The Knowledge

Wisdom hath built her House-Anonymous 16th Century

---

Here I am in this world,
But feeling
Not of this world.

Myriad years
Chimerical cities
Phantasmagorical people

Drugged and dreaming
Unaware even
That I was ever there

Stepping into rivers
Do I remember?
Glimpsing a place apart

Black lace veil rent
Revealing the plentitude
Beyond the painted stars

Refractions of the Invisible
Something like a colour,
A touch of light.

The meaning of myth,
Closer to the Absolute
Than precise measurements.

I saw, why couldn’t you?
That you and I
Are but One

All multiplicity seeks
A return so flows
Towards the source

The fire burns hottest
Within the core
Only here gets us there.

I had recognized Him not

Noli Me Tangere-Titian c 1514

---

The ceaseless tears
Rained down my cheeks,
My breathes ragged gulps
In between a wail and a sob,
A heart riven twice again
My stricken rent soul
Searching in this isolated place:
I ask the angels,
Where is the body of My Lord?
Where has my Beloved gone?
But only silence
I turn around 
To see a man, a stranger
Possibly the groundskeeper
A tiller of soil, a planter of seeds
He asks me gently 
As to the reason for my distress
I answer that I need to find him,
My brother, my father,
My companion, my son,
The one who gave me succour
In the darkness,
Cast out the seven demons
With ease and gentleness,
If you know where he has been taken
Tell me so that I may tend to his body;
To which he simply said Mary:
I had recognized Him not.
How could I have not known 
It was Rabboni
 Heavenly consort
 Transformed with inner light,
I rushed over 
But he stilled me, saying,
Do not touch me
Mary, my tower of strength,
My sister, my child,
My bride, my mother,
Divine Sophia
For although I have descended
To harrow Hell 
I have yet to ascend
To the One,
Beyond this realm of matter,
To the father and mother of us all
Not the mother who bears
Not the father who raises
Not the creator of this world
But the Source of the Word
Go now, my Beloved,
You who always understood me the best,
Be the apostle to the apostles
And tell them where I am going.

Mirror Images

(This is a post that has previously appeared here, however now with four illustrations by Susanne Rempt).

All mirrors are inherently mysterious and magical. The moment when Narcissus looked into the lake and realised that what he saw reflected was at one and the same time the self and an image was the moment of a great divide, a second Fall, but as certain Gnostic sects argued about the temptation of Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden this recognition was a necessary loss of Innocence.  It was the first experience of a mediated reality. All that was needed was the technical expertise to manufacture mirrors to disseminate this heightened self-awareness to every individual. And from mirrors it was only a matter of time before the camera and then film which led to the media landscape that envelops and dominates our perception today.

Mirrors are mentioned frequently in myth, folk-lore and religion; not to mention in art and literature. In Corinthians Paul says of our knowledge of the divine ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’. In Vodou, the syncretic religion practised widely in Haiti that combines elements of West African spirit religion, Catholicism and arguably Mesoamerican traditions, the altars of hounfours (temples)

are decorated with mirrors as they are conduits that the houngan use to contact the spirit world. Many cultures at many times held the tradition of covering all mirrors in the house when in mourning, this custom persists today in Judaism. In connection with a heresy held by one of the numerous Gnostic sects Borges states ‘Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.’

In libertine fiction mirrors play a large part as they increase the pleasure of the moment and enables the libertine to view the erotic scene which they are actively participating in. In the sparkling sophisticated jewel of a tale Point de lendemain (No Tomorrow) by Vivant Denon the artful heroine describes to her paramour the delights of her chamber with its reflective glass covering every wall, when he enters he is enchanted to find a ‘a vast cage of mirrors’ and then states that, ‘Desires are reproduced through their image’.

One of the most memorable mentions in fairy-tales of the deceptive nature of the looking-glass is the Magic Mirror of the Evil Queen in Snow White, which is a good illustration of William Blake’s quote ‘A truth told with evil intent beats any lie you could invent.’

However, for me the supreme moment for the mirror in literature is when Alice steps through to the other side of the looking glass. Ever since the phrase has been used to describe many different and varying experiences; the transfigured absolute reality glimpsed in insanity; the shifting contours of the nightly dreamscape, the heavens and hells of drug use (the John Tenniel illustration was reproduced on LSD blotters in the sixties) the transcendence achieved in sexual ecstasy, and ultimately death, that unknowing inevitable frontier where we hope that the outward appearance will vanish to be replaced for all eternity by our fundamental essence. For although mirrors are just surface and can deceive, distort and warp, they also always reveal something other than just ourselves.

Cosmic Emblems

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra Emblem 5-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

The German shoemaker, mystic and visionary Jacob Boehme’s dense theosophical writings are filled with alchemical references and allusions. These taken together with elements of Gnosticism and the Kabbalah make Boehme one of the most occult inclined of Christian writers.

The following illustrations are taken from the appendix to William Law’s four volume edition of Boehme’s writing translated into English. Law was an Anglican priest who lost his position when he refused to give an oath of allegiance to King George I and therefore become a private tutor. Among his students were Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall Of the Roman Empire and John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, (though they fell out over Law’s admiration of Boehme).

The illustrations were undertaken by the London based German mystic Dionysuis Andreas Freher, whose work was a major influence upon the English poet, painter and prophet William Blake.

The complete series of emblems included above and below tells of Creation, the fall of Lucifer followed by the fall of Adam and man’s redemption through Jesus. Interestingly Sophia, a figure found in Gnosticism features prominently (the top S contrasting with the S of Sathan down below). The drawings of Hieroglyphica Sacra are unusual with their  near geometric abstraction, minimalism and pared down symbolism. It is alchemical art taken to its most cosmic level, an allegory of the War in the Three Realms of Heaven, Earth and Hell

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 1-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 2-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 3-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 4-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 6-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 7-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 8-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 9-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 10-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 11-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 12-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

Dionysuis Andreas Freher-Hieroglyphica Sacra 13-William Law edition of Jacob Boehme

 

 

 

 

A Heresy for the 21st Century

Jerusalem-William Blake

Increasingly in the Western democracies there has been a polarisation between the ‘progressive’ left and the emboldened hard right that has resulted in a decay of political discourse. As they hold diametrically opposing views regarding almost everything it seems that no compromise is possible, especially as the one aspect they have in common means each side views the other as deluded at best, if not actively in league with evil. The shared trait that can be gleaned through all the glaring differences is a general Gnostic worldview and a belief in gnosis. Reading writers with progressive views one regularly encounters the term woke and a discussion on a given persons degree of wokeness. A central tenet of Western Esotericism (one directly borrowed from Gnosticism) is to wake up to the true nature of the world, beyond the reality directly perceived by the senses. To be woke means you have been roused from sleep and become aware of the power structures that oppress the vast majority of humanity while controlling all aspects of existence on earth. Conversely the alt-right often speak of being ‘red-pilled’, a term taken from The Matrix, a film of pure gnosticism. Take the blue pill and you stay safe in an ersatz world that is little more that a hologram created by malevolent entities; take the red-pill and you see the world as the prison it really is.

To trace how the progressive left and the hard right came to the same conclusion (though with markedly conflicting proposals for solutions) we are going to have to trace the history of Gnostic thought from 2nd Century AD Alexandria via Northern Italy and Southern France in the 12th-14th Century, detouring to take in the Jewish mystics of the Iberian peninsula during Muslim rule and onto the outpourings of a solitary English genius till we reach the 20th Century when a Swiss psychologist, an American science fiction writer, a French Marxist theorist, the Godfathers of Rap and various occultists, confidence tricksters and cult leaders, amongst others, along with a spectacular discovery in the desert laid the ground for the revival of the most perennial of heresies; Gnosticism. All of which to follow shortly.