Second Division Memorial, Washington, D.C. This monument recalls Archangel Michael’s sword and the sword Excalibur—both symbols of the sword of Eden guarding the way of the Tree of Life for America and every nation.
The sword has a number of different meanings and symbolisms.
Sacred Word
The word sword is a code word for “sacred word” or the Spirit’s word.
The understanding of the sword as the sacred word of God is illustrated in a Jewish tradition about Mount Horeb. Horeb is the mountain where God revealed himself to Moses and gave him the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew word for Horeb is closely related to the word for sword or knife.
One Jewish text says that Mount Horeb is called by that name “because there the sword of the law was drawn upon the sinners.”[1] According to Arabic tradition, the Hebrews invented the sword.[2]
Spoken Word
The word sword can also refer to “spoken Word.” This is reflected in the ancient Pythagorean maxim, “Do not stir the fire with a sword.”[3]
Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras says this maxim warns us to be prudent. He says:
It shows the propriety of not speaking sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath—not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself.[4]
Thus we see that the word sword can also mean “sharp word.”
One interesting Hebrew tradition involves the sword of Methuselah, who was one of the sons of Enoch. A text called “The Ten Generations” relates the story:
After the translation of Enoch, Methuselah was proclaimed ruler of the earth by all the kings. He walked in the footsteps of his father, teaching truth, knowledge and fear of God to the children of men all his life, and deviating from the path of rectitude neither to the right nor the left. He delivered the world from thousands of demons that were the posterity of Adam which he had begotten with Lilith, that she-devil of she-devils. These demons and evil spirits, as often as they encountered a man, had sought to injure and even slay him, until Methuselah appeared and supplicated the mercy of God. He spent three days in fasting and then God gave him permission to write the Ineffable Name upon his sword, wherewith he slew ninety-four myriads of the demons in a minute, until Agrimus, the first-born of them, came to him and entreated him to desist, at the same time handing the names of the demons and imps over to him. And so Methuselah placed their kings in iron fetters, while the remainder fled away and hid themselves in the innermost chambers and recesses of the ocean. And it is on account of the wonderful sword, by means of which the demons were killed, that he was called Methuselah.[5]
This story can be taken as myth, as allegory or as fact.
One of the words that is the root of the name Methuselah means “sword” or “he sent.”[6]
Methuselah’s sword appears again in Jewish lore. Tradition says that thousands of years later Abraham used the sword of Methuselah in his conquest of the kings[7] in about 2100 B.C. These kings had invaded the Jordan valley where Abraham’s nephew Lot had settled. Abraham routed the kings and rescued Lot and others who had been taken captive.
Genesis tells us that on that occasion:
Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine, and he was the priest of the most high God (El Elyon). And he blessed Abraham and said, “Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” And Abraham gave him tithes of all.[8]
Legends about swords abound in the world’s folklore. Perhaps the most famous of all swords is King Arthur’s Excalibur. King Arthur had two swords. The first he pulled from a stone to prove he was divinely ordained king of England. And the second he received from the Lady of the Lake.
In some texts, both of Arthur’s swords are named Excalibur. In others, only the sword from the Lady of the Lake is called Excalibur. Arthur uses the sword he pulls from the stone to fight six kings who challenge his right to be king. When Arthur unsheathes his sword at the crucial moment in the battle, it shines in the eyes of his enemies like the light of thirty torches.[9] Later, this sword breaks during Arthur’s duel with King Pellinore.
Merlin allays Arthur’s concern that he has no sword and leads him to a lake. In the midst of the lake is an arm coming up out of the water clothed in white silk fabric holding the sword Excalibur. A damsel, the Lady of the Lake, comes to Arthur and tells him he can take the sword.
The Ascended Masters teach that the Kundalini is the sacred fire of the Divine Mother and that it can be used for great good or a great evil. The symbol of the sword as the raised Kundalini opens a new dimension in our understanding of King Arthur and his sword. Arthur receives Excalibur from the hand of the Divine Mother, represented by the Lady of the Lake. The arm coming out of the water (the water element itself is symbolic of the Mother) is clothed in white—another allusion to the white fire of the Mother raised up.
The sword heroes
The sword is also symbolic of the transcendent toughness of the all-conquering spirit.
Folklore tells of a group of heroes who are considered swords personified. King Arthur is one of these sword-heroes. In King Arthur we see Abraham come again to defeat with his special sword the very same kings he had slain in the Jordan valley twenty-six centuries earlier.[10] Arthur wields the power of the raised Kundalini with both the sword Excalibur and the scepter of king.
As our Guru today, El Morya is the sacred word personified. He is the dispeller of darkness. He is the sword-hero of chelas of the will of God. He defends all who submit to the sword of the will of God. He defends all who engage in the sacred word by giving devotions to the will of God in decree and song and mantra and especially the Ashram Rituals.
El Morya shows his chelas how to cut themselves free from the not-self and the not-sword, and how to become who they really are through the sword of the I AM Presence. The Ascended Master El Morya is the knight-champion of your soul. By your leave, he will work with you side by side, day by day, as you vanquish the dragon of the dweller-on-the-threshold, your own not-self, and as you do it wielding the sword of Archangel Michael. And if El Morya finds you worthy, he may wield his sword Excalibur in your defense. To earn El Morya’s respect is the desire of every chela of the will of God.
Jesus’ sword
The Ascended Master Jesus once spoke of his own sword and King Arthur. He said:
Some have not believed me when I said, “I came not to send peace but a sword.”[11] Throughout the ages, I have loaned my sword to special initiates. The well-known legend of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone derives from an initiation of Maitreya’s Mystery School. The time did indeed come when I did tell the disciples to take the sword.[12]...
I am not an advocate of war by any means at any price. But I AM fully engaged in the slaying of unseen demons and discarnates who prey upon my own from the astral plane. And I AM fully willing to challenge the mighty and the kings and the potentates. Therefore, seek the initiation of the spiritual sword.[13]
We can look back at Jesus’ instructions to his disciples to sell what they have and buy a sword as a spiritual initiation itself that has nothing to do with physical self-defense but rather has everything to do with the raising of the Kundalini and with the use of the sacred word by which they did command devils. And when they came back, the other seventy from their mission, did they not tell Jesus, “Even the devils are subject unto us through thy name”? And Jesus said, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”[14] They were disciples of Jesus, and the sword that was their sure defense was the sword of the Divine Mother on the spinal altar.
Understand that it is a rod of sacred fire fashioned by the Divine Mother out of your own sacred life-force. Therefore, the sword that is taken from the stone of Matter is a spiritual fire. Legend would have it that it is a magic sword. Beloved, the spiritual fire does dissolve on contact all unlike itself.[15]
Adam and Eve Are Driven out of Eden, Gustave Doré
The sword in the Bible
The alchemists of old used the sword as a symbol of purification by sacred fire. In folklore when the sword is associated with fire and flames, it symbolizes purification.[16]
There are interesting connections between fire and the sword in the Bible. The Hebrew word for the blade of a sword, used in the Old Testament, also means “flame.”
Genesis depicts a sword of sacred fire for protection or defense. When the LORD God banished Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, he placed at the East Gate of the garden “cherubims and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”[17]
The science of the spoken Word
The ascended masters teach that the sword also signifies the science of the spoken Word. Dynamic decrees are the means whereby we can invoke the sacred fire of God for purification and protection. Revelation uses two graphic symbols of the power of the spoken Word.
In righteousness the Faithful and True doth judge and make war. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations. And he shall rule them with a rod of iron.
This rod of iron suggests Aaron’s rod. What is most interesting is that this sharp sword is really the sharp word of judgment that the Faithful and True pronounces upon those who move against God and his servants.
In Revelation 11:5, John writes of the two witnesses who prophesy in the last days:
If any man shall hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth and devoureth their enemies. And if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed.
The “sharp sword” and the “fire out of the mouth” are both symbols of the science of the spoken Word. So by the raised Kundalini fire, God gives the Faithful and True and the two witnesses the authority to send forth the sacred fire. This is the sword of the Spirit that is the Word of God.
Archangel Michael
Archangel Michael’s sword
Archangel Michael is depicted in Christian art with sword and armour of a superhero. It was Archangel Michael who fought Lucifer and the rebel angels and cast them out of heaven into the earth. They were cast out of heaven into earth bodies as punishment for rebellion against the Divine Woman clothed with the Sun and her Manchild.
Archangel Michael still wields his sword of blue flame today. And he goes about binding those fallen ones who are in the earth and who do torment the Woman and her seed, as it is prophesied in Revelation 12.
The blue flame derives from the First Ray of God’s power, perfection, protection and faith—the armour necessary in order for sons and daughters of God to wield the sword. Just as knights of old would not go out to do battle without the full armour upon them and then the armour of God also, so we must not just get up and start swinging our swords without having called forth individual protection.
Archangel, Michael embodies the ray, the flame, the consciousness and the attributes of the First Ray of God. Archangel Michael’s sword of blue flame is a sword of sacred fire and with it he defends and protects us. He cuts us free from unseen forces of evil who attack the Christ within us and within all people. Archangel Michael says:
My sword of blue flame is yours for the asking. Will you render a service to the hosts of Light? Then call for my sword of blue flame to manifest in your own right hand and use it. Wield it everyday to cut around yourself....
This sword is God’s sword. He has passed it to me from the mighty Elohim Hercules. It is a focus of the power of God. It is a focus not only of the power to keep men out of Eden if they are unfit to enter, but of the power to cut away from them those conditions which drove them forth from Eden to begin with—if and when they are ready to surrender those conditions.[18]
Archangel Michael protects you from invisible forces such as discarnate entities and malevolent spirits called demons and fallen angels.
The sword and entities
Helena Blavatsky explains that a physical sword can cause the dismemberment of malevolent spirits, and that this was known to the ancients. She writes in Isis Unveiled:
But we will now give a few historical instances going to show that some daimons, or elementary spirits, are afraid of sword, knife, or any thing sharp. We do not pretend to explain the reason. That is the province of physiology and psychology. Unfortunately, physiologists have not yet been able to even establish the relations between speech and thought, and so, have handed it over to the metaphysicians, who, in their turn, according to Fournié, have done nothing. Done nothing, we say, but claimed everything. No fact could be presented to some of them, that was too large for these learned gentlemen to at least try to stuff into their pigeon-holes, labelled with some fancy Greek name, expressive of everything else but the true nature of the phenomenon.
“Alas, alas, my son,” exclaims the wise Muphti, of Aleppo, to his son Ibrahim, who choked himself with the head of a huge fish. “When will you realize that your stomach is smaller than the ocean?” Or, as Mrs. Catherine Crowe remarks in her Nightside of Nature, when will our scientists admit that “their intellects are no measure of God’s almighty designs?”
Aeneas in the Underworld, Peter Paul Rubens
We will not ask which of the ancient writers mention facts of seemingly-supernatural nature; but rather which of them does not? In Homer, we find Ulysses evoking the spirit of his friend, the soothsayer Tiresias. Preparing for the ceremony of the “festival of blood,” Ulysses draws his sword, and thus frightens away the thousands of phantoms attracted by the blood of the sacrifice. The friend himself, so-long-expected Tiresias, dares not approach him so long as Ulysses holds the dreaded weapon in his hand. Aeneas prepares to descend to the kingdom of the shadows, and as soon as they approach its entrance, the Sybil who guides him utters her warning to the Trojan hero, and orders him to draw his sword and clear himself a passage through the dense crowd of flitting forms....
Glanvil gives a wonderful narrative of the apparition of the “Drummer of Tedworth,” which happened in 1661; in which the scin-lecca, or double, of the drummer-sorcerer, was evidently very much afraid of the sword. Psellus, in his work gives a long story of his sister-in-law being thrown into a most fearful state by an elementary daimon taking possession of her. She was finally cured by a conjurer, a foreigner named Anaphalangis, who began by threatening the invisible occupant of her body with a naked sword until he finally dislodged him. Psellus introduces a whole catechism of demonology, which he gives in the following terms as far as we remember:
“You want to know?” asked the conjurer, “whether the bodies of the spirits can be hurt by sword or any other weapon? Yes, they can. Any hard substance striking them can make them sensible to pain; and though their bodies be made neither of solid nor firm substance, they feel it the same, for in beings endowed with sensibility, it is not their nerves only which possess the faculty of feeling, but likewise also the spirit which resides in them.... The body of a spirit can be sensible in its whole, as well as in each of its parts. Without the help of any physical organism, the spirit sees, hears, and if you touch him feels your touch. If you divide him in two he will feel the pain as would any living man, for he is matter still, though so refined as to be generally invisible to our eye.... One thing, however, distinguishes him from the living man,...: that when a man’s limbs are once divided, their parts cannot be reunited very easily. But, cut a demon in two, and you will see him immediately join himself together. As water or air closes in behind a solid body passing through it, and no trace is left, so does the body of a demon condense itself again, when the penetrative weapon is withdrawn from the wound. But every rent made in it causes him pain, nevertheless. That is why daimons dread the point of a sword or any sharp weapon. Let those who want to see them flee try the experiment.”
One of the most learned scholars of his century, Bodin, the Demonologian, held the same opinion, that both the human and cosmical elementaries “were sorely afraid of swords and daggers.” It is also the opinion of Porphyry, Iambilichus, and Plato. Plutarch mentions it several times. The practicing theurgists knew it well and acted accordingly; and many of the latter assert that “the demons suffer from any rent made in their bodies.” Bodin tells us a wonderful story to this effect in his work On the Daemons....
“I remember,” says the author, “that in 1557 an elemental demon, one of those who are called thundering, fell down with the lightning into the house of Poudot, the shoemaker, and immediately began flinging stones all about the room. We picked up so many of them that the landlady filled a large chest full, after having securely closed the windows and doors and locked the chest itself. But it did not prevent the demon in the least from introducing other stones into the room, but without injuring anyone for all that. Latomi, who was then Quarter-President (a magistrate of the district), came to see what was the matter. Immediately upon his entrance, the spirit knocked the cap off his head and made him run away. It had lasted for over six days, when M. Jean Morgnes, Counsellor at the Presidial, came to fetch me to see the mystery. When I entered the house, someone advised the master of it to pray to God with all his heart and to wheel round a sword in the air about the room; he did so. On that following day the landlady told us, that from that very moment they did not hear the least noise in the house; but that during the seven previous days that it lasted they could not get a moment’s rest.”[19]
Everything that Blavatsky says here is true and confirmed by the ascended masters.
↑In Luke 22, Jesus says: “Now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip, and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one. And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.” He didn’t expect them to arm an army, but perhaps they would need to defend themselves as they went forth to preach his gospel.
↑Jesus, “The Foundation of Christendom That I Have Laid,” Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 30, no. 18, May 3, 1987.
