Title: Sacred Rose; The Soul’s Path to Beauty and Wisdom
Author: Mara Freeman
Reviewed by: Nina Milton
Author website: https://www.chalicecentre.net
Mara Freeman is already known in Druidic and Western Magical circles as the founder and director of the Avalon Mystery School and her life’s work has been to offer seekers on the path a profound route into their personal quest. Her earlier books, Kindling the Celtic Spirit and Grail Alchemy, are two of my go-to resources for finding the depths of mystery in this world and in others. I was keen to read her latest book, Sacred Rose: The Soul’s Path to Beauty and Wisdom. Filled with magnificent colour illustrations, and with rose-centred meditations which can be undertaken to fully illuminate the deeper messages and learning within the book, this book will delight any person on a spiritual quest.
I knew, as I began to read Sacred Rose that it would be a work of scholarship. Freeman’s careful research is combined with an attractive writing style that is never difficult to read, and she offers the sacred rose to us on two amazing levels, carefully covering both the outward and inward story of the rose. Throughout the book, we journey through historical fact, literature, sacred religious thought, legend and myth to find roses at the very heart of humankind’s longing to experience the mysteries. But at intervals, we are asked to stop, to meditate, following a visualised inner journey to take us into an aspect of sacred rose.
Freeman begins with the connection between roses and goddesses, especially Isis, Aphrodite and Venus. She then examines the relationship the medieval church had with the rose, especially though Mary, the Mother of Christ, who is often portrayed in a rose garden. She offers refreshing insights into the Rosary and the amazing rose windows in cathedrals across Christendom.
Looking across the ancient world, Freeman compares the rose to the many-petaled lotus, explores its hermetic connections, and its honouring in the Arabic world, both Islamic and Zoroastrian.
The story of the ‘rosy cross’ and the Rosicrucian movement takes us forward to the special links between roses and alchemy, the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Tarot, and the more recent resurgence of interest in the sacred world.
Freeman uses poetry to illustrate this. From Roman writers to Danté’s ‘celestial rose’, to the 13th century Sufi poet, Rumi, to Yeats and Elliot, she demonstrates how the rose is a portal leading us closer to the mysteries of life.
The core message of the book is how the reader can enter the ‘language of the rose’– how the Mystic Rose…also blooms within the individual soul. This is not achieved by the physical act of reading the book, thoughtful commentary though it is, but through the work the reader will do around the text, including using that combination of concentration of will and the creative imagery of the mind to walk into the world of the meditations that accompany the text. These allow a personal journey that certainly connected me to my deepest inner parts, and from there, to moments where I felt able to reach the spirit of the rose. My intention is to return to each meditation time after time, reaching deeper into the
magic.
Freeman sets out methods of attaining this beauty and peace, including the use of rose essences and by creating a sacred space which would include the perfection of a plucked rose.