Proposition 1: Chaos to Sense, Latent Deity to Reason

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 89 pages

*The largest file in this section at eighty-nine pages*, and the one that most rewards the contents page it is given. The front matter is a full abstract of central ideas arranged in numbered parts, each entry carrying its page number, so a single point can be looked up without reading the whole.

Part 1 argues that the shoreless Ocean of Space is the Light of the Central Sun and the First Cause: the universe is Space's body, spirit and soul, which are named as the three Kabbalistic Faces and the three degrees of the Gnostic Pleroma; Space is Macroprosopus, the supernal soil in which the archetypal forms of all things are concealed and from which the root of the universal Tree of Life grows; its symbol is the boundless circle. The most striking claim in this part is a negative one, that Lord Buddha declares there is neither a Creator nor an Absolute Being, but one Life only — either unrevealed Parabrahman as the passive principle, or its bound and conditioned reflections in the universe of illusion — so that Space exists whether there is a God, gods or none, and whether there is a universe or no universe. Part 2 turns to Space as Chaos, the unseen and unknowable Deity thrilling through every atom. Here the file does something useful for a reader coming from any one tradition: it lays the names side by side, identifying Egyptian Neith with the Assyrian Anaita, the Avestan Zeruane, the Buddhist Svabhava, the Christian Immaculate Mother, the Etruscan Nerfe, the Greek Gaia-Nyx, the Father-Mother of the Stanzas of Dzyan, the Gnostic Bythos, the Neoplatonic One, the Puranic Akasha and the Vedic Aditi. The reason Space is called unknowable is given in terms of the Ring Pass-Not, the barrier the Recorders of the Karmic Ledger drew around the manifested world of matter, dividing the lower personal self from the impersonal Self within. The section that follows is an extended exegesis of the pilgrimage of Pistis-Sophia, who longs for self-illumination and descends into the abyss of Chaos — the Infinitude of Chaos being the nest of the Eternal Bird whose wingbeat produces life.

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