Tales from the Watershed: “House Life”

Posted on March 30, 2013 by janeadamsart

Another old wives’ Watershed Tale – (See under Categories in sidebar)…

But first …

Celebrating Easter, last week’s equinoctial Full Moon, Pesach? My secret of the golden flower is buried somewhere in the grim weather here – a biting cold, sad wind, grey like a gravestone, the trees have nothing on, and are shivering, little birds are huddled under their wings. Holy things are shrouded.

hebrew moon

My ingredients are basic: visualise fluffy yellow chicks and daffodils: the full Moon radiance through my window. In London, she blushed silvery pink. Symbolically unleavened bread suggests its opposite: the Presence, the yeast: Ascension, timelessly. The bread of life is pounded down to wait, to rise. The spores are stars. In Hebrew, Bethlehem was the House of Bread.

Both faiths – Hebraic and Christian – combine great loss, grief, rebirth and joy, within the elder pagan Spring Festival … the Passion of the Passover and of the Cross. For every woman, childbirth is her Passion and Renewal.

The symbolism in the Hebrew Names for the Moon, including Levanah, is for me, breathtaking: see the above link. But I might add a more Kabbalistic one later.

sunshine boy with house 1954

Part One: “House Life” – Dreams No 275 November 1976

IN THE kitchens of this large house, we romp about and slide down chutes of dry mud. Many people live here among great rooms and staircases, and the place is semi ruined. In the spacious warmth of its untidy mysteries, great chunks of life are lived and games are played, as in the womb.

parties in gathertegen 1954

Once it was a house I wanted to rent. It had then a large clean kitchen. I rode my bicycle very fast up the road and back again to talk to a priest about it – to Father William, whom I asked to instruct me in the catholic Faith – a stout, red-cheeked Jesuit at Farm Street. He is jovial, for he knows he’s on the Rolls Royce escalator to Heaven. He strolled with one of his wealthy Mayfair parishioners to and fro along the road by the trees, in his smart black cassock and heavy gold watch. He told me, alas he could not receive me into the church, unless I promised not to have sex with my unborn baby’s father occasionally – to whom of course, I was not married. My logic to try and keep the relationship stable for my child to grow up in, went further than the Jesuits’, and I’m afraid I was angry, and very rude to him. The J’s were touchingly kind, however. They passed the hat around. They gave me a pram, two dozen terry nappies, a pile of babygros and two big boxes of groceries from Sainsburys, so I didn’t have to spend a penny. That is logic!

house lit up and the moon 1954

Father William changed his job. He now belonged to a church next door to the house, which was both Catholic and Anglican, and more permissive.

And in other dreams, the house belonged to an elderly Jewish gynaecologist whom I have painted portraits for. He is a wealthy gnome, performs abortions safely for very distressed ladies, and loves to keep a woman on his arm. I had bad dreams about him being a terrible dentist – all my teeth shouted and hurt. He is a bright magpie with his possessions; every treasure he owns must be of great market value, and he was sure that I would be, one day. He showed me and some other visitors around his lusciously furnished domain. The property was vast. It covered the area of many streets. It was a great field. It was busily inhabited by anxiety, hope and drama.

It is easy to get lost in this house. It has staircases, galleries and big musty rooms at different levels. The opulence is tarnished, it developed a patina of neglect. It is rather warm because the windows are not often opened, even in summer.

chimneys and balloon 1954

Then it became another house. I entered it several times through the garden gate. In the sultry night both indoors and outdoors, the house stood four-square and Georgian in its garden or space. It had large windows, some of which were lit up from within. Like the kind of house and garden which children draw, it had a fence around it. It was also very stately. It was alive, big and heavy, and shadows lay with oppressive sensitivity in the worn and flaking stone. On some nights that I went there, there would be only one light on upstairs. My baby’s father lived there. But the night that I remember, three or four windows were lit up, and I could hear the sombre sound of his typewriter upstairs.

fragmenting house & dreamer, 1987

I went up the path to the front door. I opened this door, inserting my key into the delicate chambers of the lock and turning it with great deliberation. I could feel the shape and teeth of the key probing inward. It was a Yale, the same as the ones that I keep outside my Greencroft Gardens flat, in the garden wall, and which he asked me to move to a different hiding-place so he wouldn’t know where they were.

The keys to this house were given to me in trust. How long would I be permitted this privilege? As I went in I said to someone boldly, “What a barn this place is.” Some parts or sections of it were not fitted up and lined with a skin of plaster and damp-proofing as a house for people is. They were like the farmyard, with walls of mud. I knew my way. I was fond of the different textures and moods of this house. I never knew what to expect, because the walls within it were porous and unsealed.

A vague, oppressive fear also kept me on my toes. Life in it could change as rapidly as the weather over the moor. Bruised and broken soldiers in the walls, awake and bleed. I reached the upstairs landing. Here several doors opened off a wide balcony or gallery to other rooms. I could still hear him writing. I didn’t want him to stop. I didn’t want to disturb him. He did not live alone here. Other people inhabited this house as well. But he heard me arrive, heard my voice say “What a barn this place is” and he appeared on the landing and might be very angry.

My memory of what next happens is vague.

We were in a room. It was an upstairs dining room, bare, with a long table. I lay on my back along a bench. This house is inhabited by a group of people governed by a matriarch and a patriarch. The old lady wears lace and musty-smelling clothes, the sort you might find in a Victorian fancy dress box in an attic, and she is very powerful. In long Saturnine waves, her dominion increases, because the patriarch, the old man, is now dying. He has a long white beard. He visibly fades and wanes. Lv – my baby’s father – tells me I must, for his sake, and with all my loyalty, concentrate every atom of my strength to resist the persuasive authority of the old matriarch and her mockery. An intense battle of will is developing between him and Her. I try to stay on his side. It is very hard to fight off the dominance of the old lady, which is ascendent in myself; for the old man, moribund, is failing fast. I need to be neutral, but do not dare. If I am neutral, Lv will feel abandoned and betrayed, and abandon me: so I play the old game.

What of the relationship, this three-fold tension between us – the grandmother, Lv and myself? She and he are absolutely opposing forces, yet they work together. He is not shouting now. Centred, quietly decisive, refined, he survives minute by minute, a cataclysm in his soul, which we struggle to protect with conscious spells. He is himself, an unborn child. I might lose the thread, any moment, and fail. He needs me to fight, and not succumb to the old woman, he tests my metal with his fate. If I lose the fight, I forfeit my right to those keys. Because of her very great age, She is stronger than he, but he holds one card : to be beyond the law. To answer to no one.

I have wondered who these unknown people are, in the magician’s house. Are they anima and animus, or are they his parents? His father is dying, is mortally ill in Hungary. He hates his mother, he hates all mothers. He hates Her. The old people and the archetypal miasma that surrounds them, come from a place where I was not. I don’t know whether or not I came clear from this battle, whether it happened in my soul, or in his house. Some of the spaces in that house are not lined, and they are not contained, either. In the extreme difficulty of combating the astral magick power of the old matriarch, I was what she was becoming.

16th Century: midwives & astrologers – womens’ work and mens’ work, back to back: practical feminine and romantic male – Our human nature both sides! I’m glad I drew/copied this, rather than just paste the original engraving. It gave me a direct insight. I am moved to draw something when I wish to embody it.

“De Conceptu et Generatione Hominus 1587” by Jacob Rueff (copy)

After this, I began to have dreams about a pregnant lady, as I always do when my bladder fills. The growing womb presses on it. I have to get up two and sometimes three times in the night. She was overdue, poor thing. I transferred to her my discomfort, so that it was she who ran around lonely in the night, though she always found helpers in streets and on country lanes near Taunton. She seemed to have been pregnant for years. This was all very well, but I was still looking for a lavatory. I found at long last a row of them in one of the barn-like scruffy areas of the house – I was desperate for relief – a great big open place of hard earth and timber props like the pigsties of derelict Rome.

Then I found myself in the kitchens – still wanting to go – by the fuel burners and the chimneys. I sat at the table and looked at a book. It was a picture story, like a strip cartoon. The rows of pictures came to life as I turned the pages, so it was no longer a book but happened to me, as botanically described: the story of a penis. He was shown in every state of arousal and repose. He glistened red like a rare flower, he lived and grew within two loamy darknesses of many hues, in a garden. I forgot I needed to pee. “A rose in dark soil is penis love. The penis is a seed. Children grow up,” it said, under the pictures. What a tender, strange thing! I was moved almost to tears. It first repelled, then I rode it. I didn’t know anything at all about sex. I had never heard of it. This was a plant, a botanical process in the garden: my education. I was at primary school – a biology lesson.

bud

I recognised it is his. I began to grow up. In each successive picture, it curled and grew like a serpent. I saw the whole genitalia, in a secret earth among the roots, like an illumined manuscript. He was a sperm, with two “heads” like fishes, one at the growing tip, and one about half way down, like a branch. The long sperm grew some more, and moved its glowing crimson flower in my garden soil. As I learned, it penetrated, the bud grew up, right up my spine to the back of my throat to speak, I desired – pain, pleasure, bad girl, heart’s desire – what if I wet the bed? I need to pee. The occult work is such a LABOUR. But I have no choice. He carries me like a flood. I bore down as it came, I didn’t care if I wet the bed, I pushed out the newborn child to him, the child he conceived from so deep inside. Love.

In the garden, conception, orgasm, childbirth, are One and the same. Fused with heaven and all human history, the One indivisible moment outshone everything I knew. It blew the fuse. I was a child.

To receive is simultaneously to give. It doesn’t matter, if the linear world pulls time apart into different times, and does not see the eros Rose, or if we see for the time being, only our fantasies, and suffer. She washes out for ever deep down, those sad soapy sexual beliefs that rocked us to sleep. A Rose is the risen: the law is for giving.

I woke with it, but slept again and dreamed I bled. The blood came in thick drops, brown in colour. Had it made me miscarry? I looked and willed the blood not to be there. But it was. I made up my mind that this is a dream, and woke at once.

Finally I dreamed again about the house. It was now enormous, of many many storeys. I lived very high up in it, in Greencroft Gardens. I went visiting down the road, and lent my spare keys (the ones I keep outside in the garden wall) to my best friend’s husband the Architect, who wanted to fetch something from my flat. He came back. The keys were sometimes of metal and sometimes of soft balsa wood (for building model boats), and so frail they might break in the lock.

Next, Lv visited me and I gave the keys to him. I was glad he wouldn’t find the Architect inside. In all innocence it is not right that these keys be passed around, for whatever reason. He said the whole building gave him the creeps. He was feeling rather jumpy.

A “Watershed” Dream – November 1976

“Jung looked up at me and said, “When a man’s anima meets a woman’s animus, it is bound to be A HELL OF A BUSINESS.” (Joseph Campbell)

Part Two: Sacred Geometry

The following Easter-bunny reflection is based on Nassim Haramein’s seminar “Crossing the Event Horizon” (2005, published by The Resonance Project), which I just began to watch.

A rose is a rose is the risen: the law is for giving. The “House Life” dream telescoped everything I would later study of Kabbalah and the Tree of Life. It was stored in my cellular memory.

How borderline we are! The language we use is a projectile interface. It moves with light and shadow: easily the Veil is imagined as evil: lived as devil: eve, the level responsible for it all. Indeed she is: She is the subconscious – God’s own womb, no less – the oven to bake the bread; the house of life.

Archetypal forms of the soul, are sacred geometry. Sacred geometry opens the understanding, visually, with less need for explanation. As we can browse beautiful tetrahedrons, blueprints and isotropic vector metrics online, to our hearts content, here are mostly, my old doodles of discovery and photos of nature – of water, wood and sky.

Nature – the bottomless

My “House Life” dream gestates the point. A single point – like a full stop – is said to have zero dimension: yet its geometry is of the sphere. It contracts or expands infinitely, according to magnification. No balloon is inflated – the cosmic Doppler shift – without an emptying lung.

Who is the blower? Who blows a black hole into a widening star?

Every law arises from its opposite. We are not nouns but verbs – the transition. Respiration in and out, is the law of Kalpa aeons: cosmic speech and stars.

solomon’s lattice

We are fluid points of transmission, the stars are not fixed. A point, or dot contains in infinite series, EVERYTHING. A circle is a magnified point. When we begin in the womb, we are nothing. But as the interior process unfolds, we are everything! Every thing is ensphered by its boundary which is No thing! A boundary – a circle or sphere – contains the potential of Infinite interior division. This is our union. Each of us centres no thing: the tiny mustard seed when opened, is empty.

“In a painting, as in life, keep the centre empty, for light to flow into it.”

When we are illumined, the dots join up. The relevance of this to everyday life, nature and each other, is love. I am empty for You. I am built open. It becomes intuitive: the natural state. As some of us begin to see things in this way, it tinctures homeopathically the fantastic off-centre slavery of today’s world. Oasis develops, and is gradually contagious, like evening stars one by one coming out: shalom – peace.

Does peace then, emerge from its opposite? – the tension we see around?

Consciousness, and therefore All, begins from one place only: HERE.
This point, which is All.

soul tetrahedrons

“The most stable structure in Nature is the tetrahedron.” The nesting of infinitely decreasing Tetrahedrons inside themselves, is identical to the human mind’s manner of mental invention, pastime, panic and creation. Absolutely ANYTHING when focused, creates its own expanding rationale – the menu on your screen. So practice peace!

(This lifetime, I have a private leitmotif – it dropped into my mind when I was twenty. I had a job at a second hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road, and scribbled my thoughts on brown paper bags: “Turn it round. To forgive, I must give way to the force.” It felt very profound. There was a house in a storm. This Karmic theme which reaches a long way back, concludes or bears fruit, now.)

Justice is done, but not in a place where I can see it. Trust is the unbroken love of life, the Underbeing: sur-render. Render unto heaven’s law and rejoice in the fresh clean air. The Point is subtle, and fills everything. Tifareth: beauty.

I meant to write just one para about the Point circumscribed by nothing: the point being everything tucked up inside it, a sleeping child. In India it is called the bindhu, and on it the entire cosmic lattice depends. Today I ran aground in slack water, low tide, I needed to curl up and doze for the day – holy black bare Saturday: tomorrow the little fluffy sunshine chicks come out.

bumble bee 1954

So I awaken through a sleepy bumble bee – black and yellow stripes. Easter Sunday is the last day of March. The clocks change to summer time, with the Risen Bread. That is a beautiful alignment! even with wind-chill frost on the ground.

Remember the Sun’s golden semi-circle, the arc of the day: the secret of the Golden Flower.

This year is a bardo of endings through beginnings. My festival, my true worship, is the Unknown: the no thing: and like the mustard seed, fulfilled.

The full blown Eros Rose is also FOR … GIVE. As you see in the photo above, of the rose in an egg, it spirals to petal from the centre sensory point. Nothing matters or happens, but this. The Chymical wedding is deeper than the human veil. The human veils Shekhinah.

floweroflifeheader: Nassim Haramein: davidicke.com

Sperm, fertilization, vesica pisces, gestation of the embryo, earth,
Sol, Star, sacred geometry cycle, you and me

GALLERY

15 Sacred India Tarot Kaccha & Devyani lovers

Ready to post this, at last. Happy Easter ! The Sun is having another go, this morning.

daffodils in Douglas Harding

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.

Aquariel Link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Sacred India Tarot Archive: Creation of 8 of Lotuses – Siva Tests Parvati

Posted on March 24, 2013 by janeadamsart

Mask

Continuing the Sacred India Tarot Archive, by Rohit Arya and Jane Adams. This post is quite a ragbag, because into it arrived two vintage Himalayan mountaineers: Siva tries on their faces to further tease Parvati, perhaps. Or … an essay on India’s charm for we romantic Brits.

This post belongs with “Solomon” (23 March) which is over in Aquariel, my other blog.

While assembling Solomon and (to conclude) a gist of his Song, I thought of Parvati in her Himalayan forest, watering the trees and being visited by the wise.

Rohit’s Notes (2004) – Eight of Lotuses: Siva Masks Himself

Lotuses 8 Visual reference 1

“Siva appears as a smug, self satisfied Brahmin, to test the poor girl, indulging in much abuse of his qualities, nature, life style and appearance. Parvati responds with anger, as shown in the comic strip below. This indicates both the Karma which kept them apart, and the fact that when such happens, the illusions which separate people no longer hold sway. This is the only card where Siva is not shown in colossal stature, and he is not bejeweled or crowned.”

lotuses 8 reference 2

Parvati pestered by sages – detail

Jane’s Notes

As a Capricorn child, I am bound to identify with the Daughter of the Mountain. My love letter is to the universe, for all hearts to read. Let it be!

Rahu Northnode … after tasting the nectar. The immortal gods severed Rahu’s head from his body, for daring to sip their elixir. He leads the glorious Illusion through which “the Shepherd leads himself back to Himself” … “the One most fully present in His seeming absence” … “honour Him with integrity or He will swallow you whole” … “there is no where in heaven or hell where I AM not” … “I do not believe – I know” … Rahu’s cosmic Love song is in this link. (song of Rahu by Jeanette Kishori McKenzie)

Here I am, Parvati by the Star pool, listening to Rahu, fishing away for Siva, and pestered by a sage or two !

Why not take all the time it needs? The sages who come along are interesting, and sometimes they pretend to be Siva for a while, which is fun. Siva’s masque fits any of them. He puts on a different face, pretending to be Rahu’s Head Exchange … Siva the god of Love is a holy terror among the wives of sages ! Siva shines through Rahu. Rudra is sometimes Rahu. They seem to pass through one another. None of them is really Siva. This is the Glory and Freedom of Siva.

Rahu’s appearance presages Parvati’s future child with an elephant’s head – Ganesh.

Wives of sages get left alone a lot in the forest. Up the path through dark stems and columns of sunlight, who comes next? What matted lean stranger, with loincloth, waterpot and glowing eyes? Any day, the unexpected ! The call of strange birds, through Himalayan valleys: the clambering rhododendron giant: nocturnal mist lifts off the ground, as Surya begins His work for the day.

I think Parvati’s nectarous ecstasy was greater in her expectant Solitude, sleeping out at night and fasting on the ground, than in all the future days of her marriage with Siva on Kailas. Of course they would squabble, whenever they came off the peak. That was the fractious energy field required to conceive their children, Skanda and Ganapati.

My loveliest experience in India, was not Gurus. I didn’t really take to them, other than Ramana. It was sitting in Ramanananda’s cottage the other side of Arunachala Hill: the tall medicinal herbs in his garden – all of them collected from sages’ samadhis – the rocks in his fireplace, his watercolours of the Hill, his old put-put scooter and excellent idiomatic English. Friar Tuck in horn rimmed specs and orange skirts welcomes staff-bearing kindred spirits. He is busy raising funds to restore Annamalai Temple: piles of paperwork perch precariously on pebbles, rudraksha beads and sacred ash. Through his parlour, men and women sadhus potter and pass the timeless hour: their laughing Vedic intellect, the Path to Liberation and the heat.

Ramanananda Saraswathi in 1993

In modern India and the loosening of some of its brackets, an ancient freedom speaks as it always has. Off the beaten track, Ramananda’s caravan among wiry eucalyptus, catches what breeze it can. He told me that in summer, if you throw an egg on the wall, it fries, and that he is not really a Swami, he is the Self.

The train stops again. Through the wide windows, time and tall herbs pass by. In Siva’s fiery light, no caste or custom confines the eccentric delight of elder India.

Mira de Coux

It is also my friendship with Belgian Mira when she stayed with me for a short time in London; we laughed about our menfolk. She like Parvati waited by the Ganga many many moons with cloth and waterpot, till Harilal Poonja returned along the path – her Siva whom she married: their daughter Mukti.

FOR MIRA AND POONJA

With a ghee lamp   
butter from the cow is burned,   
leaving nor ash nor carbon.

With a ghee lamp   
the cow is burned; pure   
is Vedic light from the Sun she gives.

Fire, brave ship in water shining.   
Sun, bright fire in the sea.   
Water, deep peace of night.   

Fire is in the wood.   
Fire sleeps in the wood.   
Fire from the Sun   
is present in all beings. 

Let there be peace   
to all beings:  to rocks, plants,   
rivers, animals and people.   
Let there be peace. 

His soul is to her love released.   
In the flower childrens' fire,   
Master's body fell, was licked and torn,   
eaten, feasted. Let there be peace   
to all beings.

from Poems of Eclipse, 1999

THE RIVER LADY

The wisdom of an elder, beautiful woman   
plays among the cows.   
The Daughter of the Mountain nomad   
knows not what'll happen next.

With her Master's zest   
she parries the prurient in the bud   
with deft shield   
and sword to tease and pierce. 

Because like Parvati, she by Ganges waited   
outside time, her spouse,   
an old, old river through her flows, a gravitas.   
A terrible compassion in her stands.   

Master's eyes are palpable   
in her round feminine face   
with wide laughter wrinkled -   
a soft river apple blooms.

Bhakti in the West is not well understood.   
The soul of bhakti is the effortless   
being taken;  Master's absence of effort.   
There is no lineage, no permission for the river.   

It overflows its banks, within my house.   
The room is filled with the river lady's 
way of hen partying   
here, with Master in our toes.

My thoughts are cradled in small sails   
the river takes to its own.   

They are brave little ships.   
They are butter, lit in paper boats.

from Poems of Eclipse 1999

The luminosity of Vedic India, the shining brown river, the Himalayan myths and legends, the paradoxical political scene … remain bright and eternal in Parvati’s soul. I feel the sound of the river and the old wrinkled stones and the sun’s heat even now. I travel sitting still! Waiting for Siva is the Himalaya in my soul: the coming and going of this, is beauty. Nobody need wait for Siva. Siva is the perfume of all the whispering leaves.

I did not tread the shores of Mother Ganga in this lifetime, nor visit Badrinath. The memory is planted from other lifetimes, who knows when or where ? Badrinath where Ganga rises, and the mountain-girt sanctuary of Nanda Devi and the Valley of Flowers, are on the watershed, on the direct trail to Kailasa in the north, the shining peak.

himalayan forest

Let Nanda Devi be my mantra ! She is the goddess of nanda, a male sanskrit word for joy. In the 1930s, the Himalayan explorer Eric Shipton opened up the dark Rishi Ganga gorge to the secret flowering meadow and snows around Her beautiful high fang, till then inaccessible … “Rishi” means “Sage”. The Sages’ silence flows from there, and the mountains are devic beings.

Eric Shipton

Nanda Devi

If my thoughts seem to stray, it is because Parvati and Siva invoke for me this landscape and its archetypal resonance. Translating Parvati’s visions on an empty tum, to my inner world in England, I am inspired by the early Himalayan explorers as they mapped the sacred trail among the high Ganga sources around Badrinath, seat of Vishnu. I have their books and their old photos. It is an INVOCATION : to touch upon, and to marvel. The trail crosses the watershed. Its great peaks are Kamet and Nanda Devi, on the way to Kailas in Tibet.

In the book with Sacred India Tarot deck, Rohit writes:

“Siva, vanquished by Parvati’s great tapasya, and even greater love, still has a puckish desire to test her. If she was not discouraged by indifference, perhaps she will be by disgust? Appearing as a young Brahmin, he professes loud astonishment that she is wasting her life and beauty on that fellow Siva. Is he any sort of goal for decent people? His family and background is unknown, his ornaments are serpents, he lives in cemeteries with weird goblins, and he certainly has no money.

“This is a peculiar form of Bhakti called Ninda-Stuthi – Abuse-Praise! It is coded language for spiritual initiates. Siva has no money because he is the lord of the world. He lives in cemeteries because that is where every human ends up. He has no family and is of uncertain background because He is the origin of the world, and so on.

“‘He encompasses all things, though he is but one. Whoever knows him, Siva the Auspicious, wins peace for ever.’

Svetasvarura Upanishad

Sacred India Tarot 7 of Lotuses/Cups: Siva Tests Parvati

Rohit continues: “While Parvati does understand this language, her great love for Siva made these contumelius epithets unbearable. She began to objurgate this insolent man – scolding and rebuking sharply in a whirlwind of offended love. “The stupid and envious always say malicious things about the Great Ones of the world. What is beyond the limited understanding of shallow minds, is condemned. To speak ill of great souls is a sin, to listen is to participate in that sin.’

The last bonds of impeding Karma snap at that moment, and Siva concedes defeat. The devas are relieved. Parvati has in her meditations, worked out their negative Karma too.”

Finally, embedded in his interpretation, Rohit concludes, “This is an end-of-Karma card … Whatever goes at this time, let it go. It has no more Karma with you. Seek new horizons in life.”

Kailas sacred mountain, starlight

Looking for a picture in Frank Smythe’s The Valley of Flowers (Hodder & Straughton 1938) about his exploration near the Nanda Devi sanctuary, I discovered this marked paragraph:

“It was the first time I had travelled alone in the Himalayas, and the experience after the last two caravanserais to Mount Everest, was more than refreshing. For the first time in my life, I was able to think. I do not mean to think objectively or analytically, but rather to surrender thought to my surroundings. This is a power of which we know little in the west, but which is a basic of abstract thought in the east.

“It is allowing the mind to receive rather than to seek impressions, and it is gained by expurgating extraneous thought. It is then that the Eternal speaks; that the mutations of the universe are apparent: the very atmosphere is filled with life and song: the hills are resolved from mere masses of snow, ice and rock into something living. When this happens, the human mind escapes from the bondage of its own feeble imaginings, and becomes as one with its Creator.

“My pen has run away with me. It often did when recording my impressions in the Valley of Flowers, for it is impossible to continue along conventional channels when the country on either side is so fair … …

“The silence was complete save for the light, almost imperceptible hiss of the burning logs. Presently even that died, and the fire shrank to a heap of glowing embers. The cold stole up behind me; suddenly I was chilly, and my pipe was out. A few minutes later I was warm in my eiderdown sleeping bag. The last thing I saw before closing my eyes, was a bright star poised on a distant ridge, looking at me through the door of the tent.”

Frank Smythe

photo from “Nothing ever Happened” by David Godman

6 Annapurna & fish's tail range from Sarangkot www.travelblog.org

The fishes’ tail

Shipton in youth

looking down on the Temple

Old photo by Frank Smythe

12 Annapurna-I-Nordflanke-Photo-himalaya-info.org_

pilgrimage to Siva’s mountain

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel/Solomon Link

Elven Belvies and the Star

Posted on March 18, 2013 by janeadamsart

Here is a charming 1940s wartime tale by Uncle B for his little niece … and 60 years later, her granddaughter – for which he commissioned from me the illustrations. He printed the book privately, in 2007, handsomely bound in hardback.

“The Story of the Belvies and the Invisible Hermit” may alas, be only hinted at here … for obvious reasons of space. You need the special spectacles which come free with each rare copy of Uncle B’s book.

gallery – click on any image

In the boughs of great trees they build their houses, skilfully concealed from prying eyes, so that humans may walk directly underneath them and never guess that they are there.

When first he came to dwell in his lonely cave, the Invisible Hermit was very unhappy. All day long he feverishly mixed potions and powders together in his search for an answer to his problem. He grew a long flowing beard, and since he had not had a beard at the time of his misfortune, it was quite as visible as any normal beard. This helped him considerably, as it prevented birds and insects that would not otherwise have seen him, from bumping into his face.

Before they left their picnic site, Potomy insisted they wash their hands and faces to remove smears of blackberry juice. Once this had been done, and Potomy combed his hair, they continued on their way.

“Well my friends,” said K.S. Owl when they reached his tree, “I have studied many great tomes this night.” “Tomes?” Featherhead interrupted – “what are tomes?” “Books,” replied the Owl.

The Hermit adjusted the spectacles, surveyed himself critically, and pronounced them entirely satisfactory.

13 Twinkie's sketch as seen by everyone else

And … some more on Tarot Key 17, The Star. For me, those Belvies are a faery thicket or wooded childhood, which the twinkling Star penetrates.

This path of the Star, Yesod-Netzach, is called “The Natural Intelligence”. The Hebrew word, ShKL MVTBO derives from a root meaning “to press in, to impress, to sink”: nature is like the impression made on wax by a signet ring. The magendovid – Shield of David, Seal of Solomon – is printed throughout Nature, as the Cube of Space: the star.

She doesn’t mind. She carries on pouring from her jugs, because the more she pours the more she sees the Star. The stars light up her interior chakras on their stem. It is the spring growth – nearly the equinox, the new Aries. TZADDI, the Aquarian “fish-hook” letter, means “those of the Good.” It drops like a fly and sinks down into the pool, the deeper the darker, like the night sky filled with stars: the fleeting, swimming fish.

The fish it hooks is ON THE DINNER PLATE – my Hermetic Zodiac Temple:

and a version including Ophiocus constellation – the serpent carrier, 30 November-17 December. He holds the Scorpio serpent power until the Bowman’s arrow is full released. He sits behind Sagittarius. He is also Aesclepius, Hermetic healer with the venom.

(The Zodiac, shown clockwise, to accord with points of the Compass, when entering a sacred space or stone circle, and the journey to the east. So this is not a star map: it is symbolic. Aries where the sun is Exalted, is in the east. Capricorn and winter fall to the north – the left pillar: Cancer and summer to the south – the right pillar. Libra is the root which balances them: firstperson, forming Malkuth of the interior Temple. Receive !)

Those are Solomon’s pillars. Who sits between them? The Priestess, with her pomegranates growing, is the Tree of Life. The fountain is the Tree of Life. (This links to my meditation (in Aquariel) on Gothic cathedral building, root and shoot.)

Trust in God. Deep intentions sown into the upturned earth, reach target and bear fruit. I am one of their bearers or porters. Just a word, a paragraph, when reading, sets off a train of meditation and fruit. I can rarely finish a book, these days.

“God’s inky finger print” on my Karmic landscape, is placed upon a small area of fields, cities, orchards, hills and valleys. Fore and aft and around the “print”, are further fields, cities, orchards, hills and valleys. I found this marvellous image in an Irish faery folk-tale, The Hounds of the Morrigan. My life time travels along and around the upraised hedges’ whorl uniquely, faithfully: the character, or seal.

The seal – like Solomon’s Seal – is also red wax; it is in the blood. Each of us bears an individual character on the envelope, as Messengers.

Today’s I Ching is 25 – “Innocence, the Unexpected”.

Richard Wilhelm says, of Heaven the Creative over Thunder’s arousing Voice: “In springtime when thunder, life energy, begins to move again under the heavens, everything sprouts and grows, and all beings receive from nature’s creative activity, the childlike innocence of their original state … The instinctive certainty has to be that which is right and in accord with the Will of Heaven.”

Thus, an unreflecting or obstinately blind ‘instinctive’ way brings misfortune – it misinforms. Listen for the Divine Instinct, rather than my default-instinct. It takes trial and error while wandering in the maze to work this out. Our life on earth is a laboratory. The Labyrinth is no longer a maze. It has no cul de sacs, it is a single path, Home. The soul journeys through the atria/ventricle chambers to the left and to the right before it reaches centre – a heartbeat, a civilization, a breath.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel Link

Violet Woman and the Hermit

Posted on March 17, 2013 by janeadamsart

I have been touching on the Tarot path of the Star, in my Parvati-Siva posts so far. On the Tree of Life, this is Netzach to Yesod, Sphere of Venus to the Moon: the Desire nature’s bond with the automatic consciousness.

Stop and reflect these resonances. Venus is deep green, Moon a violet crystal. These colours together are sweet, like my painting Flower the Despair of Painters, of which I could enlarge just the centre !

Occult practice employs them. It turns them into oxes to pull and push the desires and beliefs, and to hurry things up a bit. I don’t have a desire to do that. I only want to “see that it is very good”. To push and pull is the fate of illusion.

So she pours just for the sake of pouring. The star shines just for the sake of shining. Of the star’s interior are unbelievable forces and eternity. Tangle the tiny walnut brain with more study? No. The structural school is all in position, the home (BETh) is built. Illumine the bodymind with the star, the precision of being the woman pouring the water nakedly: the pool, the twilight in the field.

In Tarot, Key 17 is called “the Intelligence of Nature“. There is a butterfly on the rose.

I read Paul Foster Case’s Lessons, because his every single word as turned, is potent and unwasteful. He is at the plough, and ropes of red earth upturn, like a river. Use the senses as tattvas; frank-incense smell generates a gothic temple.

Tarot Key 17 is quintessentially myself, who sit here doing nothing but pour, pour, near the scarlet ibis in – hey, that’s a frankincense-tree! The violet cannot help but smell secret and lovely, the sound of the water to flow, the shine of the Stars to glow down seven chakras: the staff of life, the subtle connection, the well, cosmos to the ground.

BOTA Tarot Keys 17 & 9

The picture language says it all.

In the background of Key 17 is the distant Violet Mountain. The Hermit standing upon its snows, shines the Lamp in pitch dark. The Hermit is Yod, the semitic, semantic sperm of the Hebrew alephbeis, script of flame. The woman of the Star is the medium, fresh as a daisy, contemplative as a brooding witch. Key 17 joins up ALL THE WRITING in the well. The little scarlet ibis in the incense-tree is Thoth, scribe of Hermes.

The Hermit is not alone. He is all-One. He is often misunderstood. They think he is sad, but he is full of joy.

The Hermit’s YOD cap is deep blue, the colour of the Priestess’s subconscious ocean: the ‘feminine’ sense of touch. He is androgynous. Key 9 is called “the Intelligence of Coition”. It also governs alchemically, the assimilation of Solar energy in our food, which passes through chyle in the “black dragon” (colon) into the blood as red and white “soldiers” – the cells which maintain life in every city of the body. The cities are the organs. You can see them in the old, romantic alchemical engravings, and it is called “The Work of the Sun”. Through the Hermit, spiritual voltage is earthed, and enters the heartbeat: and under the Hermit and his Priestess cap, sprout festivals of fertility.

There is an immersion in the beauties here. What discipline permits the archetype to pass through and onward, workably? The method of knowing the Tree brought me to this point of love. But the love, though constant, is fluid and fleeting. To build and refresh daily the astral eternal Temple – Keep it practical. Picture the chakras white, violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red – the white first of all, an unbudding stellar brilliance, sinking through the rainbow strata to earth.

The chakras on the Tree of Life. The root chakra at the base of the spine, is actually our connection with the ground.

The chakras on the Tree of Life. The root chakra at the base of the spine, is our whole connection with the ground.

So much is written of the chakras, their arguable symbolism, their colour systems and mantras … to confuse poor pilgrims in differing cultures. None of it matters. I find for myself, the simplest possible – the rainbow spectrum root to shoot. Make the seven centres work, and keep it awake: plumbline into earth. Does each flower, blade of grass, tree and bird, feel and re-member this? – even as Isis with her Osiris? Nature is red in tooth and claw, but the core of Nature is bliss, the bliss of YHVH’s breath.

Alchemy Tree of Life, the World of Assiyah, material, the physical Universe. Note the violet path connecting Yesod (pale violet, the personal foundation) and Netzach (green) and the shadowy path (Netzach Malkuth) of sleep and cellular regeneration. The Hermit path goes out-of-frame. It joins Tifareth to Hesed (Grace & Opportunity) and its colour is a gold-shot green: the musical key of F.

Malkuth Sefira – Earth – contains the colours of the four elements, slate, citrine, rust and indigo. The oval is akasha-tejas tattva – the Saturn Mars centres. Their balanced function is a secret Key to Gold: it earths it. In this spectrum, gold is Tifareth, the heart, or Sun, and Hod is bright orange, the “messenger” frequency, or bearer of the solar Rays. Tifareth interweaves the male and feminine triangles in Malkuth and Yesod: a Seal of Solomon, temple of the Living God.

These became my recipes over time; but for more information of the Tree in Toledo tradition, visit http://www.kabbalahsociety.org

For Tarot in the Tree, visit http://www.bota.org, who do an excellent correspondence course. They teach the colour scale and its sound-frequencies, like a musical instrument. They supply the 22 bota Tarot Keys in outline: the student colours them in.

It takes practice, to inform the conditioned bodymind – to let sky-Siva penetrate the sleepy tangle. For instance, for the third eye – violet – I picture a violet gossamer spinning sphere: to see spring violets in their deep green leaves, I focus between the eyes. The violet complementary tone is topaz – an orange crystal point of fire. Seeing between the eyes quietens the mind, and brings detachment and the proper focus to a life-problem. The tools and colours in the paintbox are all here: use them! Use them for freedom.

Lens – another violet crystal!

The plumb-line is a meditative state. In my Aquariel “be-a-log” to companion this, I posted the Root and Shoot of the Priestess. She belongs to the book of emerging method, and there she is, in the Hermit’s blue cap … She’s been in the wings for a long while. She was one of my early breakthroughs: a method inspired by masonic symbols.

Memo to myself: follow each initiative with love.

I don’t know who drew this charming Sivaic hermit

Aphrodite after Botticelli

Sankara gives the Vedas … Annapurna is in the background. (ja 1994)

Looking towards Damehole Point: a childhood playground. I hope to return.

Window: Siva crystal

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

link to Cathedral Building & the Priestess

Sacred India Tarot Archive: 7 of Lotuses – Parvati waters Trees

Posted on March 14, 2013 by janeadamsart

Rohit’s Notes 2003/4

“Seven of Lotuses is an interesting episode, because Parvati used to break her tapasya every day, to care for trees in her vicinity, and was criticized for being frivolous in so doing. She quoted back a Vedic verse which says that the most sacred and meritorious of all acts is to serve trees! This break was also part of her Sadhana.

“The normal spirit associated with the Star card is what we are seeking here. Trees near a lotus pond will do.”

from Hermetic Tarot 1991

Jane’s Notes:

Parvati waters trees! In the Major Arcanum 17 image, she is mother naked, truth, and she pours from flasks of infinite supply, onto the ground and into the starry pool, seeking and being her knowledge.

With the same water of Life, Parvati in the Himalayan forest, replenishes the upward flowing sap and photosynthesis – the inverted root. Each forest giant is Siva, and she moves among them like the dew; the heat and smell and sweat of earth, the stirrings of insects and wild deer. She dips her cloth in the water, and wraps it around her, to cool herself.

Parvati’s sadhana and service contained these tremendous contrasts: the ultimate snows, the fiery dance of her Lord, and the lush grandeur of Himalayan valleys.

As Rohit has pointed out, after the terrible shock and humiliation of Kama being destroyed, her passion is like a little girl, convinced that a happy and magical outcome is in her power. For is it not her destiny to be the Mother of the world?

As Mother Ganga descends from the Himalayan watershed, Sati reborn as Parvati is the consciousness: and she awaits Him by the waters, with all the time in the world.

Visual reference from the cartoon-book, for Seven of Lotuses

Indeed, the tapas and self-starvation of the young Daughter of the Himalaya Mountains, richly nourished her daydreams – which every Indian Princess has – of family life with Lord Siva and their children Skanda and Ganapati, on Mount Kailas …

Postcard – Parvati, Siva & family in Kailas

… the blissful marital bed of eternal, yogic snows …

Kailas – sacred mountain

A Kabbalist experience of the Self, yet Sivaic …

Something similar to this (below) may have shone through Parvati’s dreams. Just such a moment influences an entire life. We all have them; but do we notice them?

1991: “I dreamed I or someone had an injury, a toxic swelling on the left leg, near the ankle. The person lay on, or was part of a piece of furniture or framework, in a garden out of doors, and suffered from a lack of equilibrium. With my growing interest in healing, a strange knowledge entered me. I lifted this swollen point or part of space. I let it collide with a point of vitality which I brought to meet it over the wooden frame, from the other side. From the marrying spilled an incandescent throbbing. It was not of my body; it was the air: the point everywhere, of Reality. For those endless instants, I knew and I am the infinite Source.

“Nothing can end or destroy the Source, the seamless thrill of being. A mountain range, a Himalaya of crystal light sparkles in the nucleus of every atom and in my hinterland. It calls me. It is an ancient Song which I cannot lose. It will be always, as it always has been, home and living with my grandmother. It has no beginning.

simikot kailas manasarovar, www.adventuregeotreks.com

simikot kailas manasarovar, http://www.adventuregeotreks.com

“It is as it fades, my uttermost and lingering refreshment. It is the truth. It flowered, it happened in the air. And the sick leg was naturally being cured.

“I” … How can I lose, or be lost? It is imperishably simple.

“The creative act collides the particles. It explodes their unsought energy. Their interaction is more profoundly alive than any sum of the parts. It is at position or motion. It moves as a wave of light. The hidden languages of adepts were built on verbs – motion – and not upon nouns – position.

“The interaction or “change” appears anywhere, at any moment over the cosmic lattice.

“In the ripple effect even a thousand light years distant, the mysterious brother or sister particle concurs. It answers the continuum, through the veil of time and space. An electron’s observable behaviours are pieces in cross-section of Reality. An electron is a charged unit of life or change. The quanta vanish and reappear beyond the Script of Light, in every place of time. The living being is beyond sight and touch; yet I breathe it through my nose. Fragmentary planes across the limbs, appear in our elemental lattice – we add them together to make a sum or experiment for prediction. But when they touch, the bucket’s bottom drops out. A few parts of the electron memory and the way it feels, return through the veil. The whole of I is this for ever. The three-dimensional lattice is my dream, outlining the shadow. The living being is in the wheels Ezekiel saw in the desert near Tel Aviv.

“Ezekiel recounted four simultaneous likenesses (to lion, eagle, angel, bull) in four directions squared through space at the speed of light. On the chariot, four spherical wheels, one for each creature ‘went in any of their four directions without turning as they went … and when the living creatures rose from the earth the wheels rose … for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.’ Above this was a boundless crystal firmament – their point. In this stood still ‘the likeness of the Glory of the LORD ‘ – axis of all the worlds.

“In the I-dot of each grain of space, I am the echo of that crystalline brightness Ezekiel calls ‘of a gleaming chrysolite‘ – my age old peaks, the mountains.

“Crystal is pure composition. Handling or friction of crystals releases the current. Crystal in the minerals and geological strata of Earth resembles the Angelic Laws. Crystalline and unadorned is this.”

Here now is the completed card: Parvati waters the Trees.

Sacred India Tarot – 7 Lotuses

The aura Omkara around Parvati recalls the green Kundalini in 2 of Lotuses, as she fell at the feet of the sage Narada who brought her the news.

Correspondence Jane to Gautam & Rohit – 31 October 2004: “As enclosed – and thanks for sending Garuda images.”

Rohit to Jane: “Both the eight” (see next SITA post) “and the seven are cards that leave us no room for comment. They are terrific and beautiful. It was a very pleasant surprise to see Kailas in the 8, as Gautam was going to send you a picture reference of the same to incorporate somewhere in the suit. I think that we should switch characters of Kama and Pradyumna for King and Knight, as Pradyumna is the healed person, and Kama is still immature.”

Mt Kailas over manasarovar, www.trekearth.com

Mt Kailas over manasarovar, http://www.trekearth.com

GALLERY: the young girl’s elemental romance

Fish’s Tail, Annapurna region

Lens

swollen waters – River Torridge, North Devon

…

For other Sacred India Tarot posts, look under Recent Posts, Categories in side bar, or Archive of All Posts in the title bar.

Rohit Arya

Rohit Arya is an Author, Yogi and Polymath. He has written the first book on Vaastu to be published in the West, {translated into five languages} the first book on tarot to be published in India, co-authored a book on fire sacrifice, and is the creator of The Sacred India Tarot {82 card deck and book}. He has also written A Gathering of Gods. He is a corporate trainer, a mythologist and vibrant speaker as well as an arts critic and cultural commentator. Rohit is also a Lineage Master in the Eight Spiritual Breaths system of Yoga.

Earlier posts about the deck, including the first 15 Major Arcana archives are in http://aryayogi.wordpress.com The deck is copyrighted (c) 2011 to the publishers, Yogi Impressions Books pvt, and available also on Amazon and internationally.

Jane Adams

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel Link

Human Landscape – in Capricorn

Posted on March 11, 2013 by janeadamsart

On winter evenings after school, a mile to walk home from the bus stop, the lane was often pitch dark, and I groped along the hedge. On clear nights the stars came out one by one like songs until the heavens were ablaze.

I wondered, in about 1964:

“If I were to reach for you,
a million light years of night, as spider’s sunlit string at dawn;
if I broke earth’s cloudy cloak and fled from home …
beyond thought, hope, beyond time,
abandoning spinning self contained sphere … beyond ALL …

“will you some where begin to swell
to a tiny ball of fire?

And if I should go –
(fire burned out in aeons past) –
beyond?”

From The Reckless Fruit, 1960s

In later years it seemed to me that because the whole night sky is a splendour, there is nothing in all the universe but light, the depth and density packed together of the photons which are stars.

My blog is an archival therapy. Behind the process, an ancient Dame prompts the nuances. She arranges them with clarity in the astral temple; every writer/artist has to keep mum down here on earth, with his or her nuances. We are each nourished by our roots in the tapestry, whether we grumble, forget or exalt them. Though I live in London’s light-pollutant, which screens out my awareness of the starry sky at night, an interior sensitivity compensates. Nuances are the nous of life. Buried galactic stars illumine the ground, as they do the sky. It is the same materia.

A propos, here is the link to a video: Carl Sagan describes the galactic DNA within our white blood cells. I found it on moma-fauna’s beautiful blog “Pray to the Moon”: a miracle each day, give it time.

Persons are treasures.

I went to the community ground across the road for an hour yesterday, to transfer some earth from bags to boxes with spade and wheelbarrow, and to begin sorting out long sturdy stems from the cuttings pile: the image of earth, gardens and digging is powerful just now, with ancestral nitrates and tribal tapestry. And I just have to go along with this. My muse plans without a break, this post for my father’s tribe. I want to deliver the Beauty, in spades each day. Please bear with me – this is a garden and it is spring. In the context of Families, my next watershed tale – “House Life” may sit well. A hidden story grows through it all. As a Long Thought, she completes herself to the open end. Then another Long Thought takes the baton. They are runners, like wild buttercup.

My father and I are both Capricorns, with the Moon in Cancer. Here now are some of his people. I have not done all the drawings yet. Soon I will, and will add them. The Adamses came originally from Scotland, and my paternal grandfather married Lily Basche the daughter of a piano maker from Bohemia – the Petrof piano firm. Fred Adams was a Freemason, master of his lodge, and Lily was a devout Roman Catholic: theirs was an interesting marriage.

But a couple of generations further back, a female Yule line married into the Adamses. Fred Adams said, “My mother was a Yule”. The Yules were originally London merchants and rather wild, but their graveyard is in Bradford, north Devon where John Carslake Duncan Yule was Rector for 40 years. When Rector Yule’s younger brother died, he took the widow and all her children into the household. Our link is to one of the deceased younger brother’s daughters – Commander Yule’s grand-daughter.

(Before he knew anything of the Yules, my father moved house in 1985 to the next-door parish!)

Rector John Carslake Yule’s father, Commander John Yule had served on Nelson’s ship. The rumour went around that Lord Nelson was unusually fond of him, and awarded him privileges for life: John moved west and married a Dorset Carslake; their son the Vicar was given the Bradford living, and the family prospered under Queen Victoria’s patronage. Commander Yule was either a natural favourite, or … the jury remains out ! Be that as it may, Nelson on his column soaring above the pigeons, and planted under the dome of St Pauls’, played a benevolent theme among my Victorian ancestors.

Nelson – a sketch by Zev ben Shimon Halevi in The Path of a Kabbalist (Kabbalahsociety 2010)

My strongest influence from my father’s family however, is my great-aunt Appelonia Basche, his mother’s sister. Her fiance went down in the Titanic, so she never married. She was a student of Emil Sauer – a pupil of Liszt – but her concert career was cut short during the Great War, because of her “Germanic” name. Lonie was a wonderful musician, and became an inspiring teacher – fierce, emotional and childlike. When I was 12 or so, she strictly forbade me from trying to play Brahms. She was very tall, with a deep voice, and enormously long hands and feet. She died in 1973, two weeks after her 90th birthday, after a long struggle with dementia over knitting-patterns for her many great-nephews and -nieces’ birthdays. She had promised herself a nip of scotch at 90, and she just made it.

Auntie Lonie with her niece Jennifer & children

I’ve noticed that people have their teachers’ spiritual physiognomy. Like flesh and blood, the transmission of a teaching marks and moulds the subtle body, down its own generations. I have tried to sketch that central-european resonance I see in the faces of Auntie Lonie, her teacher Sauer, and his teacher Liszt. (this is a 2nd link)

In this family portrait, the philosophical “DNA” interests me. It drew like to like, across the genetic lattice, touching the physical life-streams, birth and death, for its sustenance, to blend the rivers (Daat-Tifareth-Yesod) at various levels. Picking up the photos or drawings I have here, I follow one thread through the tapestry; but of course, many fascinating characters are left out, such as my father’s three sisters, the teacher, the dancer and the prison visitor; or the Bohemian Basche piano makers. There is only scope here to show a very few “slides”. My father’s family, though mostly quite musical, were robust, down to earth citizens: a texture which supports the arts. But Fred Adams tried to stop my father from playing the fiddle. He said “one musician in this family is quite enough.” So Peter as a boy, “practiced” with two pieces of wood, like the young Haydn. After the war, he became a farmer, one of the few pioneers returning to organic ways.

But an even stronger influence, forcing all my windows to remain open since 11 years old, is my father’s teacher, J.Krishnamurti. See my other posts in the Krishnamurti & the Coastal Path category – with more to come.

Horatio nelson, by William Beechey, 1800

One of the wild old Yules, before the Vicar of Bradford steadied them! The Vicar was also an individualist and rule bender.

Margaret of the Yule line: Andrew, an Adams

Note the monkey and the free-thiinking lady

9 Lonie & other students with Emil Sauer

The neighbours complained about my grandfather’s piano playing. Next to him is a photo of the young Lily.

As a child, I cried in my bed upstairs, at the sound of my father and Auntie Lonie playing Bach sonatas together downstairs. It made me think of “the poor”. She taught him through Bach.

14a my father with his father & 3 sisters

billet-doux for Appelonia

pruning and grafting apple trees

When I was 12 or less, Aunt scolded and forbade me to try to play Brahms, for whom I had a passion. She said my hands were not large enough yet. I was upset!

We went along the enormous rocky beaches, and scrambled back in the dark

This is the piano my great-grandfather Basche made for his bride as a wedding present. It has a fine mellow voice, and a temperamental action, with the westcountry weather.

This has turned out to be more a portrait of my father, than of his family … tentatively so.

What are these three huge Human Landscape posts for? What made me want to be a Kabbalist – or the roots of any spiritual “mould” or tradition? The map is revealed precisely!

The Adams Basche Yules group had solid earthly roots, stable psyche – with a dash of English eccentrics, and a firm ethical base. This framework – the equivalent of a mature working lifestyle in the Jewish tradition – qualified me to continue my study of Kabbalah and Vedanta with clarity, depth and safety. It is the “soul law”.

My father rebelled against the urban desk conventions. He went back to the land, with his violin, his ecology and his love of poetry, and learned about sheep, cattle and fruit. He loved land management. I am stunned at a glorious mixture in my childhood, of the tough spiritual quest with the geologies of Scotland, Yorkshire, Cornwall, Surrey, Somerset and Devon. What landscape! What a gift!

The esoteric method seeks out its student. I “think” I am the seeker, but I’m on the hook which is baited with life; I receive. I am the seed in the ground it sprouts through. My passion for it could have gone ANYWHERE – it was so eccentric, open and willing. I could have joined a cult. But I was gated and protected by a mysterious ethical restraint – there must be no personal inflation. It must work only for the good. This was reinforced by the difficult Krishnamurti influence in my teens.

The restraint is the formative one of Saturn. It comes from the shape of previous lifetimes, it gravitated to a Capricorn birth with a Capricorn parent. The flow is unbroken. Additionally, the intellect refused to go to university and learn other peoples’ thoughts. Everything had to be planted in life-experience, and tried and tested. I did not want answers. I already knew them. I wanted the open Life of the quest, and to become a better human being. Or IT wanted to; for the transpersonal works through the personal. The alchemical image is a lily in a flowerpot, standing in a garden.

I wanted to make and love the garden, the way my father loved his farms. He never owned land. He was Her servant, and sower of seed. He got the sack a few times. He hoped that what he began in those fields, would survive.

Capricorn asks perennially: How does Spirit work out in the earth plane? How can the ageless Wisdom be applied? What is practical? How can I Self remember, and live more accurately? more kindly? Music and all the other training is preparatory, step by step, in learning to walk. My artistic gift was carried over from the Renaissance apprenticeship 500 years ago – a deep, ongoing focus. It is my key to the Great Work. It no longer needs fame and fortune, it grew out of all those. It only needs to be kept exercised for the “as above, so below” – the LENS.

To love God daily, hourly, consciously, in the NOW? Peter my parent, is a passionate atheist. He became so, after the War. Thus I was never constrained by belief in God, but explored the science of God: the cosmic DNA or connectivity, the atom as the galaxy, the seed in the ground, the yeast in the loaf, the ferment in the grape, the lamb in the ewe.

How to be in The Work? to live as a Kabbalist? to wake up right now? What is the essence? The Work awakes to where life shines here, beyond my mind’s clogged pore. When dull and stuck and dispirited and repetitive and stressed – try to step off the engine into … the inner stars, here and now the Tree, an utterly new and timeless way of planning things.

Shared Sight: Shebbear

Walking the lane
past a familiar oaken discourse in the field,
I have your frameless window.

Sixteen years you lived here!

I have your sky turning wind to shape each tree
and secret mossy dip of hedgerows to the winding lane
which lies along them, like a bootlace.

In a hollow, a slow crease between unbroken waves
of inland sea, lies hid yourself, whose nature
herding wild lambs, fighting red tape
and cherishing the root along the tractor’s tread of time

sowed with love the soul
of England’s fields
and planted stout trees, retiring.

My sight along the road
which ploughs a clustered contour, coloured soils,
holds yours attentively.

Here we behold on veined leaf
one globe of dew,
light ensphered.

From Poems of Eclipse 1999

mary and peter

morwenstowe, near Hartland

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

reckless fruit 2 link

reckless fruit 1 link

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Human Landscape – Two Family Albums

Posted on March 9, 2013 by janeadamsart

These sketches were made in 2007, to celebrate a family book created by Kay and Ursula Schlapp. The family tree descends from Lutherans. Nowadays they are all string players, they play the lute. There is also a direct line from the 15th century portrait painter Lucas Cranach – a ‘leonardo’ and successful merchant who pioneered the German Renaissance. Another of Cranach’s descendents along a different string, is Goethe of Weimar.

My great-grandparents Otto Schlapp and Anna Lotze took a walking tour through south Germany for their honeymoon. They carried these integrated talents, philosophy and love of nature into the academic life of Edinburgh university and the 20th century. Settling there in 1889, their home became a cultural oasis, where music was played and kindred spirits found refuge. These values unobtrusively bridged and helped to heal, in a grass-roots way, the warring countries, England and Germany.

The same subconscious gift of dedication remains fertile through their descendents’ activities. After the first Great War, their daughter Helene married Jim Ede. He was to become the creator of Kettles Yard in Cambridge – a gallery, a way of life, an avant-garde cultural and spiritual oasis.

During the 20th century, particularly during and after the two wars, there were many such private initiatives to keep the peace.

The Cranach sketch is a copy from Durer’s drawing. I included Beethoven in the album, because his late Quartets were Walter Schlapp’s inspiration! – and his sister Helene’s, the way she played the Waldstein Sonata.

With special thanks to Kay and Ursula …

FIRST ALBUM

Ancestor to the Lotzes in Germany

this family all love and play his music

robin played the double bass

brothers

their sister

the schlapp gene, very strong

see the sketch by jim ede, later

8 three generations - their mother anna, with elisabeth and robin

the parents – this may have been taken on their honeymoon. Anna kept a vivid diary of their travels

… in the 1930s

circa late 1960s

with helen, jim and their elder daughter elisabeth

Anna’s mother traces back to Lucas Cranach. They were Lutherans, and their descendants became “lute” musicians

at edinburgh university, professor of mathematics

my great grandfather

my great grandmother

war time

great uncle

at edinburgh art college circa 1915

i shall draw this soon

many years later

27 Jim and his granddaughter marisa, 1983

see last year’s posts about vera moore

The second family album was created at about the same time, in early 2008, to celebrate the 80th birthday of Rachel Levi, in Haifa. Here too, I rove around in time : the old are looking back, while the young become older. What prevails, unchanging? It is like fishing by a river, keeping still.

The human landscape far transcends the individual. The genetic tapestry across a family, springs to life. Catching life to draw, they are for that time my flesh and blood and hinterland: their features emerge and converse: a passion to keep the record. I give them a dash of poetic license: family life is a mixed blessing.

As a portraitist, I see the parental essences develop in their children and childrens’ children, subtly suggested. I reflect on their history back through the Book. This family has roots in Iraq, Israel and Kurdistan; a surviving sacrament to keep the peace.

Rachel

he was the falafel king

grandmother, daughter, mother

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel Link

Human Landscape – a picture book

Posted on March 7, 2013 by janeadamsart

When I am moved to sketch someone, I reflect deeply on their situation and travel a little of their journey with them. Nowadays I reach a likeness with great difficulty and much rubbing out and re-doing – so I no longer do it professionally – or very rarely! It is a labour of love.

Soldier with child

This soldier with his child or grandchild was a long road this morning. For a long time it would not come right. Approaching the likeness, it just began to breathe – it is never exact; but then I could let it be: the road with him, so travelled – the connection is honoured. I pondered soldiers I have known – their families, their destiny, their duties, and whom they have to protect; and what it is like to be a soldier in today’s civil-war zones, when hell breaks out in one’s own soul at what is done and seen. I had to stick more paper on, for his hands and the way the child rests on him. He has been written all over: the child is still an “empty” book, and was easy to draw. Portraits are windows of the soul.

The following poem is his. It is by John Coyote – a veteran of Vietnam and Iraq. He knows and tells it from inside, through ways of love: the passion to be kind to each other in the human family paradox. Here is the link to his work. I love this poem, recently posted:

An empty book.

A Poem by Coyote Poetry

“Need to enjoy life. A good life is many friends and a lot of laughter.”

An empty book is a lonely story.
The great writer’s lived their life with gusto and no fear.
You can read in their stories a life filled with sadness and happiness.

Hemingway went to war as a Soldier and a reporter. Learn of death and fear.
Kosinski roamed Europe as a youth learning the truth about the nature of man.
Neruda wrote about love with experience of knowing the paradise of the kiss
and tender touch.
Gibran wrote with love and kindness. Trying to teach the world a better way.

We must travel blindly into life and chance with no fear.
Open new doors of friendship. Have long conversation about everything.
Need to dance on the edges of pleasures and take what we can from the gift of love.

Don’t waste words on people who do not want to hear them.
Learn from regret and move on to better places.
Forgive the people who hurt you and try to seek forgiveness from mistakes made.

Great writer’s must live and test life.

Need to swim in the great oceans.
Stand with the clouds on top of the splendor of the powerful mountains.

Walk on sandy beaches.

Hold sweet lovers tightly till morning light.
Don’t surrender to fear.

Good to laugh and cried often.

We create our future and need to make sure we balance our life.
Work and money is part of life. Can’t take worldly things with us.
Love and friendship are what will matter when death is upon us. A complete book is filled with pleasure, pain and story of family, laughter and
great journey. Today is a new day. Enjoy life. Be kind and make a new friend. Coyote

We meet across blog-land … making friends. That is the wonder and transmission of this creative global medium.

And now a collection of my own, from old photos. Some of these – whose names I do not know – were done for a humanitarian society.

Portrait gallery

ruth and zak

Bryan

Moira when she was young

Paul

Marisa

David

Rachel and her son Chaim

Hector Berlioz

Black belt teacher

noah and mark

winter

The lady in red below, was a child prodigy on the harpsichord until repetitive stress forced her to take her life apart – a born Aries however: courage. She too is a freedom fighter. She became a very interesting artist.

GALLERY

Here is Ros’s story. Because she is allergic to paint, she uses strange gritty materials to touch her human essences into life, like sounds from piano keys. Her portraits and inner landscapes look like rocks. Each individual is instantly recognised by all his or her friends. They are her sensual life. Her life is painfully allergic, destroying her hands’ mobility. Her psyche is playful, smearing water and the sands of time.

She was a lonely and gifted child in Lancashire. She ran out of the house and talked to bundled up shoppers and babies at the bus stop, because she was curious about human beings.

The soul’s DNA through the afterlife glows in a magical horse’s eyes. She worked the horse’s head from wax and dental dust. It seems to canter eternally by the sea; it emerges through the mist. Her creativity thrives on accidentals, and on a wash of mud with sky. Rocks, essences – her finger pads. A local miracle, tenderly placed, transcends the public galleries “out there”. The wider world is not aware of Ros, because she had to give up her music career, but her circle of friends are touched and gilded with her vibrant, bare faced honesty. When she has an exhibition, those ruthlessly exposed rocks on the mantelpiece come to life. They arrive from the street outside. As human beings – her friends – they struggle down the stairs – some of them are very old – and into the room for biscuits and tea, to greet, to recognise, to appraise and perhaps to buy one another.

When I met Ros in 1987, her scarlet specs matched her lipstick. She inspired my odyssey, because she had twenty years of psychoanalysis, and talked to me openly about it. Her frustrations and adventures with her demons, her frailty and the playful gleam in her eye, gave me the courage to turn around and look at mine.

I searched all over the house for the drawing she did of my head, like a rock on the mantel piece, but cannot yet find where I put it. Maybe tomorrow. Meanwhile, here is a drawing I did for her:

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Link to Aquariel

Sacred India Tarot Archive: Creation of 6 of Lotuses – Parvati begins Tapasya

Posted on March 4, 2013 by janeadamsart

What account of Parvati waiting for Siva could do justice, without the cosmic carnival behind it? This post is based largely on Stella Kramrisch’s writings, and a precis of some chapters of the Siva Puranas.

A few of the illustrations are details from the King and Queen of the Suit of Arrows. In fact I worked on the Suit of Arrows and the Suit of Lotuses concurrently. The Lotuses gave me some light relief from the sorrows of King Bheeshma in the Mahabharat !

The Kramrisch account refers to the Himalayas along the North: suggesting a magnetic alignment to the Pole Star, in Siva’s abode where He dances. Our planetary core is the spiritual lode star itself: realising this, walk tall.

Goddess Annapurna, the fruits of earth

Rohit Arya’s Notes:

“The visual reference in the comic book is self explanatory. In trying to win favour with God in such a manner, there is something childlike which is the core flavour of the card. It is a trust and belief that everything will come out right, that only small children and great souls possess – an irrational optimism that triumphs over petty reality.”

visual reference for Parvati’s tapas

Jane’s Notes

After Lord Siva’s shattering awakening of her Kundalini – he burnt the impudent Kama, god of lust, to ashes with one glance of his third eye, and then left the grove – the young Princess had to grow up faster than Nature would intend. To do so, she left her Himalayan Father and his court, abandoned society and retreated into essential Nature – the depth of the forest, the stones, the water, the creatures and the trees.

The young girl was spiritually and erotically romantic. As a virgin she had served and worshipped Siva, who showed her some favour … she pictured her future husband; their marriage. Then the fury blew it all apart. Parvati, not to be outdone, took sannyas. She slept on the ground, and stubbornly imagined her Lord. She had grown up with all the stories. She lived alone. Year by year, she realised the fairy tales as they unfolded in the wilderness; she grew to maturity.

Not surprisingly, other holy vagabonds heard of her, and were curious:

Parvati being pestered by Sages

Behind Parvati are Siva and her own father – the King of the Himalaya. Above the Himalayan range is the Pleiades constellation, from whose seven stars the Sivaic cosmology fell as a lightning flash, splitting the mountain, to flow as Mother Ganga through Lord Siva’s matted moon-struck hair: thus she dreamed; here are the tales she told …

Dhaulagiri, 1950 – photo by Marcel Ichac

The Mountain, the Stars and the River –
extracts from The Presence of Siva by Stella Kramrisch

“THE FAMILY of Pãrvatï, in which the Great Goddess was incarnated as the daughter of Parvata, consisted of Menä the Woman, her father Parvata the Mountain ; and her curvaceous sister Kutilã, who in the heaven of Brahma turned into the overflowing celestial waters and became Ganga (the Ganges). The other sister, Raginï – whose redness completed the triple colour scheme of the three gunas – became absorbed in the constellation of the Krttikas, the Pleiades.

“Parvata the Mountain was old as the rocks and the Rig Veda. There he was invoked together with the Waters, the Rivers, and Heaven and Earth, and with Indra, Savitri and other gods. Beyond this, the Mountain formed an essential part in the cosmogony that has Indra (god of the thunder) for its hero. In that myth, the Mountain was a figure that stood for the intangibly high ambience that enclosed the world, closed it off from spaces of shimmering light toward which its slopes were rising. The Mountain enclosed the world and closed off the infinite regions of light in the beyond, above its impenetrable extent – the region of the sun before it ever shone on earth.

“When Indra cleft the Mountain, the light of heaven flowed down to earth. Parvata the Mountain, keeping the light of heaven imprisoned, had been its guardian. In this respect Parvata, though inactive, was akin to the archers Rudra and Krsanu, who by their actions intended to keep in its integrity the state ante principium, before creation. In the myth of Indra which pervades the Rg Veda, the Uncreate was a pleroma of light closed off by the Mountain ; Indra brought it to the world. The pleroma of the Uncreate held the elixir and essence of Life – soma, the elixir, and semen, the seed. Vrtra, the serpent, had lain coiled around the cosmic mountain.

“Vrtra was killed by Indra and fell to the bottom into the abyss. Indra shattered the mountain, released the streams to flow to the sea and freed the sun to shine in this world. But Indra’s first act of creation was not yet complete, for the sun became engulfed in darkness in the cave at rock bottom, whence it had to be liberated, and let out to rise in the spring of the world.

“Parvata was the rock bottom in the depths, as well as the dome on high, the firmament, the sky, that had kept imprisoned the light and waters of life.

“In the creation myth of Indra, the figures of the Mountain and of Vrtra the Serpent coiled around it, correspond to those of Rudra and Krsanu, the archers. The Mountain was cleft. Dead Vrtra fell to its bottom, becoming the Serpent of the Deep. The shining rivers of light and life flowed down from heaven to the earth, and their waters filled the ocean.

“The sun, having shown its face on high, had yet to be liberated from the cave deep in the mountain where it had been kept imprisoned by demons. Now Dawn could come forth, and the sun could rise and set going the world of time. Like Vrtra the Serpent, Rudra and Krsanu also failed to keep in its integrity the state ante principium, before creation. Their arrows could not arrest the flowing to earth of Soma, the elixir of life, and the semen that Prajapati shed into creation. They had been in the Uncreate, described as a region of ineffable light that Parvata and Vrtra had held unspent.

Annapurna, 1950 – photo by Marcel Ichac

“The pre-cosmic power of the Mountain had to yield the streams of flowing light of which the celestial Ganga (also called Kutilä) became the mythical image. Her sister Ragini, the “red”, Dawn or Twilight, had been her fellow prisoner. Her figure, of indistinct contour in this myth, became merged with the Pleiades, the Krttikas, stars fixed in the firmament — the Mountain — becoming visible at the waning of the red evening twilight.

“Though liberated from the rock or Mountain, neither of these two daughters of Parvata was deemed adequate in her austerities to qualify as the future, potential mother of Siva’s son (the slayer of the demon Taraka) although in the mythical universe of Siva, Ganga as well as the Krttikas (Pleiades) cooperated in the birth of Siva’s son Skanda.

“The bond that was to be forged between Siva and Pãrvatï links the Mountain — a figure of the precosmic state as imaged in the myth of Indra – with the cosmic presence of Siva. The third and youngest daughter of Lord Parvata was Pãrvatï the bride-to-be of Siva.

“Within creation itself, and in later Indian myth, the Mountain was seen rising from the centre of the world into the regions where the gods are at home. Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain, carried the hierarchy of beings. Under the name of one of its peaks as cosmic axis, Mount Mandara functioned in the Churning of the Ocean.

Dhaulagiri 2, 1950 – photo by Gaston Rebuffat

“The Mountain in the cosmos of Indian myth was the centre of that cosmos. On its heights in heaven dwelled the great gods, in cities, palaces and caves, enlivened by the presence of lesser celestials who moved about at will or rested on its slopes. Siva dwelled in Kailasa and also favoured Mount Mandara. These mythic sites on high, envisioned from the earth, were assigned to the north, to the Himalayan altitudes. Cosmically and symbolically, the north signified the region of the pole star. Mythically, the Himalayan region was its proxy on earth.

“The King of these mountains was Parvata. Parvata-rãja brought to his anthropomorphic representation his precosmic past. From him issued Ganga the celestial river whose other name is Kutilä – who flooded the heaven of Brahma. Thence she flowed on earth, vivifying and bringing into this world her significance from before creation. When Parvata was forced open and had to let the flowing light from beyond into the world of man from the uncharted regions of transcendency – the inviolate and inexhaustible plenum – Parvata’s eldest daughter the twilight or Dawn (the Father’s Daughter) merged with the Krttikas (Pleiades, or seven celestial Sages). It is natural that a daughter of the Mountain should merge with the Pleiades constellation, for in creation the Mountain had its cosmic figure as the night sky, where the light from beyond was seen shining forth in the shape of stars.

Ganga & sage

“Ganga, the elder daughter of Parvata the Mountain, from whose stony dome of ancient heaven in the world of later myth she flooded the heaven of Brahma, was to occupy the highest position on Siva’s body. For a long while he held her captive in his hair on her precipitous descent from heaven. Had Siva not supported her on his mighty head, she would have crashed down to earth, shattered it, and flown into the netherworld. He sheltered her in the matted skeins of his hair, and let her flow on to fulfill her mission, flowing in heaven, on earth, and the netherworld, thrice herself. She came from the apex of heaven to the moon, and flooded the creative heaven of Brahma. She came down from heaven into the netherworld in order to redeem sixty thousand ruthless sons of King Sagara. … …

Sacred India Tarot 14 – Mother Ganga

“… To prevent the earth being split by the impact of her fall, Siva caught the turbulent Ganga like a garland of pearls on his forehead. She who had thought by raging whirlpools to press Siva down into the netherworld could not find an outlet from the meshes of his hair, and floated on them like a flower. She at last reached the earth. Her waters flooded the ashes of the sons of Sagara, flowed into the seas and filled the ocean.

“Impetuous Ganga, “who was as beautiful as the rays of the moon”, not having been found capable by Brahma to bear the seed of Siva, insisted she was capable, that she would make the head of Siva bow down by her austerities. Brahma cursed her to become all water, and she inundated Brahma’s heaven. Though she wanted to bear Siva’s son, she resented her initial humiliation. She wanted to show herself superior to Siva, who had the power to support her on his head and imprison her in his hair. She was violent in her turbulence. She would crush Siva so that pieces of his bones, like small bits of conch shells, would be mixed with her water, and Nandin would have to search for them. She was intensely desirous of Siva, determined to hold him within her aquaeous body, having broken him up all together. But he caught and held her in his hair. There, he carried her on his head like an ornament, or let her glide like a mermaid along the waves of his hair when he danced. “As beautiful as the rays of the moon”, she found herself close to the crescent moon that graced Siva’s brow. Its thin sickle showed it to be waning, for the gods had drunk its Soma nectar. Ganga, released from Siva’s hair, found her way to the sons of Sagara, dead and burned to ashes. She purified them by her water, and they ascended to heaven. Death associations decorate Siva’s head.

“This mission the sacred river Ganges fulfills to this day. Ganga went through all the levels of the cosmos and of inner experience. Wanting to bear Siva’s son, she also wanted to crush Siva. Fierce and proud, this river goddess fulfilled her mission when first she flooded with her waves the ashes of the Sagara sons. From that time on her work never ceased. The water of the sacred river Ganges brings release to the dying who seek it, and she brings joy to the living.

“Pãrvatï, the youngest daughter of the Mountain and of the Woman Menä – whose name is shared by Apsaras, seductive nymphs arisen from the spray of the cosmic ocean at its churning – from before her birth was destined for the surpassing task, beyond her control, which her sisters could not fulfill by themselves : to become the mother of Siva’s son. For this purpose, the goddess Night, her starry eyes closed, had entered Menä’s womb and infused night’s darkness into the embryo. She enveloped the embryo until birh. The goddess Night painted in Menä’s womb the embryo with her darkness (tamas).

“In this way, the Great Goddess – Siva’s earlier consort Sati – cooperated with Brahma and entered her second incarnation, now as the daughter of the Mountain and Menä Only a supergod born of Siva would be able to destroy the demon Taraka. Pãrvatï was a full incarnation of the Great Goddess – who had previously been incarnated in Sati, to win the love of Siva. Now she fixed herself in the mind of Lord Mountain when he made love with Menä. She had taken this form in answer to the prayer of the gods that she again become the wife of Siva. The Great Goddess, the eternal prakrti*, remembered herself as his first wife Sati, who had cast off her body in anger at her father Daksa’s disrespect for Siva. Before her yoga fire engulfed her however, Sati had told Daksa that she could be found at any time, any place, in every being; there was nothing in the universe in which she could not be found.

* Prakrti — Causal matter — subtle substratum of the molecular and mental universe — sakti

“Yet Siva could not find her, or peace anywhere. He made a garland of her bones. Like one who was not a god, he wailed aloud; like a lover disordered by the pain of separation. Although the Supreme Lord by his power of illusion had taken upon himself madness and pain, yet he is really unaltered, undistressed and unconquered. Through any change in form whatever, he is untainted by maya. What use has he for love and delusion?

“In the meantime, the demon Taraka oppressed the gods, laid waste the celestial world, and invaded the sky-high mountain. No one, no god, had been able to subdue Taraka (demon of the reactive mind) for he was a great ascetic, and thus had won the boon from Brahma: Taraka would be defeated by an infant seven days old; but his slayer was not yet born. The slayer of Taraka was to be born as Siva’s son.

“In due course, the Great Goddess as Pãrvatï was born from Menä, and cried like any newborn child. Although the little girl played with balls and dolls, the knowledge of her previous birth soon came to her. She had privileges of birth similar to those of Sati, together with all the knowledge of the world of the gods (who acted like human beings) which Sati had not acquired in her short life. Her family lineage however was different from that of Sati’s. Daksa was a son of Brahma the Creator, whereas Parvata’s original state lay far back, before the rule of the gods began, and before the Asuras, the Titans, had become demons.

“One feature that these two incarnations of the Great Goddess had in common was the darkness in their complexion, which they largely owed to the goddess Night, whose name Sati’s mother had borne, and who in person, had entered Menä’s womb. On her father’s side, Pãrvatï was heir to the hardness of the Mountain ; she inherited the firmness of the rock. This was not any rock, not even the rock of ages, but that all-embracing rock which, in the myth of Indra, (before Siva’s Vedic aeon as Rudra, the Wild Archer) had held within it the cosmos-to-be. This possessive Mountain had kept within itself the flowing light of the godhead. When the Mountain was shattered by Indra, the sun’s rays and the flowing rivers were set free.

“According to Brahma’s plan, Pãrvatï would practice austerities in order to be united with Siva in marriage; the conjoint energies would be formidable. Even so, the destruction of the demon Taraka seemed improbable. Their conjoint tapas had to be made even stronger. To this purpose, the Goddess Night was to interrupt their love-making by a quarrel between them. Siva would chide Pãrvatï’s dark colour in jest. Pãrvatï would be annoyed and leave him to perform austerities in order to rid herself of her darkness. Siva too would practice tapas. After this interruption, heightening their energies and desire, the son born of their union would destroy the demon.

“Thus Brahma instructed the goddess Night to work on their increase of sexual power by two means: tapas or interruption, and quarrel. His concern was now not to create mortals, but the survival and creativity of the gods. In the plan of Brahma, the asceticism of the gods was meant to be subservient to their role as the future parents of the son who would save the world. A new god was needed, more powerful than Taraka, more powerful than any god. He did not yet exist, and could be born only from the union of Siva and Pãrvatï – a supergod to defeat an invincible demon.”

Extracts from The Presence of Siva by Stella Kramrisch
published by Princeton University

The Birth of Skanda: Part One
A Story from the Rudrasamhita in the Siva Purana (Excerpts, as abridged and published in Self Enquiry December 2000) The Puranas are of more recent vintage than the Vedas and Upanishads. They record the cosmology of the gods as it impinged on human history.

“ONCE UPON a time, O sage, a monstrous demon ravaged the Universe from end to end. His name was “Taraka or “Tarakasura”, meaning “hyper-reactive mind”, and he was the unconquered King of the Triple World. The gods were powerless to prevent his arrogance and ambition, for this reason: by concentrating the power of his thought through penance and austerities, he had forced Brahma the Creator himself to promise him any boon that he should demand.

“These austerities included the following: (1) He stood on one foot, holding the other and both hands up towards heaven, with his eyes fixed on the sun. (2) He stood on one great toe. (3) He took only water as sustenance, and lived similarly on air. (4) He had himself successively drowned in water, and buried in earth and consumed by fire, but continued his devotions. (5) He stood on his head. (6) He hung on a tree by his hands. (7) He bore the weight of his body on one hand. (8) He hung on a tree with his head downwards.

“Such merit was irresistible, O Sage!. Indra and a host of demi-gods, alarmed lest their sovereignty be usurped through the potency of this penance, besieged Brahma for consolation. Brahma told them that although unable to resist such sadhana and austerities, he would, after rewarding it with the boon demanded, devise a method of rendering it ultimately inoffensive to them.

“What was Taraka’s demand? It was this: He should be unrivalled in strength. No hand should slay him but that of a son of Lord Siva. Everyone knew that Siva the ascetic had not the slightest interest in procreation. For some aeons, the worlds endured and groaned with Asuric chaos. The Sun in dread gave no heat, and the Moon in terror remained always at full. The Winds blew as he dictated; in short, Taraka usurped the entire management of the Universe.

“Every divine ingenuity was taxed, to arrange the marriage whence should arise the deliverer of the world, because Siva could not be influenced with the passion of love. At length, Indra persuaded Kama, the deity of Lust, to lie in ambush, and contrived that Parvati, the Daughter of the Himalayas, should be seen by the yogic Siva while engaged in the amiable and graceful act of gathering flowers, wherewith to decorate His image. Kama settled himself in the bushes, accompanied by his wife Ratti (Desire) and his bosom friend Vasantu (the Spring) and, taking careful aim, launched an arrow straight into Siva’s third Eye.

“O Sage! The deity, enraged at having his devotions interrupted, reduced Kama to ashes by a beam of fire from that same organ; and a wonderfully loud sound arose, covering the whole firmament. Parvati was terrified, and returned into the Himalayas, along with her maids. There she dwelt in deep distress, remembering the various gestures and movements of Siva, and muttering to herself ever and anon – “Siva, Siva. Fie upon my beauty. Fie on my birth and activity.”

“Whereupon, Parvati returned to the grove where Lord Siva had performed penance, built an altar, cleaned the ground, and embarked on a sadhana of her own. In the summer she kept a perpetually blazing fire all round, and remaining within, continued to mutter His name. In the rainy season she sat on the bare rock and let herself be drenched. During the winter, and in snowfall, and at night, she remained partly submerged in water, observing fast. She bore every extreme of Nature with equanimity; and, clad in barks of trees, wearing matted hair, and eager in the meditation of Siva, she impressed and surpassed even sages.

“Thus passed three thousand years. Through her penance, trees bore fruit, flowers of variegated colour blossomed there, lions and cows prone to amorous passions, ceased to harass one another, cats and mice became friends, and the entire forest became comparable to Siva’s abode on Mount Kailas.

“During this epoque, her father, the Lord Himalaya visited her and tried to persuade his dear daughter not to exhaust herself. Of what avail was Siva, by whom Kama had been reduced to ashes? Why try to catch the moon in the sky? Come home! But she replied, ‘O father, O mother, O kinsmen, with my penance alone here itself, I shall bring Him who burnt Kama and the mountainous forest. He is favourably disposed to His devotees. All of you please go to your abodes. You need not be anxious over this.’ And her family returned to geological time, praising her.

“By now, as a result of her penance, the Universe itself was becoming scorched. The gods conferred with Vishnu, and although very nervous, approached Siva themselves, to inform him of what was going on. They found Him in His cave, effulgent and seated in the yogic posture. Vishnu respectfully aroused Him from His trance and told Him. ‘O Lord Siva, the demon Taraka will be killed only by your Self-begotten son, and not otherwise. Ponder this, and take pity on us. Obeisance, O great Lord, to you. O Lord, redeem the gods from the misery brought about by Taraka. Hence, O Lord Siva, Parvati shall be accepted by you and grasped with your right hand. Accept her hand as offered in marriage by the Lord of the Mountains. She is full of noble attributes.’

goddess driving tritons, 1957

“Siva replied, ‘If goddess Parvati, the most beautiful lady, were to be accepted by me, she will resuscitate Kama on account of the marriage. Then all the gods, sages and ascetics will become lusty and incompetent in the great path of Yoga. A great favour to the gods was done by me, when Kama was burnt. Everyone’s meditation used to be spoiled by this stubborn archer. Kama leads to hell, lust to anger, anger to delusion, and delusion destroys penance. Anger and lust shall be eschewed by you, the best of gods. My words shall be heeded by you all, and not otherwise.’ Whereupon, He entered into His own features, and He, the Lord of great enjoyment and protection, became engrossed in supreme bliss.

“The gods in dismay, petitioned Siva’s steward, the Bull Nandin – ‘What shall we do now? Siva has become detached and has gone on meditation.’ Nandin advised them to eulogise Him with respect and piteous request, and to appeal to His compassion. They all cried so loudly, that He, the great Lord, ceased His meditation, due to His fondness for them, and asked them what they wanted. The whole tale came out. And He laughed, and replied, in brief: ‘Marriage is not a proper thing for men. Marriage is a great fetter. Anyone bound with nooses of iron and timber can secure release, but one bound with nooses of women never frees himself. Although I know and realise this, although I have the wisdom, yet I shall accede to your request and make it fruitful; for I am definitely subservient to my devotees. Hence, I may do anything. I am known all over the three worlds as one who performs ill-fitting things. What is the use of talking? I know the sufferings you undergo from the demon Taraka. I shall remove them. Although I am not interested at all in dalliance, I shall marry Parvati for begetting a son. Off you go, all of you, to your respective abodes, and be without fear. I shall achieve your task. Have no anxiety.’

“When Brahma, Vishnu and the sages had all gone, Siva meditated upon His own soul stationed in Himself as Atman, free from illusion and obsessions. Thus He became aware of Parvati’s state, and wondered at that. It distracted Him from contemplation. A deity subservient to His devotees cannot be otherwise. He summoned the Seven Celestial Sages, Vasishta and others, and commissioned them to go to the Daughter of the Himalayas and test her resolve.

“Seven wise, sweet and holy men appeared in Parvati’s grove by the bank of the river, and enchanted her with their discourse. They also told her that He for whose sake she was performing this elaborate sadhana was a perpetually indifferent person of no emotional disturbance, an enemy to innocent lust, that he had an inauspicious body, and no shame, home or pedigree, was naked and ill-featured, and only associated with ghosts, goblins and corpses – in short, a rogue and a ne’er-do-well who had led all her dedication astray …

To Be Continued

Sacred India Tarot 6 of Lotuses – Parvati begins her spiritual practice

Correspondence October 2004:

“Dear Jane,
“Herewith our feedback on Lotus 6. Regards, Gautam.”

“Dear Gautam,
“this card is tremendous and of course the serpent of the Kundalini is active. The sheer power generated from tapasya is conveyed very well. Jane should be left in peace as she has hit a rare vein of connection with Purusha and Prakriti.

“In fact, given how she seems connected to Siva at the moment, perhaps she should take a shot at the major arcana World card again – a great dancing Nataraja in a cosmic outer-space background. This especially so as Ardhanariswara is going to be covered in this suit, and we can bring The Fool (Rudra Siva) to completion as Nataraja.

“There are a few representations of the tapasya of Parvati in south Indian temples, but nothing like this. With regard, Rohit.”

Sacred India Tarot Rudra

Sacred India Tarot Natarajan

Early Nataraja

naga serpent gods

For other Sacred India Tarot posts, look under Recent Posts,
or in the Category, or in Archive of All Posts in the title bar.

Rohit Arya

Jane Adams

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Link to Aquariel

Angels and Kabbalah

Posted on March 2, 2013 by janeadamsart

Tarot Empress: Arcanum Three

Here are some more writings and sketches of Angels, from my workbook on Tarot Arcanum Three. Starting this topic in my previous post, I realised it is rather a large one – so this is Part Two!

Jacobs Ladder – Archangels & Names of God – 1992

(1) YOD … The extended Tree of Life, or Jacobs Ladder, shows the interlocking Four Worlds of Ezekiel’s vision: physical (nature and chakras), psychological (planets), Creational (angels) and the Absolute (names of HASHEM the Holy One).

Jacobs Ladder, showing 4 worlds, and the Tree of Yetzirah (astrology)

The Angels as Instruments of Law

In Yetzirah – the World of Formation’s upper regions – overlapping Beriah/Creation, and particularly around Daat of Yetzirah/Yesod of Beriah – increments of the Fourth dimension step through into consciousness. It is a passage of transformation between the worlds – a dark mirror – the whispering of a stranger from behind my neck . Some features of the world collapse. In this region, are other beings. They have a different temporal substance. They exist without cause and effect. Yet they are forms – the multiple facets of a philosophic crystal – of awareness.

O Angel – 1988

They have multifarious duties. Some take an interest in and guide mundane affairs as spiritus directores. Others are messengers from energy fields which are not human, but were shaped in a concurrent frame of consciousness. Some are called angels. The angel, a sub-atomic conduit of force, or cosmic ray, rules regions corresponding to inter-stellar space. Earth is showered every day with highly charged particles – the butterfly wings through cosmos.

The Fool and the Lamb in a tent with Angels

Angels exist outside time. Some persons see them in human or archetypal form, for some of them descend into the world of images through the Daat window and are apparent in this way. SANDALPHON is the Archangel of planet Earth, and MAHAEL is the Archangel of the Sun; there is an Angel of the Solar system, and innumerable angelic hierarchies upon Jacob’s Ladder. There are devas of the trees and woodland glades, and angelic atmospheres ruling towns and even street corners. Mountains have their devas, as do geologic strata, resins and plant elixirs. They do their jobs outside Chronos – the circle of time. But humans can develop a sensitive interface with them.

Time, as we live and know it, is a section across the Angel. It is difficult for them to manifest three-dimensionally. They do so only with human cooperation. The Archangel of Yesod in Beriah, through whom other angelic beings come and go, is GAVRIEL who “announced” the coming of an Anointed One to the mother. GAVRIEL brought the dreams to Joseph, for the management of the Egyptian granary. Cows and sheep are intuitive, but do not develop celestial vision. Angels cannot materialize into the plane of sight. The creatures who have the ability and the gift of destiny, to travel in and unify both worlds, are ourselves.

The Angel is the way a door opens into “seeing clearly”. When the door is closed, we see through a glass darkly.

Archangel MAHAEL

As our Spirit condenses, as it gravitates through the halls of upper Yetzirah into physical embodiment, we are clairvoyant to all that we are, have been and are to do, and why. The Karma drawing us into earth’s gravity is still at this point, an undifferentiated “I” of all Eye, and probably curious, but not as yet emotionally identified. Around the time of physical birth, the field of vision is abruptly restricted; the soul becoming individualized, lodges into the body whose contour her various deeds and intentions created. An aeroplane descends from the brightness into thick white cloud, and lands in a field by a toy town, dim and grey. The child cries as the musical chord is cut. Perhaps.

… where the Angel treads – 1988

All languages of adepts contain activities or presences invisible to the layman, but in which we are supposed to believe!

In the Hermetic language they are called genii.
In Kabbalah they are called angels.
In Hindu and Egyptian languages they are called gods.
Theosophists call them Masters.
Lucretius of Rome called them atoms.
In the 20^th century language of maths and physics, they are called particles.

An Angels’ Sound

Why do I find black holes so interesting?

The black hole is an archetypal dragon which guards enlightenment: traverse its coil with great care and caution. Very extreme things happen … temptations are offered … when one gets near the scent. There is a growing attunement to the power of the Self – the Universe – and it is very easy to channel this mistakenly into the personal ego – into the unreclaimed wilderness which sets itself up to teach, influence and lead. So one has to be watchful.

Strangely however, the black hole as conceived by materialists, is the great Light of Reality in metaphysics. The black hole “shrinks” into that expansion, and becomes the birth of a star … through the veil’s other side. This is a rather intuitive hunch, against the conventional grain. The idea of black holes is frightening, tearing unwary astronauts apart, but only if materiality is the only frame of reference. If it is not, then black holes open a very different prospect … of stars in the night sky at birth, creating Kalpas – the breaths of time and space. The principle stands for eternity, society, astrophysics and the inner life.

Returning briefly to the angels on Jacob’s Ladder: the creatures who have the ability and the gift of choice to travel in and unify the worlds, are human.

The human psyche is a walking transformer of “force” into materiality. Through the psyche, levels of frequency – vibrational waves which might be “angels” – interface the mobile field of height, breadth and depth. The things we do, speak and think, create concentric ripples in this field, and in the field beyond our sight.

Angel choir, 1957

We may choose to coast along blindly with a fateful pattern – the inertia of circumstance – or to open our eyes within the circumstance to see what it is up to. In the latter case, we consider the circumstance in its relation to the environment, and the other wheels which turn. If my soul is alert here, and beginning to apply steerage, I have no mob mentality. We are co-workers in all manner of things. This act is “awakening”.

angel, old master copy, 1957

(2) HEH … Some Further Thoughts – Venus (green) and Mars (red) on the Tree

The following colour complementaries are from my Tarot & Kabbalah studies with the Builders of the Adytum:

venus sun mars – colour correspondences

In the “queen’s scale” colour coding, Mars is red and Venus is green. On Jacob’s Ladder, Awakening’s red path – Netzach-to-Hod in Beriah the world of Creation – converts to the green Hokhmah-to-Binah path in Yetzirah the world of Formation – uniting masculine and feminine poles across the Tree, as well as vertically. (This can be seen in the diagram of Jacobs Ladder, above). In Tarot, the green path is Venusian – the path of the Empress. She is pregnant; she bridges Hokhmah to Binah – the Hebrew “Wisdom and Understanding”.

The triadic plane of Tifareth, Gevurah, Hesed – the Sun with Mars and Jupiter – is yellow-gold. Tifareth is the Beauty of the Tree – its consciousness. The path bridging Hesed/Jupiter (Grace) to Gevurah/Mars (Severity) over Tifareth, is yellow – Tarot Key 8, Strength: the woman who tames the red lion.

bota key 16 tower

The Netzach Hod level is ruled by Mars – the path of the Tower and of Awakening. So, Key 3 The Empress (Venus) gestates the fertile seed. Key 16 The Tower (Mars) cracks the seedcase open. (See my previous post. – a note at the end, re the House of God)

On Jacobs Ladder of the interpenetrating Trees of Life, these two paths overlay each other.

All resonances on the Tree of Life are potential meditations: an opener of doors – the Angel. The Tree is full of angelic powers, as we awake to them with our sight, hearing and heart.

And here is a composer’s analogy, down the Lightning flash:

The Trees of Music and the physical body

(3) VAV … A Visit to India – Holding Arunachala Rock in my left palm (10.9.92)

In the BE-ING, there is infinite clear space. There are senses to receive, but no “solid” wall or division anywhere. Dive or sink into this, as the core.

The fiery Arunachala pyramid is in the I. All things, and treasures of the world, are in the I which permeates the i.

Arunachala sketch – one of the oldest and most sacred mountains on earth – Siva’s red rock hill

Ramana Maharshi used to say, realisation of the Self is clear as an Indian gooseberry in the palm of your hand.

Thoughts and ashram Tourists carry on more or less as usual, though somewhat hushed or swamped by the “awesome” advent of core-mystery-absorbtion. The depth nature arises sometimes to suggest – a present, a gift to be in – for a moment. It opens in my mid-spine behind the heart. Fall inward!

All directions i am

(4) SECOND HEH … And touching on the soul, and how we evolve in relation to each other …

angel by Raphael – copy

Angels lead inevitably into platonic solids – the crystallized forms of the soul’s cosmic interface are our root elixirs. Two tetrahedrons interpenetrating, create Solomon’s Seal: a third-eye laser beam.

Cultivate in my imagination the Tetrahedron: the crystal of the Soul, to whose surfaces a third, extended centre point gives depth, volume and perspective … (“the height, the depth and breadth …”)

It trains the mind to overcome problems of the flat-earth polarity.

A Soul tetrahedron’s inner points touch the centre of each outer surface …

Sometimes it is like this: I am the base, performing the first two – the polarity. The plane of the Archangels is the raised apex, or depth; and they perform the rest. Hence the idea of surrender, and letting go – we come as far as we can, unaided: then hand it over.

No spiritual or creative task is done in isolation, but in dialogue. When They take over, I stray and struggle to collect up my bits, and think about it.

Hear this: every Angel in a wing, a mountain, a leaf or a person, is the One.

I have earth’s deep yearning for the sky to fill me. One lens is as good as any, when polished. They come to meet, as in the Masters’ limestone occulus:

Drawn up into a dark cave whose glory drop by drop
the rain through aeons carved,
as stalagmite to stalactite my soul evolves,
from floor to point of meeting.

Let us draw time,
draw together this space.

My flame drinks wick; in watered rock my mirrored twin appears –
mineral kingdom interpolates, vesica pisces, droplet rock
to drop deposit.

Not by earthly measure large, this chamber –
by a candle illumined: a single drop, a sea.
In limestone cave the work through ages dark
as organs of our inner body, gleams.

Hollowing this Gothic sphere, I am the ages’ hourglass –
an instant yes, awakens sight: the hallowing fire.

From The Masters’ Eye 1992-2009
These verses are also in my early post, Drawings of Timothy West

Finally: here is a sketch of a dream I had in 1969, of “a vulnerable angel”:

He (in green) felt something grow behind his shoulders – tender wings. He is embarassed, and tries to hide this condition from the other people in the room. Leo Tolstoy’s short story about an Angel who fell to earth – “What Men Live By” – made a deep, early impression on me.

To conclude, here is the Angel of cosmic regulation – the Tarot Temperance:

Tarot Arcanum 14 – Temperance

My articles on Kabbalah assume some familiarity with the Tree of Life, the Sefiroth, the Paths, and the Four Worlds of Jacobs’ Ladder. For more information on the subject, visit http://www.kabbalahsociety.org ; Zev ben Shimon Halevi’s books, diagrams, drawings and courses give a detailed introduction and a comprehensive view.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Link to Aquariel