One Cannot Pass By Poetry

One cannot pass by poetry if one attaches value to tradition. The whole of the Bible breathes poetry—epic, lyric and dramatic—and likewise the Zohar is full of poetry.

….poetry is élan and élan gives wings to imagination, and without winged imagination—directed and controlled by the strict laws of intrinsic coherence and conformity to facts—no progress is possible. One cannot pass by poetry, because one cannot do without the élan of imagination. One should only be on guard that one is not carried away by an imagination which seeks brilliance and not truth. With respect to an imagination that loves truth, i.e. which loves and seeks only what is coherent and in conformity with facts, it is what we name “genius” or fruitfulness in the domain of human endeavour.

Hermeticism, also, cannot pass by poetry. What is the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus if not a piece of sublime poetry. Certainly, it is not “only poetry” in the pure and simple sense of verbal and musical aesthetics, since it advances a great mystical, gnostic, magical and alchemical dogma, but no more is it a discursive treatise in prose. It is a song of truth concerning three worlds.

And the Major Arcana of the Tarot? Are they not a call to the winged imagination, within a framework and in a direction proper to each of them? They are symbols. But what does one do with symbols if not apply the inspired imagination to them, directed towards their meaning via a will obedient to the laws of intrinsic coherence and in conformity with outward and inward—material and spiritual—facts of experience? Now, poetry is not simply a question of taste, but rather one of fertility (or sterility) of the spirit. Without a poetic vein there can be no access to the life of the Hermetic tradition.

Let us therefore love poetry and respect the poets. For it is not dukes, margraves and counts who constitute the true nobility of mankind, but rather the poets. One is noble (in the sense of the “nobility of the heart”) in so far as one is a poet at heart. And since every human soul is in principle a priest, a nobleman and a worker at one and the same time, let us not smother the nobility within us by an overestimation of practical aims or by a preoccupation with our salvation, but on the contrary let us ennoble our work and our religion by bringing in the breath of poetic inspiration.

Anonymous ~ Meditations On The Tarot

❏