Robert Fludd and the Mirror of Nature

  One of my favourite images is Robert Fludd’s engraving Integrae Naturae Speculum Artisque Imago (The Mirror of Whole Nature and the Image of Art) which comes from his book Utriusque Cosmi.... or Metaphysical History of the Two Worlds which was published between 1617 and 1621. The two worlds are macrocosm and microcosm, the universe and man. Here is that famous picture in a colourised version which may appal the purists but helps to identify detail.

One is first of all struck by the female figure. She is clearly not the Virgin Mary, the usual feminine figure in Western religious art so who is she? Here I would like to examine just who and what she is, and use that as a jumping off point to look at the rest of the image in terms of the masculine and feminine poles of being because it sums up just what these are better than anything else I know. 

The image is a visual representation of the hierarchical nature of the manifested cosmos, and it shows the twin polarities of being as they are expressed in the field of creation. Here we have clearly delineated the metaphysical structure and relationship of the Transcendent Father (Spirit), the Immanent Mother (Matter), and the human being in a precise cosmic map.

There are three levels of this cosmic layout. At the apex of the vertical axis sits the Tetragrammaton (the Name of God), surrounded by a dark cloud radiating pure, unconditioned light. This is the Transcendent Source or Unmanifested Pole which represents the supreme masculine principle—the self-existent, independent root of being that sits outside and above the concentric circles of the manifested universe. It includes the formless Logos and originating Will that has its being entirely in itself.

Descending from the divine cloud is a vertical chain held by the hand of God. This chain is attached to the right wrist of a cosmic woman crowned with stars. She is the anima mundi or soul of the world who stands spanning the earthly and celestial spheres, and she represents the Immanent Feminine Principle or Nature in her universal aspect. She is not the self-existent source but the contingent reflection. Her posture embodies the sacred sequence of submission and containment. Her right hand, the vertical link is passively raised, chained to the Transcendent Father, showing that she derives her being, authority, and life-spark downward from the vertical axis. Her left hand which is the down stepping conduit holds a second chain that descends to the arm of a small monkey who sits on top of the central terrestrial globe. This monkey represents human art and intellect.

Nature acts as the cosmic transformer. She takes the formless fire of the Father and uses her macrocosmic body which includes the nested concentric rings of the elements, planets, and stars, for all this emanates from her body to shape, contain, and crystallise that power of the Father into an ordered material reality. His word shapes her substance.

 At the centre of the image is the Earth, the dense and lowest point of the horizontal plane which is where the light that flows down from the Father and through the receptive womb of Mother Nature reaches the physical world. When that hierarchy is respected order and harmony prevail, but when it is neglected then disorder makes an appearance because the sacred has been disrupted.

Fludd's engraving is a pictorial rejection of modern horizontal and egalitarian materialistic flattening. It demonstrates that the vertical axis must hold structural superiority because it is the thread that keeps the material worlds from collapsing into a chaotic vacuum. Mother Nature does not try to usurp the position of the cloud. She honours her duty as the divine vessel, ensuring that the self-existent, primary law of the transcendent Father is properly held, shaped, and anchored into the fabric of space and time.

 Moving from the terrestrial centre toward the outer rim, Fludd lays out the geocentric planetary rings from the Moon to Saturn. In spiritual terms these spheres are not just the physical planets, they are the cosmic transformers of the Anima Mundi. As the supernal light of the Father comes down the vertical axis, it passes through each planetary ring, each one of which acts as a filter, slowing down the frequency, imprinting it with a specific vibration, and stepping it down so that it does not vaporise physical matter.

Likewise, for the individual soul undergoing the training of the Masters, these spheres represent initiatory checkpoints. To return home along the vertical axis, the consciousness must climb back up through these rings and pass the tests of the emotional vehicle (Moon), master analytical discrimination (Mercury), transform desire into love (Venus), achieve integration of the heart and spiritual sovereignty (Sun), learn wisdom, benevolence and justice (Jupiter) and endure the structural discipline, restrictive pressure and final humility of the boundary line (Saturn). The planetary spheres ensure that the path of return is an orderly, geometric ascent, preventing the soul from dissolving into chaotic, unstructured mysticism.

At the apex of the vertical column, inside the radiant cloud, sits the Tetragrammaton representing the First Person of the Trinity, the source of Will and Power that commands time, space and phenomenal being into existence.

Fludd and his engraver/publisher Johann Theodor de Bry demonstrate visually that the First Person cannot touch the lower three worlds directly. He remains enclosed within the sacred cloud of unmanifested positivity. His being and energy must be funnelled down the vertical chain into the wrist of the Feminine Principle or Nature who acts as the primary transformer to hold, shape, and distribute the power of God through the cosmos.

At the centre of the image, sitting on top of the terrestrial globe (Animalia, Vegetabilia, Mineralia), the small monkey holds a compass which Fludd calls Art mimicking Nature. The monkey is man and the compass stands for his creative work as expressed through the divine order of geometry. Without that compass and the higher connection it symbolises as it measures divine law into concrete form the work of man becomes destructive because it is separated from the source.

In Western esoteric thought the Anima Mundi is not an abstract concept. She is the universal being that bridges the gap between unmanifested Spirit and physical Matter, and, as such, the intermediary between the pure spirit of God in the formless cloud and the material world. She mediates his energy so that it can manifest on lower levels, and this is shown by the fact that her head touches the starry heavens while her feet rest upon the earth thereby connecting the top of the hierarchy of manifestation with the bottom. Her right hand and upper body are aligned with the heavens, chained to the unmanifested Source, showing her essence to be purely spiritual and deriving its light and life-spark directly from the Father. At the same time, as the mother of the physical world, her lower body and womb are positioned over the terrestrial spheres. She takes the formless spiritual fire of the Father and translates it into the concentric rings of the elements and planets, so organising the physical laws of nature.

When all is said and done everything is spirit. We may think of the unmanifested source as like vapour—pure, unconditioned, formless Spirit. This is stepped down to the Anima Mundi where this spirit becomes like flowing water. The Anima Mundi is the intermediate matrix that catches the vapour and carries the divine blueprints from the Logos through space to the etheric and astral planes, the fluid, psychic, and energetic levels of being where substance is not yet locked into rigid shapes but highly mobile, permeable, and constantly flowing.

We then come to physical matter where originating spirit has become like solid ice. It is not a different substance than the water; it is simply the water itself brought down to its lowest possible temperature and frozen into a dense, rigid structure which includes our familiar solids, liquids and gases, the final crystallisation of the cosmic substance. It is the time-bound realm of rigid boundaries.
The etheric plane holds the invisible, energetic grid or template upon which the dense physical ice congeals. The astral plane holds the emotional desires and cosmic magnetism that draw the atomic particles together. The Anima Mundi catches the formless vapour of pure spirit descending down through the vertical chain and from her fluid water-matrix distributes the blueprints down into the physical world.

Therefore, matter is simply the outermost garment of the World Soul. Physical matter is universal spirit operating at its slowest, most dense, and highly crystallised vibrational frequency.

The Anima Mundi is the form-building matrix. She acts as the macrocosmic womb of manifestation and as such takes the formless ideas of the Divine Mind and spins them into form, first as etheric blueprints which then congeal into physical objects, plants, animals, minerals. Matter derives its being from her and is sustained by her life force.

Returning to the engraving, we see concentric rings branching upward and outward directly above the three foundational kingdoms of Mineralia, Vegetabilia, Animalia. These show how formless spirit is gradually crystallised into physical reality in the formation of the cosmos, and we will consider them in the next post.
 

Above Us The Stars

  It is often said that the stars incline but do not compel meaning the man lacking awareness is ruled by his stars but the aware man rules them. Then again, as I read recently, the stars do not bind the liberated man, but they do mark the average man, who is mostly driven by forces he mistakes for himself.

This is all true but only up to a point. The fact is that a person's birth chart does mark that person, saint or sinner, fool or wise. The pattern of the chart will be the pattern of the person. What does differ is how the subject responds to the pattern. There will have been someone born at the same time as the Buddha but he will not have become enlightened. Someone born at the time of JS Bach will not even have been musical. The chart will determine the form a personality takes but it does not determine the quality of consciousness the person brings to bear in expressing that form. Otherwise put, it shows the personality but not the soul behind that personality. And yet even the highest soul is obliged to follow the pattern of the chart in expressing himself on Earth.

Take a simple aspect like the Sun conjunction Mars. A person can either respond to this by becoming an aggressive bully, a highly competitive sportsman or a valiant warrior for truth. And all shades in between. The aspect shows force allied to the self and can be expressed in a multitude of different ways though all with the same basic signature of strength and purpose. This is the case for every astrological configuration whether in sign, house or by aspect. There is always a higher and lower way to respond to the energy involved. 

Take squares, for instance. This is a 90 degree aspect between two planets or points in the chart. They are traditionally regarded as hard aspects because the points involved do not pull in the same direction so creating psychological friction or difficulty. For an unevolved person this aspect might express itself negatively but for someone who is more self-aware, meaning aware of the deeper currents of life and not just reacting to inner urges without reflection, they can be a catalyst for growth. Such a person does not respond to the resultant pressure by blowing off steam but by using the energy that ensues from the clash between two conflicting principles creatively.

The transpersonal planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto will affect everyone, and presumably even did before their discovery though probably in a more veiled manner then. The discovery of these planets did coincide with changes in human consciousness, most obvious in terms of Uranus, discovered by William Herschel in Bath in 1781 and heralding the Enlightenment, revolution and maybe even the capture and use of electricity. But Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930 also prompted/coincided with radical changes. These planets are called transpersonal because they are generally perceived as having a collective rather than an individual influence, but if they hit other planets or important angles in a chart they will certainly have an impact. 

What that impact is depends on the consciousness of the individual. Uranus can lead to erratic individualism and a rebellious streak or innovation and even genius. It can be the lightning bolt of inspiration or the crazy radical. Neptune can cause dreamy mysticism, inspired art, deep spirituality or even drug addiction, all linked by the dissolution of boundaries which can have a transcendent or a destructive effect, again depending on the quality of consciousness or the soul behind the chart. As for Pluto, he was the god of the underworld and he represents what is hidden beneath the surface and that includes death but also its other side of rebirth. Incidentally, these planets were all well-named because their god forms really do encapsulate their energies. Make of that what you will. I believe there was divine purpose behind it.  

Sapiens dominabitur astris.  "The wise man will master the stars." This was the medieval maxim that summed up the idea that although the stars (really the planets) did influence the unconscious man, the conscious man could dominate them because while the stars certainly did influence everything in the lower worlds, all of which expressed their patterns, free will is paramount. And this is true. Free will is paramount. It is why we are here. Its exercise is how we grow. Nevertheless, the stars will determine the form that the personality of even the wise man takes. Where free will comes in is that he can choose to express the higher pattern rather than the lower one, and also by overcoming what is negative within himself he can prevent that unresolved negativity from manifesting externally. But still the pattern of his birth chart will operate. He cannot escape that. He can only work within it but what he can do is choose how to express it. And is this so strange? It is the same with everything about us. We are born as the embodiment of a certain form and cannot change that (we really can't despite some modern ideologically-based denials of that truth). We can only manifest our form to its highest or lowest aspect and everything between those two extremes. It's the same with the birth chart which shows our astral genetics.

In Kerala

 I've put up a post about a trip to Kerala on my Sojourn in South India blog. 

Cut Off from the Gods

If ever you wanted a symbol for our current predicament you need look no further than the fact that few of us can see the night sky any more. We are literally cut off from the heavens.

Until the invention of electric lighting human beings were able to see the glories of the night sky in almost every location of the globe. This helped keep them in touch with transcendent reality. At the very least, they were aware of something beyond that was much greater. But now all that is gone. Only in the most remote locations can one see the true magnificence and beauty of the stars and constellations that remind us of the Creator and the fact that his works exceed anything we can possibly imagine. For most of us, especially in towns and cities, a few of the major stars and planets is all we can perceive on a clear night, and the sad truth is that most of us don't even bother to look at those. The recent solar eclipse was a reminder of the impact the movement of the heavens can have on the human soul but the moment passed and we soon got back to our normal shrivelled existence.

The increasing invisibility of the physical heavens is not just a symbol for the complete loss of contact with the spiritual. It is a consequence of it. That invisibility is caused by the products of materialism. A more spiritually focussed consciousness would not wish to destroy our relationship with the sky and stars but to nurture it as a source of inspiration and connection with the image of the divine in creation. We, on the other hand, are happy to trade spiritual connection for material comfort and convenience. I am not suggesting we should return to the hunter/gatherer way of life, but there is surely a happy medium between spiritual awareness and material ease.

The vision of the physical heavens feeds the soul. It is a sign of God's work in a quite different way to the signs on earth. It gives us a sense of the transcendent and the utter vastness of God. That does still exist but in a severely diminished form because we have traded real light, which includes darkness for there was no darkness before light arose to reveal it, with false light. False light shuts out real light just as the artificiality of the modern world shuts out God to the point where even many people who claim to follow God have no idea who or what God is, and simply follow an idol of their own imagining, often  one that seems quite happy to co-exist with this world to which God is ultimately subordinate. I am not saying it is the obscuration of the night sky that has done that but the same mindset that has obscured the sky has also obscured God. We need to learn to look up again, and we need a clean space in which to do that.

Impression from the World of the Soul

 I have often mentioned that the higher powers, those I call the Masters in my books, seek to communicate with us through impression. Despite my experience they do not use trance mediums except on the rarest of occasions because they are not seeking to provide spiritual information but to bring us up to the spiritual level, and this they do by requiring us to stretch up and become responsive to that level. So although they did use a medium in my case for a period they always said that was not their preferred means of communication, and was just intended to start me off. That is why the communications became less and less as time went by.

This is how the process works. The Master's mind functions on the plane of the intuition which is above the mental level as we understand it. The original communication or impression therefore starts off as a pure idea or formless pattern of meaning. Formless means it's not in any language or even symbol but is a pure spiritual truth which might be envisaged as a lightning flash. 

This must be picked up by the disciple on this intuitional plane, a plane to which he is becoming responsive but is by no means fully established, and transferred down to the level of his own soul where it starts to take on a kind of form but still not in words or conventional thoughts. Here we might think of it in terms of light vibrations which I realise is an annoyingly vague phrase but does imply something of the nature and quality of the process. The soul here acts as an intermediary between the pure intuition and everyday mind, transforming or stepping down the light to a form that the mind can engage with and interpret. Note that the soul or spiritual self is on a lower level to that of pure intelligent intuition. It does not automatically have access to that but must grow into it, something to consider for those who think being in the moment is all there is to the spiritual path. 

The concrete mind of the disciple then translates these spiritual ideas into words and sentences in a form drawn from his pre-existing knowledge which is why it is good to have a well-stocked, well-informed mind. You then have the wherewithal to present the pure idea in a form which can express it in the highest sense it can be expressed in human terms. The risk is that a well-stocked mind can become the enemy of intuition if it gets seduced by its own knowledge. This is something the spiritual aspirant must be aware of and guard against.

So, the idea appears in the quietened mind of the disciple. It must be quiet to receive the spiritual impression hence the need for some kind of meditation or upward directed aspiration as in prayer. The mind functions like a radio receiver, taking the formless spiritual vibration and clothing it in the language and concepts already existing in the disciple's brain. It's a four-step process. From Master to soul to mind to brain or from the intuitive plane to the soul and thence from the mental plane to the physical. The message will inevitably degrade on its way down and our task is to prevent that happening as much as possible which we do by inner purification and the constant stretching up of the mind to the higher level with an openness towards increased rarification of concepts. 

 

Our understanding of spirituality is very crude. Love, wisdom, beauty, the good. These are things that have deeper and deeper levels of reality. Our task is to become aware of those and never rest content with the limited forms of them we currently respond to which are usually but shadows or reflections of the real thing. That real thing we can say exists on the intuitional plane and that is where we should be directing our spiritual attention. It is where God and his dedicated messengers wait to talk with us.

The Voice of the Soul

 When you come to one of those occasions in your life when you must make a real decision that will affect your future or even your spiritual state how do you discriminate between what comes into your thoughts on the matter from God or the higher powers or your own soul, that is to say, your spiritual being, and what is self-generated as in coming from your worldly mind which includes desires, fears and ego or put there by the counter-evolutionary powers, as we might term them, those forces that would hold you back or misdirect you? Incidentally, both these powers exist. The old and slightly comical image of an angel on one shoulder and a devil (usually a red one) on the other have a lot of truth in them. The mind is a receiving station and, depending on its tuning, can receive impressions from the forces of both light and darkness.

To get back to the question. If something comes from God, using that term very loosely because God delegates and most people are not directly in touch with him but one of his hierarchical intermediaries, you don't worry about whether you should be doing something. You know you must do it. If a situation arises in your life and you are genuinely uncertain as to how to respond, the spiritual significance of your decision may not be great. But when you come to a fork in the road and one of the paths is a destined path that you are required to take for the benefit of your spiritual growth then you know. 

Which is not to say you do not doubt. The mind will often come up with all sorts of reasons for avoiding taking the right decision. There will be rationalisations about why you shouldn't be doing a particular thing or should be doing something else. Outer circumstances and other people, even family members, might try to deter you from the correct choice. But inside you will know. You will know that you have to do a certain thing or take a certain course. That doesn't mean you will do it. The outer mind can suppress that inner knowledge which means the connection you have to the inner voice will be weakened from then on. But, nevertheless, at a deep level of your being you will know. The worldly self might overwhelm that deep knowledge, even to the extent of posing as a deeper knowledge itself, but if you are true to yourself then you will know. An honest person will feel guilt for doing the wrong thing and relief for doing the right thing even if it is the difficult thing and brings worldly problems. A spiritual slacker will brush off this guilt and dismiss it as societal conditioning or impractical romanticism or even disguised selfishness, but that person is killing the voice of the soul inside and it will be easier for him to ignore it next time a similar situation arises until the point is reached where there is no connection at all.

Listen out for the voice of the soul. It will not always tell you what you want to hear, but it will unerringly direct you to the truth.

Rameau and Ravel

Readers who don't believe in reincarnation will have to bear with me on this one, though even they might be intrigued to see how certain patterns repeat themselves in similar circumstances.

I have long had a theory that the two French composers Jean-Phillipe Rameau and Maurice Ravel could be the same soul in two different lifetimes. Rameau (1683-1764, making him an exact contemporary of Bach) worked in the late baroque style while Ravel (1875-1937) was associated with Impressionism but, like his very different contemporary Debussy, dismissed the label, and the precision and clarity of his composing style bear him out.

So, what are the grounds for this, admittedly speculative, theory? First of all, let's look at the two men's faces. Here is Rameau.

and here is Ravel.

They're not the same but there are similarities in the features which you don't have to force onto the images. They will obviously have different genetic input to their physiognomy, but something of the inner man comes through and stamps its impression on the face as well.

However, let's put that aside. At best it's only a support to a more thorough  examination, and we do find striking musical and psychological parallels between the two men. Before we look into those, though, I should say that I do not believe all incarnations follow a similar path. Here we have a case where the same soul might follow two lives in the same place (France) and doing the same thing (music). It is expressing a developed talent. But other lives might take on totally different forms and be devoted to totally different ends in different places. The soul does not learn by doing the same thing life after life. It might follow certain paths and hone certain talents for a while but to be a rounded spiritually completed being it cannot focus on those alone to the detriment of a more holistic development. If these are the same soul, it had a mission which lasted for more than one lifetime but that doesn't mean it will be a composer, or even musical, in every life.

Both composers were obsessed with order and logic. This may be a French characteristic anyway but these two men manifested it very strongly. Rameau, decidedly a man of the Enlightenment, wrote the definitive Traité de l’harmonie (1722) which stated that music is a science governed by definite rules which "cannot be known to us without the aid of mathematics". For his part Ravel approached music with the same precision, maintaining that his compositions were put together with the "inevitability of a mathematical equation." Stravinsky even teased him about this calling him "the Swiss watchmaker" because of how the meticulous intricate way he constructed his pieces.

Both men were masters of the dance. Although he came to opera late in his career, this was the genre in which Rameau most excelled. The musical form and structure of his opéra-ballets such as Les Indes galantes were entirely derived from dance patterns which he transformed into supremely elegant rhythms while Ravel, taking inspiration from the Baroque, translated those patterns into a 20th century idiom as in, for example, Le Tombeau de Couperin (a tip of the hat to a contemporary of Rameau’s), La valse, Pavane pour une infante défunte not forgetting his tour de force Boléro.

Both men were masterful orchestrators, exceptional even among their peers. Rameau employed rich textures and instrumental colours within his operas for dramatic effect such as the depiction of primordial chaos in the overture to Zaïs. He never wrote a purely orchestral piece but his operas and ballets are full of mini-symphonies and dances in which he demonstrated his outstanding skill in manipulating colour and texture. Ravel is considered one of the greatest orchestrators in the history of music, renowned for the balance and clarity he brought to his work. Examples are Daphnis et Chloé, Boléro and orchestrations of some of his own piano works though perhaps his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Picture at an Exhibition serves as exhibit A.

 

Both men poured a substantial amount of their creativity into keyboard works. Rameau demanded strict adherence to ornamentation and approached his compositions for the harpsichord with rigorous structural logic while, in like manner, Ravel insisted on an unemotional clarity for his piano pieces in which articulation had to be clean and precise. Then they both mimicked sounds from nature in their works, for example, Le Rappel des oiseaux  and La Poule for Rameau countered by Jeux d'eau and Oiseaux tristes by Ravel.

 

Finally, and most tellingly, both men had similar character traits with each of them exhibiting an extremely fastidious detachment. Rameau was a very private man, withdrawn and introverted with frugal habits and living only for music or so it seems. For his part Ravel lived a semi-reclusive life in his country home and guarded his inner life from outsiders with a mask that saw him dubbed as cold and distant. He never married, again living only for music. Rameau did marry but only when he was 42.

 

Obviously, none of that is remotely conclusive but it is intriguing,  and Ravel with his clockwork perfection, fascination with dance and devotion to pure form fits the bill as a spiritual descendant to Rameau in a way that Debussy never could, despite his piano piece Hommage à Rameau. So maybe it was the same soul just as some have speculated G.K. Chesterton was a subsequent incarnation of Samuel Johnson and George Bernard Shaw was of Voltaire.