Symbols ana a

kcy( “ opening and closing) brings us back to a well-known meaning: to open, or solve, is what happens to each contact when energies are released into the free state; to close, to fix (coagula)—and even more expressly, to fell, to kill, to decapitate—is to reseal, awakening the "nature that dominates and contains Na­ture," and arresting the return of the dampening power of chaos that would try to sweep away and drown out whatever has brought on the turmoil of awakening.⁷
In the hierarchy of the Seven, every "closing" also establishes a quality by means of which One is attracted automatically to the. next principle. For these interior experiences one could employ the image of a nucleus [or kernel) that lets the influence of a magnetic field in which it enters act upon it, allowing itself to be drawn into and identify with the nucleus, in turn, of the field—except that it detaches itself and becomes independent again once that identification is perfect. It then goes on to a higher force field in which the same phases are repeated: until it has traversed the entire hierarchy, fixating it and rescaling all the powers—powers that, in turn, have allowed into their dissolutions universal and nonhuman forms of vision and power—in the full possession of the recomposed corporeality.
At this point we return to the cipher language of dosing—exact quantities in mixtures" of active and passive, attraction and repulsion, abandon and mastery— the so-called science of balances, concerning which it has been taught: "If we could take a man, dismantle him in order to balance the natures in him and return him to a new existence, such a man would no longer be able to die"—moreover, "Once this equilibrium has been obtained, beings are exempt from change, no longer altered or modified.”⁸ It is the supreme stability of the Philosopher’s Stone, re­sponding to the command of the Arab alchemists: "Make ye immortal the bod­ies,’’⁴ which expresses the other nature's way of being: char of rhe no-longer-men.
Because of the equfvalance of "dissolve" and "elevate," of "coagulate" and
The work of extinguishing rhe re surer nr gushing forrh of chc warm with every contact is hermeti­cally re laced to Hercules' labor of killing the Hydra—whose name betrays its connection to that clement:- hacking off the immediately reborn heads chat are the ever-renewing trunk of desire, in rhe primordial energies; and also because seven are rhe heads sometimes attributed ro rhe Hydra. Before this rebirth—says Della Riviera (Mondo magico, 103)—"stands the unconquerecl Hero, and to extinguish its origin [as water) by the fire of Nature, he conquers it; rhat is, he transmures the body lluid into Earth, though still imperfect,'' An equivalent enterprise is the killing of Gervon. who ass times three forms, which it is necessary to conquer in order to be able to take away the "flock”- forms chat correspond in the hermetic interpretation to the three critical points—separation, trial by Water, and trial by hire— which, moreover, are related to the three sites: head, breast, and trunk (see page 82ff.). These are. also lound in Hindu esoterieism, which speaks of the three "knots" localized in the basal, cardial, and frontal centers (muladhara, anahata, ajna), where the force that tries to arrest the initiation process is particu­larly difficult to overcome (cf. Evola, The Yoga of Power, 173)