Proposition 1: Diagram Notes — the Heavenly Snails

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 45 pages

Forty-five pages whose own title page reads How the Heavenly Snails clothed themselves in the Fabric of Darkness. The file says plainly what it is for: *these study notes, revolving around the diagram at the end, are the blueprint of and compass to the First Proposition of the Secret Doctrine.* Anyone starting on this section could reasonably begin here, with the one-page chart open beside it.

The title is explained at the outset, which is worth knowing before opening it: the Heavenly Snails is an allegory for the Sons of Light, so called because their formless intelligences inhabit their planetary abodes unseen and carry them along with themselves, as snails do, in their revolutions around the sun. Two epigraphs set the tone, Cicero on how the contemplation of celestial things makes a man speak and think more sublimely when he descends to human affairs, and Synesius on obtaining the greatest things without labour being a divine prerogative. The notes then follow the chart. Cosmic Ideation together with the Noumenon of Matter, Mahat, is called the womb of the world and the designer of maya-illusion. Matter is crystallised Spirit, and the illusive dregs of the infinite Ocean of Light whose limbs are the Creative Forces — dregs which, the file says, not even the Sons of Light will ever fully know. A section on phallic worship deals with the desecration and degradation of the Holy of Holies. Nature is then treated at length, under the phrase that she brought forth a wonder most wonderful, and the scholastic distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata is used to hold the two senses of the word apart. Plutarch is brought in on whether God makes and unmakes oracles. The two Spirits, the Supreme and the Word or Logos, are distinguished, with the question why Absoluteness should be named the Supreme Self, and the Ocean of Life identified as the Supreme Soul against Jivatman or Pratyagatman as the differentiated soul. A long page of suggested reading from this series closes the file, and the diagram itself is reproduced at the end.

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