The Rosicrucian Cabala teaches that the three great worlds above—Empyræum, Ætheræum, and the Elementary Region—have their copies in the three points of the body of man : that his head answers to the first; his breast, or heart, to the second; and his ventral region to the third. In the head rests the intellect, or the magnetism of the assenting judgment, which is a phenomenon; in his heart is the conscience, or the emotional faculty, or the Saviour; and in the umbilical centre reside the animal faculties, or all the sensitives. Nutrition is destruction in the occult sense, and dissolution is rescue in the occult sense; because the entity, or visible man, is constructed in the elements, and is as equally ashes, or condemned matter, as they are; and because the fire that feeds the body (which is its natural respiration or maintenance) is in itself that which (however slowly) destroys it. Man lives upon the lees of nature, or (in the Bhuddistic view) upon the “gross purgations of the celestial fire,” which is urging itself clear through the operation of the divine rescuing spirit in it. It follows that metaphysically all the wonderful shows of life are phantasmata only, and their splendours false and a show only. But as these shows are the medium and the instruments of life, without which intelligence (in the human sense) would be impossible, this celestial “Second Fire” has been deified in the acknowledgments of the first inhabitants of the world, who raised pillars and stones in its honour as the first idol. Thus man bears in his own body the picture of the “Triune.” Reason is the head, feeling is the breast, and the mechanical means of both feeling and reasoning, of the means of his being Man, is the epigastric centre, from which the two first spring as emanations, and with which the two first form ultimately but “one.” The invisible magnetic, geometrical bases, or latitudes, of these three vital points, whose consent, or coincidence, or identity, forms the “microcosm,” which is a copy of the same form in heaven, answer magically to their stellar originals. This is astrological “ruling” by pyramidal culmination, and by trilinear descent or efflux, to an intersecting point in the latitudes of the heavens and in the man’s body, at which upper and lower, or heaven and earth, interchange; and Man is therefore said to be made “in the image” of the Archetype, who has “descended” to man, who has “ascended” to Him. This is the “hinge-point” of the natural and the supernatural, upon which the two wings of the worlds real and unreal revolve. The starry heavens, through whose astrological cross-work complications (as in a map) all these infinite effects are produced, and on whose (for, taking gravitation away, they are the same) floor of lights, or cope or dome of signs or letters, all the “past, present, and future” has been written by the finger of God (although to man they are ever rearranging), can be read by the competent as Fate. Natural and supernatural, though one is only the reversed side of the other, as “darkness is only the reversed side of light, and light is only the reversed side of darkness,”* are mistaken by man for opposites, although they are the same : man living in this state in darkness, although his world is light; and heaven in this state being darkness, although this state is light.
Music (although it is unheard by man) is necessarily produced in the ceaseless operations of material nature, because nature itself is penitential and but the painful (and musical) expression between two dissonant points. The Bhuddist contends that all forms are but the penance of nature. Music is life, and life is music. Both are pain, although made delightful. Phenomena are not real.
Thus colours to the human are negative as music addressed to the ear, the musical notes negative as colours addressed to the eye, and so on of the other senses, although they are all the same in the imagination, without the sensorium—as dreams show. And life and the world, in this view, are all
* “Compte de Gabalis”:—Rosicrucian.
imagination : man being made in idea, and only in his own belief. This, again, is only pure Parseeism; and the whole will be rightly regarded as the most extraordinary dream of philosophy—as depth of depths beyond idea.
Schubert, in his Symbolism of Dreams, has the following passages, which we have before adduced and made use of for illustration: “It may be asked whether that language, which now occupies so low a place in the estimation of men, be not the actual waking language of the higher regions, while we,” adds the philosopher, coming out with something very strange, “awake as we fancy ourselves, may be sunk in a sleep of many thousand years, or, at least, in the echo of their dreams, and only intelligibly catch a few dim words of that language of God, as sleepers do scattered expressions from the loud conversation of those around them.”
The following is a fair view of the Rosicrucian theory concerning music.
The whole world is taken as a musical instrument; that is, a chromatic, sensible instrument. The common axis or pole of the world celestial is intersected—where this superior diapason, or heavenly concord or chord, is divided-by the spiritual sun, or centre of sentience. Every man has a little spark (sun) in his own bosom. Time is only protracted consciousness, because there is no world out of the mind conceiving it. Earthly music is the faintest tradition of the angelic state ; it remains in the mind of man as the dream of, and the sorrow for, the lost paradise. Music is yet master of the man's emotions, and therefore of the man.
Heavenly music is produced from impact upon the paths of the planets, which stand as chords or strings, by the cross-travel of the sun from note to note, as from planet to planet; and earthly music is microscopically an imitation of the same, and a “relic of heaven;” the faculty of recognition arising from the same supernatural musical efflux which produced the planetary bodies, in motived projection from the sun in the centre, in their evolved, proportional, harmonious order. The Rosicrucians taught that the “harmony of the spheres” is a true thing, and not simply a poetic dream: all nature, like a piece of music, being produced by melodious combinations of the cross-movement of the holy light playing over the lines of the planets: light flaming as the spiritual ecliptic, or the gladius of the Archangel Michael, to the extremities of the solar system. Thus are music, colours, and language allied.
Of the Chaldean astrology it may figuratively be said that, although their knowledge, in its shape of the “Portentous Stone,”—in this instance, their grave-stone,—shut up the devils in the depths of the “Abyss,” and made the sages their masters (Solomon being the Priest or King, and his seal the “Talisman” that secures the “Deep”); Man, on account of his having fallen into the shadow and the corruptions of EXISTENCE, needs that mighty exterior HAND (before which all tremble) to rescue him back into his native original Light or Rest. All the foregoing is pure Bhuddism. Thinkers who have weighed well the character of those supposed infractions of natural laws which have admitted, as it were philosophically, the existence of other independent, absent, thinking spirits, communicating intelligibly in this world of ours, insist “that it is impossible to suppose that the partitions between this world and the other world are so thin as that you can hear the movers in the other through.”
Nevertheless, thoughtful people are equally able to convict modern philosophical realists of absurdity, when the former adduce the following insurmountable objection against them: “When we tell you of a supernatural thing,” say the supernaturalists to the realists, “you directly have recourse to a natural thing in which to find it.” This is contrary to common sense; and therefore the realistic arguer has no right to dispose in this manner of that which is supernatural; for his objections are futile and vain, and his arguments contradict themselves. Spirit and matter, when sought to be explained, are totally opposed; and hence arises the reason why there can never be any belief of impossible things, and only the conviction that such things have been in the mind, notwithstanding the insurmountable contradiction of the senses.
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