Symbols ana a

¹⁷ In Hippolytus. Philo.sophumena, n.16; ft. 15, 17
co be a repetition of the "heroic” adventure. Boehrne, after declaring that the hire of human life resides in the blood, speaks of a second blood that must be introduced into the choleric human blood and into the fire of death (created by the "Fall") in order to extinguish it.³¹⁵ All this must be connected to the "Red Lion’’ who is to be brought to exhaustion; with that ios or virus thar is a red rust, negatively speaking, that must be taken out of the copper; with the birth of the Son chat in a little while will acquire form and surpass the father (the operator who has produced him), breaking the igneous essence that is the head of the Serpent, and passing through the death by fire;³¹⁶ with the liberation of the "tenebrous spirit” full of vanity and softness which, "when it dominates the bodies, prevents them from receiving the whiteness";³¹⁷ with the greed of Mercury that it is necessary to destroy and of which it has been said: "The cleansing is an appetite that feeds on itself . . . and produces in the Four Elements [of man) an analogous spirk, with the boiling saltpeter whose principle is the humid element. "^1G
Thirty-Two
cbe be ar c aoo
cbe Liqbc
s in physiology, so in hermetism: the heart and the blood ate connected to one another, and the transform mations and evacuations of the blood are centralized in the heart. At the center of the elemental cross as at the center of the Body in the "white" work, the heart is where the "life-bestowing light of the Quintessence” appears.
Let us attend to Gichtel: "The Work takes place in the heart and here the gateway to the heavens [i.e., to the occult states] is most violently attacked. The soul seeks to withdraw its will from the outer constellation in order to turn to God at its center; abandoning all senses and passing through the eighth form of Fire [which lies beyond the lower septenary and hence marks the boundary between the natural exterior world and the intelligible inner world—see chapter 15], which requires a relentless effort, the sweating of blood [the 'Herculean task’ of ’separa­tion’], because the soul must now struggle against God [in order to maintain itself and not ’be dissolved’ in the light] and it must struggle at the same time against man [in order to overcome the human condition].’’³¹⁸ The same author says that "the life of the Soul rises out of the eternal inner fire,’’ which has its center in the heart and is swallowed up by "the fiery Dragon”; he speaks of a Holy Life of Light, hidden, inactive, and invisible to ordinary men, but when it is awakened it annuls
the dark Fire, producing in the innermost heart a spiritual light so bright that it breaks the chains forged by the ancient Dragon around the Solar principle.² This light, according to Gichtel, is ultimately related to Water and to the Woman, the Virgin, Sophia (- Wisdom), which "drags the Soul completely out of the Body and makes it cross a sea of fiery water,’’³ whose correspondence with Bernard of Treviso’s Sea of Blood, and with the symbol of the Red Sea, is obvious.
Also for the Cosmopolite, Water is found in the center of the heart of the symbolic metals.⁴ In the Book of Clemency the inner voice chat manifests as a revelatory vision declares "I am the light of thy pure and dazzling heart.’’⁵ And in the Corpus Hermeticum one is exhorted to be sober and "open the eyes of the heart, ”⁶ which can be compared to intellectual rebirth— vospdc y£vscng— the equiva­lent of the rebirth from the Water or from the Virgin and is completed in the awakening of the consciousness belonging to the "middle place” (see pages 82-83).
In any case, the agreement of the hermetic teachings on this point with that of other initiatic teachings is clear. In the Upanishads, for example, ft is said that the union of the two gods—the right-hand god, who is the flame, and the left-hand goddess, who is the light—into an androgyne is accomplished in an "ethereal space of the heart’’; wherein "the spirit maintained by knowledge, all light, all immor­tality,” by "the seer unseen, the knower unknown,” shines in man at the interior of the heart. For the heart is the dwelling place of the spirit, where—at the breaking of the chains of every bodily thing in the state of sleep—it becomes light itself.⁷ Purusha, the "Inner Man,” vigilant over the sleepers (the ''perennial guard”), the ^{319 320}
"intelligible, sleepless nature" is the true light and ambrosia: he who has beer extracted from the body like a dagger from its sheath, takes his "permanem dwelling place in the heart."^{321 322 323 324 325}
The relatonship established by this tradition between the seat of the heart as tht Dominator and to the "dike that contains the worlds within certain limits, so the^ do not fall back into chaos,’’³²⁶ is reflected in the qabalistic expression: "The heari in the organism is like a king at war.’’^{327 328} On the other hand, the association in the Qahalah, as in some Christian medieval manuscripts, between the heart and sym­bolic "palaces” or "temples,”¹¹ can throw light on the places wherever we find these same symbols used in the hermetic tradition.
We can also refer to the general traditional doctrine according to which at the moment of death, or mortal danger, or extreme terror, all the vita] energy diffusec tli rough out the body rushes to the heart, whose corona begins to radiate with £ supernatural light, through which the spirit "escapes.”³²⁹ This said, it is enough tc remember that in principle the process of initiation is the same process that ir others produces death. This reconfirms the link between the center of the heart anc the "place.” where the new development will occur, the place wherein the initiate will reach the "triumphal death” that wins immortality and recovers the possessior of the "Tree" and the "Woman.” Once the chains of the heart that "keep the unregenerated from seeing the light” have, been broken and contact has beer established with that for which the heart is a symbolic correspondence in the physical organism, an uprooting cakes place, a subtilization, a breakthrough, an illumination in the sensation of the blood by which is obtained that "spiritual blood,” without which, Artephius says, nothing is possible. It is the androgynous Mercury par excellence who, on the dry path, has the power of the "Living Watei to irrigate rhe earth and make it germinate."