CHAPTER XIX.

THE MOTHER PRINCIPLE OF THINGS, AND ITS USE IN SELF

HEALING.

THE universal life-principle in its latent state is the primal matter and cosmic substance, and fills all space, and connects all worlds. It pervades and contains the air, as the air contains the water, and the water the earth. We inhale it with every breath, and in it we live, and move, and have our being. But it is "without form and void" of quality. It is pure existence, and to it properties and qualities are given by thought alone. To it any quality can be given by the imagination as we breathe it in. It is the mother principle, the feminine creative potency, the passive power in nature, and is co-eternal with spirit, of which it is the correlative opposite. It is an interesting fact that the word mother and matter are nearly identical in most of the languages of the world. In Latin we have mater and materia, the matter, stuff, or material of which anything is made. In Italian, madre signifies mother, cause, origin, root, spring, and mould for castings. In the latter sense, the mother principle is the universal matrix. Spanish we have madre, mother, and materia, matter. In Portuguese, madre means mother and the mould for castings. Even in the Irish, mathair means mother and also matter. This primal matter is the mother principle, or feminine passive ray, emanating from the "Unknown." It is the universal mould in which all ideas take shape. It is represented in the Jewish cosmogony by Eve (or Heva), "the mother of all living

In

things," the very name signifying completeness and fulness of life. The feminine principle of things is not absolutely passive, but its characteristic is reaction. The quality which we impress by our thought upon this universal life-principle, it takes, and it is reflected back with it in the respiration. There is an occult air, immaterial and imperceptible to any of the gross external senses, but most vitally real, for things increase in reality as they come nearer to the central point of existence. "This air," says the Kabala, "is the most occult (occultissimus) attribute of the Deity." It is identical with the akasa of the Hindu philosophy. In its latent state it is the universal æther, the air of immensity, "an unburning vivific flame." It is the Shekinah of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit of the New Testament as a feminine life-principle. The Shekinah is that subtle light, or divine luminous substance, or visible glory, which was a symbol and vehicle of the divine presence. It was the sacred fire of the Persians, and the Astral light of the Rosicrucians. This primal, everywherepresent principle, or immaterial substance, is the universal matrix in which the ideas of the intellect take form and become to our minds and senses visible entities. In the Hindu theosophy, the grandest system of metaphysics the world has ever seen, it is called Nari and Mariāma, the universal mother. It was symbolized by the Lotus; and Brahm, the active masculine potency seated on the Lotus floating on the water creates the world. In the Egyptian philosophy it was called Isis, and the attributes and names given to it, the Roman Catholic system has borrowed and given to Mary, which name means the sea as a feminine principle. In the Archaic wisdom-religion this universal principle was denominated the mother-soul of the universe and the astral virgin, which waits to be fertilized or impregnated by the intellect or male potency. It was called pure essence, the mother of the five virtues, elements, or potencies; in other words, the primal force from which all the forces of nature spring. She was also called

wise mother, mirror of justice, or real truth as all the knowledge of the world in every age is recorded in it as in a sealed book. It was also the symbol and the repository of the occult science of the ancient sages, and represented by the ark. Hence Isis was veiled, to signify that this spiritual science and mystic wisdom was concealed from the world at large. The unveiling of Isis was the revelation of the hidden truths of the arcane philosophy. Both Nari and Isis were called womb of gold, sistrum of gold, and virgin queen of heaven—cœlum, which is from the Greek koilia, the belly, the womb of the universe, signified by the blue vault with its mysterious depths, the blue ray being the feminine colour. She was the mothersoul of all beings and things. It is the source of all celestial light, the morning star of the Apocalypse (Rev. ii. 28), the Syrian Astarte, the Jewish Ashtaroth, and the astral light of the Kabala.

Creation, as we have said before, and here repeat, is a begetting; that is, it is the union of the male principle-pure spirit, the nous of Plato, the primal light-with the feminine principle, the Sophia, the prima materia, the pure cosmic immaterial substance. The first is represented by the upright line or descending ray (|), and the latter, by the horizontal or base line (—), and the union of the two forms the cross (+), one of the oldest and most expressive of religious symbols. "All that is created," says the Kabala, "by the Ancient of the Ancients, can live and exist only by a male and a female" (principle). Thought and feeling, idea and sensation, combine to make a thing, a concrete reality.

The most ancient name of the Deity, the Mystic designation of God, and found in all the Archaic esoteric religious philosophies, expresses this truth. It was IAO, pronounced by the Jews-if uttered at all-Yaho, and by the Samaritans, Yava. Its significance was kept absolutely occult, and deeply veiled from the multitude. It is composed of the masculine upright line (1) as the one or unity, and the feminine, nought (0) or

cypher. The two in combination make the number ten (10) which, in its symbolic esoteric sense, means all, and fulness, completeness, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, and all between the extremes.

With the H or Ah, the aspirate or breathing, which mystically signifies breath, soul, life, coming between the masculine upright and the representative of the feminine passive or reactive principle, the oval, egg-shaped nought, the Sanscrit Siphron, it teaches that all things that live and exist, consciously and unconsciously, are generated by the conjunction of these two principles. And the most ancient name of God, IAO, means that he is the All, that we and all other creatures are included in his Being, and that "he giveth life, and breath, and all things." The egg, the oval, the cypher, is the representative of the feminine universal life-principle and creative potency, and it was a tenet of the occult philosophy, that all things are produced from an egg. But the cypher by itself stands for nothing; in union with the one (pure spirit) it means all things. In the Creation, the Divine Spirit brooded over the "face of the waters." As all the emotions and interior feelings are expressed in the face, it came to signify the inmost pure essence of things. Over this the Spirit brooded and gave it form and quality. But man, in his complete being, reaches from the last (matter) to the first (spirit), from earth to the highest heaven. Our spirits can imitate the creative act of the Elohim. Thought, which is a movement of the Divine Spirit in man, and springs out of the unknown depths of the Godhead, can act on this universal passive principle, and in it, it will take form in an idea, which is a living thing, an actual creation or thing begotten. This universal mother principle is that through which thought is made effective.

Celestial wisdom, the Divine Sophia, the second emanation of the Kabala, by a law of correlation or correspondence, in its descent downward, or its passing outward from the living

Point (the Centre which is everywhere, of a circle which is nowhere) becomes the reactive mother principle of nature, the cosmic matter, or immaterial substance, the chaos, the hyle of Plato and the Greeks, the prima materia. It is the Sakti of the Buddhists, the sacred presence, the veil of God, the instrument or agent of the active power and creative energy of gods and men. It is the vehan or vehicle or medium of communication between one mind and another, and through which a psychological impression can be made, and ideas communicated by psychological telegraphy far and near. It is the messenger dove, the carrier pigeon of the spirit, the invisible and everywhere present, and divinely sensitive silver wire through which a thought impulse may be transmitted over continents and across oceans. It is that by which God is present in the world, and through which one spirit may be present to another spirit a thousand miles away, for in it, distance ceases to be, and all objects may touch and communicate. It is also the

universal principle of sensation, that in which all sensation and perception exist, and through which a sensation may be transmitted any distance. It is the universal eye, the all hearing ear, and the omnipresent sense of feeling. It is the medium of sympathy, or psychometry, or that through which our states affect others, and our feelings become infectious. All this, and much more, is true of it.

This knowledge was kept for ages absolutely occult, and has, for wise reasons, been concealed from the rabble from the foundation of the world. It was taught by "the wise men to the elected few, but under allegorical forms of expression was hidden from the unthinking multitudes, to whom it was not given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, and it is fully known only to a chosen few to-day. It still belongs to that wisdom which Paul spoke only among the perfect. But the time is at hand when it may be proper to unloose the seven seals, and in some degree open the mystic scroll that is written within and on the backside (Rev. v. 1). And