Sections: General Index
Present Section: Index
Selected Texts Quotes Glossary
GLOSSARY:
“That is, Eve – the moral Conscience of Humanity – subject to Adam – the intellectual Force, – “whereby all manner of evil and confusion abounds, since her desire is unto him, and he rules over her until now. But the end foretold by the Seer is not far off.”” (See Illumination “Concerning the Interpretation of the Mystical Scriptures,” Clothed with the Sun, Pt. I, Nº. V.) – S.H.H.
• Athena (Pallas-Athena), Patron of Horses, Horses Signify the Intellect
“Ruach is Athena, but Athena under the aspect, not of the mere anima bruta, but of Intellect. Athena is represented as the guardian and patron of horses, and hence is called Hippia. Horses signify the Intellect. She is also a warlike Goddess, demolishing chimeras and vindicating Zeus (the Reason) in all disputes. She takes an active part in the war with the Titans, entombs Enceladus (in Etna), and slays Pallas, the winged giant; hence her name Pallas-Athena, by which this achievement is immortalised. Thus the Intellect is the antagonist of mere rudimentary forces. He who sides with the Titans is against Athena, i.e. is deprived of Intellect or Reason. As Hermes slays Argus, the astral power, so Athena slays Pallas; that is, the mind developing over-comes the blind instincts of the merely animal man.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 183]
“It is the spiritual selfhood of man – the Christ Jesus within him – that is the subject of the Christian Credo. “The Apostles’ Creed is an epitome of the spiritual history of all those who become by re-generation ‘Sons of God’.”” (Edward Maitland., Light, 1893, p. 284; and see Life of A.K., vol. I, p. 315.)
“I read a paper on Revelation as the Supreme Common Sense, meaning that the consensus or agreement which it represents is that, not of all men merely, but of all parts of man; of mind, soul, and spirit; of intellect and intuition, combined in a pure spirit and unfolded to the utmost. There is no contradiction between Reason and Revelation, provided only it be the whole Reason and not the mutilated faculty which ordinarily passes for such, for that represents the intellect without the intuition. And it is precisely the loss or corruption of this last which constitutes the Fall, the Intuition, as the feminine mode of the mind and representing the soul, being mystically called “the woman.”” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 197]
• Creation: Not from Without, but from
Within
““I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” – after affirming the universality and antiquity of really Catholic doctrine, and its identity with that of the sacred mysteries of all countries from the beginning, she showed the fallacy involved in the conventional anthropomorphic conception of Deity, and the necessity to a rational system of thought of a substratum to the universe which is at once intelligent and personal, though in a sense differing from that which is ordinarily implied by the term; the Divine personality being that, not of outward form, but of essential consciousness; and creation, which is manifestation, being due, not to action from without, but to the perpetual Divine presence and operation from within: “God the Father” being, in the esoteric and true sense, the original, undifferentiated Life and Substance of the universe, but not limited by the universe, and Himself the potentiality of all things.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 197]
““I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” – after affirming the universality and antiquity of really Catholic doctrine, and its identity with that of the sacred mysteries of all countries from the beginning, she showed the fallacy involved in the conventional anthropomorphic conception of Deity, and the necessity to a rational system of thought of a substratum to the universe which is at once intelligent and personal, though in a sense differing from that which is ordinarily implied by the term; the Divine personality being that, not of outward form, but of essential consciousness; and creation, which is manifestation, being due, not to action from without, but to the perpetual Divine presence and operation from within: “God the Father” being, in the esoteric and true sense, the original, undifferentiated Life and Substance of the universe, but not limited by the universe, and Himself the potentiality of all things.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 197]
“The fig-tree, which both with the Hebrews and the Greeks was the type of intuitional perception, was an especial symbol of Hermes, called by the Hebrews Raphael.” [Dreams and Dream-Verses, Footnote (38:1)]
– “Now, you neither see nor hear; for the fire in your organs consumes your senses. Ye are all blind and deaf, creatures of clay. We have sent you a book to read. (1) Practise its precepts, and your senses shall be opened.” [Dreams and Dream-Verses, pp. 37-38]
(1) “The book referred to was a volume entitled Fruit and Bread, which had been sent anonymously on the previous morning.” [Dreams and Dream-Verses, Footnote (38:1)]
“The fig-tree, which both with the Hebrews and the Greeks was the type of intuitional perception, was an especial symbol of Hermes, called by the Hebrews Raphael.” [Dreams and Dream-Verses, Footnote (38:1)]
“Idolatry consists in the materialisation of spiritual Mysteries:
“They are Idolaters who understand the things of Sense where the things of the Spirit are alone implied, and who conceal the true Features of the Gods with material and spurious presentations. Idolatry is Materialism, the common and original Sin of Men, which replaces Spirit by Appearance, Substance by Illusion, and leads both the moral and intellectual Being into error, so that they substitute the Nether for the Upper, and the Depth for the Height.”” (See Illumination “Concerning the Interpretation of the Mystical Scriptures,” Clothed with the Sun, Pt. I, Nº. V.) – S.H.H.
• Jesus: the Man Who Realises It (Christhood) Actively Is a Jesus
“These seven worlds compose the Lower Triangle of the sacred hexagram. When a man begins the life of Thought, he goes all round the seven stations again, and ends at the state of Christhood. Every man must attain this state potentially before he can enter the Heavens. The man who realises it actively is a Jesus. It is necessary in one’s own heart to be willing and able to be a Jesus; but to carry the will into actual deeds is to attain to the third and highest circle, ending in transmutation.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 183]
• Maya: Everything Passes, Flits By, and Vanishes
“How keenly, as one grows older, the idea enforces itself on the heart that all the events and experiences of this life are but Maya! How clearly one sees that all the light of this world is but a false radiance, and that all its seeming realities are the tricks and shows of illusion! Nothing is; everything passes, flits by, and vanishes.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 193]
• Memory, Remembrance and the Knowledge of the Divine Essential Self
“It is strange how I forget! This evening I have re-read several passages and chapters written by my own hand, and conceived in my own mind, of The Perfect Way, and they filled me with as great wonder and admiration as though I had read them for the first time in some stranger’s work. Ought this not to set me a thinking how little this outward and mundane memory has to do with the true and interior consciousness? For, indeed, in my true self, I know well all these things, and as hundredfold more than there lie written; yet my exterior self forgetteth them right readily, and, once they are written, scarce remembereth them more! And this sets me wondering whether, perchance, we are not altogether out of the reckoning when we talk of memory as a necessary part of selfhood; for memory, in the sense in which we use the word, signifies a thinking back into the past, and an act by which past experience in time is recalled. But how shall the true, essential self, which is without end or beginning, have memory in any such sort, since the “eternal remembrance” of the soul seeth all things at a glance, both past and to come? To that which is in its nature Divine and of God, memory is no longer recollection, but knowledge. Shall we say that God remembers? Nay, God knoweth. I thank thee, O my Divine Genius; thou art here! I feel thee; thine aura encompasseth me; I burn under the glow of thy wonderful presence. Yes, it is thus indeed!” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 100]
“The “philosopher’s stone,” it had been explained to us, signifies the pure spirit and soul-substance of which the regenerated selfhood – the “Christ within” – consists, and of which, therefore, the two eucharistic elements, the wine and bread, otherwise called the blood and the water, are symbols. So that when Jesus, speaking as typical man regenerate, says, “This is My body and blood,” He means that those elements represent the constituent principles of the new interior substantial selfhood which is divinely generated within man’s material body of his own soul and spirit, and is identical in nature with them. It was to this wholly reasonable explanation that Mary referred when she said that she knew too much to accept the sacrament in the sense understood by the priest.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 356]
“Like “Lot’s Wife,” in another and cognate parable, “she looks back, and straightway becomes a pillar of Salt.” Salt was, in alchemic terminology, a synonym for Matter. This transformation into Salt is the converse of the “Great Work”; it is the Fixation of the Volatile. The Great Work is, in alchemic science, the Volatilization of the Fixed. By this act of depolarisation the soul imprisons herself definitely in the body, and becomes his subject until that “Redemption” for which, says Paul, “all creation groans and travails in the pain of desire.” [The Perfect Way, p. 158]
• Soul and the Blessed Virgin Mary
“The two terms of the history of creation or evolution are formulated by the Catholic Church in two precious and all-important dogmas. These are, first, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and, secondly, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By the doctrine of the first we are secretly enlightened concerning the generation of the soul, who is begotten in the womb of matter, and yet from the first instant of her being is pure and incorrupt. Sin comes through the material and intellectual element, because these belong to matter. But the soul, which is of the celestial and belongs to heavenly conditions, is free of original sin. ‘Salem, which is from above, is free, which is the mother of us all. But Agar’ – the intellectual and astral part – ‘is a bond-slave, both she and her son.’ The soul, born of time (Anna), is yet conceived without taint of corruption or decay, because her essence is divine. Contained in matter, and brought into the world by means of it, she is yet not of it, else could not be mother of God. In her bosom is conceived that bright and holy light – the Nucleolus – which dwells in her from the beginning, and which, without intercourse with matter, germinates in her and manifests itself as the express image of the eternal and ineffable personality. She gives this image individuality. Through and in her it is focused and polarised into a perpetual and self-subsistent person, at once God and man. But were she not immaculate, – did any admixture of matter enter into her integral substance, – no such polarisation of the Divine could occur. The womb in which God is conceived must be immaculate; the mother of Deity must be ‘ever-virgin.’ She grows up from infancy to childhood at the knee of Anna; from a child she becomes a maiden, – true type of the soul, unfolding, learning, increasing, and elaborating itself by experience. But in all this she remains in her essence divine and uncontaminated, at once daughter, spouse, and mother of God.
“As the Immaculate Conception is the foundation of the mysteries, so is the Assumption their crown. For the entire object and end of kosmic evolution is precisely this triumph and apotheosis of the soul. In the mystery presented by this dogma, we behold the consummation of the whole scheme of creation – the perpetuation and glorification of the individual human ego. The grave – the material and astral consciousness – cannot retain the immaculate Mother of God. She rises into the heavens; she assumes divinity. In her own proper person she is taken up into the King’s chamber. From end to end the mystery of the soul’s evolution – the history, that is, of humanity and of the kosmic drama – is contained and enacted in the culture of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The acts and the glories of Mary are the one supreme subject of the holy mysteries.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, pp. 98-99]
“I read a paper on Revelation as the Supreme Common Sense, meaning that the consensus or agreement which it represents is that, not of all men merely, but of all parts of man; of mind, soul, and spirit; of intellect and intuition, combined in a pure spirit and unfolded to the utmost. There is no contradiction between Reason and Revelation, provided only it be the whole Reason and not the mutilated faculty which ordinarily passes for such, for that represents the intellect without the intuition. And it is precisely the loss or corruption of this last which constitutes the Fall, the Intuition, as the feminine mode of the mind and representing the soul, being mystically called “the woman.”” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 197]
• True Religion, Gnosis and Wisdom (Sophia)
“ Religion, according to the Gnostics, must be founded, not on historical facts, but on ontological ideas: – the true meaning presented by Christianity under an historical veil. The motto of the Gnostics might be exactly given in the words of Fichte: “Men are saved, not by the historical, but by the metaphysical.” The meaning of the term Gnosis, as applied to a system of Philosophy, may be illustrated by the language of Plato towards the end of the fifth book of the Republic, in which he distinguishes between knowledge (γνŵσις) and opinion (δόξα) as being concerned respectively with the real (τò ŭν) and the apparent (τò Фαινόmενον). When to this distinction is added the further explanation that the objects of sense, the visible things of the world, belong to the class of phenomena and are objects of opinion, while the invisible essence of things, the One as distinguished from the Many, is the true reality, discerned not by Sense but by Intellect, we shall be justified in identifying Gnosis with that apprehension of things which penetrated beyond their sensible appearance to their essence and cause, and which differs in name only from that Wisdom (σοФία) which Aristotle tells us consists in a knowledge of First Causes or Principles.” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 179]
• “Woman”: Mystical Representation of the Soul
“I read a paper on Revelation as the Supreme Common Sense, meaning that the consensus or agreement which it represents is that, not of all men merely, but of all parts of man; of mind, soul, and spirit; of intellect and intuition, combined in a pure spirit and unfolded to the utmost. There is no contradiction between Reason and Revelation, provided only it be the whole Reason and not the mutilated faculty which ordinarily passes for such, for that represents the intellect without the intuition. And it is precisely the loss or corruption of this last which constitutes the Fall, the Intuition, as the feminine mode of the mind and representing the soul, being mystically called “the woman.”” [Life of Anna Kingsford, Vol. II, p. 197]
