THE COMPLETED SYMBOL

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BOOK II: THE COMPLETED SYMBOL

I

I knew nothing of the Four Principles when I wrote the last Book: a script had been lost through frustration, or through my own carelessness.1 The Faculties are man’s voluntary and acquired powers and their objects; the Principles are the innate ground of the Faculties, and must act upon one another in the same way, though my instructors, to avoid confusion, have given them a different geometry. The whole system is founded upon the belief that the ultimate reality, symbolised as the Sphere, falls in human consciousness, as Nicholas of Cusa was the first to demonstrate, into a series of antinomies.² The Principles are the Faculties transferred, as it were, from a concave to a convex mirror, or vice versa. They are Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit and Celestial Body. Spirit and Celestial Body are mind and its object (the Divine Ideas in their unity),^I while Husk and Passionate Body, which correspond to Will and Mask, are senseII (impulse, images; hearing, seeing, etc., images that we associate with ourselves—the ear, the eye, etc.) and the objects of sense. Husk is symbolically the human body. The Principles through their conflict reveal reality but create nothing. They find their unity in the Celestial Body. The Faculties find theirs in the Mask.

The wheel or cone of the Faculties may be considered to complete its movement between birth and death, that of the Principles to include the period between lives as well. In the period between lives, the Spirit and the Celestial Body prevail, whereas Husk and Passionate Body prevail during life.⁵ Once again, solar day, lunar night. If, however, we were to consider both wheels or cones as moving at the same speed and to place, for purposes of comparison, the Principles in a double cone, drawn and numbered like that of the Faculties, and superimpose it upon that of the Faculties, a line drawn between Phase 1 and Phase 15 on the first would be at right angles to a line drawn between the same phases upon the other. Phase 22 in the cone of the Principles would coincide with Phase 1 in the cone of the Faculties. “Lunar South in Solar East.”⁶ In practice, however, we do not divide the wheel of the Principles into the days of the month, but into the months of the year.

At death consciousness passes from Husk to Spirit; Husk and Passionate Body are said to disappear, which corresponds to the enforcing of Will and Mask after Phase 22,⁷ and Spirit turns from Passionate Body and clings to Celestial Body until they are one and there is only Spirit; pure mind, containing within itself pure truth, that which depends only upon itself: as in the primary phases, Creative Mind clings to Body of Fate until mind deprived of its obstacle can create no more and nothing is left but “the spirits at one”, unrelated facts and aimless mind, the burning out that awaits all voluntary effort.

Behind the Husk (or sense) is the Daimon’s hunger to make apparent to itself certain Daimons, and the organs of sense are that hunger made visible. The Passionate Body is the sum of those Daimons. The Spirit, upon the other hand, is the Daimon’s knowledge, for in the Spirit it knows all other Daimons as the Divine Ideas in their unity. They are one in the Celestial Body. The Celestial Body is identified with necessity; when we perceive the Daimons as Passionate Body, they are subject to time and space, cause and effect; when they are known to the Spirit, they are known as intellectual necessity, because what the Spirit knows becomes a part of itself. The Spirit cannot know the Daimons in their unity until it has first perceived them as the objects of sense, the Passionate Body exists that it may “save the Celestial Body from solitude”. In the symbolism the Celestial Body is said to age as the Passionate Body grows young, sometimes the Celestial Body is a prisoner in a tower rescued by the Spirit.8 Sometimes, grown old, it becomes the personification of evil. It pursues, persecutes and imprisons the Daimons.^III

II

And because the Daimon seeks through the Husk that in Passionate Body which it needs, when Passionate Body predominates all is Destiny; the man dominated by his Daimon acts in spite of reason; whereas the man finds through reason or through the direct vision of the Spirit Fate or Necessity, which lies outside himself in Body of Fate or Celestial Body.^IV

The Passionate Body is in another of its aspects identical with physical light; not the series of separated images we call by that name, but physical light, as it was understood by mediaeval philosophers, by Berkeley in Siris, by Balzac in Louis Lambert, the creator of all that is sensible.11

It is because of the identification of light with nature that my instructors make the antithetical or lunar cone of the Faculties light and leave the solar dark. In the cone of the Principles, the solar cone is light and the other dark, but their light is thought not nature.^V

III

Spirit is the future, Passionate Body the present, Husk the past, deriving its name from the husk that is abandoned by the sprouting seed.¹³ The Passionate Body is the present, creation, light, the objects of sense.¹⁴ Husk is the past not merely because the objects are passed before we can know their images, but because those images fall in patterns and recurrences shaped by a past life or lives. At moments it is identified with race or instinct. It is the involuntary self as Will the voluntary. I am not, however, certain that I understand the statement that Spirit is the future.¹⁵ I would have understood had my instructors said that Celestial Body was the future, for the ideal forms are only apparent through hope; perhaps they mean that we do not in reality seek these forms, that while separate from us they are illusionary, but that we do seek Spirit as complete self-realisation, and do not spirits sometimes say, “We have no present,VI we are the future”, meaning that they are reality as we perceive it under the category of the future? From another point of view, the spirits can have neither past nor present, because Husk and Passionate Body have disappeared. My teachers do not characterise the Celestial Body, but it is doubtless the timeless. There seems to be a reversed attribution in the Faculties. In the Faculties, Mask (the forms “created by passion to unite us to ourselves”,¹⁷ in the antithetical phases beauty) is apparently the timeless, Will the future, Body of Fate, or Fact, the present, Creative Mind the past. The past of the Faculties is abstract, a series of judgments. “When did Julius Caesar die?” “What are the chemical constituents of water?” Memory is a series of judgments and such judgments imply a reference to something that is not memory, that something is the Daimon, which contains within it, co-existing in its eternal moment, all the events of our life, all that we have known of other lives, or that it can discover within itself of other Daimons. Seeing that object and judgment imply space, we may call Husk and Creative Mind by that name, for in both Time spatialises.

In the wheel of the Faculties, Will predominates during the first quarter, Mask during the second, Creative Mind during the third, Body of Fate during the fourth. In the wheel of the Principles, Husk (the new still unopened Husk) predominates during the first quarter, Passionate Body during the second, Spirit during the third, and Celestial Body during the fourth. If we put future, present, past and the timeless in the four quarters of each wheel according to their attribution to Faculty or Principle, we find that the present and the timeless, past and future, are opposite.

IV

The ultimate reality because neither one nor many, concord nor discord, is symbolised as a phaseless sphere, but as all things fall into a series of antinomies in human experience it becomes, the moment it is thought of, what I shall presently describe as the thirteenth cone.18 All things are present as an eternal instant to our Daimon (or Ghostly Self as it is called, when it inhabits the sphere), but that instant is of necessity unintelligible to all bound to the antinomies. My instructors have therefore followed tradition by substituting for it a Record where the images of all past events remain for ever “thinking the thought and doing the deed”.¹⁹ They are in popular mysticism called “the pictures in the astral light”, a term that became current in the middle of the nineteenth century, and what Blake called “the bright sculptures of Los’s Hall”.²⁰ We may describe them as the Passionate Body lifted out of time.²¹

V

My instructors, keeping as far as possible to the phenomenal world, have spent little time upon the sphere, which can be symbolised but cannot be known, though certain chance phrases show that they have all the necessary symbols.²² When I try to imagine the Four Principles in the sphere, with some hesitation I identify the Celestial Body with the First Authentic Existant of Plotinus, Spirit with his Second Authentic Existant, which holds the First in its moveless circle; the discarnate Daimons, or Ghostly Selves, with his Third Authentic Existant or soul of the world (the Holy Ghost of Christianity), which holds the Second in its moving circle. Plotinus has a fourth condition which is the Third Authentic Existant reflected first as sensation and its object (our Husk and Passionate Body), then as discursive reason (almost our Faculties).²³ The Husk as part of the sphere merges in The Ghostly Self.

²⁴

But this diagram implies a descent from Principle to Principle, a fall of water from ledge to ledge, whereas a system symbolising the phenomenal world as irrational because a series of unresolved antinomies, must find its representation in a perpetual return to the starting-point. The resolved antinomy appears not in a lofty source but in the whirlpool’s motionless centre, or beyond its edge.VII

I must now enumerate certain interactions of Faculties and Principles which are not defined by diagrams.

The emotions are formed by Will, acted upon by Mask and Celestial Body, or by Mask and Passionate Body. When Will, Passionate Body and Mask act together there is pleasure and pain in the act itself, but when Will acts alone all is abstract utility, economics, a mechanism to prolong existence. When Passionate Body and Celestial Body give way to Mask we dwell in aesthetic process, so much skill in bronze or paint, or on some symbol that rouses emotion for emotion’s sake. When Mask and Passionate Body are in unison we desire emotion that excites the senses.26 When Mask and Celestial Body are in unison we are possessed by love antithetical to our normal self. When Creative Mind is added to either combination love or desire is unified or objectified whether in action or in a work of art. When Creative Mind is separated from Spirit there is abstract thought, classification, syllogism, number, everything whereby the fact is established, and the sum of such facts is the world of science and common sense. Creative Mind united to Spirit brings not fact but truth, not science but philosophy. The Principles alone cannot distinguish between fact and hallucination. Ruskin, according to Frank Harris, saw a phantom cat at the end of the room and stooped to fling it out of the window.²⁷ That cat may have had more significant form than the house cat; displayed all cat nature as if it were the work of some great artist; symbolised with every movement Spirit and Celestial Body; been visible to others—there are houses haunted by animals—but it was never littered, could not overset the jug, had no settled place in that continuity of images, that sum of facts that has yet no value in itself. Spurious art is the conquest of Mask by Husk and Passionate Body, and commercial art its conquest by Will. Common realism is conquest by Body of Fate, and so on.

VI

I am told to give Phases 1, 8, 15, 22 a month apiece, the other phases the third of a month, and begin the year like the early Roman year in the lunar month corresponding to March, when days begin to grow longer than nights:²⁸

March	.	.	.	Phase 15
April	.	.	.	Phases 16, 17, 18
May	.	.	.	Phases 19, 20, 21
June	.	.	.	Phase 22

and so on.²⁹ There is no reason why March, June, etc., should have one phase, all others three; it is classification not symbolism. The relation between the wheel of twenty-eight phases and that of twelve months has turned out as insoluble to the symbolist as was that between the solar and lunar year to the ancient astronomers. I must keep myself at liberty to consider any period, whether between signs or enclosed in a lunar phase, as a simple microcosm containing days, months, years.30 At the Ides of March, at the full moon in March, is the Vernal Equinox, symbolical of the first degree of Aries, the first day of our symbolical or ideal year, and at the middle of each month the sign changes. Aries changes to Taurus at the middle of the second month, the middle of Phase 17, and so on. The Will marks its course by the lunar months, the Creative Mind by the signs. When the Great Wheel is a month the symbolism seems simpler, for the lunar periods are the natural phases of such a month, each solar period beginning and ending in the middle of a phase.

A solar period is a day from sunrise to sunrise, or a year from March to March, a month from full moon to full moon. On the other hand a lunar period is a day from sunset to sunset, a year from September to September, a month from moonless night to moonless night. In other words every month or phase when we take it as a whole is a double vortex moving from Phase 1 to Phase 28, or two periods, one solar and one lunar, which in the words of Heraclitus “live each other’s death, die each other’s life”.³¹

If we consider East as symbolical of the head, as in Astrology, a diagonal line drawn from East in a solar wheel will cross at right angles a similar line drawn from East in a lunar. My instructors fixed this upon my mind by saying that the man of a solar wheel stood upright whereas the man of a lunar lay horizontal like a sleeping man. That the small wheels and vortexes that run from birth to birth may be part of the symbolism of the wheel of the twenty-eight incarnations without confusing it in the mind’s eye, my instructors have preferred to give to the Principles of these small wheels cones that cannot be confused with that of the Faculties. The dominant thought is to show Husk starting on its journey from the centre of the wheel, the incarnate Daimon, and Spirit from the circumference as though it received its impulse from beyond the Daimon. These cones are drawn across the centre of the wheel from Faculty to Faculty, two with bases joined between Creative Mind and Body of Fate, and two with apexes joined between Will and Mask.

Within these figures move the Principles; Spirit and Celestial Body in the figure shaped like an ace of diamonds, Husk and Passionate Body in that shaped like an hour-glass. The first figure is divided according to the signs of the Zodiac, though it can be divided as readily according to the points of the compass, the East or sunrise taking the place of the Vernal Equinox, the second divided into the twenty-eight lunar phases. In the cones of the Spirit and the Celestial Body there is only one gyre, that of Spirit, Celestial Body being represented by the whole diamond. The union of Spirit and Celestial Body has a long approach and is complete when the gyre reaches its widest expansion. There is only one gyre because, whereas Husk faces an object alien to itself, Spirit’s object is of like nature to itself. The gyre of the Husk starts at the centre (its Phase 1), reaches its Phase 8, where the circumference can be marked Mask, and returns to its centre for Phase 15, passes from its centre to its Phase 22, where the circumference can be marked Will, and finishes at the centre. One records these movements upon the edges of the figures, phases for Husk, Zodiacal signs for Spirit,VIII Husk and Passionate Body moving from right to left and the single gyre of Spirit from left to right. Husk and Passionate Body remain always opposite, Passionate Body at Phase 15 when Husk is at Phase 1 and so on. When Husk is at Phase 15, Spirit sets out from Aries. It reaches Cancer when Husk is at Phase 22 and Libra when Husk is at Phase 1. When Spirit is at edge of Wheel Husk is at centre.

When cone and diamond are superimposed (diagram below)33 we get a simple figure corresponding to the double cone (p. 58³⁴ and elsewhere). Diamond and hour-glass revolve on one another like the sails of a windmill. As the diamond represents a sphere, at its gyre’s greatest expansion Spirit contains the whole Wheel. Though for convenience we make the diamond narrow, like the diamond of a playing-card, its widest expansion must be considered to touch the circumference of the wheel where the wheel meets the gyre of the Thirteenth Cone. Indeed, its gyre touches that circumference throughout. The diamond is a convenient substitute for a sphere, the hour-glass for two meeting spheres. Taken in relation to the wheel, the diamond and the hour-glass are two pulsations, one expanding, one contracting. I can see them like jelly fish in clear water.

The foregoing figure shows the position of diamond and hour-glass when Will on the wheel is passing Phase 17. The following diagram shows such cones when Will on the wheel of the twenty-eight phases is at Phase 15.

At Phases 15, 22, 1 and 8 of the wheel of the incarnations the cones are superimposed. These gyres complete their movement, whether of twelve months or twenty-eight days, while Will as marked upon the circumference completes its phase, their Husk starting at the centre when the phase begins and returning there at its end. Sometimes the automatic script substitutes this figure for the wheel itself, the revolving cones drawn without any containing circle, roughly indicating the phase by their position in relation to one another. The Communicators often scribbled it on margins, or on scraps of paper, without relation to the text as if to remind themselves of some phase they would speak of later.35

VII

The Four Faculties have a movement also within the cones of the Principles. Their double vortex is superimposed upon the half of the cone of Husk and Passionate Body which lies between Will (the Will on the circumference of the wheel) and the centre of the wheel.

When Husk has reached Phase 8 they are at Phase 15; when Husk has reached its Phase 15 they are at Phase 1.36 While Will (Will on circumference) is passing through half a phase, Husk passing from Phase 1 to Phase 15, the Faculties complete their full movement, Phase 1 to Phase 28, and when their movement represents an incarnation disappear at its completion. The Principles thereupon take their place defining the state between death and birth.³⁷ Death which comes when the Spirit gyre is at Aries is symbolised as spring or dawn; and birth which comes when the Spirit gyre is at Libra, as autumn or sunset. Incarnate life is night or winter, discarnate life is day or summer.

VIII

A Great Wheel of twenty-eight incarnations is considered to take, if no failure compels repetition of a phase, some two thousand odd years, and twelve such wheels or gyres constitute a single great cone or year of some twenty-six thousand years. But these twenty-six thousand yearsIX are but a norm, a convenient measure, much may shorten or lengthen the whole or some part of the whole. All men, it is assumed, once passed through their year at the same pace; all were at the same moment, at the same phase, but gradually some fell behind, and some ran ahead, and now there is a year that ends when the life-period of the individual winds itself up, and a Great Year which is a norm or average struck among the individual years. I shall, when I come to write upon the Great Year of antiquity, refer to the fact that Proclus had the same conception and gave to the smallest living creature its individual year.³⁹

IX

Hegel identifies Asia with Nature; he sees the whole process of civilisation as an escape from Nature; partly achieved by Greece, fully achieved by Christianity. Oedipus—Greece—solved the riddle of the Sphinx—Nature—compelled her to plunge from the precipice, though man himself remained ignorant and blundering. I accept his definition.⁴⁰ When my great diagram of the wheel was first drawn for me, all from Phase 1 to Phase 15 had the word “Nature” written beside it; all from Phase 15 to Phase 1 the word “God”. I reject, however, his description of Nature in the Philosophy of History, a description that seems applicable to the first eight phases alone. Nor do I see Asia as he sees it. Asia is primary, solar, and only becomes Nature at Phase 1.⁴¹ A wheel of the Great Year must be thought of as the marriage of symbolic Europe and symbolic Asia, the one begetting upon the other.^X When it commenced at its symbolic full moon in March—Christ or Christendom was begotten by the West upon the East. This begetting has been followed by a spiritual predominance of Asia.43 After it must come an age begotten by the East upon the West that will take after its Mother in turn. The Lunar Months of 2200 years apiece, in a year of 26,000 years, are years of civilisation, while the Solar Months of a similar symbolical length^XI correspond to periods of religion.

Each solar month may be called a revolution of Creative Mind and Body of Fate beginning and ending with Creative Mind in Aries, each lunar month a revolution of Will and Mask beginning and ending with Will at Phase 1. When, however, one wants to show, as the automatic script generally does, that each civilisation and religious dispensation is the opposite of its predecessor, a single revolution constitutes two solar or lunar months. For instance, classical civilisation—1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000 let us say—is represented by the movement of Will from Phase 1, the place of birth, to Phase 15, the place of death, and our own civilisation is now almost midway in the movement of the Will from Phase 15 to Phase 1. The student of ancient symbolism discovers the darkening and brightening fortnights of Brahminical symbolism, the fortnight during which the moon increases in light and represents an antithetical civilisation, and that during which it decreases and represents a primary civilisation.⁴⁵ At or near the central point of a lunar month of classical civilisation—the first degree of Aries on the Great Wheel—came the Christian primary dispensation, the child born in the Cavern. At or near the central point of our civilisation must come antithetical revelation, the turbulent⁴⁶ child of the Altar.^XII The antithesis between lunar and solar is emphasised by the correspondence of summer to the darkening fortnight and of winter to the brightening.

X

When I relate this symbol to reality various fancies pass before the mind. The Great Wheel revolved innumerable times before the beast changed into man and many times before the man learned to till the ground. Perhaps the hunting age gave way to agriculture when our present revolution brought round Phase 4 or 5. At Phase 4 or 5 or perhaps a little later may have emerged the Sacred Legend of the sun’s annual journey, symbol of all history and of individual life, foundation of all the earliest civilisations; and at the phases where Unity of Being became possible began perhaps those civilisations, Egypt or Sumer, which had made a progressive, conscious, intellectual life possible by the discovery of writing.48

Is that marriage of Europe and Asia a geographical reality? Perhaps, yet the symbolic wheel is timeless and spaceless.

When I look in history for the conflict or union of antithetical and primary I seem to discover that conflict or union of races stated by Petrie and Schneider as universal law.⁴⁹ A people who have lived apart and so acquired unity of custom and purity of breed unite with some other people through migration, immigration or conquest. A race (the new antithetical) emerges that is neither the one nor the other, after somewhere about 500 years it produces, or so it seems, its particular culture or civilisation. This culture lives only in certain victorious classes; then comes a period of revolution (Phase 22) terminated by a civilisation of policemen, schoolmasters, manufacturers, philanthropists, a second soon exhausted blossoming of the race. Schneider^XIII finds three such race cultures, each with its double blossoming, in China and India, four in Egypt, though doubtful whether the final imitative period can be called a distinct culture, two among the Greeks, one and part of another among the Romans, and I forget how many in Persia, Babylon, Judea. All these cultures, as I am directed to see them, having attained some Achilles in the first blossoming, find pious Aeneas in their second, and that second is preceded by Utopian dreams that come to little because no civilisation can spend what it has not earned.50 The Saint suffers a like impediment; the love he brings to God at his twenty-seventh phase was found in some past life upon a woman’s breast, his loyalty and wisdom were prepared perhaps a thousand years before in serving a bad master, and that is why the Indian minstrel sings God as woman, husband, lover and child.⁵¹

The historian thinks of Greece as an advance on Persia, of Rome as in something or other an advance of Greece, and thinks it impossible that any man could prefer the hunter’s age to the agricultural. I, upon the other hand, must think all civilisations equal at their best; every phase returns, therefore in some sense every civilisation. I think of the hunter’s age and that which followed immediately as a time when man’s waking consciousness had not reached its present complexity and stability. There was little fear of death, sometimes men lay down and died at will, the world of the gods could be explored easily whether through some orgiastic ceremony or in the trance of the ascetic. Apparitions came and went, bringing comfort in the midst of tragedy.

XI

I shall write little of the Principles except when writing of the life after death. They inform the Faculties and it is the Faculties alone that are apparent and conscious in human history. Vico said that we know history because we create it, but as nature was created by God only God can know it.⁵²

I must now explain a detail of the symbolism which has come into my poetry and, in ways I am not yet ready to discuss, into my life. When Will is passing through Phases 16, 17 and 18 the Creative Mind is passing through the Phases 14, 13 and 12, or from the sign Aries to the sign Taurus, that is to say, it is under the conjunction of Mars and Venus.XIV When Will upon the other hand is passing through Phases 12, 13 and 14 the Creative Mind is passing through the Phases 18, 17 and 16, or from the sign Pisces to the sign Aquarius, it is, as it were, under the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. These two conjunctions which express so many things are certainly, upon occasion, the outward-looking mind, love and its lure, contrasted with introspective knowledge of the mind’s self-begotten unity, an intellectual excitement.⁵³ They stand, so to speak, like heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the fifteenth phase.⁵⁴ In certain lines written years ago in the first excitement of discovery I compared one to the Sphinx and one to Buddha. I should have put Christ instead of Buddha, for according to my instructors Buddha was a Jupiter-Saturn influence.

Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye

There can be nothing solider till I die;

I saw by the moon’s light

Now at its fifteenth night.

One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon

Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,

In triumph of intellect

With motionless head erect.

The other’s moonlit eyeballs never moved,

Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,

Yet little peace he had,

For those that love are sad.⁵⁵

XII

As a religious dispensation begins and ends at Phase 15, a Mars-Venus conjunction presides over its beginning and a Saturn-Jupiter over its close. The group of phases so dominated are those where Unity of Being is possible. The influx that dominates a primary dispensation comes a little after the start of the dispensation itself, at its Phase 16 perhaps, and that which dominates an antithetical dispensation a considerable time before the close of the preceding primary dispensation, its Phase 26 let us say; it is, as it were, not so much a breaking out of new life as the vivification of old intellect. A primary revelation begins therefore under Mars-Venus, an antithetical under Saturn-Jupiter.

XIII

Nations, cultures, schools of thought may have their Daimons. These Daimons may move through the Great Year like individual men and women and are said to use men and women as their bodies, to gather and disperse those bodies at will. Leibniz, whose logical monads resemble somewhat my perceptive Daimons, thought there must be many monads much greater than those of individual men and women.56 Lionel Johnson was fond of quoting from Dionysius the Areopagite, “He has set the borders of his nations according to his angels”, but Swedenborg thought that all angels had once been men.⁵⁷

XIV

The twelve months or twelve cycles can be considered not as a wheel but as an expanding cone, and to this is opposed another cone which may also be considered as divided into twelve cycles or months. As the base of each cone has at its centre the apex of the other cone the double vortex is once more established. The twelve cycles or months of the second cone are so numbered that its first month is the last of the first cone, the summer of the one the winter of the other. It resembles exactly every other double cone in the system. The passage from Phase 1 to Phase 15 is always, whether we call it a month or six months or twelve months, or an individual life, set over against a passage from Phase 15 to Phase 1; and whether we consider the cone that of incarnate or that of discarnate life, the gyre of Husk or Will cuts the gyre of Spirit or Creative Mind with the same conflict of seasons,^XV a being racing into the future passes a being racing into the past, two footprints perpetually obliterating one another, toe to heel, heel to toe.

I shall consider the gyre in the present expanding cone for the sake of simplicity as the whole of human life, without waiting to portion out the Faculties and Principles, and the contrasting cone as the other half of the antinomy, the “spiritual objective”. Although when we are in the first month of this expanding cone we are in the twelfth of the other, when we are in the second in the eleventh of the other, and so on, that month of the other cone which corresponds to ours is always called by my instructors the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone, for every month is a cone. It is that cycle which may deliver us from the twelve cycles of time and space. The cone which intersects ours is a cone in so far as we think of it as the antithesis to our thesis, but if the time has come for our deliverance it is the phaseless sphere, sometimes called the Thirteenth Sphere, for every lesser cycle contains within itself a sphere that is, as it were, the reflection or messenger of the final deliverance. Within it live all souls that have been set free and every Daimon and Ghostly Self; our expanding cone seems to cut through its gyre; spiritual influx is from its circumference, animate life from its centre. “Eternity also”, says Hermes in the Asclepius dialogue, “though motionless itself, appears to be in motion.”59 When Shelley’s Demogorgon—eternity—comes from the centre of the earth it may so come because Shelley substituted the earth for such a sphere.^XVI,60

XV

All these symbols can be thought of as the symbols of the relations of men and women and of the birth of children. We can think of the antithetical and primary cones, or wheels, as the domination, now by the man, now by the woman, and of a child born at Phase 15 or East as acquiring a primary character from its father who is at Phase 1 or West and of a child born at Phase 1 or West as acquiring an antithetical character from its father at Phase 15, or East, and so on, man and woman being alternately Western and Eastern. Such symbolical children, sealed as it were by Saturn and Jupiter or Mars and Venus, cast off the mother and display their true characters as their cycle enters its last quarter. We may think of the wheel as an expression of alternations of passion, and think of the power of the woman beginning at symbolical East or Aries and seated in Creative Mind, and of the power of the man as seated in Will and beginning at symbolical West when Creative Mind is in Libra, or half-way through its course, and Will at Phase 1 (Blake’s Mental Traveller), or think of the wheel as an expression of the birth of symbolical children bound together by a single fate.62 When we so think of it we recreate the lives of Christ and St. John as they are symbolised in the Christian year, Christ begotten in spring and brought forth in midwinter, begotten in joy and brought forth in sorrow, and St. John begotten in autumn and brought forth in midsummer, begotten in sorrow and brought forth in joy.⁶³ Coventry Patmore claimed the Church’s authority for calling Christ supernatural love and St. John natural love, and took pleasure in noticing that Leonardo painted a Dionysus like a St. John, a St. John like a Dionysus.⁶⁴ But I need not go further, for all the symbolism of this book applies to begetting and birth, for all things are a single form which has divided and multiplied in time and space.

There are certain numbers, certain obscure calculations in Plato’s Republic meant to suggest and hide the methods adopted by the ruling philosophers to secure that the right parents shall beget the right children, and it is foretold that when these numbers and calculations are forgotten the Republic must decay.⁶⁵ The latest authoritative work, Taylor’s Plato, thinks it probable that the “Golden Number”, on which these calculations are based, is 36,000 years or a lunar year of 360 days, each day 100 years.⁶⁶ If I may think of those days or incarnations as periods wherein symbolic man grows old and young alternately, as he does in certain other Platonic periods, I have, but for a different length and enumeration, my Great Wheel of twelve cycles. Plato may have brought such an ideal year into the story, its periods all of exactly the same length, to remind us that he dealt in myth. My instructors, however, insist that a man of, let us say, the seventh cycle married to a woman of, let us say, the sixth cycle will have a certain type of child, that this type is further modified by the phases and by the child’s position in time and place at birth, a position which is itself but an expression of the interaction of cycles and phases. Will some mathematician some day question and understand, as I cannot, and confirm all, or have I also dealt in myth?

XVI

When my instructors see woman as man’s goal and limit, rather than as mother, they symbolise her as Mask and Body of Fate, object of desire and object of thought, the one a perpetual rediscovery of what the other destroys; the seventh house of the horoscope where one finds friend and enemy; and they set this double opposite in perpetual opposition to Will and Creative Mind.67 In Book III I shall return to this symbolism, which perhaps explains, better than any I have used, Blake’s Mental Traveller.⁶⁸

XVII

I have now described many symbols which seem mechanical because united in a single structure, and of which the greater number, precisely because they tell always the same story, may seem unnecessary. Yet every symbol, except where it lies in vast periods of time and so beyond our experience, has evoked for me some form of human destiny, and that form, once evoked, has appeared everywhere, as if there were but one destiny, as my own form might appear in a room full of mirrors. When one discovers, as will be seen presently, at a certain moment between life and death, what ancient legends have called the Shape-Changers, one illustrates a moment of European history, of every mind that passes from premise to judgment, of every love that runs its whole course.⁶⁹ The present Pope has said in his last Encyclical that the natural union of man and woman has a kind of sacredness.⁷⁰ He thought doubtless of the marriage of Christ and the Church, whereas I see in it a symbol of that eternal instant where the antinomy is resolved. It is not the resolution itself. There is a passage in Lucretius translated by Dryden, to the great scandal of his enemy Collier, which is quite conclusive.71

XVIII

My instructors identify consciousness with conflict, not with knowledge, substitute for subject and object and their attendant logic a struggle towards harmony, towards Unity of Being. Logical and emotional conflict alike lead towards a reality which is concrete, sensuous, bodily. My imagination was for a time haunted by figures that, muttering “The great systems”, held out to me the sun-dried skeletons of birds, and it seemed to me that this image was meant to turn my thoughts to the living bird. That bird signifies truth when it eats, evacuates, builds its nest, engenders, feeds its young; do not all intelligible truths lie in its passage from egg to dust? Passages written by Japanese monks on attaining Nirvana, and one by an Indian, run in my head. “I sit upon the side of the mountain and look at a little farm. I say to the old farmer, ‘How many times have you mortgaged your farm and paid off the mortgage?’ I take pleasure in the sound of the rushes.” “No more does the young man come from behind the embroidered curtain amid the sweet clouds of incense; he goes among his friends, he goes among the flute-players; something very nice has happened to the young man, but he can only tell it to his sweetheart.” “You ask me what is my religion and I hit you upon the mouth.” “Ah! Ah! The lightning crosses the heavens, it passes from end to end of the heavens. Ah! Ah!”^XVII

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I. In the following passage from The Friend Coleridge writes “reason” where I write “mind”. “I shall have no objection to define reason with Jacobi, with my friend Helvetius, as an organ bearing the same relation to its spiritual object, the universal, the eternal, the necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena. But then it must be added that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus God, the soul, eternal truth etc. are the objects of reason; but they are themselves reason . . . whatever is conscious self-knowledge is reason.” Later on he distinguishes between “the outward sense and the mind’s eye which is reason”; on the next page between mind and its object, or as we put it Spirit and Celestial Body, “reasoning (or reason in this its secondary sense) does not consist in the ideas or in their clearness but simply, when they are in the mind, in seeing whether they coincide with each other or no”.³

II. Indian Philosophy has active and passive senses. Seeing is passive, walking active.⁴

III. See Blake’s Mental Traveller. Neither Edwin Ellis nor I, nor any commentator has explained the poem, though one or another has explained certain passages. The student of A Vision will understand it at once. Did Blake and my instructors draw upon some unknown historical source, some explanation perhaps of the lunar circuit?⁹

IV. The Hermetic Fragments draw somewhat the same distinction. Necessity comes, they say, upon us through the events of life and must be obeyed. Destiny sows the seeds of those events and impels evil men. One fragment adds “Order” connecting “Necessity” and “Destiny” and identifies it with the Cosmos. The three seem to constitute a Hegelian triad. I am summarising from Scott’s Hermetics Exc. vii. Exc. viii. and Asclepius iii. Section 39. The difference between their point of view and mine is that I cannot consider that Destiny inspires only evil men. The Hermetic Fragments are full of Platonic Intellectualism. Destiny becomes evil when the Passionate Body is subject to Necessity.¹⁰

V. Collyns Simon in his index to The Principles of Human Knowledge calls Light a “Sensation, not the condition or cause of one, as some physicists endeavour to teach”. Berkeley, according to Hone and Rossi, meant by Light not “Sensation” but that which “brings out Sensation . . . a semi-material agent” discoverable by mind alone; but Simon is right, for Berkeley speaks of Light as discoverable by animals, where all to us seems dark, and uses this argument to prove that Light is all-pervading. In the Commonplace Book he warned himself to avoid the theologically dangerous theme of personality. Did he in his private thoughts come to regard Light as the creative act of a universal self dwelling in all selves? Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, described Light as corporeality itself, and thought that in conjunction with the first matter, it engendered all bodies. Pierre Duhem analyses his philosophy in Le Système du Monde, vol. v, pp. 356, 357, 358. Plotinus describes the Light seen with our eyes open and that seen when we rub our closed eyes, as a light coming from the soul itself. The modern term “Astral Light” implies this source and is probably derived from some seventeenth-century Platonist, who symbolised the soul as a star, but the popular writers who employ it seem to think that the Light seen in Spiritual Vision alone is from that star.¹²

VI. Dante describes the spirits in the Inferno as having no present, as they approach the present all grows dim. Their future is not, however, the future of spiritual freedom.¹⁶

VII. The whirlpool is an antithetical symbol, the descending water a primary.²⁵

VIII. My instructors sometimes give Husk and Will Zodiacs of their own; these lunar Zodiacs are counted from right to left, a line joining Cancer and Capricorn in a lunar Zodiac cuts a line joining Cancer and Capricorn in a solar Zodiac at right angles. “Lunar South is Solar East.” I have left them out for the sake of simplicity, but will return to them later.³²

IX. My instructors are playing with the period necessary to complete the precession of the Equinox from Aries to Aries. It has been a part of literary tradition since Edmund Spenser described it in The Faerie Queene, Book V, Introd. stanzas i–ii. They have, however, adopted the twenty-six thousand years of modern astronomy instead of the thirty-six thousand years Spenser took from the Platonic Year.³⁸

X. Flinders Petrie in The Revolutions of Civilisation says that the Eastern phase is five hundred years ahead of Europe, and draws attention to the coincidence between the rise of Arabian civilisation and the fall of that of Europe. My system seems to imply that the rise of Arabian civilisation and that of Christianity are the same phenomena. European art did not cast off the influence of Eastern art, as the Japanese interpreter of Botticelli has shown, until the establishment of “tonal values” after the Renaissance as a principal vehicle of expression. They have been accompanied by the decline of Christianity. It is not, however, easy to say how far I should interpret my symbols according to the letter.⁴²

XI. We may compare these equal periods to the incarnations of equal length attributed by Plato to his man of Ur, his ideal man, whose individual year of 36,000 years or of 360 incarnations later generations identified with the Platonic Year. The Platonic Year is an average or norm fixed by many individual years, but the year of an ideal man would conform to it.⁴⁴

XII. I am thinking of the two symbols discovered by Frobenius in Africa, the Cavern, symbol of the nations moving westward, the Altar at the centre of radiating roads, symbol of the nations moving eastward.⁴⁷

XIII. The History of World Civilisation, by Hermann Schneider, translated by Margaret M. Green.

XIV. I set down what follows less for present use than because at some later date I may return to the theme and wake these dry astrological bones into breathing life.

XV. I thought I discovered this antithesis of the seasons when some countryman told me that he heard the lambs of Faery bleating in November, and, read in some heroic tale of supernatural flowers in midwinter. I may have deceived myself, but if I did I got out of the deception the opening passage in my play The Hour-Glass: “Where is the passage I am to explain to my pupils to-day? Here it is, and the book says that it was written by a beggar on the walls of Babylon: ‘There are two living countries, the one visible and the other invisible; and when it is winter with us it is summer in that country, and when the November winds are up among us it is lambing-time there’.”⁵⁸

XVI. Shelley, who had more philosophy than men thought when I was young, probably knew that Parmenides represented reality as a motionless sphere. Mrs. Shelley speaks of the “mystic meanings” of Prometheus Unbound as only intelligible to a “mind as subtle as his own”.⁶¹

XVII. I have compared these memories with their source in Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism, an admirable and exciting book, and find that they are accurate except that I have substituted here and there better sounding words.⁷²