“Tell me of the duality of the spirit, soul and body?” asked Yermah, for the first time making it plain that he was thinking over what had been told him during the day.
“Spirit pure and simple is the Word which was in the Beginning. This has three phases, motion and breath being the other two. The Ineffable moved, breathed and spoke and the created universe, with all it contains, was the result.”
He spoke with caution, lest he should usurp divine power.
“In mankind, it is quite impossible to define or describe that subtle thing which is denoted by the word ‘spirituality,’” he continued, “the goal toward which so many efforts, such fervent aspirations are directed. Spirituality is something which differs from all these, an essence strange and deep, not expressible in other terms than itself—beyond mind, beyond thought, and, consequently, beyond speech. In the ardor of our present pursuit, we forget the fact that the spiritual can be used for evil no less than for good purposes. By failure to discriminate between the spiritual in the service of the divine and the same quality in the service of the dark powers, we may find ourselves at a point where, to regain the true path, we must with pain and agony retrace our steps and begin again.”
“And the soul?”
“Is mind in all its attributes. The animal soul, or vehicle of desire, is dominated by the phases and aspects of the moon, Mars and Venus. This is the psychic world. In the body we have the physical (or material) man and the astral prototype. The material man lives as long as the spirit functions through the psychic world into the astral body, which is a part of the physical man.”
“In what way dost thou mean to say creative energy contacts the body?”
“The astral body is the medium; the psychic, the positive; and the material, the negative polarity which attracts the magnetic current, or spirit. When the astral and physical bodies separate, death, or the loosing of the bands of Orion, in a physical sense, takes place.
“The life essence in the body,” the hierophant went on to explain, “is a lateral pulsation, which grows shorter and shorter as the impetus giving it motion in the beginning, is stilled. Its center is the solar plexus; but the divine spark is released through the cardiac plexus, the spiritual prototype of the solar.”
“What then becomes of the deathless spirit?”