The Beliefs of the Rosicrucians--Meaning of Lights and of Commemorative Flambeaux in All Worship

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CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH

THE BELIEFS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS--MEANING OF LIGHTS AND OF COMMEMORATIVE FLAMBEAUX IN ALL WORSHIP

FROM the name of the Temple, now Stonehenge, comes the name of Ambresbury, which stands a few miles from it. This is called the 'Ambres of the Abiri'. It is two words, and means the 'Ambres of the Dii Potentes', or of the ‏אבירי‎, or 'Cabiri'--for they are the same.

The star of the Légion d’Honneur bears the inscription 'Napoléon, Empereur des Français'. This order was instituted by the Emperor Napoleon the First, after the discovery and dissolution of the Secret Society, or Brotherhood, of which General Pichegru, Georges Cadoudal; the famous Moreau, and other noted revolutionary men were members. This order possessed, it is stated, a talisman or mystic head, which served as a recognitive mark, and was supposed to be a sort of bond to the brotherhood. After their death, their secret insignia were discovered; and it has been stated that the Emperor Napoleon, whose attention was instantaneously arrested by great and unusual ideas or supernatural suggestions, in suppressing this mystic symbol or head, adopted it in another form, and substituted his own head in profile, as the palladium, or talisman, for his new order of the 'Legion of Honour'.

The saffron robe of Hymen is of the colour of the

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[paragraph continues] Flame of Fire. The Bride, in ancient days, was covered with a veil called the 'Flammeum'; unless made under this, no vow was considered sacred. The ancients swore, not by the altar, but by the flame of fire which was upon the altar. Yellow, or flame-colour, was the colour of the Ghebers, or Guebres, or Fire-Worshippers. The Persian lilies are yellow; and here will be remarked a connexion between this fact of the yellow of the Persian lilies and the mystic symbols in various parts of our book. Mystic rites, and the symbolical lights, which mean the Divinity of Fire, abound at Candlemas-day (February 2nd), or the Feast of the Purification; in the torches borne at weddings, and in the typical flame-brandishing at marriage over almost all the world; in the illuminations at feasts; in the lights on, and set about, the Christian altar; at the festival of the Holy Nativity; in the ceremonies at preliminary espousals; in the Bale, or Baal, fires on the summits of the mountains; in the watch-lights, or votive sanctuary-lights, in the hermitage in the lowest valley; in the chapelle ardente, in the Romish funereal observances, with its abundance of silent, touching lights around the splendid catafalque, or twinkling, pale and ineffectual, singly at the side of the death-bed in the cottage of the peasant. Starry lights and innumerable torches at the stately funeral, or at any pompous celebration, mean the same. In short, light all over the world, when applied to religious rites, and to ceremonial, whether in the ancient or in the modern times, bespeaks the same origin, and struggles to express the same meaning, which is Parseeism, Perseism, or the worship of the deified FIRE, disguised in many theological or theosophic forms. It will, we trust, never be supposed that we mean, in this, real fire, but only the inexpressible something of which real fire, or rather

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its flower or glory (bright light), is the farthest off--because, in being visible at all, it is the grossest and most inadequate image.

All this strange, dreamy, ethereal view of a vital, accessible something, entirely separate from the suggestions of mere sensation, is Gnosticism, or Bhuddism, in its own profoundest depth. It follows on similarly to the 'intoxication,' or suffusion with the very certainty of the presence of God, which, in the poetic sense, was said to fill the mind of even the supposed arch-atheist Spinoza.

The Rosicrucians, through the revelations concerning them of their celebrated English representative, Robertus de Fluctibus, or Robert Fludd, declare, in accordance with the Mosaic account of creation--which, they maintain, is in no instance to be taken literally, but metaphorically--that two original principles, in the beginning, proceeded from the Divine Father. These are Light and Darkness, or form or idea, and matter or plasticity. Matter, downwards, becomes fivefold, as it works in its forms, according to the various operations of the first informing light; it extends four-square, according to the points of the celestial compass, with the divine creative effluence in the centre. The worlds spiritual and temporal, being rendered subject to the operation of the original Type, or Idea, became, in their imitation of this Invisible Ideal, first intelligible, and then endowed with reciprocal meaning outwards from themselves. This produced the being (or thought) to whom, or to which, creation was disclosed. This is properly the 'Son', or Second Ineffable Person of the Divine Trinity. Thus that which we understand as a 'human mind' became a possibility. This second great, only intelligible world, the Rosicrucians call 'Macrocosmos'. They distribute it as into three regions or spheres;

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which, as they lie near to, or dilate the farthest from, the earliest opening divine 'Brightness', they denominate the Empyræum, the Ætheræum, and the Elementary Region, each filled and determinate and forceful with less and less of the First Celestial Fire. These regions contain innumerable invisible nations, or angels, of a nature appropriate to each. Through these immortal regions, Light, diffusing in the emanations of the cabalistic Sephiroth, becomes the blackness, sediment, or ashes, which is the second fiery, real world. This power, or vigour, uniting with the Ethereal Spirit, constitutes strictly the 'Soul of the World'. It becomes the only means of the earthly intelligence, or man, knowing it. It is the Angel-Conqueror, Guide, Saviour born of 'Woman', or 'Great Deep', the Gnostic Sophia, the 'Word made flesh' of St. John. The Empyræum is properly the flower, or glory (effluent in its abundance), of the divine Latent Fire. It is penetrated with miracle and holy magic. The Rosicrucian system teaches that there are three ascending hierarchies of beneficent Angels (the purer portion of the First Fire, or Light), divided into nine orders. These threefold angelic hierarchies are the Teraphim, the Seraphim, and the Cherubim. This religion, which is the religion of the Parsees, teaches that, on the Dark Side, there are also three counter-balancing resultant divisions of operative intelligences, divided again into nine spheres, or inimical regions, populated with splendidly endowed adverse angels, who boast still, the relics of their lost, or eclipsed, or changed, light. The elementary world, or lowest world, in which man and his belongings, and the lower creatures, are produced, is the flux, subsidence, residuum, ashes, or deposit, of the Ethereal Fire. Man is the microcosm, or 'indescribably small copy', of the whole great

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world. Dilatation and compression, expansion and contraction, magnetic sympathy, gravitation to, or flight from, is the bond which holds all imaginable things together. The connexion is intimate between the higher and the lower, because all is a perpetual aspiration, or continuous descent: one long, immortal chain, whose sequence is never-ending, reaches by impact with that immediately above, and by contact with that immediately below, from the very lowest to the very highest. 'So true is it that God loves to retire into His clouded Throne; and, thickening the Darkness that encompasses His most awful Majesty, He inhabits an Inaccessible Light, and lets none into His Truths but the poor in spirit.' The Rosicrucians contended that these so 'poor in spirit' meant themselves, and implied their submission and abasement before God.

The Rosicrucians held that, all things visible and invisible having been produced by the contention of light with darkness, the earth has denseness in its innumerable heavy concomitants downwards, and they contain less and less of the original divine light as they thicken and solidify the grosser and heavier in matter. They taught, nevertheless, that every object, however stifled or delayed, in its operation, and darkened and thickened in the solid blackness at the base, yet contains a certain possible deposit, or jewel, of light--which light; although by natural process it may take ages to evolve, as light will tend at last by its own native, irresistible force upward (when it has opportunity), can be liberated; that dead matter will yield this spirit in a space more or less expeditious by the art of the alchemist. There are worlds within worlds--we, human organisms, only living in a deceiving, or Bhuddistic, 'dreamlike phase' of the grand panorama. Unseen and unsuspected (because in it

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lies magic), there is an inner magnetism, or divine aura, or ethereal spirit, or possible eager fire; shut and confined, as in a prison, in the body, or, in. all sensible solid objects, which have more or less of spiritually sensitive life as they can more successfully free themselves from this ponderable, material obstruction. Thus all minerals, in this spark of light, have the rudimentary possibility of plants and growing organisms; thus all plants have rudimentary sensitives, which might (in the ages) enable them to perfect and transmute into locomotive new creatures, lesser or higher in their grade, or nobler or meaner in their functions; thus all plants and all vegetation might pass off (by side-roads) into more distinguished highways, as it were, of independent, completer advance, allowing their original spark of light to expand and thrill with higher and more vivid force, and to urge forward with more abounding, informed purpose--all wrought by planetary influence, directed by the unseen spirits (or workers) of the Great Original Architect, building His microcosmos of a world from the plans and powers evoked in the macrocosm, or heaven of first forms, which, in their multitude and magnicence, are as changeable shadows cast off from the Central Immortal First Light, whose rays dart from the centre to the extremest point of the universal circumference. It is with terrestrial fire that the alchemist breaks or sunders the material darkness or atomic thickness, all visible nature yielding to his furnaces, whose scattering heat (without its sparks) breaks all doors of this world’s kind. It is with immaterial fire (or ghostly fire) that the Rosicrucian loosen contraction and error, and conquers the false knowledge and the deceiving senses which bind the human soul an in its prison. On this side of his powers, on this dark side (to the world) of his character, the

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alchemist (rather now become the Rosicrucian) works in invisible light, and is a magician. He lays the bridge (as the Pontifex or Bridge-Maker) between the world possible and the world impossible: and across this bridge, in his Immortal Heroism and Newness, he leads the votary out of his dream of life into his dream of temporary death, or info extinction of the senses and of the powers of the senses; which world’s blindness is the only true and veritable life, the envelope of flesh falling metaphorically off the now liberated glorious entity--taken up, in charms, by the invisible fire into rhapsody, which is as the gate of heaven.

Now, a few words as to the theory of alchemy. The alchemists boasted of the power, after the elimination and dispersion of the ultimate elements of bodies by fire (represented by the absent difference of their weights before and after their dissolution), to recover them back out of that exterior, unknown world surrounding this world: which world men reason against as if it had no existence, when if has real existence; and in which they were in ignorance in their 'Pre-State', as they will be (perhaps also in ignorance) in their 'After-State'. In respect of which state ('before' and 'after' this life), all people, in all time, have had an idea. It is 'Purgatory', if is 'Limbus', it is 'Suspension in Repose', it is as the 'Twilight' of the Soul before and after the 'Day' of Full Life, or complete consciousness. These ideas are as equally Christian as Pagan. How little is all this supposed in the ignorance of the moderns!

It is this other world (just off this real world) into which the Rosicrucians say they can enter, and bring back, as proofs that they have been there, the old things (thought escaped), metamorphosed into new things. This act is transmutation. This product is

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magic gold, or 'fairy gold', condensed as real gold, This growing gold, or self-generating and multiplying, gold, is obtained by invisible transmutation (and in other light) in another world out of this world; immaterial to us creatures of limited faculties, but material enough, farther on, on the heavenly side, or on the side opposite to our human side. In other words, the Rosicrucians claim not to be bound by the limits of the present world, but to be able to pass into this next world (inaccessible only in appearance), and to be able to work in it, and to come back safe (and selfsame) out of it, bringing their trophies with them, which were gold, obtained out of this master-circle, or outside elementary circle, different from ordinary life, though enclosing it; and the elixir vitæ, or the means of the renewal or the perpetuation of human life through this universal, immortal medicine, or magisterium, which, being a portion of the light outside, or magic, or breath of the spirits, fleeing from man, and only to be won in the audacity of God-aided alchemic exploration, was independent of those mastered natural elements, or nutritions, necessary to ordinary common life. The daily necessary food which is taken for the sustenance of the body was, as the Rosicrucians contended, the means of dissolution, or death daily passing through and the real cause of the destruction of the body, by the slowest of all processes, but yet, in instalments, the effectual one. They asserted that man dies daily in his own native bodily corruptions. These singular philosophers ventured the assertion that God did not, in the beginning, intend that man’s life should be terminated by diseases, nor that he should be made subject to accidental, violent means of end. In the abstract sense, and apart from our knowledge of man as man, the Rosicrucians contended that diseases are not

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necessarily incidental to the body, and that death may be said to have become an imported accident into the scheme of things; our ideas being erroneous as to the original design in regard of us.

Man was to have lived as the angels, of an impregnable, impassable vitality, taking his respiration, not by short snatches, as it were, but as out of the great cup of the centuries. He was to be the spectator of nature--not nature his spectator. The real objects of the adepts were, in truth, to remain no longer slaves to those things supposed to be necessities, but, by the assistance of Heaven, to remove back to Heaven’s original intention; to rise superior to the consequences of the original Curse, and to tread under foot, in vindicating the purpose of God, that mortal (however seductive), sexual, distinctive, degradation entailing dissolution, heired from Adam, or from the First Transgressor. That poverty and celibacy (under certain limitations) must be the obligations of the true Brothers of the 'R. C.' will at once be seen from the above reasons, however wild and mistaken--barely even comprehensible. This is the real original reason for the monastic state--defying and denying nature.

The original curse was entailed upon mankind by eating of

                                   The fruit
Of that forbidden 'Tree', whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.

[paragraph continues] What that 'Tree' was, and what are its votive, idolatrous (in the bad sense) symbols in the old world and in the new, we think we have abundantly shown--at least, in the occult, shadowy idea. Why, supposing that the alchemists ever possessed the power of universal gold-making, they fail of producing any,

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or of offering one of their rich gifts to the world, is at once answered in these two conclusive, obvious facts: Firstly, that if this power of gold-making, or of transmutation, were a recognized possibility, like any other art allowed or authorized, it would inevitably become penal or impossible, in order to preserve the existing value of gold, the richest metal; and the professor of the art would be at once put out of sight. Secondly, if supposed to be true, and not fable, like any ordinary art or science, the man who had arrived at such a stupendous secret would be sacrificed or martyred in the insatiate haste of the people to compel him to produce gold, in order to satisfy them--that gold, moreover, which will destroy, but can never satisfy. 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.' These things the alchemists too well know, and therefore they (if any exist now) hide, as they have always hidden, and deny, as they have always denied; being desirous of stealing through the world unknown and of serving God alone, whose inaccessible great glory, as we see, has been imitated in the golden lights of the inexpressibly grand (in the worldly and mortal sense), apostate constructions of the magnificent Mammon, Lord of the Treasures of this World, for which men offer themselves willing victims even to Him, King of the Visible, whose semblance is that of the most brilliant yellow element--Fire--Or, 'Golden Flame', the 'Flower' of the Fire.

The alchemists maintain that the metals are produced in the secret operations of the planets, that grow them daily in the bowels of the earth; that the sun and moon, red and white, fire and water, light and darkness, male and female, night and day, are active in the generation of the precious metals, of which gold is due wholly to the invisible operation of the sun and moon, and silver is referable to the

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whitening or bleaching lucidity of the moon; that gold is produced quicker or slower according to the faster or slower operations of nature; that it vivifies and vegetates, bears bright seed and multiplies, germinating as fructifying in the matrix, or the laboratories of the earth; that gold is produced with infinite pains, as it were, by these chemic operations of nature, very slowly under certain circumstances, but very rapidly under other more favourable, more powerful conditions; that it is possible for the adept to act as the midwife of nature, and to assist in her deliverance, and in the birth of gold, in these occult senses; that the work of nature being thus expedited by this alchemical art, the hitherto thwarted intention of Providence is effected in the predetermined liberation of the divine gold, 'Lux', or light, which is again united to its radix or producing-point, in. heaven. A spark of the original light is supposed by the Rosicrucians to remain deep down in the interior of every atom.

The Rosicrucian Cabala teaches that the three great worlds above--Empyræum, Ætheræum, and the Elementary Region--have their copies in the three points of the body of man: that his head answers to the first; his breast, or heart, to the second; and his ventral region to the third. In the head rests the intellect, or the magnetism of the assenting judgment, which is a phenomenon; in his heart is the conscience, or the emotional faculty, or the Saviour; and in the umbilical centre reside the animal faculties, or all the sensitives. Nutrition is destruction in the occult sense, and dissolution is rescue in the occult sense; because the entity, or visible man, is constructed in the elements, and is as equally ashes, or condemned matter, as they are; and because the fire that feeds the body (which is its natural respiration or

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maintenance) is in itself that which (however slowly) destroys it. Man lives upon the lees of nature, or (in the Bhuddistic view) upon the 'gross purgations of the celestial fire', which is urging itself clear through the operation of the divine rescuing spirit in it. It follows that metaphysically all the wonderful shows of life are phantasmata only, and their splendours false and a show only. But as these shows are the medium and the instruments of life, without which intelligence (in the human sense) would be impossible, this celestial 'Second Fire' has been deified in the acknowledgments of the first inhabitants of the world, who raised pillars and stones in its honour as the first idol. Thus man bears in his own body the picture of the 'Triune'. Reason is the head, feeling is the breast, and the mechanical means of both feeling and reasoning, or the means of his being Man, is the epigastric centre, from which the two first spring as emanations, and with which the two first form ultimately but 'one'. The invisible magnetic, geometrical bases, or latitudes, of these three vital points, whose consent, or coincidence, or identity, forms the 'microcosm', which is a copy of the same form in heaven, answer magically to their stellar originals. This is astrological 'ruling' by pyramidal culmination; and by trilinear descent or efflux, to an intersecting point in the latitudes of the heavens and in the man’s body, at which upper and lower, or heaven and earth; interchange; and Man is therefore said to be made 'in the image' of the Archetype, who has 'descended' to man, who has 'ascended' to Him. This is the 'hinge-point' of the natural and the supernatural, upon which the two wings of the worlds real and unreal revolve. The starry heavens, through whose astrological cross-work complications (as in a snap) all these infinite effects are produced, and on whose

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[paragraph continues] (for, taking gravitation away, they are the same) floor of lights, or cope or dome of signs or letters, all the 'past, present, and future' has been written by the finger of God (although to man they are ever rearranging), can be read by the competent as Fate Natural and supernatural, though one is only the reversed side of the other, as 'darkness is only the reversed side of light, and light is only the reversed side of darkness', ¹ are mistaken by man for opposites, although they are the same: man living in this state in darkness, although his world is light; and heaven in this state being darkness, although this state is light.

Music (although it is unheard by man) is necessarily produced in the ceaseless operations of material nature, because nature itself is penitential and but the painful (and musical) expression between two dissonant points. The Bhuddist contends that all forms are but the penance of nature. Music is life, and life is music. Both are pain, although made delightful. Phenomena are not real.

Thus colours to the human are negative as music addressed to the ear, the musical notes negative as colours addressed to the eye, and so on of the other senses, although they are all the same in the imagination, without the sensorium--as dreams show. And life and the world, in this view, are all imagination: man being made in idea, and only in his own belief. This, again, is only pure Parseeism; and the whole will be rightly regarded as the most extraordinary dream of philosophy--as depth of depths beyond idea.

Schubert, in his Symbolism of Dreams, has the following passages, which we have before adduced and

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made use of for illustration: 'It may be asked whether. that language, which now occupies so low a place in the estimation of men, be not the actual waking language of the higher regions, while we', adds the philosopher, coming out with something very strange, 'awake as we fancy ourselves, may be sunk in a sleep of many thousand years, or, at least, in the echo of their dreams, and only intelligibly catch a few dim words of that language of God, as sleepers do scattered expressions from the loud conversation of those around them.'

The following is a fair view of the Rosicrucian theory concerning music.

The whole world is taken as a musical instrument; that is, a chromatic, sensible instrument. The common axis or role of the world celestial is intersected--where this superior diapason, or heavenly concord or chord, is divided--by the spiritual sun, or centre of sentience. Every man has a little spark (sun) in his own bosom. Time is only protracted consciousness, because there is no world out of the mind conceiving it. Earthly music is the faintest tradition of the angelic state; it remains in the mind of man as the dream of, and the sorrow for, the lost paradise. Music is yet master of the man’s emotions, and therefore of the man.

Heavenly music is produced from impact upon the paths of the planets, which stand as chords or strings, by the cross-travel of the sun from note to note, as from planet to planet; and earthly music is microscopically an imitation of the same, and a 'relic of heaven'; the faculty of recognition arising from the same supernatural musical efflux which produced the planetary bodies, in motived projection from the sun in the centre, in their evolved, proportional, .harmonious order. The Rosicrucians taught that the

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[paragraph continues] 'harmony of the spheres' is a true thing, and not simply a poetic dream: all nature, like a piece of music, being produced by melodious combinations of the cross-movement of the holy light playing over the lines of the planets: light flaming as the spiritual ecliptic, or the gladius of the Archangel Michael, to the extremities of the solar system. Thus are music, colours, and language allied.

Of the Chaldæan astrology it may figuratively be said that, although their knowledge, in its shape of the 'Portentous Stone'--in this instance, their grave-stone--shut up the devils in the depths of the 'Abyss', and made the sages their masters (Solomon being the Priest or King, and his seal the 'Talisman' that secures the 'Deep'): Man, on account of his having fallen into the shadow and the corruptions of EXISTENCE, needs that mighty exterior HAND (before which all tremble) to rescue him back into his native original Light or Rest. All the foregoing is pure Bhuddism.

Thinkers who have weighed well the character of those supposed infractions of natural laws which have admitted, as it were philosophically, the existence of other independent, absent, thinking spirits, communicating intelligibly in this world of ours, insist 'that it is impossible to suppose that the partitions between this world and the other world are so thin as that you can hear the movers in the other through.'

Nevertheless thoughtful people are equally able to convict modern philosophical realists of absurdity, when the former adduce the following insurmountable objection against them: 'When we tell you of a supernatural thing', say the supernaturalists to the realists; 'you directly have recourse to a natural thing in which to find it.' This is contrary to common dense; and therefore the realistic arguer has no right to dispose

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in this manner of that which is supernatural; for his objections are futile and vain, and his arguments contradict themselves. Spirit and matter, when sought to be explained, are totally opposed; and hence, arises the reason why there can never be any belief of impossible things, and only the conviction that such things have been in the mind, notwithstanding the insurmountable contradiction of the senses.

Footnotes

221:1 'Comte de Gabalis': Rosicrucian.