Proposition 1: Bestride the Bird of Life (Drawing)

Philaletheians UK · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 1 page

*A single sheet, and a picture rather than a text.* It is the companion drawing to the study "Proposition 1 - Bestride the Bird of Life", which is listed separately in this section, and it carries a revision date of 31 July 2018.

The sheet is printed on a pale sand-coloured ground and holds three images stacked down the page. At the top is a dark disc from which long tapering rays spread outward in every direction — white and pale grey to the sides, a band of blue, red, orange and green below, with a burst of yellow at the centre and a scatter of small dots across the face of the disc, so that the sun appears both to radiate and to have depth. Below it a pair of broad wings sweeps up and outward from a plain golden sphere; each wing is drawn in overlapping feathers graded through green, blue, violet and rose, the two together forming a wide shallow arc. Beneath that is the Philaletheians monogram, a violet letter P interlaced with coloured loops. The caption beneath the images is what ties the drawing to the study: the rays of the sun flutter the wings of the eternal bird, and Kama-Eros, the desire-to-be, calls a Cosmos into being by ensouling a hamsa for its cosmic flight — hamsa being the soul of Brahmā and Brahmā the spirit of hamsa, with the manifested world their body. Readers who want the argument behind the picture will find it in the study of the same name.

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