Alchemy – Traou an Dour

I Met Faraday’s Ghost

Way back in the last century, 1985-88, I was accustomed to doing research with lasers in a pitch black laboratory in the bowels of The Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, Mayfair. There were noisy pumps and a 20Hz click of an excimer laser firing. One could drift off into one’s own world.

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In the basement there was a museum to the likes of Faraday and Davy who had revolutionised modern science there. My laboratory was “next door” to that of Faraday though separated in time by a century or two.

Back then, in Faraday’s time, on mainland Europe if you pissed off the Pope there was a lot at stake, perhaps literally.

Competition for the minds of men between science and organised religion was game on. People like Newton and Faraday probably had access to things like I posted in the previous post. Alchemy was not all about bullion and proper chemistry, as we know it today, was in its infancy. Esoteric science may well have influenced the more socially acceptable infant exoteric sciences. There was less chance of incarceration or excommunication for exoteric stuff. Occult meant to burn in hell, deal with the devil and not to see clearly that which is veiled.

Arab optics and Jewish Kabbalah were frontier sciences. There was no Netflix, Instagram or YouTube so people had to exercise their minds in other ways. There were no satellites or 3D printing. People had to settle for 2D drawings. People still loved the classics, laughing and grief, Latin and Greek.

As a student one is often up for a ruse. We would spread rumours of having heard Faraday walking the basement corridors. Then at night when everyone else had gone home, we would sneak up on an individual, eyes fixated on a computer screen, in the darkened basement. Then we would tap them on the shoulder in order to induce cardiac arrest and a swift need for a clean pair of trousers. At one stage or another pretty much everyone in our group had “fright night”.

I am pretty sure that I met Faraday’s ghost on several occasions…only in my case it was not a fellow student having a laugh….

Quotations

Some Rosicrucian Research

From AMORC Web Site:

Early European Beginnings

It was in the time of Charlemagne (742-814) that the French philosopher Arnaud introduced the mystical teachings into France, and from there they spread to much of Western Europe. Throughout medieval Europe mystical knowledge was often necessarily couched in symbolism or disguised and hidden in the love songs of Troubadours, the formularies of Alchemists, the symbolical system known as the Qabala, and the rituals of Orders of Knighthood.

While much of medieval Europe lay in darkness, the highly advanced Arab civilization preserved a large body of the mystical teachings through texts translated directly from the great libraries of the ancient world, such as Egypt’s Alexandria Library. Philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and alchemy were all important subjects preserved in these libraries and later transmitted to Europe by way of the Arabs.

Alchemy—the art of transmutation—came into prominence with the Alexandrian Greeks. It was then introduced to the Arabs, who then transmitted this art and forerunner of chemistry to Europe. The alchemists played a tremendous part in the early history of the Rosicrucian Order. While many alchemists were interested in making gold, some were more concerned with the transmutation of human character. European alchemists and Knights Templar, in contact with the Arab civilization at the time of the Crusades, brought much of this wisdom to the West. In Europe the transcendental alchemists—mystics and philosophers—sought to transmute the base elements of human character into the more noble virtues and to release the wisdom of the divine self within the individual. Some of the renowned alchemists who were also Rosicrucians or were closely associated with them were Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Cagliostro, Nicholas Flamel, and Robert Fludd.

As the old saying goes, “The truth shall make you free.” Consequently, those who sought Truth and attempted to expound it to their fellow humans became the objects of persecution by tyrannical rulers or narrow religious systems. For several centuries, due to the lack of freedom of thought, the Order had to conceal itself under various names. However, in all times and places the Order never ceased its activities, perpetuating its ideals and its teachings, participating directly or indirectly in the advancement of the arts, sciences, and civilization in general, and always emphasizing the equality of men and women and the true solidarity of all humanity.

As the Renaissance burst upon Europe with a flash of new interest in the arts and sciences, a mysterious publication printed in 17th-century Germany and called the Fama Fraternitatis heralded a renewed interest in Rosicrucianism throughout Europe. The Fama introduces Christian Rosenkreuz, a mythical character who was said to have traveled to centers of learning in the Near East and who personified the revived interest in esoteric studies and mystical learning.

As part of this great renewal, the renowned Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, and statesman, directed the Rosicrucian Order and its activities both in England and on the continent.

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Crossing the Atlantic

In the late seventeenth century, following a plan originally proposed by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis, a colony of Rosicrucian leaders was organized to establish the Rosicrucian arts and sciences in America. In 1694 Rosicrucian settlers made the perilous journey across the Atlantic Ocean in a specially chartered vessel, the Sarah Maria, under the leadership of Johannes Kelpius, master of a Rosicrucian Lodge in Europe. Landing in Philadelphia, the colonists established their first settlement and later moved further west in Pennsylvania to Ephrata. These Rosicrucian communities made valuable contributions to the newly emerging American culture in the fields of printing, philosophy, the sciences and arts. Later such eminent Americans as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine were intimately connected with the Rosicrucian community. In fact, many Rosicrucians played an important role in the great alchemical and social process leading to the founding of a new nation.

Throughout history, there have been periods of greater and lesser activity of Rosicrucianism around the world. While inactive in the Americas during the 19th century, the Order was very active in France, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Spain, and other lands during this time.

In 1909 the American businessman and philosopher, H. Spencer Lewis, journeyed to France, where he was duly initiated into the Rosicrucian Order and chartered with the responsibility of renewing Rosicrucian activity in America. With H. Spencer Lewis as its president, the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC, was incorporated in 1915 in New York City. In 1927 the Order moved its headquarters to San Jose, California—the site of present-day Rosicrucian Park.

Over the past 90 years hundreds of thousands of people have been students of the Rosicrucian teachings. From the beginning, both men and women have played an equal role in the Rosicrucian Order, without regard to religion or race.

Throughout history a number of prominent persons in the fields of science and the arts have been associated with the Rosicrucian movement, such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Cornelius Heinrich Agrippa (1486-1535), Paracelsus (1493-1541), François Rabelais (1494-1553), Theresa of Avila (1515-1582), John of the Cross (1542-1591), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Robert Fludd (1574-1637), Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), René Descartes (1596-1650), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Michael Faraday (1791-1867), Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919), Marie Corelli (1855-1924), Claude Debussy (1862-1918), Erik Satie (1866-1925), and Edith Piaf (1916-1963).

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Did Faraday have access to these Rosicrucian symbols? The timing is good.

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ॐ, Cause & Effect, Climate Change, Esoteric, Esoteric Psychology, Karma, Magic, Musings, New Age, Quotations, Rāja yoga, Vision, Yoga

Training for the Incoming Ray: Ceremonial Order or Magic – Synthesis

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“The Seventh Ray of Ceremonial Order or Magic

Special Virtues:

Strength, perseverance, courage, courtesy, extreme care in details, self-reliance.

Vices of Ray:

Formalism, bigotry, pride, narrowness, superficial judgments, self-opinion over-indulged.

Virtues to be acquired:

Realization of unity, wide-mindedness, tolerance, humility, gentleness and love.

This is the ceremonial ray, the ray which makes a man delight in “all things done decently and in order,” and according to rule and precedent. It is the ray of the high priest and the court chamberlain, of the soldier who is a born genius in organization, of the ideal commissary general who will dress and feed the troops in the best possible way. It is the ray of the perfect nurse for the sick, careful in the smallest detail, though sometimes too much inclined to disregard the patients idiosyncrasies and to try and grind them in the iron mill of routine.

It is the ray of form, of the perfect sculptor, who sees and produces ideal beauty, of the designer of beautiful forms and patterns of any sort; but such a man would not be successful as a painter unless his influencing ray were the fourth. The combination of four with seven would make the very highest type of artist, form and color being both in excelsis. The literary work of the seventh ray man would be remarkable for its ultra-polished style, and such a writer would think far more of the manner than of the matter in his work but would always be fluent both in writing and speech. The seventh ray man will often be sectarian. He will delight in fixed ceremonials and observances, in great processions and shows, in reviews of troops and warships, in genealogical trees, and in rules of precedence.”

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As I may have mentioned before my personality ray is ray seven. If you look closely you will be able to see the influence in the blog content.

The incoming ray is this ray ceremonial order or magic. Inherent in this is a major challenge for humanity, which so often is disorganised and in disarray. Winging it, is not seventh ray. The seventh ray may be précised as “the ray of having your shit together”. This is a long way from higgledy-piggledy and in some ways anti-hippie but in other ways it is the ray, par excellence, of natural rhythm. Everything should be in synch and on time with natural law and rhythm.

Yes, ritual traditional magic, craft, and mantra are a part, but only a small one.

Organisation, vivification, and energising are what proper order brings. An organism needs to organise and carry out its given physical plane learning. Karma can be thought of as residual “shit” that you have to deal with. Hence in working off your shit you get your shit together, less new karma, debt paid off.

Many people resist being organised and have never experienced the slick and the smooth of all cogs working in unison. People who are self-obsessed are separative and do not view themselves as part of the holistic whole. ME is a luddite spanner in the works. It causes discordance and discord, dis-chord, the sound jars.

The challenge of the incoming ray is to eradicate this notion of self and alchemize it into the holistic-whole, or ONE. The one humanity.

To say to a sloppy ill disciplined person, who is fond of the weird and the whacky, that they need to have their shit together is to ask for resistance.

“Hey man, that is not New Age!”

“Yes, it is! Get a haircut and pull up your trousers. You need to focus and stop being so dissipated!”

If one meanders and only cherry picks the easy fruit off the tree of teaching, then one will not taste the golden apples higher up the tree, which need more and continued effort to attain. Many choose only those teachings that are strap-on to normal life. Few want radical change. One could say people want to keep their cherry pie and eat it.

The seventh ray is also the ray of constant evolution and application. This is because Synthesis takes new learning and incorporates it with the knowledge heretofore garnered. Knowledge is never complete, because of constant synthesis one could say that knowing is a present participle synonym of evolving, knowledge relates to evolution. True knowledge cannot ever be concrete and finished.

Synthesis is an antithesis of Idealism and Devotion, the departing sixth ray. Sixth ray separates, cleaves and divides, seventh ray heals, stitches the rent wounds of division and stirs its synthetic pot of alchemy in search of the new.

The seventh ray is unlike the division with which our current world is so very badly scarred!!

It is time to synthesise and not cleave, the synthetic cauldron of inspiration must overcome the axe of cleavage.

Magic, Prophecy, Quotations

Taliesin – a lit up Anja centre

Extracted from “Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain – an exploration of the Mabinogion”

By Caitlin Matthews and published by Arkana (Penguin)

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In the days of Arthur there lived a man called Tegid Foel and his wife Ceridwen. Their daughter Creirwry, was the most beautiful maiden, but their son Morfran (Great Crow) was so ugly that he was nicknamed Afagddu (Utter Darkness). In order to compensate for his appearance, Ceridwen prepared a cauldron of inspiration so that he might be possessed of prophetic insight and secret knowledge. This was distilled from numerous herbs and plants, and the cauldron was to be kept boiling for a year and a day. She set Gwion Bach, son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Powys, to stir it and an old man, Morda, to tend the fire under it. Near the end of the year, three drops flew out of the boiling cauldron and fell on Gwion’s finger. To cool the scald, he put his fingers in his mouth and so received the inspiration intended for Morfran. The cauldron burst in two, since the remainder of its contents were poisonous, the liquor flowed into a stream, and so the horses of Gwyddno Garanhir were poisoned.

Perceiving Ceridwen’s wrath, Gwion fled in the shape of a hare, but Ceridwen followed as a greyhound. He became a fish, she an otter. He turned into a bird, she changed into a hawk; finally he fell from the sky into a pile of wheat, becoming a grain himself, but Ceridwen became a hen and swallowed him. He was born of her womb nine months later. So great was his beauty that she did not kill him, but set him adrift in a coracle on 29th of April.

Gwyddno’s son, Elphin, was a spendthrift courtier in the service of King Maelgwn. His luck and fortunes were so bad that his father allowed him to go and catch the salmon which were annually caught in the weir on May Eve: their value was £100. He saw nothing but a coracle. Opening its leather wrappings, he exclaimed, “Behold the radiant brow” (tal-iesin) – and so the child was named. The child sang to Elphin, consoling him for the loss of the salmon and prophesying that what he had found would be worth far more. When asked who he was, Taliesin sang of his transformations. Elphin’s fortunes improved, and the child was given to his wife to nurse.

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In a lengthy poem Taliesin explained in prophetic and analeptic verse his true nature: he had been existent since the creation of the world, present at all its works; he knew all knowledge; he should be until the end of the world…..

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Taliesin was brought before Maelgwn to sing of the creation. He sang of Adam and Eve, of the Fall, the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice. He sang of the fate of Troy’s descendants, the invasion of the Saxons, the servitude of the Britons, and of their final liberation.

ॐ, Esoteric, Quotations

Comte de Saint Germain and Mayavi-rupa

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From Wikipédia

Le comte de Saint-Germain, né probablement entre 1690 et 1710 (en 1691 selon la légende) et mort le 27 février 1784 à Eckernförde, est un aventurier du XVIIIe siècle, musicien, peintre et polyglotte, réputé alchimiste.

Personnage mystérieux entouré de légendes, la tradition alchimique lui attribue la paternité de l’œuvre ésotérique La Très Sainte Trinosophie. Réputé immortel, il a inspiré de nombreuses œuvres littéraires et artistiques jusqu’à nos jours.

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Potentiel descendant caché de quelque personnalité royale

Sa naissance n’a pu être conjecturée que sur la base de quelques témoignages épars, dont celui de son ami le prince Frédéric II de Hesse-Cassel, qui laissent supposer qu’il était l’enfant illégitime, né en 1696, du prince François II Rákóczi de Transylvanie et de la princesse Violante-Béatrice de Bavière, de la maison de Wittelsbach, épouse (veuve en 1713) de Ferdinand de Médicis, prince de Florence et qu’il fut élevé à Florence par le grand-duc de Toscane Jean-Gaston de Médicis, beau-frère de la seconde. Quoi qu’il en soit, certains virent en lui le descendant caché de quelque personnalité royale, et dans cette filiation supposée la raison de son intimité avec le roi Louis XV. Ainsi a-t-on pu également reconnaître en lui l’enfant naturel de la reine d’Espagne Marie-Anne de Neubourg, et d’un noble, le comte de Melgar. Ces liens de parenté, dont aucun n’est avéré, expliqueraient le train de vie aisé qu’il a toujours mené, son éducation et sa culture. En effet, outre ses connaissances certaines en chimie, Saint-Germain est reconnu par ses contemporains comme un homme de très grand savoir, musicien habile et peintre de qualité.

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Un laboratoire d’alchimie au château de Chambord

Résidant à Londres, où il brille dans les salons comme musicien, Saint-Germain est arrêté comme espion jacobite, en 1743. Il quitte la capitale britannique en 1746, et on perd sa trace pendant 12 ans. Pour certains, il se retire en Allemagne où il se consacre à ses recherches chimiques et alchimiques. Pour d’autres, il voyage jusqu’en Inde et au Tibet : aucune preuve de ces périples n’est avancée, mais on constate plus tard, en effet, que le comte a une profonde connaissance de l’Orient. Arrivé à Paris au début de 1758, sur les instances du maréchal de Belle-Isle, adepte enthousiaste de son élixir de longue vie, il écrit aussitôt à Marigny, directeur des Bâtiments du Roi, en déclarant : « J’ai fait dans mes terres la plus riche et la plus rare découverte qu’on ait encore faite. J’y ai fait travailler avec une assiduité, une constance, une patience qui n’ont peut-être pas d’exemple, pendant près de vingt ans. » Il conclut avec cette requête assortie d’une promesse : « L’objet de tant de soins obtenu, je viens volontairement en offrir le profit au Roi, mes seuls frais déduits, sans lui demander autre chose que la disposition libre d’une des maisons royales, propre à établir les gens que j’ai amenés d’Allemagne pour mon service », sur quoi Marigny lui attribue le château de Chambord, alors inhabité. Saint-Germain installe ses assistants, ses ouvriers et son laboratoire dans les communs. Pourtant, il est plus souvent à Paris qu’à Chambord. Il se fait présenter à la marquise de Pompadour, qui l’introduit auprès du roi Louis XV. Celui-ci apprécie immédiatement le brillant personnage qui, très vite, devient l’un de ses familiers.

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I have read accounts whereby this gentleman appears to have loads of jewels and to manifest without the use of doors. He is the 7^th ray master, par excellence. He is still “around” some three hundred years later and a major part of the hierarchical effort.

If he as a Master has the ability to project a Mayavi-rupa vehicle there would be no need for him to use doors. With such control, he could manifest gemstones at will. The 7^th ray is the ray of the Alchemist.

People interpret immortality as the physical body living forever. Immortality means not being mortal, not reincarnating and therefore never “dying” again. If there is no causal vehicle mortality has ended.

Who would want to keep a worn out vehicle for centuries? Strange logic…