Christ as Anti-Zeitgeist; Transfiguration and Baptism

The Christ which receives the baptized is necessarely different than the Christ exterior to the mystery of baptism.
He entered the tomb with them, entered death on their behalf and resurrected with them - to a new life he delivered them, to which is added the Hope of Glory, rid of the transgressions of this age.

In this context it is only proper to reveal the relationship between the eternal and the timebound -

Christ is Anti-Zeitgeist, Zeitgeist is Anti-Christ.

The process towards regeneration, amplified so loud that it was declared a heresy and an atrocity to the traditional churches - by the Theosophers - is a necessary measure, once the bond with the past life is broken. Christ is not understood "in this age", whatever page in the book of history you inspect - the reality beneath Christ, interior to Christ - is misrepresented. It begins with an exteriorising response to that which is interior and irreconcilable with the appearances and constructs of society. We have an example of this reaction, even in the Synoptic account of the life of Jesus: Being witness to the Transfiguration himself, present in the flesh at Mount Tabor, the Apostle Peter was completely unprepared for this critical event. Tradition should have prepared him, one might argue. Apparently quite a few theologians are so frustrated by the conundrum that they never quite face the implications of this account of the Transfiguration:


The Gospel of Mark , Chapter 9,2

New English Translation

9:2Six days later Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John and led them alone up a high mountain privately. And he was transfigured before them,6 9:3 and his clothes became radiantly white, more so than any launderer in the world could bleach them. Then Elijah appeared before them along with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. 9:5 So Peter said to Jesus,“Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 9:6 (For they were afraid, and he did not know what to say.) 9:7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came from the cloud, “This is my one dear Son. Listen to him!”
9:8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more except Jesus.
9:9 As they were coming down from the mountain, he gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. 9:10 They kept this statement to themselves, discussing what this rising from the dead meant.

Peter does not give proper heed to what has just happened to him and his fellow disciples, his immediate response to the transfigurative mystery is quite simply to attempt to assimilate it to an exterior situation; clearly Jesus followed in natural progression from the first introduction of an organized kingdom to the last greater prophetic figure, finally to Jesus - in this hierarchical order.
But this is not the nature of the vision which the disciples received.The vision immediately provokes a response from their unconscious mind when faced with unformed and unrecognized, unworldly illumination; it is salvaged from becoming the object of a premature cult, an imitation of the Covenant of Moses at Mount Hermon, which the voyage up the high mountain put them in mind of, by the inexplicable voice from the clouds "This is my Son. Listen to Him!".
This puts the event in a new potency, for if this testimony is true, in effect - real, and relevant - the object of their attention is no longer a participant in the History of Man, but rather a participant in the Eternal unfolding of God; later the disciples saw how relevant it were - through the Gnostic and Apocryphal accounts we now have access to the tradition of intimate conversations and individual visionary encounters with Christ after the crucifixion and before the resurrection, and even later - after the ascension, through the medium of the Holy Spirit, points towards this potency, but only as Mysterium; the Tradition itself is explicit with regards to this; it is necessary that this new Communion between Man and the Divine shifts focus from the fragile, yet magnificent architechture of outward temples and elaborate ritual cults - to a truely new order, far removed from the old order; from which each single new communicant needs to, quite simply, die.
Peter stumbled, At the moment prior to this Divine announciation, the second in the Chronology of the Gospel - for beforehand the witnesses of the Baptism at Jordan, and the Epiphany which occured there, had already been exposed to it; and before the sealing of this Mysterium with Jesus insisting nothing be spoken of it, before he has risen from the grave - that is; nullified the boundaries and attraction of the world and its time and orderl, this Aeon - and in and through it; the annihiliation of death itself.

What kept Peter asleep, even when the veil of this world is torn aside so as to enable the disciples to see with their own eyes the nature of Christ's presence and ministry - is the traditions of the forefathers. Jesus speaks to it, while attending to his disciple who is buried somewhere deep beneath all of it; predictably this affluence of traditional hogwash does not make sense to him either, but apparently it is all he has. Peter earlier receives Christ formally as the Messiah, but only responds after the Resurrection.

The individual response, which is caused by an interior Vision which penetrates all layers of the human personality - is necessary on account of the nature of the Christ. It was the means through which every single convert became a Christian in the Primitive Church. When the Church ceased to be "Primitive", that is to say - oriented from a pre-historical and archaic non-entity; a timelessness in history, a homelessness in the world, it could only fall back on the prior generations, whose numbing and intoxicating poison Jesus repeatedly warned his disciples against.


One interesting issue we approach when we leave behind the orthodoxy proclaimed and embrace the heterodoxy implicit - in the Christian Tradition which necessarely embrace both, is the question of Baptism. I feel I tell no one of my readers anything new, nor am I likely to shock them - if I insist that the baptism of infants can only indirectly affect the recipient party, and only through the mediation of his or her parents and sponsors.This the risk every generation of clergy within the Sacramental Churches have been willing to take; that conscientously the parents in question is fit to, later in life, administer in bite-size particles, the meaning of the sacrament, received while unconscious, to the baptized child. Moreover the aforementioned death will only occur naturally and in reverse order to the intended (this is Explicit in the Gospel) manner of administration - which is a conversion in the heart, an abandonment of former attachments and a circumcision of the heart, that is Metanoia; which comes from a life lived, from wisdom gained and individual, intimate conversation with the Spirit interior to every human being - followed by the conscious immersion into a death to the world and a resurrection to the Kingdom. The Valentinians intuited already in the second century of the common era that something was afoot in the popular Roman Church; the outer communion: apparently their contemporaries had come to the belief that their responsibility were minimal and that they these days could abandon their spiritual duties to the priesthood, and a hope in a resurrection after the fact of death. To wit, they thought that the intended and administered, Apostolic, sacrament of Baptism, fumbled up with the ablution and anointment of infants on account of the superstition that there existed a Sectarian God who would cast the stillborn,and every unbaptized child into Hell for the "disobedience" of its parents - would be automatically insured by this formality, at death. The Valentinians thought someone was lost and became vocal on this matter; but only within their communion - several Valentinian authors, among them the compiler of the Gospel of Philip, addressed this.It appears very likely that the Valentinian Gnostics, as well as a good part of Primitive Church (heterodox as it was) - subscribed to the understanding that each individual human soul pre-existed prior to Incarnation. Incarnation, insofar as its many powerful attractions causes the Soul to forget her origin (see the Exegesis of the Soul for a meditation on this), was itself the great obstacle; the immobilizing Tomb - from which a quickening of memory, an Anamnesis, enables one to rise up from; to resurrect from this forgetting. Birth into the world thus becomes an entry into exile, insofar there is no discernment between one's true self and the representations in the world. Which is the beginning of one's voluntary journey, into discerning exile - into pilgrimage towards the Mount of Vision; whose exact location remains fixed, not in Geography but in Biography, and the Hierosgamos of Spirit with Life, Light with Man, Truth with Wisdom, Logos with Sophia.

The visible, interpersonal experience of Baptism is still central to this our humble communion; but it must be discerned that it is neither subject to the fashions and trends of the contemporary; nor to the rigid dictates of tradition and ancient norm - It is a rehearsal and a recitation of the Redemptive Mystery in the Space between Initiator and Initiate; which is the selfsame pattern which exists above and which is exercised bodily and mentally here.


In the ancient Ekklesia a new orientation; a new childhood, even symbolized by the feeding of the baptized with milk after the incubation (which lasted a whole night)- A knowledge interior to the baptized were confirmed among others who had similarily received and confirmed it. For each additional event, each individual and integral testimony to the same - the Communion of these Equals iun the mysteries were renewed and refreshed.The Ekklesia saw the miraculous birth of many, it saw the face of humanity renewed as something pristine,regenerated and radically different than "the generations" before. Men of Spirit walked among them, and like Philip the Evangelist administered, unconditionally, to persons outside the conjectured confines of the "tradition"; be it Jewish-Christian or Gentile; such as the Ethiophian servant and indeed, Simon Magus.

I have asserted earlier that the Disciples were that type of witnesses to the mystery which had occasion to be the first to receive him, consequently they will be the last to rest in this labour, obliged by the selfsame reception, until the Magnum Opus is completed and perfect in and through Man. Consequently - the truely Apostolic would be those with the least occasion to celebrate either their own personal fame and glory or that of their predecessors- only looking to the Harvest, wherein the true glory, in a future time, lay. All that is in the present is service and the care,love and passion which thrives in the work itself.
To the extent it has been opportune to speak of it in the past, such as has been endeavoured in the Gospels testimony - it is equally true of the Disciples; this is the condition of their inheritance: fragile as is every single thing of soul and intellect - in the grasp, still, of the world. But renewed in a secret capacity towards a love which does not discriminate between human beings out of concern for own gain and propriety towards dead precepts.

Therefore with the incomprehensible, unappraisable quality in the One towards whom every inquiry goes, should they approach it, they need to see it themselves; their self is the medium which, like a mirror or the surface of the waters - it has chosen to be revealed in and by revelation, to increase, in and through.

Today no cipher, no code, no cryptogram is necessary:
language itself as a medium keeps the Sacred intact, on account of it being of so little assistance, and on account of the necessity of every single inquiry towards the true and real to be so focused as to be languageless,voiceless and perfectly in Silence, as the Hermetic saying goes:"Gnosis is Holy Silence and rest to every inquiry".
What language assists is a growing consciousness of exactly the places, in our minds and in our conversation, the Sacred and the Profane is distinguished from eachother and each made plain and distinct from the other. We take language into Liturgy, breaking the Word, the Reason, the Name, the Because - the timebound and causual counterparts, lost in the swirl of galaxies and atoms as much as any human meat apart, so that it may have resurrection in Truth; that action is the beginning of Wisdom.

Today, we may speak of Church, yet it does demand of us a spiritual vocabulary, a spiritual aesthetic, a spiritual discernment - since outside of it, it carries only similes which is just as little effective as "three sanctuaries", one to Moses, one to Elijah and finally one to Jesus, suggested by the Apostle Peter.

The Place of our Cross is not within the Synagogue of our inherited, natural humanity. The world belongs to the world, to the extent that we are indeed exiles, so long as we insist to belong to ourselves, to God and to the Spiritual realm. The Baptism is the place of our Cross, not only is it received only once, but once received it continues to expand and intensify, to the extent we can say; it continues to be received and is not subject to conclusion.

Excerpt from A Vesper to Barbelo

I begun working on a Vesper some years ago, devoted to Barbelo, this is an excerpt from it on occasion of the pause between the Assumptio Sophiae (on August 15th) and the Descent of Sophia.

I wrote it with the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25) in mind, which also happens to be the birthday of my mother (sic!). In a dream my mother told me that I had to be patient and look towards the transformation of "God" through Sophia (Wisdom), which would be simultaneously my own redemption (in terms of the Agon going on in my heart concerning outward and interior religion) and the redemption also, of "him". She told me this, in the dream, with an ambience of a rather rash bid on my own part (in the dream) to win her symphathy for my rejection of the God of the Old Testament, as she belongs to a denomination which belongs to a type of "Protestant Orthodoxy". It is fair to say that whatever we may argue, the Imago Dei is constantly changing. Also, that such change is more dependent on a constant searching of the human heart; a patient observance of how that particular instrument responds to those sublime mysteries we know as
Divine,Suprasensual,True and Godly - than the mechanisms of outward society. Metanoia - as much as regeneration, resurrection and rebirth - occurs first in the interior of individual seekers and only then, through a most mysterious and incalculable process - find a way to affect also the outside world.

Unconsciously, my attempt to wed the traditional Feast of Annunciation, wherein God the Father, through the mediation of the Arhcangel Gabriel forewarns his servant, Mary, that she will be instrumental in the incarnation of God the Son - with the mystery of the Barbelo; approaches this in every turn and byway, where my words unifies with that of liturgy, whether heterodox, such as the one found in the Gospel of the Egyptians, a Sethian Gnostic text unearthed at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in August 1945, a brief week after the horror of Nagasaki, approximately _on_ August the 15th - I found it addressed this mystery; which is not untimely nor impious, for the traditions of the fathers say that God becomes Man so that Man may be glorified and godly; so that they may see Him, rather than hear about him in rumours and rusty reminisciences of the generations.

Celebrant voice:

Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou – before the becoming of the Aeons.
Holy art Thou, Mother of all the Aeons and the Four Lights – Barbelo!
Holy art Thou, the Virgin of Eternity, who shine in beauty and resounds
in Song, in this your Mystery which is interior to all beings!



Holy art Thou, Barbelo
Holy art Thou, Doxomedon, in eternities eternity
Holy art Thou, Protennoia, in eternities eternity
Holy art Thou, Kalyptos, in eternities eternity
Holy art Thou, Sophia, Our Mother, in all eternity, throughout all Aeons!



All:

Blessed be the Virgin who hovers above the Tabernacle of our souls!



Celebrant voice:
May we know Thee truely and safely through Thine Mysteries, so as to receive
superessential sustenance and grow in strenght and beauty; we are born conceived
in the Gnosis of thy most interior chamber; and we have ascended , by Thy Grace,
high above the foundation of the All.



Therefore, as we are Thine – receive the prayer of our heart: We praise Thee, in our great need and in the confoundment of the world.



We have assembled here in commemoration of the Logos, our Word and our Hope of Glory, who deigned to descend below the Limit, on our behalf.

We have attended to the selfsame Call in our inner Man; the Announciation of the Incarnation of the Most Holy Logos into our sleep of the flesh, of ignorance and spiritual atrophy. Our Adam – Forefather to the three people who wander the earth
without respite, and who has as only succour and rest the Heavenly Regions – Let
Him have ressurrection in and through Us.

Hearers voice:
Hear Us in our great need and our plight; Have compassion on Us and assist our
purification and completion; May the Seed that Thou hast sown into our earth
be glorified in Perfect Fruit, in which we have our glory and honour, in which
Thou has Thine glory in Us!



All: Amen

My model of Church: Mystical Communion

I thought that they would throw something nastier at me:

You scored as Mystical Communion Model. Your model of the church is Mystical Communion, which includes both People of God and Body of Christ. The church is essentially people in union with Christ and the Father through the Holy Spirit. Both lay people and clergy are drawn together in a family of faith. This model can exalt the church beyond what is appropriate, but can be supplemented with other models. Herald Model 61% Mystical Communion Model 61% Sacrament model 56% Servant Model 28% Institutional Model 22% What is your model of the church? [Dulles] created with QuizFarm.com

Father Justin's other Journal

I just stumbled upon Father Justin Courtier's LiveJournal Heimskringla:The Saga of a Erstwhile Hierophant, It's a recommended read I think I should say,and updated frequently as well.

The Fravartis added in own section

If you haven't catched my series on the Fravartis in Mazdean Gnosis and its relation to the Gnostics' Path, I have now added a sub-category for the series.
The substance matter for the series is the erudite meditation on the theme which goes throughout most of Henry Corbin's Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth. The latter of course a heartfully recommended work on the continuity of Gnostic themes from pre-historic Zoroaster, through Suhravardi's Oriental Theosophy of Light to more recent developements of Ismailism. I have considered beginning a series of meditations on the theme of the Imago Templi as found in Imago Templi in Confrontation with the Profane, found in the excellent "final" anthology of Henry Corbin's last papers Temple and Contemplation, but will probably settle for a review of the theme of Inner Man,the Man of Light in Gnostic, Christian Esoteric and Sufi perspective - with Henry Corbin's Man of Light in Iranian Sufism as one of the primary sources.

The Heavenly Twin in Mandaean Gnosis

pp.33, Henry Corbin:The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism.

"In Mandaean gnosis, every being in the physical universe has its counterpart in the heavenly Earth of Mshunia Kushta, inhabitated by the descendent of a mystical Adam and Eve (Adam Kasia, Eva Kasia). Every being has his archetypical Figure (mabda) there, and the latter communicates with its earthly counterpart. After the exitus at death, the earthly person abandons his body and takes on the subtle body of his heavenly alter ego, while the latter, rising to a higher plane, assumes a body of pure light. When the human soul has completed its cycle of purifications and when the realm of Abathur Muzunia bear witness to its perfect purity, it enters the world of light and is reunited with its eternal partner.

"I go towards my likeness/ And my likeness goes toward me/He embraces me and holds me close/ As if I had come out of Prison".

Sophia as Palingenesis - Nasiruddin Tusi

Nasiruddin Tusi speaking of what becomes of the faithful adept after he has ascended above the Limit:

"His thought becomes an Angel proceeding from the archetypal world,

his speech becomes a spirit proceeding from this Angel,

his action becomes a body proceeding from this spirit."

The Gnostics discovered a new axis, a new pole of orientation - embedded, against all reasoning, in the substantiality of manifest being. This new centre of being is the central mystery of existence. Approached by human beings, it becomes a human being - but it is wholly Divine and not delimited to human form. Some call her the Anima Mundi, others the Hochma, others again Shekinah - the Gnostics called her Sophia and said of Her;"She is the mother of all the Angels".

We too, look towards the Assumptio Sophiae, the ascent of Sophia into Her own. We do so, because we participate in Her life, as surely as She participates in ours.

Welcome back, Ouroboros

Our unknown friend Ouroboros has got his blog back onto the blogsphere, welcome back. I look forward to following the discussions and postings in the future.

Some other Blogs added

First and foremost, I found Anulios;mysticism,magic and mayhem an intriguing read. Then comes The Traceless Warrior, whose orientation is towards mystical Islam and Sufism. Third out, the Almenac:New Middle Ages, which has many Byzantine and Orthodox oriented perspectives, as well as good amount of interesting heretical topics discussed.

Bogomilism resources

On my rambling trip on the Internet I discovered this pearl of a resource anthology for Bogomilism:

The controversy over the ancient dualist heresy remains with us.
Recently, a thread among otherwise rational Political Analysts has been to label George W.Bush's ideological platform Manichaean; an incredible insult to the thoroughly pacifist and harmless Manichaeans - but also an misnomer, since the Manichaean dualism, religious dualism - that is, is not Cartesian Mind-Body dualism, but a spiritual dualism; which presupposes a genesis out of two original sources; these two sources, in the ontological view of the religions we speak of - cannot possibly be Spirit and Matter, but rather two Spiritual powers (even more controversial to post-Augustinian Orthodoxy) which, on the "horizontal" plane of existence - necessarely are equally represented and equally vital to the reality as perceived by the religionists themselves; as such one is only measured against the other by the medium of Man (the observer), and as Man is neither Good or Evil at default (another controversy), because he is born into unconsciousness.
The Manichaeans and other Dualists have really been sold cheap, even by wellmeaning scholars and rather tendencial "supporters" after Voltaire and onwards.. but not as bad as the Bogomil Church.
They got everything hurled against them, every scathing remark, every sarcasm, every evil-minded rumour..and of course, nobody understood them.

Welcome to the Blogroll,Scott

Scott Rassbach from Wisconsin has created a new blog named The Eight Sermon to the Dead. A nice alliteration, since gnostically speaking Eight might actually be even more potent a number than the traditionally accepted sacred number seven. Scott is involved with the Apostolic Johannite Church, which is presided over by Primate Shaun McGann, and of which my old internet sparring partner Jordan Stratford is an ordained priest.

We've got no way of knowing what goes on in eachothers communions, unless, of course - we keep eachother informed. The Gnostic Blogosphere is excellent for that type of "silent communication", especially regarding Eccleasiastical Gnosticism, a term I am vary of - not only because of the traditional connotations to the exterior organizational structures with which most readers of this blog is probably quite familiar with; practically, the degree of involvement and investment is of a somewhat different color in a modern day Gnostic "revivalist" setting, but also because of the unsettled status of the modern term Gnosticism.

Hiroshima!!

Yesterday was a charged day.

It is 60 years since USA sanctioned the bombing of Hiroshima.
Jungian Psychologist Gerhard Adler said in a lecture April 1946:

"Don't we all still remember the one morning last year when we woke up and found the world changed with one word, "Hiroshima"? Don't we all remember the shock, the giddy feeling as if the bottom had dropped out from underneath somebody's feet, and each of us was this somebody just as much as the wretched men, women and children far away on an island in the Eastern hemisphere? Tragic and strange as it may be, isn't it true to say that for the first time since endless days mankind had felt and rediscovered its common fate? Had felt and rediscovered the fact of communion, the fact of the Indian "Tat twam asi" - of the "This is you"? Alas! Our seat had become very hot indeed to make us jump!"

It's such a long walk - from the trenches of The first world war, from the horrible inhumanities of the Holocaust; to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to where you and I are today. Have we become more sensitive towards eachother and our common plight, as this thinker of the last century thought and hoped?

We have no reason to expect as much, only the closest catastrophe in the vicinity, only the most local atrocity - only the closest threat to our own lives, stirs us and awakes us, perpetually alienating us from the perceived "others".
Quite recently, from a brief perspective of this very century - two airplanes were forced into collision with a high-rise skyscraper in New York, 9-11-2001, a date not a name, but everyone feel something quite conflicting and disturbing once it is brought up and really pondered. Then came wars,terror and a new darkening of the mind. Moral philosophers remind us again and again that there are no default difference between this flesh of mine and this flesh of yours, this kind and family of yours, and mine - and we nod, silently, for just the amount of time it takes for us to stack it away somewhere else.

But I was born into the decades of panic, of unsubstantiated horror, the aftermath of a great troubled time; the mushroom clouds of the Bikini Islands test bombing and the two Japanese cities reduced to dust in that fateful few days in August 1945 were a common symbol of imminent dissolution, we were told our own generation would not see itself succeeded. 1984, the Orwellian year, I joined the army of the damned and out, the kids who would shout back at the news reporters, the important know-it-alls of academia, the morally perturbed parents and relatives, who would smash anything, thrash anything and make as much noise they could - there's no holding back when you know you have been cheated out of life, out of the privileges of all the former generations. My generation was already dead. I dressed the kind. We were heading for all-out televised Nuclear Holocaust. That's what we were fed. Just Duck! The flimsy translated educational films they showed, there were air-raid drills every month - when I was in school. Old people felt sorry for us, and told us, but reminded us that nothing matched their horror of seeing the uniformed hordes marching on the main streets of our major cities at the German invasion of Norway, nothing matched the humiliation of eating pets and roots, nothing matched the fear of being ratted on by profiteering neighbours who wanted to mouth and lie themselves into the pockets of the German "overlords"..living in cellars.
I read dystopic science-fiction novels, kept for myself or at least to the little tribe of punks,hooligans and rebels and listed to anthems from the last decade, shouting "No Future!".

But all that didn't happen, what happened were that history opened up, didn't it? What happened were that we gradually got used to this much shit and it kept going - genocides,civil wars,conflicts of every hue and colour, diplomatic idiocy, world leaders running around without their head on their shoulders -in the general populace the reaction was cynicism,crass materialism, pop culture going totally overboard - Punk Rock became trend and pop, the new guard wanted more thrills and trimmings, the grandaddies of the left wanted everyone to march the same direction. How I grew up to hate that scene. All the while, that iconic presence, that looming symbol of doom - the mushroom cloud, haunting me.

Now,I am 32. Yesterday I could not turn on the television.
On every second channel, a memorial in full cinematronic glory, recontructions,montages,scraps and fragments - a hundred mushroom clouds in slow motion, skin dangling from the terminally damaged bodies of the Hiroshimites who was smitten by the invoked Angel of Vengeance, children evaporating in the arms of their festering mothers... a slow, elaborate blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
I know it is construed, at least intellectually, that every contemporary inhabitant of Western "civilization" needs to watch until their eyes bleed tears of blood the atrocities done in their name, but I could not bring myself to watch.

Some new blogs/journals added

I have just added Mike's Archelaus and Sir Gnosis' Daily Pursuit of Gnosis Livejournals to the blogroll, as well as the Gnostic Study forum over at LJ. It looks like younger bloggers use the LJ community. I thought I should keep oriented, and perhaps get refreshingly inspired by some of the discussions over there.

Centennial for the death of Maistre Philippe

Just as my ordination to the Diakonate coincided with the commemoration of the death of Maistre Philippe,Nizier Anthelme Phillipe, 2 August 1905, I thought I should share a quote from his ouevre which Phillip Garver contributed to the Eglise Gnostique list earlier:

"(Man) must descend and become nothing, and when he is nothing, he will be everything, and will obtain all Knowledge."

This directs our attention towards the necessity of emptying which is central to all the disciplines of the Christian Gnosis, and which is sadly neglected in our day and age.

The Theosophers from Jacob Boehme and onwards, spoke much of the Heart, and much is made out of that which they said of the Heart, but almost everything that is made out of what they spoke about the Heart concentrates on a property of emotional attachments, while the Heart is envisioned, by our visionaries - as a fixed point around which all subject to change, Natura herself, revolves, as if in a dervish dance. Another name for the same is Signature, it is attached to a matrix, an original contextuality, which is none other than the Divine Consciousness, from which the Psyche emerges and draws its essence, and to which it hopes to return, and whose life, if we allow it, is a continual response to.

We are brought up to fear the nothing, whether envisioned as death or as loss - we are conditioned to avoid, to plan and create strategies, to avoid overmuch intimacy with that nothing, and therefore much theology, even much philosophy and metaphysics (albeit recent in type) revolves around increasing and expanding the metaphysical All.


Jesus, in the Secret Book of James, says " "Verily I say unto you, no one will ever enter the kingdom of heaven at my bidding, but (only) because you yourselves are full." Whereupon he calls forward James and Peter, insisting that he would "fill them". He says to these two disciples, " Do you not, then, desire to be filled? And your heart is drunken; do you not, then, desire to be sober? Therefore, be ashamed! Henceforth, waking or sleeping, remember that you have seen the Son of Man, and spoken with him in person, and listened to him in person.... 'Become full, and leave no space within you empty, for he who is coming can mock you."

To which Peter protests, "Three times you have told us, 'Become full'; but we are full."

To which Jesus replies, sternly:"For this cause I have said to you, 'Become full,' that you may not be in want. They who are in want, however, will not be saved. For it is good to be full, and bad to be in want. Hence, just as it is good that you be in want and, conversely, bad that you be full, so he who is full is in want, and he who is in want does not become full as he who is in want becomes full, and he who has been filled, in turn attains due perfection. Therefore, you must be in want while it is possible to fill you, and be full while it is possible for you to be in want, so that you may be able to fill yourselves the more. Hence, Become full of the Spirit, but be in want of reason, for reason the soul; in turn, it is (of the nature of) soul."


Those who thirsted imagined themselves to be sated, those who were most wounded, imagined themselves healthy. Arrogantly they refused the physicians cure, on account of reckoning him to be an inferior fellow, despite their deficiencies and unsatisifed needs.The relationship between Jesus and the scribes once he had arrived in Jerusalem is famous, it was not on good tone - since they would not only resist help, but deny others who wanted it to receive it. If they heard a truth coming from lips they did not revere themselves, they would rather lie and make it something unheard, than allow others to weigh it and judge it for themselves. Such was also the situation between Maitre Philippe and his contemporary world, so it was with the Gnostics before him, and such is the situation for us.
But ours is not a contest and argument against those who would prefer not to hear us, those who refuse to receive us and those who would even persecute us - but a continued ordeal against our own still imperfect relationship with these gifts and these virtues, and the Gnosis which embraces them and make them, in and through us, whole.


Praise be unto the Unknown Father, who has not been mocked, who has not been rejected and who has not been a stumblingblock to His people - Praise be unto the Eternally Mercyful, whose wrath transforms into a purifying fire which settles like any storm, and leave the seed planted in good earth to grow into full bloom, as a tree covering the whole world with its branches. Praise be the Mystery which cannot be fabricated. The Truth whose price is itself. Greater still than the Universe, only the ear would hear it and the eyes distinguish its features - for giving us such guiding lights and allowing this brilliance to shine to the generations after, as a signpost towards that place where only Thou Art. Amen

The Imago Templi in Confrontation

In his philosophical exegesis Answer to Job, Carl Gustav Jung introduced the idea of a progressive transformation of the Imago Dei as a result of changes in the consciousness, the recipient and participant agent in man, throughout time. He attempted not to relativize the Sublime in view of cultural influx and trends, but to address.

I think I should explain where I was going with that lenghty excerpt from Henry Corbin's excellent survey on the Imago Templi in Confrontation with the Profane. It has less to do with any fascination with Jacques de Molay and the recurrence of a full-fledged moral or initiatic Templar knighthood - and
more to do with our effort to somehow approach the Gnosis, and if we have received a "glimpse", to hold on to its effective grace.


With the fall of the Temple of Solomon an entire culture experienced to be ejected right back into the terrible ordeal of being a people without a central sanctuary, without its axis mundi. As moderns we may recognize the situation as our own, it does not only have to do with the Sacred, mystical notions about a concentration of a Divine presence withinn a locality of one kind or another;
but loss of identity at a more profound and subtle level than the sociological. Corbin warns against going too far in the direction of a psychological inflation of mere ideas, notions and
personal hermeneutic into carriers or vessels of the Divine -
yet he returns again and again to events which is only intimate,only personal, only subjective - that is to say, which is exclusively and unrepressibly
dependent on radical intimacy at the level of the Solitary.


It is only you who can traverse past the ordeals and travel upon that steep and narrow path which leads to the Mountain of Vision, the "meeting-place of the two seas".Just as the rebuilding of the Temple occurs in the human heart before it takes form any other place.


Henri Corbin, the Mundus Imaginalis - On the Mountain of Vision, paraphrasing Suhravardi's Recital of the Occidental Exile;

"The mountain of Qaf is the cosmic mountain constituted from summit to summit, valley to valley, by the celestial Spheres that are enclosed one inside the other. What, then, is the road that leads out of it? How long is it? "No matter how long you walk," he is told, "it is at the point of departure that you arrive there again," like the point of the compass returning to the same place. Does this involve simply leaving oneself in order to attain oneself? Not exactly. Between the two, a great event will have changed everything; the self that is found there is the one that is beyond the mountain of Qaf a superior self, a self "in the second person." It will have been necessary, like Khezr (or Khadir, the mysterious prophet, the eternal wanderer, Elijah or one like him) to bathe in the Spring of Life. "He who has found the meaning of True Reality has arrived at that Spring. When he emerges from the Spring, he has achieved the Aptitude that makes him like a balm, a drop of which you distill in the hollow of your hand by holding it facing the sun, and which then passes through to the back of your hand. If you are Khezr, you also may pass without difficulty through the mountain of Qaf."

It is to Pilgrimage we are called, not architechture, whether of mind or psyche. Wherein we recover the Other, who has been a stranger to us and with whom we have contested - without knowing him, nor discerned the reason for our struggle. For the ancients all impressions from their interaction with changing Nature, contrasted with the lasting things intuitively understood by them - created a dimension to their lives which allowed an appreciation of wholeness, truth, beauty in their Ideal forms. To them the world was already a great domed temple, the great firmament above stretched out like a tent - which they elaborated as a way of orientating themselves, interiorily and through the medium of primitive art. The situation has changed - we can say with the haunting Knights of the Chapel of Gavornie, "woe unto us, the Temple is destroyed"; while visibly all seems to be in order, the interior integrity of the Temple has been broken - it is no longer a sanctuary, but a place of exile.


Now, the World is _not_ the Temple. Not anymore. To the seekers everywhere, a visit
to "Jerusalem", as the conjunction of the imaginal Jerusalem and the actual, geo-cultural
city-architecture of contemporary, "actual" Jerusalem - will provoke a reaction akin to what
Jung reports about his noctural visitors from the other side - in his Seven Sermons to the
Dead:

"The Dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought."

Many have sought that particular, special thing which seekers go and seek after in Jerusalem;
From an eagles perspective much of what comprised the early and central stages of the Middle Ages appears to be centered about Jerusalem, or at least the idea of Jerusalem - many a pilgrim looking down upon a mirage, a fatah morgana.. a building in the sky reaching
beyond where our eyes of flesh - the fires was lit, but it was physical fire, and it consumed not
only the air, but the flesh, its host.


The Diaspora seems to stretch across all the known ages, the Prophecies which foresaw it appears arcane, pre-historical, mythical and lost to our understanding of history
and time alltogether. What better example of this - than the recurring theme: The Bruchion brought
to the fire out of arrogance, the Alexandrine Library destroyed - not once, but three times, the destruction of the First Temple by King Nebuchadnezzar

Welcome to the Blogroll, Matt

Introducing McCravey, a new Gnostic's blog on the block.

I have always thought that a personal perspective sometimes is more relevant and make a topic discussed more weightier - bringing the reader closer to the core experience from which any expression have their beginning. I sometimes fail that objective, being to wrapped up in the topicality and factoid stuff. Matt, on the other hand, have complete and compelling mastery of this particular ability.
Welcome to my "neighbourhood", Matt.

Second Anniversary of my Ordination to the Diakonate

On the 2nd August, two years ago, I was ordained a Deacon for Ecclesia Gnostica at the Capella Santa Sophia in Oslo, by Bishop Stephan Hoeller, in ecclesia Tau Stephanus.

It is now also ten years ago since I met Revd.Jan Valentin Saether, discovering a fellow Gnostic who had found a means to continue in the Gnosis in periods of trial and the problems offered up by every-day life. Since that time we have been able to celebrate Mass together, wherein I gradually took upon myself increasing responsibilities and tasks with the ministry.


I have much to be grateful to him for, by way of friendship, assistance, inspiration and spiritual guidance. Approaching this year is another phase in my commitment to, and affiliation with, the Gnostic Ekklesia - in its specific manifestation in the Ecclesia Gnostica.

As I feel myself called to service at the Altar, as a con-celebration with Christ, with the guidance of the Most Holy Spirit, I hope and pray that I will prove more worthy of this mysterious grace this coming year of service. The Gnosis is lived, after all, and the spaces it fill, is that between human souls.
Pax Pleromae, brothers and sisters in the Gnosis.