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