Kenny La Roche follows the lineage of the great Semantic Heroes and Warriors of his age. Menschenkenners like Vincent of Beauvais and Honorius of Autun. Men who wrestled with the realities of their age. Ideas like this: Does the world have a reality of its own or does it just aim at hidden realities thru the veil of the world’s appearances - thru Maya. Does it mean anything by itself or can it only point and aim at other meanings beyond itself? Honorius believed the world was pure symbol. It was literally the thought of god. The world was, in fact, god’s thought as “realized” thru his son and his son’s life - Since the son of god was the Word and the creator of matter, then the “world is an idea of God’s realized by the Word.” By reading nature you can read the thoughts of god. So knowledge is not the study of things in themselves but uncovering the hidden thoughts and plans of god. Honorius wrote: “Each creature is a shadow of the truth and of life.” The moral world and the visible world are one. The physical model adumbrates the spiritual model. Even the daily and the mundane were spots of Jesus hiding in plain view. Take for example a simple Walnut. When you broke thru its wooden shell you were pushing aside the wood of Christ’s cross. And then you’d find the outer green pulp which was Christ’s flesh, his humanity, which lay like a veil over the meat of the nut which was Christ’s gift of his flesh and blood as food for man. The meat of the nut was the Cardapetra, the seat of absconded or hidden divinity. All you had to do with your life was gather nuts like a good Christian. “Thus the reflective man walked in a forest of symbols, under a sky peopled with ideas.” Well told, Mary Karry, I said to Pooler. To the minds of the Middle Ages “the world was a book with a double meaning that could be deciphered with the help of the bible.” To the minds before Darwin and Natural History, before Marlin Perkin’s Wild Kingdom, even the lives and habits of flora and fauna had to be interpreted thru the lens of Christian symbolism. For instance, Elephants were widely believed to be the least amatory of all beasts who would only copulate when given Mandrake root by the female - who it was believed would present the root to the male in a kind of sign-release ritual.
Thus they demonstrated still the presence of the sin of Eve who by presenting the apple to Adam caused the fall of mankind. Mâle describes this scene: “thus it was god’s desire that the history of the fall should remain inscribed on Earth, and it could be found even in the habits of Animals.” In the lives of flora and fauna God expressed his plan for history and he wrote out the details in the perceived characteristics of their forms and habits. ll of history and all of nature became vast semantic and symbolic fields. But it was back inside the churches that this symbolic field reached its greatest depth, if not a form of insanity - and here we define insanity, like the French do, as a semantic field which may no longer cover the territory to be revealed. Nothing in a Cathedral points only to itself. Only function may be discerned by surface, and meaning can only be reflected by function, not grasped. So all of the Sacrédotal sang a litany of deeper significance. The Penitential Stole I brought back from Amsterdam last spring is called in the church the “light Yoke of Jesus” and Christians are taught to cherish the Yoke which binds them to the light and to Jesus thru the Sacrament of Penance - the redemptive dynamics of the forgiveness of sin, the powers of penance and pilgrimage as indulgence, the specified sum, all of it. So it is believed that the Oxen figuratively “kisses” his Yoke by its acceptance and by the animal’s subsequent toil in the hard fields. And so the Stole too is “kissed” by the Priest every time he puts it on or takes it off. You would parse the analog like this: As the Ox kisses his yoke in acceptance of his burden, so we kiss the Stole in acceptance of the Doctrine of Penance.
Click 5 times on the Miniature below to go Beasting with Jesus above.
Don't click that Kladrius Bird below - look's like trouble. Don't let him look away!
Click the Button of Christ the Vine to the right 9 times and Enter the Speculum.
Click the little Kladrius only if you've got Sack.
The more I looked at Cathedral Iconography thru the eyes of guys like Emile Mâle and Pooler Jones the more I could understand why their age was also called the Age of Encyclopedias. The most popular titles for tracts and books of the era bore words like Summa, Speculum, Imago Mundi. During this time Thomas Aquinas coordinated the editing of the whole body of Christian doctrine. Jacobus de Voragine collected the lives/legends of the Saints. Durandus recomposed and codified the Liturgy, especially the Mass. Vincent of Beauvais - upon whom Honorius based his work - wrote the 4 great books of the Medieval world - some believe they are the only 4 books a student of those times needs to read to understand the mindset of the age. Collectively they were called the Speculum Majus [the Great Mirror] and were thought to embody the supreme effort of learning, the grand fusion, a “conception of the Universe achieved,” a complete expression of everything which could be known. The 4 parts or books to the Speculum Majus were called:
The print above is older than the Vitrail at St Étienne-du-Mont and Mâle believes the Window is a copy of the Print. It does correspond point for point & is probably a Century or so before the Vitrail. Over time the figure of Christ moved from his Cross in the Fountain of Life to under his Cross/Press in the Pressoir Mystique. Something was troubling the Monkey about his God. Something was moving the Icon of Christ from the Loving Lamb to the Bloody Pulp of a Mel Gibson fit. Any retooling of the Anthropos is a powerful Sign of a wobble in Consciousness.
Click the Button below 4 times to look into the Mirror of the World of Vincent of Beauvais.
Now then,” Pooler said, let’s read this window. It was by this time dark in France, a winter’s evening in Paris the City of Light. The interior of St. Étienne-du-Mont was dimmed into heavy shadow; the Gothic parts of its mixed structure seemed to swell with dark pride. It was as if corners of the church knew something more and something deeper about the source of the light itself - so that as they lost it in the evening or in the waning of their age they could still stand in shadow with a fierce but quiet dignity. Maybe they were even smug. Stilled spaces losing the day. Only artificial illumination lighted the vitraux where Pooler and I stood. The window was itself backlit by two or three artificial candles of about 25 watts apiece which had been arrayed around the altar which the window fronted. The artist had used good glass and it focused the light well so that the entire composition glowed as if the light was coming from within the scene itself. That’s what we believed, Pooler told me. That all objects were the source of their own light. Light was not reflected from the surface but an intrinsic attribute of the center of all things. It was things which gave themselves to you so that you could see them.
So you see? Pooler asked me. It worked like this: When the Catholic Church came for the Hermeticists and Alchemists the way they came for the Cathars, the way they came for Bruno, it was necessary to have secret places to meet and exchange information which could keep the furor and the movements going. French Alchemists, gone deeply underground so as to avoid the Inquisition, set up a kind of Underground Railroad thru which they could smuggle each other, and books, manuscripts, and valuables, to places like Holland or England which were more tolerant. Kenny La Roche had been a link in that chain. The meeting place in Paris was the Vitrail of the Mystic Wine Press in St. Étienne-du-Mont, deep in the heart of the Left-Bank in Paris, a place because of its Universities which had always been tolerant to those fleeing the murderous doctrines of the Church. The shibboleth or password which was used to identify the hidden to the hidden was this: “Shall we gather at the river?” Whoa! I said, hold it. “Isn’t that an English or American Protestant Hymn?” It is now, said Pooler. On the way out, in the gloom, as they were closing the church for the night, we walked by the soft gleaming white tones of the Rood Screen which was now hovering in the dark like a stone raptor. “John the Baptist,” Pooler said. Huh? I answered. The Gospel of the Mass is read from the High Altar - it is the direct word of God as given by his 4 evangelists. The Epistle, which is read not from the Altar but from the Rood Screen, comes before the Gospel in the liturgy of the Mass. It is known as the “Precursor to the Word” - Jesus is the Word. John the Baptist is his Precursor. He spoke before Christ but for him. Like the Epistle, he is a Chosen Arrow, selected to Make Straight the Way of the Lord, soon to come. Therefore the Rood Screen is a Type of John the Baptist. “You give me a fucking headache, Pooler.” I said. “Then we’ll go get some more big Lucifers,” he said. And so we did. It was Solstice in the City of Light and for a moment, as the Sun stood still, everything was Perfect and in its place. But only for a Moment. Barber Perfect was coming and he wanted the Skull and the Long Bones of Baruch Spinoza and he had warned us that he had come to trade.