Sunday, April 17, 2005
A FEW PASSAGES FROM A MOST INTERESTING WEBSITE
The following passages can be found in a page in the website of the Merchant Taylors School outside of London. The website discusses some influences on Shakespear, and I presume is used in an English class, however some of the passages have implications for a Catholic trying to understand what has happened to the Church. The passages of significance are:
Renaissance man’s longing for a 'primordial' revelation which could include not only Moses and Plato but also the traditions Magia (magic) and Jewish mystical lore, The Cabbala and the mysterious religions of Egypt and Persia. It reveals also a profound dissatisfaction with medieval religion and the medieval conception of man and the universe, and a longing for a universalistic, trans-historical, 'mythical' religion. …
The Cabbala was introduced to Occult Neo Platonism by its founding father, Pico della Mirandola. The Cabbalist's Tree of Life is a pattern of ten ascending stations (Sephiroth - Angelic Powers) positioned on and between the pillars of Justice and Mercy, mounting from the lowest Hells to the Divine Source. These ten stations form a graded system of symbolic correspondences, each station being like a file in a filing cabinet. The ten stations encompass all the possibilities of existence. Everything in the universe, attached to its symbol, can be given its proper place on the Tree, according to its spiritual quality and significance. So the Tree becomes a model of the hierarchies of the universe, a device for imagining the ordered universe as a stairway to God. Climbing in meditation through the stations, on the path of the Serpent of Wisdom, the practitioner endeavours to raise his consciousness step by step, towards union with the Divine Source.
That is a description of “cosmic consciousness”.
Bruno lifted the Cabbala out of Judaism, and re-centre it on Christ. This became the model for all variations of Neo Platonism. Because the language of Cabbala is Hebrew, the language of biblical God and the angels, and because the imagery of the Tree of Life is biblical, and because this strange apparatus for contemplation was thought to be the very Temple that Christ would build again in three days (the "Ari-el") and because it was operated by techniques of meditation that at a simple level were like prayer and at the highest provided communion with supernatural beings, it provided a system of symbolic correspondences to renovate and refashion disintegrating Christianity. …
A title of the Temple in Rabbinical literature was Ariel, literally 'Lion of God', but also 'Flame of God', the thunder and lightning of the Divine Source. However, it can only be completed by the discovery of mercy, the rose at the centre of the cross…
Rather reminiscent of the picture of Jesus used on Divine Mercy Sunday. In any case, a rose superimposed on a cross is the symbol of the Rosicrucians.
The main currents of Occult Neo Platonism came to a climax, in England, during the last decades of the sixteenth century. The great, formative figures of this final phase of the movement were Giordano Bruno and John Dee, then both at the height of their powers.
Cardinal Sodano apologized for the death of Bruno, as Zenit reported on Feb. 18, 2000.
Dee was Queen Elizabeth's mathematician, consultant to navigators and the builders of the navy, and the most celebrated English philosopher of the day: a man of prestige and influence. …His Occult Neo Platonism was imperialist…, messianic and Christian, moving towards a deepening preoccupation with conjuring spirits and angels (that eventually almost swallowed him up). …
Bruno came to England in the I580s, when Shakespeare was in his 20s. This Italian, impassioned, combative evangelist of the new vision made an impact. His brand of Occult Neo Platonism was a combination of Ancient Egyptian religion, a Copernican universe that was also a gigantic image of the spiritual creation, and a phenomenal cultivation of memory systems. All his systems were based on principles similar to the Cabbalist's Tree of Life…
The practitioner operated these systems mounting the ladder, locking his meditation upon Love by various procedures of ritual magic (that would now be called techniques of hypnosis or self-hypnosis). On the way, Bruno strove to open 'the black diamond doors' of the psyche, releasing visions, revelations of divine understanding, and even supernatural intelligences and powers. This 'magically animated imagination', as he described it, was the key to his teachings. He called his mnemonic images 'seals', meaning 'sigils', a sigil being the signature of a daemonic being. These entities, like Dee's angels, did not exist as intellectual abstractions, crowding on to the point of a needle, they had personality and were open to human negotiation, accessible to the attuned mind of the adept trained in magic, susceptible to his manipulative will, and were able, properly handled, to raise him to near god-like awareness and being.
