Symbols ana a

‘ In this context, wc might recall the images of the poet A. Honofrius in his Tcrrescrica del sole (Florence, 1926): "Beings all made of power come to us from above—Celestials, thinking diamond and iron, within their craggy graves. . . . Lightning-flashing powers, out of you comes the perfect form of the crystals." "In the head and shoulders is the power—that in mighty angels thinks earth—as in the breast, blood, and rhythm are the Sun."

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^H In this regard it is very interesting to read in the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) about the post morrem experiences (which in initiation, in a Special state of consciousness, arc produced while still in life). It is taught that the dark and infernal gods are all one with the luminous ones: they arc the same gods, but realized by an understanding incapable of identifying with the first, incapable oi recognising them as part of its own transcendent being, and dominated by irrational impulses

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^A Christian or a Brahman will have visions conforming to his beliefs, as different vestments for the same experience. The teaching abour the correspondence of " all the members and parts of the human body” with "sacred forms" is explicit in the Qabalah (cf. Zahar, \ 272b). In Hindu esotericism there is a practice known as nyosa, in which the divinities that correspond to the different parts of the body are ritually imposed on them. (cf. Eyoia, The Yoga of Powrr, 105-7) Agrippa (De occuka philosophia, 3:13) writes: "If a man capable of receiving the divine influence maintains one clean and purified member or organ of the body, this becomes a receptacle for that member or organ corresponding to the god [that is, of the primordial Man contained in the sepulchre of the body] which is hidden in him as behind a veil.” In the medieval texts we often encounter human figures, m which the astrological signs of the metals and planets placed in each part of the body serve to indicate the respective correspondences. In order to cover all rhe variants of such corrcspodences, we would have to penetrate far into the terrain of astrology which would exceed rhe limits of the present bexjk.

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^in ancient Greece, for example, medicine was considered a sacred and secret science. And now we liave said enough to make the reason for this secret understood. Galen (Dc mu pan., 714) compares medicine tn the mysteries of Eleusis and Samothiace. Asciepius, "inventor” of medicine, gives his name to one of the books of the Corpus Hermeucum, and the Asclepiads who followed his tradition made up a kind of sacerdotal caste. In che Vi'ra with which the works of Hippocrates begin, it is said that he taught his arcs only to consecrated men and under the seal of silence. All this leads us to suspect a medicine different from that vaunted today and presented as science. And it would be interesting to show how often modern pharmacological medicine can be related factually to correspondences between certain substances and certain organs or functions that were spelled out in the initiatic teaching.

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