The Spirit of Life Issues from the Earth's North Pole

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 18 pages

An eighteen-page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references. It shares its subject matter with “The Hollow Earth” in this series, which approaches the earth's polar regions from the direction of a nineteenth-century book of speculation rather than of doctrine.

The governing distinction is between the earth as seen and the earth as understood: the real earth is Gaia, the subjective matrix of the universe, and our planet is her emanation on the illusive plane of the most material world in the universe of being. The Puranic material is set out first — the present creation, when the earth was lifted out of the water by Brahmā in the shape of a boar, being one of two great creations named in the Puranas, at which the waters separated and the process of incrustation began. Water is then treated in its highest aspect as the universal symbol of the female element, the One Homogeneous and Divine Substance-Principle, and the cause of motion is given as Divine Desire manifesting through the interrelationship of the parts — a desire said to lie beyond Spirit-Matter and to be the cause of the two opposing forces. A series of identifications follows: earth as solid fire, water as liquid fire, air as semi-spiritual fire; the spirit of the earth as Hestia-Vesta on Proclus's authority, with the qualification that Vesta is neither the spiritual nor the physical Sun but is animated by the Spirit of Life; and Gaia's symbol as Gamma, the third Greek letter, read as an ideogram of both eternal and earthly life. Two further sections set the practical Kabbalists, who dealt with the spirits of the planets and the elementals, beside the Christian theologians who opposed the earth's rotation for what it cost the earth in dignity.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.5 MB, 18 pages)