Beauty of Pure Mathematics

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages translated from the French original published in La Revue Théosophique in October to December 1889, and republished in English in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XI under the title "Alchemy in the Nineteenth Century."

The passage treats geometry as a record of how a universe unfolds. Everything changes as an effect of cyclic evolution: the perfect circle becomes One, then a triangle, a quaternary and a quinary. The creative principle is said to issue from the rootless root of absolute existence, having neither beginning nor end, symbolised as the serpent swallowing its tail in order to reach its head — which became the Azoth of the medieval alchemists. The circle hypothecates the absolute, the right line a metaphysical synthesis and the left a physical one; when Nature makes of her body the horizontal line joining the two, cosmic activity awakens. Until then Purusha, spirit, is separated from Prakriti, material nature still unevolved, and lacking limbs cannot begin to build until it has mounted on the neck of the blind Prakriti — at which point the triangle becomes the pentagon, the microcosmic star. Both must first pass through the quaternary and the cross. The closing lines are pointedly sour about what has become of the older symbols: the cross divided into four parts read as Taro, Tora, Ator and Rota, and the Virgin-Substance or Adamic Earth of the Rosicrucian alchemists reduced by modern Kabbalists to soda and alcohol, written out as chemical formulae.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.3 MB, 2 pages)