The Double Act of Oedipus and Sphinx Unriddled

Thomas Taylor, H.P. Blavatsky, Éliphas Lévi · Constitution of Man Series · 15 pages

The reading offered is that there are two Oedipodes and not one, which is what the title means by unriddling the double act. The first is a Divine Oedipus, a ray of pure mind self-exiled from its celestial abode: inspired by his imagination and will, animal man begins to awaken his higher faculties, and if he succeeds will ascend from star to star and world to world, circling onward to re-become the pure planetary spirit he started from. The second is a Worldly Oedipus, a reflection of the same ray imprisoned in an impure body — and the two are sentenced to suffer conjointly on earth.

The Sphinx is placed opposite them as imagination lighting up our blind senses, corresponding to Aether, or to Buddhi-Manas as spiritual insight opened up. Bereft of Ariadne's thread of philosophy, the Worldly Oedipus remains spiritually blind and unlearned, unable to escape the labyrinth of matter, his unmastered passions condemning him to exile from the solidarity of the One. The later sections treat the Sphinx as the greatest mystery of past, present and future initiations, and as the granite pedestal of philosophy and the eternal enigma of the vulgar; explain how the tetrad changing into a duad is resolved by the triad; and observe that man's clinging to the form allowed the idea to be forgotten. The Sphinx, the file concludes, is the living palladium of humanity, and devours only blind interpreters.

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