blue rose in 2 of swords

Lillie

Is Mother love true love?

Don't know. What's true love?

Your mom is meant to love you even when no one else does (sayings like 'well, at least his mother loves him', or 'a face only a mother can love')

And a mothers love is thought to be pure (non sexual), and unconditional.

It's not always like that, but it is how it's meant to be.

The virgin Mary seems to be depicted as some kind of 'all mother', who loves everyone, who is more approchable than god (the father), who also is pure (virgin).

I suppose that could be it.

Crowley reputedly hated his mother.
Who was a horrible old harriden.
But I suppose it could be postulated that Crowley wantedto love her, or wanted her to love him (as a child at least) he certainly went a long way to get her attention.
Bad attention, but as we all know in these enlightened days, if a child don't get good attention it will mke do with bad attention instead.

Or perhaps Crowley, at some deep unconcious level, was alwayssearching for a mother figure to replace the ral mother who had failed him.

I don't know.
I'm sort of psychoanalysing him in the dark.

I have no idea wether anything I say is right.

Just thinking it over.

BrightEye

i don't know if what you say is right, Lillie, but it rings a lot of bells with me. strange how one little symbol in a card can sum up things so perfectly.

Rosanne

Hi BrightEye! I would like to add some connections for you to this Blue Rose.
I think it is the Dog Rose, with many Medieval symbol associations. There was this medieval Saint who made this riddle about the Dog Rose
QUINQUE SUNT FRATRES They are five brothers (5 Petals)
DUO SUNT BARBUTI Two of them have a beard (Stamens )
DUO SINE BARBA NATI Two of them have no beard at all
UNUS E QUINQUE One of the five
NON HABET BARBA UTRINQUE Has a beard just on one side
How not to think about the representation of the male, the female and the androgyne? How not to think, about the symbol of the union between the opposites?
Now in the Golden Dawn there was WB Yeats whose poetry was known well by Freida Harris( and the general population at large)
He used the Dog Rose as a symbol in his poetry a lot. In his Poem 'The Rose of Battle' there are these lines
Turn if you may from Battles never done, I call, as they go by me one by one, Danger no refuge holds, and War no Peace.
This card is called Peace and Blue Rose Peace is rare and hard to come by.
By the way it was called a dog rose because it was thought it was a cure for a mad dogs bite.
So it seems evident to me that this symbol has was essential to Yeats, in order to show in the context of the word imaginary, an alchemical path of integration between the opposites.(If you read the whole poem) I think this is what Lady Freida Harris was trying to paint also.
All the associations with blue and Mothers is so true also to me. ~Rosanne

Abrac

Crowley may not have had a literal person in mind, but might have been using the "Mother" as symbolic, something akin to the Earth trigram in the I Ching.

BrightEye

Rosanne said:
Hi BrightEye! I would like to add some connections for you to this Blue Rose.
I think it is the Dog Rose, with many Medieval symbol associations. There was this medieval Saint who made this riddle about the Dog Rose
QUINQUE SUNT FRATRES They are five brothers (5 Petals)
DUO SUNT BARBUTI Two of them have a beard (Stamens )
DUO SINE BARBA NATI Two of them have no beard at all
UNUS E QUINQUE One of the five
NON HABET BARBA UTRINQUE Has a beard just on one side
How not to think about the representation of the male, the female and the androgyne? How not to think, about the symbol of the union between the opposites?

This is really interesting, Rosanne, thanks, especially the bit about androgyne and union of opposites. I can relate to that in a very personal way. (How do you know all this stuff?)

Rosanne said:
Now in the Golden Dawn there was WB Yeats whose poetry was known well by Freida Harris( and the general population at large)
He used the Dog Rose as a symbol in his poetry a lot. In his Poem 'The Rose of Battle' there are these lines
Turn if you may from Battles never done, I call, as they go by me one by one, Danger no refuge holds, and War no Peace.

There is also another poem by Yeats called The Rose of Peace:

If Michael, leader of God's host
When Heaven and Hell are met,
Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post
He would his deeds forget.

Brooding no more upon God's wars
In his divine homestead,
He would go weave out of the stars
A chaplet for your head.

And all folk seeing him bow down,
And white stars tell your praise,
Would come at last to God's great town,
Led on by gentle ways;

And God would bid His warfare cease,
Saying all things were well;
And softly make a rosy peace,
A peace of Heaven with Hell.

I'm also remined of passages in Eliot's Four Quartets. The whole sequence opens and closes with a reference to roses:

from 'Burnt Norton':

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

and the very last lines of 'Little Gidding':

And all shall be well and
And all manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Rosanne said:
This card is called Peace and Blue Rose Peace is rare and hard to come by.

What is Blue Rose Peace and why is blue associated with mother?

Rosanne

BrightEye said:
What is Blue Rose Peace and why is blue associated with mother?

Thanks for poems, I really enjoyed them. Blue rose Peace is a truce that lasts. It is rare. I was raised Catholic and I was a 'Marion aide' as a youngster- till teenage, I visited homes for the aged and wore a blue dress. Then on Sundays I was a 'Child of Mary' and wore a blue cape. Blue is The blessed Virgin Mary's colour as was mentioned earlier. So most Catholic girls (well here anyway) associate blue with Mother. Mother Church as well.
My rooms are pink and cream and yellow and orange and white- I just got plain wore out on blue. Blue suits the High Priestess though

~Rosanne

BrightEye

Rosanne said:
Thanks for poems, I really enjoyed them. Blue rose Peace is a truce that lasts. It is rare. I was raised Catholic and I was a 'Marion aide' as a youngster- till teenage, I visited homes for the aged and wore a blue dress. Then on Sundays I was a 'Child of Mary' and wore a blue cape. Blue is The blessed Virgin Mary's colour as was mentioned earlier. So most Catholic girls (well here anyway) associate blue with Mother. Mother Church as well.

well, I can imagine how you got fed up with blue... I was raised Catholic as well, but if I had had to do all that I would have left home early (age 9 lol). It's interesting - that association of the Virgin with blue. I often come across the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose robes are green and red, or Our Lady of Czestochowa, whose robes are mainly red.

Rosanne said:
Blue suits the High Priestess though ~Rosanne

and the priestess is an aspect of the Virgin or vice versa

BrightEye

I've been talking to a friend about this discussion, and she gave me a book which I shall peruse over the next few days. It's called 'The Symbolic Rose' by Barbara Seward. Apparently it's a central image in the works of Dante, and as we've already said Yeats and Eliot, but also James Joyce.

There is no reference to blue roses in this book though, only to the blue flower of Novalis's novel. This is what it says on p. 66 of the above book:

The [blue] flower as symbol of the poet's dead beloved becomes symbolic of the inspiration of his work and hence of the spirit of poetry. Moreover, the poet's conception of poetry as an expression of ultimate reality associates his blue flower with the eternal mysteries of a pervasive divinity. In fact, on a smaller scale Novalis's blue flower does for romantic idealism what the white rose of Dante does for Catholic theology.

Crowley gets a footnote as well, but on a different subject.

I can see the attactiveness of the dog rose. There were hundreds of these wild rose bushes around the estate where I grew up. They were bright pink and always full of ladybirds!

I wonder whether the blue rose is entirely Crowley's or Frieda Harris's invention.

Teheuti

I recently read a novel that talked about the Peace and Truce of God. These were major medieval concepts that I think were used consciously by Crowley, if not the GD.

Here's a little from the Wikipedia entry on the subject:

"The Pax Dei [Peace of God] was a proclamation issued by local clergy that granted immunity from violence to noncombatants who could not defend themselves beginning with the peasants (agricolae) and the clergy."

"The Truce of God, or Treuga Dei extended the Peace by setting aside certain days of the year when violence was not allowed. Where the Peace of God prohibited violence against the church and the poor, the Truce of God was more focused on preventing violence between Christians, specifically between knights."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God

Mary

Glass Owl

Here is another blue rose connection--this one is to art and poetry.

http://english.mn.ru/english/issue.php?2006-9-24 said:
The Blue Rose was the name of the group of artists that existed from 1906 to 1910. At the same time it was the name of their first exhibition (1907). Among The Blue Rose members were Petr Kuznetsov, Martiros Saryan, Sergey Sudeykin, Nikolay Sapunov and several other painters - totaling 16 persons, some of which would later become world-famous. Their style of painting was primarily inspired by Viktor Borisov-Musatov, the most sensitive and lyric Russian impressionist. The artists in question were well acquainted with Borisov-Musatov, and they even staged a joint exhibition. That show's name was The Red Rose, and it was displayed in Samara (1904). Soon after that, the artists began preparations for their new exhibition - The Blue Rose. The name was allegedly derived from Vladimir Soloviev's works (some of The Blue Rose participants later explained the name as an allusion to The Blue Flower by Novalis, a famous German Romantic poet). The group of artists was widely advertised by The Golden Fleece artistic magazine edited and sponsored by Petr Ryabushinsky, a millionaire who was an amateur painter and also participated in The Blue Rose. Two of his paintings can be now seen in this exhibition.

The Blue Rose played a role of a 'mental bridge' between the brilliant style of 1890s Russian impressionists like Vrubel, Korovin, Nesterov etc. and the sophisticated avant-garde of the 1910-20s. The main idea declared by The Blue Rose painters and abstract artists like Kazimir Malevich, was elimination of shape and contour; thus, they faced no competition from photographers. Nowadays such a strategy would probably be called a search for a niche in the market. On the other hand, warm color palette and softness of shapes make The Blue Rose painters closely related to older Impressionistic art.

Doing a bit more checking on the blue flower and its connection to the writer Novalis, I found this from the Encyclopædia Britannica Article:

"The Blue Flower in literary works (represents) a mystic symbol of longing. The lichtblaue Blume first appeared in a dream to the hero of Novalis's fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), who associates it with the woman he loves from afar. The blue flower became a widely recognized symbol among the Romantics."

This makes me think about the fact that we award blue ribbons to winners. In this respect, blue can stand for excellence and achievement; however we first must have a desire in our hearts, a goal to set our sights upon.

By the way, a Chinese parallel to the Blue Rose would be the search for the non-existent Golden flower and its connection to alchemy/immortality.

blue rose in 2 of swords

Lillie

BrightEye

Rosanne

Attachments

Abrac

BrightEye

Rosanne

BrightEye

BrightEye

Teheuti

Glass Owl