In the first chapter of the Orphic-Hermetic novel of poetic education, Henry von Ofterdingen, the early German Romantic philosopher, poet, and prophet Novalis presents his celebrated vision of “the blue flower.” As the story opens, Henry is lying in bed, thinking of wonder-filled stories a stranger has just told: “It is not the treasures that have awakened such inexpressible longings in me,” he thinks.

There is no greed in my heart; I only yearn to catch a glimpse of the blue flower. It is always in my mind. I can think or write of nothing else. I have never felt like this before. It is as if I had a dream, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world in which I have always lived, who ever bothered about flowers? Such a strange passion for a flower is something I have never heard of.... I feel rapturously happy; and inner turmoil overtakes me only when I do not have the flower before my eye.

Henry then falls asleep, and dreams tumultuously of immeasurable distances, and of wild, unfamiliar regions. He

…wandered over oceans with inconceivable ease; he saw wild creatures; he lived with many kinds of people, in war, in wild tumult, in quiet huts. He fell into captivity and ignominious affliction. Sensations rose in him to unknown heights. He went through an infinite variety of experiences; he died and came to life again, loved most passionately, and was then separated from his loved one forever.

Toward dawn, when night and day touch and for a moment intermingle and merge, Henry’s soul calmed down. The images in his dream became clearer and more coherent. He found himself walking through a dark forest leading to a rocky gorge. Reaching it, he started climbing upward over mossy stones, evidence of an ancient flood. As he ascended, the forest grew sparser. The trees thinned out. Finally, he reached a small meadow. Behind it, a craggy cliff jutted forth, in which a cavernous passageway, dark and inviting, had been cut. He entered it and walked until he saw a bright light welcoming him in the distance. Coming to it, the passage opened into a great space, filled with a shaft of yellow light that glistened like gold and rose from the floor as if spouting from a fountain. As it struck the ceiling, the light cascaded down into a basin in innumerable mist-like sparks. A holy stillness filled the place.

Approaching the basin, he saw a pale blue light emanating from it, while within the bowl, the light surged and quivered in endless colors. He dipped in his hand and wet his lips. A spirit passed through him. He felt refreshed and, longing to bathe, undressed and stepped into the basin. A heavenly sensation then flowed through him—as if a sunset cloud enveloped him. The waves lapped at his chest and seemed filled with a fluid female element that dissolved at his touch. Intoxicated, he swam with the luminous stream as it flowed from the basin into the cliff. Then sweet, fantastic, dream-filled sleep fell upon him until he found himself again at the edge of another fountain, surrounded by the softest grass. Blue, veined cliffs lay before him; the light was bright and mild. The sky was dark blue and clear.

A tall light blue flower stood near the spring and touched him with its broad shining leaves. Henry felt an overwhelming attraction for it. It drew him irresistibly. Around it grew innumerable flowers of every color. A delicious fragrance filled the air. But Henry had eyes only for the blue flower. He saw only it. Inexpressible tenderness filled his soul. He moved toward it. As he did so, it began to change. Its leaves became glossier and cuddled closely around the stem. The flower then leaned toward him, and within its petals, upon a great blue corolla, hovered a sphere, a delicate face, a being… “I am you.”… And then his mother woke him!

This blue flower, unveiled in a dream within a dream, in the innermost depths of the soul, speaks of the archetypal human being as both infinite yearning and as yearning for the infinite. It also speaks of the purified imagination as the mediator between the infinite, which is unknowable, and what can be known: likenesses of the truth. “We seek the Absolute (the Unconditioned, the Infinite),” Novalis wrote, “and we find only (conditioned, finite) things.” That is our problem. “How can we live with the unknown always before us?” asked the poet Rene Char. “How can we welcome the unknown without detaining it?” To do so we must learn to think and speak in a new way. We must yearn infinitely. Such is human nature and the only foundation for philosophy. But we must be without expectations: we must renounce the infinite in our yearning. Our yearning must be without an object. Renouncing the infinite—renouncing the egotism that would make us commensurate with it and that places us under the illusion that we can totalize and master it—we may yet receive it from moment to moment as a gift, a grace: what the alchemists would call a Donum Dei. But our hearts must be open.

Novalis’s intuitive Hermetic genius lies in understanding that the image that best conveys the reality of human nature, the quintessentially human yearning for the infinite, without any need to detain it, is the flowering plant: the flower, which simply, discreetly, and joyfully exemplifies a unique kind of purity, and offers itself in praise and submission to the cosmos. Indeed, just as the flower in all its littleness and fragility offers itself selflessly, humbly, to the cosmos, the purified human soul has always sought to offer itself to God in littleness and humility. “I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys,” sings the soul in The Song of Songs. “As the lily among thorns so is my love among the daughters…. For, lo, the winter is past, and the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth…. My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feeds among the lilies.” To love, says Novalis, is to hold the wound always open.

The human soul has always been likened to a flower, and traditionally the essential nature of both has always been seen to be prayer, which exemplifies the archetypal theurgic activity of infinite yearning by means of which, by the power of sympathy, one is drawn ineffably toward one’s source. Thus Proclus, the great Hermetic Neoplatonist,
writes in his little treatise “On the Hieratic Art”:

How else could it be that the sunflower (Heliotrope) moves in accordance with the Sun and the moonflower (Selenotrope) in accordance with the Moon, each turning around with the luminaries of the world according to its ability? For all things pray—either spiritually, rationally, or in a sensory manner, according to the rank they occupy—and hymn the Leaders who preside over their chains…The sunflower [turns]…and if one could hear how it makes the air vibrate…one would realize from the sound that it makes that it is making a hymn to its king....The lotus, too, demonstrates the workings of sympathy. Its petals are closed before the appearance of the sun’s rays, but it gradually opens them as the sun begins to rise, unfolding them as it reaches its zenith and closing them up again as it descends. What then is the difference between the human manner of hymning the sun, by opening and closing the lips, and that of the lotus by opening and closing its petals? For those are its lips and that is its natural hymn.

For Proclus, flowers especially demonstrate this quality, but it is not unique to them: all earthly things, all bearing the traces of the gods, are filled with gods. All earthly things are infused with and connected to their celestial lineages, their angels and archangels. They are heavenly seeds: ineffable connections. This is the doctrine of signatures. But the planetary or zodiacal chain of which a plant or stone is a seed and link is only the beginning. For, in this view, all the divine, cosmic, and spiritual hierarchies collaborate with the Earth and her elemental beings in the evolutionary adventure that is the Earth. Therefore in Hermeticism, botany, like mineralogy and zoology, has always been a sacred science. There has always been a sacred language of flowers; and flowers (and the art of their cultivation in paradisal gardens) have always had a liturgical significance. Henry Corbin, for example, speaks of the “floral liturgy” of the Mazdeans, in which monthly and daily each presiding archangel and angel is given as its emblem a flower, which is used both liturgically and as a support for meditation. Inspired by Gemistos Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance Mage, also used flowers in his Orphic-Hermetic liturgies. Rudolf Steiner likewise, using the language of Christian esotericism, speaks of the ways in which different beings of the spiritual hierarchies, working through the planetary and zodiacal fields, shape and inform the growth, form, and metamorphosis of plants as they do of everything earthly.

Hermetically, then, we must consider the plants and the plant world as an earthly-heavenly gift, come down to Earth from the cosmos, unfolded through a vast bio-cosmic alchemy. Plants, like all things on Earth, including humanity (which includes them all), are at once earthly and heavenly. Plants and humans mirror each other and both mirror the cosmos. The flowering plant, like the human, is threefold, beginning with the root (body), unfolding through the stem and leaf (soul), and culminating in the flower (spirit).

First, however, is the seed, which is not yet the plant, nor yet of the Earth. It was created in the ovary of the flowering parent plant, enclosed by the carpel leaves, protected from all terrestrial influences— a cosmic womb for the conception of new life, open to the gods. Seeds, the Egyptians said, were “odors of the god.”

Within the seed, the seedling sprouts, its radicle turned downward to the Earth and its cotyledons upward to the heavens. Not yet truly a plant, it prefigures the plant’s dual vertical gesture—between darkness and light, gravity
and levity.

Then the root is formed and works into the earth, at once contractive and spreading out into the soil. As it pushes downward, working into gravity and darkness, it fixes and transforms minerals, all the while gradually hardening. Meanwhile the stem soars upward toward the sunlight. Expanding and contracting in a rhythmic spiral, it unfolds its green leaves in a process that is a collaboration between the influence of the Sun and the influences of the so-called “outer” planets—Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—with the earthly milieu. Without the influence of the latter, plants, under the sole influence of the Sun, would simply shoot upward indefinitely. At the same time, the influence of these outer planets is counteracted by the influence of the Moon and “inner” planets—Mercury and Venus. These work into
the development of the roots. Thus the plant is a fruit of our whole solar system—and something more.

The flower itself is almost a new being, almost something added, an initiatory transformation. A unified organ, colored, fragrant, almost a second plant of a higher level, it seems to rise above the purely vegetative. It seems supra-cosmic, almost detached from the earth, as if seeking to free itself from it and gravity and soar into the heavens like a butterfly. It has been said that a butterfly is a freed flower, a flower a fettered butterfly. Much, indeed, could be said about the relation of butterflies, bees, and other insects to the flower. But for now we can only note something almost animal-like about the flower, which certainly seems ensouled and to touch, even embody, a universal soul-spiritual-element.

As a being of root, leaf, and flower, the plant may be seen as an upside-down human being. The root may be seen as analogous to the human head or nerve-sensory system; the leaf as analogous to the circulatory-lung-rhythmic system; and the flower as analogous with the metabolism. So we may say that the plant thinks with its roots, feels and breathes with its leaves, digests and wills through its flower. As in the human head, in the root contractive, hardening, mineralizing, even dying tendencies predominate. The plant, however, is rooted in the Earth and pushes upward with its reproductive organs, while the human being is rooted in heaven and pushes downward with its reproductive organs. Another difference is that, rooted in the Earth, the plant unites with all other plants, so that the Earth is the “head” of the plants, while each of us carries his or her own individualized globe. As for metabolism, the flower is metabolic because, unable to build up organic substances itself, it “digests” what the vegetative parts have prepared for it. In this way, it transforms substances as we do food to create its fruit and seed, in the process generating heat, analogous to blood temperature. The intuitive will element enters in its formation of the seed. For what is a seed, but will? How wise, then, Novalis was. For in his vision of the Blue Flower, he could show that the infinite yearning that makes possible the full realization of our humanity has its seat, not in the emotions, but in the will, which, as Thomas Aquinas noted, is but another word for love.

Finally, balancing and mediating these two processes of root and flower are the leaves, photosynthesizing living cosmic light and exhaling oxygen by day and breathing carbon dioxide by night. The plant, whose archetypal form according to Goethe is the leaf, is, from this point of view, all lung and makes possible the breath of the Earth.

Alchemically, these three functions may be described as Salt, Mercury, and Sulfur processes. The root is salt-forming; it subjects substances to gravity. Acknowledging this allows us to see the plant as torn between gravity (darkness) and levity or light, between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. The leaf’s mercurial activity mediates and balances between the salt tendency of the root and the inward spiritual nature of the flower’s sulfur tendency. For

the flower itself is sulfuric or phosphoric. It is light-bearing, filled with the warmth and light of cosmic fire.
Alchemically, too, the plant is the paradigm of the work itself, for it is the purest image of cosmic life on Earth: the living archetype of the way the world was made. In the plant, Life itself—divine, cosmic, spiritual, earthly: One Life—is articulated for our contemplation. For the alchemists, the whole mystery of the work was a science of plants and seeds. Thus The Glory of the World confirms:

In our soil, and out of our seed, our Stone grows through the distilling of the Sun and Moon; and, as it grows, it rises upwards, as it were, into the air, while its root remains in the ground. That which is above is even as that which is below; the same law prevails; there is no error or mistake. Again, as herbs grow upward, put forth glorious flowers and blossoms, and bear fruit, so our seed blossoms, matures its fruit, is threshed, sifted, purged of its chaff, and again put in the earth, which, however, must previously have been well manured, harrowed, and otherwise prepared. When it has been placed in its natural soil, and watered with rain and dew, the moisture of heaven, and roused into life by the warmth of the Sun and Moon, it produces fruit after its own kind. These two sowings are peculiar characteristics of our Art. For the Sun and Moon are our grain, which we put into our soil, as soul and spirit—and as the father and the mother are so will be the children that they generate….

For this tradition the secret of the unity of all things is enclosed within the mystery—the one thing that is the matter of the work—that lies between seed and seed, and unfolds to our eyes through germination, rooting, sprouting, leafing, flowering, and fruiting: the multiplication of seeds. And so the entire alchemical work—which is simultaneously an inner and an outer work—unfolds in imitation of the cycle of the plant. Just as God created the world in seven days, the path of a seed from germination to the realization of the fruit falls into seven stages, none of which is quantitatively separable from another. In this tradition, the universe itself is a flowering plant: its seed in God, its flower on Earth.

Thus Goethe, going the other way, could intuit his Metamorphosis of Plants with the help of old alchemical texts, and Jacob Boehme, whose seven divine qualities of creation—from the abyssal seed, through duality, rotation, stillness, union, intelligible sound, to the new seed, tincture or entelechy—is exemplified in the plant as the image of Life itself, which unfolds through a series of expansions and contractions, polarities and exaltations, dissolvings and coagulatings, until the flower emerges and the new seed is announced. Thus, too, alchemists will mark the progression of their work by the appearance of flowers in their vessels.

Nor must we forget how flowers and flowering plants are embedded in the earthly cycle of the year. As a living being, the Earth may be said to exhale during the spring and summer months—giving herself over to the cosmos, living with it—and inhale, draw into herself, during the autumn and winter months. By another analogy, we may say she sleeps in winter and wakes in summer. Thus spring—the vernal equinox—comes as she wakes and begins to breathe out. And if winter is night and summer is day, then early spring is dawn, when Novalis began his dream.

In spring, seeds begin to germinate. A subtle life-energy—Hildegard calls it viriditas, the “greening power of God, close cousin for her of the Holy Spirit”—rises to greet the spring rains and dew that bring gifts from above. Elemental beings awaken, shaping new cloud formations, and working with vapor, air, and warmth. One senses not only new life, but also a healing presence, attributed traditionally to the over-lighting of the Archangel Raphael.

As spring turns to summer, life begins to shine. It is everywhere radiant, pressing up into the cosmos. By midsummer, St. John’s Tide, the Earth’s streaming into the heavens, reaching its peak. All is under the sign of blue—deep blue skies, blue haze, a silver-blue-green aura hovering over the plant world and the Earth. Looking out, it is not hard to see Novalis’s Blue Flower forming and dissolving. It is not hard to sense the Earth’s aspiration in love for the wisdom of the cosmos. A kind of radiant intelligence, traditionally associated with the Archangel Uriel, the fire of God, whose symbol is an open hand holding a flame, suffuses the light into which the flowers raise their heads.

There are mysteries here. From spring to midsummer was the most propitious time to conduct the alchemical work: indeed, the only time, if the work was to be successful. It was the time of the Donum Dei, the gift of god, the culmination of what began in spring—e. e. cummings’ “just-spring, when the world is mudluscious, puddle-wonderful, when the little goat-footed balloon man whistles and bettyandisabel and eddieandbill come dancing”— the time of the ancient Festivals of Flora, Demeter, also known as Chloe, “the green shoot,” Venus, and, in another vein, Mary the Mother of God.

Our guides here are the Troubadours, whose purifying path of love also began in spring, to end, metaphorically at least, in midsummer.

The Troubadour path might well be called the “flower path.”

The Troubadours are the first “Romantics,” in that they wrote and sang their songs not in the dead language of Latin but in their own Romance mother tongues, the living vernacular of experience. Romanticism, in this sense, means to stick to experience and it begins appropriately enough with a tenth-century Provencal “alba” or “dawn song.” Thus dawn again begins the journey.

Dawn appears upon the sea
from behind the hill,
The watch passes, it shines
clear amid the shadows.

To understand the significance of the Troubadours, their vision must be distinguished from that of the knightly or chivalric tradition, which rested on what they called the “manly”—we may also call them “animal” in contrast to “floral”—virtues of equality, tribalism, and brotherhood. The knights were heroic, virile, outward, open, realistic, lustful, and exalted courage, daring, loyalty, and marriage. The world they lived in was drenched in blood. The Troubadours for their part walked a different path. They sought to purify the manly, animal soul with more feminine, floral virtues, and so they praised inequality, solitude, inferiority, humility, submission, distance, discretion, secrecy, interiority, and, above all, joy.

Out of these floral virtues, then, they created an initiatory soul path of love, which according to Rene Nelli, unfolded, just like the alchemical work and the metamorphosis of the plant, in seven practices: Falling in Love; Joy; True Love; the Perfect Lover; the Perfect Lady; the Trial of Love; and the Exchange of Hearts.

For Pound, this tradition descended secretly from the Mysteries of Eleusis and sought, not ecstasy, but “a glow arising from the exact nature of the perception,” “‘an exteriorization of the sensibility,’ an interpretation of the cosmos by feeling,” “a sort of confidence in the life force” or viriditas.

Love—Falling in Love—begins with the wound. Like the seed germinating, the heart must fall into chaos. It must break open.

“A mountain whirlwind, / Punishing oak trees / Love broke open my heart” wrote Sappho. A fiery ray descends, igniting a fire, which to germinate must be tended with patience, humility, and nurturing care. The wound must be held open, but kept secret. In the alternation of expansion and contraction, it is the first contraction. But then it expands, allowing the play of infinite yearning. Distance is necessary for this: this love is from afar. Thus, stretching, the stem rises and the leaves unfold. Troubadours call it Joy. Its image is spring, dawn, and youth. Essentially interior, a contraction, as in the calyx, such joy, as they speak of it, is pure, without attachment, preconception, judgment, desire, memory, or thought. Joy, in this sense, is the pure natural condition of the heart; it allows the heart slowly to begin to regain the purity, which, they say, is as natural to it as leaves to the plant. All things are perceived, at this stage, in the image of the beloved, the goal that is no goal, held forever in the heart without attachment, perpetually welcomed but never detained or possessed. At this stage, too, for the Troubadours, nature begins to reveal its mysteries: they learn the language of the birds, the language of the flowers.

The next stage, “true love,” fins amor, which is also the path of love, is the joyful expanding practice of desire without an object, purified of all selfishness, egoism, possessiveness. “I am the most perfect of lovers because I ask nothing of my Lady,” writes one Troubadour. Another says: “I am her friend, and I serve her occultly, discreetely, silently…I ask for nothing more.” Thus the flower begins to be formed. Its creation depends upon becoming “a perfect lover,” able to serve, praise, honor, and conceal. This is what makes those virtues, so often associated with flowers, possible: patience, hope, sincerity, humility, timidity, receptivity, and above all, service. All of this in a sense may be resumed in Mary’s great Yes, her life of assent: Mary, whom Dante, like so many others, depicted as a multifoliate Rose. The great victory is over egotism. Praise is important here. Praise, which is so central to the spiritual path, because, praising, we become what we praise. In the flowering plant, we may liken this to the expansion of the corolla.

The last three stages—the Perfect Lady, the Trial of Love, and the Exchange of Hearts—we may liken to the flower’s creation of sexual organs; the creation of the fruit; and the seed itself. It comes as a gift, a Donum Dei. The Perfect Lady is Love incarnate: She is joy, intelligence, perfect beauty, and unconditionally open hospitality. In a higher sense, she is the image, the incarnation, of “the flawless mirror of the active power of God,” Sophia, La Madonna Intelligenza, as Dante calls her.

The final, seminal stages—the Test of Love and The Exchange of Hearts—are the great mystery. Here the fruit and seed are formed. The first, expanding, tests and overcomes duality. In it, the Troubadour manifests his perfected inner nature. Reminding us of Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet, Bernart de Ventadour writes: “She (the “Perfect Lady”) will call me into her chamber, and by her command I shall be by her bed, and humbly, if she offers me her foot, I shall pull off her slippers.” This is the mystery of the fruit. Then, with the Exchange of Hearts, the mutual contemplation of hearts, in which they unite in one heart, which is one with the heart of the universe, unity is realized, and the seed created.

Suggested Reading:
Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (Bollingen/Princeton University Press, 1977).
Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (Bollingen/Princeton University Press, 1969).
Gerbert Grohman, The Plant, Volume 1 (Kimberton, PA: Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association).
Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen (Frederick Ungar, 1964).
Rudolf Steiner, The Four Seasons and the Archangels (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968).

This essay is a shorter, edited version of a talk given at the first annual Green Hermeticism Conference hosted by the Sufi Order International as part of its Suluk Academy and held in May 2007 at the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York.