VISIONARY REVUE
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VISIONARY REVUE
Winding their way up the tree are a serpent and
a lotus, symbols known especially to Egypt,
Hinduism and Buddhism. The serpent continually
sloughs its skin, knowing in its flesh the mysteries of
death and rebirth. In this way it brings knowledge,
wisdom and awakening. The lotus flower closes and
sinks below the surface of the water at night, then
rises and blossoms open above the water each day.
It too is a symbol of death and rebirth, wisdom and
awakening. The archer - a women with her arrow
pointed to the heavens - suggests transcendence.
Above the tree appears the Eye of Horus within
the triangular halo or nimbus associated with God
the Father of Christianity. This Eye of Horus, the
Wedjat Eye of Egypt, is above all an image of
sacrifice: Horus the falcon god sacrificed his eye in
combat with Seth to restore his father Osiris to life.
And below, indeed, we see the falcon god Horus
descending, while the Phoenix ascends. Known as
the Bennu bird in Egypt, the phoenix emerges from
the flames - once immolated and now resuscitated.
As our meditation takes us to the next co-centric
circle of images, we behold the Christian
tetramorph of the winged angel, bull, eagle, and
lion. Traditionally, these four are found surrounding
sculpted images of Christ on the facades of Gothic
cathedrals, symbolizing the four evangelists, and
hence, the four revelations of the divine Word.
But, the Christian image is taken from the
prophet Ezekial and his vision of an angel "As I
looked, behold... a great cloud with brightness. From
the midst of it came the likeness of four living
creatures... Each had the face of a man in front... the
face of a lion on the right side... the face of an ox on
the left side [and] the face of an eagle on the back."
(Ezekial 1:4) Ezekial himself derived this imagery
from Babylonia and its large sculpted door
guardians symbolizing the four directions and the
four seasons (each season beginning with a sign of
the Zodiac: Aquarius the man, Leo the lion, Taurus
the bull, and Scorpio who appeared as an eagle).
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PARIS - SPRING 2003
We have once more a
complex image: firstly, of
revelation through the Word,
and secondly, of space and time
as they frame the hidden,
underlying Unity.
Trying to hold all the
imagery of these co-centric
circles together, we come finally
UNIO
MYSTICA to the innermost circle: a wheel
(DETAIL) in flames with the yin/yang at its
centre. The flames are a
revelation and a conflagration -
they devour ignorance and fear;
at the end of time, they transform all things.
They are also the sun, the source of light and life,
with its door in heaven offering us this world’s
transcendence.
The eight-spoked wheel is the Wheel of
Becoming in the Hindu tradition, turning from
one cosmic era to the next (yuga), from one life
incarnation to the next (samsara) in a never
ending cycle of death and rebirth. But, that same
wheel later became the six-spoked Buddhist
Wheel of the Dharma, the teachings of the
Buddha which would turn in the opposite
direction of the Hindu Wheel and eradicate its
suffering.
At the centre lies the yin/yang - Taoist symbol
of male and female energies in dynamic balance.
The Tao recognizes the law of alteration, the
exchange between forces, the eternal that
underlies the ever-changing and ephemeral.
A prolonged meditation upon the Unio
Mystica would reveal to the beholder, ultimately,
the ancient Unity underlying all these images
from their disparate traditions. It would also
offer him a vision of the Unity from whence the
contemplative himself first emerged and to which
he will ultimately return. This, anyway, is the
sacred teaching of the three traditions mentioned
by Johfra as the inspiration for his work:
Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, and the Cabbala.
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