2. The Pillars Of The Templec

The undiscerning disciples of Zoroaster divided the duad without referring it to unity, thus separating the Pillars of the Temple and endeavouring to halve God. Conceive the Absolute as two, and you must immediately conceive it as three to recover the unity principle. For this reason, the material elements, analogous to the divine elements, are understood firstly as four, explained as two and exist ultimately as three. Revelation is the duad; every word is double, and supposes two. The ethic which results from revelation is founded on antagonism, and this results from the duad. Spirit and form attract and repel one another, like sign and idea, fiction and truth. Supreme Reason necessitates dogma when communicating to finite intelligences, and dogma by its passage from the domain of ideas to that of forms, participates in two worlds and has inevitably two senses testifying in succession or simultaneously, that is, to the spirit and the flesh. So are there two forces in the moral region, one which attacks and one which restrains and expiates. They are represented in the mythos of Genesis by the typical personalities of Cain and Abel. Abel oppresses Cain by reason of his moral superiority; Cain to get free immortalizes his brother by slaying him and becomes the victim of his own crime. Cain could not suffer the life of Abel, and the blood of Abel suffers not the sleep of Cain. In the Gospel the type of Cain is replaced by that of the Prodigal Son, whom his father forgives freely because he returns after having endured much. There is mercy and there is justice in God; to the just He dispenses justice and to sinners mercy. In the soul of the world, which is the Universal Agent, there is a current of love and a current of wrath. This ambient and all-penetrating fluid; this ray loosened from the sun's splendour and fixed by the weight of the atmosphere and the power of central attraction; this body of the Holy Spirit, which we term the Universal Agent, while it was typified by the ancients under the symbol of a serpent devouring its tail; this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is depicted in archaic monuments by the girdle of Isis, twice-folded in a love-knot round two poles, as well as by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblematic of prudence and of Saturn. Motion and life consist in the extreme tension of two forces. “I would thou wert cold or hot,” said the Master. As a fact, a great sinner is more really alive than is a tepid, effeminate man, and the fullness of his return to virtue will be in proportion to the extent of his errors. She who is destined to crush the serpent's head is intelligence, which ever rises above the stream of blind forces. The Kabalists call her the virgin of the sea, whose dripping feet the infernal dragon crawls forward to lick with his fiery tongues, and they fall asleep in delight. Hereof are the hieratic mysteries of the duad. But there is one, and the last of all, which must not be made known, the reason, according to Hermes Trismegistus, being the malcomprehension of the vulgar, who would ascribe to the necessities of science the immoral aspect of blind fatality.