Tarot Keys 8 & 1 & 9

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I did a Tarot reading last week by cutting my deck of 22 Major Arcana three times three, then turning over the top card of each pile.  This orderly picture was not what I expected to see, because I’d caught a bad cold and was all over the place; so I studied it carefully to find its higher message or ‘music’.  The first or centre one means Tifareth, with the Tree’s feminine and masculine pillars to the left and right.  Here is my reflection:

Key 1, the Magician (Mercury) wears a casual red mantle (Mars) over the inner robe which is white, and he gardens roses and lilies.  He conducts the force down from heaven to earth.  To his left are the tools – wand, cup, sword, pentacle – J H V H.  Above his head swirls the symbol of infinity.  If Amnesty is a kind of I-am-nesty, he is the One-nesty: an ‘intelligence of transparency’.  A turquoise snake girdles his waist to remind me of Key 13, the Reaper of life’s cycles.  Serpent symbolism is cyclic and regenerates itself. The circle round his waist and 8 over his head, combine pleasingly;  that which appears to be bounded (circle) is infinite inside.  Be planted in your garden.

The Keys – Hermit and Soul Strength – to each side of the Magus indicate what he is doing just now.  All three – representing the Kingdoms, animal, plant and mineral – gaze downward.  The Hermit stands on a snowy mountain top like a lighthouse keeper.  The Magus grows roses and lilies in the garden, while Mistress Soul Strength tames her alchemical Red Lion.  The Lion is our vital force, the Magus is our conscious self and the Hermit is All-Consciousness.

The woman with the Lion is a female magus – a lemniscate swirls above the flowers in her hair.  She wears the Magus’s shining white robe:  the loose red mantle of Mars is now the power of her Hermetic Lion whom she tames by opening his mouth for him to roar TUNEFULLY.  Binding him to her belly with a wreath of Magus roses, she is the higher Self/subconscious relationship.  Giving birth through the lion’s mouth, she is particular with the offspring she lets out.  She contains that power, like a breeze tossing birds on hilltop or green meadow.  Behind them is a wide open landscape for long walks, and in the distance rises the Hermit’s mountain; the lion frisks his tail.  The buttercup-yellow sky and background is (in Tarot) the colour of our sun or SOL.

Alchemy is called ‘the Sun’s work’.  It moves through and transforms our bodies, with what we eat, and pushes daffodil, buttercup and primrose through the ground.  Within the mountain the hidden veins of gold are ‘congealed sunlight’.

Annika and Aslan

The Hermit is ship’s mast, lighthouse column, SOLitude.  The staff he holds is himself: the rod with which our Magus brings down the light.  The Hermit IS ‘be still and know’.  His cloak the colour of grey rocks conceals pure light.  The lamp refracts and directs the beam.  In the dark, where the other two are in full sunlight, he is the maker of Light.  Light emerges through darkness.

The Hermit’s sign is Virgo.  (Magus is Mercury and the sign of Strength is the Sun’s own – Leo).  Virgo rules the dark labyrinth through which we process solar atoms into the blood stream.  He is seeing right down into his own digestive process, and he wears a YOD cap whose colour has feminine sensitivity – blue, like the priestess.  His hebrew letter YOD is the tenth:  it carries the same meaning as linga in Sanskrit – the phallus as a kindler of light.

Contemplate these three Keys, two of them sunlight, one of them night.  The edge of the Hermit’s key is Venusian green flecked with sunlight, like early leaves in spring.  Darkness generates that power of Light.  Any condition might be brought to realise so.

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Alchemists call our gut the Black Dragon.  Solar atoms (golden yellow) are diffused through its walls into the bloodstream by means of lacteals called chyle, the virgin’s milk.  Red and white ‘soldiers’ (blood cells or corpuscles) then travel to the various cities and castles (organs) around the body where they are required. The old alchemical engravings  are filled with these ideas.  We may value also the interior splendour of our bodies: the hidden rainbow hues, the cosmic integrity and balance of each organ, vessel, enzyme and cellular memory in its place, the solar pulse and flow of life.   Virgo keeps the SECRET things in order, like a secretary.  The Hermit’s cap is phallic and feminine. YOD the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, is spermatic, a tiny fish: the seed of all the other letters.   Reflect on the fluid mystery of masculinity and the androgyne; they put the king and queen to bed together in the Hermetica.

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Conditions (and bad colds) pass, along with the idea of standing still in the flowery meadow;  another temporary adjustment to the tides of tempo:  a fruitful opportunity.  In the darkest part of the body is confected the light of life. Life is something to live slowly, because no matter where or how I am, it is full with light, sound, space and sensation. This open tempo prevails, even within an accelerated human topsoil.  I only have to stop and see and be it, and not be in a hurry.  It produces an almost imperceptible yet delectable manna from heaven.

Leo, Mercury, Virgo;  let these three add up to 18 which is 9, which always reduces to itself.   8    +      1     =     9

Astrologically, Key 1 is ‘Mercury’ wearing a red mantle of Mars – nowadays Mars is chugging along in Gemini, the sign ruled by Mercury.  Mercury changed direction last week in Aries (ruled by Mars).  It is now going Direct.  Mercury and Mars are in each other’s signs –  in mutual reception.  So is it surprising to see their clarity in the oracle?  What did surprise me was my transparency, because I felt blurred.  I think I had asked, ‘what’s this about?  What should I do?”

My ascendant (physical vehicle) is on the cusp Leo-Virgo;  here, Mercury stands between them on the cusp, in beautiful white, red and gold;  the signifier.  Mercury is the mental body, and its vitality; Mars the physical body and its regulation.   The Inner Plane or oracle reflects and advises the outer, and brings peace.  Make way for the Higher Hermetic Mercury.  He wears the Mars garment casually and he adapts the situation.  The Higher Hermetic Mercury is a healing staff:  Egyptian ankh, the Caduceus.

I find in my soul, a caduceus.  It is made from ebony or yew, and it has subtle powers of alignment.

The mental body  (Hermetic Mercury) is the template from birth for our volatile physical body.  From its constancy come needful repairs and healing to physical tissues; but that depends on what we identify with.  Many healers call upon the subtle template to assist them with repairs to the physical.  Jesus did, without even thinking of it.

Yeshua, loaves and fishes

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The highest Mercurial operation in Tarot is in key 6 the Lovers, whose sign is Gemini.  Mercurius within their reciprocal space sets everything in its place, like a table laid for God.

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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 2012-2016. 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/

 

Back Desk Mutterings – by Peter Adams

This post companions “Character in Bird-Songs”  in my other blog.

I rather go for the mutterings in the crossed-out title! What is going on under the orchestral baton? Often I watched at the back of the local orchestral society at which my parents played, but liking to sit near the percussion, I  was less aware of what seethed beneath the docile strings.

I wondered what it will be like to lose a parent;   now I know. (19 February at 9.15pm:  planted 4th March in North Devon.)  For me, Peter is not ‘lost’, he is loved and he is free in an unlimited way. The truth he listened for is his real statement, and it is all the time eternally full and ripe to live.

I discover the deepest feelings in life released through death;  the music for ‘requiem’, ‘agnus dei’  and ‘dies irae”.

“Back Desk Mutterings” is not dated, nor had it been typed for Peter’s writing class, like the Bird Songs, but may have been drafted during my parents’ Somerset County Orchestra hay-day, in the 1960s and 70s possibly – a work in progress.

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Back Desk Mutterings

The shadowed anonymity of the back desks brings its own problems.  Far from the brilliance and the tense excitement of that cherished few that encircle the conductor, anxieties of right or wrong loom somewhat larger, the problems emerging suddenly out of that quite other ‘Cloud of Unknowing’.

It must be admitted, it is very useful at times to see the conductor’s beat – at beginnings and endings and those hardly perceptible but so vital withdrawings and pushings-on for instance – but the bottom and active part of the beat, and the lower twitchings of the hands  are often quite concealed behind the broad committed backs of our leaders and their fine heads of hair.  Frequently all that comes our way is the scowl that follows our innocent but uninformed pressings-on.  That we may be more easily aware therefore of his intentions, could any conductor under the height of 6ft 3ins be provided with a stand to raise him and his arms more fully into the view of all those unfortunates committed to following his directions?

Roger Norrington rehearses at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

There is a subtle communication between that half circle of the front desks and the conductor, which seldom percolates far back.  Those sudden quips with their attendant bursts of laughter are missed or at best release a belated grin as they are retailed backwards.  More important, the sharp instruction which follows an abrupt stop is also often missed or only half heard.  Perhaps one of the front desks may half turn his head and snarl out of the corner of his mouth, “Up bow, three bars after X1V!”  The second desks struggle to find the place and write it in, dropping their only pencil meanwhile.  The third desks lean forward asking hoarsely, “What did he say?”   Lurching to their feet, the back desks reach forward, endangering instruments and music stands as they endeavour to find out what is going on.  Not only that, but this paragon of a Heavenly Conductor, if he did change his mind – and even conductors do that – stands calm after issuing his instruction and will not resume whipping the air until he sees that all his players have recorded it and are ready to attack.

But the music has restarted.  The stick flashes and the brass relieved of their boredom are brazen.  The horns twirl their instruments and quaver, and the back desks relapse no wiser into their seats and attempt to catch up among the rush of semi-quavers that surround them.  They say that correct bowing is important, and certainly wrath and scorn fall upon those whose bow flips up, on a ‘down’.  But where and what to mark?  And why should the back desks be condemned to hurriedly copy down the leader’s often hardly legible marks in those few moments of precious relaxation while the front desks quoff coffee and share each others’ jokes?

Sometimes the writer dreams of playing in a Paradisal Orchestra in which the parts are clearly marked with the conductor’s and his leader’s directions, and nowhere is there doubt or misunderstanding.  Ah, what ease and what pleasure thus to play: an ideal situation and yet not impossible;  for lo, in playing for a local choral society recently, this same writer received his music through the post with all the bowings and the conductor’s introductory beats and intentions clearly marked.  All that this fortunate had to do at the rehearsal was to concentrate entirely on the music and the conductor’s interpretation, and he was thus able to play at the performance with confidence and energy.

There is nothing more dissipating of musical energy than anxiety about an entry, or uncertainty about bowing.  Fortunate are the winds who can simply blow.  Only the mouth organ and the concertina share with strings, the up or down dilemma

So confused can this marking of copies become, that it is not unusual to find string-players feverishly marking in their parts at the end of the afternoon rehearsal before an evening performance that is to be the flowering of weeks of preparation.  This means that although they may know the notes, they are virtually sight-reading much of the bowing and dynamics for the benefit of an audience.  And an altered bow marking means changed bowing for the rest of that phrase, and perhaps for a page.  A bow checked in full flight and turned to bring it into line with the others means a break in the stream of the string-tone, and a shattering of the disciplined spectacle of an orchestra in full play.  Attention that is half on the front desks to ensure that one’s playing is right, is attention that is no longer totally in the action of the music of which one is a part.

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This gallery includes sketches of
Timothy West with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Click to view:

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john eliot gardiner 1986

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Sketches of Bernstein

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If it were just for our own fun that we played, then none of this would be quite so vital, but “folk come a-flocking to hear” and to see – they even pay for this pleasure – and their interest is probably as much in watching as in listening to our efforts.  It would be well therefore, for us to remember that we are a visual as well as an aural experience, and to ensure that our preparations are both accurate and timely.  For our responsibilities to the audience and to the music are great.

P.A., West Newton,1960s/70s

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Each morning as I wake
and in the evening as I lie
to sleep, I say –

“Come fair, come foul,
come blow or kiss
into my open arms
those are my equal
provender
as into the Now I bow.”

P A, Shebbear
2007/2015

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My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2016. 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 http://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

 

Crows Nest

 

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

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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.

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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.

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corpus christi seal of Solomon

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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/

Approaching Death is Life

 

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.

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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.

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Paths of Awakening

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

 

 

Mysteries of Master R, Part 13: AEOLIAN

The Ascended Masters are higher-consciousness tones of humanity.
Here is a link to my portrait gallery of 40 magidim or Masters;

https://genekeysdiary.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/masters-on-the-seven-rays/

Some of them are on the Seventh Ray. Others are from the East.  May they inspire and sustain our compassion during precarious times.

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“Aeolian” was a name for the universal depth behind ‘Le Comte’ – Master R.  Today I coin its resonance with the winds of ancient Greece in the Tree of Life.  The Aeolian mode in music is a natural A-minor scale without a sharpened 7th.

Back in 2003 I developed my working contact with Master R through the study of alchemy. The jury remains out on some of the historical details of his incarnations which I read about.  They are plausible, but the principle of the Master is wide open, and may adopt any of these forms, or none !

The following is from my journal on 25 July 2003.  I read somewhere that Master R’s teacher is “Aeolia” … 

The jivan-mukta, the Liberated One, is timeless, spaceless. An ‘Aeolian’ mode may enter  historical personages in the currency of a line of work through centuries.  And at some point in each appearance there is a flash or shining, which the Liberated One mirrors back to the Holy One.  Ultimately, when those aeons of the Great Work are done, S/He is absorbed into Aeolian, no more reappearing; for in the seed was a supply of gifts.

We read our physical lifetimes, appearances, and history, like a horizontal movement across the chessboard: from somewhere to somewhere else. It is not so. There is only the One: whose ‘Aeolian mode’ in Kabbalah is Kether, all-embracing. The One appears to our time and space as illumined sections or frames through our history. The One contains the depth of human osmosis towards  the White Sun.   Never is the process separate from the Whole of the Aeolian.  It can never be in any place or sense where the Aeolian is not – like a Tree, a great beech bole, Kether, the Crown!

beech bole

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In Kabbalah the Holy One is En Sof – “Without End”. Our real lifetimes are stages of emanation through the Sefiroth. Master R is said to have incarnated at least once every century. His emphasis has been on an enlightened philosophy based on self-knowledge, to educate political and religious systems and encourage them to break their fossils. He defended and protected the Ageless Wisdom by “fathering” the Christ child, and by creating secret societies for the Word. It is said that as Joseph son of Jacob, he was an Essene. He was once Albanus, a Roman Englishman in Verulam who was executed;   and later on as Francis Bacon he became Lord Verulam, Viscount Saint Albans.

(In 18th century France he was notorious as Le Comte Saint-Germain; he did not age, and he handed damaged diamonds back to their owners, as good as new.  When he escaped to England from the Terror, he wrote a quantity of baroque music for violin, keyboard and voices.  Today we find him quietly at work behind a few senior esoteric Schools. The more troubled our world becomes, the deeper we must dig to find him;  but at this depth the healing begins.)

The Christ childhood story is much more explicit in the Masters’ mediatory tradition. The Church threw away the key, as Eliphas Levi has said. Joseph is generally ignored in exoteric Christianity – just a drone – the glamour is with the immaculate Mother. In the ancient word, Virgin, or ripe birth was a commonplace Mystery.

I suppose, at some point in my life, never mind my “educational” dramas, I just stand up on my toes, take off and fly … and then can see perspective, like a bird.

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Tree of Life – tower of Alchemy – the Flowering Staff

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Seeing the Tree whose Crown and stem is Aeolian, Kether … wasn’t I once shown, in the place under the pool, the Round Table like a cut tree, a section across?   Were those floating rings our lifetimes?

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And another thing. When the Work begins to stand on tip toe and spread wings, when it begins to borrow the eagles’ strength, the earthlife has a tendency to become crisp, ordered and composed to a pattern of ageless relationships and roles. Things come out of the mist. When the illusion of persons rubs away, I begin to see the repeating principles, and the casement or container that the earth-life is. I see this with cosmic eyes. The mind begins to think differently.

Eagle book JHVH – Alchemy in Daat

Arcanum 17; the Star

Meditation

The Gate, the Field and the Star – the word A E O L I A N is beautiful and vibrant.  Is it written on my white pebble? The letter pinned to the gate seems to have a solar cross drawn on it, whose sound in the light wind is “aeolian”.

Looking into the water, I focused and followed the inner Star, quiet and still, and prayed the theosophists’ Great Invocation:

“From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let light stream forth into the minds of human beings.
Let Light descend on Earth.

“From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into human hearts.
May Christ* return to Earth.

“From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide our little wills –
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

“From the centre which we call the human race
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

“Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.”

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We must make this choice!  We have to do it;  begin it here and now.

In the lane of the sunrise I embraced my scarlet-dressed lover-brother heart to heart.  In the oak is a scarlet ibis. What will it say?

BOTA key 17 – The Star

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26 July 2003 – TRIED TO DO TAROT KEY 20 SHIN PATHWORKING … but real shambles, because undecided whether or not to go to a Temple of the Heart class today, so my Tower of alchemy is all in pieces.   It seemed on balance better to stay here and walk with Barbara this afternoon as planned. My meditation began well, with a resonant Rose Cross ritual chord of JHShVH, and Kether, but deteriorated all the way down the Tower, with occasional episodes of clarity and peace. Couldn’t concentrate, and feel now fractured and out of tune.

I find the Tower practice is difficult to maintain. Should I clear out all the Presences and Companions that are supposed to be in it, and see the symbols alone?  The field is my temple of the heart – that simplicity. Perhaps … not all of us can continue to use the ritual for our locus. I gave it a try, but I find it heavy work.   Receive then the present undecidedness?   Not to go to a class when I might have done, I might miss a synchrony?   Yet synchrony enters its time and space regardless of what I am doing, if I am surrendered;   do not “inner-consider”, or project G’s classes as their provider.

MANTRA:  On the other hand, I am loving the sound of the word AEOLIAN. It is the wind through the strings of the harp, and through the slender trees. It is the vibration of any musical instrument, and the prana of the soul. That is what I really wanted to ponder today. Behind my magid, those ancient vistas open, He is unlimited.

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Grail Trees 2002

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The Tarot Keys for AEOLIAN are (from right to left) Fool, Devil, Justice, Hermit, Death – the beautiful thematic balance of those colours together.  In the BOTA teaching, each colour vibration has a musical tone; we combine our inner senses of sight and hearing.

E O L I A N – read the tarot keys from left to right as in Hebrew. 0 and 13 both have a white rose. The hebrew letter NUN symbolises fish, sperm, embryo, and the story has no end. The seasonal movement of Death generates Life. In the Emperor, the letter HEH, (h or ah) – symbolises ‘window’ or ‘seeing’.

The musical mantra is a haunting carillon of E, A, Fsharp, F, C, then G for N (Key 13, NUN). When I play it on the piano, I hear a spontaneous groundbass of E, then lower A.  It sounds like the natural minor scale (aeolian) – with a sharpened F (Key 11, Justice, the Balance).

The dictionary says the Greek aeolian scale in music became the ninth church mode with A as final and E as dominant.   Aeolus was the god of the winds and of the harp.  I can become tuned to Aeolian mode … anyway the Aeolian sound became a beauty that rings inside.  In the same way I hear the JHShVH, a trumpet sound whose interval shivered the walls of Jericho.

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A Letter to the Aeolian …

The drawing I did yesterday, you smell like the taste of lychees. I feel I’m in a deep dark grey place, and yet I know the transparency, how simple it is.  It is the way the lotus grows. Cultivate this barely blushing petal in the earth, wrapped in a spiral of green leaf.  My inner tuition of the upper worlds isn’t me or mine:  it is just that they are, that You are.  The simplicity in an instant pierces the ground, and there is no action needed.

Seeing how my personality for all her lovable aspects, messes up communications, which is painful, I am the more ready to wait to be a vehicle for the higher speech when such time comes.  Otherwise I would get a misplaced confidence and try to do things prematurely.

L, V, X … Love is a mystery most akin to the way of indrawing breath;  to the heart touching itself. And so the fountain grows an egg.  I am allowed to love you, why?  because yours is my inmost being and we praise JHVH, what could be more “in common” than this?  If I love you, I find you, because that is the Law.  Let it go.  Let You be my plan.  Arrange my day-longs how You will.  Let me be tossed and cradled among the boughs, the stems that tremble to your wind.  How can one so wide and with so vast a root system and so great a Crown in Beriah, be so intimate and “here”?

It is the touching of the key to the door, of finger tip to harp string.

It seems that to draw you helps.  It does not enclose or confine you;  it brings you nearer.  After the drawing I meet this fresh flavour of you.  So I create you, who are before my creation.  Who in all the universe can resist the love of the spirit?  and the velvety way the breath goes in and out, your nose pointing down?

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And a visual meditation on Shabathai – Saturn the ripening process …

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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/

Discoveries with Tarot and a Garden (4) – A Valley and a Train

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“From Journal 24 May 2011:  A Valley with a Train – (with quotes from Paul Foster Case and the Pattern on the Trestle Board)

AVE:  Work on the personality is perennial.   Transformation in the knots and edges is slow.   Wholeness of truth is assured, and there is no hurry.

At the grade of lesser adept, we integrate Tifareth.   A greater adept is at Gevurah, Exempt adept is at Hesed, Master of the Temple at Binah, Magus at Hokhmah, and Ipsissimus at Kether.

tree of life for group work

In Paul Foster Case’s words, “‘Passing’ from Gevurah to Binah, one makes and keeps an adjustment of consciousness which permits him to receive the full impact of the influx from NShMH, as the influx pours outward and downward from Binah” – a wonderful depiction of the Chariot on this path.

… “One who listens to a radio overcomes the limitations of space and time and becomes virtually present in the room where the programme originates.”

Know the oak – seated where its branches flower – and look up into the Crown.

The sphinxes that draw the chariot represent the light and shadow of the Great Magical Agent.  “The field of his mastery is speech, the power attributed to the letter CHETh. This includes all verbal expressions of thought …   He uses words as building stones, the vibratory values of various combinations of sounds, and the ideas which correspond to those sounds. By directing the subtle forces of sound, combined with thought, he builds himself a body which resists every hostile force. Filled with understanding of its perfect law, I am guided, moment by moment, along the path of liberation.  

“He makes no plans, is never anxious, and has little curiosity concerning the future. He sees the immediate and sometimes the distant future as a present reality.”

 

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Yesterday I walked from Chesham to Kings Langley, along the great Herfordshire Way – one of the noble paths of England.   I pick up the Hertfordshire Way after some miles, just east of Flaunden.   It was windy and all the way I smiled to hear the deep song in the trees, with the birds;   the absence of any city sound or square – the wide spread of fields, woods and green wheat.   Another volcano erupted in Iceland – on the day (21st May) the world was predicted yet again to end, by some chap in New York.

 

The wind in the trees is the subtle force of sound – as stated above. There were many wild roses, and two poppies, and buttercups   It was my holiday away from London, but both Mrs Tiggy and D rang me.   Mrs Tiggy has had a chat with C, and one of her beloved cats got run over, and lost his tail.   D wrote Can I pop over to see him after my walk, please.  I began to worry as usual, if he’s upset with something – the Zombies etc.- and was a bit cross that my time out was no longer open ended.  I had planned to walk all the way to Brickets Wood station north of Watford; but when I reached Kings Langley after four hours, I was suddenly tired and aching, and the wind turned cold with specks of rain: I would not have enjoyed going further. There stood a station and a fast train to Euston; I was at Alum Way by 7.15 and home by 8.30, so it all worked perfectly.

Young wheat

The interdependence is quite hard to keep steady and in its proper field. I curve to D very readily, and imagine nervous scenarios.   Do I allow too much dependency?    My duty and my own dependency is quite transfigured with the fresh pleasure of seeing him: though his voice on the phone is often an irritation.  He now thanks God for the black wrought-iron spiked gate the Zombies installed, to barricade their front entrance from his and the Sisters’.   It sets off his plants and hanging baskets handsomely. The tall green garden gate I made, with its rounded points, retaliates hilariously.

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From The Golden Pleasure Book of Art by Fred Gettings

From The Golden Pleasure Book of Art by Fred Gettings

Listening to the sound in the trees – the Hierophant – are the mice and men of small daily plans and how they actually work out. That in itself is beauty.   Gevurah in relation to Tifareth, is the string’s fine tuning: the composition of a Master painting – Rafaello’s geometry.   Gevurah is the appreciation of beauty. I recognise the manifestation of the undeviating Justice in every circumstance of my life. In all things great and small, I see the Beauty of the divine manifestation. Justice is ultimately “juste” – the tuning of a key, the vital equilibrium of its triple string.

What is beautiful?   the fact that at a given point during my long walk, I wore out, and was translated at a right-angle across my path, onto a train and into the next lease of energy – for I lay down to bed quite late, and slept well.   Never force my body through the breaking point – not any more.

A trainee receives insights from the “higher garden”, packing them systematically into the lower. The insights are Reality.   In this context, I am every grade and gradient of the path: for Ipsissimus is eternal, here and now, descending to “lower” grades – incarnations – to solve specific problems of algebra, bio-geometry or calculus. The ascent is an illusion of life and time.   Kether is with me always.

Paul Foster Case discusses the grades in his The True and Invisible Rosicrucean Order, and in other works.

“If he has something to do which demands physical exercise and dexterity, he centres his consciousness deliberately in GVPh (Malkuth). If his work is concerned with the forces of the astral plane, he moves his centre to the Vital Soul, Yesod. For an intellectual problem he shifts focus to the field of Hod, and for an activity of desire, to Netzach.”

This is another statement of how the Magus embodies, by identifying with the various densities, and how I detect those incremental forces. For me to sleep, the bodies must be aligned, and they seldom are.   Out on a walk, when fatigue drops away, it is because the Spirit is aligned with my hips and feet.   When the alignment is not, my feet hit the ground, I feel tired and clumsy – a long way for children to walk.   These conditions alternate.   It is extraordinary to incarnate, but mostly overlooked, because the physical states are overwhelming .   Hindsight shows the pattern:   a tired walker, a valley with a train.

Key 18 is the journey.   Look at the wind of the Adept in my wild rosebush.   A Master of the Temple – all those levels of embodiment – is the force of heaven, always.

It is lovely to be on the receiving end, and to know I am known – even if briefly.   Each spark of knowledge is vast like a star. They brood within my wood.

Something – the archetypes of Key 18 arising? – makes me sleepy now.

VALE

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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/

Discoveries in Tarot and the Garden 2011, Day Three

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24 May 2011 – Notes from a BOTA study group
Contemplating BOTA TAROT Key 20.

We colour our own BOTA Tarot Keys by the book, to receive and embody their resonance.

Gabriel appears four-dimensionally, obeying no law of foreground or background time, but here, out of his cloud ring. He is an Archangel of Water, with fiery wings.   The horn he blows is straight down the middle: the design traces the Tree Sefiroth. The horn is the spinal thread on which the chakras are strung: the inner flute. It calls the uprising child, whose arms outstretched form a Y or V.

There are seven planetary rays from its bell, and twelve zodiac rays from Gabriel’s cloud, plus a thirteenth – the horn itself: AChD, AHBH (13 = unity and love).

Note that Key 19 – the Children of the Sun – sheds 13 YODs, and how the rays of the Sun shine concentrically around.   In Key 20, the 13 YODs as rays, are focused into the human condition, like a bird’s wing indrawn.

The Sun rises with Buddha’s intimate detachment as the children “cook” in their grassy vessel with sunflowers.   Then Archangel Gabriel in the Judgement, the Annunciation – (for he the messenger, struck Mary’s child with divine awareness) – engages intimately with each human soul.

madonna at table 1957

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Gabriel’s right hand is over his heart and his left hand over his belly.   This is said to be a good mudra to summon sleep and align one’s bodies.

The stone coffins float on the waters of the subconscious:   they are not only linear third-dimension cells from which the cultivated humanas grows, but also the athanor of the Children of the Sun: their protecting wall.

These Children grow up into parents:   their child becomes the androgynous Union of the World in Key 21.

The woman’s gesture L is active. She smiles, because at last she is understood.   The man’s gesture X over his heart is surrendered, he now looks up and receives the Archangel directly.   L V X:   let there be light.   Let this be no mere salute.

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What is Judgement? How is it different from Justice?   The design echoes and develops Key 14 on the path of Probation, in which the human beings are the lion and eagle in Ezekiel’s vision. (The lion and eagle receive alchemically, the water which burns and the fire which flows.)  Where Justice holds a Karmic balance, the Judgement commands an Ascension to a higher level. The Archangel Michael in Tarot Key 14 is often depicted holding the sword and scales of Justice, Key 11.

Visually, the design in Keys 20 and 14 fits over Key 6 the Lovers too, whose Archangel is Rafael. (see further down)

The subconscious responds to images. Each of the Tree of Life’s 22 paths has a Tarot Key.  We contemplate the Tree visually and as a whole – the paths of intelligence and influence.

Through the Four Worlds of Jacobs Ladder, the paths of ZAIN (sword) and SHIN (tooth) “overlay” each other. The Hebrew letter ZAIN (the Lovers) is the descent of Understanding and discernment from Binah into Tifareth, the heart centre.  Letter SHIN (the Judgement) is the element of promethean fire reaching Malkuth, the ground.

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Pictorially, the Archangel is veiled from the Lovers by the cloud, and pierces THROUGH the cloud to the lovers of the Judgement.   The Judgement is an overall cosmic grace, receiving Volition (Gevurah) and Benevolence (Hesed).   The qualities of Gevurah and Hesed are constraint and expansion, the balance.

Then where is the fourth Archangel?   Key 15, the Shadow, masks Archangel Uriel of the lightning flash – and presents our greatest challenge, at all levels.   There are organisations.   “Give me a spiritual contact and I will organise it!”

Examine the different attitudes of nakedness in the 22 Keys – how the man and woman in 15 seek to exploit and disguise it, and how in 6 and 17, the nakedness is unabashed and loves itself:  the natural state.

In Key 17, the chakras in the woman’s spine are “interior stars”.  The pool is all of them, reflecting the evening sky.  Her foot rests lightly on the waters of the soul.  This Key is also called “Meditation”, and from the same pool the evolutionary path of Key 18 will emerge – as she sees it.  The hebrew letter Tzaddi resembles a fish-hook which we let down into the deep.

Painting of Arcanum 18, 2002. The idea here, is to sit with the star-woman by the well. Look up with her, through the Tree’s Sefiroth from Malkuth to Kether. Yesod is the pool of evolution, with crayfish, guardian dog and wolf. Tifareth is the golden Sun just visible at the horizon of the long  path to full humanhood. Daat is the timeless presence of our unknown Guides. The ‘third eye’ Tzaddi is Key 17’s ‘fish hook’ meditation. Kether is the White Sun. The side Sefiroth are coloured in the Queen Scale. Each Tarot Key is modelled on the Tree of Life.

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In Key 20, the Judgement, the great sea water congeals to ice mountains – the density of the Spirit of Ruach.   We receive a fountain breath right down the centre of Key 20, from above to below, like Genesis.   Let the horn wake the flute.

One of the most helpful pointers for me, was when we spontaneously saw that the seven stages of spiritual unfoldment – F’s question, doing his tarot Interpretation exam – are not just 15-21, but INCLUDE the two septenary levels above them in the Tarot Tableau:   the tonal depth enriches and opens up the dimension.

BOTA Tarot Tableau, showing the three septenaries and all the intermediary relationships of the Tarot, like a keyboard.

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Are the coffins in Key 20 tethered to land, or do they float?   We agreed that they float, and we also caught sight of the opened lids, representing all the Karmic history which limited the parents: the child has no lid but the infinite Archangel – the Law of resurrection or growth through the planes.   Those floating coffins are like the silhouettes I’ve been discussing (in previous post), pasted on the infinite, wobbling in the water surface like oil.   The human Family arises like a living iris from flat-earth outline theory.

The Iris flower symbolises Key 14: the rainbow.   Michaels’ wings are of fire through droplets of water.

There is an outline, and there is the living truth:   they intersect at a right angle – this is displayed cryptically in the red cross flag attached to Archangel Gabriel’s horn. The red cross flag represents also the white work and the red work.   The white work is spiritually inspired.   The red work applies it to the earth vessel with the help of Mars, the secret fire.

It was agreed that different souls’ responses to kundalini – whether it be presented in picture form or internalised in body awareness – should not be generalised.

The flag also represents the rosicrucean vault proportions – 3 : 5, 5 : 8 – the golden mean.   The cross on it echoes the man’s hands, crossed over his heart.

renaissance angel, 1957

An African told me two dreams he had, which helped him to understand one of Warren’s books perfectly (Halevi).  In the first dream, a priest told him he is Jewish. In the second dream, he was shown in a graphic diagram, just how souls drop into incarnation along the line, in such a way that it changed his life. Then he could read the book, which before, he couldn’t grasp.

There!

This day of Tarot is, as it were, the other side of yesterday’s Deva page.   They co exist happily, like palms together.

renaissance madonna, 1957

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Each Tarot Key has a musical note, related to its colour vibration, as in Pythagoras.  We learn these in the BOTA correspondence course lessons.

The council lawn mower passes back and forth, below my window.   Its motor has a tonic note, to which I spontaneously chimed a fourth above; and suddenly struck a beautiful edgeless chord or vibration.   This is how we can “play” the Tableau visually. The notes of Mirth, Awakening, Meditation, Embodiment, Realisation, Ascension and Completion along the base of the Tableau make chords with the Keys above them.

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The lawnmower note turned out to be the first I blew on the whistle – an E.   E is yellow, the tone of the Fool and the Magician and Strength.   The tonic is B major – magenta – Key 18 the Moon:   the questing way of embodiment.

Very nice to see these Keys together – how the Fool leads the quest, and the Magician and Strength contain and focus it.

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F said yesterday, it is difficult for him to grasp the chakra correspondences in the bota system.   It takes time. We have to live with it and let it grow and inform, like the Magician with his plants.

VALE

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Discoveries in Tarot and the Garden 2011 – Part Two

I am dipping back into an old diary – see previous post.

22 May 2011 – Pentacle:  Dark Pennies and Victory Falls

AVE.  Some strong spiritual leaders of humanity “clothe their higher bodies with physical matter, by stepping down the vibratory rate of their personal vehicles. The greater number are men and women who came into earth-life in the usual way” through the birth canal.

(Quotation from Paul Foster Case)

Every one of us has the unfolding, dormant or active potential of master of humanity: magister.   Ramana and other sages relate to this, in each soul they see. The “grade” is omnipresent, for it is our true Self, and it is mostly unnoticed.

It is a remarkable thing to creep into the embodied arena through that tiny little door and fall into the storms, milk and wiped slate of babyhood.   Our deepest privacy is what we no longer remember, because our memory’s data base rests on learning to read. Before literacy, there is usually an awakening contact with the tribe of past lives, their fruition in this one – the magic of childhood.

The magi move with ease, when their bodies have grown up through the dramas of puberty and infancy.  Hold this impression:   the magister in me through a string of births: the oak inside the acorn: the presence of the magister in every time and place, is a lode star:   I keep returning to talk about it.

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My writing in the mornings consists of: spiritual contact, study and psychology – the daily application –  for instance, tales of the garden at Alum Way reflect for me in their textures and patterns of leaves, the contact of the deep. They do, because there is love going on there – enough to much amuse the magister: enough to ground the settlement: enough to reflect the law.   Human love is a servant to the transpersonal.   Instinctively, it makes me work hard and develops my dedication.

Yesterday I sowed the first grass seeds along the edge of the garden where the rubbish dump used to be – I knelt and stroked them into the earth. The man came along at that moment and teased.   In the evening we watch Grand Designs, following persons who build their dream mansions, and all the problems of construction, relationship and planning – a roof which turns out to be too high, etc.   And look at me!   My Grand Design in reverse, removed a mountain, and I end up not high on the roof but hands and knees on the ground, like this – smile.

Ramana used to say, when you dig a well, or realise your Self, all you do is remove what isn’t there.   All that stuff blocking it is space. For much of my life I fantasised Capricornly about building or creating some big thing bare handedly – it turns out to be this space, and it gives me confidence at various levels. Only with our hands touching earth do we realise the heavenly motions.

Yesterday I also painted both gates green – a brighter park-bench Venus green which the man bought and finds more cheerful: his instinctive signal to the Zombies (neighbours) – my green is bigger than yours – and re-organised the back “subconscious” wild garden, moved the tip-rubbish to the other side of its entrance, sorted out the woodpile/long lovely privet poles for fencing, and raked up the man’s grass trimmings.   The Zombies were busy trimming the elderflower tree by the street – they have plans for their little front garden; with their fear of the man, they use their back garden less.   I do not have the social skill to speak to them at present, but I enjoyed the feeling of them working near me: the Meerkat – who has turned blonde – sweeping up leaf-litter by the bins.   The man’s way with the Zombies is now quite sensible – keep distance: aloof courtesy.

Now yesterday – my insights from the garden clearance begin to dew – I jotted that it doesn’t matter to be wrong or mistaken. The magi too are constantly adjusting focus: like one who draws. The fixed fear of making mistakes is egotistic.

I saw when dozing the other day, an image of the Victoria Falls – there are pictures of them in Prof Cox’s universe book, a magical place of rainbows falling (of course) on himself – the fast moving flood tosses turbulent white.   On the brink, bushy islands or trees part the vast spill. I saw this too from a distance, like teeth and gaps, or silhouettes, and imagined myself caught on one of those tree-clumps between the thundering waters: identifying.   I flit like a butterfly by an abyss – cliffs of fall.   The subconscious distils to me the image.   The dark places where the trees cling to rock, along the wide white bite of the falls, shocked and awoke me.   Jung says “unconscious” material floats to the surface and shocks the dreamer.

Similarly: the patches of the finite – vibrant bodylife, and its moods and dreaming cityscapes – are pasted on the infinite. They – the silhouettes – are on a plane merged with the grey Infinite, yet distinct, like threads of oil on water. For some reason the silhouette being not tilted but resting in the plane, pleases me.

I swim in your silhouette, your shadow on the grass – a little pool.   Circles – pennies – of the soul that can lie a little overlapping one another as vesica pisces without invasion, are a  tender discovery. I don’t think it is possible in a relationship’s early stages to venture this, because too many karmic defences and compulsions are being processed.   In the early stages there is infatuation and quite a lot of psychic rape.

Lay the coins – the shadow discs of the soul – together, move their edges over one another, then back.   The fish where circles overlap, is a fluid oval, and from it the Angel or the Child rises.   Relationship – as spiritual practice – is a field where the shadow discs quiver together like leaves in the breeze.   It is whimsical or it is conscious. The clean parting is as important as the merging.   That is why the Lovers’ hebrew emblem is ZAIN the sword whose tip parts the ways. It applies to partnership and to the binary relationship within my self.

(“And” is VAV, the Hierophant. This is because the hebrew letter VAV means a hook or nail – something that joins things together or bridges souls – and even signifies the grammatical conjunction “and”.)

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The shadow discs lie in the field, deep blue with night. One may look into the other, and empathise, withdraw, empathise. To speak is not necessary.   They throb.

Yesterday was not really optimum for planting grass, with the Moon in last quarter.   However my incentive to carry through, was strong  – the Moon in Capricorn, and Mercury, Venus and Mars in Taurus.   21 May, my daughter’s birthday, is also for me, a moment of the Magi;   they reveal their face.   The gardens – all earth, with some timber piles, a few new shrubs and garlanded with trees – are a beauteous space in readiness, an invitation.   This week is also the man and my 5^th anniversary.   There is a curious and welcome spiritual relaxation – take it or leave it – with things.   Removal of anxiety is truth.

But see:   keep clearing:   pause in the inward turned writing, which is on a daily base repetitive, and be silent;   hear and see.   The world was rumoured to come to an end, yesterday.

The gardens are a lens, responding also to my meetings with Jung and Master R at a plain round table in a secret garden by a hedge.   At Alum Way, I am busy in the garden:   here at home I see and rest in it.

Thus the coins overlap and part.  They are pentacles.  The pentacle is a yantra of the bare soft earth, that I tread level in a circle with my feet, for planting.  Pentacles are stars, five-petal flowers, and seals of Solomon;   pentacles are magic rings.  My ideas of circles of grass in squares of ground should not be applied too literally.   The magic gestures are in my writing:   the material and the plans are his.  I watered everything yestereve copiously with Marion’s hose:   but it rained a little anyway, in the night, and now the wind sings in a bright sky with leaves.

The rainbow waters of Victory descend through my flute.   This is Fall – the endless falling of the Light.   Light loves gravity.   Light is also gravity – curved as space around the spheres.   Gravity is endless and everywhere – the falling.   In some parts among the stars, it condenses locally and vorticises to black holes – the birth of stars. Black holes are old collapsed stars.   Their singular rebirth shines through the other side of the spangled cloth.   Stars are infinite, even though they die.   I am infinite, even though I die.   I see above the clouds:   my face is every where.   Is gravity the speed of light?

The lesson of the brown pennies lying in the field, is when I see into your dark with you; I rest with your reality; it is a mystery how we touch.

In the day, the sparkle in your face breaks mine in a smile: your eyes as bright and dark as a child; your bravery in the battle field: your cock and your crisp wit like toast:   your deep voice and will power in your chest and throat: your brown impulsive hands: your flaws: your broken teeth and smokers cough: your unfettered expression of your vulnerability: your emotional zest.

It is wise to keep distinct, my depth perceptions and the surface pools.   They marry and entwine in time – it is the hourglass of the stars.   Where I live as a membrane or sounding board, it is unwise to define too much. The circles on the water expand, contract, change shape to rods and amoebic globes, disappear and reform;   the five mobile islands where Hokhmah dips his hand.

VALE

Ah! a thought while blowing out the candle:   my present drift away from esoteric groups and ritual is because I am being assisted by the nature Devas whom I honour in the garden.   I’m glad to be reminded of the Devas.   This clarifies much, and puts the adventure in context.   The Devas spell out things of life very clearly, and dispel hobnobbing.

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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/

Discoveries in Tarot and the Garden 2011 – part One

Glancing back … In 2011, I studied Tarot, Alchemy, reclamation and relationship.  Physically, I sanded down, varnished and restored the floors of a small concert venue in Highgate, and at the same time removed (by hand) a ten year rubbish dump from a string of neglected gardens in Alum Way near Golders Green – the task took almost 9 months.  In my journal I reached ground zero and celebrated my daughter’s birthday:

21 May 2011 – ON BIRTH, HEALING AND THE GARDEN

Summer gives me a greatly extended day: getting up with full daylight, is at 5.45, earlier than ever. I finish writing between 8 and 9.30 usually; then all being well, I am active until eight or nine in the evening – how do I manage in winter?   The body clock contracts accordingly, so everything adjusts.   In winter I watch more TV and (obviously) sleep more, because I hit the hay about the same time.

Each morning before I write, I open the Tree of Life.  I say Warren Kenton’s Invocation (“let us gather together, draw together, let us form a vessel to catch the dew of heaven.  Let us rise up and go to that holy place of meeting, and gather there with the Companions of the Light;  and let the veil of Heaven be drawn back.  Hear this:  Malkuth, Yesod, Hod  …”).

With the Invocation, I do  Dion Fortune’s hand mudras – The Good Shepherd, Those who Sailed West to East, The Builders – and repeat Actaeon’s vision to – “part the waves, kiss the lips, turn the wheel, fingers touch numbers of the clock, enter the cave, find the jewel, and climb the mountain, through the rainbow.”

I let it dance as a physical instrument, to earth it, feet on rosewood floor.   At the end of writing, I blow out the candle and “come down the Tree.” I used to neglect this, but was taught that closure is proper.   In ritual I am lazy – it is pared down to the essentials – but dedicated.   This sounds right. It is a hand-clap to summon and thank the guardian angel.  It diminishes my weevils and opens the sky.   Ritual is a statement of embodied intention: ascent.

The drawing above, is of Dion Fortune’s mudra – three gestures with the hands were transmitted to her in trance. I drew them embedded in the slanting wave-contours of Glastonbury Tor. The peak is a mental-plane arena – ring of stones, winged angel and chalice, in a subtle vesica-pisces geometry. The vertical circles intersect the horizontal one – like my painting of the Grail Table with the Tree.

The Tor angel is a cut out silhouette window of light within the tower.   Recall  the silhouettes we see each other as;  my day’s changing modes are silhouettes. A rare opportunity permits my intimacy with another silhouette; to deepen objectively and be aware.   The invitation to enter another’s room, and vice versa, rubbing shoulders, should not spell out each others’ codes, but empathise. Our vesica pisces: the circles, as on the Tor peak, enter each other just a little.   Creative imagination is the Empress dressed in green.   Out she comes! lush, like an apple.

Venus is lush like an apple.  Yellow, green and red, with black and blue are colours of alchemical antimony, a kind of transformational corrosive, or quickening.   She is pregnant, about to parturate, seated on a stone bench – cool stone to her distended fanny.   Swollen seed splits.   Golden stars of the zodiac dance nonchalantly around her head; her gaze eye to eye, is direct:   relationship.

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At 9.15am, thirty four years ago, I saw my daughter rotate out from my thighs, slippery, greyish dark pink, flecked with blood, vibrantly athletic and alive, her father’s face, her well formed female sex, her strong trumpet cry – the lady’s a survivor!   In this light, the Angel descended through me a moment later, with an overwhelming maternal bonding instinct:   love.

How perfectly it all fits together ! When a royal child lies in her cradle in the fairy tales, the godmothers who gather round, are zodiacal powers of love and of compromise – the gifts for life.   They are titanic feelings.   Every mother who has looked at her new child and been struck by lightning, knows them. Nature!

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Nature is the goddess – and when I next see Ris (she says she wants a quiet birthday on her own, but might change her mind later and let me take her out for a nosh), ask her a bit more about the Goddess or feminine energy she’s reading about, and the totem stick.   She told me the other day, about seven daughters of Eve, and mitochondrial DNA.

7 daughters of Eve, by Ulla Plougmand Turner

Ancient women of Gaia at first trusted the masculine deity as he rose – made trade with him – and then, as he abused them, they became atheists.

When a deep perception is on the way, it is like the child coming through the canal, and my thought in-draws silently, and waits.   Labour in its fullness, is the natural coming and going of the breath.   My labour hurt a lot, but after I was allowed to push with it, the massive commitment with nature replaced the pain.  The essence of labour is not violent, though the sensations in transition are extremely so – the waves knock against each other.   The essence of labour, as during the pregnancy, guides the little voyager through the portals;  she rides her vessel through oceanic storms of emotion – which there were.   Whatever the mother’s argument, tension, grief or release, that little presence deep inside, is kept safe in harbour as she grows.

The ancient women of Gaia trusted the man in the field, planting grain, and he betrayed, abused and confined them.

This fable works its way organically through the soul, like a baby through the birth canal, until it is delivered to the air.   When the fable is embodied, she is conscious, and may choose to forgive.   For as long as there is no “for give”, it must be born again.   Eventually the forgiveness – the wholeness – is accomplished, and then there is movement.

Whatever the lifetimes in my daughter’s private inner soul, unknown to me – an outline emerges; the depth of her Karmic compassion as a certain trouble took form. Her soul was emboldened to reconcile it. Her father lost his creative path in life, and abused us with his rage and disappointment. She does not wish him ill.   She may have interacted with him in previous lives, as I did, or he may have been called upon by destiny to play the bully.   He knew not what he did.  At a certain depth, and taking time, the action of individual souls upon each other is archetypal and transformative.

For me, Karmic issues seek a conscious breath and transmutation.   If an ancient woman is abused or blamed, if men exploited her, lifetimes may fill with revenge, directed outwardly or inwardly, sometimes inflicting and sometimes receiving, sometimes as the man and sometimes as the woman.  Long shadows are thrown across history, for ourselves to embody with life, growth and awareness.  In time a maternal environment is found, which is alchemical, and accelerates things:   we meet our full nature … and let it go.

The fertile green plants all down her stair and filling her balcony, are symbolic.   On my way to Warren’s meeting on Thursday evening, I saw her sitting in her doorway among them – she has an open view up to Hampstead from her roof-terrace village – and so I sent a text, and she waved back.

Karmic issues are subtle, powerful wave-trains. It is too simplistic to make them tit for tat, because they criss-cross also (as in the Nasca lines of birth chart aspect patterns);  Karma is an echo chamber. When I walk in the sea with Mercury, my soul is raised enough to glimpse the divine dimension which seems to us (who live within its walls, waves and thumb-print whorls) such a labyrinth. I see the simple noble outlines, and at the same time, their complexity; a vast world. It is a great honour to behold thus: to walk in the sea with Mercury.

Illustration from Alchemy & Mysticism by A Roob

Speaking of which, Mercury through Gemini rules The Lovers, Tarot key 6.

My daughter’s Tarot template is:

Individuality:  Sun on Gemini cusp – The Lovers, key 6
Personality: Ascendant (and Moon) in Cancer –  The Chariot, key 7
Problem: add 6 to 7 = Death, key 13, “Scorpio force” (the movement)
Solution:  subtract 6 from 7 = key 1, the  Magician, Mercury (the focus)
by what Means?:  subtract 1 from 13 = 12, the Hanged Man: the Waters
Integration – sum of the previous five = 12, the Hanged Man: or 3, the Empress.

Ris tarot template, Sun Gemini (Lovers) Ascendant Cancer (Chariot)

jane tarot template, Sun Capricorn, Ascendant Virgo –  only four keys, because problem & solution are both 6.  The sum of the four keys reduces also to 3, the Empress.

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I knew Key 12 was strong in her template: which means “reversal”, the capacity to invert a wrong and to change things round.   The womans’ staff she told me about some weeks ago, is the caduceus or ankh. She has electricity and healing in her hands, still awakening, being born in the Year of the Snake.

The Tarot Keys are godmothers, the bringers of the forces.

In 1969 when I first knew him, a mantra arose, concerning her father Mr V:   Give way to the Force.   For-give.   I intuited in those early months, a transgression which would be my life’s work and instruction, to forgive. I saw the tender child in him, not fully formed;  and the soldiers around him.  I projected furies with and through him, as well as an obsessive romance and fear.   I enacted the woman bruised and scorned.   In those days – he was 34 then – he was attractive, intense and tentative, feeling his way. I was fascinated by his warmth, and by the cold steel in his nature.  He was vulnerable to my drama, as his ego was not secure, and his path was at a forking of the ways.  I was just 20.  I wanted a child with him.

The little fish who swam towards our first encounter and knocked at the door for life, was born seven years later in Gemini.   She persisted and prevailed.

To forgive, does not erase from the slate – no one can do that except the bearer, with God.  It goes to a hidden place and it opens wide.   To forgive means to give away my enmity; to move apart; to respect that soul’s providence and freedom as a whole.   To be able to forgive and move on, is a personal boon; I am not jailed, I am out on parole.   To forgive is the holistic LAW OF THE UNIVERSE;   and the Law is movement: and movement through the fields and seasons of life is Key 13, the “scorpio force”.

My friend Lyn is writing an autobiography of the scorpio force through herself. She told me she has trouble with the amount of “I” in it.   I told her Actaeon left the I out of his first draft, and it was contrived and read badly.   Perhaps the answer is, to ask from time to time what this “I” is – Self-enquiry.   Then it becomes objective, and the dimension of cosmic mystery restores the Life.   So why not study … the human who is closer to me than my heartbeat?   All else is speculative.

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Meanwhile, at Alum Way, there is the man, my friend David.  We’ve been together for five years;  we are reclaiming the string of overgrown gardens next to the woods and the brook.  My building of rough timber fences is now approved of by the man; with the addition of some long apple branches, the fabric starts to flow, and is strong.   Yesterday I almost finished the digging.  In the corner of the garden where the recent rubbish is stacked, the earth was packed with broken pots and old barbecue coals and litter, and has died to dust, it is filled with tough thatches of dead corpuscular root fibre.   Nothing will want to grow there except – possibly – nasturtiums which are said to like infertile ground.   It might be a good place to put the man’s fishpond.   The man wants the rubbish pile remnants to be moved into the woodpile garden, away from his sight, until it can be dealt with.   But  the woodpile garden is my little subconscious sanctuary – as well as being the first place last year, that I entered and cleared.   Why not put it further back, in the nettle garden which no one is bothering with at the moment, and cut it up into bags for the municipal dump?

looking into the tip

Before …

… and After

For me these gardening details are psychology.   After digging along the border, I raked, levelled and trod a room-size area where the high rubbish tip used to be; to lay the first turf.   It is incredibly exciting and creative.  Around the green “mandala”, we can seed grass and wildflower, to watch it grow.   I found the man in good voice with these plans in general.   The place which is trod and prepared for grass, is a magical dancing floor at dusk; darker than the lumpier ground around it.

The “I” in narrative is fine, so long as the dimension is alive through it, of a story working through a local i, like a sonata through a cello.

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I’ve been reading in Self Enquiry April 2003, Jim Pym’s article on spiritual healing.   It is very interesting.   It is for him the attentive practice of “I do not know, nor do I try to fix it”, which clears the space for God.

The man had a bad day yesterday, with his back. He can live with a lot of physical pain, but not the fear and tension that rises to his head from it as it accumulates.  His GP referred him to a pain management clinic, where they can try out drug changes. I heard (when I had toothache) that to alternate pain killers is more effective than to use just one, which habituates.  He draws the line at morphine.   Clive up the road wears morphine patches and he says he’s not going there.    Alum Way is tenanted by brave souls in pain, crying a little in their beds at night.   The Welsh lady downstairs has almost wasted away, but is as wiry as a root, thanks to the bottle.   The man pulled strings through his social worker (a large black lady called Lolita whom he manipulates with great skill), and the council came along at once, and mended the steps and re-concreted the front path – he is delighted with his will with A Way.   He made prints in the wet cement with stencils of a rose and a boat, and a magendovid.   I told him the magendovid looks more like a paw print.   He said he will make his dog walk in it.  Through the ages, the cave dweller marks his dab.

Spiritual and sexual healing does not remove his pain – yet – but it does open up his resources and inner soul strength. It is a long-haul circuit. As a “soul gardener”, he manifests a physical garden and an Eve.   His Aries will is powerful.  My lovership with him, and in the garden, is for the whole.   Does this rare opportunity stand equal with writing great screeds and getting published and influencing people?

VALE

Quantock hill waters

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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/

Alchemical Ethics: Part Two

Grail Table Round, 2002

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D asked me to say to him out loud, “Yes I am a difficult person.” This was after I took Maya out into the field to play ball for two hours, hearing him say an hour and a half, but he said 45 mins, and I had left my phone behind and he was climbing the walls convinced I had lost Maya. In fact he had a frightful day with one bloody thing after another, I spilt codliver oil in the car, and he lost the car keys at home and panicked – I picked through the dustbin and he found them in the kitchen drawer. I am a difficult person and I find myself hard to live with. I didn’t like that very much, but it is true. It is a life-long battle inside my fractious personality, trying to limit damage when with others, i.e. not to do or say things chaotically, or increase my own tension by badgering, etc.

What a curious illusion this is!

I saw the truth  … each of us, every single worthy human being is difficult for themselves or others to live with. Those whom I love are often irritating, overbearing or even downright scary. It is our elemental side; our vulnerability. This is how we are, and how life is.  In daily life I search what I think is right, and get stressed when the words vanish, because in summation it isn’t.  I am bullied and chivvied by my ethical ideal. When my vision clears, it is plain that the superego ideal doesn’t work;  it has no power.

hermit, 1987

Though ethics are broad cosmic commands – the platonic streams of light in the river – they are not written in any obvious way in the sky. We have to rediscover the melody, and to improvise. The ethic rarely stabilizes as a plan. When interacting with others, it changes perspective with the light, and the desired action may turn out quite different.

Greetings of glad tidings, 1989

This is because the ethical waveband plays a human instrument not in isolation, but as a developing social being – a keyboard or orchestra. The issue must interact and co-respond – the “finding” is not what I meant to find when my mind was closed. With new humility, receiving a more open perspective, I am chastened for the umpteenth time: I was a crusader wearing blinkers.   I know nothing.

Let me try to grasp the way ethics are social, interactive, relational and creative.

I didn’t do it – I dropped an egg to see what would happen: Cornwall 1955

 

Yes there are Dharmic cosmic strands of consciousness. But the business of being human is scratchy. The ethics are not dished up on a plate. A hen roams and scratches in the ground for the grain which drops out of her nether end as an egg.  The henyard is an earthy mess with disturbed grass-shoots.   Images interlink just now, of golden yoked egg, the planetary orbits around the Solar atom – and which came first, chicken or egg? – the elliptical miracle produced from that feathered backside, is found among some nettles or a nest of hay, and boiled for breakfast. Hen and egg are a great work without beginning, to which the cockerel appears incidental. The cockerel makes the louder noise, standing at dawn to lift his pinions and announce the sunrise: cock crow, YOD – and poor St Peter’s discovery that it had crowed three times, and he had forgotten the courage of his ethics. He had cringed, denied and slept while his Teacher awoke in the garden all night long. His  courage was clouded by the self-preserving fears of his surface mind.

cockerel, 1987

Yes, in myself, this happens daily – the waters are muddied, and I put myself on trial.

Who has the right to do that? Who is the judge?

Sanatana Dharma

An aspect of ethics is courage – the courage to remember and speak up for what the heart knows is true – the Sanatana Dharma or optimum way to grow at all levels. For those today in prison or under torture for freedom of thought and speech, any failure to protest their conscience is a far worse fate than physical suffering, electric shock or being murdered. For men and women whom regimes attempt to crush, the ethical imperative is simple. The lamp shines in them strong and clear.  They speak.

As humans we are a process so incomplete – racially about eight years old in terms of infancy – that an ethical realisation should bring a daily, hourly practice of compassion for the way we know not what we do. I know not what I do.   For give.

seagulls and plough, woodcut by C.F.Tunnicliffe

The intensive study of spiritual matters and platonic virtues leads straight into the field of life where I  churn up mud and feel lost. This is the task of embodiment. Kabbalists say our embodied life on earth is the hard School where our work in the soul is applied. There is no evolution in the soul, unless we plough the physical field. Life on earth – with what it flings at us at every level – is a difficult training.

The manifold crisis today which humanity faces, is a progressive force for transformation in the collective soul.

cockadoodledoing 1987

The ethical waveband appears an eternal verity: but it is not static. It is implanted in the human psyche in order to grow and generate life through each small human. My evolution is a difficult imperative: a combat with failure. The failure is relative, and mostly imagined. Who is responsible? Whom do I try to serve? When I am out in the playground of my primary-school, how am I with my companions? A very early memory arises from village school age six: we sat in pairs back to back on the see-saw: I faced the middle: without thinking, I shifted further and further back and pushed the boy sitting behind me and facing outward off the plank, and onto the ground. When he got to his feet, his nose and mouth were bleeding gristle. Maybe my guilty thoughtlessness was planted there, for the image arises of its own accord now: trust the subconscious. On Her akashic scroll, all is recorded, all is synchronistically delivered.

Astronomer with spinning top and cockerel 1988

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Be holy, whole, well, sound. The philosophers’ Stone is the universal medicine.  When Yesod and Tifareth – moon and sun – are One, I am EBN (hebrew for Stone) – child with father/mother.

“Never forget human is a social being, and the highest resonance of this is love. The lilies and roses in the Tarot Magician’s garden are symbols of knowledge and love. The hebrew number 53, EBN, Stone is the same which describes the Sun and the Garden by gematria. The red roses in the Magician’s garden are the completion of the Work of the Sun. Without love there is no fulfillment. 

“Garden, Stone and Sun are the One Thing. The flowers are fed by the chemical elements of decomposed stone, and grow by the power of the sun. When we really know this, we cannot help loving our fellow humans:  this is revolutionary. The highest piece of philosophy in nature is love.  Skill in this comes from long practice.  

We fail more than we succeed, but our small successes and breakthroughs are of homeopathic quantum.

(Adapted from Paul Foster Case)

I found in the Chaldean Oracle some pure alchemy:  “For from the (YOD) Source, naught that’s imperfect spins or wheels …  The soul must have measure, rhythm and perfection, to spin, circulate or throb with this Divine Principle.  The Father/Mother does not sow fear, but pours forth persuasion …   controls from within and not from without;  controls by being, by living within, and not by constraining.“

an early impression of the muscle of heaven with earth 1987

Saturn approaching my natal Cheiron and square to natal ascendent and Saturn this year made me feel confined, anxious and unable to complete my tasks.  Recognising this, relaxes it.  This tension will be shaping my path – between Saturn’s butter-pats – until November.  So go with the flow!

And now go within.  Be within the field.  What is here?

In a field of flowers, the long grass warms my bare feet, encircled with mountains and hills. Over the last twenty-odd years, love shed its turbulence into a deeper strata of acceptance.  Do the beautiful. Go with Grace, one thing at a time. The strata of acceptance under the earth mirrors the ethical aurora borealis of a clear blue sky – Beriah. As above, so below:  be joined!

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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/