The Western Way [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The Outward Spiral Hear with the understanding of the heart. Thomas Vaughan: Anima Magica Absondita The soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete. Plotinus: Enneads, IV, 8,1 The Roman cult of Mithras has associated with it the figure of Aion: a lion-headed god swathed by a serpent. He represented boundless time, which held sway over the ages and the cyclic divisions of the year. In his hands he carried the keys of the solsdces: a silver one which opened the Gate of Cancer, the Way of the Ancestors, and a golden one which opened the Gate of Capricorn, the Way of the Gods, which lead beyond the processes of birth and dying and through which the gods could descend to earth. (104) (fig 1.) These two ways represent eternal laws, as unchanging as the universe itself, and they can also be seen as akin to the two traditions which are the subject of the present work. On the one hand the Native Tradition, which looks to the Ancestors, now elevated to the status of gods, for guidance. On the other the Hermetic Tradition, which looks outwards to the stars, and to the angelic presences which inhabit them, as mediators between mankind and God. These are different but complementary approaches to the same end: a fuller understanding of our place in the scheme of things. Both have helped to preserve an ancient wisdom which would otherwise have been lost to the world. In Herman Hesse's novel, The Glass Bead Game, a group of esoteric philosophers known as The League of Journeyers to the East were said to have 'contributed new insights into the nature of our culture and the possibility of its continuance, not so much by analytical and scholarly work, as by their capacity, based on ancient spiritual exercises, for mystical identification with remote ages and cultural conditions' (142). The same can be said of the explorers of the Western Esoteric Tradition whom we call Hermeticists, who have helped almost single-handedly to preserve