Saturday, August 26, 2017
Monday, August 21, 2017
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Myth, in its deep structure as well as in its superficial content, is about this compound relation between body/mind and word/world. It is metaphoric, not in the sense that is uses what we call ‘figures of speech’, mere rhetorical devices, but in the root sense of the word: 'carrying across’ the convenient boundaries we establish between sexes, seasons, species and stars. This metaphoric leakage is not consciously contrived, nor is it peculiar to myth; it penetrates, in the act, everything we do, all the sense we make- even in the most narrowly specialized branch of science. Our being-in-the-world is itself a continuous process of two-way criss-crossing between ourselves and the world which cannot help being metaphoric, so in Emerson’s words, 'The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’
— David Maclagan
Friday, August 18, 2017
Thursday, August 17, 2017
The Bee: Part 1 – Beedazzled by Andrew Gough
History is rife with lost knowledge and traditions whose meaning has blurred with the passage of time. I believe the ‘Bee’ is one such tradition, and that its symbolism was important to civilizations of all ages. Inexplicably, the Bee is dying and nobody is quite sure why. Legend asserts that when the Bee dies out, man will shortly follow. We will review the implications of the Bee’s apparent demise in due course, however in this – our first installment, we will examine the genesis of the Bee’s symbolism in the mist of prehistory.
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"While dealing with this subject I may as well outline its scope completely. Human nature demands (in the case of most people) the satisfaction of the religious instinct, and, to very many, this may best be done by ceremonial means. I wished therefore to construct a ritual through which people might enter into ecstasy as they have always done under the influence of appropriate ritual. In recent years, there has been an increasing failure to attain this object, because the established cults shock their intellectual convictions and outrage their common sense. Thus their minds criticize their enthusiasm; they are unable to consummate the union of their individual souls with the universal soul as a bridegroom would be to consummate his marriage if his love were constantly reminded that its assumptions were intellectually absurd.
I resolved that my Ritual should celebrate the sublimity of the operation of universal forces without introducing disputable metaphysical theories. I would neither make nor imply any statement about nature which would not be endorsed by the most materialistic man of science. On the surface this may sound difficult; but in practice I found it perfectly simple to combine the most rigidly rational conceptions of phenomena with the most exalted and enthusiastic celebration of their sublimity."
— From Confessions, Aleister Crowley; On the significance of the Gnostic Mass
What is alchemy? The question still exists, despite all the resources and interpretations that have emerged in the modern period. We can easily find images of alchemists working with furnaces, herbs, chemical, and metals. But what is the goal? Is alchemy aimed at the creation of gold? Is its aim the philosopher’s stone, or great longevity, or a panacea? For all the alchemical texts and images that became available in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and for all the practicals alchemists and schools of alchemy that appeared during the same period, as well as the scholarship in a number of European languages, the fact is that alchemy retains its enigmatic, mysterious, and multivalent qualities. At times it seems that alchemical texts and imagery are like a screen upon which various interpreters project their views. And alchemical writings and imagery are so rich that they surely can support a great number of interpretations. Here, will turn our attentions to only one theme, which is the prevalence of sexual imagery in some alchemical works.
That sexual imagery plays a major role in various series of alchemical images can hardly be doubted, as we will see when we look at a few such works and images. But is this imagery suggestive of some chemical processes, to be worked out via a chemical apparatus and a furnace? Or is it possible that, as the imagery itself would suggest, alchemical imagery and writings might be multivalent, conveying multiple levels of meanings at once? This is the line of inquiry posed by Karen-Claire Voss, who, after long study, came to interpret late medieval or early modern alchemy as reflecting a process of ‘multileveled union of the two,’ from whose union emerges ’ the Child of the Work,’ a third, which also 'signifies the second birth in a theosophical [or gnostic] sense.’ She continues: 'The nature of the conjunction seems to me to suggest that the tradition of the alchemist and the soror mystica was not simply intended as a symbol with no corresponding reality in time and space, but that it was a form of Western tantra.’
— Arthur Versluis (The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism: Sacred Practices and Spiritual Marriage)
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
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