Our Glyph & Motto.htm

OUR GLYPH & MOTTO

The Angel of the Pointing Hand - the glyph of our work

The glyph of the Angel of the Pointing Hand is show here. It is also portrayed on the badge of our order seen on the

Home page. An explanation of the glyph is given below in the extract from Mr. Hodson's book The Brotherhood of

Angels and of Men, where the archangel Bethelda explains it along with our motto.

"The Highest" - the motto of our work.

There is too much satisfaction with that which is not the highest, and not enough readiness to aim higher still in all things that are done. Even in the pleasant talk of friends, there should always be upheld the ideal that thought and word and deed should be the highest ; because this is not so, the keen edge of heart and mind is blunted, the sense of greatness falls away, lesser things come into and clog the soul, delaying its progress on the Path. These things should not be, need not be; even little things are great for those who continually aspire. Make something great of all things. The walk, the drive, the fireside talk, all the household ways, all your earthly obligations, your pleasures and your pains, your strivings and your times of ease - let them be great, the greatest that, so far, has dawned within you - the highest you can reach.

Let the motto be for you all - THE HIGHEST - and let all who join our ranks pledge themselves to that motto. We, too will pledge ourselves, and every time this inward pledge is uttered by a man, an angel shall repeat his pledge and bear it like a torch to add to the great reservoir of power appointed for our work. Let each who would so pledge himself, retire into solitude, the private room, some grassy height, some woodland shade, or if he needs them not, into the chamber of his heart. There with fixed purpose let him first meditate, seeking to penetrate into the depth and meaning of our great ideal: then, having envisioned it, let him make firm resolve that he will ever strive towards it throughout this and his future lives; remembering to the great all things are great.

Thus, perchance, we may remove the blight that threatens your race, the blight of apathy; in which you are sunk so deep that only wars, earthquakes, fires and floods, famines and sudden death can stir your somnolence. Your higher selves - your angel selves - strive continually to awaken you, to send a vision through your dreams, and here and there a sleeper stirs and stretches, all too often to return to sleep; your dreams must be disturbed by the force of things external to your selves. Wars come to rouse you, and you pray to God to save you from more wars! Pestilence and famine stride hand in hand across your heedless lives, and only as you see them threatening your repose do you awake, and, for a time, become your greatest selves. Yet from these, you pray unto your Lord, asking Him to deliver you! The deliverer from these is with you all the while, it is your innermost self; but as you will not be aroused by the Self within you, you must be awakened by the Self without. Know that in wars, plagues, cataclysms, you see yourselves, the expressions of your soul, striding torch in hand, through the dormitories in which your bodies lie, to stir you from your sleep, to drive away the dark shadows of self-satisfaction and content. These other selves of yours will come again and again until you yourselves banish them for all time. They go from the nation, from those men, who answering to the highest, live according to its laws; who seeing the greatest, strive ever to express it, who neither rest nor sleep, filled with a craving which drives them onwards from peak to peak of the mountains of the spiritual world. That is the way to release, brothers, and there is none other. He who tells you that war may cease by act of law, does worse than lie; he covers up the truth, so that men, feeling safe, sink back again into their dreams - and war returns in due season.

In our Brotherhood, we must begin to hold aloft the great ideal - THE HIGHEST - and each must pledge himself that nothing else will satisfy his soul. You must preach this gospel - that the cause of all things, good and ill, lies within ourselves, that the good may be made better and the bad disappear, only by action from within. It is the lives of men you must reform, not their laws; lives can only change when they conform to the highest, instead of trifling with the lowest.

No man can plead that he does not know these things. Messenger after messenger has come and spread the truth abroad. It is you who have locked up such truths in temple, church, and mosque, and taken refuge in the courts of law, till self-denial is unknown, and is displaced by denial of the Self. Still you laugh contemptuously, when told that love shall save the world - or purity, or truth, or law, or sacrifice. You have hardened your hearts; yet He still comes, the embodiment of love, purity and truth, of law and sacrifice, to teach you once again the ancient truths, lest war - and even greater war - should take His place as Teacher of Angels and of Men.

Let this be our motto and our password, the sign by which we know each other by day and night - THE HIGHEST. Seek an artist friend that he may draw a picture of a member of the angel host standing upon a globe and pointing to the sky, and underneath - "THE HIGHEST." Call it "The Angel of the Pointing Hand"; make it into badge and talisman, bless it with power and love and courage to achieve, that all who wear it may be filled with divine discontent and a craving for the highest, a longing for the goal. Learn to make the form in the mental worlds and fill it with your desire, and send it out to men. Charge it to the full with your will; call upon an angel to ensoul it with his life, until you fill the mental world with glowing forms of angel kind which shall call to the mental selves of men, shall wake them from their sleep. Flood the mental world with this ideal, the ideal of THE HIGHEST.

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