Travelogue Chartres
Mieke Mosmuller
Photos © Holger Niederhausen
During the week after Easter, on the initiative of Marie-Anne Paepe from Bruges, we visited Chartres Cathedral with a group of 33 participants. In 2014 and in 2019, we visited the cathedral again in the week before Easter with a new group. I gave an introductory talk on Thursday evening in a room at the Hotel St. Yves, located behind the cathedral. Then on Friday we visited the cathedral, exchanged our experiences in the afternoon, and then visited the cathedral again. In the evening we enjoyed an extremely pleasant dinner with the whole group. On Saturday morning I gave a closing talk, after which we went home. The piece below describes the basis for this visit. I gave lectures on this in Hamburg, Amsterdam and Breda. The visit to Chartres, where we were able to discuss this theme on the spot, was a highlight.
Following the lectures in Hamburg, I wrote the following summary
“This is what I wanted to tell you today, my dear friends, about the entirely different kind of experience we have when we are in the spiritual world than we have here in the physical. And yet again, things hang together. But they hang together in such a way that we are completely upside down. If we could encircle human beings here in such a way that we would turn his interior outward, so that, for example, the interior, the heart, would then be the surface of man – he would not continue to live as a physical man in this, you can believe that – but if one could encircle him, grasp him in the middle of the heart and then encircle him like a glove, then he would not remain such a man as he is here, he would expand into a universe. For when one concentrates in a point in the heart and then has the ability to envelope himself in spirit, then one becomes that world, which one otherwise experiences between death and a new birth. That is the secret of the human inner self, which alone in the physical world cannot be bulldozed outward. But the human heart is also an enveloped world, and so the physical earth world is once again related to the spiritual world. We have to get used to this encircling. If we do not get used to it, we will never get a correct idea of it, how actually the present physical world relates to the spiritual world.”
( In: Hans Bonneval, Umstülpung als Schöpfungs- und Bewusstseinsprinzip. Verlag Ch. Möllmann, 4. Auflage 2008. Zitat aus: Rudolf Steiner, GA 214, Das Geheimnis der Trinität, 9. Vortrag.)
In the chapter “Zur Begründung” in Hans Bonneval’s book on the envelopment there is this quote from Rudolf Steiner. It prompted me to actually try intensively to imagine the envelopment of the heart as vividly and powerfully as possible.
First of all, one must consider how the consciousness of human beings is located, by sense, in the heart. Thus, when one begins an exercise, surely the first thing one wants to do there is to imagine how consciousness on earth is “located” very centrally in the human being, and how it can be enveloped in such a way that what is inside becomes outside, and what is outside becomes inside. When one meditatively tries in this way to completely envelop his inner sense of self, a sensation occurs that is not so easily endured. For the “I-point” must become circumference, and everything that can be called “non-I” must become point, or at least be enclosed by the “I-perimeter.
However, when one has then received some insight from Rudolf Steiner about life between death and a new birth, something great comes into consciousness. One gains an inkling of how the heart is actually sun, and how after death, when one enters the solar sphere, one has expanded so much that the Self has surrendered completely. The sensation of the self takes on a very different nature. It extends further upward and becomes music. One is no longer “self,” but altogether tone, in spherical harmony with other tones. The self is outside, the spirit becomes music, assumes its own form.
But the expansion goes even further. Music was still a solar experience, but now one ascends to Mars, where the sounding music begins to sound meaningful, it becomes word. And one becomes his own word, becomes himself completely word, meaning in the world-all. The work on the future body here sounds like musical word, and this spiritualizes itself even more when it extends to Jupiter. For Jupiter forms the word into world thoughts, and one lives on musically speaking in thought, indeed one is himself a speaking musical thought, and lives in the midst of this only to be suspected world. Then the sphere expands even further, one feels oneself ìin the whole world and human development, because the world thought absorbs, yes becomes, the world memory. Saturn bestows this transformation of the already fully enveloped consciousness.
When man has joined himself to Christ on earth, he can still rise above Saturn, up to the midnight hour of existence, where he absorbs and forms the impulses, in order to be able to find the spirit in a new earthly body, and also be allowed to proclaim it. Then it goes down again, and the man in spirit must gradually master the loftiness of world memory, of world thoughts and of the world word, gradually detaching himself from bliss and striving for a new “point-I.
This happens when it reaches downward to the sun. There the cosmic heart once again bulges over, this time, however, to take it up itself, to become independent, and as it descends, to forget more and more spiritual bliss, in all its variety. Consciousness becomes fairy-like, dormant, there is drinking from the Lethe. This process begins at the sun, the farewell to celestial harmony and incorporation into a new personality.
The second thing that one can try is to perform an involution of the organ heart – in meditative thought. This is quite a different activity from the one described above, for now one should not be thinking and feeling but seeing and moving, in a circumscribing movement. The difficulty here is that the heart does not have a pure spherical form, but a complicated quadrilateral, in which the inner wall is not smooth. This inner wall must now come out, and the septa, which divide the space into four areas – two atria and two ventricles – must be represented in such a way that they will once again be in the correct position during the involution. To imagine in this way is quite an effort.
Het hart bestaat uit vier holle ruimten:
* Twee hartkamers (ventrikels)
* Twee boezems (atria)
Schematische voorstelling van het hart.
Now, with this kind of curvature, one should not think that one can do it as precisely as with a geometric body. There, although inside becomes outside and outside becomes inside, spiritualization does not occur. Here, at the heart one enters the spiritual world, and something similar to that described in the first part happens. The whole inner life comes outside the heart, and the whole environment, up to the stars, comes inside the new structure.
When you concentrate on the septa and the heart valves, on the valve muscles (the papillary muscles), which extend into the ventricles, and you try to make this structure the outer wall, you get a structure where the septa unfold like a cross over the outer wall; the muscles give a kind of lacework on the outside.
In meditation, this image formed and became a gothic cathedral, as I observed several times in Chartres. Such a “seeing” comes as a kind of sudden insight, giving not only the image, but at the same time the meaning. For one then “sees” at the same time, how the cathedral is really an attempt to let man, as he is between death and a new birth, experience, however imperfectly.
Of course, such a structure is too rigid and lifeless to come anywhere close to the goal. But the outside of the cathedral is to the sense, contemplatively experienced, a girdled inside of the heart, and the inside of the cathedral then shows the cosmos, as man after death, before birth, makes himself equal to it.
When one views the cathedral in this way, one must pass through the portals with reverence – for one enters the spiritual world. The portals also all have the purification of the soul as their theme, albeit in different ways. Once one is in the cathedral, that is, in the spiritual world, the interior is a completely enveloped human being. The brain is found on the ground in the form of the Labyrinth.
Rudolf Steiner has described, how in Knossos the Labyrinth is image for the mind that can err. Ariadne is the pure thinking, which takes Theseus to the center in the form of a thread. Inwardly he overcomes the Minotaur and he can find his way back out thanks to this thread. The Chartres Labyrinth takes the form of this Labyrinth in Knossos.
The light from outside pours in full of colors through the wondrous stained-glass windows, which cannot be seen anywhere like Chartres. The shapes seem to metamorphose from window to window, and they contain an Akashic chronicle; the entire spiritual history of the earth is depicted there.
This is how one can proceed. The large rose window in the west facade refers to the heavenly Jerusalem from John’s Apocalypse.
Here man has become perfect. This is what they wanted to portray in the cathedral. Man in the midnight hour of existence, where he has purely shaped his future body, living in accordance with the heavenly Jerusalem.
Translation Jolanda Mourik-de Vilder
