Proposition 3: Three Spirits Live in Man

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Paracelsus · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 8 pages

Eight pages of selections from Isis Unveiled volume I, pages 212 to 213, 301 to 303 and 305 to 306. Its own title page reads Three Spirits live in Man, which describes the contents better than the line on the section list does. *The whole file hangs on one quotation from Paracelsus*, and it is given at the front.

Three spirits live and actuate man, Paracelsus teaches; three worlds pour their beams upon him, but all three only as the image and echo of one and the same all-constructing and uniting principle of production. The three are then named, with Blavatsky's own glosses in square brackets. The first is the spirit of the elements — the terrestrial body and the vital force in its brute condition. The second is the spirit of the stars — the sidereal or astral body, the soul. The third is the Divine spirit, which she identifies with the Augoeides, the shining or glorified body of the Neoplatonists. That threefold scheme is the ancestor of the sevenfold constitution set out elsewhere in this library, and seeing it in its simpler form makes the later one easier to follow. What she does with it next is the reason the file belongs to the Third Proposition rather than to a section on Paracelsus. Our human body being possessed of what Paracelsus calls primeval earth-stuff, she argues, we may readily accept the tendency of modern scientific research to regard its processes as continuous with the rest of nature — the point being that the materialist account of the body is not denied but accepted, and then shown to be an account of the first spirit only.

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