Concerning Persephone, Or The Soul's Descent Into Matter

No. XIII

CONCERNING PERSEPHONE, OR THE SOUL'S DESCENT INTO MATTER ²

I SEE God under two modes, one static or passive, the other dynamic or active. As the former, God is original Life, Will, Power. As the latter, God is the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit and the Substance of God are one. At first there is perfect rest. Then comes a movement of rotation round itself, and Substance becomes first ether, and at length matter. Every ultimate particle of matter moves in ether, as do the planets, and has two poles, that is in the intercellular ether. Their rotation is intensely rapid; it makes me giddy to look; and by this movement comes creation. This is accomplished in six periods, and then there is Rest, and the whole is re-absorbed. Wherefore there is an incessant Putting-Forth for six "days," and a recurring Sabbath of Rest.

The more rapid the movement of the particles of his body, the more material is the man. Hence the object of the saint is to attain perfect quiescence, and thereby union with the Divine

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[paragraph continues] One. The "Philosopher's Stone" signifies in one aspect perfect quiescence, or the re-absorption of matter into spirit through the absence of motion.

Thus the rigidity we know as matter is caused by the incessant intense movement of spirit. This truth, for the Greeks, is represented by Demeter, who is all that is in motion and solid. And whereas motion is begotten of the Holy Spirit in time, her parents are Rhea and Saturn. Rhea is "the mother" of the Gods, and is the same as Nox, the original Darkness or Invisible Light of Divinity prior to manifestation in creation. And Persephone, or Proserpine, is the daughter of Demeter or Motion--or that which makes visible--by Ether. Persephone is the liquid or psychic part of man, which consists both of his true soul and his "fiery" or magnetic perisoul. And the story of the stealing of Persephone, or rape of Proserpine, relates to the "fixing of the volatile," whereby the astral part becomes coagulated into the material. Belonging thus, half to the body, or lower world, and half to the heavens and upper world, and thus linking the two together, she is said to spend six months of the year in Hades and six on Olympus. And she would be updrawn altogether to the latter, but that as the consequence of her eating a pomegranate, which--like the apple of Eve--is the symbol of illusion or matter, she is fixed in the lower world or body, whence her mother, Demeter, seeks to withdraw her.

You are to understand, further, that this descent of Persephone into Hades comes about not only through the continued motion of the particles of the soul, but also through their depolarisation from the central and Divine Will. The body ought to be in such a state that the man can indraw and re-absorb it. But Persephone, through following her own will, reversed the poles of her constituent substance, and caused this to become fixed. Whenever, as was the case with Jesus, the man is in union with the central will of his system, he has power to indraw and re-absorb his body. And one of the purposes of the Gospel story of the water being changed into wine, was to typify this transmutation. Animals never have this power, as they have no divine spirit, and, therefore, no central will, to polarise. Man has it only by the Spirit's descent into him. The eating of the pomegranate implies the reversal of the poles, and the illusion whereby the outer becomes the inner, and the individual polarises outwardly instead of centrally, and, so, becomes fixed and material.

Footnotes

34:2 London, March 23, 1881. Spoken in trance.