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Sacred India Tarot - Seven of Staves/Wands - Sita through the fire

Sacred India Tarot eight of wands, Vimaha flight

Continuing this series on the Sacred India Tarot published by Yogi Impressions in November 2011.

The suit of Wands or Staves contain the soul of Agni, the sacred fire – where more so than in these two cards of destiny?

Their story is: in the Seven of Staves, Sita the distrusted bride immerses herself in the flame which is purity itself; in the Eight, she is liberated with her beloved as the Karmic bonds are released. Who among us has not felt scorched with self doubt and then seen the skies open as life becomes simple again?

As Rohit has pointed out, the eight of each suit is an ‘end of Karma card’. Then the seven of each suit portrays a matter of doubt: a threshold through which the Dharma moves. If I look through the four suits, each “seven” portrays an inward gesture or vulnerability to purify, and each ‘eight’ clears the slate. I was not aware of this when I painted them. It was Rohit’s work to perceive the archetypes and their speech, and to email to me, brief suggestions or pointers. When I received these, the primary images took over and flowed, surprising both of us many a time. The deck has an elder Vedic soul. It is contacted and released through creative concentration. Thus the deck provides us with an astute psychological mirror.

Sequentially in the story, Sita tested herself through the flame after her safe return with Rama to India – but in the Mahabharatha as in other great epics, time is not linear but visionary. Hearing bad council, Rama would suspect her of enforced infidelity with Ravana the King of Asuras he had rescued her from, and they suffered a second isolation from each other while this was sorted out. Psychologically a man’s union with his inner beloved can be as fickle as the sea – especially when he believes he should stand alone. In the female psyche, this is mirrored. In all of us the male and female interact – animus and anima – and set up mutual obstacles.

The suit of Wands/Staves denotes the play of sacred weapons; the higher transformation of war games into the martial arts.

The tragedy implicit in the Seventh card, is the old, old story: the woman is targeted. Many of us bear this redemptive burden down the centuries. Is it any wonder when we feel inexplicably tired?

Rohit’s Notes to Jane, 2003
“Card Seven is Sita Agni Parikasha – courage – she asks for it.

“It should be easy enough to show the fire ordeal she goes through to prove her innocence as seven logs of burning wood from which she emerges, held up by Agni lord of fire. The 3 illustrations given should be of some help. This is a dynamic and dramatic card, as everyone except Rama was appalled at what was happening.”

Visual reference for Seven of Wands/Staves

From Rohit’s Book with the Deck
“Sita’s Trial by Fire. Sita has been rescued. In the ensuing celebrations over this fact, as well as Ravana’s death, one awful unspoken question hovers raptor-like over the minds of all. Did Ravana forcibly molest her or did he not? … Rama knows there will never be any end to insinuation, slander and malice if this is not tackled expeditiously. So he harrows Sita by giving voice to the collective suspicion – ‘Ravana could never have been so self-controlled.’

“Sita is outraged and furious. In popular Indian imagination, Sita is all that is meek, timid and subservient to a husband. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Sita of Valmiki’s Ramayana is a fire-brand intellectual, outspoken and fearless, and she is not going to tolerate sniggering speculation about her virtue. She upbraids Rama for daring to speak so – the fault if any is in the abductor, not the woman.

Visual reference – Ravana king of Asuras abducts Sita

“Provoked beyond endurance, Sita orders Laxmana to arrange a funeral pyre for her, as a life without dignity is worthless. As the appalled audience watches this awe inspiring act of courage – a living Sita seated amidst flames – the gods intervene. Agni god of fire rises from the flames with an unscathed Sita, and remonstrates with Rama for his conduct. Rama wryly admits he manipulated matters thus, so that a public and miraculous vindication of Sita would silence all loose talk forever. The issue is resolved – for now.

“Interpretation of the card: Courage, decisive battle, defiance and reliance on the self. Inner resources and resilience. Do not back away. Inner battles especially over ethical issues and temptation – perseverance through adversity: taking responsibility. Refusal to be intimidated or manipulated into restrictive roles. Able to say ‘No’ without guilt.

“Shadow – this can also be the card of the excuse maker – fatigue and fear of loss – giving in to others’ wishes – neglected talent. Fear of failure or of being thought incompetent. What do you really need to take a stand about, or what are you shirking from? Are your values important, or ‘being liked’? Clean up any clutter at home.”

Sacred India Tarot – Seven of Staves/Wands – Sita through the fire

Jane’s Notes:

Behind Sita, Agni the deity of the sacred fire seems to breathe on her gently like a bellows – to raise the power of the pure and liberating flame within her: to open her wings of prana in the chrysalis. In the next card she is the Shakti: she flies.

In alchemical traditions, the transformative agent is the secret fire with the breath: the cooking: the warmth of the hen’s breast to hatch the egg.

I feel this suit thematically signifies woman’s truth and male doubt when he does not listen. We are both masculine and feminine. The creative combat of intuitive wisdom and the rational mind is played out daily within our psyche.

Rohit’s Feedback – “The Seven – Sita in the flames with Agni – This is a superb card, mystical and melancholic, and the Agni is a very unusual interpretation of the god of fire. Perhaps the outlines of the seven wands need to be slightly stronger but in all other aspects it is beautiful. Most seven of wands are all about a huffing and puffing macho sort of courage, but this is courage with dignity and grace. Sita is absolutely wonderful.”

Rohit did not send me a visual reference for the Pushpaka-Vimana, though he mentioned a ‘sculptural panel’, and that it is a conscious vehicle. Here is a link to an article about the vimanas or devic chariots that cut through time and space.

The above article on https://ancientaliens.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/vimanas is fascinating, reminding me of dreams I had in which I built a flying machine whose “engine” was fuelled by balance and intention. The archetype is deep within us, and in “His Dark Materials” Philip Pullman describes an Intention Craft which rises vertically, descends, hovers and travels laterally as thought – a remarkable depiction of the body of light in the western occult tradition.

Correspondence 2003 – Jane to Gautam (publisher) and Rohit (author)
(for Card 9 and the court cards, see next SITA posts)
“Dear Gautam – I do not understand your picture references for Cards 8 and 9. 8 should be the Vimana flight home to Ayodhya, and 9 should be Rama’s agony at banishing Sita; but the pictures you gave are of Sita being abducted and Jatayu fighting Rama, both marked 8. Please clarify.

“For the court cards, which documents are the photos of yourself and Rohit attached to? I do not have the Skanda document you refer to, or the photos! Regards, Jane.”

“Dear Jane, please find below, comments of Rohit: ‘We do not have the exact visual reference for either of these cards, as neither in painting nor sculpture have the two incidents been clearly depicted. The two pictures marked 8 have been provided to convey the impression of flight. They are just triggers for the events to be depicted in card 8, they do not illustrate.

‘For card number 9, there is no reference as such, as the event is both touchy and controversial in India and avoided by artists. Please tell Jane she has free rein to depict it in any manner she chooses.’

“I will send our pictures via email. Warm regards, Gautam.”

Rohit’s Notes 22 September 2003 – Eight of Wands/Staves
“The Pushpaka-Vimana flight back home to Ayodhya (representing swiftness) – The Pushpaka Vimana was supposed to be composed of flowers or flower-bedecked, in blooms that would never fade. It was an airplane of sorts, and there is a bewildering paragraph in the Valmiki Ramayana where Sita asks Rama why the stars are visible from the vimama, even though it is day.

“The answer given is that at such elevation the light of the sun fails, and we see the stars which are always present in the sky! What we perhaps need is a feeling of flying over the ocean, or alternatively we could show the vimana flying over Ayohdhya which too is a spectacular city. I like the touch in the sculptural panel of showing the vimana as an embodied form; according to the texts, the vimana had consciousness and was a genuine personality in its own right. The eight wands could perhaps be poles on the vimana like some sort of flying pavilion?

Sacred India Tarot eight of Wands – Vimana flight, Rama and Sita

This image also depicts the power of the Mantric vehicle: the way sound travels through all dimensions. See my earlier posts on Ganapati Muni’s Guru Mantra Bhashya – “Om Vacadhbuve Namaha“.

This link (below) is not strictly speaking related to the content of this post; it arises intuitively because I began this week to learn the Gayatri and other mantras and to chant them at odd times during the day – in the street, on the bus, or wherever. Wonderfully, they clear the weather! The science of mantra fascinates me, and so does the warm and ancient Vedic vibration. My Indian roots are deep.

All powers seek the one who does not slip out from the state of wisdom. They come naturally for the Jnani is omnipotent , whether he shows the powers openly, impelled by momentum of karma, or imperceptibly but surely by his very presence.

Source: Sri Ramana Gita by Ganapati Muni

Om Vacadbhuve Namah
Om Namo Bhagavate Sri Ramanaya’

With the energy in this Karma-clearing card, 8 of Staves, I see the principle not only in mantra and sound and healing, but in the quality of relationships and what we try to communicate to one another.

From Journal, September 2003 – “I began Eight of Wands yesterday. I have not drawn an oriental vehicle, but a living Being, an outlined gandharva or angel, in whose lap Sita and Rama are transported across the sea to their home. I realised while on this, that what is happening in the world today, is the same as in the Ramayana or the Bhagavad Gita. A vast mythological archetype is in action, destroying the father of lies again. Be gold, go bold, and seize and receive this actual perception. It trembles truth.”

Rohit’s Feedback 10 December 2003 – “The Eight is the most original interpretation of the pushpaka I have yet seen. It conveys that Hanuman carrying Rama subtext as well as showing the swift flight back home.”

sun yantra

From Rohit’s Book with the Deck:

“… The trip from Lanka in the time left, is feasible only by Pushpak Vimara, a flying craft seized by Rama from Kubera, god of wealth. This machine was a curious mixture of science and magic, having human form as well as being a wood and metal craft capable of expanding infinitely, with aisles and window seats! Its fuel was kept in vats on flight, and was an amalgam of wine, honey, mercury and herbal concoctions – a veritable environmentalist’s dream!

“The aerial route described in the Ramayana is similar to the now defunct Colombo to Allahabad air service. It took nine hours to make the trip to Ayodhya, so the speed was quite good if not spectacular … Ancient Indians were fabulous astronomers, and there is nothing peculiar in Rama’s knowledge when he answers Sita that at such heights the rays of the sun do not penetrate and veil the stars, therefore they are visible in the daylight – but the sheer incongruity of such a perspective in the midst of Wordsworthian lyricism is striking. The swift, even giddy atmosphere such a flight would generate, was what the poet captured.

“In a reading – … Things happen sooner than planned for or anticipated, but that is for the best … ideas and work tumble out – increase in vital forces – spiritual breakthroughs and out of body experiences; transcendence of limitations. All Eights are end-of-karma cards, so it also means giving up unproductive and unprofitable activities.

“Or: (shadow) act in haste and repent at leisure, especially when it comes to marriage. Future shock and disproportionate reaction to events – a station wagon trying to be a Ferrari. Pay careful attention to all documents, agreements etc, as the hasty nature of the energy may cause serious blunders or omissions.

“The insight of the card: You have abundant energy. Now set some clear goals and focus this drive to achieving them, before it fritters away in interesting distractions.

photo by giorgos tsamakdas

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 2012-2014. 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://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Glancing through this series, I am reminded how the suit of Staves or Wands develops the astral weaponry of the suit of Swords/Arrows into a martial art, or dance form. This seemed fairly straightforward in the early cards of this suit, but by the time I reach Nine and Ten, it feels like too much is manifesting all at once on the earthly plane; a bundle of imagined responsibility, almost a shut-down.
Never have I felt less creative.

Let the bundle go and lighten up! Rohit’s interpretative notes suggest this also, as do the original Rider-Waite illustrations I worked from.

The wands are miniature trees. Take just one, and look up it; dance with it …

NINE OF STAVES – from Rohit’s Notes, 2003

“Suspicion about Sita in Ayodhya ensures her banishment; One of the meanings of this card is Authority and the burdens thereof. Rama had assumed Kingship and did such a great job that it is still regarded as India’s golden age. However, his sense of responsibility to public opinion caused him to banish Sita when slander had reached impossible levels. The king’s wife, like Caesar’s, had to be above suspicion. What ought to be shown is Rama in all the splendour of his kingship having to take a decision to banish his wife, and never spending a happy moment since. Sita need not even be present in the card; this is Rama’s agony.”

From Rohit Arya’s Book with the Deck

“Rama ruled over Ayodhya in a manner which has become synonymous in India with the Perfect Age; the rule of Rama is still invoked as an ideal to aspire towards. Poverty was non-existent, and the people so content that Rama would wait every day at court for a person seeking justice! In Rama the ancient dream – if a perfect king was found, the society would mirror his stature – found fulfilment.

“Yet there was one unhappy soul in this sea of contentment, and that was Rama. For the old rumours about Sita and her virtue had begun again … A perturbed Rama, for whom family reputation and the respect kings gained by example was paramount, gave in to public opinion. He told Laxmana to abandon Sita in the forest near the ashram of Valmiki, so that she would be taken care of. She was pregnant at the time, so Rama has been denounced ever since for being heartless.

Rider Waite 9 of Wands

“This tale is part of the Uttara Kanda of the Valmiki Ramayana, a segment long held by scholars to be spurious. Nevertheless, the banishment of Sita has captured the imagination, and while it may not be true it is a (psychological) reality. I also wanted one card to reflect the now traditional Rider-Waite imagery in Tarot, and when I read this sentence I could not resist it: ‘Rama picked up a staff used during the yagna and, while leaning upon it, gave vent to his grief.’

“Interpretating the card: Caution owing to vulnerability – face unjust criticism boldly. Period of developing self awareness. The card of unsought and unwanted promotions and responsibilites; wisdom and strength gained at great cost – inner resoluteness increases. Controlling oneself from misuse of power- realisation that one’s path is always going to be lonely. Vigilant and alert attitude required.

“Shadow: remembering past slights and fearing the future and that this new responsibility will turn out badly. Being kicked upstairs. Putting others first to the point of exhaustion. Feeling of, but not actual stagnation. Tendency to retreat within, self absorbed, loner. Old habits die hard. Deferring to society’s norms.

“Are you fed up or exhausted with the current situation? Why?
What can you do about it?”

Sacred India Tarot, 9 of Staves – Rama’s agony and suspicion of Sita

Jane’s Notes – 2015

In the Rider Waite deck, the Wands sprout small green shoots. I could have included these in the above painting, but for some reason I left them bare. Implicit in the rod or wand is its fertile potential. Discover an undistracted sphere of authority or focus – then act on it.

roob alchemy saturn illustration - Version 2

Gaia covers aphrodite with earth and flowers_0003

Lord Siva on his Tao

Why is Sita’s banishment as Rohit says above, a “psychological reality”?

Perhaps one meaning is when our thoughts and grand ideas about things become brittle. When we trust, we walk on the water of life. But when we think or listen to what ‘others’ say, we get heavy and sink.

TEN OF STAVES – Rohit’s Notes, 2003

“Sita returns to earth’s womb, Rama is left alone. The ten of wands has always a sense of oppression associated with it. The card is liable to be complex as the brooding isolation that Rama feels is intensified here. The earth has opened up to recover Sita, as she was unable to bear yet another demand for proof of innocence. Rama has one more trauma to bear; previously his wife was banished but alive in the forest, now he did not even have that straw to cling to.

“This event occurs at a great fire sacrifice, a Yagnya, so the positioning of the wands should not be too problematic.”

From Rohit’s book with the Deck, 2011

“The Earth receives Sita – Now Rama and his judgemental subjects are in trouble. The king has to perform yagnas – Vedic fire sacrifices – as a vital part of his intermediary between the gods and humans. By law, a ruler could not officiate at yagnas without his wife being present; it rendered the whole ritual futile. Rama however, had famously sworn to have only one wife. In a polygamous society, this was breathtaking and a new paradigm of ethical behaviour, rapidly emulated by an impressed world.

“The fidelity that saw the citizens bask in the supremacy of their king, has now become a problem for the maintenance of the social fabric. The very foundation of ritha – cosmic harmony – rests upon the kings of the earth performing yagnas. Here is Rama, supreme amongst men, unable to hold yagnas. Sita is still alive, and Rama will never have any other spouse. She is also still banished. It is an intolerable impasse. The self satisfied littleness of mind in Ayodhya has made them the laughing stock of the world – a society with no yagnas!

http://www.templepurohit.com/yajna-or-yagna-sacred-fire-sacrificial-rituals-in-hinduism/

“A desperate compromise is sought. If Sita would agree to just one more ordeal by fire to prove her chastity … A distraught Sita, never doubting Rama’s unswerving love, nevertheless has had enough. She calls upon Bhumidevi Gaia – the Earth Goddess who is her mother – to rescue her from this unceasing torment. The earth swallows her while the very gods are appalled, witness to Rama’s utter desolation.

“In a reading: Overwhelmed – too much of everything; superabundance of talents, which have become burdensome. Next set of challenges after success. Drop some things, lighten the load … Period of intense concentration and focus cannot be maintained for long. Loneliness at the top, but it is the top.

“Shadow: Oppression and taking on too much – terrible deadline pressures, and too eager to please. Misuse of power, making unreasonable demands. You cannot do so much. Accept it. Let go of some things, delegate others, and forget the impossible and implausible.”

Sacred India Tarot Ten of Staves – The earth receives Sita

Jane’s Notes – 22 October 2003

Finished the Rama picture. It is not being done according to the “maestro tempo”, but to the whim of my personal unfolding. Each month or so, the India Tarot moves forward a jot or jolt, and from time to time produces a picture which is about my own discoveries.

In this one, Rama’s grief has sunk underworld with the fay and loyal Sita whom he unjustly suspected. She arises through his bones, watery, into the Fire of the Yagna Sacrifice – and from that same fire is sprouted the man in an orange sky of flame upon a violet crystal landscape. She ascends through the sacrifice, and he grieves, he feels. The bundle of ten red Wands crosses behind his upper spine and weighs upon his heart; this is humanity having to learn by experience. It is also the irrepressible arising of the dew, the spring waters, as the heart connection transfigures – the white around Rama and on the Wands. The membrane between Rama and Sita is a turgid dark green, signifying impurities and jealousy in the desire nature. But you can see that the pure waters are impacting up his lower spine by osmosis.

The earth in fact has opened like a lake, and She – like the lady of Shalott – rests within it. The man looks elsewhere, he is speared and crossed through with his individuation, but has not yet glimpsed beyond his own container.

In the previous card, the Nine of Wands, he stands on guard with self righteous dignity, wearing a purple mantle; this violet colour is now the rocky landscape in which he sits semi-naked.

For the Sacred India Tarot, their interpretation of the Wands is the Intellect. In the Nine – I am now following the classic Rider-Waite designs – he grasps one of the Wands of a fence, to use it as a spear. In the Ten, this one becomes the burden of the entire Ten which he believes he carries.

Tree of Life with three Gunas, showing vedanta and western traditions

Kabbalistically, Ten of Wands is Malkuth of the suit – the nitty gritty reality – just as Nine of Wands is Yesod, the self image or cloak. In fact, with the possible exception of Three of Wands (Ravanna rejecting wise counsel) for Binah/Understanding, all the Wands I have drawn work well in the ten Sefiroth of the Tree – about which I thought not at all, in the doing. So ten are done – a whole Tree. The Court cards are the four worlds, and will begin with the Page of Wands as the Ashwin solar twins – the divine healers.

On the other hand there are multiple levels to see in this Ten of Wands painting, for turning to “Stage 12 in Alchemy, Multiplication” I see that the upright and stationary wands in the Nine all have this transformative and incendiary potential into the orange sky light of the Ten. So the Ten contains a great release potential.

Correspondence/Feedback; Rohit, December 2003

“The Nine of wands is remarkable, we have broken out of the cliche of Rama always with a bow. This is what he must have really looked like, the power and authority he radiates is terrific.

“The Ten is also unusual and creative in conveying so many layers of story at one time. There is Rama in the kingly posture that conveys his burden of kingship and responsibilities, the arrows that mark his nature and form rays around him in his role as a solar deity; there is the lost Sita, sinking into the ground beneath him – that action cost him his moral footing though ethically it was an impeccable decision. It is one of the most psychologically complex and layered cards Jane has done.”

Sagittarian inscape

For other Sacred India Tarot posts, look under Recent Posts, Search, or Archive of All Posts in the title bar.

Rohit Arya

Rohit Arya is an Author, Yogi and Polymath. He has written the first book on Vaastu to be published in the West, {translated into five languages} the first book on tarot to be published in India, co-authored a book on fire sacrifice, and is the creator of The Sacred India Tarot {82 card deck and book}. He has also written A Gathering of Gods. He is a corporate trainer, a mythologist and vibrant speaker as well as an arts critic and cultural commentator. Rohit is also a Lineage Master in the Eight Spiritual Breaths system of Yoga.

Earlier posts about the deck, including the first 15 Major Arcana archives are in http://aryayogi.wordpress.com – (look in his Archives May 2012 and June 2012.) The deck is copyrighted (c) 2011 to the publishers, Yogi Impressions Books pvt, and available also on Amazon and internationally.

Jane Adams

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.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C3TIr2bBo0 – Barenboim’s noble rendering of the Appassionata Sonata

http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Famille/FamilyTree-Minona.html#Midi

Beethoven profile – xerox of a lost sketch

In my earlier post, More Sketches of Beethoven, I described a dream I had many years ago, that I tried to draw his daughter, who lived with him somewhere underneath Vienna. It seemed at the time to parallel his efforts at composition, a titanic process of inspirational song, rain-soaked notebooks and hours or months of cutting, shaping and refining – it did not come easy for him.

I brought from my dream’s dark-room an impression down the years, of a child with a wide face and a fringe. She was his child, or she was his soul – he looked through her eyes. I met him in my dream, and we made an agreement. That is all I remember – and the heart breaking toil of trying to portray her. In those days I drew many children, capturing their essence in sometimes half an hour or less. Not so, with this one!

I decided to try to reconstruct the dream – particularly when “Edwardian Piano” informed me that there was a daughter – it is said her mother, Josephine Brunswick, raised her as Minona Stakelberg. Josephine’s sister Therese alone was in the secret, which she kept until her grave. On the website (see top of page under the Barenboim video), you can hear a couple of Minona’s Ecossaises for the piano. It is a pity that they are played in ‘electronic’ style. I can imagine their grace and humour on an old Broadwood.

With sepia photos or daguerrotypes, I guess my way along, like a palaeontologist. The photo looked at once familiar. Her face in it is broad, yet heart shaped; she looks a determined young woman. In the other photo, she is an older woman. She probably lost her teeth, and her nose looks longer. I began with Neidl’s likeness of Beethoven, nearest to the dark child I see in my mind:

Engraving of Beethoven by J.Neidl from a drawing by G.E.Stainhauser von Treuberg in 1800

The young Beethoven – after the Neidl engraving

Minona’s face is rather thin here, which draws on information from both the photos. In old photos, much of the bone structure detail is blurred. It is said her looks were dark and “Spanish”, like Beethoven’s. My drawing doesn’t show much family likeness, but an exploration of this kind might touch unknown factors; I do not know!

Josephine Brunswick, her mother

Finally I began work on this:

Beethoven and his natural daughter

… and it is not finished, and cannot be, but is starting to speak.

There are mysteries between ourselves as human beings and our hidden continents and the things we grieve and share and conceal and stumble with, which can only be recognised and touched upon … beyond words. We touch the hem of the robe. The story’s pressure through my dream was the character of Beethoven’s illegitimate daughter, and how this condition made her strong, made her hear him, and grow up beyond her years. This, like tidal currents in the sea which enter one another, has resonance.

Grief is sharp and alive with colour as in a painting, and so is joy; and life is born through dying, born through dying and letting go … again and again and again.

Photo of Minona Stakelberg

Anton Schindler’s Impression of Beethoven at the piano:
“What the Sonata Pathetique was in the hands of Beethoven (although he left something to be desired as regards clean playing) was something that one had to have heard and heard again, to be quite certain that it was the same already well known work. Above all, every single thing became, in his hands, a new creation, wherein his always legato playing, one of the particular characteristics of his execution, formed an important part.

“In his lessons, Beethoven taught: always place the hands on the keyboard so that the fingers do not rise any more than is strictly necessary, for only with this method is it possible to create a tone and to learn how to ‘sing’. He hated staccato playing, especially in the execution of passages; he called it ‘finger dance’ or ‘leading the hands into the air.’

“The pieces which I myself heard Beethoven execute were, with few exceptions, always quite free of tempo limitations: a tempo rubato in the truest sense of the word, according to the demands of the contents and situation without, however, the slightest tendency to caricature. It was the clearest and most comprehensible declamation … as perhaps can only be elicited from his works.

“His older friends, who carefully followed the evolution of his spirit in every aspect, assure me that he developed this style in the first years of the third period of his life, and that he turned completely away from his earlier manner of playing with fewer nuances. From this, it is clear that his urge towards discovery had already found the ways and means to open up with confidence the portals of the mystery to both laity and initiated.

“He wanted the Quartets to be performed in the same manner as the Sonatas, for they paint states of mind, as do the majority of his Sonatas.”

Allegri quartet rehearsing, 1988

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.

aquariel link

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://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Part 7 in the ‘Mysteries of Isis’ –
Some early writings on Isis, from my “Arcanum Two”:

25 September 1991 – The symbol for Taurus the Bull, ruled by Venus, is a circle crowned with a crescent – a pair of horns. Why the horns? To explore this question is fruitful.

How does it feel? The horns have sharp points. They are a heavy head-dress. They give majesty to the Full Moon, and define the New Moon. They are a garment of authority and they inspire fear. The horns of the Bull are antennae of the earth’s fecundity and riches. To encounter suddenly in my life a blindfold soothsayer or white witch, crowned with archaic and savage horns and sitting so still, is startling.

The horns are there to drive away or impale unwary or merely inquisitive trespassers into her subtle magnetic field. They make a repellant aura around her: a defense system. The priestess is in myself. What am I guarding? What am I protecting? Whom do I attack?

To look inward, into the well of God within atoms, is to create a surrounding “field” of space which reinterprets my material body. As “I” collapse inward – like into a black hole – this field extends outward in all directions from the singularity. It is the veil of the inner sanctuary. In all the old legends the dragon or serpent is coiled around the golden fleece. The hero must, in stepping over or neutralising the dragon, confront the storms around his own Cape Horn, and master the creative daemons that arise from his “unconscious” seeking consciousness. His chaos must transmute to kosmos — the Greek word for harmony. Only then, when the tumult dawns transformed in his being, might he behold the light of the golden fleece, by the gentle light of Isis – her moonbeam.

The hero in all these tales is the alchemist, and the adventure is trans-formation. Tentatively I suggest that the lady Isis in her pure state, together with Thrice Great Hermes who flows and makes speech with metals, is the catalyst of this transformative process. But I speak now personally …. I suppose I speak from many lifetimes. They are all only this one. For instance: I sit down each day here to write, and I do not know what it will be, and the content may flow or not as the case may be, but I am almost invariably astonished.

In the classic The Golden Ass, Lucius Apuleius gives an allegorical account of his initiation. Transformed into a donkey he had to suffer and witness the depth of human iniquity, and be beaten and abused by his inner discordancy, before the lady Isis rising from the midnight sea offered him the key to his release into human form … he must eat the rose carried by the Great Hierophant during the procession the following day, of her Mysteries. In the vision of Apuleius, as she rose from the dark sea to instruct his still asinine form:

“Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disk, like a mirror or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the lefthand and righthand partings of her hair supported this disk, with ears of corn bristling beside them. Her many coloured robe was of finest linen; part was glistening white, part crocus-yellow, part glowing red, and along the entire hem a woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung and swayed to the breeze.

“But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left shoulden where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivered. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery Moon.”

Apuleius The Golden Ass

Her mantle of night is that of the visible universe, the stars and the spaces between. The snakes that support her disk, besides echoing the pair of horns, suggest the caduceus of Hermes:

Two serpents, the positive and negative polarity, entwine a staff of authority or directed power, and are held in equilibrium. The equilibrium forms the circle of her disk.

The ears of corn in Apuleius’s description, remind me of Ceres. Ceres is the ripe standing wheat of the earth, and the mother of Persephone who married the dark Underworld. “Hades”, king of the Underworld, is derived from the Greek eidein, to see.

“The centre, the depths of this sphere (of the universe) is named Hades the invisible, because the centre of a sphere cannot be seen from without. It appears visible only by means of those special forms whose images appear graven upon it, it shows itself only in effigy; but in reality it is always invisible in itself.”

Trismegistus, The Virgin of the World

Ears of corn, or wheat, are the vessels of that sprouting grain of the inner world. They are the visible allegory which is “graven upon its surface”. I, dreaming twice in the last few nights about taking earplugs out, am perhaps being advised to hear; to be here, listen and hear. For this is the way the priestess receives information … silently into the oracle or shell of her ears. The oracle, coracle, is a celtic craft on the waters. The waters dance and play with reflections from the sky in crescents of light like fallen leaves or “boats of mine a-floating … Where will all come home?”^[1]

She has her eyes closed because the instruction is to be still and hear, to be not taken in by the deception, the flickering screem of sensory sight. To hear the unruffled depth of the settling water is to be the quietness of the water itself.

I drew the ears of earth (that is Ceres) with wheat growing in them, like little masts in a walnutshell boat.

Burial and Hermetic Initiation – the Grain Sprouts
To be the awareness of the ears is to extend and receive the lateral sense of consciousness; the Capitols of the two pillars. I am what rests between them, that which is, as it is.

From that alone comes forth what is relevant to the time. Silence must receive its own information, before delivering it. Thus is truth. Open the ears, the arms, of my Soul. These horns are the ears or antennae of some creature of the deep.

The horns of Isis are the sense organ through which she receives the waves. This is her focus of divination. Between the horns is held, or hung, the equilibrated breath of her magnetic field.

* *

In the Masons’ craft, there is a ceremony of passing, from being an entered apprentice to receiving the degree of fellowcraft. This represents work on the soul, or ability to listen, in the Middle Chamber. The candidate must bear in time and maturity the fruit of his own work. So upon acceptance he is given an ear of corn.

In this gesture there is a profound mystery, which lies in the ancient body of Egypt. Isis is the dark earth or body receiving the golden grain of Osiris in the flood of the Nile river which spreads it to all parts of the black land^.^[2]^. . When the waters ebb the grain sprouts. This is the Child who is also the Father. The land of upper, middle and lower Egypt was, in ancient times the head, thorax and abdomen of the subtle body. These are parts of the embodied fragment of God which lay beneath heaven.

Like the lower arm of the letter BEIT, this fragment – like all the “fragments of hermetica” that survived the destroyed Alexandrian library – echoes but is not quite the same as the Firmament. But from within the fragment (the rock, the tomb of forgotten awareness) can be resurrected the light of Osiris. I am reminded of Thomas Browne again: We are somewhat more than ourselves in Sleep, and the Slumber of the Body seems to be but the Waking of the Soul.

It seems that in most cases the slumber or apparent death of the body, (death of the world-orientation) was a pre-requisite to resurrecting the consciousness – the Spirit – outside and encircling the spacetime continuum.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead was written to guide those who, plunged by subtle arts into profound physical sleep, awoke to behold the Holy One. The weighing of the Soul and all that followed, was not the sole prerogative of those who had reached the end of their earthly span. Some who passed through the gates or pillars of “death”, returned re-born in the light of the Sun to bear witness (and keep the secret). This idea was explored in some of Paul Brunton’s meditations in his Search in Secret Egypt.

The Sacred Books of Hermes are a collection of fragments and discourses written down in Alexandria just before or after the time of Christ. In them seems to be reflected the essential wisdom of Thoth. Thoth is the ancient secretary to the gods. He has the head of an Ibis bird, and carries his pad and pencil. The hieroglyph for AKH – Light, or the scribing of a light that pre-exists Creation – is in the form of an Ibis. The crest and plumage of this bird is dark green and shot through with glittering metallic specks of light. The root of AKH is Spirit, to shine, to irradiate. The curve of the Ibis’s neck is like the uraeus or cobra, worn by Pharaoh as his “third eye” or pineal body^*. And it is not altogether unlike the neck of a swan.

The letter BEIT is a “neck” or channel of the current of speech. Yes! Speech is Hermes. The neck through which the silvery river flows, is the lady Isis. Isis and Hermes together are Thoth, the month of the harvest, the art of the priesthood. Isis’ womb-brother Osiris is then Self knowledge within the art, for he is the Sun.

The precious stone assigned to Hermes is emerald. The Bible of spiritual alchemy “As above so below” was traditionally inscribed by him on the legendary Emerald Tablet which – says Eliphas Levi – contains all of Magic in a single page. It was found by Alexander the Great in the depths of the Great Pyramid where priests in ancient times had concealed the tomb of Hermes. In the time of the Romans the emperor Severus buried the Mysteries in Alexander’s tomb, and Diocletian destroyed all the books on alchemy. Christianity dawned upon a devastated battlefield of esoteric knowledge, a burnt-out wound of the world, a Way swept clear.

*In this light, consider the ideas of modern physicists: “Light – the range of electro magnetic frequencies – precedes the the manifestation of luminous bodies. Radiant energy is held to be the basis of all things within the range of human perception.” (P.Foster Case). The symbols and colours which picture the ancient-world mysteries are tools equivalent to the equations used in our day.

These inscriptions, burials and tombs are direct reference to language, its events and its veils. The esoteric language had to be veiled from temporal powers who would exploit or destroy it: yet perennially accessible to ‘those who knew’.

I feel the Hermetic cosmology – which has been handed down as an oral tradition, like the Kabbalah – has a Vedic antiquity. There were originally four Sacred Books of Hermes. These were subdivided into forty-two volumes, the same number as those of the Vedas which were carried from India into Egypt by the Yadava emigration (cf. Mrs Child: The Progress of Religious Ideas, 19th century). There are innumerable stories and conjectural confluences of this kind, behind the shadows we see on the wall.

But, more importantly, the Egyptian doctrine of initiation, that the Eye of God opens in the most profound “sleep” of the organic and astral body, corresponds to advaita or “Not Two” of the elder East and of Gautama. Ramana Maharshi said the SELF of God awakens in the Fourth state of consciousness – that of deepest physical “sleep” … and is always awake. The other three states of consciousness are: the physical world, dreaming, and normal sleep. All three conform to the conditioned self-world view, a horizontal play on surfaces. Awareness in the Fourth state alone is unchanging and infinite.

Awareness in the Fourth state intersects the worldview everywhere at each point vertically. The worldviews of the three other states are sections across it, and thus illusory. Our worldview has the measure (or maya) of rings of time across a living tree. The presence of the Tree itself, its root, its many branches, the birds in the foliage, and seasonal colours and sound of the wind, is invisible to the cut surface spectrum. To appreciate that a whole Tree exists NOW, above and below the surface, requires a radical leap in the inner life which till then was occupied with one ring after another of historical time.

The way is : I AM THE TREE ITSELF. I AM ROOT AND SHOOT.

In both Western and Eastern traditions, pentacles and yantras combine the flat, diagrammatic plane of sacred geometry, with the vital dimension of which it is a talisman. The solar system itself, apparently a disk of planetary orbits of time around the Sun, is a section across a living organism like a whole egg, or the petals of a rose without an outline … So it is also with the structure of the atom. Electrons around the nucleus are not things, or even points, but waves ensphering it. Sages know this intuitively, which is why they say “All is well”; for they are That. The human worldview, like music in the grooves of a flat disk, perceives what begins and ends, and must take the sage’s view on trust until the limited perception “dies”.

Nature is full of allegory: the section across the tree: concentric ripples of sound, or over water: the vessel which rises from the potters’ wheel: the spiral of seasons and orbits. The clean section across a tree is itself artificial, conforming to human tools. The faculty is specialised, and yet it still obeys the ripple form.

Awareness in the Fourth State alone unchanges. The disciple of life has no access to it through the normal senses, and so in its presence, he sleeps, he “dies”, it is night to him.

In the ancient world, the physical catalepsy, through which the divine bird flew free of the mortal frame, is a conditional form of enlightenment. Advaita teachings call it “nirvikalpa samadhi”: the bird flies free but then returns to ignorance. The Sun is hid again in the night, and becomes a memory. In unconditioned illumination, no catalepsy of the body is necessary. The sage moves easily as air with his environment. He or she is the SUN. In all their atoms, they are and know the source, as simply as the stars.

The idea is not the temporal histories and how they might all be filed together on the disk, but what the currencies of mysticism all have in common, free from time; for it is obvious that many rivers within one River flow … from the pregnant void of Source, to the ocean which is itSelf. Here again, the human view is specialised, seeking in attainment, peace.

The inner Light has no past or future. Maybe it is a musical chord of kalpas, ever present.

July 2011

The foregoing was an exploration, turning up from the subconscious field, spontaneous references to ears, hearing and speech. The title, Why Does Isis Have Horns? delivered to me, the Taurus symbol … in which the Moon (High Priestess) is exalted. This means, that when the Moon is going through Taurus, the tidal fertile function is supreme, in nature and humanity.

The Moon’s actual ruling sign is Cancer – the sensitive shoreline, the rhythm of the tides, the breath and endochrine system. When the Moon is in the Earth-sign Taurus, the tide deposits the fruits of earth on fertile ground.

Taurus’s planetary ruler is Venus – attraction, affinity, passion, the laws of gravity. With reference to hearing and speech, Taurus is assigned to the faculty of hearing, and to the throat – which I was not aware of, at the time of writing.

So sea birds follow the plough – the upturned furrows of earth – to feast.

Seagulls and plough – woodcut by Tunnicliffe

FOOTNOTES
[1] A Child’s Garden of Verses, R.L.Stevenson
[2] Ancient name for Egypt: KEMET, meaning black land – Alchemy – the Raven’s Wing

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.

aquariel link

This post continues the previous ones about Isis – to remind myself Who she is. The next post will conclude this series with Dion Fortune’s invocation of Isis as “the Sea Priestess”.

To label an aggressive militant virus loosely as “isis” is a misnomer, unconsciously perverting and undermining our human-ness and capacity to heal. The women and girls are attacked, stoned, tortured or infected in that mindset, which mindlessly destroys ancient sacred places.

Our genetic vitality as men and women, stems from the archetypal wisdoms and mythologies of the ancient world. Isis is – at our thoughtless peril – trampled, forgotten or abused. In the mirror of every culture, she is what we truly are, the light and the shadow. As the goddess of the Moon she rules the tides of our psychology; as Gaia she is our Earth.

What can we do?

Recognise the daily corporate hypnosis under which we lie, under which we dream as slaves, accepting belief – and wake up. It is better to see and be aware of the venom than to step right into it. The problem is not in other lands, politics or ideologies – it starts HERE, with what we care about.

Remember who we are. Find and grow from our roots, and be an example to our children. Let it spread. No frozen society out there can do it. I and you are in HERE – the open reality we create. Individual awakenings send ripples far and wide, and change things.

Here is another chapter from my “Arcanum Two” (1991, 2011):

The sea near Tintagel

September 1991 – The Wholeness of Osiris: Precession of the Equinox:
What are the scattered pieces, the fragments of Osiris? Typhon, the god of titanic entropy or disorder, slew and scattered fourteen parts of Osiris the Law-giver up and down the black land. Isis wept over, gathered and conceived from them the child HORUS, of herself and her womb-brother Osiris.

Plutarch – an initiate – tells of Horus’s battle with Typhon to avenge his father:
“We are … told that among the great numbers who were continually deserting from Typho’s party was his concubine Thueris. A serpent pursuing her as she was coming over to Horus, was slain by her soldiers. The memory of this action, they say, is still preserved in the cord which is thrown into the midst of their assemblies and then chopped into pieces.

“Afterwards it came to a battle between them which lasted many days. But victory at length inclined to Horus, Typhon himself being taken prisoner. Isis however, to whose custody Typhon was committed, was so far from putting him to death that she even loosed his bonds and set him free. This action of his mother so extremely incensed Horus that he laid hands upon her and pulled off the ensign of royalty which she wore on her head. Thoth(Hermes/mercurial) clapped onto Isis instead a helmet made in the shape of an ox’s head.

“After this, Typhon publicly accused Horus of bastardy. But with the help of Thoth the legitimacy of Horus was fully established by the judgement of the gods themselves. After this there were two other battles fought between them, in both of which Typhon had the worst. Furthermore, Isis is said to have kept company with Osiris after his death, and in consequence to have brought forth Harpocrates, who came into the world before his time and lame in his lower limbs.”

In Plutarch’s account Horus was conceived before the fragmentation; he was conceived indeed in the mutual affection of Osiris and Isis as siblings in the womb of their mother before they were born. And Horus became known to the Greeks as Apollo, the god or radiance of the Sun’s (physical) chariot.

What are those scattered fragments of Osiris?

When they are put back together he is brought to life.

Note this: he is brought to life, a life beyond the concept of beginning or ending with the fragments. Instantly it springs to being, and has always been. It crosses the plane of fragmentary knowledge.

The fragments are perhaps the multiple and illusory costumes, lifetimes, of the body. The fragments are what remains of the Alexandrian Library – the wisdom of the ancient world. They arise among the disappearance of Self-knowledge into ignorance, into the pockets of spacetime called maya, or matter or “separate” incarnations.

The initiate, entering the cave of “sleep” emerges as a bird from a tiny opening deep in the heart lotus. The pocket of space and time falls away. The chamber of all the worlds – the whole of the Great Pyramid – is open to his flight of seeing. He awakens from the trap of time.

The wholeness of OSIRIS is a dimension of which the visible shapes of his body or any of his parts are only sections in time and space across it, apparently disparate.

The reality of OSIRIS is a Great Circle; like a “lunar” or “solar” orbit of human cycles of life on earth towards Reintegration. It abides beyond and within the visible spheres. The visible bodies in the night are only allegories. Osiris and Isis are a Mystery Play of reflected light whose phases, on the Moon, seek unity. I wonder if this relates to the Great Circle (25,800 years) or precession of the equinox around the ages of history … his story?

The combined action of solar and lunar gravity causes the polar axis of earth to ‘wobble’ or describe a slow dance around itself. This exposes the terrestrial magnetic field to subtle changes in alignment with the constellations. The turning of a mystic dervish expresses this.

The rhythmic cycles of our local perception or Universe, the times for plants to grow and for human beings to awaken dormant strata to the light, seem to be governed by Osiris and his sister Isis from a plane transcending that of the zodiac (the planetary/psychological frame of reference.) Neither of them represents solely the Sun (gold) or the Moon (silver). Their mystery dance describes their cyclic relationship. Osiris, known as the Sun of the Dead, appears as the Sun’s light upon phases (death and resurrection) of the Moon, particularly as it waxes. But he derives from ‘RA’ or ‘PTAH’ of a primordial LIGHT.

The rhythmic breath of Osiris and Isis governs the solar System as a whole. Perhaps they are analogous to the galaxy or, more locally, to the nodes of intersecting planetary orbits, the petals of the Great rose. They dwell outside the measure of planetary time, while remaining inside cosmos, the Divine Circle inscribed by Thoth within atoms and stars. The name of their son HORUS means ‘Time’ and also the eye of the eagle. The higher the eagle flies the smaller appears the space-time context, and the larger is the view around it.

From the raised apex of the Pyramid which is its centre, an edifice can be viewed. The plane of the base has four sides; at the point ‘above’, where they meet, they are simultaneous. This raised point is simultaneously the length, breadth and depth of the world around. It is the stance of rectitude, of truth. The fourth dimension cancels opinion and division, because as there is no separation between things, there are no ‘things’ themselves.

The Eye of RA, the primordial SUN, is this hieroglyph for the eagle HORUS, the Oudja: “The Right Eye of the Supreme Being is the Sun, and his Left Eye is the Moon.”

In the old stories the left eye of Horus, wounded by Typnon/Seth is repaired by Thoth. Thoth, Master of writing, of sciences and of time, has again and again to separate the two combatents, gather together the fragments of the hurt Eye and heal them into a unity greater than the sum of their parts.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes states:
“Thou shalt separate earth from fire, the subtle from the gross,
with prudence, understanding and modesty.
The Great Action rises up from the earth to the heavens
and returns again to the earth,
taking into itself the power of the Above and the Below.
Thus you will obtain the glory of the Whole world.

In the organism of the whole, the left eye has all the adventures for it receives, it is YIN; and the right eye performs the synthesis for it gives, it is YANG. Healers know intuitively that the ‘energy’ which cures fractions of the body and soul in mass, utilizes a ‘higher power’ of light beyond the small area of their differences. Isis and Osiris are a profound and esoteric resonance of the solar and lunar pulse in nature; their mutually embracing TAO.

The Great Circle and the Egg
In working with ISIS, the priestess of the Second arcanum, I feel like a ‘broken’ circle, which desires completion into a circuit. Electrically the current propels this urge over a vaccuum to return to itself. The divine Circle fell from the edgeless sphere into the elliptical distortion of a mental universe which oscillates between two poles.

This happens when the conjecturing mind pushes harder and harder at its own frontier. It constructs hypotheses, wanting everything to “fit” and falls exhausted and dead into flat paper. “So What?” What is the good of writing symphonies about silence, if there is no silence here, if waves of irritation immediately arise when the telephone doesn’t work, when the water mains is turned off, when gadgets are all-important, when fatigue snaps?

The orbital rhythms of the planets are egg shaped. Within them shines the perfect golden sphere of their birth, our yearning for them to be simply that. They move around the Sun, carrying interior Suns. Every feature of the visible universe is a dance of assymetry towards that unchanging ideal. Within my door of perception, this moves and changes and becomes the creation of matter and time. Re-cognition of ‘TWO’ catalyzes a movement towards ‘ONE’ which is ‘THREE’. The flow of current, its friction into photons or ‘particle-waves’ of light, sets up the paradox of ‘movement’ with ‘not-movement’; a relativity.

In these explorations, I am driven by beauty. The aesthetic sense has its own limitations, because it wants to make things conform to it. The mind builds castles, and becomes over taxed. The truth, being beauty, has no expectation. It is better to keep quiet, and to trust that truth is beauty, and needs no grandiose support or justification. In the absence of these, I become still.

When recognised, the testament to human beauty – a Bach cello suite, a Botticelli angel, the wind, the sea, the birds, the high pre-Cambrian moorland of mid Wales, and the colours of earth, water and autumn leaves – awakens again in its natural element. With a scented rose in the garden, who needs to construct one in the firmament, out of sight? And yet … those ones, those mansions in the subconscious, are special cultivations, seeds of wisdom. They bloom there undying … the garden for everyman to find.

Letter Gimel – wheatsheaf

The letters BEIT and GIMEL echo but are not quite the same as the Firmament which is silence.

* *

Gimel – and Into the Street
Going out now, late evening, into the street for groceries, I find – though very tired – an intense awareness of the field of space between me and each other person I see along the crowded pavement outside Waitrose. The world is differentiated. My eyesight retreats to within my spine. between the wings, and shows to me each person, each object, with clarity and without comment. Even the existence of my uppity ego has clarity, without comment.

If I hope to travel into being ‘Not Two’, it makes good sense to know what the condition of ‘Two’ really is. How can this be done without becoming lovingly interested in it? How much of life is spent bundling along and totally unaware even of duality and separate objects and the space between us? Those separate beings, mobile screens of history and inner-life, are comets who trail their births behind them, the invisible tale growing endlessly longer. They register within me with a sensation now of … something like hard diamonds. Each one is this hard and shiny rock of light… like being a jeweller. Who cut the first diamond?

Who cast the first stone?

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her,” said Jesus scribbling vaguely on the ground when the elders all crowded indignantly round the repentant prostitute and asked what to do.

When I am out in the street like this, words, poems, riddles, fragments of koans come, to be stopped and written down. They are traces, incomplete, of little fish sliding away, they are mischievous mercurial promptings, of the mind that will not rest. They are like the voice which delivers an enigma between waking and sleep. It sounds like a perfect capsule for unremembered truth.

I did much free-wheeling with these promptings, for years encouraging and writing them down. They lead to my oracle, the inner ruler. But if I become too enamoured of them, they no longer guide but exhaust me – the froth and foam, but not the water of life itself.

Mental metal-fatigue is a painful exercise. What poetic fancies about Osiris and Isis can reach me here? They seem now to be only a way to pass the time, with a risk of redundancy. They seem to be effluents of arrogant cardinals in the church. What of my limited aesthetic of circles beyond the circles in the invisible sky, right now, when the birds have flown? What on earth do I know about it? They were pictures only in my mind, and now I cannot read. Creative artists are bored children.

I feel it is up to each of us as we individuate, to discover mythology and follow it upstream in a way which is unique and meaningful. The paths on a mountain are of infinite variety and relationship; they connect and lead towards the peak which dissolves them all.

It is natural to be tired, and to let Isis, the oceanic subconscious, sink back into the tide: to breathe in and out; to sleep and wake.

quantock trees

At home I read in a little book by Sundaresa Iyer:
“I am the Present ever present, so I am not newly discovered or obtained. Only I have no delusion about myself. I am unborn so death cannot affect me. For me death does not mean the loss of a body, whether gross, subtle or causal. To me death means only identifying the Self with the non-self. This is intoxication, and this intoxication is Death. So has Sri Ramana Maharshi taught.

“ … caught and drew his normal consciousness deeper and deeper inward into that in which nothing but Itself is seen or heard or known, in which there is not the shining of the sun, the moon or the stars, but which is all these and fullness Itself.

“Abidance in the Void is firmness.”

Ramana – my earliest complete sketch of him

The Mother of God
I have one more small point to investigate in the interest of these Horns of Isis. My diversions into malleable symbolic history are as satisfying as writing poetry. As follows:

Hermes Trismegistus in Virgin of the World declares that: “Over the earth and sea he reigns who nourishes all mortal creatures, the plants and fruitbearing trees and whose name is Zeus Serapis.” This is Jupiter. This deity symbolises expansion and grace. In the psychological Tree of Life, Hesed is represented by Jupiter.

I want to look briefly into the idea of the Apis bull, for I read in a scholarly book by the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, that the name “Serapis” is derived from Osiris-Apis. Apis is a symbol of power and fertility, associated with the god PTAH. PTAH is the expression of primaeval creative power in the cycle of Osiris. Serapis was a Ptolomeic deity who acted as a bridge from Egyptian mystery to Greek philosophy. He was a benign bearded and Jovian character, with a great interest in death and funerary ceremonial.

The qualities of primaeval power and fertility were manifest in a bull calf born with special markings in Memphis. He was kept in the Temple, venerated throughout his life as the apis bull and finally buried with royal pomp and splendour. From the earth he came, took into himself the divinity of sky and was ploughed with it, back into earth. (“The Great Action rises up from the earth to the heavens and returns again to the earth, taking into itself the power of the Above and the Below”) The pharoahs would bow to this bull as a Great King – the archetype of their virile grace and favour. “He nourishes all mortal creatures, the plants and fruit-bearing trees.” He has the forces of growth.

The holy bull must be born of a mother, the sacred cow or Mother of Apis. She was identified with Isis, as “Hathor”. The burials in due season of these bulls of God with big throats and long pointed horns, and of their mothers, are very festive occasions. When the full moon sets below the western horizon, the sun is rising in glory in the east. And after the sun himself has set, the full moon is rising high and looking for her lord.

Two horns on the head of Isis are creation’s curve, the binary of two poles which carry the current.

To Conclude:
In astrology, the moon is exalted – meaning that its power to respond is at its most benevolent and enduring – when it is travelling through the sign of “fixed earth” – TAURUS the Bull.

Tarot’s Hierophant – the High Priest, Arcanum 5 – is assigned to TAURUS, and the 6^th letter, the VAV, meaning “hook” or “that which joins”. Taurus governs the throat and ears – the faulty of inner hearing or intuition.

Like a happy assonance for a poem, is the blend of Arcanum 2’s High Priestess, whose symbol is the Moon, with the power and fertility of the bull. When the sun is in Taurus, leaves have burst their buds, the baby birds are hatched and hungry, and spring is in full flower. Those born with the moon in Taurus often have intuitive “green fingers”. There is a consistency in their sense of touch with “the plants and fruitbearing trees” in the garden by day or the tao by night. They love nature and are strong and imaginative workers in their field. They have the power of concentration.

So it is by way of thanksgiving to this exploration and enquiry with Isis, that I discover her to be beautifully earthed, and let her rest. The Taurean glyph – the circle surmounted by a crescent — gives this work its cadence.

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.

aquariel link

Mother Isis of the Moon, 2015

In esoteric work for the healing of nations, there are at least two main streams – the path of the Lineages and the path of the Hearth-fire. Through occult Lineage traditions, an octave of initiations is handed down to practitioners. This way of discipline and group work enjoys a living contact with the Inner Plane guides and their wisdom.

Dion Fortune in 1927

In the 1920s, Dion Fortune founded a Society of the Inner Light in Avalon, Glastonbury. She became its trance medium (based on her training in psychoanalysis). She also wrote novels and books on the theory of The Mystic Qabalah, and did astral-plane police work.

Among core themes in her work, was regeneration of the natural spiritual and physical energy between men and women, which had become atrophied. (“Dion Fortune and the Inner Light” – a biography by Gareth Knight)

Mudras – builders of Avalon 2003

Dion Fortune taught also the path of the Hearth-Fire. Reaching back to the Corn goddess and the human network in Gaia, mother Earth, the Hearth-Fire complements the path of the Lineages by bringing the divine essence into our daily life and practice – our relationships, our workplace, and the way we learn our parenting.

We may visualise – as if from an aeroplane at night – a pattern of sacred fires placed here and there on earth, where the Companions of the Light are gathered and keep watch. We may approach and join them. It is said that they are most numerous over the middle east where the need for them is acute. They are gathered there in the darkness, the way antibodies travel to a wound. We need to gain a high altitude vision, to realise that because the issues show as yet no signs of resolution, that does not mean they never will.

We need to dive within. For some of us, our job is to assist the Companions by facing our own shadow projections at home – as we journey in the soul law to the source – through Self-enquiry in psychology, philosophy, family life and feelings. Time in the lap of the gods is not as our time; it all must come up and out, becoming conscious. Healing is the whole.

Here – shortened to just the main images for meditation – is Dion Fortune’s invocation of Isis as she appeared to Wilfred and Molly at the end of “The Sea Priestess” (published by Society of the Inner Light):

hearth fire, salamanders

“Night by night, as the wood smoke rose from the Fire of Azrael, we built up the form of the Priest of the Moon in the drifting shadows till he was as real to us as we were to each other; and though we knew his form was such stuff as dreams are made of, there came through that form, the touch of mind on mind, and that was the thing that counted … and so we felt the touch of mind on mind where no man was, and heard the words where no one spoke, for the thing came across the gulf on the wings of fantasy; for fantasy is the ass that carries the ark, as they said in the ancient Mysteries.

“Now it is a very odd thing, that I, who could visualise the Priest of the Moon at will till he seemed to stand out like an image in a stereoscope, always felt him to be a shadow thrown by some other reality; whereas Molly who couldn’t visualise him at all, was perfectly sure of his presence and actuality, and seemed to commune with him interiorly with as much certainty as if he were on the telephone. He taught me and I learnt all manner of things from him about Atlantis and the ancient ways of Britain. But he didn’t so much teach Molly as change her.

“… There was a sea fog that night that wrapped all round the narrow neck of land where stood the farm between the salt marsh and the tide water … only the sea remained open to us as an occasional shift of the drift of the wind opened long sea-lanes in the fog down which the moon shone, for she was low and near her setting.

“It was strange to see a sea-lane open thus, with the water all silver in the moonlight and the fog standing up in walls on either hand, like the cliffs of a phantom fiord. It was such a sea path as this down which the oldest gods might travel, coming from the moon and that which is behind the moon – most ancient time and space when earth and moon were both etheric, not yet solidified into dense matter and not yet parted from one another.

“The tide was coming in. I had begun to notice that with the rising tide Molly always seemed to wake up, unlike Morgan who came to her power when the tide was at uttermost ebb. But then she was a sea-priestess, and Molly was a priestess of corn and hearth and garth, which is another aspect of the Great Goddess whom they both served after their different ways.

priestess of black isis, priest of the moon and baal shem tav 2002

“… Presently the first shallow, spreading wash of a breaking wave ran up to the edge of the weed, and Molly put a match to her Fire of Azrael and we watched it take the flame, the dry and resinous woods rapidly turning into a pyramid of fire after their year long storage out at the fort. The seaweed burned too, with an odd iodine smell that seemed to have the ancient essence of all sea-beaches embalmed in it, and I thought of the far-travelled mariners with their gold ear-rings and curled beards, who had drawn their highbrowed sea-ships up on Ishtar’s Beere.

“Then the cold drifting-draught that is in every fog opened a sea-lane that led right out to the moon, and we saw the slow heave of the sea running all black and shadowy as the tide made up-channel. But even as we watched, the sea felt the call of the moon, and the water became flickering silver as the turn of the tide broke the rhythm of the waves, and we watched the water that had come far up the land turn again to the great deep. The waves had respected Molly’s fire, and just lipped it and made it hiss before they turned again, sinking slowly back, leaving a belt of wet sand and fresh weed to mark their path.

“Molly raised her arms in the sign of the horns of the moon, and invoked the Great Goddess as I had seen Morgan do. The moon was low in the west towards her setting, and at Molly’s feet was the red-lit Fire of Azrael, and beyond it the silver pathway stretched out over the sea toward lost Atlantis. And it seemed to me that at her call came the gods of the past and their priests and worshippers, for she was waking the old worship once again.

… The moon sank lower; the sea cut her disk and the mist of the sea banked about her in a golden nimbus. Then Something seemed to formulate in the darkness and come over the sea towards us through the mist, moving by the pathway of silver light upon the water; and it was vast, so that Its head met the stars, and It was all veiled and swathed and shrouded. Only we saw the silver Feet upon the sea, and they were like moonlight over water.

“And so She came, She of the Sea, to the place where sea meets land, and we awaited Her coming. She paused at the edge of the line of the breaking foam, Her feet and Her head among the stars, star-crowned. There was no Face to see for She is forever veiled, but there came to us the great exalted awe which some say is the gods and none other.

“This tingling fear took me by the heart and by the throat and by the eyes, gripping like a hand. And my hands began to burn and tingle with a pulsating force, and from behind my eyes it seemed to come out like a beam. And I broke out in that heavy sweat of the heat of the gods, which Morgan had told me always heralds their passing; and my breath was taken short, but not with the asthma, and I grew rigid and shook like a man in a fever fit. I looked towards Molly, and saw that she stood on tiptoe, reaching up towards her Goddess as if floating between earth and air like a frozen figure of dance, immobile, tense and effortless.

“Then slowly Great Isis turned, and drew Her veil closer about Her, and She went down the long sea-lane out towards the west, the fog closing in behind Her.

“The sea drew back with the falling tide and bared the place of Her passing, and on the sand we saw silvery pools that might have been the marks of eddies, but that we knew were Her footprints. And so She passed away as silently as She had come, but the place where She passed was holy, being filled with power. Something had touched our souls to awe, and we chose to call it the passing of the Goddess.”

Harbour, 1987

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.

aquariel link

janeadamsart:

Reblogged from my gene keys journal – A midsummer portrait gallery – representing some sources of higher inspiration in humanity. The sketch of the Baal Shem Tav (see below) came about one day in 2002 when there was an argument going on upstairs in my house: when I left it and went downstairs I felt a “thickening” in the air, like cream, as if it came in through the window. I got out my sketch pad, and the Rabbi of Joy sprang forth with his strong blue eyes. Other portraits were the fruit of my tentative trial-and-error contact with the upper and inner worlds.

All the Great Masters are the One. Their different facial expressions are the way we perceive them and their teaching, through the clouds. There is a spectrum of relationship and commitment. As Dion Fortune has written, we first ‘imagine’ and then we ‘will to be there.’

Originally posted on Journal with Gene Keys:

Gene Keys Journal, 20 June 2015

For all of us who tune in to the opening of the Seven Seals retreat this summer solstice: a gallery of my portraits of the Great Holy Council and some Companions of the Light.

Many of these were commissioned as a series in 2008, for Anne Dorcas in Montreal, and you may recognise those who are close to you. May Their blessings and peace illumine and go on transforming the shadows in our world. They are the Lighthouse keepers!

Click on any of them to see the gallery, then click on “view full size” individually.

The Rabbi of Joy – Baal Shem Tav

With love, Jane

View original 5 more words

Beethoven at Zum Roten Igel

Last week, I got very excited about this link:

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/beethoven-guest-blogger/

Here, Elene explores a musician friend’s contact with Beethoven, comparing it to her own subtle relation with him and with Chopin.

It inspired me to dig out my old sketches of Ludwig Beethoven, and to see what happens: to try perhaps a new one. I am reminded of a dream I had in 2011, of my hands like a child, and Beethoven touching them and looking onward … or mine resting on his:

My dream with Beethoven, 29 May 2011. He had Pluto and Venus in Capricorn – a musician’s Hades-Persephone marriage. Pluto is again in Capricorn – 2008-2024 – completing a cycle since Beethoven’s day. Pluto is the depth dredger in human affairs, but also represents – particularly in Capricorn – a depth and enduringness of human values, such as those which Beethoven heard, sang as he walked, and wrote. These values seemingly hidden by today’s turbulence, are perenially fresh for those who touch and find.

The Pluto Venus Capricorn glyph in this drawing speaks to me of the master’s depth and tenderness.

Journal 29 May 2011
“I dreamed – An eager young man, with some arrangement with Beethoven, built an Ascension vehicle which lifted us high to behold his vision and his project, for which he was gathering souls like mine, for faith and ballast. The landscape was stupendously beautiful – a great smooth sunset sea surrounded by distant mountains, their crazy, graceful outlines rimmed with supernal light. It was heart-catching: awe. The sea – the LENS – was like a very large bay or inlet, because ‘inland’ or harbour seemed to be to the right, below. It is my perennial vision of the human coastline and hinterland. Have faith!

“The man spoke of it all, and somewhere I touched the back of Beethoven’s hand. The vision was – as in the Eroica – of Beethoven’s divine pride and purpose. Beethoven was immediately to hand, the writing all joined up. It was time to go with the man and put it all into action … the young man’s voice had an Australian twang … …

“… I listened to Beethoven’s Adieux, Therese, the Goblins and the Fourth piano concerto, all played by Arrau … Artists and musicians are forgiven much. Grumpy old Beethoven – chunks of humanity off the old block – are put there for us to listen to their musical integrity, not to be wise or polite.

“I draw very slowly the line – and it was really hard to get a Beethoven likeness – eventually found photo of his sculpted head, taken from the life mask. I think this is the one he didn’t like, as the weight of the plaster dragged down his face – so we ALL think he went around with mouth down turned at the corners, and maybe he didn’t. He is said to have pursed his lips when concentrating, and certainly he stuck the lower one out. His chin was cleft like a great shell. His nose was ‘three cornered, like a lion’, his eyes rather small and exceptionally alive – changing colour, dark greenish hazel perhaps. He tended to roll them upwards. He was swarthy, pock marked, with leonine black hair ‘like a Spaniard’, and much hair over his body and hands. He dressed elegantly when he was young. When a fine lady complemented the nobility of his brow, he said ‘Salute it then, Madam’ and offered it to kiss.”

Here is one of my efforts to sketch him yesterday – the young Beethoven, from the Hornemann portrait 1802: before his deafness and at the height of his performing powers.

This drawing was done perhaps in the 1970s: the older man bends close to the keys in his struggle to hear.

Beethoven plays

The above portrait was inspired by this painting by an unknown artist – my father has the sepia photo. I always assumed it was Ludwig Beethoven playing the violin, but if you look closely, you can see his life mask hanging on the wall … like a secret mirror.

When I was a child we lived in a farmhouse with a large attic. Exploring up there, I found this cobwebbed photo of a painting by Franz Stvk. I have it still.

When I was young, I played a lot of Beethoven on the piano, and identified – often painfully – with his darkness. In the 1980s I teamed with a violinist, Fred Barschak, and together we climbed the mountains of the Spring, Kreuzer and Seventh Violin Sonatas.

Here are my earlier sketches of Beethoven, and their sources:

beethoven on a walk

Beethoven at work

This portrait was inspired by Batt’s drawing (below) in the Oxford Companion to Music.

Gallery: Beethoven by Batt, Klein, Stvk and von Kloeber

Klein, Franz: Beethoven-Büste; späterer Abguß der originalen Streicher-Gipsbüste

Klein, Franz / Micheli: Beethoven-Maske mit Lorbeerkranz, nach der Lebendmaske von Klein

Beethoen in later life

More early studies – I made his forehead much higher than it really was. Beethoven’s brow had a noble, rounded breadth.

Beethoven after the painting by F.Schimon

These two pages are from a journal in 1969, quoting Schindler’s visit to the master when he was composing the Missa Solemnis Credo.

And … within the cosmos of the late Quartets –

Glancing at Elene’s other posts touching on Beethoven, here is a teaching of his to a pianist-composer friend – he sat in the car and said to Elene’s friend, “How do you get the perfect cut of meat? – you trim away all the fat.” While reading the earlier post, ‘More on Lou van B’, these words came to me: “before sitting down to play Beethoven, open and fill your heart with love.”

It is a struggle for me to find him sometimes – like climbing over fences. Perhaps it is the spiritual battle of the “heroic” with love; the personal ego with the truth; the ‘I-can-and-I-will’ with ‘listen’ … inheriting Beethoven’s philosophical dilemma in the Quartet opus 135 – must it be? It must be.

piano action

I am at present “exercising” Emily’s baby grandpiano in Southgate. It has a beautiful faded case; her father used to play popular classics on it, but he died nearly 30 years ago, and no one touched it since. The poor thing had sagged to honky tonk with three stuck notes, and yet I found a good, light action. I persuaded them to have it tuned. The sleeping beauty is in shock! – and now between tunings to stabilise – all her strings woke up and stretched and some of them already slipped. I put a vase of water underneath and a small dish of water inside, to counteract the heating in the house.

Yet her voice came out, singing and mellow, in the quieter places, quite sensual. It was wonderful to play and hear it in the restful, faded drawing-room which opens onto the long wisteria garden. I enjoyed a strange sense of flow and freedom of tone across the ‘vertical’ hammer system, in terms of touch and tenderness: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and other slow movements spoke with love, and so did Bach preludes. Some of the bass notes growl. My fingers were – magically – not in the way. I thought of the Liszt method in Paul Roes’ book Music – the Mystery and the Reality. Magic happens in an individual variety of tone – part of the charm which older pianos have – which challenges me to find and adapt to its way of singing. The new or electronic instruments don’t have that playful intimacy.

Instrument. This is actually my father’s Petrof piano, as I have not yet photographed Emily’s.

Interestingly, in Elene’s post on conversations with Beethoven, he says new agey views of higher plane diaphanous white robes are nonsense – we wear what we wore in history and sometimes dress up in contemporary style for fun – like he did in a 1940s brown suit. “He still loves rain, baths, showers and the woods. His house is in the woods.” Because generation after generation discover and interpret his music, his commitment to humanity is timeless, covering a very wide landscape, and continually refreshed … “A German word in the ear, meaning energy flowing: projection: Vorsprung – projects like rock.“

Have we a Beethoven forum? Visit also https://edwardianpiano.wordpress.com/my-poetry/ for some evocative verse, haiku and pictures of Beethoven I never saw before. This fascinating site turned up last week in synchrony with Elene’s Beethoven, Guest Blogger; I had to jump in.

TO BE CONTINUED – my new attempts to draw Beethoven, and some more impressions.

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.

aquariel link

Beethoven and ... Rostropovich? I found this forgotten early drawing from the 1970s, while searching for the two which I have lost. I used to find it 'easier' to draw him than I do now!

Beethoven and … Rostropovich? (circa 1972). I found this forgotten early drawing from the 1970s, while searching for the two which I have lost. I used to find it ‘easier’ to draw him than I do now! I love listening to the Beethoven cello sonatas.

Continuing this “Beethoven series” inspired by Elene’s researches : this post includes some journaling over the weekend, and portraits of the master by others, and from my new sketches.

First: a detail from my “watershed” series of dreams during the 1970s:

September 1976 – from “Paris and the Hollow Way”
(Watershed Tales)
“Smelling the flowers which grow around the end of Boulevard Malesherbes, I see the bright food in the brasseries, the Gaulish striped canopies over smoked glass. Avenues which radiate from this place are planted tree-deep with bouquets gathered this morning from the tart grass; the dew is still upon them – the waters of a river, where the pit of the railway once was.

“And yet this place in Paris has mile upon mile of shattered streets and dirty weathered brick. The sorrow moves me, through field upon field of unhoused space, like Liverpool after the war. As far as I see, no man lives here. It moves me in strange ways. I discussed these ways with the old hoardings of scarred planks and corrugated iron which give and take along the road. What tragedian devastated this land?

“No man,” they replied. No man is an island. But they live and speak. Their answer is in nomadic ways, in syllables of philosophy I cannot recall. They are my notice boards, my inner adversities that talk.

“So I came at last to an arrangement with Beethoven, of whom I was very fond. I found him in a room without much light, and a musty smell … maybe a Viennese cellar during Napoleon’s bombardment? I agreed to draw a portrait for him of his daughter. She’s a small child, and her facial features are very dark. For hours I toiled with each line and contour. I saw Beethoven’s light within her, her soul so clear where she sat, but I couldn’t get it right. The expression of her mouth and eyes, came into me, but I couldn’t connect. I hesitated. I erased and drew, and erased again and drew. The difficulty stared me in the face like having to learn all over again to walk, and made me cringe with pain. I struggled to achieve at length an approximation: my facility is lost, and I forgot the way. There are no short cuts I can take.”

The young child Beethoven?
portrait by an unknown artist, discovered in 1972
and … how might he have looked?

Beethoven age 13 by an unknown artist - discovered in 1972

I was reminded of this, because I had rather a struggle to draw Beethoven over the weekend. I lost two early sketches of him which I like – maybe I gave them away – so I tried to reconstruct them. The creative process doesn’t always flow. Beethoven often had titanic difficulty with his compositions, scribbling and shouting and scratching out and searching for what he heard in the rain and the trees, from God.

Beethoven on a walk … Pastorale

Autograph MSS, op. 111, http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=&template=dokseite_digitales_archiv_en&_dokid=ha:wm33&_seite=1

Journal 24 July – Beethoven and Vera
He really is around … two new followers to my blog, who write about him and about pianos – did they come in through Vera Moore?

On Emily’s piano yesterday however, the three or four out-of-tune keys were very noticeable, and I couldn’t ride it well; it was evening after a long tiring day. When I played, the flowing faculty wasn’t there, and I stumbled along the up-down action. I rang the tuner: he said it could be tuned again in two or three months, but if it gets unbearable he will come and see what he can do. One small consolation: my own piano – a Spencer upright – is easier!

Strings and hammers – detail from a larger painting

It was a revelation for me the day before, that to play Beethoven we must meditate with love: that is, to wait and let him enter. He reaches the soul universally and constantly regenerates and sprouts runners along the higher astral ground – a hardy perennial. The perennial is love – the humanitarian love which strove and strode nobly with his wrecked health and domestic furies.

I need to tune into that love, spontaneously or deliberately, to play him at all. I have to walk with him and feel the rain, meditate and imagine the wild wind in the trees I see, and the noble themes it whispers onto a sodden notebook page. The love and the divine beauty had to force a way through discordant tinnitus.

Beethoven walk: by Julius Schmid

This must have made the silent sound of the outer world unbearably alluring – to see the movement and feel the wet rain. On his walks the nature devas counselled him: he sang and scribbled and “raved”. To rave is to be ravished in the elements. People who knew him recorded the way his face opened into a raptus. The raptus of old Beethoven fought the daily cacophonies inside his ears, and strode the serene paradox of the late quartets and the Opus 111 Arietta.

I did long ago, a small oil sketch of B walking in the grass hatless – can’t find it yet – did it get left behind at the red hedgehog? Yesterday it was clear to me that my enormous labour of love at the red hedgehog in 2011 (a small and struggling concert venue), to clean and sand down and varnish the floors which were filthy, was for Beethoven. I did it for the Peter Donohoe Beethoven series there – hook, line and sinker: an esoteric assignment if you will. If I hadn’t cleaned and brightened the floors, that wonderful Beethoven series might not have happened or touched earth there – a peak symbolic moment. The sublime got through the chaos – the timeless touch spread fore and aft, and struck its Sound and Glory.

Klein, Franz / Micheli: Beethoven-Maske mit Lorbeerkranz, nach der Lebendmaske von Klein

As I mentioned Vera Moore above, suddenly my world with her is here too. She is with me. She was my piano teacher in Paris in 1965: her eternal Life in a rickety household, rather like Beethoven’s – but she lived till she was 90: her strong caress of the keys, like wrapping a baby – her reverent joy – giving birth to her “son of Art” and bringing him up through the French Resistance and after the war: her powerful and abrasive personality as a younger woman and single mother – I hear again the obstinate ripple of her voice. It didn’t bother her if her old Gaveau was out of tune – she couldn’t afford the tuner.

Vera Moore when I knew her – this drawing from memory is from the early 1970s. I can imagine her sitting with me, and what she might say about this note or that note, wrapping my fingers round it like a baby with a shawl … her way with poetic images and her LOVE … her instruction to play what I am learning, like a chorale, without any inhibitions – sing it inside, with the touch.

I read somewhere that Liszt could draw forth the heart and soul from an out-of-tune instrument and captivate his listeners. There must be a way of using those odd sounds.

One of Vera’s students helped her to write a piano Method. I don’t think I heard Vera play Beethoven, but when Beethoven’s window opens in my soul, I may be pretty sure she will come through it as well. Her gift like his, is a delicate seed of power, grace, humour and peace, in a turbulent nest.

I think Vera taught her piano students the “horizontal” caress which holds and rolls along the white and black keys, and on rare occasions comes through me in a moment of delight (I soon fall off !). I believe Liszt played like this, glancing sideways with seductive smile (“isn’t this amazing?”); and Paul Roes aims to reconstruct it in his “Music – the Mystery and the Reality“.

Vera Moore in the 1930s – from Winifred Nicolson’s painting of her. Search ‘vera moore’ on this blog, for my two posts about her.

I do prefer old uneven character pianos to the mechanically-perfect electronic keyboards. You can hear straight away, even through a high open window.

A sketch of Beethoven in his teens. This one ‘works’ for me – and took just a few minutes.

Here is a timely message from a fellow blogger:

“Draw a circle
place inside of it
every aspect of your
human experience …
all emotions
all actions
all shame and guilt
all the things you would love to forget
and all that you hope
you will never forget.

“Make it a place where all of it fits.
Let them no longer be strangers
to one another.
Let them take off their shoes and stay a while
rub elbows
break bread
toast to one another’s health and long life.

“When everything that you have experienced
is located in one place
you are
finally
‘One with Everything’.”

Charlie Morris wrote this poem … this morning, about everything in his life, the human texture, difficulty and joy, being in this one room unconditionally and inclusively, which is “God”. It is not spiritual or unspiritual.

So Beethoven poured basins of water over his head to cool the fire of composition. Now see and breathe interior peace in and as the room. Nobody is alive without depending on something or someone for their well being. No one goes it alone. Look at what I depend on! If my path with the Inner School was taken away, where would I be?

Gallery, working from Kloeber and Carolsfeld’s portraits
– click to view

Beethoven on a walk - an attempt to reconstruct my lost oil sketch

Sketch of Beethoven in 1802, after the Hornemann portrait - Heiligenstadt Testament

Beethoven, the original by Kloeber. The master liked this drawing, in particular the flowing hair.

Pencil drawing by Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1808

Sketch after the drawing by von Carolsfeld, circa 1808

I spent the rest of the day trying to draw Beethoven – three more efforts. It is much more difficult for me than it used to be – and so is playing the piano. I found my Robbins Landon book which has lots of pictures, and an interesting photoshop idea online, with B’s life mask. I got very bogged down and stuck.

I also extracted from my 2011 journals, the gist of Peter Donohoe’s Beethoven series at the red hedgehog (zum roten igel in North London) – I might put it in my next post, with my sketches of PD’s master-class. Then my energy was all gone.

Gallery – click to view

http://fotosketcher by lvbandmore.blogspot.com

photosketcher by http://lvbandmore.blogspot.com

Beethoven 1940s style. It intrigued me to try to sketch him in this way that someone saw him - he put on the costume for a joke. But I lost it! I rubbed it all out and ...

... re-did it in period style - a trial and error process

Klein, Franz: Lebendmaske Beethovens im 3/4 Profil - Foto von Simon

Gallery

Beethoven, after the Joseph Mahler portrait

Beethoven kept this painting by Joseph Mahler on his wall throughout his many changes of lodging. It must have been among his few possessions – apart from the thousands of pages of his notebooks – which survived. He will have identified particularly with its heroic quality. Another of his treasured paintings was the one of his grandfather.

I decided to ‘have a go’ with this one, but quickly found the pose too artificial and romantic to reproduce convincingly! So I switched to the idea of him conducting from the keyboard – keep practicing ! Keep trying …

Helen Ede in 1974, on my last visit to her. She is knitting a sock for 'Old Bonesie', my grandfather. Through the window you could see the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh

Helen Ede in 1974, on my last visit to her. She is knitting a sock for ‘Old Bonesie’, my grandfather. Through the window in Jordan Lane, you could see the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh

I hear the severe ecstasy of my grandmother, Helen Ede – her face and eagerness shaped somewhat like his. She used to play Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata on her Bechstein … in whose dusky dark tones I explored his slow movements. When her memory went, or she fell off a note, she would say ‘h’ai’ crossly.

We spoke together about the Arietta in his Opus 111 – after listening to her old record of Claudio Arrau playing it. Her face lit up: I cannot reproduce her voice, but she said something like this:

“… the long trills where the sun comes out. You have in the beginning an austerity, and through the variation the austerity slowly relents, letting go of its own form, to melt and smile and dance. You know that place where the dotted rhythm begins to go around, and around, to break it up – dissolving the form into light without ever quite losing it … ? it falls open and time stops. It seems to me that through that light, very gradually emerges again the variation. The theme didn’t quite disappear, but is transcended and transfigured. Then slowly the bar lines return, and the theme resumes.”

Imagining old Beethoven in private, his deaf face, his pain transfigured, alone in that mess of a room, having just poured another bucket over himself … I hear in some of his piano music, the Dionysian cyclic mandala or mantra rhythm, like Dante’s cosmic rose, dissolving into light.

“Ochh Jane,” says my grandmother in her Scottish-German accent, “Oh what a sight to see.”

Claudio Arrau 1986: from the record sleeve of Opus 111

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.

aquariel link

In 2011, Peter Donohoe performed all the Beethoven piano Sonatas at a small concert and arts venue in North London, the Red Hedgehog – named after the famous 19^th century Zum Roten Igel coffee-shop in Vienna where the composers hung out. I helped to get the venue ready for the series, and volunteered to scrub, sand and varnish all the floors, which were very dirty. It felt like a hands-on gesture to renovate a noble instrument and hear its voice.

‘Small is beautiful’. The 32 Sonatas were originally performed in small halls or in private houses. In our time the big concert industry has somewhat swamped that sense of community and … communion. Here was a chance to recapture the flavour and to support enduring musical values, at grass-roots level: feeling the deep need for this, in society at present.

2011 was a curious year for me: I also cleared (by hand) a ten-year rubbish tip from a garden; which took nine months. What was going on in my inner life? It was like a recurring dream I used to have, of a derelict chamber or series of forgotten and neglected rooms in the depths of my psyche. To bring them to life and make them grow and glow? I couldn’t resist the challenge!

Beethoven at Zum Roten Igel in London

Here are some of my impressions of the Beethoven series from my journal – illustrated with my sketches of Peter giving a master-class a month before the Beethoven series.

20 February 2011

Peter Donohoe’s master class reached the mountain tops – Liverpudlian Taurean-type maestro, discusses music with his students. I did a number of rough sketches. Drawing gives me energy … The atmosphere in the venue was delightful, and smelt of wood floors and paraffin heaters. A trick of the stage lighting makes the piano keys and other details wink scarlet glints … with the musical summit discussion around PD’s penultimate and very gifted student in the late afternoon (Chopin’s 4^th Ballade)

Gallery – click to view

21 February 2011

Peter Donohoe’s competent bulk, story-telling profile and the glittering powers in his arms and fingers and centre of gravity are my good friend for life. His Liszt episodes from the Swiss Annees invoked 19^th century magic, dreamy Venice and the almost unbearably, daemonically romantic Master of all the music: the long mane, erotic strength and gypsy speech. In those days, THINK of hearing all the composers for the very first time under Liszt’s hands: he did all the recording, all the travelling and drew in all the threads.

Peter plays Chopin – as all pianists do nowadays – very loudly. Ballades 3 and 4 and the Fantaisie Polonaise: and Schumann’s Arabesque that my grandmother used to play, very tenderly. Big colour range. The piano screamed but spoke. Pianists ravish pianos; this explains a lot for me.

Franz Liszt and daemons

24 February 2011

Mrs T has her wake-up call. Peter told her he was disappointed in the small audience number, and that the place is cold and dirty and – behind the bar especially – unhygienic, and he might have to withdraw from the Beethoven series. Catastrophe!

THE SCRUB AND SANDING

During the following month I hired a sanding-machine and took all the dirt off the floors – it was amazing to see the fresh wood emerge – and started to apply coats of smelly gloss varnish. The Indian takeaway shop next door complained that the fumes were coming through the walls. We googled online for an antidote – freshly chopped onions!

22 March

I arrived at ‘the Endangered Species’ yesterday, to an aroma of onions spread on bits of newspaper like cat food, no trace of fumes or damp, and the venue humming with two bookings – the actors in the back room and a quintet in concert black, in the front room having a jolly photo session round the Yamaha. The sanded bamboo floor looked pale, vulnerable and marvellous. In the evening I did my marathon. Two coats of water based acrylic varnish – home-worked from my local builders merchants – took nearly 6 hours. This morning I didn’t get up till nearly 9! Am still tired almost to tears, but enjoying great creative satisfaction – the depth and beauty of the bamboo glows up through the coating like a forest – (It was shop-coated but not dirt/feet/chairs proof when Mrs T bought and installed it.) The filthy black floors everywhere are gone: clean wood brightens the whole place, with my pictures in it, and the spirits of Beethoven & Co, and Mrs T’s resurrected desire to love it and keep it clean. There’s a lot of work to do on skirting boards and doors, etc. She gave me some Anthony Trollope in the headphones to accompany my labours. She loved my concentration and commitment. She said she can’t tell me how much this means to her. But she does. She is an eager, clever, long-nose schoolgirl with a big heart, fierce green politics and droll dark eyes, clumsy with her feet and knocks the onions around.

Movements of God are funny.

Photos of my work – I didn’t take any ‘before’ pix!

Brahms composing, 1983. Brahms was a well known habituee of Zum Roten Igel in Vienna. He liked his coffee very strong

23 March 2011

I go back again tonight, to apply the Third Coat in full. Fourth coat next week. The hard wear of constantly moving chairs, enormous piano and calor-gas heaters, needs several layers/coats. Last night I put first and second coats on the patches which had been covered by piano and chair-stacks, and tinkered a bit of Bach on that noble black beast, the Yamaha – fingers all a-fumble. I had to work around all the furniture of the rehearsing actors’ day, but have ordered it to be cleared. Mrs T provides wine – which she is afraid to drink herself.

27 March 2011

Last night the Peter Donohoe concerts began, and I understood why I have worked so hard. Beethoven at the height of his game, flowed into every well-loved part of my soul: the magic of musician and audience – who gasped like a woman in bed – such an intimate venue. There were plenty of people, (bookings suddenly flooded in yesterday) and Donohoe didn’t bang, he sang with power, nobility, simple humanity, tenderness and dazzling ferocity, those early sonatas I know well, but I never heard them played before! He said the one emotion not expressed in Beethoven’s sonatas, is defeatism.

The puzzlement is that music or performance seems ephemeral, a one-off; yet it has this power as no other, to draw villages of souls together for a blessing which pierces turmoil and any kind of speech.

by the sea the sun – found online

28 March 2011

We heard the three Sonatas preceding the Pathetique. The last of these has a slow movement with Beethoven’s deepest thoughts and yearnings. When Peter plays the fast ones, he hurtles and bounds, much as I believe, the fiery Beethoven would have done – with splendid vocal statements, silences, humour and elasticity. It is architectural. He plays the slow movements with full sonority and depth from the key-bed, making the chords roll-break just a fraction, which resonates the bell. His technique and tool kit is precise, colour-toned and beautiful: he is a big man, he rides his mistakes, and power takes hold. His profile is good with the instrument, and so are his wide blue eyes and mature wonder. He said last month that when he practices he works, but when he performs, he learns. Each performance and its dynamic with the audience is unique.

They talked again (him and Michael White from the Telegraph) about the even-tempered piano nowadays, wherein the keys no longer have different tonal colours; but Beethoven and his colleagues would have approved of the way the instrument and its range has developed. The keys themselves have widened, so the hand stretch required is now greater. They discussed the composer’s metronome. Peter said he never bothers with it, and if he does, it plays tricks on him. The day’s living temper varies. Beethoven requests very fast metronome markings, perhaps because he inner-hears the music faster than it physically plays – just as when scanning or memorising a score; or when thinking rather than talking. My friend Paul put up his hand at the depth implication of this, and said something about the etheric field, and the borderline of the deaf or death. Randy Newman the critic told me afterwards, the Hammerklavier’s markings are impossibly fast, and then (apparently) stupendously slow in the slow movement, because when I mentioned my Solomon recording, he said Solomon took up Beethoven’s tempi spontaneously, in the Hammerklavier, and suffered his stroke immediately after.

It was all about frequency: the higher dimensions into the performer’s pulse. They discussed the sublime late Sonatas. These seemed to cadence Beethoven’s creation and look beyond – then followed his real Late period, the Quartets, Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony, the cosmic jokes in the Diabelli variations and the profoundly playful Bagatelles. He transcended dissolution. Temporal transparencies slide together enigmatically, and extend life – Peter’s side-slipping gestures. How Beethoven in such states, appeared “crazy”. I thought of Mrs T’s venue-household chaos – not unlike Beethoven’s – and how she adores him, she wishes she were his lover. So this whole noble festival and its curve, has Beethoven’s untidy and stressed out sublimity. It will command its course.

Gallery – click to view

I arrive into an insight … to let persons proceed in their own unfolding way; to assist with this only where I can, practically, and not to argue with their actions or ideas. They are learning, just as I have.

Do not put wrong lenses together. Accept and hear, and do not try to fix, or overrule.

“The whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desires to enter the way.”

At moments yesterday I perceived how aptly my task with the floors mirrors the chaotic artist element in my life: it shows me – like wood grain under varnish – my panics, terrors and scrambling against the clock – the disrespect for my person that they cause – the noble summit of the deep-end brief – the over all humanity: humane. The ability to care for my own home is evolutionary. Give it some, today.

Put lenses together which may be different, but which align truly.

Re-arrange the vehicles of consciousness, to co-ordinate always a little better with what’s given.

piano, brahms 1st piano concerto 2nd subject theme – 1969

Peter spoke last night of the adventure of a Beethoven Series, and what it means to him each time he does one – the philosophical and physical commitment to the mountain.

Peter Donohoe spoke last night of Beethoven’s profound political and philosophical awareness during a time of intense social upheaval. I said it is like this again, today (which is why it’s significant to hear Beethoven in the Highgate Red Hedgehog) but I didn’t mention Pluto in Capricorn, in case Peter thinks astrology is codswallop. He might not. There is the mystic in him, and the intelligence. He loves Messiaen, and studied under Yvonne Loriod. He was very tired yesterday, and a bit skinless. He hadn’t slept well. As he loves Messiaen, his inner world has those vast slow bird song mandalas, like Dante’s Rose in the Paradiso.

The floors begin to glow with beauty, and are admired; Peter played the Moonlight and Pastorale as always in his searching, lyrical and thrilling manner to pin-drop pause and howls of amazement in the applause. Sarah from Radio 3 pitched in for the pre-concert conversation – he likes her – and they discussed Stravinsky’s remarks during Rite of Spring, about the composer or performer being a vessel for the music. There were about 65 in the audience. Peter enjoys himself in the dialogue atmosphere. Mrs T dares to book his 13^th Beethoven cycle next year. The bamboo forest floor shines golden, and it is a concert hall, serious and serene.

11 April 2011

Beethoven was an emperor who despised Napoleon’s competing claim. As Donohoe said, his apparent arrogance was in fact, confidence not only in himself, but in the self-transcending power of his gift. Around it, effects settle and Time sets a pulse. The pulse itself gathers intention.

For my mother, the Red Hedgehog, the Beethoven and meeting Mrs T, (who wishes she could borrow her) is another adventure in human eccentricity, to dine out on. She thinks the shop front should stay as it is, because the interior oasis by contrast is fascinating to step into.

They mentioned in Saturday’s talk, that Beethoven lost nearly all his possessions during his frequent moves from lodging to lodging, but never lost the thousands of pages of his notes and musical ideas which he carried always with him. Where are these?

I spoke to Donohoe in the doorway of the Awful Bar (where he says he likes to stand), about the mandalas in Messiaen and those same flowering pulses – like Dante’s Rose – in his intelligence of Beethoven; and the control of the cyclic dance measure through all the passion; the voices and colours and accents which emerge. He agreed and was pleased. Underpinning the Beethoven cycle has been this discussion of tempi, pulse and inner and outer hearing.

The playing is titanic, and sometimes terrifying, I feared the instrument would break, the power unleashed yet just contained in that wind swept dance or circling. It must be twenty times louder than Beethoven’s day: yet Beethoven played like a fury, as well as with tenderness, and so he is invoked. Randy Newman the critic came up and said that was the worst Adieux he EVER heard. For me it was full of profound speech. The Appassionata, a waterfall of fountains, made me tremble. Opus 78, said to be Beethoven’s own favourite, is Beethoven’s warm romantic personality, face to face.

The Messianic mandalas of Peter’s performance of Beethoven – (he told me that most people don’t perceive that spiritual energy-field in Beethoven) – are magnetic. I perceive this power and its law, touching the ground.

the piano keys are grapes – 1987

Gallery – click to view

Ops 90-something and 101 were heavy in places – Peter was not quite in his stride – but the Hammerklavier was a profound and passionate reading, especially the slow movement, and the questing recitative as it floats between the keys to the fugue – through endless space – and all through the Hammerklavier the mandala inseminates all the keys, like Wagner’s chromatic Tristan. I was surprised, because I hear again and again how DIFFICULT the Hammerklavier is to play, and for people to hear … yet the whole of it is accessible, to me: how well I know it, every note! I said to Peter, I suppose I’m rather odd, he said yes you are. This work is the interior man laid bare – his thoughts, his jottings, exploring and titanic resurgence. In the fast bits, Peter tumbles through all his tempi like water in flood, like (I guess) Beethoven must have done, devouring the multiple pulse.

18 April 2011

Full house at the hedgehog last night, for Peter’s last 3 Beethovens, which he played with sublime powers. Before the music, John Suchet spoke of the original red hedgehog in Vienna, about the size of this one, and with about the same audience, and how last month at the end of a certain bad day, in the middle of 12 emails, all marked Rubbish, stood just one marked Red Hedgehog, and it opened up from there; and so here he is – and he talked with attractive enthusiasm about his hero and the Sonatas and the dreadful mishandling of beloved nephew Karl. Yet Karl survived and went to America where he produced another little Beethoven who – sadly – died in World War One.

People are too busy for commitment. So should I be, really. Too busy for commitment? For an alchemist, commitment is where I am. Commitment is my job. When Mrs T went off to the pub to debrief and dine with Peter and his wife and daughter, I had an energy lift, and tidied things up and put half the chairs away, leaving it neat and golden … and had to scramble/clamber into the locked back room through the glory hole, to retrieve my bags …

The ‘Endangered Species’ now has a great Beethoven audience, ambiance and a chatty maestro, with two colourful ladies running it and welcoming everybody. Mrs T began to remind people that she hasn’t actually got any money. Let’s hope the Last Night of the Beethovens triggers more Providence – it is an energy field. I met the hedgehog’s original financial provider, a man called M and his boyfriend. The floors shine. In league with old Beethoven in his own desperate lodgings, I rolled up my sleeves. I’m proud.

This stayed with me: Peter spoke during the master class and during the Beethoven series, on interpretation. He said that often there is too much emphasis on this, and on one’s ideas about the music. He aims to take himself out of the way, to play the notes the composer wrote – humility – and let them speak. Do not stand in front.

If you are interested in helping The Red Hedgehog in its work with music, education and the theatre, here is the link: http://www.theredhedgehog.co.uk/ . The manager is Clare Fischer.

See also my post of Timothy West at the Red Hedgehog

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.

aquariel link

Continuing this series on the Sacred India Tarot published by Yogi Impressions in November 2011.

The suit of Wands or Staves contain the soul of Agni, the sacred fire – where more so than in these two cards of destiny?

The suit of Wands/Staves denotes the play of sacred weapons; the higher transformation of war games into the martial arts.

The tragedy implicit in the Seventh card, is the old, old story: the woman is targeted. Many of us bear this redemptive burden down the centuries. Is it any wonder when we feel inexplicably tired?

Rohit’s Notes to Jane, 2003
“Card Seven is Sita Agni Parikasha – courage – she asks for it.

Visual reference for Seven of Wands/Staves

Visual reference – Ravana king of Asuras abducts Sita

Sacred India Tarot – Seven of Staves/Wands – Sita through the fire

Jane’s Notes:

In alchemical traditions, the transformative agent is the secret fire with the breath: the cooking: the warmth of the hen’s breast to hatch the egg.

“For the court cards, which documents are the photos of yourself and Rohit attached to? I do not have the Skanda document you refer to, or the photos! Regards, Jane.”

“I will send our pictures via email. Warm regards, Gautam.”

Sacred India Tarot eight of Wands – Vimana flight, Rama and Sita

This image also depicts the power of the Mantric vehicle: the way sound travels through all dimensions. See my earlier posts on Ganapati Muni’s Guru Mantra Bhashya – “Om Vacadhbuve Namaha“.

Source: Sri Ramana Gita by Ganapati Muni

Om Vacadbhuve Namah
Om Namo Bhagavate Sri Ramanaya’

sun yantra

From Rohit’s Book with the Deck:

“The insight of the card: You have abundant energy. Now set some clear goals and focus this drive to achieving them, before it fritters away in interesting distractions.

photo by giorgos tsamakdas

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.

aquariel link

Let the bundle go and lighten up! Rohit’s interpretative notes suggest this also, as do the original Rider-Waite illustrations I worked from.

The wands are miniature trees. Take just one, and look up it; dance with it …

NINE OF STAVES – from Rohit’s Notes, 2003

From Rohit Arya’s Book with the Deck

Rider Waite 9 of Wands

“Are you fed up or exhausted with the current situation? Why?
What can you do about it?”

Sacred India Tarot, 9 of Staves – Rama’s agony and suspicion of Sita

Jane’s Notes – 2015

Lord Siva on his Tao

Why is Sita’s banishment as Rohit says above, a “psychological reality”?

TEN OF STAVES – Rohit’s Notes, 2003

“This event occurs at a great fire sacrifice, a Yagnya, so the positioning of the wands should not be too problematic.”

From Rohit’s book with the Deck, 2011

http://www.templepurohit.com/yajna-or-yagna-sacred-fire-sacrificial-rituals-in-hinduism/

Sacred India Tarot Ten of Staves – The earth receives Sita

Jane’s Notes – 22 October 2003

In the previous card, the Nine of Wands, he stands on guard with self righteous dignity, wearing a purple mantle; this violet colour is now the rocky landscape in which he sits semi-naked.

Tree of Life with three Gunas, showing vedanta and western traditions

Correspondence/Feedback; Rohit, December 2003

“The Nine of wands is remarkable, we have broken out of the cliche of Rama always with a bow. This is what he must have really looked like, the power and authority he radiates is terrific.

Sagittarian inscape

For other Sacred India Tarot posts, look under Recent Posts, Search, or Archive of All Posts in the title bar.

Rohit Arya

Jane Adams

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C3TIr2bBo0 – Barenboim’s noble rendering of the Appassionata Sonata

http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Famille/FamilyTree-Minona.html#Midi

Beethoven profile – xerox of a lost sketch

Engraving of Beethoven by J.Neidl from a drawing by G.E.Stainhauser von Treuberg in 1800

The young Beethoven – after the Neidl engraving

Josephine Brunswick, her mother

Finally I began work on this:

Beethoven and his natural daughter

… and it is not finished, and cannot be, but is starting to speak.

Grief is sharp and alive with colour as in a painting, and so is joy; and life is born through dying, born through dying and letting go … again and again and again.

Photo of Minona Stakelberg

“He wanted the Quartets to be performed in the same manner as the Sonatas, for they paint states of mind, as do the majority of his Sonatas.”

Allegri quartet rehearsing, 1988

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.

aquariel link

This post continues the previous ones about Isis – to remind myself Who she is. The next post will conclude this series with Dion Fortune’s invocation of Isis as “the Sea Priestess”.

What can we do?

Here is another chapter from my “Arcanum Two” (1991, 2011):

The sea near Tintagel

What are those scattered fragments of Osiris?

When they are put back together he is brought to life.

The wholeness of OSIRIS is a dimension of which the visible shapes of his body or any of his parts are only sections in time and space across it, apparently disparate.

The Eye of RA, the primordial SUN, is this hieroglyph for the eagle HORUS, the Oudja: “The Right Eye of the Supreme Being is the Sun, and his Left Eye is the Moon.”

Letter Gimel – wheatsheaf

The letters BEIT and GIMEL echo but are not quite the same as the Firmament which is silence.

* *

Who cast the first stone?

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her,” said Jesus scribbling vaguely on the ground when the elders all crowded indignantly round the repentant prostitute and asked what to do.

It is natural to be tired, and to let Isis, the oceanic subconscious, sink back into the tide: to breathe in and out; to sleep and wake.

quantock trees

“Abidance in the Void is firmness.”

Ramana – my earliest complete sketch of him

The Mother of God
I have one more small point to investigate in the interest of these Horns of Isis. My diversions into malleable symbolic history are as satisfying as writing poetry. As follows:

Two horns on the head of Isis are creation’s curve, the binary of two poles which carry the current.

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.

aquariel link

Mother Isis of the Moon, 2015

Dion Fortune in 1927

Mudras – builders of Avalon 2003

hearth fire, salamanders

“Then slowly Great Isis turned, and drew Her veil closer about Her, and She went down the long sea-lane out towards the west, the fog closing in behind Her.

Harbour, 1987

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.

aquariel link

janeadamsart:

Reblogged from my gene keys journal – A midsummer portrait gallery – representing some sources of higher inspiration in humanity. The sketch of the Baal Shem Tav (see below) came about one day in 2002 when there was an argument going on upstairs in my house: when I left it and went downstairs I felt a “thickening” in the air, like cream, as if it came in through the window. I got out my sketch pad, and the Rabbi of Joy sprang forth with his strong blue eyes. Other portraits were the fruit of my tentative trial-and-error contact with the upper and inner worlds.

All the Great Masters are the One. Their different facial expressions are the way we perceive them and their teaching, through the clouds. There is a spectrum of relationship and commitment. As Dion Fortune has written, we first ‘imagine’ and then we ‘will to be there.’

Originally posted on Journal with Gene Keys:

Gene Keys Journal, 20 June 2015

For all of us who tune in to the opening of the Seven Seals retreat this summer solstice: a gallery of my portraits of the Great Holy Council and some Companions of the Light.

Click on any of them to see the gallery, then click on “view full size” individually.

The Rabbi of Joy – Baal Shem Tav

With love, Jane

View original 5 more words

Beethoven at Zum Roten Igel

Last week, I got very excited about this link:

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/beethoven-guest-blogger/

Here, Elene explores a musician friend’s contact with Beethoven, comparing it to her own subtle relation with him and with Chopin.

The Pluto Venus Capricorn glyph in this drawing speaks to me of the master’s depth and tenderness.

Here is one of my efforts to sketch him yesterday – the young Beethoven, from the Hornemann portrait 1802: before his deafness and at the height of his performing powers.

This drawing was done perhaps in the 1970s: the older man bends close to the keys in his struggle to hear.

Beethoven plays

When I was a child we lived in a farmhouse with a large attic. Exploring up there, I found this cobwebbed photo of a painting by Franz Stvk. I have it still.

Here are my earlier sketches of Beethoven, and their sources:

beethoven on a walk

Beethoven at work

This portrait was inspired by Batt’s drawing (below) in the Oxford Companion to Music.

Gallery: Beethoven by Batt, Klein, Stvk and von Kloeber

Beethoen in later life

More early studies – I made his forehead much higher than it really was. Beethoven’s brow had a noble, rounded breadth.

Beethoven after the painting by F.Schimon

These two pages are from a journal in 1969, quoting Schindler’s visit to the master when he was composing the Missa Solemnis Credo.

And … within the cosmos of the late Quartets –

piano action

Instrument. This is actually my father’s Petrof piano, as I have not yet photographed Emily’s.

TO BE CONTINUED – my new attempts to draw Beethoven, and some more impressions.

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.

aquariel link

Continuing this “Beethoven series” inspired by Elene’s researches : this post includes some journaling over the weekend, and portraits of the master by others, and from my new sketches.

First: a detail from my “watershed” series of dreams during the 1970s:

The young child Beethoven?
portrait by an unknown artist, discovered in 1972
and … how might he have looked?

Beethoven on a walk … Pastorale

Autograph MSS, op. 111, http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=&template=dokseite_digitales_archiv_en&_dokid=ha:wm33&_seite=1

Journal 24 July – Beethoven and Vera
He really is around … two new followers to my blog, who write about him and about pianos – did they come in through Vera Moore?

Strings and hammers – detail from a larger painting

Beethoven walk: by Julius Schmid

Klein, Franz / Micheli: Beethoven-Maske mit Lorbeerkranz, nach der Lebendmaske von Klein

I read somewhere that Liszt could draw forth the heart and soul from an out-of-tune instrument and captivate his listeners. There must be a way of using those odd sounds.

Vera Moore in the 1930s – from Winifred Nicolson’s painting of her. Search ‘vera moore’ on this blog, for my two posts about her.

I do prefer old uneven character pianos to the mechanically-perfect electronic keyboards. You can hear straight away, even through a high open window.

A sketch of Beethoven in his teens. This one ‘works’ for me – and took just a few minutes.

Here is a timely message from a fellow blogger:

“When everything that you have experienced
is located in one place
you are
finally
‘One with Everything’.”

Gallery, working from Kloeber and Carolsfeld’s portraits
– click to view

Gallery – click to view

Gallery

Helen Ede in 1974, on my last visit to her. She is knitting a sock for ‘Old Bonesie’, my grandfather. Through the window in Jordan Lane, you could see the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh

We spoke together about the Arietta in his Opus 111 – after listening to her old record of Claudio Arrau playing it. Her face lit up: I cannot reproduce her voice, but she said something like this:

“Ochh Jane,” says my grandmother in her Scottish-German accent, “Oh what a sight to see.”

Claudio Arrau 1986: from the record sleeve of Opus 111

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.

aquariel link

Beethoven at Zum Roten Igel in London

Here are some of my impressions of the Beethoven series from my journal – illustrated with my sketches of Peter giving a master-class a month before the Beethoven series.

20 February 2011

Gallery – click to view

21 February 2011

Franz Liszt and daemons

24 February 2011

THE SCRUB AND SANDING

22 March

Movements of God are funny.

Photos of my work – I didn’t take any ‘before’ pix!

23 March 2011

27 March 2011

by the sea the sun – found online

28 March 2011

Gallery – click to view

Do not put wrong lenses together. Accept and hear, and do not try to fix, or overrule.

“The whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desires to enter the way.”

Put lenses together which may be different, but which align truly.

Re-arrange the vehicles of consciousness, to co-ordinate always a little better with what’s given.

piano, brahms 1st piano concerto 2nd subject theme – 1969

Peter spoke last night of the adventure of a Beethoven Series, and what it means to him each time he does one – the philosophical and physical commitment to the mountain.

11 April 2011

the piano keys are grapes – 1987

Gallery – click to view

18 April 2011

If you are interested in helping The Red Hedgehog in its work with music, education and the theatre, here is the link: http://www.theredhedgehog.co.uk/ . The manager is Clare Fischer.

See also my post of Timothy West at the Red Hedgehog

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.

aquariel link

Continuing this series on the Sacred India Tarot published by Yogi Impressions in November 2011.

The suit of Wands or Staves contain the soul of Agni, the sacred fire – where more so than in these two cards of destiny?

The suit of Wands/Staves denotes the play of sacred weapons; the higher transformation of war games into the martial arts.

The tragedy implicit in the Seventh card, is the old, old story: the woman is targeted. Many of us bear this redemptive burden down the centuries. Is it any wonder when we feel inexplicably tired?

Rohit’s Notes to Jane, 2003
“Card Seven is Sita Agni Parikasha – courage – she asks for it.

Visual reference for Seven of Wands/Staves

Visual reference – Ravana king of Asuras abducts Sita

Sacred India Tarot – Seven of Staves/Wands – Sita through the fire

Jane’s Notes:

In alchemical traditions, the transformative agent is the secret fire with the breath: the cooking: the warmth of the hen’s breast to hatch the egg.

“For the court cards, which documents are the photos of yourself and Rohit attached to? I do not have the Skanda document you refer to, or the photos! Regards, Jane.”

“I will send our pictures via email. Warm regards, Gautam.”

Sacred India Tarot eight of Wands – Vimana flight, Rama and Sita

This image also depicts the power of the Mantric vehicle: the way sound travels through all dimensions. See my earlier posts on Ganapati Muni’s Guru Mantra Bhashya – “Om Vacadhbuve Namaha“.

Source: Sri Ramana Gita by Ganapati Muni

Om Vacadbhuve Namah
Om Namo Bhagavate Sri Ramanaya’

sun yantra

From Rohit’s Book with the Deck:

“The insight of the card: You have abundant energy. Now set some clear goals and focus this drive to achieving them, before it fritters away in interesting distractions.

photo by giorgos tsamakdas

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.

aquariel link

Sacred India Tarot Archive – Creation of Seven and Eight of Wands

Sacred India Tarot Archive – Creation of 9 and 10 of Staves/Wands

Sketches of Beethoven and Minona

Why does Isis have Horns?

Mysteries of Isis, part 8 – the Wholeness of Osiris

Mysteries of Isis 9 – the Hearth-Fire and the Sea

Human Landscape – Masters on the Seven Rays

Human Landscape – Sketches of Beethoven

More Sketches of Beethoven

2011 – Beethoven at the Red Hedgehog

Sacred India Tarot Archive – Creation of Seven and Eight of Wands

Sacred India Tarot Archive – Creation of 9 and 10 of Staves/Wands

Sketches of Beethoven and Minona

Mysteries of Isis, part 8 – the Wholeness of Osiris

Mysteries of Isis 9 – the Hearth-Fire and the Sea

Human Landscape – Masters on the Seven Rays

Human Landscape – Sketches of Beethoven

More Sketches of Beethoven

2011 – Beethoven at the Red Hedgehog

Sacred India Tarot Archive – Creation of Seven and Eight of Wands