pleased at the prospect! The press of bodies and the confusion of orientation symbolises the chaotic nature of life without God. So anyone looking at our house would conclude . . . .
It’s a bit crowded in here. The damned descending to hell together with their allotted torturers. Detail from Fol. 77v.
Here is a close-up of the hellsmouth and we can see some of the beasts and monsters who will be tormenting the damned. This is clearly by a different illustrator.
The ‘mouth of hell’ filled with the damned and the demons who will torment them. Fol. 81v.
First, it seems, the damned are cooked in ovens for a while. The forks seem very impressive!
Those who broke the commandments are cooked in the ovens. Fol. 82
The Seven Deadly Sins
Having been cooked the damned are now ready for some appropriate punishment. Those guilty of the seven most terrible sins (at least in the Christian tradition), the so called ‘Seven Deadly Sins’, are punished in such a way that each punishment reflects in some way the nature of the sin.
Here the proud and vainglorious (i.e. those who think too much of themselves) are ‘broken’ on a terrible wheel. Standing tall and proud requires a strong back bone. No one will be doing much of that after this.
Fol. 83r
Here those guilty of Envy are being punished by immersion in either fire or ice, each no doubt thinking that the other lot have it easier!
The envious are punished, some in fire, some in ice. Fol. 83v
Here the wrathful (implaccably and violently aggressive) are being punished by experiencing the rage and aggression of the devils.
The wrathful getting their just deserts. Fol. 84r
Below the slothful are being eaten by dragons and eagles. The wrathful and the slothful are close to each other for a reason. Sloth was considered to be closely connected to Wrath. Thomas Aquinas, reflecting on Aristotle’s distinctions between the different kinds of Wrath, the acute, the bitter and the difficult, wrote that “the bitter have a permanent Wrath on account of the permanence of the gloom they keep closed within them”. St. Bonaventure wrote “Wrath, when it cannot avenge itself, turns sullen, and thus from it is born Sloth”; and Brunetto Latini, Dante’s guardian and teacher, wrote that “In Wrath neglectful Sloth is born and abides,” Sloth was Wrath turned in on itself. These are not people who just don’t like hard work, these are people who bitterly resent having to do anything because they are angry all the time, an anger turned inwards in sullenness and gloom. Sounds like being a teenager to me!
The slothful are eaten by dragons and eagles Fol. 84v
Here are the avaricious being cooked. Interesting to see Popes, Bishops and Kings in there! People of this era were under no illusions about their rulers! O.K., here’s the interactive bit. What high profile political or religious figures would you like to see in your cauldron?!
The avaricious are boiled in cauldrons. A pope, a king, a cardinal, a bishop and monks are all included. Fol. 85r
Gluttony comes next in the list, a more henious sin than Lust which comes next. This interested me because in our modern church Lust is a much more high profile sin than Gluttony. Very few pastors or priests are thrown out of the church in disgrace for eating too much! But in the medieval era Gluttony was considered a worse sin than Lust because it was thought that for the glutton, food takes the place of God. It was in fact a form of idolatry. The classification of Gluttony as a greater evil than Lust is reflected in a widespread medieval interpretation of Genesis 2.15–17 and 3.6, according to which Adam’s sin was literally an excessive love of food! Since the food was offered to Adam by Eve, gluttony also had sexual implications and was seen (partly) as the root cause of Lust! So Lust and Gluttony were thought to be interconnected – the one (food) led to the other (sex)! Perhaps for that reason medieval spirituality emphasised fasting as a means to purge the soul!
Below the gluttons are being punished, but I am not sure I can explain how. It looks as if they are forced to sit around a meal table on which there is nothing palatable to eat.
The punishment of the gluttons. Fol. 85v
And here are the lustful being cooked together. Just as they burned for one another while they were alive so they will burn with one another in this way in hell.
The lechers who burned with passion in this life now burn in a very different way in hell. Fol. 86r
Anything else to confess?
But of course there are many more than seven sins and the hell of Le Livre has something for everyone! Here the usurers (those who lend money for interest – bankers!) are being punished. They are immersed in wells of boiling water up to their deserved level.
The usurers. Each one is immersed to different depths depending on how bad they were Fol. 121r
It was important to deter thieves. They are hung over flames while two delighted devils look at the reader.
Thieves are hung over fires. Fol 121v
And murderers and tyrants get their comeuppance too. They experience violence and tyranny themselves.
Murderers and tyrants are attacked with spears and pikes Fol. 122r
Many rivers to cross
In Classical mythology the underworld was watered by at least four rivers and these are usually intergated into Christian accounts of hell. Here we see four rivers depicted. Below are the Styx and the Phlegeton.
According to some versions of Classical mythology the Styx was the river which the dead had to cross in order to enter the afterworld. The person (or being!) who ferried them across was called Charon. Some versions of the myth give the river a different name, the Acheron. Dante’s Inferno names both the Styx and the Acheron (so he ends up with five rivers only four of which are actually in hell). In Dante’s version of hell it is the Acheron that forms the border between the land of the living and hell and which the damned must cross (in Charon’s boat) to get to hell itself. The Styx is the second river Dante and Virgil find in hell. It begins life as a bubbling spring in the fourth level of hell and flows down into the fifth level where it forms a swamp in which the violent are punished. The name Styx in Greek meant ‘gloom’. In LeLivre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur it seems as if the Styx is a river the damned must swim over while being clubbed on the heads, not by Charon but by devils.
The rivers of hell (1). The Styx and the Phlegeton Fol. 87v
The Phlegeton was also a river taken from Classical mythology. The word in Greek means ‘fiery’. In Phaedo (112b) Plato describes it as “a stream of fire which coils around the earth and flows into the depths of Tartarus”. In Dante’s Commedia the Phlegeton in the third river of hell and it originates, like all the rivers of Dante’s Inferno, from tears flowing from a crack in the statue of the Old Man of Crete. Dante’s Phlegeton consists of boiling-hot blood, which probably symbolizes the blood of victims of violent death. The stream forms the first ring of the seventh circle, in which the sinners of violence against others are immersed at various depths corresponding to the severity of their crimes against their fellow men. Here in LeLivre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur it seems that is indeed a very hot and fiery river.
And here are the other two rivers of hell; the Lethe and the Cocytus.
In classical mythology the river Lethe represented forgetfulness. The waters of the river erased memory. In the Republic (10.621), Plato mentions Lethe as the river that the soul must drink during the process of metempsychosis, the passing of the soul at death into another body. In the Aeneid (6.713–715) Virgil refers to Lethe during Anchises’ speech on transmigration: only when the dead have had their memories erased by the Lethe that they may be reincarnated. According the Roman poet Statius the river Lethe borders Elysium, the final resting place of the virtuous in the underworld. This is how Dante conceives of the role of the Lethe and the river forms the physical boundary separating the pilgrim from the earthly paradise at the top of the mount of purgatory. The pilgrim must drink from the waters of the river to forget his sins before he crosses to paradise and begins his ascent to the highest heaven. Here in LeLivre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur it is found in hell.
The Lethe and the Cocytus. Fol 88r
The Cocytus, which means ‘the river of wailing’, is also associated in Classical mythology with the underworld. In some versions the Cocytus, along with the Acheron, forms the boundary of the underworld. In the Commedia Dante situates the Cocytus in the ninth circle of hell, right at the bottom, where its waters are frozen by the beating of Lucifer’s great leathery wings. In situating it here he was possibly influence by Isidore of Seville who in his Etymologies (book 14) located the Cocytus near Tartarus, the deepest, darkest part of hell. Here in LeLivre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur it seems very hot and fiery, not icy at all! But the monks’ conception of Satan is very different to that of Dante and hell isn’t arranged in every deepening circles. There is icy punishment but the river don’t freeze over.
And a terrible time was had by all
Finally (as far as this post is concerned) here are some images which were added I think, just to remind the reader that being in hell is a really, really bad way to spend your eternity. The interest (to me) is how the illustrator(s) identified the most painful and terrible forms of human suffering.
Too darned hot
Fire was generally the most popular image of eternal torment
The damned and devils languish in the flames in the mouth of hell. Fol. 87rThe damned writhe in the flames of hell. Fol. 90v More burning. Fol 105v
Being devoured
But being eaten seems to have been very popular too.
Here the damned are eaten by worms. The reference to worms is found in the bible (eg Mark 9.42-48) and becomes one of the main images of hellish torment in medieval art. The idea of having your body constantly gnawed away by little burrowing creatures is truly horrifying. Having spent a day in the mountain here in Sweden being eaten by thousands of mosquitos gave me some idea of how appalling this would be!
The damned are devoured by worms Fol. 91v
Here the damned are devoured by wild creatures and snakes.
Terrible beasts and serpents torment the damned Fol. 92r
‘You’re as cold as ice’
We usually think of hell as hot and fiery but in some depictions of hell freezing is an option too. Hell can be icily cold too. In Dante’s Inferno, sinners guilty of treachery are frozen in the waters of the Cocytus in the ninth circle of hell, The waters are frozen by the cold wind generated by the beating of Lucifer’s wings. The bottom circle of hell is a profoundly cold and silent place. This shouldn’t surprise us when we realise that God was usually thought of as pure light. People knew that the sun, the source of their light, was also the source of warmth and would readily have undeerstood the image of somewhere far away from God being dark and cold. The bottom of hell is as far away from God as you can get! Here we see the damned frozen.
The damned encased in ice. Fol. 94r
Eat up!
And finally (for now) some poor souls being fed molten metal (or very hot tomato soup . . . not sure which – it’s hard to see)
The damned have molten metal poured down their throats Fol. 95v
Lucifer, prince of Hell, with devils around him.Twelve devils with forksTorments of the Damned, some are clawed and embraced by devilsDevils biting and clawing the damned.Devils attack the Damned with weapons.Devils scourge and beat the Damned.Usurers are punished by being plunged into boiling wells. The depth of the water is the depth of their wickednessThieves are hung over firesMurderers and tyrants are attacked by devils with spears and pikes
These are amazing (and horrifying) images, intended to frighten people into believing in God and staying true to their religious vocations. It may also have provided some satisfaction to the readers to think of political and religious figures featuring in some of these hellish landscapes, being eaten, boiled, frozen and poked mercilessly. Surely we have all had such dreams!
Dark Way to Paradise: Dante’s Inferno in Light of the Spiritual Path
Dante’s Inferno is often presented today in lurid ‘gothic’ terms as if it were no more than an entertaining demonic freak-show. Alternately, it is taken as merely a cultural and political commentary on Dante’s own place and time, cast in allegorical terms. But the Inferno, and the Divine Comedy as a whole, are much more than that. The human passions, and the Mystery of Iniquity of which they are expressions, are fundamentally the same in any place and time; the Inferno presents not so much a history of sin as a catalogue of the archetypes of sin, the fundamental ways in which all of us are tempted to betray the human form. Based on the works of a number of the Greek Fathers, on the writings of several members of the Traditionalist School, notably Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon, and on the kind of wide personal experience of the violation of the human form that is available to anyone in these times with both the requisite discernment-rooted in love-and the courage to keep his or her eyes open, Jennifer Doane Upton has once again seen Dante’s Inferno as it really is. It is the record of the struggle of the human mind, will, and emotions to discover and name, by the grace of God, the sins resident in the human soul. As both a traditional re-presentation and a contemporary revisioning of the ‘examination of conscience’, individual and collective, Dark Way to Paradise is at once an exegetical masterpiece and a handbook of demonology of concrete use to any true physician of the soul. In its direct application of metaphysical principles to ‘infernal psychology’, it is unique among Dante commentaries. And in a time like ours, when the Western Church appears to be dissolving before our eyes, to save again what Dante himself saved out of the great medieval Christian synthesis has never been so timely.
The Ordeal of Mercy: Dante’s Purgatorio in Light of the Spiritual Path/The vertical path
The Ordeal of Mercy is a book of wide erudition and simple style; its goal is to present the Purgatorio, according to the science of spiritual psychology, as a practical guide to travelers on the Spiritual Path. The author draws upon many sources: the Greek Fathers, notably Maximos the Confessor; St. John Climacus; Fathers and Doctors of the Latin Church, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas; John Donne, William Blake and other metaphysical poets; the doctrines of Dante’s own initiatory lineage, the Fedeli d’Amore; the modern Eastern Orthodox writers Pavel Florensky and Jean-Claude Larchet; and the writings of the Traditionalist/Perennialist School, including René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, Leo Schaya, and Titus Burckhardt.
Other exegetes of Dante have dealt with the overall architecture of the Divine Comedy, its astronomical and numerical symbolism, its philosophical underpinnings, and its historical context. Jennifer Doane Upton, however–while preserving the narrative flow of the Purgatorio and making many cogent observations about its metaphysics–directs our attention instead to many of its “minute particulars,” unveiling their depth and symbolic resonance. She presents the ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory as a series of timeless steps, each of which must be plumbed to its depths before the next step arrives; in doing so she demonstrates how the center of this journey of purgation is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.
In the words of the author, “The soul in its journey must divest itself of extraneous tendencies and desires in order to become the ‘simple’ soul of theology–the soul of one essence, of one will, of one mind. If it can do this it will reach Paradise, its true homeland.”
“The Ordeal of Mercy is the finest commentary on Dante’s Puragtorio that I have ever read, an indispensable book for all those who want to understand the paradoxical dance of grace on the path to liberation.”–Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism
“The Ordeal of Mercy presents a detailed and erudite metaphysical commentary on the Cantos of the Purgatorio section of Dante Alighieri’s ‘Fifth Gospel,’ La Divina Commedia, one that is clearly the fruit of extensive research combined with deep contemplation. Dante himself said that his poem had an interior sense beyond the surface meaning; Jennifer Doane Upton’s approach accordingly opens the Cantos of Purgatorio–whether we take it as an account of purgation in the post-mortem realms or as the passage through this present life understood as an ‘ordeal of mercy’–to the eye of initiatic apprehension, the eye of the Heart. Seemingly minor motifs are homed in on to reveal their deep significance, as well as their place in the broader pattern of the Purgatorio, which corresponds to the stage of Purgation on the Christian Way.”–Nigel Jackson, More Info on website of Charles Upton
When we imagine a full year as a circle, then the straight lines that connect the starting points of opposing seasons form a cross within that circle. This is the true Cross of Jesus, as shown in the figure on the right-hand side. Opposite to the beginning of winter on (about) December 21st lies on this circle the beginning of summer on (about) June 21st. These two points are called ‘solstices’ from solstitium in Latin, literally meaning ‘solar standstill’. However, it is not the standing still of the Light Bringer, but the standstill of the daily growing (or shrinking) of its arc-like path. Likewise, opposite to the beginning of spring on (about) March 21st lies on this circle the beginning of autumn on (about) September 23rd. These two points are called equinoxes from aequinoctium in Latin, literally meaning ‘night getting even’ (with day). On these two days a year, the nocturnal darker period and the diurnal lighter period indeed get even.
The word “Easter” itself, however, is Old English, from Eastre or Eostre, a title derived from an old English month now known as April. Christian Easter is celebrated on the first Sabbath after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This holy-specific day most often occurs in April and is representative of the most fertile time of the year, when sun, moon, and earth are all in their phases of rebirth and awakening. Easter is therefore the day of resurrection, in heaven and on earth. And this heaven-earth relationship is only an archetypal symbol for the heaven-earth awakening that occurs in the soul of God, or in the spirit and breath of each mortal man and woman. In Christian rite and belief, every soul will arise like the sun, moon, and earth, to a new immortal dwelling.
The Japanese
As far back as the Paleolithic Age,” writes Maarten J. Varmaseren, “one finds in the countries around the Mediterranean a goddess who is universally worshiped as the Mighty Mother” . From 30,000 to 10,000 BCE, adds Joseph Campbell, “the [Goddess] is represented in those now well-known little ‘Venus’ figurines” . A limestone relief found in southwestern France in the Pyrenees is illustrative in this regard. Dating to 25,000 BCE, an engraved Venus image is shown holding a bison horn inscribed with thirteen vertical strokes. This is the number of nights between the first crescent and the full moon .
Path to the Maypole of Wisdom 