Labyrinth and Rose Cross
Part 4 in the “Isis” series. This Meditation on the Virgo constellation and the Gothic art was written in 1992. It is from my book “The Masters’ Eye” – inspired by Louis Charpentier’s “The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral” (R.I.L.K.O.)
Contact me if you would like a copy of “The Masters’ Eye”. I produce it from home (275 pages) but might be able to turn it into an ebook.
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roof, chartres
In the House of God, the Cross represents the IAM (AHAM in sanskrit, AHIEH in hebrew) or AIM of Solomon’s temple. It was laid sky to ground-plan for the Common Era; in the cruciform shape of nave and transepts.
The horizontal beam of the Cross is warp and weft of the great picture of the universe. On this loom is strung the imaging or spectrum of the five senses: our body and terrain of perception.
The vertical beam, soaring limitlessly Above as Below, and effulgent through the sensory fabric, is the essence of our Self. Its spectrum, like Siva’s fiery column, transcends the narrow horizontal band of the senses and their story of space and time. We see higher and lower octaves of the same instrument. (Link to “Cathedral Building“)
Essentially, the horizontal beam manifests time and space. The vertical beam intersects this tapestry at any given point of life, as cognition or awareness, before and after birth and death, and in the depth of dreamless sleep. It is anterior to the ‘evidence’ it illumines. It brings into play our hidden dimension.
The heart of the Cross is a fluid point of stillness wherein the two planes meet. They create upon each other a factor of vital resistance: the birth of an evolutionary consciousness. The vertical beam is masculine, the Creative potential; and the horizontal is feminine, the balancing inertia or momentum: (or rajas, tamas, whose “balance” is sattva.) In the ground-plan of the Cathedral, the vertical is laid along the meridian west to east, Earth’s rotation to sunrise.** The horizontal crosses it, south and north, as do the Pillars of Solomon, to uphold the cosmic temple.
**Sunrise, itself motionless to the rotating surface of Earth, is “outside time”. Sunrise encircles our local measure and engirdles Earth. To the Temple plan, sunrise is the metaphysical centre of gravity, or “sky” unchanging
So we have first the creative principle, the idea upon the ground, a map or sacred diagram laid out along our axis of sunrise. From this arises the actual fabric, like a plant: the Tree of Life’s integrity on the columns of Jakin and Bohaz. The equilibrating of active and passive “poles” of construction, manifests this principle. A draft sketch is translated into an arch, a portal of height, breadth and depth. It manifests for us in three dimensions.
Paradoxically, the visible, audible and tangible, is a worldly cross-section through the numinously unseen. The grace and proportion of the building, altering the consciousness that enters it, is an echo only of the Light which was its inspiration. It is the ripple or projection upon the sensory field, of all time, all space, and simultaneously it is neither.
Nowadays, a hologram is created by projecting laser beams to cross each other at right angles. An image is created in space when the mutual-interference pattern of their rays precisely fits. Upon this principle the perceptible universe is strung, and sustained. The same image-ing of three dimensions, from the galactic to the miniature, will manifest an apparently solid picture of reality, wherever you cut through the projection. You pass your hand through empty air, and yet the picture remains, like a standwave.
The same applies to apparently impregnable infrastructures of our mind, emotions, karmic dragons, and sorrows of life. What are these really? Who holds the lamp which illumines the inner space, like clear sky?
The Cathedral is a projection onto the physical plane, of a “hologrammatic” revelation, achieved by cross-fertilising or marrying that plane with its numinous perpendicular, in sacred geometry.
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In twelfth century gothic art – (Fulcanelli’s argot or art-gothique, the slang of the Philosophers’ Stone) – the Knights of the Temple did not depict the Crucifixion. Their true Cross is in the natural ground-plan of heaven to Earth, as drawn with a circle round it by stake and string. This circumscribed cross is also an ancient form of the Hebrew letter TAV, which signifies completion.
The Christ, an ancient, immanent, unfathomable mystery uplifted in stone and earth, is in the Templars’ sanctuaries Un-crucified. The body of nave and transepts lies upon Earth to receive Heaven. This follows the law of mandala and yantra construction, which diagram the laws of tree growth. The holy Spirit so earthed, engages with the commodity of the world. And the gothic Temples to Notre Dame in northern France represent each a star in the Virgin constellation, as laid out over the land.
The real meaning of “the Virgin” is “she who is ripe”.
At the time of harvest she is the fruitful womb, receptacle for implantation, one that is in readiness. The Spirit is seeded deep into matter, into the cave or oracle of Earth – the grain, the bread of life. In an earlier age, Our Lady was Isis of Egypt who reunited the fragments of the body of Osiris into his wholeness or Divinity. She has her counterpart in Hindu cosmology as Parvati, Mother of the universe, Daughter of the Mountain, shakti power of manifestation and abundance. In Greece she was known as Demeter and as Ceres, from whom the grain sprouts.
Her Knights, being Hospitallers or Guardians of the Sanctuary (routes of pilgrimage) enlisted in the early part of the twelfth century Common Era, the support of the Church, whom they funded. They made an offer which could not be refused, to build Houses of God. Their spiritual sponsor was the great Benedictine Bernard of Clairvaux.
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But these Knights were not mere Crusaders. They were messengers of Great Mikael, archangelic slayer of Dragons clerical as well as secular: who, looking deep into the dark dense coil of Baphomet, liberates and raises up the Light – as consciousness. A hundred years or so later, the Church, frightened of their rival power, accused them of devil worship and burnt them at the stake.
Here, time as a Great Circle clashed with linear or ‘tick tock’ time. By then the Knights had seeded a number of soaring Temples of Light into the soil of Mother Earth in northern France; and more were undoubtedly planned to fill and peg down the entire constellation; the vessel for the Divine Child. The Black Death followed their demise as an Order, fragmenting time, space and continuity. The Black Death flowed around the gothic sanctuaries which transcended it.
“Gothic” is a strange word, as handed down to us, for it has acquired paradoxical resonances of horror, caricature and over-elaboration – I believe this is due to the plague’s shocking spectre in our deep cellular and racial memory.
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The Order reappeared several generations later as a Rosy Cross fraternity, and from about the seventeenth century onward, was reorganised into the Degrees of freemasonry.
From the fertile soil or compost of the Black Death, had sprouted a strange Renaissance flower – Botticelli’s Aphrodite – and the later cultivation of a deductive science to investigate and ravish her.
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Hokhmah and Nezach on the Tree
I find a resonance or echo here with the birth of Aphrodite in greek mythology, from the castration of Uranus the god of Revelation. In those legendary dreams, Uranus, the Sky of Stars, lay with Gaea, Earth. Gaea grew tired of the incessant titans Uranus begot on her, and called on their young son Chronos – meaning cycles of Time and therefore limitation – to do the job. The procreative organ of Uranus fell into the sea. It stirred up a titanic froth on the wave, from which emerged the comely figure of Aphrodite, goddess of Desire, pulse of nature’s beauty, and of attraction.
In the geographical solar system, the polar tilt of both Venus and Uranus inclines at a virtual right-angle to that of the other planetary bodies. Mercury, Terra, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto all rotate more or less, west/east. The rotational spin of Venus and Uranus is north/south, almost into the plane of their orbits.
That innocence, inner science, or in-formed awareness of their association is shown in the ancient myths, whose Masters possessed no measure more than their ear to the ground.
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From “Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral” by Louis Charpentier:
“The currents in old Earth are numerous and various, but here at Chartres we are concerned with one that is especially sacred, capable of awakening a man to the spiritual life. The DIVINE is born here, and no material influence may be allowed to trouble or destroy it. The Hill of Chartres must not be polluted. That is why, among all the french Cathedrals, Chartres is the only one in which no king, cardinal or bishop is interred. The Hill must remain virgin.”
This paragraph declares the Resurrection of the Christ. Here there is no merely dead seed. The telluric pulse at Chartres is particularly potent. Here under the Mound in ages past, was enthroned a Black Virgin, Our-Lady-under-the-Earth, as a focus for pilgrimage and inner purification. She is our subconscious, so she is the ageless Isis, Demeter, Belisima.
Scorpio & Virgo glyphs: phallus and womb
The currents in old earth – like the mesh of chorionic villi, those tiny vessels and fibres of lifeblood which embed the embryo in the lining of the maternal womb – are the same subtle meridians of the Dragon or Serpent energy which flow along the leylines. In the landscape, as in our body, these are gathered and released or contained at acupunctural power-points – (see in Charpentier’s work, and below, the map of Virgo Our Lady of the Constellation in France) – to invoke Archangel Mikael’s protection, and for gestation.
These ageless foci of authority or power, are condensers. They are dolmens or druidic circles of stones. They became towers, temples and churches to Michael and Maria, the Guardian and the Mother of God. The Michael and Mary leyline in England runs from the eastern part of the country through Ogbourne St George in Wiltshire through Avebury and Stonehenge, Glastonbury and a succession of tumps, mounds and chapels across Sedgemoor, Devon and Cornwall to St Michael’s Mount in the bay of Penzance. A friend I visited in Ogbourne, where George slew the dragon of Albion, has a well inside her house sunk deep into this Line. Her guests have interesting dreams at night.
To “slay” or pierce the Dragon, harnesses its creative strength. It can be tamed and trained to become a strong and willing servant or alliance to the higher power. This corresponds to the Karmic “leyline” of tendency (ascending and descending Lunar nodes, known as the Head and Tail of the dragon) in our astrological maps. Where the Moon’s orbit around the Earth crosses the path of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, these are the Lunar nodes.
The Knight is the seer., The Dragon is his personal attachment to the mortal coil to master. The Dragon, as electric current in the copper wire, is coiled around a MAGNET, the treasure of the Source, our inner elixir.
1992
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My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.
This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.
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