Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism Based on the Ancient Sources With a Re-Evaluation of His Philosophy and TeachingsMead, G. R. S. (George Robert Stow)
Religion
Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism Based on the Ancient Sources With a Re-Evaluation of His Philosophy and Teachings
Mead, G. R. S. (George Robert Stow)
Simon, Magus, active 1st century
Between this Divine World, the Unmanifested Triple Aeon, and the World
of Men is the Middle Distance--the Waters of Space differentiated by the
Image or Reflection of the Triple Logos (D) brooding upon them. As there
are three Worlds, the Divine, Middle, and Lower, which have been well
named by the Valentinians the Pneumatic (or Spiritual), Psychic (or
Soul-World), and Hylic (or Material), so in the Middle Distance we have
three planes or degrees, or even seven. This Middle Distance contains
the Invisible Spheres between the Physical World and the Divine. To it
the Initiated and Illuminati, the Spiritual Teachers of all ages, have
devoted much exposition and explanation. It is divine and infernal at
one and the same time, for as the higher parts--to use a phrase that is
clumsy and misleading, but which cannot be avoided--are pure and
spiritual, so the lower parts are corrupted and tainted. The law of
analogy, imaging and reflection, hold good in every department of
emanative nature, and though pure and spiritual ideas come to men from
this realm of the Middle Distance, it also receives back from man the
impressions of his impure thoughts and desires, so that its lower parts
are fouler even than the physical world, for man's secret thoughts and
passions are fouler than the deeds he performs. Thus there is a Heaven
and Hell in the Middle Distance, a Pneumatic and Hylic state.
The Lord of this Middle World is One in his own Aeon, but in reality a
reflection of the triple radiance from the Unmanifested Logos. This Lord
is the Manifested Logos, the Spirit moving on the Waters. Therefore all
its emanations or creations are triple. The triple Light above and the
triple Darkness below, force and matter, or spirit and matter, both
owing their being and apparent opposition to the Mind, "alone ordering
all things."
The Diagram to be more comprehensible should be so arranged, mentally,
that each of the higher spheres is found within or interpenetrating the
lower. Thus, from this point of view, the centre is a more important
position than above or below. External to all is the Physical Universe,
made by the Hylic Angels, that is to say those emanated by Thought,
Epinoia, as representing Primeval Mother Earth, or Matter; not the Earth
we know, but the Adamic Earth of the Philosophers, the Potencies of
Matter, which Eugenius Philalethes assures us, on his honour, no man has
ever seen. This Earth is, in one sense, the Protyle for which the most
advanced of our modern Chemists are searching as the One Mother Element.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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