Proposition 1: Time Was Not, Eternity Is

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 15 pages

Fifteen pages whose cover title is Time was not, Eternity is, with a contents page of key concepts. *It is the most Platonist file in the section* — after an abstract by the series editor, the argument is carried by three named readers of Plato in turn.

The definition offered at the start is a psychological one: time is the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness. From it follows the distinction the whole file rests on — there are two Times, universal and finite. The one is the abstraction or noumenon of infinite time, Kala; the other its phenomenon, appearing periodically as the effect of Mahat. What is called temporal, on this account, can exist only in time, which is itself a portion of the revolution of the highest sphere. Time is said to be asleep in the bosom of the Orphic trinity, secondary Logoi such as Zeus-Jupiter being born in and out of Chronos-Saturn or infinite time, and the last vibration of the Seventh Eternity — when time was not — is the First Logos. The central image is that time is an intellectual dance of finite souls around the centre of the World Soul, and it is pursued through the three commentators. Plutarch is taken first, on the Timaeus, with the question of what Timaeus means when he says that souls are dispersed into the earth, the moon and other instruments of time. Plotinus follows, on time with regard to date. Thomas Taylor, the English Platonist, comes last, and the file closes on the line it takes from him — that attired with stars we shall for ever sit, triumphing over death, and chance, and thee, O Time. A page of suggested reading ends it.

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