Meditations on the Tarot

2011-06-062020-06-07

Freedom is a Fact

Justice

Human thought results in the diremption of the Cosmos, into Macrocosm and Microcosm. The Macrocosm is what we experience through our senses, the Microcosm what we experience through thought. Through our senses – colour, shape, sound, and so on – we ascertain that something is. But it is through thought that we understand what it is.

In the diagram by Robert Fludd we see the arrangement of the Microcosm. The three Hermetic sciences — Alchemy, Astrology, and Theurgy — address different sections of the diagram as shown in the following chart.

Microcosm	Macrocosm
Thought	Senses	Method of experience
Alchemy	Chemistry	Study of the elements.
Astrology	Astronomy	Study of stars and planets.
Theurgy	Science	Study of angelic hierarchies.

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2011-05-052011-05-05

Axioms of the Will (I)

Nothing resists the will of man when he knows the truth and wills the good.
COMMENTARY. The Truth is the Idea identical with Being. Will means altering Being in conformance with the Idea. The True Idea is. To will the good is to will the Idea.
To will evil is to will death. A perverse will is the beginning of suicide.
COMMENTARY. Evil is disorder, chaos, formlessness, multiplicity. To will evil, then, is to will dissolution.
To will good with violence is to will evil, for violence produces disorder and disorder produces evil.
COMMENTARY. The Will of God is actionless action. Violence is its opposite and is destructive of order.
One can, and one should, accept evil as the means of good; but one must never will it or do it, otherwise one would destroy with one hand what one builds with the other. Good faith never justifies bad means; it corrects them when one undergoes them, and condemns them when one takes them.
COMMENTARY. Evil increases the virtue of the wise but corrupts the weak.

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2011-04-122017-04-13

Moral Purification of the Will

Man’s mind is rapt by God to the contemplation of the divine truth in three ways:

He contemplates it through certain imaginary pictures.

He contemplates the divine truth through its intelligible effects.

He contemplates it in its essence.

Now when man’s intellect is uplifted to the sublime vision of God’s essence, it is necessary that his mind’s whole attention should be summoned to that purpose in such a way that he understands nothing else by phantasms, and is absorbed entirely in God.

~ Mary of Agreda, Mystical City of God

Mary of Agreda has given us the three stages of Hermetic contemplation, which are related to their Yoga counterparts in the following table:

Hermetism	Yoga	Theophan	Description
Concentration	dharana	Spoken prayer	Visualization
Meditation	dhyana	Mental prayer	Mental Prayer
Contemplation	samadhi	Unceasing prayer	Prayer of the Heart

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2011-04-102011-04-10

The Void and the Fullness are Indissolubly Bound

We never start from the “many”, but from the “One” in a state of privation which is correlative to the appearance of others around and against it, in order to move to the “One” in a state of fullness and sufficiency, in which such an appearance is consummated.
~ Julius Evola

To understand the creation of the world, we need to begin with the concept of privation. “Privation” is the absence of a given form in something capable of possessing it. As it is a lack, it has no being in itself, yet it is part of experience. Whatever appears to limit me, whatever seems to oppose my Will, reveals an insufficiency in me, that is, a “privation”. Rather than simply representing a lack or insufficiency, a being may embrace privation and deliberately choose to limit itself. Boris Mouravieff writes (Gnosis, Vol 1):

Orthodox Tradition teaches that the Universe was created by a sacrifice of God. We shall understand this postulate better if we consider that it differentiates between the state of manifested Divinity and that of unmanifested Divinity — which is therefore limitless and free from all conditions. God’s sacrifice is Self-limitation by manifestation.

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2011-04-092017-04-08

Where Truth Will Dwell

Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of the Lord, by which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat? But we look for new heavens and a new earth according to his promises, in which justice dwelleth.
~ 2 Peter 3:12-13

In the brief monograph, The Problem of the New Man, published by the Praxis Institute, Boris Mouravieff describes the historical conditions leading up to the issues of today and the necessary solution that will usher in the next Golden Age, ending the current cycle. Mouravieff claims to be revealing the esoteric teachings of the Eastern Churches, which have not been made public until now.

Four moments of the Spirit

He identifies four dominant trends, which we are calling the moments of the Spirit since they are the historical manifestation of a single idea. These are: Philosophy, Religion, Science, and Art.

Philosophy: Philosophy is based on the concept which is both universal as idea and concrete as it is expressed as the judgment of particular states of affairs. This judgment is the unity of subject and object, or essence and existence.
Religion: Religion denies that reality can be fully expressed conceptually. For the religious consciousness, the concept and the thing, essence and existence are no longer statically givens, as objects of contemplation. The ethical will connects the ideal to existence, which it actualizes.
Science: Science, the child of nominalism, then reduces the concept to the practical. Bracketing out any reference to the transcendental, it is autonomous with respect to the ethical. The will is replaced with volition, or desire, whose aim is merely practical. Ideas, concepts, and theories are tools to manipulate the world for practical ends.
Art: Art is knowledge of the individual, not the universal concept of philosophy. Its method is intuition, a direct, unmediated, unity. But intuition is real only to the extent to which it is expressed. For intuition, the ethical is the aesthetic.