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Che same metaphysical correspondences apply to another teaching that hermetism also shares with the most an­cient traditions: that of the Seven—which prevails in the symbolism of the seven planets.
Metaphysically, Seven expresses the Three added to the Four. According to the established meaning of these numeric symbols, Seven is the manifestation of the creative principles (triad) in relation to the world made up of the four elements (3 + 4): the full expression of nature creating nature (natura nacurans) in action.¹ These seven principles are simultaneously internal and external,^{137 138} residing in man and the world in the visible and invisible aspect of both. Sometimes in the teaching they undergo a duplication, which expresses die duality existing between the Sun ("being”) aspect and the Moon ("energy”) aspect of each individual power (whence the hermetic symbolism of the two trees each with seven braches or seven fruits, arbor soils er arbor /unae); or else the duplication is that existing between the septenary as it is in itself, and what the septenary becomes upon the intervention of the "Fall" and the domination of the Harth element.
As for references, we can start with this from the Corpus Hermcticum: "The intellectual entity male and female god (the primordial androgyne composed of 0

and C ], which is Life and Light, engenders by means of the Logos, another creative intelligence, God of Fire and Fluid, who in turn creates seven ministers, who enclose within their circles die sense-perceived world. Their dominion is called sipappevf} (Fate).¹³⁹ Here tile last phrase sends us back to the tradition referred to by Plato as the Wheel of Fate composed of seven spinning spheres, ruled by the "daughters of necessity.” The preceding distinction makes this necessity the work of a second god, beyond whose realm, however, exists an even higher intellectual androgynous entity. And in the function of this higher region can be seen the same seven principles.
Besides, in that gnostic, mystery ambience in which the Greek alchemical texts took form, it was customary to teach the existence of two septenaries, a lower, called the "sevenfold serpent, daughter of Ialdabaoth” (a name for the "second god”) and the other, higher and celestial, which in its totality could be made to correspond to the eighth sphere (that "beyond the Seven”) or ogdoad,^{140 141} also placed by Plato above those of "necessity.”^ The gnostic Valentinus calls it the "Heavenly Jerusalem. "¹⁴² A gnostic-hermetic papyrus conceives of it as the "Holy Name, ” being the seven Greek vowels taken as symbols for the "Seven Heavens,” while the Eighth is the "Monad” or unity "of another kind,” which repeats them on a higher plane; we can then establish a connection with the schematic of the eight-rayed stars in the Chrysopoeia o/ Cleopatra.¹⁴³ And vice versa we can consider, above all, the higher septenary and see in the last of the seven forms the substratum of the inferior septenary, which is born through the symbolic "Earth.” It is in this way that Roehme sees in the seventh principle, "Nature," the expansion (exterioriza­tion) of the other six—the "body” being the seventh, and the others being its "life” (in a transcendent sense): "The seventh spirit is the spirit-fountain of nature. Once engendered, it becomes the mother of the other seven. It comprises in itself the other six, and generates them in turn (that is, manifests them in her own form by making them manifestations in visible nature; for example, die seven visible planets, which are the sense-perceived symbols of the invisible): since in the seventh exists the natural and corporeal essence ... In this, one of the seven forms of nature dominates the others, and each one collaborates according to its own essential strength, naturalizing itself in the body according to its rank.”⁸ "Body,” here, of course, has to be understood in the broadest sense, in which the tangible human body is merely a particular case of its own.
These same doctrines, presented in the form of myths and descriptions of cosmic entities, must be related to the meanings and possibilities of inner experi­ence, especially with regard to the differentiation between the two septenaries. We can thus return to the hermetic text cited above⁹ wherein it is said that man, once awakened to a will to create, wants to bypass the limits of the circles of necessity and master the power residing in Fire. This is clearly a variation on the Promethean myth, which also ends in a "fall”: the man who is "superior to harmony [that is, to the universal order, the unity of the various laws and natural conditions], to harmony becomes a slave. Although hermaphrodite like the Father and above sleep, he remains dominated by sleep.”¹⁰ But sleep is an esoteric word traditionally meaning consciousness weighed down by the conditions of the animal body, in antithesis to the symbol of the awakening of the initiate with the work of descroying sleep (nidrdbhdngd in the Hindu texts), by the "sleepless” intellectual nature—t)
f which Plotinus speaks. As Buddhistic avidya, so this symbolic "sleep” can be considered equivalent as well to "oblivion," the Greek Xi)9r}, "lethe.” Macrobius¹¹ transmits the tradition of the division of the "materia”— if/lr/— into two parts, of which one, as ambrosia, is the sustenance of the gods, and the other, as drink of the souls, constitutes the waters of the river Lethe, the water of forgetfulness; and this tradition clarifies the meaning of the teaching of the two septenaries.
It is not a question of two really different orders, but of the same reality with two different modes of manifestation.¹² That which leads from one mode to the other is the event referred to in the Corpus Hermecicum, the epilogue of which is the "state of sleep,” "forgetting,” the loss of spiritual consciousness, the alteration of the most profound principle.
This teaching is explained by a disciple of Boehme, Georg Gichtel, who speaks of a fire (that is, an ego-power) that, when separated from the Light (that is, from the diffuse vitality), is turned into desire; this fire hotly devours all "oily wetness,” by which the light is extinguished¹³ and a black precipitation is produced (the color ¹⁴⁴ of Saturn, whose dark point, in an engraving of Basil Valentine, is precisely directed toward the corpus principle). It is the "corruption of the luminous paradisiacal body" that in sleep (Gichtel uses exactly this word) is replaced by the black terrestrial body, "seat of an insatiable appetite, of sickness and death.” Gichtel continues: inwardly dead, the Soul (that original Fire) is converted into "Hell,” where eternal corruption takes place. "And then appear seven forms, daughters of the Fire Dragon, Spirit-of-this-world, who are the seals that keep the non-regen­erated from perceiving the Divine Fire. ”¹⁴⁵
Transmitted as motifs in fairy tales and fables are dragons with seven heads who guard "caverns” (that is to say the accesses to the interior of the "Earth,” to the depths locked in the corporeal) or "treasures" (Gold, or precious stones—in alchemy and before that in Gnosticism, gems frequently signified "powers”). According to Mithraism the soul, in order to free itself, must go through seven spheres marked by seven gates, each one of which is guarded by an angel of the "God of Light," an equivalence to the seals that bar the spiritual ascent to the higher septenary (the seven "heavens”).¹⁴⁶ To each gate corresponds a degree of the Mithraic initiation, however, which confirms that it is not a question of theological abstractions but of allusions to transcendental forms of consciousness, which have been paralyzed by the power that acts on those who have been conquered by symbolic sleep.¹⁴⁷
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Let us move on to the "Seven" in man. What the hermetists call Spirit ( ^ and the "life body") - corresponding analogically to the planetary region intermediary between Earth and Heaven—also presents forces and structures corresponding to each of the planets. Plotinus himself taught: "There are within us forces analogous to the powers of the different planets."¹ And thus we come to the esoteric doctrine of the seven points through which the higher powers enter into the corporeal context, whereupon they become vital cur­rents and energies specific to man.^{148 149} But because of the two-way direction that each point of passage or "portal” affords, these seven centers, which normally serve to convey nonhuman forces into human channels, can be taken in an opposite direction. That is, the flow may be turned back from the human to the nonhuman—which is equivalent to the aforementioned passing through the seven gates, breaking the seven seals, ascending through the seven heavens, and so forth.
To see this teaching in more complete and explicit terms, we have to go back to the Hindu tradition where the centers are called chakras or "wheels” (because of the spinning movement of the vitalizing energies that radiate from them), and also padma, or "lotuses,” The lotus, however, like the rose in hermerism (or "flower,” less specifically), is a symbol that we also find in the Chaldeo-Egyptian and Minoan traditions, where often enough it is associated with the "key of life” and has the meaning of resurrection, palingenesis, awakening; the "flowering” of the seven higher forms freed from the obstruc­tion that the human Earth (the body) entails is the reconquest of the integral and primordial being of Gold,¹⁵⁰
The varieties of hermetico-alchemical symbolism in which, one way or the other, the Seven figure, can be interpreted at the microcosmic level on the basis of such a teaching. The references to specific points of the body so rigorously followed in the Orient (references not crudely spatial, but of "functional correspondence”), are rarely encountered in hermetism. We encounter the most explicit reference—conforming quite closely to the Hindu teaching in this matter- in the fourth illustration annexed to Georg Gichtel's Theosophia praccica. In this illustration the coronal, frontal, laryngeal, cardiac, lumbar, umbilical, and sacral regions are indicated by means of tbe hermetico-astrological ideograms of the planets affixed at given points in each of these regions. Since the il­lustration shows "the dark and terrestrial nature of man," it represents the inferior septenary. In this same depiction, a spiral extends from Saturn (sym­bol of the basic corporeal and "terrestrial” condition in which the other plan­ets or principles are manifested) in an enveloping movement passing through all the other centers until it arrives at the heart, where a serpent can be seen coiled around the solar © principle. This is a representation of the process of "falling,” which unwinds down to the restriction where the power of the ego, far from the living Gold or Sun of the Wise, manifests only in its vulgar form of the human personality. In each one of the other centers an equivalent loss of power occurs and, in fact, to each of the centers in the chart there is given the name of a passion.
An equivalence to the Hellenistic doctrine is evident in the symbolic de­scent of the soul through the planetary spheres, from each of which the soul takes on the garment of a given passion or the quality of the energies accord­ing to its degree. The inner meaning is the same: the debasing of the powers of the primordial man to dark, repressed, corporeal energies contained in the subconscious and peripheral psychologisms—passive, broken off from cosmic spirituality ro the point where it is said: "This miserable soul, ignorant of what it is, is turned into a slave of bodies of strange form, in sorrow, bearing the body like a weight, not as one who dominates, but as one dominated."^{151 152 153}
But now we can see what the return journey should be, described in clear words by the Corpus Hermecicumr' once separated from the irrational nature the Soul passes back up through the planetary spheres, "divesting itself" of whatever pertains to each of them, surmounting them, renewing the audacity of transcending the Lords of Destiny who had brought it to its fall in the first place; and so arriving, "cloaked in its sole power,” at the tighch stage, whose symbol is the region of the fixed stars, called the sphere of "identity” or "being in itself” - KaO’ cavOd—in contrast to the spheres overcome, which are called those of "alteration” or "difference’'—KCttd to enjpov There, beyond the Seven, is the place of "those who are,”^ft those who have stopped "becom­ing.” It is at that point that we reach the possession of the transcendent Knowledge. It Is the moment of "birth according to essence”—fj oixTiroSeg yevccng—and "becoming a god.” One is transformed into those beings -be­comes them. Once "necessity," which rules the lower spheres, has been iden­tified with the current of the Waters, the symbols of this realization will be the figures of those who have been "saved from the waters,’’ those who can "walk on the water,’’¹⁵⁴ those who have crossed the "sea” or the "stream” (and