has become with the Materialists only
... Prime cheerer, light,
Of all material beings, first and best.
For the Occultists it is both Spirit and Matter. Behind the “mode of motion,” now regarded as the “property of matter” and nothing more, they perceive the radiant Noumenon. It is the “Spirit of Light,” the first-born of the Eternal pure Element, whose energy, or emanation, is stored in the Sun, the great Life-Giver of the Physical World, as the hidden concealed Spiritual Sun is the Light- and Life-Giver of the Spiritual and Psychic Realms. Bacon was one of the first to strike the key-note of Materialism, not only by his inductive method—renovated from ill-digested Aristotle—but by the general [pg 522] tenor of his writings. He inverts the order of mental Evolution when saying:
The first creation of God was the light of the sense; the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of the Spirit.
It is just the reverse. The light of Spirit is the eternal Sabbath of the Mystic or Occultist, and he pays little attention to that of mere sense. That which is meant by the allegorical sentence, “Fiat Lux,” is, when esoterically rendered, “Let there be the ‘Sons of Light’,” or the Noumena of all phenomena. Thus the Roman Catholics rightly interpret the passage as referring to Angels, but wrongly as meaning Powers created by an anthropomorphic God, whom they personify in the ever thundering and punishing Jehovah.
These beings are the “Sons of Light,” because they emanate from, and are self-generated in, that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole is pure Spirit lost in the absoluteness of Non-Being, and the other pole, the Matter in which it condenses, “crystallizing” into a more and more gross type as it descends into manifestation. Therefore Matter, though it is, in one sense, but the illusive dregs of that Light whose Rays are the Creative Forces, yet has in it the full presence of the Soul thereof, of that Principle, which none—not even the “Sons of Light,” evolved from its Absolute Darkness—will ever know. The idea is as beautifully, as it is truthfully, expressed by Milton, who hails the holy Light, which is the
... Offspring of Heaven, first-born,
Or of th' Eternal coëternal beam;
... Since God is Light,