Meditations on the Tarot

Contents

Started reading in September 2023, took a break from it in October, continued in November, and finished in early December.

The last letter is dated Feast of the Holy Trinity, 21 May, 1967, but apparently this book was never published in any form until after the author’s death in 1980.

Overall I learned many things from this book. There were many genuine, Christian, spiritual insights. I can see that I would profit from meditating on many parts of it. There were a lot of parallels between this and Matthieu Pageau’s book and things that Jonathan Pageau teaches, and I was very pleased to find these commonalities.

However all throughout I had the distinct impression that I wasn’t the target audience. I am not, nor have ever been an occultist/Hermetecist, and I think that the Unknown Friend is someone who has at least taken these things seriously before and perhaps never considered Christianity as being the true embodiment of Hermetic teaching. As such I wouldn’t know whom to recommend this book to, since it is very long.

As I knew going into it, not everything is orthodox, the reader should know his catechism before reading. There’s definitely a universalist/Origenist line of thought in it. I was surprised that he believes in reincarnation, which was one of his more off-putting ideas. However, as the author says on p. 217 (The Hermit), these letters are meant to be spiritual exercises. The solutions he proposes to theological problems will not please everyone, and he includes them more as exhortations for people to strive for such solutions on their own.

His distinction between the “Hierarchies of the Left” (Satan the “accuser” and the other angelic prosecutors of mankind) and “egregores” (evil spiritual beings created by a polluted spiritual environment, by human sin, much like bacteria, flies, or rats multiple in a physically unclean environment) is compelling. I’m not sure I understand whether in this scheme the Hierarchies of the Left are still fallen, since the author says that they are not the enemies of God. Does St. Michael still need to do battle against them?

The author had a very high opinion of Teilhard de Chardin, and sometimes a naive, 1960s view of how the 20th century was shaping up. I wonder how different his examples he gives would have been had he lived to, and wrote this book in, the 2020s.

Jonathan Pageau on Valentin Tomberg

Jonathan Pageau discusses this book with some people called Michael Martin and Nate Hile, but he himself is a bit dismissive of it. If the truths it contains are already in the Christian tradition then why do you need tarot cards to meditate on?

• Despite some strange ideas like reincarnation, which Jonathan thinks comes from his study of Kaballah, his cosmology is very much aligned with Jonathan’s
  • Ideas such as “vertical causality”, that things below are caused by their prototypes above
  • Thinks there is a lot of synergy with what he teaches in his videos that could help people struggling to understand him and vice versa
• Tomberg is trying to reconcile Christianity with the esoteric traditions that have otherwise been adversarial to Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries
  • In some ways Tomberg is reaching back beyond the adversarial esotericism of that period to the Middle Ages, Renaissance, when people were still trying to marry spirituality with the natural sciences
• It can be difficult to discern esotericism, whether it’s good or bad
  • Jonathan feels like he doesn’t need books like this, he has in St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Maximus the Confessor, a good, cosmic understanding of the Liturgy
  • He does pull from other sources but not too much lest people get confused

Charles Coulombe on Valentin Tomberg

Also discussed a bit by Charles Coulombe.

• Valentin was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, but then became Catholic
• He saw in Catholicism what he had been seeking for in his past life, direct experience of the Divine
• “Orthodox but outré in his expression”
• Joseph Ratzinger wrote the forward to the German edition
• St. Thomas Aquinas’ (and other medievals) wrote on astrology too, and like Tomberg did not see it as a system of fortune telling, but as a set of symbols, as a place for gaining insight into the nature of reality
  • St. Thomas: “The stars do not compel, they impel,” they influence but do not overwhelm your free will
  • The main problem with fortune telling is that it denies your free will
• Charles talks about Wolfgang Smith, a philosopher and scientist (physicist) whom he has met, “the real man in the high castle”, a very interesting thinker, has done a lot of work in this area of astrology
  • A lot of what we think of today as the Catholic worldview is actually the 19th century materialist worldview, and it takes people like Tomberg and Smith to draw us out of this, showing us what was real and true in the medieval worldview, that we moderns tend to look down on with disdain
  • Difficulty is that not everything in the Middle Ages was great, and also we are so used to living our faith in materialist terms
  • “Superstition” makes us think “anything to do with the unseen”, and there’s a slippery slope from denying rabbits’ feet to denying prayer to the Saints
• Charles is not in a position to say whether either of these men are completely right but you can gain valuable insights from both, and expand your perspective on the Faith, inspire you to think more deeply
• Remember (and this applies to many things touching the faith) dogma always comes first, anything that goes against the Four Creeds is wrong

Letter I - The Magician, le Bateleur

• P. 4, the Major Arcana are authentic symbols, i.e. they both conceal and reveal their sense depending on the depth of one’s meditation thereon
  • Not secrets (things hidden by the human will)
  • Arcana are like enzymes or ferments or spiritual stimulants, they make us fertile in our creative pursuits, in whatever domain of spiritual life
  • Symbols are what bear and communicate these enzymes
  • Mystery > arcanum > secret
  • Mystery is a spiritual event, comparable to physical birth or death
  • “The seven sacraments of the Church are the prismatic colours of the white light of one sole Mystery or Sacrament, known as that of the Second Birth, which the Master pointed out to Nicodemus in the nocturnal initiation conversation which He had with him.”
  • See also Letter III, p. 65, an arcanum is a twilight of symbolism, both concealing itself and revealing itself at the same time
• P. 6, Church of Peter and the Church of John
  • There are some who teach that the end is at hand of the Church of Peter and the Papacy, and that it will be replaced by the Church of John
  • Sed contra, “just as the heart is not called upon to replace the head, so is John not called upon to succeed Peter. The heart certainly guards the life of the body and soul, but it is the head which makes decisions, directs, and chooses the means for the accomplishment of the tasks of the entire organism—head, heart and limbs. The mission of John is to keep the life and soul of the Church alive until the Second Coming of the Lord. This is why John has never claimed and never will claim the office of directing the body of the Church. He vivifies this body, but he does not direct its actions.”
• P. 7, the Magician on the card holds a rod in one hand and a ball or yellow object in his other
  • They are held lightly, with perfect ease, without clasping, showing no tension or effort
  • He does what he does with perfect spontaneity, this is play, not work, for him
  • He does not follow the movements of his hands with his gaze, which looks elsewhere
  • He seems to say: Learn at first concentration without effort: transform work into play: make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light.
  • See Letter III, p. 66, this is the arcanum of the primordial spontaneity that existed before the Fall
• P. 8, “concentration is the willed silence of the automatism of the intellect and imagination”
  • The quieting of the discursive mind, the calculating intellect, the cocktail party of your mind, the constantly chattering monologue
  • P. 9, a tightrope walker eliminates the activities of the intellect and imagination, if he didn’t he would fall
  • This is compared to St. Dionysius walking carrying his severed head from Montmartre to his final resting place (in the Golden Legend)
• P. 9, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila both say that the concentration necessary for spiritual prayer requires first the moral purification of the will
• P. 11, with time, the practice of complete silence and concentration without effort becomes a fundamental element of one’s life, always present in the life of the soul
  • Like how the Liturgy of the Church is always going on, whether one is in attendance or not
  • One is able to draw on this “zone of silence” both during rest and work
  • Not only concentration without effort but activity without effort
• P. 13, two dimensions of symbolism:
  • Typological, vertical, expresses correspondences between prototypes above and their manifestations below
    • As in the Tabula Smaragdina, “Quod superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.”
    • “That which is above is like to that which is below and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing.”
  • Mythological, temporal, horizontal, expresses correspondences between archetypes in the past and their manifestations in the present, e.g. Biblical figures
  • Form of a cross
  • P. 14, Cain and Abel has sometimes been taken as a typological symbol of “centrifugal and centripetal forces”, this is an error
  • Cain and Abel are a mythological symbol, an eternal idea, referring to time and history, not structure and space
  • They symbolize how brothers can become mortal enemies despite worshipping the same God in the same way, the source of religious wars being the pretension to equality or the negation of hierarchy, the archetype of revolution
• P. 16, pure induction versus analogy in philosophy and the sciences
  • Induction based on statistics, quantity
  • Analogy based on quality, that which is of intrinsic importance
    • E.g. Andrew is formed of matter, energy, and consciousness. Since matter and energy don’t disappear with his death, but change their form or mode, so with his consciousness. Therefore Andrew is immortal.
  • According to J. Maynard Keynes, the ideal of science would be to transform the scientific method into one based on pure analogy, pure experience, without the hypothetical elements immanent in pure induction
  • St. Thomas Aquinas (representing Aristotle) and St. Bonaventure (representing Plato) both assigned analogy an important role in philosophy
    • St. Bonaventure, doctrine of signatura rerum, the entire visible world is a symbol of the invisible world, the visible world is another Holy Scripture, another revelation
  • P. 17, analogy endorsed by our Lord, through his use of parables, and his arguments a fortiori
  • P. 18, method of analogy also presents negatives and dangers, since it is entirely founded on experience and any superficial, incomplete or false experience will lead to false conclusions by analogy
  • P. 19, method of analogy as play without effort, as opposed to work, like the juggler, it is a skill that requires a long training beforehand, and then becomes concentration without effort
• P. 20, Mark x, 15: “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it”
  • Children play, they don’t work, they play seriously too
  • “The Master did not want us to become puerile; what he wanted is that we attain the geniality of intelligence and heart which is analogous—not identical—to the attitude of the child, who carries only easy burdens and renders all his yokes light.”
• “There is Play and play. There is the Magician and the magician. This is why anyone who confuses lack of concentration with concentration without effort, and streams of simple mental associations with the vision without effort of correspondences by analogy, will necessarily become a charlatan.”

The Emerald Table

This Nuremberg 1541 version seems to be the version used in this edition. I’ve copied it here from Wikipedia:

Verum sine mendacio, certum, et verissimum. Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius. Et quod est superius, est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius. Et sicut res omnes fuerunt ab uno, meditatione unius, sic omnes res natae ab hac una re, adaptatione. Pater ejus est Sol, mater ejus est Luna. Portavit illud ventus in ventre suo. Nutrix ejus terra est. Pater omnis telesmi totius mundi est hic. Vis ejus integra est, si versa fuerit in terram. Separabis terram ab igne, subtile ab spisso, suaviter cum magno ingenio. Ascendit a terra in coelum, iterumque descendit in terram, et recipit vim superiorum et inferiorum. Sic habebis gloriam totius mundi. Ideo fugiet a te omnis obscuritas. Haec est totius fortitudinis fortitudo fortis, quia vincet omnem rem subtilem, omnemque solidam penetrabit. Sic mundus creatus est. Hinc erunt adaptationes mirabiles, quarum modus hic est. Itaque vocatus sum Hermes Trismegistus, habens tres partes philosophiae totius mundi. Completum est, quod dixi de operatione Solis.

Letter II - The High Priestess, la Papesse

• P. 30, the pure, spontaneous act that is the first arcanum (the Magician), cannot itself be grasped, it is like the wind that blows where it will
  • It is its reflection that makes it perceptible or understandable
  • The reflection of the pure act produces an inner representation of it that we retain in our memory
  • Memory becomes the source of the spoken word
  • The spoken word becomes fixed by means of writing, becoming a book
  • This arcanum, the High Priestess, is the reflection of the pure act up to the point where it becomes a book
  • Fire and wind become science and book
  • The second arcanum is “how Wisdom builds her house”
• In order to know where the breath of the Spirit comes and where it goes, water is required to reflect it
  • This is why our Lord tells Nicodemus: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of Water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” (John iii, 5)
• P. 33, there is both a legitimate and illegitimate duality, a good and an evil kind of twofoldness
  • Division, whole becoming the half, illegitimate duality
  • But two is not necessarily so, since it is the number of love, the fundamental condition of love, love presupposes duality, requires a Lover and a Beloved, a me and a you, a One and an Other
• P 34, God is Love, and it is Love and Love alone that gives worth to power, and wisdom, and being itself, and the absence of Love is Hell
  • Love surpasses being, more fundamental than being
  • Sallustius, a friend of the Emperor Julian: “Fine souls for the sake of the food despise being, when they are willing to face danger for country or friends or virtue.”
  • Love and the Good are one here
• P. 36, giving primacy to Being, rather that the Good or Love, leads to seeking True Being (rather than True Love), and since there cannot be two True Beings, we have the idea of duality as illegitimate
  • A characteristic of this mystical way where Being has primacy (pupils of Yoga or Vedanta) is that one loses the ability to cry
  • Christian mystics and all those who follow the other mystical way, the way of Love, have the “gift of tears”
  • Our Lord cried at the tomb of Lazarus
  • Nothing is extinguished on this path, we do not lose ourselves or our personality, rather we are set on fire, everything is set ablaze
  • This is legitimate twofoldness, or the union of two separate substances in one sole essence
  • Substance, substantia, εἶναι
    • The fact of existence
  • Essence, essentia, οὐσία
    • Existence due to Ideas, the reality of the Idea, the positive act by which being is, “the act of emanation of the first Sephirah, Kether (כֶּתֶר‎, crown)”
    • Essentia belongs to God alone, everything else is substantia
    • St. Augustine, De trinitate: “manifestum est Deum abusive substantiam vocari, ut nomine usitatiore intelligitur essentia, quod vere ac proprie dicitur, ita ut fortasse solum Deum dici oporteat essentiam”, “hence it is clear that God is not properly called a substance, and that he is better called by the more usual term essence, which term is a right and proper one; so much indeed that perhaps God alone ought to be called essence.”
• P. 37, John i, 18, “No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”
  • The sages who came before Christ, the prophets of the Old Testament, and the wise men of other traditions, certainly had the experience of God, of being immersed in God, but no one ever saw God, but always at the expense of their personality
  • The Christian idea of the beatific vision, seeing God face to face, while maintaining one’s personality is radically new
  • The beatific vision takes place in the domain of essence transcending all substance; it is not a fusion, but an encountering; the human personality remains intact, and not only that, becomes that which it is, becomes truly itself
• P. 38, John x, 8, “All others, as many as have come, are thieves and robbers.”
  • The masters who came before Christ taught the experience of God at the expense of the personality, which had to be diminished when it was immersed in God
  • They were “thieves and robbers” in the sense that they robbed the personality which is the image and likeness of God, they taught depersonalization
  • Yoga masters and stoics especially taught and practised this, and were unable to cry
  • The personality is that which cries, which has the gift of tears
• P. 39, The fact that men are usually more intellectual than women does not signify that the intellect is a masculine principle
  • Men are physically masculine, psychically (i.e. in their soul) feminine, the intellect being the feminine side of the soul
  • Women are physically feminine, psychically masculine (active), the fertilizing imagination being the masculine side of the soul
• P. 40, This is the arcanum of the twofoldness underlying consciousness: spontaneous activity (pure act, essence) and its reflection (in substance)
  • Arcanum of the transformation of the pure act into representation, of representation into memory pictures, memory pictures into word, word into written characters, or the book
  • The arcanum is concerned with gnosis, or the descent of of revelation (pure act and its reflection by substance) down to the final stage (the book)
  • Gnosis is the reflection of that which is above
  • Science on the other hand is the interpretation of that which is below
  • Science begins with facts, the characters of the book of Nature, and ascends through laws to principles
• Seated posture represents a relationship between the vertical (tiara) and horizontal (book)
• P. 44, The practical teaching of the second arcanum relates to the gnostic or contemplative sense
  • Contemplation follows on from concentration and meditation
  • It begins when discursive and logical thought is suspended
  • When one listens in silence in the state of contemplation, consciousness becomes a mirror, which reflects that which is above
  • It is a vertical recall or memory (the horizontal being that which recalls the past)
• P. 45, What is necessary to obtain in the state of waking consciousness, the reflection of that which is above?
  • To be seated, i.e. have an active-passive state of consciousness, the state of the soul that listens attentively in silence
  • It is necessary to be a woman, i.e. be in a state of silent expectation, not talking
• P. 46, a woman giving birth, magic, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo are analogous
  • Something is projected from a nothingness of forms and matter that is imbued with a life of its own
  • Creatio ex nihilo is the apotheosis of magic
  • The world is a magical act

Letter III - The Empress, l’Impératrice

• P. 53, the arcanum of sacred magic
• Three kinds of magic:
  • Sacred magic, where the magician is the instrument of divine power
  • Personal magic, where the magician himself is the source of the operation
  • Sorcery, where the magician is the instrument of elemental or other unconscious forces
• All magic is putting into practice this maxim:
  • The subtle rules the dense, that is,
  • Force rules matter,
  • Consciousness rules force,
  • The divine or superconscious rules consciousness.
• P. 54, gnosis (the second arcanum, the high priestess) wore a triple tiara, because she carries revelation through three different planes all the way to the book or tradition
  • Magic (this third arcanum) is double crowned since her task is the sublimation of Nature
  • This is also indicated by the eagle in flight on her shield, which she holds instead of the book of the High Priestess
  • P. 55, the shield signifieds the “what” of magic, the sceptre the “how”, and the crown the “by what right”
  • P. 57, the two-layered crown means the Empress is “doubly happy” to serve that which is above and that which is below, this double service is its legitimacy
  • Crowns and tiaras both represent the power of service
• P. 56, sacred magic, a miracle, is where there is an accordance of divine will and human will
  • St. Peter was certainly necessary for the healing of Aeneas at Lydda (Acts 9), even though this was divine magic, not personal magic
  • P. 58, what Peter had to do was revealed to him by the Master
  • Sacred magic is putting revelation into practice, where as personal or usurpatory magic is putting occult theory into practice
  • The order of sacred magic:
    1. Real contact with the Divine, mysticism
    2. Taking this into consciousness, gnosis
    3. Putting into operation what revelation has made known
• P. 59, dangers of arbitrary or personal magic:
  • “Incurable heart problems, slow destruction of the spinal marrow, sexual disorders and madness await those who risk this.”
• P. 60, “Dear Unknown Friend, do not think that I have combined these things intellectually, after having read books on the Holy Grail and treatises of mystical theology on the sacrament of the Eucharist. No, I would never write of the mystery of blood as the source of sacred magic—even if I ‘knew’ these things—if I had not visited and returned many times to the Chapel of Holy Blood at Bruges. There I have had the unsettling experience of the reality of the Holy Blood of the God-Man.”
• P. 61, The shield with the eagle represents the aim of sacred magic, i.e. liberating action, restoration of freedom to beings who have lost it.
  • (Likewise the book of the High Priestess represented communicable expression of gnosis, of mystical revelation.)
• P. 62, the reason for the existence of sacred magic stems from the Fall, from fallen Nature, fallen Man, and the fallen Hierarchies
  • Cf. Romans viii, 19–23, “For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope: Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now. And not only it, but ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body.”
  • P. 63, Sacred magic always wakes the free will, delivers from possession by fixed ideas, it opposes all the means of constraint employed by ceremonial magic on elemental beings, it gains the confidence of said elemental beings, it opposes practical Cabbala which seeks to subjugate fallen angels and turn them into servants, it resists the temptations of those same angels
  • The fallen angels/hierarchies are also waiting for the revelation of the sons of God. They are not atheists, they do not lack faith in God, rather they lack faith in man.
  • Sacred magic with respect to such a devil re-establishes its faith in man
  • The trial of Job was not to dispel God’s doubts, but to dispel those of the devil; once the doubts were dispelled the devil laboured to restore all those things formerly deprived, i.e. Job’s enemy became his familiar, his voluntary servant, his friend
• P. 64, Galatians vi, 2: “Bear ye one another’s burdens; and so you shall fulfill the law of Christ.”
  • This is how the saints practised sacred magic
  • Cf. St. Lidvina (Lidwina of Schiedam), who never left her bed for many years, once smelled strongly of alcohol at the same time as a local alcoholic was cured
• P. 65, as we said in Letter I, p. 4, an arcanum is in between a mystery and a secret
  • An arcanum is a twilight, and it is this twilight that protects it
  • It reveals itself and hides itself at the same time using symbolism
• P. 66, the Fall changed the destiny of humanity
  • The original spontaneity or “mystical union” (the first arcanum) was replaced by struggle or toil
  • Gnosis (the second arcanum) was replaced by suffering
  • Sacred magic was replaced by death
  • John xiv, 6, “I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE.”
  • This Gospel is a summation of the first three Arcana
    1. The arcanum of the true way or mystical spontaneity
    2. The arcanum of revealed truth or gnosis
    3. The arcanum of transforming life or sacred magic
• P. 67, Sacred magic reveals itself to those who say with our Lady, “Ecce ancilla domini. Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.”
  • Sacred magic manifests itself by a miracle
  • The miracle of fire above our hearts and altars from century to century
  • Goodness, truth, and beauty do not lose their attraction from century to century
  • In spite of all, there is faith, hope, and charity in the world
  • Saints, sages, poetry, music are not engulfed by the void
  • The universal miracle of human history is that the miraculous exists
  • Life is a series of miracles
  • Miracle is not the absence of cause, that would be more like luck or chance
  • Miracle is the visible effect of an invisible cause
  • An effect on a lower plane due to a cause on a higher plane
• P. 68, the scientific advancements of our age seem varied: steam, petrol, splitting the atom, but they are all of a kind, namely destruction that releases energy
  • The domination of nature by means of the principle of destruction or death
  • Small controlled destruction or death
  • Imagine efforts and discoveries directed in the opposite direction, that of construction and life
  • E.g. an acorn that “explodes” out into a tree, a constructive bomb
  • This is the ideal of the Great Work of alchemy, “perpetranda miracula rei unius”, or the Tree of Life
  • The negation of the mechanical or technical element
  • The living synthesis of celestial light and of earth, that which descends from above and ascends from below
  • The Cherubim with the flaming sword which turned every way to guard the tree of life (Genesis iii, 24) is a defence against “putting forth and taking” from the Tree of Life, against repeating the act committed against the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
  • “Putting forth and taking” is the ideal of science, the will-to-power underlying science
  • The Hermetic attitude is the will-to-serve, he opens his mind, heart, and will to receive grace that is bestowed on him
  • The flaming sword is a weapon of divine magic, a constructive weapon, it encourages those who are worthy to the benefits of the Tree of Life, and sends away the unworthy
• P. 70, ceremonial or arbitrary or personal magic are like branches that have been separated from the tree
  • They have forgotten gnosis and mysticism
  • These arts may live for a time but inevitably wither, e.g. the humanist magic that flourished during the Renaissance until the 17th century, which served man and not God
  • Its ideal was power over Nature, both visible and invisible, and later on the invisible too was forgotten
  • Science is in a way the continuation of this humanist magic, stripped of its occult element
• P. 72, the Empress arcanum invites us to de-mechanise all that which has become solely intellectual, aesthetic, and moral technique, in order to become a mage
  • Sacred magic is essentially life, that life revealed in the Mystery of the Blood (cf. p. 60)
  • One becomes a mage by becoming essential, as essential as blood
• P. 73, this is the arcanum of life before the Fall
  • Generation as it was before the Fall: vertical, from a higher plane to a lower
  • Not horizontal, which is on a single plane
  • ET INCARNATUS EST DE SPIRITU SANCTO EX MARIA VIRGINE
• “At this point, dear Unknown Friend, I shall withdraw and leave you alone with your Angel. It is not fitting that my human voice arrogates the right of uttering things which are a more profound continuation of what is outlined above.”

Letter IV - The Emperor, l’Empereur

• P. 78, the Emperor has renounced violence and compulsion, he has no weapons
  • His right hand holds his sceptre forwards, his gaze is fixed on it
  • He leans against a throne without sitting, he has renounced ease
  • He is on sentry-duty, therefore does not have freedom of movement, a guardian bound to his post
  • He wears a large and heavy crown: legitimacy, but also signifies that he is charged from above with a mission
  • Every crown is a crown of thorns: heavy, restrains one’s personal thoughts and imagination
  • P. 79, the eagle shield rests on the ground; unlike the Empress he does not hold it, it belongs to the throne, not him
  • The emperor’s purpose is not his own, but his throne’s; his mission is not personal; he is anonymous
  • His four renunciations are: violence, ease or freedom of movement, freedom of intellectual movement, and name
• P. 79, the first Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
  • Those who are rich and full, filled with the spiritual kingdom of man, have no room for the kingdom of heaven
  • Revelation of the truth presupposes emptiness, renunciation
  • Tao-te Ching, Ch. 11: “三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用。埏埴以為器，當其無，有器之用。鑿戶牖以為室，當其無，有室之用。故有之以為利，無之以為用。”
  • “Thirty spokes unite in one nave, and because of the part where nothing exists we have the use of a carriage wheel. Clay is moulded into vessels, and because of the space where nothing exists we are able to use them as vessels. Doors and windows are cut out in the walls of a house, and because they are empty spaces, we are able to use them. Therefore, on the one hand we have the benefit of existence, and on the other, we make use of non-existence.”
  • Tao-te Ching, Ch. 22: “曲則全，枉則直，窪則盈，弊則新，少則得，多則惑。是以聖人抱一為天下式。不自見，故明；不自是，故彰；不自伐，故有功；不自矜，故長。夫唯不爭，故天下莫能與之爭。”
  • “Be humble, and you will remain entire. Be bent, and you will remain straight. Be vacant, and you will remain full. Be worn, and you will remain new. He who has little will receive. He who has much will be embarrassed. Therefore the sage keeps to One and becomes the standard for the world. He does not display himself; therefore he shines. He does not approve himself; therefore he is noted. He does not praise himself; therefore he has merit. He does not glory in himself; therefore he excels. And because he does not compete; therefore no one in the world can compete with him.”
  • Translation by Chʻu Ta-kao, 初大告, London, 1953.
  • See Christ the Eternal Tao, where Ch. 11 (the hub) is quoted to a similar purpose in Part II, Ch. 3
• P. 80, God governs by authority, not force, if it were not so then the first three petitions of the Our Father would not make sense:
  • Sanctificetur nomen tuum.
  • Adveniat regnum tuum.
  • Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra.
• P. 81, our modern dogmas only recognize power, power is the only truth
  • If God exists, why then does he not reveal his power?
  • Only that which is powerful is of the Divine
  • P. 82, a worship of power opposite to the Nietzschian superman is faith in a God that depends on his power; if God were powerless, they would not believe in him
  • It is they who teach predestination of souls to eternal damnation
  • It is they who teach that God is responsible for all human atrocities
• P. 83, God is has two aspects with respect to free beings:
  • He is the ruling King to those who voluntarily accept his authority
  • He is the Crucified to those who abuse their freedom and worship idols, who substitute something else for divine authority
• P. 86, as it is suitable that a city or kingdom should should be made according to the model the world or cosmos, so is it necessary that the order (ratio) of the government of the city should draw form divine government
  • This is St. Thomas Aquinas’ fundamental thesis in De regno xiv, 1
  • This is why the Medievals could not imagine Christianity without the Emperor, and the Church without the Pope
  • The world is governed hierarchically by God; so should Christianity, and the Empire, and the Church
  • A hierarchy only exists when it is complete, and the Emperor is its summit, and the imperial crown confers royalty to the royal crowns below it, and thereon on down to ducal crowns, and so on, and so on
  • Without the emperor, no kings sooner or later, without kings, no nobility sooner or later, next no bourgeoisie, next no peasants, next the dictatorship of the proletariat (the class hostile to the hierarchical principle)
  • The hierarchical principle is a reflection of the divine order, this is why the proletariat professes atheism
  • “Europe is haunted by the shadow of the Emperor. One senses his absence just as vividly as in former times one sensed his presence.”
• P. 87, the post of Emperor is reserved to the choice of heaven alone, not those who seek it or the choice of the people
  • The post of emperor has become occult
  • The crown, sceptre, throne, coat-of-arms are found in the catacombs, that is under absolute protection
• Why on the card is the Emperor’s throne found in the open air?
  • The card teaches the arcanum of the authority of the Emperor, though it may be unrecognized, occult, unappreciated
• P. 91, All the arcana of Hermeticism and of the Tarot are spiritual exercises whose aim is to awaken from sleep deeper layers of consciousness
  • This is also the key to the Apocalypse of St. John, to practise it, to use it as a book of spiritual exercises
  • Its 7 letters to the churches, 7 seals, 7 trumpets, and 7 vials together are a course of 28 spiritual exercises
  • This book is a revelation which requires one to establish oneself in a state of consciousness suitable to receiving it
  • This state is concentration without effort (1st Arcanum, the Magician), vigilant inner silence (2nd Arcanum, the High Priestess), inspired activity of imagination and thought (3rd Arcanum, the Empress)
  • Lastly this state requires cessation of creative activity and contemplation of all that preceded with a view to summarizing it (4th Arcanum, the Emperor)
  • This is the key to the Apocalypse, one will search in vain for another
  • The Gospels likewise are spiritual exercises that require not only reading and re-reading but plunging entirely into their element, breathing their air, participating in the events described in them as an admirer
• P. 93, an arcanum practised for long enough becomes an aptitude
  • Does not give you knowledge of facts, but makes you able to acquire knowledge when it is necessary
  • Luke xi, 9: “Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and you shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you.”
  • It is only after having asked, sought, knocked, that one knows
  • This kind of knowing is the 4th arcanum, the synthesis of the prior three arcana, namely of mystical experience, gnostic revelation, and magical effect
• P. 95, the final faith of René Guenon, Islam, a simpler religion than Christianity, was not entirely without reason
  • Hermetic philosophy has more in common with the plain and sincere faith of simple people than with abstract metaphysics
• The Emperor perhaps owes his authority not to having power over people, but to his representing people before God
  • He is not superhuman, but very human, like King David

Letter V - The Pope, le Pape

• P. 99, The Pope on the card is in the act of benediction
  • Don’t lose sight of this benediction, whoever the Pope may be
• P. 100, in the Cabbala, prayer and benediction is a double movement, ascent and descent, similar to the circulation of the blood
  • The prayers of humanity ascend to God, are divinely oxidized, and redescend as benedictions
  • The two pillars behind the Pope are the column of prayer (on our right, the Pope’s left), and the column of benediction (on our left, the Pope’s right)
  • Jachin (veinous blue blood which ascends) and Booz (the arterial, oxidized red blood which descends), the pillars of Solomon’s Temple
  • The right and left pillars of the Sephiroth/Tree of Life
    • Right: the pillar of mercy (חָכְמָה ,חֶסֶד ,נֶֽצַח), which blesses
    • Left: the pillar of severity (בִּינָה ,גְּבוּרָה ,הוֹד), which stimulates prayer
  • The pillar of day (prayer) and pillar of night (benediction)
  • Spiritual asphyxia (blood not carrying oxygen around) happens to those who do not practise some kind of prayer
• P. 101, there are nine Beatitudes, not eight, the author insists
  • Matthew 5 has nine “beati”, but sometimes the last two are considered to be one it seems
• P. 102, no parliament could replace the spiritual reality of the Emperor, the throne of David is not replaced by collectivity
  • So can no ecumenical council replace the spiritual reality of the Pope, the Throne of Melchisedech, King of Plenitude (Salem)
• History has a nocturnal aspect as well as a diurnal
  • An esoteric as well as exoteric
  • “The silence and obscurity of the night is always full of events in preparation — and all that which is unconscious or superconscious in the human being belongs to the domain of ‘night’. This is the magical side of history, the side of magical deeds and works acting behind the facade of history ‘by day’.”
• P. 103, the Pope is the guardian of the threshold which separates night and day
  • His pillars represent day and night or prayer and benediction
  • He guards the equilibrium between day and night
  • Equilibrium between human effort and divine grace
• P. 104, the Pope represents a criterion of truth different to the scientific
  • The true is harmonious spiritual respiration, the false is that which upsets this respiration
  • Heliocentricism is scientifically true, but spiritually false
  • Christ’s blood, spilled on earth, gives the earth its central position in the cosmos
  • P. 105, Psalm 84: “Mercy and truth have met each other: justice and peace have kissed. Truth is sprung out of the earth: and justice hath looked down from heaven.”
  • This is the principle of double truth, i.e. scientific or factual, and moral or spiritual
  • At some point the factual and the moral meet, justice (צֶדֶק) and peace (שָׁלוֹם) will kiss
  • Mercy and truth are the same as the blood and water that came from the side of Christ
• P. 108, only the pentagram of the Five Wounds is the effective sign of personal sacred magic
  • The pentagram of the five currents of the personal will, no matter which way the pentagram is pointed, is always the effective sign of the imposition of the personal will on weaker beings, always tyrannical
  • P. 110, the senses are wounds through which the objective world imposes itself on us
  • The stigmatics, St. Francis, Padre Pio, Teresa Neumann, etc., are those for whom the reality of the Five Wounds has reached the physical plane
• P. 112, how does one acquire the Five Wounds? The three traditional vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience
  • Obedience, fiat voluntas tua
    • Silencing personal desires, emotions, imagination in the face of reasoning and conscience
    • The ideal over the apparent, the nation over the personal, humanity over the nation, God over humanity
    • The meaning of the hierarchy of the nine choirs of angels
    • Universal peace
    • Limits the inclinations of the “usurper” in man, where men estimate themselves to be great in their own eyes, and women make themselves estimated great in the eyes of others
  • Poverty, inner emptiness
    • Established as a consequence of the silence of personal desires, etc.
    • Required for any receptivity from above, revelation, illumination
    • Binds the tendencies of the “thief” in man, where men seize and women keep forever instead of waiting for free gift or merited reward
  • Chastity, the ideal of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    • Triumphs over sterility and indifference
    • Does not concern solely the domain of sex, concerns all domains where there is a choice between law and intoxication
    • Holds fast the “hunter” inclinations in man, where men pursue game and women set traps
• P. 114, From the “Considerations on the Stigmata of St. Francis”
  • A friar prayed that the secret words revealed by the seraphim to St. Francis when he received the stigmata on La Verna would also be revealed to him
  • One day St. Francis appeared to him, and said that by virtue of the Five Wounds he received, he in further imitation of Christ travels to purgatory every year on the anniversary of his death and delivers any souls he finds there that are of his three orders, Minors, Sisters, and Penitents
  • P. 115, the author interprets: the Five Wounds are a sacred pentagram, they change people from the natural state (limbo) to the state of human suffering (purgatory) to the blessedness of the divine state (paradise), a work of spiritual alchemy
  • P. 116, limbo is what nature offers us insofar as it is virgin and unfallen, what we could enjoy constantly in it had there been no Fall; despite the Fall we still experience moments, hours, days even of the natural joie de vivre, without sorrows or cares; this experience is the “key of analogy” to understanding limbo
  • We already experience here foretastes of purgatory and heaven, in that we suffer, and heavenly graces and consolations are extended to us
• P. 118., the two forms of the pentagram, i.e. pointing up (⛤), pointing down (⛧)
  • They do not correspond to “white” and “black magic”
  • They refer to human electricity, electricity accompanying the movements of the will
  • In ⛤, it is the will of the intellect that moves the electrical currents
  • In ⛧, the intelligence of the will does so
  • The two poles can each equally serve good or evil, both represent a mixture
  • Granted, there is more chance with ⛤ that reason and conscience will make the best of the operation than in the case of ⛧, but much depends on the intellectual and moral state of the operator
  • A perverse intellectuality would make worse use of ⛤ than a sound will with good intention would of ⛧
• The history of mankind, seen from its “nocturnal” side is the operation of symbols
  • The Cross: the vow and virtue of Obedience, the sign and formula of Faith, horizontal human and vertical divine respiration united
  • The Pentagram: the vow and virtue of Poverty, the sign and formula of Hope, it is initiative, effort, work
  • The Hexagram: the vow and virtue of Chastity, the sign and formula of Charity
  • The spiritual history of mankind is the journey from Cross to Pentagram to Hexagram, the school of Obedience, Poverty, and Charity, a divine magical operation where Charity is obtained through Faith by means of Hope
• P. 119, if the Middle Ages bore the sign of the Cross, it is in the Renaissance that the Pentagram, the Sign of Hope, flourished
  • But opposition arose between the sacred pentagram of the Five Wounds (hope in God), and the pentagram of emancipated personality (hope in man)
  • A purely humanistic art, science, and magic developed
  • The impulse of freedom, hope in emancipated man, has built up and demolished a great deal since then
  • It has created a materialistic civilization without parallel, but destroyed the hierarchical order of obedience
• The Pope, in the spiritual history of mankind, is the guardian of the sacred pentagram of the Five Wounds
  • He guards the one legitimate way of passing from the cross to the pentagram to the hexagram
  • His mission is to take care that Obedience, Poverty, and Chastity do not disappear from the world
  • When disobedience, greed, and unchastity prevail on earth, it is the keys or sacred wounds which can re-establish the unity of that which is above and that which is below
  • Peter will bind and loose

Letter VI - The Lover, l’Amoureux

• P. 124, the sixth arcanum is the summary of the preceding two, chastity being the fruit of obedience and poverty
  • Summarizes the three vows
  • It is a matter here of the choice between on the one hand obedience, poverty, and chastity, and on the other, power, richness, and debauchery
  • The three vows are memories of paradise, where man obeyed God, possessed everything at once (poverty), and where his companion was at the same time his wife, friend, sister, and mother (chastity)
• P. 125, In this arcanum a winged infant archer is shooting an arrow from within a sphere of fire at the shoulder of the young man
  • This arrow brings about true celibacy as well as true marriage
  • The heart of a monk is a pierced heart, that is why he is a monk
  • The same goes for the heart of a fiancé on the eve of his wedding
  • In which is there more truth or beauty to be found? Who can say?
• P. 127, For Freud sexual desire is the basis of all human psychology
  • Sed contra, the whole of love (in the sense of the formula Adam-Eve) is to sexual desire as white light (containing all colours) is to the colour red
  • The whole is the principle of chastity
  • The separation of red from the whole is the inverse of chastity, the very principle of unchastity, the autonomy of carnal desire, the whole is ruined
  • P. 128, Karl Marx also dealt in a partial truth, namely that it is necessary to eat in order to be able to think, and thus raised the economic interest to THE principle of man and the whole of human culture
  • Carl Gustav Jung at least saw past these, past sex, past the economy, past the will-to-power, to the deeper reality that man is a religious being
  • Is there something of Jung in Fr. Giussani’s The Religious Sense? Or is Jung merely discovering what was always known before modern times and Giussani had to reiterate. More likely the latter.
• P. 129, the Genesis account of Paradise and the Fall is true in the most profound way
  • “Descend into the depths of your own soul, descend as far as the roots, to the sources of feeling, will and intelligence—and you will know. You will know, i.e. you will have certainty that the Biblical narrative is true in the most profound and authentic sense of the word—in the sense that you must deny yourself, deny the witness of the inner structure of your own soul, in order to be able to doubt the intrinsic truth of Moses’ account. The descent into the depths of your own soul in meditating upon the account of paradise in Genesis will render you incapable of doubt.”
• P. 131, St. John the Apostle was an initiate “of both day and night”
  • He had both the macro- and microcosmic experience of the Master
  • Both the Cosmic Word and the Sacred Heart
  • As the litany says: “Cor Jesu, rex et centrum omnium cordium.”
  • St. John’s Gospel is for this reason at the same time cosmic and humanly intimate, of such heights and depths simultaneously
• P. 132, the intelligence of the serpent in the garden was horizontal, whereas that of Adam-Eve before the Fall was vertical
  • Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed because of this vertical consciousness; they saw divine ideality expressed through phenomenal reality, they knew simultaneously both the ideal and the real
  • This vertical consciousness is explained in the Emerald Table, “as above, so below”
  • Horizontal consciousness, that of the snake, is realism, pure and simple, “that which is outside me is as that which is inside, and vice versa.”
  • When Adam and Eve’s eyes were “opened”, and they became “as gods”, the self replaced the function previously filled by God, their intelligence became horizontal
  • They no longer saw things in divine light, but in their own light
  • P. 133, Eve’s first temptation was listening to the voice of the serpent
    • Obedience is devotion to the sole voice from above
    • But she heard two voices at once and began to doubt
    • She considered and compared the voice of God and the voice of the serpent as if they belonged to the same plane
    • Opposition to obedience, the root cause and the beginning of the Fall
  • The second temptation was seeing that the tree was good, and a delight
    • She looked at the tree in a new way
    • Before when she heard just the voice of God she had not the least attraction to the tree, but with the voice of the serpent vibrating in her being she looked a the tree doubting, questioning, comparing, ready to have new experiences
    • Greed, opposition to poverty, was the next cause of the Fall
  • The third temptation was eating of the fruit and sharing it with her husband
    • She tried to escape from doubt by plunging into experience and making the other take part
    • Unchastity, opposition to chastity
• “The spiritual world does not in any way suffer experimenters. One seeks, one asks, one knocks at its door. But one does not open it by force. One waits for it to be opened.”
  • P. 134, Initiation is an act of grace from above, it cannot be achieved by any technical procedures, one does not initiate oneself, one becomes initiated
  • P. 135, Hermeticism without grace is just dry historicism, without effort it is just aesthetics
  • There is certainly the idea of the Great Work, but this Work is the child of grace and effort
  • Here is the Catholic doctrine of Grace and Work
  • Here is the rejection of Pelagianism (only work counts)
  • Of Luther’s Protestantism (only grace counts)
  • This is the teaching of the Catholic Church, that natura vulnerata, non deleta
  • Fallen nature is not entirely corrupt, thus there is an element of human nature that is capable of effort or work that counts
• P. 137, the three fundamental temptations (disobedience, greed, unchastity) relate to the three conditions of the paradisiacal state of grace, or the three fundamental vows from after the Fall (obedience, poverty, chastity)
  • This is the practical meaning of the hexagram, ✡︎, the Seal of Solomon
  • This is the seal of the memory of Paradise and the Fall
  • It concerns the Law (תּוֹרָה), since the Law is the child of Paradise and temptation
  • Since the New Testament is the fulfilment of the Old, it too begins with the three temptations
    • but it is the Son of Man who undergoes them, and in a terrestrial wilderness rather than a garden
    • It is not the serpent who tempts but the Prince of this World, the superman, the other son of man
    • If this other son of man were incarnated it would be the full realization of the promise of freedom made by the serpent in the garden, i.e. Antichrist
    • Antichrist is the ideal of biological and historical evolution without grace
    • He is not an entity created by God (i.e. through grace), but an egregore or phantom generated through the biological and historical evolution initiated by the serpent
    • This is the biological and historical evolution that modern science studies and teaches
    • P. 140, Antichrist is “the ‘superman’ who haunts the consciousness of all those who seek to elevate themselves through their own effort, without grace.”
• P. 139, the confusion between that which descends from on high and that which is engendered from below is as common among modern scientists as it is among occultists
  • For them the “soul” is an egregore engendered by so many neurons firing
  • An egregore of our cells certainly exists, this is what we might call a ghost, a phantom, a haunting, a haunted house, etc., something of an electro-magnetic nature that resists the decomposition our body undergoes after death
  • This is of course nothing to do with the soul however
  • P. 141, in a similar way, the economic life below is primary and the spiritual life is merely its epiphenomenon
• P. 140, As the Baptism in the Jordan is the prototype of the Holy Sacrament of Baptism
  • So is the Temptation in the Wilderness the Prototype of the Holy Sacrament of Confirmation
  • This was the meeting of the Grace of the Baptism in the Jordan with the quintessence of the evolutionary impulse originating at the Fall of Man
  • Grace is firmly established against the law from below
  • Evolution gives way to Grace
  • The three temptations that Christ underwent were his experiences of the directing impulses of evolution, namely,
    • the will-to-power (disobedience vs. obedience),
    • the “groping trial” (unchastity vs. chastity), and
    • the transformation of the gross into the subtle (greed vs. poverty).
• P. 141, turning stones into bread is the very essence of our aspirations today, victory over poverty
  • Synthetic resins, rubber, fibre, vitamins, proteins, eventually… bread?
  • But “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew iv, 4)
  • Here our Lord adds to the law by which man is fed by the kingdom of creatures lower than himself
  • In the new law of grace it is the kingdom higher than man which feeds him
  • This means that not only does the spirit and soul of man live from nourishment from above, but also his body
  • It is not well known but over the millennia there have been and are today many cases where holy people undergo great feats of fasting sufficient to cause biological death many times over
  • E.g. two well verified cases are Servant of God Therese Neumann (1898 – 1962), and St. Lidvina (Lidwina) of Schiedam (1380 – 1433), both of whom lived for many years solely on Holy Communion
  • P. 142, The incarnation of Christ into human history signifies the possibility of abolishing the struggle for existence, the primacy of the struggle for bread
• P. 142, inviting our Lord to through himself down from the pinnacle of the temple allowing the angels to catch him is the “groping trial”, the temptation of poverty
  • Evolution proceeds from form to form, groping, trying, rejecting, trying anew
  • It is neither absolutely wise nor absolutely good (unlike God)
  • Biological evolution is the work of a vast intelligence proceeding by trial and error, a very subtle but imperfect intelligence and a very determined but imperfect will
  • It reveals to us the serpent, the most artful animal of the fields, the Prince of this World
  • P. 143,in this temptation the tempter proposed to the Son of Man the method to which he owes his existence, the trial: “Throw yourself down and see whether the Son of God and not the Son of Evolution as I am.”
  • The trial is the same as what the Bible calls fornication
  • The prophets of Israel railed against the people of the Old Testament and their spiritual fornication whenever they worshipped strange gods
  • The people succumbed to the temptation to throw themselves down from the pinnacle of the temple, and into the collective instinct below
• P. 144, seeing from the very high mountain all the glory of the kingdoms of the world, and worshipping the superman who has the power to grant them, this is the trial of obedience
  • The superman, the summit of the mountain of evolution
  • He has passed through the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and made them all subject to him, he is their final aim, he has taken their subsequent evolution into his hands
• The sixth arcanum evokes not just the vow of chastity, but also the two others, and their associated temptations in paradise and the wilderness, because one cannot be chaste without also being poor and obedient

Letter VII - The Chariot, le Chariot

• P. 147, the Chariot has a double aspect
  • On the one hand it represents someone who remains faithful to the Three Vows
  • On the other, it represents the danger of the Fourth Temptation, the most subtle and intimate
    • This is the invisible synthesis of the Three Temptations
    • The spiritual temptation of the victorious through victory itself
    • The temptation to act in one’s own name, to act as master instead of servant
  • The arcanum of mastership, both in the sense of achievement, and temptation
• P. 148, since that which is above is as that which is below,
  • Renunciation below sets in motion forces of accomplishment above, and
  • Renunciation of that which is above sets in motion forces of accomplishment below
  • The Gospel term “reward” (e.g. Matthew vi, 1) is the action set in motion above by the renunciation of things below
  • Desire does not realize magic, but renunciation of desire
  • The sincere practice of the Three Sacred Vows realizes magic
  • There is no true sacred magic outside of the Three Sacred Vows
• P. 150, the angels that ministered to Christ after his temptation were three, an angel of poverty, of chastity, and of obedience
  • Like the three Magi who brought three gifts at his birth, these three brought three gifts after his Baptism and Confirmation (temptation, cf. Letter VI, p. 140):
    • The crown of gold
    • The breath of incense from the throne of God
    • The divine word become food
  • Not sure quite what these are derived from
  • They are a response to Christ’s triple renunciation though
• The effect of the vanquished temptations was mastery over the world of the elements
  • There followed the seven archetypal miracles of St. John’s Gospel:
    • The wedding at Cana
    • The healing of the nobleman’s son
    • The healing of the paralysed man at the pool of Bethesda
    • The feeding of the five thousand
    • The walking on water
    • The healing of the man born blind
    • The raising of Lazarus at Bethany
  • Corresponding to these there followed also the revelation of the seven aspects of the name of the Master:
    • I am the true vine
    • I am the way, the truth, and the life
    • I am the door
    • I am the bread of life
    • I am the good shepherd
    • I am the light of the world
    • I am the resurrection and the life
  • These miracles are the glory or δόξα of the victory of the Three Vows over the Three Temptations
  • The victory of the threefold good over the threefold evil produces the sevenfold good, whereas the victory of threefold evil over threefold good produces only threefold evil
  • Good manifests itself wholly, in indivisible fullness
  • Seven is the number of fullness (πλήρωμα) or fullness of glory
• P. 151, for many the superman has more attraction than the Son of Man
  • John v, 43: “I am come in the name of my Father, and you receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him you will receive.”
  • The superman promises power, the Son of Man promises foot washing
• P. 152, the Charioteer has thus triumphed, and triumphed alone, he has intrinsic glory
  • but it is a most dangerous glory, for “pride” and “vainglory” are the traditional names for it, and yet these do not quite suffice for it
  • “Mystical megalomania” is apt, one sees the divine only within oneself
• P. 156, inflation, i.e. being puffed up, is the main risk to those who seek mystical depths, or that which is occult
  • Monasteries have always known this, and have millennia of experience in dealing with it
  • The monastic spiritual cultivates humility by means of obedience, the examination of conscience, and reciprocal help of one’s brothers
• P. 158, the author recounts a personal story of spiritual megalomania
  • He once knew a “tranquil man of mature age” who taught English at a YMCA at the capital city of a Baltic country
  • He had “attained a spiritual state which manifests itself through ‘the eternal gaze’ and which is that of consciousness of the identity of Self with the Eternal Reality of the world. The past, present and future … were an open book for him.”
  • He had no more problems in life, not because he had resolved them, but because they looked unimportant to him from his perspective.
  • When he spoke to the author, “his beautiful blue eyes rayed out sincerity and certainty. But this radiance gave way to a dark and angry look as soon as I raised the question of the value of the ‘subjective feeling of eternity’ when one is … unable to do something more towards helping humanity.”
  • “He did not forgive me this question,” and eventually travelled to India where he died from an epidemic.
• P. 159, spiritual megalomania is as old as the world, e.g. the fall of Lucifer
  • Cf. Ezechiel xxviii, 12–17
  • Cf. Challoner comment: “The king of Tyre, by his dignity and his natural perfections, bore in himself a certain resemblance to God, by reason of which he might be called the seal of resemblance, etc. But what is here said to him is commonly understood of Lucifer, the king over all the children of pride.”
• P. 160, the spiritual megalomaniac comes to consider human beings as insects
  • Still, the reformer/activist can fall victim to this, for though they want to save and improve humanity, they come to see themselves as more and more important for its salvation
• P. 161, occultists are particularly susceptible to having a superiority complex, inflation, and megalomania
  • They start to speak confidently and informally about higher and sacred things
  • Then they “know better” or “know all”
  • Lastly they believe themselves infallible
• The only answer to spiritual megalomania is the ancient formula, ora et labora, worship and work
  • He who worships will always know the distance which separates (and unites) worshipper and worshipped, he will not be tempted to worship himself
  • He who works, who takes part in human effort, will have no illusions about what he is capable of
• P. 162, ora et labora will hold megalomania in check, but for full immunity more is needed, namely, a concrete encounter with a being higher than oneself
  • E.g. St. Teresa of Avila meeting Christ, conversing with him, receiving advice and instruction from him
  • P. 163, in fact, the touchstone for visionary experiences in terms of their veracity, is whether they made the recipient humbler or more pretentious
  • A law: authentic experience of the divine makes one humble, the proud have not had the experience of the divine
  • The Bible has many such examples
  • Humility must come from grace, must be a gift from above
• P. 164, the traditional meaning of the Arcanum of the Chariot is victory, triumph, success
  • It is both an ideal, and a warning, as all the Arcana are
  • The Magician teaches concentration without effort and the method of analogy, but warns against charlatanry and intellectual jugglery
  • The High Priestess teaches the discipline of true gnosis, but warns against gnosticism
  • The Empress reveals the mysteries of sacred magic, but warns against the dangers of mediumship
  • The Emperor teaches us the power of the Cross, but warns against the will-to-power
  • The Pope teaches holy poverty, obedience to the divine, and the magic of the Five Wounds, but warns against the humanistic cult of personality and the magical pentagram which is its culmination
  • The Lover teaches us the Three Sacred Vows, but warns against the Three Temptations
  • The Chariot teaches us the real triumph achieved by the Self (mastery of self, αὐταρχία?, Gene Wolfe’s “Autarch”), but warns against megalomania
  • The “triumph achieved by the Self” seems to be a Jungian term, the successful outcome of “individuation”, the successful passage through catharsis (purification)
  • The Charioteer is both triumpher and Triumpher, megalomaniac and integrated man (master of himself)
• P. 165, the integrated man, master of himself, holds in check all four temptations, the three in the wilderness, plus pride, the centre of the triangle of temptation
  • He is master of the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth
  • He is master of the four cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice
• These are the four columns on his chariot, i.e. the elements and virtues in their meanings throughout the physical and spiritual worlds
  • The canopy which they support represents two contradictory things
  • The crowned charioteer is a megalomaniac, separated from heaven
  • Or he is an initiate in spiritual mysteries, and he does not identify himself with heaven, being conscious of the distance between him and it
  • Cf. p. 161, the distance that separates and unites worshipper and worshipped
  • P. 166, A tabernacles, tents, baldachins, these are all tents under which man is united in love with God, without being absorbed by Him
• P. 166, The three forms of mystical experience:
  • Union with nature,
    • Separation between the conscious subject and the outside world disappears, “mystical participation”, shamanistic experience, Empedocles throwing himself into a volcano;
  • Union with the transcendental human Self,
    • Progressively “coming to one’s senses” (as opposed to the inebriation of union with nature);
  • Union with God,
    • With the living God, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sts. Augustine, Francis, Teresa, and John of the Cross,
    • union with God in love, “a substantial duality being essentially one”, the Beatific Vision, which implies duality of seer and seen, and union in love
• P. 168, the two horses, one blue, one red, have relieved the charioteer of the effort of walking
  • These two forces have become motive forces in him, they obey his sceptre
  • This is the two pillars, yes and no, attraction and repulsion, arteries and veins, trust and mistrust, faith and doubt, life and death, right and left, Jachin and Booz
  • Cf. Letter V, the Pope, p. 100
  • True mastery is the alliance not subjugation of forces
  • This is the prototype of peace in humanity, a world divided into races, nations, classes, religions, allied but not subjugated
  • This peace is an equilibrium, is called justice
  • Each force plays its part in the microcosm and the macrocosm

Letter VIII - Justice, la Justice

• P. 174, the card evokes the idea of the law place between free action of the will and essence of being
  • Between the freedom of man and the freedom of God
  • Justice is seated between two pillars, that of the will (Jachin), and that of providence (Booz)
    • cf. Letter V, the Pope, p. 100
    • cf. Letter VII, the Chariot, p. 168
  • She does not act, only reacts, hence why she is a woman not a man
  • The balance represents equilibrium, order, health, justice
  • The sword the power to re-establish it when the individual will sins against the universal will
• P. 175, concepts and abstract ideas of God can become icons or sacred images when they are considered the beginning of the way of knowledge, not the end (e.g. God of the philosophers, God as the Absolute, or as the First Cause, etc.)
• Hypotheses, while not truth themselves, lead us to the truth, in the same way that icons lead us to experience the spiritual reality they represent
  • An icon is the beginning of the way to spiritual reality
  • Does not replace it, but gives impulse and direction towards it
• P. 176, in Roman and Anglo-Saxon law, the principle of equity is part of the exercise of justice
  • Intuition in intelligence plays a role, not just the mere establishment of facts of strict justice
  • This is why the jury exists throughout Christendom, did not exist in pre-Christian times
  • P. 177, The absence of a jury led Pilate to abdicate his responsibilities as judge, and hand Christ straight to the prosecutors
• P. 178, the law of grace is superior to the law of karma and strict justice
  • The New Testament is to the Old as grace is to karma
  • Gratia gratis data, the sun shines on the good and wicked alike
  • Grace also makes use of the balance, i.e. justice, but one scale is on earth while the other is in heaven
  • P. 179, The Lord’s prayer makes use of this balance:
  • “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
  • “For if you will forgive men their offences, your heavenly Father will forgive you also your offences. But if you will not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive you your offences,” Matthew vi, 14–15
  • The heaven-earth balance of grace signifies cooperation with grace
  • The light of the sun is freely given to all, but we need to open our windows, or eyelids, in order to receive it
• Eternal hell seems unjust merely from a quantitative perspective: the days of our lives are short compared with an infinite number of days in hell
  • P. 180, to enter into eternity without an ounce of love, that is eternal hell
• P. 181, the author is an Origenist or Universalist, he believes that an eternal hell exists, but that by the end of time it will be empty
  • He claims here that “The sweat of blood in Gethsemane is the source of ‘Origenism’.”
  • That Christ’s sweating of blood was his journey to eternal hell and his victorious return from it
  • He uttered the words, “I am he,” and many of the soldiers, etc., fell prostrate before him
  • Origen too meditating on this felt he had certain knowledge that there would be no damned at the end of the world, the devil included
• P. 183, in 1 Cor. i, 18ff., St. Paul points out that both the Jews and Greeks have dethroned the principle of love, in favour of either the principle of wisdom or that of power
  • Greeks were devoted to the supremacy of wisdom
  • Jews to the supremacy of God’s power
  • This is mirrored by the medieval and modern struggles between extreme realists or rationalists (“Greeks”) and extreme nominalists or voluntarists (“Jews”)
  • For realists or rationalists, ideas are objective realities, and God’s faculty of reason is higher than his will, God is all-powerful reason, infinite wisdom
  • For nominalists or voluntarists, ideas are only names to classify phenomena with, and God’s will is higher than his reason, God is all-powerful will
  • But the essentially Christian position is that the primacy of love, this is what brings true peace to the world, true balance, equilibrium, holds Christendom together
  • The complete victory of realism, which favours the general at the expense of the individual, would drown Christianity in severity and cruelty
  • The complete victory of nominalism, which favours the individual at the expense of the general, would drown Christianity in relativism and personal opinions
• P. 186, quote from Hermes Trismegistus in the dialogue Asclepius, i:
  • “There will be many who will make philosophy hard to understand, and corrupt it with manifold speculations … philosophy will be mixed with diverse and unintelligible sciences … whereas the student of philosophy undefiled, which is dependent on devotion to God , and on that alone, ought to direct his attention to the other sciences only so far as he may.”
• P. 188, Hermes Trismegistus on knowledge for its own sake
  • Kore kosmou, Κόρη κόσμου: the prosecution, the demon Momus, an inquisitor, complains to Hermes that the human race will be insatiable in its demand for knowledge and will tear the world apart seeking its laws
  • The Key: the defence, Hermes defends man’s cognitive faculty, which allows him to ascend to heaven, being a kind of mortal god
  • Knowledge for its own sake is to be condemned, but for the glory of God or for the service of one’s neighbour it is just
  • There exists both illegitimate (vain, foolhardy) and legitimate (even glorious) knowledge
  • It is thanks to the Church that there is any legitimate knowledge in today’s world
  • “Dear Unknown Friend, imagine to yourself a world without the Church. Imagine a world of factories, clubs, sports, political meetings, utilitarian universities, utilitarian arts or recreations—in which you would hear not a single word of praise for the Holy Trinity or of benediction in its name. Imagine to yourself a world in which you would never hear a human voice say: ‘Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum,’ or ‘Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus.’ A world without worship and without benediction… how deprived of ozone the psychic and spiritual atmosphere would then be, and how empty and cold it would be! Do you think that Hermeticism could exist and live for a single day?”
• P. 191, Hermeticism is neither a science nor a religion
  • Like a hyphen that unites two things, the true Hermeticist applies himself to a double discipline, Church and Academia, ora et labora, oratory and laboratory
  • He prays with the fervour of a son of the Church
  • He thinks with the discipline and diligence of an academic
• P. 194, St. Augustine acted as a Hermeticist in transmuting Platonism into Christian thought
  • Similarly St. Thomas Aquinas did with Aristotelianism

Letter IX - The Hermit, l’Hermite

• P. 200, the figure of the Hermit was the master of the author’s most intimate and cherished dreams of his youth
  • the youth have always in every place and time had their imagination haunted by this mysterious figure, a good, wise, and spiritual father, one who has passed through the narrow gate, who walks the hard way, utterly trustworthy, and lovable
  • “Which young Russian man, for example, would not have undertaken a journey, no matter how long and of what duration, in order to meet a startetz?”
• The hermit has a lamp, mantle, and staff
  • Lamp: the gift of shining light in the darkness
    • In terms of the Hermetic method of knowledge this corresponds to the a priori knowledge of the intellect
  • Mantle: separating himself from the collective moods of society, reducing the noise of society to silence, allowing himself to listen to and understand the harmony of the spheres
    • The harmony of all by analogy
  • Staff: his realism is such that he stands firm not on two feet but on three, he advances after having touched the ground first, he experiences things first-hand, without intermediaries
    • Authentic immediate experience
• p . 201, the Hermit resolves three antinomies:
  • Idealism-realism
    • “Consciousness or the idea is prior to everything,” vs. “The thing (res) is prior to all consciousness or ideas.”
    • P. 202, “Nihil in sensu quod non prius fuerit in intellectu,” vs. “Nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.”
    • “No, let us not prostrate ourselves either before the world or before the intellect, but let us prostrate ourselves in adoration of the common source of both the world and the intellect—God.”
    • P. 203, Hermeticism is rather “logoistic”, founded neither on the thing, nor the human intellect, but rather on the Logos
    • The Logos’ objective manifestation is the world of prototypes underlying the phenomenal world, and its subjective manifestation is the light or prototype of human intelligence
    • Objects are real in the sense of realism when they are real in the Word
    • Intellectual constructions are only true in the sense of idealism when they are true in the Word
    • The world is the phenomenal manifestation of both the world created by the Word and the evolutionary world of the serpent
    • The intellect is the manifestation both of the light of the Word, and of the “ruse” of the serpent
    • Therefore realism must distinguish between the World and the world, and idealism must distinguish between cosmic intelligence and the human intellect
    • These distinctions made, it is possible to embrace both realism and idealism at the same time
  • Realism-nominalism
    • P. 204, realism here has nothing in common with the realism above
    • Here, realism is the school of thought considers general notions or universalia to be objectively real (in fact these are extreme idealists), types and species exist in themselves, above and beyond individuals
    • Nominalism considers only particulars to be real, types and species do not exist beyond individuals, there are only names, words useful for classification
    • Medieval doctors saw that the problem of universals is at the very heart of philosophy, its central problem
    • P. 205, the problem becomes acute when we consider mankind and his creation/genesis: is there a plan, and celestial Adam, anterior to his realization, or is there a force immanent in individuals which seeks through trial and error a way of progressing
    • It becomes a problem of creation vs. evolution
    • P. 207, the resolution of this antinomy in our spiritual history was the incarnation, when the fundamental universal, the Logos, became Jesus Christ, the fundamental particular, the prototype of personality
    • Especially in St. John’s Gospel is this clear, the union of the principle of universal knowledge with the Being of individual love
    • P. 208, Darwin’s “law” of the struggle for existence will one day yield to the law of cooperation for existence, as we observe already between bees and flowers, between the different cells of an organism, among social animals (and humans), etc.
    • “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb: and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: the calf and the lion, and the sheep shall abide together, and a little child shall lead them.”, Isaias xi, 6
    • This will become the new “law”, replacing the old, a profound change happening first in consciousness, then desires and affections, then in the organic structure of beings
  • Faith-empirical reason
    • P. 210, the insane often lack doubt completely regarding their illusions
    • If faith is nothing other than intensity of belief, confidence, and hope, should they not move mountains?
    • This is not the faith that the Gospel has in view, rather intensity of the certainty of truth
    • The faith that moves mountains is complete union even if for only an instant of man and God
    • Miracles are fruits of the union of the whole human being with comic truth, beauty, and goodness, i.e. with God
    • Miracles are operations of divine-human magic, which is based on the “spiritual constellation”, the God-Man
    • “ὁ πατήρ μου ἕως ἄρτι ἐργάζεται, κἀγὼ ἐργάζομαι” — “Pater meus usque modo operatur, et ego operor,” John v, 17
    • P. 211, doubt is the primus motor, the principle that explains all of the great successes of modern science, doubting the experience of the senses, e.g. that the sun goes around the earth
    • And yet, if doubt is the father of empirical science, faith is its mother, the source of its fruitfulness
    • Newton doubted traditional knowledge, yet he believed in the unity of the world, and therefore in cosmic analogy; hence, an apple falls, and he sees in it by analogy universal gravitation
    • P. 213, the logic of cunning, that of the serpent, that of empirical science, has becoming like God as its ultimate aim
    • Genesis iii, 5: “For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.”
    • To open the eyes, knowing good and evil, this is the great arcanum of empirical science, seeking enlightenment and absolute power, and amoral or morally neutral
    • Empirical science is not a deception, we do see more, albeit only horizontally, it does give us power over nature, and it is useful both for good and evil
    • P. 214, The price of scientific enlightenment, of opening the eyes in the horizontal (quantitative) aspect, is increasing blindness to the qualitative aspect of the world
    • E.g. colours and light described scientifically are only numbers, frequencies or wavelengths
    • It is not necessary to choose between science and religion, quantity and quality, the Book of Genesis and modern astronomy,rather it is a matter of giving each their proper place
    • P. 215, in practice though, doesn’t the “scientific creed” (cf. p. 212), the scientific worldview, espouse values (e.g. denial of God, the human mind is Lord) contrary to the Christian creed?
    • The author has no answer but, “Crucify the serpent!”, i.e. between the orthogonal axes of religion and science
    • The serpent, the scientific creed, will become what it is in reality, not what it pretends to be: no longer truth, but method
    • No longer “in the beginning was matter”, but “in order to understand the mechanism of the created, material world, it is necessary to choose a method which takes into account the origin of matter and that which sets it in motion from above”
    • No longer “the brain produced consciousness”, but “in order to understand the function of the brain, it is necessary to pretend that consciousness is caused by it”
    • The metaphysical dogmas of science will become methodological postulates
    • Then following this, the will-to-power, the desire for unlimited growth and dominion over nature will lose its moral indifference, will-to-power will become will-to-service
    • P. 216, Numbers xxi, 9: “Moses therefore made a brazen serpent, and set it up for a sign: which when they that were bitten looked upon, they were healed.”
    • Today we need to look on this crucified serpent, the synthesis of science and religion, and save our spiritual life
  • P. 217, “Let us also not fear, therefore to become like the Hermit of the Tarot, who is clothed in the habit of faith and whose doubt fathoms the ground—with his staff! The light of the lamp which he holds is that which is emitted from the opposition of faith and doubt.”
• p. 217, since the Arcana, the Hermit included, are spiritual meditations, the preceding meditations on the resolution of antinomies are not intending to be solutions that will please everyone, but more exhortations to strive for such solutions
  • In general the setting forth of such theses and antitheses as clearly as possible is a special spiritual exercise, it is crystallized light
  • The intellectual “light” that is at your disposal is consumed by the opposing forces, these two opposing lights, and your mind is plunged in darkness
  • You know and see no more than the rays of these two opposing theses, and all else is dark
  • P. 218, it is from darkness that the solution to antinomy is drawn
  • Hermeticism speaks of the neutralization of binaries, that is, the generation of a third or neutral term from an active and a passive principle, e.g. father + mother = child, light + darkness = twilight, sun + moon = mercury
  • This neutralisation is called “synthesis” when the third principle is on a higher plane than the two original principles, it is called “compromise” when horizontal (same plane), and “mixture” when below
  • P. 219, An example is the colour system of Wilhelm Ostwald, two cones with their bases stuck together, the upper peak representing white light, the lower peak black, and the equator between them is where the colours are most individual and at their greatest intensity
• P. 220, the traditional interpretation of the 9th arcanum is Prudence
  • Prudence is the constant awareness of being between two darknesses
  • These correspond to the Ostwaldian “white point” above
    • Absolute synthesis which is dazzling to us, and needs careful spiritual preparation before we can approach it
  • and “black point” below
  • The Hermit’s lamp is the white point, the folds of his mantle are all the qualities that have their place at the equator, his staff is for support when feeling his way through the domains of darkness
  • He is a peripatetic Platonist en route around the equator, he is neither blinded, nor stumbles
• P. 222, Kore kosmou, Κόρη κόσμου, describes the “gift of Perfect Night”, “τέλειον μέλαν”
  • It is from darkness that the rays of light of knowledge are emitted, through the resolution of antinomies, the neutralization of binaries
  • This method implies true impartiality, that is why the Hermit must be alone, a hermit, he is prudence, and prudence is alone
• P. 223, Peace is unity in diversity, no peace without unity, no peace without diversity
  • The equator of living colours is thus the region proper to peace, the balance between the white point and the black point
• P. 224, Four types of peace (i.e. the elimination of conflict):
  • Transcendental or nirvana, the peace of the white point
  • Immanent or catholic, of all the colours of the equator
    • this is the true peace
    • Of brotherhood and mutual complement
    • The ideal of the Hermit, who knows to say no to the other false peaces
  • That of predominance or hegemonic, i.e. a particular equatorial colour eclipses all others
  • That of death or nihilistic, of the black point
• P. 226, the Hermit is neither contemplating nor working
  • He is in a third state beyond these two, the synthesis of these two, walking
  • The heart does not need to forget contemplation in order to act, nor to suppress action in order to contemplate
  • The heart is simultaneously active and contemplative
  • It walks day and night steadily, unceasingly

Letter X - The Wheel of Fortune, la Roue de Fortune

• P. 233, the Wheel of Fortune is accompanied by three figures

  • A monkey on the left of the wheel descends in order to rise again
  • A dog on the right of the wheel rises in order to descend again
  • A sphinx is seated on a platform above the wheel, beyond its movement
    • A crowned winged sphinx, with a human head and an animal body, carrying a white sword

• P. 234, there are two ideas concerning the genetic relationship between the four kingdoms of nature (mineral, vegetable, animal, human):

  • The Fall, man is the pinnacle of creation, the monkey is a degraded human, and so on down the chain
    • In this arcanum the monkey, an animal with a human face is falling
  • Evolution, the origin and ancestor of all beings is the most primitive being

• P. 235, The monkey is falling from the state of the sphinx, while the dog is approaching it

  • The sphinx represents the unity of the human and animal kingdoms
  • The monkey could be seen as a sphinx without wings, sword, and crown
  • The dog, the animal most passionately attached to human beings represents aspiration to towards union with humans, i.e. the sphinx

• P. 236, a circle of involution and evolution is a commonplace in occult literature, but involution is not commonly understood as the Fall, nor evolution as Salvation

  • They see a natural process, not the cosmic tragedy of the risks of perdition and salvation
  • P. 237, analogy of a ship at sea, the passengers see the boat and crew as a natural means of crossing the ocean, something that happens by itself once they buy a ticket
  • For the captain and crew though the passage requires work, responsibility, struggle, and risk
  • Evolution too can be seen exoterically as a natural, fatalistic process, or esoterically as a tragedy and drama

• Exotericism (“natural process”) is not an illusion, e.g. God would indeed have spared Sodom and Gomorrah had ten righteous men been found there, and their civilization would have continued to “evolve naturally” from there

  • P. 237, similarly in evolution there is both natural selection and spiritual selection or election
  • Had ten Sodomites and Gomorrites not sinned against nature, spiritual selection would prevailed over natural selection, and they would have been spared
  • Esotericism would have save their exoteric life

• Esotericism is not a life of secrecy

  • The “secrets” of the ship’s captain and crew are secret only insofar as the passengers are unwilling or unable to participate in their responsibilities

• P. 239, the author tells an account of the creation of the world, i.e. an esoteric account of the exoteric process of evolution

  • On the seventh day the Father rested, and blessed this seventh day, a day not of the movement of the world
  • Thus the circle of the movement of the world remains open, not closed, and the world had access to the Father, and he to it
  • The serpent didn’t like this remaining open, he decided there was no freedom for the world, since there was interference from outside
  • The serpent took his tail in his mouth, closing the circle, and creating a great swirl in the world that caught up Adam and Eve, and following them, all other beings
  • The woman however guarded the memory of the opening to the Father, and of the Holy Sabbath; she offered herself to be a vessel to give birth to children originating from beyond the closed circle; this brought suffering upon her, and enmity between her and the serpent
  • The sons of the woman set up altars to the Father, Enos the son of Seth worshipped and came to know the Father’s Name; Enoch, a descendent of Seth, walked with God and did not suffer death, which is the usual way out of the closed circle, but was taken up by the Father
  • Prophets proclaimed the transformation and restoration of the world inside the serpent, by the coming of the Word
  • “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

• P. 240, the open circle, or the spiral, is the world before the Fall, six days of creation crowned by a seventh

  • Mathematically the seventh day is the “step” of a spiral
  • Is there something in Matthieu Pageau about open and closed circles?
  • See also Laurus
  • See also Letter XVII, the Star, for spirals and growth
  • See also J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letter 96 to his son Christopher where he talks about the impossibility of recovering Eden, though we may come to something like it, since the way of repentancce is a spiral and not a closed circle

• P. 241, the cosmic wheel

  • According to Buddha, is a wheel of births and deaths, its movement is suffering, but there is a way to the centre of the wheel, where rest can be found
    • This is a good diagnosis of the world before Christ
  • According to King Solomon (in Ecclesiastes), it is inexorable fate, rendering all hope and endeavour vain
    • This despair certainly belongs to Holy Scripture, in that he lamenting the world without Christ (as did Buddha)
    • This is the sighing of creation for deliverance
  • Like Buddha and King Solomon, Nietzsche also saw the closed circle of the wheel, but he monstrously said yes to it! He praised the serpent and its ewige Wiederkunft

• P. 243, a miracle is some change in the energy of the world

  • If the world is a closed circle, it’s energy must be conserved
  • A miracle implies some opening in the circle, it must in fact be a spiral, there must be a sabbath
  • Miracles are action from beyond the circle of nature, which appears closed to us

• P. 245, the world, though sick, still retains characteristics of its primordial state

  • The world is worthy of being sung for and wept for at the same time
  • Reminds me of Tolkien’s Mythopoeia: “Though now long estranged, / Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. / Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned, / and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned.”
  • Also Verlyn Flieger’s comments on Tolkien’s joy and despair

• In nature we see both a harmony of equilibrium (e.g. the stars in the heavens) yet also much strife

  • Modern science as well as many ancient heresies, especially gnostic ones, fail to distinguish between nature and fallen nature, like a doctor who would tell his patient that his cancer is just natural
    • The difference with the gnostics is that they considered all nature evil

• P. 247, the most general feature of the world of the serpent is “enfoldment”, e.g animal intestines, lungs

  • The most general feature of God’s created world is “radiation”, or unfolding, or blossoming, e.g. plant foliage, flowers, etc.

• P. 249, the cunning (עָרוּם⁩) of the serpent in Genesis was mimicry, the serpent was better at mimicry than any other creature

  • To be cunning is to mime wisdom and make use of it for one’s own ends
  • The evolution of the brain (especially the human brain!) is due to the serpent
  • Some cultures, e.g. Ancient Egypt, India, Aztec Mexico, indeed revere serpents
  • It is worth considering also Moses’ brazen serpent (נְחֻשְׁתָּן) on a pole in the desert (Numbers 21) which continued to be venerated until the time of King Ezechias (4 Kings 18) nearly a thousand years later

• P. 250, some have proposed that the serpent is the “great magical agent” in the world, the source of magic, who also taught arts and sciences to early humanity

  • Presented in occult literature as the sole principle of knowledge, occult or otherwise
  • But centuries of experience have shown that there is another agent and another magic
  • John the Baptist didn’t see a serpent descend upon the Master of Sacred Magic, but a dove
  • Several days later the miracle at Cana was accomplished
  • The agent is the dove, the Spirit that is above the brain, who descends upon the head and remains, transcending cerebral intellectuality
  • P. 251, Matthew x, 16, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves.”
  • I.e. one should try to unite cerebral intellectuality with spiritual spontaneity

• P. 252, if the skulls unearthed by palaeontologists are evidence of the biological evolution of the human brain, then the martyrs throughout history are evidence of transcendence of biological evolution

  • “Complete evolution” is the intersection of biological and spiritual evolution

• P. 254, the author notes that there is a paradox in science as to how traits acquired through experience are transmitted from one generation to the next, if it is known that these are not expressed in the genes

  • Also interestingly, in the sum total of facts concerning “general evolution” there is evidence of “progress”, of creativity, not accounted for in theory

• P. 256, the sphinx above the wheel represents animality and humanity united

  • Its enigma is the humanization of animality (dog ascending) and the animalization of humanity (monkey descending)

• P. 257, There is created animality (created by God before the Fall) and evolved animality (worked out by the serpent since the Fall)

  • The holy animality of divine origin is summarized by the Four Living Creatures (חַיּוֹת) of Ezechiel/Revelation, the Bull, the Lion, the Eagle, and the Angel or Man
  • The union of these four is the sphinx, the prototype of holy animality
  • Holy animality means spontaneous obedience to God, divine instinct
  • The serpent’s animality is bestiality, bestial instinct
  • The Eagle’s instincts:
    • Divine: that which elevates heart and spirit
    • Bestial: aggression and lightning attack
  • The Lion’s instincts:
    • Divine: moral courage
    • Bestial: ferociousness
  • The Bull’s instincts:
    • Divine: productive concentration, deep meditation
    • Bestial: concentration of will on a single thing, blindness, rage
  • The Angel or Man’s instincts:
    • Divine: objectivity, truthfulness, impartiality, conscience
    • Bestial: indifference to everything, coldness and heartlessness, cynicism

• P. 259, it is necessary to restrain the bull in order to elevate it into the Bull (divine)

  • Restrain your rage and blindness, be silent, elevating your concentration, and you will be open to deep meditation
  • The Eagle and the Bull are vertical opposites, and this elevation is their marriage
    • The marriage of opposites being the traditional theme of alchemy
    • They are tendencies towards heights and depths, toward the general and particular, towards a comprehensive view and minutiae
  • The Angel and the Lion are the horizontal pair of opposites on the cross of man’s instinctively
    • By uniting instinctual courage with conscience we unite the Lion and the Angel
    • We obtain the courage that we admire in the martyrs and saints

• P 260, the Tenth Arcanum presents the sphinx as the solution to the wheel of animality, through the law of the Cross (the Four Living Creatures)

  • It lacks one thing however, the quinta essentia, i.e. what would make the sphinx a reality, but is not the sphinx itself
  • I.e. the “active principle of the Cross”, the New Adam, without which the operation would remain only knowledge and hope
  • The author thinks that the absence of any direct reference to the New Adam on the card indicates a pre-Christian origin to the iconography here, perhaps it is the oldest card

• P. 263, the Greek concept of different levels of knowledge is mentioned here in the context of Plato:

  • Opinion, δόξα, which leads to a
  • Probable conclusion, διάνοια, which leads to
  • The certainty of immediate perception, ἐπιστήμη, leading to the world of ideas

• P. 269, this letter discusses the transformation of fallen animality into holy animality, which latter is spontaneous obedience to God

  • It is represented in the tradition as the synthesis of the Four Living Creatures, which is the sphinx, divine instinct, the kingdom of God in and through the unconscious

Letter XI - Force, la Force

• P. 270, the divine instinct of the previous letter expresses itself through the “hunger and thirst for righteousness”, acts of generosity, respect, admiration
  • The world is full of implicit religion, religio naturalis
  • The birds indeed praise God when they sing
  • Can be seen in Revelation iv: “And in the sight of the throne was, as it were, a sea of glass like to crystal; and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four living creatures, full of eyes before and behind… And they rested not day and night, saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come.”
  • The sea of glass is the eye of nature for God
  • The Four Living Creatures are the natural reaction to the divine presence
  • Natural religion manifests itself through “vital elan”
  • “Nature is fundamentally supernatural”, nature and supernature come from the same source, religion (conscious or unconscious)
  • i.e. the perception of the Presence (the many eyes) and reaction to it (the Sanctus)
• P. 271, All beings are baptized into natural religion, though the baptism of fire and Spirit surpasses this and bring healing to fallen nature
• Revelation xii, 15: “And the serpent cast out of his mouth after the woman, water as it were a river; that he might cause her to be carried away by the river.”
  • The waters of the serpent are different from the sea of glass, they are in movement, in pursuit of an aim
  • Our faith can be full of calm steadfastness, or we can be “carried away” like fanatics, e.g. like Nazis or communists
  • When all the dust settles on Karl Marx and his philosophy it will be Plato to whom the young return one day
  • Marx “carries away”, Plato illuminates
• P. 272, In Revelation the Four Living Creatures before the throne are called ζῷα, whereas the others are called θηρία, beasts
  • Revelation contrasts genuine and holy animality with fallen bestiality
• P. 273, force consists of perception and then reaction to the perceived
  • The two feminine figures of Revelation:
    • Revelation xii, the woman clothed with the sun, etc., celestial, non-fallen nature
      • Perception and reaction to that which is above
    • Revelation xvii, the prostitute, arrayed in gold and jewels, terrestrial, fallen nature
      • Horizontal perception and reaction
• P. 274, miracles are always a cooperation between grace and nature
  • E.g. multiplying of loaves was a multiplying of existing loaves
  • The man born blind had to wash in the pool of Siloam, before the healing by the Master’s words and clay made by the Master’s saliva took effect
  • Even the Resurrection itself is not a new body but transformation of an old body
• P. 275, we see here a woman victorious over a lion, holding its jaws open, therefore the subject of the 11th Arcanum is Virgin Nature participating actively in the miracles of divine magic
  • She does so with the same ease as the Magician, and her hat is similar, lemniscate, ∞
  • Force is power without effort, she subdues the lion with a power that is very different from the lion’s power, she has a power of a higher order than the lion’s
  • The virgin is plainly weaker than the lion in terms of quantity of physical force
  • She invites us to leave the plane of quantity and raise ourselves to the plane of quality
  • The lion yields to the Lion, bestiality to holy animality
  • P. 278, “Force is virginity”
• P. 276, the author says he has learned from many people, scientists, mystics, whose lives were characterized by a spirit of “conversation”, i.e. flowing-together, people who join their efforts with each other in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of things
  • He owes nothing however to polemicists, those who attack each other
  • The force at work in the former is that of the virgin here, the Shekinah, while that which electrifies polemicists is that of the serpent
• P. 277, two words for “life” in Greek:
  • Ζωή, vivifying life, the source, that which fills the individual in prayer, meditation, sacrifice, and the sacraments, vivification from above, vertical
  • Βίος, derived life, that which flows, vitality issuing from the source that flows horizontally, flows from generation to generation
• P. 278, βίος is that which prevails during sleep, that which during sleep repairs damage to the organism due to electricity
  • In a tree, βίος always prevails, it is only exterior mechanical destruction that ends the life of a tree, not an exhaustion of inner vitality (old age)
  • The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, of the polarity of opposites, is electricity, which entails exhaustion and death
  • Death is the price paid for life amidst opposites
  • At the Fall, electricity (physical, psychic, and mental) is what entered into Adam and Eve and into all creation
  • The whore of Babylon of the Apocalypse represents nature in which βίος is subordinated to electricity
  • Suffering creation, what St. Paul says “groaneth and travaileth in pain” (Romans viii) for its deliverance, is nature in which βίος and electricity are in equilibrium
  • Non-fallen nature, virgin nature, is when βίος dominates electricity, and ζωή in turn dominates βίος
• P. 279, the state of virginity is the state of spirit, soul, and body being in consonance
  • From the point of view of the earth, this means complete obedience of body to soul
  • From purgatory, this is complete obedience of soul to the breath of eternity, or chastity
  • From heaven, this is absolute receptivity to the divine, or poverty
• P. 282, the Emerald Table speaks of two aspects of Force:
  • It “overcometh every subtle thing” (vincet omnem rem subtilem)
    • To deeper meaning of overcome is to change the enemy into a friend
    • The devil will be overcome only when he sings again with the celestial hierarchies praising God (probably some Origenism/universalism here)
    • To overcome the subtle is to change opposing forces into allied
    • The subtle things to overcome are temptations of doubt, pleasure, and power
    • Temptation entails contact and exchange, every temptress risks becoming overcome by a saint, and wiping their feet with her hair and tears
      • Is this true for demonic temptations I wonder?
  • and “doth penetrate every solid substance” (omnemque solidam penetrabit)
    • P. 287, every physical, psychic, and mental obstacle is penetrable by force/viriginity
    • By action opposite to explosion, i.e. emollient action
    • Force will not concern itself with someone’s rigid intellectual system, rather it will “breathe” straight into the person’s heart, which having tasted ζωή, will pass that breath on back to the head, mollifying the mind’s rigidity
    • Regarding physical obstacles, the author quotes a Dr. Étienne May who says that even had all other illnesses been cured, sclerosis of the arteries alone would prevent us from being immortal
    • Sclerosis is therefore death itself, modifying the body over the course of its life little by little into a corpse
    • P. 288, there are two types of dying
      • Sclerosis, the body expels the soul, refuses to serve as its instrument
      • The principle which vivifies the body retires, the soul quits the body
    • In ecstasies the souls of saints can leave their body temporarily, but this process could also be gradual, e.g. an increasing nostalgia, a growing ecstasy leading to the end of one’s life, the soul quitting the body, a “natural” death
    • P. 290, Force (Ζωή) has penetrated the solid substance, it has kept the arteries supple and nervous system normal through emollient action, making the “natural” death possible
• P. 291, the Virgin/Force is the principle of Springtime, creative spiritual élan, spiritual flourishing
  • The sickness in the West today is lack of creative élan, it is growing old, drying up, lacking freshness
  • The Reformation, Englightenment, Bolshevism, etc. all show mankind turning its back on the Virgin
• P. 296, every spiritual tradition must adhere to these conditions:
  • It must be founded from above
  • It must observe the 10 Commandments and be inspired by the ideal of virginity
    • These are much more than a moral code, they are the hygiene, method, and conditions of the spiritual life
  • Its aim must be implied in the will which founded it, with no human agenda
• P. 297, the Fourth Commandment, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” is the commandment of tradition
  • To advance one must learn
  • To learn one must appreciate and continue the past
  • Progress implies continuity, coherence between past, present, future
  • There is only progress within tradition, whether spiritual or biological
• P. 298, all the fruits of human experience and worthy of study and examination, but faith is different
  • “One cannot change faith without gaining or losing. A Negro fetishist who embraces Islam gains; a Christian who is converted to Islam loses. The former gains new moral values for his soul; the latter loses moral values from his soul. Regrettable or not, it is a fact that religions constitute a scale of moral spiritual values. They are not equal.”
• P. 300, the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Commandments, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,” “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods,” “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife,” relate to the spirit of rivalry
  • He contrasts St. Theresa of Avila and Martin Luther as leaders of spiritual movements in this regard
  • St. Theresa profoundly reformed the Carmelite order without destroying the unity of the Church and without accusing anyone
  • Martin Luther founded a rival church calling Rome the seat of the Antichrist, bearing false witness against his neighbour in a spirit of criticism and rivalry
  • Criticism and polemicism are the mortal enemies of the spiritual life, they substitute destructive electrical energy in place of constructive vital force
• P. 301, the 10 Commandments signify harmony with non-fallen nature, harmony with the principle of virginity and Force

Letter XII - The Hanged Man, le Pendu

• P. 307, we see a man suspended upside-down, caught between two gravitational fields, that of “this world”, and that of heaven
  • The attraction from below is as real as that from above
  • The Hanged Man of this card is comparable to someone who while living has passed from the terrestrial field into the celestial field
• St. Anthony the Great, Apothegmata x: “As fish who remain on dry land die, so do monks who linger outside of the cell, or who pass time with the people of the world, slacken the tension of solitude.”
  • This “tension of solitude” belongs to those under the sway of attraction from above
• P. 308, the attraction of heaven is so real it can take hold not only of the soul but also the body, as we have seen with many saints whose bodies indeed rise during their extasies, e.g. St. Theresa of Avila
  • P. 309, what happened when the centre of spiritual attraction was clothed in flesh?
  • He quotes the Gospels of our Lord, and then St. Peter walking on water
  • John vi and Matthew xiv: “Ego sum. Nolite timere.”
  • P. 310, The esoteric kernel of “I am” is concealed by the translation “It is I”
  • The fear is the fear of being carried away by the elemental forces of gravitation of a lower order, the sea of the electrical field of death
  • The celestial centre of gravitation, the Master, says do not fear and supports St. Peter on the water
  • Uniting oneself with that centre, one can transcend the agitated elements of this world, the electrical gravitational field of the serpent
  • P. 311, our Lord’s walking on water was due to entasy, centering in himself, not ecstasy
  • “Ego sum. Nolite timere” means “I am gravitation, I am the true sun of the invisible world who attracts and supports all beings, do not be afraid for I AM.”
• P. 315, Genesis vi, the sons of God (בְנֵיהָֽאֱלֹהִים) exchanged divine gravitation and radiation for terrestrial gravitation and enfoldment, and gave birth to the giants (נְפִילִים), beings endowed with a great force of enfoldment
  • Since that time, the world of enfoldment tends to produce the strong hero (גִּבּוֹר), and the world of radiation the righteous man (צַדִּיק)
  • Not so long ago Friedrich Nietzsche championed the ideal of the גִּבּוֹר, the Übermensch
• P. 315, Two things characterize the state of the spiritual man
  • he is suspended
    • St. Theresa: “The soul seems to me to be in this state when no comfort comes to it from heaven and it is not there itself, and when it desires none from the earth and is not there either. Then it is as if crucified between heaven and earth, suffering and receiving no help from either.”
    • This is a state of complete solitude, being alone, because one is outside both the terrestrial and celestial worlds
    • The zero-point between the two gravitation fields, from there one can only ascend to the celestial or descend to the terrestrial
  • he is upside-down
    • P. 316, the solid ground under his feet is actually found above, whilst the ground below is only the concern and perception of the head
    • Abraham had faith, that is “the firm assurance of things hoped for” after having experienced “the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews xi), i.e. his will knew despite his mind and imagination not seeing
    • Nevertheless, he obeyed without knowing where he was going, i.e. his head followed his feet, and his feet were “above”, obeying the commandments of heaven, while his head was “below” knowing only the risks of the journey
• P. 324, the author uses the following terms for the voluntary sacrifice of the soul’s powers to heaven, and the sacrifice of these three powers is the same as the three traditional vows:
  • The “zodiacalisation of the will”
    • The will becomes an organ of perception and execution towards God, as the zodiac is in the macrocosm
    • Obedience, the sacrifice of the will
  • The “solarisation of thought”, and
    • Thought becomes warm and luminous as the sun
    • Poverty, the sacrifice of thought
  • The “lunarisation/selenisation of imagination”
    • The imagination reflects the truth as the moon does the sun
    • Chastity, the sacrifice of imagination
• P. 328, a quote from St. Athanasius’ Life of St. Anthony:
  • “And indeed, after this still others came. They were of those who among the pagans are supposedly wise. They asked him to state an argument for our faith in Christ… (Anthony said to them through an interpreter)… ‘since, of course, you pin your faith on demonstrative proofs and this is an art in which you are master, and you want us also not to worship God without demonstrative arguments—do you first tell me this: How does precise knowledge of things come about, especially knowledge about God? Is it by verbal proof or by an act of faith?’ When they replied that the act of faith takes precedence and that this constitutes accurate knowledge, Anthony said: ‘Well said! Faith arises from the disposition of the soul, while dialectic comes from the skill of those who devise it. Accordingly, those who are equipped with an active faith have no need of verbal argument, and probability find it even superfluous. For what we apprehend by faith, that you attempt to construct by arguments; and often you cannot even express what we perceive. The conclusion is that an active faith is better and stronger than your sophistic arguments.’”
  • Clear comparison of certainty due to active faith (actual meeting with truth) vs. that due to demonstration by reasoning (semblance of truth)
  • The difference is the same as meeting a person vs. a photograph of that person, reality vs. image
  • Reasoning is intrinsically hypothetical, depends on the completeness and validity of those elements upon which it is based, new pieces of information can topple our tower of reasoning
  • P. 329, the martyrs did not die for hypotheses, but for the truths of faith
  • Communist martyrs died not for the dogmas of Marxism (supremacy of the economy, etc.) but for the grains of Christian truth contained within Communism, (human brotherhood, etc.); there cannot be materialist martyrs
  • The Communist witness against Christianity: you who have the fullness of truth, not just a few grains, are you willing to sacrifice your lives for it?
• P. 337, Who is the Hanged Man?
  • Neither sanctity, nor righteousness, nor initiation, but their synthesis
  • He is the eternal Job, the tried and tested man
  • A man between two kingdoms, that of this world and that of heaven
  • Job vii, 1–2: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling. As a servant longeth for the shade, as the hireling looketh for the end of his work.”
  • Job xix, 23–27: “Who will grant me that my words may be written? Who will grant me that they may be marked down in a book? With an iron pen and in a plate of lead, or else be graven with an instrument in flint stone. For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God. Whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom.”
  • Job xxiii, 11: “My foot hath followed his steps, I have kept his way, and have not declined from it.”

Letter XIII - Death, la Mort

• Ezechiel xxxvii, 4: “Ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”
• P. 341, contrary, categorical statements made by God and the serpent in Genesis:
  • “On the day when you eat from it you will die,” vs. “You will not die.”
• P. 342, forgetting, sleep, and death are three manifestations of the same thing
  • They all bring about disappearance, they differ in degree only
  • They effect the disappearance of intellectual, psychic, and physical phenomena respectively, i.e. forgetting is to memory as sleep is to consciousness as death is to life
  • Yet their domains are wider than just intellectual forgetting, organic sleep, and clinical death
  • Beyond intellectual forgetting there is forgetting in the domain of the soul and of the will (just as there is a memory of the soul and of the will)
  • E.g. one can remember a person intellectually and psychically (with vivid feeling), and yet do nothing for him, since your will has forgotten him
  • The black of the card represents forgetting, the tufts of grass represent sleep, the skeleton with a scythe represents death
  • Natural forgetting reduces man to animality
  • Natural sleep reduces him to vegetality
  • Natural death reduces him to minerality
• P. 346, Three kinds of memory
  • Mechanical, logical or intellectual, and moral
  • Young people possess a good mechanical memory, but they need to train their intellectual memory to supplement their mechanical memory which will grow weaker with age
  • In old age, the intellectual memory will gradually fail too, and so moral memory must come to replace both it and the mechanical
  • Senile lapse of memory is due to the fact that the intellectual and mechanical memories have not been replaced by anything
  • People who are able to give everything moral worth and see the moral sense in everything will forget nothing, they will have an excellent memory to advanced age
  • Moral memory can comprehend all things
  • It is more effective the less one is indifferent, one remembers more of the past and even learns new things when one is morally interested
  • Lack of moral interest is the fundamental cause of memory loss in old age
  • See also Letter XX, The Judgement
• P. 347, vertical or revelatory memory, is a fourth kind of memory
  • The three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience render a man capable of listening to and receiving things from above, increasing his vertical memory
  • This is in fact moral memory carried to a higher degree
• Purely mechanical explanations of phenomena are no explanations at all
  • The act of smiling explained in terms of contractions of muscles and electrical nerve impulses, has missed it entirely, has missed the joy of which smiling is the manifestation
• P. 348, the force of recall in memory is shown in its highest form in the story of the raising of Lazarus, John xi
  • It is love for Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus
  • Recall to life, resurrection, has three stages: “coming”, “taking away the stone”, and recall or “crying with a loud voice”
• P. 349, work and suffering are what render our voices audible and louder to the spiritual world
  • This is why the Rosary repeats the Ave Maria 150 times and the Pater noster 15 times
  • “The effort of the rosary-prayer founded on suffering makes it a powerful means—sometimes almost all-powerful—in sacred magic.”
• “There is no freedom outside of the miraculous, and man is man only insofar as he lives from the miracle, through the miracle, and for the miracle.”
  • P. 350, It is a miracle, that is an act of freedom, for a rich man to abandon his possessions and embrace poverty, as did St. Anthony the Great
  • To bless those who curse you is a miracle, it is contrary to the normal functioning of the human machine
  • The Sermon on the Mount is the triumph of doing, acts of freedom, over functioning, the ordinary course of nature
  • Nothing is done without being a miracle, the non-miraculous is not done, it is just automatic functioning
  • The Prologue of St. John’s Gospel reveals the cosmic role of the miracle, the world was made by the creative Word, it was not due to any automatic functioning
  • “All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.”
• P. 353, Guardian angels could not guard human beings if they were absorbed in contemplation of God
  • Thanks to their habitual union with God, the accomplished fact of the union of their will with God’s, they are able to do so
  • They know God’s will “blindly”, through the dim intuition of their own will, i.e. through perfect faith
• P. 354, Matthew v, 37, “But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil.”
  • The yes-and-no is essential reality, the truth pure and simple
  • Any surplus comes from evil, the sphere of the serpent
  • The serpent has his own word, a third term, which is the surplus over yes-and-no, over life-and-death
  • The serpent offers Adam and Eve crystallization, according to the principle of enfoldment, such that the human will become death-proof
  • This crystallization is through friction, electrical energy produced by the struggle between yes and no in man
  • P. 360, When the serpent says you will not die, he is not lying, but talking about a different kind of immortality: the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil produces an inner friction between yes and no, which effects crystallization and resists death
• P. 358, The author states plainly that “ghosts exist”, not a question of belief but of explaining, since there is an immense body of literature and experience on it
  • From time to time after someone’s death, this person, or something of him, or something similar to him, manifests in a physical way (noises, movements, etc.) in the guise of active energy
  • As if energy, freed through death, but not dispersed manifests as an entity or body
  • P. 359, Ghosts usually have a maniacal consciousness, fixated on some few limited actions, the crystallization of a single habit or idea
  • Ghosts are the intense crystallization of a purpose or passion
• P. 360, many scientists study victory over death through science, without God or mysticism, a new Tower of Babel
  • P. 361, The serpent’s bold programme, his Tower of Babel, is immortality, but different from God’s immortality
  • He aims at a mankind composed of the living and of ghosts, the latter reincarnating without delay and avoiding purgatory and heaven
  • The author claims that the Church is hostile to the idea of reincarnation not because it doesn’t exist, but because it is avoidance of purgatory; we should be preparing for purgatory instead of a future terrestrial life
  • P. 362, there are thus two immortalities, God’s and the serpent’s
  • There are also two deaths
    • In the parable of the prodigal son, the father speaks of death, saying his son was dead and is alive again; this death is remoteness from the Father and his house
    • There is also physical death, remoteness from the physical plane and the electrical field of terrestrial gravitation (see The Hanged Man)
    • When God says that Adam and Eve will die when they eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he means that you they will remove themselves from him
    • When the serpent says that they will not die he means that Adam and Eve will live, but remotely from God, and it will be the serpent who will attend to the uninterrupted continuation of their life on the horizontal plane
    • The serpent will make up for his lack of wisdom and love with his intellect and psycho-physical electricity, which will be the source of their life
    • The serpent understands by “life” what God understands by “death” and vice versa
  • There is thus vertical Life and Death, and horizontal life and death
  • The Cross of Calvary, +, is two opposed lives and deaths
  • The resurrection is not only the triumph of Life over Death, but of Life over life
  • Luke xxiv, 5: “Why seek you the living with the dead?”
  • Let us not seek amongst the dead for the living, and above all not seek for immortal Life in the domain of death and intellect and electricity
• P. 363, Imagine trying to prove using scientific arguments to St. John of the Cross or St. Theresa of Avila, whose souls many times left their bodies, that the soul is only a mirage produced by chemical and electrical reactions
• P. 366, concentration is the art of forgetting, meditation or profound communion is the art of sleeping, and contemplation of authentic initiation is the art of dying
  • Through forgetting, sleep, and death one arrives at mystical union with God and immortality
• P. 369, contrast the construction of the Tower of Babel with the descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem
  • In the latter, the whole of human civilization is transformed into a celestial city, where the laws are those of heaven, and finally the whole of nature is assumed into, in the realization of a new heaven and new earth

Letter XIV - Temperance, Tempérance

• P. 374, the angel on this card wears a red and blue robe, and holds red and blue vases, and makes water gush in a mysterious way from one vessel to the other
  • He bears good news that beyond the either-or there is the possibility of the not-only-but-also, or the both-and
  • He suggests the cooperating polarity or integrated duality
  • The water is the fruit and gift of the both-and integrated duality
• P. 375, St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermon on the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “Man was made in the image and likeness of God: in image he possesses freedom of will, and in likeness he possesses virtues. The likeness has been destroyed; however, man conserves the image. The image can be burnt in hell, but not consumed. It is damaged but not destroyed. Through fate as such it is not effaced, but subsists. Wherever the soul is, there also will be the image. It is not so with the likeness. This remains in the soul which accomplishes the good; in the soul which sins it is wretchedly transformed. The soul which has sinned ranks with beasts devoid of intelligence.”
  • Image is the indestructible, essential structure and likeness is the totality of functions or functional structure
  • The functions are a hotbed of sin, attracted towards evil; they are immortal only in proportion to their conforming with the image
• The author says the God given counterweight to our vicious inclinations is our guardian angel
  • The prayer at the service of aspersion asks God: “to deign to send from heaven his holy Angel to guard, cherish, protect, visit, and defend all those who are gathered together in this place.”
  • He is a flaming star, a luminous pentagram above a man
  • P. 376, A perpetual memento to our primordial likeness to God, to our soul’s mission, to our soul’s place “in my Father’s house where there are many rooms” (John xiv, 2)
  • Sometimes he takes a greater part in our activity than usual, he “visits”, as in the prayer
  • He warns, informs, helps to appreciate, but he never suppresses the occasions themselves of temptation
  • St. Anthony the Great: “Without temptation there is no spiritual progress.”
  • For both angels and demons temptation is integral to the inviolable human free will
• P. 378, the angels are not omniscient, but the ease by which they understand human beings is impressive, leading some to believe they are omniscient
  • This is the origin of the term genius, originally a tutelary guardian spirit, now a superhuman intelligence
• The guardian angel depends on the man’s creative activity
  • If the human does not ask for the angel’s help he turns away and has no motive for creative activity himself
  • His creative geniality remains potential and unmanifested
  • He enters a “twilight state” of consciousness comparable to human sleep
  • An angel who has nothing to exist for is a great spiritual tragedy
  • “Therefore, dear Unknown Friend, think of your guardian Angel, think of him when you have problems, questions to resolve, tasks to accomplish, plans to formulate, cares and fears to appease! Think of him as a luminous cloud of maternal love above you, moved by the sole desire to serve you and to be useful to you.”
• P. 381, St. John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, ii, 9, 11: “God sometimes permits an effect to extend to the bodily senses in the fashion in which it existed interiorly, the wound and sore (then) appears outwardly, as happened when the Seraphim wounded St. Francis. When the soul is wounded with love by the five wounds, the effect extends to the body, and these wounds are impressed on the body and it is wounded, just as the soul is wounded with love. God does not usually bestow a favour upon the body without bestowing it first and principally upon the soul.”
• P. 384, prayer without ceasing (1 Thessalonians v, 17)
  • It is impossible to pray unceasingly in full consciousness, but you can carry over prayer into the unconscious, where it goes on unceasingly
• An angel’s wings are a union of effort and grace, and the grace is most decisive here
  • The unity of two currents, human effort (prayer without ceasing) from below and divine grace from above
  • The bat wings of the Devil in the fifteenth arcanum consist only of energy engendered from below
  • Pure humanism also can only create wings of Icarus
• P. 386, the name Temperance is given to this fourteenth arcanum because just measure is required in the fluidic relationship between image and likeness, in order to give live and health
  • This measure is an ever changing equilibrium between eternity and the moment, the absolute and relative, contemplation and action, ideal and phenomenal, Mary and Martha
  • When these two sisters, Mary and Martha are present and collaborate in us we live a healthy life
  • Ora et labora, the essential formula
• St. Bernard, in his monastic reform, his sermon on the second Crusade, and his rules for the Templar order, all showed contemplation and work united
  • People criticise the saint for his intervention in the crusades
  • But the armies for this battle were already assembled, had been seen the Arab invasions in the seventh century
  • St. Bernard’s task was to make saints of the men who were going off and fighting, not to end the just war
  • Charles Martel repulsed them at Poitiers in France and saved Christian civilization from conquest
  • If they had been content with only taking a defensive attitude from that point on, likely the fate of Byzantium would have befallen the West also
• P. 388, the contact between image and likeness is experienced as inner weeping
  • Image and likeness are two sisters, weeping is the reality of the fact that they touch
  • Being “moved to tears” is the usually expression for this
  • Their tears mingle, the resulting inner current is the life of the human soul
• Tears, sweat, and blood are the three substances of the mystery of Man
  • To be touched from above is tears, tears announce the engagement of the temporal and the eternal
  • The effort to conform to that which is above is sweat, the trial of the engagement
  • The consummated marriage of grace from above and sweat from below is blood
• P. 388, the gift of tears has always been considered a gift of the Holy Spirit by the Church Fathers
  • By this gift the soul surpasses itself, ascends to a higher intensity of life
  • In the ancient world, ritual weeping or lamentation was common, i.e. there were prescribed gestures of mourning and grief
  • It was amongst the people of Israel that real weeping began, and this was a manifestation of their chosen status, and their role to play in the coming of Christ, who wept at Lazarus’ resuscitation and who sweated blood in the garden of Gethsemane
• P. 396, Martin Luther and John Calvin both had incorrect ideas about inspiration (the author uses this term now for what was above referred to as “blood”, the marriage of grace and effort)
  • Martin Luther ardently desired inspiration, and engaged in rigorous asceticism in order to procure it, but had none
    • Thus disillusioned he preached the vanity of work and effort, and that faith alone suffices for salvation
    • Man is only a sinner, nothing more, and because of sin is prevented from inspiration
  • John Calvin had a sudden conversion from which he concluded that inspiration is the work of God alone, man does not participate in it
    • God chooses some for salvation from amongst the mass predestined for perdition
    • God is arbitrary, a cosmic tyrant, and inspiration is not up to man
  • St. John of the Cross was needed to show that one can pass through the dark night of the soul, and spiritual aridity, without despairing
    • In the same way one can effect profound reform without destroying the unity of the Church
    • St. John atoned for Martin Luther
  • St. Ignatius of Loyola was needed to demonstrate that man can choose the cause of God voluntarily, completely of one’s free will, out of love for Him
    • One can obey God out of love for the God of love, instead of as a poor wretch before God’s almighty power
    • St. Ignatius atoned for John Calvin

Letter XV - The Devil, le Diable

• P. 402, with the Devil as a subject of meditation, the meditant must be cautious and not come to identify with the Devil
  • There is great danger in arriving at an intuition of evil, or uncovering the secrets of evil
  • The author gives the (for my part, unexpected) example of Dostoevsky, that he released into the world many Christian truths, but also secret practical methods of evil, especially in the novel The Possessed
  • Another example of delving too deep into evil is the splitting of it by some anthroposophists (the movement founded by Rudolf Steiner of the Steiner/Waldorf schools) into two principles, Lucifer (subjective, the seducing principle) and Ahriman (the main Zoroastrian evil spirit, objective, the hypnotizing principle)
    • The East could be said to be under Lucifer insofar as it denies matter
    • The West and modern science could be said to be under Ahriman, since it has become so materialistic and objective
    • Some say that laboratories are the fortresses of Ahriman, while theatres are fortresses of Lucifer
  • To occupy oneself in thus investigating evil is bringing oneself into contact with evil and reducing one’s contact with the good
    • This is why the anthroposophical movement is now all but dead and very distant from the teachings of its founder
• P. 403, one can only grasp profoundly that which one loves
  • One cannot love evil, therefore evil is unknowable in its essence
  • One can understand it only at a distance, observing its phenomenology
  • The world of evil is a chaotic world, at least so it presents itself
  • One ought not to enter this jungle if one does not wish to lose one’s way
• P. 404, The author gives some Biblical quotes about the Devil, but suggests that the illustration of this card does not appear to be about this cosmic drama about the fall of the angels and their struggle against St. Michael:
  • Ezechiel xxviii, 14–17: “Thou a cherub stretched out, and protecting, and I set thee in the holy mountain of God, thou hast walked in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day of thy creation, until iniquity was found in thee. By the multitude of thy merchandise, thy inner parts were filled with iniquity, and thou hast sinned: and I cast thee out from the mountain of God, and destroyed thee, O covering cherub, out of the midst of the stones of fire. And thy heart was lifted up with thy beauty: thou hast lost thy wisdom in thy beauty, I have cast thee to the ground.”
  • Revelation xii, 3–4: “A great red dragon, having seven heads, and ten horns: and on his heads seven diadems: And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth.”
  • Rather than the metaphysics of evil, this card suggests a practical lesson about how human beings forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity, which makes them degenerate by making them like it
  • This is about the generation of demons and the power those generated demons have over those who generate them
  • P. 405, the world of evil consists not only of fallen hierarchies (hierarchies “of the left”, who obey the law, just accusers, putters to the trial), but also non-hierarchical entities
  • “Microbes of evil”, similar to diseases or bacteria
  • in Scholastic terms their origin is neither primary causes, nor secondary, but tertiary, i.e. arbitrary abuse by autonomous creatures
  • Demons whose soul is a specific passion
  • Can be egregores, created by a community, e.g. monstrous gods of antiquity (or even present day) such as Moloch, or Quetzalcoatl
  • P. 408, Marx announced the birth of such an egregore: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”
  • P. 409, the egregores of our time, created by our ideological superstructures, have proved particularly bloody
• P. 408, the generation of demons results from the cooperation of the male (will) and female (imagination) principles, e.g. a desire that is perverse and the corresponding imagination
  • The big central devil on the card is not actually the central personage here, rather it is the smaller man and women who have imagined it and willed themselves to be enslaved by it
  • An androgynous demon was thus created, of the male will and female imagination
• P. 409, in view of the egregores of our time, is it not time that we said to ourselves, let us be silent? Let us silence our arbitrary will and imagination!
  • To be silent is not only to safeguard holy things from profanation
  • It is also a great magical commandment to not engender demons
  • “Let us resign ourselves, therefore, to the ‘great work’ of contributing constructively to tradition—the spiritual, Christian, Hermetic, scientific tradition. Let us thoroughly immerse ourselves in it, let us study it, let us practise it, lastly, let us cultivate it, i.e. let us work not in order to overthrow but in order to build. Let us range ourselves amongst the builders of the ‘great cathedrals’ of mankind’s spiritual tradition—and let us try to contribute to it. May the Holy Scriptures be holy for us; may the Sacraments be sacraments for us; may the hierarchy of spiritual authority be the hierarchy of authority for us; and may the ‘perennial philosophy’—and also truly scientific science—of the past and present have friends in us and, should it be the case, respectful collaborators! This is what the commandment to be silent entails—the commandment of not engendering demons.”
  • P. 410, if Marx and Engels had confined themselves to defending the working class and not letting their imaginations get carried away they would have been contributors to tradition (of which the well-being of the poor is certainly a part!)
  • They were carried away by a fever of imagination and will, and were compelled to change everything utterly, giving birth to a demon of class hatred, atheism, disdain for the past, and materialism above all else
• P. 411, St. Anthony the Great says there are three kinds of carnal movements:
  • A natural movement inherent in the body, the tendency of the body to act in a certain way, if the soul does not want it though it is without passion/concupiscence
  • A movement produced by too much food and drink, the pleasure from this provokes the body to excitement and certain kinds of actions
  • A movement caused by evil spirits
  • Origen says (In libro Jesu Nave) that beginners in the spiritual life are more beset by temptations of the second kind, while masters are more beset by the third kind, i.e. attacked by the demons themselves
  • P. 412, Temptations thus scale with spiritual advancement, the temptation becomes more spiritual as the man becomes more spiritual
  • Origen again (In libro Judicum): “One should not … speak to disciples, at the beginning of their formative period, of profound and secret mysteries; but one should confide to them that which concerns the improvement of habits, the formation of discipline, and the first elements of religious life and simple faith. Such is the milk of the Church; such are the first elements for initial beginners.”
  • P. 413, Origen again (In libro Judicum) talks about how the angels help us, especially in the beginning of our spiritual journey, but:
    • “But when we have tasted the sacraments of celestial militia, when we have nourished ourselves on the bread of life, listen how the apostolic trumpet invites us to combat! It is with a loud voice that Paul cried to us, saying: ‘Take the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand the wiles of the devil.’ He no longer permits us to hide ourselves under the wings of our nurse; he invites us to the fields of battle. ‘Gird yourself,’ he says, ‘with the breastplate of righteousness, and the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, and above all the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one.”
  • St. John of the Cross (The Dark Night):
    • “It is at the time they (i.e. the beginners) are going about their spiritual exercises with delight and satisfaction, when in their opinion the sun of divine favour is shining most brightly on them, that God darkens all this light and closes the door and spring of the sweet spiritual water they were tasting as often and as long as they desired. For since they were weak and tender, no door was closed to them, as St. John says in the Apocalypse (Rev. iii, 8). God now leaves them in such darkness that they do not know which way to turn in their discursive imaginings; they cannot advance a step in meditation, as they used to, now that the interior sensory faculties are engulfed in this night. He leaves them in such dryness that they not only fail to receive satisfaction and pleasure from their spiritual exercises and works, as they formerly did, but also find these exercises distasteful and bitter. As I said, when God sees that they have grown a little, he weans them from the sweet breast so that they might be strengthened, lays aside their swaddling bands, and puts them down from his arms that they may grow accustomed to walking by themselves.”
  • P. 414, St. Anthony the Great (Apothegmata):
    • “No one, if he is not tempted, will be able to enter the kingdom of heaven. For, take away the temptations and no one is saved.”
• P. 420, Holy places, relics, icons, statues of the saints, these are not depots for the mental energy of pilgrims and any who venerate them, they are places where “heaven opens and Angels ascend and descend”, points of departure for spiritual radiation
• P. 421, St. Athanasius of Alexandria struggles against human errors and the great depravity of the people of his day
  • At the same time St. Anthony struggled against devils in the desert, the very devils that were stirred up by the errors and depravity that Athanasius knew
  • The temptations of St. Anthony were not only about the salvation and progress of his own soul, they were acts that healed humanity from its demoniacal obsession
• P. 422, one needs rest from combating demons, and tradition has passed down formulae for driving them away, such as
  • Make the Sign of the Cross towards the north, south, east, and west, each time saying the first two verses of Psalm 67:
  • Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered: and let them that hate him flee from before his face. As smoke vanisheth, so let them vanish away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.
  • Exsurgat Deus, et dissipentur inimici ejus; et fugiant qui oderunt eum a facie ejus. Sicut deficit fumus, deficiant; sicut fluit cera a facie ignis, sic pereant peccatores a facie Dei.
  • ἀναστήτω ὁ θεός καὶ διασκορπισθήτωσαν οἱ ἐχθροὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ φυγέτωσαν οἱ μισοῦντες αὐτὸν ἀπὸ προσώπου αὐτοῦ ὡς ἐκλείπει καπνός ἐκλιπέτωσαν ὡς τήκεται κηρὸς ἀπὸ προσώπου πυρός οὕτως ἀπόλοιντο οἱ ἁμαρτωλοὶ ἀπὸ προσώπου τοῦ θεοῦ
  • P. 423, The author recommends this as an effective practice especially against artificial demons
  • The “enemies” the God scatters are not the “hierarchies of the left”, the divine prosecutors, since they are not his enemies
    • in law one cannot win a case by driving the prosecution away, one must convince him of the accused’s innocence
    • Image a legal team occupied not only with establishing facts, but with putting potential criminals to the test by setting up situations favourable to crime, submitting them to temptations, such are the hierarchies of the left
    • Satan does not accuse Job of sin but of potential sin and sets to work in trying to realize it
    • God does not need this test, it is Satan himself and perhaps some of the “sons of God” impressed by Satan’s accusation who must see Job put to the test
    • No magical means could driven Satan away from Job, Job could only endure in order to convince Satan of his righteousness and his unwillingness to curse God
    • P. 424, the accusations of the hierarchies of the left are usually the product of great research and intelligence on their part, they only lack knowledge of human moral conscience
    • This intimate domain of moral conscience is precisely where the accusation can turn to the advantage of the accused
    • One is righteous and holy when both good and evil agree that one is so
    • Hence the advocatus diaboli required for canonizations
• P. 426, When considering the question of whether all the pagans gods of antiquity were egregores, the author identifies four types of paganism:
  • That of Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, etc., the god of the philosophers and initiates,
    • Unlike the popular monotheism of Moses and the Hebrews, this was a private monotheism for initiates and elites
    • They practised theurgy, intercourse with “gods”, i.e. celestial hierarchies, in order to elevate themselves to them, or bring them down among them
  • That of Homer and Hesiod, mythological paganism,
  • Cults of the sun, moon, stars, elements, etc., naturalistic paganism,
  • Cults of gods engendered by perverse imagination and will, i.e. egregores, demoniacal paganism
    • A degeneration of the other three forms, especially naturalistic
    • Demons were engendered, worshipped, and obeyed
  • P. 428, one can see in many of the ancient paganisms anticipations of Christ’s coming
    • The Jews prepared for the Incarnation, Christ’s coming in the flesh, while the pagans prepared to recognize the Logos, his Word and Spirit

Letter XVI - The Tower of Destruction, la Maison Dieu

• P. 433, as the fifteenth arcanum was relation to demonic evil, so this sixteenth is related to human evil, evil having its origin in the human soul
• P. 441, there are two traditional and seemingly contradictory answers to the question of what is innate human evil:
  • Ignorance
  • Illicit knowledge
  • They are however in agreement insofar as ignorance is a consequence of the original sin of the will, which became infatuated with the desire to replace knowledge due to revelation by knowledge due to experimentation
• P. 442, the Fall in Paradise is the decisive Fall of Man, but Genesis goes on and gives three further stages of the Fall:
  • Cain’s fratricide
    • The seed of all subsequent wars and revolutions
    • Consequently Cain became an exile, a wanderer
    • The lower self revolts against the true self, the fallen likeness against the intact image
  • The generation of giants
    • The seed of all subsequent human pretensions (by groups or individuals) to dominate as divine sovereign, to be Supermen
    • The flood came as a consequence
    • The marriage of the lower self to fallen hierarchies instead of to the true self
  • The building of the Tower of Babel
    • The seed of all subsequent attempts to conquer heaven by earthly means
    • Consequently God scattered by a thunderbolt the builders and confused their language
    • The will of the lower self to replace God by a structure fabricated by its will
• P. 443, this arcanum teaches a general law (works both for individuals and humanity), that autonomous activity from below will inevitably meet with divine reality
  • that he who rebels against his higher self will no longer live under the law of the vertical but of the horizontal, he will become a wanderer on the earth
  • He who unites himself with fallen hierarchies will be drowned, i.e. will go mad, e.g. Nietzsche who lauded the Superman and Antichrist
    • the same happened to the city of Atlantis
    • “There were once powerful kingdoms and magnificent towns in Africa, but their descendants had lost all memory of them and gave themselves up entirely to the daily life of ‘primitive’ tribes—the life of hunting, fishing, agriculture and war. The forgetting on the part of the indigenous Australians was even more complete.”
  • He who builds a tower to replace revelation from heaven will be blasted by a thunderbolt, i.e. will be humbled, reduced to his own subjectivity and terrestrial reality
    • Purgatory could be said to be a consequence of this law, for every man who is not perfect has built himself a Tower of Babel in his life; all his autonomy, his private world, he will bear with him into the next life
• P. 445, In St. John of the Cross’ The Dark Night, we find that the experience of the Dark Night of the Soul is very similar to Purgatory
  • “Why does the soul call the divine light, which enlightens the soul and purges it of its ignorances, the dark night? I reply that the divine wisdom is, for two reasons, not night and darkness only, but pain and torment also to the soul. The first is, the divine wisdom is so high that it transcends the capacity of the soul, and therefore is, in that respect, darkness. The second reason is based on the meanness and impurity of the soul, and in that respect the divine wisdom is painful to it, afflictive and dark also.”
• P. 447, The inevitable confrontation of human nature with divine truth can be summarized by this card’s image of a tower blasted by a thunderbolt and the fall of its constructors
  • The thunderbolt is the divine light, the blasted tower is what human understanding and imagination have erected, the constructors who fall are the “school of humility”
  • Those overwhelmed by this thunderbolt with either rise again illumined like St. Paul, or alienated like Nietzsche
• P. 448, the Magnificat sings of the eternal law of the Tower of Babel, it is the song of a heart struck by the thunderbolt:
  • “He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.”
  • The most concise summation of this law is also from St. Luke’s Gospel: “Every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled; and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted.”
• P. 449, the choice every person, every community, every school must make:
  • To abase oneself or to exalt, “to specialize oneself in order to gain temporary advantages or to be moved only by the hunger and thirst for truth”, to build a tower or to grow
• P. 451, the Good News that the world received 20 centuries ago was that of resurrection, the great alchemical operation of the transmutation of the human being
• P. 453, unlike scholasticism or empirical science, Hermeticism does not use any sort of intellectual instruments, any symbolic grammar or logic for making discoveries
  • Its questions are crises, and its answers are states of consciousness arising from crises
  • Hermetic symbols are mystical-gnostic-magical ferments or enzymes, that trouble and disquiet, stimulating new depths of thought
• P. 456, as missionaries in the domain of our own soul, we have the mission of bringing back our own “lost sheep” to the fold, healing our soul’s faults and vices, converting our desires and ambitions to their proper end
  • The practical method of doing this is meditation
  • To think in the presence of God
  • Meditation makes our “lost sheep” present to us, and impresses on us alternatives
  • Meditation is honest and courageous thinking of the lower self together with the higher self, in the divine light
  • Concentration precedes meditation, and meditation precedes contemplation
  • Contemplation is union of the thinker with reality
    • Not arriving at a conclusion, but receiving or undergoing the imprint of reality
  • The three sacred vows, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, are what make concentration, meditation, and contemplation effective in bringing the soul to purification, illumination, and union
    • The practical secrets, the inner gardening of the soul
    • Concerned with growth of the human being, not building
• This arcanum reveals the dangers of specialization: one must not build, it is a matter of growth
• P. 457, there is nothing mechanical at the foundation of the world
  • Take away mechanical appearances and the world is moral, crucified love

Letter XVII - The Star, l’Étoile

• P. 464, the Tower of Destruction presented us with two alternative ways, construction and growth, but this, the Star, is the arcanum of growth, and growth flows, while construction starts and stops
  • Construction and growth are superficially similar, but it is the sap inside the tree that makes growth possible, while construction is a dry process
• The author talks about a (so-called in occult literature) “magical agent” that links consciousness and action, brings things from imagination to reality
  • The “agent of growth” is similar, transforming ideal into real, bringing a seed of potentiality into maturity
  • P. 465, the “magical agent” however is electrical in nature, dry and warm, to do with fire
  • The arcana of the Devil (XV, two warmths meet, good and evil) and the Tower (XVI, two drynesses meet in the lightning and the tower) are of the magical agent, electricity, and fire
  • The arcana of Temperance (XIV, angelic inspiration) and the Star (XVII, the agent of growth) are of water, they both flow, act continuously, not through shocks
• P. 465, These two agents act in human intellectuality, some thinkers side with water, some with fire
  • Water: transformation, evolution, progress, education, natural therapy, living tradition
    • Thales (ca. 625–547 BC) believed that water is the principal element in the world
    • Portrayed fruitfully by the philosopher Leibnitz (1646–1716) in his theory of monads (simple substances with no parts, definitely existing in that they have qualities, the qualities changing continuously over time, each monad being entirely unique)
      • I hadn’t heard of this theory before; it’s difficult to suddenly grasp
      • Peace was the overriding character of his work
      • Apparently contradictory things are possible by virtue of them flowing into each other like colours of the rainbow
      • contradictory intellectual schools, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, Cartesianism, etc. constitute a rainbow of the perennial philosophy
      • The principle of continuity, “water”, led to his discovery of calculus; differential calculus is simply the application of the principle of continuity (instead of crystallization) in mathematics
  • Fire: creatio ex nihilo, invention, election, surgery, prosthesis, revolution
    • Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 500 BC) believe fire was principal
• P. 469, Just as there is Fire (of Divine Love) and fire (electricity due to friction), so is there Water (the sap of growth, instinctivity, etc.) and water (the flood, drowning)
• P. 471, the card has a great central Star in a constellation with seven other smaller stars
  • This Star is two 8-pointed stars superimposed, one yellow (contemplative justice) and one red (active justice)
  • Invites us to the alchemical marriage of opposites of contemplation and activity
  • The light-force emanating from the Star, brought about by this marriage, is the antithesis to the thesis that “there is nothing new under the sun,” namely Hope
  • Each day is new, nothing will be repeated
• P. 472, The Star’s message is “I am the Alpha and the Omega”
  • Alpha, activity, the effective cause who sets in motion
  • Omega, contemplation, the final cause, who draws all towards himself
• We say “no” to dualism in the light of the future, but “yes” to it in the light of the present
  • Hope defends dualism but promises a final unity
  • This is the aim of the spiritual exercise of this card
• P. 473, This card represents the maternal principle, between the constellation of Hope above her and the flow of life beneath her
  • Every mother professes a double faith, that the future will be more glorious than the present, and in the terrestrial continuity of her race
  • Romans viii: “For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope: Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now.”
• P. 477, Poetry is the union of the upper waters above the firmament and the lower water below on the second day of Creation
  • The poet is the point at which the separated waters meet, where hope and continuity meet
  • Poetic inspiration is the union of blood from above (hope) and blood from below (continuity)
• P. 483, “The spiral is the arcanum of growth—both spiritual and biological. A plant grows following the movement of a spiral; an idea, a problem, likewise grows following the movement of a spiral. Not only the branches of a tree are found arranged according to the spiral, but also the so-called ‘tree-ring’ circles, which are formed each year between the bark and the centre of the trunk of the tree, constitute traces or effects of the operation of circular growth in two dimensions—vertical and horizontal—at the same time, i.e. proceeding in a spiral.”
  • Cf. Letter X, the Wheel of Fortune for the parable of the serpent and open and closed circles
  • Also Matthieu Pageau, and Laurus, and Tolkien’s Letter 96, to Christopher Tolkien
• P. 484, St. Matthew’s Gospel gives a spiral of history
  • 1st step: 14 generations from Abraham to David
    • A process of interiorization
    • Baptism (the Three Patriarchs)
    • Confirmation (Moses and the Covenant on Mt. Sinai)
    • Penance
  • 2nd step: 14 generations from David to the Babylonian exile
    • The “school of David”, inner penance resulting in expiation (Babylon)
  • 3rd step: 14 generations from the Babylonian exile to Christ
    • The absolution of penance to Holy Communion, the presence and reception of Christ
  • St. John the Baptist repeated this history in miniature
    • Baptism by water
    • The Son of David, was the son of penitence on his father, Joseph’s, side and the son of innocence on his mother’s side
    • The Baptist brings us from penitence to communion, “Behold the Lamb of God”

Letter XVIII - The Moon, la Lune

• P. 494, the Moon (agent of diminution, eclipse, retrograde movement) is the antithesis of the Star (growth)
  • This principle would be present in us even if the devil and all his demons resigned, even if all humans learned humility and built no more Towers of Babel
  • P. 495, this is the arcanum of the inseparable couple, the earth and its satellite, or materiality and intelligence
• P. 496, science/intelligence can only work on what is supposed to repeat itself, irreversible things elude science
• Ecclesiastes i: “What is it that hath been? the same thing that shall be. What is it that hath been done? the same that shall be done. Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us. There is no remembrance of former things: nor indeed of those things which hereafter are to come, shall there be any remembrance with them that shall be in the latter end.”
  • Time creates nothing, only combines and recombines that which is given
  • Space is like the sea, and time is like the wind, forever blowing and creating patterns on the sea, and yet the sea doesn’t change
  • There cannot be anything new under the sun
• P. 499, David’s great sin in attempting to number the people of Israel (2 Kings xxiv) was applied methods of science or intelligence to living and moral human beings, reducing them to dead or inanimate things, to corpses
  • In Luke ii, this sin is repeated across the world, and everyone including the Incarnate Word was treated as inanimate
  • “It was winter time as far as the sun is concerned … and the time of an eclipse of the moon as far as intelligence is concerned.”
• P. 501, Zeno’s paradox denies intelligence, for the reason that intelligence can only represent motion as a succession of static positions in movement
  • As Solomon proclaimed that there is nothing new under the sun, so did Zeno proclaim that there is no continuous movement, only successive points of rest
  • Intelligence knows only the product, not the production, which for it is a series of steps for attaining the result
• P. 502, the difference between intelligence and intuition of faith
  • Between autumn and spring
  • The former is understanding that which is, the latter is participation in that which is to be
  • When Abraham left Ur via the desert in order to give birth to a people that was to be he was a man of springtime, of faith, he was a sower
  • When Solomon as Ecclesiastes summarized all he had learned through experience and reflection, he was a man of autumn, he was a reaper
• P. 506–509, some sephiroth diagrams and explanations
• P. 513, no technique will allow us to pass from the surface world to the world of depth other than the moral sacrificium intellectus, the sacrifice of intelligence to conscience
  • The recognition of the primacy of moral logic over formal logic, passing from reasoning to intuition
  • No exercise to quiet the mind, to promote concentration, no breathing exercise, will bring you to intuition except this sacrifice
  • In order to achieve an aim that is higher than the intellect and the body, the means used must also be higher; the spiritual is achieved by spiritual means
  • P. 514, St. John of the Cross emphasises that it is God himself who effects that state of silence of intellect, imagination, and will
    • No “spiritual technology”, but the mutual love between the soul and God
    • “En una noche oscura / Con ansias en amores inflamada / O dichosa ventura! / Salí sin ser notada / Estando ya mi casa sosegada.”
    • “My house now being at rest … [the soul] goes forth into the divine union of love … with the whole household of its powers and desires sunk in sleep and silence.”
    • “No one would be capable through his own forces alone of disengaging himself from all his tendencies (‘the whole household of powers and desires’) in order to go forth to God.”
• P. 515, Is repetition not a kind of technique?
  • Rhythm or repetition makes prayer pass from the psyche, from personal tendencies and moods, to life and its universal impulses
  • Technique is the principle of maximum effect for minimum effort
  • Ages, generations, festivals, religious rituals, breathing, the beating of the heart, the rosary, the prayer of the heart, the recitation of the psalms, these are all manifestations of the principle of rhythm
  • The prayer wheel of the Tibetans is an example of the mechanical principle, the technique of maximum effect for minimum effort
  • Life flows like a river unceasingly, without fatigue, so does the rosary, and it is vivifying
  • “The one hundred and fifty Ave Marias and the fifteen Pater Nosters of the rosary prayer introduce one to the universal river of spiritual life—which is the proof of a universal prayer—and thus lead one to joyous serenity.”
  • In The Way of a Pilgrim, ch. 3, “[in himself and his wife] the wish for prayer was there, and the long prayers we said without quite understanding did not seem tiring, indeed we liked them. Clearly it is true, as a certain teacher once told me, that a secret prayer lies hidden within the human heart. The man himself does not know it, yet working mysteriously within his soul, it urges him to prayer according to each man’s knowledge and power.”
  • The rosary, the prayer of the heart, repeated litanies and psalms, turn prayer-effort into prayer-life
  • Far from mechanizing prayer, they spiritualize it
• P. 523, the eighteenth arcanum asks us, do you want to choose the way of the eagle which rises above antinomies, or the way of the crayfish, which retreats before them into absurdity, into the suicide of intelligence?

Letter XIX - The Sun, le Soleil

• P. 527, the preceding arcanum, the Moon, gave us the task of human intelligence which is to end its separation and unite itself to spontaneous wisdom, arriving at intuition
  • This one, the Sun, is the arcanum of the accomplished union of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom, the arcanum of intuition
• P 528, paraphrasing from the Emerald Table: “May that which is below be as that which is above, and may that which is above be as that which is below to accomplish the miracles of one thing.”
  • This is the “Gemini” teaching impulse (the card features twins under the sun, and indeed Gemini includes some of the longest days of the year)
  • The principle of analogy put into practice, taking for its point of departure the principle of cooperation
  • The opposite of the Darwinian struggle for existence (“Sagittarius”)
  • P. 529, the health of the organism is due to the cooperation of its many cells and many kinds of cells
  • Civilization is due more to cooperation than it is to strife
• P. 529, some faking-it-till-you-make it, in the marriage of intelligence and wisdom, in intuition
  • You might venerate a saint in a disinterested, intellectual way
  • You respect, wish to conform to them
  • This veneration cannot fail to create an invisible link of sympathy with its object
  • Maybe in a subtle way, maybe dramatic or gradual or imperceptible way
  • The day will come when you experience their presence (not as a ghost), a breath of radiant serenity and you know with certain knowledge that its source is not at all in you
• P. 532, Resurrection (the theme of the following twentieth arcanum) is the divine analogy for human memory
  • As man remembers the past, actualizing it, so God “remembers” the whole fullness of past duration when he resurrects the dead
  • The Church’s liturgical year is human memory attempting to unite itself with divine memory in order realize resurrection, to make the past live in the present
  • All the festivals aim at resurrection
  • The words of consecration are the key to the liturgical year, “This is my body, which is given for you; do this in memory of me.”
  • Christ, his Mother, the apostles, saints, martyrs are present, living and acting in the present
  • The liturgical year says to us: Remember, for it is through memory that resurrection is accomplished
• P. 534, analogy of the Star of Bethlehem and Hermeticism
  • May those who follow the star do so without reserve, seeking the star and nothing else (e.g. scientific approval, confirmation, etc.)
  • P. 535, Teilhard de Chardin “following the star”; the author believes that he did so, and showed us a way “to the manger”
• P. 538, Christ’s appeal to intelligence, Matthew vii: “By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit.”
  • The proper role of intelligence was understood in the Middle Ages
  • It is not true that Scholasticism arose to intellectualize the faith and dispel people’s doubts
  • Rather the root of Scholasticism was the desire for the fullness of intuition, to baptize intelligence and have it cooperate with faith
  • The author urges the unknown friend not to scorn Scholasticism, saying that it is as beautiful as the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages
  • Scholasticism was and still could be for many people the right cure for many a spiritual quandary, a bit like a physician might prescribe a sojourn in mountains, scholasticism could be a breath of fresh mountain air for many people
• P. 539, neither is it true that the mystical impulses of the end of the 13th century into the 17th century were simply reactions against the dry intellectualism of Scholasticism
  • The flowering of mysticism at this time was rather the fruit of Scholasticism, and many believing thinkers became mystics, the marriage of faith and intellect gave birth to intuition, prefigured in the spirituality of St. Thomas Aquinas himself
  • E.g. the famous story about how St. Thomas towards the end of his life came back from a mystical ecstasy saying that all his works were straw, writing nothing more
• P. 540, Hermeticism lives from intuition, but appears to outsiders, people of religion or people of science, who do not see the intuition, as something dead, or something incomplete, lacking a good understanding of either science or religion or both
• P. 550, “Honour thy father and thy mother” applies not only to transitory things but also eternal
  • We must honour our Father in Heaven, and also our Mother in Heaven
  • Catholic and Orthodox faithful have always cared little for doctrinal hairsplitting but have always honoured our Lady as much as God the Father
  • P. 551, prayer and liturgical practice always precede and anticipate any promulgation of dogma in the life of the Church
• P. 552, this nineteenth arcanum, the Sun, depicts children bathing in the light of the sun
  • Here it is not a matter of seeing occult things, but seeing plain and ordinary things in the light of day with the sight of a child
  • The arcanum of intuition, naivety in the act of knowledge, a sight not troubled by doubt and scruples
  • Vision of how things are under the eternally new day of the sun
  • Seeing things as they are without intellectual hypotheses and superstructures
  • Our examination of things like the rosary and novenas above was in no way distancing ourselves from the theme of this arcanum, because at its heart is the endeavour to advance from an understanding of intuition to the exercise of intuition, from meditation on this arcanum to use of this arcanum

Letter XX - The Judgement, le Jugement

• P. 557, different prognoses at the bed of a sick person; the first three lack any therapeutic impulse
  • He is not ill, his state is only natural
    • Pagan Hellenism
  • His illness of temporary, the law of destiny is alternating cycles of sickness and health
    • Hindu Brahminism
  • The illness is incurable, and his suffering is vain, death would be better
    • Buddhism
  • His blood is infected and the illness is fatal without intervention, I will give him a blood transfusion (and use my own blood for the transfusion)
    • The prophetic religions, Iranian, Judaic, Islamic, and of course Christian, are therapeutic
    • The renewal of the world is the final aim
    • The parenthetical phrase, using one’s own blood, is of course the Christian act, a new heaven and a new earth, universal resurrection
• P. 560, forgetting, sleep, and death are opposed to remembering, wakefulness, and birth in the life of man
  • John xi, the account of the resurrection of Lazarus, considers the chain of forgetting-sleep-death:
  • “Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister Mary, and Lazarus. When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he still remained in the same place two days… and after that he said to them: Lazarus our friend sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep… Then therefore Jesus said to them plainly: Lazarus is dead… Thomas therefore, who is called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples: Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
  • Thomas understood that the Master had allowed forgetting, sleep, and death to accomplish their work
• P. 561, to act requires forgetfulness
  • All that you know of astronomy, chemistry, whatever, is temporarily forgotten when you discuss gardens with the gardener
  • To act also requires drawing out from forgetfulness all that would be useful in your current situation
  • To be good at concentrating is to be good at chasing away all images and concepts that are not useful for action, mastery of forgetting
  • To have a good memory is to have mastery of recall, of rendering present the images and concepts that you require
  • P. 562, one forgets what one does not love, and never forgets what was loves
  • Loves gives power to recall, our hearts keep certain things warm
• P. 563, automatic memory eventually gives way to logical memory, which in turn will give way to moral memory (cf. Letter XIII, Death)
  • Moral memory is a tableau of the past in terms of its moral value and meaning
  • In old age, the strength of one’s memory more and more depends on the intensity of one’s moral and spiritual life
  • In principle, a person with great love for God and an intense spiritual life can replace all the functions of their automatic and logical memory
• P. 564, occult literature commonly speaks of the Akasha Chronicle or Akashic Record (only one)
  • Like a cinematographic film of the world’s history in all its detail unfolding before a seer’s eye
  • There are in fact three Akasha Chronicles, the one chronicle dividing into
    • a lower chronicle: quantitative, precisely those facts rejected by the higher chronicle
      • The “book of facts” or “book of archives”
      • Cannot be swallowed but information can be drawn from it by various means
    • a higher chronicle: qualitative, typological facts that represent many facts
      • Intelligent memory of the history of the world, the logical chronicle
      • The “book of truth” that can not only be read but swallowed, assimilated, bitter to the stomach, sweet to the mouth
      • Rev. x: “And I went to the angel, saying unto him, that he should give me the book. And he said to me: Take the book, and eat it up: and it shall make thy belly bitter, but in thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey. And I took the book from the hand of the angel, and ate it up: and it was in my mouth, sweet as honey: and when I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.”
      • P. 567, the intuitive experience of this chronicle and the gravity of its contents brings a kind of psychic depression, but the depression is transformed into joy once it is understood by intelligence, when it becomes “articulated word”
    • A third chronicle, the “book of life”
      • Contains only that which is of moral value
      • Only that which is worthy of resurrection
      • Not only “great” things but also things judged “small”
      • “One finds there, for example, complete texts of manuscripts written by authors—who, as editors, entrusted them to the four winds, addressing them to anyone into whose hands they would perhaps at some time fall. One also hears there the prayer borne by the last breath of a dying atheist or agnostic—the prayer which no one heard and no one expected. One sees there the radiation of the small coins put by ‘poor widows’ in the ‘temple coffers’—and many things judged as small by the world.”
      • It does not contain forgiven and atoned-for sins, forgiving and atonement entails a change in the “book of life”, thus it is constantly modified day to day
  • P. 566, the sacrament of Baptism, in the cosmic sense, is the soul’s passage from ancient karma (regulation of accounts) to new karma (the law of pardon in the Book of Life)
    • This is what is confessed by the words, Confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum
  • How the hierarchies use the chronicles:
    • The hierarchies of the left, of strict justice, base their accusations primarily on the first chronicle, that of facts, or the archives of cosmic prosecution
    • The second chronicle is virtually the totality of accounts between cosmic advocacy (right) and prosecution (left)
    • The third chronicle is the source of strength for the hierarchies of the right, contains the reasons for their support of humanity, and salvation
  • P. 567, certain individuals are sometimes allowed to read the Book of Life in sleep
    • They forget it during their waking life, which could not support such knowledge
    • But they retain some impression of it, in optimistic faith
    • The author believes Leibnitz to have had this (cf. Letter XVII, The Star)
• P. 570, the trumpet of the angel on the card is the entire Akasha chronicle, concentrated into a single sound or word
  • It awakens, vivifies, resuscitates
  • In general the trumpet symbolizes concentration of many things down to one point
  • The Hermetic symbolism of the trumpet is mysticism and gnosis which have become magic
• Lazarus did not come forth from the tomb under constraint, compelled by magic
  • Rather a voice awoke within in him all his faith, hope, and charity, and he had the ardent desire to be near the one who called him
  • P. 571, “It was the affection and respect that the Master inspired in the soul of Lazarus, just as it was the persuasion that life was still necessary for him and that precious experiences were still promised to him here below, which made Lazarus come out of the tomb.”
  • Similarly the final resurrection also will not involve any constraint upon the dead
  • Similarly the arising depicted on the card is not a mechanical response to the angel’s trumpet, but a free and conscious “yes” from the heart, intelligence, and will
• P. 572, the earth was given to man by the Father as the field of development for his freedom
  • Man represents God to nature, to the earth, he acts as a mediator between God and nature
  • Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
  • This prayer attempts to put all in order, put man’s relationship to nature and to God as they should be
  • St. Augustine’s Confessiones III, 6, 11: “Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.”
  • It is not only a prayer of submission of the human will to the divine, but a hunger for union with the divine will
  • It is not a fatalism (like in Islam), but a love
  • Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institutione formati audemus dicere: Pater noster, etc.
  • These words imply that the Lord’s Prayer requires preliminary instruction and elucidation
  • One must understand that our will is only truly free in union with God’s will
  • God acts on earth through our free will united with his
  • Miracles are proof of the omnipotence of the alliance of divine and human will
  • “Anyone who preaches the pure and simple omnipotence of God sows atheism for the future. For he makes God responsible for the wars, concentration camps, and physical and psychic epidemics from which mankind has suffered and will suffer again. And sooner or later one arrives at the conclusion that God does not exist, because his omnipotence does not manifest where it should without doubt be manifested.”
  • The divine will is not simply done on earth as it is in heaven, it is necessary for humans to pray for it, to unite with it in order that it be done
  • Similarly the resurrection is the union of divine and human wills, not simply an act of divine omnipotence
• P. 573, resurrection is a synthesis of life and death, a neutralisation of a binary
  • P. 574, The risen Christ entered through closed doors, and ate fish
  • He was free as a disincarnated spirit and yet was incarnate
  • Why was he so hard to recognize? Because he was ageless, he was not simply the age he was on Calvary, but the “age” he was at the Transfiguration
  • He was the synthesis of youth and old age
• P. 577, the resurrection body will have nothing mechanical or automatic about it
  • It will not have invariable, ready-made “organs”
  • It will be absolutely mobile and create the “organs” it needs for any action, e.g. light, warmth, the human form in flesh, etc.
• P. 582, the uniqueness of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
  • The author believes that she didn’t die, her soul and body never separated, death as we know it never occurred
  • “Instead of separating from the material body and from the soul in order to descend below to the place of rest of the ‘sleep of peace’, the resurrection body remained united with the soul and the material body, and ascended—united with the soul—to the spiritual world. With respect to the material body, it did not decompose but was wholly absorbed by the resurrection body. It dematerialised, spiritualising itself to the point of becoming one with the resurrection body—in its turn united inseparably with the soul of the Blessed Virgin. The tomb of the Blessed Virgin was in fact empty. The tradition which relates this is exact. One would search in vain for the terrestrial tomb of the Blessed Virgin; one would find nothing of it, since it does not exist. What exists is only the spot designated for laying to rest the body of the Virgin, but which never served this end.”
• P. 583, the resurrection is not only victory over death (separation of soul and body), but also sleep (separation of soul and action), and forgetfulness (separation of consciousness from memory)
  • It will be the integral unity of human spirit, soul, and body, and also the uninterrupted continuity of human activity and consciousness
  • The complete memory of the past is equivalent to the final judgement, where all is reviewed in the light of conscience
  • The conscience, the soul, will judge itself
  • P. 584, This is prefigured by the Confiteor at the start of Mass
  • Mankind will accuse itself, God will not accuse anyone, he will only forgive, and the last judgement will be the sacrament of penance on a cosmic scale
    • To which I say: Iterum venturus est cum gloria judicare vivos et mortuos
  • “It will be only the impenitents who will exclude themselves from the grace of universal absolution, although it is difficult to imagine impenitence in this situation. The Church Father Origen could not do so.”
• P. 585, “The last judgement will be the last crisis. The Greek word for judgement is κρίσις. Friedrich Schiller said rightly that ‘the history of the world is the judgement of the world’, i.e. it is a continual crisis, the stages of which are ‘historical epochs’. The last judgement will therefore be the culminating point of history. It will be simultaneously the aim, the meaning and the summary of history—history condensed.”

Letter XXI - The Fool, le Fou

• P. 592, the Fool of Good
  • Evokes the gaunt figure of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the knight-errant who made everyone laugh, both a fool and good
  • Don Quixote, a literary figure, has taken on a life outside the pages of Cervantes’ novel
  • He haunts the imagination of every generation
  • “At evening time in an arid and rocky land, when the shadows are lengthening, does one not see you silhouetted in distorted profile, of tall and stiff stature, mounted on an emaciated nag?”
  • Sometimes we meet him in a spiritually, rather than physically, arid landscape
  • “It is your voice which resounded more loudly than the beating of drums around the guillotine, one day in the month of Thermidor or Fructidor in the year II or III (of the French Republican calendar), with a cry from the top of the scaffolding, ‘Long live the King!’—before your chopped-off head rolled to the ground.”
  • Cervantes didn’t invent him, but merely described him such as he appeared to him in Castile in the twilight of knighthood
  • He existed and acted long before Cervantes and long after, he is an archetype, revealing himself to different people in many ways
• P. 593, Orpheus is another instance of the Fool
  • Such was the suffering of separation for him that it became magic, magic surpassing sleep, forgetfulness, and death
• Don Juan is another
  • Not simply a blasphemous dissolute, but the hierophant of a small but powerful god, Eros
  • He is the magic of Eros, and the priest
  • As a dissolute pure and simple he could not have exercised such power of the imagination of the poets
  • According to Alexis Tolstoy, Don Juan was an obedient servant of this divinity who commands enthusiasm and ardour, but detests reason, calculation, utility, circumspection, convention, etc.
  • The archetype of love for its own sake
• P. 594, Tijl Uilenspiegel, Till Eulenspiegel is another example
  • The mocking spirit who overturns mankind’s temples and altars by his magic wand, ridicule
  • This wand transforms solemn into pompous, moving into sentimental, courageous into presumptuous, tears into snivelling, love into passing fancy
  • The other side of Till is militant anarchism, the revolt of humble people against overbearing and prescriptive laws
• P. 596, Goethe’s conception of Faust, the archetype of the tried and tempted, the eternal Job
  • Faust is the humanist Job at the dawn of the modern age
  • Like Job, Faust is the stake in a wager between God and Mephistopheles
  • Unlike Job, Faust’s trial however is good fortune and success, satisfaction of desire
  • Can all the pleasures here below anaesthetize man’s aspiration to the eternal?
  • Oswald Spengler, author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, calls modern, post-medieval man the Faustian man (der faustische Mensch)
  • In our age, the prince of this world has obtained the power to satisfy all our desires, in order to prove to God that the relative and transitory can make man forget the absolute and eternal
• P. 597, Communism, social and collective state control
  • Aims to satisfy people’s needs and desires as much as possible
  • But supposing it does satisfy them (e.g. in Russia)? What then? No answer.
  • The parable of the Prodigal Son gives the answer: modern conveniences, technological marvels, gratification of desires, these are worth nothing in comparison with the embrace of the Father at the return of his son
• P. 603, the Faustian trial was prefigured in antiquity by Cyprian the Mage, who became a Christian and bishop of Nicomedia, and martyr together with the virgin Justina under Diocletian
  • We can see him depicted on this card, renouncing the wisdom of the world and setting off in pursuit of divine love
  • “In other words, Cyprian, the bishop and martyr—with the magical wand, cup, sword, and pentacle of Cyprian the mage in a bag—took it on his shoulder and set off, without defence against the dogs who attacked him, and as a ridiculous clown in the eyes of the world, en route towards… the martyrdom which awaited him. His Greek, Phrygian, Egyptian, and Chaldean co-initiates must have said: ‘There goes the Jester’. Educated people and those of common sense of the society of his time would have said: ‘There goes the Fool’. For in their eyes Cyprian had turned his back on the very principle of human culture and civilization—the intellect… the intellect whose ruling genius himself he had met face to face and who had called him ‘a gifted young man who is easy to instruct’. For the spirit of ‘knowledge for its own sake’ spoke to him mouth to mouth and exhorted him to be ‘a strong and persevering man in all that he does.’”
  • The Arcanum of the Fool teaches how to pass from intellectuality moved by desire for knowledge, to the higher knowledge due to love
• P. 605, this arcanum is the Hermetic method of sacrificing intellect to spirituality, such that it grows and develops instead of atrophying
  • The alchemical union of human wisdom (folly in the eyes of God) with divine wisdom (folly in the eyes of men), resulting not in double folly, but in a single wisdom, understanding both that which is above and that which is below
  • 1 Cor i: “For both the Jews require signs (σημεῖα), and the Greeks seek after wisdom (σοφίαν): But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness: But unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power (δύναμιν) of God, and the wisdom (σοφίαν) of God.”
  • This is the precise relationship between the pagan intellectuality and Jewish prophetic spirituality in the time of St. Paul
  • The former wanted to understand the world, the latter awaited the miraculous transformation of the world
  • The preaching of Christ crucified clashed with the philosophers’ idea that the entire world in the incarnate Logos
  • Also clashed with the Jewish idea that the Celestial King is above the world and intervenes in it only through lightning-flashes of his power, i.e. through prophets, thaumaturgists, and through the Messiah, without leaving his throne
  • P. 606, the Cross of Christ is only understood through the cross of revelation (miracle) and wisdom (immanent Logos)
• P. 618, different aspects of prayer
  • Magical: i.e. prayer in formulae
    • Thus prayer is never in vain and without effect, even when pronounced rapidly and impersonally it still retains its “magical” effect, because the sum-total of ardour put into that formula by all the believers, and angels, and saints in the past is evoked
    • Every such prayer formula is collective prayer, and the voices of all those who have gone before join in with you
    • This applies above all to the sacred Liturgy
    • P. 619, “One should know, dear Unknown Friend, that one never prays alone, i.e. that there are always others—above, or in the past on earth—who pray with you in the same sense, in the same spirit, and even in the same words. In praying, you always represent a visible or invisible community together with you.”
  • Gnostic: when it becomes inexpressible inner sighing
    • P. 619, the transformation of psycho-physical breathing into prayer
    • It can be made permanent, awake or asleep, without interruption as long as respiration lasts
    • Especially practised in the Christian east
    • Has a virtue above the magical, transforming man into a mirror of the spiritual world
  • Mystical: when it becomes the silence of union with the Divine
    • The profound silence of all the soul’s faculties (intelligence, imagination, memory, and will), the consummation of love between the soul and God
• Meditation, the gradual deepening of thought, has different stages
  • Concentration on the subject
  • Understanding the subject in its relationships with reality
  • Intuitive penetration into the subject’s essence
    • As prayer leads to union with the Divine, so meditation leads to knowledge of eternal principles
    • “Having attained this contemplation of things surpassing actual understanding, meditation becomes prayer—just as prayer which attains the state of contemplation without words becomes meditation.”
    • An alchemical marriage

Letter XXII - The World, le Monde

• P. 626, first impression of this card is of the world as the rhythmic dance of the female psyche, sustained by four primordial instincts, yielding a rainbow of colours and forms
  • In other words, that the world is a work of art
  • It is of course a work of divine art, at the same time choreographic, musical, poetic, dramatic, painting, sculpture, and architecture
• P. 628, the relationship between sacred art and sacred magic is what exists between the beautiful and the good
  • The beautiful is the good which makes itself loved, the good is the beautiful which heals and vivifies
  • The hardening of the good into a moral code and the softening of the beautiful to pure pleasure is the separation of the beautiful and the good, whether in morality, religion, or art
• P. 630, the author proposes to maintain sobriety in this meditation, but this sobriety is not dryness, but recognizing the necessity of avoiding mirages, and therefore keeping faithful to chastity, poverty, and obedience
• P. 631, Genesis iii, 23 in the Septuagint: “καὶ ἐξαπέστειλεν αὐτὸν κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἐκ τοῦ παραδείσου τῆς τρυφῆς ἐργάζεσθαι τὴν γῆν ἐξ ἧς ἐλήμφθη”
  • Παράδεισος τῆς τρυφῆς is rendered in the Vulgate as paradisus voluptatis
  • “Garden of delight” was chosen to translate the Hebrew גַּן־עֵ֑דֶן
  • Advances the thesis that the primordial state of man and nature was joy, the world was a kingdom of joy before the Fall
  • P. 633, joy predates suffering, precedes the world of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest
  • Proverbs viii: “He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law and compass he enclosed the depths: When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters: When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits: when he balanced the foundations of the earth; I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men.”
• P. 633, on the card is a globe, and above it a naked woman dancing
  • Joy is the accordance of rhythms
  • The primordial joy of paradise was the accordance between the rhythms of divine creation and artistic creation
• P. 634, the joy of Wisdom vs. the joy of intoxication
  • Proverbs ix: “A foolish woman and clamorous, and full of allurements, and knowing nothing at all, Sat at the door of her house, upon a seat, in a high place of the city, To call them that pass by the way, and go on their journey: He that is a little one, let him turn to me. And to the fool she said: Stolen waters are sweeter, and hidden bread is more pleasant. And he did not know that giants are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”
  • But the Septuagint adds to the last verse: “ὁ δὲ οὐκ οἶδεν ὅτι γηγενεῖς παρ᾽ αὐτῇ ὄλλυνται καὶ ἐπὶ πέτευρον ᾅδου συναντᾷ ἀλλὰ ἀποπήδησον μὴ ἐγχρονίσῃς ἐν τῷ τόπῳ μηδὲ ἐπιστήσῃς τὸ σὸν ὄμμα πρὸς αὐτήν οὕτως γὰρ διαβήσῃ ὕδωρ ἀλλότριον καὶ ὑπερβήσῃ ποταμὸν ἀλλότριον ἀπὸ δὲ ὕδατος ἀλλοτρίου ἀπόσχου καὶ ἀπὸ πηγῆς ἀλλοτρίας μὴ πίῃς ἵνα πολὺν ζήσῃς χρόνον προστεθῇ δέ σοι ἔτη ζωῆς”
  • “But he knows that mighty men die by her, and he falls in with a snare of hell. But hasten away, delay not in the place, neither fix thine eye upon her: for thus shalt thou go through strange water; but do thou abstain from strange water, and drink not of a strange fountain, that thou mayest live long, and years of life may be added to thee.”
  • This “strange water” (ὕδωρ ἀλλότριον) is the joy of intoxication, a false wisdom that produces mirages
  • This verse of the Septuagint is addressed to a foolish disciple: “delay not in the place!”
  • The lure of mirages is “stolen water”, that which flows and sweeps consciousness away, provides delicious illuminations and inspirations that do not demand prayer, chastity, and obedience
• P. 638, the way of esotericism requires the practitioner to confront the sphere of mirages, the sphere of the false Holy Spirit
  • P. 639, In the Christian East, mystics always warn beginners against “seductive illumination” (Russian прелестное просвещение)
  • They insist on the “nakedness” of spiritual experience, i.e. the spiritual world stripped of all form, colour, sound, intellectuality
  • The sole experience one should aspire to is the intuition of divine love, and its effect on the moral consciousness
  • The reality and dangers of the spiritual world are so immediate to them that they prefer to renounce anything visionary or intellectual
  • In the West, many have also been conscious of spiritual reality and its dangers, but there has not been the same tendency to renounce outright being a visionary or deriving intellectual enlightenment from these experiences
  • The religious orders and central church hierarchy of the West (the East has neither of these) have developed criteria for discerning whether private revelations are from the sphere of the Holy Spirit or not, the criteria relating to chastity, poverty, and obedience
    • The chaste mind seeks truth and not joy from revelation, just as chaste love seeks union with the loved and not pleasure
    • The poor mind refuses to drink the “stolen water”, since it only seeks what is essential, it will refuse the orgy of spiritual illumination offered by the sphere of mirages
    • The obedient mind has a cultivated will, allowing it to distinguish the voice of truth from other voices
    • John x: “The sheep follow him, because they know his voice. But a stranger they follow not, but fly from him, because they know not the voice of strangers.”
• P. 641, The sphere of mirages is constantly trying to disorientate us, reshuffle facts and relationships in our minds, frequently relationships with the opposite sex
  • The esotericist should be silent, perhaps for many years, concerning new illuminations or inspirations, allowing them to mature, allowing time for discernment, allowing one certainty about their origin, whether they accord with morality, with our other experiences, with divine revelation, etc.
  • Goethe wrote Faust over a period of 60 years, in order to brush aside the sphere of mirages from his work, and reveal the sphere of mirages more fully in his work
  • Goethe insisted on directed or exact imagination (exakte Phantasie) in artistic creation as well as knowledge
• P. 642, sacred art is founded on a science of forms, not subjective creative élan
  • Quotes from a Titus Burkhardt, Sacred Art in East and West
  • Art cannot be called “sacred” solely because its subject originates in spiritual truth; its formal language must also bear witness to that truth
  • Sacred art must imitate Divine Art, Divine Creation, but this does not mean “naturalism”, copying the created world we see
  • What must be copied is the way the Divine Spirit works, and its laws must be transposed to the medium in which the artist works
  • This transposition presupposes the three sacred vows, poverty, chastity, and obedience
  • Purification must precede illumination and perfection
  • Sacred art requires the artist to rid his soul of its inclinations and habits
• P. 643, twofold meaning of the arcanum of the World:
  • It teaches that joy, the accordance of rhythm, is at the root of creation
  • It warns of the danger of seeking creative joy instead of creative truth
    • To become intoxicated by the realm of mirages and the false Holy Spirit
• P. 644, the practical meaning of the arcanum:
  • The world is a work of art, animated by creative joy, its wisdom is a joyous wisdom, that of the artist and not of the technician
  • Happy is he who seeks first wisdom, for he will find it to be joyous
  • Unhappy is he who seeks first joyous wisdom, for he will fall prey to illusions
  • From this stems an important rule of spiritual hygiene: never confound the intensity of a spiritual experience with its truth
  • Mirages can overwhelm you, while the truth can be a subtle inner whisper
• P. 647, the Four Living Creatures have stars associated with them, located at the four cardinal points, that is, they make a cross whose centre is the pole star, which corresponds to the young girl at the centre of the arcanum
  • Aldebaran (α Tauri), the eye of the Bull
  • Regulus (α Leonis), the heart of the Lion
  • Altair (α Aquilae), the light of the Eagle
  • Fomalhaut (α Piscis Austrini), the stellar Fish, which absorbs the water poured out by the Waterman

The Minor Arcana

• P. 657, the author is now treating briefly the Minor Arcana
  • Plato’s Seventh Letter, sometimes called ἡ μεγάλη ἐπιστολή, written about the age of 75:
    • “I have written not treatise on these matters (reality, τὸ ὄν), nor shall I ever write one. These matters cannot be expressed in words as other subjects can, but after persistent occupation in the study of these matters, after living for some time with them, suddenly a flash of understanding, as it were, is kindled by a spark that leaps across, and once it has come into being within the soul it proceeds to nourish itself.”
  • Plato, similar to Thomas Aquinas at the end of his life, is becoming a contemplative
  • Passing through the sphere of swords, Plato and Thomas Aquinas arrive at spiritual poverty, necessary for becoming a receptacle of revelation (sphere of cups), and for becoming an active cooperator or an initiate (sphere of sceptres or wands)
  • The four suits, in this order, are the traditional degrees of:
    • Preparation (pentacles or coins)
      • What one acquires through observation, study, reasoning, discipline
    • Purification (swords, purgatio, κάθαρσις)
      • The above world but exposed to the breath of the Real
    • Illumination (cups, illuminatio, φωτισμός)
      • That which remains after the above trial becomes the virtue of the soul to receive illumination from above
    • Perfection (sceptres or wands, perfectio, unio mystica, τὰ τέλη)
      • To the extent that the soul raises itself from receptivity to active cooperation with the Divine, it is perfected