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—
28o
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
explained, 7's the body of those Sph'its themselves, and their very essence.
Our physical light is the vianifestation 011 otir plane, and the reflected
radiance,
of the Divine Light, emanating from the collective Body of
those who are called the "Lights" and the "Flames." But no other
Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction on the
other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence, and
in such flowing language, as Eliphas Levi. He leads his reader through
the most lovely valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren
rock.
Says the Commentary:
// is thr'ough and from the radiations of the seven Bodies of the seven
Orders of Dhyanis, that the seven Discrete Quantities \_Eleme7its\ whose
Motion and harmonious Union p^vduce the manifested Universe of Matter,
are bom.
The Second Round brings into manifestation the second Element
Air ;
an element, the purity of which would ensure continuous life to
him who would use it. In Europe there have been two Occultists only
who have discovered and even partially applied it in practice, though
its composition has alwa3'-s been known among the highest Eastern
Initiates. The ozone of the modern Chemists is poison compared with
the real Universal Solvent, which could never be thought of unless it
existed in Nature.
From the Second Round, Earth— hitherto a foetus in the matrix of Space
— began its real existejice: it had developed individtial seiitient Life, its
second Principle. The second corresponds to the sixth \_Priiciple']; the
second is Life contiiuous, the other,
temporary.
The 77/ /r^ Round developed the third Principle—Water ;
while the
Fourth transformed the gaseous fluids and plastic form of our Globe
into the hard, crusted, grossly material sphere we are living on.
Bhtimi has reached her fourth Principle. To this it may be objected
that the law of analog}^ so much insisted upon, is broken. Not at all.
Earth will reach her true ultimate form—her body shell—inversely in
this to man, only toward the end of the Manvantara, after the Seventh
Round. Eugenius Philalethes was right when he assured his readers,
"on his word of honour," that no one had yet seen the "Earth," i.e..
Matter in its essential form. Our Globe is, so far, in its Kamarupic
state—the Astral Body of Desires of Ahamkara, dark Egotism, the
progeny of Mahat, on the lower plane.
It is not molecularly constituted matter, least of all the human Body,