Proposition 1: Plotinus on the Centre and Circle

Plotinus, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 24 pages

Twenty-four pages built from *selections out of Plotinus's Enneads** in the translation by Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page, published in London by Philip Lee Warner for the Medici Society between 1917 and 1930 — MacKenna translated Enneads I to V, Page the first three tractates of Ennead VI and a revision of the rest. A note by the series editor records that the full text of the Enneads* is held in the site's Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers series, and describes Plotinus as the pupil of the god-taught Ammonius and the teacher of Porphyry, who afterwards edited his master's work.

The organising sentence is given at the front and everything else hangs from it: the Good is the centre, the Intellectual-Principle an unmoving circle, and the Soul a circle in motion. From that the file draws out the consequence that in unity there can be no knowing, so that the One can know itself only through plurality, while remaining distinct and apart in the great illusion of form — present without being inherent. The Plotinus extracts are set out in a two-column arrangement, with a condensed statement of the argument in the left-hand column and the fuller translated passage beside it, so a reader can take the sense quickly or follow the reasoning at length. The passages chosen return repeatedly to the geometry: the centre is the total of terminals and radii impinging at every point upon it, the terminals are of the same nature as the centre and separate reproductions of it, and the lines converging reveal the centre and are the development of that undeveloped. Blavatsky's commentaries then take the same figure into her own vocabulary — the Monad as the emanation and reflection of the Point or Logos in the phenomenal world, becoming the apex of the manifested equilateral triangle; the Monad divine in its higher condition and human in its lower; and the Ocean of Life not dividing into its constituent drops until the life-impulse reaches the stage of man-birth. The Dawn of Chaos-Theos-Cosmos drawing, held separately in this series, is reproduced within the file, and a page of suggested reading closes it.

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