(47) 4. He fixed the twenty-two basic letters in a ring (sphere) like a wall with two hundred and thirty-one gates, and turned the sphere forward and backward. Turned forward, the sphere signified good; when reversed, evil. Three letters may serve for an illustration: There is nothing better than ע נ ג (O, N, G), pleasure (joy), and nothing worse than נ ג ע (N, G, O), plague (sorrow).

(4) The heavens your movements do initiate, I say not all; but granting that I say it, Light has been given you for good and evil, And free volition; which, if some fatigue In the first battles with the heavens it suffers, Afterwards conquers all, if well 'tis nurtured. To greater force and to a better nature, Though free, ye subject are, and that creates The mind in you the heavens have not in charge. Hence, if the present world doth go astray, In you the cause is, be it sought in you; And I therein will now be thy true spy. Forth from the hand of Him, who fondles it Before it is, like to a little girl Weeping and laughing in her childish sport, Issues the simple soul, that nothing knows, Save that, proceeding from a joyous Maker, Gladly it turns to that which gives it pleasure. Of trivial good at first it tastes the savour; Is cheated by it, and runs after it, If guide or rein turn not aside its love. Hence it behoved laws for a rein to place, Behoved a king to have, who at the least Of the true city should discern the tower.

(2) "It came to pass then, when this befell among the tyrants who are below these rulers, that they all lost power and fell down to the ground in their æons and became as the dead world- dwellers with no breath in them, as they became in the hour when I took from them their power. "It came to pass then thereafter, when I left those æons, that every one of all those who were in the twelve æons, was bound to their order all together, and they accomplished their works as I have established them, so that they spend six months turned to the left and accomplishing their works in their squares and their triangles and in those which are in their aspect, and that further they spend another six months facing to the right and towards their triangles and their squares and those which are in their aspect. Thus then will those who are in the Fate and in the sphere travel.

(1) "And I left that region behind me and came to the gate of the second sphere, which is the Fate. Then were all its gates thrown into agitation and opened of themselves. And I entered into the houses of the Fate, shining most exceedingly, and there was no measure for the light that was about me, for I shone in the Fate forty-and-nine times more than in the [first] sphere.

(3) "And the Fate and the sphere over which they rule, I have changed and brought it to pass that they spend six months turned to the left and accomplish their influences, and that six months they face to the right and accomplish their influences. For by command of the First Commandment and by command of the First Mystery Yew, the Overseer of the Light, had set them facing the left at every time and accomplishing their influences and their deeds.

(2) "When then they mutinied and fought against the light, thereon by command of the First Mystery I changed the paths and the courses of their æons and the paths of their Fate and of their sphere. I made them face six months towards the triangles on the left and towards the squares and towards those in their aspect and towards their octagons, just as they had formerly been. But their manner of turning, or facing, I changed to another order, and made them other six months face towards the works of their influences in the squares on the right and in their triangles and in those in their aspect and in their octagons. And I made them to be confounded in great confusion and deluded in great delusion --the rulers of the æons and all the rulers of the Fate and those of the sphere; and I set them in great agitation, and thence on they were no longer able to turn towards the refuse of their matter to devour it, in order that their regions may continue to delay and they [themselves] may spend a long time as rulers. "But when I had taken away a third of their power, I changed their spheres, so that they spend a time facing to the left and another time

(34) For ourselves, while whatever in us belongs to the body of the All should be yielded to its action, we ought to make sure that we submit only within limits, realizing that the entire man is not thus bound to it: intelligent servitors yield a part of themselves to their masters but in part retain their personality, and are thus less absolutely at beck and call, as not being slaves, not utterly chattels.

The changing configurations within the All could not fail to be produced as they are, since the moving bodies are not of equal speed.

Now the movement is guided by a Reason-Principle; the relations of the living whole are altered in consequence; here in our own realm all that happens reacts in sympathy to the events of that higher sphere: it becomes, therefore, advisable to ask whether we are to think of this realm as following upon the higher by agreement, or to attribute to the configurations the powers underlying the events, and whether such powers would be vested in the configurations simply or in the relations of the particular items.

It will be said that one position of one given thing has by no means an identical effect- whether of indication or of causation- in its relation to another and still less to any group of others, since each several being seems to have a natural tendency of its own.

The truth is that the configuration of any given group means merely the relationship of the several parts, and, changing the members, the relationship remains the same.

But, this being so, the power will belong, not to the positions but to the beings holding those positions?

To both taken together. For as things change their relations, and as any one thing changes place, there is a change of power.

But what power? That of causation or of indication?

To this double thing- the particular configuration of particular beings- there accrues often the twofold power, that of causation and that of indication, but sometimes only that of indication. Thus we are obliged to attribute powers both to the configuration and to the beings entering into them. In mime dancers each of the hands has its own power, and so with all the limbs; the relative positions have much power; and, for a third power, there is that of the accessories and concomitants; underlying the action of the performers' limbs, there are such items as the clutched fingers and the muscles and veins following suit.

(144) Direct not thy mind to the vast surfaces of the Earth; for the Plant of Truth grows not upon the ground. Nor measure the motions of the Sun, collecting rules, for he is carded by the Eternal Will of the Father,. and not for your sake alone. Dismiss (from your mind) the impetuous course of the Moon, for she moveth always by the power of necessity. The progression of the Stars was not generated for your sake. The wide aërial flight of birds gives no true knowledge nor the dissection of the entrails of victims; they are all mere toys, the basis of mercenary fraud:, flee from these if you would enter the sacred paradise of piety, where Virtue, Wisdom, and Equity are assembled.

(21) This act is naught but a reflection from Himself! The forms of the walls and roofs of houses Know to be shadows of the architect's thought; Although stones and planks and bricks Find no entrance into the sanctuary of thought, Verily the Absolute Agent is without form, Sometimes that Formless One of His mercy Shows His face to His forms from behind the veil of Not-being, That every form may derive aid therefrom, Again, when that Formless One hides His face,

(1) "And I left that region behind me and ascended to the first sphere, shining most exceedingly, forty-and-nine-times more brightly than I had shone in the firmament. It came to pass then, when I had reached the gate of the first sphere, that its gates were shaken and opened of themselves at once.

(23) In such a Manner as this the Sun rose up in the Fiat, and out of the Sun (in its first Kindling) [rose] the other Planets, viz. upwards, out of the raging Bitterness, Mars [rose,] which pTo. the Splendor of the Sun stayed [or upheld] when it discovered it: And out of the Virtue of the Sun, which raised itself higher, [rose] Jupiter imprisoned in the Center of the Fiat: And out of the Chamber of Anguish [rose] Saturnus: And downwards Venus [rose] from the soft Mildness, when the Harshness was overcome, and was soft, sweet, and sinking down like Water. And when the Light kindled, then out of the sour harsh Wrath came Love and Humility to be, running downwards: And out of the overcome Virtue in the sour Harshness [rose Mercurius,] wherein stands the Knowledge of what was in the Original before the Light: But when the Light made the Virtue in the Place of the Sun material, as it were in an earthly Manner [rose] the Moon.

(449) S UCH is the good and true City or State, and the good and true man is of the same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the evil is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also the regulation of the individual soul, and is exhibited in four forms. What are they? he said. I was proceeding to tell the order in which the four evil forms appeared to me to succeed one another, when Polemarchus, who was sitting a little way off, just beyond Adeimantus, began to whisper to him: stretching forth his hand, he took hold of the upper part of his coat by the shoulder, and drew him towards him, leaning forward himself so as to be quite close and saying something in his ear, of which I only caught the words, ‘Shall we let him off, or what shall we do?’ Certainly not, said Adeimantus, raising his voice. Who is it, I said, whom you are refusing to let off? You, he said.

(510) sphere of the visible consists of images. And by images I mean, in the first place, shadows, and in the second place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like: Do you understand? Yes, I understand. Imagine, now, the other section, of which this is only the resemblance, to include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is made. Very good. Would you not admit that both the sections of this division have different degrees of truth, and that the copy is to the original as the sphere of opinion is to the sphere of knowledge? Most undoubtedly. Next proceed to consider the manner in which the sphere of the intellectual is to be divided. In what manner? Thus:—There are two subdivisions, in the lower of which the soul uses the figures given by the former division as images; the enquiry can only be hypothetical, and instead of going upwards to a principle descends to the other end; in the higher of the two, the soul passes out of hypotheses, and goes up to a principle which is above hypotheses, making no use of images 14 as in the former case, but proceeding only in and through the ideas themselves. I do not quite understand your meaning, he said. Then I will try again; you will understand me better when I have made some preliminary remarks. You are aware that students of geometry, arithmetic, and the kindred sciences assume the odd and the even and the figures and three kinds of angles and the like in their several branches of science; these are their hypotheses, which they and every body are supposed to know, and therefore they do not deign to give any account of them either to themselves or others;

(7) As the geometrician, who endeavours To square the circle, and discovers not, By taking thought, the principle he wants, Even such was I at that new apparition; I wished to see how the image to the circle Conformed itself, and how it there finds place; But my own wings were not enough for this, Had it not been that then my mind there smote A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish. Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy: But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

(56) And so the Soul of Man is out of the same Balance in the Angle of the recomprehended Will, towards the Light, and also in the first Will in itself, in its own Center, where behind it the Darkness is comprehended, and before it is the End of the eternal Band, and in itself there would be nothing but an anxious Source [or Property;] and if any Thing else were to be in it, then the first Will (in the eternal Band) must conceive another Will in itself, to go out of the dark Source [or Property,] into a joyful Habitation without a Source.

(2) "I entered into the houses of the sphere, shining most exceedingly, and there was no measure to the light that was about me. And all the rulers and all those who are in that sphere, fell into agitation one against another. And they saw the great light that was about me, and they gazed upon my vesture and saw thereon the mystery of their name. And they fell into still greater agitation, and were in great fear, saying: 'How hath the lord of the universe passed through us without our knowing?' And all their bonds were unloosed and their regions and their orders; and every one left his order, and they fell down all together, adored before me, or before my vesture, and all sang praises together to the interiors of the interiors, being in great fear and great agitation.

(1) That the circuit of the stars indicates definite events to come but without being the cause direct of all that happens, has been elsewhere affirmed, and proved by some modicum of argument: but the subject demands more precise and detailed investigation for to take the one view rather than the other is of no small moment.

The belief is that the planets in their courses actually produce not merely such conditions as poverty, wealth, health and sickness but even ugliness and beauty and, gravest of all, vices and virtue and the very acts that spring from these qualities, the definite doings of each moment of virtue or vice. We are to suppose the stars to be annoyed with men- and upon matters in which men, moulded to what they are by the stars themselves, can surely do them no wrong.

They will be distributing what pass for their good gifts, not out of kindness towards the recipients but as they themselves are affected pleasantly or disagreeably at the various points of their course; so that they must be supposed to change their plans as they stand at their zeniths or are declining.

More absurdly still, some of them are supposed to be malicious and others to be helpful, and yet the evil stars will bestow favours and the benevolent act harshly: further, their action alters as they see each other or not, so that, after all, they possess no definite nature but vary according to their angles of aspect; a star is kindly when it sees one of its fellows but changes at sight of another: and there is even a distinction to be made in the seeing as it occurs in this figure or in that. Lastly, all acting together, the fused influence is different again from that of each single star, just as the blending of distinct fluids gives a mixture unlike any of them.

Since these opinions and others of the same order are prevalent, it will be well to examine them carefully one by one, beginning with the fundamental question:

(7) Hence, too, the errant spheres, being moved contrarily to the inerrant one, are moved by one another by mutual contrariety, [and also] by the spable one through contrariety itself. And this can otherwise not be. The Bears up there , which neither set nor rise, think'st thou they rest or move? A: They move, Thrice-greatest one. H: And what their motion, my Asclepius? A: Motion that turns for ever round the same. H: But revolution - motion around same - is fixed by rest. For "round-the-same" doth stop "beyond-same". "Beyond-same" then, being stopped, if it be steadied in "round-same" - the contrary stands firm, being rendered ever stable by its contrariety.

(17) But we should not here again wholly set down the Ground of the Deity, so far as it is otherwise meet and known by us, we account that needless [here,] for you may find it before the Incarnation of a Child in the Mother's [Womb or] Body. We set down thus much here, to the End that the Region of his World may be understood. And thus we give the Reader exactly to understand and know how the Region of Good and Evil are in one another, and how it is an imperishable Thing [or Substance,] so that one is generated out of the other, and that also the one goes forth out of the other into another Substance [or Being,] which it was not in the Beginning; as you may learn to understand this in Man, who in his Beginning, in the Will of Man and Woman, viz. in the Limbus, and in the Matrix, is conceived in the Tincture, and sown in an earthly Soil; where then the first Tincture A Desiring or Attracting. Dispels. (in the Will) breaks, and his own Tincture springs forth out of the anxious [or aching] Chamber of Darkness, and of Death, out of the anxious Source [or Property,] and blossoms out of the Darkness, in the broken Gate of the Darkness in it, as a pleasant Habitation, and so generates its Light out of the anxious Fierceness out of itself; where then (in the Light) there goes forth again the endless Source of the [Thoughts or] Senses, which make a Throne and Region of Reason, which governs the whole House, and desires to enter into the Region of Heaven, out of which it proceeded not. And therefore now this is not the original Will, which there desires to enter into the Region of the Heaven; but it is the preconceived Will out of the Source of the Anxiety, [which Will is a Desire to] enter through the deep Gate of God.

(5) My mind in this wise wholly in suspense, Steadfast, immovable, attentive gazed, And evermore with gazing grew enkindled. In presence of that light one such becomes, That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect It is impossible he e'er consent; Because the good, which object is of will, Is gathered all in this, and out of it That is defective which is perfect there. Shorter henceforward will my language fall Of what I yet remember, than an infant's Who still his tongue doth moisten at the breast. Not because more than one unmingled semblance Was in the living light on which I looked, For it is always what it was before; But through the sight, that fortified itself In me by looking, one appearance only To me was ever changing as I changed. Within the deep and luminous subsistence Of the High Light appeared to me three circles, Of threefold colour and of one dimension,