The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother affect it neither for better nor for worse. Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other; these powers conflict with their opponent principles, not with their substrata- which it would be foolish to confuse with the entrant forms- Heat annuls Cold, and Blackness annuls Whiteness; or, the opponents blend to form an intermediate quality. Only that is affected which enters into combinations: being affected is losing something of self-identity. In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change: in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the Soul or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither Principle is associated with it as friend or enemy. So the appellation "Recipient and Nurse" is the better description: Matter is the mother only in the sense indicated; it has no begetting power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a Mother as Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being formed out of food. But if this Mother does give anything to the offspring it does so not in its quality as Matter but as being an Ideal-Form; for only the Idea is generative; the contrary Kind is sterile. This, I think, is why the doctors of old, teaching through symbols and mystic representations, exhibit the ancient Hermes with the generative organ always in active posture; this is to convey that the generator of things of sense is the Intellectual Reason Principle: the sterility of Matter, eternally unmoved, is indicated by the eunuchs surrounding it in its representation as the All-Mother. This too exalting title is conferred upon it in order to indicate that it is the source of things in the sense of being their underlie: it is an approximate name chosen for a general conception; there is no intention of suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood to those not satisfied with a surface impression but needing a precisely true presentment; by a remote symbolism, the nearest they could find, they indicate that Matter is sterile, not female to full effect, female in receptivity only, not in pregnancy: this they accomplish by exhibiting Matter as approached by what is neither female nor effectively male, but castrated of that impregnating power which belongs only to the unchangeably masculine.

But the quality externally without them, or externally without their bodies, viz. their mother, is not their propriety, as also their mother is not th...

Thus also in Christ; the Will [to the Child] was the Mother's, when the Angel declared the Message to her, and the Tincture (which received the...

And though the child be in the mother's house, and the mother nourish the child with her food, and the child could not live without the mother, yet bo...

Now thus the Child qualifies [or mixes] with the Mother, and with all Essences, till it kindles the Light of Life, and then the Child lives in its...

Behold, dost thou know how a Child comes to be Flesh and Blood, and in the End a living Soul? And do you not know that the Tincture of the Mother is...

For every Creature looks but into its Mother that is fixed [or predominant] in it. The material Creature sees a material Substance, but an immaterial ...

It appears to me that the justice which subsists among men, may be called the mother and the nurse of the other virtues. For without this a man can...

Father, mother, and child constitute the natural trinity. The Mysteries glorified the home as the supreme institution consisting of this trinity...

Wherefore the claims of God predominate over the mother's, Whoso acknowledges not God's claims is a fool. He who made mother and breast and milk...

Thus the Birth gets an Essence that has Sharpness from the Harshness, and Sweetness, Thinness, and Expansion from the Light. And now when the Flash...

The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in...

All the seed of the females which issues beforehand, takes a place within the womb, and the seed of the males will remain above it, and will fill the...

Still, if it be not closed even by that, and thou findest thyself ready to enter the womb, the third method of repelling attachment and repulsion is...

The same relation holds with the creator, and maker, and father. A thing is not the cause of itself. Nor is one his own father. For so the first...

The womb herein referred to was apparently the glass casket, or container, in which the Brothers were buried. This was also called the philosophical...

These same are father, mother, and offspring. The father is Mind. The mother is Speech. The offspring is Breath. l

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...

The three Mothers, א מ ש, enclose a great, wonderful, and unknown mystery, and are sealed by six wings (or elementary circles), namely, air, water, fi...

This Figure does not (as many judge) go into the Abyss, but as the Parents were, so is also their Figure; for this Figure is the Parent's, till the...

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 Creatur...