Explanation XXI. — 1st. Psychicone, image of Paya (son of the doctor) projected by Mme B. in the dark with the hand in front of the plate. In the middle of an odic cloud, the face of P. appears, impressed, coming from the fingers. They are the features of the child, such as he was two years ago: the creative spirit of Mme B. saw P. as he was at five and not as he was at seven years of age.
A 2nd Psychicone is equally a projection due to Mme B. who sought to project my image under the same conditions. A whitish form is seen, surrounded by Od vaguely impressed (without apparatus, with electricity, the fingers stretched towards the plate).
XXII. Iconograph of state of soul.
Explanation XXII. — This iconography was obtained by Dr. Baraduc after a visit to the Church of Sacre-Couer. He was under the impression of the teaching of Christ preaching the forgiveness of injuries.
XXIII. Projection of special state of soul.
Explanation XXIII. — Dr. Maurice Adam, who wished to try and repeat some experiments after my directions, produced these two psychicones in a special state of soul, that of worry, which had modified his ordinary life. These were produced, by the hand, above the plate. The first represents a spectral veiled headshaped form; the second, a jeering face. These images have also been obtained by the single projection of thought.
XXIV. Psychicone without aid of hand.
Explanation XXIV. — Psychicone produced by Mr. Hasdeu of Bucharest. This image shows the possibility of the creative spirit acting on a plate without the help of the hand.
On the upper part a burst of odic projection is seen, in the centre a large spot, the profile of which is turned towards the left represents the features of Mr. Hasdeu's brother. The icone is due to the spirit of Mr. Hasdeu, who has modulated the image of his brother in his brain and then projected it over the lamp. Here is a psychicone without the intervention of the hand, by the single tension of the creative spirit.
Explanation XXIV a. — Telepathic Psychicone.
Psychicone or image of the spirit, obtained by telepathy between Messrs. Istrati & Hasdeu of Bucharest.
Dr. Istrati going to Campina it was agreed he should at a fixed date appear at Bucharest on a plate of the Roumanian savant, at a distance of about 100 miles.
August 4, 1893, Mr. Hasdeu evoked the spirit of his friend on going to bed, one apparatus at the foot, another at the head of his bed.
On the other hand, Dr. Istrati slept at Campina with the firm determination of appearing in one apparatus of Mr. Hasdeu's.
In reality, on the plate A, three attempts are seen, one of which has been extremely successful. Dr. Istrati returned to Bucharest and remained quite astonished in front of his physionomic profile. His fluidic image is very characteristic in the sense that it is a more exact expression of him than his photographic profile.
The reduced portrait and the telepathic psychicone are very much alike.
XXV. Emanation of the Somod.
Explanation XXV et XXVa — The two icones of this light are emanations of the human soul Somod. It is the fluidic expiration. I am able to confirm this fact all the more as these plates were obtained while investigating the form of expansion repelling the biometric needle.
The second is the signature of the force emanated from the soul, the Ob, repelling 15 degrees. The first which represents the obic force of my head, has repelled the needle 2°, as if a part of the exhalation had been employed for the formation of this icone XXV and XXVa.
These two negatives were obtained in the dark with red light, the plate put in front of the biometric apparatus with neither electricity nor photographic apparatus, the hand stretched towards the sensitive plate.
XXVI. Voluntary Psychob.
Explanation XXVI. — Major Darget, placing his fingers together, projected his will on a sensitive plate, saying "In the interest of science, I want this plate to receive an impression."
Numerous pearls are seen on it, produced by the exterioration of the will.
(Without apparatus and electricity, in red light, in Major Darget's cellar.)
Explanation XXVIa. — Voluntary Psychob.
Photog. of Nadar in red light, his form appears very clearly in electric light on ground glass. — Large sized pearls of voluntary psychob, sparkling pearled of the will with well-marked circle of peripheric Od.
XXVII. Signature of prayer.
Explanation XXVII. — Iconography produced in April 1894 in the dark, both hands stretched towards the plate without photographic apparatus.
Animistic state very thoughtful. The doctor wished to know if prayer is a force having a special signature. He obtained a small flange of thin pearls with a single ray; the pearl is the act of exterioration of the spirit which has left its covering to reascend to its psychical source.
XXVIII. Fluidic spectre of the body.
Explanation XXVIII.
1. Photograph of Dr. Baraduc in daylight.
2. Psychicone image of his head, immersed in an odic mass, in the middle of which his desired icone clearly appears.
3. Physical soul, spiritual ego. Spiritualised soul, a thin star pearl with four branches; at the centre, the area of the divine ray, a fine circle of odic covering around four rays communicating with the four breezes of the spirit.
4. Spontaneous Icone representing the fluidic spectre of the body reproducing the form of his head. This icone was made in red light with the right hand, placed in front of the sensitive plate which is set before the biometric apparatus so as to study at the same time the expansive force of Ob, repelling the needle 2°, and giving its own siganture, whilst crossing the sensitive layer, the glass, the apparatus to repel the needle.
XXIX. Concomitant invisible movement.
Explanation XXIX. — These three photograph-iconographs show the relation existing between the expression of the face, a visible reflection of the soul on the features, and the signature of the animistic forces of concomitant invisible movement (no electricity, in morning light, with apparatus).
In the first, the child is sadly stroking a recently killed fowl.
The third represents the child in happy possession of this fowl.
The second expression is that of contemplation, of meditation.
It will be remarked that the form of the vitual fluid varies with the different states of soul of the child.
XXX. Electro-static light.
Explanation XXX. — Electro-static light.
1. Luminous spectre of the north pole magnet, obtained by the red electric photographic lamp, surrounded by fine pearls of psychecstasis.
2. The electro-positive fluid is presented in the expansive form of ruffled hair. It is obtained by placing the hand or an object on a plate, put in an electro-negative bath, and then withdrawing it very quickly. The aigrette is crushed on to the plate and gives this longhaired appearance.
Author of "Hypnotism" Senior Author of "The Principles and Practice of Psychiatry," "The Principles and Practice of Neurology," etc.
London: Rider & Co. Paternoster House, E.C.
Dr. Alexander Cannon (1896-1963)
K.C.A., M.D., Ph.D., D.P.M., M.A., Ch.B., F.R.G.S., F.R.S.M., F.R.S., TROP. M. & H. Member of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain & Ireland Member of the British Medical Association (Executive Council 1934-5) Member of the Society for Psychical Research, London Member of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, London Member of the Sections of Psychiatry and Neurology of the Royal Society of Medicine, London Vice-President of the University of Hong Kong Medical Society Kushog Yogi of Northern Tibet Master of the Fifth of the Great White Lodge of the Himalayas
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Hippolyte Baraduc(1850–1909) was a French physician and parapsychologist. He is most notable for his claim that a misty form leaves the human body at the moment of death which he believed was evidence for the soul.
In France,Dr Hippolyte BaraducandLouis Darget[did experiments in 1895 on thought photography and he produced colour photos on glass, mainly showing human fingerprints with aura forms.]attempted to photograph thoughts or psychic energy (‘the light of the soul’) simply by placing foreheads or fingers on a photographic plate. Despite refutations by experts, who argued that the results claimed by the ‘effluvists’ were merely technical accidents, these experiments continued throughout the 20th century.
In one experiment, Hippolyte-Ferdinand Baraduc fastened a pigeon to a board and strapped a photographic plate to its chest.He then cut the pigeon's throat, "the picture of its death agony taking the form of curling eddies' on the plate.In a paper read before the Society of Psychic Sciences in Paris, Baraduc claimed to have photographed the human soul or "vital force. " He placed a photographic plate on the body of a man in a totally dark room which "received an impression from the vital forces three hours after death. "[The British Journal of Photography, 26 June 1896, p.412; The Photographic Review, Vol.2. , no.1, January 1897, p.19.]
Baraduc also photographed both his son and his wife, one four minutes after death, the other 24 hours after death.The "vital force" was pictured stretching from the bodies in a fluid stream which hit the ceiling of the room and arced down again.
Biometer - an instrument designed by Hippolyte Baraduc and claimed to measure a vital force which is emitted by the human body. The instrument consists of a bell glass, from the inside of which is suspended a copper needle by a fine silken thread. The glass stands on a wooden support, below which is a coil of copper wire, which, however, is not connected with any battery or other apparatus, and merely serves to condense the current. Below the needle, inside the glass, there is a circular card divided into degrees to mark the action of the needle. Two of these instruments are placed side by side, but in no way connected, and the experimenter then holds out the fingers of both hands to within about an inch of the glasses. According to the theory, the current enters at the left hand, circulates through the body, and passes out at the right hand, that is to say, there is an indrawing at the left and a giving-out at the right, thus agreeing with Reichenbach[1]'s experiments on the polarity of the human body.
"The Human Soul: its movements, its lights and the iconography of the fluidic invisible"[1913]by Hippolyte Baraduc
One of the most convincing proofs I have seen is that afforded by the "biometre," a little instrument invented by an eminent French scientist, the late Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc, which shows the action of what he calls the "vital current."The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, by Thomas Troward, [1909]
Ernest William Hornung( 1866 – 1921), known professionally as E. W. Hornung (nickname Willie), was a poet and English author, most famous for writing theA. J. Rafflesseries of novels about a gentleman thief in late 19th century London.
In 1911 a photographic journalist declared that "Photography is becoming too sensational for the liking of quiet minds.”[ The Amateur Photographer, 1 May 1911, p.444.]The event which prompted this remark was the publication of a strange novel, "The latest clever exploit in hair-raising fiction," by a popular turn-of-the-century author, E. W. Hornung. Although Hornung wrote over 30 books, his name has been largely forgotten in the annals of popular fiction.This is understandable.His novels were urbane, witty, well-crafted but not very profound.
The Camera Fiend, written in 1911, is a strange tale about a crazy photographer/scientist and a young snapshot enthusiast whom he befriends.
The hero, an asthmatic youth named Pocket, is found sleepwalking with a pistol in his hand while nearby is the body of a tramp, a "dilapidated creature lying prone," who had been shot moments earlier.It looks bad for young Pocket.
He is approached by an odd looking man, Dr.Otto Baumgartner, who had attended various universities studying psychology and theology until becoming obsessed with proving the existence of the human soul.
Baumgartner disarms and wakes up young Pocket who later notices a stereoscopic camera beneath the Doctor's cloak.They discover a mutual interest in photography and, back at Baumgartner’s home, they discuss the pleasures of the camera.Quickly, however, it is established that they have different aims. Baumgartner is a psychic photographer obsessed with capturing the human soul in a picture
It is possiblre that experimental attempts at photographing the human soul at the moment of death, such as those by Baraduc during the 1890s, were prime sources for E. W.Hornung and his plot of The Camera Fiend.
[1]Baron Karl von Reichenbach (1788-1869). Nineteenth-century German chemist, expert on meteorites, and discoverer of kerosene, parrafin, and creosote. He also spent over two decades experimenting with the mysterious force which he named "od" (also known as odic force or odyle in various translations). This claimed force, which has its intellectual roots in Mesmerism, had particular relevance to concepts of the human aura.
"Beginning in early childhood, Ann Ree's life bore testimony to her extraordinary spiritual gifts and aptitudes. She was a prophet, clairvoyant, spiritual teacher and healer, author of 23 books on spiritual subjects, lecturer, counselor, creative artisan, and an adept articulate in the inner mysteries. She began her life as a spiritual teacher in her twenties, and served as a teacher of the higher life for over sixty years."
"Ann Ree Colton was a living example of one who dared to reach for her own star. Because of that daring and courage she was used by the Eternals to bring forth a great body of knowledge for the human race to embrace for all time.
Through her revelatory powers, Ann Ree Colton made visible profound insights into our destiny with the Cosmos Mind of the Christ, God-Realization, Soul-Realization and Self-Realization through an Archetypal System of Knowing. She gave us all the tools we would ever need to be Lighted revelatory vehicles for the Eternals. Her Archetypal System provides the inspiration and the Way to walk the path of our destiny and fulfill our life‘s potential as instruments for God."
Like Madame Blavatsky with original Theosophy, Rudolph Steiner with Anthroposophy, and Alice Bailey with the Arcane School, Niscience is based solely on the genius of one person, Ann Ree Colton It is my feeling that Ann Ree Colton is a genuinely good and spiritual person. And certainly someone of great intellect and occult and spiritual insight. So if i seem at times critical of her style and approach, thius is not to in anyway denigrate her as a spiritual teacher, or a visionary esotericist. Although clearly a developed spiritual clairvoyant, it is my personal impressions (others may differm,, and indeed I may be completely wrong or biased) that Ann Ree Colton's writings suffer from a strongly puritanical and moralising element with frequent reference to sin and sensuality, from a dense and at times impenetrable jargon with Christian-religious elements sprinkled in, and, worst of all, from a total lack of structure or systematisation of ideas. Her books, especially her later and more developed ones (The Third Music, Kundalini West, and Galaxy Gate I and II) are a strange combination of great spiritual-psychic insight and completely unstructured presentation. In the following quotations I have often had to resort to numerous lacuna to improve readability. It is unfortunate that intractability of style seems to be almost a pre-requesite among occult and esoteric writers, from Blavatsky to Steiner to Crowley to Aurobindo to Colton, so often do they display it. Main influences seem to be Blavatsky, Adyar Theosophy, Christianity; Rudolph Steiner, and in later works Radha Soami (Sant Mat) (unless she independently discovered the same truths)
While there are a number of books written by Ann Ree Colton, the following two are my favourite The Third Music - this book will be of more interest to readers interested in Ann Ree's own teaching, and less to those who are more interested in Tantra and the chakras. Same cosmology and approach as in Kundalini West - she has a lot to say about the various levels of lower and higher consciousness.
Kundalini West as the title indicates, the subject of this book is the chakras and kundalini as interpreted through Ann Ree's own brand of Christian theosophy. References are made to western concepts such as the 12 zodiacal archetypes, the etheric and emotional and mental body, and so on. There are Eastern references but they are often idiosyncratically interpreted.
Philosophy and physics may seem like polar opposites, but they regularly address quite similar questions. Recently, physicists have revisited a topic with modern philosophical origins dating over a century ago: the unreality of time. What if the passage of time were merely an illusion? Can a world without time make sense?
While a world without the familiar passage of time may seem far-fetched, big names in physics, such as string theory pioneer Ed Witten and theorist Brian Greene, have recently embraced such an idea. A timeless reality may help reconcile differences between quantum mechanics and relativity, but how can we make sense of such a world? If physics does indeed suggest that the flow of time is illusory, then philosophy may be able to shed light on such a strange notion.
British philosopher J.M.E McTaggart advanced this idea in 1908 in his paper titled, “The Unreality of Time.” Philosophers widely consider his paper to be one of the most influential, early examinations of this possibility. Looking through McTaggart’s philosophical lens, a reality without time becomes a little more intuitive and, in principle, possible.
A Tale of Two Times
McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time has a number of interpretations, but his argument starts with a distinction about ordering events in time. The “A” series and “B” series of time form an integral part of McTaggart’s argument, and I’ll unravel this distinction with an example historical event.
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 became the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon. For argument’s sake, consider this event to represent an event during the present. Several days in the past (July 16), then, Apollo 11 lifted off the ground. Additionally, several days in the future all of the mission astronauts will land back on earth, safe and sound. Classifying an event as “several days past,” or “several days future,” falls under the “A” series. For the moon landing, some events (e.g. Lincoln’s assassination) are in the distant past; some events are in the distant future (e.g. the inauguration of President Obama); and other events fall somewhere in between.
Under the “A” series, events flow from one classification (i.e. past, present and future) to another. On July 16th, the moon landing would have the property of being in the future. The instant the Apollo 11 landed on the moon, that event would be present. After this moment, its classification changes to the past.
The “B” series, however, doesn’t classify events on this scale ranging from the distant past to the distant future. Instead, the “B” series orders events based on their relationship to other events. Under this ordering, Lincoln’s assassination occurs before the moon landing, and Obama’s inauguration occurs after the moon landing. This relational ordering seems to capture a different way of looking at time.
Two Times, One Contradiction
With this distinction in place, McTaggart additionally argues that a fundamental series of time requires a change to take place. Under the “B” series, the way these events are ordered never change. Obama’s inauguration, for instance, will never change properties and occur before the moon landing and vice versa. These relational properties simply don’t change.
But the A series does embody the change that we might expect from the flow of time. Events first have the property of being in the future, then they become present events. Afterward, they drift into the past. Under the A series, time does have an objective flow, and true change does happen. In McTaggart’s mind (and perhaps the mind of many others), this change is a necessary aspect of time.
But herein lies the contradiction. If these events do change in this sense, they will have contradictory properties. McTaggart argues that an event can’t be in the past, in the present, and in the future. All of these properties are incompatible, so the A series leads to a contradiction. Consequently, time, which requires change, does not truly exist. Welcome to the timeless reality.
Wait a Minute…
Certainly, many philosophers and physicists still believe in the reality of time and have objected to McTaggart’s argument. There are a number of fascinating caveats and counterexamples that you can read about elsewhere. Nonetheless, McTaggart’s work has influenced a number of philosophers’ approach to time, and his work has inspired many philosophers to incorporate physics into their arguments.
For instance, when Albert Einstein introduced special relativity, he seriously disrupted our “folk” conception of the flow of time. In special relativity, there is no absolute simultaneity of events. In one reference frame, two events may appear to happen at the same time. An observer on a speeding rocket ship, however, may observe one event happening before the other. Neither observer is “right” in this situation: This is simply the weirdness that special relativity entails.
Consequently, many philosophers have used special relativity as evidence against a theory supporting the A series of time. If absolute simultaneity doesn’t exist, it doesn’t make sense to say that one event is “in the present.” There’s no absolute present that pervades the universe under special relativity.
But McTaggart’s entire argument may help us better understand strange physics at the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity. In an attempt to reconcile these two theories, some well-known physicists have developed theories of quantum gravity that imply the world lacks time in a fundamental way.
Brad Monton, a philosopher of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, recently published a paper comparing McTaggart’s philosophy with prominent theories in physics, including quantum gravity. During an interview, I asked him how some of the “timeless” ideas in quantum gravity compared to McTaggart.
“They’re on par with the radicalness,” he said. “There’s a lot of radicalness.”
Monton cautioned, however, that quantum gravity does not imply the same lack of time that McTaggart may have had in mind. Physicist John Wheeler, as Monton notes, has postulated that time may not be a fundamental aspect of reality, but this only happens on extremely small distance scales.
Some of these ideas in quantum gravity may be radical, but several respected names in physics are seriously considering a reality without time at its core. If a quantum gravity theory emerges that requires a radical conception of time, McTaggart may help us prepare.
As Monton writes in his paper: “As long as McTaggart’s metaphysics is viable, then the answer to the physicists’ queries is “no” – they are free, from a philosophical perspective at least, to explore theories where time is unreal.”
Many quantum gravity theories remain speculative, but there’s a chance that timelessness may become a prominent feature in physics. If that’s the case, then hopefully philosophers of science will help us wrap our heads around the implications.
In addition to the chakras themselves, there is the subtle body that the chakra is attuned to, and the direction of rotation of the chakras
"All upper chakras...move naturally in clockwise manner. Until reversed by pure will, pure desire, and devotion, all chakras below the heart move counterclockwise through the force of gravity."
Spiritual purification disconnects the chakras from "the downward gravity-pull of earth struggle." [p.56] In describing the actual dynamics of the chakras, subtle bodies, and states of consciousness, Ms Colton is at her best:
"The chakras are energised, whirling vortexes of consciousness; their momentums are regulated by samskara compulsions and instincts as recorded in...previous physical-body experience. The nadis, or astral tubes and etheric canals, are pathways connecting the chakras; these...must be kept open and free... Each chakra has a correlating astral layer, an etheric layer, and a mental layer. These...layers are inter-connected rotational discs... When the lower astral...layer...is active...through the upward turn of Kundalini fire, one...experiences astral flight where he will be involved in the research of his instinctual, physical, and emotional-life karmas. If the etheric portion...has been purified and is turning clockwise with the spiralling upward thrust of Kundalini, the astral...and the etheric disc-layer of the chakra come into balance. This results in a healthy...emotional body, accompanied by the desire for purity in all physical actions. Healing power and graciousness are expressed....This is done when the ascending Kundalini...is lifted to...the heart. When the Kundalini fire is balanced in the mental disc-portion of the heart chakra, the mind becomes organised and steady....The astral, etheric, and mental atom-points of the heart chakra open as the petals of a flower... In the contraclockwise action of a chakra - if the etheric, the astral and the mental discs are working as one - one can be successful in some form of concentrated physical [material] activity. However, one is separated from the spiritual aspect of the clockwise disc movements... If the etheric, astral and mental discs are whirling at different rates, and the chakra action is contraclockwise, one is scattered in his energies, in his emotions, in his mind... When the seven initiatory chakras are synchronised and move in clockwise unison...one is successful spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically...
The equation clockwise = good; counterclockwise = bad (or unspiritual) is certainly simplistic, and indicates a dualistic moralising way of thinking. Later in this chapter we will present a more balanced understanding on this point. For the rest though we see here a fascinating description of the relationship between chakra layer activity and states of consciousness, although still presented in an intuitive and undeveloped way. Insightful clairvoyants like Steiner and Colton certainly pave the way for a complete and systematic occult science, but for all their tremendous contribution they have not yet themselves actually formulated such a science. Their teachings are either too unstructured, or, in the case of Steiner, too rigid and structured. It is the intention of the present writer to lay the foundations of such a science through bringing together various occult teachings and drawing out common themes. Yet the amount of material to be considered is immense. The above sections of chakras represents only a small selection of the dense material Ann Ree Colton has written on this subject.
<a href="ARC-chakras1.htm">Chakras and Levels of Self
Substance, that can take form, has numerous degrees of rarefaction and density. All that is, lives, and wherever there is life, intelligence and love can awaken. These are the primary qualities. The Cosmic Forces emanating from the Formless give form to, and perfect, worlds. The more rarefied degrees act as forces in the denser degrees.
from the Bases of the Cosmic Philosophy
The Four- and Seven-fold Cosmic Classification
The opening pages of the "Cosmic Tradition" were thus summarized by the initiators:
"The Cosmos of Being, that is, that which has form, is described as .consisting of four classifications, but one has to understand that these classifications are adopted for the sake of simplification and there is no real division between them. Just as in the rainbow, each color merges gradually into the adjacent colors.
"Of the four classifications, the one of Materialisms is the densest; Etherisms follow in the order of density; Pathotisms are the third, and Occultisms are the most rarefied.
"That which the "Cosmic Tradition" calls the Impenetrable or the Indivisible, is that which religions often call Pure Spirit without form or likeness. "Cosmic Tradition" also uses the term-the Formless. It is said that the Impenetrable is veiled by the Nucleolinus, the Occultisms by the Nucleolus, and the Pathotisms by the Nucleus. These terms are found most convenient because they were often used by advanced physicians and biologists such as Haeckel.
"Tradition teaches that the seven Attributes, or inherent qualities of Adonai (called also the Cosmic Cause of the Materialisms) are manifested in an intermediary region between Etherisms and Materialisms, of which earth and other celestial bodies of similar constitution are the densest.
"Thus, in the immense and magnificent cosmic order, those forces manifesting the Impenetrable and the Indivisible, permeate the entire spectrum of matter, from the most radiant and most rarefied to the densest, according to the receptive capacities of each state. "
Here is the diagram, giving Theon's cosmic "classifications"
Perusing this diagram, with its ineffable Absolute, seven sets of seven, and so on, we see amazing parallels with Theosophy. According to The Mother Mother's Agenda, vol 3, p.452, Theon met Blavatsky9 September 2005 in Egypt, although Chanel (The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor p.9 ) considers this unlikely. This was also before he met Madame Theon, who channelled "The Tradition" as we now have it In contrast to Theon's more straightforward terms, Blavatsky incorporated sanskrit and other terms from Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as comparative mythology, and her own clairvoyance. Blavatsky's ideas were further developed and altered by later theosophists like Dr Annie Besant and Bishop Leadbeater, as well as by Alice A. Bailey, and through her, the New Age movement in general. Tracing back the origin of Theon's own ideas, one finds the strong influence of Lurianic Kabbalah. The four worlds are of course based on the four worlds of Kabbalah, each of which is seperated by a veil or barrier, called parso in Hebrew. The correspondence being Occultisms (the plural presumably being a statement of the fact that each world is subdivided) with Atzilut, Pathetisms with Beriah, Etherisms with Yetzirah, and Materialisms with Asiyah. Etherisms here has nothing to do with the "Etheric plane" as defined by Adyar Theosphy, Rudolph Steiner, and Alice Bailey. In fact, Steiner's Etheric Formative Forces I understand as pertaining to the Materialisms division (this latter also including all the auric bodies described by Barbara Ann Brennan). It should also be added that just because the four worlds of Theon's cosmology seem to follow a similiar pattern to the four worlds of Kabbalah, that does not mean that they are directly equivalent. It may well be for example that the world of Occultisms corresponds to the manifest Absolute; say to Sri Aurobindo's Supermind or the Adam Kadmon of some interpretations of Lurianic cosmology (depending on how you approach it, i.e. which Lurianic text one uses, the Adam Kadmon is either the most manifest part of the En Sof (Malkhut of En Sof in other words), eternal and unlimited, or a distinct and much lower and more finite world). It is fascinating to use this cosmology as a sort of standard by which to compare and correlate other systems of thought. The equivalence of the veils with biology, being based on Haeckel and others, shows how much Darwinian and quasi-Darwinian thinking had excited and influenced the imagination of the time (not unlike paradoxes in quantum physics, concepts like superstrings, black holes, etc today). These biological analogies clearly need not be taken too literally. The Theosophists are even today still paying the price for Blavatsky's tying her esotericism to the astronomy, biology and geology of her day, giving Theosophical scientific observations a quite fundamentalistic quality (something that Madame Blavatsky herself would have abhorred). It is interesting to note that the fourth veiling (seperating the Etherisms from the Materialisms), seems to be itself a distinct hypostases, pertaining to the dynamic workings of deities and having a seven-fold structure. It can be considered one of the Psychic or Intermediate worlds, between the lower worlds of pure light (Etherisms), what I would term the Ideational World, and the Psycho-Physical and material physical. Note that the "Etherisms" here are the lower archetypal world of spirit and light, not the "etheric plane" of Steiner or Leadbeater or as elsewhere defined on this site. I have seen the word "Etheric" sometimes used in this higher context to describe a sort of spiritual plane - e.g. some spiritualist and New Age literature). One can also see in the eight Materialisms states on the lower left of the table) an arrangement quite similiar to Barbara Brennan's sequence of subtle bodies, with the physical body making up the eight body. The seven subtle bodies can also be identified with the seven subdegrees of the Nervous degree of the Physical state of the fourth world (see diagram). The Theosophical tabulisations are also pretty close here. Madame Blavatsky, always a very original and creative thinker, substituted Theon's terminology for Vedantic Sanskrit terms. But we still find Theon's classification reflected in Blavatsky's. Blavatsky has planes within planes, and her Objective or Terrestrial (First Prakritic) plane is equivalent to, say, Theon's Physical State of the Materialsms world. Later Theosophists like Besant and Leadbeater and Rudolph Steiner present a simpler and more comprehensible (which doesnt necessarily mean more correct) version. This can be shown in the following table (note: these categories should not be taken as necessarily equivalent!):
Although the four main worlds are like the three hypostases of Neoplatonism and the four worlds of Kabbalah, and the veils, if also considered worlds (as in the lowest veil, which is much more complex then the veils or barriers of Lurian Kabbalah), would give eight worlds. The alternation of "worlds" and "veils" recalls the description of the human energy field given by Barbara Brennan, which has alternating form and formless bodies. Also in the Indian Kosha doctrine, in Kabbalah and in elements of Islamic mysticism, each stratum of being is a veil in that it conceils of the Light of the Supreme.
Appearing in one of the earliest Upanishads is the important and influential mystical concept is five selves. The Taittiriya Upanishad is exceptional in that it is one of the first writings to present a systemmatic metaphysic or theory of first principles. It speaks of the individual as divided into five selves (atma, initially - as with all such terms - "breath", and then "self" or "soul"; the term elsewhere, and especially later, came to characterise that aspect of the self which is synonymous with the Absolute). Five levels of self are referred to:
the anna-maya-atma or the "Self (atma) made of Food" the prana-maya-atma or "the Self made of Vital Breath (prana)" the mana-maya-atma or "the Self made of Mind (manas)" the vijnana-maya-atma or "the Self made of Consciousness or intellect (vijnana)" the ananda-maya-atma or "the Self made of Bliss (ananda)", where one attains to Brahman
The spiritual aspirant, in the quest for Self- and God-realisation, passes under the guidance of the Master through each of these selves in turn, finally attaining to the Absolute or Brahman, which is synonymous with the highest or Bliss Self. There is a strong resemblance here to the Hellenistic Hermetic and Neoplatonic scheme of more than a millenia later. According to this, the gross physical body is only the outermost of a number of"bodies" or "vehicles"- ochema - to use the Neoplatonic term. Death means the discarding, first of the physical, than of the successive subtle vehicles, until only the immortal Spirit, the Nous, remains. As expressed in the Corpus Hermetica:
"The mind (nous) has for its vehicle the soul (psyche); the soul has for its vehicle the vital spirit (pnuema); and the vital spirit, traversing the arteries with the blood, moves the body.... (W)hen men quit the body...(t)he soul ascends to its own place, and is separated from the vital spirit; and the mind is separated from the soul. Thus the mind, which is divine by nature, is freed from its integuments..." [pp.195-9]
Comparing the Indian with the Hermetic scheme, it is obvious that the Food self is more or less the same as the Soma (Physical body), the Life-force self to the Vital Spirit (Pneuma), the Mental self to the Psyche, and the Consciousness self to the Nous, the Divine mind or spirit principle. There is however little or no similarity with the Egyptian, Chinese, and classical Kabbalistic conceptions, all of which spoke in terms of many souls, rather than a single gradational continuum from material body to divine spirit. (Later Kabbalisticwriters on the other hand did posit a five-fold continuum (Nefesh-Ruah-Neshamah-Hayyah-Yehidah) more or less analogous to the Taittiriya and Hellenistic Hermetic versions. The Taittiriya Upanishad presents a very world-affirming philosophy, because each level of self is described in a positive way, and Brahman itself is referred to emphatically as the nature of Bliss (Ananda). Thus, one begins with Life (or "food", referring perhaps to the ecological web) and attains to Bliss. In the world-affirming cosmology of the Taittiriya Upanishad, in which each level of self is described in a positive way, and the highest self-level, the Self made of Bliss, is equated with Brahman, the Absolute. Brahman is therefore also of the nature of Bliss (Ananda). Fifteen hundred years after the Taittiriya Upanishad was composed (i.e. around the seventh and eighth centuries), the sages Guadapada and his prolific sucessor Shankara, who saw the cosmos as ultimately illusory (or Maya) and only the Absolute as real. In the teachings of Gaudapada and Shankara, the world-affirming element of the original Taittiriya Upanishad was denied, and the five selves (atma) become five koshas or "sheaths" which veil the light of the True transcendent self or Atman. The Taittirya Upanishad's terminology was retained, but the concepts used were, for the most part, rather different. This of course is always the case: words change much more slowly than the ideas they are used to represent. Thus a polemicist can use an ancient and respected authority to mean something totally different, and at times even totally at variance to, the meaning intended by the original writer (the classic example being the contemporary Christian fundamentalist's use (or misuse) of the Hebraic religious corpus). Rather clumsily, the koshas are also identified with the four states of consciousness of the Mandukya Upanishad. So for example the Bliss kosha is equated with dreamless sleep, but how can dreamless sleep be blissful (except in the negative sense of freedom from pain)? This Advaitin interpretation became very popular, and is still taught by practically all the gurus from the East. It also had a strong influence on Theosophy. There, the Food kosha became the Gross Physical body, the Life-force kosha the subtle double or Etheric body, the Mental kosha the Astral/Emotional and Mental principles, and the higher koshas and the Atman the higher self and transcendent spirit.
David Albert Scientific American May 94 Last Words of a Quantum Heretic John Horgan New Scientist 29 Feb 93 The keystone of Bohr's interpretation was the concept of complementarily, which held that wave-particle duality is a paradox that cannot be resolved. Bohr also ruled out the possibility that the probabilistic behaviour of quantum systems was actually the result of underlying deterministic mechanisms called hidden variables. Reality was unknowable because it was intrinsically indefinite, Bohr insisted.
Particles are always particles In trying to explain Bohr's approach, Bohm became dissatisfied with it. "The whole idea of science so far has been to say that underlying the phenomenon is some reality which explains things," he explained. "It was not that Bohr denied reality, but he said quantum mechanics implied there was nothing more that could be said about it." Such a view, Bohm decided, reduced quantum mechanics to "a system of formulas that we use to make predictions or to control things technologically. I said, that's not enough. I don't think I would be very interested in science if that were afl there was." In 1952 Bohm defied Bohr's prohibition against hidden-variable explanations in a classic two-part paper in Physical Review entitled "A suggested interpretation of the quantum theory in terms of 'hidden' variables". He proposed that particles are indeed particles-and at afl times, not just when they are observed. Their behaviour is determined by an unusual field or wave consisting both of classical versions of forces such as electromagnetism and an entirely new force-which Bohm called the quantum potential-that is responsible for nonclassical effects. The positions of particles in tum serve as the hidden variables determining the nature of the pilot wave. Bohm's interpretation was causal, or deterministic. Particles always had a distinct position and velocity, but any effort to measure these properties precisely would destroy information about them by physically altering the pilot wave. Bohm gave the uncertainty principle a purely physical rather than metaphysical meaning. Bohr had interpreted the uncertainty pn'nciple, Bohm explained, as meaning "not that there is uncertainty, but that there is an inherent ambiguity" in a quantum sv'tem. Bohm sent out preprints of the paper and was quickly informed that his interpretation was an old one, proposed 25 years earlier by Louis de Broglie. De Broglie had abandoned the pilot-wave concept after Wolfgang Pauli pointed out that, when applied to systems involving more than one particle, it led to "some very strange behaviour" This strange behaviour referred to by Pauli, Bohm realised, was nonlocality. Actually, nonlocality was a feature intrinsic to all quantum theories, not just Bohm's. Einstein had demonstrated this fact back in 1935 in an effort to show that quantum mechanics must be flawed. Working together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen at Princeton, Einstein proposed a thought experiment involving rwo particles that spring from a common source and fly in opposite directions. According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither particle has a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but by measuring the momentum of one particle, the physicist instantaneously forces the other particle to assume a fixed position-even if it is on the other side of the Galaxy. Deriding this effect as "spooky action at a distance", Einstein argued that it violated both common sense and the theory of relativity, which prohibits the propagation of effects faster than the speed of light-I quantum mechanics must be an incomplete theory. Perhaps because he had always had a holistic view of reality, Bohm was not disturbed by nonlocality. "I must have tacitly been feeling all along that quantum mechanics was nonlocal," he said. In Quantum Theory, Bohm even suggested an experiment that could demonstrate nonlocaliry more clearly and easily than the one proposed by Einstein, Podoisky and Rosen. Bohm called for measuring not the momentum and position of rwo particles from a common source but rather their spin. Bohm's spin experiment became the basis for a brilliant mathematical proof bv Bell in 1964 showing that no local hidden-variable theory could replicate the predictions of quantum mechanics. In 1982, a group led bN, the French physicist Alain Aspect at the University of Paris-South, carried out Bohm's experiment, demonstrating once and for all that quantum mechanics does indeed require spooky action. (The reason that nonlocality does not violate the theory of relativity is that one cannot exploit it to transmit infon-nation faster than light or instantaneously.) Bohm said he never had any doubts about the outcome of the experiment: 'it would have been a terrific surprise to find out otherwise." Ironically, Bell's theorem and the Aspect experiment were widely thought to rule out all hidden-variable theories, including Bohm's. It was Bell who pointed out years later that Bohm's theory, since it was nonlocal, was not ruled out by his theorem. According to Bohm's model, nonlocality was mediated through the pilot wave: any localised physical act, such as the measurement of a particle, would instantaneously alter the shape of the entire pilot wave, affecting all particles under its influence. Bohm continued to develop the pilot-wave theory through the 1980s with the help of collaborators such as Hiley. In its latest version, the Bohmian pilot wave is quite distinct from the one posited by de Broglie. De Broglie conceived of the pilot wave as a kind of mechanical force which pushed particles this way and that through the transmission of energy. Bohm's pilot wave is more subtle: it guides particles not through its amplitude but through its form-much as the form rather than the amplitude of a flight-controller's radio transmission controls a plane's behaviour. The wave's abuity to influence particles therefore does not diminish with distance, as classical waves do. In the last decade, Bohm also became absorbed in another perennial puzzle: why quantum effects are generally lim ited to very small-scale phenomena. Two recent efforts to explain this mystery left him unimpressed. One of these, proposed by Gian Carlo Ghirardi of the University of Trieste and others, holds that as a quantum entity propagates through space, its multiple, possible states converge into a single state that behaves in a classical way. Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford presented another possibility in his book The Emperor's New Mind: quantum effects disappear in systems containing so much mass that gravity-which is usually negligible at subatomic scales-becomes a factor. Bohm favoured what he felt was a much simpler explanation: heat. Various lines of evidence-notably the fact that superconductivity, which relies on quantum effects, occurs only at very low temperatures-suggest that thermal energy swamps quantum effects. To completely resolve the issue of the limits of quantum effects, Bohm contended that: "It would be required to connect thermodynamics and quantum mechanics in a deep ftindamental way rather than the present superficial way, which is that you start with quantum mechanics and then apply statistics. It may be that thermal properties are just as essential as quantum properties, or there's something deeper than both." To arrive at such a theory, physicists might need to jettison some basic assumptions about the organisation of nature. "Fundamental notions like order and structure condition our thinking unconsciously, and new kinds of theories depend on new kinds of order," he said. During the Enlightenment, he noted, thinkers such as Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton replaced the ancients' concept of order with a mechanistic view. Although the advent of relativity and other theories has brought about modifications in this order, Bohm said, "the basic idea is still the same: a mechanical order described by coordinates". Bohm himself began formulating what he called the implicate order several decades ago. His ideas were inspired in part by a simple experiment he saw on television, in which a drop of ink was squeezed onto a cylinder of glycerine. When the cylinder rotated, the ink diffused through the glycerine in an apparently irreversible fashion; its order seemed to have disintegrated. But when the direction of rotation was reversed, the ink gathered into a drop again. Bohm made this simple experiment into a metaphor for au of reality. Underlying the apparently chaotic realm of physical appearances-the explicate order-there is always a deeper, implicate order that is often hidden. Applying this concept to the quantum realm, Bohm proposed that the implicate order is the quantum potential, a field consisting of an infinite number of fluctuating waves. The overlapping of these waves generates what appear to us as particles: these constitute the explicate order. Even such seemingly fundamental conceprs as space and time may be merely explicate manifestations of some "nonlocal, deeper implicate order', according to Bohm. Bohm hoped the implicate order could even point the way to a resolution of that perennial conundrum of philosophy, the mind-matter problem. His belief was based on hints and rough analogies rather than on any concrete evidence. For example, he compared the way a pilot wave guides a particle to the way thought guides Ehe movements of a dancer. "The movement of the body is coming from thought, and the movement of the eleciron Ls coming from something very subtle, this wave. So there are similarities, which should make it possible to relate them."
Krishnamurti and David Bohm discuss the observer and the observed.
Despite his own enormous ambition as a truth seeker, Bohm rejected the possibility that scientists can ever bring their enterprise to an end by reducing all of nature to a single ftindamental phenomenon (such as infinitesimal particles called superstrings). "At each level we have something which is taken as appearance and something else is taken as the essence which explains the appearance. But there's no end to this. What underlies it all is unknown and cannot be grasped by thought." Indeed, scientists' belief that they are on the verge of a final theory may prevent them from seeking deeper truths. "It's like fish," Bohm elaborated. "If you have fish in a tank and you put a glass barrier in there, the fish learn to keep away from it. Then if you take the barrier away the fish never cross the barrier." Scientists who are frustrated at the thought that ultimate truths are unat tainable should consider the altemative. "They are going to be very frustrated if they get the final answer and then have nothing to do except be technicians," Bohm said. Science, Bohm believed, is sure to evolve in totally unexpected ways. He expressed the hope, for example, that future scientists wdl be less dependent on mathematics for modelling reality and will draw on new sources of metaphor and analogy. "We have an assumption now thaes getting stronger and stronger that mathematics is the only way to deal with reality," Bohm said. "Because it's worked so weLl for a while we've assumed that it has to be that way." Indeed, like some other scientific visionaries, Bohm expected that science and art would someday merge. "This division of art and science is temporary," he said. "It didn't exist in the past, and there's no reason why it should go on in the future." Just as art consists not simply of works of art but of an "attitude, the artistic spirit", so does science consist not in the accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of fresh modes of perception. 'The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained." No matter how history treats Bohm's specific ideas, this, surely, wOl be one of his greatest legacies: his ability to make the rest of us perceive and think differently. John Horgan
Spin behaviour is disrupted in a sequence ofthree measurementsElectrons are measured one at a time for their hrizontal spins (left), then for their vertical spins (right) and again for their horizontal spins (bottom). The vertical box disrupts the spin of half those electrons, so that half emerge from the second horizontal box with right spin and half with left.
Spin equivalent of two-slit interference: Two-path spin detection experiment depicts the unusual spin behaviour of electrons. On the left diagram right-spinning electrons are reflected back from an up down detector and recohered. The subsequent horizontal detector confirms they are all right spinning. However if one of the paths (top) are obstructed, then only 50% of the electrons subsequently measure as right spinning. This is because those which make it to the end definitely were down spinning and hence had had a disrupting measurement made of their vertical spin.
Bohm's theory can fully account for the outcomes of the experiments with the contraption-the experiment seemed to imply that electrons can be in states in which there fails to be any fact about where they are. in the case of an initially right-spinning electron fed into the apparatus, Bohm's theory entails that the electron wdl take either the up or the down route, period. Which of those two routes it takes wiu be fully determined by the particle's initial conditions, more specifically by its initial wave flmction and its initial position. Of course, certain details of those conditions wiu prove ixnpossible, as a matter of law, to ascertain by measurement. But the crucial point here is that whichever route the electron happens to take, its wave ftmction wiu split UP and take both. It wfll do so in accoidance with the linear differential equations of motion So, in the event that the electron jn question takes, say, the UP route, it wm nonetheless be reunited at the black box with the part of fts wave function that took the down route. How the down-route part of the wave function ends up pushing the electron around once the two are reunited wgl depend on the physical conditions encountered along the down path. To put ft a bit more suggestively, once the two parts of the electroifs wave fimction are reunited, the part that took the route that the electron itself did not take can inform the electron of what things were like along the way. For example, if a wall is inserted in the down route, the down component of the wave function will be missing at the exit of the black box. This absence in itself can constitute decisive information. Thus, the motion that such an electron executes, even if it took the up path through the apparatus, can depend quite dramaticaUy on whether or not such a wall was inserted. Moreover, Bohin's theory entails that the 'empty' part of the wave functionthe part that travels along the route the electron itself does not take-is completely undetectable. One of the consequences of the second equation in the box below is that only the part of any given particle's wave ftmction that is tly occupied by the particle itself can have any effect on the motions of other particles. So the empty part of the wave function-notwithstanding the fact that it is really, physically, thereis completely incapable of leaving any obsle trace of itself on detectors or anything else. Hence, Bohm's theory accounts for all the unfathomable-looking behaviors of electrons discussed earlier every bit as well as the standard interpretation does. Moreover, and this point is important, ft is free of any of the metaphysical perplexties associated with quantum-mechanical -perposition.
Left: A graphical depiction of the quantum potential. Right: Trajectories of an electron in a double slit experiment.
Bohm's theory-in Its entirety consists of three elements. The first is a deterministic law (namely, Schödinger's equation) that describes how the wave functions of physical systems evolve over time. lt is:
where i is the imaginary number , h is Planck's constant, V is the wave function, H is a mathematical object called the Hamiltonian operator, N is the number of particles in the system, xl...X3N represent the spatial coordinates of those particles, and t is the time. Loosely speaking, the Hamiltonian operator describes the energy in the system. The second element is a deterministic law of the motions of the particles:
where X1 ... X3N represent the actual coordinate values of the particles, dXj(t)/dt is the rate of change of X, at time t, and j represents the components of the standard quantum-mechanical probability current. The subscript i ranges from 1 to 3N. The third element Is a statistical rule analogous to one used In classical statistical mechanics. It stipulates precisely how one goes about 'averaging over' one's Inevitable Ignorance of the exact states of physical systems. It runs as follows. Assume one is given the wave function of a certain system but no information about the positions of its particles. To calculate the motions of those particles in the future, what one ought to suppose is that the probability that those particles are currently located at some position (X1 ... X3N) is equal to . If information about the positions of the particles becomes available (as during a measurement), the rule indicates that that information ought to be used to 'update' the probabilities through a mathematical procedure called straightforward conditionalization. That is literally all there is to Bohm's theory. Whatever else we know about it derives strictly from these three elements.
Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble’s discovery of red-shifting of light from galaxies in all directions from our own suggested that space itself was getting bigger. Combined with insights from a handful of proposed non-Euclidean geometries, Hubble’s discovery implied that the cosmos exists in more than the three dimensions we’re familiar with in everyday life. That’s because parts of the cosmos were moving further apart, yet with no physical center, no origin point in three-dimensional space. Just think of an inflating balloon seen only from the perspective of its growing two-dimensional surface, and extrapolate to four-dimensional inflation perceived in the three-dimensional space that we can see. That perspective suggests that three-dimensional space could be curved, folded, or warped into a 4th dimension the way that the two dimensional surface of a balloon is warped into a 3rd dimension. We don’t see or feel more dimensions; nevertheless, theoretical physics predicts that they should exist. Interesting, but are there any practical implications? Can they become part of applied physics?
1. Warp Drive Teaching about the 4th dimension, physicists have used analogies, like drawings of something called a hypercube, and even the 19th century novella Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. The book imagines two-dimensional beings living on a planar world that has only length and width. Unable to perceive a third dimension, the Flatlanders see only one plane of three-dimensional visitors, kind of like how computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging shows the body in slices. Two slices through a leg, one a few millimeters up from the other, look almost the same, but a slice through the waist or chest gives a very different picture. We can relate to this analogy, imagining our three-dimensional environment as just one of an infinite number of slices of a four-dimensional environment. But moving beyond four dimensions, it gets even weirder, and very hard to visualize. The main theory here is called M theory, which is a theory in physics that unites various types of what’s called superstring theory. In M theory there are a bunch of dimensions, either 10 or 11, depending on who explains it to you. In addition to the three we’re familiar with there are compact dimensions. It’s all related to phenomena called branes that vibrate like strings, but what’s most relevant to this discussion is that the extra or compact dimensions don’t necessarily have to remain compact. Like a jack-in-the box, it might be possible to unpack the extra dimensions, says Richard Obousy, director of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit organization promoting starship research. “If an advanced civilization learns how to manipulate higher dimensions, they might use them for technology, including warp drive,” Obousy noted to me, the idea being that some kind of controlled decompacting of extra dimensions could have the effect of squeezing or expanding one of the three big dimensions that we know. Engage the compacting effect in front of a starship and the expansion effect to the rear, and you’d have warp drive, like I discussed in a previous post. But don’t start packing for your Alpha Centauri vacation just yet, because there’s one tiny little complication, which Obousy is the first to admit. So far, we don’t have a shred of evidence that the hypothesized extra dimensions even exist. Someday, soon, we might get some evidence from the Large Hadron Collider, but even then it’s anyone’s guess whether that would lead to a warp drive technology. 2. Time Travel Time is usually considered a dimension, even if not a spatial dimension, and we’re certainly moving along the time axis just fine. We don’t possess technology to go backward and change history. If we could find a way to go through other dimensions, the balloon analogy tells us it should allow a kind of tunneling to locations that look distant from the perspective of the three dimensions that we perceive. It is far less clear, however, whether we could tunnel into other time periods, future or past. Any fans of Star Trek know that the philosophy of time travel into the past is mind-boggling, because you could change history, prevent the series of events that caused your existence in the first place, yada, yada, yada. But time travel to the future – accelerating from the usual move into the future of one minute per minute, one year per year – requires no philosophy. Moreover, we know how to do it. It’s called time dilation, it’s predicted by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and it will happen, if we accelerate a spacecraft to a significant fraction of the speed of light. Travel very close to the speed of light (c), and time slows down from your perspective and the slowing is quantified by a variable known as the gamma factor. On a ship moving just under 0.87c, the gamma factor = 2; thus, from the perspective of Earth-bound observers, the traveler moves 2 minutes into the future for each minute that seems to go by aboard the ship. At 0.94c, gamma = 3, and it increases more dramatically as the ship approaches light speed asymptotically. At 0.9992c, for instance, gamma reaches 25, which can advance you noticeably into the future if you stay at that speed long enough. Make a round-trip to the star Vega, located 25 light-years away, and two years will pass by for you and your friends aboard the ship (you’ll age two years and accumulate two years of memories), but arriving on Earth you’ll find that you’ve jumped ahead by a half-century. It really would happen; we’re certain, because time dilation has been proven with subatomic particles in accelerators. We can’t do it right now with people, but the capability for relativistic velocities is only a matter of time (excuse the pun), since it could happen with technology that may be just over the horizon, namely nuclear fusion. 3. Traversable Wormholes Another means of transport made possible by a multidimensional cosmos is wormholes. When Carl Sagan needed a realistic way for humans to travel interstellar distances for his story Contact, he consulted theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Working with a couple of his best graduate students at the California Institute of Technology, Thorne worked out the equations showing that, indeed, there was a way: a stable, traversable wormhole, or even a system of such tunnels linking different areas of space-time. This was more than a decade before Miguel Alcubierre would demonstrate that Einstein’s general relativity theory allowed for Star Trek-style warp drive, so Sagan saw the wormhole concept as the only scientifically-valid means by which his protagonist, Ellie Arroway, could be shuttled through the galaxy quickly enough to meet storyline demands. An advanced civilization could build a system of wormhole-dependent tunnels connecting different points of the space-time fabric, essentially drawing the departure and arrival points in the fabric into close proximity to one another through a 4th dimension. If we could do it, we could have an entry portal nearby, somewhere in the inner Solar System, that leads to an exit point at our destination, for instance a nearby star system with an Earth-like planet. In science fiction, it’s the concept of a star gate.
Image by andrey_l / Shutterstock
Because of mathematically complex findings derived from equations in general relativity known as the Einstein field equations, technology that can warp space, whether for warp drive or traversable wormholes, would require a phenomenon called negative energy. Intuitively it is difficult to visualize what negative energy is, but its existence is consistent with a well-established area of physics known as quantum field theory. In fact, using the technology of quantum optics and a phenomenon called the Casimir effect, physicists have actually produced a kind of negative energy already in tiny quantities (negative vacuum energy). Nature produces it in big quantities, but only by using huge concentrations of gravity, which we can’t produce artificially. According to Eric Davis, Senior Research Physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, Texas, who is an expert on faster-than-light propulsion concepts, the most promising way to do this is with a quantum optic device called a Ford-Svaiter mirror. It’s not something that anyone has built yet, but it can be built. It would concentrate the negative vacuum energy. If you do it with a small Ford-Svaiter mirror, it would produce a mini-wormhole, but Davis says that the device could then be scaled up to make wormholes bigger and bigger, eventually big enough for a spaceship to enter. Navigation to find an exit point would be tricky at first, but it’s theoretically possible to place the Ford-Svaiter mirrors in different points to create a kind of tuner, for instance from somewhere near Earth to a point near an Earth-like planet in a nearby star system. Once the first wormhole is built with stable entry and exit points we’d have a way to go back and forth between Earth and our first interstellar destination. We could explore that star system, and no doubt we would do so particularly if it contains a habitable planet that we could colonize, but we could also use it as a staging point to go further. Thus, little by little, we could create wormhole network of sorts, in our little corner of the galaxy. Or, perhaps, at some point, our tunneling might tap into an already existing network similar to what Sagan imagined. In that case, we’d better make sure to learn the rules, for there might be traffic.
Magick, in the context of Aleister Crowley's Thelema, is a term used to differentiate the occult from stage magic and is defined as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will", including both "mundane" acts of will as well as ritual magic. Crowley wrote that "it is theoretically possible to cause in any object any change of which that object is capable by nature".[1]John Symonds and Kenneth Grant attach a deeper occult significance to this preference.[2] Crowley saw Magick as the essential method for a person to reach true understanding of the self and to act according to one's true will, which he saw as the reconciliation "between freewill and destiny."[3] Crowley describes this process in his Magick, Book 4:
One must find out for oneself, and make sure beyond doubt, who one is, what one is, why one is ...Being thus conscious of the proper course to pursue, the next thing is to understand the conditions necessary to following it out. After that, one must eliminate from oneself every element alien or hostile to success, and develop those parts of oneself which are specially needed to control the aforesaid conditions. (Crowley, Magick, Book 4 p.134)
The term itself is an Early Modern English spelling for magic, used in works such as the 1651 translation of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, or Of Magick. Aleister Crowley chose the spelling to differentiate his practices and rituals from stage magic and the term has since been re-popularised by those who have adopted elements of his teachings. Crowley defined Magick as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will."[4][5] He goes on to elaborate on this, in one postulate, and twenty eight theorems. His first clarification on the matter is that of a postulate, in which he states "ANY required change may be effected by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner, through the proper medium to the proper object."[6][7] He goes on further to state:
Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one's conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.[8]
Crowley made many theories for the paranormal effects of Magick; however, as magicians and mystics had done before him and continue to do after him, Crowley dismissed such effects as useless:
So we find that from November, 1901, he did no practices of any kind until the Spring Equinox of 1904, with the exception of a casual week in the summer of 1903, and an exhibition game of magick in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid in November, 1903, when by his invocations he filled that chamber with a brightness as of full moonlight. (This was no subjective illusion. The light was sufficient for him to read the ritual by.) Only to conclude, "There, you see it? What's the good of it?"
Even so, Crowley recognized that paranormal effects and magical powers have some level of value for the individual:
My own experience was very convincing on this point; for one power after another came popping up when it was least wanted, and I saw at once that they represented so many leaks in my boat. They argued imperfect insulation. And really they are quite a bit of a nuisance. Their possession is so flattering, and their seduction so subtle. One understands at once why all the first-class Teachers insist so sternly that the Siddhi (or Iddhi) must be rejected firmly by the Aspirant, if he is not to be sidetracked and ultimately lost. Nevertheless, "even the evil germs of Matter may alike become useful and good" as Zoroaster reminds us. For one thing, their possession is indubitably a sheet-anchor, at the mercy of the hurricane of Doubt— doubt as to whether the whole business is not Tommy-rot! Such moments are frequent, even when one has advanced to a stage when Doubt would seem impossible; until you get there, you can have no idea how bad it is! Then, again, when these powers have sprung naturally and spontaneously from the exercise of one's proper faculties in the Great Work, they ought to be a little more than leaks. You ought to be able to organize and control them in such wise that they are of actual assistance to you in taking the Next Step. After all, what moral or magical difference is there between the power of digesting one's food, and that of transforming oneself into a hawk?
There are several ways to view what Magick is. Again, at its most broad, it can be defined as any willed action leading to intended change. It can also be seen as the general set of methods used to accomplish the Great Work of mystical attainment. At the practical level, Magick most often takes several practices and forms of ritual, including banishing, invocation and evocation, eucharistic ritual, consecration and purification, astral travel, yoga, sex magic, and divination.
The professed purpose of banishing rituals is to eliminate forces that might interfere with a magical operation, and they are often performed at the beginning of an important event or ceremony (although they can be performed for their own sake as well). The area of effect can be a magick circle, a room, or the magician himself. The general theory of Magick proposes that there are various forces which are represented by the classical elements (air, earth, fire, and water), the planets, the signs of the Zodiac, and adjacent spaces in the astral world.[9] Magick also proposes that various spirits and non-corporeal intelligences can be present.[10] Banishings are performed in order to "clean out" these forces and presences.[10] It is not uncommon to believe that banishings are more psychological than anything else, used to calm and balance the mind, but that the effect is ultimately the same—a sense of cleanliness within the self and the environment. There are many banishing rituals, but most are some variation on two of the most common—"The Star Ruby" and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Crowley describes banishing in his Magick, Book 4 (ch.13):
[...] in the banishing ritual of the pentagram we not only command the demons to depart, but invoke the Archangels and their hosts to act as guardians of the Circle during our pre-occupation with the ceremony proper. In more elaborate ceremonies it is usual to banish everything by name. Each element, each planet, and each sign, perhaps even the Sephiroth themselves; all are removed, including the very one which we wished to invoke, for that forces as existing in Nature is always impure. But this process, being long and wearisome, is not altogether advisable in actual working. It is usually sufficient to perform a general banishing, and to rely upon the aid of the guardians invoked. [...] "The Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram" is the best to use.[citation needed]
However, he further asserts:
Those who regard this ritual as a mere devise to invoke or banish spirits, are unworthy to possess it. Properly understood, it is the Medicine of Metals and the Stone of the Wise.[11]
Purification is similar in theme to banishing, but is a more rigorous process of preparing the self and her temple for serious spiritual work. Crowley mentions that ancient magicians would purify themselves through arduous programs, such as through special diets, fasting, sexual abstinence, keeping the body meticulously tidy, and undergoing a complicated series of prayers.[12] He goes on to say that purification no longer requires such activity, since the magician can purify the self via willed intention. Specifically, the magician labors to purify the mind and body of all influences which may interfere with the Great Work:
The point is to seize every occasion of bringing every available force to bear upon the objective of the assault. It does not matter what the force is (by any standard of judgment) so long as it plays its proper part in securing the success of the general purpose [...] We must constantly examine ourselves, and assure ourselves that every action is really subservient to the One Purpose.[12]
Crowley recommended symbolically ritual practices, such as bathing and robing before a main ceremony: "The bath signifies the removal of all things extraneous or antagonistic to the one thought. The putting on of the robe is the positive side of the same operation. It is the assumption of the frame of mind suitable to that one thought."[12]
Consecration is an equally important magical operation. It is essentially the dedication, usually of a ritual instrument or space, to a specific purpose. In Magick, Book 4 (ch.13), Crowley writes:
The ritual here in question should summarize the situation, and devote the particular arrangement to its purpose by invoking the appropriate forces. Let it be well remembered that each object is bound by the Oaths of its original consecration as such. Thus, if a pantacle has been made sacred to Venus, it cannot be used in an operation of Mars.[citation needed]
An example of the magic circle and triangle of art of King Solomon
Invocation is the bringing in or identifying with a particular deity or spirit. Crowley wrote of two keys to success in this arena: to "inflame thyself in praying"[13] and to "invoke often". For Crowley, the single most important invocation, or any act of Magick for that matter, was the invocation of one's Holy Guardian Angel, or "secret self", which allows the adept to know his or her True Will. Crowley describes the experience of invocation:
The mind must be exalted until it loses consciousness of self. The Magician must be carried forward blindly by a force which, though in him and of him, is by no means that which he in his normal state of consciousness calls I. Just as the poet, the lover, the artist, is carried out of himself in a creative frenzy, so must it be for the Magician.[13]
Crowley (Magick, Book 4) discusses three main categories of invocation, although "in the great essentials these three methods are one. In each case the magician identifies himself with the Deity invoked."[14]
Devotion—where "identity with the God is attained by love and by surrender, by giving up or suppressing all irrelevant (and illusionary) parts of yourself."
Calling forth—where "identity is attained by paying special attention to the desired part of yourself."
Drama—where "identity is attained by sympathy. It is very difficult for the ordinary man to lose himself completely in the subject of a play or of a novel; but for those who can do so, this method is unquestionably the best."
Another invocatory technique that the magician can employ is called the assumption of godforms—where with "concentrated imagination of oneself in the symbolic shape of any God, one should be able to identify oneself with the idea which [the god] represents."[15] A general method involves positioning the body in a position that is typical for a given god, imagining that the image of the god is coinciding with or enveloping the body, accompanied by the practice of "vibration" of the appropriate god-name(s).
There is a distinct difference between invocation and evocation, as Crowley explains:
To "invoke" is to "call in", just as to "evoke" is to "call forth". This is the essential difference between the two branches of Magick. In invocation, the macrocosm floods the consciousness. In evocation, the magician, having become the macrocosm, creates a microcosm. You invoke a God into the Circle. You evoke a Spirit into the Triangle.[14]
Generally, evocation is used for two main purposes: to gather information and to obtain the services or obedience of a spirit or demon. Crowley believed that the most effective form of evocation was found in the grimoire on Goetia (see below), which instructs the magician in how to safely summon forth and command 72 infernal spirits. However, it is equally possible to evoke angelic beings, gods, and other intelligences related to planets, elements, and the Zodiac. Unlike with invocation, which involves a calling in, evocation involves a calling forth, most commonly into what is called the "triangle of art."
The word eucharist originally comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving. However, within Magick, it takes on a special meaning—the transmutation of ordinary things (usually food and drink) into divine sacraments, which are then consumed. The object is to infuse the food and drink with certain properties, usually embodied by various deities, so that the adept takes in those properties upon consumption. Crowley describes the process of the regular practice of eucharistic ritual:
The magician becomes filled with God, fed upon God, intoxicated with God. Little by little his body will become purified by the internal lustration of God; day by day his mortal frame, shedding its earthly elements, will become in very truth the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Day by day matter is replaced by Spirit, the human by the divine; ultimately the change will be complete; God manifest in flesh will be his name.[16]
There are several eucharistic rituals within the magical canon. Two of the most well known are The Mass of the Phoenix and The Gnostic Mass. The first is a ritual designed for the individual, which involves sacrificing a "Cake of Light" (a type of bread that serves as the host) to Ra (i.e. the Sun) and infusing a second Cake with the adept's own blood (either real or symbolic, in a gesture reflecting the myth of the Pelican cutting its own breast to feed its young) and then consuming it with the words, "There is no grace: there is no guilt: This is the Law: Do what thou wilt!" The other ritual, The Gnostic Mass, is a very popular public ritual (although it can be practiced privately) that involves a team of participants, including a Priest and Priestess. This ritual is an enactment of the mystical journey that culminates with the Mystic Marriage and the consumption of a Cake of Light and a goblet of wine (a process termed "communication"). Afterwards, each Communicant declares, "There is no part of me that is not of the gods!"
Generally speaking, Yoga is not considered to be Magick per se., by those who are really familiar with it. But in verity, it is the necessary training of the body and the mind to allow for certain types of illumination of the soul and the person himself to take place. Simply put, the goal is the control of the mind—to increase concentration and to be able to enter different states of consciousness. When developing his basic yogic program, Crowley borrowed heavily from many other yogis, such as Patanjali and Yajnavalkya. Yoga, as Crowley interprets it, involves several key components. The first is Asana, which is the assumption (after eventual success) of any easy, steady and comfortable posture so as to maintain a good physique which complements the high level of enlightenment that meditation is accompanied with. Next is Pranayama, which is the control of breath, yogi's believe that the number of breaths a human takes are counted before one is even born and thus, by controlling the intake one may also be able to control the life. Mantram, the use of mantras enables the subject to use the knowledge of the Vedas "Atharva Veda" in this context adequately. Yama and Niyama are the adopted moral or behavioral codes (of the adept's choosing) that will be least likely to excite the mind. Pratyahara is the stilling of the thoughts so that the mind becomes quiet. Dharana is the beginning of concentration, usually on a single shape, like a triangle, which eventually leads to Dhyana, the loss of distinction between object and subject, which can be described as the annihilation of the ego (or sense of a separate self). The final stage is Samādhi—Union with the All, it is considered to be the utmost level of awareness that one could possibly achieve, according to Hindu mythology, one of their main three deities, Shiva, had mastered this and thus was bestowed upon with stupendous power and control.
The art of divination is generally employed for the purpose of obtaining information that can guide the adept in his Great Work. The underlying theory states that there exists intelligences (either outside of or inside the mind of the diviner) that can offer accurate information within certain limits using a language of symbols. Normally, divination within Magick is not the same as fortune telling, which is more interested in predicting future events. Rather, divination tends to be more about discovering information about the nature and condition of things that can help the magician gain insight and to make better decisions. There are literally hundreds of different divinatory techniques in the world. However, Western occult practice mostly includes the use of astrology (calculating the influence of heavenly bodies), bibliomancy (reading random passages from a book, such as Liber Legis or the I Ching), tarot (a deck of 78 cards, each with symbolic meaning, usually laid out in a meaningful pattern), and geomancy (a method of making random marks on paper or in earth that results in a combination of sixteen patterns). It is an accepted truism within Magick that divination is imperfect. As Crowley writes, "In estimating the ultimate value of a divinatory judgment, one must allow for more than the numerous sources of error inherent in the process itself. The judgment can do no more than the facts presented to it warrant. It is naturally impossible in most cases to make sure that some important factor has not been omitted [...] One must not assume that the oracle is omniscient."[17]
The Tree of Life is a tool used to categorize and organize various mystical concepts. At its most simple level, it is composed of ten spheres, or emanations, called sephiroth (sing. "sephira") which are connected by twenty two paths. The sephiroth are represented by the planets and the paths by the characters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are subdivided by the four classical elements, the seven classical planets, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Within the western magical tradition, the Tree is used as a kind of conceptual filing cabinet. Each sephira and path is assigned various ideas, such as gods, cards of the Tarot, astrological planets and signs, elements, etc. Crowley considered a deep understanding of the Tree of Life to be essential to the magician:
The Tree of Life has got to be learnt by heart; you must know it backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside down; it must become the automatic background of all your thinking. You must keep on hanging everything that comes your way upon its proper bough.[18]
Similar to yoga, learning the Tree of Life is not so much Magick as it is a way to map out one's spiritual universe. As such, the adept may use the Tree to determine a destination for astral travel, to choose which gods to invoke for what purposes, et cetera. It also plays an important role in modeling the spiritual journey, where the adept begins in Malkuth, which is the every-day material world of phenomena, with the ultimate goal being at Kether, the sphere of Unity with the All.
A magical record is a journal or other source of documentation containing magical events, experiences, ideas, and any other information that the magician may see fit to add. There can be many purposes for such a record, such as recording evidence to verify the effectiveness of specific procedures (per the scientific method that Aleister Crowley claimed should be applied to the practice of Magick) or to ensure that data may propagate beyond the lifetime of the magician. Benefits of this process vary, but usually include future analysis and further education by the individual and/or associates with whom the magician feels comfortable in revealing such intrinsically private information. Crowley was highly insistent upon the importance of this practice. As he writes in Liber E, "It is absolutely necessary that all experiments should be recorded in detail during, or immediately after, their performance ... The more scientific the record is, the better. Yet the emotions should be noted, as being some of the conditions. Let then the record be written with sincerity and care; thus with practice it will be found more and more to approximate to the ideal."[19] Other items he suggests for inclusion include the physical and mental condition of the experimenter, the time and place, and environmental conditions, including the weather.
As with Magick itself, a magical weapon is any instrument used to bring about intentional change. As Crowley writes, "Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take "magical weapons", pen, ink, and paper ... The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will."[20] With that said, in practice, magical weapons are usually specific, consecrated items used within ceremonial magic. There is no hard and fast rule for what is or isn't a magical weapon—if a magician considers it such a weapon, then it is. However, there does exist a set of magical weapons that have particular uses and symbolic meanings. Common weapons include the dagger (or athame in neopagan parlance), sword, wand, holy oil, cup (or graal), disk (or pentacle), oil lamp, bell, and thurible (or censer).
A magical formula is generally a name, word, or series of letters whose meaning illustrates principles and degrees of understanding that are often difficult to relay using other forms of speech or writing. It is a concise means to communicate very abstract information through the medium of a word or phrase, usually regarding a process of spiritual or mystical change. Common formulae include INRI, IAO, ShT, AUMGN, NOX, and LVX. These words often have no intrinsic meaning in and of themselves. However, when deconstructed, each individual letter may refer to some universal concept found in the system that the formula appears. Additionally, in grouping certain letters together one is able to display meaningful sequences that are considered to be of value to the spiritual system that utilizes them (e.g. spiritual hierarchies, historiographic data, psychological stages, etc.)
In magical rituals involving the invocation of deities, a vocal technique called vibration is commonly used. This was a basic aspect of magical training for Crowley, who described it in "Liber O."[21] According to that text, vibration involves a physical set of steps, starting in a standing position, breathing in through the nose while imagining the name of the god entering with the breath, imagining that breath travelling through the entire body, stepping forward with the left foot while throwing the body forward with arms outstretched, visualizing the name rushing out when spoken, ending in an upright stance, with the right forefinger placed upon the lips. According to Crowley in "Liber O", success in this technique is signaled by physical exhaustion and "though only by the student himself is it perceived, when he hears the name of the God vehemently roared forth, as if by the concourse of ten thousand thunders; and it should appear to him as if that Great Voice proceeded from the Universe, and not from himself." In general ritual practice, vibration can also refer to a technique of saying a god-name or a magical formula in a long, drawn-out fashion (i.e. with a full, deep breath) that employs the nasal passages, such that the sound feels and sounds "vibrated'. This is known as Galdering.
Jump up ^Crowley, Aleister. Magick, Book 4. p. 127. What is a Magical Operation? It may be defined as any event in nature which is brought to pass by Will. We must not exclude potato-growing or banking from our definition. Let us take a very simple example of a Magical Act: that of a man blowing his nose.
Jump up ^John Symonds; Kenneth Grant (1973). "Introduction". In Crowley, Aleister. Magick. Samuel Weiser. ISBN978-0-7100-7423-2. The Anglo-Saxon k in Magick, like most of Crowley's conceits, is a means of indicating the kind of magic which he performed. K is the eleventh letter of several alphabets, and eleven is the principal number of magick, because it is the number attributed to the Qliphoth - the underworld of demonic and chaotic forces that have to be conquered before magick can be performed. K has other magical implications: it corresponds to the power or shakti aspect of creative energy, for k is the ancient Egyptian khu, the magical power. Specifically, it stands for kteis (vagina), the complement to the wand (or phallus) which is used by the Magician in certain aspects of the Great Work.
Jump up ^Crowley, Aleister. "A Lecture on the Philosophy of Magick". The Revival of Magick. p. 207.
Jump up ^Magick in Theory and Practice, Book 3 of 4 by Aleister Crowley
Initiation is a rite of passage marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society. It could also be a formal admission to adulthood in a community or one of its formal components. In an extended sense it can also signify a transformation in which the initiate is 'reborn' into a new role. Examples of initiation ceremonies might include Hindu diksha, Christian baptism or confirmation, Jewish bar or bat mitzvah, acceptance into a fraternal organization, secret society or religious order, or graduation from school or recruit training. A person taking the initiation ceremony in traditional rites, such as those depicted in these pictures, is called an initiate.
Mircea Eliade discussed initiation as a principal religious act by classical or traditional societies. He defined initiation as "a basic change in existential condition," which liberates man from profane time and history. "Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the world. And through this recapitulation, the whole world is sanctified anew... [the initiand] can perceive the world as a sacred work, a creation of the Gods." Eliade differentiates between types of initiations in two ways: types and functions.
"this real valuation of ritual death finally led to conquest of the fear of real death."
"[initiation's] function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence to the new generations and to help them assume the responsibility of being truly men and hence of participating in culture."
"it reveals a world open to the trans-human, a world that, in our philosophical terminology, we should call transcendental."
"to make [the initiand] open to spiritual values."
Puberty Rites- "collective rituals whose function is to effect the transition from childhood or adolescence to adulthood." They represent "above all the revelation of the sacred."
MysticalVocation- "the vocation of a medicine man or a shaman." This is limited to the few who are "destined to participate in a more intense religious experience than is accessible to the rest of the community."
These can be broken into two types:
puberty rites, "by virtue of which adolescents gain access to the sacred, to knowledge, and to sexuality-- by which, in short, they become human beings."
specialized initiations, which certain individuals undergo in order to transcend their human condition and become protégés of the Supernatural Beings or even their equals."
In the study of certain social forms of initiation, such as hazing in college fraternities and sororities, laboratory experiments in psychology suggest that severe initiations produce cognitive dissonance.[1] Dissonance is then thought to produce feelings of strong group attraction among initiates after the experience, because they want to justify the effort used.[2]Rewards during initiations have important consequences in that initiates who feel more rewarded express stronger group identity.[3] As well as group attraction, initiations can also produce conformity among new members.[4] Psychology experiments have also shown that initiations increase feelings of affiliation.[5]
A spiritual initiation rite normally implies a shepherding process where those who are at a higher level guide the initiate through a process of greater exposure of knowledge. This may include the revelation of secrets, hence the term secret society for such organizations, usually reserved for those at the higher level of understanding. One famous historical example is the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, thought to go back to at least the Mycenaean period or "bronze age".
In the context of ritual magic and esotericism, an initiation is considered to cause a fundamental process of change to begin within the person being initiated. The person conducting the initiation (the initiator), being in possession of a certain power or state of being, transfers this power or state to the person being initiated. Thus the concept of initiation is similar to that of apostolic succession. The initiation process is often likened to a simultaneous death and rebirth, because as well as being a beginning it also implies an ending as existence on one level drops away in an ascension to the next. Initiation is a key component of Vaishnavism, Sant Mat, Surat Shabd Yoga, Wicca, and similar religious gnostic traditions. It denotes acceptance by the Guru and also implies that the Chela (student or disciple) agrees to the requirements (such as living an ethical lifestyle, meditating, etc.)
In unionisedorganizations, the "initiation" is typically no more than a brief familiarization with basic procedures and the provision of a copy of the appropriate collective bargainingagreement that governs the work performed by members of the union. Some unions also charge a one-time initiation fee, after which the joining person is officially deemed to be a member in good standing.
Some communities on board a military vessel and also of military soldiers tend to form a closed 'family' which absorbs in members, who are often formally accepted, generally after a form of trial or hazing. In addition, there can be similar rites of passages associated with parts of naval and military life, which do not constitute true initiations as the participants are already and remain members of the same community. One such rite is associated with crossing the equator on board a naval ship, but it can even be taken by passengers on board a cruise liner, who are not and do not become members of anything but the so-called "equator crossing club". Another form, “Kissing the Royal Belly” or “Royal Baby”, calls for initiates to kneel before a senior member of the crew, who wears a mock diaper. This “Baby” usually has a huge stomach covered with greasy materials ranging from cooking oil to mustard, shaving cream, eggs, and oysters. Junior sailors must lick the Baby’s navel area, while the "baby" grabs and shakes their head to better smear the goo onto their faces.[6]
Gangs often require new members to commit crimes before accepting them as part of the gang.[7] New members may be physically beaten by fellow gang members to demonstrate their courage, also known as "beat in" or "jump in", which occasionally results in a fatality.[7][8] One study indicates that young people are more likely to be hurt in gang initiation than they are by refusing to join.[9]
Tribes often have initiations. The initiation done in the Bapedi tribe of South Africa is normally regarded as a stage where a boy is to be taught manhood and a girl to be taught womanhood. In many African tribes, initiation involves circumcision/genital mutilation of males and sometimes circumcision/genital mutilation of females as well. Initiation is considered necessary for the individual to be regarded as a full member of the tribe. Otherwise, the individual may not be allowed to participate in ceremonies or even in social rituals such as marriage. A man will not be allowed to marry or have any special relationship with a woman who did not go to an initiation, because she is not considered to be a woman. Initiation may be thought of as an event which may help teens prepare themselves to be good husbands and wives. Where modernization is occurring, initiation is not taken so seriously as before, although there are still certain areas which still perform initiations. In some African tribes, boys take about 3–4 months participating in initiation rites and girls take about 1–2 months. Australian Aboriginal tribes usually had long periods of time to help prepare adolescent boys, teaching them traditional lore before they were ready to attend large elaborate ceremonies at the time of initiation when they were finally recognized as full-fledged men in their society. Most tribes had circumcision and scarification as part of the male initiation rituals, while many Central Australian tribes also practiced subincision. A salient shared cultural feature of the Min peoples of the New Guinea Highlands is initiation into a secret male religious cult.[10] For example, the Urapmin people used to practice a type of male initiation known in Urap as ban.[11] These elaborate rituals were a central part of Urapmin social life.[12] The ban was a multistage process which involved beatings and manipulation of various objects.[11] At each stage, the initiate was offered revelations of secret knowledge (Urap: weng awem), but at the next stage these would be shown to be false (Urap: famoul).[11] These initiations were abandoned with the adoption of Christianity, and the Urap have expressed relief at no longer having to administer the beatings which were involved.[13]
Jump up ^Aronson, E.; Mills, J. (1959). "The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology59 (2): 177–181. doi:10.1037/h0047195.
Jump up ^Festinger, L (1961). "The psychological effects of insufficient rewards". American Psychologist16 (1): 1–11. doi:10.1037/h0045112.
Jump up ^Kamau, C. (2012). What does being initiated severely into a group do? The role of rewards. International Journal of Psychology, doi:10.1080/00207594.2012.663957
Jump up ^Keating, C. F.; Pomerantz, J.; Pommer, S. D.; Ritt, S. J. H.; Miller, L. M.; McCormick, J. (2005). "Going to college and unpacking hazing: A functional approach to decrypting initiation practices among undergraduates". Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice9 (2): 104–126. doi:10.1037/1089-2699.9.2.104.
Jump up ^Lodewijkx, H. F. M.; van Zomeren, M.; Syroit, J. E. M. M. (2005). "The anticipation of a severe initiation: Gender differences in effects on affiliation tendency and group attraction". Small Group Research36 (2): 237–262. doi:10.1177/1046496404272381.
Christogram with Jesus Prayer in Romanian: Doamne Iisuse Hristoase, Fiul lui Dumnezeu, miluieşte-mă pe mine păcătosul ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner").
The Jesus Prayer (Greek: Η Προσευχή του Ιησού, i prosefchí tou iisoú; Syriac: ܨܠܘܬܐ ܕܝܫܘܥ , Slotho d-Yeshu' ) or "The Prayer" (Greek: Η Ευχή, i efchí̱ – literally "The Wish") is a short, formulaic prayer esteemed and advocated especially within Eastern Churches:
“
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱὲ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.[1]
”
(English) The prayer has been widely taught and discussed throughout the history of the Church. It is often repeated continually as a part of personal ascetic practice, its use being an integral part of the eremitic tradition of prayer known as Hesychasm (Ancient Greek: ἡσυχάζω, hesychazo, "to keep stillness"). The prayer is particularly esteemed by the spiritual fathers of this tradition (see Philokalia) as a method of opening up the heart (kardia) and bringing about the Prayer of the Heart (Καρδιακή Προσευχή). The Prayer of The Heart is considered to be the Unceasing Prayer that the apostle Paul advocates in the New Testament.[1] St. Theophan the Recluse regarded the Jesus Prayer stronger than all other prayers by virtue of the power of the Holy Name of Jesus.[2] Oftentimes in Protestant faiths when praying one will breathe in during the first part "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God" and then they will breathe out saying "have mercy on me, the sinner". While its tradition, on historical grounds, also belongs to the Eastern Catholics,[3][4] and there have been a number of Roman Catholic texts on the Jesus Prayer, its practice has never achieved the same popularity in the Western Church as in the Eastern Orthodox Church, although it is said on the Anglican Rosary. As distinct from the prayer itself, the Eastern Orthodox theology of the Jesus Prayer enunciated in the 14th century by St. Gregory Palamas was generally rejected by Roman Catholic theologians until the 20th century, but Pope John Paul II called Gregory Palamas a saint,[5] cited him as a great writer,[6] and an authority on theology[7][8][9] and spoke with appreciation of Palamas's intent "to emphasize the concrete possibility that man is given to unite himself with the Triune God in the intimacy of his heart".[10] In the Jesus Prayer can be seen the Eastern counterpart of the Rosary, which has developed to hold a similar place in the Christian West.[11] The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: "The name of Jesus is at the heart of Christian prayer. All liturgical prayers conclude with the words 'through our Lord Jesus Christ'. The Hail Mary reaches its high point in the words 'blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus'. The Eastern prayer of the heart, the Jesus Prayer, says: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' Many Christians, such as St Joan of Arc, have died with the one word 'Jesus' on their lips."[12]
The prayer's origin is most likely the Egyptian desert, which was settled by the monastic Desert Fathers in the 5th century.[13] A formula similar to the standard form of the Jesus Prayer is found in a letter attributed to John Chrysostom, who died in 407. This "Letter to an Abbot" speaks of "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy" and "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on us" being used as ceaseless prayer.[14] However, some consider this letter dubious or spurious and attribute it to an unknown writer of unknown date.[15] What may be the earliest explicit reference to what became the standard version of the Jesus Prayer is in Discourse on Abba Philimon from The Philokalia. Philimon lived around AD 600.[16] But while the prayer itself was in use by that time, John S. Romanides writes that "We are still searching the Fathers for the term 'Jesus prayer.'"[17] The earliest known mention[need quotation to verify] is in On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination of St. Diadochos of Photiki (400-c. 486), a work found in the first volume of the Philokalia. The Jesus Prayer is described in Diadochos's work in terms very similar[citation needed] to St. John Cassian's (c. 360-435) description in the Conferences 9 and 10, which gives, as the formula used in Egypt for repetitive prayer, not the Jesus Prayer, but "O God, make speed to save me: O Lord, make haste to help me."[18][19] St. Diadochos ties the practice of the Jesus Prayer to the purification of the soul and teaches that repetition of the prayer produces inner peace. The use of the Jesus Prayer is recommended in the Ladder of Divine Ascent of St. John Climacus (c. 523–606) and in the work of St. Hesychios the Priest (ca. 8th century), Pros Theodoulon, found in the first volume of the Philokalia. Ties to a similar prayer practice and theology appear in the 14th century work of an unknown English monk The Cloud of Unknowing. The use of the Jesus Prayer according to the tradition of the Philokalia is the subject of the 19th century anonymous Russian spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim. Though the Jesus Prayer has been practiced through the centuries as part of the Eastern tradition, in the 20th century, it also began to be used in some Western churches, including some Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.
The hesychastic practice of the Jesus Prayer is founded on the biblical view by which God's name is conceived as the place of his presence.[20] Orthodox mysticism has no images or representations. The mystical practice (the prayer and the meditation) doesn't lead to perceiving representations of God (see below Palamism). Thus, the most important means of a life consecrated to praying is the invoked name of God, as it is emphasized since the 5th century by the Thebaidanchorites, or by the later Athonitehesychasts. For the Orthodox the power of the Jesus Prayer comes not only from its content, but from the very invocation of Jesus' name.[21]
Theologically, the Jesus Prayer is considered to be the response of the Holy Tradition to the lesson taught by the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, in which the Pharisee demonstrates the improper way to pray by exclaiming: "Thank you Lord that I am not like the Publican", whereas the Publican prays correctly in humility, saying "Lord have mercy on me, a sinner" (Luke 18:10-14).[22]
The Essence-Energies distinction, a central principle in Orthodox theology, was first formulated by St Gregory of Nyssa and developed by St. Gregory Palamas in the 14th century in support of the mystical practices of Hesychasm and against Barlaam of Seminara. It stands that God's essence (Ancient Greek: Οὐσία, ousia) is distinct from God's energies, or manifestations in the world, by which men can experience the Divine. The energies are "unbegotten" or "uncreated". They were revealed in various episodes of the Bible: the burning bush seen by Moses, the Light on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. Apophatism[23] (negative theology) is the main characteristic of the Eastern theological tradition. Incognoscibility isn't conceived as agnosticism or refusal to know God, because the Eastern theology isn't concerned with abstract concepts; it is contemplative, with a discourse on things above rational understanding. Therefore dogmas are often expressed antinomically.[24] This form of contemplation, is experience of God, illumination called the Vision of God or in Greek theoria.[25] For the Eastern Orthodox the knowledge or noesis of the uncreated energies is usually linked to apophatism.[26][27]
The Eastern Orthodox Church holds a non-juridical view of sin, by contrast to the satisfaction view of atonement for sin as articulated in the West, firstly by Anselm of Canterbury (as debt of honor)[need quotation to verify]) and Thomas Aquinas (as a moral debt).[need quotation to verify] The terms used in the East are less legalistic (grace, punishment), and more medical (sickness, healing) with less exacting precision. Sin, therefore, does not carry with it the guilt for breaking a rule, but rather the impetus to become something more than what men usually are. One repents not because one is or isn't virtuous, but because human nature can change. Repentance (Ancient Greek: μετάνοια, metanoia, "changing one's mind") isn't remorse, justification, or punishment, but a continual enactment of one's freedom, deriving from renewed choice and leading to restoration (the return to man's original state).[28] This is reflected in the Mystery of Confession for which, not being limited to a mere confession of sins and presupposing recommendations or penalties, it is primarily that the priest acts in his capacity of spiritual father.[20][29] The Mystery of Confession is linked to the spiritual development of the individual, and relates to the practice of choosing an elder to trust as his or her spiritual guide, turning to him for advice on the personal spiritual development, confessing sins, and asking advice. As stated at the local Council of Constantinople in 1157, Christ brought his redemptive sacrifice not to the Father alone, but to the Trinity as a whole. In the Eastern Orthodox theology redemption isn't seen as ransom. It is the reconciliation of God with man, the manifestation of God’s love for humanity. Thus, it is not the anger of God the Father but His love that lies behind the sacrificial death of his son on the cross.[29] The redemption of man is not considered to have taken place only in the past, but continues to this day through theosis. The initiative belongs to God, but presupposes man's active acceptance (not an action only, but an attitude), which is a way of perpetually receiving God.[28]
Distinctiveness from analogues in other religions[edit]
The practice of contemplative or meditative chanting is known in several religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam (e.g. japa, zikr). The form of internal contemplation involving profound inner transformations affecting all the levels of the self is common to the traditions that posit the ontological value of personhood.[30] The history of these practices, including their possible spread from one religion to another, is not well understood. Such parallels (like between unusual psycho-spiritual experiences, breathing practices, postures, spiritual guidances of elders, peril warnings) might easily have arisen independently of one another, and in any case must be considered within their particular religious frameworks. Although some aspects of the Jesus Prayer may resemble some aspects of other traditions, its Christian character is central rather than mere "local color." The aim of the Christian practicing it is not limited to attaining humility, love, or purification of sinful thoughts, but rather it is becoming holy and seeking union with God (theosis), which subsumes all the aforementioned virtues. Thus, for the Eastern Orthodox:[31]
The Jesus Prayer is, first of all, a prayer addressed to God. It's not a means of self-deifying or self-deliverance, but a counterexample to Adam's pride, repairing the breach it produced between man and God.
The aim is not to be dissolved or absorbed into nothingness or into God, or reach another state of mind, but to (re)unite[32] with God (which by itself is a process) while remaining a distinct person.
In a modern context the continuing repetition is regarded by some as a form of meditation, the prayer functioning as a kind of mantra. However, Orthodox users of the Jesus Prayer emphasize the invocation of the name of Jesus Christ that St Hesychios describes in Pros Theodoulon which would be contemplation on the Triune God rather than simply emptying the mind.[citation needed]
Acknowledging "a sinner" is to lead firstly to a state of humbleness and repentance, recognizing one's own sinfulness.
Practicing the Jesus Prayer is strongly linked to mastering passions of both soul and body, e.g. by fasting. For the Eastern Orthodox not the body is wicked, but "the bodily way of thinking" is; therefore salvation also regards the body.
Unlike "seed syllables" in particular traditions of chanting mantras, the Jesus Prayer may be translated into whatever language the pray-er customarily uses. The emphasis is on the meaning, not on the mere utterance of certain sounds.
There is no emphasis on the psychosomatic techniques, which are merely seen as helpers for uniting the mind with the heart, not as prerequisites.
A magistral way of meeting God for the Orthodox,[33] the Jesus Prayer does not harbor any secrets in itself, nor does its practice reveal any esoteric truths.[34] Instead, as a hesychastic practice, it demands setting the mind apart from rational activities and ignoring the physical senses for the experiential knowledge of God. It stands along with the regular expected actions of the believer (prayer, almsgiving, repentance, fasting etc.) as the response of the Orthodox Tradition to St. Paul's challenge to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thess 5:17).[22][31] It is also linked to the Song of Solomon's passage from the Old Testament: "I sleep, but my heart is awake" (Song of Solomon 5:2).[35] The analogy being that as a lover is always conscious to his or her beloved, people can also achieve a state of "constant prayer" where they are always conscious of God's presence in their lives.
"There isn't Christian Mysticism without Theology, especially there isn't Theology without Mysticism", writes Vladimir Lossky, for outside the Church the personal experience would have no certainty and objectivity, and "Church teachings would have no influence on souls without expressing a somehow inner experience of the truth it offers". For the Eastern Orthodox the aim isn't knowledge itself; theology is, finally, always a means serving a goal above any knowledge: theosis.[24] The individual experience of the Eastern Orthodox mystic most often remains unknown. With very few exceptions, there aren't autobiographical writings on the inner life in the East. The mystical union pathway remains hidden, being unveiled only to the confessor or to the apprentices. "The mystical individualism has remained unknown to the spiritual life of the Eastern Church", remarks Lossky.[24] The practice of the Jesus Prayer is integrated into the mental ascesis undertaken by the Orthodox monastic in the practice of hesychasm. Yet the Jesus Prayer is not limited only to monastic life or to clergy. All members of the Christian Church are advised to practice this prayer, laypeople and clergy, men, women and children.
In the Eastern tradition the prayer is said or prayed repeatedly, often with the aid of a prayer rope (Russian: chotki; Greek: komvoskini), which is a cord, usually woolen, tied with many knots. The person saying the prayer says one repetition for each knot. It may be accompanied by prostrations and the sign of the cross, signaled by beads strung along the prayer rope at intervals. The prayer rope is "a tool of prayer". The use of the prayer rope, however, is not compulsory and it is considered as an aid to the beginners or the "weak" practitioners, those who face difficulties practicing the Prayer. It should be noted here that the Jesus Prayer is ideally practiced under the guidance and supervision of a spiritual guide (pneumatikos, πνευματικός), and or Starets, especially when Psychosomatic techniques (like rhythmical breath) are incorporated. A person that acts as a spiritual "father" and advisor. Usually an official certified by the Church Confessor (Pneumatikos Exolmologitis) or sometimes a spiritually experienced monk (called in Greek Gerontas (Elder) or in Russian Starets). It is not impossible for that person to be a layperson, usually a "Practical Theologician" (i.e. a person well versed in Orthodox Theology but without official credentials, certificates, diplomas etc.) but this is not a common practice either or at least it is not commonly advertised as ideal.
There are not fixed, invariable rules for those who pray, "the way there is no mechanical, physical or mental technique which can force God to show his presence" (MetropolitanKallistos Ware).[33] People who say the prayer as part of meditation often synchronize it with their breathing; breathing in while calling out to God (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God) and breathing out while praying for mercy (have mercy on me, a sinner). Another option is to say (orally or mentally) the whole prayer while breathing in and again the whole prayer while breathing out and yet another, to breathe in recite the whole prayer, breathe out while reciting the whole prayer again. One can also hold the breath for a few seconds between breathing in and out. It is advised, in any of these three last cases, that this be done under some kind of spiritual guidance and supervision. Monks often pray this prayer many hundreds of times each night as part of their private cell vigil ("cell rule"). Under the guidance of an Elder (Russian Starets; Greek Gerondas), the monk aims to internalize the prayer, so that he is praying unceasingly. St. Diadochos of Photiki refers in On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination to the automatic repetition of the Jesus Prayer, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, even in sleep. This state is regarded as the accomplishment of Saint Paul's exhortation to the Thessalonians to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). The Jesus Prayer can also be used for a kind of "psychological" self-analysis. According to the "Way of the Pilgrim" account and Mount Athos practitioners of the Jesus Prayer,[36]"one can have some insight on his or her current psychological situation by observing the intonation of the words of the prayer, as they are recited. Which word is stressed most. This self-analysis could reveal to the praying person things about their inner state and feelings, maybe not yet realised, of their unconsciousness."[37] "While praying the Jesus Prayer, one might notice that sometimes the word 'Lord' is pronounced louder, more stressed, than the others, like: Lord Jesus Christ, (Son of God), have mercy on me, (a/the sinner). In this case, they say, it means that our inner self is currently more aware of the fact that Jesus is the Lord, maybe because we need reassurance that he is in control of everything (and our lives too). Other times, the stressed word is 'Jesus': Lord Jesus Christ, (Son of God), have mercy on me, (a/the sinner). In that case, they say, we feel the need to personally appeal more to his human nature, the one that is more likely to understands our human problems and shortcomings, maybe because we are going through tough personal situations. Likewise if the word 'Christ' is stressed it could be that we need to appeal to Jesus as Messiah and Mediator, between humans and God the Father, and so on. When the word 'Son' is stressed maybe we recognise more Jesus' relationship with the Father. If 'of God' is stressed then we could realise more Jesus' unity with the Father. A stressed 'have mercy on me' shows a specific, or urgent, need for mercy. A stressed 'a sinner' (or 'the sinner') could mean that there is a particular current realisation of the sinful human nature or a particular need for forgiveness. "In order to do this kind of self-analysis one should better start reciting the prayer relaxed and naturally for a few minutes – so the observation won't be consciously 'forced', and then to start paying attention to the intonation as described above. Also, a person might want to consciously stress one of the words of the prayer in particular when one wants to express a conscious feeling of situation. So in times of need stressing the 'have mercy' part can be more comforting or more appropriate. In times of failures, the 'a sinner' part, etc....)."[37]
Paul Evdokimov, a 20th-century Russian philosopher and theologian, writes[38] about beginner's way of praying: initially, the prayer is excited because the man is emotive and a flow of psychic contents is expressed. In his view this condition comes, for the modern men, from the separation of the mind from the heart: "The prattle spreads the soul, while the silence is drawing it together." Old fathers condemned elaborate phraseologies, for one word was enough for the publican, and one word saved the thief on the cross. They only uttered Jesus' name by which they were contemplating God. For Evdokimov the acting faith denies any formalism which quickly installs in the external prayer or in the life duties; he quotes St. Seraphim: "The prayer is not thorough if the man is self-conscious and he is aware he's praying." "Because the prayer is a living reality, a deeply personal encounter with the living God, it is not to be confined to any given classification or rigid analysis"[22] an on-line catechism reads. As general guidelines for the practitioner, different number of levels (3, 7 or 9) in the practice of the prayer are distinguished by Orthodox fathers. They are to be seen as being purely informative, because the practice of the Prayer of the Heart is learned under personal spiritual guidance in Eastern Orthodoxy which emphasizes the perils of temptations when it's done by one's own. Thus, Theophan the Recluse, a 19th-century Russian spiritual writer, talks about three stages:[22]
The oral prayer (the prayer of the lips) is a simple recitation, still external to the practitioner.
The focused prayer, when "the mind is focused upon the words" of the prayer, "speaking them as if they were our own."
The prayer of the heart itself, when the prayer is no longer something we do but who we are.
Once this is achieved the Jesus Prayer is said to become "self-active" (αυτενεργούμενη). It is repeated automatically and unconsciously by the mind, having a Tetris Effect, like a (beneficial) Earworm. Body, through the uttering of the prayer, mind, through the mental repetition of the prayer, are thus unified with "the heart" (spirit) and the prayer becomes constant, ceaselessly "playing" in the background of the mind, like a background music, without hindering the normal everyday activities of the person.[37] Others, like Father Archimandrite Ilie Cleopa, one of the most representative spiritual fathers of contemporary Romanian Orthodox monastic spirituality,[39] talk about nine levels (see External links). They are the same path to theosis, more slenderly differentiated:
The prayer of the lips.
The prayer of the mouth.
The prayer of the tongue.
The prayer of the voice.
The prayer of the mind.
The prayer of the heart.
The active prayer.
The all-seeing prayer.
The contemplative prayer.
In its more advanced use, the monk aims to attain to a sober practice of the Jesus Prayer in the heart free of images. It is from this condition, called by Saints John Climacus and Hesychios the "guard of the mind", that the monk is raised by the Divine grace to contemplation.[citation needed]
A number of different repetitive prayer formulas have been attested in the history of Eastern Orthodox monasticism: the Prayer of St. Ioannikios the Great (754–846): "My hope is the Father, my refuge is the Son, my shelter is the Holy Ghost, O Holy Trinity, Glory unto You," the repetitive use of which is described in his Life; or the more recent practice of St. Nikolaj Velimirović. Similarly to the flexibility of the practice of the Jesus Prayer, there is no imposed standardization of its form. The prayer can be from as short as "Lord, have mercy" (Kyrie eleison), "Have mercy on me" ("Have mercy upon us"), or even "Jesus", to its longer most common form. It can also contain a call to the Theotokos (Virgin Mary), or to the saints. The single essential and invariable element is Jesus' name.[33]
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. (a very common form) (Sometimes "τον αμαρτωλόν" is translated "a sinner" but in Greek the article "τον" is a definite article, so it could be translated "the sinner.")
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.[1] (a very common form in the Greek tradition)
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. (common variant on Mount Athos)[3]
Part Four of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is dedicated to Christian prayer, devotes paragraphs 2665 to 2669 to prayer to Jesus.
To pray "Jesus" is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies. Jesus is the Risen One, and whoever invokes the name of Jesus is welcoming the Son of God who loved him and who gave himself up for him. This simple invocation of faith developed in the tradition of prayer under many forms in East and West. The most usual formulation, transmitted by the spiritual writers of the Sinai, Syria, and Mt. Athos, is the invocation, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners." It combines the Christological hymn of Philippians 2:6-11 with the cry of the publican and the blind men begging for light. By it the heart is opened to human wretchedness and the Savior's mercy. The invocation of the holy name of Jesus is the simplest way of praying always. When the holy name is repeated often by a humbly attentive heart, the prayer is not lost by heaping up empty phrases, but holds fast to the word and "brings forth fruit with patience." This prayer is possible "at all times" because it is not one occupation among others but the only occupation: that of loving God, which animates and transfigures every action in Christ Jesus.[43]
In his poem The Book of the Twelve Béguines, John of Ruysbroeck, a 14th-century Flemishmysticbeatified by Pope Pius X in 1908, wrote of "the uncreated Light, which is not God, but is the intermediary between Him and the 'seeing thought'" as illuminating the contemplative not in the highest mode of contemplation, but in the second of the four ascending modes.[44] Similar methods of prayer in use in the Roman Catholic Church are recitation, as recommended by Saint John Cassian, of "O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me" or other verses of Scripture; repetition of a single monosyllabic word, as suggested by the Cloud of Unknowing; the method used in Centering Prayer; the use of Lectio Divina; etc.[45]
In addition to Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, many Christians of other traditions also use the Jesus Prayer, primarily as a centering prayer or for contemplative prayer. The prayer is sometimes used with the Anglican Rosary. The structure and content of the Jesus Prayer also bears a resemblance to the "Sinner's Prayer" used by many Evangelical Protestants.
Jump up ^Antoine Guillaumont reports the finding of an inscription containing the Jesus Prayer in the ruins of a cell in the Egyptian desert dated roughly to the period being discussed – Antoine Guillaumont, Une inscription copte sur la prière de Jesus in Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, Pour une phénoménologie du monachisme, pp. 168–83. In Spiritualité orientale et vie monastique, No 30. Bégrolles en Mauges (Maine & Loire), France: Abbaye de Bellefontaine.
Jump up ^Eastern Orthodox theology doesn't stand Thomas Aquinas' interpretation to the Mystycal theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (modo sublimiori and modo significandi, by which Aquinas unites positive and negative theologies, transforming the negative one into a correction of the positive one). Like pseudo-Denys, the Eastern Church remarks the antinomy between the two ways of talking about God and acknowledges the superiority of apophatism. Cf. Vladimir Lossky, op. cit., p. 55, Dumitru Stăniloae, op. cit., pp. 261-262.
Jump up ^The Philokalia, Vol. 4 ISBN 0-571-19382-X Palmer, G.E.H; Sherrard, Philip; Ware, Kallistos (Timothy) On the Inner Nature of Things and on the Purification of the Intellect: One Hundred Texts Nikitas Stithatos (Nikitas Stethatos)
Jump up ^Olga Louchakova, Ontopoiesis and Union in the Jesus Prayer: Contributions to Psychotherapy and Learning, in Logos pf Phenomenology and Phenomenology of Logos. Book Four – The Logos of Scientific Interrogation. Participating in Nature-Life-Sharing in Life, Springer Ed., 2006, p. 292, ISBN 1-4020-3736-8. Google Scholar: [2].
^ Jump up to: ab(Romanian) Hristofor Panaghiotis, Rugăciunea lui Iisus. Unirea minţii cu inima şi a omului cu Dumnezeu (Jesus prayer. Uniting the mind with the heart and man with God by Panagiotis K. Christou), translation from Greek, second edition, Panaghia Ed., Rarău Monastery, Vatra Dornei, pp. 6, 12-15, 130, ISBN 978-973-88218-6-6.
Jump up ^Unite if referring to one person; reunite if talking at an anthropological level.
^ Jump up to: abc(Romanian)Puterea Numelui sau despre Rugăciunea lui Iisus (The Power of the Name. The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality) in Kallistos Ware, Rugăciune şi tăcere în spiritualitatea ortodoxă (Prayer and silence in the Orthodox spirituality), translation from English, Christiana Ed., Bucharest, 2003, p. 23, 26, ISBN 973-8125-42-1.
Jump up ^(Romanian) Fr. Ioan de la Rarău, Rugăciunea lui Iisus. Întrebări şi răspunsuri (Jesus Prayer. Questions and answers), Panaghia Ed., Rarău Monastery, Vatra Dornei, p. 97. ISBN 978-973-88218-6-6.
Jump up ^(Romanian)Ilie Cleopa in Dicţionarul teologilor români (Dictionary of Romanian Theologians), electronic version, Univers Enciclopedic Ed., Bucharest, 1996.
Jump up ^"The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios" by Dionysios Farasiotis
The Jesus Prayer: Learning to Pray from the Heart, by Per-Olof Sjögren, trans. by Sydney Linton; First Triangle ed. (London: Triangle, 1986, cop. 1975) ISBN 0-281-04237-3
For the character in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, see Gollum. For other uses, see Golem (disambiguation).
A Prague reproduction of the Golem.
In Jewish folklore, a golem (/ˈɡoʊləm/GOH-ləm; Hebrew: גולם) is an animated anthropomorphic being, magically created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material (usually out of stone and clay) in Psalms and medieval writing.[1] The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-16th-century rabbi of Prague. There are many tales differing on how the golem was brought to life and afterwards controlled.
The word golem occurs once in the Bible in Psalm 139:16, which uses the word גלמי (galmi; my golem),[2] meaning "my unshaped form,"[3] connoting the unfinished human being before God's eyes.[2] The Mishnah uses the term for an uncultivated person: "Seven characteristics are in an uncultivated person, and seven in a learned one," (שבעה דברים בגולם) (Pirkei Avot 5:6 in the Hebrew text; English translations vary). In Modern Hebrew, golem is used to mean "dumb" or "helpless." Similarly, it is often used today as a metaphor for a brainless lunk or entity who serves man under controlled conditions but is hostile to him under others.[citation needed]"Golem" passed into Yiddish as goylem to mean someone who is clumsy or slow.[citation needed]
The oldest stories of golems date to early Judaism. In the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 38b), Adam was initially created as a golem (גולם) when his dust was "kneaded into a shapeless husk". Like Adam, all golems are created from mud, by those close to divinity; but no anthropogenic golem is fully human. Early on, the main disability of the golem was its inability to speak. Sanhedrin 65b describes Rava creating a man (gavra). He sent the man to Rav Zeira. Rav Zeira spoke to him, but he did not answer. Rav Zeira said, "You were created by the sages; return to your dust". During the Middle Ages, passages from the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) were studied as a means to create and animate a golem, although there is little in the writings of Jewish mysticism that supports this belief. It was believed that golems could be activated by an ecstatic experience induced by the ritualistic use of various letters of the Hebrew Alphabet[1] forming a "shem" (any one of the Names of God), wherein the shem was written on a piece of paper and inserted in the mouth or in the forehead of the golem.[4] In some tales (for example, some versions of those of the golems of Chełm and Prague, as well as in Polish tales and version of Brothers Grimm), a golem is inscribed with Hebrew words, such as the word emet (אמת, "truth" in Hebrew) written on its forehead. The golem could then be deactivated by removing the aleph (א) in emet,[5] thus changing the inscription from "truth" to "death" (metמת, meaning "dead"). Other versions add that after creating an entity out of clay, it would be brought to life by placing into his mouth a shem with a magic formula, and could later be immobilized by pulling out the shem,[6] or by reversing the creative combinations, for, as Rabbi Jacob ben Shalom, who arrived at Barcelona from Germany in 1325, remarked, the law of destruction is the reversal of the law of creation.[7] Joseph Delmedigo informs us, in 1625, that "many legends of this sort are current, particularly in Germany".[8] The earliest known written account of how to create a golem can be found in Sodei Razayya by Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (1165–1230).
The oldest description of the creation of a golem by a historical figure is included in a tradition connected to Rabbi Eliyahu of Chełm (1550–1583).[1][2][8][9] A PolishKabbalist, writing in about 1630–1650, reported the creation of a golem by Rabbi Eliyahu thus: "And I have heard, in a certain and explicit way, from several respectable persons that one man [living] close to our time, whose name is R. Eliyahu, the master of the name, who made a creature out of matter [Heb. Golem] and form [Heb. tzurah] and it performed hard work for him, for a long period, and the name of emet was hanging upon his neck, until he finally removed it for a certain reason, the name from his neck and it turned to dust."[1] A similar account was reported by a Christian author, Christoph Arnold, in 1674.[1] Rabbi Jacob Emden (d. 1776) elaborated on the story in a book published in 1748: "As an aside, I'll mention here what I heard from my father's holy mouth regarding the Golem created by his ancestor, the Gaon R. Eliyahu Ba'al Shem of blessed memory. When the Gaon saw that the Golem was growing larger and larger, he feared that the Golem would destroy the universe. He then removed the Holy Name that was embedded on his forehead, thus causing him to disintegrate and return to dust. Nonetheless, while he was engaged in extracting the Holy Name from him, the Golem injured him, scarring him on the face."[10] According to the Polish Kabbalist, "the legend was known to several persons, thus allowing us to speculate that the legend had indeed circulated for some time before it was committed to writing and, consequently, we may assume that its origins are to be traced to the generation immediately following the death of R. Eliyahu, if not earlier."[1][11]
The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th century rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly created a golem to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attacks[12] and pogroms. Depending on the version of the legend, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. To protect the Jewish community, the rabbi constructed the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava river, and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations. The Golem was called Josef and was known as Yossele. It was said that he could make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead.[12] The only care required of the Golem was that he can't be alive on the day of Sabbath (Saturday).[6] Rabbi Loew deactivated the Golem on Friday evenings by removing the shem before the Sabbath began,[4][6] so as to let it rest on Sabbath.[4] One Friday evening Rabbi Loew forgot to remove the shem, and feared that the Golem would desecrate the Sabbath.[4] A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have the golem eventually going on a murderous rampage.[12] The rabbi then managed to pull the shem from his mouth and immobilize him[4][6] in front of the synagogue, whereupon the golem fell in pieces.[4] The Golem's body was stored in the attic genizah of the Old New Synagogue,[12] where it would be restored to life again if needed.[6] According to legend, the body of Rabbi Loew's Golem still lies in the synagogue's attic.[4][12] When the attic was renovated in 1883, no evidence of the Golem was found.[13] Some versions of the tale state that the Golem was stolen from the genizah and entombed in a graveyard in Prague's Žižkov district, where the Žižkov Television Tower now stands. A recent legend tells of a Nazi agent ascending to the synagogue attic during World War II and trying to stab the Golem, but he died instead.[14] A film crew who visited and filmed the attic in 1984 found no evidence either.[13] The attic is not open to the general public.[15] Some strictly orthodox Jews believe that the Maharal did actually create a golem. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the last Rebbe of Lubavitch) wrote that when his father-in-law, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, was asked about his experiences visiting the attic of the Old New Synagogue, he expressed that he was unwilling to speak about it. Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn did write in his memoirs that when he visited the Old New Synagogue's attic, his father was very grave when he descended back to the ground floor and said that he has recited psalms for his safety while he visited the attic. However, Shnayer L. Leiman writes in an article that Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn's Daughter Chana Gurary (Barry Gurary's mother) related to Rabbi Berel Junik that her father, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn had seen "[the] form of a man wrapped up and covered. The body was lying on its side." and that he said he was "very frightened by this sight. I looked around at some of the shemus (discarded ritual objects) that were there and left frightened by what I had seen."[16] Rabbi Chaim Noach Levin also wrote in his notes on Megillas Yuchsin[17] that he heard directly from Rabbi Yosef Shaul Halevi, the head of the Rabbinical court of Lemberg, that when he wanted to go see the remains of the Golem, the sexton of the Alt-Neu Shul said that Rabbi Yechezkel Landau had advised against going up to the attic after he himself had gone up.[18] The evidence for this belief has been analyzed from an orthodox Jewish perspective by Shnayer Z. Leiman.[13][19]
The general view of historians and critics is that the story of the Golem of Prague was a German literary invention of the early 19th century. According to Robert Zucker,[20]"the golem legend about R. Chełm moved to Prague and became related with" Rabbi Loew of Prague about mid-18th century. According to John Neubauer, the first writers on the Prague Golem were:
There is also a published account from 1838, written by the German Czech journalist Franz Klutschack.[22] Cathy Gelbin finds an earlier source in Philippson's The Golem and the Adulteress, published in the Jewish magazine Shulamit in 1834, which describes how the Maharal sent a golem to find the reason for an epidemic among the Jews of Prague,[9][23] although doubts have been expressed as to whether this date is correct.[24] The earliest known source for the story thus far is the 1834 book Der Jüdische Gil Blas by Josef Seligman Kohn.[25][26] The story was repeated in Galerie der Sippurim (1847), an influential collection of Jewish tales published by Wolf Pascheles of Prague. All these early accounts of the Golem of Prague are in German by Jewish writers. It has been suggested that they emerged as part of a Jewish folklore movement parallel with the contemporary German folklore movement[9][27] and that they may have been based on Jewish oral tradition.[27] The origins of the story have been obscured by attempts to exaggerate its age and to pretend that it dates from the time of the Maharal. It has been said that Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935)[28] of Tarłów (before moving to Canada where he became one of its most prominent rabbis) originated the idea that the narrative dates from the time of the Maharal. Rosenberg published Nifl'os Maharal (Wonders of Maharal) (Piotrków, 1909)[29] which purported to be an eyewitness account by the Maharal's son-in-law, who had helped to create the Golem. Rosenberg claimed that the book was based upon a manuscript that he found in the main library in Metz. Wonders of Maharal"is generally recognized in academic circles to be a literary hoax".[1][19][30]Gershom Sholem observed that the manuscript "contains not ancient legends but modern fiction".[31] Rosenberg's claim was further disseminated in Chayim Bloch's (1881–1973) The Golem, legends of the Ghetto of Prague (English edition 1925). The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 cites the historical work Zemach David by David Gans, a disciple of the Maharal, published in 1592.[4][32] In it, Gans writes of an audience between the Maharal and Rudolph II: "Our lord the emperor ... Rudolph ... sent for and called upon our master Rabbi Low ben Bezalel and received him with a welcome and merry expression, and spoke to him face to face, as one would to a friend. The nature and quality of their words are mysterious, sealed and hidden."[33] But it has been said of this passage, "Even when [the Maharal is] eulogized, whether in David Gans'Zemach David or on his epitaph …, not a word is said about the creation of a golem. No Hebrew work published in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries (even in Prague) is aware that the Maharal created a golem."[13][21] Furthermore, the Maharal himself did not refer to the Golem in his writings.[13] Rabbi Yedidiah Tiah Weil (1721–1805), a Prague resident, who described the creation of golems, including those created by Rabbis Avigdor Kara of Prague (died 1439) and Eliyahu of Chelm, did not mention the Maharal, and Rabbi Meir Perels' biography of the Maharal[34] published in 1718 does not mention a golem.[9][13]
There is a similar tradition relating to the Vilna Gaon or "the saintly genius from Vilnius" (1720–1797). Rabbi Chaim Volozhin (Lithuania 1749–1821) reported in an introduction to Siphra Dzeniouta (1818)[35] that he once presented to his teacher, the Vilna Gaon, ten different versions of a certain passage in the Sefer Yetzira and asked the Gaon to determine the correct text. The Gaon immediately identified one version as the accurate rendition of the passage. The amazed student then commented to his teacher that, with such clarity, he should easily be able to create a live human. The Gaon affirmed Rabbi Chaim's assertion, and said that he once began to create a person when he was a child, under the age of 13, but during the process he received a sign from Heaven ordering him to desist because of his tender age.[36] (See also discussion in Hans Ludwig Held (de), Das Gespenst des Golem, eine Studie aus d. hebräischen Mystik mit einem Exkurs über das Wesen des Doppelgängers[37] München 1927.) The Vilna Gaon wrote an extensive commentary on the Sefer Yetzira,[38]Kol HaTor, in which it is said that he had tried to create a Golem to fight the power of evil at the Gates of Jerusalem.[39] As far as we know, the Vilna Gaon was the only rabbi who had actually claimed that he tried to create a Golem; all such stories about other rabbis were told after their time.
The existence of a golem is sometimes a mixed blessing. Golems are not intelligent, and if commanded to perform a task, they will perform the instructions literally. In many depictions Golems are inherently perfectly obedient. In its earliest known modern form, the Golem of Chełm became enormous and uncooperative. In one version of this story, the rabbi had to resort to trickery to deactivate it, whereupon it crumbled upon its creator and crushed him.[2] There is a similar hubris theme in Frankenstein, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and some other golem-derived stories in popular culture, for example: The Terminator. The theme also manifests itself in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), Karel Čapek's 1921 play which coined the term robot; the play was written in Prague, and while Čapek denied that he modeled the robot after the Golem, there are many similarities in the plot.[40]
The Golem is a popular figure in the Czech Republic. There are several restaurants and other businesses whose names make reference to the creature, a Czech strongman (René Richter) goes by the nickname "Golem",[12] and a Czech monster truck outfit calls itself the "Golem Team". Abraham Akkerman preceded his article on human automatism in the contemporary city with a short satirical poem on a pair of golems turning human.[41]
A Yiddish and Slavic folktale is the Clay Boy, which combines elements of the Golem and The Gingerbread Man, in which a lonely couple make a child out of clay, with disastrous or comical consequences.[42] In one common Russian version, an older couple whose children have left home make a boy out of clay, and dry him by their hearth. The Clay Boy comes to life; at first the couple are delighted and treat him like a real child, but the Clay Boy does not stop growing, and eats all their food, then all their livestock, and then the Clay Boy eats his parents. The Clay Boy rampages through the village until he is smashed by a quick-thinking goat.[43]
Mainstream European society adopted the golem in the early 20th century. Most notably, Gustav Meyrink's 1914 novel Der Golem is loosely inspired by the tales of the golem created by Rabbi Loew. Another famous treatment from the same era is H. Leivick's 1921 Yiddish-language "dramatic poem in eight sections", The Golem. In 1923, Roumanian composer Nicolae Bretan wrote the one-act opera The Golem, first performed the following year in Cluj and later revived in Denver, Colorado, US in 1990. Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer also wrote a version of the legend,[clarification needed] and Elie Wiesel wrote a children's book on the legend.[clarification needed] In 1958, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges published a poem about the golem using the image of the golem creature and the creator/creature Rabbi Loew, called Juda Leon. The work addressed a circular argument among the creator and the creation, the name, and the meaning of the name using the argument of Cratylus. In 1974, Marvel Comics published three Strange Tales comic books that included a golem character, and later series included variations of the golem idea.[44] Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series of novels (1980–1990), which features two parallel worlds—one ruled by technology and the other by magic—draws a parallel between robots and golems. Additionally, Grundy the Golem is a character in his Xanth series. The novels of Terry Pratchett in the fictional setting of Discworld also include several golems as characters. For example, they are a plot device in the 1996 novel Feet of Clay, in which the golems create their own golem. The golems of Discworld are also much more intelligent than most representations; though still bound to obedience, if they feel they are mistreated they will take an obstructively literal interpretation of their orders as a form of rebellion. The golems also figure into the sub-series featuring Moist von Lipwig that begins with Going Postal. Von Lipwig's love interest, Adora Belle Dearheart, runs the Golem Trust, whose purpose is to free all golems on the Discworld. Although this also becomes the stated purpose of the golem Dorfl from Feet of Clay, he and the Golem Trust have not interacted professionally as of Making Money. Golem is a 1996 children's book by David Wisniewski that tells the illustrated story of the golem. In Cynthia Ozick's 1997 novel The Puttermesser Papers, a modern Jewish woman, Ruth Puttermesser, creates a female golem out of the dirt in her flowerpots to serve as the daughter she never had. The golem helps Puttermesser become elected Mayor of New York before it begins to run out of control. Pete Hamill's 1997 novel Snow In August includes a story of a rabbi from Prague who has a golem.[45]
A recent representation of a golem by illustrator Philippe Semeria. The Hebrew letters on the creature's head read "emet", meaning "truth". In some versions of the Chełm and Prague narratives, the Golem is killed by removing the first letter, making the word spell "met," meaning "dead."
Michael Chabon's 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, features one of the protagonists, escape artist Josef Kavalier, smuggling himself out of Prague along with the golem. Petrie describes the theme of escape in the novel, culminating in Kavalier's own drawing of a modern graphic novel centered around a golem.[46] In James Sturm's 2001 graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing, a Jewish baseball team in the 1920s creates a golem to help them win their games. In the Michael Scott novel "The Alchemyst", the immortal Dr. John Dee attacked Nicholas Flamel with two golems, which, along with being made of mud, each had a pair of shiny stone "eyes". Jonathan Stroud's children's fantasy book The Golem's Eye centers around a golem created by magicians in an alternate London. The story depicts the golem as being impervious to magical attacks. The golem is finally destroyed by removing the creation parchment from its mouth. In Byron L. Sherwin's 2006 novel "The Cubs and the Kabbalist", rabbis create a golem named Sandy Greenberg to help baseball's Chicago Cubs win the World Series. In 2009, horror writer Edward Lee released the novel Golemesque, later retitled The Golem when released in mass market paperback form in which corpses are transformed into golems via mystic rites performed by a satanic sect of Kaballah and by covering the bodies with special clay taken from the banks of the Vltava river in the Czech Republic. In 2010, medieval mystery author Jeri Westerson, depicted her version of a golem terrifying the streets of fourteenth century London in the third book of her Crispin Guest series, The Demon's Parchment.[47] In the 2013 Helene Wecker novel The Golem and the Jinni, the golem is a female creature named Chava who is brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who practices dark Kabbalistic magic. In the 2014 Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman novel The Golem of Hollywood, the golem of Prague comes to 21st century Los Angeles to exact justice on a serial killer. Through a parallel mythological narrative the creation of the Golem is linked to the story of Cain and Abel.
Inspired by Gustav Meyrink's novel was a classic set of expressionisticsilent movies (1915–1920), Paul Wegener's Golem series, of which The Golem: How He Came into the World (also released as The Golem, 1920, USA 1921: the only surviving film of the trilogy) is especially famous. In the first film the golem is revived in modern times before falling from a tower and breaking apart.
A golem had a main role now in the color 1951 Czech movie Císařův pekař a pekařův císař released in the US as The Emperor and the Golem. In The Emperor and the Golem, the shem used to activate the Golem had the form of a small ball placed in his forehead.
A 1966 British/American film entitled It!, starring Roddy McDowall, was about a golem.
The Golem of Prague figures prominently in "Golem," a second-season episode of the animated series Gargoyles. One of the characters trying to re-animate it is a descendant of Rabbi Loew.
A 1997 episode of Chris Carter's television series The X-Files, called "Kaddish" (S4E15), was focused on golems. The plot involved a Jewish man dying from an anti-Semitic attack, then being resurrected by his fiancée to kill the men who murdered him. A golem-like creature can also be seen in a 1999 episode "Arcadia" (S6E15).
In 2012, two back-to-back episodes of the children's horror series R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series featured a golem. The two-part episode, "The Golem" (S3E10&11), tells a story of a golem that was raised by a ved'ma during the second world war to protect a small, Russian village from German soldiers. The ved'ma, named Nadia, keeps the golem dormant thereafter, but as she grows weak on her deathbed, she finds herself no longer able to keep the golem dormant. The golem resurrects and begins terrorising the Russian village it once saved. Nadia's grandchildren, Jeremy and Bonnie, visit the village and lay the golem to rest for good. Jeremy achieves this by blowing a few of his grandmother's ashes onto the golem.
In 2013, the fantasy/horror series "Sleepy Hollow" episode "The Golem" has a Golem which was made by Jeremy Crane (or Henry Parish/The Horseman of War) when he was beaten at his "Foster Care" home. When Jeremy bled onto the Golem he gave it life and killed his master's enemies. After Jeremy has supposedly died, the Golem was trapped in "Purgatory" until it woke up and started killing the coven which killed Jeremy. The Golem was finally stopped when Jeremy's father, Ichabod, killed the Golem with his blood as Golems can only be stopped by injecting the master's or a relative of the master's blood.
In 2013, the fantasy/horror series Supernatural episode "Everybody Hates Hitler" (S8E13) features a golem that is used by a secret association of rabbis.; The show explains that the golem has been a protector for the Jewish people for years, especially in times of war or genocide. Specifically, this golem, created by the Judah Initiative during the Holocaust, is being used to fight a society of Nazi necromancers called the Thule Society. Unlike most golem, it can speak and frequently voices its disapproval of the fact that its new master is not an observant Jew.
In Shonen Jump's Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal; the main protagonist Yuma Tsukumo, uses a monster card known as Gogogo Golem in his deck.
In 2014 in the Grimm S04E04 a Golem was called upon by a Rabbi to protect his nephew but it starts killing everyone who scared the boy.
Golem is also a dual Rock/Ground type creature (Pokémon #76) in the video game series, animated TV show, and card game Pokémon. Golem is the evolved form of Graveler, who is in turn the evolved form of Geodude, and they all first appeared in the 1996 game Pokémon Red and Blue. Regirock, Registeel, and Regice are legendary Pokémon introduced in Generation III were based on the Hebrew Golems; therefore, the name for the trio is the Legendary Golems. A fourth golem and the master of the trio, Regigigas, was introduced in Generation IV. Generation V introduced two other Pokémon heavily based on the Golem: Golett and Golurk. Golett was supposedly created by ancient scientists as a defense, and Golurk's seal on his chest controls his internal energy, and it is said it loses control of that energy once the seal is removed.
^ Jump up to: abcdefgIdel, Moshe (1990). Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. ISBN0-7914-0160-X. page 296
Jump up ^שו"ת שאילת יעב"ץ, ח"ב, סי'פ"ב. Cf. his בירת מגדל עוז, Altona, 1748, p. 259a; מטפחת ספרים, Altona, 1768, p. 45a; and מגילת ספר, ed. Kahana, Warsaw, 1896, p. 4. See also שו"ת חכם צבי, סי'צ"ג, and the references cited in שו"ת חכם צבי עם ליקוטי הערות, Jerusalem, 1998, vol. 1, p. 421 and in the periodical כפר חב"ד, number 351 (1988), p. 51. Cited by Leiman, S.Z., "Did a Disciple of the Maharal Create a Golem?"
Jump up ^The tradition is also recorded in ה לחורבנה / תל-אביב : ארגון יוצאי חלם בישראל ובארה"ב, תשמ"א
^ Jump up to: abcdefBilefsky, Dan (May 10, 2009). "Hard Times Give New Life to Prague's Golem". New York Times. Retrieved 2013-03-19. According to Czech legend, the Golem was fashioned from clay and brought to life by a rabbi to protect Prague's 16th-century ghetto from persecution, and is said to be called forth in times of crisis. True to form, he is once again experiencing a revival and, in this commercial age, has spawned a one-monster industry.
Jump up ^See also Jewish Encyclopedia (1906): "A legend connected with [the Maharal's] Golem is given in German verse by Gustav Philippson in Allg. Zeit. des Jud. 1841, No. 44 (abridged in Sulamith, viii. 254; translated into Hebrew in Kokebe Yiẓḥaḳ, No. 28, p. 75, Vienna, 1862)"
Jump up ^Akkerman, Abraham (2003–2004). "Philosophical Urbanism and Deconstruction in City-Form: An Environmental Ethos for the Twenty-First Century". Structurist. 43/44: 48–61. Published also as Paper CTS-04-06 by the Center for Theoretical Study, Prague.
Jump up ^Cronan, Mary W. (1917). "Lutoschenka". The Story Teller's Magazine5 (1): 7–9.
Jump up ^Lipsyte, Robert (May 4, 1997). "Shazam!". New York Times on the Web. Retrieved 24 February 2012. kabbala and the golem. ... rabbi, a lonely refugee from Prague.
Jump up ^Petrie, Windy Counsell (2007). "For Illumination and Escape: Writing and Rgeneration in 21st Century Jewish-American Literature". LITERATÛRA49 (5): 105–107. ISSN0258-0802. Jewish Golem out of Prague into Vilnius
Bilski, Emily B. (1988). Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art. New York: The Jewish Museum. ISBN978-0873340496.
Bloch, Chayim; tr. Schneiderman, H. (1987). The Golem: Mystical Tales of the Ghetto of Prague (English translation from German. First published in 'Oestereschischen Wochenschrift' 1917). New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications. ISBN0833400258.
Chihaia, Matei (2011). Der Golem-Effekt. Orientierung und phantastische Immersion im Zeitalter des Kinos. Bielefeld: transcript. ISBN978-3-8376-1714-6.
Faucheux, Michel (2008). Norbert Wiener, le golem et la cybernétique. Paris: Editions du Sandre.
Dennis, Geoffrey (2007). The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism. Woodbury (MN): Llewellyn Worldwide. ISBN0-7387-0905-0.
Winkler, Gershon (1980). The Golem of Prague: A New Adaptation of the Documented Stories of the Golem of Prague. New York: Judaica Press. ISBN0-910818-25-8.
Goldsmith, Arnold L. (1981). The Golem Remembered 1909–1980: Variations of a Jewish Legend. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN0814316832.
Montiel, Luis (30 June 2013). "Proles sine matre creata: The Promethean Urge in the History of the Human Body in the West". Asclepio65 (1): p001. doi:10.3989/asclepio.2013.01.
Idel, Mosche (1990). Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press. ISBN0-7914-0160-X.
Rosenberg, Yudl; tr. Leviant, Curt (2008). The Golem and the Wondrous deeds of the Maharal of Prague (first English translation of original in Hebrew, Pietrkow, Poland, 1909). Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-12204-6.
Speaking of empty illusion, it is illusion when created and illusion when experienced too; it is illusion when you are knowing and aware and illusion when your are lost in delusion too! Past, present and future are all illusions. (…) In the daily activities of a student of the Path, to empty objects is easy, but to empty mind is hard. If objects are empty but mind is not empty, mind will be overcome by objects. Just empty the mind and objects will be empty of themselves! Once this mind is empty, then what is there outside of mind that can be emptied?
Think again! The above are quotes from the lectures and letters of ZEN master Ta Hui as compiled in the book Swampland Flowers, translated by J.C. Cleary. Posted here today in support of my review of yet another great movie advancing Buddhist notions. This one has been sitting in my DVD collection for some years, only to be re-discovered the other day: What Dreams May Come directed by Vincent Ward with Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding Junior.
The understanding that all of reality is mind constructed and even the experience of birth and death or heaven and hell is nothing but a mind powered illusion, is perfectly illustrated in this movie which won acclaim for its visual power. Here some of the more interesting conversations between Cuba Gooding Junior and Robin Williams plus a few visuals from this mind adventure.
After dying in a car accident, Chris alias Robin Williams finds himself on a journey that is limited only by his own imagination and personal views of reality…
RW: Oh, am I really here? CGJ: What do you mean by you anyway? Are you your arm or your leg? If you lost all your limbs, wouldn’t it still be you? RW: Yeah, I’d still be me. CGJ: So, what is the me? RW: My brain I suppose. CGJ: Your brain is a body part, like your fingernail or your heart. Which part is that you think is you? RW: Because I have that sort of voice in my head, that part of me that thinks and feels. That is aware that I exist at all. CGJ: So, if you are aware you exist, then you do. That’s why you are still here. Look, your brain is meat, it rots and disappears. Did you really think that’s all there is to you? RW: But it looks like I rebuilt myself, huh? CGJ: You see a body because you like seeing one. We are seeing what we choose to see. This is your world! Thought is real! Physical is the illusion!
Even the old Greeks already had a term for the notion that mind only sees and accepts as reality what it wants or expects to see. They called it Scotoma (see Wikipedia for details).
CGJ: Here is big enough for everyone to have their own private universe! RW: And what does that mean Buddha? I want to see my children (who died previously)! CGJ: And when you really do, you will.
The movie also ventures into the Buddhist notion that we do not always re-create ourselves exactly as we appeared in our last life. Sometimes we change gender and race during the rebirth process. And sometimes we are not even lucky enough to be born as a human being to begin with and may appear as a tree or a butterfly or an elephant… Not the best possible choice as the animal kingdom is defined by delusion, with close to no understanding of how any of this really works.
Ultimately, there are neither humans nor Buddhas! The universe is like a bubble in the ocean and all phenomena are like flashes of lightening. And anything else we might perceive as physical reality is created by The One Mind as an illusion, a mirage, as the moon reflected in a pool of water, based strictly on our own State of Mind so that we may feel secure and protected in our little comfort zones. So that we may convince ourselves there is meaning and substance to life as we know it.
But that isn’t even close to what is possible, or real!
Good people create their very own hell because they are unable to come to terms with their own reality. Because they can’t forgive themselves – or anybody else – for their actions and thoughts. Good people create their own heaven because they are able to live without lying, cheating, flattering and deceiving anybody for any reason. By pursuing a life that contains no discrimination of judgement or judged, good or evil, based on any given superficial man-made perception of right or wrong.
What’s true in our mind is true! What we believe to be real is reality! Mind is real! Physical reality is the illusion!
Jean Walker (first spouse maiden name), Jessie Richards Dwight (second and last spouse maiden name)
Children
Richard and Ann
Parent(s)
William Orage, Sarah Anne McGuire (mother's maiden name)
Relatives
David, Marcus, Linnet, Carolyn, Piers, Toby and Peregrine (grandchildren)
Alfred Richard Orage (22 January 1873 – 6 November 1934) was a British intellectual, now best known for editing the magazine The New Age. While he was working as a schoolteacher in Leeds he pursued various interests, including Plato, the Independent Labour Party and theosophy. In 1900 he met Holbrook Jackson and three years later they co-founded the Leeds Arts Club, which became a centre of modernist culture in Britain. In 1905 Orage resigned his teaching position and moved to London. There, in 1907, he bought and began editing the weekly The New Age, at first with Holbrook Jackson, and became an influential figure in socialist politics and modernist culture, especially at the height of the magazine's fame before the First World War.[1] In 1924 Orage sold The New Age and went to France to work with George Gurdjieff, the spiritual teacher whom P. D. Ouspensky had recommended to him. After spending some time on preliminary training in the Gurdjieff System Orage was sent to America by Gurdjieff himself to raise funds and lecture on the new system of self-development, which emphasised the harmonious work of intellectual, emotional and moving functions. Orage also worked with Gurdjieff in translating the first version of Gurdjieff's All and Everything as well as Meetings with Remarkable Men from Russian to English, but neither book was ever published in their lifetimes. In 1927 Orage's first wife, Jean, granted him a divorce and in September he married Jessie Richards Dwight (1901–1985), the co-owner of the Sunwise Turn bookshop where Orage first lectured on the Gurdjieff System. Orage and Jessie had two children, Richard and Ann. While they were in New York Orage and Jessie often catered to celebrities such as Paul Robeson, fresh from his London tour. In 1930 Orage returned to England and in 1931 he began publishing the New English Weekly. He remained in London until his death on 6 November 1934.[2]
James Alfred Orage was born in Dacre, near Harrogate in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a Nonconformist family. He was generally known as Dickie, and he eventually dropped the name James and adopted the middle name Richard. In 1894 he became a schoolteacher in an elementary school in Leeds and helped to found the Leeds branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). He wrote a weekly literary column for the ILP's paper, the Labour Leader, from 1895 to 1897. He brought a philosophical outlook to the paper, including in particular the thought of Plato and Edward Carpenter. Orage devoted seven years of study to Plato, from 1893 to 1900. He also devoted seven years of his life to the study of Nietzsche's philosophy, from 1900 to 1907, and from 1907 to 1914 he was a student of the Mahabharata.[3] By the late 1890s Orage was disillusioned with conventional socialism and turned for a while to theosophy. In 1900 he met Holbrook Jackson in a Leeds bookshop and lent him a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita. In return Jackson lent him Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which led Orage to study Nietzsche's work in depth. In 1903 Orage, Jackson and the architect Arthur J. Penty helped to found the Leeds Arts Club with the intention of promoting the work of radical thinkers including G. B. Shaw, whom Orage had met in 1898, Henrik Ibsen and Nietzsche. During this period Orage returned to socialist platforms, but by 1906 he was determined to combine Carpenter's socialism with Nietzsche's thought and theosophy. In 1906 Beatrice Hastings, whose real name was Emily Alice Haigh and who hailed from Port Elizabeth, became a regular contributor to the New Age. By 1907 she and Orage had developed an intimate relationship. As Beatrice Hastings herself later put it, ″Aphrodite amused herself at our expense.″[4] Orage's involvement with Beatrice Hastings was too much for Orage's wife Jean, who had shared his theosophical and aesthetic interests until then. She went to live with Holbrook Jackson and spent the rest of her life as a skilled craftswoman in the tradition of William Morris. Orage explored his new ideas in several books. He saw Nietzsche's Übermensch as a metaphor for the "higher state of consciousness" sought by mystics and attempted to define a route to this higher state, insisting that it must involve a rejection of civilisation and conventional morality. He moved through a celebration of Dionysus to declare that he was in favour, not of an ordered socialism, but of an anarchic movement.[5] In 1906 and 1907 Orage published three books: Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superhuman, based on his experience with theosophy; Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age; and Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism. Orage's rational critique of theosophy evoked an editorial rebuttal from The Theosophical Review and in 1907 he terminated his association with the Theosophical Society. The two books on Nietzsche were the first systematic introductions to Nietzschean thought to be published in Britain.[6]
In 1906 Orage resigned his teaching post and moved to London, following Arthur Penty, another friend from the Leeds Art Club. In London Orage attempted to form a league for the restoration of the guild system, in the spirit of the decentralised socialism of William Morris. The failure of this project spurred him to buy the weekly magazine The New Age in 1907, in partnership with Holbrook Jackson and with the support of George Bernard Shaw. Orage transformed the magazine to fit with his conception of a forum for politics, literature and the arts. Although many contributors were Fabians, he distanced himself from their politics to some extent and sought to have the magazine represent a wide range of political views. He used the magazine to launch attacks on parliamentary politics and argued the need for utopianism. He also attacked the trade union leadership, while offering some support to syndicalism, and tried to combine syndicalism with his ideal of a revived guild system. Combining these two ideas resulted in Guild socialism, the political philosophy Orage began to argue for from about 1910, though the specific term "guild socialism" seems not to have been mentioned in print until Bertrand Russell referred to it in his book Political Ideals (1917).[7] Between 1908 and 1914 The New Age was the premier little magazine in Britain. It was instrumental in pioneering the British avant-garde, from vorticism to imagism, and its contributors included T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Herbert Read. Orage's success as an editor was connected with his talent as a conversationalist and a ″bringer together″ of people. The modernists of London had been scattered between 1905 and 1910, but largely thanks to Orage a sense of a modernist ″movement″ was created from 1910 onwards.[8]
Orage declared himself a socialist and followed Georges Sorel in arguing that trade unions should pursue an increasingly aggressive policy on wage deals and working conditions. He approved of the increasing militancy of the unions in the era before the First World War and seems to have shared Sorel's belief in the necessity of a union-led General Strike leading to a revolutionary situation.[9] However, for Orage economic power precedes political power, and political reform was useless without economic reform.[10] In the early issues of The New Age Orage supported the women's suffrage movement, but he became increasingly hostile to it as the Women's Social and Political Union became more prominent and more militant. Pro-suffragette articles were not published after 1910, but heated debate on this subject took place in the correspondence columns. During the First World War Orage defended what he saw as the interests of the working class. On 6 August 1914 he wrote in Notes of the Week in The New Age: ″We believe that England is necessary to Socialism, as Socialism is necessary to the world.″ On 14 November 1918 Orage wrote of the coming peace settlement (embodies in the Treaty of Versailles): "The next world war, if unhappily there should be another, will in all probability be contained within the clauses and conditions attaching to the present peace settlement." By then Orage was convinced that the hardships of the working class were the result of the monetary policies of banks and governments. If Britain could remove the pound from the gold standard during the war and re-establish the gold standard after the war, then the gold standard was not as necessary as the monetary oligarchs wanted the proletariat to believe it was. On 15 July 1920 Orage wrote: ″We should be the first to admit that the subject of Money is difficult to understand. It is 'intended' to be, by the minute oligarchy that governs the world by means of it."[11] After the First World War Orage was influenced by C. H. Douglas and became a supporter of the social credit movement. On 2 January 1919 Orage published the first article by C. H. Douglas to appear in The New Age: ″A Mechanical View of Economics″.[12]
Orage had met P. D. Ouspensky for the first time in 1914. Ouspensky's ideas had left a lasting impression and when he moved to London in 1921 Orage began attending his lectures on "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching", the basis of his book In Search of the Miraculous. From this time onwards Orage became less and less interested in literature and art, and instead focused most of his attention on mysticism. His correspondence with Harry Houdini on this subject moved him to explore ideas of the afterlife. He returned to the idea that there are absolute truths and concluded that they are embodied in the Mahabharata. In February 1922 Ouspensky introduced Orage to G. I. Gurdjieff. Orage sold The New Age and moved to Paris to study at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. In 1924 Gurdjieff appointed him to lead study groups in the United States, which he did for seven years. Soon after Gurdjieff arrived in New York from France, on 13 November 1930, he deposed Orage and disbanded his study groups, believing that Orage had been teaching them incorrectly: they had been working under the misconception that self-observation could be practised in the absence of self-remembering or in the presence of negative emotions. Members were allowed to continue their studies with Gurdjieff himself, after taking an oath not to communicate with Orage. Upon hearing that Orage had also signed the oath Gurdjieff wept. Gurdjieff had once considered Orage as a friend and brother, and thought of Jessie as a bad choice for a mate. Orage was a chain smoker and Jessie was a heavy drinker.[13] In the privately published Third Series of his writings Gurdjieff wrote of Orage and his wife Jessie: ″his romance had ended in his marrying the saleswoman of 'Sunwise Turn,' a young American pampered out of all proportion to her position...″[14] Orage, Ouspensky and C. Daly King emphasised certain aspects of the Gurdjieff System while ignoring others. According to Gurdjieff, Orage emphasised self-observation. In Harlem, New York City, Jean Toomer, one of Orage's students at Greenwich Village used Gurdjieff's work to confront the problem of racism.[15] The Orages sailed back to New York from England on the S.S. Washington on 29 December 1930, and arrived on Thursday 8 January 1931. The next day, while they were staying at the Irving Hotel, Orage wrote a letter to Gurdjieff unveiling a plan for the publication of All and Everything before the end of the year and promising a substantial amount of money.[16] At lunch in New York City on 21 February 1931 Achmed Abdulla, a.k.a. Nadir Kahn, told the Orages that he had met Gurdjieff in Tibet and that Gurdjieff had been known there as Lama Dordjieff, a Tsarist agent and tutor to the Dalai Lama.[17]
In London Orage became involved in politics again through the social credit movement. He returned to New York on 8 January 1931 in an attempt to meet Gurdjieff's new demands, but he told his wife that he would not be teaching the Gurdjieff System to any group past the end of the Spring. Orage was on the pier on 13 March 1931 to bid Gurdjieff farewell on his way back to France and the Orages sailed back to England on 3 July. In April 1932 Orage founded a new journal, The New English Weekly. Dylan Thomas's first published poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, appeared in its issue dated 18 May 1933, but by then the magazine was not selling well and Orage was experiencing financial difficulties. In September 1933 Jessie gave birth to a daughter, Ann. In January 1934 Senator Bronson M. Cutting presented Orage's Social Credit Plan to the United States Senate, proposing that it become one of the tools of Roosevelt's economic policy. At the beginning of August 1934 Gurdjieff asked Orage to prepare a new edition of The Herald of Coming Good. On 20 August Orage wrote his last letter to Gurdjieff: "Dear Mr Gurdjieff, I've found very little to revise ..."[18] Towards the end of his life Orage was attacked by severe pain below the heart. This ailment had been diagnosed a couple of years before as simply functional and he did not again seek medical advice. While he was broadcasting a speech, "Property in Plenty", once again expounding the doctrine of social credit, he experienced excruciating pain, but he continued as if nothing was happening. After leaving the studio he spent the evening with his wife and friends, and made plans to see the doctor next day, but he died in his sleep that night.[19] Orage's former students of the Gurdjieff System arranged for the enneagram to be inscribed on his tombstone.
Political and Economic Writings from 'The New English Weekly', 1932-34, with a Preliminary Section from 'The New Age' 1912 (1936), edited by Montgomery Butchart, with the advice of Maurice Colbourne, T. S. Eliot, Philip Mairet, Will Dyson and others
Essays and Aphorisms (1954)
The Active Mind: Adventures in Awareness (1954)
Orage as Critic (1974), edited by Wallace Martin
Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman (1978)
A. R. Orage's Commentaries on Gurdjieff's "All and Everything", edited by C. S. Nott
Jump up ^Carswell, John (1978). Lives and Letters. New Directions Publishing. pp. 28–31. ISBN0-8112-0681-5. ...his little book introducing the philosophy of Nietzche... appeared in 1906...
Jump up ^Luckhurst, Roger (2002). The Invention of Telepathy (1870-1901). Oxford University Press. p. 257. ISBN0-19-924962-8. ...the main problem of the mystics of all ages has been the problem of how to develop the superconsciousness, of how to become supermen.
Jump up ^Orage, A. R. (1975). Wallace Martin, ed. Orage as Critic. Routledge. pp. 6–7. ISBN0-7100-7982-6. ...Orage did not lack activities to engage his intellectual interests.
Jump up ^Gurdjieff, George (1978). Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am (2nd private ed.). New York: Triangle Editions, Inc. p. 67. LCCN 75-15225. On the first evening of my arrival in New York...
Jump up ^Gurdjieff, George (1978). Life is Real Only Then, When I Am (2nd Private ed.). New York: Triangle Editions Inc. p. 95. LCCN 75-15225. ...Mr Orage ... realising the necessity and at the same time all the difficulties of getting means on the one hand for sending money to me, and on the other hand for meeting the excessive expenditures of his new family life...
Jump up ^Woodson, Jon (1999). To Make a New Race. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp. 38–41. ISBN1-57806-131-8. Jean Toomer...was encouraged by Orage to undertake groups of his own.
Jump up ^Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. p. 173. ISBN1-57863-128-9. Dear and kind author of The Tales of Beelzebub...
Jump up ^Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. p. 178. ISBN1-57863-128-9. On St Valentine's day ...bootleg whisky Gurdjieff had offered them in honor of the Saint of Love.
Jump up ^Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. pp. 179–194. ISBN1-57863-128-9. There has been a great fight here over the question of Orage. Now I understand Orage has returned to the fold.
Jump up ^Philip Mairet A. R. Orage: A Memoir, pp. 118-120, University Books, 1966 ASIN: B000Q0VV8E; 1st ed. 1936
We’ve all had one or two of those dreams that turn out to be eerily similar to an event we later experience. Or those times when we start thinking about someone right before they call. Some of these episodes are easy to dismiss as coincidences, but other times the correlation is so striking that it gets us thinking about stranger possibilities. My own experiences with such events have led me to investigate the literature of parapsychology: that branch of psychology that deals with the phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, and the like, collectively referred to as psi (pronounced like “sigh”). Anyone familiar with this literature will know that, while there is a lot of experimental evidence that is strongly suggestive of the existence of psi phenomena, the effects are usually small under laboratory conditions—so small that it’s tempting for critics to dismiss them as artifacts of faulty experimental design. Even though I myself am quite open to the existence of telepathy and other varieties of extrasensory perception, I can sometimes find myself wondering just how much these experiments really prove. Maybe there’s something extrasensory going on deep in our minds, but even if there is, can it ever really have an effect that’s strong enough to get excited about? And then along comes the work of neuroscientist and psychiatrist Diane Powell, which has the potential to change everything. Dr. Diane Powell has just completed her first study of telepathy in autistic savants, and the results are rather astounding. Powell started out intrigued by the fact that the incredible abilities of autistic savants—abilities which are firmly accepted by mainstream scientists, mind you—nevertheless remain just as unexplained as psychic abilities. She thought she might have a chance of learning something about how telepathy works by studying savants. And in fact she discovered early on that mathematical savants, when asked about the process they go through to do complex calculations, say that they don’t go through a process. The answer just pops into their heads. To Powell, this sounded suspiciously like psi. So she began to wonder if maybe some savant skills were actually the result of psychic abilities. When word got out of her interest in the connections between the two, she received information about a 9-year-old autistic savant whose therapists had already begun to wonder if she might be telepathic. This girl was labeled a mathematical savant and was able to produce correct answers when asked to multiply six-digit numbers by each other or to find cube roots of six-digit numbers. But one of her therapists noticed that, when the therapist made a mistake in stating the problem or in figuring it on the calculator or computer, the girl’s answer would mirror the mistake. Another therapist independently began to get the feeling that the girl was reading her mind. So she asked her, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in German?” even though the girl had never been exposed to that language. The girl typed out, “Ich liebe dich.” Powell decided the case merited investigation. So Powell met the girl and set up an experimental protocol which made it very difficult (though not entirely impossible) for her to gain any visual information from the therapist interacting with her. A barrier was placed between them, and, as Powell explained in a recent interview with Skeptiko podcast host Alex Tsakiris, “We had cameras documenting the experimental space entirely. We had cameras in front of them, behind them, mounted on either side of the divider, so that we saw everything. It was capable of a frame-by-frame analysis and we had a total of five different camera views watching everything.” The room also contained three separate microphones. And while everything was being so carefully recorded, Powell fed the therapist papers with equations—equations containing large numbers produced by a random number generator. The therapist then asked the girl to tell them not only the “solution” side of the equation, but each number on the “problem” side as well. Powell explains, “There was a period of about ten minutes of where…out of 162 random numbers…she only made 7 errors. And each one of those she corrected on the second try.” Of course, Powell’s work will have to be scrutinized and replicated by her peers. But her results already appear to stand head and shoulders above those obtained in any other controlled experimental context. Nothing close to this level of purported psi has ever been so thoroughly documented. Powell’s work also captures some of the girl’s very telling “mistakes.” When the therapist mistook a cube root sign for division by three, the girl didn’t carry out the operation of division that was verbally indicated to her. Instead, she gave the cube root as it was correctly listed on the paper given to the therapist. All signs point to this girl’s gifts’ being in the area of telepathy, not mathematical genius. Which is not to say that there are not genuine mathematical savants. It’s simply to say that in at least this one case, there is intriguing evidence that we are dealing with something even more revolutionary. Diane Powell’s publication of this research is due shortly. In the meantime, check out her interview with Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko. Powell has also published a very short video of some of her work with this autistic subject, available on the website where she is raising funding for a more rigorous series of experiments and a full-length documentary of her results. This short video alone doesn’t prove anything, but it is a way for people to get an idea of the experimental set-up she was working with in this first round of experiments. She plans to post further videos as soon as her videographer can obscure the faces of all the participants. ————————— Update: There is now a longer (15-minute) video without voiceover published here. Some discussion of Powell’s methodology can be found under the “Updates” tab of her Indiegogo site.
* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. This notice is not to be removed. I can be contacted at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes—But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy. I also would welcome any contact with someone who has any letters of Kuhn or has any personal knowledge of him. Thank you. Recently (January 15, 2005) I was contacted by a 15 year old student of Upton High (state and city to be determined) who wanted to interview me in regards to the life of Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam). The interview was conducted and this student asked me if there was anything else. This is what I relayed: There is a nationally and worldwide known issue of a disabled person in my state (Florida) who is being subjected to attempted murder. Her name is Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo. The courts say that she is in a Persistent Vegetative State when in fact she is not, they lie. Videos were shown on CNN during a live feed that prove she is not comatose. She sits up in a chair. Her husband who lives with another woman for over 9 years and who has two children with this woman is trying to say that Theresa wants to die when in fact he has been denying her rehabilitation and therapy so that she can have her own voice and be back on to the road to her recovery. He has been with several women since he caused Theresa's incident and this is his latest live-in concubine who is in collusion with him to make Theresa dead. His attorneys are attempting to accomplish a heinous starvation/dehydration death on her for the third time. One of his attorneys wrote a book in which he talks about tearing out peoples feeding tubes and says he speaks to them by "soul speak" asking them if they want to die and they tell him along the lines "Yes, I want to die! Please kill me." The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is holding her hostage for over 4 years. This feeding tube yanker attorney was chairman of the board of this hospice. This is the worst case of domestic terrorism happening in our country right now. While we are off in other countries helping helpless and disabled people the government has been remiss to save a human life from terrorism here in my state. There is a cover-up of mass proportions and I have the evidence on a CD to prove it. This message is to you and all of your classmates and teachers who may be reading this. Please contact others if you know of others who care to stop this murder. Perhaps you, or others, including activist friends, know people who have the power to stop what is happening here in my state or bring greater attention to what is going on. Contact me at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net or call me at 407-925-4141 and I will get whatever information you may need. Help me and others to stop the return of Nazi T4 days in Florida, the rest of the United States of America and the world. We must take a stand and make our voices heard.Please join my Alvin Boyd Kuhn Yahoo!Group and Gnosis284! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlvinBoydKuhn/join : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/join
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ESOTERIC STRUCTURE OF
THE ALPHABET
The modern world is awakening slowly to the fact that in the day we call ancient, though it was but a few thousand years ago in the run of millions, advanced men fully worthy of the name of sages were deeply versed in the profundities of recondite philosophy and possessed knowledge of things both human and divine, and well comprehended the great sciences of both cosmology and anthropology. Evident it is that men of this caliber indited the great Scriptures of ancient religions, which have won and held the reverence of mankind so generally that they have been made the unique objects of religious veneration and the canons of spiritual authority for most of the world over long ages. Indeed the homage paid them has been of the character of worship offered to something regarded as divine. The tradition has prevailed that the Bible authors were in truth men of a divine or semi-divine order, or at least men inspired by a divine afflatus to transmit to mankind the heavenly dictation of sacred truth. A study of ancient literature, growing more enlightened as it is pursued, is revealing the presence of a definitely formulated and high organic truth-structure, constituted of the essential elements of a great logical systematization of fundamental archai, as the Greek word has it, or principles of a cosmic order of being, expressed in many varied forms of representation everywhere over the field of ancient culture. Primarily, of course, the great wisdom was embodied in tomes of a vast body of literature, a literature so cryptically recondite that its esoteric purport has almost completely eluded the most erudite lucubrations of world scholarship from the ancient day to the present. Indeed it has been the perversions and misinterpretations of that ancient corpus of wisdom that have afflicted the religious consciousness of the world, particularly in the West, with an intellectual befuddlement that approaches the status of a universal dementia for some two millennia. Not only in the scripts of religion, however, but also in a wide variety of other modes of expression was the wisdom tradition
3
embodied and transmitted. It is found, but always in subtle forms of crypticism,--a feature that has bewildered and befogged all later conclusions of investigators--in ancient art, in architecture, in myth-making, secret society ritual, dramatic scenario, music, mathematics, anthropological science, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, semantics, psychology, festival ordinances, social ceremonies and throughout the warp and woof of life generally. Now, perhaps strangest of all the channels through which it was given expression, comes the momentous revelation that the sagacious genius of antiquity had even insinuated a form of its basic outline into the very structure of that ground-base of all literature,--the alphabet. The announcement and elucidation of its presence in this, the fundamental semantic code for the transmission of human thought, should rank as an epochal event in the history of world culture. Ancient sagacity viewed high spiritual culture in a different light from that in which it is envisaged today. While modern intelligence aims to disseminate its blessings over the widest popular area, hoping that it may edify the mass body of people generally, the sages of old acted upon a different estimate of the possibilities in the case. They appraised the cultural potential of the "vulgar masses" as practically nil, and therefore deemed it a sacrilege to cast the precious jewels of esoteric truth and knowledge to the "swine" that would trample them in the mire of unconscionable crudity of misunderstanding. It may be said that the history of religious cultism over many centuries has demonstrated the practical wisdom of this conservatism. The perversion, corruption, materialization and literalization of the lofty mystical sense of ancient cryptic literature, has caused perhaps the most colossal debacle in the culture of spiritual values in the course of known history. Its easily discernible evil fruitage has been the positive derationalization of the Occidental mind as regards all things religious, theological and Scriptural. It has deprived that mind of the cardinal advantage of knowing the sublime meaning of the splendid Jewish-Christian Scriptures, which are a collection of ancient mythographic portrayals of spiritual truth, sadly and calamitously mistaken for history. Not only were the Sages constrained to adopt methods of crypticism of varied forms to safeguard precious cosmic and anthro-
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pogenic truth from desecration by the "rabble," but they employed a technique which found its basic authentication in nature itself. As the world below is a mundane reflection and copy of an overshadowing world of spiritual truth, they strove to portray the structural forms of that higher truth by representing it under the forms of its counterparts everywhere existent in the natural world. Even supposed history was oriented into the form of archetypal ideologies. But everywhere, in drama, ritual, choral dance, festival institution and in language the astute formulators aimed to incorporate their figures of fundamental archai. A great structure compounded of the elements of the cosmic logic of creation was inwrought into the pattern of all these modes of human cultural expression. Finally, if not perhaps initially, its structural design was woven into the formation of the alphabet. If this cryptic organic form was the structural principle determining the arrangement of the alphabet, it must be seen to have made its significance definitely basic in all literature. For thus the words themselves, carrying the elements of the original letter components would constantly represent the forms of the archaic thought which as symbols they portrayed. So that in reconstructing the hidden outlines of meaning form in the alphabet, we are piercing to the heart's core of the most recondite connotations of all literature. It is a commonplace of present educational theory to say that letters of the alphabet are symbolic representations of the sounds universally possible to the human vocal organs. It is hardly as generally known that in shape they are more than mere algebraic x's or sheer onomatopoetic imitations. They are in fact evident forms shaped to picture basic ideas. They are true ideograms. The capital letter A, for instance, is obviously the cardinal letter I, the symbol of primordial unity (since it is also the number 1), split apart from the top into the creative duality of spirit and matter, the cross-bar indicating the interrelation which dynamically subsists between them. The U (V) symbolizes, exactly as it is drawn, the descent of spirit into matter and its return above. The W pluralizes it, and we find, not strangely, the W to be the letter that pluralizes words in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The O readily symbolizes the endlessness of matter and of eternity. So that the Gnostics, when they named the unit of deity in the cosmos the IAO, had condensed in the triadic name a sermonette in full,
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signifying the initial bifurcation of the first unit divine consciousness, the I, apart into the duality, A, and running the round of an eternal cycle, O. And so even Revelation has it: "I (am the) A (and the) O, the beginning and the end, the first and the last,"--IAO. (The almost breath-taking significance of the M, when the spirit says "I AM," will be introduced later.) It is possibly true that literation started with the utilization of the two simplest elements of written symbolism, the vertical line I and the circle O. At any rate it is to be shown here that nearly all divine names in antiquity were built up from and upon these two. For the Egyptians of remote past time had combined the two in the form of what is almost certainly the most ancient of cross symbols, the crux ansata, ansated cross, called by them the A N K H (more recently spelled E N K H), an O topping an I with a horizontal line at the point of contact. It represents by the O above, the endless existence of that which is the indestructible primordial matter, the eternal Mother of all things; and by the I below, it indicates the emanation of creative mind, or spirit power, from the heart of the great sea of first matter plunging downward. The horizontal bar shows both their conjunction and their separation, as does any boundary line between two areas. But the median line is important also because it marks the meeting point between the two poles of spirit and matter, since it is at this point that all reality is brought out to manifestation through the union of the two. The ANKH is the astrological symbol--@insert symbol. The two symbols with which literate symbolism begins are thus the I and the O. The item of their gender comes first to notice. The I is masculine, as standing for the Father's power of generation, which is spirit; the O is the eternal feminine, matter, the universal Mother, personalized in ancient religions by such goddesses as Isis, Cybele, Mylitta, Aditi, Venus, Juno and others. The appropriateness of this symbolism from the subsidiary phallic side needs no accentuation, nevertheless is very important and indeed very wonderful. (The author has fully dealt with it in his larger work, SEX AS SYMBOL.) As all progenation of life can come only through the union of male and female elements of the cosmic duality, a symbol that would dramatize life would have to combine both the I and the O. This the Egyptians did in their great A N K H symbol, which thus is their written word for life, and carries also the connotation of two other elements entering into life, or
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necessary for life, namely love and tie. Even more than the IAO it condenses in its three renderings the gist of a mighty sermon, and becomes the hieroglyph of both the structure and the meaning of life. Rendered in one sentence the symbol means life because life can exist only where two things, spirit (I), and matter (O), are tied together by a sufficiently cohesive power, love. Love ties the two together to procreate life. The A N K H is therefore the first and greatest symbol in the world, which should make us aware that the cross is the first and greatest symbol because it is the symbol of life and not of death. (The ancients said, however, that the soul, when incarnated in the body on earth, was in its spiritual "death," and therefore the cross became the emblem of death--but soul-death, not body-death--a death viewed wrongly by all theology since the days of ancient mystery teaching, since the reference is to the "dead" condition of the soul when immersed in body, and not to the demise of the physical body. Even in this view it equally connoted life, for it was the soul's relative "death" that gave life to the creature, whose bodily demise in turn liberated it for its freer life above.) Detaching the two emblems from each other as they are united in the A N K H symbol, and combining them in lateral juxtaposition, we have the first divine word and name in all literature, IO. That it figures with equally fundamental significance in ancient typological numerology is evident from the fact that the two, now converted into numbers, constitute the cardinal base of all mathematics, the number 10. Modern study seems not to have recognized this close connection, amounting almost to identity, between the letters of the alphabet as originally devised, and numbers. Numbers were indicated by letters. Each letter carried a number value. Hence words were composed of those alphabetical units that would together express an idea, a mental value, but as well a numerical value. As far as the Scriptures are concerned, even whole sentences were constructed to total a number quantity. As Pythagoras has said, God geometrized in creating the world; he built the universe on number. Such esoteric works as The Zohar, of ancient Jewish Kabalistic literature, reveal clearly also that the deity formed the creation by means of the letters of the alphabet. This can have sense only on the predication that as (according to the Scriptures) he spake and the worlds formed themselves in order under the vibratory impact of the letter tones
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of his voice, every letter sound of the creative reverberation became a constituent element in the cosmic framework. Every letter expressed or in fact constituted a principle or fundamental part of the universal structure. Perhaps this is one of the greatest keys to our recovery of the cryptic purport of ancient writing. The archaic IO (10) then would be charged with the potency of the first projection of the creative thought-force, but only in its first partition into duality, not in its later and further subdivision. In its expression as the prime triplicity it was the IAO (which became IAH and JAH), and its still further differentiation toward endless multiplicity at the quaternary stage brought it to the form of the great Tetragrammaton, the Kabalistic J H V H. In its full seven-letter expression it became, on the side of matter alone, the seven-vowelled name, composed of the seven primary vowel sounds made by the human voice. The Greek alphabet still retains seven vowels, a, short e, long e, i, short o, long o and u. This was to express the fact that every cycle of creation runs through seven sub-cycles, each of which sounds out the reverberation of one of the seven successive component form-tones. The potent symbol, typifying primogenital creative energy of mind and matter combined in the relation of polarity, being the power that dominates all things as it was their creator, became the figure of all combined mental and material ruling power everywhere, as all lesser ruling units were themselves but projected partial rays of the power itself. It was therefore the first king in the cosmic realm, as every divided segment of it was king in the tinier realm over which it exercised sovereignty. How notable this will appear when we shall see in a moment that the very word, King, derives from the A N K H name! Nothing has been more revealing than the list of words, in English, Greek, German, Hebrew, which can be traced to the old Egyptian name of this mighty symbol. Its central idea, it was noted, is the production of life through the tieing or union of spirit and matter. The central clue to the meaning of all these derivatives is the idea of tieing two things together. It must be elucidated that in building words upon the A N K H stem, the H may be virtually dropped out of consideration, as K H is equally well expressed by K alone. But K H is also equivalent to C H, which often replaces it. The vowel A is of inconsequential value and can also be dropped. So there is the bare N K left as the hard root.
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The next matter to be noted is that in later philosophical usage it was immaterial whether it was written N K or K N. And in Greek the N K (K N) became N G (G N),--a significant item. With these specifications it is possible now to discern a whole new world of meaning in many common words never dreamed to have come down from so divine a lineage. It is seen first in such words as anchor, that which ties a boat to a fixed place; knit, knot, link, gnarled, gnaw, gnash (accounting for the odd spelling); ankelosis, a growing together of two bones; anger, anguish, anxiety, a tightening up of feelings. But most interestingly it seems to have given name to at least four joints or hinge-points (hinge itself seems to be another) in the human body: ankle, knee, neck and knuckles. Lung, as being the place where outside air unites with the inner blood, could perhaps be added. Far away as our English join appears to be from a source in A N K H, (N being the only letter common to both), it is certainly directly from it after all. For A N K H was the root of the Latin jungo, to join, N K becoming N G through the Greek. From this we get junction, adjunct, juncture, conjunction, from the Latin past participle form of jungo,--junctus. But in coming into English through the French, all these words were smoothed down to join, joint, and this carried so far into English as to give us finally union, which is really junction in its primal form. With even the N dropping out we have yoke, that which ties two oxen together. And in Sanskrit it comes out as yoga, which in reality stands for yonga, meaning union. The English present participle ending -ing, as well as the prefix con-, meaning with or together, likely comes from the A N K H. For the -ing connotes a continuing of things moving on together. Therefore all three parts of the word con-nect-ing would be from the ancient word. Our most common word, thing, likewise comes from A N K H, as a thing is that which is created by the union of spirit and matter, a divine conception and atomic substance. Next comes one that carries an impressive significance in the study, the common verb to know, in Greek gnosco, German kennen, English ken. What constitutes the knowing act? The joining together of two things, consciousness and an object of consciousness, for there must be something apart from consciousness to be known. So Greeks called knowledge the Gnosis. The Greek verb meaning
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to be, gignomai, also has the G N, as token that existence is the result of the "ankhing"together of spirit and matter. But a most surprising Hebrew derivation from A N K H is the first-personal pronoun, I. It is in fact the A N K H itself unchanged except for the inconsequential insertion of two minor vowels o and i, making it ANOKHI. This is amazingly significant, since it reveals the identity of the innermost soul-being of man, the I ego, with the primal cosmic mind. That consciousness in man which enables him to think and say "I" is indeed a unit element of that same cosmic mind. In the I-consciousness of a creature the central creative mind energy of the universe is nucleated in unity. And as the ruler of all life in every domain, it is in that function and capacity the king of life! That power which knows things is verily creation's king. And also then it must be the power that thinks. Gerald Massey, great scholar of ancient occult knowledge, connects in kindred significance think and thing, a thing being that which has been thought by some mind. The I, as the king of consciousness, both thinks and knows. The German has for king Koenig, the one who can, (which in German is koennen) and the one who knows what is best. And what has the Greek for king? Astonishingly anax, which is equivalent to the spelling anaks. The Greek for messenger, one who ties the sender with the recipient of a message, is angelos, from which is our angel. And messenger itself has the ng in it. Where two lines meet we have an angle. A nook suggests something in the A N K H meaning. Perhaps hundreds more words might be traced from this venerable but most significant origin in the A N K H. And the words themselves help us reestablish the fundamental elements in the composition and structure of the great ancient knowledge so well called the Gnosis. The letter I, as the spiritual-masculine first half of the great IO symbol, must be examined more closely. It is in the alphabet and in language the symbol of the divine mind principle. It is the king of all being, knowing, determining, ordering, acting. And so it has been made the 10th (tenth) letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the king number both 1 and 10 or any multiple thereof, and therefore has for its meaning the word God itself. Its Hebrew name is YOD (YODH) and means the "hand of God." Its hieroglyphic representation is that of a tongue of candle flame, bent as it would
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be momentarily if blown upon by a gentle puff of the breath. This is to indicate the breathing of God upon the latent creative fires of atomic energy to blow them up to creative heat. It is suggested in Genesis when it is said that God brooded over the great deep. Water is the symbol of matter, as matter in the cosmos and water on the earth are the common universal mothers of life. And matter contains the latent atomic fire which creates all. God blows upon this latent fire to enflame it for creative work. This is indicated in the bent candle flame of the YOD,--@insert Hebrew YOD. Ten is esoterically called the "perfect number." In the highest possible sense it is the number that rounds out or perfects a cycle of creation, and it does this through the interrelation of the eternal upper triad of noumenal creative forces, cosmic spirit-soul-mind, with the septenate of lower physical energies, as anciently represented in the great system of Egyptian Gnosis, and faithfully reproduced in the Ten Holy Sephiroth of the early Jewish Kabalah. The YOD then stands for that divine creative fire that in its deployment as a decanate of powers, forges the worlds into the shape prefigured in the divine mind. The triple-aspected cosmic Noumenon designs the blueprint of the creation-to-be, and the seven hierarchical energies carry them out in the world of concreteness. If one reflects on the remarkable physical phenomenon of a ray of white light passing through a triadic glass prism and casting the refracted rays upon a screen in the seven colors of the spectrum, one will have an instructive analogue of the number basis of the creation. Revelation symbolism evidently represents it as the Beast with seven heads and ten horns, the three horns in excess of the number of heads being presumably in the invisible noumenal worlds, the heavens of pure thought. Concomitant with the IO primacy in symbolism runs a variant representation which depicts successive stages in the creative process. It begins with the symbol of inchoate matter, the O as representing primordial inorganic homogeneity or the unity and eternity of life in its unmanifest state. It in fact typifies what to us stands as empty space. It is empty (to us) as exhibiting absolutely nothing in visible palpable form. "The world was without form and void." But to the cosmic consciousness it is doubtless not empty, since it is filled with substance apperceptible to that consciousness. What it seems to us is best depicted by the empty circle,--@insert circle.
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The next stage shows the circle with the visible point in the center. This design indicates the emergence of the first organic entification out of unmanifest being,--@insert circle w/ point in the center. The third depiction shows the circle cut horizontally into two halves, upper and lower, by the median diameter line,--@insert circle just mentioned. This diagram shows the bifurcation of the original unity into the creative duality and the polarization of its two self-contained opposite natures, a prerequisite for any creation of visible organic worlds. The fourth stage indicates the opposition or crossing of the cross within the circle, the vertical line standing for the spirit force and the horizontal for the physical. Lifting the cross out of the circle, we have it in its simplest form, and since life can add increase unto itself only by this crossing of spirit and matter, the cross becomes the sign of addition, the plus sign,--. The fifth stage has the same configuration, but as it were, turned one-eighth on its axis, giving the X within the circle. This is to show that motion has been introduced, that creation has begun,--. This, similarly to the bent candle flame of the YOD, indicates that God's impulse has begun to move. Then, as the initial motion imparted to the creation not only adds to its working potential, but vastly multiplies it, the X becomes the sign of multiplication. In this final form the design eventuates in giving us the great symbol of the number 10,--X. And then if we take the X out of its eternal encirclement in the absolute existence--and by the beginning of the movement this emergence is indicated,--and place the two great symbols side by side, we have astonishingly that mystic word and symbol that enters so mysteriously into Scriptural allegory,--the word OX. (The elucidation of the esoteric intimation of this word is reserved for the finale.) The extensive list of divine names derived from the IO base may now be scanned. Io is itself the name of one of the goddesses with whom Zeus, king of the gods in the Greek pantheon, entered into an escapade that exoterically sounds less honorable than would be expected of divine royalty. But as paramour of the supreme God she would stand in the role of the great Mother of life, like Cybele, Isis and the rest. An Io character occurs in other mythologies. As, however, the I functions as the male-spiritual symbol and is not to be taken as the vowel force alone, but rather as the con-
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sonantal force, it was paired with each of the vowels in turn to represent the conjoined duality. And so we find IA, IE and IU standing as the base of a number of early deific names. The IA came to serve as the final syllable of all names of countries, as Germania, Britannia, Australia, Russia, Austria, Scandinavia, Asia, India, Arabia and many more. The IE begins the original Greek name Iesous (Jesus). Preceded by the H, denoting again the first motion of the breath of God, it began some Greek words for divinity, principally hieros, sacred, holy and a priest, from which comes hierophant, hierarchy and the old Greek name for Jerusalem, Hierosolyma. But as IU it stands as one of the most basic of all divine name-forms. IU was in fact the shortest and commonest of Egyptian verbs, and meant to come. Because the divine nature was considered an element of consciousness that was in course of its evolutionary coming to deify mankind, the Messiah doctrine connoted the idea of the slow, gradual and continuous coming of the deific mind in the world. In fact a common name in Egypt for the Messianic character was "the Comer.""Iu is he who comes regularly and continually," periodically. Hence IU is the primal Egyptian name of deity. As such it formed the first element of the great compound Egyptian name of the Christ-Messiah, Iu-em-hetep, which was shortened by the Greeks into Imhotep. In full translation this would read: Iu (he who comes) -em (with) -hetep (peace, also seven); "he who comes with peace as number seven." This name comprehends in itself another great sermon like the A N K H--symbol, referring to the occult fact that in any cycle of creation the principle of divine consciousness that will unfold to bring peace to the chaotic subconscious elements (the so-called six elementary powers, the potencies in the atom) comes to full outward expression in the seventh and last round of the cycle. Christhood is always a seventh unfoldment. Our own word seven comes from hetep, as this shortened to hept, and directly became the Latin sept-em, by the interchange of h with s, as occurs in very many instances, as in Asura becoming Ahura. H and s are also closely related through the Hebrew letter shin, which is either S or sh in sound. S is really only a sharper h. The next step in the development is quite notable. The I being male-spiritual, a consonant (masculine gender) rather than a vowel, and representing the projected ray of divine mind that
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beamed forth out of primordial being, ran the course of its projection into the deepest bosom of matter, planted its germinal seed in matter's womb, then turned to return, the configuration of the I was changed or enlarged to include in its shape the suggestion of the turning upward for the return. It might most significantly then be said that it was turned into the letter J. With more definiteness the J-form could bespeak the masculine-divine than the vowel-feminine or the androgynous aspect. Also in this form it could be more fitly prefixed to the other vowels, as JA, JE, JO and JU. With this important change the number of divine names begins to multiply exceedingly. It is impossible to pass by this item of the turning of the I into the J (the two are essentially the same letter still in Latin) without calling attention to the astonishing significance of the fact in relation to one of the key words in the Biblical allegory of the soul's descent and return. In the Hebrew-Mosaic allegory in the Old Testament the place where God descended in a cloud to meet and commune with his children (Israel) was Mount Sinai. This name then must mean the lowest point to which the spirit-soul descends to meet matter, the pivot point round which it swings to begin its return to the heavens. This is diagrammed by the lower turn of the J. What must be our astonishment, then, to discover that this key name Sinai derives from the Egyptian word seni (senai), meaning "point of turning to return!"And where, in concrete reality, is that point located? Nowhere else than in the physical body of man! The physical body of man is the Mount Sinai of the Bible. And where else could God and man meet than in the body of his human child? An obscure point in scholarship has at last come forth to enlighten us on one of the most important features of our sacred Scriptures. Greek mythology gives us Jason, a divine figure. In the Old Testament we have Jacob, Jabez, Jared, Jakin and perhaps others; James in the New; Jacques, Jack, a folk-lore character of the deity in man; Janus, definitely a Christ-figure in Roman mythology. The JE-form gives Jesus, Jesse, Jeshua, Jeshu, Jezebel, Jeremiah, Jerusalem, Jehu, Jethro, Jehosophat, Jehovah, Jephthah, and others. In passing it seems quite worth while to analyze the true context of the name Jesus. It is the JE combined with the Egyptian SU, meaning son, heir, prince, successor to the king; and the final masculine terminal letter, which was F in Egyptian, but
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became S (US) in Latin: JE-SU-S. It would then mean the coming masculine-divine son (of God the Father) as "prince of peace." The masculine terminal F of Egypt was kept in the variant form JO-SE-F, JO-SE-PH, as in the Russian Yussuf at the present. This is the most prominent in the JO group, which includes Joram, Josiah, Joash, Jonah (Jonas), Job, Joses, Joachim, Joel, Joshua and (in the Norse) Jotun. These have never been recognized for the divine names they are, because of the inveterate mistaking of Old Testament allegorism for assumed factual history. But, being in the allegory of man's divinity immersed in the flesh, they are incontestably the names of the divine or Christly principle personalized in the many myth-forms. Horus, the Christ of Egypt, had for one of his designations "the Jocund." The JU-form yields Judah, Judas, Judea, Jubilee, Judith, Julia, along with significant common noun derivatives such as judge, jury, justice. But Latin mythic usage exalted the JU to the very highest pinnacle of divine dignity in naming its supreme deity after the Egyptian JU, adding the word for father, pater (piter), to it to form the great name of the king of the gods, JU-PITER. Even the god's wife and sister partook of the glorious title--JUNO. The great Caesar boasted of his fabled derivation from deity in his cognomen Julius. The Juniper tree carries this connection with divine source. Latin juventus, our "youth," conveys the idea that the gods are ever young. (The I, the J and Y are all forms of the same letter-sound.) From this we have our junior, the German has jung, meaning and pronounced as our young. The ju--that begins the Latin jungo (iungo), to join, indicates that spirit and matter are joined together anew to generate fresh life. This IU (JU) stem is much more significant than has ever been seen before. In the form of YU--it enters into the great world signifying the birth of deity--Yule. Every letter, of course, expresses some aspect or segment of creative purpose. Alphabetical schematism has been presented in several different formulations. In the Hebrew alphabet there were said to be three "mother letters,"aleph (A), mem (M) and shin (SH). These ostensibly represent respectively the pre-creation stage (A), the middle stage of spirit's involvement in matter (M), and its final stage of glorious deification (SH),--the symbol of fire. M is the symbol of water. Life emanates out of potential fire, is "baptized" for evolutionary purposes in water, the symbol of
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matter, and returns to source with fiery potentialities actualized by having "overcome" the powers in the water-matter. The Hebrew word for fire is esh, and spirit evolves its divine fire in man, ish. The divine fire in man made him the ish-man, and the divine man in the tribal life of some nations was called the shaman. How the other letters were grouped in relation to the three mother-letters is matter of uncertainty. Several schematic designs have been suggested by students of Kabalism. But two consonants, beside J, were made the central frame of another extensive run of divine names. These are R and L. The names derived from or based on them must be listed. It is evident that, as their usage worked out, R and L may be regarded as essentially the same letter. The Chinese confusion of the two is well-known. But their identification became almost a necessity in the ancient Hebrew-Egyptian exchange of words, ideas and symbols, inasmuch as the Egyptian alphabet had no L and was forced to substitute R in all words where the Hebrew could use either L or R. It is therefore extremely likely that the great basic words, as seen so well in Latin rex, king, and lex, law, are of practically identical significance. The heavenly king is the Lord, and the old Saxon derivation of Lord from law-ward, as Ruskin points out, is more than coincidental. The king's will was the law in all archaic life, and in theology it is still true that the will of the Lord is the law of life. Just why R and L came, with J and SH to emblemize divinity is not too clear. They, along with M and N, are of the class of letters called liquids: they are sounded with a continued flow of the voice. They could thus have been chosen as representing the on-flowing course of all life. This idea would not have been inappropriate. It may be the correct one. At any rate R came to its divinest application in being chosen as the name of that greatest of all spiritual deities of antiquity, the Egyptian Sun-god Ra, whose symbol is that of the sun, the circle with the dot in the center. A cursory view of names based on R and L yields many interesting items. The R and L can be associated with any of the vowels and can either follow or be preceded by it. From AL-LA we note Allah, Aladdin, Alheim (Elohim), the frequent Al--of Arabic names and a host of others, perhaps our all. From EL-LE we have El, the Hebrew word for God, the plural being Elohim. The masculine article, the, in the four languages
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derived from Latin, is, as in the Spanish, el, and in the French, le. This will not be seen as significant until it is recognized that the definite article is, or was, itself a cognomen of deity. Spanish the is the Hebrew word for God, EL. English the is the Greek for God, the-os. And Greek masculine form of the is ho, a Chinese word for deity. The ancients habitually prefixed the to divine names, as "the Osiris." From IL comes the Arabic Ilbrahim and the Latin ille, meaning this, that which is, a succinct definition for deity. The Latin name for the sacred tree was the holm-oak, and its Latin name was ilex. OL and UL yield a few words referring to divine things. Hebrew olam, the world, eternity, the aeon, and olah, up, to go up, and the Mohammedan Ullah, Abdullah, may trace origin from these two bases. AR-RA shows in numerous words, ar meaning river in Hebrew, and there are several rivers on the world map named the Ar, or Arar. The stream of divine force emanating from the heart of being to create worlds was called the river. Every ancient land had its sacred river. As Ra was the great solar deity, the origin of ray, radiant, radius, radium, radiate and array is evident. As the king was the one radiant with divine glory, the rex (rey, roi, roy), such words as regal, royal, real (as in Mont-real), regulate (along with lex, legal, loyal, leal and legislate), are traceable to this source. Plato has the famous "myth of Er," a divine character. The Greek has Er- with the masculine singular ending -os, giving the great God of divine love, Eros. Re must be the base of the common Latin word for thing, res, the stem of which is just re. This gives reality, realize and reify, and the prefix denoting repetition, re-, as life is constantly repeating its processes; as in re-new, re-vive, re-store, etc. IR-RI shows scant usage, but in OR-RO and UR-RU we encounter a prolific wealth of derivatives, all pointing to high, if not directly divine reference. It is significant, to begin with, that OR is found to be the base of words in several languages meaning two things, gold and light. French for gold is or, and Latin aur-um; our word ore; Hebrew for light is Oroh. Gold, the indestructible, was symbolically related to light, which is also indestructible. The creative energy of God flowed forth as light like a golden river, so that all three, gold, light and river show the derivation from ar, aur, or. Aurora, God of Dawn, needs no further explication; aura and aureole likewise.
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UR reveals a grand list of shining names. It was in itself the greatest and most likely the original word for fire. The Egyptians, wishing to name it the fire, added the divine article, the, which in their language was the hieroglyph for the letter P. This addition made it p-ur, pur, the Greek word for fire to this day. From this comes pure, purge, purgatory, as also pyre, pyrotechnic and empyrean, the Greek U changing to Y in English, as in hundreds of words. Ur (a variant of aur, or) was the name of that state of the primordial spiritual "fire" from which the first divine ray, Ab-ra-ham, proceeded as first father of spiritual Israel (not the historical Hebrews). In the same category it was the name of the universal Egyptian symbol of creative fire, the uraeus, "a serpent of fire," which was sevenfold as typifying the seven archangels that created the universe. It is therefore another representation of the dragon or beast with seven heads. Is it strange that our modern discovery of the creative fire of the universe in the atom has brought into prominence as the most fiery of the elements those two whose names incorporate both the title of the Sun-god and the Uraeus, RAdium and URanium? The German language has some hundreds of words prefixing UR, as Ursprung, Urquelle, Ursache, all meaning original source-spring of being. All life came out of UR, the primordial fount of cosmic fire. A verse in the Chaldean Oracles says that "all things are the product of one primordial fire, every way resplendent." How resplendent it is our modern nuclear physics is now revealing! The Hebrew word for father being ab, Ab-ra-m is "Father Ra," as clearly as Hebrew can say it. Ram would be this creative fire immersed in water, matter. The list so far traced becomes more than doubled through the prefixing onto these root-forms the Hebrew article, the, which is just the letter H. The addition of the H has the force of divinizing the word, as has been seen. So from HAL there is hallow, hale, hallel (Hebrew to praise), halleluiah, hail and more. From HEL can be traced heal, health, heil (German hail), hell (German, bright, clear), and most significantly, the Greek helios, the sun! The spiral, or helix, was a figure tracing the spiraling course of the sun, or its planets around it. The feminine names Helen, Helena (with the H intensified into S becoming the name of the moon, Selene), are assumed to derive from it also. The Greeks adopted unto themselves the divine name Hellenes, signifying "bright and shining ones," dubbing the rest of humanity "barbarians." (They did this
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in the same fashion and with the same motive as the Jews adopted for themselves the divine name Israelites, dubbing the rest of mankind "Gentiles.") From HIL comes doubtless our word hill, "the hill of the Lord," the high locale of divine power. (Har in the R-group is the Hebrew word for hill!) From the HOL stem comes of course holy, whole, holism. Few of particular divine character or reference derive from HUL. The H-R group yields many of exalted significance. HAR gives heart, hearth, Har-Tema, (a name of Horus, the great Christ of Egypt), Harpocrates, (another Greek-Egyptian Christ-name), perhaps harvest, harp, harpy (the harpies of Virgil's Aeneid). HER gives a long list: hero (title of one grade of deities in Greek mythology), German Herr (God), herald, Hera, (Juno's Greek name), Heracles (Hercules), Hermes (Mercury), and, reinforcing the e with the i, hieros, Greek for sacred. HIR appears perhaps in the German for shepherd, and in Hiram. HOR gives the base of perhaps the greatest of ancient personalizations of Christhood, the Egyptian god Horus, who stands on the horizon, hour, horology, hormone, horn, horticulture. Horn was a universal ancient symbol of divine power. HUR shows in Ben-Hur and hurricane, the natural exemplification of divine fiery power. The Hurrians were a people sharing Asia Minor with the Hittites. As H comes out often in the roughened form of CH (KH), and also exchanges often with S, the H-basis of hundreds of words, all in one way or another intimating deific reference, the derivative field is vastly extended, embracing such words as chalice, charity, care, cure, cross, cheer, choir, chorus, Christos, charm, cherish, cherubim, Serapis, seraphim, sir, sire, seer, ser (Egyptian for chief, elder, sire), kherufu (Egyptian for the two lion-gods on the horizon). These lists are put down almost at random. It is certain that intensive research would immensely increase the total number, and no doubt others of the greatest importance could be revealed. These formations from the basis IO are of the greatest interest and importance. They do not, however, give any intimations of the organic structure in the alphabet which this work is intended to disclose. But they will appear in clearer light as that hidden structure is outlined.
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To enforce the cryptic significance of the disclosure now to be made, it is necessary to present, with the utmost brevity, the fundamental meaning-graph of all ancient religious literature. The Bibles of antiquity have but one theme: the incarnation. The vast body of ancient Scripture discoursed on but one subject,--the descent of souls, units of deific Mind, sons of God, into fleshly bodies developed by natural evolution on planets such as ours, therein to undergo an experience by which their continued growth through the ranges and planes of expanding consciousness might be carried forward to ever higher grades of divine being. These tomes of "Holy Writ" therefore embodied their main message in the imagery of units of fiery spiritual nature plunging down into water, the descending souls being described as sparks of a divine cosmic fire, and the bodies they were to ensoul being constituted almost wholly of water. (The human body is seven-eighths water!) It can indeed be said that the one sure and inerrant key to the Bibles is the simple concept of fire plunging into water, the fire being spiritual mind-power and water being the constituent element of physical bodies,--as well as the symbol of matter. Soul (spirit) as fire, plunged down into body, as water, and therein had its baptism. Hence soul's incarnation on earth was endlessly depicted and dramatized as its crossing a body of water, a Jordan River, Styx River, Red Sea, Reed Sea. Since the water element of human bodies is the "sea" which the soul of fire has to cross in its successive incarnations, and it is red in color, the "Red Sea" of ancient Scriptures is just the human body blood. When the red fire of spirit-soul was gradually introduced into and permeated the original sea-water which was the bodily essence of earliest living creatures on earth, it changed colorless salt water into its own color, red. The "Red Sea" never could have meant anything other than the human blood. The Scriptures reiterate that "fire descended from heaven and turned the sea into blood." This transformation of course took place in man's body, not in the world oceans. This is a clarification that alone can reillumine all old Scriptures with a flashing new and enlightening orientation of meaning. Egypt said that souls came down to "kindle a fire in the sea," to "create a burning within the sea," verily to set the ocean on fire. This has actually been done, but in man's veins and in his passions, not in the seven seas.
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It is now to be announced that the great meaning-structure discovered in the alphabet outlines this descent of soul-fire into water and its return to its native empyrean. If one arranges the letters in a circular arc downward from A to the last letter of the first half of the alphabet, and then begins the upward return with the first letter of the second half and completes the arc to the final letter, describing the lower half of a circle, one will have blueprinted the organic structure here revealed. On the thesis just presented, one would challenge the claim of such a structure to demonstrate that the first letter or letters were somehow charactered as fire, and that the two middle letters at the bottom or turning-point of the semi-circle were charactered as water. We are proclaiming that the structure meets that challenge and therefore proves itself as true and correct. The result is that, along with every other symbolic device of ancient meaning-form, even the alphabet embodied the central structure of all ancient literature,--the incarnation, the baptism of fire-soul in and under body-water. If this is to be confirmed, we must find fire at the top or beginning of the descending arc, and water at the bottom or turning-point. It must now be shown that the conditions our thesis requires to prove itself are precisely met in the alphabet. The discovery was made and certified when it was perceived that the alphabet did fulfill these precise conditions. The top or beginning letters are A and B, and should, the A alone or combined with B, represent fire; the middle letters coming at the base of the arc are M and N, and, mirabile dictu, they represent water! From A to M, then, the descending arc traces the downward or involutionary plunge of fire into water, reaching its lowest depth with M; from N back to the final letter, whatever it be in different languages, the upward return arc represents the arising out of water and the return through evolution of the heavenly fire to its true home, completing the cycle. The fire-character of A and B does not show out in such explicit form as does the water-character of M and N. Nevertheless it is intimated and implicit in various ways. The celestial fire emanated from primal source as one ray, but soon radiated out in triadic division, and finally reached the deepest heart of matter in a sevenfold segmentation. But in its first stage of emanation it was always pictured as triform. The YOD candle-flame being its type-form, the Hebrews constructed their letter which was to represent the fire-principle with three YODS at the top level, with
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lines extending downward to a base, on which all three met and were conjoined in one essence. This gives us the great fire-letter SH, shin,--@insert shin. But the triform fire symbol was only possible as the result of the one first ray bifurcating into the two fires of spirit and matter and uniting to generate their product, which became the third two-flame aspect as preceding the three-fire aspect. And what letter is it that depicts the two-flame stage, the first real creative stage? Precisely what the thesis calls for--the first letter aleph, composed of two YODS, one above, the other below, the central axis, a slightly variant form of our mathematical sign of division, a horizontal line with a dot above and one below it. All life is an interplay between the upper fire of spirit and the lower fires of sense and the flesh, of "pure" fire in air and "impure" fire in water. Even the English A carries the same depiction, as it presents the one vertical line of spirit raying downward, the I, as being split apart into duality, with the two separated lines still connected by the horizontal bar of mutual inter-relation,--@insert aleph. The resulting Hebrew word, then, for fire is just what the specifications of symbolic representation demand. The word should be composed of symbolic letters carrying the idea of the one-fire, the dual fire and the triple fire signs, and this is precisely what the Hebrew word for fire is. It is ESH, really AeSH, composed of aleph, subvowelled by e, and shin. Aleph is the dual letter, shin the triple, and the middle bar between the two YODS is the aleph in the single-bar fire. Then significantly man, who embodies this single, double and triple fire is ISH! One would ask at once whether the English word ash would carry the same connotations, being the visible end result of fire. It is extremely likely that it does. Not only is it at once evident in its relation to fire as its residue,--ashes,--but the Norse mythology, depicting the radiating streams of the living fire under the imagery of a branching tree, chose the ash as the tree-type of the fiery emanation: Ygdrasil, the ash-tree of life. It has already been stated that the patriarchal character designated as Abram personified in the Hebrew formulations the first father of spiritual life, emanating out of the primordial essence
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of fire, UR of the Chasdim. (This latter word signifies not national Chaldeans, as those thus designated were not an ethnic group, but a spiritual caste. The term stands for the first archangels, or creative fires, the seven.) To be the father of spiritual life in an evolutionary cycle, this ray had to be the first aspect of the emanation. Therefore it would be found to be composed of the first two letters of the alphabet. This is precisely what is found in the Hebrew word for father: AB. Linking it with the Egyptian RA, the radiant solar deity, we have AB-RA-M, receiving later in its evolution the developed powers of godhood represented by the fifth Hebrew letter, he, and so becoming AB-RA-H-AM. And as Abram came out of the primordial empyreal fire, UR, it is hardly coincidental that even UR begins with that letter, U, which (with V) represents the downward line of descent, the turning upward and the return to the heights. The detailed knowledge is not at present available to trace the chain of linked steps in the descent of the divine flame from A down to M. It does not seem apparent that at any rate in extant alphabets there is to be found a sequence of letter significations paralleling and depicting the successive stages of the creative fire's descent into the water, or matter involvement. If such an explicit arrangement was planned for the first alphabets, it seems impossible to trace the stages in orderly succession in present alphabets. But what emerges with astonishing certitude is that the central letters, M and N, carry the significance of what the diagram demands,--water. Thus at the point of lowest descent, where our thesis requires water, there indeed we have it. Every letter of the Hebrew alphabet, beside carrying a number value, also has attached to it a symbolic monograph: B is beth and means house; G is gimel and means camel; D is daleth and means door; H is he and means window, etc. When we come to M, we find it is named mem and means--water! N is called nun and means that which is the animal life in water,--fish! This is in the Hebrew. But amazingly, when we turn to the old Egyptian, we find that N has the name of nun likewise, but means and is the hieroglyph of--water! Its character letter is simply a short line indented to indicate seven waves, as our English script m is a succession of three waves. M therefore in the Hebrew, and in the English as well, marks the nadir of soul's decent into water, and N, at the same level and therefore also signifying water (or as fish the
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organic life in water), marks the turning-point for return, the Mount Sinai of evolution. Its reference is undoubtedly to this earth, which true symbolic insight discovers is itself--and not any hill on its surface--the "mount" or "hill of the Lord," on which God meets man in a cloud of fire, and on which all sermons are preached by his inner deity to man, and all temptations, crucifixions, spiritual initiations and final transfigurations take place. From A, the point of emanation of the spiritual fire, the creative stream of living energy, the river of vivification, as the Greeks call it, proceeded and swept downward until at M it had immersed its fiery potencies in the water of the human body, therein to begin to do its evolutionary work of kindling its own bright flame of spiritual consciousness in the red sea of the human blood. And now it is known that this red blood was originally sea water. As fire causes water to evaporate, the ancient allegorism represented the divine fire as drying up the water of the bodily sea, permitting souls to pass over the watery terrain dryshod. Variant symbolism had the Christ nature walking on the water without sinking into its depths. Egyptian figurism had the fire causing the water to boil, with the soul subjected to the danger of being scalded thereby. So the graph of the soul's descent and return swings down from the fire-height of AB to MN and there turns back upward to end in the final letter. It may be a chance circumstance, but is at any rate an odd one, that if we start with A and then take in succession the final letter of the English alphabet, Z, the final one of Greek, O, and the final of the Hebrew, TH, it gives us the word AZOTH, the word used in Medieval "alchemy" to denote the primogenetic source-essence of life. If it were thus made up of the first and last letters of the three most representative alphabets it would have been intended to denote that basic essence which constitutes the substance of all life from the first step in creation through to the final dissolution of all things. In descending from the height of fire essence to the depth of water substance, the energization would have had to pass through the intermediate stage or form of air. Fire symbolizes pure energy of spirit; air typifies mind; water stands for emotion, as earth for sensation in the scale of conscious states. If any of the letters between A and M are intended to mark the air stage, it has not come to knowledge as yet, unless it be that the bent form of the tenth
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letter YOD, indicating the candle flame bent by a puff of air to denote the original impulse of God's mind on the flame, is to be taken in this significance. M and N, separate or conjoined, form the framework of hundreds of words relating to the condition of spirit-energy when immersed in matter. As the primal mind-fire is the father, AB, so the primal matter-essence is the eternal mother, which in Hebrew is AM. M will be found to begin virtually all words denoting motherhood. M represents three, or five, or seven waves of water, and it should not be a matter of surprise, therefore, that we find all life on the planet having its generation in and from the sea water. Sea water is in a sense still the mother of our life, because that life is sustained by the electro-dynamic potencies in our blood, which is still chemically undistinguishable from sea water! Our blood is the red sea water! So we get the mother-name by conjoining the letter of potential fiery energy A, with matter symbolized by water, M. Our colloquial "Ma" for mother is essentially the Hebrew AM. Starting with A M for mother, there is met an almost endless list of words whose connotations link them to the matter side of the life duality. To view them in the light of this orientation of thought is to discern in them new and vivid intimations of esoteric meaning. These recondite connotations can best be seen by contrasting their sense with their antonyms denoting fire, spirit and the fatherhood. To begin with, the creative powers symbolized by the letters at the head of the alphabet are gods; while the being who embodies god-power in matter is--MaN. The divine powers at the summit are unmanifest; in matter they become MaNifest. At the summit there is but one power, undifferentiated; below in matter it has multiplied itself and become the MaNy. At the god height the power is purely spiritual; at the lower level it comes out as MeNtal; spirit above, MiNd below. At the top there is the maximum of power, even though purely potential; at the lower range its is MiNus, or at a MiNimum, though actual in its limited expression. A man is the cosmos in MiNiature. That which is expressed down here is, in comparison with the superior potential above, MeaN. Also as here the two poles of being are locked in a more or less stable equilibrium, things here are at a MeaN or MediaN counterbalance. To hold this steady is to MaiNtain life in its right poise. The father-power, AB is the conscious cognitive
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element in creation; the power it wields in matter, the M N energy of the atom, is the MaNipulative hand of God (the meaning of YOD); and so it is that the word for hand in many languages is not only compounded of M and N (Latin manus, Spanish mano, French main), but is in all languages feminine in gender, intimating the motherhood. In contrast to heaven above, the earth below is, in Latin, MuNdus, from which is our adjective MuNdane. Also from this comes MouNt, MouNtain, MouNd, already explained as referring to no hill on earth, but to the earth itself. Hebrew name for this lower vale of tribulation was HiNNoM, or GehiNNoM. In the upper realms souls are not sufficiently individualized to deserve specific differentiated names; here soul gets its proper NaMe. The fate allotted to each soul by karmic desert comes out to manifestation here below; it is therefore the soul's NeMesis. The soul here is under law, in Greek NoMos. A section of the terrain of a nation was by the Egyptians termed a NoMe. Since matter, like type-symbol, water, is, from the philosophical view of reality, nothing (it was designated by the Greeks "privation"), the Egyptian base-root of the letter N, whose hieroglyph was seven waves of water, along with the primal deific trinity Nu, Nun, Nut, gives us all the words expressing Negation: no, not, neither, nor, none, nil, nix (German: nichts), Latin nox (night), our night, deny, neuter, never, nay, German nein, niemals, etc., etc. Applied to man, his (relative) nothingness would make him "no one" which is in Latin NeMo. As man is cut off from deity here below, he is in Greek MoNos, alone. Also he is a MoNad. Perhaps MoNk is one who is alone, not united to the female counterpart. The food the soul eats on earth is that divine MaNNa that was rained down from heaven, but had to be scraped up off the earth, the perfect analogue of how mortals acquire their heavenly nutriment. The universal ancient tribal name for the divinity manifesting in the life of nature was MaNa, MaiNu, MaNitou. Then we have the word for the thinking principle, which in the Hindu system is MaNas. One caught under the demoniac possession of this power was a MaNiac. In India the practice of prophecy was called MaNtric science. And the -mon in the word deMoN is probably of this derivation. The Greek Furies were called MaeNads. Plato refers to divine obsession as a MaNia better than sober reason. An oMeN was a foresight of one's earthly fate. And the mystifying and baffling word ending prayers,
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aMeN, if not directly from the Egyptian god of that same name, would seem by letter intimation to mean "so let it be," indicating that what is set forth should come to reality in the evolutionary process measured by the descent of soul into matter the whole way from A to M-N. Memory in Latin is MeMiNi and the Greek Muse of Memory was MNemosyne. To recall one's past is to reMiNisce. Things here are the MiNutiae of what is whole and integral above. They are MiNute in magnitude and last but a MiNute of time, poetically speaking. Another most important line of derivatives branches off into sidereal regions. The great cosmic symbol, if not the embodiment of divine energy, is the sun. In contrast with its mighty generative power, its opposite character in the earthly region of the heavens, dead, inert, purely passive and reflective, the symbol of matter, is the MooN. Hence the composition of its name in English from M and N, giving also MoNth, MoNday and MeNses. If in Latin L stands for the divine Light, their Luna (the moon) might have taken form from the idea that on the lunar orb the divine Light (L) was weakened and dimmed by the reflection from the surface of the negative lifeless moon, giving them LuNa, L for the light and N for the darkness; or it might have been originally L reflected in M-N, suggesting LuMNa, later wearing down into Luna. Oddly enough the Latin for light in its pure solar glory is lux; but for light in its earthly refracted dimmed form the word was LuMen. At any rate L and N are set directly at opposite nodes to each other in lux, light, and nox (Greek nux) night. L evidently here carries the connotation of divine character analyzed earlier. For not only does the Latin have lumen (our illumine) for light, but it has the word representing the divine light or power in things, NuMen, which comes close to bearing the same significance as NoMen, Latin for name. The soul was thought to put on its bodily vesture as a MaNtle, which, as being the house it lived in was its MaNse or MaNsion. That which trailed back from the horse's head was his MaNe. That which flowed forth from the head of being was the eMaNation of creative force. The divinity implanted in living nature, most evolved in man, was iMMaNent, our EMaNuel. It is close to certainty that here is to be found an explanation of a prominent item in the grammar of language, which seems still unknown in philological science,--the reason why the accusative
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(objective) case of all Latin nouns masculine and feminine in the singular number ends in the letter--M, and those corresponding in Greek end in--N, as also in Sanskrit and doubtless other languages. It is obvious that the M and N endings here denote objectivity, as the accusative is the objective case. Why this is so is definitely implicit in the significance of the meaning structure which places the two letters ending this case at the bottom of the descending arc of involution. For the divine light is emanated from the supernal kingdom of spirit, and spirit is the active generative productive force that energizes all life process. It alone is self-generating, it alone initiates and institutes action. It is the father principle; the maternal-material principle is eternally only passive, receptive, mothering that which it receives germinally in its womb. The spirit force must stand as the actor; it does whatever is done; it moves upon the inert water, stirs them into agitation and motion to throw them into the forms of the conceived pattern. It is therefore the subject of the sentence that tells what its action initiates in the creative order. It is therefore in the nominative case, the subject-actor in the movement, and is grammatically called nominative because it gives specific character and name (Latin: nomen) to that which the action creates. But what of the end product that the action brings into the status of being? As end product, materially created, it stands there as the object of the action, the thing purposed and by an energizing process made objective as the result. It is therefore the objective in view in the initial action and the objective thing produced. It must therefore be put into the objective case in grammar. The actor works subjectively, in the purely noumenal or subjective realm of conscious being. But its work is to bring its purposes thus subjectively conceived out into objective actuality. Hence the creative subject force that emanates out of the A B condition of primal being ends by generating its product here below at the M-N station of physical objectivity. The M and N terminations (even this word has the two letters in its context) therefore fitly appertain to the objective case of nouns, and the Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and others so have it. To illustrate the point, the nominative case of "trumpet" in Latin is tuba, but the objective case is tubam. So all nouns. Only in the case of neuter nouns is there no distinction between the nominative and accusative cases, obviously
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because a noun of neuter gender can not manifest any difference between subjective and objective status. It is not living, therefore can neither initiate action or be acted upon by its own volition, hence can be neither subject nor object in the living sense. The spiritually noumenal world is the realm where the subject principle initiates action; the lower physical world is the place where that action results terminally in the production of objectivity. M and N seem thus always to designate objectivity, and that again must be the reason for the composition of that English suffix denoting a thing's attainment or achievement of its status of being in objectivity--ment. The principle of explanation thus established is seen with startling definiteness in three of our common English personal pronouns. Of the first personal pronoun the nominative case is I, but the objective introduces the M: me. The third personal pronoun masculine singular is in the nominative he; but in the objective it is him. The third person plural nominative is they; but the objective is them. It is in passing to be noticed that the I is the only one of the pronouns capitalized, in respect to divinity, since the I-ego is the only part of us that is divine! Likewise the survival of the dot above the I (and the J) is the remnant of the YOD, the Hebrew divine flame. All this induces us to think that the I element (another word incidentally showing the L-M-N sequence) of a person is the subjective divine self within, initiating all action; while the outer personal physical bodily self is what this I has produced as the me. It might be said that the I has objectified itself in and as the me. What the noumenal I came to be when manifested outwardly in matter is the me. The I revealed itself in the me, just as it is said in religion that God has revealed or manifested himself to the world and in the world as Jesus. The ancients personalized a goddess named Echo. She represented the physical material repercussion to the impact of the waves of creative noumenal energy, the "voice" of God, upon matter. What matter, so to say, responded or answered was the "echo" of the divine voice. There is aptness and beauty in these ancient conceptions and ingenious allegorizations and poetizations once their sane high relevance is captured. The me is the echo from the side of matter of the divine voice of the I-ego. The M is conspicuously seen as marking the point of lowest descent and beginning of return in a notable key-word in Hebrew.
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The word for sun holds as high a place of glory in religious philosophy as does the radiant orb itself in the solar system. It typifies for mental illumination the same generative ray of power that its physical beams represent in the stellar cosmos. The Hebrew word for it was obviously aimed at embodying the story of its nature and its daily course of (apparent) travel. In outward semblance it appears as a globe of fiery essence that plunges at every eventide down into earth, or water, crosses a land of darkness and arises again unquenched in fiery splendor the following morning. As a globe of fire its nature would be expressed most fittingly by the letter shin (SH), with its threefold candle flame, the three YODS, above; the place of water into which it nightly descends would be indicated by M, and the place of its final return, the empyrean above, by SH again. So the word thus constituted would turn out to be SH-M-SH (shemesh); and this is just what it is. It is the old basic story of divine fire plunging down into water, the universal trope-figure under which all operation of spirit in and upon matter was dramatized. It seems unquestioned that the Scriptural names of Samson, Saul, Samuel, Samael, Simon, Solomon were based on this semesh stem. For all the divine figures in ancient spiritual dramas were essentially sun-god characters, typifying the spiritual aspect of the solar effluence in man. Samson's loss of power through the betrayal of Delilah fairly closely parallels Jesus' loss of life and his helplessness on the cross through his betrayal by Judas. Jesus, like Samson, was shorn of his aureole of glory which was replaced by the black crown of thorns, as Samson's loss of hair--always typical of solar rays--reduced him to impotency. And the etymology of Delilah is most significant as fulfilling her part in the allegory. In the case of Jesus' crucifixion "darkness was over the earth" during the agony. The name Delilah is compounded of the Hebrew word for night, lilah (lailah), with the fourth Hebrew letter, D, prefixed. Now the tribe of Dan was in astrological tropism allocated to the autumn sign of Scorpio, when the sun is entering the winter-time of darkness and solar feebleness. So Scorpio was called the gate or door of the dark "underworld," which in the Egyptian was named the Tuat, now tending to be spelled also with a D, as Duat, Duad. When we turn to the Hebrew alphabet and see that D, daleth, means door, we have the name D-lilah reading definitely "the door of the dark underworld of night." This may
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seem far-fetched to those not habituated to the nature of ancient allegorical composition of spiritual myths. When the name of a paramour of a sun-god figure works out to mean the "door of the dark night" of incarnation, the fitness of the construction is most astonishingly convincing and clearly reflects a designed conception. When one encounters and unravels not only one or two chance constructions of this kind, but scores of them, indeed finds them at every turn, one is certain that the methodology of ancient cryptic writing has been rediscovered. When this disclosure is carried through to the farthest limit of its bearings on the significance of the ancient literature, it is recognized with astonishment that the meaning-content of archaic writing was expressed as definitely by the form-structure of the material as by the connotation of the words. It is becoming more clearly discerned that the formulators of the sacred scripts of antiquity strove to dramatize a postulated form of cosmic structure in a graph outlining the life development and movement by imitating its rhythms and number counts, its cyclical swirls and sweeps, in the organic form of the textual construction. Thus it is seen that the numerical basis of Bible writing in Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek is the "magic" number seven. The number value of thousands of verses, divine names, key phrases and even whole Bible books is with surprising regularity a multiple of seven. Thus there are seven other combinations in the verse score multiples of seven. Life, so to say, in every one of its creative advances travels in seven-league boots, dances to a seven-beat measure, runs a scale of seven notes. It is evident that the authors of Holy Writ labored to inweave the form of this movement into the writing itself. The lilt and pause, is to reproduce in mantric value the lilt and swing of evolution itself. That this methodology has lain under the eye of scholarship for these twenty centuries or more without its implications being seen or guessed is unimpeachable testimony to the blindness of religious obsession. Another most significant combination of the divine SH with the earthly M-N comes to view in the Hebrew word for oil, shemen. Here the fire-symbol, SH, is united with both the water letters. As the fuel for fire and the substance used in the divine anointing, which is itself the dramatization of the divinizing of man, oil is
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one of the most frequent symbols of the deific power in the Scriptures and mythology. The great divine names Christ and Messiah both mean "the Anointed One." It was observed earlier that when the X symbol of the developing movement of creation was lifted out of the matter-symbol O and placed after it, we strangely found that it spelled the word OX. This singular circumstance at once bred the conviction that this word, this theriograph, or animal hieroglyph, should play some prominent part in the scheme of ancient figurative representation of values and relations. It was of course known to be a figure in a number of Biblical stereotypes as well as in Greek and other mythic scores. But its full symbolic import was not realized until the significance of its connection with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet came to view with startling impact. Aleph, A, has for its name coefficient this very word OX. Along with this, there is also the Hebrew letter L, lamed, with the meaning of ox-goad. But why is A denominated by the ox-symbol? What is the significance of this animal that connects it with the first letter? Revelation of this profound and recondite symbolism should indeed open the eyes of all Scriptural exegetists to the almost impenetrable crypticism of ancient esoteric writing, which they have with such obdurate intransigence continued to deny, ignore and scorn. To put it in the most compact form of statement, it appears that A was denominated the ox because, as the animal is unproductive, incapable of begetting life--as the result of desexing--so the primal state or stage of creation, represented by the letter A, is unproductive, incapable of begetting life. The alphabet's first character fittingly represents the no-not-nought-nothing stage of the cyclical creation. It is the pre-zoic stage, the lingering darkness before the first rays of dawn. As yet there is nothing, neither matter nor movement. It is the absolute zero on life's or the cycle's thermometer. It is the state which the Egyptians described by their name NU (NUN, NUT), night, and the Hebrews by their AIN. It is the stage when naught was. In it nothing could be produced, nothing could have birth. It was the great darkness, the great deep, into whose bosom had not yet fallen the seminal seed of new creation. It was sheer potential of life, standing, like the ox, unfertilized, unimpregnated by the fructifying ray of cosmic mind, impotent to mother life until so enriched.
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If this seems like an arbitrary fancy, it also appears to be indubitably substantiated by the positive fact that in the main languages, from Sanskrit down to English, this letter A is the universal prefix which gives to all words with which it is conjoined the negative meaning. It can be translated invariably by the word "not." In Greek it is called "alpha privative,"the letter that deprives a word of its positive meaning, making it negative. A-theist, a-gnostic, a-symmetrical, a-moral, a-mnesia, a-pathetic, a-tom (not cuttable), even the Greek word for "truth,"a-letheia, (that which is not forgotten), and a host of others attest the negative force of A. This being so, we are introduced directly to another outstanding fact in connection with the succeeding letter, the second of the alphabet, B. It is not by chance or as a pure pun that begin begins with B. For in the structural formation of the alphabet, since the creation does not begin with A, a pre-creation stage, the ancient books definitely state that it starts with B,--B-gins, as it were. B is therefore the first letter in the actual creation. How fitting it is, then, that it is the first letter of the first verse of Genesis, which starts with the Hebrew word b,rashith and that followed by the verb bara. B,rashith means in the beginning and bara means created. Yes, creation begins with B, not a-gins with A. As the beginning institutes the process of coming to be, or becoming, these words also start with B. The great number of German words with the prefix be-, as bekommen, bekennen, bedenken, and a very large number also in English, as beget, betoken, bespeak, besmirch, behave and befriend, all carry the meaning of a movement coming, so to say, to a becoming. And in what way could the whole process of creation be more graphically expressed than by saying that it is a movement on its way to becoming to be? As the great Hindu philosopher Aurobindo expresses it, "the only being is becoming." Can it be without significance, then, that the Hebrew word meaning to come is just the B leading out the A,--BA? And this also spells the Egyptian word meaning the soul that comes to being here in the body. And would it be sheer coincidence that our born, bear, birth, breed, baby, beget, all start with B? And that well or spring in the Hebrew is baer? (Beer Sheba, "the well of the seven.") We cry Abba father, says the Scripture, which, if ab is father, and ba means comes, would have us saying "the father comes"--in the character of his Christly Son on earth, the ray in us of the Father principle in the universe.
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It may be asked, why, since the tenth letter YOD represents the flame of the divine creative fire, and indeed gives its name to God, the shin (S or SH) has come in for so much of the divine fire symbolism. Our answer can not be categorical or dogmatic. It can be speculated that as the YOD represented the flame in its primal oneness, the shin represented it when it had differentiated into the triplicity, for it contains three YODS. It does not seem a wild assumption to think also that the letter chosen to carry the hissing sound of S and SH should depict the threefold divine fire, for the fire became triple only when it entered the watery composition of the body, and the S and SH sound is precisely that produced by fire plunging into water! The YOD then can be taken as representing the cosmic fire when first fanned by the breath of God. Jesus is dramatized as coming "with his fan in his hand" to generate heat to mold the worlds in proper shape and to fan into bright flame the smoldering fire of divinity in man's constitution. Shin would represent the fire, now become triple, plunging into the lower levels of water, standing both for the actual water of the human body and as a general symbol of matter. The three YODS of the shin have lines carrying their power down to the bottom level, where they are united in one common bar, this again intimating that the three divine aspects, spirit, soul and mind, are all mingled as one in the body of man. As a symbol designed to depict the immersion of fiery spiritual units of consciousness in their actual baptism in the water of physical bodies, the letter form that dramatizes the actual event, and the letter sound that onomatopoetically mimics the sound of fire plunging into water, this alphabet character shin is certainly most eloquently suggestive. It has often been said that the S (SH) sound is derived from the hiss of the serpent. This tradition seems more likely to have come from the ancient symbolism of fire plunging into water (symbol of soul descending into body) than from the inaudible "hiss" of the snake. For, again coincidental as it may seem, the creative fire was by the ancients called the "serpent fire," expressly by the Egyptians the great uraeus snake, "a serpent of fire." Let it be noted also with regard to the shin, that when a dot--likely acting deputy for the YOD--is placed above the right side of the letter, it is pronounced as SH; but when the dot comes above the left side, it has only the sound of S. This change of position of the dot actually changes the name of the letter; for
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when it is above the left side, the name is not shin, but sin. Doubtless a thunder of protest and a charge of scholarly chicanery would greet our intimation that this left-handed name of the great divine letter is the origin and covertly carries the significance of the theological word sin. What can be adduced in some support of the suggestion is not without considerable force on that side. There is the Bible phrase, "the wilderness of Sin," which is the same as the "wilderness of Sin-ai," and the "mount of the earth," i.e., the earth itself, as that celestial mount on which every transaction of the business of human divinization takes place. A salient feature of the ancient science of truth representation was the designation of things spiritual and divine as allocated to the right side of life and things mundane and physical as of the left side. Good lay on the right hand, evil on the left. Esotericism has always spoken of the right and the left-hand path. Such books as the Zohar and other haggadic works of the early Jewish allegorists prominently use this figurism. To go left, to stand on the left, was to "miss the mark" of good and truth and right. The Greek word for to sin is precisely this: hamartano, "to miss the mark." The sharp distinction between the two directions has always appeared even in language with a moral connotation. The Latin word for right hand is dexter, from which we get dexterous; the French is droit, from which comes adroit. For left hand the Latin has our word sinister; the French has gauche, from which comes our gawky. Things on the right were favorable, propitious; on the left were sinister, ill-omened. And as St. Paul's Epistles (mainly Romans 7) so pointedly reveal, earth was that mount on which the divine soul, sinless in its celestial habitation, came under the dominion of sin. "Know ye not, my brethren," asks the Apostle, "how that a man is under the law (of sin and death) only as long as he liveth?"--that is, while he is here on earth. He implies that there is no sin in heaven, for he clearly states that "sin sprang to life" when the soul obeys the "command" to incarnate. Sin can touch the soul only from the side of body, and, he says, the soul goes "dead" under its power while here on earth until its resurrection "from the dead" in the course of evolution of spirit back to its divine condition. So that the earth is that "Mount of Sin," that "Mount Sin-ai" of the Scriptures. But the Old Testament contains an allegory--for the story is preposterous as history--which shows the ancient writers of
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sacred ideological constructions using the shin-sin difference to point the moral that the soul that can pronounce the full SH sound of the letter has taken the right path and completed its evolution to divinity; while the one that can enunciate only the S sound has taken the left-hand path to "sin" and must return to earth, the land of "death" for further schooling in life. The guards at the Jordan fords were instructed to subject the Ephraimites on the east side of Jordan who wished to cross to enter the Holy Land (not of Judea, but of spiritual consciousness) to a simple test: require each man who crosses to pronounce the key word Shibboleth. But, says the story, in every case "he said Sibboleth."The direful result was that forty-two thousand Ephraimites who could not convert the S indicating sin into the divine SH were put to the sword on one day. They were still on the left-hand path of sin, not yet ready to "cross the river" into the land of spiritual blessedness. It seems worthy of remark that not in twenty centuries has the easy esoteric unraveling of this simple and evident cryptogram come through to the intelligence of any scholar. How a Hebrew exegetist could long miss it is not comprehensible. Furthermore, how it could have been mistaken for history, for an actual event, is still far more incomprehensible. Yet Fundamentalists still claim that it "happened." If you assert that "history" was only a few thousand years ago a run of miracles, of course it neither needs nor can have an explanation. One is just to gape in awe at the Lord's wondrous doings and be sanctified of soul,--if stultified of mind. If the S and SH sounds carried the intimation of fire plunging into water, a special use of these letters in the old Egyptian hieroglyphic language seems to fall into conformity with the same idea. The S (SH) was consistently prefixed to verbs to express the idea of setting off the action which the verb indicated, to give the action its initial push, or s-tart, as it were. The likelihood of the origin of this usage from the basic fire-going-into-water thesis will not so hastily be scouted if it is reflected that in the creation no real beginning in the visible worlds can have been made until the fire of spirit potency has radiated forth from the divine thought and impregnated the sea of matter (water.) The visible and audible work of creation starts only when the two nodes of being approach each other and establish tensional relation between themselves. As many a scientific speculator has predicted, the early stages of earth's
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formation brought together the chemical elements of fiery gases and humid vapors, the precipitates from the mixture finally forming the first earthly and mineral substances. Those early periods might, in the Egyptian sense, be termed the hissing, or S (SH) stage of planetary evolution. An example of the inceptive force of the S in the hieroglyphics is seen in the Egyptian word MNKH (MeNKH), which as adjective means firm, stable. But, made into a verb, it becomes SMNKH (SMeNKH), meaning to make firm, stabilize, establish. It is also likely that in this word MeNKH we have another prime example of the M-N reference. In relation to its meaning of firmness and stability, it is to be recalled that a passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead described this world of life on earth as "the place of establishing forever." Also in the M-N connection it is highly significant that the Egyptian name for this lower region, the "underworld" or "nether earth" of their system, was Amenta, composed of the name of the God Amen and ta, meaning earth. Also significant is the name of this god, made up of the A and the M and N, for he was called "the god in hiding," and his hieroglyph is a god seated under a canopy. Obviously he then is the personification of the divine nature hidden under the canopy of our mortal flesh. All this should be a specific guiding datum for philosophical science, inasmuch as orthodox theology has loaded the evolutionary marshland, or Reed Sea, of the earthy-watery human body with heavy contumely as the place where only fleeting ephemeral influences affect, if not afflict, the soul with evil. That it is, on the contrary, the place where the soul establishes forever its grounding in fundamental realities, is a tenet of the sacred and secret wisdom of the Egyptian sages which must be made one of the chief stones in the new temple of rational religion now in process of building. The S prefixed to MNKH adds the starting forces that brings the firm establishing to actuality, that sets it to work. It is hardly unlikely that the very long run of English verbs which begin with S (or SH) carry this inceptive or initiating force of the letter--though speculation of this sort can not be asserted with too much certainty--in such words as start, step, slide, shake, skip, skate, slip, sink, stir, sneak, smite, spur, shout, scream, stamp, stand, spit, slap, shoot, speak, sprint, spurn, scoff, slay, spill, sift and scores more.
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Massey traces even the great name of mystery, the sphinx, from the ANKH stem, preceded by the demonstrative adjective P (this, the, that) and the starting S, thus: S-P-ANKH. Massey was well versed in the abstrusities of the hieroglyphics and his surmise on this is as good as that of others. The word thus composed would mean "the beginning of the process of linking spirit and matter," which indeed is the sphinx-riddle of the creation. The sphinx image does conjoin the head of man, spirit, with the body of the animal, lion, representing matter. It is precisely such values and realities that the sages of antiquity dealt with and in precisely this manner of subtle indirection. When will modern scholarship come to terms with this recognition! If sphinx derives from the ANKH symbol, it is not at all unlikely that the other great emblem suggestive of the spirit involved in matter, the wondrous "bird of life," the phoenix, stems from it likewise. It was also named the bennu, the spirit energy that goes from B, the fiery start, down into water, N, which is also probably the make-up of the Hebrew word for son, which is ben. Another name of the fabled bird was nycticorax. Corax is raven in Greek, which, from it black color, is often called the "bird of night," symbolizing the soul flying down into the dark night of imprisonment in earthly bodies; and nycti stems from the Greek nux (nyx), meaning night. The mythic phoenix was pictured as migrating north and returning south (to Egypt), where it renewed its life in periodic rhythm. And "Egypt" is symbolically the earth. Can there be doubt that the fabled migratory fowl is just the divine soul of life that commutes regularly between heaven and earth, pictured as a bird because it can build a nest on the ground, but equally well rise into the heavens of consciousness? It would be highly revealing to recapitulate some of the, at times, astonishing formulations which the ancient Hebrews discovered as fortuitous or designed constructions in their interpretative methodology that was elementary to their so-called science of Gematria. This was based on the equation of number value of the words with the meanings expressed in the text. The number forms were held to "geometrize," so to say, the meanings. As a physical object or phenomenon can configurate a meaning structure so can number values and relations. This "science" was carried to
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lengths that have ever seemed to overrun the bounds of rational sense, and the method has been held in disdain as fantastic jugglery since the days of its esoteric vogue. Yet it would seem to be grounded on legitimate premises and to be subject to criticism only in its unwarranted extravagances. One senses this in reading the Zohar, for instance. Somewhat in the spirit of the Gematria modus it may be profitable to look at several word and letter combinations in the Hebrew. To condense in a sentence what would take ten pages to elucidate in full, it is notable that beside the number of central and basic significance in this systematization, seven, perhaps the one most prominent in the sacred numerology was six. If seven was the number rounding out the cycles, six was the one that completed the physical evolution of the life-forms of any cycle. The progress achieved in the first six sub-cycles was necessary preparation for the channeling down of the spiritual grade in the seventh and climactic sub-cycle. We find the deeply esoteric Jewish philosopher Philo in the first century A.D. giving expression to the importance of the number six in several statements. One runs: "The world was created according to the perfect nature of the number six." And again he asks who can fittingly celebrate the divine majesty of this number. He says also that the sixth day of creation was the "festal day of all the earth." The creation was to work at physical labor for six days and rest in spiritual delight on the seventh. Man, made in the image and likeness of the cosmic creation, is likewise to work only six days in the analogical cycle of seven days. Therefore the number six, hardly less than the number seven, furnishes the basic clue to the meaning-value of many words. As six stages finished the physical form of creation in any cycle, it would seem likely that the Gematria plan would have used the final letter or letters of the alphabet to construct the words carrying the value of six. We are not disappointed in our gematric expectations here, for the last three letters of the Hebrew alphabet are R, S (SH) and TH, and six is written variously shesh, shisah, sheth and sixth is shishi. It is likely that if records were available we should find that the last son of Adam in the Genesis had been traditionally regarded as the sixth, for his name is Seth or Sheth. But the Hebrew Bible's very first word opens up a veritable mine of speculative possibilities of this sort. That first word, translated "in the beginning," is in Hebrew B'RASHITH. It
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was either constructed with amazing ingenuity to express a remarkable cosmographic conception or chanced to do just that by sheer coincidence. The reader must first be reminded that in the ancient manuscripts of the Biblical books the words were not separated and there were no vowels! It is therefore permissible to separate the words in different ways and in doing so some curious new readings come out as possibilities. The initial B is a preposition meaning "in" and can be prefixed to any noun or participial verb. RASH means head, so that B'RASH would mean "in the head,""in his (God's) head," as the place where God "created the heaven and the earth." Oddly enough it is precisely in God's head that the creation started, as there were formed the archetypal ideas over the pattern of which he shaped the creation. If B'RASHITH might be considered the overlapped form of B'RASH-SHITH, it would read "in the head of the six" or "of the sixth," and again it can be said (and the Zohar expressly does say it) that the creation, emanating out of God's head, came to a head in the sixth formative impulsion. Then B'RASHITH is followed by the verb BARA, "he created." If we take the B'RA for BARA (the vowels being wholly conjectural and indeterminable), BARASHITH itself would read "he created six, or the sixth." The Zohar gives this as a reading alternative. And it does in fact look as if this first Hebrew word was designedly made up of the first letter with which the creation truly begins, B, to indicate the beginning of the process, and the last three letters, R, SH and TH, to spell out, as it were, a cosmic evolution running clear through from beginning to end and so inscribed in the alphabet. The use of all three final letters would appear to indicate that the creative process brought out the result of the operation of the original unit divine mind manifesting in its triple aspects of spirit-soul-mind. The SH itself carries this triplicity, we have seen, in its three YODS. So that in its full esoteric sweep of meaning this first Bible word B'RASHITH would condense a far more comprehensive significance than its conventional translation would show. It would really read: "From the beginning in his head God unfolded from his triple powers of mind the heavens and the earth in six creative stages." This must stand as most likely the first full esoteric translation of the first Bible verse. The Hebrew words for water and heaven will lucidly illustrate the water-value of M and the fire-value of SH. Water is MAYIM,
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the M conspicuously predominating. As the Y is another form of the fiery I, MAY (MAI) would read as the M-water expression of the I-fire power. Esoterically the universe can be thought of in just those terms. Now, most appropriately, the word for heaven is this same water-word, MAYIM, preceded by the SH of fire, SH'MAYIM. Earth is the home or world of water; heaven is the home of water generated by fire,--the lightning; or water as invisible vapor, or water proceeding out of the empyrean, or realm of potential fire. Jesus says that he beheld Satan as lightning, or fire, falling from heaven, and that he himself came "to send fire on the earth in the sight of men." The Greeks said that the gods "distribute the divine fire" among men, a portion of soul-fire to each. Genesis tells us that God first created the two firmaments in the midst of the waters, the firmament above and the firmament below, the MAYIM and the SH'MAYIM, the water and the fire-water. Such a word as YOM, for day, seems to reveal semantic formation. The time-words, of whatever period, age, aeon, cycle, year, month, week, day, hour, are used very definitely to indicate no actual time-periods, but whole cycles as a concept, not a specific duration. A cycle is a year, a day, a week, a month. The world was created in six "days." The Israelites (again not the historical Hebrews) marched in the Sinai desert "forty days, for every day a year," says the text. So YOM (IOM) is the "day" of creation. It would be the period in which life proceeds from start at A (B) to deploy the creative fire-power, I (Y), into manifestation at M (N). This "day" would last from I (Y) to M, making its name YOM. As the action between A, or I (Y), and M (N) represents the process of life's coming to be, or becoming, it seems almost as if we find it saying I A M. Is it strange that the Latin word for now is IAM? It is as if life were saying "I am in existence in the eternal NOW." If one were to say "I am" in English and now in Latin, it would be I am iam. Coincidence it is, no doubt, but both forms must be composed of the same primal letter elements. To say "I am" in German gives interesting results also. It is Ich bin. The Ich is the I heavily aspirated. In some parts of Germany the Ich is pronounced as Ish. This equates the Hebrew word for man, uniting the primal unitary I-fire-power with the triple manifestation of that power that the SH represents; and this is precisely what man does. In man the divine trinity comes to
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manifestation. But the German, instead of using the pre-creative A and the matter-terminal M to say "am," says it with the actual beginning letter B and the other matter-terminal, N, with the I between them (as it does stand between them in the alphabet), giving BIN, Ich bin. It is not to be forgotten that LOVE was one of the three elements in the great ANKH symbol, along with LIFE and TIE. Now it is in the descent of soul fire from A (B) to M and back to the final letter (in Greek it is O) that the two poles of being generate the power of divine LOVE. Is it not a bit surprising, then, that to say in Latin "I love" is to say AMO? The significance of the Hebrew word for "the oil of anointing," SHeMeN, has already been mentioned. Since this divine oil that, so to say, is destined to set the head of man on fire with the divine unction, manifests in man in its triple spirit-soul-mind divisions, it must be recognized as of great significance that repeatedly the Old Testament instructs that the sacrificial cakes are to be compounded of fine flour mixed with three measures of oil. The three divine flames that are to deify man are to be fed by the "oil" compressed out of the wine-press or olive-press of our conscious earthly experience. It would be gratuitous to assert that the Hebrew shemen, oil, derived from the earlier Egyptian word smen. This was an incense spoken of in the Ritual for the dead, those "dead," however, being the souls incarnated in bodies on earth, and not the "shades" of deceased mortals. The word must therefore refer to an element in the human constitution, not of course, to be taken as an actual physical substance burning at funerals. In this connection it can be speculated whether the Geth- of Gethsemane is not a variant of Beth as in Bethel, Bethany, Bethlehem, meaning house. If so, the word Gethsemane would mean the house in which life burns its smen-incense to divinize its child, man; that "house" being man's physical body, the beth or home of souls on earth. It was in Gethsemane that the Christos wrestled in the living agony that caused "him" to sweat, as it were, great drops of blood. Several of the prime Egyptian mythic legends of the creation of mankind by the gods represent the deity as exuding drops of his blood seminally upon the earth, from which sprang two characters, male and female, that equate Adam and Eve in the Genesis allegory. Seminal creative blood essence is more than a few times poetized as sweat.
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All this is of epochal importance as demonstrating that the bloody sweat of Jesus in Gethsemane is a watered-down rescript of one of the old Egyptian mythic constructions. It must strike any person of open mind how marvelously these words articulate in all these constructions with perfect naturalness and semantic felicity. The Scriptures have remained for centuries both a perplexing riddle and a derationalizing influence simply because the abstruse and recondite relevance of these symbolic terms has never hitherto been explored. The study could be pursued to the dimensions of a major work. Enough has been given to answer the purposes of an introductory treatise that has been undertaken at the urgent behest of many who heard the exposition in lecture form. By way of epilogue and summary it will be well to end with the analysis of another pivotal Hebrew word of only two (Hebrew) letters, as it will provide virtually irrefutable certification of the main theses of this essay: the descent of spirit-fire into matter-water at the middle or nadir point of the alphabet, M-N, and its return. That little word is in Hebrew HAG (CHAG), base of the Mohammedan words haj, hajj, hegira. It is given in lexicons as meaning feast, festal day, festival, holy day (holiday); also as pilgrimage, journey, flight. The Hebrews themselves seem to have little apprehension of its true significance, even on its exoteric side. What it connotes in its esoteric reference has never yet been given out. It is virtually the cryptic key to the Scriptures, the definite key to the chiasmus construction of much of the material in the Scriptures, in which verses or portions of chapters are arranged in the form of a succession of four separate statements made successively in a line outward, so to say, as A, B, C, D and then a return back over the same first three, C, B, A, giving a seven-form structure, A, B, C, D, C, B, A. It seems to put the seven-stage structure in the form of an outgoing journey or pilgrimage, HAG, of three and a half steps or stages, and a return over the same three and a half, the turn to return (Sinai by Egyptian derivation) being made at the middle point of the fourth, or D, stage. To this structure the name chiasmus has been given, from the form of the Greek letter chi (much like our X), the two upper arms of which pictorialize a descent and return. The HAG ordained by the Lord for Israelite observance in Leviticus reproduces the framework of this same design, though
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here in the form or terms of a feast or festival ceremonial. But deeper research reveals that it was to be carried out in the form of an actual pilgrimage, setting out from home, journeying outward for three and a half days, crossing a river or water boundary between two kingdoms, (and always crossing at that point,) and then the return. It was to be an actual march out, an exodus of three and a half days, and the nostos, or return journey of equal length. The tradition of its meaning, preserved better in Mohammedan ideology than in Christian or Hebrew, was the origin of the Islamic pilgrimage, the great hegira to Mecca; for that matter the origin of all religious pilgrimaging. When we turn to the Scriptural Book of Revelation--and other places--we are there faced with the recurrence of this specific number, three and one-half (the half of seven!), three times in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the last book in the Bible. This book, has twenty-two chapters, and, whether it be by chance or by design of ancient structure-builders of archaic literature, the eleventh and twelfth chapters stand at the place in the book corresponding to where M and N stand in the alphabet,--the middle or turning point. This would seem to indicate that the entire book of twenty-two chapters was arranged with the intent to reproduce the chiasmus structure. That is, at the three-and-a-half point in the book the number three and a half is introduced three times! It seems so clear as to be beyond cavil that this definite form was used in symbolism to dramatize the outgoing or descent of the soul into incarnation through three and a half root stages of matter, from ethereal to solid, its experience there in a body of (seven-eighths) water, and its evolutionary return through the same three and a half levels, reaping on its return its harvest of rich experience. Yet this, the open sesame to all the baffling mystery of Holy Writ, has eluded the sagacity of the Scriptural pundits for centuries. Most lucidly it allegorizes the soul's pilgrimage out or down to body, and its return. Most astonishing is the item that at the outward terminus of the three and a half "days" journey was a river or water body on the boundary between two kingdoms. This the soul had to cross to begin its return. If sufficient poetic imagination is used to see that this Red Sea--Jordan River--Styx River of the allegories is actually the red blood of our human bodies, the Scriptures begin at once to become like an opaque glass suddenly made transparent.
<a href="ARC-chakras1.htm">Chakras and Levels of Self
. If information about the positions of the particles becomes available (as during a measurement), the rule indicates that that information ought to be used to 'update' the probabilities through a mathematical procedure called straightforward conditionalization. That is literally all there is to Bohm's theory. Whatever else we know about it derives strictly from these three elements.
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