Purification, illumination and union represent the universal pathway of spiritual development found across all wisdom traditions. This eternal way creates the rainbow of hope.
The Three Fundamental Stages
“The three ‘ways’ or stages of traditional mysticism—purification, illumination and union—are those of the experience of divine breath or faith, divine light or hope, and divine fire or love. These three fundamental experiences of the revelation of the Divine constitute the triangle of life—for no spirit, no soul and equally no body would be able to live if entirely deprived of all love, all hope and all faith.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p71.
“There is in the first place the traditional mystical way of purification, illumination and union, which is the voluntary and conscious experience of the three stages of the way of the human soul after death—through purgatory to heaven, and from heaven to God. You will find this not only with the great Christian mystics such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Bonaventura, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross…not only in the pre-Christian teachings of the Hermetic treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, such as The Divine Pymander, but also in the great mysteries of pagans, Egyptians, and others, where the three stages of catharsis (purification), photismos (illumination) and henosis (union, or identification with the Divine) give consciousness of the post-mortem states and certainty of immortality.” Meditations on the Tarot, p366.
The Necessity of Spiritual Purification
“The concentration necessary for spiritual prayer is the fruit of spiritual purification of the will. It is therefore useless to strive to concentrate oneself if the will is infatuated with something else.” Meditations on the Tarot, p9.
“Science wants to compel Nature to obedience to the will of man such as it is; Hermeticism, on the contrary wants to purify, illumine and change the will and nature of man in order to bring them into harmony with the creative principle of Nature (natura naturans) and to render them capable of receiving its willingly bestowed revelation.” Meditations on the Tarot, p68.
The Universal Way
“There are many tracks, but there is only one way. This means to say that whatever one does, one advances and grows only in the sense of purification, illumination and union; and that whatever one knows and whatever experience one has, the criterion of true progress is solely progress in purification, illumination and union. One judges a tree by its fruits; one judges the mystic, gnostic, mage and philosopher by their faith, hope and charity, i.e. by their progress in purification, illumination and union.” Meditations on the Tarot, p367.
“It is through mastering forgetting, sleep and death that one arrived in the past, that one arrives today, and that one will arrive in the future, at the mystical experience of the soul united with God, and therefore at the absolute certainty of immortality. And one arrived there, one arrives there, and one will arrive there through the three stages of the eternal mystical way: those of purification, illumination and union.” Meditations on the Tarot, p366.
The Law of Growth
“The Cross is the law of growth: that of perpetual dying and becoming. It is the way which does not lead to impasses of specialization, but rather to ‘throughways’ of purification— which lead to illumination and end in union.” Meditations on the Tarot, p451.
“The real triumph achieved by the Self—this means to say the successful outcome of the ‘process of individuation’, according to C. G. Jung, or the successful outcome of the work of true liberation, which is the fruit of catharsis (purification) and which precedes photismos (illumination), and which is followed by henosis (union), according to the occidental initiation tradition.” Meditations on the Tarot, p164.
The Three Sacred Vows
“The states or stages of the soul corresponding to concentration, meditation and contemplation are those of purification, illumination and union. And it is the three sacred vows of obedience, chastity and poverty which render concentration, meditation and contemplation effective, with a view to the realization of the soul’s purification, illumination and union. These are the practical “secrets” of inner ‘gardening’—concerned with the laws of growth (and not those of building) of the human being, in the sense of his becoming ever more human, i.e. in the sense of human evolution without the impasses of specialization.” Meditations on the Tarot, p456.
“The way in which the divine spirit works in the domain of human artisanship presupposes the three traditional vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. Purification must precede illumination and perfection. Sacred art, which imitates the way in which the divine spirit works, requires that the soul of the artist rids itself of its own inclinations and habits, i.e. that it becomes poor, so as to be able to receive the wealth of the divine spirit…that it reduces its own phantasy and its own predilections to silence, i.e. that it is chaste, so as not to disturb the limpid waters flowing from the divine source…and that it is obedient, so as to be able to imitate the divine spirit at work, i.e. to be able to work in concert with the divine spirit.” Meditations on the Tarot, p643.
The Rainbow of Hope
“The work of all those who taught a way—the mystical and spiritual way of purification, illumination and union, or the historical and social way of the progress of civilization through social and moral justice, or the biological way of evolution from the sphere of chemical elements to the sphere of living organisms and from the sphere of living organisms to that of beings endowed with thought and word—the work of all these, I say, which teaches us a way of individual and collective perfection, is now resplendent in the rainbow of the synthesis of salvation and evolution, the rainbow of mankind’s hope.” Meditations on the Tarot, p475.
Logion 24
His students said to him,
“Take us to the place where you are,
since we are required to seek after it.”
He answered them,
“Whoever has an ear for this should listen carefully!
Light shines out from the center of a being of light
and illuminates the whole cosmos.
Whoever fails to become light is a source of darkness.”
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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