Chalice Fire & Rose: Symbols of Transformation
The chalice, fire and the rose are frequently seen and experienced as symbols and companions in the visionary-mystical-mythical life. Friends and readers of my mystical writing know that these three frequently appear in my visions. Recently, by synchronicity, I was reading three different wise teachers who each touched upon the power of these sacred symbols and their centrality to the process of inner transformation: Michael Meade, T.S. Eliot, C.G. Jung. I compiled some excerpts below — powerful words that offer further contextualization for how we can respond to and work with the symbols that call to us when they appear in our dreams and visions.
Carl Jung always advised people to seek amplification of the images and symbols that appeared in their dreams or visions as a way to gain insight into what they are trying to communicate to us and mediate in us. The excerpts below offer such amplification of the symbols of the chalice, the fire, and the rose.
Michael Meade of Mosaic Voices is a contemporary writer, mythologist, and teacher. He is among the wisest of living people who addresses both the chaos of the world, how to navigate it, and the need to birth the new world. Meade speaks of the necessity for “Living vessels through which creative energies and divine influxes can enter the world.”
T.S. Eliot, the greatest 20th century war poet speaks in Little Gidding of how “The fire and the rose are one.”
C.G. Jung, founder of modern psychology and analytic psychotherapy speaks of the woman “who ignites fire” and whose “whose fate it is to be a disturbing element” that “both illuminates and enlightens all the victims of the entanglement.” And elsewhere of, the feminine “as a vessel of spiritual transformation.”
On Living Vessels
Michael Meade of Mosaic Voices. This is an excerpt from his podcast, Living Myth.
“And since the old idea is that creation wishes to continue, and that divine energies are always trying to enter the world, but can only enter the world through those people living at a given time, it can begin to make sense that we all might be called into living the second adventure, in order to become conscious vessels of the creative energies and divine forces that are needed in order to bring a genuine sense of unity and fullness back to the world. In the old mythic understanding, we each have something to give to the world that comes from our essential nature. And when the world around us becomes darker and increasingly uncertain, it becomes more essential for us, regardless of our age or the condition of our lives, to somehow find a way to live the inner adventure of the soul.”
….
“Amidst the increasing uncertainties of the world, many try to reduce life to simple survival and cling to fixed ideas, while others are poised to awaken to a greater sense of meaning, while also becoming living vessels through which creative energies and divine influxes can enter the world.”
From Living Myth: Episode 442 - Your Lot in Life, 2 Jul 2025
________________________
On Fire and Rose
Poet T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding, The Four Quartets.
IV
The Dove descending breaks the air
With flames of incandescent terror
Of which tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then deserves the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
…
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
…
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing nothing less than everything)
And all shall be well
All manner of things shall be well
When tongues of flame in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
________________________
The woman who ignites fire “both illuminates and enlightens all the victims of the entanglement.”
CG Jung. From “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” p. 30 – 31, in Four Archetypes.
“Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heart burns all superfluities to ashes (…). But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.
The woman whose fate it is to be a disturbing element is not solely destructive, …. Normally the disturber is herself caught in the disturbance; the worker of change is herself changed, and the glare of the fire she ignites both illuminates and enlightens all the victims of the entanglement. What seemed a senseless upheaval becomes a process of purification:
So, that all that is vain
Might dwindle and wane. (Faust, Part II, Act 5.)
If a woman of this type remains unconscious of the meaning of her function, if she does not know that she is
Part of that power which would
Ever work evil but engenders good. (Ibid., Part I, Act 1.)
she will herself perish by the sword she brings. But consciousness transforms her into a deliverer and redeemer.”
________________________
The Feminine as Vessel of Spiritual Transformation
CG Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections. Chapter VII. “The Work” p 201 - 202.
“[That] other essential aspect of Gnosticism: the primordial image of the spirit as another, higher god who gave to mankind the krater (mixing vessel), the vessel of spiritual transformation.* The krater is a feminine principle ….[unlike pre-1950 Catholicism and contemporary Protestantism and Judaism in which] the father continues to dominate…. In philosophical alchemy, on the other hand, the feminine principle plays a role equal to that of the masculine.”
* 'In the writings of Poimandres, a pagan Gnostic, the krater was a vessel filled with spirit, which Creator-god sent down to earth so that those who strove for higher consciousness might be baptized in it. It was a kind of uterus of spiritual renewal and rebirth, and corresponded to the alchemical vas in which the transformation of substances took place. The parallel to this in Jung’s psychology is the inner transformation process known as individuation.’ Aniela Jaffé, editor.
__________________
To conclude I’m saying that these beautiful writings provide rich context and framing for these three symbols in particular but also shows the sweep of how myth, poetry, religion, psychology, spirituality, creativity, and mysticism all weave together to create the tapestry of life that calls each of us to radical inner transformation and guides us through it. This is not only the work of our time, it has always been the essential work of humanity, but its true life-giving and life-critical significance has been lost. Our work is to help recover the wisdom we need to re-connect with the true task of the human species.
Image, The Holy Grail, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874.