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(p. 230)
“Ecce, concipies
in utero, et paries filium, et vocabis nomen
ejus
JESUM. Hic erit
magnus, et Filius Altissimi vocabitur; et dabit illi Dominus Deus sedem David patri ejus; et regnabit in domo Jacob in
aeternum; et regni ejus non erit finis.”
– Luke I, 31-33. (2)
In Christian dogma, esoteric as well as exoteric,
the personality of the Holy Virgin is the highest and most important next to
that of her Son.
Just as the life and Passion of Christ constitute a representation of and
correspond to the interior progress and trials of the mystic, so also the acts
and grace of the Holy Virgin find their corresponding expression in a similar
way.
If Christ sets humanity free from the curse of Adam, so that the Apostle calls
him the second Adam in whom all men are made alive, Mary sets us free from the
curse of Eve by expiating through perfect obedience the disobedience of the
latter. Thus the promise made to Eve is transferred to Mary, who, as second Eve,
crushes the head of the serpent and becomes the Mother of God. Both arcanum and symbol remain identical, so that Eve and Mary
stand for one and the same principle in man. This principle is the Soul, –
anima
divina – the interior and spiritual Self which all
mystical writers consider as feminine, and which, through union with the
descending Influx of the Holy Ghost, conceives in him (man) the divine life and
brings forth Emmanuel, the God-in-us. (3)
(p. 231)
Esoterically and mystically, the subject of sacred history is the Soul.
In the Old Testament, the soul is depicted, in the first place, as Eve, emerging
radiant in beauty and purity from the hands of the Creator. Tempted by the
adversary, she yields to his cunning devices. Rejected from Paradise, she is
subjected to the bonds of enslavement and suffering. Yet in the very hour of her
condemnation she is upheld by the promise of redemption and divine motherhood.
In the second place, in the New Testament, she reappears under the figure of
Mary, of illustrious lineage, “highly favoured.”
Greeted with the reversed name of Eve (Ave); overshadowed by the virtue of the
Most-High; bearing in her own virgin bosom the Son of the Almighty; taking part
in His sufferings, His sacrifice, and His victory; witness of His ascension;
recipient of the gift of the Paraclete; assumed into
Heaven; and crowned with the twelve stars as the twelve fruits of the spirit. (1)
There is not a single feature of the story of Eve and of that of Mary, which is
its sequel, that is not truly applicable to the soul of man; and were it not for
this fact, there would be in these stories nothing to relate them to man’s
spiritual welfare. “Truly unfortunate,” says the Zohar, “is he who sees
in sacred history nothing further than a simple narrative.” Each word of the law
has a divine meaning, and veils a mystery entirely sublime. History is only the
garment of the law. The sages and servants of the Supreme King – they who dwell
upon the heights of Sinai – take account only of the soul, which is the
foundation of all the rest.
Every sinner can witness in his own interior experience a representation of the
grievous drama of the fall. Every saint re-enacts in his regenerate life the
mystery of the Holy Virgin’s Rosary. Within him, the soul travels through every
stage in turn of the joys, of the sorrows, and of the glories of Mary. Even as
without Mary there can be no Christ, so without the soul there can be no divine
life. Therefore the part which is assigned to Mary in the gospel of the
Christian religion is that which is enacted by the soul in the interior of the
mystic. That which seduces the soul in the first place and lures her into the
evil path, is the attraction of the illusory world,
symbolised
under the figure
(p. 232)
of the serpent with its glittering coils and the
fascinating power of its eyes.
It is by yielding to this attraction that the soul leaves heavenly realities for
the shadows of the terrestrial world, and drags down in her fall the intellect
of man (Adam). Intellect and soul fall together, and lose the twofold faculty of
desiring and apprehending divine things. No longer in harmony with the latter,
they are placed outside divine conditions, and are henceforth conscious of their
material surroundings only. That which constitutes sin
and the fall, is the substitution of the illusory for the real. That which is
the gain of regeneration, is the restitution of the power to love and apprehend
again the real. The original sin of which Mary was
free, is precisely this state of blindness which prevents cognition of heavenly
things and closes to the soul’s perception the world of truth and of the
Absolute. It is not possible that divine life be generated in a soul afflicted
with such blindness. Christ can be conceived only in the Virgin-Immaculate. The
converted soul passes from the state of fall into the state of regeneration, and
through that very fact becomes virgin, that is to say, no longer entangles
herself in material and illusory conditions. She is delivered from
earthly attachments; she has rejected the yoke of her companion Adam, compelled
to till the earth, in order to be espoused to the Holy Spirit. And as Eve has
accepted the annunciation of the serpent, so does Mary accept the annunciation
of the Angel. In other words, just as the soul in her frailty has, by preferring
the material to the spiritual, yielded to the temptation of illusion, so also
the soul in her virtue obeys the voice of angelical nature, and prefers
virginity or the spiritual life to dealings with matter.
Western mystics and Hermetists distinguish four
separate elements in man – body, mind, soul, and spirit. The alchemists say that
the human kingdom is divided into four parts or hypostatic relations called
“elements.” In The
Golden Treatise of Hermes, it is stated that the third part of this kingdom is coagulated, but
that the rest is fluidic. “Our stone, writes the author, is the resultant of
many things, its colours
(tinctures) are varied and compounded of four elements. (...) Thou must know
that the hen’s egg is that which will best help thee to an understanding of the
nearness and relatedness of substance to nature. For therein is found a
spirituality and a conjunction of the elements and an earth the colour of which is gold.” And in fact, if the egg is
examined from its external to its internal texture, it
(p. 233)
is seen
to be composed of a shell which corresponds to the body of man, of a fluidic,
plastic mass which represents his mental or astral part, of the golden yolk
which is the figure of his soul or spiritual individuality, and within this yolk
is found the white germ which corresponds to the divine vitality of the Spirit.
It would seem that Christ stated this
fourfold division when He compared the Kingdom of God to a little leaven which
the woman – the Divine Wisdom – took and hid in three measures of meal [flour],
– the body, the mind, and the soul, – until the mass had risen, that is, until
the whole being had been penetrated by and transformed through the working of
the Spirit. This image is entirely alchemical, and sums up the
arcanum of transmutation, which is the central doctrine of alchemy. The
divine life or leaven operates in the soul as a ferment which gradually, and
through her, acts first upon the mind, and then upon the physical man, until the
whole individuality is “highly
favoured” (gratia plena, lit. full of grace), and passes from corruption into incorruptibility.
Now it is ever in the soul that this heavenly influence is first felt; it cannot
be born in the mind or astral man, still less in the bodily sense; and, as we
have already seen, the soul must be in
a special state of grace or favour, that is to say,
polarised towards divine conditions, before the Divine Child can be
conceived within her. The third element – or the soul – being in this state of
grace, is, therefore, the kingdom of man, – the human kingdom, – the counterpart
of the Holy Virgin. Her Son is the fourth element, or the express Image of the
person of the Eternal (One), the Divine Life formed and incarnate as concrete
expression of the Deity. It is thus that we read in another part of the
Scriptures, “the form of the fourth is like the Son of God” (Dan. iii. 25).
We have said that the acts and the glory of Mary find their corresponding
expression in the regenerate life of the saint. What then are these acts and
this glory? The Gospels tell us very few of Mary’s acts, apart from those of her
Son. And it is so, because the special characteristic of the holy and regenerate
soul is humility, the suppression of the personal I (I-hood) to the profit of
the Divine Self (I AM); the absorption of the human into the heavenly, the
surrender of the created for the uncreate.
All the acts of the Son are the acts of Mary; but none belongs to her, as her
own. She has part in the birth of her Son, in His manifestation, in His passion,
in His resurrection, in His ascension, in His Pentecost, and He is her gift to
the world. But it is always
(p. 234)
He who operates, while she merely
entreats, consents, and responds. It is through the mediation of Mary that her
Son overflows into the mind and body of man.
The Christ, being of divine nature and heavenly origin, by His own power causes
her to ascend. She is nothing of herself. He is her all in all. Where He dwells,
there she must also be lifted by the force of the divine union which makes her
one with Him. Thus bound to Him and penetrated by His Spirit, she no longer can
remain among earthly conditions, in the realms of illusion. She is dead to
material things, she lives only in the spiritual
things. She leaves the atmosphere of the earth, carried upwards by the angelical
nature wherewith she is clothed; she rises into Heaven, attracted by God.
Henceforth she enjoys this divine estate which alone can develop her affinities;
she dwells in the Real, and has for ever done with illusion. In the mystery of
the Incarnation, which makes Mary the Mother of God, there is a conjunction of
human force with divine force. Mary receives her Child by an act of heavenly
energy (on her part) which brings about the conception of the Holy of Holies.
(...) The divine life incarnate (or Emmanuel) does not spring up spontaneously
or of necessity. It is the result of the conjunction of two forces, the union of
the divine and the human. (1) The soul is as
transparent glass exposed to the rays of the sun (or spirit). It polarises these rays and draws fire from them. The spiritual
state corresponding to her condition, and the intimate communion with God which
is the result of it, belong to her in the spiritual world.
Then is lit within her this holy flaming Light which illumines
(p. 235)
the world. In Latin, the language of, the Church,
the name of Mary is identified with that of the Sea, and in the litany of the
“Holy Name of Mary” she is addressed as “Mary, ocean of bitterness,” (...) From
the beginning, water has been regarded as a symbol of the soul, and this term is
used throughout the Holy Scriptures and by Our Lord Himself in the same
acceptation: “Except a man be born of water and of the Holy Spirit, he cannot
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Every Christian must, therefore, even as Jesus, be engendered psychically in the
virgin soul by the divine Spirit. He must be born again in the Heavenly world
and to spiritual things. It is only as a child of soul and spirit that he can
apprehend that which is transcendental (...) (I Cor. xv. 48).
Again, “That which is born of spirit is spirit.” It is to the soul, needless to
say, that Hermes alludes in his Golden Treatise, when he mentions the “alchemical
water wherein fire resides.” (...) This water is Mary, “the Great Deep,” over
which the Spirit of God broods and moves in the beginning of the work of
regeneration, and the fire that dwells in her is the heavenly Light, called “the
glory of the only-begotten Son.”
The Son of Mary, states the evangelical annunciation, shall sit upon the throne
of David, and shall reign for ever in the house of Jacob. The throne of David is
the throne of the Beloved, of the King. It is the place of royalty and
supremacy, and therefore is given to him who has been anointed with the
Christ-principle. The house of Jacob is the image of this system, for Jacob was
made the prince, and the representative of God upon earth,
and his name is always used in Holy Scripture as denoting a governor of the
microcosmic kingdom. This reign in the house of Jacob is, therefore, the
expression and exercise of royal supremacy in the human system; the
establishment in the midst of it of the glorious law of Spirit; its
transformation into the Temple of the Holy Ghost, through the power of the
Christ which has been given to us from God, and is made unto us wisdom, justice,
sanctification, and redemption (I
Cor. I. 30.)
FOOTNOTES
(230:1) See note on p. 225 (1), ante.
(230:2) [Transcriber’s note: Luke I, 31-33 – “And, behold, thou
shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and
shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son
of the Highest. And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father
David. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom
there shall be no end.”]
(230:3) In an Illumination “Concerning the Christian Mysteries,” received by Anna Kingsford,
occurs the following passage: “It is said that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the
daughter, spouse, and mother of God. But, inasmuch as spiritual energy has two
conditions, one of passivity and one of activity, – which latter is styled the
Holy Spirit, – it is said that Mary’s spouse is not the Father, but the Holy
Ghost, these terms implying respectively the static and the dynamic modes of
Deity. For the Father denotes the motionless, the force passive and potential,
in whom all things are – subjectively. But the Holy Ghost
represents will in action, – creative energy, motion, and generative function.
Of this union of .the Divine Will in action – the Holy Ghost – with the human
soul, the product is Christ, the God-man and Our Lord. And through
Christ, the Divine Spirit, by whom He is begotten, flows and operates” (Clothed with the Sun, Pt. I. No.
xlviii.).
– S.H.H.
(231:1) The twelve fruits of
the Holy Ghost are: Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience,
Longanimity, Goodness, Benignity, Mildness, Fidelity, Modesty,
Continency, and Chastity. – A.K
(234:1) In a note to “Asclepios on Initiation,” in The Virgin of the
World, Anna
Kingsford says: “Hermetic doctrine regards man as having a twofold nature. For
he is in one sense a child of the earth, developed by progressive evolution from
below upwards; a true animal, and therefore bound by strict ties of kinship with
the lower races, and of allegiance to Nature. In the other sense, man descends
from above, and is of celestial origin; because when a certain point in his
development from below is reached, the human soul focuses and fixes the Divine
Spirit, which is peculiarly the attribute of man, and the possession of which
constitutes his sovereignty over all other creatures. And until this
vivification of the soul occurs, man is not truly Man in the Hermetic sense” (p.
53). – S.H.H.
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