SUPERNATURAL TRANSLATION. 341 nism of the senses,* which have contracted inwards and formed (in life) the prison of the soul-a prison of pains and penalties; from between the bars of the windows of which (or out of the eyes) the suffering, languishing SPIRIT looks for the often long-coming releasing GREAT SPIRIT DEATH. TO "Rise "—is to cast off the chains of mortality. To become "Glorified" is to discover in one's own identity the glorious, godlike gifts or MAGIC-which are the wings upon which to rise. Those men who have passed (as through a door) in their lifetime from the "hither" side (or world) to the "thither" side (or the world invisible— following into the LIGHT the divine beckon to Paradise of the ANGELS of LIGHT, are the BROTHERS of the Rosy CROSS, or the ROSICRUCIANS, as they have been called; who "know everything," can "do anything," and have even arrogated to themselves, when in them should be set-up the same angelical-magical spirit which was in the Christ-Jesus, to be of the "COUNCIL of GOD." Though, in the world, they were the humblest of the servants of the Almighty. In the Sixth Place.-Creation is not the making of things out of nothing, which we understand commonly (or vulgarly) of God's work in the beginning of the universe or of Creation. Matter, which the Rosicrucians frequently refer to as Darkness, is that only which is properly to be called "Nothing." Thus when God is said to create, or make something out of nothing (to do which is impossible), it is to be understood that He worked with material, or with Darkness, which is the "Blank side," or the "Other Side of Light; turned away." These profound metaphysical distinctions are the key of all the Theologies. Moses, when he describes the Creation of the World, is the Alchemist, relating in parable the generation of the solids, and the flowing-over into the border-country (out of the flesh) of the Invisible-WHERE EVERYTHING ULTIMATELY IS. The history of David, Solomon (of the "Temple"), Jacob (of the "Ladder; or Staircase from Earth to Heaven, and from Heaven to Earth," &c.), Job;-the accounts of the Heroes of the stories of the Apocrypha (the most concealed or * The flitting of the flickering flame (consciousness) out of the urn. recondite of the "things hidden "—thence its name), &c., are cabalistic and alchemical, similarly to all the mythologies, which are, in their fanciful and mystic range of supposed facts, cabalistic and alchemical. The true Cabalistæ are none other than alchemists and Rosicrucians. Likewise the Magi, Wise Men, Philosophers, Priests, and Heroes; from Jason and the "Three Kings" to King Arthur, and from Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, to Numa, Paracelsus, Borrichius, Robertus de Fluctibus (nearer our own time), AND Others. The Rosicrucian system took the following forms:These Philosophers believed that there were Two Principles in the Beginning-Light and Darkness, or Form and the Material out of which the Form was. That before the Creation (distinctively so called), the Light Itself was as "Divinity Latent," or "At Rest." In the Creation, or in the production of things, Divinity became active, aroused, and inventive. By whatever name distinguished, or by whatever style identified, Moses' description of Creation is to be taken as the process of Alchemy, as worked by Nature itself, being her Form; to which head are referred the kingdoms of darkness, or chaos, and the Light emerging out of its own bosom or DARKNESS. After the active movement from the centre, or evolvement, or Creation, the radiation and counterworking or interchange of Light and Darkness in crossing and encountering irritated mutually, naturally; became expansive and contractive angularly-thence pyramidal and starry. And in the relative counterbalancing contemperation, the diversity of things arose at the points of the masterdom into form or Light. The medium in which the elements were (and the elements themselves) now grew "in their natures." From these various rudiments of being-(in the vehicle Light) the archetypical scheme arranged itself; which, "One" in essence, was Triple," in procession or 'parade." Hence the TRINITY.* From the TRINITY and the 66 * But it is Incomprehensible, obviously, without the means to comprehend it- which is CHRIST. Christ the "PENALTY" Christ the "SACRIFICE." Christ the "Glass" of the "Universe," in which THE MAGIC OF MUSIC. 343 * vivifying substratum in the mathematical four corners of the world, comes the ineffable name—“ Tetragrammaton.” The archetypical "Idea" is also called Reflective-Intelligible Informed-Superessential-Endless in resource. The reflection of God is in the Archetype which is the Second Principle, or "Macrocosmos" (created worlds), exhibiting "Either Sides," or "Will" in "Action." This is displayed in Three Divisions, or Spheres-called (1st.) the "Empyræum" (God). (2d.) The "Ethereum" (the "Saviour "). (3d.) The "Elements" (the Virgin Mary). Light emanates in the Sephiroth ("CABALA") or "Sevenfold" rotationhence the "production of phenomena." In uniting with the Ethereal Spirit, it becomes the Soul, or "Responsive Sentience of the World." The further elucidation of the Rosicrucian theological system, in its general features-so far as in hint or parable submitted to unenlightened comprehension-will be found pre-stated at Page 208, and elsewhere. 66 The Rosicrucians contend that music, or melody-which is enchantment-pervades all nature in its prosperous or intended progress, although it is only the wail, or plaint, of the instinctive soul on its "wounded," or "sacrificed,” or Ruined Side." It mourns for its "Original Lost Paradise." The music of the spheres is no unreal thing, but real as is the atmosphere of the spirits; for "music is the atmosphere of the spirits," and discords (though the necessity, support, and balance of Creation) are a medium for the coarse and low spirits, who inundate, as it were, the lees and the settlings of nature. In discords, or in the inharmonious strife amidst the sounds, the rabble of the spirits (so to term them) are stimulated to their envious and spiteful, or malific or freakish and blundering, bad life. Beauty is not, however, necessarily beauty - it may be seduction. For the higher grades of the recusant or rebellious spirits who find their power in the original permission that there might be phenomena," are beautiful in their assumption or usurpation-of the lovely forms of spiritlife and of nature. And they will prevail, sometimes, even "God" saw "Himself." But "Christ" is not "God," any more than the "Glass" is the "Seer." * Object-Subject-Result: or the Three "Persons" of the Trinity. * against the best efforts of the Angels of Light. The Cabalists whisper that God "made the world" by the "means of music; "-that music, as man knows music, is essentially a power; that it is the faint, much-changed, much-enfeebled, sole relic, and tradition, and reminder of Man's Lost Paradise; that (through it originally) everything was possible, as the gift of God; which explains the classic fables of Orpheus, Amphion, and the mythological wonder-workers in music;—that music is modulated in the movements of the planets according to the re-arrangement of the postdiluvian world, and in conformity with the re-adjustment of the solar-system after mysterious aberration or cataclysm ;that mortality cannot hear, and that the human soul is so debased that it only catches intermittently the faint echo of the continuous universal music which in other-now material-senses is the life and growth and splendour of everything. Music is magic, is sacred, and a power-as all harmony must be;—the nerves of the world—the aspiration of living things-the spell which breaks-up and extols -into super-added, super-natural life-the "Real" into the "Ideal." Harmony-or the mysterious solace and satisfaction and happiness at heroism which we feel is found in the beauty of the human figure, the glories and graces of all growing objects and moving or unmoving natures. Success in nature, and in life, with their changes—as man knows "nature" and "life". - arise from the inter-starry, mechanical modifications, and the incidents (and the apparent interference and intertangle) through the restless movement of the planets. All the glorious seeming mechanism of the starry sky shows so as mechanism only to the measuring senses of man; but in reality it may be the play of Infinite Spirit. (See accompanying Charts, A, B, C.) The planets of our own system may be directed in their "continual-speaking" changes by their several crowds of governing spirits. Spirits being every"There's not the smallest orb, that thou behold'st, But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims: Such harmony is in immortal souls ; But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." |