Massimo Scaligero - Graal

GRAIL

by

MASSIMO SCALIGERO

Excerpts translated by

Extracts from GRAIL by MASSIMO SCALIGERO

Mark Willan © 1997

Chapter II

The Androgynous* and Eden

Note * Androgynous = the human pre-sexual archetype. ... The infernal aspect of sex is a psychic production of man's, and does not concern sex. Originally the matter of sex was not a factor for the soul, but the direct action of the Spirit within the human body. One can say that at first, the soul limited itself to calmly receiving the relationship which the Spirit had with the sphere of reproduction. When the Sun separated from the Earth, the power of the forces of sound, or of the Word, and of life, over the lower darkness, made man able to generate his own likeness by himself. In his structure, the power of light (principle of consciousness), the higher waters (astral body), and the lower waters (lunar body), or lower astral - presence in him of the world which would later make up the Moon - were held together by the principle of sound and of life, as if by a higher I. The creative synthesis of the powers of light-life and darkness, dominated by the nature of the Word, is present in man as an androgynous power, which made his nature binomial, capable of generating his own likeness. That part of his structure, through which androgynous man had the possibility of reproducing himself, insofar as it was able to receive the Powers of creative sound, was the lower part of the body, the seat of the lunar currents. The infernal zone, of the "lower waters", or lunar zone was that part of the earthly sphere which acquired over-ruling power from the time of the detachment of the Sun until the highest Powers detached the Moon also from the Earth. This was the time during which the darkness enlivened itself with its own radical force, and was able to bring about a densification of the human form, in which the forces of lightlife ceased to have their original dominion over its lower portion. It was the time of the destitution of the Androgynous, or the separation of the sexes. The Powers of sound which dominated the lower part, in order to be able to maintain the androgynous balance of man, would have had to take over his consciousness, since they operated in the higher part. But this would have stopped the formation of man, whose task was to be to develop his individual powers so as to conquer the powers of his own higher nature, for the time being given to him. Thus, whilst the separation of the sexes took place, those powers continued to operate in mankind, independent of his consciousness. Life in him, still co-operated with the light, insofar as his relationship with the other part of the couple was outside sex. Gradually, however, he tended to link himself by means of the senses with the lower sphere of the body, in which the harmony of light and life, through the forces of the Word, made the reproductive act possible. The link with sex through the senses, made the forces of light lose the co-operation of the forces of life. This was the Serpent's chance, symbol of the degenerating form of man, due to the overcoming of the powers of light by the lower earth waters : the beginning of the activity of thought as lifeless light, which will later become the dead reflection of light, dialectics. The original Powers of life and sound now directly dominated the dark part of the Earth, which they had detached from it, so as to make up the lunar body : infernal fragment of the Earth, whose expulsion was referred to in the myth of the victorious struggle by celestial entities with the Serpent, or Dragon. From then on, the Moon was to be the symbol

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of the lowest nature of man, dominated by solar powers, that could no longer operate in the same way in the soul of man, but only through his own free action. Insofar as he re-conquers his spiritual nature, man shall one day overcome the Serpent : to realise and dominate the nature of the Serpent shall be an initiatic symbol. The Moon, in this context, sign of the moment of the Serpent and the loss of the androgynic power, takes on to spiritual vision the meaning of the symbol of the task, through which the celestial constitution of man may be restored, by his realising the synthesis of his higher and lower natures : insofar as in such a synthesis he re-awakens in himself the power of redemption : which is the redemption of the lunar body, which dominates his sexual life and the mechanism of the generative functions. The resurrection of such powers, to whose loss is linked the sensual bond of earthly love, the necessity of egotism, of sickness and of death, is visible in the symbol of the Virgin standing on the sickle of the moon, with the Serpent beneath her feet. It is as if the Virgin were to be carried in the heavens by means of the Moon purified of the shame of the Serpent, so that the luminous sickle is the celestial Ostensory, or the Chalice of the Holy Grail, which gives itself as a symbol of the radical force liberating man. This radical force bears within itself, in truth, the serpentine movement : the powers that dominated the lower liquid earth, that is the lunar element of the Earth, gave man the possibility of androgynous generation, or self-generation, before the lunar prevarication and the consequent detachment of the dark Earth, or sub-earthly part, from the Earth itself. These forces themselves detached the lunar body from the Earth : not because they did not dominate the lunar darkness, but because man was beginning not to do so. Thus the Serpent does not arise for them, but for man. For man, the Archangel Michael attacked the Dragon. In substance, the loss of Eden was not a state which had to do with Earth or Moon or the Serpent, but only with man, and not man as a spirit being, but his soul, in which all the powers which took part in his origins are present, be they supernal or infernal. The meaning of such a history is the mystery of the soul of man : the possibility of its being made fertile by the spirit. Man has not yet reached his rank, the form that corresponds to the Spirit, because he has not yet realised the spirit principle in his soul. The separation of the soul from the spirit, and the reflected spiritual form, in which the soul holds that it has an I and a spirit, are the continuation upon an individual level, of a loss of level of which man has even lost all memory, and the possibility of conceiving its conscious reconquest.

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Chapter IV

The Lunar Stone

... The apparent death of the soul, as a state of desire, is the origin of the mÉyÉ of the world. MÉyÉ hides the magic of resurrection. From this apparent death, which is the lack of the spirit, the soul projects its own disanimation into the world, which arises before it as an objective and opposed otherness. From this death, resurrection has its secret in the current of desire itself, whose lower channel is eros, and the upper one reflected or dialectic thought, the expression of deadness. Dialectic is the codification of desire. The Serpent thus has two heads : one above and one below : in mental picturing and in willing. That is the equivalent of saying that man has two adversaries, but, with respect to his possibility of overturning, by resurrecting his soul, the current of desire, they make up a synthetic adverse power, which assumes different aspects, according to the area of the soul in which man attempts his liberation. Equally, by mutual correspondence between reality and symbol, he who at the present time wishes to join the Western Mysteries - which today resume the past functions of those of the East - must be able to recognise two terrible adversaries of the Grail, two marvelously articulated doctrines, whose purpose is to deviate his search, indicating a false path to the seat of the Mysteries, and paralysing for ever his powers. The art of the Ancient Adversary is to operate in man in the vehicle of those soul forces, through which he identifies with his body and with the sensory, in order to be conscious of himself, so that he believes himself to be free : forces of the soul, in themselves impersonal and powerful, but making themselves otherwise in the current of desire : desire in thinking, desire in feeling, desire in willing : from dialectic which builds the culture, to the sex which feeds its infernal level. (In truth sex degrades culture, not so much in supplying its content, but through the fact that it operates in man as a power, which paralyses the pure forces of intuition needed for the process of culture). The art of the Ancient Adversary is,within the current of desire, to keep separate the forces of thinking from the forces of willing, so that man may not know their synthesis, which is the beginning of the inner androgynous restoration : mental picturing or imagination being the female polarity, willing being the masculine one. The inner reconstitution of the original synthesis, which one day shall be able to take place as the restitution of the adamantine structure of man, is the beginning of sacred love. Thus the art of the ancient Serpent is to operate in the zones of the soul in which, through the current of desire, he can make arise in man the illusion of choosing for himself, making him mistake for his own life the state of deep sleep, belonging to the lunar body, or the apparent death with which he minerally assumes the world, the series of appearances, including the appearance of the other (partner). Desire produces appearance : it needs appearance, to subsist. The play of appearances is in fact the possibility that the Serpent suggests to man, ideals or reasons for life : from love to pity, to freedom, to spiritualism, to power, to religion. When he keeps the two forces of mental picturing and willing separate in the soul, the Ancient Adversary can dominate man : he stops him from actuating the I, which has in itself, intact, the original androgynous power : he manages to make man live in the reflection of the I, where the I lives broken up in a thousand forms of reflection, each one opposing another, believing he is himself in every form in which the reflection makes appear his ideal of life, or his creed, or his mysticism, or his esotericism. In the current of unseen desire, he manages to make him turn to a sexual magic, to an erotic ritual, which is supplied both with the anointing of Tradition and of present day dialectic.

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In reality, no-one can contradict desire, even when he opposes himself, because in effect no-one sees where it arises. And if it is of the same nature as the I, its non-manifestation cannot surpass it, because every activity of the I manifests it anyway. The reality is that it is not really the I, but its reflection, its temporary presence : this temporary presence is reinforced by the Obstacler using the power of the I. The problem for man is to find the I to which he refers : to note that he speaks of the I, as if he truly were it. The path to the finding of the I is sacred love, as a force that draws consciousness of the unknown zone of the soul, towards an absolute point: it is the path of loyalty and donation to the inner being, which is revealed in the other (partner). From the I springs the movement of sacred love, as a super-conscious impulse of the consciousness in a search for the eternal : the search of the I itself, referred to in the enigma of the symbolism of the stone of the Grail. He who moves from sacred love, looks for his own higher I in the other half of the couple, because only there can he find it. The I bears in itself restored, the power to surpass the human, the androgynous secret of the soul : the task is to note the point at which the activity of the I expresses its own soul secret, a transcendency which is the path through which the soul at last wakes from its apparent death. In the human soul are present all the forces which operated in the beginning, including the forces of the Serpent, by whom is guarded the dominion over the primordial current of life, as long as the I does not awaken in itself the forces which have radically defeated the Serpent. This is definitively the task of the I : to make present the gift of the Redeemer : this is what Parsifal discovers when on Good Friday he understood the meaning of his long wanderings and his invincibility in combat. The task is to discover that the Serpent has been defeated in man, in the original vital body which has remained intact, outside the current of desire in which reflected awareness moves. The task of the Grail consists of finding the intact life of light within man : a task equivalent to that of surpassing reflected consciousness. In reality it is the surpassing of what is normally considered to be human. Sacred love realises this task, because it is the movement of the soul which goes beyond consumption and death, through love of the Spirit, which is the being of the other (partner). The task of sacred love takes place in the inner world of the two, according to an intimate rush of the will to surpass the individual limit. This will in substance finds again its unity with thinking : thus it surpasses the limit of reflected consciousness, right up to meeting the luminous sound of the vital body of Eden, custodian of the secret of the original correlation, or of superhuman love, which alone can redeem the human. It bears the power of the ancient creative music, of which the soul is substantially made up : which the soul estranged itself from in order to express itself in reflected consciousness. The correlation of the superhuman couple is found as a dimension of the soul resounding according to the etheric archetype, whose restitution is symbolised by the solar diamond taken from the lunar stone : the precious content of the Grail, of whose hidden meaning no rational thinking, nor erudite esotericism can tell. ...

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Chapter V

Reconquering the Original Harmony

... Being awake through egoic consciousness, makes man lose the pure link, which he could have at one time with the forces of the Word which operated in the sexual act. The link with these forces becomes impure, insofar as it takes place according to the desire of a form which is, in its exclusive value as a sense form, the symbol of the moment in which the forces of the lower darkness managed to overcome man : through such overcoming, in fact, he lost at first the androgynous power, and then the angelic link to the original couple. It is the moment of the Serpent. The Serpent symbolises the degradation of the original power and the level from which it must arise. From the moment of degradation,every sexual pleasure shall be a inversion of an aspect of superhuman bliss : man shall search anyway with his soul forces for the soul of the other (partner) in bodily appearance : sexual joy shall give him the fleeting sensation of re-finding an original good, but he shall inevitably always be disappointed. The disappointing pleasure, which draws man on through ever newly relit desire, brings him to search, beyond the form of satisfaction which has become habitual, for that which, by means of accustoming himself and disappointment, he thinks is hidden in other forms : every sexual perversion is the illusory play of desire which leads man to seek in further forms of bodily eros something which inevitably escapes him, because it belongs to the soul and not to the body. The series of sexual perversions is the dominion of the inverted force, or force of the Serpent, constitutionally present in every living being, as the radical mark that is stamped on all earthly nature, and implicating, because of human prevarication, the animal world and in part the vegetable one. The degradation of the eros according to the current of desire is the inevitable consequence of the descent of the spirit into the body, up to sense awareness : from this, as has been seen, arises selfawareness, which in merely rational form is a recent conquest of man. Thus the re-ascent of man appears substantially to be the resolution of the strata of sexual degradation, which is the price of self-awareness. Self-awareness cannot limit itself to being a rational fact : other states of being must incarnate it, so that it be a living reality and not a mere dialectic phenomenon. The re-ascent of man to his original level, cannot but find itself faced with the strata of sexual degradation as a barrier : to each awakening of an original spiritual faculty, corresponds as a counterpart a level of corruption of the eros. The task of the disciple of the Grail is not the traditional one, of detaching himself ascetically from the sphere of the senses, or to allow it sacrally to be dominated by a ritual wisdom which transcends him, but to proceed, by inner alchemy, to the gradual resolution of each strata. His initial task is the inner perception of the chains that determine the degradation in the soul. Such a perception becomes a vehicle for the forces of Redemption. Today the I has in itself the possibility of becoming aware of the meaning of its own history and of the relationship which links his inner life to an image of the body and of the physical world, taken as real in that they lack their living content. Through the activity of the conscious soul, today man, insofar as he is free, can codify his condition of dependency upon the sensory to absurdity, using science, insofar as it does not know of its own basic process of knowledge. But in such a way he shall betray definitively his own spiritual nature and shall lose the chance of the I, whose meaning is the restitution of the original magic-solar nature, by

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reconquering the stages which lead to it : stages through which he has descended, by means of sexual alienation, until reaching the present rational-sensory condition. The movement of self-awareness hides in itself the vital lymph of the intact power of the I. Thanks to the presence of this force intact, the I can ask itself the secret of its own deep nature and the path to reascend, can move according to lucid choice and pure decision of the will. The task, hidden in the symbolism of the Grail, leads man to seeing the power of the Serpent in the soul. Parsifal can do nothing for the redemption of the Grail, before he recognises the infernal magic of Chastel Merveil, operating subtly within him too. The recognition of the serpentine power, as the highest animadversio of man, is already an action of winning force in the soul : the power of the Logos. From it arises the vision of the task, through which the task can be carried out. The task, intuited and taken on, reveals itself to be the resolution of eros, implying a new experience of the relations of the human couple. The couple are on the point of ending a long cycle of dispersion, and thus meet again. The meeting again demands a state of deep concentration of the faculties of the soul, and the definitive decision of dedication. The resolving experience of the Spirit is clearly seen. For a seeker capable of such a decision, there is the other being of the original harmony that awaits. But the man must be ready. One can say that the woman is virtually ready. A poetic task, a task of the most unmaterial love, an ideal which seems unrelated to the raw dynamics of everyday life and to the empire of the world of the senses, supplied with its technology, its ethics and its mysticism : and nevertheless a concrete task of knowledge and power : the most practical task, the real task of man, which bears the only force which can give a new impulse to man. It is not simple mystical love, bhakti, the marvel of the Indian spirit, the devotion of the Christian saints or those of Islam, but something more essential and dynamic, that can only now be born on earth : sacred love. The task is to find the currents of light and life lost in sexual experience dominated by desire. This dominion can be contemplated and in contemplation be dissolved. In the embrace which only just unites the bodies, because it moves from the hearts, being the salutation of a meeting or the effusion of a soul with another, the abandonment which is complete according to the demand of the heart, is the initial sign of the flow of the light. It is the symbol of a union which must not be betrayed. It is the embrace in which the dorsal spine takes part, or the spinal marrow, but not the sex (organs). The form of the dorsal spine is the form of the Dragon or the Serpent : in the pure embrace, as the meeting of soul with soul, the Serpent begins to be enchanted by a music which is no longer heard : he then tends to withdraw into himself, allowing free passage on the path to the heart. The resistance to this embrace, or the incapacity of full abandonment free of desire, is a sign of refusal of the light. The embrace, as a momentary communion of the heart, is a minimum extasy which does not know desire, arising from the opposite of desire, the giving of oneself. Where bodily desire awakens , this is a sign of a still incomplete giving of oneself, a persistent refusal of the light. The refusal is in any case the deep attitude of the "lunar body", the zone of dominion of the Serpent, capable of supplying all emotions and exaltations, except for the giving of oneself. The measure of independence from such dominion is the embrace, as the meeting of the soul, in which the light-life current corresponding to the abandon of self, is objectively experienced. ... ... One may speak at this point of a Christlike ataraxy, as of a point of invulnerability, or of unseizableness which begins to reign in the zone of the Serpent. This zone is not the place of sex, but that of the cerebral organ and the spinal marrow. The experience of Christlike ataraxy, as of the total

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foreignness of the soul to the nervous system, is comprehensible, on condition of giving this expression its correct meaning, of cessation of dependency from habitual reactions, such as are movements of desire or of the ego : through which one comes to realise, without predetermination, the image : "Not I, but the Christ in me". The realisation is the equivalent of a deep calm, of a capacity to stand any adversity, to contemplate any catastrophe, or human tragedy, without being minimally altered by them, taking in, penetrating everything with liberatory knowledge, thanks to an imperturbability which is not insensitivity, but acceptance of being for what it is, insofar as one is at the centre of such being : one cooperates in the process of redemption of the world, according to the correlation of sacred love, the real love for the world. ...

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Chapter VI

Metaphysical Circuit of the Force

... The test of sacred love is the disenchantment of all levels of the "luciferic" form of love, right up to the one which appears to be the most legitimate one : compassion. This is such an elevated faculty, that it is difficult for it to pass through the paths of the ego. It is right for an egoic man to be compassionate, or charitable. However, one should take into account that we are looking at the esoteric meaning of the faculties, in relation to sacred love. At a certain stage of experience, there is the test of recognition of the dominion of Lucifer over feeling : a legitimate attitude like compassion may show itself to be untrustworthy, if it provokes an interruption in the communion with the principle, from which alone the form of feeling towards others may flow. In other words, the fount of sacred love, by not allowing emotions or human feelings foreign to its own source, demands real compassion : which does not impede love. If one wants to find the root of this direction, one needs to become aware that any flow of human feeling is dominated by sex. Human feeling, insofar as it is bound to the body, cannot fail to be an expression of sex : even filial love, or maternal or paternal (love). In this matter, Freud had reasons to see as reality, the image of the confusion of motives, the psychic states of fact, without their inner background, which it was impossible for him to see : because of which he made the problem be substantially with no way out but nevertheless supplied with all the appearances of an analysis which corresponds to reality. Love cannot come from the body, but only from the spirit : nevertheless, to realise it as something which comes from the spirit, is a long path sown with delusions and seductions, which are the tests, whose meanings are ordinarily found during life's catastrophes, or at death. Only insofar as he has the power to free himself of the bond that is the love of his mother, can Parsifal set off to conquer the Grail. One must deserve that feelings such as compassion or charity should come from the spirit, and not be a betrayal of the spirit, a temptation which interrupts sacred love. The series of noble feelings are necessary to human ethics, as a surrogate for the real dedication to the spirit : even yesterday, such ethics could enjoy spiritual inspiration, mediated by priests or traditions. This inspiration is gone. By now there can be none other, than that which come from the inner decision of those who are called to find sacred love anew. ... ... According to a teaching of the Master of the new age, what man has truly lost, is not the Logos, but Isis-Sophia, the inner woman, or the ineffable secret of devotion. Isis has been kidnapped by Lucifer, and thus it is necessary to penetrate the kingdom of Lucifer, if one wants to find the bearer of Divine Love. Every form of love, or affection, or of bhakti, can be a trick by Lucifer. Man in reality has not lost the Logos, because self-awareness is the obscure nascent form of the Logos, the virile pole of the androgynous element : which remains as a sterile capacity of self-affirmation, if it is not enlivened by the principle of primordial sound, or the music of the spheres, whose symbol is the Virgin crowned by stars, Isis-Sophia. Man in truth has lost the inner woman, or the sacredness of devotion, the fire of sacred love, the real kundalinå. Finding Isis-Sophia anew is therefore the decisive struggle of man against Lucifer. Lucifer, beaten in the heavens by Michael and on earth by Christ, must be beaten within the soul by man. Man has never beaten Lucifer. Regarding such a task, Wolfram von Eschenbach warns that whosoever wants to accede to the power of the Grail, must open the way by force of arms : the task is in substance reconquering the precious jewel, lost one time by Lucifer, lost again by man through Lucifer's work : returned into the hands of the Lord, at the time of the Last Supper, borne thence to mankind by the Custodians of the

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Grail. The task of Parsifal is in substance his struggle at all times against the insidious Lucifer, up to the moment in which, on one Good Friday, Trevrezent communicates to him the Mystery of Death and Resurrection, the content of the Sacred Cup. Lucifer's trick is the dependence of love from the vastness of the reign of its reflected light, where even the highest or mystical forms of feeling depend deeply on the body, or on sex. This can give the measure of the heroic nature of the task, which tends to free in man's inner nature, the angelic being, or the heavenly woman. By such a path the soul realises in itself the gift of the Redeemer : Lucifer ceases to be an inner divinity, dominating man through mystical , religious or loving feeling. The I can liberate Isis-Sophia from the dominion of Lucifer, when it manages to take itself beyond the astral body where Lucifer dominates : he dominates it insofar as he set up his reign even before the I connected with the astral to take on bodily (form). Through this dominion, the I identifies with the astral, and the astral with the body : man acts according to the Luciferic current, believing himself free: in every feeling he expresses not himself, but the impulse from Lucifer. Where he transcends the astral - the sphere in which Amfortas lost his battle - the I finds his own pure being anew : he can find afresh the direct relationship with the original vital body, whose sonorousluminous life-flow operates intact in sex, foreign to the voluptuous contamination, which concerns the astral and the zone of the etheric body which is enslaved by it. The relationship of the I with the "life body", is a possibility which should not be contemplated as a function of sexual magic - which at this point is meaningless, or ceases to have the sense attributed to it by certain human systems - but as the measure of the value of sacred love, of the element of absolute purity or of independence from desire. Lucifer as the instigator of Eros, ceases to be an inner divinity of man, insofar as the I-Logos in the soul links up again to the original heavenly entity, the Virgin-Sophia. This is the meaning of reducing to pure duality the relationship of the I with the body, thanks to the elimination of the astral : in reality it is not the astral which is removed, but Lucifer. With Lucifer gone, the freed astral body is the soul restored to the original light, the Virgin-Sophia, the heavenly spouse, the light which shines intact on the waters, Stella Maris. One may understand how the ascent of pure perception, or perceiving the light of entities, in substance is a discipline of silence of the luciferic astral, or of purification of the astral. The I is taken directly to meet perception : here too a clear duality between the I-sense world or I-body is set up, which reveals the possibility of an absolute synthesis of the I : already at work in the unconscious simplicity of perception : for which reason its animadversio is the principle of unchangeable calm : which in chapter V is called Christ-like ataraxy. Earthly evil can do nothing to this, insofar as it can wound man through Lucifer's bridle : (through the ) Obstacler who lives on human affections, in the same way as on hatreds, on passions, on exaltations or depressions of the soul. Lucifer's harness is removed : the relationship is between the I and the world, between the I and being. But this relationship is the mystery of the soul found again : if being is, the I is the original being. Being is the correlation with the soul of the other (partner): every higher faculty can now be awakened, insofar as it is a power which is incarnated as life in the other (partner) : by means of androgynous complementarity, each one finds as a power in the soul, what is an action in the living being of the other (partner). The measure of this correlation is the presence of the single-voiced adamantine element, which has united the two since primordial (times), and which can manifest its connection only in the form of super-human love : that which ever arises and is lost again in human love. The sacred binomial is

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reconstituted, when it becomes aware of its intangibility which has remained unchanged throughout time, as it was before time.

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Chapter IX

Transendancy, not Sublimation

... The concept of the absolute foreignness of the original power of eros in the sphere of sex, can help to understand how spiritual love is not the sublimation of physical phenomena. Every form of sexual sublimation is undeniably positive, but from the point of view of real experience, remains closed within the limits of the body. No matter what heights are attainable through it, sublimation of desire does not go beyond the context of desire. A sublimated dependence does not cease to be a dependence : which is always dependence upon the power of the Serpent. Sacred love is not the spiritualisation of sensual love, but the opposite : it is a metaphysical rush which strikes the human, taking on or resolving sex. Having nothing in common with sex as it appears to human sensuality, it manages to set up its own relationship with it. It alone, sacred love, can arrive at the communion with the original forces of life and sound which, lying unknown to awareness, operate in man, by penetrating the reproductive process. They are forces with which the only possible relationship is with the sanctity of the soul in which the Principle is present, the unbodily absolute, which sustains the body from the depths. ... ... The naiveness of such very able means (of sexual magic) consist of their presupposing a principle of power, whose confirmation is sought after in the potential for desire, which is its very deprivation. Two concepts lie at the foundation of this naive position : the concept of sublimation and that of wilful harnessing of the force. Both of them show a sufficient degree of plausibility, in relation to the lack of knowledge of the raw material of the work and of the principle needed to be called upon. It is inevitable to move from the condition of desire, but it is equally inevitable to remain bound to it, by means of a technique which, not knowing the constitutional need for desire, ends up by reinforcing it. Klingsor in substance becomes the adversary of the Grail, insofar as he is the victim of desire for power : the meaning of his castration was the abstract chastity of the body, or the illusion of realising the spirit by means of a bodily event, or an act of desire. There is no sublimation of sex which may allow one to control its metaphysical force : radical means are needed : a heroic path. One must understand what in the human inner world manifests a principle of absolute independence from the sphere of the instincts, as an immediate absolute. One can set against the deep drive of desire, which is the only force able to link the human awareness with eros and with the erotic-generative act, only such a force as has an equal and deeper intensity, able to link the higher virtue of consciousness to the sphere of generation, as used to originally take place for the super-human couple, which could have a heavenly awareness with regard to the need for reproduction, insofar as the union of the bodies took place in a state of impersonal transcendency, as in a state of dreamconsciousness. The only counter-part is a force which knows its source outside the desire which in any case imprisons the soul within the sentient-bodily limits. Abstract thought, pure logical thought, is the only activity which, even though it springs from the original movement of desire of the soul, estranges itself from the soul, becoming reflected, lifeless : deprived of desire, mathematical or logical. This thought has been cut out from the soul : but thus it is the possibility for the I to operate outside the soul, or outside the sphere of desire. Normally, there is no relationship between this abstract thought and the I : this thought, in fact, unaware of its own power, proceeds automatically, constructing for its own purposes its own I, its own psyche, its own systems of science, its own culture. The real I is unknown to it.

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But the I can wilfully establish a relationship with such lifeless thought : then it resurrects as an element of life of the soul. In reality the final meaning of such thought is for it to die up to the such a possible resurrection : one has to will it to its exhaustion, so that in the same direction is found the will that has willed it, a new will, with no presuppositions, free of psychic links, unconditioned. Through this dead thinking, the I can will itself according to a pure movement which restores the breath of life and light to the soul : thinking and willing find an even deeper harmony : feeling. There is a discipline of concentration and meditation, which belongs to the man of this time, which is inseparable from the resurrection of feeling, which corresponds to the original structure of the soul. From here can be ignited a power of unbodily love, capable of acting beyond the body - as reflected thought or mental picturing can abstractly do - with the impulse of un-materialness of a pure idea and nevertheless with the intensity of a powerful passion : something like platonic love become a flame that does not burn, a flame all awareness, a dedication all will, on the background of a starry music or a devotion which is gratefulness towards the spirit which is revealed by the figure of light of the other (partner). The musicality of this platonic love is recognised as the presence in the soul of the power of the Word - or of the original life and sound - capable of defeating the Serpent. The original music enchants the Serpent, which is the natural enchanter of the soul. The virtue of physical generation resurrects as the virtue of an inner generation, which from physical depths draws its maximum creative power. The surpassing of the limit is the time of an intense crisis of the human, in whom the test of every lower bond is presented. One is confronted with a supernatural current of life, ready to break the enchantment of the apparent death of the soul : it strikes awareness with the violence of a force which destroys life to reawaken it at another level. The giving of oneself in sacred love is not a mystical fact, or a form of bhakti, but a higher act of will : an heroic determination. It presupposes a transcending of self, which is attainable through meditation, or the noesis of pure thought. Christ-like ataraxy has been spoken of, as the background climate of the soul which is preparing itself for such an experience : the removal of every vanity, readiness for the radical test of autonomy with regard to the bonds of desire. In reality it is above all the surpassing of an internal limit of thinking : this overcoming leads to the communion with impersonal powers, or Spiritual Hierarchies, that support personal feeling and willing : the meeting of the light of thought with the powers of heat and life, is the process of sacred love. ...

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Chapter XI

The Initiatic Secret of the Serpent

... The nervous system, which from the head to the dorsal spine reproduces the form of the Dragon, is the instrument through which the original music of the universe worked on the structure of man. It is an ancient organ of life of the light, used by the powers of sound to construct a being able to hear the primordial harmony, and to live it by virtue of inner vibration. This organ, which according to a meditation given by the Master of the new age, has the form of a stringed instrument, like a cosmic lyre primordially used by the powers of sound to build the human form, ceases to be the vehicle of the cosmic harmony, when it starts to become the vehicle of individual awareness. ... ... By means of the neuro-cerebral system, or through the lifeless organ of reflex awareness, from which man take his sense of self, culture and content of existence, man is bound to the Earth, not to the living Earth which is invisible to him, but to the Earth as dead mineral. Any form of reflex thought is lifeless, through which he is obliged to be bound without residue to such an earthliness, to identify with it, its indefinite surface, to crawl along it : like a serpent. To see a serpent gives man a feeling of repugnance and shame, because it awakens in him the inner, albeit obtuse perception of his real condition on Earth, the lowering of awareness to the life of matter exclusively. This identity with matter, in its exclusion of the living, cannot fail to give rise to sickness and death. After having eaten the fruit suggested by the Serpent, Adam and Eve lost the gift of immortality. If immortality had not been a gift, man could not have lost it. Having become a lifeless organ, cold in itself, taking life from the hot blood of the sanguine-muscular system, is for the nervous system the condition of the Serpent. From the head to the dorsal spine, the system takes on the form of the Dragon : symbol of an infernal demonic (nature), of a savage egotism, from which man can be healed only through suffering, fear, death. But knowledge carries latent within it the uncontaminated forces of the serpent, that is of the being of life, which remains pure in itself, untouched by its degradation : these are the forces of healing, the true medicine of alchemical doctrine, the forces which one day shall free man of the need for egotism, suffering and death : thus the Serpent symbolises an initiatic degree. Through knowledge, man can win that which the physical organ of consciousness presents to him as a condition of death. He has knowledge, but lifeless : the vivification of knowledge can restore the real perception of himself to him : can bring him to the reawakening of heavenly hearing, necessary to perceive the secret harmony of the world : the sound that enchants the Serpent, of which is being is privation. The task is the meaning of sacred love : the impulse through which man, by freeing himself, shall one day be able to redeem the Serpent. The redemption of Lucifer passes through the redemption of man. The man that can find anew the life of light and the warmth of the senses uncorrupted, perceives the movement of the light, the luminous circuit of the blood, that needs no sensual switch-on, to have from his senses the heat of the light enclosed in matter. He ceases to corrupt the cold blood which the Serpent bears. By re-enlivening the life of heat where it is a pure metaphysical force, he understands his own debt to the serpent, the debt of lost angelicness and the abjection of his animal form. The shame of the serpent as an animal, has to do with man, not the serpent. If man stops identifying with the sense world, the senses transmit sees reality "uncontaminated by spirit" : which in this case is not spirit, but desire. Through the senses, the spirit can find the being it is.

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The level of the serpent, the need to identify with the earth, of crawling along the earth, can be surpassed by the man who, by means of the awareness at his disposal, manages to be aware of this level : against this he can begin to set the level of the sphere in which he intuits the arising of consciousness. He can have an intuition of a still higher level and recognise the stages of awareness which await to be lived through, so that he may realise his true being. Without the restoration of such levels, man cannot realise on Earth harmony and love, which for the time being he can only conceive of as ideals. The task of the Grail is not only a symbolic reference, but a reality which indicates, in the background of man's present history, the model of conscious human-cosmic action. The age of the conscious soul demands that man find the lost reality : inner perception, spirit hearing. Spirit hearing can restore true sound, the unmistakable music of the supernal place of birth, which has been taken from man. He understands that all his human operations, his desires, his struggles are substantially not only the desire for what appears, but deep and unstoppable will to find anew the lost place : which can be called the lost original love. Every human being bears within himself deeply this will to search, and each time the love for the other partner in the couple is relit, he experiences more or less fleetingly the hope of restoration of an unknown good, of which he has been deprived : he feels obscurely that in love a path is opened to him towards the lost Paradise, but he does not know that in order to be followed, this path demands being consecrated. The consecration is the task of the Grail. ... ... Whoever meets the Logos in the concept, has the direction towards Resurrection, or the possibility of hearing the Logos, the sound that overcomes death. The concept is for now the shadow of the Logos, the "shadow of the light": the life of light resurrects in the creative movement of thought, which demands from such a movement, the exercise of a love that is life of the Logos. For this life to be awakened, is a sign for the ascetic that he has arrived at the moment for meeting the other binomial being. The powerful truth appears to him : "The other is". Where he is able to perceive it as the reality beyond appearance, he sees his own Higher I coming to meet him from the other (partner). He finally finds himself : the Operatio Solis begins to show him the line for its accomplishment. Where he seeks beyond the figure of feminine grace, the being of sacred love, he sees before himself as form the perennial life of the light, the light that dominates the waters, Stella Maris : he sees as Marine Light, in its etheric light, the Gate of Heaven. The ancient harmony of the superhuman couple, in whom the original powers of sound and light flow together, is restored.

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Massimo Scaligero - Graal

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