Yeshua
said, “I have thrown fire upon the world, and look, I am watching till it
blazes.” “Whoever is near me is near fire.” (The Gospel of Thomas: Nag Hammadi Library, Codex II)
Ave Maria resounded in the streets of Île de la Cité
as Parisians became witness to the fire that was slowly engulfing their iconic Notre
Dame Cathedral. A strange phenomenon indeed as global Christianity was poised
to celebrate another Holy Week. News channels and internet videos were
broadcasting the struggle of fire fighters to save this beloved seat of their
devotion to the Mother of God. However, thanks to a recent serendipitous visit
to a sublime gnostic sanctuary, the blazing fire took this blogger to the voices
in Nag Hammadi texts. This fiery spectacle at this Holy time could signify
something stirring at the heart of an erstwhile Christendom, at least for those
who savor humanity’s symbolic imagination.
Egyptian brothers who discovered the hidden books of
early Christianity feared a jinni when they found the earthen jar while digging
near the town of Nag Hammadi. It indeed
contained one that would agitate the self-righteous chroniclers of religious
monomania. These books present a different Jesus who dances, has a sense of
humor and speaks riddles that those who have ears can hear. What does Yeshua
mean when he utters, “whoever is near me is near fire”? Was he watching as the
fire blazed in the heart of an emblematic city, proud of its western Catholic
heritage and equally of its opposite, scientistic atheism? Does this invoke a fierce
deity that throws fire upon the world to wake us from self-induced slumber?
Does this elemental fire, that in tantric contexts
represents the mind, bring the supplicants closer to Yeshua, a rebel teacher
who pledged truth and freedom but mostly got lost in the cobwebs of an
imperium? In The Round Dance of the Cross,
embedded in the Acts of John, Yeshua commands to form a circle and hold each
other’s hands. He stands in the middle, and says, “I will play the flute.
Dance, everyone….The whole universe takes part in dancing….Whoever does not
dance does not know what happens….I have no temple and I have temples.….Amen.” Does the glowing Rose window of Notre Dame represent
that circle? The figure lighted by fire creates a mandala of affirmation of birth
amid death, paradox that is life, paradox that is humanity and its religions.
The jar that contained the non-canonical texts of
early Christianity revealed paths that are scandalously close to traditions
that its imperial aspects tried to exterminate. In the Thunder Perfect Mind
there is a voice that sounds like the Great Mother of many religions who is
comfortable in her paradoxical and all-encompassing form that is a mandala: “I
am the first and the last. I am the honored and the scorned. I am the whore and
the holy. I am the wife and the virgin…. I am the mother of my father and
sister of my husband, and he is my offspring…I am knowledge and ignorance…. I
am war and peace. Hear what I say.” For me these books offer that serpentine
wisdom represented by the brazen cross. It is curious that Nagas hid the Mahayana
text of Prajnaparamita, as the Nag desert hid the wisdom teachings of these gnostic
texts.
I have haunted many sacred sites of Christendom
searching for its dark deity. We now know in much more detail the history of
Black Madonnas and the pagan goddesses upon whose submerged bodies, many cathedrals
were built. Ean Begg chronicles their history
whose existence was first revealed to the scholarly world by Leonard Moss. Scandalized,
the traditional church, pretended that black virgins did not exist – they were
only darkened by candle light and smoke.
A lot has changed since then; a book like China Galland’s Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna that spurred
my own journey has resuscitated this mystic Madonna that cannot be contained by
any official version.
Strange, the central figure of Pieta left intact on
the altar seems sullied by smoke! How she reminds me of those Black Virgins of
Europe. A young philosophy student once told me that there is a Black Virgin in
the basement of Notre Dame. Although I visited the shrine twice, I did not get
to see her. Perhaps this week she just left her entombed chamber and showed up
holding her sons and daughters in her pained arms. Charred remnants of the roof
piled up in front of her look like the bones of beings, both human and
non-human, that have suffered, sometimes in her name. The Great Mother who has
no religion embraces all of them because she herself is the root of all:
darkness and light emanate from her. She
creates Abraxas, one of the gnostic deities whom I first met in the pages of
Herman Hesse’s Demian ages ago when I
had little knowledge of Christianity and its discontents.
Having traversed a path beyond multicolored Indic gods
that are never just “good”, I now see this Abraxas not too different from the
god that declares in Isaiah 47.5: “I form the light and create darkness: I make
peace and create evil.” However, this complexio
oppositorum was hidden by translations, explanations, interpretations,
presenting a one-sided deity that was cut off from its other, creating a truncated
god. In a powerful metaphysical dualism, Satan who was this god’s associate in The Book of Job became the Devil and took
residence in all the “others” of these religions, including a fallen earth that
deserves to die according to some benighted theologies.
In Seven Sermons
to the Dead, Carl Jung, the supreme gnostic teacher of the West who
explored the deep well of human psyche better than Freud, writes: “Everything
that discrimination taketh out of the pleroma is a pair of opposites. To god,
therefore, always belongeth the devil….This is a god whom ye knew not, for
mankind forgot it. We name it by its name Abraxas. It is more indefinite
still than god and devil…..The burning one is eros, who hath the form of
flame. Flame giveth light because it consumeth….Good and evil are united in the
flame.” Perhaps now the emptied roof of the Cathedral will open itself to the
sky that embraces all those “others” including its own repressed half and understand
the Fire sermon of a Buddha.
Many a faithful could imagine end times in the figure
of this blazing Cathedral that often bring bibliophiles to speculate about its meaning.
After all those images have shaped western imagination for millennia. Where will all these exciting tales go
without that terrifying awaiting? We will lose a major part of western art and
literature if we excise that imaginary. But what if apocalypse is a revelation,
a disclosure, a clearing of debris that time accumulates? What if such an
apocalypse happens all the time and hence has nothing to do with linear time - Chronos
(chronology) but belongs to Kairos (creative instant)?
After all cathedrals, temples, synagogues, mosques, museums,
libraries burn down, not just by accidental fire but sometimes set ablaze by rival
human powers: Alexandria, Nalanda come to mind. Possibly Anthropocene induced
fire devasted parts of the West Coast recently. Last year fire raged through a
museum in Brazil and destroyed precious artefacts even as some of us in warring
zones are destroying our own human heritage.
Creative activities whether religious or secular attest
to our collective effort to create beauty beyond what occupies a recently
enthroned Homo-Economicus. They are versions of Keats’ “Grecian Urn” that is a
“foster-child of silence and slow time” and knows that “Beauty is truth, truth
beauty.” They voice our deep creative hunger not accessible to religions that lodge
them beyond life. How ironic that in
search of a heaven elsewhere we ignore the voice of Yeshua that Didymos Judas
Thomas recorded: “The Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth and people
do not see it.”
Yes, it is a gorgeous Cathedral that houses treasures
and historical moments and fortunately much was saved. Some had asked how could
this be happening? Indeed, how could a structure that survived so much including
the Cult of Reason and iconoclasm burn when modern civilization is most
technologically sophisticated? Is something different at this moment in history
then? As we face planetary suicide, asphyxiation by plastic, perhaps the
falling spire, a towering inferno indicates something else altogether.
News of the latest oil spill in Indonesia that killed
five fishermen, decimated wild life and created unspeakable pollution is beyond
heartbreaking. Perhaps Our Lady of Paris, like the Indian goddess Sati, has set
herself aflame with her yogic power to protest injustice and wants to purge her
own body of its accumulated waste. Perhaps
Yeshua of the gnostic texts that speak a different truth will resurrect this
weekend to join the voices of seers around the world, especially today’s celebrants
of Passover. May we all be lifted by the “Ruach HaKodesh, the Holy Spirit Who
interbreathes all life” and work to restore the earthly paradise.
Now to the magic of life and its enchanting surprises.
I am a literature lover who unwittingly wandered into world religions in search
of manifestations of “my” Kali. Last year I found myself awestruck when my
college library’s Films on Demand randomly brought me to a video on Gnosticism.
There familiar figures like Elaine Pagels and June Singer spoke, but it
contained a voice that startled me. It
was the voice of Tau Rosamonde Miller, a French American woman who underwent
unspeakable agony as a political prisoner in her youth.
I was moved beyond words when I heard her speak of her
epiphany and the compassion that flowed from her for her tormentors. Her anguished
quest led her to the gnostic deity of light and dark and the wisdom beyond. Since I look for sincere practitioners of a
tradition, not just the academics with endless arguments, I was thrilled to
discover that she is a gnostic priestess. I hoped to meet her someday. I was overjoyed and not surprised at all when
I found out that the lineage of Mary Magdalene was bestowed upon her by the emissaries
of the secret order of Miriam of Magdala in Southern France. http://www.gnosticsanctuary.org/lineage.html My
search for the Magdalene mystery took a new shape then. Tau Miller is the epitome of a Gnostic Mystic who acts “as an antibody
in the bloodstream of humanity and religion.”
Last month I was invited to attend a God seminar in
California organized by Westar institute. Thanks to my sister in law I
miraculously found myself in her sanctuary on a Sunday morning, When I heard Tau
Miller invoke the voices of Thunder and Sophia during a magical service, I was
speechless and thunderstruck. I
also discovered her full name; a delightful and yet unfolding connection with
my native country is hiding in her Sanskrit middle name! Rosamonde Ikshvàku Miller is an Urban Mystic, who “while not necessarily pious or even religious,
lives poised between the worlds aware of the Reality beyond opposites, awake
and connected to the Source no matter what form the moment takes.” I can think of no better way to end my gnostic
musing on another sad moment in our collective history than share her words:
“….So far, no one knows how the fire in Notre Dame started,
but the blaming of The Rothschilds, the Jews, the Muslims, the Masons,
permissiveness, karma, the president of France, their dog, and whatever else
embodies the inner darkness and self-hatred of the agitators, is being
irresponsibly thrown about. That’s how pogroms, lynching, witch-hunts,
suspicion, and persecution begins. We haven’t progressed much beyond being
villagers with torches and pitchforks, assaulting the projected externalization
of our inner fears and darkness.
We’ll know soon enough how that specific fire started. Until
then, let’s mourn the loss of the soul of a city, the loss of this majestic
visible Temple on earth to our Eternal Celestial Mother.” Rosamonde
Ikshvàku Miller,15 April 2019
