The Way into the Flowering Heart
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
The Way into the Flowering Heart
Saturday, August 4, 2018
10. Mystical Heart Diagrams of Paul Kaym
The mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym
http://www.jacobboehmeonline.com/paul_kaym
@ Levity
The Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel, (A Bright, Shining Heart-Mirror), Amsterdam and Gdansk,
Heinrich Betkius,1680, a visual interpretation of John Tauler, in the form of sixteen copper-plate engravings. is thought have been been compiled and edited by
Paul Kaym from writings of Abraham von Franckenberg . The title page
indicates that it written on the doctrine of Johannes Tauler (an "illuminated" 14th century
German mystic), but it takes much from the mystical Jakob Boehme. Kaym had written to Boehme in 1620 asking him about
the 'end of time', and was answered in letters 8 and 11 of Boehme's,
later published, Epistles. (numbers 4 and 5 in
Collection 1 of THE EPISTLES OF JACOB BOEHME) which Kaym published as OF THE END TIMES.
The Mystical Heart Diagrams of Paul Kaym @ Jacob boehme online
Brightly illuminating Hertzens mirror: by means of a threefold presentation ..., I. The Erknnnis, II. The exercise, and then III. The secret of true godliness, that is, the whole act, Krafft and Hertzens theologia ... with highly valuable Kupffer figures ..., including a short-fisted yet complete prayer booklet, or devotional spear
by Wehrd, N. of ; Tauler, Johannes, ca. 1300-1361Reference:
Divine Diagrams: The Manuscripts and Drawings of Paul Lautensack (1477/78-1558). Berthold Kress
Monday, March 19, 2012
Norwegian Dower Chest, 1889
A hand made painted and rosemaled decorated Norwegian immigrant dower chest inscribed with the name Magdeli Jahns dr [dotter] Laupsa 1889. |
Eph 5- 15-21 Matt 22. 1-14 “Come behold King Solomon, with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, in the day of the rejoicing of his heart.”
After bidding for the chest we found the marriage troth handwritten in the till:
“Come
behold King Solomon, with the crown wherewith his mother crowned
him in the day of his espousals, in the day of the rejoicing of his heart.” Chests of old wood, fraktur, rosemaling, folk arts are as extinct to us as electricity soon enough. The new chair of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey, worries that the lack of redundancy in the internet puts all our social-technical systems at risk. Redundancy means here also that books, chests, linens, crafts, even writing itself, all things done by hand, set aside by the virtual machine invention will incapacitate society in their loss, for there is an app where typing is superseded and speech is automatically translated to text. This results in much loss of mental clarity and depth, for syntactic relations make new pathways in the brain that establish cognitive grasp.
Comparisons to follow in the manufacture of brain pathways Faulkner's sentences produce great mental strength in those who read them.
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Tuesday, August 23, 2011
2. Way Into The Flowering Heart
This is the same double day lily that grew in Anna's garden in Media but which Elizabeth revealed came originally from Uncle George's farm in Worcester, home of the Schwenkfelder emphasis on inner spirituality over outward form. They brought saffron to America and declined amalgamation with the United Church that swallowed most of the other pietistic groups. Their pastors were chosen by lot from the congregation like Mennonites. Several of Uncle George Reiff's daughters, Katie, Lena and Susie, were members. |
A lily is the centerpiece of this imagination that transfers Christ and His redemption to nature. Perhaps the likeness is more than symbolic. Among architectures of furnished rooms and philosophies of hymns, gardens and kitchens, this sacrament is the inner garment of earth.
The inward care of earth, the great poem of earth that remains to be written, Wallace Stevens says in The Necessary Angel), finds its unspoken search of the devotional attitude flowering in Johann Arndt's Paradies Gartlein, the book that would not burn (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 245, and in Gerhard Tersteegen's Spiritual Flower Garden of the Inner Soul (Geistliches Blumen-Gärtlein inniger Seelen, 1729, Germantown 1747), which was also sung. So if it is said that “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in concept and its motifs and designs are non-representational expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (Stoudt, vii), there is some likeness here with theologian Cornelius van Til calling it a Christian earth along with a Christian moon and sun. Citing Stoudt in defense of the lily is a little like taking Wallace Stevens as he is, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, for we delight to equivocate Dutch men. Stoudt says that when the underlying faith of this people was lost, so was its art. Wallace Stevens also changed from a Berks County farmer to a poetry sophisticate.
If you're of this folk you will be feeling better when you understand that before its elaboration in the writing of Boehme and in Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister the lily in the hymns and gardens is an image from the Song of Songs . This inner garden of the larger medieval setting of the terrestrial paradise, of the German Minnesong and baroque German religious poets (Stoudt, 56), Bernard of Clairvaux and even more obscure Dionysian Neoplatonists, contemplated the lily much as did the English metaphysical poets. Hymnists and poets “escaped to illuminated writings, to the decorated chest, and to pottery” (Stoudt, 92). So a four fold progression accounts the Bible, Boehme, hymns and folk art.
Fraktur |
This flower was to the soil what the human was to the animal, except that man was also a plant. For Boehme the image of God in man in the earth emerged as if from a plant: "For those who are a growth of such a kind, and are shooting forth into the fair lily in the kingdom of God and are in process of birth, have we written this book” (Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 4). So "he will blossom like a lily" (Hosea 14.5) making a paradise where none was before. This imaging of the man as a plant overcame the notion that nature was tainted with the human. As all creation groans and travails for its redemption, the man is both its fall and its rise.
A flowering heart would connote a flowering mind much as the mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym, Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (1680) give as a series of heart-head images engraved by Nicolaus Häublin, who illustrated the works of Boehme. Many works of alchemy find comfort in Boehme, who exchanged letters with Kaym whose16 engravings showing how the heart is attacked, receiving light waves from the sun and moon, as in letters 8 and 11 of Boehme's, later published, Epistles. Paul Kaym had written to Boehme in 1620 asking him about the 'end of time', and was so answered. Kaym also wrote commentaries on the Song of Songs and the Book of Revelation. That these are concomitant awith alchemical texts or other mystical Boehme letters is irrelevant to the fact an air clogged with unseen spiritual beings. The study of alchemical texts cannot produce such life altering effects, it rather defeats them, since the person is bogged in rituals and sacrifices that only embroiled them further in darkness, as witnessed by the brows of patrons at S. Weiser books. Why do the rich and the royal families seek alchemy then, if it’s only for profit? Because they have no other means of life.
The lily as an image of nature's redemption, is not however drawn strictly as a botanical lily. This Lily is unknown, a stylized “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions." Stoudt said that such collective images underlay the life of the Pennsylvania Dutch in hymns, flowers, pottery and linens and “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land” (3).
Detail, silver napkin ring Berks County c. 1880 |
Friday, April 22, 2011
6. The Inself Border. Good Friday Riding Westward. Leaf Meditation.
Twine a poem about a branch,
it will not leaf.
Tendrils do not speak.
The Inself speaks the plant.
What is the speech of corn?
What says aloe? Every thing has breath. Plants breathe light. THOSE WHO LOOK TO HIM ARE RADIANT. I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, a cloud of dew in the midst of harvest.
At Altamira many millennia of horses and bulls had no words, but rhythm and color. They had no language, nothing written the stones cry. Breuil says art was an extension of hunt, the worship of life, a celebration.
Inself sounds like Inscape. A true statement about Hopkins is that "seen from one point of view Hopkins' work is some dozen nearly perfect lyrics. Seen from another perspective it is a heterogeneous collection of documents...but within this seemingly chaotic mass we can detect a certain persistent structure." J. Hillis Miller. This describes life on the borders.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Introduction: Paradise Narrations
These amount to a naming of the animals, for to name a thing you must understand its nature, dream of it, meditate it like St. Francis, but not like a government biologist thinning wild horse herds or elk to protect cattle. It is the level of care than makes these things possible, for if you don't care you lose it, masquerading human good as a care of the wild. How Adam took care of the garden, meaning the lives within it, might need some examination, so preconditions of paradise exist, the main one is health; you must think free of hindrance, fatigue, prejudice, greed.
The Way into the Flowering Heart
The Way into the Flowering invented itself as ancestors wove the outside in and the inside out, making one seamless garment of belief. I...
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The mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym http://www.jacobboehmeonline.com/paul_kaym @ Levity The Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiege...
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