(2) Just as a man casts off worn-out clothes and puts on others which are new, so the embodied (Self) casts off worn-out bodies and enters others which are new.

(29) Through art (the process of learning) the whole mass of base metals (the mental body of ignorance) was transmuted into pure gold (wisdom), for it was tinctured with understanding. If, then, through faith and proximity to God the consciousness of man may be transmuted from base animal desires (represented by the masses of the planetary metals) into a pure, golden, and godly consciousness, illumined and redeemed, and the manifesting God within that one increased from a tiny spark to a great and glorious Being; if also the base metals of mental ignorance can, through proper endeavor and training, be transmuted into transcendent genius and wisdom, why is the process in two worlds or spheres of application not equally true in the third? If both the spiritual and mental elements of the universe can be multiplied in their expression, then by the law of analogy the material elements of the universe can also be multiplied, if the necessary process can be ascertained.

(43) For every Man is free, and is as a God to himself; he may change and alter himself in this Life either into Wrath, or into Light. Such Cloaths or Garments as a Man puts on, such is his Ornament or Lustre. And what Manner of Body soever Man sows into the Earth, such a Body also grows up from it, though in another Form, Clarity and Brightness, yet all according to the Quality of the Seed.

(3) 'Thus does that serene being, arising from this body, appear in its own form, as soon as it has approached the highest light (the knowledge of Self ) He (in that state) is the highest person (uttama pûrusha). He moves about there laughing (or eating), playing, and rejoicing (in his mind), be it with women, carriages, or relatives, never minding that body into which he was born . 'Like as a horse attached to a cart, so is the spirit (prâna, pragñâtman) attached to this body.

(7) Tat: Made like to God? What dost thou, father, mean? Hermes: Of every soul apart are transformations, son. Tat: What meanest thou? Apart? Hermes: Didst thou not, in the General Sermons, hear that from one Soul - the All-soul - come all these souls which are made to revovlve in all the cosmos, as though divided off? Of these souls, then, it is that there are many changes, some to a happier lot and some to [just] the contrary of this. Thus some that were creeping things change into things that in the water dwell, the souls of water things change to earth-dwellers, those that live on earth change to things with wings, and souls that live in air change to men, while human souls reach the first step of deathlessness changed into daimones. And so they circle to the choir of the Inerrant Gods; for of the Gods there are two choirs, the one Inerrant, and the other Errant. And this is the most perfect glory of the soul.

(1) But Indra, before he had returned to the Devas, saw this difficulty. As this self (the shadow in the water) is well adorned, when the body is well adorned, well dressed, when the body is well dressed, well cleaned, if the body is well cleaned, that self will also be blind, if the body is blind, lame, if the body is lame , crippled, if the body is crippled, and will perish in fact as soon as the body perishes. Therefore I see no good in this (doctrine).

(43) When the alchemists stated that every animate and inanimate thing in the universe contained the seeds of gold, they meant that even the grains of sand possessed a spiritual nature, for gold was the spirit of all things. Concerning these seeds of spiritual gold the following Rosicrucian axiom is significant: "A seed is useless and impotent unless it is put in its appropriate matrix." Franz Hartmann comments on this axiom with these illuminating words: "A soul cannot develop and progress without an appropriate body, because it is the physical body that furnishes the material for its development." (See In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom.)

(14) When the physical body is discarded by the soul at "death," it proceeds to disintegrate; first the organic substances of which it is composed, i.e., the vegetable and animal organic material, become resolved into their mineral and chemical elements, and then these, in turn, become resolved into their more simple forms and conditions, and are used in supplying material for the bodies of other forms of living creatures.

(10) (15) That the soul is of the family of the diviner nature, the eternal, is clear from our demonstration that it is not material: besides it has neither shape or colour nor is it tangible. But there are other proofs.

Assuming that the divine and the authentically existent possesses a life beneficent and wise, we take the next step and begin with working out the nature of our own soul.

Let us consider a soul, not one that has appropriated the unreasoned desires and impulses of the bodily life, or any other such emotion and experience, but one that has cast all this aside, and as far as possible has no commerce with the bodily. Such a soul demonstrates that all evil is accretion, alien, and that in the purged soul the noble things are immanent, wisdom and all else that is good, as its native store.

If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny that it is the nature we have identified with all the divine and eternal? Wisdom and authentic virtue are divine, and could not be found in the chattel mean and mortal: what possesses these must be divine by its very capacity of the divine, the token of kinship and of identical substance.

Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will differ but little as far as soul is concerned from the Supernals; he will be less than they only to the extent in which the soul is, in him, associated with body.

This is so true that, if every human being were at that stage, or if a great number lived by a soul of that degree, no one would be so incredulous as to doubt that the soul in man is immortal. It is because we see everywhere the spoiled souls of the great mass that it becomes difficult to recognize their divinity and immortality.

To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed state, since any addition obscures the reality. Clear, then look: or, rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe: he will not doubt his immortality when he sees himself thus entered into the pure, the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an Intellectual-Principle looking on nothing of sense, nothing of this mortality, but by its own eternity having intellection of the eternal: he will see all things in this Intellectual substance, himself having become an Intellectual Kosmos and all lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The Good, which radiates truth upon all that stands within that realm of the divine.

Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word "Farewell: I am to you an immortal God," for he has ascended to the Supreme, and is all one strain to enter into likeness with it.

If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest, then, too, the science latent within becomes manifest, the only authentic knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state; what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity.

Imagine living gold: it files away all that is earthy about it, all that kept it in self-ignorance preventing it from knowing itself as gold; seen now unalloyed it is at once filled with admiration of its worth and knows that it has no need of any other glory than its own, triumphant if only it be allowed to remain purely to itself.

(32) At the words, ' Strike the corpse with part of her.' O pious ones, slay the cow (of lust), If ye desire true life of soul and spirit! I died as inanimate matter and arose a plant, Why then should I fear to become less by dying? I shall die once again as a man To rise an angel perfect from head to foot! Again when I suffer dissolution as an angel, I shall become what passes the conception of man! Let me then become non-existent, for non-existence

(12) When the touchstone is hidden from the sight of all, Then come forth to battle and boast, O base coin! Your time for boasting is when the touchstone is away; The base coin says to me with pride every moment, "O pure gold, how am I inferior to you?" The gold replies, "Even so, O comrade; But the touchstone is at hand; be ready to meet it!" Death of the body is a benefaction to the spiritual; What damage has pure gold to dread from the shears? If the base coin were of itself far-sighted, If it had showed its blackness at first on its face,

(2) Just as in this body the embodied (Self) passes into childhood and youth and old age, so does He pass into another body. There the wise man is not distressed.

(41) But whoso seeks his water of life in worldly joys, The eyes of the heart which behold the heavens Mankind are ever being changed, and God's elixir Joins the body's garment without aid of needle. On the day that you entered upon existence, You were first fire, or earth, or air. If you had continued in that, your original state, How could you have arrived at this dignity of humanity? But through change your first existence remained not In lien thereof God gave you a better existence

(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.

(58) And though indeed the bestial Body must putrefy and rot, yet its Power and Virtue live, and in the mean while there grow out of its Power, in its Mother, fair beautiful Roses, Blossoms and Flowers. And though it were quite burnt up and consumed in the Fire, yet its Power and Virtue stands in the four Elements in the Word, and the Soul qualifies, mixes, or unites therewith; for the Soul is in Heaven, and the same Heaven is every where, even in the Midst or Center of the Earth.

(14) Tat: Tell me, O father: This Body which is made up of the Powers, is it at any time dissolved? Hermes: Hush, [son]! Speak not of things impossible, else wilt thou sin and thy Mind's eye be quenched. The natural body which our sense perceives is far removed from this essential birth. The first must be dissolved, the last can never be; the first must die, the last death cannot touch. Dost thou not know thou hast been born a God, Son of the One, even as I myself?

(12) The priests of Egypt not only used the scarab as a symbol of regeneration but also discovered in its habits many analogies to the secret process whereby base metals could be transmuted into gold. They saw in the egg of the scarab the seed of the metals, and the above figure shows the path of this seed through the various planetary bodies until, finally reaching the center, it is perfected and then returns again to its source. The words in the mall spiral at the top read: "The spiral Progress of the mundane spirit." After the scarab has wound its way around the spiral to the center of the lower part of the figure, it returns to the upper world along the path bearing the words: "Return of the spirit to the center of unity."

(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.

(2) Taking fuel in his hand he came again as a pupil to Pragâpati. Pragâpati said to him: 'Maghavat (Indra), as you went away with Virokana, satisfied in your heart, for what purpose did you come back?' He said: 'Sir, as this self (the shadow) is well adorned, when the body is well adorned, well dressed, when the body is well dressed, well cleaned, if the body is well cleaned, that self will also be blind, if the body is blind, lame, if the body is lame, crippled, if the body is crippled, and will perish in fact as soon as the body perishes. Therefore I see no good in this (doctrine).'

(14) But if now the Essences of the first Principle of the Soul have been so very conversant about [or addicted to] the Kingdom of this World, so that the Essences of the Soul have sought after the Pleasures of this World only, in temporary Honour, Power, and Bravery; then the Soul (or the Essences out of the first Principle) keeps the starry Region to it still, as its dearest Jewel, with a Desire to live therein; but then [the starry Region] has the Mother (viz. the four Elements) no more, and therefore it consumes, with the Time itself, in the Essences out of the first Principle; and so the Essences of the first Principle continue raw, [or naked without a Body.]