Wednesday, December 08, 2004
ROSA MYSTICA - CONNECTING THE DOTS
I was browsing the blogs and checked in at Threshing Grain where I found a post on the "Rosa Mystica Hour of Grace", Our Lady of Montichiari. According to the Montichiari website, this hour of grace was exactly at the time that the program on Fatima aired in my area today. Curious coincidence.
Next I looked at the Catholic Apparitions of Jesus and Mary website to see if this apparition had Church approval. It does not. Neither has it been disapproved. There is no Bishop's letter either. It's in limbo, apparently.
The name Rosa Mystica is familiar. I Googled it. There were many Catholic hits--websites that talk about apparitions and devotion to the Blessed Virgin. One hit had a University of Dayton URL. That got my attention. U. of Dayton is the source of some Marian Material that dovetails with The Da Vinci Code theories.
I Googled "Rosa Mystica" with "Hermetica" and got "Petit Manuel d'Human - Cahier 14 - La Rose-Croix." Rose Croix. Rosy Cross. Not much help. It's written in French. Still, I could read enough of it, including the names, to recognize occultism when I saw it. In the print-out, Rosa Mystica appears on page 16 of 27 total pages. Back to Google.
Then I found this website. "The Meaning of the Rose Cross" by Christopher Bamford. Bamford is the editor of Anthroposophic Press. Things were beginning to make sense. This is Rosicrucian Christianity. From this website:
Thus we see that Saint Dominic’s institution of the Rosary (encouraged, it is said, by an apparition of the Blessed Virgin herself) and Arnold of Villanova’s alchemical Rosarium Philosophorum have more in common than one might suspect. For the symbol of this Sophia—the purified soul with access in the three realms—has always been the Rose. Sixteenth century alchemists knew this and called it the flos sapientium:, the flower of wisdom; for them, to accomplish the Great Work was to have “attained the Rose.” Throughout the Middle Ages, the figure of the Rose—Rosa Mystica, that rose planted beside the waters—proliferates alarmingly, seemingly used indifferently of Jesus and Mary but in fact always referring to this purified heart of humanity in which the Christ—the center of the world, the immanent transcendent principle—can dwell. In Dante’s words, it is “the Rose wherein the divine Word made itself flesh.”
Here mention must be made of the Grail which, as Guenon pointed out, following Charbonnneau-Lassay, echoes the kind of symbolism we have been following.
Guenon. Rosicrucianism. Grand Orient Freemasonry? That appears to be a logical conclusion, though I have not seen Bamford's name linked with Grand Orient specifically. He is a member of Lindisfarne Associates, the organization originally based at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York that pushes Gaia worship and supports United Religions Initiative.
The paper talks of the Kabbalah, of Grail questing, of Pico della Mirandola, of Joachim of Fiore, of Moses de Leon, of St. Bernard, of the Cathars, of Sophia, of Hildegard of Bingen, of alchemy, Paracelsus, and more. In other words, Christopher Bamford and Michael Baigent would have a lot in common. As would Dan Brown, I presume.
This is Rosicrucian Freemasonry. It sounds Catholic, but with a twist. As Mark said of Williams in a comments box below, these people are just really odd, probably not the least because they are Gnostic.
Since Guenon is cited, and since Bamford is part of the support for United Religions Initiative, I presume they intend to morph this distorted Christianity into a world religion of some sort.
ONE MORE DOT
The Archangel Michael: His Mission and Ours : Selected Lectures and Writing 1994, Rudolf Steiner, Christopher Bamford ISBN: 0880103787
That book appears on this website dedicated to books on channeling.
