Holy Spirit

Some Paracelsian alchemists, especially Heinrich Khun rath (ca. 1560-1605) and Stefan Michelspacher (active ca. 1615-23), were objects of persecution on the part of hoth Lutheran and Catholic authorities. Khunrath was an alchemist from Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, but his theological stance was characteristic of the second generation of Protestants who felt that Luther s work had been left incomplete and that another religious reform was essential. In Khunrath s ideas this would take the form of a Lutheranism that could accommodate an autonomous personal piety. To express their Lutheran piety intellectually the alchemists employed the terms of Paracelsian theosophy, while they found an emotive outlet in the mystical experience of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. They felt themselves to be inspired (literally breathed ) by the Spirit, a force that they identified with alchemical pneuma. Khunrath called himself an enthusiast, hlled with the presence of the divine. 

Khunrath s engraving of Christ-Anthropos, the Archetype of the universe (fig. 3), initiated many of the elements later found in Fludd s prolific illustrations of the Macrocosmic Man. These included the use of the male nude, kabbalistic inscriptions, geographical compass-points, the diagrammatic structure of the Macrocosm and the motif of the dove of the Holy Spirit. The apocalyptic context of these images and their role in the Protestant Reformation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will be considered in the following chapter. 

The Calvinists had a rather different view of the Communion. In their interpretation, Christ s body was truly eaten, but in a spiritual form through the grace of the Holy Spirit. He qualified this belief, nevertheless, by his statement in his Institutes, IV (1559) that ... 

Men have rejected the true, living, and inward knowledge of God, and his Anointed and also of his Holy Spirit... but have placed their Reason in the midst of the Temple of God, in place or stead of GOD, and his Divine Light ... 

Through Paracelsus both the theological and the magical aspects of the Hermetica entered alchemical theory. He united the Pauline teachings on the inner Holy Spirit of Christ with the concept of Physis taught by Trismegistus ... 

In the Aurora Consurgens the south wind is fiery, like the alchemical fire, and so is the Holy Spirit see von Franz, Aurora Consurgens (1966), 386. 

Nonetheless, the few potent alchemical medicines that he did advocate reveal his unorthodox religious views. At the heart of Fludd s alchemy is the recipe for a red elixir which he described as being a catholic, that is, a universal medicine. It was the quintessence of both Nature and of the human soul, being permeated by the Holy Spirit of the resurrected Christ." It was said to be the alchemical equivalent of human blood, a tincture extracted from the red-oil of wheat. 

Paracelsian alchemists such as Fludd and Franckenberg were the spiritual descendants of the radical Spirituals of the 1540s—1560s who had placed more importance on the Christ-essence in the individual soul, than on the historical Christ. It was the Holy Spirit that had created the new man of St. Paul, through the gift of a state of... 

Waite, Arthur Edward. The brotherhood of the Rosy Cross being records of the house of the Holy Spirit in its inward and outward history. London William Rider ... 

Theosophia traces the long-hidden esoteric stream of Christian gnostic theosophy, revealing a "chivalric" religion of the Holy Spirit at the heart of Christianity. It shows that all three major branches of Christianity bear within them interrelated esoteric traditions. 

Nuttall, G.F. The Holy Spirit in Puritan faith and experience. Oxford Blackwell,... 

It remains, then, only to observe, that it has been abundantly shown, that the Holy Spirit directed the attention of the Jews, and has pointed out to the consideration of all ages, two sovereigns, designated by name long before their birth, and that many heathen historians and writers, as particularly Herodotus and Xenophon, have borne undesigned testimony to the exact verification of what the prophets described. 

In the New Testament, Kundalini is referred to as the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord, the Giver of Life. The planetary reservoir of Kundalini is termed the Laboratory of the Holy Spirit and initiation as the work of the Holy Spirit. Hence, Jesus question takes on deeper import, Know ye not that ye are temples of the Holy Spirit and that the Power of the Most High dwells within you The human body is the temple, and the heart is the temple s sanctuary (literally, holy place ). But the Adytum, the temple s Holy of Holies, is the pineal gland, the rudimentary third eye. The Stone is confected in the pineal gland by the Spirit-Fire of Chokmah and so the favorite name that the old alchemists awarded themselves was philosophers, the lovers of Wisdom. ... 

In the myth, the Grail appears upon the Table Round when the king and all his knights are gathered for court on the feast of Pentecost. Pentecost, or Whitsun, as it is also called, occurs fifty days after Easter (Christ s resurrection) and celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples when they are gathered together, in the same upper room in which they had celebrated the Last Supper with their master. The Divine Spirit descends like tongues of fire. 

The Sanskrit noun kundalini literally means the coiled one. This refers to the reservoir of the Fiery Power coiled at the base of the spine, and also to the spiral movement of the one radiant energy. The Qabalah teaches that the original kundalini center is in Malkuth (the laboratory of the Holy Spirit) and that the Yesod center is a storehouse for that energy. Kundalini is also called the Serpent Power, because when the ancients observed the serpent casting its skin, the snake was taken to... 

Oh melt me and transmute me in this Thy holy Fire, so that on the day at Thy command the Fiery Waters of the Holy Spirit draw me out from the dark dust, giving new birth and making me alive with His breath. 

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