Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,(603) the “Power of the Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our World, “the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory of Nazianzen corroborated Hermes by stating that: Things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see. It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the Ladder of Being down to the lower. The “Fall of the Angels,” and the “War in Heaven” are repeated on every plane, the lower “mirror” disfiguring the image of the superior “mirror,” and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the _Desatir_: All that is on earth, saith the Lord [Ormazd], is the _shadow of something that is in the superior spheres_. This luminious object [light, fire, etc.] is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights. In the Kabalistic books, in the _Zohar_ prëeminently, the idea that every objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is the “Shadow” (Dyooknah) of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong. The Third Race was prëeminently the bright “Shadow,” at first, of the Gods, whom tradition exiles on to the Earth after the allegorical War in Heaven. This became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the War between Spirit and Matter. This War will last till the Inner and Divine Man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of that self will be at eternal feud with his Master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the “Fall,” when even mortal man was “created” by the Elements and was not born.