Amor

Named in the founding motto

When the Círculo de Regeneração e Fé was founded at Brasileia in 1916, the circle a young Raimundo Irineu Serra belonged to, its motto was Harmonia, Amor e Verdade — harmony, love and truth. The parent order, the Círculo Esotérico da Comunhão do Pensamento, had its members vibrate together at set hours toward Harmony, Love, Truth and Justice. Love in this doctrine is therefore not a sentiment attached to the teaching afterwards; it is one of the terms the teaching was organised around from the beginning.

What the hymns ask of it

The hymn quoted above states the whole demand in four lines: love is to be made known, and the test of it is conduct — fazer bem, não fazer mal, to do good and not do evil. That is a plainer claim than it first sounds. Love here is measured by what a person does, and the hymn puts the measure immediately beside the declaration rather than leaving it implied.

Elsewhere in O Cruzeiro the same word carries the whole relation to the divine: o Amor eterno, eu devo consagrar — the eternal love, I must consecrate. And in Padrinho Sebastião's O Justiceiro, love is given a place rather than a quality: o amor é o trono da harmonia, love is the throne of harmony, the thing the other virtues rest on.

The moon and the Virgin

Within the doctrine love is symbolised by the moon, understood as generating and nurturing all her children across the earth, and is represented by the Sovereign Virgin Mother, identified with the Virgin Mary, who is understood in the tradition to have known universal love made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. That identification is the tradition's own theological claim rather than a historical statement, and the hymns make it directly: the Virgin Mother who taught me, from You I must not part.