The Royal Art reads with three eyes: the eye of history, the eye of myth, and the eye of gnosis.
The Astral Library of Light contains many kinds of material: historical research, traditional sources, scripture, myth, symbolic interpretation, personal synthesis, poetic theology, speculative connections, and living gnosis. These should not be confused with one another. Each has its place.
History
History asks: what happened, as far as we can responsibly know?
It concerns dates, texts, authorship, institutions, influence, transmission, evidence, and context. Historical reading matters because the Work is not served by carelessness. The past should be honored as carefully as possible.
But history alone cannot exhaust sacred meaning.
Myth
Myth asks: what pattern is being revealed?
A myth may be historically uncertain and still spiritually true. Eden, Atlantis, the Grail Castle, the Wasteland, the Philosopher's Stone, the Fall of Sophia, the Tower of Babel, and the New Jerusalem all function as maps of the soul and cosmos.
Myth does not mean false. Myth means symbolic truth carried in story-form.
Gnosis
Gnosis asks: what is directly known by the awakened soul?
It is not mere opinion, mood, or fantasy. True gnosis is recognition: the soul sees, remembers, and knows inwardly. But because personal gnosis can become distorted by ego, it must be tested by humility, tradition, love, clarity, and fruit.
Symbolic Reading
The Royal Art reads sacred texts symbolically without denying their historical or devotional dimensions.
Jerusalem may be a city, a people, a soul-state, a heavenly archetype, and the final Kingdom. The Temple may be a building, the cosmos, the body, the heart, and the restored human being. The King may be David, Christ, the Self, the initiate, and the inner sovereign.
The symbol does not reduce the thing. It expands it.
Speculative Synthesis
Some pages in the Library explore possible correspondences: Egypt and Israel, Grail and Templar, Kabbalah and alchemy, ACIM and Gnosis, Tolkien and Christian myth, astrology and sacred time.
These are not always historical claims. Often they are symbolic, comparative, or poetic-theological syntheses.
The question is not only: can this be proven?
The deeper question is: does this illuminate the Work?
The Rule of Discernment
A claim may be:
Historical.
Traditional.
Scriptural.
Mythic.
Symbolic.
Speculative.
Poetic.
Personal gnosis.
Practical.
Devotional.
A mature reader learns to know which mode is being used.
Confusion happens when myth is forced to behave like history, when history is flattened into dead fact, when personal gnosis is treated as universal doctrine, or when symbols are literalized too early.
All Is Perspective
The Royal Art does not require the reader to believe every symbolic connection literally. It invites the reader to enter the pattern, test the fruit, and discern what leads toward truth, love, beauty, freedom, and God.
This method protects the Work from both reductionism and fantasy. It allows the Royal Art to be scholarly without becoming dry, mythic without becoming careless, and visionary without becoming ungrounded.