Symbols ana a

^ Incroicus apcrcas, §3.

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^ In Stobaeus, Flnr., 4.107 According to the Corpus tkrmericum (22.3), man has the hope ot immor­tality. It is said that not all human snub are immortal, but only those that become da/mons (10 7, 19) The decisive thing is their level of identification with the latter. Pythagoras would have admitted that "the soul in some cases can become mortal, when it allows itself to be dominated by the Erinyes, rhat is, by the passions—and makes itself immortal again when freed of the same—which are passions again” (Hippolytus, Philnsoph umciu, 6 26).

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- As for Christianity in its less popular forms, it presents an aspccr of rhe rragic doctrine of salvation, which to some extent preserves an echo of the ancient truth: the idea—pushed to extremes hy Luther and Calvin that man on earth stands at the crossroads between Salvation and eternal damnation. Tills point of view, if lived intensely and coherently, could create the conditions for liberation at the moment of death or in post-mortem states. (Cf. Evola, The Yoga, of Power and The Doctrine of rhe Awakening.) Among authentically Traditional forms, there is an especially esoteric Taoism, which has professed most clearly the doctrine of conditional immortality and the only one possible. See the introductory essay to our edition oi the Tao re Ching ot Lao-tzu, ! lihrn del principio della sua azione (Milan, 1959),

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EnneatL. 1.2.7; 1.2.6.

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^From die point of view of the profane disciplines it is expressed rhuslv in an Arab alchemical text: "He who knows this [our] Science, even superficially, and who deserves to be one of its adepts, is superior even ro those, spirits who are the most distinguished in all the other sciences. In fact, any man instructed in any science whatsoever, who has never consecrated a part of his time to the study of even one ol rhe principles ol the Work, in theory or in practice, possesses an absolutely inferior intellectual education. The most he can do is to align words, combine phrases and definitions from his imagination, and ro investigate things that have no existence of their own, but which he still believes exist outside himself" (Livre du mcrcure occidental, CMA. 3:2l4). Even Aristotle, although considered "the most brilliant of non luminous beings," could not have compared himself to those beings who have reached the incorporeal state (Syrian rexts, CMA, 2:264). And in the Corpus Hermericum (16.2) it is said: "The Greeks, O King, have new' kinds of language, to carry on arguments, and their philosophy is a buzz, of words. We, however, do not use words, but the great voice of things."

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^This is what the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung has done systematically in his work, Psychology and Alchemy, On the basis of the "unconscious," of "projections ot the unconscious" and the like.

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^a Flamel, Dcsir desire, §6.

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^ Ibid.

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^ Scndivogius, De sulphate, 157. 171, 1%, 219

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