XII. Chapter 3. The Cult
Providential forces always stand on guard. They are always ready to give a helping hand to each and every one of us. They tirelessly work upon every single soul and its destiny. Each soul is an arena for their struggle with the demonic principle, and the whole of the life of the soul consists of a continuous chain of choices rising before the “I”, which either expedite or paralyze the help coming from the principle of the Light.
The soul is just like a traveller feeling his or her way across a rickety bridge. From the other side, there is a helping hand; yet, in order to grab hold of it, the traveler is to reach out his or her hand in that direction. Any good deed, any right choice, and any light-filled movement of the soul, prayer included, make up the hand reaching out to the forces of the Light. This essentially answers the question, why pray, why participate in worship. I am using the word “prayer” in the broadest sense here. It is a solitary communication of the soul with God or with the forces of the Light cocreating with Him; so too the state of adoration, awe, and spiritual delight, in which the heart becomes overtaken when contemplating Beauty, Loftiness, or Greatness; a catharsis uplifting the human soul, with a work of art being the catapult; finally, its participation in purifying and elevating temple rites.
Prayer can be solitary (e.g. in a cell) or collective when its wordless song is being weaved into the solemn flow of worship. Both these kinds of activities are equally important. Solitary prayer is an exertion of the soul when – far apart from the spiritual Heart of the world, yet connecting to it through a single and unique string – it makes this string twang in a high pitch, fending off nightly shadows. As for collective prayer, it is a concerted exertion of thousands of such strings, it is a choral filling up each soul with a foretaste of the universal harmony. For worship is not an arbitrary activity thought up by humans, but a mystical one, that is, the one reflecting the harmonious reality of higher spheres and bringing down its powers into our heart. Hence the profound justifiability of what we call “the cult”. Hence the intense prayerful life setting the ground for the creative and mystical life of the coming temples of the Rose of the World.
What is a rite? It is a sacred ceremony grounded in the inner experience of the person and aimed at seeking help from the extrasensory light-filled forces or for preventing adversarial influences, which emanate from the extrasensory forces of darkness.
What is a sacrament? – It is a sacred ceremony, whereby the superconscious roots of the human being will take in Divine grace. That is, the “will” is being nourished in its advancement toward harmony between the individuality and the universe, spirit and flesh, human and Deity.
For this reason, any indifference of the consciousness or lack of faith on the part of the recipient of the sacrament does not incapacitate this activity. Hence comes the ability to perform the sacrament to atheists, those seriously ill, and children. Yet, the involvement of the mind and personal faith facilitates and expedites the flow of the effluences of Grace from the superconscious roots of the will into the sphere of the waking consciousness.
The transrational and transpersonal nature of the sacraments also warrant their efficacy, even given the lack of faith and mystical concentration on the part of those performing them. Hence the independence of the sacrament’s power from the personal qualities and psychological state of the ecclesiastic. Yet, his or her focus, faith, and penetration into the meaning of what is being performed becomes transferred to the sacrament’s recipient, that is, facilitates his or her apprehension of the grace-filled effluence.
A sacrament can be performed by anyone. Yet, for better efficacy, it is more advisable that it be performed by those who have gone through temptation, and have a certain spiritual and cultural background, culminating in their own initiation, which is a sacrament in and of itself. An austere years-long temptation, which an ecclesiastic is supposed to go through, would make him or her more conscious of what is being done and more focused during the sacrament, thus ensuring the highest efficacy thereof.
Yet, the nature of the sacrament is such that it contains nothing spiritually harmful either for the believer performing it, albeit he or she may not be initiated, or for its recipients. Therefore, performing the sacrament by laymen cannot be banned. Given a pressing need for the sacrament and the absence of an ecclesiastic, such an activity is all the more welcome. The sacrament is not to be performed only in one case: when one of its participants – either the celebrant or the recipient – has a sacrilegious motive.
While acknowledging the mystical efficacy of the sacraments, which had been established by the ancient Christianity and been performed by ecclesiastics of Christian churches, one, however, cannot leave unnoticed that, due to shifts in the global religious consciousness over the last centuries, our modified understanding aims to attach an essentially new significance to certain sacraments, the Eucharist being among them. Most importantly, the new religious consciousness intensifies the inner need for the sacraments, of which neither the patriarchs of the great Christian churches, nor the founders and creators of non-Christian denominations could have dreamt. Moreover, it is not just about the sacraments: this need is sweeping across the entire field of sacred rites. It longs for collective prayers to be offered up to the hierarchies of the invisible world that had been beyond the consciousness of the creators of the ancient religious forms. It yearns for the rituals, which would hallow the entirety of life: not only the upward vertical momentum of the human soul, that is, the elevation of the soul, but also its horizontal development – the enlargement of the soul’s compass, as it were. This yearning, which had emerged long ago and has never quite been stilled, reached its highest in the epoch of the global wars. It has reached such a degree of intensity that the outcry, rising up to the heavens, cannot but elicit a response.
The Spirit breathes where it wants. The contention, something to the effect that the revelation in the post-apostolic centuries had hallowed only the church fathers and been crystallized in the ecumenical councils, is characteristic of the type of consciousness which abides in the forms of old Christian confessions and only in them. The new type of consciousness hears the revelation resound as in the hymns of the Vedas and Ikhnaton, so too in the epiphanies of Gautama Buddha and Ramanuja, Valentine and Maimonides, in Goethe’s “Faust”, in the musical dramas of Wagner, and in the stanzas of many great poets – the new consciousness hears it as clearly in all these as in the hymns of John of Damascus or in Vasily the Great’s liturgy. Moreover, it hears it in its own depths and yearns for its perfect materialization.
Humanity had been waiting for too long for a new voice to start ringing out from the church pulpits and pedestals. All existing creeds proved to be only capable of preserving the old content and old forms. The voice is ringing from where it has never been expected: from the depths of everyday life, from prison cells, from solitary midnight rooms, from the thicket of the forest. Its heralds have not been ordained by the ecclesiastics of either the West or the East. Neither the Orthodox patriarchs, nor the Roman pope, nor the theologians of Protestant churches have found acceptance for that which they have been preaching. Yet, a day will come, when what they have annunciated will become the heart wherein, having forgotten their old contentions, theologians, patriarchs, and archpriests of all religions will concur and say: Yes.
Shall I give a pale glimpse of the impressions from the temple worship without resorting to large excerpts from poetic and musical worship texts? Yet, coverage of the worship texts is far beyond the scope of my book. They are already sensed and resound in the depths of the soul, and everyone intuiting them aspires to prepare themselves for their verbal and musical embodiment. One already distinguishes certain phrases, certain fragments of choirs and consecrations; at times, one clearly sees the snippets of those sacred rites full of indescribable beauty. It is not in my destiny to live to see those sacraments “in flesh and blood” rather than as a creative intuition, in the temples erected on the vergrads’ squares and filled with a singing and supplicating throng. I am praying to God to extend my days such that, having accomplished the rest, at least I would be able to listen into and compile the last of my books – worship in the Rose of the World.
After all, what can I do here and now? Just to make a few sketchy instructions in a dry and passionless language about the inner space of those shrines and the purpose of some of them.
The center of the vergrad, its heart and, at the same time, the pinnacle is the Sun of the World temple. Without it, it is impossible to picture vergrads in small towns, which would do without many other constructions.
Since my early years, the image of this temple has haunted my mind’s eye. I see it as too general an outline to be able to put it down as a vivid blueprint. Yet, I become overtaken with a feeling of incomparable magnificence every time this image pops in my mind. Plated with a white marble of sorts, it nestles on top of the hills towering over the riverbend, with wide stairs leading to it. Each stair rises to it from one of the four sides as though expanding the heavy pediment and cutting through the ring of the monumental colonnades, which perch on high. Each stair faces a high white wall with three semicircular gates and a golden emblem at the top – a winged heart inside the winged sun. Rising above the colonnades and central wall are the roofs: making up an intricate system of hefty golden steps, they serve as pedestals of sorts for five white, slightly tapering towers. The central tower is larger than the others; yet, all five are embellished with narrow vertical divisions and crowned with golden domes. It appears that clouds are holding onto their strange crosses.
Essentially, each tower crowns a special side-altar underneath it. The ledge-like roofs underneath the central tower are more magnificent; below is located the inner space of the shrine, wider and more grandiose – heading upwards, it morphs into the inner hollow of the main tower. There, at the giddying height of the dome, the emblem of the glaring Sun, inscribed into the equal-ended cross with four tapering rays, shines evenly through slowly changing bluish plumes.
As I see it, the nave of the central shrine is skirted with rows of columns, which support the choir balcony, and faces the wide “ambo” (an oblong altar with steps on each end, translator’s note); the latter is detached from the main altar with an arcade. Festive worship happens there, when the behind-the-altar “leadlight” (colored glass leaded together, t/n) image slides apart, thus making a tall opening into the outer space. There shapes up the north-eastern leg of the horizon, and the morning disk of the summer sun rises from behind the city roofs so as to parade along the heavenly arch of the longest day in the year. Through the breach behind the altar, supplicants come out to the open terrace overlooking the city that faces the northeast. Here, visible both to those gathering on the square and participating in the temple prayers, the precept performs a high service to the Sun in its three facets: as an embodiment of a great life-giving spirit; as the womb, which has spawned forth the physical substance of the entirety of the Earth and of everything earthly; and as the image and likelihood of the Supreme.
Fitted out with state-of-the-art technologies, the temple would be capable of ridding the congregation of any outer inconveniences or hindrances and enable the externalities of any complex and magnificent activities presupposing a crowded gathering. The switchboard to the mechanical part would be taken out to the choir balcony, and so too the organs, as well as the seating for orchestras and the clergy.
I picture side-altars of the Most Holy Mother and God-Son being to the right and to the left from the main altar wherein the First Hypostases is worshipped. They would open into the main hall with two high arches; heavy drapes would be curtaining off the embrasures of those arches on a normal day. On looking back, one would see similar arches sideways from the main entrance, with side-altars for the Synclite of Russia and the Synclite of the World standing behind.
In the vergrads of smaller towns, there is no call to have individual temples dedicated to one of the Trinity’s hypostases or individual temples – to Synclites: the need for those cults can be satisfied with the worship in the corresponding side-altars of the Sun of the World temple. Yet, apart from those side-altars, large cities will inevitably see special temples having precisely this purpose.
The cult of the Supreme, the cult of the Sun of the World will not exhaust religious conceptualization, in which the Rose of the World will clothe historical and cultural events, as well as the personal happenings of human life. The sacrament of birth; the rites of passage corresponding to the different ages of children and their maturation; the sacrament of marriage and the sacrament of divorce; the sacrament of camaraderie – a sacred action blessing the union of two souls in a lofty friendship; blessing creativity, whether it be art, education, medical treatment, social life, love, family, enlightenment of animals, or forms and kinds, which are not foreseeable to us as of yet – all this will become a part of the Rose of the World’s rites. Some of these will be oriented toward the hierarchies of the Christian Transmyth, others – toward the Synclites of metacultures and the Synclite of humankind, toward the Great Elementals and Mother Earth, and, finally, toward Her, upon whose advent we are placing our hopes.
Oh, the cult of the Most Holy Mother and Her expression on the earth – Zventa-Sventanna – will be as beautiful as a spring sky and as spotless. This cult should have no male ecclesiastics. Caution and care should stand guard against any murk and be more alert and meticulous in that cult than in any other. It would be impossible to warrant its purity, should ecclesiastics of both genders or even men alone take part in its rituals. Only the utmost lucidity of consciousness and purity of the soul can ensure that the ecclesiastic would not mar those sacred acts, unintentionally or otherwise, with droplets of subtle psychic venom, would not adulterate the atmosphere of the most pure worship with effluences of spiritual amorousness and some emotional-poetic exaltation. For this reason, male ecclesiastics are to be barred entrance into the altars of the Most Holy Mother and Zventa-Sventana, except on two or three special celebrations when one of the archpriests would serve together with the priestesses. That is why the temple of the Most Holy Mother is connected with a female monastery of sorts – not like the one that used to cripple destinies with harsh ordeals in the times past, but where strict monastic vows are taken for a strictly defined term, not exceeding a decade. No one would object to this. Quite the reverse: upon expiration of the term, the church will bless the still-in-her-prime priestess to withdraw from the monastic vows and come back into worldly life in order to fulfill her universal human duty: love, motherhood, and nurturance.
There will be, perhaps, yet another category amid ecclesiastics of this second, blue hierarchy: women taking to the temple life in their twilight years when everything personal has burned out of their souls. Only old age would allow them to go into the fields wherein, apart from the cult, “the people of the blue clothes” will be expressing themselves, be it education, medical treatment, and, perhaps, ethical rehabilitation of criminals.
There is an immense field of human life, with which, so far, the only sacrament of the Christian cult has been directly linked: the relationship between men and women and its associated sacrament of marriage. In the chapter on Femininity, I have already pointed out that the great ascetic era – the one that has been imprinted so hardhandedly and implacably in the historic Christianity – underplayed marriage and childbearing, albeit hallowed them as a sacrament, while prioritizing the much higher regarded monastic life. It would be more accurate to say that marriage and childbearing had been simply tolerated – just that. Only some are aware of the following contradiction in the marriage ritual: the very hierarchies, in which blessings are sought to sanctify marriage, favor celibacy and self-restraint as a straighter road toward them. The hierarchies of the Christian Myth are precisely such. Is it appropriate to ask permission for a spousal cohabitation from Jesus Christ whereas the very thought of His human marriage would come as sacrilegious? Or from great saints that have achieved saintliness precisely in singlehood? Or from the Holy Virgin Mary? They speak of the miracle in Cana of Galilee. Yet, is it conceivable to pit this singular episode in the whole evangelic history against the imperative spirit of all other Gospel chapters, against countless sayings of evangelists, against Apostles and Christ Himself that hold up renunciation from all earthly attachments as the loftiest ideal? Hadn’t the mission of Christ in Enrof been interrupted, it is quite plausible that the miracle in Cana of Galilee would have become the beginning of the chain of His activities to completely transform the physical reality of marriage and love. Yet, it was not to be. It should come as no surprise that the verbalization of the sacrament of marriage proved to be somewhat contrived and dry. It feels that “Rejoice, O Isaiah!” was inserted by some friar as ordered by higher religious hierarchs. It seems that it did not occur to anyone in Christianity to sanctify such a tremendously important event as the birth of a child with a profound and elaborate ritual. As for divorce, this turned out nearly impossible, both theologically and factually: “What God has put together, let no man put asunder”.
Yet, when the will of God manifests in the union of the two betrothed, it does not show as thunder and lightning or some miraculous intrusion of the hierarchies into our visible world but as the voice of love that is now speaking in their hearts, as their own desire for this union to happen. This voice of love is nothing but a Divine voice. The sacrament of marriage is a mystical act, aimed at having the higher spiritual forces descend into the will of the two beloved ones so as to help them realize this love in their spousal cohabitation without muddying, distorting, and exhausting this love. Well, what if their hearts are willing to part? If one of them has ascertained that love is no more, and, in its stead, a new love toward another person has emerged in a similarly mysterious way? Not as a fleeting infatuation but as a deep and undefeatable feeling? Who has said, from where is it known, what sage has proclaimed that love can come only once in a lifetime and never again? What Puritanical ignorance in human souls can push the way of a select few onto others? Even if it is not about discovering a new love, the couple may have just realized that to continue living together is nothing but a mutual, useless torture – isn’t this yearning for freedom a manifestation of the very Divine Will in the human being? Christ’s words “What God has put together, let no man put asunder” is not a binding legal rule but a moral behest, that is, a spiritual warning. It means that if God – the voice of the mutual love heard by both hearts – has united their lives, let each of them be cautioned against undoing the union under the influence of all too human temptations: indulging in the base freedoms of the self, egotism, fleeting fancies and passions, laziness, lust, and impatience. Then why do we manacle the entire life with the inseverable bonds, which the sacrament of marriage presupposes? As though a sacrament is incapable of inviting spiritual help into such a compass of efforts that would see marriage as a long-term rather than life-long or eternal enterprise! Why do we sanctify the union of the beloved couple with one sacrament and are unwilling to sanctify the pain of their parting with another? Can’t we have a mystical act, which would invite new spiritual powers into the will of the parting to help them cleanse their hearts from mutual animosity, petty discontent, jealousy, self-love, grudges? Can’t we dignify the inner act of parting such that the parting spouses would remain mutually respectful, mutually well-disposed, and mutually grateful friends?
Besides, marriage itself can be of different kinds and forms. To my mind, when a youth and a maiden stand before the altar, there is no call to impose matrimonial vows upon them for more than several years, and it is more becoming to ask for Mother Earth’s and even the All-Human Aphrodite’s rather than for the Christian Transmyth hierarchies’ help at that. Only over years, once the union has proved to be strong and the love between the partners – to be lasting, another sacrament is possible, this time addressing only Mother Earth and the Sun to send down a more grace-filled help for the next, lengthier stage, albeit not for eternity just as yet. Once, finally, this term is over, and the love between the spouses has grown deeper and stronger, endured all trials of life, and been on the rise; once, in the face of imminent separation in the clutches of death, they feel the need for their love to be blessed from above and thus outgrow into an eternal feeling – only then the priestess of the Most Holy Mother would seal their spiritual destinies with a sacrament of eternal marriage, of their eternal companionship in all the worlds.
With regard to the architecture and artistic style of the temples dedicated to the Most Holy Mother, I picture these, in a way, as varieties of the Sun of the World temples. It is not hard to guess that the prevailing color in their interior is going to be hues of blue whereas the building exterior’s finishing will be either silver-bluish or combining gold, blue, and white.
It would be only natural to suppose that temples to the God-Son, mainly dedicated to the image of Jesus Christ, will neighbor the temples to the Most Holy Mother. It does not seem to me that this cult will be much different from that of the old Christianity; however, certain differences are unavoidable. The ancient liturgical texts are weighed down with the burdensome legacy of the Old Testament, of which the spirit is precisely that component of Christianity to be revised in the first place. Everything, suffusing worship with the antiquated spirit of Judaism, cannot be left as is. From the other side, the Christian cult does not contain even a glimpse of what has made up the ascending path, activities, and creativity of Jesus Christ since his transformation, known as “the ascension” in the Gospels. Meanwhile, nineteen centuries have passed since then. In their unflagging struggle with the Antigod’s forces, the Savior and His great friends have transformed entire systems of worlds in all the metacultures by turning eternal tormentories into purgatories. The greatest of the enlightened, those making up the Elite of Shadanakar, have been creating truly spectacular worlds. Just as a reminder, the foundations of Usnorm, the layer of the eternal worship of all the humankinds in Shadanakar, was created by the great spirit that had last walked the earth as John the Evangelist. Neither is it possible to forget that the planes of such worlds as the Heavenly Russia, Roman-Catholic Eden, Byzantium Paradise, and Monsalvat are created by the great spirits, known as the Apostles Andrew and Peter, John the Baptist, and the legendary Titurel mentioned only in esoteric teachings. For how long are we supposed to keep a deathly hush about the ongoing and multifarious struggle, which the forces of Christ have been waging with the thousand-faced spawns of the Antigod, and his ever-changing global schemes? For how long and in the name of what do we have to pretend that we know nothing about the global prospects awaiting us – about the coming antichrist, his reign, and his demise, about what had been ciphered two thousands years ago in the prophecy on the Second Coming and the Last Judgment? Who gave us the right to keep the lid on the dizzying joy from knowing about the imminent “thousand year reign” when millions of the enlightened – those having ascended, are ascending, and due to ascend into the Zatomises of metacultures – will receive their birth on the transformed earth? When the time will come for the millennia, of which the purpose is in saving all those fallen into the bottom layers of Shadanakar, in reuniting with them, in struggling to jolt demonic forces into the ascending trajectory, into the enlightenment of all the layers of bramfatura, and in the expiation of the Antigod himself? All this and much more cannot be kept unmanifest in the cult of Christ the Savior; we do not have the right to silence all this in our worship of the Logos.
The third of the Rose of the World’s ecclesiastic hierarchies is going to be associated with this cult. Whilst the first of them, that is, the hierarchy of the Triune God, symbolized with the Sun of the World and its first hypostases God-Father, can be assigned with the color gold and the second one – with sky-blue or blue, the ecclesiastics of the God-Son, Planetary Logos, Jesus Christ can be legitimately clothed in white in accordance with mystical tradition.
The soul is just like a traveller feeling his or her way across a rickety bridge. From the other side, there is a helping hand; yet, in order to grab hold of it, the traveler is to reach out his or her hand in that direction. Any good deed, any right choice, and any light-filled movement of the soul, prayer included, make up the hand reaching out to the forces of the Light. This essentially answers the question, why pray, why participate in worship. I am using the word “prayer” in the broadest sense here. It is a solitary communication of the soul with God or with the forces of the Light cocreating with Him; so too the state of adoration, awe, and spiritual delight, in which the heart becomes overtaken when contemplating Beauty, Loftiness, or Greatness; a catharsis uplifting the human soul, with a work of art being the catapult; finally, its participation in purifying and elevating temple rites.
Prayer can be solitary (e.g. in a cell) or collective when its wordless song is being weaved into the solemn flow of worship. Both these kinds of activities are equally important. Solitary prayer is an exertion of the soul when – far apart from the spiritual Heart of the world, yet connecting to it through a single and unique string – it makes this string twang in a high pitch, fending off nightly shadows. As for collective prayer, it is a concerted exertion of thousands of such strings, it is a choral filling up each soul with a foretaste of the universal harmony. For worship is not an arbitrary activity thought up by humans, but a mystical one, that is, the one reflecting the harmonious reality of higher spheres and bringing down its powers into our heart. Hence the profound justifiability of what we call “the cult”. Hence the intense prayerful life setting the ground for the creative and mystical life of the coming temples of the Rose of the World.
What is a rite? It is a sacred ceremony grounded in the inner experience of the person and aimed at seeking help from the extrasensory light-filled forces or for preventing adversarial influences, which emanate from the extrasensory forces of darkness.
What is a sacrament? – It is a sacred ceremony, whereby the superconscious roots of the human being will take in Divine grace. That is, the “will” is being nourished in its advancement toward harmony between the individuality and the universe, spirit and flesh, human and Deity.
For this reason, any indifference of the consciousness or lack of faith on the part of the recipient of the sacrament does not incapacitate this activity. Hence comes the ability to perform the sacrament to atheists, those seriously ill, and children. Yet, the involvement of the mind and personal faith facilitates and expedites the flow of the effluences of Grace from the superconscious roots of the will into the sphere of the waking consciousness.
The transrational and transpersonal nature of the sacraments also warrant their efficacy, even given the lack of faith and mystical concentration on the part of those performing them. Hence the independence of the sacrament’s power from the personal qualities and psychological state of the ecclesiastic. Yet, his or her focus, faith, and penetration into the meaning of what is being performed becomes transferred to the sacrament’s recipient, that is, facilitates his or her apprehension of the grace-filled effluence.
A sacrament can be performed by anyone. Yet, for better efficacy, it is more advisable that it be performed by those who have gone through temptation, and have a certain spiritual and cultural background, culminating in their own initiation, which is a sacrament in and of itself. An austere years-long temptation, which an ecclesiastic is supposed to go through, would make him or her more conscious of what is being done and more focused during the sacrament, thus ensuring the highest efficacy thereof.
Yet, the nature of the sacrament is such that it contains nothing spiritually harmful either for the believer performing it, albeit he or she may not be initiated, or for its recipients. Therefore, performing the sacrament by laymen cannot be banned. Given a pressing need for the sacrament and the absence of an ecclesiastic, such an activity is all the more welcome. The sacrament is not to be performed only in one case: when one of its participants – either the celebrant or the recipient – has a sacrilegious motive.
While acknowledging the mystical efficacy of the sacraments, which had been established by the ancient Christianity and been performed by ecclesiastics of Christian churches, one, however, cannot leave unnoticed that, due to shifts in the global religious consciousness over the last centuries, our modified understanding aims to attach an essentially new significance to certain sacraments, the Eucharist being among them. Most importantly, the new religious consciousness intensifies the inner need for the sacraments, of which neither the patriarchs of the great Christian churches, nor the founders and creators of non-Christian denominations could have dreamt. Moreover, it is not just about the sacraments: this need is sweeping across the entire field of sacred rites. It longs for collective prayers to be offered up to the hierarchies of the invisible world that had been beyond the consciousness of the creators of the ancient religious forms. It yearns for the rituals, which would hallow the entirety of life: not only the upward vertical momentum of the human soul, that is, the elevation of the soul, but also its horizontal development – the enlargement of the soul’s compass, as it were. This yearning, which had emerged long ago and has never quite been stilled, reached its highest in the epoch of the global wars. It has reached such a degree of intensity that the outcry, rising up to the heavens, cannot but elicit a response.
The Spirit breathes where it wants. The contention, something to the effect that the revelation in the post-apostolic centuries had hallowed only the church fathers and been crystallized in the ecumenical councils, is characteristic of the type of consciousness which abides in the forms of old Christian confessions and only in them. The new type of consciousness hears the revelation resound as in the hymns of the Vedas and Ikhnaton, so too in the epiphanies of Gautama Buddha and Ramanuja, Valentine and Maimonides, in Goethe’s “Faust”, in the musical dramas of Wagner, and in the stanzas of many great poets – the new consciousness hears it as clearly in all these as in the hymns of John of Damascus or in Vasily the Great’s liturgy. Moreover, it hears it in its own depths and yearns for its perfect materialization.
Humanity had been waiting for too long for a new voice to start ringing out from the church pulpits and pedestals. All existing creeds proved to be only capable of preserving the old content and old forms. The voice is ringing from where it has never been expected: from the depths of everyday life, from prison cells, from solitary midnight rooms, from the thicket of the forest. Its heralds have not been ordained by the ecclesiastics of either the West or the East. Neither the Orthodox patriarchs, nor the Roman pope, nor the theologians of Protestant churches have found acceptance for that which they have been preaching. Yet, a day will come, when what they have annunciated will become the heart wherein, having forgotten their old contentions, theologians, patriarchs, and archpriests of all religions will concur and say: Yes.
Shall I give a pale glimpse of the impressions from the temple worship without resorting to large excerpts from poetic and musical worship texts? Yet, coverage of the worship texts is far beyond the scope of my book. They are already sensed and resound in the depths of the soul, and everyone intuiting them aspires to prepare themselves for their verbal and musical embodiment. One already distinguishes certain phrases, certain fragments of choirs and consecrations; at times, one clearly sees the snippets of those sacred rites full of indescribable beauty. It is not in my destiny to live to see those sacraments “in flesh and blood” rather than as a creative intuition, in the temples erected on the vergrads’ squares and filled with a singing and supplicating throng. I am praying to God to extend my days such that, having accomplished the rest, at least I would be able to listen into and compile the last of my books – worship in the Rose of the World.
After all, what can I do here and now? Just to make a few sketchy instructions in a dry and passionless language about the inner space of those shrines and the purpose of some of them.
The center of the vergrad, its heart and, at the same time, the pinnacle is the Sun of the World temple. Without it, it is impossible to picture vergrads in small towns, which would do without many other constructions.
Since my early years, the image of this temple has haunted my mind’s eye. I see it as too general an outline to be able to put it down as a vivid blueprint. Yet, I become overtaken with a feeling of incomparable magnificence every time this image pops in my mind. Plated with a white marble of sorts, it nestles on top of the hills towering over the riverbend, with wide stairs leading to it. Each stair rises to it from one of the four sides as though expanding the heavy pediment and cutting through the ring of the monumental colonnades, which perch on high. Each stair faces a high white wall with three semicircular gates and a golden emblem at the top – a winged heart inside the winged sun. Rising above the colonnades and central wall are the roofs: making up an intricate system of hefty golden steps, they serve as pedestals of sorts for five white, slightly tapering towers. The central tower is larger than the others; yet, all five are embellished with narrow vertical divisions and crowned with golden domes. It appears that clouds are holding onto their strange crosses.
Essentially, each tower crowns a special side-altar underneath it. The ledge-like roofs underneath the central tower are more magnificent; below is located the inner space of the shrine, wider and more grandiose – heading upwards, it morphs into the inner hollow of the main tower. There, at the giddying height of the dome, the emblem of the glaring Sun, inscribed into the equal-ended cross with four tapering rays, shines evenly through slowly changing bluish plumes.
As I see it, the nave of the central shrine is skirted with rows of columns, which support the choir balcony, and faces the wide “ambo” (an oblong altar with steps on each end, translator’s note); the latter is detached from the main altar with an arcade. Festive worship happens there, when the behind-the-altar “leadlight” (colored glass leaded together, t/n) image slides apart, thus making a tall opening into the outer space. There shapes up the north-eastern leg of the horizon, and the morning disk of the summer sun rises from behind the city roofs so as to parade along the heavenly arch of the longest day in the year. Through the breach behind the altar, supplicants come out to the open terrace overlooking the city that faces the northeast. Here, visible both to those gathering on the square and participating in the temple prayers, the precept performs a high service to the Sun in its three facets: as an embodiment of a great life-giving spirit; as the womb, which has spawned forth the physical substance of the entirety of the Earth and of everything earthly; and as the image and likelihood of the Supreme.
Fitted out with state-of-the-art technologies, the temple would be capable of ridding the congregation of any outer inconveniences or hindrances and enable the externalities of any complex and magnificent activities presupposing a crowded gathering. The switchboard to the mechanical part would be taken out to the choir balcony, and so too the organs, as well as the seating for orchestras and the clergy.
I picture side-altars of the Most Holy Mother and God-Son being to the right and to the left from the main altar wherein the First Hypostases is worshipped. They would open into the main hall with two high arches; heavy drapes would be curtaining off the embrasures of those arches on a normal day. On looking back, one would see similar arches sideways from the main entrance, with side-altars for the Synclite of Russia and the Synclite of the World standing behind.
In the vergrads of smaller towns, there is no call to have individual temples dedicated to one of the Trinity’s hypostases or individual temples – to Synclites: the need for those cults can be satisfied with the worship in the corresponding side-altars of the Sun of the World temple. Yet, apart from those side-altars, large cities will inevitably see special temples having precisely this purpose.
The cult of the Supreme, the cult of the Sun of the World will not exhaust religious conceptualization, in which the Rose of the World will clothe historical and cultural events, as well as the personal happenings of human life. The sacrament of birth; the rites of passage corresponding to the different ages of children and their maturation; the sacrament of marriage and the sacrament of divorce; the sacrament of camaraderie – a sacred action blessing the union of two souls in a lofty friendship; blessing creativity, whether it be art, education, medical treatment, social life, love, family, enlightenment of animals, or forms and kinds, which are not foreseeable to us as of yet – all this will become a part of the Rose of the World’s rites. Some of these will be oriented toward the hierarchies of the Christian Transmyth, others – toward the Synclites of metacultures and the Synclite of humankind, toward the Great Elementals and Mother Earth, and, finally, toward Her, upon whose advent we are placing our hopes.
Oh, the cult of the Most Holy Mother and Her expression on the earth – Zventa-Sventanna – will be as beautiful as a spring sky and as spotless. This cult should have no male ecclesiastics. Caution and care should stand guard against any murk and be more alert and meticulous in that cult than in any other. It would be impossible to warrant its purity, should ecclesiastics of both genders or even men alone take part in its rituals. Only the utmost lucidity of consciousness and purity of the soul can ensure that the ecclesiastic would not mar those sacred acts, unintentionally or otherwise, with droplets of subtle psychic venom, would not adulterate the atmosphere of the most pure worship with effluences of spiritual amorousness and some emotional-poetic exaltation. For this reason, male ecclesiastics are to be barred entrance into the altars of the Most Holy Mother and Zventa-Sventana, except on two or three special celebrations when one of the archpriests would serve together with the priestesses. That is why the temple of the Most Holy Mother is connected with a female monastery of sorts – not like the one that used to cripple destinies with harsh ordeals in the times past, but where strict monastic vows are taken for a strictly defined term, not exceeding a decade. No one would object to this. Quite the reverse: upon expiration of the term, the church will bless the still-in-her-prime priestess to withdraw from the monastic vows and come back into worldly life in order to fulfill her universal human duty: love, motherhood, and nurturance.
There will be, perhaps, yet another category amid ecclesiastics of this second, blue hierarchy: women taking to the temple life in their twilight years when everything personal has burned out of their souls. Only old age would allow them to go into the fields wherein, apart from the cult, “the people of the blue clothes” will be expressing themselves, be it education, medical treatment, and, perhaps, ethical rehabilitation of criminals.
There is an immense field of human life, with which, so far, the only sacrament of the Christian cult has been directly linked: the relationship between men and women and its associated sacrament of marriage. In the chapter on Femininity, I have already pointed out that the great ascetic era – the one that has been imprinted so hardhandedly and implacably in the historic Christianity – underplayed marriage and childbearing, albeit hallowed them as a sacrament, while prioritizing the much higher regarded monastic life. It would be more accurate to say that marriage and childbearing had been simply tolerated – just that. Only some are aware of the following contradiction in the marriage ritual: the very hierarchies, in which blessings are sought to sanctify marriage, favor celibacy and self-restraint as a straighter road toward them. The hierarchies of the Christian Myth are precisely such. Is it appropriate to ask permission for a spousal cohabitation from Jesus Christ whereas the very thought of His human marriage would come as sacrilegious? Or from great saints that have achieved saintliness precisely in singlehood? Or from the Holy Virgin Mary? They speak of the miracle in Cana of Galilee. Yet, is it conceivable to pit this singular episode in the whole evangelic history against the imperative spirit of all other Gospel chapters, against countless sayings of evangelists, against Apostles and Christ Himself that hold up renunciation from all earthly attachments as the loftiest ideal? Hadn’t the mission of Christ in Enrof been interrupted, it is quite plausible that the miracle in Cana of Galilee would have become the beginning of the chain of His activities to completely transform the physical reality of marriage and love. Yet, it was not to be. It should come as no surprise that the verbalization of the sacrament of marriage proved to be somewhat contrived and dry. It feels that “Rejoice, O Isaiah!” was inserted by some friar as ordered by higher religious hierarchs. It seems that it did not occur to anyone in Christianity to sanctify such a tremendously important event as the birth of a child with a profound and elaborate ritual. As for divorce, this turned out nearly impossible, both theologically and factually: “What God has put together, let no man put asunder”.
Yet, when the will of God manifests in the union of the two betrothed, it does not show as thunder and lightning or some miraculous intrusion of the hierarchies into our visible world but as the voice of love that is now speaking in their hearts, as their own desire for this union to happen. This voice of love is nothing but a Divine voice. The sacrament of marriage is a mystical act, aimed at having the higher spiritual forces descend into the will of the two beloved ones so as to help them realize this love in their spousal cohabitation without muddying, distorting, and exhausting this love. Well, what if their hearts are willing to part? If one of them has ascertained that love is no more, and, in its stead, a new love toward another person has emerged in a similarly mysterious way? Not as a fleeting infatuation but as a deep and undefeatable feeling? Who has said, from where is it known, what sage has proclaimed that love can come only once in a lifetime and never again? What Puritanical ignorance in human souls can push the way of a select few onto others? Even if it is not about discovering a new love, the couple may have just realized that to continue living together is nothing but a mutual, useless torture – isn’t this yearning for freedom a manifestation of the very Divine Will in the human being? Christ’s words “What God has put together, let no man put asunder” is not a binding legal rule but a moral behest, that is, a spiritual warning. It means that if God – the voice of the mutual love heard by both hearts – has united their lives, let each of them be cautioned against undoing the union under the influence of all too human temptations: indulging in the base freedoms of the self, egotism, fleeting fancies and passions, laziness, lust, and impatience. Then why do we manacle the entire life with the inseverable bonds, which the sacrament of marriage presupposes? As though a sacrament is incapable of inviting spiritual help into such a compass of efforts that would see marriage as a long-term rather than life-long or eternal enterprise! Why do we sanctify the union of the beloved couple with one sacrament and are unwilling to sanctify the pain of their parting with another? Can’t we have a mystical act, which would invite new spiritual powers into the will of the parting to help them cleanse their hearts from mutual animosity, petty discontent, jealousy, self-love, grudges? Can’t we dignify the inner act of parting such that the parting spouses would remain mutually respectful, mutually well-disposed, and mutually grateful friends?
Besides, marriage itself can be of different kinds and forms. To my mind, when a youth and a maiden stand before the altar, there is no call to impose matrimonial vows upon them for more than several years, and it is more becoming to ask for Mother Earth’s and even the All-Human Aphrodite’s rather than for the Christian Transmyth hierarchies’ help at that. Only over years, once the union has proved to be strong and the love between the partners – to be lasting, another sacrament is possible, this time addressing only Mother Earth and the Sun to send down a more grace-filled help for the next, lengthier stage, albeit not for eternity just as yet. Once, finally, this term is over, and the love between the spouses has grown deeper and stronger, endured all trials of life, and been on the rise; once, in the face of imminent separation in the clutches of death, they feel the need for their love to be blessed from above and thus outgrow into an eternal feeling – only then the priestess of the Most Holy Mother would seal their spiritual destinies with a sacrament of eternal marriage, of their eternal companionship in all the worlds.
With regard to the architecture and artistic style of the temples dedicated to the Most Holy Mother, I picture these, in a way, as varieties of the Sun of the World temples. It is not hard to guess that the prevailing color in their interior is going to be hues of blue whereas the building exterior’s finishing will be either silver-bluish or combining gold, blue, and white.
It would be only natural to suppose that temples to the God-Son, mainly dedicated to the image of Jesus Christ, will neighbor the temples to the Most Holy Mother. It does not seem to me that this cult will be much different from that of the old Christianity; however, certain differences are unavoidable. The ancient liturgical texts are weighed down with the burdensome legacy of the Old Testament, of which the spirit is precisely that component of Christianity to be revised in the first place. Everything, suffusing worship with the antiquated spirit of Judaism, cannot be left as is. From the other side, the Christian cult does not contain even a glimpse of what has made up the ascending path, activities, and creativity of Jesus Christ since his transformation, known as “the ascension” in the Gospels. Meanwhile, nineteen centuries have passed since then. In their unflagging struggle with the Antigod’s forces, the Savior and His great friends have transformed entire systems of worlds in all the metacultures by turning eternal tormentories into purgatories. The greatest of the enlightened, those making up the Elite of Shadanakar, have been creating truly spectacular worlds. Just as a reminder, the foundations of Usnorm, the layer of the eternal worship of all the humankinds in Shadanakar, was created by the great spirit that had last walked the earth as John the Evangelist. Neither is it possible to forget that the planes of such worlds as the Heavenly Russia, Roman-Catholic Eden, Byzantium Paradise, and Monsalvat are created by the great spirits, known as the Apostles Andrew and Peter, John the Baptist, and the legendary Titurel mentioned only in esoteric teachings. For how long are we supposed to keep a deathly hush about the ongoing and multifarious struggle, which the forces of Christ have been waging with the thousand-faced spawns of the Antigod, and his ever-changing global schemes? For how long and in the name of what do we have to pretend that we know nothing about the global prospects awaiting us – about the coming antichrist, his reign, and his demise, about what had been ciphered two thousands years ago in the prophecy on the Second Coming and the Last Judgment? Who gave us the right to keep the lid on the dizzying joy from knowing about the imminent “thousand year reign” when millions of the enlightened – those having ascended, are ascending, and due to ascend into the Zatomises of metacultures – will receive their birth on the transformed earth? When the time will come for the millennia, of which the purpose is in saving all those fallen into the bottom layers of Shadanakar, in reuniting with them, in struggling to jolt demonic forces into the ascending trajectory, into the enlightenment of all the layers of bramfatura, and in the expiation of the Antigod himself? All this and much more cannot be kept unmanifest in the cult of Christ the Savior; we do not have the right to silence all this in our worship of the Logos.
The third of the Rose of the World’s ecclesiastic hierarchies is going to be associated with this cult. Whilst the first of them, that is, the hierarchy of the Triune God, symbolized with the Sun of the World and its first hypostases God-Father, can be assigned with the color gold and the second one – with sky-blue or blue, the ecclesiastics of the God-Son, Planetary Logos, Jesus Christ can be legitimately clothed in white in accordance with mystical tradition.
