(8) Wherefore I've ever heard, my son, Good Daimon also say - (and had He set it down in written words, He would have greatly helped the race of men; for He alone, my son, doth truly, as the Firstborn God, gazing on all things, give voice to words (logoi) divine) - yea, once I heard Him say: "All things are one, and most of all the bodies which the mind alone perceives. Our life is owing to [God's] Energy and Power and Aeon. His Mind is good, so is His Soul as well. And this being so, intelligible things know naught of separation. So, then, Mind, being Ruler of all things, and being Soul of God, can do whate'er it wills."

(1) But we sometimes see that take place which is now proposed to be considered. For it happens that spirits are commanded [to do this or that] who do not use a reason of their own, and have not the principle of judgment. Nor does this occur irrationally. For our dianoia naturally possessing the power of reasoning about and judging of things as they are, and comprehending in itself many powers of life, is accustomed to command the most irrational spirits, and such as derive their perfection from one energy alone. Hence, it invokes these as more excellent natures, because it endeavours to attract to particulars from the whole world, in which we are contained, things which contribute to wholes. And it commands them as inferior natures, because frequently certain parts of things in the world [such as our reasoning power] are more pure and perfect than things which extend themselves to the whole world.

(14) And the evil spirit shouted thus: 'I will not depart, I will not provide assistance for thy creatures, I will not offer praise among thy creatures, and I am not of the same opinion with thee as to good things. I will destroy thy creatures for ever and everlasting; moreover, I will force all thy creatures into disaffection to thee and affection for myself.'

(14) But, admitting this one soul at every point, how is there a particular soul of the individual and how the good soul and the bad?

The one soul reaches to the individual but nonetheless contains all souls and all intelligences; this, because it is at once a unity and an infinity; it holds all its content as one yet with each item distinct, though not to the point of separation. Except by thus holding all its content as one-life entire, soul entire, all intelligence- it could not be infinite; since the individualities are not fenced off from each other, it remains still one thing. It was to hold life not single but infinite and yet one life, one in the sense not of an aggregate built up but of the retention of the unity in which all rose. Strictly, of course, it is a matter not of the rising of the individuals but of their being eternally what they are; in that order, as there is no beginning, so there is no apportioning except as an interpretation by the recipient. What is of that realm is the ancient and primal; the relation to it of the thing of process must be that of approach and apparent merging with always dependence.

But we ourselves, what are We?

Are we that higher or the participant newcomer, the thing of beginnings in time?

Before we had our becoming Here we existed There, men other than now, some of us gods: we were pure souls, Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, members of the Intellectual, not fenced off, not cut away, integral to that All. Even now, it is true, we are not put apart; but upon that primal Man there has intruded another, a man seeking to come into being and finding us there, for we were not outside of the universe. This other has wound himself about us, foisting himself upon the Man that each of us was at first. Then it was as if one voice sounded, one word was uttered, and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing, possessed through and through of what was present and active upon it: now we have lost that first simplicity; we are become the dual thing, sometimes indeed no more than that later foisting, with the primal nature dormant and in a sense no longer present.

(1) "Of all these then will I speak unto you at the expansion of the universe--in a word, all those whom I have spoken of unto you: those who will arise and those who will come, those who emanate, and those who come forth, and those who are without over them, and those who are implanted in them, those who will contain the region of the First Mystery and those who are in the space of the Ineffable--of these will I speak unto you, because I will reveal them unto you, and I will speak of them unto you according to every region and according to every order, at the expansion of the universe. And I will reveal unto you all their mysteries which rule over them all, and their Pro-thrice-spirituals and their Super-thrice-spirituals which rule over their mysteries and their orders.

(2) And therefore it is that I call the powers of a soul, some principal, and some secondary. Not because a soul is divisible, for that may not be: but because all those things in the which they work be divisible, and some principal, as be all ghostly things, and some secondary, as be all bodily things. The two principal working powers, Reason and Will, work purely in themselves in all ghostly things, without help of the other two secondary powers. Imagination and Sensuality work beastly in all bodily things, whether they be present or absent, in the body and with the bodily wits. But by them, without help of Reason and of Will, may a soul never come to for to know the virtue and the conditions of bodily creatures, nor the cause of their beings and their makings.

(3) What, then, is the spirit ?

The Spirit of here and now.

And the God?

The God of here and now.

Spirit, God; This in act within us, conducts every life; for, even here and now, it is the dominant of our Nature.

That is to say that the dominant is the spirit which takes possession of the human being at birth?

No: the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit; it presides inoperative while its secondary acts: so that if the acting force is that of men of the sense-life, the tutelary spirit is the Rational Being, while if we live by that Rational Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still higher Being, not directly operative but assenting to the working principle. The words "You shall yourselves choose" are true, then; for by our life we elect our own loftier.

But how does this spirit come to be the determinant of our fate?

It is not when the life is ended that it conducts us here or there; it operates during the lifetime; when we cease to live, our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own personal career.

That principle strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit : if on the contrary it is weighed down by the developed evil in the character, the spirit of the previous life pays the penalty: the evil-liver loses grade because during his life the active principle of his being took the tilt towards the brute by force of affinity. If, on the contrary, the Man is able to follow the leading of his higher Spirit, he rises: he lives that Spirit; that noblest part of himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life; this made his own, he works for the next above until he has attained the height.

For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of life: and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by what is the highest, to the Divine Intellect: by all that is intellective we are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are fettered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in itself diminished.

(6) "Hearken, therefore, that I may discourse with you concerning the soul according as I have said: The five great rulers of the great Fate of the æons and the rulers of the disk of the sun and the rulers of the disk of the moon breathe into that soul, and there cometh out of them a portion of my power, as I have just said. And the portion of that power remaineth within the soul, so that the soul can stand. And they put the counterfeiting spirit outside the soul, watching it and assigned to it; and the rulers bind it to the soul with their seals and their bonds and seal it to it, that it may compel it always, so that it continually doeth its mischiefs and all its iniquities, in order that it may be their slave always and remain under their sway always in the changes of the body; and they seal it to it that it may be in all the sin and all the desires of the world.

(2) Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is stationary in you: there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in any other form of identity between you and me; nor would it entail the transference of my emotion to any outside point: when in any one body a hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand as represented in the centralizing unity.

In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient bodies made one, would the souls feel as one.

We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in one same body escape the notice of the entire being, especially when the bulk is large: thus in huge sea-beasts, it is said, the animal as a whole will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to traverse the organism.

Thus unity in the subject of any experience does not imply that the resultant sensation will be necessarily felt with any force upon the entire being and at every point of it: some transmission of the experience may be expected, and is indeed undeniable, but a full impression on the sense there need not be.

That one identical soul should be virtuous in me and vicious in someone else is not strange: it is only saying that an identical thing may be active here and inactive there.

We are not asserting the unity of soul in the sense of a complete negation of multiplicity- only of the Supreme can that be affirmed- we are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in the nature divided in body, but at the same time a unity by virtue of belonging to that Order which suffers no division.

In myself some experience occurring in a part of the body may take no effect upon the entire man but anything occurring in the higher reaches would tell upon the partial: in the same way any influx from the All upon the individual will have manifest effect since the points of sympathetic contact are numerous- but as to any operation from ourselves upon the All there can be no certainty.

(383) Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own. You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in which we should write and speak about divine things. The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way. I grant that. Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire the lying dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the verses of Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials ‘Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and to know no sickness. And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul. And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of prophecy, would not fail. And now he himself who uttered the strain, he who was present at the banquet, and who said this—he it is who has slain my son 15 .’ These are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our anger; and he who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall we allow teachers to make use of them in the instruction of the young, meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be, should be true worshippers of the gods and like them. I entirely agree, he said, in these principles, and promise to make them my laws.

(1) And this order is adapted to dæmons; one part of it being allied to those that are invoked; another being derived from more ancient causes; and the third part effecting a common completion from both the others. Do not, therefore, assimilate divine invocations to such as are human, nor those that are ineffable to those that are effable; nor compare those that are prior to every boundary, and every indefinite mode, to those that are defined by men, or to indefinite actions. For our concerns have nothing in common with theirs, whose whole genus and whole order transcend and govern the whole of our essence and nature. But here, especially, the greatest errors happen to men, when from human imbecility they infer any thing concerning the domination of dæmons, and from things which are small, of no worth, and distributed into parts, form a conjecture of great, excellent, and perfect natures. And thus much in answer to you concerning the peculiar dæmon, in addition to what has been before said.

(51) "From hence, in the Creation, Good and Evil are existed: And I exhort the Reader to conceive our very deep Sense right, and not mistake or go astray here, but to read our other Writings, where these Things are sufficiently explained." Of the great Sin, and contrary or opposite Will; and of the eternal Enmity of King Lucifer, together with his whole Host or Army against God.

(1) Let us then, in the next place, consider the opposing arguments, what they are, and what reason they possess. And if we should discuss some things a little more abundantly, in consequence of speaking freely and at leisure, it is requisite that you should promptly attend to, and endure what, we say. For it is necessary that great labour should be bestowed on the greatest disciplines, and that they should be accurately explored for a long time, if you intend to know them perfectly. Do you, therefore, conformably to the present hypothesis, propose the arguments which occasion the doubt, and I will answer you. Say then, “ it very much perplexes me to understand how superior beings, when invoked, are commanded by those that invoke them, as if they were their inferiors .” But I will unfold to you the whole division, which is worthy of regard, concerning the powers that are invoked; from which you will be able clearly to define what is possible and what is impossible, in the subjects of your investigation. For the Gods, indeed, and the natures that are more excellent than we, through the wish of what is beautiful, and from an unenvying and exuberant fulness of good, benevolently impart to those that are worthy, such things as are fit for them, commiserating the labours of sacerdotal men, but being delighted with those that they have begotten, nourished, and instructed. But the middle genera are the inspective guardians of judgment.

(2) So, then, although it may do good to few alone, ’tis proper to develope and explain this thesis:—wherefore Divinity hath deigned to share His science and intelligence with men alone. Give ear, accordingly! When God, [our] Sire and Lord, made man, after the Gods, out of an equal mixture of a less pure cosmic part and a divine,—it [naturally] came to pass the imperfections of the cosmic part remained commingled with [our] frames, and other ones [as well], by reason of the food and sustenance we have out of necessity in common with all lives ; by reason of which things it needs must be that the desires, and passions, and other vices, of the mind should occupy the souls of human kind.

(2) Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father.

And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.

The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty- the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part- thence to pour forth into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it.

For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.

(8) What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of; one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for prediction and augury?

Soul: we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other Principle, not merely the Soul of the Universe but, included in it, the Soul of the individual: this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign; it would hold rank in a series.

Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes : there will therefore be a compromise; the action of the Soul will be in part guided by this environment while in other matters it will be sovereign, leading the way where it will. The nobler Soul will have the greater power; the poorer Soul, the lesser. A soul which defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage and is abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbitrary in power. The soul of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings; it is more apt to change them than to be changed, so that often it improves the environment and, where it must make concession, at least keeps its innocence.

(6) My beloved Reader, just thus is our Mind also. It is the indissoluble Band, which God by the Fiat in the moving Spirit breathed into Adam out of the eternal Mind, [from whence] the Essences are a Particular, or a Sparkle out of the eternal Mind, which has the Center of the Breaking, and in the Breaking has the Sharpness in itself; and that Will drives [forth] the Flash [or Glimpse] in the Breaking, and the Sharpness of the Consuming of the Darkness is in the Glimpse [or Flash] of the Willing, and the Will is our Mind. The Glimpse is the Eyes in the Fire-flash, which discovers itself in our Essences hin us, and without us, for it is free, and has both the Gates open, that [Gate] in the Darkness, and that Gate in the Light. For although it continues in the Darkness, yet it breaks the Darkness, and makes all Light in itself; and where it is, there it sees. As our Thoughts, they can i speculate a Thing that is many Miles off, when the Body is far from thence, and it may be never was in that Place; the Discovery or Glimpse [or piercing Sight of the Eye of the Mind] goes through Wood and Stone, through Bones and Marrow, and there is nothing that can withhold it, for it pierces and breaks the Darkness every where without rending the Body of any Thing, and the Will is its Horse whereon it rides. Here many Things must be concealed, because of the devilish Inchantment, (or else we would reveal much more here,) for the Nigromanticus [Necromancer] is generated here.

(110) Inasmuch as thou art acquainted with the Master of all; Be a man, and not another man's beast of burden! Follow thine own way and lose not thy head!" In one 'twas said, "All we see is One. Whoever says 'tis two is suffering from double vision." In one 'twas said, "A hundred are even as one." Each scroll had its contrary piece of rhetoric, In form and substance utterly opposed to it; This contrary to that, from first to last,

(5) "Thus they give commandment to their servitors, that they may deposit it into the bodies of the antitype. And following this fashion the servitors of the rulers bring the power and the soul and the counterfeiting spirit, bring them down to the world, and pour [them] out into the world of the rulers of the midst. The rulers of the midst look after the counterfeiting spirit; and also the destiny, whose name is Moira, leadeth the man until it hath him slain through the death appointed unto him, which the rulers of the great Fate have bound to the soul. And the servitors of the sphere bind the soul and the power and the counterfeiting spirit and the destiny. And they portion them all and make them into two portions and seek after the man and also after the woman in the world to whom they have given signs, in order that they may send them into them. And they give one portion to the man and one portion to the woman in a victual of the world or in a breath of the air or in water or in a kind which they drink. "All this I will tell unto you and the species of every soul and the type, how they enter into the bodies, whether of men or of birds or of cattle or of wild beasts or of reptiles or of all the other species in the world. I will tell you their type, in what type they enter into men; I will tell it you at the expansion of the universe. "Now, therefore, when the servitors of the rulers cast the one portion into the woman and the other into the man in the fashion which I

(1) The soul: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt- with, at least, the gain of recognizing the problem that confronts us- this is matter well worth attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time required by minute discussion and investigation? Apart from much else, it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of what sphere the soul is the principle, and whence the soul itself springs. Moreover, we will be only obeying the ordinance of the God who bade us know ourselves.

Our general instinct to seek and learn, our longing to possess ourselves of whatsoever is lovely in the vision will, in all reason, set us enquiring into the nature of the instrument with which we search.

Now even in the universal Intellect there was duality, so that we would expect differences of condition in things of part: how some things rather than others come to be receptacles of the divine beings will need to be examined; but all this we may leave aside until we are considering the mode in which soul comes to occupy body. For the moment we return to our argument against those who maintain our souls to be offshoots from the soul of the universe .

Our opponents will probably deny the validity of our arguments against the theory that the human soul is a mere segment of the All-Soul- the considerations, namely, that it is of identical scope, and that it is intellective in the same degree, supposing them, even, to admit that equality of intellection.

They will object that parts must necessarily fall under one ideal-form with their wholes. And they will adduce Plato as expressing their view where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says "As our body is a portion of the body of the All, so our soul is a portion of the soul of the All." It is admitted on clear evidence that we are borne along by the Circuit of the All; we will be told that- taking character and destiny from it, strictly inbound with it- we must derive our souls, also, from what thus bears us up, and that as within ourselves every part absorbs from our soul so, analogically, we, standing as parts to the universe, absorb from the Soul of the All as parts of it. They will urge also that the dictum "The collective soul cares for all the unensouled," carries the same implication and could be uttered only in the belief that nothing whatever of later origin stands outside the soul of the universe, the only soul there can be there to concern itself with the unensouled.