(32) As above said, the visions of males and females in union will appear. If, at that time, one entereth into the womb through the feelings of attachment and repulsion, one may be born either as a horse, a fowl, a dog, or a human being.

(18) Now listen to the rest of the discourse (Logos) which thou dost long to hear. The period being ended, the bond that bound them all was loosened by God's Will. For all the animals being male-female, at the same time with Man were loosed apart; some became partly male, some in like fashion [partly] female. And straightway God spake by His Holy Word (Logos): "Increase ye in increasing, and multiply in multitude, ye creatures and creations all; and man that hath Mind in him, let him learn to know that he himself is deathless, and that the cause of death is love, though Love is all."

(43) Now God said, Let all Manner of Beasts come forth, every one after its Kind; and so there came forth out of the Essence of every one's kind, a Male and Female. And thus the Spirit of the Stars, or the Spirit of the Form of Fire, had now by its Longing copulated with the watery [Spirit,] and two Sexes sprung out of one Essence; the one according to the Limbus in the Form of Fire, and the other according to. the Aquaster [or Spirit of the Water] in the watery Form; yet so [blended or] mixed, that they were alike as to the Body. And so the Male was qualified according to the Limbus, or Form of Fire, and the Female according to the Aquaster in the watery Form.

(103) But if nature led them, like the irrational animals, to procreation, yet they were impelled to do it more quickly than. was proper because they were still young and had been led away by deceit. Thus God's judgment against them was just, because they did not wait for his will. But birth is holy. By it were made the world, the existences, the natures, the angels, powers, souls, the commandments, the law, the gospel, the knowledge of God. And "all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withers, the flower falls; but the word of the Lord abides" which anoints the soul and unites it with the spirit. Without the body how could the divine plan for us in the Church achieve its end? Surely the Lord himself, the head of the Church, came in the flesh, though without form and beauty, to teach us to look upon the formless and incorporeal nature of the divine Cause. "For a tree of life" says the prophet, "grows by a good desire," teaching that desires which are in the living Lord are good and pure.

(64) As the Members of Man's Body love one another, so do the Spirits also in the Divine Power; there is nothing else but a mere longing, desiring, and well liking Acceptation, as also a triumphing and rejoicing the one in the other: For through these Spirits come the Understanding and Distinction in God, in Angels, Men, Beasts, and Fowls, and in every Thing that lives. [triumphing]

(1) And she then bethought herself- ' How now does he copulate with me after he has produced me just from himself? Come, let me hide myself/ She became a cow. He became a bull. With her he did indeed copulate. Then cattle were born. She became a mare, he a stallion. She became a female ass, he a male ass; with her he copulated, of a truth. Thence were bom solid-hoofed animals. She became a she-goat, he a he-goat; she a ewe, he a ram. With her he did verily copulate. Therefrom were born goats and sheep. Thus, indeed, he created all, whatever pairs there are, even down to the ants.

(28) Now look upon the human Life a little further, you neither see, find, nor apprehend any more by your Light than Flesh and Blood, wherein you are like other Beasts; secondly, you find the Elements of Air and Fire which work in you, and that it is but an animal or bestial Life, for every Beast has the same in it, from whence proceeds the Lust to fill themselves, and to propagate themselves, as all Plants, Herbs, and Grass, and yet you find no true Understanding to be in all these living Creatures; for although the Stars or Constellations operate in Man, and afford him the Senses, yet they are only such Senses as belong to Nourishment and Propagation, like other Beasts.

(44) And so now there is a vehement Desire in the Creatures. The Spirit of the Male seeks the loving Child in the Female, and the Female in the Male; for the Irrationality of the Body in the unreasonable Creatures knows not what it does; the Body would not, if it had Reason, move so eagerly towards Propagation; neither does it know any Thing of the Impregnation [or Conception,] only its Spirit does so burn and desire after the Child of Love, that it seeks Love, (which yet is paradisical) and it cannot comprehend it; but it makes a P Semination only, wherein there is again a Center to the Birth. And thus is the Original of both Sexes, and their Propagation; yet it does not attain the paradisical Child of Love, but it is a vehement Hunger, and so the Propagation is acted with great Earnestness.

(95) Hearken, there belongs more than so to this; thy animated or soulish Spirit must first qualify, operate or unite with the innermost Birth or Geniture in God, and stand in the Light, that it may rightly know and understand the astral Birth or Geniture, and that it may have a free and open Gate into all the Births or Genitures, else thou wilt not be able to write a holy and true Philosophy, but as it were full of Lice and Fleas, and to wit be found a Mocker against God. [Or many evil Beasts and creeping Vermine.]

(55) Therefore God established the State of Wedlock with Adam and Eve, and bound it fast with a strong Chain, in that he said; A Man shall leave Father and Mother, and cleave to his Wife, and they two shall be one Flesh. And God tolerates their as one Body and its Members, and must aim (in the Fear of God) at the Getting of Children; or else the Wantonness [or Lust] in itself (without that true Love of the State of Wedlock) is continually a bestial Lust, [Infection,] and Sin. And if you (in the State of Wedlock) seek nothing but the Lust and Lechery, then in such a Condition, thou art not a Jot better than a Beast, And do but consider it rightly, that without this, thou standest [already] in a bestial Birth [or Generation,] contrary to the first Creation, like all Beasts. For the holy Man in Adam was not predetermined to have propagated so, but in great modest Love out of himself.

(104) Furthermore they wish to maintain that the intercourse of man and wife in marriage, which is called knowledge, is a sin; this sin is referred to as eating of the tree of good and evil, and the phrase "he knew" signifies transgression of the commandment. But if this is so, even knowledge of the truth is eating of the tree of life. It is possible for a sober-minded marriage to partake of that tree. We have already observed that marriage may be used rightly or wrongly; and this is the tree of knowledge, if we do not transgress in marriage. What then? Does not the Saviour who heals the soul also heal the body of its passions? But if the flesh were hostile to the soul, he would not have raised an obstacle to the soul by strengthening with good health the hostile flesh. "This I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God nor corruption incorruption." For sin being corruption cannot have fellowship with incorruption which is righteousness. " Are you so foolish?" he says; "having begun in the Spirit are you now to be made perfect by the flesh."

(12) Far more excellent, in my opinion, than the seeds of wheat and barley that are sown at appropriate seasons, is man that is sown, for whom all things grow; and those seeds temperate husbandmen ever sow. Every foul and polluting practice must therefore be purged away from marriage; that the intercourse of the irrational animals may not be cast in our teeth, as more accordant with nature than human conjunction in procreation. Some of these, it must be granted, desist at the time in which they are directed, leaving creation to the working of Providence.

(6) But in fact everything follows its own Kind; the birth is a horse because it comes from the Horse Kind, a man by springing from the Human Kind; offspring answers to species. Allow the kosmic circuit its part, a very powerful influence upon the thing brought into being: allow the stars a wide material action upon the bodily part of the man, producing heat and cold and their natural resultants in the physical constitution; still does such action explain character, vocation and especially all that seems quite independent of material elements, a man taking to letters, to geometry, to gambling, and becoming an originator in any of these pursuits? And can we imagine the stars, divine beings, bestowing wickedness? And what of a doctrine that makes them wreak vengeance, as for a wrong, because they are in their decline or are being carried to a position beneath the earth- as if a decline from our point of view brought any change to themselves, as if they ever ceased to traverse the heavenly spheres and to make the same figure around the earth.

Nor may we think that these divine beings lose or gain in goodness as they see this one or another of the company in various aspects, and that in their happier position they are benignant to us and, less pleasantly situated, turn maleficent. We can but believe that their circuit is for the protection of the entirety of things while they furnish the incidental service of being letters on which the augur, acquainted with that alphabet, may look and read the future from their pattern- arriving at the thing signified by such analogies as that a soaring bird tells of some lofty event.

(8) He brought female to be with male and in the same way united all animals. He thus showed righteousness to be a universal fairness and equality.But those who have been born in this way have denied the universality which is the corollary of their birth and say, 'Let him who has taken one woman keep her,' whereas all alike can have her, just as the other animals do." After this, which is quoted word for word, he again continues in the same spirit as follows: "With a view to the permanence of the race, he has implanted in males a strong and ardent desire which neither law nor custom nor any other restraint is able to destroy. For it is God's decree." And how can this man still be reckoned among our number when he openly abolishes both law and gospel by these words. The one says: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." The other says: "Everyone who looks lustfully has already committed adultery." The saying in the law, "Thou shalt not covet," lt shows that one God is proclaimed by law, prophets, and gospel; for it says: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife." But for a Jew the "neighbour" is not a Jew, for he is a brother and has the same spirit. Therefore it remains that "neighbour" means one of another race. But how can he not be a neighbour who is able to share in the same spirit? For Abraham is father not only of the Hebrews, but also of the Gentiles.

(15) For he who conducts himself heathenishly in the Church, whether in deed, or word, or even in thought, commits fornication with reference to the Church and his own body. He who in this way "is joined to the harlot," that is, to conduct contrary to the Covenant becomes another "body," not holy, "and one flesh," and has a heathenish life and another hope. "But he that is joined to the Lord in spirit" becomes a spiritual body by a different kind of conjunction.

(46) For the Word is in thy Heart, and qualifies or unites with the Soul, as if it were one Being; and if thy Soul stands in the Love, then it also is one Being. And, thou mayest say, that according to thy Soul thou sittest in Heaven, and livest and reignest with God. ["Understand, according to the Spirit of the Soul, with the Image out of the animated or soulish Fire."]

(113) and the Woman on the Man, and to the Spirit of the Man, understand the root of the Love, which in the Rising up of the Life out of the Water, rises up through the Fire, as also the Woman's Spirit does; and so one Spirit catches the other in that Oil of the Heart, whereby presently a Mass, Seed, or driving Will, or Desire to the propagating of a Man again, arises in the Mass.

(6) Someone may here object, "But if man has been created with animal and demonic qualities as well as angelic, how are we to know that the latter constitute his real essence, while the former are merely accidental and transitory?" To this I answer that the essence of each creature is to be sought in that which is highest in it and peculiar to it. Thus the horse and the ass are both burden-bearing animals, but the superiority of the horse to the ass consists in its being adapted for use in battle. If it fails in this, it becomes degraded to the rank of burden-bearing animals. Similarly with man: the highest faculty in him is reason, which fits him for the contemplation of God. If this predominates in him, when he dies, he leaves behind him all tendencies to passion and resentment, and becomes capable of association with angels. As regards his mere animal qualities, man is inferior to many animals, but reason makes him superior to them, as it is written in the Koran: "To man We have subjected all things in the earth." But if his lower tendencies have triumphed, after death be will ever be looking towards the earth and longing for earthly delights.

(8) So much for the thing of sense; but it would appear that the prototype There of the living form, the universal horse, must look deliberately towards this sphere; and, that being so, the idea of horse must have been worked out in order there be a horse here?

Yet what was that there to present the idea of the horse it was desired to produce? Obviously the idea of horse must exist before there was any planning to make a horse; it could not be thought of in order to be made; there must have been horse unproduced before that which was later to come into being. If, then, the thing existed before it was produced- if it cannot have been thought of in order to its production- the Being that held the horse as There held it in presence without any looking to this sphere; it was not with intent to set horse and the rest in being here that they were contained There; it is that, the universal existing, the reproduction followed of necessity since the total of things was not to halt at the Intellectual. Who was there to call a halt to a power capable at once of self-concentration and of outflow?

But how come these animals of earth to be There? What have they to do within God? Reasoning beings, all very well; but this host of the unreasoning, what is there august in them? Surely the very contrary?

The answer is that obviously the unity of our universe must be that of a manifold since it is subsequent to that unity-absolute; otherwise it would be not next to that but the very same thing. As a next it could not hold the higher rank of being more perfectly a unity; it must fall short: since the best is a unity, inevitably there must be something more than unity, for deficiency involves plurality.

But why should it not be simply a dyad?

Because neither of the constituents could ever be a pure unity, but at the very least a duality and so progressively . Besides, in that first duality of the hypothesis there would be also movement and rest, Intellect and the life included in Intellect, all-embracing Intellect and life complete. That means that it could not be one Intellect; it must be Intellect agglomerate including all the particular intellects, a thing therefore as multiple as all the Intellects and more so; and the life in it would nat be that of one soul but of all the souls with the further power of producing the single souls: it would be the entire living universe containing much besides man; for if it contained only man, man would be alone here.

(30) And they say, Yes, we will take thee in, for thou art a Member of our Spirit; thou shalt dwell in us, and strengthen the Essences of our Spirit, that it may not faint; yet we must also have the Children of the Earth (for they have our Quality also in them) that we may rejoice. And the Spirit of the Lungs says; Then I will live in you wholly, and rejoice myself with you. The Gate of the Syderial, or Starry Spirit. 3 1. Thus now when the Light of the Sun, which had discovered and imprinted itself in the Fire-flash of the Essences of the Spirit, and was shining in the Fire-flash (as in a strange Virtue, and not in the Sun's own Virtue,) [when he] sees that he has gotten the Region, and that the Essences of the Soul (which are the Worm or the Spirit) as also the Elements will rejoice in his Virtue and Splendor, and that the Elements have made their four Regions [or Dominions] and Habitations, for an everlasting Possession, and that he should be a King, and that they should serve at Court (in the Spirit of the Essences) in the Heart, and so exceedingly love him, and rejoice in their Service, and have besides brought the Children of the Earth, that the Spirit might present them (where then they will first be frolick and potent, and eat and drink of the Essences of the Children of the Earth) then i he thinks with himself, it is good to dwell here, thou art a King, thou wilt bring kthy Kindred [Offspring, or Generation] hither, and raise them up above the Elements, and make thyself Gate where the Children of this World are wiser than the Children of Light. O Man! consider thyself! And he draws the Constellations to him, and brings them into the Essences, and sets them over the Elements, with their wonderful and unsearchable various Essences, (whose Number is infinite,) and makes himself