This is part I on the role of the Warrior caste in a Traditional Society. Here Guido De Giorgio describes the role of the warrior caste and its relationship to the priestly caste.

In the active life, they are the bearers of power and therefore constitute the second caste of traditional society whose duty is the maintenance of activity guided by virtue. We say power only in the arena of the active life because in the contemplative life, true power is manifested in its highest reality, from the invisible to the visible, from the divine to the human, and thus represents the supreme authority that belongs to the priestly caste. Power in the active life is realized by giving a sacred character to every manifestation;

Please find the rest of the text on Gornahoor.

Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!

This is also the key to Yoga as Pantajali tells us:

Yoga is the suppression of the oscillations of the mental substance.

These oscillations are automatic and mechanical: they arise from sensory impressions, inner desires, negative emotions, and thoughts that run on their own and usually have origins from unsuspected sources. Concentration is a free act and must be distinguished from obsession, which mimics concentration, but is not free.

Intentional sacrifice then is training for concentration: we learn to distinguish the state of calm and freedom from the disorder of “desires, the imagination and discursive thought”. To be effortless, the will cannot oppose directly the sources of these disorders. Instead, we need to learn to detach from them, to observe them from a point of silence. Only then will they dissipate. This is the rational order of things, where the intellect is higher than, and dominates, thought and desire.

Advent is also the time of preparation for the incarnation of the Logos. Every physical event is the reflection of a spiritual reality and, since spiritual reality is timeless, it returns eternally. Hence, we can revisit the meditation on the second Arcanum as the Word is made Flesh.

There we see that the Logos is made incarnate by the Holy Spirit through the Holy Soul. As we are, the waters of our souls are full of perturbations. An event may create anger or anxiety, resulting in whirlpools that are hard to climb out from. There are tides coming in and out, so one day we say, believe, or vow one thing, and then the next day, just the opposite. Storms blow across the waters leaving them rough and choppy. In an unperturbed soul, the surface of the water is smooth line a pane of glass. Only in that condition will the Spirit be reflected clearly in the Soul. Otherwise, it gets mixed up with our fantasies and desires, which we too often take to be real expressions of the Spirit.

On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception we are reminded that only the Soul without sin can fully accept the Spirit. That Soul is totally free from perturbations. Can we even imagine what that is like? The exercise is worth the effort.

So either instead of, or in addition to, a physical fast, there is a Taoist exercise called mind fasting. If anyone has bothered to observe his thoughts, he will find abundant material to fast from. Perhaps there is a vulgar fantasy he indulges in. Perhaps he replays an event or conversations over and over in his mind. Perhaps he has a persistent anxiety or a worry. Maybe he has some daydream of success or power. Choose one and give it up. But give it up without effort.

The cuore gentile [kind heart] of the Fedeli d’Amore is the heart purified, that is, devoid of all that concerns worldly objects, and by this very fact made ready to receive interior illumination. It is remarkable that an identical doctrine is found in Taoism.

What is also remarkable is that an identical doctrine is found in Meditations on the Tarot. On the Bateleur, Valentin Tomberg writes:

The first Arcanum, the underlying principle of the other 21 Major Arcana of the Tarot, is that of the connection between personal effort and spiritual reality. It holds the first place in the series because if one does not understand it (i.e., grasped in cognitive and realized practical experience), one will not know what to do with all the other arcana. For it is the Bateleur who is called to reveal the practical method relating to all the arcana.

So here are the two terms in the connection.

1. Personal Effort: the heart purified.
2. Spiritiual Reality: interior illumination.

We can immediately see the connection between the practice of the Fedeli d’Amore and the first two arcana. In the second Arcana of the High Priestess, where we learn to clarify the soul as was pointed out in The Word is made Flesh. So for Dante, the personal effort of purifying the heart makes it ready to receive the interior illumination of the spirit.

This passage is taken from Dio e il Poeta by Guido de Giorgio. Julius Evola asserted that De Giorgio followed a Vedantized Christianity; this is immediately apparent in his description of the world as the “play of God, which has its exact analogue in the idea of lila in Hinduism. Readers will also recognize the influence of Rene Guenon‘s Multiple States of Being, as shown in the topics of the Infinite, Possibility, or multiple worlds. Then again, Guenon claimed only to be explicating the metaphysics of the Vedanta. Yet, De Giorgio does not approach that text as a logical exercise, but rather as “one who knows”.

Finally, there is the profound influence of St. Thomas Aquinas and, of course, Dante. Much of the vocabulary, which cannot come across in a translation, is archaic, originating from Dante’s time. There are several references to The Divine Comedy, which I have provided whenever I could recognize them. The Comedy is more than a poem, it is a detailed text for initiates. It seems to us that De Giorgio followed the path outlined, climbing the seven storey mountain of Purgatory, and saw the world from that height.

It is tied to the first, and subordinated to the first, ancillarily, but in the purely religious meaning in which this term must be used, as profound comprehension of the divine drama, of creation, that, divine and non-human, refers to that which, coming from God, returns to God, as a “restitution” which becomes a “gift”, a gift of love. The world is the fruit and the work of divine love which multiplies itself, remaining one, gives itself because given to Him, offers itself because offered to Him, breaks itself, shatters itself, apparently because every part, every fraction, purely apparent, comes back in the All, from which it separated itself as pure “play”. The world is God’s “play”, removing from this word any frivolous, human limitation whatsoever, in the special, precise sense that, e.g., St. Thomas gives it, when he speaks of contemplation, in the Latin word “ludus”. The world is the “mirror” of God, the crystal in which the Unity contemplates himself and, contemplating himself, pluralizes himself, multiplies himself, still remaining One, because he cannot not be One while being One, like a fire of a thousand sparks each one of which is fire but not the fire, since every relation with God is unilateral, not double, not reciprocal, God alone being God and what has life from God, has being, not being able to be God, if God is God, “for the contradiction does not allow it”. [Inferno, XXVII]

The world is “imprinted” by God in the sense that God, while passing, creates, and the created reflects Him, it is His footprint, nor can it be considered otherwise than in relation to Him, without which nothing would be, it is obvious, because the trace is a sign, a sign that indicates the Giver, the Donor, the One who imprinted it, stamped it, engraved it. One could not speak of God without the world, although God is without the world, beyond all possible worlds, for the simple reason that He cannot exhaust Himself in creation which is His work, nor limit Himself to it, why His power is always “in infinite excess” [Paradise, XIX] in the ambit of created things and since this “excess” is infinite, it is understood without difficulty, that which we call “everything” created, is, ontologically, nothing in the face of He who created it.

If we call the “world” the visible, it is clear that is cannot reflect God who, by definition, by necessity, by absoluteness, is invisible, that not removing, however, what is visible, insofar as it is visible, it is also the sign, imprint, mirror, reflection of the invisible, and that the visible breaks itself, shatters itself indefinitely (a multitude of beings) because it cannot contain the invisible. The creaturely multiplicity is the indication of this impotency, as numerical indefiniteness is the indication of the infinity of unity, without which it could not offer itself, although no number of the series entirely reflects the unity that is in everything and in none of them.

God as God must create the world, without which He would not be God, or, at least, He would not be known and therefore loved as God, but if God is the Invisible, it is also necessary that he is God outside and beyond the world, outside and beyond creation, which is one of his possibilities but not all of his Possibility that must be infinite as He himself is infinite. His “infinite excess”…

Manifestly, therefore, everything originating from Him, each thing should return to Him, and in fact, does return to him, must return to Him, but each thing, as every creature, through its way and manner, or “diversimode” [diverse modes, Latin] as St. Thomas would say, by levels of integration. Among all creatures, there is man, who has his mystery which corresponds to the Mystery of the Incarnation, the descent for the ascent, and this mystery can determined in a certain manner saying that man can “take up again” all the work of God, in a syn-thesis, i.e., in a com-position, in the universality of understanding, of prehension as the eye which embraces an entire horizon in a unitary vision, uniting the multiplicity, joining the separated, but it is necessary, however, that he has a third eye in the middle of the forehead in which the two eyes are “centered”, to resolve the duality in unity, since the two is limitation, it is a throwback, and must result in the three.

The privilege of man, therefore, is this, to be able to return to God, freely and totally because he alone, among all creatures, has the option, the choice, to remain in creation, or return to the Creator, taking up all creation, capitulatim [summarily, Latin] in the unity. This is the true, the great dignity of man that he owes to the faculty that, only in him, embraces not only what appears (the visible, the world), but that which is, God, This faculty is the intellect, not reason which, visibly, cannot pass beyond the visible domain of quantity, the world, creation.

Woman has sovereignty of love that man does not know, because she is receptive, and virgin, and mother, and, yes, naturally, Eve, but supernaturally she is Maria, and these two symbols of Fall and Resurrection are alternated in her bosom, lowering her and raising her up, making of her the guaranty [arra] of death and of life, of becoming like a beast and of the mystical union with God.

And this is the true mystery of woman, the ambiguity of Eve-Maria, flesh which is made spirit and spirit which is made flesh: in this double alternation, there is a secret that man does not know and that dismays him. Infinitely more free, more spontaneouss, more decisive than man, the woman seems to surpass him in what man lacks, receptivity, but is surpassed by man in innocence, a childlike conscience, and spiritual clarity. When sex becomes unitary – in mysticism, in the saint – we can no longer speak of the antithesis because then Eve is no longer Eve, but Maria, Maria mother of the Christ through the work of the Spirit of God who inundates her with wisdom …

Christian initiation is the conscious experience of the heart of the world and the solar nature of man. ~ Valentin Tomberg

If Hermetism has provided a safeguard for nearly twenty centuries, it must be said that circumstances have now changed. At the current point in history, as at the time of the Coming of Christ, the veil has been partially raised. Therefore, for those who want to advance beyond book knowledge, which never goes beyond the domain of information; for those who intensely seek the true sense of life, who want to understand the significance of the mission of the Christian in the New Era, the possibility will exist of initiation into this divine Wisdom, mysterious and hidden. ~ Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis I

Classic initiation formula: try to grasp that which, once learned, you will know all. ~ Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis II

In his Meditation on the Lovers, Tomberg describes the experience of Initiation. Along the way, he teaches us how to understand symbolic texts. Commenting on the story of creation in Genesis, he points out that the true of that story lies not in its allegedly historical details—viz., the Garden, Tree, Serpence, etc.—but in our inner experience. By penetrating into the depths of the soul, one can recover a sense of the Primordial state and how it was lost. To make clear, this is not the same as some pseudo-intellectual description of symbols, but rather of conscious efforts to recreate that story in consciousness.

This, he says is knowledge of the “beginning”, initium, which knowledge is called initiation. As Mouravieff also points out, initiation now takes place on a spiritual plane, not on the material. Tomberg concurs, when he writes, “God-man is the Initiator and there is no other.”

This descent into the depths of the human being is called Hermetic Initiation by Tomberg. Its method is enstasy, which is the aim of the jnani in the Vedantic systems. Following this path, the Initiate descends into the depths of his soul, until he awakens to the primordial layer of his soul as the “image and likeness of God”. This is the alchemical creation of the true I or Will, the experience of the Microcosm.

The second type of initiation involves ecstasy, or the going outside oneself, leaving the Self behind to be absorbed in God or Heaven. This is what is commonly known as mystical experience. The Initiate reaches the beginning in terms of the Macrocosm. There is no need to discuss this at this point, since the literature is so vast.

However, it is the first type of initiation that is less known or even rejected when it is made known. However, in our time, when man has no experience of the Macrocosm nor even understands who he is, it is the necessary path. In the past, the development of the Self has been referred to as the Left Hand Path, in contrast to those paths that seek to annihilate the Self. Mouravieff goes so far as to point out the dangers of seeking ecstasy for its own sake. He points out that this often involves the use of drugs, or entheogens. Quite clearly, if the aim is consciousness of the Self and development of the Will, any drug induced stupor leads in the totally opposite direction.

For Mouravieff, then, the path of the Initiate in the Era of the Holy Spirit is the development of the I. Nevertheless, this does not preclude the experience of the Macrocosm as found in his elaborate cosmology, but rather that it must be done so consciously.

Tomberg insists the Christian esotericism unites the two paths. So, like the left hand paths, he proclaims the knowledge of the Self. Yet unlike those unbalanced deviations that see no more than material reality, Tomberg makes clear that the true Initiate must also be initiated in the right hand path. The following chart summarizes Tomberg’s description of the two methods.

The practice of poverty pins down the tendencies of the thief in the human being whose male side tends to seize and female side to keep indefinitely instead of waiting for the free gift or merited fruits of one’s labour.

Obviously, he does not mean material poverty in itself, since a material cause cannot effect a spiritual change. It is interesting to note how this corresponds to the Bhagavad Gita, where we read Krishna’s advice to Arjuna:

Be free from the pairs of opposites. Be always established in sattva. Do not try to acquire what you lack or preserve what you have. Be established in the Self. (2:15)

Here he is referring to the three gunas, or fundamental forces. Rajas is the active (male) principle that seeks to acquire, while the tamas is the inertial (female) principle that seeks to horde. Sattva, serenity and harmony, is the equilibrium between rajas and tamas. Tomberg describes the practice of spiritual poverty in these words:

The vow of poverty is the practice of inner emptiness that is established as a consequence of the silence of personal desires, emotions and imagination so that the soul may be capable of receiving the revelation of the Word, the life and the light from above. Poverty is the active perpetual vigil and waiting in the face of eternal sources of creativity; it is the soul ready for what is new and unexpected, it is the aptitude to learn always and
everywhere, it is the condition sine qua non of all illumination, all revelation and all initiation.

In the light of this, our understanding of the inclinations to seize and horde is deepened. Poverty of spirit must first follow obedience. Obedience is the silencing of personal desires, emotions, and imagination, by making them subject to the dictates of reason, conscience, and legitimate authority. We may also want to add here the silencing of personal opinion.

Without this silencing, illumination and revelation are impossible; we cannot hear the new and unexpected, since all we hear are our old and persistent expectations. The desire to seize leads us to claim an understanding that is not ours. When our mind is emptied, we may receive the free gift of the Spirit which is the revelation of the Word. Otherwise, we are hearing what we want to hear, that which satisfies a secret desire, makes us “feel” good or important, enflames our imagination with fantasies of power or success. There is a simple touchstone we can use to discern the spirits.

1. Is what we hear reasonable?
2. Is what we hear good and consistent with the moral law, or does it perturb our conscience?
3. Is it consistent with spiritual and other legitimate authority?

The second obstacle is the desire to horde. The female desire to horde means that we hang on to our personal opinions and theories. This takes many forms and it is quite common in milieus of this type. In this case, we cannot hear anything new, since everything is filtered through our prior expectations. We may belong to some political, religious, or intellectual movement that colours all our perceptions. We see this quite often among readers of Meditations on the Tarot. They have a commitment to some alien mentality and end up unwilling to follow our Friend in his task of enriching
the Hermetic Tradition. The result is that the message is diluted and confused.

A different kind of friendship is based on utility or pleasure. Thus two friends may cooperate as long as they are useful to each other or bring each other pleasure. However, such a friendship is shallow and usually ends abruptly when one party becomes useless to the other. There are many more such friend of the Meditations than there are true friends. They have their own agendas and their own goals. The Meditations may be useful to them to attract adherents, students, or paying customers. Sincere seekers of true friendship may the author of the Meditations will often be misled on the path, only to suffer disillusionment later on.

Aristotle tells us that one’s true friends will be few. There are not too many who will read a book such as the meditations. Fewer still will embrace it and its goals wholeheartedly. Few among them will actually do the meditations and develop a disinterested moral character. Among these few, it will be difficult for them to find and get to know each other. Nevertheless, these few friends will somehow recognize each other. True friends of the Meditations will help each other understand the text in depth.

I have translated the following passage from Arcana XX: Judgment, where the author explains this. He clearly expects his true Friends to carry on the work that he himself was carrying on from his own friends. In that spirit, this blog wishes carry on that work. Note especially his plea that NO organisation be established to carry on this work. So beware of any group that has goals that differ from the clearly stated goals of the Author. Be leary of anyone who wants to charge you for classes. Question anyone who claims to have inside or special knowledge apart from the text itself. The sure way to an understanding the Meditations is to do the meditations oneself.

Dear Unknown Friend, you who are reading these lines written in 1965 after some 50 years of effort and experience in the field of Hermetism, please do not regard them as a simple wish in support of the progress of Hermetic historicism, but as a legacy making you who read these lines the agent of such a task, provided you consent to it. Therefore, do what you judge to be good, but I implore you not to do just one thing: to found an organisation, an association, a society, or an order which would be encharged with it. For the Tradition lives, not thanks to organisations, but in spite of them. In order to preserve the life of a tradition, friendship pure and simple is necessary; what is not needed is to entrust it to the care of embalmers and mummifiers par excellence which organisations are, except for the one founded by Jesus Christ.

One of Tomberg’s guiding spirits in the French Hermetic Tradition was Josephin Peladan. The vision of the mass man, the unitiated man, is restricted to two dimensions. He absorbs his ideas and opinions from those around him and is subject to the vagaries of popular opinion. It can be said that he not so much lives his life but rather life lives through him. The Mage, or initiate, on the other hand, sees the third dimension of life, which is depth. Peladan ties Baptism and the grace of faith to this depth. Baptism that frees us from the hypnosis of Society. He writes, in How to Become a Mage:

Baptism [as an initiation rite] makes us children of God, but Society dooms us to evil through is laws and education. Faith enlightens us, but it is in perpetual conflict with Society. The initiate, in order to make the grace of baptism full and effective, must renounce anew Society, its boundaries, its crimes, so that the fear of God makes him prefer the intimate greatness to the degrading favours of the country.

The uninitiated man takes the world as it appears to him as the norm; this is not the real world, but is a second reality, or a shadow world hiding its true source; such a man lives in that second reality. The initiate begins to wake up and must see through that second reality in order to become fully conscious. Of course, in our day and age, everyone thinks he is a rebel and boasts about flaunting societal mores. Unable to conceive of any higher goal, this faux rebel can only act out against the taboos against sex, drugs, and other anti-social behaviour. This is just another trap, another way of being moulded. This type is similar to the Aghori of India. Peladan explains:

For more on Peladan, please see Josephin Peladan.

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.

Now astrology is no more concerned with the effect of the stars on our future than alchemy is with chemical experiments in the lab. Alchemy is concerned with spiritual transformation based on the elementals. Astrology then is concerned with the planets and their relationship to the stellar heavens.

As we have shown, Rudolf Steiner devoted a book to understanding astrology. The constellations represent systems of thought that cohere together. It is curious that people of a given worldview will take the same position on any new issue that may come up. This is because their thought patterns are determined by the constellations. The planets correspond to different “moods” that affect thoughts in certain ways. In the course of one’s life, the moods may change, or one may find oneself in a different thought constellation. Besides your “sun sign”, there may be other constellations that have a smaller, but not negligible, effect thought patterns.

In Meditations on the Tarot, Tomberg makes clear that the Hermetic method involves understanding by analogy, not physical causation. Thus, we understand astrology as analogous to astronomy, as there is no question of the stars having a physical causation on our destinies. This is not to deny the possibility of synchronicity, that is, a strange coincidence between an exterior situation and an interior one. Tomberg was certainly familiar with Steiner’s book, but he updated his conception to include Jung’s idea of archetypes, which he defines as “astrological planetary influences”.

Tomberg defines “characterology” as “microcosmic astrology”. In coming to self-knowledge, the understanding of human types is essential. By self-observation we come to understand our own type and thus learn how to transcend it. Otherwise, a man is enslaved to the constellations of thought (his “horoscope”) that form his character.

The ordinary man is a product of temperament (the elemental forces) and character (his astrological sign). Only by awakening his spirit can a man develop a true conscience. Tomberg writes:

Freedom is a fact which one experiences when one judges not by his temperament (“etheric body”) nor by his character (“astral body”), but rather by the Scale of Justice, or by his own conscience. … Conscience is neither a product nor a function of character. It is above it. And it is there, and only there, that the domain of freedom begins and is situated. One is not at all free when one judges or acts according to character or temperament, but one certainly is when one judges and acts according to the scale of Justice or conscience. But Justice, the praxis of the scale, is only the starting point for a long progression and development of conscience, and therefore of the growth of freedom.