Proposition 1: Light Drops One Solitary Ray (Drawing)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 1 page

*A single drawing sheet, dated 4 August 2017, headed Thus the Sons of Light clothed themselves in the fabric of Darkness*, and made to accompany "Proposition 1 - The Rope of the Angels", which is listed separately in this section.

The sheet is printed on a ground that shades from deep blue at the left to green at the right, with the title across the top in red script. Below it stand five circles in a row, lettered Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, which show one figure being built in stages. In Alpha a pale curved stroke sweeps in from outside and a white vertical line descends through the circle to a point numbered 1. In Beta a red line runs up from that point to a point numbered 2. In Gamma the line continues across to a point numbered 3 and a triangle closes. In Delta the same triangle is drawn again with a dotted red line returning from 3 back toward the apex, completing the circuit. Epsilon shows the finished figure: a gold and dark-shaded diamond within the circle, with a red arrow running horizontally through its centre. A wave of interlaced coloured strands runs beneath the row. The text at the foot supplies the reading, in capitals: darkness radiates light, and light drops one solitary ray into the waters, into the mother deep; the ray shoots through the virgin-egg, causes the eternal egg to thrill, and drops the non-eternal or periodical germ, which condenses into the world egg. Beneath that, a passage from Blavatsky's Collected Writings volume X, from the Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge, explains the numbering — the Pythagorean Monad descending from no-place shoots like a falling star through the planes of non-being into the first world of being and gives birth to Number One, then branching off to the right produces Number Two, and turning again to form the base-line begets Number Three, before ascending again to Number One and disappearing into the realms of non-being.

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