Month: August 2013

What’s the world’s greatest lie?
It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, & our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.

The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

books0977:

Scheherazade costume design (1919). Umberto Brunelleschi (Italian, 1879-1949).

In 1910, the Ballets Russes introduced Scheherazade in Paris in to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov. “With its daring depiction of violence and Eastern sensuality… it tapped into the longstanding vogue for orientalism in French art and literature, while its erotic violent imagery tied in with the emerging cult of primitivism…” Ida Rubinstein and Nijinsky took the leads. Rubinstein was famed as a beautiful actress although she was less a dancer.

The evil figures in the Bible are not really evil at all; they are simply opposed to the Demiurge, while the ‘good’ figures are dupes of this malignant deity. Similarly, for some Gnostics the serpent in the Garden of Eden was not a devil, but an emissary of the true, good God, who sought to liberate the divine spirit in Adam and Eve through knowledge. In the Gospel of Judas too, Jesus regards it as a favour that Judas will, by his betrayal, ‘free him from the man’ – that is, the body – that envelops him.

Richard Smoley, Judas: the Greatest Disciple? (via gnowing)

alwaysinsearchoflight:

C. W. Leadbeater’s book, The Hidden Life of Freemasonry. Leadbeater says of this symbol:

In Egypt they had a symbol of very great significance, called the Arrow of Ra, which includes both the square of the R.W.M. and his gavel of office. (Plate VIII) (page 260).

In our plate the different parts are separate, but sometimes they are joined together, and then one gets the effect of an arrow, whence it is named the Arrow of Ra, the Sun-God, who was also called Horus of the Double Horizon, the Son of Osiris and Isis, and yet a reincarnation of Osiris, God in evolu-tion. The lower portion of the drawing refers to His descent into matter, the inverted square signi-fying descent, and the angle beneath symbolizing the cavern of matter into which He went down. The upper square then indicates that He ascended or rose again. The symbol in the centre – that of the double axe – is that of the Most High God; so the complete glyph is thus a kind of symbolic creed, which for those who drew it affirmed their faith in the descent of the Deity into matter and His final triumphant ascension from it: “descended He; ascended He”. If we were to interpret it along lines of Christian symbology we might call it the emblem of the crucified and triumphant Christ; but it is also a token of the whole method of evolution.

This device appears in many places. It is to be seen in the museum of the Louvre in Paris, engraved upon a Chaldaean intaglio made of green jasper. It is also to be found on the walls of some very old churches in Devonshire and Cornwall in England, where it must have been engraved by the wandering Freemasons who built those churches, for the orthodox Christians could have known nothing of it.