Proposition 1: The Rope of the Angels

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 59 pages

*Fifty-nine pages, the largest file in this batch, subtitled Fountain of fountains and boundary of all fountains* and opened by a full abstract and train of thoughts. A footnote credits the frontispiece to Ilene Meyer and the illustration on page 39 to James White. Both single-sheet drawings in this section — the Dawn of Chaos-Theos-Kosmos and Light drops one Solitary Ray — were made to accompany this file.

It begins with an overview of the primal symbols of cosmogenesis, built round the question of how the Two Ones form the intelligible world. That opening section is shared almost word for word with "Squaring the circle in heaven, or sphering the cube on earth?", also in this section, so a reader who has one already has that part of the other. Its terms are these: the First One is a ray from Parabrahman, and the Second One, the Logos Demiourgos or creative Logos, is a mere reflection of the first. The Virgin Matrix of the universe is described in a phrase the file returns to — cold fire, cool radiance, colourless, formless, devoid of every quality. Seven natural elements are said to surround the Golden Egg, four ready and three secret, and Chaos-Theos-Kosmos, the triple Deity, produces four primary elements, each divisible into forty-nine sub-elements, one hundred and ninety-six in all; Kosmos and Cosmos are then compared and contrasted as distinct terms. The middle of the file is given to two long discussions, and they are what makes it more than a compilation. The first asks what is meant by light dropping one solitary ray into the waters, and how that ray is connected with the First Triangle. The second argues that the One is ever undifferentiated and the Many endlessly differentiated, and works out the consequences: that Matter is Mother and Mother is Matter; that undifferentiated matter is composed of indestructible atoms while differentiated matter is destructible in form; and that the Mundane Egg is the first stage seen from the plane of differentiation but the third seen from the plane of non-differentiation. The geometry is then read as sexual polarity — the vertical line the male principle, the horizontal the female — with an explanation of how the circle becomes triangular by hypothecating absoluteness, the right line a metaphysical synthesis and the left a physical one, so that cosmic activity awakens at the moment Mother Nature makes of her body the horizontal line joining the two. The section closes on the rule that in the manifested world the highest sees through the eye of the lowest, since Manas, the basic line of the ideal triangle and a Laya-Centre, can have no perception of things on this plane without the help of matter.

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