Truly, truly, I say to you,
unless one is born anew,
he cannot see the kingdom of God ...
Truly, truly, I say to you,
unless one is born of water and the Spirit,
he cannot enter the kingdom of God ...
The wind blows where it wills,
and you hear the sound of it,
but you do not know whence it comes
or whither it goes;
so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
(John iii, 3, 5,8)
Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests;
but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.
(Matthew viii, 20)
Then the righteous will shine like the sun
in the kingdom of their Father.
(Matthew xiii, 43)
That which I had to say
about the operation of sol
is completed.
(Tabula Smaragdina 13)
Dear Unknown Friend,
Here before us is the Card of the twelfth Arcanum of the Tarot, the Hanged Man. It represents a young man suspended by one foot between two trees, with branches cut close to the trunk, from a transversal beam that they support, thus forming a porch.
The position of the man — upside down, head below, hanging by one foot in a porch, with his free leg folded back at the knee and his arms bound behind his back — at first naturally evokes ideas of gravitation and of the torture that conflict with it can inflict on man. Therefore, our first impression of the Card plunges us into the heart of the problem of the relationship between man and gravitation, and the conflicts that this relationship entails.
Gravitation — physical, psychic and spiritual — occupies a central place as a regulating factor in the solar system, in the system of the atom, in the biological cell, in the biological organism, in the mechanism of memory and the association of ideas, in the relationship of the sexes, in the social organism, in the formation of communities according to way of life, doctrine and ideal, arid, lastly, in the process of biological, psychic and spiritual evolution, where a centre of gravity - or universal prototype as the final cause — is at work across the ages, just as the sun, in so far as it is the centre of gravity of the planetary system, operates across space. The whole world manifests itself to us as a comprehensive system of gravitation constituting a number of particular gravitational systems — such as atoms, cells, organisms, planets, individuals, communities and hierarchies. Each one of us is placed in the cosmic gravitational system which determines our freedom, i.e. what we are able and not able to do. The domain of our freedom itself, our spiritual life, shows the real and active presence of gravitation of a spiritual order. For what is the phenomenon of religion if not the manifestation of spiritual gravitation towards God, i.e. towards the centre of spiritual gravitation of the world? It is significant that the term "the Fall" — chosen for the primordial event which brought about the change of man's state from that named "paradise" to the terrestrial state of toll, suffering and death — is borrowed from the domain of gravitation. In fact, there is nothing against the conception of the Fall of Adam as the passage from a spiritual gravitational system, whose centre is God, to a terrestrial gravitational system, whose centre is the serpent (that we have characterised in the preceding Letter as the "principle of electricity"). The Fall, as a phenomenon, can certainly be understood as the passage from the one gravitational field to the other.
Now, the domain of freedom — the spiritual life — is found placed between two gravitational fields with two different centres. The Gospel designates them as "heaven" and "this world", or as the "kingdom of God" and the "kingdom of the prince of this world". And it designates those whose will follows or is submitted to the gravitation of "this world" as "children of this world", and those whose will follows the gravitation of "heaven" as the "children (or the sons) of light".
The Manichaeans straight away drew the conclusion from this that the invisible world, or heaven, is good and the visible world of Nature is bad, wholly forgetting the fact that evil is of spiritual origin, and is therefore invisible, and that good is impressed into created Nature, and is therefore also visible. Although the two gravitational fields are interpenetrating and one could not, or should not, identify them simply with visible Nature and the invisible spiritual world, they are nevertheless certainly real and morally quite discernible. For just as there is a "discernment of spirits", which the apostle Paul speaks of, so there is a discernment of the phenomena of Nature, which manifests, for example, in medical diagnosis, in the choice of remedies from the kingdoms of Nature, in the domain of physical and psychic hygiene, etc.
The human being participates in these two gravitational fields, as the apostle Paul had in mind when he said:
These "opposing desires" are the tendencies through which the two gravitational fields manifest themselves. The man who lives in the grip of gravitation of "this world" at the expense of the gravitation of "heaven" is the "carnal man"; he who lives in equilibrium between the two gravitational fields is the "psychic man"; and, lastly the one who lives under the sway of the gravitation of "heaven" is the spiritual man".
It is this latter who constitutes the subject of the twelfth Arcanum of the Tarot, for it is an upside-down man that the twelfth Card represents. The Hanged Man represents the condition of one in the life of whom gravitation from above has replaced that from below.
Firstly, it should be said that attraction from above is as real as that from below, and that the condition of a human being who has passed, whilst living, from the field of terrestrial gravitation into that of heaven is indeed comparable to that of the Hanged Man of the Card. This is at one and the same time a benefaction and a martyrdom; both are very real.
The history of the human race bears witness to the reality of attraction from above. The exodus into Egyptian, Palestinian, Syrian and other deserts inaugurated by St. Paul of Thebes and St. Anthony the Great were nothing other than the manifestation of irresistible attraction from above. The desert fathers, pioneers of this exodus, had no programme or plan to found any communities or schools of Christian spirituality comparable to the schools of yoga in India. No, what happened to them was the irresistible appeal from above to solitude and a life given up entirely to spiritual reality. Thus, St. Anthony the Great said:
As fish who remain on dry land die, so do monks who linger outside of the cell, or who pass time with people of the world, slacken the tension of solitude. Therefore it is necessary — as fish do to the sea — that we return to the cell, so as not to forget, through dallying outside, our interior vigil. (St. Anthony the Great, Apophthegmata, x)
Thus, the "tension of solitude" is the element proper to souls under the sway of attraction from above. It was "as fish seeking the sea" that they sought solitude where they found the "tension", i.e. the relationship between the gravitation of heaven and that of earth, which was as right for them as water is for fish. It was in solitude that they could live, i.e. develop spiritual temperature, breathe spiritual air, quench their spiritual thirst and satisfy their spiritual hunger. Outside of the solitude and tension that the "Interior vigil" meant to them, the desert fathers felt cold, were unable to breathe, and suffered spiritual hunger and thirst.
This, therefore, is really something quite different from programmes and plans: the reality of the attraction of heaven at work in the lives of the desert fathers.
They were pioneers. Before long, still during their lifetime, the deserts of Thebais, Neutra and Ceuta were peopled with anchorites. Then, in Upper Egypt, St. Pactiomius founded cenobites, the prototypes of the monasteries that we know, where several hermits lived together under a superior or abbot. This form of life was, much later, adapted and perfected by St. Basil in the East, and by St. Augustine, St. Cassian and St. Benedict in the West.
Although all this immense subsequent development was present in germ in the solitary lives of St. Paul of Thebes and St. Anthony the Great, this was not at all the conscious motive for their retreat into the desert. This motive was solely the desire for solitude caused by the irresistible attraction of heaven.
Top Back Home