Mysteries of Master R – Part 14: Trinosofia Chapter 8

Posted on December 22, 2015 by janeadamsart

Copy of illustration, Trinosofia section 8

This post continues my improvisations on Master R’s “The Most Holy Trinosofia”.

I copied the above illustration from the Trinosofia facsimile book which is available online in colour through SCRIBD. The reproduction quality online is not sharp, so I had to guess at the hieroglyphs on the side panels. Otherwise I use the book “Most Holy Trinosofia” presented by Manly P Hall, and published by the Philosophical Research Society in 1983. It has poor quality black and white reproductions of Master R’s (copied) paintings. His art was witnessed, but disappeared mysteriously. He left nothing in his name except for his music and some seminal writings, yet he is everywhere

As always, the best way for me to understand a symbol and to make it my own, is to earth it by drawing, to love and recreate it in this way. Poetic license enters; the system is not rigid, but evolving. The grapes kept reproducing themselves as my pencil turned. The background in the original is plain, but I gave it a Beriah (world of Creation) sky colour, blending to grey, the silvery tone of Hokhmah, Wisdom.

The altar in which the secret fire burns is Philo Sofia, a lover of wisdom.

To read the chapter itself, and Hall’s commentary on the text, open Trinosofia Texts in the black title bar of this blog, and scroll down to chapter 8.

First, here is what I wrote about the painting and its imagery, in my earlier studies:

Journal 16 September 2003
Well, the day is passing, and my stream no longer running. But I read again yesterday the Eighth Stage of Trinosofia, with Manly Palmer Hall’s help.

The blazing Solar genius is clouded from the profane. The initiate goes into a room, and sees above the altar, a painting on the wall: in it, the white lion wears a crown of seven rays, and is dignified. That means light, before the rainbow refracts it. Hall’s commentary: “This is no longer the despotic lion of the earlier illustration. Ambition has been transmuted into aspiration; and that impulse which, unregenerated, lures men on to temporal destruction, is now the force which bestows courage upon spiritual enterprise.”

The bunch of grapes – surprise – is a symbol not only of Mars (see previous section when the gifts are given), and of blood, but has a special affinity with GOLD. The blood carries within it these particles of the sun. Initiates of a School grow together on the one branch – the Golden Bough! We are a group Soul, as I have ever known. The work of the one blesses the brother.

The righthand panel reads “Kindle a light at the appointed time – the seventh hour of the dawning. Fire comes forth at noon. Dance in a circle, and prophesy.”

Hear also by resonance with noon, the Hebrew letter NUN (which actually means little fish, or sperm, and also “to sprout”). The intuitional genius, or secret fire of the Scorpionic well, mirrors the Solar disk. The dark lake which the initiate will cross to Stage Nine, is a Scorpio teaching, and so is the death, putrefaction and resurrection he will encounter there.

The lefthand panel reads “Honour is paid to the Giver of Life.”
“This is the voluntary offering up of the personality, the KA. The number 9 appears, and the ark or coffin in which candidates are buried in the greater Mystery. Then the full face of the Sun appears, as resurrection, as the KA ascends through the gate of heaven.” (MPH’s Commentary)

I understand: the persona belongs to God, and is returned to me with this in mind. This panel describes the passage of the soul – KA – through the invisible Worlds as set forth in the Pyramid rites. “In a certain degree of Scorpio, the Hierophant would release his disciple’s KA into the Amenti.” Note that the white lion and the grapes both rest “on a salver sustained in the air by the smoke of a lighted brazier” upon a round altar.

The altar he saw under this picture was the stump of a vine. On it was strewn a pile of shining salt. Salt grains form perfect Cubes – the symbol for mercurial gold at Kether. “We may change into spiritual gold things which are of all least precious, even the refuse of the earth.” (Eliphas Levi).

The salt of the wise is derived from experience. The initiate salts himself, he rubs it into his skin, just as they salt fish to preserve it – here comes the letter-NUN symbol again: the Fish. He pickles himself in wisdom’s wine, Scorpio steeps. The wise man’s salt cannot decay. It “bleeds” as a pure white salt from the cross-sectioned concentric years of the vine root. This is the inner white light that arises from the dark well. The vine root is the well. As the Water of Life triply distills, it projects through evaporation, the salt.

Copy of a painting which heads Chapter 8. M P Hall’s profile is to the left.

(To read more about the yeast and grape symbolism with Master R, and the sonnet by him, go to this link:)

December 2015
Now the white lion and the bunch of grapes emblem the essence of personality, and the sun is encircled by grape-cluster clouds like a bruise; it is said to be veiled. The white lion and the grapes are on a salver heated by the secret fire: the altar for the fire is a “cut vine”. The vine is pruned back repeatedly, to force the flavour of the wine.

The altars in the Trinosofia paintings look like cotton-reels. They are pedestals for the sacred fire.

In the Tarot Keys, the Red Lion (alchemical sulphur) is Key 8 – Strength – knowledge of the works of magic, a secret knowledge: “Change the pattern and you change the result – make it accurate, profound, courageous, positive. Then you tame the lion and he becomes your servant.” (P.Foster Case). In fact the female is these things. The lion is the raw sovereign force of nature being tamed; the roar becomes a song. This all happens around the woman’s belly which is hidden by the lion’s head and open mouth and rose garland. Woman’s speech is a silent power from her inner cave, to bless the children of the world she births. We are shaped in these strange ways to know the openings and speech of hills and valleys and rivers. The current flows without a word.

This is how I see Key 8 – the lion’s mouth is her inner cave. Knowledge of nature is parturition.

lady with lion

In the Trinosofia text of section 8, there are two doors. One opens onto a desert with a hot dry wind. The other door opens onto a wide lake with a rocky shore, and at its extreme end, a black marble facade. The Arabian-style inscription on the bridge across the lake is “the strong to be subdued”. But the bridge is too far away to reach along the rocky shore, and so the initiate sets to and wades. This means he takes his salt through the element.

It takes 13 days to cross the lake of Scorpio’s coagulant dark water. Nowhere does he wade deeper than the knee, but the water is like cement. This must be the density of the slow moving snake. This process through Scorpio signifies my steepings in my life-experience; and in the painting, the white lion and the dark grapes rest on a lake.

Rub it well in! This too shall pass.

Here is the gist: you wash the rock and gravel through a sieve, to extract the gold. Gold glitters like particles of desert crystal. Gold melts to solar water. Gold brings itself together, and flows. Then we are dusts of gold, and He is making with us, gold leaf.

Be lovers of gold. Watch what shape it takes as it falls from the sun.

The treasure in the land: engraving from alexander roob’s alchemy & mysticism

Song by Master R – “O wouldst thou know what Sacred Charms ...” xeroxed from the collection of his music in the British Library

Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

COPYRIGHT – All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2015. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeaquariel.wordpress.com/

Crows Nest

Posted on December 12, 2015 by janeadamsart

Here are some more thoughts in general, following my previous post.

Rosicrucean Emblem Praenesis: “This shows the way”

Journal, 8 December 2015
At death we must be honest. The nearness of death demands honesty. I think of my death, not only metaphysically but about my physical breakdown beforehand, and all the paper and stuff for people to tidy up afterwards. Please God – give me a good six month warning so I can tidy up while I am strong enough! Dying for we humans is precisely timed, yet it feels complex and long drawn out.

“Look at your long life. What did you learn?”

I am naturally selfish, but there are a lot of impulses and incentives going on, which are NOT selfish. Rather like my perennial doubts about my writing, there is a war going on. This is jehad.

It is important nowadays, to understand what jehad truly is, and not to misuse this word ignorantly. I am told that according to Koran, the great jehad is not with enemies or the battlefield. The great jehad is the jehad the Sufi follows – dealing with the inner conflict, which we all have in one form or another. The Sufi is constantly in birth and death: dying to the lower, giving birth to the higher self – dancing with and searching the essence: salaam, peace: moving from one side to the other to do the beautiful, absorb the light, and disappear.

A Sufi moves in this way through anxieties related to the resistance of the material world.

solstice dervish

Jehad is the holy war in the soul and in the daily plod. Each of us deals with personal interior jehad of one kind or another, as we grow. If we are not lighthouse keepers, it is about the neighbours.

So is it at all surprising that the interior war coalesces into exterior, international wars? War is a human condition at many different levels, inherited from Earth’s geological aeons of friction through fire and ice, igniting life. Our bodies are at war against viruses. The tendency gets acted out extremely on the stage of religious and political belief and empire. It is the same. It is projectile, it is our Shadow and we need to understand it more fully.

Around the dying of our loved ones, when their bodies begin to break up into nature’s jehad, honesty is traditionally difficult – we shilly and shally. Yet if I was starting to die in earnest, I think it might preoccupy me all the time, and I would want to share it with someone close. I would want it to be recognised – to prepare for Thoth’s scales and feather. Our entire life is condensed into a little vital essence of everything – a sugarlump, a salt cube or a heart – you know, we are physically mostly fluid and space? This at death gets wrung out like a cloth which liquefies back into the ground, and what goes onward is akin to the tiny bit of solidarity when our atoms are compressed together. “What goes onward is an invisible homeopathic compression of the entire package – the sting in the tail of the whole lifetime.”

Goodness me! Is that so?

I write only to dance with my death.

The vessel which carries my raw thoughts is a big schooner ship just now on the high ocean, with all her sails bulging with the wind as she rides the wine dark waves. The hands on deck and up the masts and at the stern and in the hold are teamwork, like the cells which maintain my body. I trust them to get on with it – a horde of dark sailors and jacktars, linked by rope and cloth and oil and winches and the winds.

Storm approaching, October 1987

The problem with having a conversation about death with a soon-to-be-dying person is – he might feel too weak or simply need affection, not deep ideas, which are only words. I arrive with my deep ideas in full sail – oh-dear! – and discover they are not appropriate – there is not an opening for them. I know so little. It is his journey into the Continent: a mystery of birth through apparent ‘endings’. And there is pain before birth, and there are gleams of light. Peace.

Jehad – holy war inside myself, the inner scold at my many stupidities and faux-pas – I saw it this morning for what it is, in a balanced, accepting way. I saw plainly I am not a bad person, I deal with the instruments of opposition and discord within my being, just like everyone else in a multitude of different ways – whatever bothers each of us most. It is the condition through and through: my body at cellular level is at holy war for communal maintenance of my crows-nest conscience among the billowing sails. This again – the crows-nest lookout post – is a cell among the myriad which sustain a divine cosmic Life, part of a Murmuration: and so on.

The crows-nest analogy emerged, and it is beautiful because of Don Juan/Castaneda’s silver crows at death, and turning into a crow; and I put a little Indian crow (or sparrow) in my blog the other day, to look like a starling. Once again the symbols draw together in this way which delights, affirms and refreshes me.

However – long life. What am I learning? What did I learn?

It seems to be about balance and acceptance on the swaying ship. Accepting my inner jehad gives me an understanding of its outer forms and extensions. What about PROFOUND COMPASSION AND ACCEPTANCE with my inner jehad? The main thing I learned as a lighthouse-keeper, and always learn, is that deep transformation in the human race begins in here; in acknowledging, recognition and response. This is heart-connected to the real activity of the Companions of the Light around the earth.

I feel when my cloth is wrung out after I die, what will go onward is a solvent buoyant salt cube – Solomon’s Seal of course.

“Be still and know I am God.”

In fact (conversation with a friend just now) there is no death or end, because life goes on, birth goes on; looking at death or a loved one’s death re-opens this realisation. This musing joins my own about the I’s and the same little flame of the fire which lights innumerable candles, one to the other, without end. Deep, deep depth, and feeling the life of unspoken truth through the words; a private person and how it feels to be himself.

How does it feel to be you?

Seeing clearly, and listening, keep quiet; because the spreading of half baked ideas and clever opinions is gossip and propaganda, and nourishes war on earth.

Tree of Life – 3 Gunas – like a ship

What a lot to take in and digest all the time. I re-surface just sitting here in this sunny room, feeling quite buoyant. That schooner-ship earlier, is strong in my spine. The Tree of Life is the schooner in full sail towards me, keel well down in Malkuth.

Silence?

What is silence for? The point of connection: the point from which the pendulum swings; the point which travels along the ocean … a power for the peace.

corpus christi seal of Solomon

Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

Approaching Death is Life

Posted on December 7, 2015 by janeadamsart

Forest Medicine 2000

“What will you do God, when I die?” (Rilke). What will I do when my father dies?

I am reading the Castaneda books again. The Teachings (which terrified me in my psychedelic twenties) leaves me unmoved now, but the next book, A Separate Reality, awakens my seeing. This idea and its practice is seminal to my vital life. It gets submerged and reappears as a reality and re-membering.

What is seeing? It is when my heart-path sees through appearances and chimes the interconnecting filaments which bond every unique thing like gossamer. We humans are not those mere shapes in which we depress and die: we are egg-auras of the omnipresent flowing filaments, filled with awe and pulsation. When I stop looking, and see, I let go of depressing worries about my father’s discomfort as he grows much weaker, and my mother’s fret, and instead I focus the current. To see is to receive.

The current has within it the wisdom of time, place and providence. It gives me freedom, space and sanity. It touches the other with that strength of purpose and surrender. For me, everything boils down into the practice of seeing. When this way is open, the silly mind is silent. Seeing floods the mental engine and stops its opera. Real mind then works efficiently: connections and arrangements are made; the right level of care falls into place; patience knits.

Paths of Awakening

Tree of Life as a Garden - Kabbalah 1989

In fact the trap-door opens. In the Tree of Life, the Daat catflap opens, so the transpersonal informs and revitalises the personal vehicle Yesod.

I must keep this way open for when I too am crumbling and dying and losing the plot. When it is closed up, I am tired, querulous and crazy. When it is open, I am my real self and sane. The worst thing for we humans about old age and dying, is the conditioned fears, papers and complicated houses, which crowd in and clog us up.

A warrior learns throughout life to dance to his or her dying: crows (turned silver) fly along the sunset – the image from the Teachings of Don Juan is very beautiful. The only thing I can do for my dying parent is to be mindful of my warrior-dance and his: to see. Over his house each morning at dawn flies a carol of starlings almost in murmuration. (See this link for videos).

A family carries the same principle as a murmuration. (A spiritual or martial movement does the same.) A murmuration is a flock of birds forming fish-like patterns in the sky. The murmuration carries single birds in a singing cloud, constantly changing its shape, and greater by far, than the sum of all its fluttering hearts.

It is the same with the cells and all the moving parts of the body: the individual element serves the greater intelligence, in the natural state. Joy is a dissolution of conflict, as waves become the sea. Through conflict, we grow. It arises, settles, changes and vanishes.

To see is the opposite of the life-habit way of looking-at. Perhaps animals see, and know therefore far more than we do. Seeing includes the raw fear built into nature and earth’s tension and predators; but the beatitude around the seeing is radically different from our angular human bungalows.

Plants and stones see. So do stars and angels and demons. So does our planet Earth Gaia, with the sores in her skin: a different order of time. I then see the days and months and people coming and going in my father’s house and his struggle with failing heart aged 93, as an eye-blink, a preparation for the birth which is his death and planting: it awaits the astrological cadence. It could be weeks or several months, or more. It could be tomorrow. With this view I relax with the rugged rocks of necessity, and can be more present and helpful.

Seeing as a practice, is a compassionate, tender objectivity. The seer engages more intimately with the condition than she could when she dramatised about it. To see is a conscious decision to switch off the drama.

My daily drama which blankets life is death.

Approaching the reality of physical death is Life.

I am getting tentative hold of this concept. I live mostly in the walking dead – thus the conflict of nations and beliefs. As physical death draws near, Life becomes exposed – essence of life and pain: truth. An essence of life is taken through the birth canal of Daat in the Tree of Life, as the physical heart lets go of its grip, its rhythm with the viscera … and then it flies. Rekindling my sense of this, may assist my father by resonance, as we are close, we are both Capricorn-Cancer, the coastal path, the human song.

The sea beats against the cliff and the land falls into the sea. When he read the Castaneda books he said the Sonora desert is a conscious power-point, like the ions along a rocky coastal path, where waves meet the rolling fields. We live and die into this eternal sound of one hand clapping. Time passes.

Contemplatively, I hold him in my arms with this. I renew his philosophy and his quest: his name and form fade into the landscape, into the music and the birds. His body farmed the land for a teeming moment, for almost a century! Thank you for the green fields we knew and grew in, and all their names!

Contemplatively I scan the ocean ahead – what will it be like after he dies?

How can I know? I feel in touch.