The Rose of the world
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
W.B. Yeats. 1893.
The Rose is a symbol of hermetic and esoteric schools of the west as well as the east. It can also be found in the legend of the Holy Grail. In terms of psychology of the deeper unconscious the Grail, the chalice of salvation and sanctification, is a feminine element.
The order of the Black Rose
Also linked to the symbolism of the Rose is the order of knighthood hired by King Arthur with the aim of the discovery of the Holy Grail: the order of the Black Rose…
In addition to the meanings of abstinence and purity, traditional symbolism attaches to the White Rose the symbol of death. To the black Rose, in reality a dark red, are instead associated with the meanings of rebirth through pain and sacrifice and, consequently, of Eternal Life.
The meanings of the Black Rose then make explicit reference to the power of transmutation of Love, to the death and resurrection, through his favorite symbol, the Rose. It is the energy that can be either at the level of animal passion as that of pure spiritual strength.
