The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary

by Karl von Eckartshausen

Apart from "The Cloud upon the Sanctuary," Eckartshausen is a name only to the Christian Transcendentalists of England. He wrote much, and at his period and in his place, he exercised some considerable influence; but his other works are practically unknown among us, while in Germany the majority at least seem forgotten, even among the special class to which some of them might be assumed to appeal. The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary has, I believe, always remained in the memory of a few, and is destined still to survive, for it carries with it a message of very deep significance to all those who look beneath the body of religious doctrine for the one principle of life which energizes the whole organism. This translation has offered it for the first time to English readers, and it enters here upon the third phase of its existence. It appeared originally in the pages of "The Unknown World," a magazine devoted to the deeper understanding of philosophical and mystical religion, and it was afterwards republished in volume form, of which edition this is a new issue. It has attracted very considerable attention and deserved it; it has even been translated into French, under the auspices of the late Countess of Caithness, for the pages of L'Aurore. These few words of bibliography are not unnecessary because they establish the fact that there has been some little sentiment of interest working within a restricted circle, as one may hope, towards a more general diffusion and knowledge of a document which is at once suggestive from the literary standpoint and profoundly moving from other and higher considerations. It encourages me to think that many persons who know and appreciate it now, or may come under its influence in the future, will learn with pleasure the little that I can tell them of its author, the Councillor Eckartshausen, and of certain other books not of his writing, which, as I think, connect therewith, and the study of which may help us to understand its message.

Genres: Occult, Religion, Nonfiction, Mysticism, Esoterica, Christianity, Psychology

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1793

Reviews

[The Spiritualist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moses freed his personality (Israel’s nation) from the tyrannical pharaoh (ego), and ended his materialistic lifestyle (slavery in Egypt). In the wilderness (a spiritual state of mind), he built the sanctuary. 
The sanctuary is inside, shrouded in the mist of our thoughts and emotions that cloud the truth about our Self. The sanctuary hosts the miracles of miracles, the divine presence inside our personality. As we proceed in the great work, the fog slowly disperses and we turn the (mobile) sanctuary into a permanent temple. The work is finished with the Holy of Holies in which we can invoke the presence of the Creator.
Karl von Eckartshausen was a true Rosicrucian and his book conveys spiritual truth.

- The Spiritualist, www.thespiritualist.net

[Michael Snuffin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have known of this book's significance within the Golden Dawn for many years, but I only picked up a copy a few months ago at HPB. Levi mentions Eckartshausen in DRHM, so I pushed it to the top of my reading list. The book consists of six letters; the first three letters gave me enlightening insight on the some of the core principles of the Golden Dawn, while the last three did not interest me as much, in part because the raving about Jesus as sole lord and savior increases significantly in the last half of the text. I did not read any of the accompanying commentary or translators notes, preferring to come to my own conclusions. Well, that and the fact that Waite authored the introduction...

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is no age more remarkable to the quiet observer than our own. Everywhere there is a fermentation in the mind, as in the heart of man; everywhere there is a battle between light and darkness, between exploded thought and living ideas, between powerless wills and living active force; in fine, everywhere there is war between animal man and growing spiritual man.”
—
“It is said that we live in the age of light, but it would be truer to say that we are living in that of twilight; here and there a luminous ray pierces the mist of darkness, but does not light to full clearness either our reason or our heart. Men are not of one mind, scientists dispute, and where there is discord, truth is not yet apprehended.”
—
“Poor mankind! To what eminence have you raised the happiness of man? Has there ever been an age which has counted so many victims to humanity as the present? Has there ever been an age in which immorality and egotism have been greater or more dominant than in this one? The tree is known by its fruits. Insensate beings! With your imaginary natural reason, from whence have you the light by which you are so willing to enlighten others? Are not all your ideas borrowed from your senses, which do not give you the reality but merely its phenomena? Is it not true that in time and space all knowledge is but relative? Is it not true that all which we call reality is also relative, for absolute truth is not to be found in the phenomenal world.
Thus your natural reason does not possess the true essence, but only an appearance of truth and light; and the more this semblance increases and spreads, the more the essence of light fades inwardly; the man is lost in the apparent and gropes vainly after dazzling phantasmal images devoid of all actuality.”
—
“You abstract from the Scriptures and Tradition their moral, theoretical and practical truth; but as individuality is the principle of your intelligence, and as egotism is the incentive to your will, you do not see, by your light, the moral law which dominates or you repel it with your will. It is to this length that the light of to-day has pentrated. Individuality under the cloak of false philosophy is a child of corruption.”
—
“Who can pretend that the sun is in full zenith if no bright rays illuminate the earth, and no warmth vitalises vegetation? If wisdom does not benefit man, if love does not make him happy, but very little has been done for him on the whole.”
—
“Absolute truth does not exist for sensuous man; it exists only for interior and spiritual man who possesses a suitable sensorium; or, to speak more correctly, who possesses an interior organ to receive the absolute truth of the transcendental world, a spiritual faculty which cognises spiritual objects as objectively and naturally as the exterior senses perceive external phenomena.”
—
“This organism has been naturally inactive since the Fall, which relegated man to the world of physical sense. The gross matter which envelops the interior sensorium is a film which veils the internal eye, and prevents the exterior eye from seeing into spiritual realms. This same matter muffles our internal hearing, so that we are deaf to the sounds of the metaphysical world; it so paralyses our spiritual speech that we can scarcely stammer words of sacred import, words which we pronounced formerly, and by virtue of which we held authority over the elements and external nature.”
—
“There are three different degrees in the opening of our spiritual sensorium.
The first degree reaches to the moral plane only; the transcendental world then operates in us by interior movements, called inspiration.
The second and higher degree opens our sensorium to the reception of the spiritual and the intel-lectual, and then the metaphysical world works in us by interior illumination.
The third degree, which is the highest and most seldom attained, opens the whole inner man. It breaks the crust which darkens our spiritual eyes and ears; it reveals the kingdom of spirit, and enables us to see, objectively, metaphysical and transcendental sights; hence all visions are explained fundamentally.”
—
“The great and true work of building the Temple consists solely in destroying the miserable Adamic hut and in erecting a divine temple; this means, in other words, to develop in us the interior sensorium, or the organ to receive God. After this process, the metaphysical and incorruptible principle rules over the terrestrial, and man begins to live, not any longer in the principle of self-love, but in the Spirit and in the Truth, of which he is the Temple.”
—
“This Sanctuary remained changeless, though external religion received in the course of time and circumstances varied modifications, and became divorced from the interior truths which can alone preserve the letter. The profane idea of wishing to secularize" all that is Christian, and to Christian-ise all that is political, changed the exterior edifice, and covered with the shadow of death all that reposed within it of light and life. Hence rose divisions and heresies, and the spirit of Sophistry ready to expound the letter when it had already lost the essence of truth.”
—
“This interior community of light is the reunion of all those capable of receiving light, and elect thereto; it is known as the Communion of Saints. The primitive deposit of all power and truth has been confided to it from all time—it alone, says St. Paul, is in the possession of the science of the Saints. By it the agents of God were formed in every age, passing from the interior to the exterior, and communicating spirit and life to the dead letter —as already said.”
—
“But all exterior societies subsist only in proportion as this society communicates its spirit thereto.
As soon as external societies wish to be independent of the interior one, and to transform a temple of wisdom into a political edifice, the interior society retires and leaves only the letter without the spirit.
It is thus that secret external societies of wisdom were nothing but hieroglyphic screens, the truth remaining invariably without the sanctuary so that it might never be profaned.”
—
“The absolute truth lying in the centre of Mystery is like the sun, it blinds ordinary sight and man sees only the shadow. The eagle alone can gaze at the dazzling light, and only the prepared soul can bear the arcane lustre. Nevertheless, the great Something which is the inmost of the Holy Mysteries has never been hidden from the piercing gaze of him who can bear the light.
God and nature have no mysteries for their children. Mystery is caused by the weakness of our own nature, unable to support light, because it is not yet organised to bear the chaste sight of unveiled truth.
This weakness is the Cloud that covers the Sanctuary; it is the curtain which veils the Holy of Holies.”
—
“The exterior symbol is only the sheath which holds the inner; it may change and multiply, but it can never weaken the truth of the interior; more-over, the letter was necessary; we ought to seek and try to decipher it—so to discover the interior sense.
All errors, divisions, all misunderstandings, all which in religions and in secret societies tends to divagation can only concern the letter-the outer veil of symbol, ceremony and rite. What rests behind remains always pure and holy.”
—
“Morning follows night, the sun rises, and all moves on to full mid-day, where shadows disappear in the vertical splendour. The letter of truth must exist in the first place; then comes the practical ex-planation, then the truth itself; and it is only thereafter that the Spirit of Truth can descend Which testifies to truth, and sets the seals closing the light.
He who can receive the truth will understand. It is to you, much-loved brothers, you who labour to reach truth, you who have so faithfully preserved the glyph of the holy mysteries in your temple, it is to you that the first ray of truth will be directed; this ray will pierce through the cloud of mystery, and will announce the full day and the treasure which it brings.”
—
“Revelation entails the necessity of faith therein, because he who has no experience or knowledge whatsoever of a thing must necessarily believe if he wishes to know and have experience. If faith fails, there is no desire for Revelation, and the mind of man closes, by itself, its own door and road for discovering the methods contained in Revelation only. As action and re-action follow each other in nature, so also inevitably Revelation and faith act and re-act. One cannot exist without the other, and the more faith a man has the more will Revelation be made to him of matters which lie in obscurity. It is true, and very true, that all the veiled truths of religions, even those veiled most deeply, those most difficult to us, will one day be justified before a tribunal of strictest reason; but the weakness of men and their lack of penetration in perceiving the relation and correspondence between physical and spiritual nature, require that the highest truths should only be imparted gradually.”
—
“Thus also, mere physical man is, in general spiritually blind, having his interior eye closed, and this again is one of the consequences of the Fall. Man then is doubly miserable; he not only has his eyes blindfolded to the sight of high truths, but his heart also languishes a prisoner in the bonds of flesh and blood, which confine him to animal and sensuous pleasures and deny those which are more elevated and genuine. Therefore are we slaves to concupiscence, to the domination of tyrannical passions; therefore do we drag ourselves as paralysed sufferers supported on crutches-the one crutch being the weakness of mere human reason, and the other sentiment—the one daily giving us appearance instead of reality, the other making us constantly choose evil, imagining it to be good. Of such is our woeful condition.”
—
“You must know, my brothers, that there is a dual nature, one pure, spiritual, immortal and indestruc-tible, the other impure, material, mortal and de-structible. Pure and indestructible nature preceded that which, though pure, was destructible. This latter originated solely through the disharmony and disproportion of substances which form destructible nature. Hence nothing is permanent until all disproportions and dissonances are eradicated, so that all remains in harmony.”
—
“The nerves and fluidity of the brain can only yield us rough and obscure notions derived from phenomena—not from truth and the things them-selves; and as we cannot, by the strength of our thinking powers alone, have sufficient balance to oppose representations strong enough to counteract the violence of external sensation, the result is that we are governed by our passions, and the voice of reason which speaks softly internally is deafened by the tumultuous noise of the elements which keep our mechanism going.”
—
“This truth has been felt for long, and it has always been taught that reason should be sole legisla-tor. It should govern the will and never be governed itself.
Great and small feel this truth; but no sooner is it desired to put it in execution than the animal will vanquishes reason, and then the reason subjugates the animal will; thus in every man the victory and defeat are alternate, and this power and counter-power cause a perpetual oscillation between good and evil, or the true and the false.”
—
“Jesus Christ has written in our hearts in exceedingly beautiful words, this great truth, that man must seek in his common clay for the cause of all his sorrows. When He said, ‘The best man, he who strives the most to arrive at truth sins seven times a day,’ He intended to show that in a man of the finest organisation, the seven powers of the spirit are still so closed that the seven sensuous actions overcome him daily after their respective fashions.”
—
“Thus the best man is exposed to error and pas-sions; the best man is weak and sinful; the best man is not a free man, and, therefore, exempt from pain and trouble; the best man is subject to sickness and death, because these things are the inevitable consequences incidental to the corrupt matter of which he is formed.”
—
“There can be no hope of higher happiness for humanity so long as the corruptible or material forms the principal substantial part of our being. The impossibility of mankind to transport itself, of itself, to true per-fection, is a despairing thought, but, at the same time, one full of consolation, because, in consequence of this radical impossibility, a more exalted and perfect being than man permitted himself to be clothed in this mortal and destructible envelope in order to make the mortal immortal, and the destructible indestructible; herein is to be sought the true reason for the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.”
—
“Where is the man that has no passions? Let him show himself. Do we not all wear the chains of sensuality more or less heavily? Are we not all slaves, all sinners?
This realisation of our low estate excites in us the desire for redemption; we lift up our eyes on high, and an angel's voice says — the sorrows of man shall be comforted.”
—
“Many men cannot understand the idea of the Tree of Good and Evil; this tree was, however, the product of movable but central matter, in which destructibility had somewhat the superiority over the indestructible principle. The premature use of its fruit was that which poisoned Adam, robbing him of his immortality and enveloping him in material and mortal clay. In this manner he fell a prey to the Elements which originally he governed.
This unhappy event was, however, the reason why Immortal Wisdom, the pure metaphysical element, clothed itself with a mortal body and was voluntarily sacrificed, so that its Interior Powers could penetrate into the centre of the destruction, and could thus raise gradually all that which is mortal into the immortal state.
When it came about quite naturally that immortal man became subject to mortality through the enjoyment of mortal fruit, it happened, also quite naturally, that mortal man could only recover his former dignity through the enjoyment of Immortal Matter.”
—
“When, after the enjoyment of a corruptible fruit — which permeated him with the ferment of death — man was poisoned so thoroughly that all around him became also subject to death and destruction, then Divine mercy was constrained to establish a counter remedy, which could be taken after the same manner; it contained within itself the divine and revitalising substance, so that by receiving this immortal food, poisoned and death-stricken man could be healed and rescued from his suffering. But in order that this Tree of Life could be replanted here below, it was requisite beyond all things that the corruptible material in the centre of the earth should be first regenerated, resolved and made capable of being again one day a universally vitalising substance.”
—
“This capacity for new life, bringing about the dissolution of corruptible essence which is inherent in the centre of the earth, was only possible in so far as Divine Vital Substance assumed flesh and blood to transmit the hidden forces of life to dead nature. This was done through the death of Jesus Christ. The tinctural force which flowed from His blood penetrated to the innermost parts of the earth, raised the dead, rent the rocks and caused the total eclipse of the sun by driving from the centre of the earth, wherein the light penetrated, the central darkness to the circumference, and therein laying the foundation of the future glorification of the world.”
—
“When our hearts, through living faith, have received Jesus Christ, then this Light of the World is born within us as in a humble stable.
Everything in us is impure, surrounded by the spiderwebs of vanity, covered with the mire of sensibility.
Our will is the Ox that is under the yoke of its passions.
Our reason is the Ass which is bound
through the obstinacy of its opinions, its prejudices, its follies.
In this miserable and ruined hut, the home of all the animal passions, can Jesus Christ be born in us through faith.”

[K.D. Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic book that absolutely must be read for anyone seeking cross cultural and spiritual/religious understanding. Another book that gives you some key information for those with enough wit to discern it.

[John Banner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good material in here, but it is just too heavy on the Christian bias for my taste. But if you can read through that or it doesn't bother you, well worth the read.

[Hotspur · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sort of basic mystical Nietzscheism, where the select few know the greatness of love and Jesus. There's not too much here, and it didnt resonate with me.

[DaCane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many truths Saul tried to explain to us in the New Testament are discussed…definitely gets my stamp of approval….Going to reread

[Ezra Hodgson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uncloudy day

The insights of this author into the true spiritual realms of the manifestation of the Kingdom of God through Jesus Christ are astounding. He didn't have TV to contend with!

[Brianna Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought provoking articulation of the purpose behind the process.

I would recommend this book to an anyone seeking truth based on the word of God. I am avid student of The Holy Bible, constantly trying to better understand the fundamental and timeless meaning in scripture.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book on Christian Mysticism

[Joseph Voelbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This small book composed of five letters from Karl Von Eckartshausen is an excellent piece of meditative literature for anyone interested in Christian Mysticism.