The human being Adam was revealed through the bright shadow within. And Adam’s ability to think was greater than that of all the creators. When they looked up, they saw that Adam’s ability to think was greater, and they devised a plan with the whole throng of rulers and angels. They took fire, earth, and water, and combined them with the four fiery winds. They wrought them together and made a great commotion. The rulers brought Adam into the shadow of death so that they might produce a figure again, from earth, water, fire, and the spirit that comes from matter, that is, from the ignorance of darkness, and desire, and their own false spirit. This is the cave for remodeling the body that these criminals put on the human, the fetter of forgetfulness. Adam became a mortal being, the first to descend and the first to become estranged. The enlightened afterthought within Adam, however, would rejuvenate Adam’s mind. They put their tree of life in the middle of paradise. I shall teach you the secret of their life, the plan they devised together, the nature of their spirit: The root of their tree is bitter, its branches are death, its shadow is hatred, a trap is in its leaves, its blossom is bad ointment, its fruit is death, desire is its seed, it blossoms in darkness. The dwelling place of those who taste of it is the underworld, and darkness is their resting place. But the rulers lingered in front of what they call the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is the enlightened afterthought, so that Adam might not behold its fullness and recognize his shameful nakedness. But I was the one who induced them to eat. I said to the savior, Master, was it not the snake that instructed Adam to eat? The savior laughed and said, The snake instructed them to eat of the wickedness of sexual desire and destruction so that Adam might be of use to the snake. This is the one who knew Adam was disobedient because of the enlightened afterthought within Adam, which made Adam stronger of mind than the first ruler. The first ruler wanted to recover the power that he himself had passed on to Adam. So he brought deep sleep upon Adam. I said to the savior, What is this deep sleep? The savior said, It is not as Moses wrote and you heard. He said in his first book, He put Adam to sleep. Rather, this deep sleep was a loss of sense. Thus the first ruler said through the prophet, I shall make their minds sluggish, that they may neither understand nor discern.

(4) Which what it finds there active doth attract Into its substance, and becomes one soul, Which lives, and feels, and on itself revolves. And that thou less may wonder at my word, Behold the sun's heat, which becometh wine, Joined to the juice that from the vine distils. Whenever Lachesis has no more thread, It separates from the flesh, and virtually Bears with itself the human and divine; The other faculties are voiceless all; The memory, the intelligence, and the will In action far more vigorous than before. Without a pause it falleth of itself In marvellous way on one shore or the other; There of its roads it first is cognizant. Soon as the place there circumscribeth it, The virtue informative rays round about, As, and as much as, in the living members. And even as the air, when full of rain, By alien rays that are therein reflected, With divers colours shows itself adorned, So there the neighbouring air doth shape itself Into that form which doth impress upon it Virtually the soul that has stood still.

(8) To what do the former beings pertain? They are like forgetfulness and heavy sleep; being like those who dream troubled dreams, to whom sleep comes while they - those who dream - are oppressed. The others are like some creatures of light for him, looking for the rising of the sun, since it happened that they saw in him dreams which are truly sweet. It immediately put a stop to the emanations of the thought. They did not any longer have their substance and also they did not have honor any longer.

(4) So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then, they remain with soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing with him, do not descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed are thus far in the one place with their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths it henceforth sinks far.

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back.

It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing itself now through its intellectual phase, it operates through sense, it is a captive; this is the burial, the encavernment, of the Soul.

But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent: by a conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosed from the shackles and soars- when only it makes its memories the starting point of a new vision of essential being. Souls that take this way have place in both spheres, living of necessity the life there and the life here by turns, the upper life reigning in those able to consort more continuously with the divine Intellect, the lower dominant where character or circumstances are less favourable.

All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as "parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial, they must of necessity experience birth.

Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be understood as when he tells of God speaking and delivering orations; what is rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively treated as coming into being by generation and creation: stage and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to things whose being and definite form are eternal.

(3) Now ope thine eyes to what I answer thee, And thou shalt see thy creed and my discourse Fit in the truth as centre in a circle. That which can die, and that which dieth not, Are nothing but the splendour of the idea Which by his love our Lord brings into being; Because that living Light, which from its fount Effulgent flows, so that it disunites not From Him nor from the Love in them intrined, Through its own goodness reunites its rays In nine subsistences, as in a mirror, Itself eternally remaining One. Thence it descends to the last potencies, Downward from act to act becoming such That only brief contingencies it makes; And these contingencies I hold to be Things generated, which the heaven produces By its own motion, with seed and without. Neither their wax, nor that which tempers it, Remains immutable, and hence beneath The ideal signet more and less shines through; Therefore it happens, that the selfsame tree After its kind bears worse and better fruit, And ye are born with characters diverse.

(1) The Hoopoe continued: 'Last of all comes the Valley of Deprivation and Death, which it is almost impossible to describe. The essence of this Valley is forgetfulness, dumbness, deafness and distraction; the thousand shadows which surround you disappear in a single ray of the celestial sun. When the ocean of immensity begins to heave, the pattern on its surface loses its form; and this pattern is no other than the world present and the world to come. Whoever

declares that he does not exist acquires great merit. The drop that becomes part of this great ocean abides there for ever and in peace. In this calm sea, a man, at first, experiences only humiliation and overthrow; but when he emerges from this state he will understand it as creation, and many secrets will be revealed to him.

'Many beings have missed taking the first step and so have not been able to take the second - they can only be compared to minerals. When aloe wood and thorns are reduced to ashes they both look alike - but their quality is different. An impure object dropped into rose-water remains impure because of its innate qualities; but a pure object dropped in the ocean will lose its specific existence and will participate in the ocean and in its movement. In ceasing to exist separately it retains its beauty. It exists and non-exists. How can this be? The mind cannot conceive it.'

(18) O thou dear Soul, that swimmest in a dark iLake, incline thy Mind to the Gate of Heaven, and behold what the Fall of Adam has been, which God did so greatly loath, that [because of it] Adam could not continue in Paradise: Behold and consider the Sleep, and so you shall find it all. Sleep is nothing else but an overcoming; for the Sun and the Stars are still in a mighty Strife, and the Element of Water, [viz.] the Matrix, is too weak for the Fire and the Stars, for that [Element] is the [being] overcome in the Center of Nature, as you find before in many Places.

(3) Then he [i.e. Yajnavalkya] questioned them with these verses: — As a tree of the forest, Just so, surely, is man. His hairs are leaves. His skin the outer bark. From his skin blood, Sap from the bark flows forth. From him when pierced there comes forth A stream, as from the tree when struck. His pieces of flesh are under-layers of wood. The fibre is muscle-like, strong. The bones are the wood within. The marrow is made resembling pith. A tree, when it is felled, grows up From the root, more new again; A mortal, when cut down by death — From what root does he grow up? Say not 'from semen/ For that is produced from the living, As the tree, forsooth, springing from seed, Clearly arises without having died. If with its roots they should pull up The tree, it would not come into being again. A mortal, when cut down by death — From what root does he grow up? When born, indeed, he is not born [again]. Who would again beget him? Brahma is knowledge, is bliss, The final goal of the giver of offerings, Of him, too, who stands still and knows It. J For a similar comparison in Hebrew literature see Job 14, 7-10.

(2) 'Tis evening there already where is buried The body within which I cast a shadow; 'Tis from Brundusium ta'en, and Naples has it. Now if in front of me no shadow fall, Marvel not at it more than at the heavens, Because one ray impedeth not another To suffer torments, both of cold and heat, Bodies like this that Power provides, which wills That how it works be not unveiled to us. Insane is he who hopeth that our reason Can traverse the illimitable way, Which the one Substance in three Persons follows! Mortals, remain contented at the 'Quia;' For if ye had been able to see all, No need there were for Mary to give birth; And ye have seen desiring without fruit, Those whose desire would have been quieted, Which evermore is given them for a grief. I speak of Aristotle and of Plato, And many others;"—and here bowed his head, And more he said not, and remained disturbed. We came meanwhile unto the mountain's foot; There so precipitate we found the rock, That nimble legs would there have been in vain.

(2) ... For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire body of the science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its last detail: and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to the Supreme.

At no point did the All-Soul come into Being: it never arrived, for it never knew place; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it, participates in it: hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in Soul. The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure- they come from the All-Soul- and they have a Place into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend: but this All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun.

The partial Soul is illuminated by moving towards the Soul above it; for on that path it meets Authentic Existence. Movement towards the lower is towards non-Being: and this is the step it takes when it is set on self; for by willing towards itself it produces its lower, an image of itself- a non-Being- and so is wandering, as it were, into the void, stripping itself of its own determined form. And this image, this undetermined thing, is blank darkness, for it is utterly without reason, untouched by the Intellectual-Principle, far removed from Authentic Being.

As long as it remains at the mid-stage it is in its own peculiar region; but when, by a sort of inferior orientation, it looks downward, it shapes that lower image and flings itself joyfully thither.

(4) 'Having had enjoyment in this state of waking, having traveled around and seen good and evil, he hastens again. according to the entrance and place of origin, back to dreaming sleep. 1 8. As a great fish goes along both banks of a river, both the hither and the further, just so this person goes along both these conditions, the condition of sleeping and the condition of waking. The soul in deep, dreamless sleep

(3) "And when the ruler casteth out souls, straight-way the angels of Yew, the First Man, who watch the dungeons of that region, hasten to snatch away those souls to lead them before Yew, the First Man, the Envoy of the First Commandment. And Yew, the First Man, seeth the souls and proveth them; he findeth that they have completed their circuits and that it is not lawful to bring them anew into the world, for it is not lawful to bring anew into the world all souls which are cast into the outer darkness. [But] if they have not yet completed their number of circuits in the changes of the body, the receivers of Yew keep them with them until they perform for them the mystery of the Ineffable, and remove them into a good body which shall find the mysteries of the Light and inherit the Light-kingdom.

(30) "Nature, beholding the descent, wrapped herself about the Man whom she loved, and the two were mingled. For this reason, earthy man is composite. Within him is the Sky Man, immortal and beautiful; without is Nature, mortal and destructible. Thus, suffering is the result of the Immortal Man's falling in love with His shadow and giving up Reality to dwell in the darkness of illusion; for, being immortal, man has the power of the Seven Governors--also the Life, the Light, and the Word-but being mortal, he is controlled by the Rings of the Governors--Fate or Destiny.

(6) Souls that descend, souls that change their state- these, then, may be said to have memory, which deals with what has come and gone; but what subjects of remembrance can there be for souls whose lot is to remain unchanged?

The question touches memory in the stars in general, and also in the sun and moon and ends by dealing with the soul of the All, even by audaciously busying itself with the memories of Zeus himself. The enquiry entails the examination and identification of acts of understanding and of reasoning in these beings, if such acts take place.

Now if, immune from all lack, they neither seek nor doubt, and never learn, nothing being absent at any time from their knowledge- what reasonings, what processes of rational investigation, can take place in them, what acts of the understanding?

Even as regards human concerns they have no need for observation or method; their administration of our affairs and of earth's in general does not go so; the right ordering, which is their gift to the universe, is effected by methods very different.

In other words, they have seen God and they do not remember?

Ah, no: it is that they see God still and always, and that, as long as they see, they cannot tell themselves they have had the vision; such reminiscence is for souls that have lost it.

(27) But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by which we are human beings, or that other which springs from the All?

Memory must be admitted in both of these, personal memories and shared memories; and when the two souls are together, the memories also are as one; when they stand apart, assuming that both exist and endure, each soon for gets the other's affairs, retaining for a longer time its own. Thus it is that the Shade of Hercules in the lower regions- this "Shade," as I take it, being the characteristically human part- remembers all the action and experience of the life, since that career was mainly of the hero's personal shaping; the other souls going to constitute the joint-being could, for all their different standing, have nothing to recount but the events of that same life, doings which they knew from the time of their association: perhaps they would add also some moral judgement.

What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told: what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul would recount?

The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did and felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the lives lived before, some of the events of the most recent life being dismissed as trivial. As it grows away from the body, it will revive things forgotten in the corporeal state, and if it passes in and out of one body after another, it will tell over the events of the discarded life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and it will remember much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will come to forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion.

Then free and alone at last, what will it have to remember?

The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what faculty of the soul memory resides.

(4) And he who wakes abhorreth what he sees, So all unconscious is his sudden waking, Until the judgment cometh to his aid, So from before mine eyes did Beatrice Chase every mote with radiance of her own, That cast its light a thousand miles and more. Whence better after than before I saw, And in a kind of wonderment I asked About a fourth light that I saw with us. And said my Lady: "There within those rays Gazes upon its Maker the first soul That ever the first virtue did create." Even as the bough that downward bends its top At transit of the wind, and then is lifted By its own virtue, which inclines it upward, Likewise did I, the while that she was speaking, Being amazed, and then I was made bold By a desire to speak wherewith I burned. And I began: "O apple, that mature Alone hast been produced, O ancient father, To whom each wife is daughter and daughter-in-law, Devoutly as I can I supplicate thee That thou wouldst speak to me; thou seest my wish; And I, to hear thee quickly, speak it not."

(1) Whenever by delight or else by pain, That seizes any faculty of ours, Wholly to that the soul collects itself, It seemeth that no other power it heeds; And this against that error is which thinks One soul above another kindles in us. And hence, whenever aught is heard or seen Which keeps the soul intently bent upon it, Time passes on, and we perceive it not, Because one faculty is that which listens, And other that which the soul keeps entire; This is as if in bonds, and that is free. Of this I had experience positive In hearing and in gazing at that spirit; For fifty full degrees uprisen was The sun, and I had not perceived it, when We came to where those souls with one accord Cried out unto us: "Here is what you ask." A greater opening ofttimes hedges up With but a little forkful of his thorns The villager, what time the grape imbrowns, Than was the passage-way through which ascended Only my Leader and myself behind him, After that company departed from us.

(5) Sometimes an animal, when covered, struggles So that his impulse needs must be apparent, By reason of the wrappage following it; And in like manner the primeval soul Made clear to me athwart its covering How jubilant it was to give me pleasure. Then breathed: "Without thy uttering it to me, Thine inclination better I discern Than thou whatever thing is surest to thee; For I behold it in the truthful mirror, That of Himself all things parhelion makes, And none makes Him parhelion of itself. Thou fain wouldst hear how long ago God placed me Within the lofty garden, where this Lady Unto so long a stairway thee disposed. And how long to mine eyes it was a pleasure, And of the great disdain the proper cause, And the language that I used and that I made. Now, son of mine, the tasting of the tree Not in itself was cause of so great exile, But solely the o'erstepping of the bounds. There, whence thy Lady moved Virgilius, Four thousand and three hundred and two circuits Made by the sun, this Council I desired;

What, then, is that which he wants such a one to think? “I am like the shadows and phantoms of the night.” When morning comes, this one knows that the fear that had been experienced was nothing. Thus they were ignorant of the father; he is the one whom they did not see. Since there had been fear and confusion and a lack of confidence and double-mindedness and division, there were many illusions that were conceived by them, as well as empty ignorance—as if they were fast asleep and found themselves a prey to troubled dreams. Either they are fleeing somewhere, or they lack strength to escape when pursued. They are involved in inflicting blows, or they themselves receive bruises. They are falling from high places, or they fly through the air with no wings at all. Other times, it is as if certain people were trying to kill them, even though there is no one pursuing them; or they themselves are killing those beside them, and they are stained by their blood. Until the moment when they who are passing through all these things—I mean they who have experienced all these confusions—awaken, they see nothing because the dreams were nothing. It is thus that they who cast ignorance from them like sleep do not consider it to be anything, nor regard its properties to be something real, but they renounce them like a dream in the night and they consider the knowledge of the father to be the dawn. It is thus that each one has acted, as if asleep, during the time of ignorance, and thus a person comes to understand, as if awakening. And happy is the one who comes to himself and awakens. Indeed, blessings on one who has opened the eyes of the blind. The spirit came to this person in haste when the person was awakened. Having given its hand to the one lying prone on the ground, it placed him firmly on his feet, for he had not yet stood up. This gave them the means of knowing the knowledge of the father and the revelation of his son. For when they saw it and listened to it, he permitted them to take a taste of and to smell and to grasp the beloved son.

(5) But this power which determines memory is it also the principle by which the Supreme becomes effective in us?

At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere, memory is the source of its activity within us; when we have possessed that vision, its presence is due to the principle by which we enjoyed it: this principle awakens where it wakens; and it alone has vision in that order; for this is no matter to be brought to us by way of analogy, or by the syllogistic reasoning whose grounds lie elsewhere; the power which, even here, we possess of discoursing upon the Intellectual Beings is vested, as we show, in that principle which alone is capable of their contemplation. That, we must awaken, so to speak, and thus attain the vision of the Supreme, as one, standing on some lofty height and lifting his eyes, sees what to those that have not mounted with him is invisible.

Memory, by this account, commences after the soul has left the higher spheres; it is first known in the celestial period.

A soul that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognize many other souls known in its former state supposing that, as we have said, it retains recollection of much that it knew here. This recognition would be natural if the bodies with which those souls are vested in the celestial must reproduce the former appearance; supposing the spherical form means a change of appearance, recognition would go by character, by the distinctive quality of personality: this is not fantastic; conditions changing need not mean a change of character. If the souls have mutual conversation, this too would mean recognition.

But those whose descent from the Intellectual is complete, how is it with them?

They will recall their memories, of the same things, but with less force than those still in the celestial, since they have had other experiences to remember, and the lapse of time will have utterly obliterated much of what was formerly present to them.

But what way of remembering the Supreme is left if the souls have turned to the sense-known kosmos, and are to fall into this sphere of process?

They need not fall to the ultimate depth: their downward movement may be checked at some one moment of the way; and as long as they have not touched the lowest of the region of process there is nothing to prevent them rising once more.