Sublime

a gateway leading down to Amenti.

The uroboros, traceable in all epochs and cultures, then appears as the latest symbol of individual psychic development, signifying the roundedness of the psyche, life’s wholeness, and perfection regained. It is the place of transfiguration and illumination (illus. 11 ),of finality, as well as the place of mythological origination. Thus the Great

Considered from the wider perspective of the history of the human spirit, alchemy and its goal appeared not only as physical processes leading to chemistry, but also as a religious discipline whose goal was the transformation of earthly man into an illuminated philosopher.

At its basis was a view of the cosmos as an ordered expression of certain primordial essences or transcendent first principles, variously conceived as Forms, Ideas, universals, changeless absolutes, immortal deities, divine archai, and archetypes.

The Goddess therefore had a binary function: she presided over the coalescing of atomic matter (birth) and the dispelling of material existence (death), these being the “downward” and “upward” phases of the energy-mass interchange or the periodic transition from essence to substance and back again.

this inner body is “the life within our life,” our nascent “Real I.” It is the secret veiled by the form, the building slowly taking shape inside the scaffolding. From the imaginal perspective, however, it is our actual body, the true seat of our nontemporal selfhood. When we die, the scaffolding falls away and what has been created stands on its

for through this ‘lifting ourselves’ out of the circle of our everyday thoughts and feelings, through the ‘emptying itself’ of our soul, we unite with a world from which pictures come towards us, pictures that we can compare with nothing out of our usual life.

Of all this there is no mention in the works of Plotinus. He turned aside from the spectacle of ruin and misery in the actual world, to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty. In this he was in harmony with all the most serious men of his age. To all of them, Christians and pagans alike, the world of practical affairs seemed to offer

pass from fearful fragmentation To fearless fullness in the changeless whole.