transmission

FUSE: Parpola on Kabbalah – to Rene Daumal to the Thurman piece on Maitreya – the higher moral strata and lower immoral – bankruptcy??? See: past articles – we must dig in the past, excavate the archetypes in order to precipitate the psyche into the future . . .

But circularity as in the circumpunct and the Symbol of the Sun has an ancient history –

Kingsley’s from “the core to the core . . .”” fits in nicely with the Babylonian example of Harpocriton and the Old Man and the pillars engraved with knowledge – Eudoxus in Heliopolis also could have been a core to core transmission –

In Rochberg, transmission originates from the ‘Mouth of the God’ just as in the Kagyu Lineage from the Celestial Vajradhara.. [Bearer of the Thunderbolt] (Sanskrit: वज्रधार Vajradhāra, Tibetan: རྡོ་རྗེ་འཆང་། rdo rje 'chang (Dorje Chang);

The dharmakaya, synonymous with Vajradhara Buddha, is the source of all the manifestations of enlightenment. Vajradhara is central to the Kagyu lineage because Tilopa received the vajrayana teachings directly from Vajradhara, the dharmakaya buddha. Thus, the Kagyu lineage originated from the very nature of buddhahood.

That realization of the nature was in turn transmitted within the Golden Rosary by Tilopa. [HERE] See also VAJRADHARA HERE AND HERE

Hermann of Carinthia, travels from Toledo to Damascus, there is no reason why he could not have stopped off at the Court of Palermo for a bit of networking, just as later, Michael Scott visits Palermo and the Court of Frederick II.

“At Alamut the Assassins kept a great library full of works on philosophy and the occult sciences. Hulagu sent his Moslem Chamberlain, Ata al-Mulk Juveni to inspect it. Juveni set aside the Korans that he found, as well as books of scientific and historical value. The heretical works were burnt. By a strange coincidence there was about the same time a great fire, caused by lightening, in the city of Medina, and its library, which had the greatest collection of works on orthodox Moslem philosophy, was totally destroyed.” [1]

The transmission of the visual image. Hermann of Carinthia in Constantinople, with his friend . . . from Toledo to Palermo to Bologna

to Byzantium . . . The Aratea Decans . . . where did the Leiden Aratea originate?

Check Toledo material - Michael Scott. VIP - Carolingian Renovation . . . bringing the astrological material out of the Scriptoriums . . .Roman roots in classical knowledge of Charlemagne

“. . . the ancient Sufi concern of passing knowledge between different cultures, particularly at times of greatest need.”

“Sufis themselves will tell you that it is an ancient organization that has embraced free thinkers and people concerned with human development from many cultures throughout history.”

“In an article in The Guardian, Jason Webster is also of the opinion that the Sufi Way, as it is known, is a natural antidote to fanaticism.

“Webster states that classical Islamic Sufis include (amongst many others) the poet and Persian polymath Omar Khayyám, the Andalusian polymath Avërroes, the Persian poet and hagiographer Fariduddin Attar, and the Persian poet and theologian Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi. The reviewer also notes that when The Sufis first appeared, The Washington Post declared the book “a seminal book of the century”, and that the work attracted writers such as Doris Lessing, J. D. Salinger and Geoffrey Grigson. The poet Ted Hughes also described it as “astonishing” and wrote that “The Sufis must be the biggest society of sensible men on Earth.” According to the reviewer, others in the West drawn to or influenced by Sufism include St Francis of Assisi, the novelist, poet and playwright Miguel de Cervantes, the poet and diplomat Sir Richard Burton, the leading British politician Winston Churchill, and the diplomat and economist Dag Hammarskjöld.”

Jason Webster, "Sufism: 'a natural antidote to fanaticism'". The Guardian. (23 October 2014)

Jason Webster, “The Biggest society of sensible men” The Guardian, 25^th October 2014, p.21.

“This raises the second issue: the issue of esotericism. In the case of Ezekiel we appear to be faced with an example of transmission from one religious tradition to another - but transmission of a very particular kind. In the rabbinic tradition of Judaism, the central details of Ezekiel's vision remained as esoteric, as strongly guarded a secret, as they had been in the Babylonian priestly tradition which preceded him. This clearly implies that the transmission was not, as one might suppose would be the case with cultural borrowings of imagery or ideas, a straightforward matter of contact between the periphery of one religion and the periphery of another. On the contrary, the transmission seems to have occurred directly between the heart of one tradition and the heart of another: from centre to centre, core to core. How exactly it happened, we do not know; what matters is the fact that it evidently did happen. And the case of Ezekiel is by no means unique. Much the same phenomenon appears to occur repeatedly in the subsequent history of western ideas: for example, the transmission of highly complex and necessarily esoteric Babylonian doctrine to the Pythagoreans during the two to three centuries after Ezekiel, or the subsequent interchanges between Kabbalah, Sufism and Christianity. The supposedly insuperable barriers of language and cultural difference prove at this level to be no obstacle at all. What "should not" happen according to the exoteric view of cultural or religious self-definition continues to occur; and, what is more, it proves of incalculable significance in shaping those supposedly distinct religions, cultures or philosophies.

Peter Kingsley, Ezekiel by the Grand Canal: Between Jewish and Babylonian Tradition, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Nov., 1992), p. 345.

“Against the narrowly defined fundamentalisms and the ambient neo-spiritualism, it is important to engage in useful work drawing from the sources that are the great Traditions and to clear the way for a true oecumenical spirituality, showing the importance of mediating beings and their symbolic fecundity, restoring the indissoluble link between traditions and revelation, between degrees of knowledge, levels of reality and theophanies.”

“Some of the more learned lamas, including the late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, have believed that since very early times there has been a secret international symbol-code in common use among the initiates, which affords a key to the meaning of such occult doctrines as are still jealously guarded by religious fraternities in India, as in Tibet, and in China, Mongolia, and Japan.

In like manner, Occidental occultists have contended that the hieroglyphical writings of ancient Egypt and of Mexico seem to have been, in some degree, a popularized or exoteric outgrowth of a secret language. They argue, too, that a symbol-code was sometimes used by Plato and other Greek philosophers, in relation to Pythagorean and Orphic lore; that throughout the Celtic world the Druids conveyed all their esoteric teachings symbolically ; that the use of parables, as in the sermons of Jesus and of the Buddha, and of other Great Teachers, illustrates the same tendency; and that through works like Aesop's Fables, and the miracle and mystery plays of medieval Europe, many of the old Oriental symbols have been introduced into the modern literatures of the West.”

The Tibetan Book of The Dead or The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering Compiled and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz with a new Foreword and Afterword by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Oxford University Press, 2000, p.3

Paul J. Bagley, On the Practice of Esotericism, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1992), pp. 231-247

Egil Asprem, Esotericism and the Scholastic Imagination: The Origins of Esoteric Practice in Christian Kataphatic Spirituality*

Scholars agree that the imagination is central to esoteric practice. While the esoteric vis imaginativa is usually attributed to the influx of Neoplatonism in the Italian Renaissance, this article argues that many of its key properties were already in place in medieval scholasticism. Two aspects of the history of the imagination are discussed. First, it is argued that esoteric practice is rooted in a broader kataphatic trend within Christian spirituality that explodes in the popular devotion literature of the later Middle Ages. By looking at the role of Bonaventure’s “cognitive theology” in the popularization of gospel meditations and kataphatic devotional prayer, it is argued that there is a direct link between the scholastic reconsideration of the imaginative faculty and the development of esoteric practices inspired by Christian devotional literature. Secondly, it is argued that the Aristotelian inner sense tradition of the scholastics left a lasting impression on later esoteric conceptualizations of the imaginative faculty. Examples suggesting evidence for both these two claims are discussed. The article proposes to view esoteric practices as an integral part of a broader kataphatic stream in European religious history, separated out by a set of disjunctive strategies rooted in the policing of “orthopraxy” by ecclesiastical authorities.

Having overdosed on Medieval Splatter and Gore of ‘Game of Thrones’ I thought it would be in keeping with the atmosphere to re-read Umberto Eco’s, The Name of The Rose. Not an entirely successful operation. But there was one nugget that caught my attention. He writes of:

Now in my mind, and in common images, the ‘idea’ is always associated with a Light Bulb - the ‘bright-idea’ – Illumination being part of LIGHT SYMBOLISM. So under Hermetic Headings I discovered further examples:

"An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left."

"Ideas develop from seeds, and we do not know what ideas will develop from what seeds in the course of history."

“If we want a beautiful garden, we must first have a blueprint in the imagination, a vision. Then that idea can be implemented and the external garden be materialized.

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

A. T. Sinclair, The Secret Language of Masons and Tinkers, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 22, No. 86 (Oct. - Dec., 1909), pp. 353-364

“Hiram has a linguistic identification with the Greek Hermes (Roman Mercury, Egyptian Thoth) who was the messenger of the gods and guardian of the crossroads, the “X”.”

Margaret Starbird, The Woman with The Alabaster Jar, Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1993. p..112

"To the initiated Builder the name Hiram Abiff signifies 'My Father, the Universal Spirit, one in essence, three in aspect.' Thus the murdered Master is a type of the Cosmic Martyr - the crucified Spirit of Good, the dying god - whose Mystery is celebrated throughout the world."

"The efforts made to discover the origin of the Hiramic legend show that, while the legend in its present form is comparatively modern, its underlying principles run back to remotest antiquity. It is generally admitted by modern Masonic scholars that the story of the martyred Hiram is based upon the Egyptian rites of Osiris, whose death and resurrection figuratively portrayed the spiritual death of man and his regeneration through initiation into the Mysteries. Hiram is also identified with Hermes through the inscription on the Emerald Tablet."

Manly P. Hall, Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic & Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy

“This mason's talk is a secret language spoken only by stone-masons, they all claim. Apprentices obtained from a master-mason first papers, second papers, and finally a third paper, called an "indenture," and an increase of wages with each paper. No apprentice was entitled to his indenture until he could speak the "Bearla lagair." They were forbidden to teach it to any one not a mason, even to a member of their own family. No stone-mason would work on any job except with members of the order. This language identified them. They also had secret signs, methods of handling their trowels, squares, and other tools, ways of pointing, and laying and smoothing mortar, which indicated a member, without a word being spoken. Meetings were held, from which strangers were excluded by posted sentinels. Any member who had broken a rule of the craft could be tried and punished. Some of these rules were de-signed to protect the health; and the tradition is, that in olden times masons had the right to, and did, punish occasionally with the death penalty. They were a powerful order, and at that time contained a large class of the most intelligent men of the time. The mason's trade was perhaps the most important craft.”

A. T. Sinclair, The Secret Language of Masons and Tinkers, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 22, No. 86 (Oct. - Dec., 1909), p. 354.

See: Tubal Cain – Genesis 5:22

[1] Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Volume 3, Penguin 1965, p.301.