‘Salon de la Rose + Croix returns’

    

The Salon de la Rose + Croix will return to the Livingston Library later this month for the lecture series. From the publicity:

Livingston Library

Live Lecture Series

March 27 at 7:30 p.m.

The Salon de la Rose + Croix

From Darkness to Light:

The Orphic and Rosicrucian

Path to Divine Unity

A philosophical and spiritual exploration through the Orphic mystery tradition and Rosicrucian thought, and the quest for divine unity. This lecture shares invaluable insights from ancient Greek culture and discusses hermetic and alchemical symbols, and artistic expressions that guide the soul from darkness to enlightenment and beyond.

The presenters are Tony Crisos and Ian Pedigo. 71 West 23rd Street, Manhattan. Tenth floor, French Ionic Room.

Tony Crisos

Tony Crisos is a versatile composer, guitarist, lyre player, philosopher, writer, and lecturer, holding a BA in Music Performance from Berklee College of Music and an MA in Music Education from Boston University. Deeply engaged with ancient Greek philosophy and religion, he founded the modern Salon De La Rose + Croix tradition at the Grand Lodge of New York. As a Hellenic priest in the initiatic lineage of Orpheus, he represents Spyridon Nagos’s lineage on ancient Greek tradition in the U.S. Tony has published extensively, notably revitalizing the Orphic tradition and the Pythagorean Harmony of the Spheres doctrine, and currently contributes as an independent researcher to the Interdisciplinary Society for Quantitative Research in Music and Medicine.

Ian Pedigo

Ian Pedigo has been a practicing visual artist for the past 25 years. He has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas. Since that time, he has made work and exhibited at galleries and museums both nationally and internationally, with shows in nine countries. His work has been written about in the New York Times and The New Yorker, among other publications, as well as a monograph of his work published in 2011.

     

‘Streaming a Rosicrucian salon’

    

The Metropolitan Study Group of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia will host a “Salon of the Arts” next month—and it will be streamed online.

The group is settling into a new meeting space: Atlantis Bookshop in Bloomsbury. With its proximity to the British Museum, its many personal links to Metropolitan Rosicrucians, and, of course, the neighborhood’s centrality to literary history, I doubt I could name a more apt location if I tried.

This October 16 event will feature readings, dramatic performance, and music. That’s a 9:30 a.m. start in New York time.

The contact link to register for this free live stream is here.

SRIA is the eldest of Freemasonry’s Rosicrucian societies, and Atlantis is London’s oldest occult bookstore.

While membership in the college is limited to regular Master Masons, the Metropolitan Study Group welcomes seekers of diverse backgrounds.

     

‘Salon de la Rose-Croix this month’

     
The Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library will host its third annual Salon de la Rose Croix, featuring unique conversation, poetry, art, and music, later this month at Masonic Hall.

That will be Thursday, March 26 at 6 p.m. in the French Doric Room on the tenth floor. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Admission is free, but book your seats here. Masonic Hall is located at 71 West 23rd Street in Manhattan.

Milosz Jeziorski will begin the salon with his lecture titled “In Search of The Golden Fleece: The Warrior Philosopher’s Path Towards Immortality.” Tony Crisos will present a musical performance, and then Angel Millar and Adrienne Chrysovergis will read original poetry. A question-and-answer period will conclude the evening. From the publicity:

Milosz Jeziorski

Bro. Milosz Jeziorski is a composer, visual artist, and podcast producer who often creates under the name MJDorian. His professional accolades include winning Best Original Score at VisionFest film festival for his music to the feature film Ontologica, as well as collaborations with up-and-coming singers and rappers of New York City for his debut dark pop album Catharsis. His current passion project has been writing and producing a podcast series titled Creative Codex about history’s great creative geniuses. Milosz’s foray into Western esoteric traditions began with Freemasonry in 2012, and now includes the distinguished honor of serving as Master of Compact Lodge 402.

Angel Millar

Bro. Angel Millar is the author of The Three Stages of Initiatic Spirituality: Craftsman, Warrior, Magician, and other books. He is a well known lecturer on the subject of the Craft, and has spoken at Masonic Con, Attleboro, Massachusetts; Masonic Con, Pasadena; 300: Freemasonry’s Legacy, Freemasonry’s Future event at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Virginia; at the Grand Lodge of New Jersey; and at lodges around the United States.

Bro. Tony Crisos is a composer, guitarist, lyre player, philosopher, writer, and lecturer. He studied philosophy at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Music Performance from Berklee College of Music, and his Master of Arts in Music Education from Boston University.

Tony Crisos

Crisos was raised in March 2016 in Advance Service Mitzpah Lodge 586 in Queens, and now is a member of Compact Lodge 402. He has been an active member of the fraternity, including in both the Scottish Rite and York Rite. Crisos contributes his time and energy to philosophy, Freemasonry, and the Western esoteric arts. He has presented lectures on Masonic subjects to Advance Service Mitzpah Lodge, to the RW John C. Ross School of Instruction, to the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Library, and at the Apollo Festival of Masonic Arts in Virginia. He is an active member of the Aesthetic Rose+Croix Order of the Temple and the Grail (also known as the Aesthetic Rose+Croix), and is founder of the modern incarnation of the Salon de la Rose + Croix tradition currently taking place at the Livingston Library. Crisos has published several articles online including “The Spiritual Meaning of Music from Ancient Greece to Today” in 2016, “Myth, Catharsis, and the Riddle of The Sphinx” in 2017, “The Sufi Mysticism of Music, Sound, and Vibration” in 2017, “In Search of Light: A Journey Through the Mysteries of the Great Gods” in 2017, and “Three Ancient Greek Texts for the Warrior-Philosopher” in 2018. Today he is lecturing on Greek philosophy and the ancient Mystery Schools, writing a book on the ancient Greek lyre, and actively performs with both his instruments in the New York City area.

Adrienne Chrysovergis

Adrienne Chrysovergis is a licensed insurance agent, running her family-owned insurance brokerage since 2002. She oversees all aspects of the business, from sales to customer service. She received her B.A. in English from Adelphi University, and loves all things related to words, including reading and writing poetry. She is also an active member of the Aesthetic Rose+Croix, and she is working on a series of poems inspired by ancient Greek theology.

Nick Kampouris

Nick Kampouris is a New York City-based artist and designer. His artworks include portraits with a contemporary/urban feel, as well as representational and nonrepresentational abstract pieces. You can find his art in magazines, film, and private collections.
     

‘Thursday: Mystical Symbolism and Music’

     
The Fourth Manhattan District of the Grand Lodge of New York (my home district!) is the sponsor of the next lecture at the Livingston Library on Thursday. Free and open to the public. Photo ID is required to enter the building. From the publicity:

Lecture No. 6:

“Mystical Symbolism and Music”

Chancellor Robert R. Livingston

Masonic Library

Thursday, June 28 at 6:30

Masonic Hall

71 W. 23rd Street, Manhattan

Sponsored by the Square Club of the Fourth Manhattan District, Thursday, June 28, the Livingston Masonic Library will host Bro. Tony Crisos and Bro. Angel Millar, who will present a lecture and concert titled “Mystical Symbolism and Music: a Salon de la Rose Croix Lecture and Concert.”

The short introductory talk will be on the Salon de la Rose Croix and on the relationship between music and spirituality. A musical performance will follow the lecture with four original compositions utilizing the Hermetic Laws as they appear in the Kybalion and as inspired by the Orphic, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian traditions. The evening is fashioned aesthetically after the famous Salon de la Rose+Croix movement which took place in Paris, France, between 1892 and 1897.

Courtesy Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library

Angel Millar and Tony Crisos.

     

‘Guggenheim to exhibit Symbolist art of the Rose+Croix salons’

     
Here is an edition of The Magpie Mason from nine months ago. The exhibit will open tomorrow.


The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present about 40 works of Symbolist art first presented in fin de siècle Paris in Sar Péladan’s annual Rosicrucian salons. Péladan founded his own idiomatic system of Rosicrucian thought (don’t we all), and the art he cultivated in his Rose+Croix salons drew deeply from Christianity and Greek mythology, among other sources, to breathe some shock and awe spirituality into the Paris art scene, which was dominated by Realism at that time.

The exhibit will be open from June 30 through October 4, 2017. Then the collection will go to Venice to be shown in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection from October 27, 2017 through January 7, 2018.

From the publicity:

Mystical Symbolism:

The Salon de la Rose+Croix

in Paris, 1892-1897

In 1892, Joséphin Péladan (1859-1918), a Rosicrucian, self-proclaimed high priest of the occult, author, and critic, organized the first Salon de la Rose+Croix. This annual exhibition in Paris showcased mystical Symbolist art, particularly a hermetic, numinous vein of Symbolism that was favored by Péladan and dominant during the 1890s, a time when religious and occult practices often intertwined. Mysterious, visionary, and mythical subjects, often drawn from literary sources, prevailed in the art at the salons.

Orpheus Death by Jean Delville, 1893.

Images of femmes fragiles and fatales, androgynous creatures, chimeras, and incubi were the norm, as were sinuous lines, attenuated figures, and anti-naturalistic forms. Cosmopolitan in reach, the salons featured artists from Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, such as Antoine Bourdelle, Jean Delville, Rogelio de Egusquiza, Charles Filiger, Ferdinand Hodler, Fernand Khnopff, Alphonse Osbert, Armand Point, Gaetano Previati, Georges Rouault, Carlos Schwabe, Alexandre Séon, Jan Toorop, Ville Vallgren, and Félix Vallotton.

“Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892-1897” will capture a fascinating, transnational cross section of artists—some well known, others less so—and invite a fresh look at and new scholarship on late 19th century Symbolist art. Organized by Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, with the assistance of Ylinka Barotto, Curatorial Assistant, “Mystical Symbolism” will feature about 40 works culled from the six Salon de la Rose+Croix exhibitions, as well as pertinent historical documents. A musical component with pieces by Erik Satie and others will complement the presentation and underscore how composers played key roles in the development of the movement. The exhibition will highlight central artworks shown at each salon in order to tease out themes such as the role of Orpheus, the adulation of the Primitives, and the cult of personality that developed around figures including Richard Wagner and Péladan himself. These carefully chosen works and groupings, in turn, will allow for an in-depth exploration of the diverse and sometimes opposing concepts that informed Symbolism in the 1890s.

A fully illustrated catalogue will comprise essays on the salon and its main themes (Greene); the contemporary reception of the salon (Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, independent scholar); and the connections between Symbolists tenets and those of early 20th century avant-garde artists (Kenneth Silver, Professor of Art History, New York University). It will also contain a selected bibliography and artist entries authored by emerging scholars.
     

‘Guggenheim to exhibit Symbolist art of the Rose+Croix salons’

     
Okay, calm down. It won’t open until next summer, but it will happen, and it will be a first for any museum.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present about 40 works of Symbolist art first presented in fin de siècle Paris in Sar Péladan’s annual Rosicrucian salons. Péladan founded his own idiomatic system of Rosicrucian thought (don’t we all), and the art he cultivated in his Rose+Croix salons drew deeply from Christianity and Greek mythology, among other sources, to breathe some shock and awe spirituality into the Paris art scene, which was dominated by Realism at that time.

The exhibit will be open from June 30 through October 4, 2017. Then the collection will go to Venice to be shown in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection from October 27, 2017 through January 7, 2018.

From the publicity:

Mystical Symbolism:

The Salon de la Rose+Croix

in Paris, 1892-1897

In 1892, Joséphin Péladan (1859-1918), a Rosicrucian, self-proclaimed high priest of the occult, author, and critic, organized the first Salon de la Rose+Croix. This annual exhibition in Paris showcased mystical Symbolist art, particularly a hermetic, numinous vein of Symbolism that was favored by Péladan and dominant during the 1890s, a time when religious and occult practices often intertwined. Mysterious, visionary, and mythical subjects, often drawn from literary sources, prevailed in the art at the salons.

Orpheus Death by Jean Delville, 1893.

Images of femmes fragiles and fatales, androgynous creatures, chimeras, and incubi were the norm, as were sinuous lines, attenuated figures, and anti-naturalistic forms. Cosmopolitan in reach, the salons featured artists from Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, such as Antoine Bourdelle, Jean Delville, Rogelio de Egusquiza, Charles Filiger, Ferdinand Hodler, Fernand Khnopff, Alphonse Osbert, Armand Point, Gaetano Previati, Georges Rouault, Carlos Schwabe, Alexandre Séon, Jan Toorop, Ville Vallgren, and Félix Vallotton.

“Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892-1897” will capture a fascinating, transnational cross section of artists—some well known, others less so—and invite a fresh look at and new scholarship on late 19th century Symbolist art. Organized by Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, with the assistance of Ylinka Barotto, Curatorial Assistant, “Mystical Symbolism” will feature about 40 works culled from the six Salon de la Rose+Croix exhibitions, as well as pertinent historical documents. A musical component with pieces by Erik Satie and others will complement the presentation and underscore how composers played key roles in the development of the movement. The exhibition will highlight central artworks shown at each salon in order to tease out themes such as the role of Orpheus, the adulation of the Primitives, and the cult of personality that developed around figures including Richard Wagner and Péladan himself. These carefully chosen works and groupings, in turn, will allow for an in-depth exploration of the diverse and sometimes opposing concepts that informed Symbolism in the 1890s.

A fully illustrated catalogue will comprise essays on the salon and its main themes (Greene); the contemporary reception of the salon (Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, independent scholar); and the connections between Symbolists tenets and those of early 20th century avant-garde artists (Kenneth Silver, Professor of Art History, New York University). It will also contain a selected bibliography and artist entries authored by emerging scholars.
     

‘A Saturday Satie memory’

     
For some reason—I don’t know why, and I’m not necessarily proud of it—many of my earliest memories are of things seen on television. Bill Jorgensen with that day’s Vietnam body count on the Ten O’Clock News. Nixon’s resignation speech. Munich. A snippet of some cartoon showing anthropomorphized vegetables (e.g. an ill-tempered tomato) splashing down inside a stomach, or maybe a garbage can, and bickering among themselves about it.

One day at age three or four—definitely before kindergarten—I squeezed in a full morning of Sesame Street and other such programming before it was time for a nap. I abandoned the television in the master bedroom, but left it turned on, and walked a straight line of no more than twenty feet to my bed. Sacking out for a while and still able to hear the TV, I held still as haunting music reached my ears. A melody so laden with pathos that it made me afraid and sad. My eyes began tearing. I listened for maybe a minute more, feeling very uneasy, before venturing back to my parents’ room to see whatever trouble the program was. It showed wild animals, in slow motion, running through the grass and trees of some jungle-like setting. Which animals I do not remember; the music stayed with me for life.

Erik Satie

It was Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, as I would learn some 35 years later, in an arrangement—if I really can recall correctly—for guitar.

Erik-Alfred-Leslie Satie, says Encyclopædia Britannica, was a French composer “whose spare, unconventional, often witty style exerted a major influence on 20th-century music, particularly in France.” If you’re a fan of John Cage, you are acquainted with the sparse composition style and unconventional harmonies that are Satie’s legacy.

My proper introduction to M. Satie came courtesy of the Rose Circle Research Foundation, specifically Trevor Stewart’s lecture at our first conference, held in April 2006. Trevor spoke at length on the Salon de la Rose + Croix movement, led by Joseph Péladan in fin de siècle Paris. In short, it was an artistic movement wed to Péladan’s self-styled Rosicrucianism, a highly idiomatic esoteric Christianity indeed. (Now that is a subject any Rosicrucian ought to explore for personal edification.) The goal of the annual art salons was to restore the expression of spirituality to the Paris art scene, which at the time was devoted almost entirely to Realism. The art itself expressed themes from mythologies, mysticism, dreams, and other such intuitive inspirations. We can tell these paintings were generations ahead of their time because today they are merely awesome. A hundred and twenty years ago they were explosive.

Armand Point's poster promoting the 1895 Salon de la Rose Croix depicts Greek mythical hero Perseus, slayer of Medusa the Gorgon, holding up decapitated Emile Zola. 

In the liner notes of the CD Musique de la Rose-Croix (LTMCD 2469), James Nice summarizes Satie’s involvement with this arts movement:

A Templar Knight Rose Croix meets
Leonardo da Vinci in this Salon poster.

For a short period Erik Satie was appointed official composer for the esoteric Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, founded in Paris by the flamboyant mystic ‘Sar’ Joséphin Péladan. The first Salon de la Rose-Croix was held in March 1892, at which Satie’s solemn Trois Sonneries de la Rose + Croix were performed for the first time. Satie also composed music for Péladan’s play Le Fils des Étoiles (Son of the Stars), as well as two preludes for a chivalric play, Le Nazaréen. Satie subsequently broke from the Order in August 1892.

It would be too wonderful a coincidence for the sublime melody that upset me in a moment of early childhood to be among the composer’s Rosicrucian works I enjoy in middle age, and that is not the case, but I am delighted—très content—to connect the pieces and enjoy them. Erik Satie was born on this date in 1866, and when today settles down enough so I may sneak off with some tobacco and a glass of whiskey, I surely will toast his memory.