Spiritual Enzymes
The symbols of the zodiac are spiritual enzymes.
The anonymous author of “Meditations on the Tarot” - A Christian Hermetist - introduces the Major Arcanas as “Spiritual enzymes”: they have the power to stimulate and awaken deep layers of the soul when we contemplate them. I have no doubt that the zodiac is the same. The twelve signs are authentic symbols, let’s say arcanas.
Symbols are not mere conventions, like ordinary words. If you don’t know that the French word “bateau” means “ship”, you won’t be able to guess. The sound of the word “bateau” has nothing to do with any sound that may suggest a ship. You can calligraphy the word with great art, it won’t look like a ship at all.
Symbols on the other hand are like tips of icebergs: if you see the tip, you can have an intuition of the whole iceberg.
Imagine being new to the world like a child, and you see an iceberg for the first time; however you have previous experiences of floating things.
Intuitively, you are using the law of analogy: this new thing (the iceberg) must behave like things you already know (the yellow duck in the bathtub, a piece of wood in the river...) so there must be a part of the iceberg below the surface. Intuitively you also understand density, because you have experience of small and heavy things versus bigger but lighter ones.
You can feel the approximate size of the immersed part of an iceberg, even without previous experience of icebergs. You apply the law of analogy: you assume that it goes with this new thing- the iceberg - like with the things you already know.
Symbols invite us to a similar intuitive understanding. They appear as the tip, they mean the iceberg. Thanks to the symbol, we should be able to guess the whole thing without opening a textbook.
One day a guy called Archimedes found the exact formula for floating bodies, but he would never have been able to discover the scientific formulation if he hadn’t had first the lived experience of things floating or sinking.
The famous esoteric law of analogy states that we can similarly get intuitions about the invisible worlds.
Symbols are tips of spiritual icebergs. Don’t take the metaphor too literally, this doesn’t mean that the spiritual world is cold like Antarctica. It’s only the tip versus hidden part that is supposed to make sense!
Symbols show something we know, the head of a ram, a bull, two twins etc. or imaginary creatures like a centaur or a sea goat - but these are made of parts that belong to the world we know: a horse and a man, a goat and a fish…
The other side of the equation, the hidden part belongs to dimensions that are beyond the grasp of our senses. Symbols mean psychic energies or spiritual realities, you may think of “the occult”. The word “occult”, as you know, means “hidden”.
The law of analogy, as an esoteric principle, states that “As above, so below” and we understand that “above” means the heavens, the spiritual world, and “below” is down here on earth.
So, paradoxically, our world below is like what is above, it is a reflection of the psychic or spiritual dimensions, but at the same time, there is a radical difference between what’s familiar and what’s beyond our grasp, what’s transcendent, mysterious, unutterable, ineffable, you name it.
Another disorienting theme in esoteric thinking is the coincidence of opposites -This simultaneous likeness and radical difference may be an example of it.
I believe paradoxes to be only confusions though.
Our everyday mind is limited. It is used to deal with finite objects or bodies. We live in a three dimensional space, we are unable to imagine a four-dimensional one. Try, imagine a house: it has a certain length, width and height. Can you create a mental picture of a house with a fourth dimension? No. Could God design worlds with four, five or more dimensions? Why not! It’s just unimaginable for us, humans. So let’s just accept that there can be reality beyond our understanding, with a tip of the iceberg that we can perceive: symbols, messages from the Mystery.
We have a linear perception of time: the past is behind, the future is ahead. Some people say that ancient folks had a circular definition of time, but I’ve never heard of old Hindu or Chinese sages mentioning that with time, our physical body will get young again, and we will have our childhood a second time. But what if there were more than one dimension to time? We can certainly imagine puzzling stories, but we can’t hold clear mental pictures of alternative realities. Our reason is stuck in this one.
Symbols have a foot in our world, and the rest in the unknown. The foot we can see is an integral part of the rest, it has the power to conjure it up, or simply to mean it for our intuition to get it and feel dizzy.
However, if we admit that we are spirits, created in the likeness of God as some old texts claim, these mysterious, sacred and ineffable dimensions of “above” are also within ourselves. We are made of them. Therefore, when we try to understand symbols, we are trying to remember who we are. My faith, or intuition, is that we also have within ourselves the ability to become conscious of the Mystery of who we are, and understand it, not with reason, but with what is called “Nous”in the Corpus Hermeticum, the Higher Mind . The search for Truth is meant by the Ninth House.
Blog posts from past years have become a book…