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Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon / “Universal Notebook,”(pdf) – Novalis
“and you,” she went on, addressing me, “have received more than others, see that you also give more!”
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (German: Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459) is a German book edited in 1616 in Strasbourg. Its anonymous authorship is attributed to Johann Valentin Andreae. The Chymical Wedding is often described as the third of the original manifestos of the mysterious “Fraternity of the Rose Cross” (Rosicrucians), although it is markedly different from the Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis in style and in subject matter.
It is an allegoric romance (story) divided into Seven Days, or Seven Journeys, like Genesis, and recounts how Christian Rosenkreuz was invited to go to a wonderful castle full of miracles, in order to assist the Chymical Wedding of the king and the queen, that is, the husband and the bride.
This manifesto has been a source of inspiration for poets, alchemists (the word “chymical” is an old form of “chemical” and refers to alchemy—for which the ‘Sacred Marriage’ was the goal) and dreamers, through the force of its initiation ritual with processions of tests, purifications, death, resurrection, and ascension and also by its symbolism found since the beginning with the invitation to Rosenkreutz to assist this Royal Wedding. (read more: wiki)
[page 150, 151] Thus we see how these elemental beings are the intermediaries between the earth and the spirit-cosmos. We see the drama of the phosphorescent upsurge of the undines, which pass away in the sea of light and flame of the higher hierarchies as their sustenance; we see the upward flashing greenish-reddish lightning, which is breathed where the earth continually passes over into eternity, the eternal survival of the fire spirits, whose activity never ceases. For whereas, here on earth, birds tend to die at a particular time of year, the fire spirits make sure that what is to be seen of them pours out into the universe throughout the entire year. Thus the earth is as though cloaked in a mantle of fire. Seen from outside the earth appears fiery. But everything is brought about by beings who see the things of the earth quite differently from how man sees them. As already mentioned, man’s experience of the earth is of a hard substance on which he stands and walks about. For the gnomes it is a transparent globe, a hollow body. For the undines water is something in which they perceive the phosphorizing process, which they can take into themselves as living experience. Sylphs see in the astrality of the air, which emanates from dying birds, something that makes them into more actively flashing lightning than they would otherwise be, for in itself the lightning of these sylphs is dull and bluish. And then again the disintegration of butterfly existence is something which continually envelops the earth as though with a shell of fire. Beholding this, it seems as though the earth were surrounded by a wonderful fiery painting; and there to one side, when one looks upwards from the earth, one beholds these lightning flashes, these phosphorescent and evanescent undines. All this shows us that here on earth the elemental nature spirits move and work actively, striving upwards and passing away in the fiery mantle of the earth. In reality, however, they do not pass away, but they find their eternal existence by passing over into beings of the higher hierarchies.
◊ The notion of a black secret technology allows Afrofuturism to reach a point of speculative acceleration. ◊ Blaccelerationism proposes that accelerationism always already exists in the territory of blackness, whether it knows it or not. ◊ Sinofuturism is a darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia; It connects seemingly heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary capitalism. ◊ Shanghai futurism ultimately depends on breaking free from the now common assumption about the nature of time. ◊ T he unfolding story of Gulf Futurism is a strange mitosis happening out of the sight of the master planners and architects; it’s the splitting of worlds, of then and later, us and them, real and unreal. ◊ The Dubaification of the world is already a thing of the present and the recent past, and has completed its ideological mission at lightning speed.
“Vollmann’s undertaking is in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences.”
TimeSpace Warps 