(35) Behold, thou reasonable Soul, to thee I speak, and not to the Body, thou only apprehendest it:- When the Birth is thus continually generated, then every Form has a Center to the Regeneration; for the whole divine Essence [or Substance] stands in continual and in eternal P Generating (but unchangeably) like the Mind of Man, the Thoughts being continually generated out of the Mind, and the Will and Desiring out of the Thoughts. Out of the Will and Desirousness [is] the Work [generated] which is made a Substance, in the Will, and then the Mouth and Hands, go on to perform what was substantial in the Will.

(110) For when the new spirit in the brain is well settled, then it goeth to its mother again, into the heart; and then it stands as a perfect spirit or will, or as a newborn person, which, in man, is called the soul.

(44) But now the astral birth generateth the animated soulish birth, viz. the third, which stands in the word, wherein the incorporated or compacted word lies hidden in its heaven. ["The Sulphur to the (production of the) soul is the first Principle in the eternal willspirit, and cometh to life in the third Principle, and so liveth between love and wrath, and hangeth to both."]

(109) For there the spirit or the thoughts become a whole creaturely person again, through the affecting or proving of all powers, which in man I call the animated or soulish birth.

(1) [This chapter is supplementary to chapter iii.] Those who understand the conditions of life devote no attention to things which life cannot accomplish. Those who understand the conditions of destiny devote no attention to things over which knowledge has no control. For the due nourishment of our physical frames, certain things are needful. Yet where such things abound, the physical frame is not always nourished. For the preservation of life it is necessary that there should be no abandonment of the physical frame. Yet where the physical frame is not abandoned, life does not always remain. Life comes, and cannot be declined. It goes, and cannot be stopped. But alas! the world thinks that to nourish the frame is enough to keep life. And if indeed it is not enough, what then is the world to do? Although not enough, it must still be done. It cannot be neglected. For if one is to neglect the physical frame, better far to retire at once from the world. By renouncing the world, one gets rid of the cares of the world. The result is a natural level, which is equivalent to a re-birth. And he who is re-born is near.

(50) [Note three sorts of births or genitures in man] The flesh signifieth, 1. The outward birth or geniture, which is the house of death. 2. The second birth or geniture in man is the astral, in which the life stands, and wherein love and wrath wrestle the one with the other; and thus far man himself knoweth himself; for the astral birth generateth the life in the outermost, that is, in the dead flesh. 3. The third birth is generated between the astral and the outermost, and that is called the animated or soulish birth or geniture, or the soul, and is as large as the whole man.

(39) At birth only a third part of the Divine Nature of man temporarily dissociates itself from its own immortality and takes upon itself the dream of physical birth and existence, animating with its own celestial enthusiasm a vehicle composed of material elements, part of and bound to the material sphere. At death this incarnated part awakens from the dream of physical existence and reunites itself once more with its eternal condition. This periodical descent of spirit into matter is termed the wheel of life and death, and the principles involved are treated at length by the philosophers under the subject of metempsychosis. By initiation into the Mysteries and a certain process known as operative theology, this law of birth and death is transcended, and during the course of physical existence that part of the spirit which is asleep in form is awakened without the intervention of death--the inevitable Initiator--and is consciously reunited with the Anthropos, or the overshadowing substance of itself. This is at once the primary purpose and the consummate achievement of the Mysteries: that man shall become aware of and consciously be reunited with the divine source of himself without tasting of physical dissolution.

(44) Now if the Spirit of the Soul remains unregenerated in its first Principle, which it has inherited out of the Eternity, with the Beginning of its Life, then also (at the Breaking [or Deceasing] of its Body) there proceeds out of its eternal Mind such

(1) The wise, therefore, speak as follows: The soul having a twofold life, one being in conjunction with body, but the other being separate from all body; when we are awake we employ, for the most part, the life which is common with the body, except when we separate ourselves entirely from it by pure intellectual and dianoetic energies. But when we are asleep, we are perfectly liberated, as it were, from certain surrounding bonds, and use a life separated from generation. Hence, this form of life, whether it be intellectual or divine, and whether these two are the same thing, or whether each is peculiarly of itself one thing, is then excited in us, and energizes in a way conformable to its nature. Since, therefore, intellect surveys real beings, but the soul contains in itself the reasons of all generated natures, it very properly follows that, according to a cause which comprehends future events, it should have a foreknowledge of them, as arranged in their precedaneous reasons. And it possesses a divination still more perfect than this, when it conjoins the portions of life and intellectual energy to the wholes from which it was separated. For then it is filled from wholes with all scientific knowledge, so as for the most part to attain by its conceptions to the apprehension of every thing which is effected in the world. Indeed, when it is united to the Gods, by a liberated energy of this kind, it then receives the most true plenitudes of intellections, from which it emits the true divination of divine dreams, and derives the most genuine principles of knowledge.

(8) E. (13) We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must enquire how it is applied to soul.

It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled body- not, then, Form to every example of body or to body as merely such, but to a natural organic body having the potentiality of life.

Now; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into the body as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it will follow that, upon any dividing of the body, the soul is divided with it, and if any part of the body is cut away a fragment of soul must go with it. Since an Entelechy must be inseparable from the being of which it is the accomplished actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep cannot occur; in fact sleep itself cannot occur. Moreover if the soul is an Entelechy, there is an end to the resistance offered by reason to the desires; the total must have one-uniform experience throughout, and be aware of no internal contradiction. Sense-perception might occur; but intellection would be impossible. The very upholders of the Entelechy are thus compelled to introduce another soul, the Intellect, to which they ascribe immortality. The reasoning soul, then, must be an Entelechy- if the word is to be used at all- in some other mode.

Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the impressions of absent objects, must hold these without aid from the body; for otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images, and that would mean that it could not take in fresh impressions; the perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy inseparable from the body. Similarly the desiring principle, dealing not only with food and drink but with things quite apart from body; this also is no inseparable Entelechy.

There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest the possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the inseparable Entelechy of the doctrine. But it is not so. The principle of every growth lies at the root; in many plants the new springing takes place at the root or just above it: it is clear that the life-principle, the vegetal soul, has abandoned the upper portions to concentrate itself at that one spot: it was therefore not present in the whole as an inseparable Entelechy. Again, before the plant's development the life-principle is situated in that small beginning: if, thus, it passes from large growth to small and from the small to the entire growth, why should it not pass outside altogether?

An Entelechy is not a thing of parts; how then could it be present partwise in the partible body?

An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of another: how could the soul of the first become the soul of the latter if soul were the Entelechy of one particular being? Yet that this transference does occur is evident from the facts of animal metasomatosis.

The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon serving as Form to anything: it is an Essence which does not come into being by finding a seat in body; it exists before it becomes also the soul of some particular, for example, of a living being, whose body would by this doctrine be the author of its soul.

What, then, is the soul's Being? If it is neither body nor a state or experience of body, but is act and creation: if it holds much and gives much, and is an existence outside of body; of what order and character must it be? Clearly it is what we describe as Veritable Essence. The other order, the entire corporeal Kind, is process; it appears and it perishes; in reality it never possesses Being, but is merely protected, in so far as it has the capacity, by participating in what authentically is.

(36) Behold! thy spirit or thy soul is generated from or out of thy astral birth or geniture, and is the third birth in thee, just as an apple upon a tree is the third birth or geniture of the earth, and has not its vegetation in, from, or within the earth, but from above the earth; and if it were a spirit, as thy soul is, it would not suffer the earth any more to tie or bind it to corruption.

(67) For from or out of that half part of the wrath the dead birth generateth itself continually, and out of the other half part, which reacheth with its innermost degree even into the innermost heart and light of God, the life generateth itself now continually through death, and yet the astral birth or geniture is not two bodies, but one body.

(34) This I have here shown very briefly and summarily, and not according to all the Circumstances, that it might thereby be somewhat understood [by the Way, what] the Life [is.] In its due Place all shall be explained at large, for herein is very much contained, and there might be great Volumes written of it; but I have set down only this, that the Overcoming and the Sleep might be apprehended. The Gate [or Explanation] of the heavenly Tincture, how it was in Adam before the Fall, and how it shall be in us after this Life.

(49) But the astral birth is in its body very sharp; yet the new birth, which riseth up in the water of life, and presseth through death, mitigateth it. But the new birth cannot alter the kernel of the sharp birth, but is generated out of it, and keeps its own holy new life to itself, and presseth through the angry death, and the angry death comprehendeth it not.

(32) If [about] to be born as a male, the feeling of itself being a male dawneth upon the Knower, and a feeling of intense hatred towards the father and of jealousy and attraction towards the mother is begotten. If [about] to be born as a female, the feeling of itself being a female dawneth upon the Knower, and a feeling of intense hatred towards the mother and of intense attraction and fondness towards the father is begotten. Through this secondary cause — [when] entering upon the path of ether, just at the moment when the sperm and the ovum are about to unite — the Knower experienceth the bliss of the simultaneously-born state, during which state it fainteth away into unconsciousness. [Afterwards] it findeth itself encased in oval form, in the embryonic state, and upon emerging from the womb and opening its eyes it may find itself transformed into a young dog. Formerly it had been a human being, but now if it have become a dog it findeth itself undergoing sufferings in a dog's kennel; or [perhaps] as a young pig in a pigsty, or as an ant in an ant-hill, or as an insect, or a grub in a hole, or as a calf, or a kid, or a lamb, from which shape there is no [immediate] returning. Dumbness, stupidity, and miserable intellectual obscurity are suffered, and a variety of sufferings experienced. In like manner, one may wander into hell, or into the world of unhappy ghosts, or throughout the Six Lokas, and endure inconceivable miseries.

(34) It is just such a birth as is in man; the body is even the father of the soul, for the soul is generated out of the power of the body, and when the body stands in the anguishing birth or geniture of God, as the stars do, and not in the fierce hellish birth, then the soul of man qualifieth, mixeth or uniteth with the pure Deity, as a member in or of his body.

(2) Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being.

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived:

That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body's turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body- clay and water- or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, "the execration of the Gods."

The Soul's nature and power will be brought out more clearly, more brilliantly, if we consider next how it envelops the heavenly system and guides all to its purposes: for it has bestowed itself upon all that huge expanse so that every interval, small and great alike, all has been ensouled.

The material body is made up of parts, each holding its own place, some in mutual opposition and others variously interdependent; the soul is in no such condition; it is not whittled down so that life tells of a part of the soul and springs where some such separate portion impinges; each separate life lives by the soul entire, omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety. By the power of the soul the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through soul this universe is a God: and the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars: and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in virtue of soul; for "dead is viler than dung."

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own soul is of that same Ideal nature, so that to consider it, purified, freed from all accruement, is to recognise in ourselves that same value which we have found soul to be, honourable above all that is bodily. For what is body but earth, and, taking fire itself, what is its burning power? So it is with all the compounds of earth and fire, even with water and air added to them?

If, then, it is the presence of soul that brings worth, how can a man slight himself and run after other things? You honour the Soul elsewhere; honour then yourself.

(15) The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy. Some even plunge from heaven to the very lowest of corporeal forms; others pass, stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness.

As for the differences among them, these are due to variation in the bodies entered, or to the accidents of life, or to upbringing, or to inherent peculiarities of temperament, or to all these influences together, or to specific combinations of them.

Then again some have fallen unreservedly into the power of the destiny ruling here: some yielding betimes are betimes too their own: there are those who, while they accept what must be borne, have the strength of self-mastery in all that is left to their own act; they have given themselves to another dispensation: they live by the code of the aggregate of beings, the code which is woven out of the Reason-Principles and all the other causes ruling in the kosmos, out of soul-movements and out of laws springing in the Supreme; a code, therefore, consonant with those higher existences, founded upon them, linking their sequents back to them, keeping unshakeably true all that is capable of holding itself set towards the divine nature, and leading round by all appropriate means whatsoever is less natively apt.

In fine all diversity of condition in the lower spheres is determined by the descendent beings themselves.

(16) But if the work is so far successful, then all belonging to the dark principle is entirely destroyed, and the body born into pure light. When the conscious spirit has been transformed into the primordial spirit, then only can one say that it has attained an unending capacity for transformation, and departing from the cycle of births, has been brought to the six-fold (6) present, golden spirit. If this method of ennobling is not applied, how will the way of being born and dying be escaped?

(59) But when the light of God shineth through this sharp birth or geniture, then it becometh very meek, and is as it were like a man that is asleep, in whom the life still moveth; and the body is in a sweet, quiet rest.