THE SILENT LANGUAGE: SYMBOLS OF HERMETIC PHILOSOPHY

Panta rei' All life is movement and the symbol is her witness
The exhibition "The silent language. The symbols of Hermetic Philosophy', which has been
put together from the rich sources of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, is, as far as I
know, the first exhibition which demonstrates an integral relationship in the language of
symbols used in hermetic philosophy, in mysticism, in alchemy and in the Rosicrucian move
ment.

These four main areas into which hermetic-Christian philosophy has been gathered within
the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica have, each in their separate way, produced a Silent
Language, a Lingua Muta, which, in the form of the symbol, the hieroglyph, or other
character, reflects a universal world of concepts, alive and directly accessible to all mankind
and as ancient as the road of humanity itself.

In his incomparable study Rivers of life, J.G.R. Forlong uncovers the history of the growth
of the great spiritual movements of mankind, which go back over 10,000 years before our
Christian era. The primal aspects of the major spiritual movements are represented by him in
five symbols.

First of all there is the symbol of the sun as the wheel of life, explaining the sun mysteries
of Mithra. Secondly, there is the symbol of fire, the so-called Aesch Majim, the fire-water
principle in which the primal wisdom, as it is also visible in the Jewish Kabbala, finds its origin
Thirdly, there is the symbol of the tree, also called the tree of life and the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, in which both the life-creating principle, as well.as the polarity of
life manifesting itself within it, are brought to life, an image which in many successive spiritual
movements has been each time explained anew. Fourthly, there is the symbol of the phallus, as
the bearer of the life-giving principle itself, the seminal principle, which lies at the basis of the
procreation, continuation, multiplication and fertility of life, and expresses itself in the human,
animal, vegetable and mineral world. Finally, the symbol of the snake appears, a reference on
the one hand to the paradisical myth, the Fall of Man, but in its most sublimated form the
symbol of wisdom, the fullness of the pleroma, the reality of the gnosis, the knowledge of
God, which has come about through Him, in Him and by Him, the All-One.

The force of the symbol lies in her practical allusion to the ancient principle panta rei'
all life is movement. As the bird is an emblem of the sky, the fish an emblem of the water and
the four-footed animal an emblem of earth, the living nature, so man has been placed by his
creator, the cosmo-creator, as a microcosm in the centre of His creation, this being the symbol
of an originally conceived place for the micro-creator - the little creator - to live and to exist in
the world of the perennial continuation of life...