Just as my ordination to the Diakonate coincided with the commemoration of the death of Maistre Philippe,Nizier Anthelme Phillipe, 2 August 1905, I thought I should share a quote from his ouevre which Phillip Garver contributed to the Eglise Gnostique list earlier:

“(Man) must descend and become nothing, and when he is nothing, he will be everything, and will obtain all Knowledge.”

This directs our attention towards the necessity of emptying which is central to all the disciplines of the Christian Gnosis, and which is sadly neglected in our day and age.

The Theosophers from Jacob Boehme and onwards, spoke much of the Heart, and much is made out of that which they said of the Heart, but almost everything that is made out of what they spoke about the Heart concentrates on a property of emotional attachments, while the Heart is envisioned, by our visionaries – as a fixed point around which all subject to change, Natura herself, revolves, as if in a dervish dance. Another name for the same is Signature, it is attached to a matrix, an original contextuality, which is none other than the Divine Consciousness, from which the Psyche emerges and draws its essence, and to which it hopes to return, and whose life, if we allow it, is a continual response to.

We are brought up to fear the nothing, whether envisioned as death or as loss – we are conditioned to avoid, to plan and create strategies, to avoid overmuch intimacy with that nothing, and therefore much theology, even much philosophy and metaphysics (albeit recent in type) revolves around increasing and expanding the metaphysical All.

Jesus, in the Secret Book of James, says ” “Verily I say unto you, no one will ever enter the kingdom of heaven at my bidding, but (only) because you yourselves are full.” Whereupon he calls forward James and Peter, insisting that he would “fill them“. He says to these two disciples, ” Do you not, then, desire to be filled? And your heart is drunken; do you not, then, desire to be sober? Therefore, be ashamed! Henceforth, waking or sleeping, remember that you have seen the Son of Man, and spoken with him in person, and listened to him in person…. ‘Become full, and leave no space within you empty, for he who is coming can mock you.”

To which Peter protests, “Three times you have told us, ‘Become full’; but we are full.”

To which Jesus replies, sternly:”For this cause I have said to you, ‘Become full,’ that you may not be in want. They who are in want, however, will not be saved. For it is good to be full, and bad to be in want. Hence, just as it is good that you be in want and, conversely, bad that you be full, so he who is full is in want, and he who is in want does not become full as he who is in want becomes full, and he who has been filled, in turn attains due perfection. Therefore, you must be in want while it is possible to fill you, and be full while it is possible for you to be in want, so that you may be able to fill yourselves the more. Hence, Become full of the Spirit, but be in want of reason, for reason the soul; in turn, it is (of the nature of) soul.”

Those who thirsted imagined themselves to be sated, those who were most wounded, imagined themselves healthy. Arrogantly they refused the physicians cure, on account of reckoning him to be an inferior fellow, despite their deficiencies and unsatisifed needs.The relationship between Jesus and the scribes once he had arrived in Jerusalem is famous, it was not on good tone – since they would not only resist help, but deny others who wanted it to receive it. If they heard a truth coming from lips they did not revere themselves, they would rather lie and make it something unheard, than allow others to weigh it and judge it for themselves. Such was also the situation between Maitre Philippe and his contemporary world, so it was with the Gnostics before him, and such is the situation for us.

But ours is not a contest and argument against those who would prefer not to hear us, those who refuse to receive us and those who would even persecute us – but a continued ordeal against our own still imperfect relationship with these gifts and these virtues, and the Gnosis which embraces them and make them, in and through us, whole.

Praise be unto the Unknown Father, who has not been mocked, who has not been rejected and who has not been a stumblingblock to His people – Praise be unto the Eternally Mercyful, whose wrath transforms into a purifying fire which settles like any storm, and leave the seed planted in good earth to grow into full bloom, as a tree covering the whole world with its branches. Praise be the Mystery which cannot be fabricated. The Truth whose price is itself. Greater still than the Universe, only the ear would hear it and the eyes distinguish its features – for giving us such guiding lights and allowing this brilliance to shine to the generations after, as a signpost towards that place where only Thou Art. Amen

In his philosophical exegesis Answer to Job, Carl Gustav Jung introduced the idea of a progressive transformation of the Imago Dei as a result of changes in the consciousness, the recipient and participant agent in man, throughout time. He attempted not to relativize the Sublime in view of cultural influx and trends, but to address.

I think I should explain where I was going with that lenghty excerpt from Henry Corbin‘s excellent survey on the Imago Templi in Confrontation with the Profane. It has less to do with any fascination with Jacques de Molay and the recurrence of a full-fledged moral or initiatic Templar knighthood – and

more to do with our effort to somehow approach the Gnosis, and if we have received a “glimpse”, to hold on to its effective grace.

With the fall of the Temple of Solomon an entire culture experienced to be ejected right back into the terrible ordeal of being a people without a central sanctuary, without its axis mundi. As moderns we may recognize the situation as our own, it does not only have to do with the Sacred, mystical notions about a concentration of a Divine presence withinn a locality of one kind or another;

but loss of identity at a more profound and subtle level than the sociological. Corbin warns against going too far in the direction of a psychological inflation of mere ideas, notions and

personal hermeneutic into carriers or vessels of the Divine –

yet he returns again and again to events which is only intimate,only personal, only subjective – that is to say, which is exclusively and unrepressibly

dependent on radical intimacy at the level of the Solitary.

It is only you who can traverse past the ordeals and travel upon that steep and narrow path which leads to the Mountain of Vision, the “meeting-place of the two seas”.Just as the rebuilding of the Temple occurs in the human heart before it takes form any other place.

Henri Corbin, the Mundus Imaginalis – On the Mountain of Vision, paraphrasing Suhravardi‘s Recital of the Occidental Exile;

“The mountain of Qaf is the cosmic mountain constituted from summit to summit, valley to valley, by the celestial Spheres that are enclosed one inside the other. What, then, is the road that leads out of it? How long is it? “No matter how long you walk,” he is told, “it is at the point of departure that you arrive there again,” like the point of the compass returning to the same place. Does this involve simply leaving oneself in order to attain oneself? Not exactly. Between the two, a great event will have changed everything; the self that is found there is the one that is beyond the mountain of Qaf a superior self, a self “in the second person.” It will have been necessary, like Khezr (or Khadir, the mysterious prophet, the eternal wanderer, Elijah or one like him) to bathe in the Spring of Life. “He who has found the meaning of True Reality has arrived at that Spring. When he emerges from the Spring, he has achieved the Aptitude that makes him like a balm, a drop of which you distill in the hollow of your hand by holding it facing the sun, and which then passes through to the back of your hand. If you are Khezr, you also may pass without difficulty through the mountain of Qaf.”

It is to Pilgrimage we are called, not architechture, whether of mind or psyche. Wherein we recover the Other, who has been a stranger to us and with whom we have contested – without knowing him, nor discerned the reason for our struggle. For the ancients all impressions from their interaction with changing Nature, contrasted with the lasting things intuitively understood by them – created a dimension to their lives which allowed an appreciation of wholeness, truth, beauty in their Ideal forms. To them the world was already a great domed temple, the great firmament above stretched out like a tent – which they elaborated as a way of orientating themselves, interiorily and through the medium of primitive art. The situation has changed – we can say with the haunting Knights of the Chapel of Gavornie, “woe unto us, the Temple is destroyed”; while visibly all seems to be in order, the interior integrity of the Temple has been broken – it is no longer a sanctuary, but a place of exile.

Now, the World is _not_ the Temple. Not anymore. To the seekers everywhere, a visit

to “Jerusalem”, as the conjunction of the imaginal Jerusalem and the actual, geo-cultural

city-architecture of contemporary, “actual” Jerusalem – will provoke a reaction akin to what

Jung reports about his noctural visitors from the other side – in his Seven Sermons to the

Dead:

“The Dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought.“

Many have sought that particular, special thing which seekers go and seek after in Jerusalem;

From an eagles perspective much of what comprised the early and central stages of the Middle Ages appears to be centered about Jerusalem, or at least the idea of Jerusalem – many a pilgrim looking down upon a mirage, a fatah morgana.. a building in the sky reaching

beyond where our eyes of flesh – the fires was lit, but it was physical fire, and it consumed not

only the air, but the flesh, its host.

The Diaspora seems to stretch across all the known ages, the Prophecies which foresaw it appears arcane, pre-historical, mythical and lost to our understanding of history

and time alltogether. What better example of this – than the recurring theme: The Bruchion brought

to the fire out of arrogance, the Alexandrine Library destroyed – not once, but three times, the destruction of the First Temple by King Nebuchadnezzar

Introducing McCravey, a new Gnostic’s blog on the block.

I have always thought that a personal perspective sometimes is more relevant and make a topic discussed more weightier – bringing the reader closer to the core experience from which any expression have their beginning. I sometimes fail that objective, being to wrapped up in the topicality and factoid stuff. Matt, on the other hand, have complete and compelling mastery of this particular ability.

Welcome to my “neighbourhood”, Matt.

On the 2nd August, two years ago, I was ordained a Deacon for Ecclesia Gnostica at the Capella Santa Sophia in Oslo, by Bishop Stephan Hoeller, in ecclesia Tau Stephanus.

It is now also ten years ago since I met Revd.Jan Valentin Saether, discovering a fellow Gnostic who had found a means to continue in the Gnosis in periods of trial and the problems offered up by every-day life. Since that time we have been able to celebrate Mass together, wherein I gradually took upon myself increasing responsibilities and tasks with the ministry.

I have much to be grateful to him for, by way of friendship, assistance, inspiration and spiritual guidance. Approaching this year is another phase in my commitment to, and affiliation with, the Gnostic Ekklesia – in its specific manifestation in the Ecclesia Gnostica.

As I feel myself called to service at the Altar, as a con-celebration with Christ, with the guidance of the Most Holy Spirit, I hope and pray that I will prove more worthy of this mysterious grace this coming year of service. The Gnosis is lived, after all, and the spaces it fill, is that between human souls.

Pax Pleromae, brothers and sisters in the Gnosis.