A symbolic representation of

the Holy Blood lineage

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is composed of 2 selections from the stand-alone & idiosyncratic essays of Elvezia Gazzotti, a.k.a. Lotus Peralté, better known under her pseudonym of ‘Lotus de Paini’, excerpted from her main works we have gathered at our study-library.

The first selection is from ‘Les Trois Totémisations’-1924- page 142 to 144 & 150 to 151; the second selection is from her 1914 study upon Wagner’s opera Parsifal, from page 64 to 72.

Coming soon, A Little LOTUS DE PAINI Sampler – Part VI will be a continuation of ‘Women and the Mysteries‘ as initiated in part IV.

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Selection number 1.

 ‘Les Trois Totémisations’-1924, page 142 to 144 & 150 to 151.

Excerpts from Chapter IX – Blood and The Mask

At the dawn (of humanity), everything was accomplished in BLOOD. Physical suffering did not exist, due precisely to the exclusively psychic constitution of beings, beings with a great halo of sensitive antennas radiating outside their bodies. This intense exteriority made these beings corporeally insensitive.

Blood, in all magic, was the essential element. Saturated with the intense psyche of the creature, it streamed with living germs, elemental sap, ‘effluences‘ that powerfully fertilized. The Eskimos of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay speak of these effluences when they say: ‘the souls of the animals of the sea are endowed with a greater power than ordinary souls. They are ‘visionary’ and can see the effect of human blood which flows and from which rises a vapor that surrounds the bleeding person, (a vapor) which communicates itself to everyone and everything that comes into contact with that person’. (Bulletin of the American Museum of natural History XV. pt. i (1901), p. 119).

The farther one moves away from historical times, the deeper one plunges into the fabulous distances, consequently the more blood has its original, metamorphosing savor. In those distant mists, blood is a very warm sap that mingles with the elemental force, essentially receptive and plastic, of the being enveloped in the magic of the rite; it is a prodigious agent of occult transmission, a propulsive, fascinating, intoxicating power! Blood deeply imbues the primitive elements of human will.

In the old historical world, the oracle still seeks inspiration in the ritual cup, filled with blood. The marvelous Holy Grail brings us the mysterious tradition.

Even today, blood is the great living element of every rite. It is made to flow from the arm and especially from the urethral subincision and is used to knead the totemic figurines (‘The Native Tribes of Central Australia‘ (1899), by Spencer & Gillen p. 599). It is the source of MANA, the sap, the will, the ‘intelligence‘ of the ancestor.

In the distant past, besides the bloody circumcision of the foreskin, they made deep incisions in the lower regions of the spinal column. The sacral plexus was furrowed with these incisions, the epilated parts were flayed, and onto the gaping, bleeding, powerfully emanating flesh of the young subject, exteriorized to the extreme because seized, fascinated by the mysterious psychic plasticities of the occult drama, they poured the warm blood, charged with sap, heavy with psychic effluences of the animal-totem ritually immolated. This was the Bloody Baptism, that of the human dawn, THE TRUE ONE… the one that gave the man of the origin his REAL SOUL NAME: eagle, bear, boar, hippopotamus, etc., according to the high occult essence he had absorbed in the totemizing mystery.

This baptism was a ‘transfusion of totemic blood‘. This is extremely interesting for us intellectuals, insofar as we today consider the blood of an animal as deadly for man. This rite of human origin is therefore revealing of all the biological sympathy that existed at that origin between the animal-totem and the man of that time, so close to one another that their bloods could mix with impunity.

The name was then a simple resonance, the occult SOUND that had vibrated for a long time in that animal mystery; it was the deep, intimate psychic SOUND of the strange metamorphosis lived in the blood, the very sound of the interior harmonies of those two very simple beings, man and animal, resonating very high under the ritual pressure, it was a first HUMAN resonance, living, powerful, a resonance that was thus an integral part of the initiated creature, its very NAME of soul and blood, it was consequently a magical resonance, which put it at the mercy of the one who could utter its name; this is why, in legends and old traditions, the TRUE NAME is regarded as the most important part of the person and is never pronounced, it is strictly ‘taboo‘… Isis seeks, by all possible means, to find the real name of the solar god ‘Ra‘ in order to give him back life by pronouncing it, for the old god is dying out, but she only knows this name on the day when the god reveals it to her himself.

Even today, in the central Australian tribes, the true name ‘is strictly taboo‘, it is never pronounced.

In these tribes there still exist certain customs regarding the name, customs that must be regarded as a development of human language, right at its origin. Today, since the totemic bloody baptism no longer exists in these tribes, for the reason that they are very far from their origins and are completely telesmatized, the child is given, from its conception, the name of an ancestor. This name is taboo and is never pronounced, except on very rare ritual occasions, by the men of the clan to which the child belongs. This ‘true name‘ is drawn on a churinga, which is made of a long, hollow bark and is the symbol of the child’s spinal column; this churinga is hidden in the hollow of a rock from where it is only taken out at the moment of the initiation of the child become a boy; his ‘true name‘ is then revealed to him; the initiation over, the possessor immediately hides the churinga again.

For everyday life, this child is given the name of the ‘occult emanation‘ of the place where he was born. He keeps this name all his life. At his death, this common name is in turn tabooed, it is no longer pronounced, it is replaced by another name of still occult essence given to him by an old woman inspired by the elemental forces.

Animals also have (excluding the name of the ancestor) a name inspired by the psyche they emit and, when they die, this name, having become taboo, is replaced by another name also of psychic source (Frazer mentions this custom in ‘Taboo or Perils of the Soul’, p. 318, without a psychic interpretation).

All these names thereby become elements of language, the psychic elements. Today this succession of names, although very curious in its complexity, is only a survival, but, at the origin, it formed the occult roots of human language.

The roots of mother tongues have a psychic genesis; they emerged in the extreme distance from the most intimate essence of the occult ‘source‘ of magical rites. They have blood in them.

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In the era preceding the Christian era, a very powerful esoteric current of Iranian source is found in Asia Minor, Mithraism; this spread, after the (Christian) era, widely in the Roman world, then gradually vanished, or rather hid itself in Manichaeism which is essentially Gnostic and to which Rosicrucian esotericism belongs.

Mithra is the great solar figure of vegetation that stands behind the powerful Vedic and Iranian cosmogonies of very ancient prehistoric times. Around the approaches of the (Christian) era, Mithraism was a magical synthesis; it united within itself the great currents of the inner life of that time: that of Aryan thought and that of Semitic Sentiment and will. It came to Europe where, from its appearance in Rome, it was adopted by all the profound thinkers of the Stoic school. Its magic was telesmatic, it included the bloody baptism and ritual phases of an extremely esoteric animal order. The bull, which, according to the occult principle, expresses the genital force and the radiations of the solar plexus, was the center of this mystery. All the mystical action revolved around it. The initiate had to enter into struggle with the Animal, overthrow it and slit its throat; then he was victor over the sexual principle, he was proclaimed FREE and they crowned him with the red Phrygian cap. Now, according to the data of the old Rosicrucian & Gnostic tradition, this red Phrygian cap is THE SYMBOL OF THE BLOODY FORESKIN (‘Mysteries & Customs of the Rosicrucians‘, Hargrave Jennings, page 47). Likewise the pope’s tiara, that conical form, derives from this preputial symbolism.

In all symbolic forms pertaining to magic, one must first and foremost seek the architecture of an organ, for magic is a penetrating knowledge of the soul, at the same time as an essentially positive science of the body which is made of soul.

For a thorough study

of Mithraism look here

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Selection Number 2.

From ‘l’Esotérisme de Parsifal’- 1914, page 64 to 72.

(This is a continuation of the first excerpt in Sampler part III).

…This cup is full of blood, and this blood is the very pure blood of the Saviour, it is the San-g-réal (Holy Grail/Real Blood)!

At the last supper of love, at the infinitely sad and grave Last Supper, Christ took this Cup in His Hands and accomplished the mystery of Life in the Spirit, saying these very simple words: ‘Take, this is my blood‘. Later, at Golgotha, Joseph of Arimathea collected in this holy and marvelous Cup the red Blood that carried all the inexpressible and boundless suffering of the pale Crucified One!

In the Arthurian legends of the Saint-Grail, blood streams everywhere, it shows itself as the center of the event. Blood, that strange sap of the human plant which carries and drives in a flash the will of man, his anger, his mysterious, ardent, and wounding desire, blood surges into the brain, then swiftly returns to the heart, and the latter beats sonorously, regularly, for it is this red sap, ‘it’ that is the bearer of Life and that strikes its powerful rhythm!

Blood, in its rapid course towards the brain, becomes saturated with impressive wills and thoughts arise, but, in the heart, where it impetuously plunges, it accomplishes a spiritual alchemy more mysterious still, for it is there that its occult essences are transformed into deep reason, into the closed life of man! It is there that are all human impulses, the courageous, the steadfast, the loyal, the generous, but also the selfish, the avaricious, the proud, for the blood that conveys the Will of man imprints with its pure or impure mark these strong and obscure impulses!

Blood carries within it the individuality of man, ‘his consciousness‘. It physically expresses his Self, his inner Will, and, as such, blood imbues all the legends of the San-g-réal.

The marvelous and wounding Lance, the mysterious weapon of Longinus, expresses occultly the rapidity of the blood that conveys Life, but which also surges forth, giving death through the human passion with which it is saturated.

In certain versions of the legend of the Holy Grail, heavy, warm drops of blood fall from the holy Lance onto the instinctive seeker of the human Cup, these drops of blood lull him to sleep, put him in a state of trance, and he can then see and feel the mystery he must understand! In the proper legend of Joseph of Arimathea, from all the objects of the Passion of Christ streams forth blood in torrents, and the earth is soaked with it! In other versions, blood flows from the wound of an unknown and mysterious corpse, this blood pours into Grails placed around the body, it fills these cups, leaps into channels through which it runs swiftly around the earth! In other more distant legends, Peredur, the young Perceval, sees a head in a basin full of blood, as well as two lances from which heavy drops of blood flow!

Such a mysterious figuration of blood may seem strange to us, our current extremely restricted and mechanistic conceptions on the problem of life having accustomed us to see in blood only a liquid whose property is to contain red and white corpuscles, the bearers of physical life; thus accustomed to considering life only very materially, as something that allows us to breathe and which one day disappearing carries away our breath and leaves us death, we can only with great difficulty understand, even intellectually, the ‘real and occult’ nature of blood, the essential importance of blood and this fact that it expresses human moral integrity, for, although our current conceptions of life give us only a very narrow glimpse of this life, leaving many problems, which they believe solved, inviolate, mysterious and attractive, despite this we strive to stem the plethora of our sensitive powers and the anxiety of our searching thought within the monotonous circle where modern logic imprisons us!

Perhaps we act this way because it ‘tranquillizes‘ us!

Be that as it may, according to the Spirit, blood is the physical sheath, fluid and supple, of the forces of the Self, it is therefore, by this property which makes it convey the ardent troop of the selfish desires of this Self, the murderer of the human organism, murderer in the brain where thought is forged and into which it surges, murderer in the heart where the closed life of man is forged and into which it rushes!

Blood is powerfully occult, and that is what the very old wisdom of the ancients knew, our wisdom of yore (in French: la sagesse d’antan)!

If we cast a glance back at the history of blood through religious rites, we are struck by the mysterious importance of this blood!

In the traditions of primitive races, still perceptive of the occult of Life and its deep mystery, we see the dark evocations of manes through rites of human skulls, skulls filled with the black blood of a goat, we see prophecy in the still-warm blood of entrails, the great libations of blood, the oath rendered inviolable by the very drops of blood of the sworn, blood which they let flow into the cup from which they must drink, we see the bloody hecatombs of men devoting themselves voluntarily to death, the blood baptisms in certain Mysteries! And, despite our peaceful and scientific conceptions on the constitution of blood, we cannot prevent a slight shudder from running through us upon reading the solemn and mysterious descriptions where blood plays a role! Atavism, this shudder, science will say! Hereditary memory in the unconscious, the neo-vitalist philosopher will judiciously say! Yes, certainly, but atavism of the Spirit, but memory of a deep reality in the soul’s past!

Whence come the grandeur, the great dramatic art, the powerful breath that permeates all these old traditions, this powerful breath that still vibrates, that resonates faintly, but which nevertheless astonishes us and can stop us for an instant amidst our culture so experienced and of such perfect machinery? Why? Is it not because the Spirit vivified these old cultures, inspired these races and made these primitive souls feel the interior, the warm and expressive life of the Being? These old races knew that in blood the soul engraves its humanity, that in blood it writes its very long history, its interior annals, they knew that blood bears the ‘consciousness‘ of man. For these old races thus blood was heavy with mystery and power!

It is curious to observe the laws that regulate and ordain ‘blood’ in the evolution of primitive races; this observation shows us the force and power of the blood of these races imprinting themselves in their long lineages; blood among them is hereditary, it has a primary importance, and we see several peoples of these old eras governed by draconian laws that punish adultery, misalliance with death.

In their blood these old races carried their physical power, their courage, their audacity, their despotism, but also their strength of soul and the occult virtue of the individuality, of the tribe, of the clan, of the nation, of the numerous families. The ‘hereditary‘ purity of blood was therefore the inexorable law of the ancient oriental races; this heredity of blood was the object around which evolved the dramatic history of these old races before our era.

It was no longer the same for the European races!

The dawn of our era saw a new law of blood superimpose itself upon the old, the law of blood was no longer to govern the heredity of the family, ‘the old hereditary power had to withdraw before the Christian Spirit which announced the great law of the equality of Beings in the spiritual equality of blood!’

The Christian Spirit thus announced the great law of Space where all points are equal, the law of Space which from then on, in the human soul, supplanted the law of Time, the law of series, of successions, the law of the hierarchy! The principle of feudal hereditary nobility thus still has its roots in the old law of the Orient!

At the Christian dawn, human evolution definitively centered itself in Europe, there where races of a young and strong blood developed freely. In the nomadic life lived by these races, a combative life, full of health, of joy, full of the animation of the chance of conquest, the strong and rich seeds of freedom that were deeply within them, deeply in their racial character, were then ready to be fertilized by the great new Law of blood, a profoundly moral law that was to become the law for all men! From then on, the oriental races became the old races, their traditions, the old traditions. Great, profound law of blood that was the basis of knightly solidarity and that gave to this curious Life its type of high individual value and its perfect loyalty!

Now, the esotericism of the legend of the Holy Grail tells us how the human soul centered its perceptive forces in the heart, there where moral reason, the closed life of man, is painfully forged. It tells us how the sensitive soul became the comprehensive soul!

It tells us that the Holy Grail is the human Cup that expresses man in his highest essence, that this Cup is full of blood and that this blood is the very pure blood of the Saviour! It is the San-g-réal (Holy/Real Blood)!…

It further tells us that at the last supper of love, at the infinitely sad and grave Last Supper, Christ took this Cup in His Hands and accomplished the occult mystery of love in the Spirit, saying these very simple words: ‘Take, this is my blood‘! Then, this esotericism adds, at Golgotha, Joseph of Arimathea collected in this holy and noble Cup the red blood that carried all the inexpressible and boundless suffering of the pale Crucified One, suffering that carved into the painful Effort of humanity the furrow of deep and pure Love!

It is therefore the San-g-réal that the squires of the inner Sanctuary of Montsalvage solemnly carry to the altar beneath the sacred dome, it is the Real Blood that Amfortas the sorrowful must uncover. This Real Blood is darker in the marvelous chalice, but, when through the profound adoration of the Peers of the Temple the rhythm of the Spirit becomes intense in the high silent hall, this Blood, in the physical night, becomes Light, within the human Cup become Alive!

An abyss of mystery that no word can reveal, but whose depths resonate profoundly, profoundly in the soul of the believer in the holy splendors of the Being, in the virtual, infinite powers of human Consciousness!

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An Appendix

In Three Parts

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Part 1: How to not think of Carl von Eckartshausen

and his Letter V in the ‘Cloud upon the Sanctuary‘?

Here is an excerpt:

‘….There is a terrible judgment pronounced upon the human race, and this judgment is- men can never become happy so long as they will not become wise; but they will never become wise, while sensuality governs reason, while the spirit languishes in the bonds of flesh and blood. Where is the man that has no passions? Let him shew himself. Do we not all wear the chains of sensuality more or less heavily? Are we not all slaves? All sinners?

This realization of our low estate excites in us the desire to be raised beyond it, and we lift up our eyes on high, and an angel’s voice says-the sorrows of man shall be comforted.

Man being sick body and soul, this mortal sickness must have a cause, and this cause is to be found in the very matter out of which man is made.

The destructible imprisons the indestructible, the ferment of sin is in us, and in this ferment is human corruption, and its propagation and consequences form the perpetuation of original sin.

The healing of humanity is only possible through the destruction of this ferment of sin, hence we have need of a physician and a remedy that really can cure us. But an invalid cannot be cured by another; the man of destructible matter cannot re-make himself of indestructible matter; dead matter cannot awake other dead, the blind cannot lead the blind.

Only the Perfect can bring anything to perfection; only the Indestructible can make the destructible likewise; only the Living can wake the dead.

This Physician and this active Medicine cannot be found in death and destruction, only in superior nature where all is perfection and life!

The lack of the knowledge of the union of Divinity with nature, nature with man, is the true cause of all prejudice and error. Theologians, philosophers, moralists, all wish to regulate the world, and they fill it with endless contradictions.

Theologians do not see the union of God with nature and fall therefore into error.

Modern Philosophers study only matter, and not the connection of pure nature with divine nature, and therefore announce the falsest opinions.

Moralists will not recognize the inherent corruption of human nature, and they expect to cure by words, when means are absolutely necessary.

Thus the world, man and God, continue in permanent dissension; one opinion drives out another; superstition and incredulity take turnabout in dominating society, separating man from the word of truth when he has so much dire need of approaching her.

It is only in the true Schools of Wisdom that one can learn to know God, nature and man; and in these, for thousands of years, has work been done in silence to acquire to the highest degree this knowledge,- the union of man with pure nature and with God.

This great object, God and Nature, to which everything tends, has been represented to man symbolically in every religion ; and all the symbols and holy glyphs are but the letter by which man can gradually, step by step, recover the highest of all divine mysteries, natural and human, and learn the means of healing his unhappy condition, and of the union of his being with pure nature and with God.

We have attained this epoch solely under God’s guidance. Divinity, next remembering its covenant with man, has given forth the means of cure for suffering mankind, and shewn thereby how to raise man to his original dignity, uniting him to God, the Source of his happiness.

The knowledge of this method ensuring recovery is the science of Saints and of the Elect, and its possession the inheritance promised to God’s children. Now, my beloved brothers (and sisters), I want you to grant me your most earnest attention to what I am about to say.

In our blood there is lying concealed a slimy matter (called the gluten) which has a nearer kinship to animal than to spiritual man. This gluten is the body of sin.

This material, this matter, can be modified in various manners, according to the stimulus of sense; and according to the kind of modification and change occurring in this body or matter of sin, so also vary the diverse sinful tendencies of man…‘

Full text here

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Part 2:

A short extract from Thomas Bromley’s ‘The Journeys of the Children of Israel importing the Great and Gradual Work of Regeneration’, page 65 and 66 in the 1744 London Edition:

Ver. 8th,  From Pihahiroth, they passed through the Sea to M A R A H.
The fifth Journey.

‘Their passing through the Sea, speaks to us the Baptism of Sufferings, the more to wean us from the Pomp and Pleasures of this World. For ’tis said of the Israelites, they were all baptized into Moses in the Sea,  (1Cor.10-12). that is, made Disciples to the divine Light thro’ Trials and Afflictions. But Israel being here Miraculously delivered, and the Egyptians signally overthrown, speaks as Blessing, from the more severe Attributes of God, to his Children; so Destruction from them, upon his and their Enemies, which caused that great Triumph and divine Song. But as in the desert State, such Joys seldom last long; so this Mirth, was soon changed into Mourning (Exod.15). From the Sea, they after three Days come to Marah, that is Bitterness, so called from it’s Waters, Exod.15-23, lively Emblems of new and great Afflictions, which in our internal Work, frequently follow such transporting Joys, as Israel was under on the bank of the Sea, seeing their Enemies Dead, themselves Living and Safe. These Waters of Marah are to prove us, to reduce us to Resignation and true Contentation; which when we attain, we possess what was Figured by the Wood which God shewed Moses, and cast into the Waters, by which they were made sweet and potable, Exod. 15-25. So will great Afflictions be rendered to us, when we can heartily Acquiesce in God’s Will, as believing it best; that great Lesson which St Paul, thro’ Labour and Patience had so happily learnt, Phi.4-11′.

Full text here

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Part 3:  A little commentary upon

‘The Evolution of ‘Spiritual Circumcision’:

At the dawn of human consciousness, identity was forged not in thought, but in blood. As preserved in the most ancient shamanistic rites, the ‘Bloody Baptism‘ constituted the primordial initiation: a violent, transcendent exchange where the warm, psychically charged blood of a totemic animal was poured upon the open wounds of an initiate. This ritual, a ‘transfusion of totemic blood‘, effaced the individual’s mere human identity and bestowed upon him his true ‘soul name’, integrating him into the occult essence of Bear, Eagle, or Bull. Blood was understood not as a mere physical substance but as the fluid vessel of will, consciousness, and ancestral mana, the very sap of being. From this mystic origin, the quest for spiritual transformation through a symbolic circumcision of the flesh began its long evolution into the inner life of the spirit.

This ancient legacy was carried forward and profoundly transformed by the Mithraists, heirs among others to these archaic, shamanistic mysteries. Within their Roman-era cult, the brutal literalism of the blood-baptism was sublimated into a potent symbolism of spiritual conquest. The central act, the ritual slaying of the bull, the embodiment of generative and solar power, culminated not in a physical marking, but in the crowning of the initiate with the red Phrygian cap. Esoteric tradition, as noted by Lotus de Paini, explicitly identifies this cap as ‘the symbol of the bloody foreskin‘. Here, the physical act of circumcision is fully internalized; victory over the animal nature and liberation from the dominion of the flesh are symbolized by this headpiece, marking a spiritual rather than a carnal covenant. This Mithraic synthesis provided a critical bridge, translating the archaic language of blood and physical incision into a new lexicon of psychic interiority.

It was within this fertile syncretic milieu that early Christianity, particularly through the Pauline & Johannine currents, articulated its own definitive doctrine of spiritual circumcision. For Paul, the old covenant’s physical sign was rendered obsolete by the baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, a baptism not of water alone, but of the Spirit. This concept finds its ultimate expression in the symbolism of the Eucharist and the Holy Grail. As elucidated in the texts, the San-g-réal (the Holy/Real Blood) collected by Joseph of Arimathea becomes the supreme Vessel of this new covenant. No longer is salvific power found in the shed blood of totem animals or in the physical cut of circumcision; it is now eternally present in the sacramental blood of the Saviour, offered to all who partake in spirit and truth. The physical rite is thus completely subsumed by a spiritual reality: the ‘circumcision of the heart‘.

This sublime inheritance was entrusted to the Knights of the Grail legends, the spiritual warriors of Montsalvage. Their quest, as recorded by Lotus de Paini, was not for a physical relic but for the perpetual re-enactment of this inner mystery. The wounded Amfortas, the solemn procession of the Grail, and the piercing question of the pure knight all revolve around the revelation of the San-g-réal—the Real Blood that becomes Light in the vessel of a prepared heart. The knights’ discipline and striving represent the continuous, active internalization of the baptismal and eucharistic mystery, achieving through spiritual chivalry what the ancients sought through blood: a transformation of consciousness and a transcendent name.

This underground stream of spiritual circumcision did not vanish with the medieval world but flowed powerfully into the soil of early modern mysticism. Its most profound expression is found in the work of Jacob Boehme and the great theosophical blossoming of the 17th century. Boehme, the humble cobbler of Görlitz, articulated a cosmology where the inner life of the soul recapitulated the divine drama of creation, contraction, and rebirth. For him and his successors, the critical event was no longer a historical baptism or a ritual supper, but an inward, alchemical process of Die Wiedergeburt (Rebirth).

The ‘blood‘ in this schema becomes the fiery tincture of the soul, the spiritual life-fluid that must be purified and resurrected from the chaos of the self-will. The true circumcision was the severing of the soul’s attachment to the dark, fiery source of its own ego, allowing it to be regenerated in the divine light.

In this, the entire lineage, from the totemic blood-baptism, through the Mithraic cap and the Christian Grail, reached its most interior formulation within Boehmian Theosophy: the ultimate spiritual circumcision is the birth of the new, heavenly humanity from within the scattered vessel of the old self.

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Coming soon

A Little LOTUS DE PAINI Sampler – Part VI:

‘Women and the Mysteries‘

(continuation).

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