(48) When the soul was joined to the body it was part of the all: never has there been so marvellous a talisman. The soul had a share of that which is high, and the body a share of that which is low; it was formed of a mixture of heavy clay and pure spirit. By this mixing, man became the most astonishing of mysteries. We do not know nor do we understand so much as a little of our spirit. If you wish to say something about this, it would be better to keep silent. Many know the surface of this ocean, but they understand nothing of the depths; and the visible world is the talisman which protects it. But this talisman of bodily obstacles will be broken at last. You will find the treasure when the talisman disappears; the soul will manifest itself when the body is laid aside. But your soul is another talisman; it is, for this mystery, another substance. Walk then in the way I shall indicate, but do not ask for an explanation.

(21) It goes not out at the Mouth like a Bodily Substance; it is raw [or naked] without a Body, and instantly passes (at the Departure of the four Elements) into the Center, into the Gate of the Deep, [in the hidden Eternity;] and that which it is clothed with, that it comprehends, and keeps it: If its Treasure be Voluptuousness, Might, [or Power,] Honour, Riches, Malice, Wrath, Lying, or the Falshood of the World, then the fierce Might of the Essences out of the first Principle comprehends these Things, through the syderial Spirit, and keeps them, and works therewith according to the Region of the Stars; yet the [starry Region] cannot bring the Spirit of the Soul into its own Form, but it practises its juggling therewith, and so there is no Rest in its Worm, and its Worm of the Soul hangs to its Treasure; as Christ said, Where thy Treasure is, there is thy Heart also.

(133) Indeed the soul had its life before the body, but it stood in the Heart of God, hidden in the mass in heaven, and was a kind of holy seed, qualifying, mixing or uniting with God, which seed is eternal, incorruptible and indestructible; for it was a new and pure seed for an angel and image of God.

(19) She gave the body to those who had given it to her, and they were ashamed, while the dealers in bodies sat down and wept because they were not able to do any business with that body, nor did they find any (other) merchandise except it. They endured great labors until they had shaped the body of this soul, wishing to strike down the invisible soul. They were therefore ashamed of their work; they suffered the loss of the one for whom they had endured labors. They did not realize that she has an invisible spiritual body, thinking, "We are her shepherd who feeds her." But they did not realize that she knows another way, which is hidden from them. This her true shepherd taught her in knowledge.

(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.

(73) But it retaineth its seat in the kernel, which is the unctuosity or fatness, or the water of life, or the heaven; for it is the body of life, which the death cannot comprehend, and yet it riseth up in the death.

(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.

(1) The chest which has the sky for its circumference and the earth for its bottom, does not decay, for the quarters are its sides, and heaven its lid above. That chest is a treasury, and all things are within it.

(24) Now comes the question of the soul leaving the body; where does it go?

It cannot remain in this world where there is no natural recipient for it; and it cannot remain attached to anything not of a character to hold it: it can be held here when only it is less than wise, containing within itself something of that which lures it.

If it does contain any such alien element it gives itself, with increasing attachment, to the sphere to which that element naturally belongs and tends.

The space open to the soul's resort is vast and diverse; the difference will come by the double force of the individual condition and of the justice reigning in things. No one can ever escape the suffering entailed by ill deeds done: the divine law is ineluctable, carrying bound up, as one with it, the fore-ordained execution of its doom. The sufferer, all unaware, is swept onward towards his due, hurried always by the restless driving of his errors, until at last wearied out by that against which he struggled, he falls into his fit place and, by self-chosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose. And the law decrees, also, the intensity and the duration of the suffering while it carries with it, too, the lifting of chastisement and the faculty of rising from those places of pain- all by power of the harmony that maintains the universal scheme.

Souls, body-bound, are apt to body-punishment; clean souls no longer drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of body are, by their very being, outside the bodily sphere; body-free, containing nothing of body- there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the Divinity, among Those, within That, such a soul must be.

If you still ask Where, you must ask where those Beings are- and in your seeking, seek otherwise than with the sight, and not as one seeking for body.

(68) Therefore now the Question is, Where was the Soul of Christ all the Time that the Body did rest in the Grave? Beloved Reason, do not like those that are blind concerning God, who say, the Soul [of Christ] went away from the Body down into Hell into the Earth, and during that Time, in the divine Power and Virtue, assaulted the Devils in Hell, and bound them with Chains, and destroyed Hell. O, it is quite another Thing. The Saints rising out of the Graves at the Hour of the Death of Christ declares otherwise.

(2) All manner of bodily thing is without thy soul and beneath it in nature, yea! the sun and the moon and all the stars, although they be above thy body, nevertheless yet they be beneath thy soul.

(27) This is also wholly hidden as to my body, but not as to my animated or soulish spirit, for so long as my animated or soulish spirit qualifieth or works with and in God it comprehendeth the same; but when it falls into sin, then the door is shut against it, which the devil bolteth up fast, and which must, with great labour and industry of the spirit, be set open again.

(98) For all the veins, together with the light in thee, as also thy heart and thy brain, and all whatsoever is in thee, make or constitute that spirit; and that is thy soul; and it well signifieth the Holy Ghost, which goeth forth from the Father and the Son, and reigneth in the whole Father; for the soul of man reigneth in the whole body.

(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.

(72) And so thou must not think that the Soul of Christ was then gone a great Way from his Body. For all the Three Principles were on the Cross, why also not in the Grave? At that very Moment when Christ laid off the Kingdom of this World, the Soul of Christ pressed into Death, and into the Anger of God, and in that very Moment the Anger was reconciled in the Love, in the Light, and became Paradise; and the Devils were captivated in the Anger in themselves, together with all the wicked Souls; and so instantly the Life sprung up through Death, and Death was destroyed, and made a Scorn; yet to the Wicked (which remain in the Anger) it is Death, but in Christ it is a Life.

(67) Therefore the Soul (when it departs from the Body) needs not to go far; for at that Place where the Body dies, there is Heaven and Hell; and the Man Christ dwells every where. God and the Devil is there, yet each of them in his own Kingdom. The Paradise is also there; and the Soul needs only to enter through the deep Door in the Center. Is the Soul holy? Then it stands in the Gate of Heaven, and the earthly Body has but kept it out of Heaven; and now when the Body comes to be broken, then the Soul is already in the Heaven; it needs no going out or in, Christ has it in his Arms, for where the four Elements break, there the Root of them remains, which is the holy Element, and therein the Body of Christ stands, and also Paradise, which stands in the springing Source of Joy; and that Element is the soft still Habitation.

(10) The sacrificial joint and the funereal raiment, let those who find them bury them

(120) That drew or attracted the divine Salitter together, and dried it, so that it became a body, and so the whole divine power of all the seven qualifying or fountain spirits of that place or room, as far as that of the angels reached, was captivated in the body, and became the propriety of the body, which neither can nor will be destroyed again in eternity, but will remain the body's propriety or proper own in eternity.

(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.]

(6) Evermore where thou findest written thyself in ghostliness, then it is understood thy soul, and not thy body. And then all after that thing is on the which the powers of thy soul work, thereafter shall the worthiness and the condition of thy work be deemed; whether it be beneath thee, within thee, or above thee.