ἐπιτάφιος

The traps of Eden unreleased
feral fletched a fell game fleest
the heart of man, a tangled beast
aim, dread Huntress
& fetch no priest

charcoal got inside he shoe, Lor bless you honey how de ashes flew.

...I am the red thread
Between Nothingness
And Eternity.
-Sri Chinmoy

Heart burning, still yearning. Walking with a toothache in my heel ...
- Bob Dylan: Ain't Talkin'

not just of earth and skin and bone

"Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."
-C. S. Lewis,1898-1963



“The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power”
-John Ruskin,1819-1900

GonG is one and one is you

Fri 19 Jun - USA, Bethlehem, PA, Zoeliner Arts Centre, Nearfest - STEVE HILLAGE BAND
'THE' US indoor Prog-fest, also with Van der Graaf Generator and PFM. The first Steve Hillage Band gig in the US for 30 years and the first Gong one since 2000 - there will not be any other US dates on this trip.

Sat 20 Jun - USA, Bethlehem, PA, Zoeliner Arts Centre, Nearfest - GONG
So good that it always sells out - may have already done so.
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(680 mi – about 11 hours 25 mins from Bloomington, In.)

NEARfest 2009 Ticket Prices
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3. Zoellner Arts Center Box Office, 420 East Packer Avenue, Bethlehem, PA
http://www.nearfest.com/tickets/generalsales.asp



A primer

The Jewell and the Lotus

"This is the year we have prayed for
This is our moment sublime
All of our lives we have waited for
For this one perfect time

Barbie, Barbie, others I knew
Can't compare for one moment with you
Everyone loves you, and everyone knows
That Barbie, my Barbie, your love will set me free"



Today marks the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Tibet when The People’s Liberation Army of China surrounded Lhasa and trained artillery guns on the palace. It is also the birth of Barbie. The sacrifice of the Tibetan people has resulted in the jewell of the dharma, the wisdom teachings of Liberation, being bourne around the world in their diaspora. Barbie, the tear Chenrezig wept at the fall of freedom in Tibet, has now reached maturity as a dharmapala dakini; Mattell manufactures a Tibetan Barbie, known as Fuxi Girl.


"How troubling when our daughters reach so readily for those eleven inches of molded plastic; the slender body that fits so easily in their still-dimpled hands; the far-from-lifelike doll that survives every kind of fashion torture, burial in sandboxes, drowning in bathtubs, and disastrous haircuts administered in secret with forbidden scissors. How mortifying when, among all the more sensible offerings, all the appropriate and sanctioned playthings, our daughters more or less universally agree: Barbie is good.

It’s in that rub, the eternal struggle of bad versus good, right versus wrong, that I see the hidden dimension of the icon under the bed. It goes beyond the unassailable ideals of gender neutrality and healthy body image. It’s far subtler than choosing sides with demons or innocents. It’s not us versus them; it’s neither black nor white. It’s dharma, the dharma of Barbie, available for as little as $5.99 at the discount superstore."

"I recognize the classic arc of fable in her tale. I see how densely human she is, how eternal and unknowable her mind. I stop trying to make the game be nice, quiet or amiable. I stop steering it by my own notions of fairness or morality. I let it be."

Now, Chenrezig resides in the tear on the cheek of Barbie.
May the wisdom of compassion & harmlessness speak through the unmoving lips of the dakini to all daughters that they, in turn, may teach us lift the misery of men.

"I can hear so much in your sighs
And I can see so much in your eyes
There are words we both could say
But don't talk, put your head on my shoulder
-
Don't talk, put your head on my shoulder
Come close, close your eyes and be still
Don't talk, put your head on my shoulder
Come close, close your eyes and be still"

Caught in the thralls of a gonzo pollen

"In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver."
-Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness 1902

These misfortunes of immortals...
Such as the recent sneezing ragtime serenade & softshoe proposition to reprise Livery Stable Blues with Jazz Crackson's Muletrain Harem Queue; an opportunity as Livestock Biowaste Relocation Engineer available for a limited time only. Mssr. Crackson, showman of the spiffiest magnitude informed me that union scale wage regrettably would not be forthcoming for the position; however, a tip jar was provided. Now, over the years, I've lost my appreciation for the braying of rank burritos; I'm sure its just my ears, some deleterious result of hearing myself whoop it up big time in the long ago & faraway. I declined. But if I'd only seen the SIZE of that tip jar....
Reminds me of the time I worked at a certain used record store: Crossbone's Rusty Needle Exchange & Espresso Bar, and things went afoul with Biff the narcoleptic bootleg peddlar. Crossbone was a craven rook of a man who would think nothing of foreclosing on the mortgage to your soul; "chump change", he'd snort. He subsisted on the dire endorphin of greed and was chained to his harbor of Marlboro lights; he kept for companion a gargoyle which maintained an unhealthy affection for scouring powder. He thought he had her on a tight leash but repeatedly she furrowed in the register to score more ajax, "its a filthy world", she'd growl.
Biff made sporadic appearances with platters of questionable origins that Crossbone made available to the General Public. On occasion Biff good naturedly threw something my way and thus we gradually became acquainted. I made the error though of entrusting a certain treasure, a rare analogue radio recording from the summer solstice '94 of some unknown eerie cosmonauts allegedly called the Octave Doctors into his hands in order to digitize for me; the sole evidence of their actual existence. Biff disappeared after that; some say the Octave Doctors would not allow such documentation revealed, the world wasn't equipped to handle it.
I miss old Crossbone. He was honest as the grave and just as ruthless. Last I heard he was hawking women's croc shoes in the obituaries of Southern Indiana. His laugh was grisly as a death rattle but his decency preceded him by reputation. Here's to Crossbone: slap on some Boz Scaggs & burn one down to the blister.


Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of El Dorado.

But he grew old --
This knight so bold --
And -- o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like El Dorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow --
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be --
This land of El Dorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied --
"If you seek for El Dorado."
-Edgar Allan Poe, 1849

Such tricks hath strong imagination...

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
-William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act v. Sc. 1.


"The Imago Templi can be seen as the meeting-place of the great families of the Abrahamic tradition, of all the "communities of the Book" (Ahl al-Kitab)."
-Henry Corbin: Temple and Contemplation. KPI, 1986

"...features in the Kalachakra teachings... Specifically, the twelve astrological signs of the zodiac were painted around the walls of the main halls of the Buddhist monasteries in Kabul. This motif was found both in Iranian royal palaces and in the Kalachakra mandala, where deities representing the twelve signs surround the palace. "

"...the Kalachakra Tantra embodies a large conglomerate of Western Asian, mostly Iranian (Zoroastrian, Manichean), elements, Hellenistic and local religious features characteristic of Gandhara and Udyana as well as Vedic borrowings (which interestingly had themselves made their way into India via western Central Asia, though in prehistoric times).6
<Das Kalachakra, die letzte Phase des Buddhismus in Indien. In: Saeculum 15,1964. Siegbert Hummel: Frau Welt und der Priesterkoenig Johannes. In: Zeitschrift fuer Missionswissenschaft und Religionwissenschaft 43/2, (M?ster) 1959). Siegbert Hummel: Notes on the Lamaist Apocalypse. In: Tibet Journal XXII/4, 1997 (Orig. in: Archiv Orientalni 26/2, Prag 1958). >>
Besides that, it shows the marks of Buddhism's struggle against the inexorable expansion of Islam in the region, and bears traces of the Jewish and Christian traditions, also probably mediated into the region by the Arabs.7
<<. Helmut Hoffmann: Kalachakra Studies I. Manicheism, Christianity and Islam in the Kalachakra Tantra. In: Central Asiatic Journal XIII, 1969.
Helmut Hoffmann: Kalachakra Studies I. Addenda et Corrigenda. In: Central Asiatic Journal XV, 1971. >>

"How awesome is this place! This is none other than the House of God, and this is the gate of heaven." So Jacob rose early in the morning and he took the stone which he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called the name of that place Bethel {Beith-El}, but the name of the city was Luz at first... The stone representing the Omphalos could take the form of a pillar like the stone of Jacob, and it is quite probable that among the Celtic peoples certain 'menhirs' had the same significance; and the oracles were uttered close by these stones, as at Delphi, which is easily explained by the fact that they were considered to be the dwelling-place of the divinity, the 'House of God' being moreover quite naturally identified with the 'Center of the World'."

Meanings of the Monad Number One
"The point within a circle, the Central Fire Deity. The lingam, an upright pillar, was its Hindu symbol.:"
- W. Wynn Westcott: Numbers: Their Occult Power And Mystic Virtues, 1890

"The Shekhinah is the image (dimyon) manifest in prophetic visions, for she is the likeness of the anthropos (demut 'adam), that is, the image of the masculine aspect of the divine.170 More specifically, it is evident that in the above passage the Shekhinah is portrayed as the phallus of the divine anthropos. This is alluded to in the depiction of the Shekhinah as the seal (hotam) of the image of the man... The imaginal forms that inhere within the feminine Presence ... locus of the images or forms is in Yesod (Foundation)...that corresponds to the phallus of the divine anthropos...."

"...to Yesod belongs the inner world of dreams, daydreams and vivid imagination, and
one of the titles of Yesod is "The Treasure House of Images"."

Concerning the Hieron du Val d’Or:

"The Abbey of Orval's web site says only that mysterious monks from Calabria came there in 1070, although little is known about their identity, and they were welcomed there by Count Arnould de Chiny. These "pioneers" moved out after forty years, i.e. around 1110. The legend of Orval claims that it was named by Mathilda de Tuscany, who after finding a lost ring declared the place "a Valley of Gold" (Val D'Or.) "
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/poseur3.html

Zacharias Werner: Die Söhne des Thals (The Brotherhood of the Valley, 1803-4)

"Werner developed an extraordinary theme, representing a great secret, spiritual power behind the Temple, that of the SONS OF THE VALLEY, a Company of Adept Brethren belonging to a Hidden School of Christ which recalls the Secret Church Mystical in Eckartshausen's CLOUD UPON THE SANCTUARY. The Knights Templar are said to have tampered with a sacred knowledge placed in their hands and they were about to reveal it in the world. The providence of the Sons of the Valley was therefore withdrawn, and they were left to work out their own destiny of destruction at the hands of Pope and King."

"Those who remember a dictum of St Augustine, which I have quoted myself often, namely, that Christianity has been always in the world but has not been known always under that name, may perhaps see that a pregnant intimation is conveyed by Werner when he suggests remotely and in words aloof that the Religion of Osiris became in the course of long ages the religion of Christ. In their all-hidden Sanctuary the SONS OF THE VALLEY seem to have stood apart from the ages and to have watched them passing. He Who was called Christ on the circumference of the Templar circle was still named Horus at the point within the circle."
-Arthur Edward Waite: Secret Tradition in Freemasonry

Ludwig Werner's Sons of the Valley came out of the German Masonic Order of the Strict Observance. Werner was a High-Grade Mason and a member of the STRICT OBSERVANCE, the traditional history of which is elaborated in his remarkable work.
"Werner's Sons of the Valley already mentioned, being the existence from time immemorial
of a Secret Order of Wise Masters in Palestine devoted to the work of initiation for the building of a spiritual city and as such the power behind the Temple, as it was also behind Masonry""
-Arthur Edward Waite: THE TEMPLAR ORDERS IN FREEMASONRY
An Historical Consideration of their Origin and Development
in: The Occult Review", Volume XLV, nos.
1 and 4, January and April, 1927.

"...in Werner's Sons of the Valley already mentioned, being the existence from time immemorial of a Secret Order of Wise Masters in Palestine devoted to the work of initiation for the building of a spiritual city and as such the power behind the Temple, as it was also behind Masonry."
-Arthur Edward Waite: THE TEMPLAR ORDERS IN FREEMASONRY, An Historical Consideration of their Origin and Development" The Occult Review", Volume XLV, nos. 1 and 4, January and April, 1927.

"... the ’eben shetiyah, which, in Jewish tradition, marked the center of the earth, the center of the sanctuary, and was the foundation stone of the ancient temple. "

'Ahad al-arkan'; the provided translation there being: 'pillar of the game'
Arkan being = 'pillar', however according to Wikipedia:
ahad= "only." Islamically, ahad means One Alone, unique, none like God.

"a pillar in the temple of my God" (Rev. 3:12), and to enjoy the immediate vision of the divine
Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, [which is] new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and [I will write upon him] my new name.

"[the imamate] is a spiritual kingship above the visible world that operates incognito, something like the role of the dynasty of the Grail.
The Hidden Imam, like the eternal Parzifal, is a world master in occultation, a Pole, one who upholds the world in his invisibility
"
"The Tzadikim Nistarim or Lamed Vav Tzadikim (often abbreviated to "the Lamed Vav(niks)", the 36) refers to 36 Righteous people, a notion rooted within the more mystical dimensions of Judaism. (In Hebrew gematria, Lamed is the letter representing "thirty", and vav represents "six". Tzadikim is the plural for "righteous")

The Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim are also called the Nistarim ("concealed ones"). In our folk tales, they emerge from their self-imposed concealment and, by the mystic powers, which they possess, they succeed in averting the threatened disasters.
An analogous group of individuals may be discerned within the Islamic tradition of the Kutb and The Abdals.

" It is not surprising that the space inside Titurel's Temple is of a size that makes it the measure of the entire human community... the number seventy-two [the double of Lamed-Vav=36] corresponds to the number of peoples and of human tongues (seventy or seventy-two), as the Ancients traditionally represented them... preeminence is given ...to the relationship of the Temple with the human race."
-Henry Corbin: Temple and Contemplation. KPI, 1986

These men, without suspecting it, are the secret pillars of the universe.

aspectans silvam immensam, et sic forte precatur:
beholding the boundless forest, and thus by chance he prays.
“Si nunc se nobis ille aureus arbore ramus
“If now that golden branch should display itself to us
ostendat nemore in tanto!
from the tree in so great a grove.

"Every 200 years the kutb changes, and there may only be one kutb at a time. Each kutb influences knowledge according to the times and is the pillar of the faith upon earth, the axis of the faith. According to other beliefs, no one knows whether the Kutb are one man, or two men, or four men; they have the supervision of all the saints alive on earth, and are more powerful than kings, though they look like ordinary men. They are often seen yet almost never recognized, and they travel over the earth, mildly reproving the impious and hypocritical." (In fact, Kutb means axis or pole in Arabic, which is similar to the concept of a pillar)."



Q: Master Builder, tell me how you make a temple?
A: Tools and moon stones, you don't really need them, you know...
Q: Master Builder, tell me what the temple's made of?
A: Deep inside you, you can build an invisible temple in your own imagination if you will

Lost Horizon

"You won't find paradise by doubting it exists"- Lord Byron

If our signature calls to us from it's inscription upon the Grail, where then, is the Grail?

Tír na nÓg, Shambala, Avalon, El Dorado, Belovodye

"The center has many names: Mount Meru, Shambhala, Olympus, Asgard. This seat is often placed in a polar region, as in the Greek legend of Hyperborea."

(Tibetan: sbas yul)
"There is a tradition in Tibetan folklore of beyul -- secret or hidden lands, usually described as valleys. The tradition of the Himalayan Buddhist Elders -- the Nyingmapa -- says that Guru Rinpoche empowered 108 of these havens, places where there was peace and prosperity, and spiritual progress was facilitated."

"LJ Ringbom, in his comprehensive Graltempel und Paradies has tried to take up LE Iselin's (Iselin, L. E. Der morgenslandische Ursprung der Grallegende. Halle, 1909)
old hypothesis to show that the idea of the Grail Castle (especially as it is described in the Jungere Titurel came to Europe from Persia, and that this castle or temple — a mandala-shaped structure — represents Paradise, or a spiritual Beyond
whose prototype he sees in the Parsee sanctuary of the holy fire at Siz (Gazak)."
-Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz: The Grail Legend

"In the Titurel, the legend of the Grail reached its final and splendid transfiguration under the influence of ideas that Wolfram appears to have taken from France, and particularly from the Templars in the south of France. It was no longer in the British Isles but in Gaul on the border of Spain, that the Grail was kept. A hero named Titurel founded a temple in order to deposit the holy Vessel there, and it was the prophet Merlin, initiated by Joseph of Arimathea in person to the plan of the Temple par excellence, the Temple of Solomon, who directed this mysterious construction."
- Henri Martin: Histoire de France, V. III, pp. 398-399

"...at the end of Albrecht von Scharfenberg's great epic, "the New Titurel"... there is an episode which has all the impact of a parable of the Imago Templi. When Titurel and Parsifal take the Holy Grail back to the East, they pass through a certain city. Parsifal leaves the inhabitants of this city with an image of the castle-temple of the Grail at Montsalvat. And with the aid of the single image the inhabitants set about building their own Temple of the Grail...this Image is imperishable, to the extent that we see it rise triumphant in the "waste land", from an earth that is spiritually more devastated than the domain of the Grail ever was before the coming of Parsifal..."

"...the Imago Templi, the image of the castle-temple left to mankind by Parsifal, will never be lost. It is in some sense the response to the geste of Parsifal, and both together are the response to the desperate cry of the Templar knights... Together they reply: No! the temple is not destroyed forever. This was known to Suhravardi also [who]... composed an entire "Book of hours" in honour of the "guardians of the Temple", who are unknown to the majority of men. They guard a secret Temple, and those who find their way to it can join in the invocation which returns, like a refrain, in one of the most beautiful psalms composed by Suhravardi: "O God of every God! Make the litany of the Light arise. Make the people of Light triumphant. Guide the Light towards the Light. Amen."
- Henry Corbin: "The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms," in: Temple and Contemplation, London: KPI, 1986, pp. 389-90.

"Moreover, it is this exalted science of alchemy that Zacharias Werner sees as the secret of the "Valley", the secret which transformed the martyrdom of Jacques de Molay into an ecstatic apotheosis. The Order had but a single aim: the regeneration, the new birth, brought about by the re-establishment of the identity between macrocosm and microcosm. The all-powerfulness of the active Imagination (quite different, as Paracelsus says, from the "fantasy") puts into operation an alchemy which comprises simultaneously a conception of the world, an ethic and eschatology. And this is so whether it is a case of practical alchemy or speculative alchemy: the notion of mediating and mediation is the very foundation of the Ars magna. The philosopher's stone is to be found only through the coincidentia oppositorum, and this coincidentia can occur only through a mediatory term and on a mediating level (the level, as the Islamic theosophers say, "where bodies are spiritualized and where spirits take on body"). Mercury both engenders and reabsorbs contraries, and it is also one of the names for the Stone of the Sages. This stone has the power to destroy gross matter and to convert the body of man into a subtle body of luminous essence, like the bodies of the Righteous in Paradise, or the body of the androgynous Adam before his Fall. The active Imagination is the organ of meditation that assimilates the Opus alchemicum, by which base metal is refined. In virtue of this assimilation, the Imagination is the mediator which brings about the refinement of whoever "spiritualizes himself until he reaches the final stage of mystical union."
- ibid

"...the rotunda of the Temple of the Grail at Mount Salvat, in the New Titurel contains 72 chapels all around the centre - the sanctuary of the Grail)"

"Mundus Imaginalis... Like the domain of the Grail, it is an interworld that is self-sufficient."
-Henri Corbin: Imaginal Worlds and Utopia

"The following passages from Proclus' Theology of Plato, however, will throw further light on this interesting subject. Thus the Demiurgus is said to 'constitute the psychical essences in conjunction with the Crater' (V.xxxi)--this in the Sensible World. Again, 'the Crater is the peculiar cause of souls, and is co-arranged with the Demiurgus and filled from him, but fills souls'. Thus the Crater is called the 'fountain of souls', the 'cause of souls' "
-G. R. S. Mead: The Orphic Pantheon

"P. Wapnewski, Wolfram's Parzival,... points out similarities between the ideas advanced in the Grail poems and those of the Fedeli d'Amore and Hermetic tradition."
-Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz: The Grail Legend, 1970

""Why then, my father, did God not distribute Mind to all?
He willed, my son, to set it before souls as a prize that they might win.
And where did he set it? He filled a great bowl with it and set it down.
He provided a herald and ordered him to proclaim to the hearts of men
the following message. Dip yourself, you who can, into this bowl,
you who believe that you will ascend to him who sent the bowl down,
you who know for what purpose you have come into being.
Those therefore who have understood the proclamation and dipped
themselves in Mind partook of gnosis and became perfect men, since they
received Mind. But those who ignored the proclamation, these are the
logikoi, who have not received Mind in addition (to Reason) and do not know
for what purpose they have come into being, or from what source.""
-----------

3. Reason (Logos) indeed, O Tat, among all men hath He distributed,
but Mind not yet; not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not
from Him, but hath its place below, within the souls of men who
have no Mind.

Tat: Why then did God, O father, not on all bestow a share of Mind?

H: He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls,
just as it were a prize.

4. T: And where hath He set it up?

H: He filled a mighty Cup with it, and sent it down, joining a Herald [to it],
to whom He gave command to make this proclamation to the hearts of men:

Baptize thyself with this Cup's baptism, what heart can do so, thou that hast
faith thou canst ascend to him that hath sent down the Cup, thou that dost know
for what thoudidst come into being!

As many then as understood the Herald's tidings and doused themselves in Mind,
became partakers in the Gnosis; and when they had "received the Mind"
they were made "perfect men".

But they who do not understand the tidings, these, since they possess
the aid of Reason [only] and not Mind, are ignorant wherefor they have
come into being and whereby.

5. The senses of such men are like irrational creatures'; and as their
[whole] make-up is in their feelings and their impulses, they fail in all
appreciation of those things which really are worth contemplation.
These center all their thought upon the pleasures of the body and its appetites,
in the belief that for its sake man hath come into being.

But they who have received some portion of God's gift, these,
Tat, if we judge by their deeds, have from Death's bonds won their release;
for they embrace in their own Mind all things, things on the earth,
things in the heaven, and things above the heaven - if there be aught.
And having raised themselves so far they sight the Good; and having sighted it,
they look upon their sojourn here as a mischance; and in disdain of all,
both things in body and the bodiless, they speed their way unto that
One and Only One.

6. This is, O Tat, the Gnosis of the Mind, Vision of things Divine; God-knowledge is it,
for the Cup is God's.

T: Father, I, too, would be baptized.
- Corpus Hermeticum, IV. The Cup or Monad, 1906 translated by G.R.S. Mead


From the cradle to the grave
There are roads for us all
that we'll find, and follow to the end
Leading upwards to a place in the stars,
ten million miles away...
There's a path called Tenemos Roads
Everything happening there is history,
records of ages before we were born.
But the sound of men in battle makes me cry
out in my dreams. ..

I will build a home on Tenemos Roads
I will build a home on Tenemos Roads
-Dave Stewart: TENEMOS ROADS

Radio Genome

"But I wish here only to give indications and directions of approach to that Divine Mind whose signature is upon us in everything, and whose whole majesty is present in the least thing in nature."
- A. E.: Candle of Vision (George William Russell, 1918)

Performing my filial characterization of Pasta Dharmajohn, priest of the Oblique Faith;
I was elaborating for my patient brother Tom the other evening upon my conceit that humankind is a species which divines significance. In this respect, an artifact of ours is the Doctrine of Signatures.

"In a text that can stand as the foundation for such a doctrine of signatures, Paracelsus declared that: The ars signata teaches the way in which the true and genuine names must be assigned to all things, the same names that Adam, the Protoplastus, knew in the complete and perfect way which show, at the same time, the virtue, the power, and the property of this or that thing. [. . .] This is the signator who signs the horns of the stag with branches so that his age may be known: the stag having as many years as his horns have branches. "

"God had educated Adam by breathing into him the capacity to call things by their appropriate names (Guillaume Postel: De originibus, seu, de varia et potissimum orbi Latino ad banc diem incognita aut inconsyderata historia, 1553).

"....Although the Paracelsian essences are hidden, they shine forth through the signatures, like a metaphorical light. This may have inspired the Paracelsian image of the "light of nature" (Pagel, 1982, 55), one of the most elegant concepts of natural magic. The English alchemist Thomas Vaughan describes it:

The Light of Nature. . . is the Secret Candle of God, which He hath tinned in the elements: it burns and is not seen, for it shines in a dark place. Every natural body is a kind of black lantern; it carries this Candle within it, but the light appears not: it is eclipsed with the grossness of the matter (Vaughan, 1968, 266). "

“Seeking for truth”, I considered within myself that if there were no teachers of medicine in this world, how would I set to learn the art? Not otherwise than in the great book of nature, written with the finger of God…. The light of nature, and no apothecary’s lamp directed me on my way”.
-Paracelsus

According to legend, the Grail assigns its own guardians — their names magically appearing inscribed thereupon; testament to its enduring transfigural power.

Helinandus was a Flemish troubadour who became a noted scholar and the Cistercian abbot of Froidmont whose:
"... Chronicle was concluded in 1204 and written therefore during the golden age of the Grail poems.60 In it we read :
At this time (717-719) a hermit in Britain was shown a wonderful vision by an angel, a vision of Joseph, the noble decurion who took the body of Christ down from the cross, and of that bowl which the Lord had used at the Last Supper with his disciples. The hermit himself wrote a description of these visions, which account was called after the gradale."



"Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of the earth. We learn to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that is to feel beauty."
--Chief Luther Standing Bear , 1868-1939

Rum, trinkets & a grave

"Throwing large amounts of money into Palestinian reconstruction while reinforcing a political context that only perpetuates Israel's regular destruction of Palestinian institutions is wasteful folly at best, and complicity in criminality at worst."

"In 1544, in De orbis terrae concordia, Concerning the Harmony of the Earth, (Guillaume) Postel advocated a universalist world religion. The thesis of the book was that all Jews, Muslims and heathens could be converted to the Christian religion once all of the religions of the world were shown to have common foundations and that Christianity best represented these foundations. He believed these foundations to be the love of God, the praising of God, the love of Mankind, and the helping of Mankind."

"...Guillaume Postel attempted an objective portrayal of Islam in his République des Turcs, first published at Poitiers in 1560. Postel tried to show that Protestants, Jews, and Moslems held many beliefs in common, for which (among other reasons) he earned the almost universal reprobation of his contemporaries."

"The only real connoisseur of the customs of the Muslims , and the first true protagonist of the study of Arabic and other oriental languages was Guillaume Postel, professor of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic in the Collège de France, established in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Postel travelled in Muslim countries several times, and had a first-hand knowledge of people's way of life there. He insisted on the necessity to reach out to the sources of the Islamic doctrine and Muslim worldview, in order to obtain authentic and objective knowledge about them — hence the need to start with philological and linguistic studies. Like Nicholas of Cusa, Postel also believed that Islam contains many elements of the Christian doctrine, and he praised the Muslims' charity towards the poor and their non-discrimination among those who received the alms."

"No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers.... Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?

The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was first, and should be now, for it was never divided."

We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game, and in return what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum, trinkets, and a grave."
-Chief Tecumseh, 1768 – 1813

War for the Grail

Across the Wasteland the Grail bears the way.

=============================

"Rant" by Diane DiPrima

You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes

there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not "make" it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create

every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky

w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire

history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
"find out for yourself"
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum

of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world

yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.

the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination

it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else's world

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT

There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

A woman's life / a man's life is an allegory

Dig it

There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can't sign up as a conscientious objector

the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making

the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death

bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself

the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant

intellectus means "light of the mind"
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun

the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central

==========================================

"There is a road in the hearts of all of us, hidden and seldom traveled, which leads to an unknown, secret place...."
---Chief Luther Standing Bear , 1868-1939

Lapsit Exillis: The Creative Imagination

"Imaginatio est Astrum in homine, coeleste sive supracoeleste corpus"
("Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.")
-Martin Ruland: Lexicon Alchemiae, 1612

Tossing, turning, sinking/surfacing in pseudo-sleep the other night, I latched onto the passing realization that the Holy Grail symbolizes the Creative Imagination. In this restless slumber, images drift by of an emerald altar stone fallen from the brow of a seraphim ,
Coleridge clutching after, empty handed; & Hermes, solemn as a pillar holding the smaragdine table entoning its inscriptions to Ludovico Lazzarelli, who transcribes implications into the Crater Hermetis.

".... Lodovico Lazzarelli's Crater Hermetis is about a process of mystical rebirth and "regeneration" rather than about magic."

And when I finally crawled ashore, coffee'd and trawling internet discover that for Richard Barber, in The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, “it is, in all its forms, a construct of the creative imagination”.

"The first person to write on the Grail was Chrétien de Troyes, in le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail), between 1180 and 1191. Interestingly, Chrétien refers to his object not as “the Grail”, but as “un graal”, “a grail”, suggesting the word was used, in its earliest literary context, as a common noun – and that there were indeed more than one."

"For William Blake, the imagination is much more than a mental faculty. It is, he claimed, ‘the Human Existence Itself’, and ‘the Eternal Body of Man’. He was inspired by the idea of the seventeenth century German mystic, Jacob Boehme, that the imagination is divinely implanted, “the Son” being “the substantiality of the Father’s imagination”. In his own idiosyncratic version of Christianity, he came to identify the figure of Jesus with the imagination. In Blake we see the perfect integration of a highly developed creative imagination with spiritual vision. His poetic utterances are the expressions of that vision, and flow without stint or hindrance. He was able to speak, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the language of the whole man”."

"...Dakinis and other Tantric deities, appear in what is known in Buddhist cosmology, as the ‘rupaloka’, literally the world of Form, a world which is intermediary between the mundane world and the Transcendental. This realm has parallels with the intermediate realm in Persian sacred texts, which Henri Corbin calls the ‘Mundus Imaginalis’. Sangharakshita’s preferred translation of ‘rupaloka’ is ‘the world of archetypal form’.

The Muse figures that play a leading role in Coleridge’s visionary poems, like the Dakinis, do not come from the world of ordinary sense perception (though they may well be transformations of sensuous impressions). They come from, or appear in, the world of Archetypal form, which is just as real, and therefore just as important, from a Buddhist point of view, as the world of the waking senses. While they may not be Dakinis in the specifically Tantric sense of being agents of the utterly unconditioned freedom of the Mind of enlightenment, they are certainly reminiscent of the wrathful female figures that appear in a typical Tantric ritual drama. They are embodiments of psychic forces that have an urgent message for the visionary, in this case the poet. "
http://www.urthona.com/abhaya-coleridge.html

"Like the domain of the Grail, it is an interworld that is self-sufficient. (5) It is protected against and immune to any attempt from outside. (6) only one who is summoned there can find the way. (7) A mountain rises in the center; we have noted the symbols that it conceals. (8) Like Mont-Salvat, the inviolable Green Island is the place where his followers approach the mystical pole of the world, the Hidden Imam, reigning invisibly over this age- the jewel of the Shi'ite faith."

"As (Henry) Corbin summed up the matter, the "Creative Imagination is a theophanic imagination, and the Creator is one with the imagining Creature because each Creative Imagination is a theophany, a recurrence of the Creation."

"The mythic import of kabbalistic symbolism secures the representation of the nonrepresentable by creating an imaginal body,346 a body whose ontic status is that of a "real" if not "actual" entity."347

“Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts,” he writes, “because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels and the imagination leads us astray from both. Even when the heart is allowed its reasons, they are those of faith or of feeling, for we have forgotten that philosophy itself -- the most complex and profound demonstration of thought -- is not ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ in any abstract sense of ‘sophic.’ Rather, philosophy begins in a “philos” arising in the heart of our blood, together with the lion, the wound, and the rose. If we would recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.”
-James Hillman: “The Thought of the Heart.”


He who is born in imagination discovers the latent forces of Nature. . . . Besides the stars that are established, there is yet another -- Imagination -- that begets a new star and a new heaven.
-Paracelsus