The High Priestess

Posted on 2014-05-10 by Logres

When God manifested in the created plane, the Two inescapably arose. First of all, as secondary to God, and secondly as articulations within itself, to create the pyramid and hierarchy of all Being. There is nothing wrong with Two: as Cologero notes, the animus within the woman is necessary for her healthy development. The Two is very good in itself, but not by itself. This is noted earlier on as it is not good for man to be alone. This would also apply to the feminine part within man’s own interior.
Watch a political debate, read a cutting edge expose of the Gospels, pick up a history book, or (worse) sample a modern textbook. For that matter, pick an acquaintance’s brain. What you will inevitably almost always discover is someone for whom the Two is not merely a good, but is actually God, subsisting alone. Not only have they made a false god out of what is created, but (for them) the One and indeed any other competing Twos simply don’t exist. Thus, those who think the Catholic Church was part of a vast cosmic conspiracy involving the Demi-Urge suppressing channellers from the stars simply never get around to asking themselves the simple question, If God is a fake God (Yahweh is the Demi-urge) then how do I know the One True Light God is not just in on the fix? What if the deception is even more elaborate than I first believed? No for them what is an important psychological insight gets distorted into a cosmology, an ideology, and at last, a madness. They cannot square the circle. This phenomena is common today.

Psychologically and humanly speaking, people like modern liberals, civil rights activists, free thinkers and others may certainly possess a modicum of truth. Yet, what lie does not contain modicums of truth? It is not hard to be partly right. But this is not what is claimed: it is claimed that this is the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and (most importantly) the only truth which could possibly matter. And it must be taken as presented, which is to say, in isolation from the One. It is, at root, a narrative created by the demonic power of the egocentric mind, which attempts to enslave others to its dominating will. This is the opposite of the what the Priestess was created to be: instead of the alma mater, we have the devouring wrath of the psychotic Lilith, who hates Eve, and attempts to destroy Adam (this is how salvation comes from the woman, for Eve will oppose Lilith).

We see at work here the very power of distortion and twisting which they claim to see in the One. To quote Phillip Dick, “Those who fight the Empire, become the Empire“. Or to quote Jesus, “resist not evil, but overcome evil with Good”. Anyone who uses the Ring of Sauron against Sauron is doomed to either become like him, or to be turned into a slave. God Himself does not overcome evil with evil, but rather overturns Hell from the inside out. Good triumphs because it remains unchanged when Evil touches it, and is capable of changing Evil into its opposite. Evil cannot make this claim, and therefore, has no true power. Evil can only uncover what is already Evil, and test what is Good.

This is not to say one cannot be a warrior and a man of the One. There are beautiful stories about how to reconcile the two, & many men have done it extremely well, so well they merit great titles and honors, and perhaps even more than man can say. Giorgio has pointed out that the warrior (however) is female in relation to the brahmin or priest. That is, the warrior has to overcome the flesh to arrive at the one, he has to fight himself. He has to struggle against the tendency to carve out a separate kingdom away from the Law of the One. This is the first temptation faced by man, to divide himself into Two and to make a kingdom of his own, separate from the aboriginality of the Self Beyond the Selves.

How can this be? How can the virile, manly warrior be female? When the universe is taken hierarchically, we can say that that which is above something is male in relation to it, and that which is below something is female in relation to it. Things below revolve around, cling to, and require for their health and sanity the relation to that which stems from above. When something is detached, it careens off into the outer darkness, and although it may retain its own hierarchy for a time, there is a process of decay that sets in immediately. The horizontal cannot sustain itself by itself. It requires a link to the vertical. Thus, everything is male/female, and yet we can properly speak of certain things as “male” or “female” in configuration to each other.

Neither is privileged. Without the female, the male does not make itself known. If there is a privilege, it consists of duties. To quote the Baron, loving,proud obedience and humble command are the duties of respective stations. Since all of Being involves climbing the ladder or the Tree, there is no Black Iron Prison of compartments or boxes, but rather a kind of dance. If you are living in a Black Iron Prison, it is because your soul (to that extent) is tainted and evil, and God manifests to you as the oppressor. The eye, being not single, cannot see the Light. The psychological insight (however) of this state is correct: you are seeing that the God you made in your own image is actually a Demi-Urge. Angels appear as demons, men of good breeding and sound sense are tyrants, Western civilization is the greatest evil on earth, etc. The only way out is “deeper in”, that is to say, to pull the beam out of your own Eye.

The lesson of the second Card is that Two cannot exist alone. Which (put this way) is irrefutable. QED. Or, put another way, Two can only exist together as One.

Tomberg gives an example of what happens when the Two wants to be alone:

“Passing on to mysticism which has not given birth to gnosis, magic and Hermetic philosophy – such a mysticism must, sooner or later, necessarily degenerate into ‘spiritual enjoyment’ or ‘intoxication’. The mystic who wants only the experience of mystical states without understanding them, without drawing practical conclusions from them for life, and without wanting to be useful to others, who forgets everyone and everything in order to enjoy the mystical experience, can only be compared to a spiritual drunkard.”

He mentions that those who develop the spiritual sense develop a “touch” which allows him to apply and understand what he has experienced. This is analogous to the virginal pool, which more deeply reflects (until it engenders or creates) what is shining on it from above : the Sun gives birth over the void, or the waters. One begins to examine the thoughts that enters one’s mind, to make them pass “tests” (smell, touch, hearing) before true gnosis (or sight) is finally engendered, much as a baby learns to see in three dimensions and to arrange shapes in proper contours to the forms emanating them. This is the meaning of “become as little children”, who are female/passive at first as regards that which is already fully grown and solar.

The Gnostic challenge to the Church is an opportunity to recover what was Once: an exoteric Church which is sustained by a Life, to reunify the split between Gnosis and Faith that spiraled out of control in the early development of the West. Neither the New Age or Gnostics on the one hand, nor the purely exoteric believer on the other can long subsist in division. Such a division engenders monsters, more confusion, and less and less life. We can apply this pattern to the post-colonial schools of thought in literature, to the revolutionary and reactionary schools of thoughts in politics, and to the endless culture debates in sociology and geopolitics.

“On the part of the human being it is the act of daring to aspire to the supreme Reality, and this act is real and effective only when the soul is serene and the body completely relaxed – without smoke and crackling fire.”

We remember the One, because gnosis and magic and alchemy “do not dazzle God.” In the eyes of God, their practitioners are “dear sheep to him: in his consideration of them he desires that they shall never go astray and that they shall have life increasingly and unceasingly”.

The yoke is easy, the burden is light. There are more dangers ahead, but to learn the lesson of the One is to pass into abundant Life.

Tomberg’s Labor

Posted on 2014-04-11 by Logres

Valentin Tomberg (as any reader of this blog by now knows) plays a not insignificant role in linking Christianity with esotericism, even paganism (of the older kind). It would be easy to just go through and cherry pick random quotes from Tomberg: this would actually turn out much better than one might imagine, since Tomberg manages to stuff every sentence with profound meaning and an inner direction which helps even isolated sentences maintain their context.

There is a particular section of text which helps to elucidate his purpose more sharply and pointedly than is his wont, as Tomberg usually manages to hide in plain sight. On my first reading of the text, I apparently gleaned much less than I missed, and am ashamed to say that this only jumped out on a second reading.

The macrocosmic sphere of paradise (St Paul’s third heaven) and the microcosmic layer of Eden are the initia (beginning) to which one is initiated in the macrocosmic initiation as well as in the microcosmic initiation. Ecstasy to the heights beyond one’s self and entasy into the depths within one’s self lead to knowledge of the same fundamental truth. Christian esotericism unites these two methods of initiation.

There is his entire program in a nutshell (incidentally we see that the Christian method is more about the union of the modes, rather than emphasis on the division between the two techniques). He is writing a secular “John” for a modern age. This is very like Goethe re-casting Job in Faust, except thankfully Tomberg actually claims to know what he is doing, and seems to back this up. In other words, Valentin Tomberg is actually claiming that a Christian can mingle the exoteric and esoteric modes of knowing in their own person, without (and this is the important point) compromising or losing either one individually.
If this claim reminds you of the claims regarding Christ and the homo ouison with or without iotas (made by successive councils) it should, for that is actually his aim. The Christian is a “little Christ”, and Tomberg wishes to perfect Nature (exoteric religion) with Super-Nature (esoteric meaning), without however losing either the Self or the “Self beyond the Selves”. Jesus is the man-God, and Christians are also called to be fully God and truly man. He is not splitting hairs, he is describing or coming to terms with, something he had already fully experienced.

The figure of the Emperor is the “truest man” (King David), and the hermit (prophet) is the most like God (fully God), remarks Tomberg in his chapter on the Pope. The pope (or priest) actually balances earth with heaven. So an invisible principle of union is here shown to be concretely uniting two seeming opposites. Here we have Soloviev’s “Ideas”, with the veil lift by for a moment, Tomberg explaining the Arcanum that shows even the invisible worlds correspond to Law rather than Chaos. For here it is not a matter of seeing contrasts, and is never a matter of contrasts. John Michael Greer brilliantly points out that focusing on differences actually obscures them (this is because, as Iamblichus teaches, you have to start with One, not Two). If you focus on similarities, the differences are seen truly and starkly for what they are.

Any present or future set of events, however unique it may be in terms of the fine details, has points of similarity with events in the past, and those points of similarity allow the past events to be taken as a guide to the present and future. This works best if you’ve got a series of past events, as different from each other as any one of them is from the present or future situation you’re trying to predict; if you can find common patterns in the whole range of past parallels, it’s usually a safe bet that the same pattern will recur again. Any time you approach a present or future event, then, you have two choices: you can look for the features that event has in common with other events, despite the differences of detail, or you can focus on the differences and ignore the common features.  The first of those choices, it’s worth noting, allows you to consider both the similarities and the differences.  Once you’ve got the common pattern, it then becomes possible to modify it as needed to take into account the special characteristics of the situation you’re trying to understand or predict: to notice, for example, that the dark age that will follow our civilization will have to contend with nuclear and chemical pollution on top of the more ordinary consequences of decline and fall.If you start from the assumption that the event you’re trying to predict is unlike anything that’s ever happened before, though, you’ve thrown out your chance of perceiving the common pattern. What happens instead, with motononous regularity, is that pop-culture narratives such as the sudden overnight collapse beloved of Hollywood screenplay writers smuggle themselves into the picture, and cement themselves in place with the help of confirmation bias. The result is the endless recycling of repeatedly failed predictions that plays so central a role in the collective imagination of our time, and has helped so many people blind themselves to the unwelcome future closing in on us.

So the “hermetic” method is actually just sanity, applied in depth and height, of the common-sense-rule of having a unity-principle and not forcing apples to be seen as oranges. If one sees sleep follow work, then awakening follow sleep in Nature, one can assume (by analogy) that Death follows Life, and then Life supersedes Death. This is the affirmation of the Great Chain of Being, the “Book of Nature”, the Analogia Entis.

So (too) we can say that it is the inner “priest” in man which reconciles the manly-earthly King with the God-mad prophet, in the dark of night, before the black turns to red, white, then gold at the dawning of the Sun. There is always a balance, and always a “higher level”. This is because God is always God: “higher up, and further in”. As Tomberg says, choose spiritual death, and choose hell: choose Life, and you have chosen God. It’s so simple, children can do it, and so complex, that even seraphim yearn to be able to see clearly.

This occurs within Christian esotericism, and within the Christian esotericist, who privileges neither the badge of Christianity nor the heritage or technique of ancient practices which are given new life through baptism. Does anyone really suppose that it would be “spiritually exciting” to live under the rule of the tutelary stars in the same sense that the heathen did? So that an ill omen meant almost certain death? The heathen are a picture of our natural man, sunk in darkness. Paradoxically, it is the man who learns that he is under the rule of stars who then begins to escape that rule of the stars, and the wise man becometh free. This is why astrology is as much an art as a science, and why the Middle Ages baptized it, but did not use it to replace the mass and the organized Christian religion. In any event, men like Pythagoras were not subject to the stars in the same sense that the local god-fearing goat-herders were. He learned to judge the angels, & it was this that made him free. So the “Christian” sees that while there is “progress” (and man learns to be “free” of powers), yet these things were altogether written for our sakes, because we have the same process to over go in miniature. So, in a sense we are more free, in a sense we are less: welcome to the Kali Yuga. The point is to find God.

In the same manner, it is the true “Christian” who both grasps intuitively the power of the antique Tradition, & yet sees it living through its transformations in Christianity and onto into and despite the Kali Yuga; he or she it is who can keep the contradictions together because he approaches from a standpoint of faith, rather than doubt, and thus doesn’t sink into experience through the moving, opening, readying of wavering doubt (like Eve before the apple). This is the man who can keep entasy (unpeeling one’s soul layers) and ecstasy (voyaging into God) from dissolving together into the slime of muddle and confusion that tends to stamp those trying to be “spiritual” in the Dark Ages, using the one to heighten and enhance the other. The same wind wrecks one vessel, and lifts another one over the waves. The same wind drives down some birds, and causes the hawk to soar. Jesus the God-man is the true in hoc signo vinces for the esotericist or exotericist, since both are valid, and both “mean” the same thing. This is one of the meanings of the hypostatic union: that there is fully each, without loss of either.

Faith precedes experience because sense experience alone takes too long, and tends to lose one in a “dark wood”. Additionally, “faith” is actually a divine principle which begins to work before it is either deserved or understood. It thus appears “blind” to the blind, and “powerless” to the powerless. It is actually the power and potency of God, Who is willing to act long before man is worthy of it. Thus, it is power, because man (at that juncture) has no power. In this way, man is invited to cooperate with God, and that is the price of ascent and the meaning of the night time, which sees great growth. But this merely accords with the Nature principle of paganism: a seed has to first fall into the ground and die, before it can have the life of the tree. Likewise, God’s power is so great, it first has to die, because it has to “make a little space” for man by withdrawing, or else man could not be. God is so powerful, He can afford to suffer in silence. God alone can afford it. Here is the meaning both of kenosis and of grace.
We will be looking at Tomberg’s journey, through the eyes of the Meditations (and using some of the notes sent out on the mailing list, not to mention Cologero’s observations and thoughts), however, it will primarily be an attempt to unfold or unpack some of his meaning, so that it stands out more clearly, so that others can “meditate” (which was his whole purpose anyway).