Thirty-Two

THE HEART AND THE LIGHT

As in physiology, so in hermetism: the heart and the blood are connected to one another, and the transformations and evacuations of the blood are centralized in the heart. At the center of the elemental cross as at the center of the Body in the "white" work, the heart is where the "life-bestowing light of the Quintessence" appears.

Let us attend to Gichtel: "The Work takes place in the heart and here the gateway to the heavens [i.e., to the occult states] is most violently attacked. The soul seeks to withdraw its will from the outer constellation in order to turn to God at its center; abandoning all senses and passing through the eighth form of Fire [which lies beyond the lower septenary and hence marks the boundary between the natural exterior world and the intelligible inner world—see chapter 15], which requires a relentless effort, the sweating of blood [the 'Herculean task’ of ’separation’], because the soul must now struggle against God [in order to maintain itself and not 'be dissolved’ in the light] and it must struggle at the same time against man [in order to overcome the human condition]."¹ The same author says that "the life of the Soul rises out of the eternal inner fire," which has its center in the heart and is swallowed up by "the fiery Dragon"; he speaks of a Holy Life of Light, hidden, inactive, and invisible to ordinary men, but when it is awakened it annuls the dark Fire, producing in the innermost heart a spiritual light so bright that it breaks the chains forged by the ancient Dragon around the Solar principle.² This light, according to Gichtel, is ultimately related to Water and to the Woman, the Virgin, Sophia (= Wisdom), which "drags the Soul completely out of the Body and makes it cross a sea of fiery water,"³ whose correspondence with Bernard of Treviso’s Sea of Blood, and with the symbol of the Red Sea, is obvious.

Also for the Cosmopolite, Water is found in the center of the heart of the symbolic metals.⁴ In the Book of Clemency the inner voice that manifests as a revelatory vision declares "I am the light of thy pure and dazzling heart."⁵ And in the Corpus Hermedcum one is exhorted to be sober and "open the eyes of the heart,"⁶ which can be compared to intellectual rebirth—νοεμἀ  γένεσις— the equivalent of the rebirth from the Water or from the Virgin and is completed in the awakening of the consciousness belonging to the "middle place" (see here).

In any case, the agreement of the hermetic teachings on this point with that of other initiatic teachings is clear. In the Upanishads, for example, it is said that the union of the two gods—the right-hand god, who is the flame, and the left-hand goddess, who is the light—into an androgyne is accomplished in an "ethereal space of the heart"; wherein "the spirit maintained by knowledge, all light, all immortality," by "the seer unseen, the knower unknown," shines in man at the interior of the heart. For the heart is the dwelling place of the spirit, where—at the breaking of the chains of every bodily thing in the state of sleep—it becomes light itself.⁷ Purusha, the "Inner Man," vigilant over the sleepers (the "perennial guard"), the "intelligible, sleepless nature" is the true light and ambrosia: he who has been extracted from the body like a dagger from its sheath, takes his "permanent dwelling place in the heart."⁸

The relatonship established by this tradition between the seat of the heart as the Dominator and to the "dike that contains the worlds within certain limits, so they do not fall back into chaos,"⁹ is reflected in the qabalistic expression: "The heart in the organism is like a king at war."¹⁰ On the other hand, the association in the Qabalah, as in some Christian medieval manuscripts, between the heart and symbolic "palaces" or "temples,"¹¹ can throw light on the places wherever we find these same symbols used in the hermetic tradition.

We can also refer to the general traditional doctrine according to which at the moment of death, or mortal danger, or extreme terror, all the vital energy diffused throughout the body rushes to the heart, whose corona begins to radiate with a supernatural light, through which the spirit "escapes."¹² This said, it is enough to remember that in principle the process of initiation is the same process that in others produces death. This reconfirms the link between the center of the heart and the "place" where the new development will occur, the place wherein the initiate will reach the "triumphal death" that wins immortality and recovers the possession of the "Tree" and the "Woman." Once the chains of the heart that "keep the unregenerated from seeing the light" have been broken and contact has been established with that for which the heart is a symbolic correspondence in the physical organism, an uprooting takes place, a subtilization, a breakthrough, an illumination in the sensation of the blood by which is obtained that "spiritual blood," without which, Artephius says, nothing is possible. It is the androgynous Mercury par excellence who, on the dry path, has the power of the "Living Water to irrigate the earth and make it germinate."