Revelation, divine

Dee, John.Mysteriorum libri quinti, or, Five books mystical exercises of Dr. John Dee an angelic revelation of cabalistic magic and other mysteries occult and divine revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly, A.D. 1581-1583 / edited by Joseph Peterson with a preface by Elias Ashmole. Edited by Joseph Peterson and Elias Ashmole. Silican, Dyfed, Wales Felindenys, 1985. xvi, 293 p. 

Contents l. The Sixt Book of the Author. . . 79p. 2. A Brief Exposition or Small Book of These Six Points. . . 12p. 3. A Consideration of the Divine Revelation. In a Hundred Seventy Seven Theosophick Questions. . . 75p. 4. A Fundamentall Instruction Concerning the Earthly And... 

Volume III. Printed for G. Robinson, MDCCLXXII. Contents l. Mysterium Magnum 507p. 2. Four Tables of Divine Revelation 20p. 

One of the best versions of Julian of Norwich is Revelations of Divine Love, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966, with Clifton Wolters s masterly introduction. Julian s Way by Rita Bradley, HarperCollins, London, 1992, brings out the allusions to the interconnectedness of things. 

Now published as Revelations of Divine Love, by Mother Julian of Norwich. 

From the beginning, the problem is to discover what the sickness is the sick one is suffering from and prognosticate the remedy. Medicine woman, she eats the mushrooms to see into the spirit of the sick, to disclose the hidden, to intuit how to resolve the unsolved for an experience of revelations. The transformation of her everyday self is transcendental and gives her the power to move in the two relevant spheres of transcendence in order to achieve understanding that of the other consciousness where the symptoms of illness can be discerned and that of the divine, the source of the events in the world. Together with visionary empathy, her principal means of realization is articulation, discourse, as if by saying she will say the answer and announce the truth. 

The religious festivities ended, the lords gathered to eat woodland mushrooms, which contain that which confuses the mind, as if they were intoxicating drinks while their minds were confused they saw visions, believed they heard voices therefore they took these hallucinations as divine notices, revelations of the future, and augury of things to come.13... 

The requirements necessary in order to arrive at this Secret, are the knowledge of Nature and of one s self. One may not understand the first perfectly, or even the second, without the aid of Alchemy. The love of wisdom, the horror of crime, and of falsehood, the avoidance of cacochemists, the association of the wise, the invocation of the Holy Spirit not to add secret to secret, to attach one s self only to one thing (because God and Nature delight in unity and simplicity), such are the conditions necessary for obtaining the divine revelation. 

Educated in the belief in the validity of these prophecies, and ancient religious tenets, it never seems to occur to anybody that law, both moral and civil, must have been the outgrowth of long periods of racial experience, rather than the direct revelation of deity. All the evil there is in the world is the direct result, 1. Of the establishment of law, 2. Of the divine authority investing such law, and 3. Of the administration of law by theological and civil legislators, priests, and lawyers. 

Anna Zieglerin, for instance, certainly drew on this dimension of alchemical tradition in the 1570s when she claimed that her alchemical knowledge, received through a kind of divine revelation, would prepare the world for the Last Days. See Tara E. Nummedal, "Alchemical Reproduction and the Career of Anna Maria Zieglerin," Ambix 48 (2001] 56-68. 

An English mystic, she was a follower of Jakob Boehme, and was closely linked to the Berkshire Boehmian John Pordage, traditionally seen as her Jiatei mjsterium. Perhaps her most well-known work is the Rerelation of Revelations, which describes her 1670 vision of the Virgin in the form of Sophia, or Divine Wisdom. Her work is notable for its peace and happiness in this, she calls to mind another great mystic, her contemporary Thomas Traherne. 

One possible approach to the resolution of this dilemma might be termed the way of the shaman one dispenses with all attempts at reductionist analysis and simply accepts the experience on its own terms, perhaps as a divine revelation from a source outside the self—a god within a plant, for instance. Indeed, the psychedelic experience is so profound and overwhelming that even scientifically sophisticated individuals can easily succumb to the misperception that the trip is in the drug. The alternative response, which might be characterized as the way of the alchemist, is to become utterly obsessional in the seeking of reductive explanations, and to construct wildly elaborate models in an attempt to integrate the irreducible reality of what is experienced into some scientific or, more often, quasi-scientific paradigm. This book tries, unsuccessfully perhaps, to steer a middle course between these two approaches. 

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