Periodically I get a bee in my bonnet and return to research and reading around a few books that seem to me to have some real meaning. One of these is Comte de Gabalis of course. The others though are also worthy of mention. They are The Chymical Wedding of CRC and John Dee’s The Hieroglyphic Monad. There is a common set of linkages in these three books that doesn’t stop at the use of Dee’s Monad on the cover of The Chymical wedding!
To cut right to the chase, for me, the commonality is the Elements and Elemental magic. This may be obvious in Comte de Gabalis but maybe not so obvious in the other two books – until you see it that is. Comte de Gabalis is a strange book with its humorous discussions of sexual relationships with Sylphs, Undines and the like and its demand that you forgo sexual relations with women (or men in the case of a woman!) but, it has to be read with a key to understand what the book is really saying about the make up of Men in terms of the Elements. I get glimpses of this key and the underlying meanings.
Dee’s Monad as a symbol points to, and he explains somewhat cryptically, how the Elements and the metals/planets ought to be looked at and I believe in this is the key to how the body’s energy centers (chakras) are to be worked. The Chymical wedding may be looked at as nothing more than an account of the Monad in my opinion and so the two supplement each other very well.
But I always end up back at Bardon. That Czech magician who, for some, is to be distrusted as a stage magician and for others is unique amongst men. Bardon, living in relative isolation for much of his life through the Nazi and early Communist era here in the Czech Republic takes an almost Elementary (pun intended) approach to personal development and the work. The Elements are the key for him and his, sometimes incomplete, explanations of the Elements and their polarities and relationships (the tetrapolar magnet for example), resonate strongly with what I glimpse at in Dee, Gabalis and The Chymical Wedding…..
Hopefully, this may make some sense to the reader because I will confess I have a picture that becomes almost visible and then fades rapidly leaving me with a sense that I must continue to seek in this direction in order to understand. More and more however, I am beginning to come to some conclusions and practices for personal development that seem to resonate with these authors……