Michael Sanborn has released the third publication in the The Ways of Awakening Trilogy through Rose Circle books and we’ve enjoyed many titles from this publisher over the years. In fact, this third installment in Michael’s translation of the trilogy particularly caught my eye because it delivers oral traditions, which take you beyond the formalities of initiation and guides you right into the heart of the tradition. I believe this offering of oral traditions in print form might set a new trend of great interest, especially for those who have no local lodge to receive initiation or choose to walk this path alone.
I decided to put four questions to Michael so our Pansophers community could find out more.
Michael thanks for joining. Firstly, what’s something new that this book brings to our audiences?
What always strikes me as fresh about Rémi Boyer’s work is his contectualizing of European wisdom traditions within a view of nonduality that is simultaneously informed by the Gurdjieffian Fourth Way. The teaching has its own organic integrity, so I wouldn’t describe it as a syncretism, exactly, but it is a meeting place of many rivers.
This book in particular surprised me with its emphasis on the Iberian (chiefly Portuguese) perspective of the Rose-Croix. It brings up a great deal of Templar history, with reference to the troubador tradition and chivalric romances. This might not be new to all of your readers, but it was unfamiliar to me.
I was also very interested in the details that it provides about the esoteric side of Fernando Pessoa, the great 20th century Portuguese poet, whose visibility has lately been on the rise in the English-speaking world with the recent publication of Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith.
Does this book blur the lines between Martinism and Rosicrucianism?
While Beneath the Veil of Elias Artista: The Rose-Croix as a Way of Awakening, An Oral Tradition is a work that can be read by itself, it is also the third volume of The Ways of Awakening Trilogy, of which the second volume is Mask Cloak Silence: Martinism as a Way of Awakening. And the difference in tone and content between the second and third volumes could hardly be more distinct. There’s almost no Martinist content in the third volume. There are some references to Robert Amadou, who is mostly known as a Martinist, but he’s clearly got on his Rose-Croix cap when he’s cited in this book.
I should mention that Mask Cloak Silence includes an exploration of the difference between the Rose-Croix and the Reau-Croix (as found in the Élus Coëns tradition), with an aside as to how Martinism is distinct from either one.
What does it mean that the book contains oral traditions?
The subtitle “An Oral Tradition” has layered meanings. But on one level, it seems to me that it points to the way that the Iberian perspective is generally not represented in the most accessible written material on the Rose-Croix, but is rather something that has been passed down sub rosa (so to speak) across the generations.
This is laid out with the most detail in the Afterword by Manuel Gandra (a leading expert on the topic of Rose-Croix Templarism), but Lima de Freitas’ essay also provides a crucial piece with the story of the Blessed Amadeus of Portugal, as important to the Iberian Rose-Croix tradition in his way as is Christian Rosencreuz to the more familiar tradition of Bohemia and Germany.
It’s also true that there is much material in the opening essay, “The Rose-Croix as a Way of Awakening,” that appears to come from sources that (as far as I know) have not been published anywhere.
My last question: What is your favorite quote from the book?
I have many, but perhaps this would be a good example:
Valediction
May the Rose-Christ,
The Free Being,
The Great Emancipator,
He who freed the primordial man and the primordial woman from numbers and times so that they could celebrate their mystical and alchemical nuptials in the Divine Heart, awaken in us the thirteen roses of Ultimate Realization, and crown the Hidden King, the Rose-Croix, by the Anointing of Sophia.
Free you are,
Free you remain.
Beautiful! Thank you Michael.
Readers can obtain a copy of this book on Amazon.
