Artwork: School of Andrea Mantegna,

 woodblock engraving by Jean Cousin and Jean Goujon

for the 1553 Kerver edition

of ‘Le Songe de Poliphile’,

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🌿Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is another selection from the collected works of Elvezia Gazzotti, better known under her pseudonym of ‘Lotus de Paini‘. Here the chosen theme is the ‘symbolism of plants in relationship with the development of humanity at the dawn of history‘. Our next selection will be about ‘the Journey of the Soul’🌿Reading Lotus de Paini is like listening to those science and nature documentaries when we were back in school and getting excited hearing about the Cosmos, the formation of the Earth, the volcanos and the oceans, the apparition of life and its multi-stage development, the first humans and pre-historical lore and archeology about the Neanderthal and the homo Sapiens…A long lasting enchantement. Imagine her being the narrator of such documentaries…this is why her style and her story-telling is so effective: Her power of evocation in her tightly knitted and dense prose. She is an invitation to travel and unravels before us the clues of our remote origins🌿 Lotus de Paini’s books should find an English translator and a daring publisher, so that her legacy would not solely be limited to a very limited hype caste of French literary-oddities-and-esoteric-lore ‘connoisseurs’…We urge and call for a  Lotus de Paini (re)-discovery by the English-speaking community and for a fair appraisal and re-evaluation of her status as an important writer and of her visionary and seminal works🌿

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Excerpts 1, 2, 3 and 4

From ‘Les Trois Totémisations’-1924-

From page 50, 57, 88 and 158

1. …In fact, Man is an ‘event’ in the history of Earth. The day when he appeared was an unusual day in the course of things, because the metamorphosis that brought existence to the human being marks the end of a cycle. Clearly, from stone to plant and then from plant to animal, there is also an ‘event’, because the metamorphosis is strong enough to avoid each time the old phenomenal furrow. But from all these deviations new forms of life are born, the course of the phenomenon is not broken. It is not the same from animal to man: the human metamorphosis close the cycle of the external phenomenon. When Man appears in the Universe, new forms of life are not created; all the gushing living sap of existence internalizes, Man diverts, by authority, the great current of the instinct; he forces the living sap to become IMAGINATIVE. It is a new world that widely opens in the race of the soul…A closed world, spiritual, were the whole psychism of the universe will engulf. Every free soul, wild, stunningly fertile, is taken by the viril being of man that spiritualizes it, making it a thought! It is, therefore, a new order that is establishing itself in the footprints of the coming of Man. Everything of the past: Animal, plant, stones, elements, etheric and astral realms, in one word the whole cosmic Being, by this coming is RE-BORN INTO A SPIRITUAL EXISTENCE. It is this deep religious act of the human dawns, the great work of the ritual mysteries upon which the biblical legend is grafted on.

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2. Is the plant not a strange container of odoriferous conscience whose sharp and reliable automatism attests of an extreme estrangement? Haven’t we ever pondered about this sensibility that grows from the earth, that breathes, perfumes and makes the forest, thickens it, tamps it, darkens it and makes all trees stick together? The plant is a deep mystery, so remote, from which we must come closer with pure hands…Plant totemism grants the world chastity!

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3. And thinking (note: the activity of mentation)…thinking, is it not like a mysterious spiritual plant in Man-mysterious plant whose growth potential is formidable? Thinking, does it not grow its logical being in the manner of a tree, with the tight progression of the trunk followed by great branches, then twigs and smaller twigs? And does it not, this thinking, dive its the sensatory roots in the obscur and mighty humus of human soil? Thinking is truly a magical metamorphosis of plant might. A plant contains, in its occult essence, the elementary impulse of cosmic Thinking. In the Osirian myth, OUADJIT, the divine might of plant growth, precedes the eye of Horus on the Osirian boat.

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4. At the dawn of humanity, the unconscious creature was penetrating, pure and ignorant, into the obscure and heavy arcanes of life; in front of this fully instinctive creature-experiencing only the subconscious Intelligible and ignoring physical reality, a soul spread within the living cosmos-the terrestrial heaven of the great ‘animal dream’ was closing down…The Aboriginal Australians (still standing on their old cretaceous land where marsupials thrive) have kept this tradition of this time of ‘dream’: they call it ‘Alcheringa’. The adamic mystery was a dramatic metamorphosis of the spine (from horizontality to verticality), which became ‘the mighty great tree’ whose fruits are good and bad. The sexual mysteries of the Bible were essentially a totemic mystery that gave to Being its ‘anxious duality’, its ‘intellectual vision’ of a world in three dimension.

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Excerpts 5, 6 and 7

From ‘La Magie et le Mystère de la Femme’-1928-

From page 170 to 175, from 193 to 194 and from 197

5. The plant carries in itself a high cosmic morality (note: in the senses of ethics): It desires to be pure and to be given away as food; it is also the desire of being ‘solid’ in the earth, the desire to be in its depths and at the same time the desire to reach heights, to grow in the sun and absorb its rays to accomplish its great chlorophyll work of purification. What the plant expresses is in deed a high morality from which flow the great notions of terrestrial solidarity, purity, virgin mother and gift of one-self.

The solar flesh of the plant is the work of the powerful impulses of the range of Thought and Cosmic Love…Man one day took these impulses for himself, re-casted them inside himself to make them the human thought (note: the human mentation function).

The spiritual beings of the plant, their great, eternal and out-of-time laws are formidable. It is them that overshadow and dominate the Magical Mystery; It is theses spiritual beings that men are consecrating themselves to, that the victims of sacrifices are being offered to…The grandiose elevation of the plant ritual throughout the old races is of a mystical nature. This mysticism had been a great religious science.

Occult traditions that originate from the mysteries of plants showcase the complete ‘plantification’ (note: ‘végétalisation’, in French) of Man as a superior aim to reach.

‘They became tall with the sap of plants‘, says the old codex Borbonicus, talking about ancient men. (Denzel, Mexico I).

The second book of the Vedas, called Ayouch (note:  यजुर्वेद, yajurveda, from yajus), that speaks about plants, enumerates them according to their magical properties. The Laws of Manou gives them a religious dimension. (Bonnier, in ‘The Plant world’ says that its content is now entirely lost). The Yogas or occult trainings are ‘plantifiying’ (note: in French= ‘végétalisantes’) disciplines-Similar, in the West, to Rosicrucianism that jealously guards the treasures of the experimentation of the Mental Mysteries, ‘the blood dripping red rose’ that blossoms between the branches of the Tree of Knowledge: the Human rose.

In South America, where the mystical rites of plants are still alive, the natives use this prayer to the plant before eating it: ‘I am going to eat you; may you always help me to keep rising, so that i am able to reach the summits of the mountain, so that i may never be heavy; i am asking you, flower of the sun, as you are the greatest of all mysteries.‘ (Frazer, Art Magic, ii). And the Indu in his cult of the plant says: ‘I adore this Tulasi. In its roots are all the roots of pilgrimage, in its center are all the divinities and in its high branches are all the Vedas‘. (Frazer, Art Magic, page 26).

More than the animal metamorphosis does, the transmutation of the plant into human energy demonstrates that magic has been a deep and acute science, a powerful observer of the occult phenomenon in their relationship with the psycho-physiological functions of Man. It demonstrates this with a greater clarity, because when it was still possible to feel a human metamorphosis from the animal, a psychical transmission of its qualities to Man, we can hardly feel what makes Man close to the plant. The plant being a closed world to our sensibilities.

Magic reveals the laws, the affinities, the reactions that justify the closeness of the plant and Man. It shows us why we must identify the physiological organs of the plant to the forces of the human mental. With a rare penetration, a stunning confidence, we see it at work in the relationship between these two powers. And its tool is as always Art-a great dramatic art that deeply fills with its mysterious life the externalized soul of ancient Men!

A perfect and complete principle of evolution lays at the root of magic; with this difference in mind: There is a deep dichotomy between magic and our scientific methods, as the later only consider psychological phenomena on its surface-rooted in necessity, intellectual determinism-while magic focuses on the remote and untouched regions of vital intuition, right beneath the shapes of intellectual intelligence at the level of the pure forces.

With the mystery of the plant, encompassing the Arcane of human thought, we are getting away from the ‘animal’ rite that gave birth in the extremely externalized soul to the ‘imaginative sensation’. Not that in the mystery of the plant the magic of the early hours ceases to be observed; for instance, throughout time circumcision had been a religious law of a great importance, one of the rules in initiation, but slowly, due to the propulsive strength of evolution that changes Men, that makes them towards a designated aim, this law lost it purely genital meaning, being ‘plantified’ so to speak. The sexual might decisively gushed towards  the brain.

The mystery of the plant is a solar mystery of a extreme etheric (note: aitherique in French) purity and of an androgynous character. It grew in the asexual psychic regions of the human being the leafy mystical TREE of thinking (note: the activity of mentation) and the great midnight sun that shines upon the spiritual darkness.

The work of the magic of mystery of the plant by its all strange ritualization became a great synthesis of the sensitive powers; it took over some spiritual images in the soul of Man, bind them in bundle and deduced from them living notions, the laws of understanding.

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6. Then, what is the existing parallel between the being of the green plant and the human being? By which phenomenon thinking is put in the likeliness of the chlorophyll function? Is there a double breathing in Man that dives into his spiritual world? Because a oral tradition from esoteric India suggests it: ‘Men, it says, will only reach the perfect development of their human essence, only when able to feed themselves of their carbon, then, they will have become human plants. Again, then, they will in an inner light give ‘flesh and blood’ to their thoughts.‘ They will have become demiurges (from the  Greek δημιουργός or dēmiurgós, in the original).

When Man is introspecting and thinks deeply, everything in him is penetrated by this silence; his senses are withdrawn, he is in his temple; his breathing is modified, appeasing itself and another rhythm, deeper, rarer, comes to pace, expand and lighten him. This rhythm is a very obscure and acute breathing of  the being that ‘makes itself still’. It creates a void that is a call to its pure astral might, a concentration of its spiritual fire. Then, the thinker SEES into this luminosity, he takes back his previously experienced sensibility by him, recasts it in his soul and makes it a precious food composed of pure thought. This rhythm, this deep breathing, is of a human chlorophyll property, a GREEN asexual breathing, occult, that transports Man unto another level of being, under an internal Sun! The thinker, in this fathoming act upon himself, where all of his being is silent, is tree-like and impregnates himself; he is feminine, he is GREEN.

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7. To be a human plant, in the complete occult understanding of the word, is a ‘positive’ state. It implies an inner belonging of the great Self, an inconceivable widening of the process of thinking and the moral (note: ethical) being, the complete encompassing of the immense universe in a deeply human metamorphosis! Man will have found Man! He would then create in the very fabric of life, not by means of steel and engines, but by his pure and mighty thought, which would then have become a living universe…A new solar system, because the future of Mentation is a cosmogony.

Such a state, as it is easy to foresee, will lead a slow and deep modification in all the bodily physiology of the human being, who will become plant like-the very pure androgyny-but a human plant capable of movement.

(To be continued)

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