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You can find the text for Master R’s Most Holy Trinosofia Chapter Five, above in the title-bar page: Trinosofia Texts. Here – slightly abridged in a few places – is Manly P.Hall’s commentary on this section:
“The candidate next experienced the mystery of the airy or intellectual principle. He is raised out of the subterranean depths by his guardian spirit and lifted into the higher atmosphere. Below him is the desert. Special attention is called to triangular masses – the pyramids.
“An early manuscript in our collection affirms that the Egyptians were able to manufacture the Philosophers’ Stone without artificial heat, by burying the retort in the desert sand, which furnished the exact temperature for alchemical experiments.
“The desert is here a symbol for the aridity and unproductivity of the unawakened consciousness. In the physical universe, spiritual values languish; yet in the midst of this mortal sphere stand the pyramids, supreme symbols of spiritual alchemy – temples of initiation in the desert of waiting.
Copied from Eliphas Levi’s ‘History of Magic’. 27 years ago, when I saw and read about these, in the chapter on Hermes, I was stirred with an elder, unknown and undying knowledge, half covered by the sands.
“It is significant that the atmosphere of Egypt is particularly conducive to the perpetuation of ancient monuments of learning which, when moved from their old footings, rapidly crumble away. Thus material life, the desert, is a natural laboratory in which the supreme chemistry is accomplished through suffering and aspiration.”
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To which I add: the old alchemical texts refer to coction – that of a hen’s warm breast to her egg – in the First Matter. It is the interior temperature of our physical body. Our life is this constant process of transmutation. If we keep the inner fire banked and gentle, it gestates Life, rather than blaze up and consume what it creates. In the arts of Alchemy, we regulate our passions. As Master R has said elsewhere, tiny things – a spore of yeast, the pip in a grape – generate a field of wheat, a vineyard, a transformative Universe.
Further: the desert suggests aridity, but also the ancient and elemental matrix of all life – our body – to which the Life returns. Those who yearned to live the spiritual Life, walked out into the desert and their learning came with the wind, the sand and the stars.
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“The desert” is our primordial physical body in which the sky and stars are planted root and shoot: the leaves, loaves, fishes and our children.
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MPH’s commentary continues (see the journey itself in the Trinosofia Texts page above) : – “The account of the rising and falling of the candidate through space relates to the alternations of the substances in the retort by which they pass through a cycle of attenuation and precipitation, to be finally drawn off through the neck of the vessel. Hermes uses this figure to set forth the mystery of rebirth, the periodic alternation of the soul from a temporal to a sidereal condition, and its final liberation through initiation. Reaching the upper extremity of the intellectual sphere, the candidate is incapable of further function and swoons.”
Genesis in retort – from Alexander Roob’s ‘Alchemy & Mysticism’
The adepts, like Master R, are able to regulate their “density” so that it takes form with our own. Thus they seem to appear and disappear through death, and to migrate or occupy levels of frequency, like electronic orbits in the atom. If we look inside our mind, our thoughts are nothing other than this way. The wearer of a body of Light moves his or her thought intentionally through several planes to converse at will.
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MPH continues: “Upon regaining consciousness, he discovers himself to be invested with a starry garment … By the starry garment is represented not only the auric body, but the new universal aspect of being – the Sidereal consciousness bestowed by … initiation. The candidate may return to the narrowness of his physical environment, but he can never again reduce his consciousness to the limitations of the material state. The starry body is his regenerated and illumined intellect.”
As the sand in the desert, as the cells in our body, so are the stars and galaxies of our origin. Remembrance of this is initiation, and treats its fellow hosts with respect and love.
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Altar, Bird, Torch illustration
MPH: “The strange characters signifying the name of the bird with the green branch are decoded to mean ‘To be given the Life.’ The name of the altar reads ‘The Crown, Kether’, and is decoded, ‘when shall be the gate of entrance’. Together the two phrases mean: ‘Immortality shall be conferred at the gate of the House of Wisdom.’ The name of the torch is Light, but translates to: ‘The dernier shall be hidden away and forgotten.'”
The dernier is a coin, and MPH refers this to the Tarot Suit of Coins – the material body. The hidden light is in our body and its un-conceived origin. “The body of the wise man shall be concealed.”
“The tombs of the Initiates have never been discovered, and in the famous Rosicrucean cemetery, the resting places of the Brothers are marked only by the Rose … The personal ego must die or be buried, that the Universal Self may be born from its seed.”
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Gallery – Various forms of the Rose
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Manly P Hall now analyses the illustration (see below):
“The strange bird hovering above the altar fire is the sacred Ibis, symbol of Thoth the Egyptian god of wisdom and letters, and patron of alchemy. The volatile philosophical Mercury can remain in a suspended state only ‘when in the midst of the flames’.
“By the philosophical Mercury, we must understand the regenerated principle of intellect – mind rendered luminous by the flame of inspiration.
“In its beak the bird carries a green branch, the acacia of Freemasonry – symbol of rebirth and immortality. The black feet and wings signify earth, the silvery body is water, the red head is fire, and the golden neck is the airy principle. The spiritual bodies of the elements are thus united in a philosophical creature, the bird of the wise men – the phoenix.”
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Note: instead of a lotus, I painted the Hebrew SHIN, the Mother-letter of sacred Fire – whose symbol is also a molar tooth.
Manly P Hall continues:
“Beside the bird and the altar is an elaborate candlestick, its base formed of twisted serpents – Ida and Pingala? The upper end of the candlestick terminates in a lotus blossom from which rises a lighted taper – the soul light, the inner light which reveals the secrets of the bird.
“As man’s external existence is lighted by an external sun, by which he perceives all temporal concerns, so his internal existence is illuminated by the light of the soul, the radiance of which renders visible the workings of the divine mind within.
“An inscription beneath it reads, ‘To the strong is given the burden.’ The great truths of life can be conferred only upon those who have been tested in character and understanding. The reader is instructed to kindle a fire upon the high place, that the sacrifice may be borne upward to the Desired One.
“The symbolism is borrowed from elder Jewish ceremonials. Upon the altar of burnt incense a fire continually burned. The fire of holy aspiration consumes the base elements of the body and transforms them into soul qualities, symbolised by the incense fumes. These ascend … as the covenant between aspiring humanity and its Creator.
“‘When the years of this existence are done, and the soul outbreathing at death, approaches the gate of immortality, may the Bird bear it swiftly away to the abode of the wise.’
In the Egyptian rites, the soul of the Initiate departed in the form of a bird which hovers over the couch on which the mummy lies. The soul bird with the green branch … confers immortality, as set forth in ‘The Book of the Dead’. Without wisdom, the soul must perish with the body. This is the secret of the ritual of the Coming Forth by Day, or the Breathing Out of the Ka.
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Meanwhile, my parallel journey continues with Jung’s Red Book; for at this point he begins – like Master R’s Initiate – to enter the desert. In the desert, he will encounter some strange characters and “letterings”.
The initial painting which heads the Red Book’s previous chapter was a mosaic of interior earth and stone and star, bright colour. The painting for Chapter 4, The Anchorite – (and they get larger) – is a temple Window – a mandala with four gates. The two concentric frames contain a formal maze of hieroglyphic Runes which substantiate and support Jung’s interior vision from now on. They resemble Celtic knots, but they are living Runes – reddish brown on a light brown raw-sienna background. In the centre is a sky blue square containing the golden letter D.
What is a Rune? A symbol hieroglyph that has power to speak, and to arrange the tides and the leaves of life, to pronounce a fate. The old wizard remembers and casts the Runes. They are created through his “drawing hand”.
In Black Book 3, Jung noted: “All kinds of things lead me far away from my scientific endeavour, which I thought I had subscribed to firmly. I wanted to serve humanity through it, and now, my soul, you lead me to these new things.
“Yes, it is the in-between world, the pathless, the manifold-dazzling. I forgot that I had reached a new world, which had been alien to me previously. I see neither way nor path. What I believed about the soul has to become true here, namely that she knows her own way better, and that no intention can prescribe her a better one. I feel that a large chunk of science has been broken off.
“I suppose it must be like this, for the sake of the soul and her life. I find the thought that this must occur only for me, agonizing, and that perhaps no one will gain insight from my work. But my soul demands this achievement. I should be able to do this just for myself without hope – for the sake of God. This is truly a hard way. But what else did those anchorites of the first centuries of Christianity do? And were they the worst or least capable of those living at the end? Hardly, since they came to the most relentless conclusions with regard to the psychological necessity of their time. They left wife and child, glory and science – and turned toward the desert – for God’s sake.”
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Finally – Master R’s (St-Germain) first Violin Sonata, composed in London in the 1750s:
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
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Aquariel 