THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE HEART
I hope your day was great, spent with family, friends and loved ones. Thank you all of you who did message me the last couple of days, I have really appreciated that as I am in Ireland far away from family and friends. My day was spent doing research all day, no gifts for me but quite a big one from books as always, my loyal companions, and from history.
Sharing today's 2 poems from "Love Poems from God" by Daniel Ladinsky. Today's pick:
Otherwise the Darkness - by St Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274), considered by many as the greatest Catholic theologian great advocate of solitude and meditation which he described as "the greatest opportunity offered to a human being, a life of contemplation of the wonders of creation and God". Meditation and contemplation are key to understanding the mysteries of the universe and were practiced by the Knights Templar who followed two of the maxims inscribed on a column once standing at the entrance (pronaos) of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi: “Know thyself” (gnothi seauton) and “Nothing in excess” (meden agan). I follow these too...
I
have a cause.
We need those don’t we?
Otherwise the darkness and the cold gets in
and everything starts to
ache.
My soul has a purpose, it is
to love;
if I
do not fulfill
my heart’s vocation,
I suffer.
How did the Rose - by the most beloved poet of all Persians, Hafiz (c.1320-1389) or Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz. Although still quite unknown in the West, his work was treasured by renowned figures such as Emerson, Goethe, Garcia Lorca, the composer Brahms, and even Nietzche.
How did the rose
dare open her heart
and give to the world
all her beauty?
She felt the encouragement of light
against her being.
Otherwise,
we all remain
too frightened.
from The Gift, Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master, translated by Daniel Ladinsky, Compass, Penguin Books, 1999
The Rose is not just a divine feminine symbol, but we find it in architecture and is relevant to the architecture/symbolism of the Knights Templar, such as for example the rose in the middle of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral (the labyrinth symbolising many things but primarily resurrection and in this case, our journey through life and resurrection provided by the feminine life force creation side of God as the Shekinah, the dove, the flame. Note that labyrinths and circles were already used in antiquity and the world's first hospital, the sanatorium at the Temple of Apollo & Asklepius in Epidavros, Greece already featured these as part of treatment within the Tholos where surgery would be performed in "dreams" through incubation.
The rose is also connected to Mary Magdalene, Venus, and the number 5 as well as Rosicrucian Freemasonry which carried forth the legacy of the Knights Templar and the work of the artistic branch of the Knights Templar in Italy, the "Fideli di Amore" where artists/poets/writers such as Dante Alighieri and Petrarch chose to represent the "rose" through female characters (Beatrice, Laura) who were their beloved. The Rose is also the "Beloved" for the Sufi poets and mystics, and we can also appreciate it in the Bible's most erotic poem of all time attributed to King Solomon; the Song of Songs which was ardently defended by Cistercian abbot Bernard de Clairvaux (who was family of the initial founding Knights Templar and wrote their Latin Rule). Bernard was a devoted Marianist and wrote 86 sermons in defense of the Song of Songs (see below)
https://www.themathesontrust.org/.../st-bernard-on-the-song
And let's also not forget the ties through symbolism from Templars to Rosicrucians to Freemasonry through the beautiful rose, so crucial to all of them (note the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded by 3 Rosicrucian Freemasons. The work of scholar and member of this order, A.E. Waite who also designed the blueprint for most of today's tarot decks (the Waite-Smith Deck), did considerable work on the links between the grail, the Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, and Freemasonry as did scholar Joseph Campbell and to some extent Carl Jung, who wasn't just a psychiatrist but also a historian and anthropologist and his wife Emma Jung and L.M. Von Franz who wrote The Grail Legend.
