Hoping that all are well – in both Hemispheres, where due to the facility of email – I receive news of glorious Spring, and oncoming Winter!

A re-haul of the Computer – and an update to Windows 98 – meant a 10 day holiday from the keyboards. I am enjoying the Art Class I am giving to a dozen Children – although it is exhausting.

PLEASE NOTE THAT I HAVE PUBLISHED:

Further information will be added to this site.

There is a slight chaos in this posting – but I have decided to send it out anyway. Some very crucial political material is enclosed herein – on resistence to The World Trade Organisation, Genetically modified food and so forth. Love and Peace, Samten

While searching for images on VENUS - for that Tarot Department I came across:

where I found the:

and other Cranch paintings

gives one an idea of what can be achieved on a humble scale.

More Ambitious is the:

In this manner, we can see how religion, in some of its lowest manifestations, must part company with science.

In particular, the above diatribe, has been inspired by my reading of: Langdon, S. Tammuz and Ishtar, A Monograph upon Babylonian Religion and Theology, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914. This book has a wonderful chapter on Astral Deities, which traces the origin of astrological attributions in cuneform texts over 4,000 years old. As this material unfolds in my research, so I am ever amazed at the accuracy of the Church of Light system, which I have been using for almost 40 years. For example, what is the Constellation SERPENS doing in Libra? S.Langdon shows the links between the Goddess and the Serpent - an Ophidian Goddess - not so far from Venus-Aphrodite as one might expect. And many other revelations - all to be processed in due time. Then from the first quarter of this century also comes: Wensinck, A. J., "Tree and Bird as Cosmological Symbols in Western Asia," Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wet. te Amsterdam, Afd. Letterkunde, Johannes Müller, Amsterdam, 1921. I found a tatty copy in a University Library here - and have scanned the entire text, plus illustrations - and will see when I get to Amsterdam if copyright has lapsed and whether it would be possible to publish this excellent booklet on the Web.

While waiting for this appearance, with baited breath I presume, you can assuage your intellect with these words describing the booklet by Zofia Ameisenowa:

"Wensinck’s book, a very scholarly work based on the investigation of original sources, reveals the close connection between the cosmological Tree of Life and the solar bird (Eagle, Phoenix, Bennu, Simurgh). Wensinck describes the varying topography of the Tree of Life — the Tree of the Centre, of the East, West, South and North, and the Tree as guardian of the Gate of Heaven. He also considers the changing conception of the Tree as Tree of Life, Tree of Paradise, Haoma and Tree of all Seed, Tree of Day and of Night together with the parallel conception of it as the Tree of Hell or of Death in the literary and pictorial traditions of the peoples of the Near East between about 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D."

This accurate description of Wensinck, is from: Zofia Ameisenowa, The Tree of Life in Jewish iconography, JWCI, Vol. 2, 1939, pp. 326 - 344. Which is in itself an extraordinary journey through Tree Symbolism. At the same time, we have the magnificent 'The Philosophical Tree' by Carl G. Jung; and the equally brilliant 'The Tree of Life' by Roger Cook (Thames and Hudson, London.) Zofia Ameisenowa gives extensive further bibliographical material - and I have yet to update the research by seeing what has been published on the subject over the past six decades.

Wensinck, A. J. La Pensee de Ghazzali.

Wensinck, A. J. The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis & Historical Development

Wensinck, A. J. Mystic Treatises By Isaac Of Nineveh

 All the above has considerable importance to the theme of The Tree in Alchemy.

And so we go onwards, gathering, harvesting - and pressing the juice out of the symbols, to enrichen our inner lives. And, remember, this is all the Work of the Devil! What an inversion!

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 LADY OF REALISATION - is NOW AT:

 Dear Friends,

After a period of over three weeks on the Ligurian Coast, mainly reading and writing (with pen and paper!) I returned to Turin to a week knocked out by a bad cold. So really the whole of September has passed with very little outward communication. Now that I am back on my feet again, a great deal of work has been accomplished and the Ardere e Versare Workshop starts on Friday 08^th October - and will continue every Friday night - through October and November, if all goes well. Thereafter -I may do a bit of travelling for the first weeks of December, or in any event set out for Amsterdam - where I look foreward to a Winter Retreat - courtesy of Tony van der Veen and Chris Hirnet, while they are in South Africa.

Then - I have closed down the Mweb account in South Africa as I have had some difficulty sending payments from Italy to South Africa - and more trouble form the service providers. I have now moved everything to XoOOM.com - and eventually hope to obtain a Domain through this serice provider.

I am also planning to release an entire whack of new material - staring with the full set of 50 cards of the Tarot of Mantegna; a series of images and studies on the Alchemical Androgyne, material on Dionysus, Babylonian susmbolism, and heaven knows what else. My fingers are racing across the keyboards converting everything into .html files.

Plese keep in touch. There are far too many friends who do not acknowledge this newsletter. Let us be kind to one another.

Love and Peace, Samten

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While in Levanto, I read Wolfram von Eschenbachs great medieval classic Parzival. This was necessary in the light of my ongoing interest in Gral Legends aand the Templars, - and some short essays have been generated from this study - which I will make available soon.

In connection to the Parzival - Web Research indicates that this is another growth industry. For the moment here are a few clues, for further research - and a possible Workshop on Graal Symbolism in 2000.

Background Information on Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette . Chrétien de Troyes and Some Poetic Issues

Last but not least -many people have been interested in the ramifications of the Golden Dawn on English Culture and Letters, a excellent book has appeared and a chapter can be sampled here:

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An afternoon in La Spezia to visit one of the nicest Museums I have seen in years. Spent a precious few hours here - you can visit as well - and get an overview. Please do:

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This looks like an Interesting Project:

Terence McKenna

COINCIDENCIA OPPOSITORUM - A UNION OF OPPOSITES

 Alchemy was not about the transmutation of crude metals into gold, but was a magical art designed to bring the soul to completion.

--Terence McKenna

 This film-in-progress from Mystic Fire is a visually rich exploration of a lost world of magic and alchemy set in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, at a time when alchemy reached a feverish pitch of interest in the European imagination.

 The story, presented by Terence McKenna, centers on the alchemical/political/religious movements surrounding the

Renaissance magus Dr. John Dee -- mathematician, astrologer and advisor to Queen Elizabeth the First. John Dee laid the ground for an alchemical and magically based society that took root and flourished twenty years later in the marriage of the princess, Elizabeth Stuart of England, to Frederick V, the Palatinate prince of Heidelberg.

The film, shot in England, Heidelberg, and Bohemia; will includes enacted scenes from Dee's diary; as Dee and his skryer Edward Kelley invoke the guidance of angels in seances as they traveled through Northern Europe on Dee's mission to Bohemia -- a little known incident in European history which holds clues to understanding the fate and evolution of modern science and the nature of a lost world of magical and alchemical thinking.

 Photos (from top counterclockwise) Terence McKenna on location at Heidelberg Castle; the gateway to the castle built by Frederick V for Elizabeth on her birthday; alchemical laboratory below the castle. Photos by Liza Stelle.

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 31^st August 1999

 "All things are full of Gods," said Euripides; it is their personal belongings that furnish our world. The event is there—though not in a mirror, for if the mirror vanish the event will still be there. Or better: the event is the mirror self-sustaining its own reflection. Have faith in the everlasting indestructible ground of images. They do not need us."

James Hillman [1]

Dear Friends,

From the 'Mundus Imaginalis' of Henry Corbin, to the Imaginal Alchemy of James Hillman, from the images of 'The Memory Theatre' to the Sacred Tarot, - it is the images which have survived, in some cases, for millenia, not the ideologies. This is what I have come to realize lately, and it is a comfort to say that one knows what direction ones work must take.

I am very grateful to Anderson Bakewell, a recent visitor to Turin with his daughter Petra - for the gift of a book with literally thousands of pictures. It is called "The Hermetic Museum. Alchemy and Mysticism" by Alexander Roob, published by Taschen, 1977. It measures about 14 X 19.5 cm and is almost 14 cms thick - if you do not thrill to its esoteric images you will certainly enter the collective unconsciousness if this book falls on your head. This is an Art Historian's view of Hermetic, Rosicrucian, Masonic and Alchemical symbolism - richly interlaced with images and observations of the work of William Blake and James Joyce. 700 pages of it - with about twice as many illustrations, many of them in colour. Here one views, for the time, images from the Aurora Consurgens, that I have never seen before, a delicious coloured tinted version of the Mutus Liber, and sprinkled everywhere the usual crop of old faithfuls from the Atalanta Fugiens, and Mylius. Illustrations from the Collected Works of Kircher have also been widely used. The text is sparse - and complements the images. To compliment this feast -I have just also read - The Picture of Dorian Grey, by Oscar Wilde, and On the Road by Jack Keroac.

I am doing a bit of travel for the first part of September, to the sea and to see friends - and then serious work will begin. By early December I hope to re-construct a few Web sites - and start a little Online E-Zine, to which you are welcome to contribute.

I am also in the process of building up a small site in Italian - to channel some of the local energies here. Bascially, I have spent the past month in a massive scanning operation - trying to reduce the bulk of my paper archives to digital form. More on that later.

Love and Peace, Samten.

FULCANELLI - Ed from Arizona suggested this intersting material - Some more material to add to the Fulcanelli industry:

HERMETICA - The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation, with notes and introduction by BRIAN P. COPENHAVER - Provost, College of Letters and Science and Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles, Cambridge University Press, 1992. There is a later paperback edition. This descerition is from the Dust Jacket:

"The Hermetica are a body of theological-philosophical texts written in late antiquity, but believed during the Renaissance (when they became well known) to be much older. Their supposed author, a mythical figure called Hermes Trismegistus, was thought to be a contemporary of Moses. The Hermetic philosophy was regarded as an ancient theology, parallel to the revealed wisdom of the Bible, supporting biblical revelation and culminat-ing in the philosophy of Plato, Plotinus and others in the Platonic tradition. This new translation is the only English version based on reliable texts of the Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius. Professor Copen-haver's introduction and notes provide a context of interpretation taking into account recent advances in Hermetic scholarship, making this accessible edition an indispensable resource to scholars in ancient philosophy and religion, early Christianity, Renaissance literature and history, the history of science, and the occultist tradition in which the Hermetica have become canonical texts."

MYTHOLOGY - DRAGONS

My friend Tiziana Ferrari approached me to help in the envisioning of a Conference that she is organizing for a new NGO she has created 'Agenzia Terzo Mondo'. She is working with Constanzo Allione - [originally marrier to Tsultrim Allione, whose book 'Women of Wisdom' is a good classic.] Constanzo has formed and organization for his work with Siberian Shamans WHERE THE EAGLES FLY you can go to the Website - which well stocked with pictures, programmes and biographies of the shamans. Very impressive.

I am sure that the above organisation would be interested in having documentation on the Sacred Caves near Rustlers Valley, South Africa, - as well as if there would be a possibility for the Siberian shamans to visit there - and if any South African sangomas would be interested to visit Europe - I think one African representative is coming from West Africa - see the site events.

Find here, the works of Peter Lamborn Wilson, religious historian and author of the recent book, Pirate Utopia: Moorish Corsairs, European Renegades (Autonomedia). He spends his days studying comparative liturature and the origin of religion, and is primarily interested in Islamic studies. Here is also an article on Celtic folklore on the search for the mythical fruit of knowledge; the divine bread of life and death; the gateway to the galactic soul-electric; known in days of old as SOMA.