Delight in the Beauty of the Soul

Moschus, Plutarch, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 20 pages

A twenty-page compilation drawing on Moschus, Plutarch and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts and closing with four numbered endnotes on Saturninus, Basilides, Moschus and the rape of Europa.

The file moves from metaphysics to myth to ethics, and the sequence is the argument. It opens with the gods adoring the One Dark Truth, and with the claim that Eastern occult philosophy transcends the perceptive faculties of human reason: the deific essence is unknown and ever unknowable, yet its action can be apprehended in the universe of effects. Three identifications follow in quick succession — that the symbol of the Great Unknown is the letter X, that the Fullness of Valentinus is the Space of occult philosophy, and that the Theogony of the Wisdom-Religion is the Aletheia of occult science. The middle section turns to the bull as a symbol standing for the seed of life, generative and destructive at once, with the solar gods appearing as heroes, warriors and shepherds followed by their herds, and the horns read as an emblem of eternal divine power. Moschus's hymn to Europa is then given, the myth in which a god takes the form of a bull. The closing section supplies the moral the whole arrangement has been building towards, and it is Plutarch's: that love should be directed to the soul and not to the beauty — which is what the title asks of the reader.

Read the full text (PDF, 2.1 MB, 20 pages)