The Rose from Elsewhere is composed of 8 concentric corollas enclosed in a circle, which interpenetrate and blossom into 8 smaller petals, each of a different color. Both the corollas and the petals converge at the center of the circle, integrating into a single point. The opening of the petals is enclosed in a second circle where, by communion, an octagonal geometry is inscribed. The Rose from Elsewhere is apparently still, but in reality it is always in motion and in accordance with the cycles of the universe, since it reflects two essential eternal movements: the projection of the interior towards the exterior and of the center towards the circumference, and vice versa. The 8 colors make up a musical octave, and each color in turn contains its own octave. The 9 octaves, conceived in a circular triplet, vibrate the rhythm of the eternal experience of the Absolute. Blossoming from the central seed, the Rose expands in the circle on multiple dimensions and geometrically generates a triangle, a square, a cross and a pyramid from which, to the attentive eye, the 5 solids that structure the formal reality of the universe are revealed. The summa of the Rose, guided by intuition, leads to the numerical quintessence sacred to the Initiates and therefore to the cosmic completeness of the divine Man.
The Rose from Elsewhere animates the one who remembers to be a vibrant fire in this world and who aspires, burning with its fire, to make the Roses bloom on his own Cross.
The Hermetic Rose
Superior Alchemy
In Western esotericism, the rose has become over the centuries one of the most significant emblems of the manifestation of the Divine. In fact, observing its best-known structure, its symbolic graphic representation, we see that the flower from a center widens, expanding outwards with numerous petals and concentric corollas. Through this splendid flower, nature represents to us the emanation of the Absolute, which for alchemical hermeticism is a field of constant energy and creativity, but indeterminate and indefinite, given that such energy and creativity is Eternal and Infinite.
In religions, the rose symbolizes the Mother fertilized by the Father, who generated the Son through the Holy Spirit. In alchemy, the symbol of the black rose is synonymous with the Cosmic Mother, the First Matter, the Mother Substance condensed from an unmanifest metaphysical state to a real manifest one, by the intelligent spirit of an Absolute Principle. The motionless Thought of the Absolute is the potential of the matrix, venerated in ancient times also as the Black Virgin, whose emanation of a fertile and dark protean chaos creates multiple forms and structures, similar to the countless varieties of roses with various colors and scents. In the graphic representation of the rose we find another important element: the circle, which encloses the petals and corollas and represents the multiple planes of manifestation of the One. The esoteric tradition represents the whole of the One and the All with the circular labyrinth. Alchemical hermeticism compares the Absolute to a circle, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Contemporary physics also affirms something similar: a single universal force, the unified field of the four forces (in esotericism the four Powers of the divine Mother) that determine all the phenomena of the world, namely the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. It would be an intelligent network of synchronous interactions, both between the subatomic particles of matter and between the celestial bodies in the cosmos.
This Universal Mind is represented by the convolutions of the labyrinth, which by analogy resemble those of the neural network of a brain and the grid of the energy flow of the cosmos.
One of the most important Rosicrucian symbols depicts five roses, one in the center of the cross and one on each arm. In fact, Five is the number that symbolizes the qualities of the Initiate, represented by the five-pointed star, the distinctive sign of the Sons of Hermes or alchemists. This numerical symbol is represented in Pythagorean science and also by Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, who passes from the crucifixion of the ordinary man in the Four, in the four gross elements of matter, to his liberation in the Five, in the alchemical quintessence, which transmutes the square of matter into the circle of the Absolute: it is the “squaring of the circle”. The roses on the cross are the allegory of individual existence aimed at spiritual research, existence that faces the mortifying ordeal of the cross or the processing in the alchemical crucible to be refined in the elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire, through necessary tests of purification of life represented by the thorns of the rose.
In the Greek and Roman world, the rose is associated with the myth of Aphrodite and the hunter Adonis. This myth tells us about those who are prey to sexual impulses and greedy for material goods, exploiting nature for selfish purposes with arrogance and insensitivity, but who through the rejection of the lower nature can transform the profane love of the material sphere into divine and otherworldly love. Aphrodite, lover of the young hunter, can do nothing to save him from death caused by the attack of a wild boar, traditional symbol of the spiritual order that violently destroys the material order. In helping her dying beloved, Aphrodite wounds herself with brambles from which, soaked in her blood, red roses bloom. Zeus, moved by the goddess’s pain and delighted by the sublime flower, allows Adonis to lie for only four months in Hades and to live four months in the world of the living and for another four wherever he would have preferred (3 times 4). For this reason, the red rose becomes a symbol of sublimated love that conquers the death of the soul identified in ordinary life, an emblem and symbol of spiritual Rebirth.
In the Egyptian world, the rose is a sacred flower to the goddess Isis, in Mesopotamia to Ishtar, in Anatolia to Cybele. These deities represent the Great Mother and the return to prenatal origins, that is, the backward process of initiatory death necessary for a radical spiritual regeneration, through a resetting of the pollution and conditioning attributable to the existential events to which every human being is subject by spiritual choice.
In Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, the protagonist of the first initiatory novel in literature is transformed into a donkey by the spell of a sorceress, who represents the great illusion of the influences of the external world, and regains human form by eating a crown of vermilion roses offered to him by the high priest of Isis.
In the archaic esoteric tradition, the crown of roses or the rose garden are the path of man who, through a series of tests, is reborn from the initiatory point of view and experiences a non-ordinary reality through the integration of Body, Soul and Spirit.
Among other things, the rose is often represented in magical pentacles, in pagan, mystical and cabalistic rituals. Medieval alchemists inherited the symbolism of the rose from the Greco-Alexandrian culture and often included its image in their treatises, which refers to the Rose Garden or Rosary of the Philosophers.
The white rose, sometimes replaced by the symbol of the white swan, the lily or the pelican, indicates the philosopher’s stone that is not yet perfect and is associated with the Minor Mysteries, that is, the result of the intermediate phase of the alchemical Work, the White Work or Albedo in Latin, concrete and accessible with the processing and purification of the elements Earth and Water, through the interaction of the opposite elements Air and Fire. This operation is called the Black Work or Nigredo.
The red rose with the Major Mysteries indicates the perfect philosopher’s stone and therefore the outlet in the Great Work, the result of the phase called Red Work or Rubedo, accessible thanks to the processing and purification of the elements Air and Fire, through the interaction of the elements Earth and Water, already previously sublimated with Albedo.
CONTINUA…
