‘The Soul Hovering over the Body’,

an Illustrations by William Blake

to Robert Blair’s “The Grave” (Composed 1805).

Picture from the William Blake Archive.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is composed of 3 selections from the lesser known essays of Elvezia Gazzotti, better known under her pseudonym of ‘Lotus de Paini‘, excerpted from her collected works.

Selection 1  is from her 1914 study upon Wagner’s opera Parsifal, selection 2 from her theosophical work dealing with the aftermath of the break up with Annie Bessant’s version of Blavatskian Theosophy and the search for a ‘western theosophy’, as Rudolph Steiner would eventually develop a personal version, and selection 3 from one of her last publications dealing with mineral & stone symbolism found in early human myths, after spending much time and earlier publications exploring plant symbolism in human development.

Here the chosen theme is about the ‘Journeys of the Soul’. Our next selection will be about ‘Women and the Mysteries’, as Sampler Part IV.

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Selection Number 1.

‘From l”Esotérisme de Parsifal’- 1914

From page 51 to 59

The legend of the Round Table or the Arthurian Cycle, aggregating the old Keltic  principles did develop into three legendary phases which have individually their intrinsic value, as their all tell and precise the growth of one of the strength of the soul.

These three legendary phase are exemplified by the story of King Artur and the Round table, the second legendary phase is exemplified by the Legend of the Holy Grail, and the third legendary phase is exemplified by the story of Parsifal.

Consequently, we see the three strength of the soul, the strength to think, the strength to feel and the strength of the will or of the consciousness: all had their proper growth period.

In the proper Arthurian Cycle, specifically Arthur and his 12 companions or peers of the Round Table, this cycle belong to the first legendary phase; the esoterism of the legend tells us the development of the thinking faculty within the sensible soul.

In order to understand this first legendary phase, it is necessary to set our minds back to a remote age in the past, so to review the old traditions of the Druids we have spoken of earlier and what they were teaching about the structure of the Universe & the Soul.

We therefore see, starting from the prehistoric era, the druids setting the moral ground principle upon which the western civilization was to be built upon: the principle of equality. Their religious monuments, the Crom-Lekh, is the very simple and solemn expression of this great principle! It symbolizes the law of Space, the law of the Circle; its essential properties being: ‘the equal value of all the points composing it’.

The Crom-Lekh, with its 12 standing stones around a central thirteenth, here, represent the Universe. It showcases the Great Universal Space engirdled by 12 mighty houses of the irradiating zodiacal powers, while spreading in the space, all coming to converge in the central solar point, the thirteenth. The sun, in virtue of the living essence of its Being, in return shines its life towards the 12 mighty zodiacal houses.

Therefore, in this exchange of forces lies the ‘Solidarity‘ of the Universe; the Crom-Lekh expresses this very principle!

The druidic traditions tell us: ‘Everything is alive in the vastness of the world; the Spirit engenders matter; the human souls, which are cosmic powers, can conceive the vastness, because they are this very vastness; they are, alike mathematical points that form the circle of space of equal value among themselves; they are everywhere centers in universal circles‘.

Therefore, being a power and cosmic center, the Soul, alike a tall and marvelous spiritual plant, slides her roots into the depths of the infinite circle where are found, enclosing the Universe, the 12 zodiacal houses: in these houses, the soul takes root.

These 12 zodiacal houses were named by the old druidic traditions: The Kabeiri, the Great Ones, The Powers. Through these names, these traditions were designating and pointing at the occult nature and the spiritual Energy of these formidable houses.

Hence rooted into these occult houses, their energy rises in her like a sap, substantial and nutritive; the soul receives the forces of the sensitive life, of its Imaginative life. These formidable zodiacal houses, intense occult dwellings, are the genomic powers of the soul, the occult drivers of the human Thought.

These zodiacal houses are the cosmic plexus of the great sensitive system of the Soul!

Through them, the soul is endowed with 12 sensitive faculties; the human being inherits these 12 perceptions & Imagination sources-equal in might, depth and Spirit.

Furthermore, these 12 houses irradiate their strengths and make them converge into the solar system, the 13th. This solar center, heart of the Universe, synthetizes in itself the forces of the peripheral zodiac; it transform them into solar life and in return projects them in the infinite space.

As for the soul, power and cosmic center, it is also deeply linked to the solar center, the 13th, from where the warm and synthetic forces of Life rise into her.

The Round Table symbolizes at the time of the Middle Ages, the same principle than the Crom-Lekh. ‘…the Round Table rotating like the World‘ says a minstrel from the XIIth century in the Welsh ‘Trystan Legend‘. The Legend of the Round Table, therefore, esoterically designate, through its 12 peers, ‘the cosmic source of the sensitive forces‘, the sap of the Thoughts of the human soul; by Arthur, it designates the solar source of the might of the ‘sensorial life‘ flowing into human thinking.

By this, each of the 12 heroes of the Round Table characterizes through his soul-aptitudes and in his manly type one of the zodiacal powers and a sensitive faculty. This feeling faculty opened to the said peer a whole universe of perception. He lived deeply this universe, as he was poised to become its knower. He had, through his will, to become conscious of this very universe and transform these forces and this sensitive faculty of a cosmic origin into thinking power, into human activity.

Arthur, the 13th among the 12-the central focus, characterized in his manly type the synthesis of the sensitive faculties. The strength of his knights irradiated towards him; Arthur centered theses forces, synthetized them in his Thinking and sent them back, hence transformed, to his knights.

Queen Guinevere, on the other hand, ‘humanized’ the lunar forces, while each of the other individualities of Arthur’s court characterized and humanized deep & sensitive faculties of the human soul-cosmic by essence, who has her powerful roots diving into the immensity of the Universe.

This Legend is a grandiose Conception, very difficult to fathom in our modern, intellectual & materialist thought that makes humanity ‘an exile‘ by defining it  as ‘the human specie‘, a pygmy isolated in the vastness of the worlds, alien and indifferent to its splendid solidarity!

And yet, this mutilated thought, where can it not penetrate, when it gathers itself, when it growths and glides afar?

The brilliant court of the enigmatic Artur, its remarkable feats, expresses under the very thick veil of occult symbolism, the combative nature of the sensations through which the forces of the thinking uses form; those forces engender the imaginative thoughts. They tell, at the same time, these incredible feats, these painful struggles of Humanity, in order to help it-through reflexivity-become conscious of its own thinking.

As for Merlin, the bard endowed with a magical voice, who sang marvelously occult sonorities of the sensitive elements of nature, he is the Keltic Hero of Sensitivity, the human creator of human thoughts! Myrddin ( the Welsh name for Merlin) allows himself to be surrounded by the marvelous veils of the Spirit of the Imaginations, in the arms of the exquisite Vivyan (Vivian, also Nimue or Morgan) the fairy of the woods, ‘a lady more beautiful than an immaculate white swan‘. He can only live far from cities, from the conventions of its dwellers, of their routine lives. He lives in the inextricable forests of Sensation, at the edge of their whispering sources. He listens to the fresh and solemn voices of Nature, the deep voices of Space. He let’s himself be surrounded by the images of the Thought, and falls asleep in this Living dream.

With the second legendary phase, telling the enigmatic story of the Holy Grail, we enter in the core of our subject. We penetrate, with this legend, in a new occult period that recorded a deep modification that happened in human consciousness.

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Selection number 2.

From ‘The First Stages of a Spiritual Movement’- 1914

From page 66 to 72

…The origins of Humanity, as we have delineated earlier, is spiritual. Man expresses himself by human unity, constituted by three spiritual bodies, and by one physical body. The body we perceive is thus but a partial aspect of the whole human being. The three spiritual bodies, essentially active and traversed by currents of vital forces, predominate in the origins of human development, and they overflow, overpower the physical part; the ‘self‘ lives in them, unconscious, and it is instinctive in the physical body to which it is a stranger; Man has but a crepuscular vision of the spiritual world surrounding him.

The forces of the spiritual bodies flowing into the activity of his external sensation, determining Man’s organs of sense, and the vague perceptions which results from it, form the elements of his waking consciousness. Then he gradually shifts the center of his soul-life into a physical sensation, and the expansion of the spiritual bodies shrinks together towards the center.

This process of spiritual integration into the physical body lasted for long centuries and demanded the passage through a series of human groups which succeeded each other from the primeval up to the Christian era, and under this spiritual impetus the organism is continually modifying; it is a slow and incessant transformation which effects the solidarity of the whole human being.

During this very long period Man was a being entirely formed by exterior sensations, he was receptive to the slightest spiritual influence; by the soul texture of his organism he was responsive to all the motions of the elementary soul of the worlds. The cerebralisation was slow, and the abstract form showed itself beginning only with the Hebrew. Greece expressed the perfect balance of spiritual & physical forces, and spiritual integration was entirely concluded with the Latins tribes, where Man had the exact perception of the physical world. But then this movement of integration became, in a certain measure, a danger of spiritual hardening, of total degeneracy, and Man had to modify the direction of its activity; he had to return towards spiritual expansion, not treading through familiar road this time, but through introcession of the thinking & sensitive consciousness which were going to weave his deep moral life.

If we can with the help of these few words follow the process of evolution according to the Spirit, and give ourselves an idea of the extreme complexity of human organization and of its infinite delicacy, we will conceive more easily the importance the order & regularization of the spiritual bodies may have had in certain reactions of the consciousness and certain physical impulses.

We will then admit that the experimental methods, which were the result of a scientific knowledge of the process in the occult growth of the human being, may have had a very important action in the direction of the development, or the atrophy, of its essential activities. It is through having this knowledge of that process precisely that the science of the Spirit has established its esoteric discipline and its occult experimental methods. These methods have always existed, from the very first appearance of sensitive life and of the subsequent auto-formative life of Man.

In India, a peculiar country from the religious point of view, we find again the ancient esoteric discipline and its methods freely explained and very often practiced: it is an ancient form of the ‘development of the Spirit‘.

In those primitive epochs the human self had power still within the expansion of its spiritual bodies, and its outline was very soft and vague. Physical consciousness was dawning, and sensation without thought was purely vital, without admixture.

These were states of the first stages of human consciousness, and we must see their very special importance to understand exactly the scientific nature of the occult process of those times.

One of the objects of the occult method was to accelerate the positive life of the consciousness of the neophyte who submitted to its training. It imposed upon him a discipline which consisted of a full concentration upon a part of the plexus of the sympathetic nerve, concentration which strongly intensified the activity of the vital centers and indirectly produced physiological reactions; with these reactions the nervous system of Man was more rapidly formed; it was an appeal to the forces of the self, from the periphery to the center.

The application of this method gradually, but profoundly, modified the human organization, which was then of a essentially psychic texture, essentially of the soul, and fundamentally different to what it is to-day; it modified it, formed it in the direction of a growth towards physical consciousness; but, at the same time, this concentration on a part of the plexus awakened certain elementary forces in Man, forces of his subconscious being, which led him towards his primitive, perfect clairvoyance, and gave him thus the possibility of being united in his human state with the Universal Life of the Spirit. it was the mystic union of the Yogins of the primitive ages.

But through the centuries, through the diverse human groups and their culture, the science of the Spirit has always modified its occult methods, this following step-by-step the centralization of the self in the human consciousness; for this slow and incessant modification in the course of time transformed in each of its moments the solidarity of the elements of human organization, so that for us to-day, who are separated by long centuries from those primitive ages, the practice of the ancient methods of the occult development can only lead us to retrogression.

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Selection number 3.

From ‘ Pierre Volonté’- 1932

From page 40 to 46

This cult of the dead, of a pure imitative magic, has as its purpose to im-print, to seal in the soul the souvenir of her terrestrial deeds and the memory of what it had lived. To this end, it will ‘surround‘ the soul with ‘rhythms‘ that have filled her physical existence from birth to the death of its body. It will paint, sculpt them in its hypogea, or on its mummy.

These rhythms of the past will have as their aim to contain the dissociations of the soul and its flight when the body dies. They will prevent the oblivious soul to be scattered, to slide like water in the great and cold currents of the cosmic psychism, its ‘mother-water‘.

They will prevent to forget its human history, its physical experience by having her remember of the great living Images of her life? The soul, blur, evanescent, must stabilize, synthetize her psychic activity, become a spiritual block of human depth, a ‘Self’ in spirit, the great consciousness of Man in the night of the unconscious, such is the plan of the funerary cult of the bones. The Rite is a ‘post mortem’ occult individuation. It unfolds in the magnetic Will of the ‘skeleton‘ submitted to the magical manipulations of endless ages.

In its great simplicity of an opposite depth, the old myth, of ‘Isis & Osiris‘, tells us: ‘Isis reconstitute the lacerated body of Osiris, recomposes him limb after limb, tightens him in strips, anoints him and tells him: RESURRECT !’.

Then the great figure of Osiris becoming alive again in the Spirit lights up the night of the consciousness, beyond death.

It is the Atlantean Isis who sets the foundations of the ‘Self‘ in the perennial spiritual being! ISIS, the WOMAN endowed with cosmic & spiritual Might and her mysterious Vision of the after-life, supervises the whole funerary liturgy.

As a WOMAN she binds the spiritual world, and in an authoritative manner plants the ‘seed of Immortality’ in the world of dying men.

(Author’s note: The cult of the dead is FEMININE in nature. Die Walküre , The Morrígan, the Amazons, all gather the dead on the battle field to honor them with proper funerary Rites. Women are also the custodian & guardians of tombs and mausoleums).

During centuries, millennia, the funerary rites were performed un-interrupted. One day came when the soul felt ONE, full; nothing would break it any further. It was responsible for its mistakes. The ‘Book of the Dead‘ eventually appeared, in its great Morality, its weird negative Confession.

Man has his Osiris inside of him, an powerful entity that thinks in the Night; he has a conscience which is a living being, made of his genius, overcoming him: his inner God.

The Egyptian funerary cult is a deepness and is directly link with ancestral Totemism. Ptah & Osiris are the mysterious ‘Tat‘ dominating the Cult of the Nile, Dad, Ded, Didou….the great divine Tot!

And how astonishing is this Imaginative power creating in the darkness of the Spirit! During the rites performed around the mummy, the priest would say: ‘Wake-up! Live! Walk!‘ These words were engraved on the sarcophagi.

The soul of the deceased would wake up in the spiritual darkness, alone, but everything would bind her magnetically to the Earth, to what it had lived, to the living Images of her physical life that she just had left. Every memory would rise before her.

The food, the furniture, the hunting, the games, the different jobs, all the daily life, painted on the walls of the Hypogea make us smile. Yes, all that seems quite childish to our modern intellectual eyes; but, if we think about the moral deepness of the ‘Book of the Dead‘ placed on the chest of the deceased, we cease to smile and we seek, anxious, the ‘why‘ to this strange assemblage?

This little funerary book who contains the great epic of the distraught soul facing the spiritual charade, how tragic it reveals itself, when we penetrate into its deep Art?

The soul has crossed the dreadful threshold, it stands in the dark, withdrawn into herself, shivering, under the watchful guard of the great snakes with human faces standing besides her. These great bi-cephalic snakes, sometimes tri-cephalic-seemed to have been originating from within her very own substance-answer to the names of : Justice, Loyalty, Purity, Responsibility. They escort her in the long corridors of the after-life consciousness.

The soul is unsettled by their persisting presences, unsettled by the great silence surrounding her and showing her how naked she is in these dark territories of the ‘Duat‘, Osiris’ realm.

And then, she sees her own heart thrown into the highest weighing dish of the occult scale, having only as a counter-weight in the other dish the fair Goddess MAAT’s tiny feather; and disoriented it struggles no more and cries to her heart: ‘My heart,  you came from my mother, my heart I need to live upon Earth, do not rise against me! Do not testify against me!’

At that moment, she realizes a frightening thing: No time, no Space- she is Alone in the great & eternal night, where Mystery gauges human strength. ‘Who am I?‘, ‘What can I do in these ebony vastness, where only Truth resonates?‘ ‘What is my void?”.

Finally, the cold striping of all the slag obstructing her passionate being has ended- the soul, revitalized,  penetrates into the arcane of the Osirian initiation: She has become the great Spiritual SELF. This is what the ‘Book of the Dead‘ Says.

The Osirian origin seems to have appeared at the end of the ‘Atlantean vegetal culture‘. During the following Stone Age, the funerary cult of the bones took a great development, all pointing to archetypal Osiris, whose high figure rises in the darkness of our unconscious.

From this mysterious myth, came the conception of the ‘double‘, the ‘Ka’ of Horus: the Falcon totem granting pharaoh his ‘acute vision‘ of all things of the Spirit and his genius.

The individualization after death is the last ‘purely magical‘ growth of the totemic disciplines under the new eon of the Stone-Will (a.k.a. the Stone Age). A remarkable growth, made possible through the deep & fascinating imaginations of the Osirian Rite, which has made the blurred & evanescent soul, passionately cosmic, the great Entity humanely immortal of the human Spirit.

The funerary magical Will and the negative Confession conjure the great failure of the soul wanting to escape the gravity of the body. This powerful religious im-pulse in the magical order, gave birth to a complete displacement of psychic values: the cult of the dead opened to the soul a new world, a world created by mankind itself.

The human beings, walking for millennia in-to life, have gradually forgotten their luminous origin; they have lost-when penetrating the realm of the earth-the memory of the old psychic  radiation, in which they were living their Dream-Life; these human beings, deprived, darkened and fumbling through everything, stressed by ‘death being the end of everything‘, they could re-project themselves through the funerary WILL of the cult of the Dead and by the ‘Acceptation of their own responsibility‘ in the Light of the Spirit.

Through their human will, they would ‘re-introduce themselves‘ in the great Spheres of the Eternal Breath, but this time with their free-will and their awakened conscience. They ‘humanized‘ the Spirit, making it ‘their’ own! This is the great gesture, the great gift of Ancient Egypt!

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Coming soon

A Little LOTUS DE PAINI Sampler – Part IV 

Women and the Mysteries

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