Desatir on the Eye of the Heart

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Mulla Firuz Bin Kaus (T) · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 12 pages

The longest file in this batch at twelve pages, and the only one with its own contents page and abstract. It draws on the Desatir, the collection of writings attributed to the ancient Persian prophets, in Mulla Firuz Bin Kaus's translation of 1818, and is arranged in three parts with a closing page of suggested reading. Its own title page reads "Pearls of Wisdom from the Zaratusht of the Desatir."

The first part, from Zaratusht — described as the thirteenth Persian prophet and the seventh and last of that name — is built around the idea that the visible world is a shadow of something higher. St Paul's phrase about the enigmatical mirror of pure truth and Gregory of Nazianzus's statement that visible things are the shadow and delineation of what cannot be seen are set beside the Desatir's own formula, that all that is on earth is the shadow of something in the superior spheres, with the Fall of the Angels and the War in Heaven repeated on every plane, each lower mirror disfiguring the image above it. The second part carries the teaching of the prophet Jemshid and the passage that gives the file its title: the world created as a single Individual, whose body composed of all bodies is the Universe, whose soul composed of all souls is the City-of-Souls, and whose intelligence composed of all intelligences is the City-of-Understanding — the Great Man — with the planets given as its organs, Saturn the spleen, Jupiter the liver, Mars the gall and the Sun the heart. Seeing this, the text says, requires opening the eye of the heart, and it warns against looking upon the self-existent with the ordinary eye at all: ask for another eye. The third part turns outward, to the outer world as the enemy of every truth-loving heart, and to the claim that the theosophical movement will bring about charity, fairness and justice however tardily.

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