In order of succession, the Gnosis that Jesus revealed to John, James, and Peter after His resurrection reached Clement of Alexandria (about 160-215) and his direct disciples. Due to the persecutions of the third century, and the troubles that arose in the heart of Christianity after it became the State religion, it became imperative to make it ‘hermetic’ if it were to survive. Hidden like a treasure buried in the earth, it slienty made its way and, like a subterranean stream, flowed from master to disciple and from generation to generation until the present, when it rose to the surface again. Stripped of its occult character, it reappears with it original significance as an esoteric projection into the future taking the form of a New Covenant, or, in other words, a Third Testament.

The Law of the Old Testament, dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai amid thunder and lightning, took the form of a command. On the other hand the New Testament was not imposed on human beings, it came to them as Good News, and each was free to welcome or reject it. Though of great significance, this difference goes unnoticed. We will try to understand this different attitude of the divine Will in the two cases. This will enable us to penetrate more deeply the true meaning of the Third Testamnet, as well as its message.

~ Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis Book Three VII, IV (1)

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be. (Matthew 24:27)

Over the past two hundred years, an important spiritual and philosophical movement has been coming out of Russia. This, until recently, has been little known and appreciated; fortunately, the past few decades has seen new translations of many of the thinkers listed below. According to the Lindisfarne Press, the publishers of the “Library of Russian Philosophy”, Russian philosophy is marked by certain characteristic features.

• Epistemological realism.
  Knowledge consists of the idea of the thing, and these ideas – in the Platonic sense—are real.
• Integral knowledge.
  Knowledge is an all-embracing unity that includes sensuous, intellectual, and mystical intuition. Here we recognize the degrees of knowledge described by Rene Guenon, in recapitulation of Traditional Wisdom.
• Integral personality.
  The complete man is sensuous, rational, and mystical.
• Resurrection.
  The flesh and the world are to be transformed.

I date this from the time of the Joseph de Maistre’s period as ambassador to Russia. In addition to his vocation, Maistre was a Martinist and Catholic philosopher. He represents the opening of Russia to Western ideas, and around the same time, several works important to Martinism and Hermeticism were translated into Russian. These include: the “Imitation of Christ” by Thomas a Kempis, as well as works by Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and Jacob Boehme.
This led to two independent streams.

• Occult, as represented by
  • Helena Blavatsky
  • Gurdjieff, Ouspensky
• Sophiology, as represented by
  • Vladimir Solovyov
  • Sergius Bulgakov
  • Pavel Florensky
  • Nikolai Berdyaev
  • Vyacheslav Ivanov

This spiritual outpouring can related to the three Romes.

• The Third Rome. Theophan the Recluse ties together the two Romes: one, by the Russian edition of the Philokalia, and the other in his version of Lorenzo Scupoli’s “Spiritual Combat”, translated into English as “Unseen Warfare”.
• Boris Mouravieff represents the second Rome, the Byzantine Empire. Following Theophan and the occultism of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, he reworks the Orthodox spiritual tradition.
• Valentin Tomberg is the first Rome. He begins with the occult stream originating with Blavatsky and then expanded by Rudolf Steiner. He is also heir to the Martinist current that had infiltrated the Russian consciousness and then integrates it with the Sophiology of Solovyov and his followers. He eventually joined the Roman Church.

I include Rudolf Steiner, although he was not a Russian However, his wife was Russian, and he predicted that the next cultural epoch is to emerge from Russia.

The culmination of these streams is represented by two important works of Christian Hermeticism:
“Meditations on the Tarot” by Valentin Tomberg, and “Gnosis”, by Boris Mouravieff. While quite different in tone and subject matter, they are compatible on a deeper level. I can point out some interesting correspondences.

• Both books written by Russians, who were almost exact contemporaries: Valentin Tomberg (1900 – 1973) and Boris Mouravieff (1890 – 1966).
• They each fled the Russian revolution in 1920.
• They each claimed to be recovering the esoteric teachings of the Church, one from the Roman church, the other from the Eastern church.
• Their main works were written in the 1960s in French.
• They were made available in English within a few years of each other.

The first two volumes of “Gnosis” (exoteric and mesoteric cycles) each contains 21 chapters, indicating incompleteness. The third (esoteric cycle) has 22 chapters. It concludes with a description of the Knight, his work in the world, and the creation of an elite to begin the process of transformation.

“Meditations on the Tarot” contains 22 chapters, one for each of the major arcana. The final arcana is the “world”, and it ends with the challenge to bring Hermeticism into the world by meditating on the meanings of the minor arcana.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody.

~ Carl Jung

Suppose you observe two men, man A is aiming a gun at the man B whose arms are raised. As a strict positivist, who only accepts the evidence of the senses, that is the limit of what you can say about this “fact”. But have you really explained anything?

Man A could be robbing man B in the street. Man A may be a police officer placing man B under arrest. Or perhaps Man A is a private citizen looking for his daughter whom Man B kidnapped. Three quite different stories about the same alleged fact.

A physicist may treat man A and man B as physical objects and try to predict their future actions based on their mass, momentum, and so on. Of course, he will fail. We cannot understand the scenario without taking into account human consciousness, particularly in its relation to social and political structures that would legitimize or criminalize the observed facts. Similarly, there are “spiritual” facts, of a totally different kind, and these require their own methodology. Consider the following table:

First we have the traditional three kingdoms — nature, man, heaven — as expounded, for example, in the Tao Te Ching. Science, or positivism, is the study of nature in an external way, as a set of facts to observe and theorize about. Depending on the object of study, we have physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology.

Philosophy, or idealism, is related to the second kingdom. Its method is the contemplation of concepts transcending the natural world. Such systems as the Vedanta, Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Stoicism are the results of such contemplation.

Religion is not the result of purely human expression and creation. They enter the world as a revelation from a divine, supra-human, source. Certain of the world’s religious traditions have preserved that revelation in a superior way, and it is these that deserve our special study.

Boris Mouravieff, in Gnosis, shows the three realms directly influence our world; he refers to these influences as the A influence, B influence, and C influence; all our ideas can be traced to one of these influences. Valentin Tomberg looks deeper into things, and claims to understand the hidden inner nature of these influences. These he calls “occultisms” and categorizes them as mechanical, hygienic, and eugenic. This study, he claims, leads to a higher positivism, where we achieve direct and certain knowledge of higher things; this he calls spiritual science. Julius Evola similarly claimed that there is a positivism of metaphysical wisdom.

So we see that facts don’t speak for themselves and require a consciousness to penetrate into their inner nature.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press