(31) Man was so altogether dead in death, and so bolted up in the outermost birth or geniture in the dead palpability; or else they could have thought, that in this palpability there must needs be a divine power hidden in the centre, which had so created this palpability, and moreover preserveth, upholdeth and ruleth the same.

(48) The stars are only the kindling of the great house; for the whole house is benumbed in death, as the earth is; for the outermost birth or geniture is dead and benumbed, as the rind, shell or bark of a tree. But the astral birth is the body in which the life riseth up.

(15) Aeon, moreover, is God's image; Cosmos [is] Aeon's; the Sun, of Cosmos; and Man, [the image] of the Sun. The people call change death, because the body is dissolved, and life, when it's dissolved, withdraws to the unmanifest. But in this sermon (logos), Hermes, My beloved, as thou dost hear, I say the Cosmos also suffers change - for that a part of it each day is made to be in the unmanifest - yet it is ne'er dissolved. These are the passions of the Cosmos - revolvings and concealments; revolving is conversion and concealment renovation.

(43) For the dead or mortal flesh has encompassed the astral birth, and man's flesh is a dead carcass, while it is yet in the mother's body or womb, and is encompassed with hell and God's wrath.

(9) Thus also is the whole house of this world. The outward darkness is the house of God's wrath, wherein the devils dwell, and it is rightly the house of death, for the holy light of God has therein died. ["Understand, the light stepped into its Principle, and is the outward substantiality in God, as it were dead in our esteem, whereas it liveth in God, but in another source or quality."]

(16) The light of God, which is the Son of God, and also the Holy Ghost, died not; but the light, which has gone forth from or out of the heart of God from eternity, and has enlightened nature, ([the nature] which is generated out of the seven spirits), that [light] is departed or gone away from the hard corrupted nature. From whence it is that the nature of this world, with its comprehensibility or palpability, has remained in death, and cannot apprehend the light of God, but is a dark house of devils.

(3) And of the matter stored beneath it , the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical - wrapping it round the life - [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make materiality eternal. But He, the Father, full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives as in a cave, willing to order forth the life with every kind of living. So He with deathlessness enclosed the universal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself from body's composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder. For matter, son, when it was yet incorporate , was in unorder. And it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] enveloping the rest of the small lives - that increase-and-decrease which men call death.