Fifteen

THE CENTERS OF LIFE

Let us move on to the "Seven" in man. What the hermetists call Spirit ( and , the "life body")—corresponding analogically to the planetary region intermediary between Earth and Heaven—also presents forces and structures corresponding to each of the planets. Plotinus himself taught: "There are within us forces analogous to the powers of the different planets."¹ And thus we come to the esoteric doctrine of the seven points through which the higher powers enter into the corporeal context, whereupon they become vital currents and energies specific to man.² But because of the two-way direction that each point of passage or "portal" affords, these seven centers, which normally serve to convey nonhuman forces into human channels, can be taken in an opposite direction. That is, the flow may be turned back from the human to the nonhuman—which is equivalent to the aforementioned passing through the seven gates, breaking the seven seals, ascending through the seven heavens, and so forth.

To see this teaching in more complete and explicit terms, we have to go back to the Hindu tradition where the centers are called chakras or "wheels" (because of the spinning movement of the vitalizing energies that radiate from them), and also padma, or "lotuses." The lotus, however, like the rose in hermetism (or "flower," less specifically), is a symbol that we also find in the Chaldeo-Egyptian and Minoan traditions, where often enough it is associated with the "key of life" and has the meaning of resurrection, palingenesis, awakening; the "flowering" of the seven higher forms freed from the obstruction that the human Earth (the body) entails is the reconquest of the integral and primordial being of Gold.³

The varieties of hermetico-alchemical symbolism in which, one way or the other, the Seven figure, can be interpreted at the microcosmic level on the basis of such a teaching. The references to specific points of the body so rigorously followed in the Orient (references not crudely spatial, but of "functional correspondence"), are rarely encountered in hermetism. We encounter the most explicit reference—conforming quite closely to the Hindu teaching in this matter—in the fourth illustration annexed to Georg Gichtel’s Theosophia praccica. In this illustration the coronal, frontal, laryngeal, cardiac, lumbar, umbilical, and sacral regions are indicated by means of the hermetico-astrological ideograms of the planets affixed at given points in each of these regions. Since the illustration shows "the dark and terrestrial nature of man," it represents the inferior septenary. In this same depiction, a spiral extends from Saturn (symbol of the basic corporeal and "terrestrial" condition in which the other planets or principles are manifested) in an enveloping movement passing through all the other centers until it arrives at the heart, where a serpent can be seen coiled around the solar principle. This is a representation of the process of "falling," which unwinds down to the restriction where the power of the ego, far from the living Gold or Sun of the Wise, manifests only in its vulgar form of the human personality. In each one of the other centers an equivalent loss of power occurs and, in fact, to each of the centers in the chart there is given the name of a passion.

An equivalence to the Hellenistic doctrine is evident in the symbolic descent of the soul through the planetary spheres, from each of which the soul cakes on the garment of a given passion or the quality of the energies according to its degree. The inner meaning is the same: the debasing of the powers of the primordial man to dark, repressed, corporeal energies contained in the subconscious and peripheral psychologisms—passive, broken off from cosmic spirituality to the point where it is said: "This miserable soul, ignorant of what it is, is turned into a slave of bodies of strange form, in sorrow, bearing the body like a weight, not as one who dominates, but as one dominated."⁴

But now we can see what the return journey should be, described in clear words by the Corpus Hermeticum:⁵ once separated from the irrational nature the Soul passes back up through the planetary spheres, "divesting itself" of whatever pertains to each of them, surmounting them, renewing the audacity of transcending the Lords of Destiny who had brought it to its fall in the first place; and so arriving, "cloaked in its sole power," at the eighth stage, whose symbol is the region of the fixed stars, called the sphere of "identity" or "being in itself"—κάθ’ εἁυθό—in contrast to the spheres overcome, which are called those of "alteration" or "difference"—κατά τὸ ἕτηρον. There, beyond the Seven, is the place of "those who are,"⁶ those who have stopped "becoming." It is at that point that we reach the possession of the transcendent Knowledge. It is the moment of "birth according to essence"—ἡ οὑσιώδες γένεσις—and "becoming a god." One is transformed into those beings—becomes them. Once "necessity," which rules the lower spheres, has been identified with the current of the Waters, the symbols of this realization will be the figures of those who have been "saved from the waters," those who can "walk on the water,"⁷ those who have crossed the "sea" or the "stream" (and for this we can also call up all the varieties of navigational symbolism), and that of swimming upstream against the current. This last, according to the Corpus Hermeticum, is the means of reaching the state of "those who have attained Gnosis"—οἱ ἐν γνώσει ὄντες—"where one is no longer inebriated,"⁸ where inebriation signifies, obviously, symbolic sleep, forgetting, the power of the Lethean waters.⁹