Divine Love Lying Alone in Concealed Potentiality

Simon Magus, G.R.S. Mead · The Masque of Love Series · 10 pages

Ten pages of edited selections and notes from G.R.S. Mead's Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism (Theosophical Society, 1892), with a contents page and key concepts at the front. A headnote explains what the file is for: these notes and the diagram at the end are the blueprint and compass to Simon's Aeonology — that diagram being the Simonian sheet also held in this series' plate album.

Mead begins with vocabulary, because the argument turns on it. The patristic meanings of aeon are given as lifetime, time, a long but definite period, a period of indefinite duration, and eternity; plērōma is the totality of aeons, the whole invisible world. In Gnosticism, however, the aeons are logoic emanations of the One — also called the Monad, Aiōn teleios or Perfect Aeon, and Bythos or Depth. From that the Simonian scheme unfolds. The unmanifested universal cause of all universes is described as lying in potentiality and in incomprehensible silence, producing itself by itself and manifesting to itself its own thought; and from the fire of that divine thought six syzygies — paired emanations — pass into action. The image the file is built around is of fire read as tripartite and yet one, and it is worth quoting for its strangeness: the fire eats up all that connects with it from below; the dark part of the flame is a throne on which the white part stands; the dark part changes its colour while the white part never changes; and above the white part rests a hidden light stronger than either. Taken with the diagram, which sets the two black discs of the Universal Principle and the Boundless Power above three worlds of being with their lettered triangles, the file is best used as a key to a picture rather than read straight through.

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