(1) IF we consider ourselves in our right Reason, and behold the Kingdom of this World, in which we stand with our Flesh and Blood, also with our Reason and Senses, then we find very well, that we have the Substance and Stirring of it in us; for we are its very proper own. Now all whatsoever we think, do, and purpose in the outward Man, that the Spirit of this World does in us Men; for the Body is nothing else but the Instrument thereof, wherewith it performs its Work; and we find, that as all other Instruments (which are generated from the Spirit of this World) decay, corrupt, and turn to Dust, so also our earthly Body, wherein the Spirit of this World works [and acts] for a While.

(67) We know that the Body without the Spirit is a Thing that lies still; for though the Body of Christ (which the holy Element generated in the P Mercy) is from God, yet the Mobility and Life stands only in the Deity; and in us Men in the Spirit of the Soul, and in the Spirit of the great World, which are unseparated in this Body upon Earth.

(26) But if we search what it is in Essence and Property, and how it is generated, then we find a very worthy [precious] noble the Fountain of the Deity, which has imprinted itself in all Things. And therefore it is so secret and hidden, and is imparted to the Knowledge of none of the Ungodly, to find it, or to know it. And although it be there, yet a vain, false, [or evil] Mind is not worthy of it, and therefore it remains hidden to him; And God rules all in all incomprehensibly and imperceptibly to the Creature; the Creature passes away it knows not how; and the Shadow and the Figure of the Tincture continues eternally; for it is generated out of the eternal Will: But the Spirit is given to it by the Fiat, according to the Kind of every Creature; also in the Beginning of the Creation it was implanted and incorporated in Jewels, Stones, and Metals, according to the Kind of every One.

(17) For it says, I am the Spirit, and the Life, I will dwell in the Virgin; and the [sour] harsh Fiat attracts all to it, and makes it a Mesch, [Massa, Concretion,] and moreover [it makes it] Flesh; and the Fire keeps the uppermost Region, viz. the Heart: For the four Elements separate themselves by their Strife, and every one of them makes itself a several Region; and the Fiat makes all to be Flesh: Only the Air would have no Flesh; for it said, I dwell in no House; and the Fiat said, I have created thee, thou art mine, and closed it in with an Inclosure, that is, the Bladder.

(6) For neither can he who perceiveth It, perceive aught else; nor he who gazeth on It, gaze on aught else; nor hear aught else, nor stir his body any way. Staying his body's every sense and every motion he stayeth still. And shining then all round his mond, It shines through his whole soul, and draws it out of body, transforming all of him to essence. For it is possible, my son, that a man's soul should be made like to God, e'en while it still is in a body, if it doth contemplate the Beauty of the Good.

(12) When the Hierarch has finished these things, he places the body in an honourable chamber, with other holy bodies of the same rank. For if, in soul and body, the man fallen asleep passed a life dear to God, there will be honoured, with the devout soul, the body also, which contended with it throughout the devout struggles. Hence the Divine justice gives to it, together with its own body, the retributive inheritances, as companion and participator in the devout, or the contrary, life. Wherefore, the Divine institution of sacred rites bequeaths the supremely Divine participations to them both--to the soul, indeed, in pure contemplation and in science of the things being done, and to the body, by sanctifying the whole man, as in a figure with the most Divine Muron, and the most holy symbols of the supremely Divine Communion, sanctifying the whole man, and announcing, by purifications of the whole man, that his resurrection will be most complete.

(1) When, [then,] the soul’s departure from the body shall take place,—then shall the judgment and the weighing of its merit pass into its highest daimon’s power. And when he sees it pious is and just,—he suffers it to rest in spots appropriate to it. But if he find it soiled with stains of evil deeds, and fouled with vice,—he drives it from Above into the Depths, and hands it o’er to warring hurricanes and vortices of Air, of Fire, and Water.

(1) NEVERTHELESS it is needful to lift up our eyes and our hands bodily, as it were unto yon bodily heaven, in the which the elements be fastened. I mean if we be stirred of the work of our spirit, and else not. For all bodily thing is subject unto ghostly thing, and is ruled thereafter, and not contrariwise.

(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.

(38) But now, nothing corrupts, [or is transitory,] but only the Spirit in the Will, and its Body in the Fiat; and the Figure remains eternally in the Shadow. And this Figure could not thus have been brought to Light and to Visibility; that it might subsist eternally, if it had not been in the Essence; but now it is also incorruptible, for in the Figure there is no Essence: The Center in the Source is broken asunder, and gone into its Ether, [Receptacle, or Air;] and the Figure does neither Good nor Evil, but it continues eternally to the [Manifestation of the] Deeds of Wonder, and the Glory of God, and for the Joy of the Angels.

(16) And now as we understand, that Man (with the Similitude wherein God dwells) is not merely at Home in this World, much Hurts, or moves. less in the stinking Carcase, so it is manifest (in that we are so very blind as to Paradise) that our first Parents (with their Spirit) are gone out of the heavenly Paradise into the Spirit of this World, where then the Spirit of this World instantly captivated their Body, and made it earthly, so that Body and Soul are perished; and now we have the pure Element no more for our Body, but the Out-Birth, (viz. the four Elements, with the Dominion of the Stars) and the Sun only is the Light of the Body; also this Body does not belong to the Deity. God does not discover himself in the stinking Carcase [or Corpse,] but in the holy Man, in the pure Image which he created in the Beginning.

(19) The soul in man, however - not every soul, but one that pious is - is a daimonic something and divine. And such a soul when from the body freed, if it have fought the fight of piety - the fight of piety is to know God and to do wrong to no man - such a soul becomes entirely mind. Whereas the impious soul remains in its own essence, chastised by its own self, and seeking for an earthly body where to enter, if only it be human. For that no other body can contain a human soul; nor is it right that any human soul should fall into the body of a thing that doth possess no reason. For that the law of God is this: to guard the human soul from such tremendous outrage.

(22) Therefore it happens often, that the Spirit of a deceased Man is seen walking, also many Times it is seen riding in the perfect Form of Fire; also many Times in [some] other Manner of Disquietude; all according as the Clothing of the Soul has been in the Time of the Body, just so has its Source [or Condition] been; and such a Form, according to its Source, it has (after the Departing of the Body) in its Figure, and so rides (in such Form) in the Source [or Working] of the Stars, till that Source also be consumed; and then it is wholly naked, and is never seen more by any Man. But the deep Abyss without End and Number is its eternal Dwelling-House, and its Works which it has here wrought, stand in the Figure, in its Tincture, and follow after it.

(4) It is round earthly lives that this unorder doth exist. For that the bodies of the heavenly ones preserve one order allotted to them by the Father as their rule; and it is by the restoration of each one [of them] this order is preserved indissolute. The "restoration" of bodies on the earth is thus their composition, whereas their dissolution restores them to those bodies which can never be dissolved, that is to say, which know no death. Privation, thus, of sense is brought about, not loss of bodies.

(26) These holy Souls Works also follow them, in their Tincture of the Spirit of the Soul, in the holy Element, so that they see and know how much Good they have wrought here; and their highest Delight and Desire is still continually (in their Love) to do more Good; although without the paradisical Body (which they [shall then] first attain at the Restoration) they work nothing, but their Source, [Quality or Property,] is mere Delight and soft Welfare.

(18) . . . . After the Paternal Conception I the Soul reside, a heat animating all things. . . . . For he placed The Intelligible in the Soul, and the Soul in dull body, Even so the Father of Gods and Men placed them in us.

(1) IF we consider now (in the Light of Nature) of Man, the Image of God, of his Beginning, and of his eternal Enduring, Being, [or Substance,] and then of the Breaking of his Body, how Body and Soul part asunder, and whither the Souls go, when the Spirit of their Breath does break [or dissolve] in them, and the Springing or Moving in the Tincture of this World does cease, then we find the Ground of the Unquietness of the Soul, when it is separated from the Body, [being] unregenerated; from whence Lamentation and Desiring arise; from whence then the Babel of Confusion has risen, so that very many Things have therefore been invented to ransom Souls [out of Distress.]

(11) I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.

It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for the created to be without share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to descend into the created.

The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that sphere- let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos- and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises- as far as, through soul, anything can- from the lower to the highest.

Nothing, in fact, is far away from anything; things are not remote: there is, no doubt, the aloofness of difference and of mingled natures as against the unmingled; but selfhood has nothing to do with spatial position, and in unity itself there may still be distinction.

These Beings are divine in virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being.

(12) Now that this is demonstratively and certainly thus, [appears] in that it is written; And God breathed into him the a living Breath, whereby Man became a living Soul. All other Creatures which were produced out of the corruptible Limbus by the Fiat, in all those the Will in the Fiat had awakened the Spirit in their Center, and every Creature's Spirit went forth out of the Essence and Property of its own self, and mixed afterwards with the Spirit of the great World, of the Stars and Elements, and that ought not to have been in Man, his Spirit ought not to have mixed itself [or been united] with the Spirit of the Stars and Elements. The two Principles (viz. the Darkness and the Spirit of the Air) ought to have stood still in such a Substance [as should be the Image of God;] and therefore he breathed into him the diving Breath; understand God's Breath, that is, the paradisical Breath or Spirit, [viz.] the Holy Spirit; that should be the Breath of the Soul, in the Center of the Soul. And the Spirit which went forth out of the Limbus, or out of the Quinta Essentia (which is of the a Condition of the Stars) that was to have Power over the fifth Essence of this World. For Man was in one only Essence [or Substance,] and there was also but one only Man that God thus created, and he could have lived for ever. And although God had brought the Stars again into their Ether, and also had withdrawn the Matrix of the Elements, and the Elements also back into nothing, yet Man would have continued still. Besides, he had the paradisical Center in him, and he could have generated again out of himself, out of his Will, and have awakened the Center; and so should have been able in Paradise to generate an angelical Host, without Misery or Anguish, also without tearing [rending or dividing in himself;] and such a Man he ought to have been, if he must continue in Paradise, and be eternal without Decay; for Paradise is holy, and in that Respect Man also ought to have been holy, for the Virtue [and Power] of God and Paradise consists in Holiness. The deep Gate of the Soul.

(57) But that they have hitherto ascribed such acute Knowledge to the Soul, after the Departure of the Body, that thing is very various, according as the Soul is variously armed. It it here (in this Body) entered into the new Birth, and if itself was entered, with its noble Champion [Jesus Christ,] through the Princely Potentates, Gates of the Deep, to God, so that it has received the Crown of the high Wisdom from the noble Virgin, then indeed it has great Wisdom and Knowledge, even above the Heavens, for it is in the Bosom of the Virgin, through whom the eternal Wonders of God are opened. This [Soul] has also great Joy and Clarity, [Brightness or Luster,] above the Heavens of the Elements; for the Glance of the holy Trinity shines from it, and clarifies, [brightens, or glorifies] it.