(1) Death said: 'The good is one thing, the pleasant another; these two, having different objects, chain a man. It is well with him who clings to the good; he who chooses the pleasant, misses his end.'

(69) For men were created exactly like the angels, to the intent that they should continue pure and righteous, and death, which destroys everything, could not have taken hold of them, but through this their knowledge they are perishing, and through this power it is consuming me†.

(119) On the other hand, the devil with his poison shooteth and darteth at the seven qualifying or fountain spirits which generate the soul, intending to destroy and to kindle them, that thereby he may get the whole body for his own propriety.

(1) This bird said to the Hoopoe: I am afraid of death. Now this valley is wide, and I have nothing at all for the journey.

I am so filled with the fear of death that my life will leave me at the first stopping place. Even were I a powerful emir, in the hour of death I should fear no less. He who with a sword would iry to ward off death, shall have it broken like a Kalam; for alas, faith in the strength of the hand and of the sword brings only disappointment and sorrow.'

The Hoopoe replied; 'O you who are fickle and weakwilled, do you wish to remain a mere frame of bone and marrow? Don't you know that life, be it long or short, is composed of a few breaths? Don't you understand that whoever is born must also die? That he goes into the earth and that the wind disperses the elements of which his body was made?

' You were nourished for death; and you were brought into the world in order to be taken away from it! The sky is like a dish upside down, which every' evening is immersed in the blood of sunset. One could say that the sun, armed with a scimitar, is cutting off heads on this dish. Whether you be good or bad you are only a drop of water kneaded with earth. Though all your life you may have been in a position of authority, you will, in the end, give up the ghost in affliction.'

(2) The effect of death on the composite nature of man is as follows: Man has two souls, an animal soul and a spiritual soul, which latter is of angelic nature. The seat of the animal soul is the heart, from which this soul issues like a subtle vapour and pervades all the members of the body, giving the power of sight to the eye, the power of hearing to the ear, and to every member the faculty of performing its own appropriate functions. It may be compared to a lamp carried about within a cottage, the light of which falls upon the walls wherever it goes. The heart is the wick of this lamp, and when the supply of oil is cut off for any reason, the lamp dies. Such is the death of the animal soul. With the spiritual, or human soul, the case is different. It is indivisible, and by it man knows God. It is, so to speak, the rider of the animal soul, and when that perishes it still remains, but is like a horseman who has been dismounted, or like a hunter who has lost his weapons. That steed and those weapons were granted the human soul that by means of them it might pursue and capture the Phoenix of the love and knowledge of God. If it has effected that capture, it is not a grief but rather a relief to be able to lay those weapons aside, and to dismount from that weary steed. Therefore the Prophet said, "Death is a welcome gift of God to the believer." But alas for that soul which loses its steed and hunting weapons before it has captured the prize! Its misery and regret will be indescribable.

(15) In this very way we exist in this world, like fish. The adversary spies on us, lying in wait for us like a fisherman, wishing to seize us, rejoicing that he might swallow us. For he places many foods before our eyes (things) which belong to this world. He wishes to make us desire one of them and to taste only a little, so that he may seize us with his hidden poison and bring us out of freedom and take us into slavery. For whenever he catches us with a single food, it is indeed necessary for us to desire the rest. Finally, then, such things become the food of death.

(3) But if life is a good, is there good for all that lives?

No: in the vile, life limps: it is like the eye to the dim-sighted; it fails of its task.

But if the mingled strand of life is to us, though entwined with evil, still in the total a good, must not death be an evil?

Evil to What? There must be a subject for the evil: but if the possible subject is no longer among beings, or, still among beings, is devoid of life... why, a stone is not more immune.

If, on the contrary, after death life and soul continue, then death will be no evil but a good; Soul, disembodied, is the freer to ply its own Act.

If it be taken into the All-Soul- what evil can reach it There? And as the Gods are possessed of Good and untouched by evil- so, certainly is the Soul that has preserved its essential character. And if it should lose its purity, the evil it experiences is not in its death but in its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in the lower world, even there the evil thing is its life and not its death; the misfortune is still life, a life of a definite character.

Life is a partnership of a Soul and body; death is the dissolution; in either life or death, then, the Soul will feel itself at home.

But, again, if life is good, how can death be anything but evil?

Remember that the good of life, where it has any good at all, is not due to anything in the partnership but to the repelling of evil by virtue; death, then, must be the greater good.

In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil but the Soul enters its Good through Virtue, not living the life of the Couplement but holding itself apart, even here.

(112) But seeing the sound of God's word must rise up through the astringent bitter death, and generate a body in the half-dead water, thereupon that body is good, and also evil, dead and also living; for it must instantly attract the sap of fierceness and the body of death, and stand in such a body and power, as does the earth, its mother.

(5) For the Pythagorean Theano writes, "Life were indeed a feast to the wicked, who, having done evil, then die; were not the soul immortal, death would be a godsend." And Plato in the Phaedo, "For if death were release from everything," and so forth. We are not then to think according to the Telephus of Aeschylus, "that a single path leads to Hades." The ways are many, and the sins that lead thither. Such deeply erring ones as the unfaithful are, Aristophanes properly makes the subjects of comedy. "Come," he says, "ye men of obscure life, ye that are like the race of leaves, feeble, wax figures, shadowy tribes, evanescent, fleeting, ephemeral." And Epicharmus, "This nature of men is inflated skins."

(74) The people do not fear death; to what purpose is it to (try to) frighten them with death? If the people were always in awe of death, and I could always seize those who do wrong, and put them to death, who would dare to do wrong? There is always One who presides over the infliction death. He who would inflict death in the room of him who so presides over it may be described as hewing wood instead of a great carpenter. Seldom is it that he who undertakes the hewing, instead of the great carpenter, does not cut his own hands! 75 The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine. The people are difficult to govern because of the (excessive) agency of their superiors (in governing them). It is through this that they are difficult to govern. The people make light of dying because of the greatness of their labours in seeking for the means of living. It is this which makes them think light of dying. Thus it is that to leave the subject of living altogether out of view is better than to set a high value on it.

(119) Thus thou seest how the power or virtue of the Word and eternal life in the earth, and in its children, lies hidden in the centre in death, and springeth up through death, incomprehensibly as to the death, and continually travaileth in anguish to the birth of the light, and yet cannot flourish or bud, till the death be severed from it.

(16) But when the Wisdom of God saw that Man, from the Spirit of the World, came to lust, to mingle himself with the four Elements, then came the Commandment and said; Thou shalt not eat of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not manifest in the Paradise, and in the Kingdom of Heaven, but only in what is proceeded out of the Element, in the Fierceness, there only stands the Knowledge of Evil manifest; and there only the Essences are capable of being kindled, and so therein Death sticks; of which God said, When thou eatest thereof thou shalt die.

(20) What is the so great fault, said I, the ignorant commit, that they should be deprived of deathlessness? Thou seem'st, He said, O thou, not to have given heed to what thou heardest. Did I not bid thee think? Yea do I think, and I remember, and therefore give Thee thanks. If thou didst think [thereon], [said He], tell me: Why do they merit death who are in Death? It is because the gloomy Darkness is the root and base of the material frame; from it came the Moist Nature; from this the body in the sense-world was composed; and from this [body] Death doth the Water drain.

(8) But if a soul on entering the body of a man persisteth in its vice, it neither tasteth deathlessness nor shareth in the Good; but speeding back again it turns into the path that leads to creeping things. This is the sentence of the vicious soul. And the soul's vice is ignorance. For that the soul who hath no knowledge of the things that are, or knowledge of their nature, or of Good, is blinded by the body's passions and tossed about. This wretched soul, not knowing what she is, becomes the slave of bodies of strange form in sorry plight, bearing the body as a load; not as the ruler, but the ruled. This [ignorance] is the soul's vice.

(84) And so instead of the paradisical Joy and Refreshment, there has been a mere Brimstone-Spirit, which stands in Anguish and Trembling, of Corruption [or Fragility,] which kindles the Tincture of the Blood, wherein Tearing, Stinging, and Tormenting is wrought; and if the Fire in the Brimstone-Spirit be too much kindled, then it burns the Tincture up, and the Light of Life goes out, and then the Body falls away to be a dead-Carcase; and if the tart Sourness be kindled too much by the hard Attracting and Holding, then also the Light of Life goes out, and the Body perishes; so also of the Water; if the Tincture kindles itself in the Meekness, then it becomes windy, gross, swelled, wholly dark, also infectious.and corrupt, wherein the Flash of the Life is as a pricking Thorn. And so Man's Life is every where begirt with Enemies, and the poor Soul is always in a close Prison fettered with many Chains, and is continually in Fear that (when the Body shall [die or] break) it may fall into the Kingdom of the Executioner, the Devil.

(277) 'All created things perish,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way to purity.

(159) From thence existed the first poison, wherein we poor men now in this world have enough to chew upon, and thereby the bitter poisonous death is come into the flesh.

(104) But thou art to know that the earth has all the qualifying or fountain spirits. For through the devil's kindling the spirits of life were incorporated or compacted together also in death, and, as it were, captivated, but not quite murdered.

(4) Similarly, also, the same rule holds with pains, some of which we endure, and others we shun. But choice and avoidance are exercised according to knowledge; so that it is not pleasure that is the good thing, but knowledge by which we shall choose a pleasure at a certain time, and of a certain kind. Now the martyr chooses the pleasure that exists in prospect through the present pain. If pain is conceived as existing in thirst, and pleasure in drinking, the pain that has preceded becomes the efficient cause of pleasure. But evil cannot be the efficient cause of good. Neither, then, is the one thing nor the other evil.

(3) ' Yajnavalkya/ said he, * since everything here is food for death, who, pray, is that divinity for whom death is food? ' £ Death, verily, is a fire. It is the food of water (apas}. He overcomes (apa-jayati) a second death [who knows this].' 3