The Green Ray

If The Green Ray enjoys a certain fame following the cinematic success of Eric Rohmer's film of the same name, less known are other appearances, both literary and esoteric, of the light that returns hope and confirmations to those who dare to go. over after losing course and landmarks.


di Alexander Gabetta
cover: solar eclipse as seen from Lompoc, California, 1923

Β 

Β«Elle est retrouvΓ©e!
Quoi? l'Γ©ternitΓ©.
C'est la mer mΓͺlΓ©e
Au soleil. "

- A. Rimbaud, "L'Γ©ternitΓ©"

On the border between sea and sky, where two infinites meet, the last ray of sunshine reverberates for a few moments. If the horizon is clear and the sky clear, in exceptional conditions of grace, the final flash that closes the day will not be bright red but Verde,

« of a wonderful green, of a green that no painter can obtain on his palette, a green of which nature, neither the variety of vegetables, nor the color of the clearest sea, has ever brought back the nuance! "

Who is lucky enough to witness the sparkle of the green ray once in a lifetime, he will forever receive the gift of seeing clearly in one's own heart and in that of others. This is the Scottish legend that Jules Verne inserts in his novel Le green ray following his second trip to Scotland, aboard his yacht St-Michel IIΒ from Leith within the Highlands and from Glasgow to the Hebrides and Fingal's cave. And it is precisely the natural cavity with its dark basalt columns worthy of a Gothic cathedral that inspires the writing of the novel, which traces the itinerary of Verne himself.

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Illustration from Jules Verde, β€œThe green ray”, ed. Mursia

The protagonist, Helena Campbell, refuses to marry the pedantic scientist Aristobulus Ursiclos and postpones the wedding date until she has seen the Green Ray, because only her appearance guarantees the security of not deceiving one's feelings. The faith in the clarity of vision is such as to lead Helena to cross the Corryvrekan vortex to Oban, where she will meet a young artist, used to scrutinizing all the colors of the horizon, the sunsets painter Olivier Sinclair. The Green Ray will make its appearance only after countless attempts and after having risked death by drowning together, prisoners in the black cave of Fingal.

The brightened sky that follows the storm shows the kaleidoscope of colors from gold to red to the last flicker of emerald. Ma when the sun is about to sink, the eyes meet and the two young people are reflected in each other, losing the appointment with the Green Ray but glimpsing happiness itself thanks to love, the true miracle that legend connected to his appearance.

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Konv Lexicon, β€œNorthern Lights from the Meyers”, 1870

The green ray, in addition to being a dimension of the soul, is also a really existing phenomenon, about which the Egyptians and Chaldeans had already questioned, without answer. Even more interesting is the scientific debate in the nineteenth century about its real nature. While, initially, it was also considered by Newton as an optical illusion of a purely physiological nature, following the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano numerous green and blue rays are observed.

In 1869 Joule manages to physically describe the phenomenon which is also followed by a direct vision by Lord Kelvin on Mont Blanc. In 1925 the first black and white photographs by Lucien Rudaux are published, but it is only in 1958 that a detailed study of the event appears. From the corona of the sun, at sunset, arching over the horizon, a faint green streak can be observed that detaches from the solar disk, but the true green ray occurs when the last glow illuminates the sky from the bottom up, like the light of a lighthouse below sea level.

If for the Egyptians the sun is tinged with emerald every night, the ray that crosses New York from the East Egg pier is decidedly more nostalgic.Β "There is always a green light that shines at night at the end of the dock." It is the call of the corrupt and mysterious billionaire Jay Gatsby, in the novel of the same name byΒ Francis Scott Fitzgerald, towards the image of the never forgotten girlfriend Daisy. Beyond every baseness and crime that like "filthy dust hovered in the wake of his dreams" hides a long wait for years to find the beloved through the construction of oneself and material wealth, reaching out towards a completely ideal love, pushed beyond Daisy, beyond her own individuality.

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Paradoxically, it is precisely the dissolute world that surrounds the surface of the protagonist that makes Gatsby's purity shine, understood only by his friend Nick Carraway, narrator of the novel. For Fitzgerald "There is no fire or frost big enough to challenge what a man has hidden in his possessed heart" and Gatsby steadfastly rides his personal American Dream, in hope that the rock of the world rests firmly on the wings of a fairy, an allusion to the unreality of reality, so that every miracle becomes possible.Β And in the end Gatsby manages to touch his dream fleetingly, reaching Daisy and the pier from which the green light radiates.

β€œHe didn't know he was already behind him, somewhere in the immense darkness beyond the city, where the republic's dark fields extend into the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the future orgastic that year after year retreats before us. He then eludes us, but it doesn't matter - tomorrow we will run faster, we will stretch our arms even more… And one fine morning… So we keep rowing, boats against the current, constantly pushed back into the past. "

In fact, the green ray flickers in the tension between hope for the future and nostalgia, going beyond the limit of external perceptions, projecting its light through the interior of the soul like a prism.Β 

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AmΓ©dΓ©e Guillemin, β€œLes phenomenes de la physique”, 1868

It is a refraction which requires overcoming the inner darkness, melancholy and black bile that permeates the winter of existence, but which allows the power of life to revive. The inner rebirth, following the death of consciousness and matter, blossoms like a gem from the depths, alluding to life-giving love and life that is perpetuated through generation: the experience of viriditas, to which Saint Hildegard of Bingen gives voice:

Β«I am the supreme and fiery energy that transmits fire to every living spark… I am the bright life of the divine essence; I flow shining on the fields, I shine on the waters, I burn in the sun, in the moon and in the stars ... Together with the wind I revive all things with invisible and omnipresent energy ... Force that penetrates to the highest heights and all depths, which binds together and it makes all things mature ... from her the clouds receive their movement, the air its flight, the stones their consistency, for her the water gushes in streams and because of her the earth gives birth to plants ... "

To access this operates in the green however, one must have gone through the despair and putrefaction of nigredo and be dead to themselves, a way to go alone which allows access to the spirit of life hidden behind the veil of illusions. Alchemically the viriditas it appears in fact where the vital principle in matter is resurrected and blossoms like the green of paradise, the true color of hope. As a passage it announces the end of the nigredo and the awakening of nature in a symbolic inner springtime, whereby the solar consciousness of the world needs to set in order for the green ray to shine, as a numen which is a prelude to the liberation ofsoul and clairvoyance through the imagination ofalbedo.

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Etienne Leopold Trouvelot, "Aurora Borealis", 1872

The quest which also accomplishes the introvert e naive protagonist of film The green ray by director Eric Rohmer, perhaps inspired by his Romanian esoteric friend Jean Parvulesco. Vegetarian and melancholy, Delphine wanders France from Paris in search of true love, taking her loneliness to the limit. On the Atlantic coast, the protagonist meets a young reader of theIdiot by Dostoevsky, with whom he will pursue the legend of Verne's novel. Green beam that appears in the theatrical version of the film, but not in the version reserved for the television audience due to a resolution defect. Rohmer will later comment, "After all, it's not that bad!"; the director had left the viewer free to see the green ray within himself.Β 

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But it is thelove, like glimpsed, the fundamental component of this reflection in which the light returns, after a descent into hell, through the image of a partner, which restores hope and trust on the way. An angel of metanoia appears on the road, a daimon interior that brings with it a withdrawal from the game of Maya, from the illusion of the world. Often this vision, in a dream, occurs near death. Only a few individuals, introverted and reflective, have the grace to experience it previously, understanding their essence at the cost of a great suffering that cleans up worldly prejudices and earthly concerns, forcing a change of attitude towards existence.

This is how the images of the interior spouses, which at times radiate a light of their own, and show the way. It's souls of one's soul, assigned to each one following a close agreement in the seniority, to allow the revelation of the individual interiority, through faith in the vision.Β These figures of celestial maidens, such as the Nordic Valkyries or the Iranian daΓͺnΓ’, they guide the soul in the ascension that leads eschatologically and aesthetically to the threshold of the afterlife: from the world to the psychocosmic mountain.

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Peter Goodfellow, from β€œThe Illustrated Man”, 1951

He is another esotericist, the Chilean Michael Serrano, to propose this extreme research, within his "Trilogy of Magical Love". Miguel Serrano, who with Carl Gustav Jung and Herman Hesse formed the Hermetic Circle, recalls an Orphic anthropogony in which the couple of him and her, first united but separated in a dance outside of time, must find themselves in the world through the "Rounds of the Eternal Return". One must renew the myth of one's β€œMagical Love” within oneself to try to eternalize oneself again together and not get lost forever in the Rounds.

It's a love imagined but more real and sharp than ice, which allows you to return to the Crystal City and build the Face of your beloved and your own Absolute Personality. Like Parsifal it is necessary to be a pure insane to find the soul inside and out of himself, in a mystery of love that reaffirms the Sacred Marriage and that reappears in Europe with the MinnesΓ€nger, the singers of the memory of this myth of resurrection.

Β«In the Rounds of the Eternal Return it is always given to them to meet again. It can be late, or too early. However, if they come to meet each other, everything will have to be at stake, to resurrect her. It is a crime to keep losing lives in other non-essential research; because no one will be able to change his you. Β»

But you have a limited time to find yourself and restore your original purity. The Green Ray appears to those who have been elected to repeat this initiation of love, forced not to be able to shine more of the solar consciousness but of the light of the Black Sun, the light of the unconscious itself that comes from deep within.

It shines with a green phosphorescence, emerald like the eyes of Lucifer and like the reflection of the Grail precipitated on the earth, which initiates into the mystery of Love grasp in the shining of the Morning Star. In this research work, both exterior is inner, even the events of the world are transfigured poetically, so the synchronicity and the accidents of fate refer to a different order, toanima mundi which alludes to an eternity that is not lost, but that is to be grasped beyond the veil of the everyday.

Orientation is established vertical towards the supersensible, place of Origin and Return, for Henry Corbin object of the Eternal Research, in the direction of a mystical east which is represented by the Pole heavenly, a north cosmic so extreme as to be the threshold of the size of thebeyond. The twilight that marks this passage between the world of Day and Night is the borderline moment in which a northern glow shines, the Midnight Sun. Only under its rays it is possible to access this inner world that shines with its own light, a luminous interiority that is opposite to the Darkness of the external matter, a heavenly earth which is found within each individual.

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Hans Thoma, β€œEs werde Licht”, 1884

In Sohravardi's Zoroastrian Platonism this universe, spiritual and at the same time concrete, defines itself mundus imaginalis, an ontologically real world like the world of the senses and the intellect, in which these images endowed with extension and corporeality reside.Β These intermediate figures between spiritual and material, like subtle bodies, are suspended in a place outside of space. They manifest themselves through the mirror ofimagination, which allows all universes to symbolize each other and which re-establishes the analogical correspondence between the various worlds, between inside and outside.

To access these inner abodes of the Shiny earth and the dazzling green glow of the I see smaragdine it is first of all necessary to extract the light of one's subtle organ from the mountains in which it lies captive. As in the alchemical imagination, during the ascent from the well in which she had rushed towards the celestial pole a series of deserts, towns, cities are visualized, which seem to descend towards the adept, who in reality is ascending. When, after crossing Water and Fire, a distant immensity is reached, the heart can open itself again to life: the green color is perceived on the horizon. Its purity in the Air announces the primacy of divine light, which now shines even in the dark well, at first infested with demons and clouded by Darkness.

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Viriditas, detail from β€œThesaurus of Alchemy”, ca. 1725: Wellcome Library, London

Touching the supernatural Earth at the edge of the Sphere, above the planetary skies and the sky of the fixed stars, you reach the mountain of QΓ’f, from which the reflection of the emerald rock spreads, keystone of the celestial dome from which the Northern Lights reverberate in the Sky of the soul, the "abode which secretes its own light" and which highlights the achieved initiatory knowledge. When the sovereign condition of Heaven is reached, there is an atmosphere of vital green light, crossed by waves moving towards each other, of such an intensity that it cannot be tolerated but which nevertheless pushes to fall in love with mystical love.

Making this journey of ecstatic research means internalizing, that is, "going out towards oneself", towards the origin which is the celestial pole, outside the well where the green vision is reached. Only in this way can contact be re-established between the light of the heart from below with the light of the spirit from above, because like is reunited with like. If the veil of illusion is torn, a crack opens in us

"Every time a light comes up from us a light comes down towards us, and every time that flashes come up from us, flashes corresponding to them come down on us ... and it is light upon light Β»

It restores itself in this way the homology between inside and outside of oneself, between historical time and interior time, so that every external event can be traced back to the soul and to its superior extraction, breaking a passage towards the world of images through their transfiguration, "where the corporeal becomes spirit, where the spiritual takes shape".

Through trust in the imagination, the link between heaven and earth can be strengthened, at the point where the strength of the spirit, combined with light, fecundates the original unity. The green ray radiates its splendor again where it takes up hope for life as an archetype beyond the singular existence, beyond individuality, but through its own finitude..Β  In the bottom, as Rimbaud illuminates, eternity is found where the sun and the sea come together.


REFERENCES

  • Carl Gustav Jung Psychology and alchemy. Stamped Boringhieri.
  • Carl Gustav Jung Psychology and religion. Stamped Boringhieri.
  • Claudius Widmann, The symbolism of colors, Magi Editions.
  • Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
  • Henry Corbin, The man of light in Iranian Sufism, Mediterranean Editions.
  • Ian Thompson, Jules Verne's Scotland: In Fact and Fiction. Luath Pr.
  • Joscelyn Godwin, The polar myth, Editions Mediterranee.
  • Jules Verne, The green ray.
  • Marie-Louise von Franz, Reflections of the soul, Vivarium editions.
  • Miguel Serrano. We. The Book of the Resurrection, Seventh Seal Editions.
  • Paul Candy, The wonders of the sky, The castle.

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