Saint George and Alchemical Union

23rd April. Today is a day for lovers, for the lovers within ourselves, as our masculine parts descend and our feminine parts rise to join in amorous harmony. The union of the heart and brain. 

Edward Burne Jones dipiction of George

The prince of the skies, Saint George came down from the air. He fell from paradise, from the place of union of light, flew down through intuition and found himself confronted by his own earthly reality.  Suddenly he is no longer the prince of the skies but now a (half) human (half) being. Woaah! What is that dragon?

They say that we are born on earth impure. The Catalans would say malparits, which is literally born badly, figuratively translated as “in a sorry state”. We come out a little monstrous, not quite as perfect as our minds would like. We are our own Frankensteins. We are not in harmony with the universe (One- version) but we pipe our own out-of-unison song. The cosmos flows around in orderly lines, like a ploughed field, in harmonic unison with each other, like an orchestra with each musician playing as one creating a beautiful uplifting piece of music. And then we are born and get out those party horn things. And blow it. But it's not exactly Mozart.

The dragon is a representation of this rather uncoordinated clumsiness. We are all made up of the four elements, everything is. In an enlightened state, the four elements are equally balanced and working together: Air (intuition), Water (emotions), Fire (thinking) and Earth (sensations). We need to balance our four elements. Ether (the belonging to a whole greater than the sum of its parts) is impotent without the others in balance. It is the secret of physical and psychological health. None of us, as far as I can see, are enlightened: we've got work to do! We’ve got our dragons to face.

 

Aristotle's elemental qualities

The dragon is a representation of the four elements, he blows fire angrily out from his mouth, his wings allow him to fly clumsily in the air, his claws grip into the earth and he cries big baby crocodile tears. But his elements are all badly born. Clumsy and angry, his elements are all at odds with each other, like trying to light a fire in the rain or flying through tarmac...

So, Saint George finds himself in a predicament coming up against this dragon (inside of himself) as he heroically admits to discovering his instincts. And as all cavaliers, to save his good name, he is faced with one option:

Slowly, calmly, he gets out his sword and shield. 

He fights nobly from the top of his white horse of the mind, just like all of our fantasy heros do, and with his sophisticated sword work he manages to slice through the reality of himself (like Shiva´s sword) getting a little closer to the truth to give him a little more strength to dominate his dragon. Some stories just go right ahead and kill the dragon off, but how can instincts be killed? It is impossible. Some Granddad got carried away retelling the story…so in the mystic story, the dragon is dominated. Saint George is able to dominate with his mind the impulses of his instincts. Dominating the dragon he has aligned his four elements to be more in harmony. They do not fight so much anymore, the dragon is a little more docile. Ether is given a chance.

Saint George finds himself in a more balanced state, and as a result, from the mouth of the cave, steps a beautiful maiden now that the dragon is not ferociously guarding the entrance. 

Jung's dipiction from his Red Book

Saint George is rewarded by glimpsing his soul. His Anima, the feminine within, influences his interactions with the world giving them more meaning. Allowing him to begin to conceive of himself in the Uni-verse. It could be considered the path to our creative gifts. From floating in the mind, suddenly Saint George is using his heart, and if expressed in a harmonious way, while the dragon is comfortable domesticated, it is beauty and truth and purity and wonderfully creative expression. It is being fully and ecstatically alive.

We can have as much information in our brains as we can fill, but until we have understood our knowledge through love, it cannot be comprehended. Those moments of eureka when suddenly you ‘see’, when you ‘click’ into what you you know is true because you remember somewhere knowing it once. You feel it's truth, because it is so obvious, so simple. It is like peeling away an onion skin, or taking off a veil (revelation). Normally we are left with something so beautifully simple that we secretly wonder if actually we knew it all along and had just somehow forgotten.

If we only understand our world with our brains, it is dry and unconnected. Comprehension is with our hearts and we connect with our profound memories, with our entire being. This connection of knowledge and heart is represented by the union of Saint George with the beautiful maiden, and how lovely she is! She allows us to leave the dark depths of the cave and resurface to fresh air where we can wake up and smell the roses.  (The Rose is the western equivalent of the eastern Lotus flower). 

The masculine and feminine come together once more, the sky and the earth rejoin... They have sex (alchemically speaking of course...)

The Alchemical union of the King and Queen

The union of Saint George with his maiden creates a third, a rebirth. This time the birth is a little better. They are transformed into the new castle and live happily ever after according to Walt D (....No!!! Don't believe it!!) The castle with its slightly better squared four walls is a representation of the four elements in slightly better harmony.

And the cycle comes to a close, but not an end. Like any spiral, Saint George is back where he began, at the same point but not the same man. Now he has aligned himself a smidgen more to the UniVersal, he has dominated his dragon for a while, and he has incorporated the Beauty of the glimpse of Truth into his self thanks to his inner maiden emerging from the cave of matter.

But too much of a good thing is never good…Saint George soon falls back down through the clouds, motivated by the image of a greater world…to go delve in the realms of his dragon land. Saint George is in constant movement, never getting stale, constantly birthing in another weird but wonderful way as he and his inner maiden evolve in greater and purer love.

Happy Saint George's day!

Carpaggio's dipiction of Saint George

Easter Growth

So that chocolate scoffing time of year has come around again.  Breaking open a Cadbury´s Cream Egg even though your stomach´s shouting out “Intoxification!” and your visions begins to blur.  Which is probably exactly what the Hindus mean when they say that the Mundane Egg, in which Brahma gestated, broke its shell in spring.

Easter is the first full moon after the equinox (“equal night”).  This year it was on March 30^th.  It is when the masculine and feminine energies are both at their plenitude and create an energy of fertility on earth, depicted by the engraving “The Philosophers Compass”.  Larry Boemler in his book "Asherah and Easter" writes “The Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility [was] known variously as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos.”  We get the point Larry…

If you´ve a garden, you can´t help but notice how the plants are having their first splurge of growth, of which I´ve proudly attached “fotos” of our first sproutings.  If we were all dependant on the growth of wheat rather than opening up Mars Bars, we´d be pretty damned glad to see it begin to grow.  And wine lovers will smile with wetted lips as they see what looked dead in the winter, spring into life once more, with little buds bursting on the vines.  The full moon gives the plants a complementary light to go for a marathon of energetic growing through all of the night and all the day…it´s quite logical really.

But Easter isn´t just about the nature´s rhythm, but also about the inner life.  Gods who die on the cross around this time (Jesus, Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, Orpheus…) represent how we as spiritual beings need to be have “a second birth” into a greater consciousness of ourselves and our world.  In order to just to start, it is necessary to dominate our egos, like in the Puranic allegory, when Viswakarman's daughter Sanjana (spiritual consciousness), complained as wives tend to do, about the natural qualities of their husbands.  After a while no matter how shiny and great and brill they are, they start to irritate.  Her husband was Surya the sun (often linked in astrology to the ego).  She went back to her daddy and complained he was getting all the attention, that he was shining too bright.  Like any loving father would do, he got his sun-in-law by the neck and being a carpenter of high craftsmanship, crucified the sun on his lathe and cut away an eighth part of his rays – creating around him a dark auroela.  A crown of thorns.

Which is basically spiritual initiation: killing all of those fiery passions, and going through hell, facing our demons, before we can rise into new life and be reborn. We become more conscious of ourselves, less reactionary, more responsive.  We´ve all been through it in some way, some emotional crisis which has made us understand ourselves better where at the end we firmly wobble, “I´m glad it happened but I wouldn´t like to go through that again!” 

In the past initiation was intense, people were put through all sorts of, what my father would call, character building situations, and then left exhausted attached to a “cross” (which I reckon must represent the symbolic centre of ourselves, the centre of creation) They lay there in the dark for three days in which their spirit descended into Hades’ underworld, to be reborn again into a new life once back in the light of day.  Initiates were left exhausted in caves and such, to encounter their inner demons, to face fear, and dominate it, to awaken to another perspective of themselves and their world.

Which is not exactly the same as scoffing our faces with Cadbury cream eggs and then getting stabs of stomach ache…

I remember in primary school going into panic staring into the face of my friend who had fiendishly asked “Are you a human being?” because I had no idea what she was on about.  We are both, we are a human and we are a being, we are physical and we are spiritual.  And as we go to the gym to get perfect bodies, so we are challenged with the evolution of our spirits.  Every time we refuse to listen to that spirit, the divine nature within us is “crucified”, but after each crucifixion there has to be a resurrection, else we would end up as a dead physical blob, only to be later recognised by the Ben and Jerry carton stuck on our heads.  There has to be a balance, we can´t just be spiritual, and we can´t just be physical, because, after my experience in primary school, I can say quite confidently now that we are all human beings.  Psychology, and Life, is the idea of balancing both the “light” and the “dark” within us. Such as in Spring and Autumn equinoxes. And we are back to Star Wars again.  Here is the battle plan described by H P Blavatsky:

He who strives to resurrect the Spirit crucified in him by his own terrestrial passions, and buried deep in the "sepulchre" of his sinful flesh; he who has the strength to roll back the stone of matter from the door of his own inner sanctuary, he has the risen Christ in him. The "Son of Man" is no child of the bond-woman—flesh, but verily of the free-woman—Spirit, the child of man's own deeds and the fruit of his own spiritual labour. (H.P.B. Series No. 7, pp. 4-5)

But why why does it have to be so painful, so difficult, so bloody scary at times.  Why can´t we just all be nice and get on so friendly and just evolve picking out the thorns from our innerds with tweezers, like apes deflea each other? Padma-Sambhava, an Indian sage guru, had to say of it:

Although sesame seed is the source of oil, and milk the source of butter, not until the seed be pressed and the milk churned do the oil and butter appear. Although sentient beings are of the Buddha essence itself, not until they realize this can they attain Nirvana.

To achieve spiritual growth we face a difficult path, in which we have to do things in a specific way.  How is something that each of us must search for ourselves…

Easter is a real and symbolic time of growth through death of the old, and resurrection of the new, of our continual becoming.  I think the idea is rounded up nicely in a eggshell, by Anais Nin:

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Happy Easter everyone! Egg smashing galore!