Better is he who is above temptation than he who, being tempted, overcomes; since the latter but suppresses the evil inclination in his breast, which the former has not. Whoever is tempted has so far sinned as to entertain the tempting lust stirring within him, and betraying his lapse from singleness or holiness. The virtuous choose, and are virtuous by choice; while the holy, being one, are above all need of deliberating, their volitions answering spontaneously to their desires. It is the cleft personality, or other within, that confronts and seduces the Will; the Adversary and Deuce we become individually, and thus impersonate in the Snake.[[12]]
III.—SERPENT SYMBOL.
One were an Œdipus to expound this serpent mythology; yet failing this, were to miss finding the keys to the mysteries of Genesis, and Nature were the chaos and abyss; since hereby the one rejoins man’s parted personality, and recreates lost mankind. Coeval with flesh, the symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist, a remnant of it in the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our May-day dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that it became associated with those “traditionary teachers of mankind whose genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors.” An early Christian sect, called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge. So the injunction, “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” becomes the more significant when we learn that seraph in the original means a serpent; cherub, a dove; these again symbolizing facts in osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the invertebrated cranium accepted by eminent naturalists, and so substantiating the symbol in nature; this being ophiomorphous, a series of spires, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure, set erect, prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man, supreme in personal uprightness, and holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or losing his prerogative as he lapses from his integrity, thus debasing his form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed throughout Nature’s kingdoms; or, again, aspiring for lost supremacy, he uplifts and crowns his fallen form with forehead, countenance, speech, thereby liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods, and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal arts.[[13]]
“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man.”
IV.—EMBRYONS.
“The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work, in the divine mind before it exists in the creature.”—Leibnitz.
As the male impregnates the female, so mind charges matter with form and fecundity; the spermatic world being life in transmission and body in embryo. So the egg is a genesis and seminary of forms, (the kingdoms of animated nature sleeping coiled in its yolk) and awaits the quickening magnetism that ushers them into light. Herein the human embryon unfolds in series the lineaments of all forms in the living hierarchy, to be fixed at last in its microcosm, unreeling therefrom its faculties into filamental organs, spinning so minutely the threads, “that were it physically possible to dissolve away all other members of the body, there would still remain the full and perfect figure of a man. And it is this perfect cerebro-spinal axis, this statue-like tissue of filaments, that, physically speaking, is the man.“ The mind above contains him spiritually, and reveals him physically to himself and his kind. Every creature assists in its own formation, souls being essentially creative and craving form.
“For the creature delights in the image of the Creator; and the soul of man will in a manner clasp God to herself. Having nothing mortal, she is wholly inebriated from God; for she glories in the harmony under which the human body exists.”[[14]]