ruffashlar
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Lodge Milncroft No. 1515 (GLoS), Govanhill Royal Arch Chapter 523 (S.G.R.A.C.S.)
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Post by ruffashlar on Jun 8, 2005 3:06:09 GMT
The Kabbalah is a Jewish system of thought which interprets the Old Testament in a special way. It says that everything in the universe comes from God, and all these different things are imagined as rays of light called Sefirot (singular: Sefirah) or Emanations.
There are reckoned to be ten Sefirot, which are symbolic powers or qualities with names in Hebrew like Chokmah (Wisdom) or Chesed (Glory). The manner of their radiation outwards is imagined as a framework, rather like a theatrical lighting-rig, called the Tree of Life. Note that the numbering of the Sefirot, from 1 to 10, counts down to Earth in a zigzag suggesting a thunderbolt. It is this which is believed to have been described when Jacob in the Bible dreams of his famous Ladder.
Its angel-thronged rungs and the posts supporting them are known as the Paths. They are numbered 22 after the names and number of the Hebrew letters (not 32); they each have symbolic meanings. The Ladder is considered to have three posts: the post on the left, that on the right and, between them, the individual himself: the middle pillar.
This idealised human figure superimposed on the Tree is called Adam Kadmon and each of the Sefirot can be considered as one of the gifts of God to Man as they are variously assigned to the regions of human anatomy. Thus Chokmah (Wisdom) and Binah (Understanding) are placed either side of the brain.
Kabbalah can be spelled in different ways. The K-spelling generally means the Kabbalah regarded as a Jewish school of philosophy only. With a C, it means that system as later interpreted and added to by Christians. And with a Q (qabalah), both systems as interpreted by modern, specifically Hermetic (occult) or Masonic groups. The name means "received wisdom" or "secret tradition".
The earliest books of importance in the Kabbalah are the Zohar (see thread by that name) and the Sefer ha Yetzirah. There are others, and search engines will uncover them if you look.
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Post by hollandr on Jun 8, 2005 3:50:18 GMT
And if you meditate for a long time you may see how to apply the tree of life geometry to various islands and continents.
Human habitation often is concentrated around the sites that coincide with the lower sephira - as far as I have observed to date.
Cheers
Russell
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ruffashlar
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Lodge Milncroft No. 1515 (GLoS), Govanhill Royal Arch Chapter 523 (S.G.R.A.C.S.)
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Post by ruffashlar on Jun 8, 2005 18:58:17 GMT
WTF?
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Post by hollandr on Jun 9, 2005 0:39:51 GMT
Ruff
On what basis do you think that the geometrical Tree of Life only applies to the human body?
As above so below.
Cheers
Russell
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ruffashlar
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Lodge Milncroft No. 1515 (GLoS), Govanhill Royal Arch Chapter 523 (S.G.R.A.C.S.)
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Post by ruffashlar on Jun 9, 2005 4:11:32 GMT
On what basis do you think that the geometrical Tree of Life only applies to the human body?
The obvious one: that in columnar shape, vertical bearing, the upness of the head and the downness of the feet, the human body can be apportioned to the parts of the Tree of Life and the parts of the Tree of Life to the body. There are ten Sefiroth and ten each of fingers and toes.
Whereas, the Earth is round and not symmetrical over its surface. Cities, towns and conurbations are not distributed evenly across it, neither are physical geogeaphical features.
"As above so below" doesn't mean rigid mirror-imaging. Otherwise, why are all the Earth's stars in hollywood?
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Post by sid on Jun 11, 2005 2:13:44 GMT
Regarding the term "As above so below":
Hermeticly speaking the correct translation is believed to be "the joining of the 'above' with the 'below':
The joining of the two parts of the lion (to make the lion complete) i.e., the front part of the lion (above), with the back part of the lion (below).
This is derived from the original texts & meaning from Egypt, which include the 2 hierogliphics of the front and back parts of a lion HATY, the 'above', with PEH, the 'below'.
See: page 128 of the book "Rebel in the Soul" a sacred text of ancient Egypt, with translation & commentary by Bika Reed. Inner Traditions, New York. ISBN 0-89281-004-1
If anyone would like to have the exact quote from the book, I will post it on the forum.
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Post by hollandr on Jun 11, 2005 2:42:29 GMT
Sid
I am most interested in the spiritual aspects of lions.
Please post the full text
Cheers
Russell
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Post by taylorsman on Jun 11, 2005 11:41:53 GMT
On the matter of the Tree of Life and the Human Body, I have been struck by the similarity of the famous painting of "Christ of St John of the Cross" which has fascinated me since I first saw it as kid in the Kelvingrove Art Galleries in Glasgow, (it is now located near St Mungo's Cathedral in Glasgow in the Museum of Religion), and the lower portion of the Tree.
The top of the Cross with the writing of Pilate INRI is Tiphereth 6, Christ's hands are Netzach 7 (Right) and Hod 8 (Left), His head is Yesod 9, and Malkuth 10 His feet. Several sets of Triangles are of course formed. Thus we have Beauty, Victory, Splendour, Foundation, and The Kingdom - Five Points?.
Anyone have constructve comments to make on this?
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Post by hollandr on Jun 11, 2005 12:48:12 GMT
Taylorsman I assume you are referring to the triangular geometry in the painting www.peeblesscotland.com/dalichrist.htmlI think that you might be pushing the interpretation a bit. To my untutored eye the picture suggests that some being is looking down on the crucified man. This could be the man's own spirit come out of the body as it is very close to and just above the body - not too far from where it is possible to access the intelligence of the soul body. The Sea of Galillee (I assume) below is pretty much deserted. Does this mean no followers left? It is interesting that the nails are through the palms. I assume that it was well known by then that Romans put nails through the wrists. If so then Dali is deliberately putting up a traditional image when it was likely that he was quite sophisticated in his understandings. I think you need to look for the Five Points elsewhere. This is primarily because the 5 points are based on spot-welding 2 brothers at specific major and minor chakras as a mechanism for fellowship energy flows. (Ruff, ignore the above) Cheers Russell
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Post by atarnaris on Jun 11, 2005 16:24:17 GMT
I think you need to look for the Five Points elsewhere. This is primarily because the 5 points are based on spot-welding 2 brothers at specific major and minor chakras as a mechanism for fellowship energy flows. (Ruff, ignore the above) Wait a minute... Foot,Knee,hand,Breast, and Shoulder. Where is the major Chakras except the fourth?
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Post by hollandr on Jun 11, 2005 22:43:56 GMT
Andrew
To be more specific then, one major and four minor chakras.
I first saw the spot welding while making love. I saw these energy spots forming and recognised them.
Does this suggest that male only Masonry is missing out a bit in some of the dynamics of the spot welding?
Cheers
Russell
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Post by atarnaris on Jun 11, 2005 23:00:45 GMT
Does this suggest that male only Masonry is missing out a bit in some of the dynamics of the spot welding? Cheers Russell Russell, The Great Work is accomplished by the Holy Union of the Square & the Compass, not just the Compass on its own .
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ruffashlar
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Lodge Milncroft No. 1515 (GLoS), Govanhill Royal Arch Chapter 523 (S.G.R.A.C.S.)
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Post by ruffashlar on Jun 12, 2005 3:42:05 GMT
Aherm. All very interesting, I'm sure. However, I think Steve actually asked Anyone have constructve comments to make on this?
The Cristo de San Juan de la Cruz (1951) is based in part upon an extant autograph drawing by St John of the Cross, also called St John of Avila. The drawing shows the crucified Christ from the unusual perspective of a viewer looking down upon Christ's head, either from above or from in front of the cross seen as suspended horizontally. This St John was a Catholic mystic, a man with a very close and intensely passionate relationship to God. His verses of mystical love for God are written as love poems, full of very fleshly desire sublimated into hymns of praise.
The only person to share his passion was another mystic, St Teresa of Avila. They were so close that it was feared they were at it like knives. There's little doubt they kept their vows but were in every other sense devoted to one another, and their mutual love, the Divine.
Salvador Dali himself - a former child prodigy, a superb photographic artist, an obsessive neurotic, a shrewd self-publicist and an unashamed lover of money - as well as all this, was deeply involved with his own dream-life to the extent that it seemed more real than waking. Dreams are the key to understanding him. Many of his paintings come from dreams, and he grew to be fascinated with legendary stories of saints having visions of God, which thanks to his reading of Freud he could never entirely separate from a psychosexual reading.
The Christ figure in this work is therefore a dream image which mutates into different meanings as you look at it. In its shape, with the arms flung back in a steep V, it suggests a descending dove in flight: hence, the Holy Spirit which both heralded His birth and will attend upon His Resurrection.
The arm-posture also suggests the ovaries either side of the womb, where the head is, the crossed feet indicating the birth-canal.
He is also a figure floating in darkness: a foetus.
Typical of Dali, the male child is identified with the uterus, with femaleness. Dali depicted himself very often as a child in his pictures, and sometimes as a girl child. He was very strongly feminine identified, but pathologically denied (or was in denial about) any attraction to men. His friend the late poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was certainly strongly attracted to Dali, but Dali himself was culturally as well as personally terrified by the very idea. This conservative streak in Dali is highly significant.
As I say, he identified strongly with women, but was equally strongly attracted to women sexually while also being afraid of them. He was in some regard cured of this by his wife, Gala, formerly married to Surrealist poet Paul Eluard (who rather bohemianly gave her up to him), but in fact he simply obsessed about her as Woman Personified, and began to sign himself Gala Salvador Dali.
Bizarre sex fantasies of the two of them mutually eating one another (a coded reference to soixante-neuf? Freud regarded this as an obsessive perversion) resulted in pictures like Autumn Cannibalism -www.duke.edu/web/lit132/dali_cannibalism-autumn.jpg - which is also an allegory of the internecine prandial orgy of the Spanish Civil War, in which conflict he supported the Fascists. But crucially, the theme of eating, Dali concluded must be related to the Catholic Mass, in which the central rite consists of the ingestion into oneself of the body of God.
So Dali, despite being a Modernist, a Surrealist and a very strange kind of guy, eventually and inevitably comes back around to the Catholicism of his childhood. We see it in the creation of these big, traditionally-themed religious paintings in the style of the Old Masters. His St John is thus one more expression of this burgeoning revision of Catholicism as a personal allegory, the chaste love of Ss. John and Teresa mirrored in the rather odd marriage he shared with Gala. The amniotic darkness of a floating foetal Christ was Dali himself suspended within the personality of Gala, who was also his Oedipal mother-figure.
The sea below Christ is actually the coast of Port Lligat on the Costa Brava, where the Dalis set up home. The real world constantly pokes through into the dreamworld, because Dali thought they really were interconnected.
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Post by taylorsman on Jun 12, 2005 8:18:38 GMT
Thanks to both Ruff and Russell for your useful comments on this Painting. I have a colour print of both Christ of St John of the Cross and the Tree of Life on my wall side by side .
I was very young when Glasgow City Council purchased this painting and there was quite a local controversy about it. Glasgow is a very divided city between Protestants and Roman Catholics and some of the more extreme Prods objected that the painting was too Popish. On the others side some RCs felt it deviated too far from the Traditional and therefore Church approved Crucifixion scene of a broken and bleeding Christ flanked by two theives. Instead Dali's painting is Christ Triumphant, transcending physical Death. That is why I prefer this portrayal of the Crucifixion to the more standard ones.
Ruff, I was aware of the sexual aspects of Dali and how he incorporated these into his paintings , indeed one is called "The Great Masturbator" but I didn't think this was relevant to this discussion. That he supported Franco was possibly more as self preservation and backing the horse which would win unlike Picasso who took an idealogical stand and was thus exiled from Spain until the Dictator died.
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ruffashlar
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Lodge Milncroft No. 1515 (GLoS), Govanhill Royal Arch Chapter 523 (S.G.R.A.C.S.)
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Post by ruffashlar on Jun 12, 2005 20:31:53 GMT
I was aware of the sexual aspects of Dali and how he incorporated these into his paintings ... but I didn't think this was relevant to this discussion.
No, I wasn't being at all gratuitous. The psychosexual element is absolutely (pardon the pun) crucial to understanding Dali, and all aspects of his work. Dali himself has said as much in his extensive self-examinatory experiments in autobiography. The only artist to whom he is comparable in this sense is Dante Alighieri: the Vita Nuova, which details the poet's own nascent obsessive love for Beatrice, is to the same extent explicitly involved with the erotic as a transformative agent.
Something very close to alchemy is being attempted in Dali, as it is in Dante: the body dies, becomes morbid, is purified of its dross, and springs up again resurrected, climbing the star-strung ladder to infinite being. Transformation is absolute: male and female transcended, the individual has become the universal.
That he supported Franco was possibly more as self preservation and backing the horse which would win unlike Picasso who took an idealogical stand and was thus exiled from Spain until the Dictator died.
I disagree fundamentally: fascism is the only possible ideology for someone as divergent and internally diverse as Dali. True, he did not have to literally believe in it, but irony, as many fail to understand, is not an available tint on Dali's palette. He is always completely serious, even though he focusses, with undeniable consistency, upon the least polemical aspects of anything which he invests with attention.
His peculiar apotheosis of the image of Hitler, for example, tells us nothing at all about Politics, but unwittingly reveals much about Dali's own masochistic bisexuality:-
I was fascinated by Hitler's soft, fleshy back, which was always so tightly strapped into the uniform. Whenever I start to paint the leather strap that crossed from his belt to his shoulder, the softness of that Hitler flesh packed under his military tunic transported me into a sustaining and Wagnerian ecstasy that set my heart pounding, an extremely rare state of excitement that I did not even experience during the act of love.
Do doubt about it, Dali was a fascist by conviction, if a very stupid one. But that hardly distinguishes him among fascists.
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Post by maat on Jun 27, 2005 1:35:51 GMT
Herewith is an interesting site for the beginner who wishes to see how ALL is connected. www.byzant.com/mystical/I have visited an interactive site on the Kabbala before but cannot find it at present - will continue my search for it. And if I may bore you with another of my dreams ... but the message may be relevant to Masons in general. I am at the bottom of 3 terraced gardens with a zig zaqging ramp that connects the different levels. While looking at this I am involuntarily moved at great speed straight up the centre to the top level and my attention is drawn to a wheelbarrow leaning against the wall. Next moment if find a trowel in my hand upon which are five seeds. The trowel starts to vibrate to such an extent that the seeds are thrown off onto the ground when they start to grow before my eyes. Next I am told to look behind me - which I do and see that "someone" has taken my seedlings and have put them in pots and they become like Jacks beanstalk reaching skyward before my eyes. End of dream. Again it was only some time later that I recognised the terrace symbolism of the Kabbala and the "tools" of Freemasonry...the wheelbarrow and the trowel. My interpretation of the dream was that if we put in the hard work and do the best we can - we will receive aid from the great unknown. I thought the 5 seeds were interesting - the 5 senses? Looking behind me? We don't always see the results of our efforts or acknowledge the invisible help that we receive upon our path. Ascending straight up the centre? ... walking the middle path? between the Pillars? B & J? I do exhort Masons to pay more attention to their dreams - throughout Masonry you will find 'reflections' - Mark and Royal Arch spring to mind. Our minds find our dreams the easiest way to reflect the upper worlds...by symbol and allegory. Maat
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Post by maat on Jun 27, 2005 2:01:39 GMT
After my last post I realised I was replying to posts on page one only - I have done this before - just put it down to advancing years.
Re page 2 - the sex page - all very interesting. But don't forget it is the band around our waist - to which the apron is attached - that reminds us to direct the Energy to the upper chakras. Many the disciple has fallen because the Energy was not elevated. Could this be a reason why so many powerful people fall prey to the irresistable sexual urge and find that enough is just not enough?! The Kundulini starts its upward accent from the base of the spine.
Maat
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Post by hollandr on Jun 27, 2005 3:24:36 GMT
Maat
One of the contributors to sex problems in genuine initiates is that the matter of the planet is not perfect.
So that it is most difficult to achieve a highly-energised perfection through subtle bodies of imperfect matter.
Hence the occasional fall from grace.
Cheers
Russell
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ruffashlar
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Lodge Milncroft No. 1515 (GLoS), Govanhill Royal Arch Chapter 523 (S.G.R.A.C.S.)
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Post by ruffashlar on Jun 28, 2005 18:54:51 GMT
No, the reason why so many powerful people fall prey to the irresistable sexual urge and find that enough is just not enough is because there is nothing like it in all of Nature.
Only art, sport, drugs, nationalism, love, religious ecstasy and the life of the intellect can compare with sex for the feeling of elation and euphoria - and even then, not very favourably. As a way to get animals to spread their genes to the next generation, it certainly takes some beating; which is probably why so many combine it with flagellation.
No, I'm afraid there is no denying this fact: hats off to the Creator, sex is the best thing.
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Post by sid on Jun 28, 2005 19:57:45 GMT
Oh, those pheromones
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