Vitality and Dissolution in the Grand Cycles of Existence

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

Eight pages with an abstract and train of thoughts. *Its opening phrase is the best single description of what this whole section attempts*: that the taxonomy of heavens is both cosmic embryology and cosmic palaeontology — that is, an account of how a universe develops and a record of what it has already been.

The complaint that follows is about chronology and is directed at the science of her day: it is mere vanity, she writes, that prevents modern science from accepting the enormous periods of time insisted upon by the ancients as having elapsed since the first civilisations. The symbol the file is built around is then introduced. Shesha is the great serpent-cycle, represented as swallowing its own tail, with a thousand heads embellished with the pure mystical sign — and he is named as the spirit of vitality and dissolution in the grand cycles of existence, which is where the file's title comes from. The figure is well chosen for the argument, because a serpent eating its tail is at once alive and consuming itself, which is exactly the double process the section describes: form built up as spirit descends and dissolved as it re-ascends, the same claim the Mineral Monas diagram makes in the first batch of this section. The closing pages return to the chronological quarrel, with the observation that Christian theologians claim unblushingly that their patriarchs lived some four thousand years ago — set against the millions of years the root-race scheme requires. Coming near the end of the section, it makes a fitting close: the Third Proposition asks the reader to think in periods that no Western chronology had room for.

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