Hilma af Klint: ‘Untitled’. Wikimedia Commons.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA is an excerpt from Louis Claude de Saint Martin‘s ‘The Spirit of Things’, volume 1, Chez Laran Imprimeur-Libraire, Paris 1800. Page 50 to 53. English translation from the original French by Via-HYGEIA. It is fascinating how much it echoes from its own tradition with Suhrawardi and his Ishraqi philosophy, especially theses two texts:  ‘On How And In What Order The Many Are Generated From The Truly One.’ and ‘Of Dazzling Flashes Of Light & The Descent Of The Sakina’.

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‘ The reason why God has produced millions of spirit-beings is that he could have in their sheer existence an image of his own creation (generation); because, without this, as we saw before, he would not know himself, because he proceeds only forwards him; also despite these uncountable mirrors that gather from all sides, around him, his universal rays, each of them according to its own particular property, he knows himself only in the product and its result and stands in his own center forever surrounded by his unfathomable magic.

The spirit-beings follow the same law. We only know the length of our thoughts only by the images that take birth in us, that spring from our center, and that, in the limits of their power, become sensible and comprehensible to us by their fertilizing meeting of their common potentialities. These images are the mirrors in which our spirit contemplates itself and acquires the knowledge of its own treasures. This is why the more we use our intellectual and moral faculties in their true ways, the more we acquire esteem and admiration for the nature of our being and consequently, the more we fulfill the supreme plan that invites us to help God to know himself in his products and results and that he only can do this in finding around him pure mirrors on which he can reflect his own rays.

This law of the mirrors is so much foundational, that it is not only the structures created by our own mind that help us to gather our images and reflect them; but all that which is surrounding us can fulfill this mission for us; therefore we look continuously for structures around us: This is what makes us devoted so passionately to the culture of arts and sciences and to the study of all these external objects that strike our eyes and that reflect us our own wisdom, like we reflect God’s wisdom. This is mostly why we like so much having a space in the heart and mind of our fellowmen, because we should find there mirrors that would magnify the intensity of ours and that help us more to achieve the main and sovereign object of our very own existence.

But if it is possible that we create in us and outside of us faithful mirrors of our potentialities and of our spiritual treasures and that are reflecting, according to their different measures, truth ‘s abundant richness, there can also be unfaithful mirrors that will repel it, like there is a void of mirrors that only make her cease appearing; this is what makes lighter men, imbeciles and the impious ones; therefore there are a few diverse species of opponent of the truth, amongst men: one is those who don’t make use of their thoughts; one other are those who use it but improperly; and these diverse classes are all at one of the extreme opposite of truth.

Finally, natural beings have also their mirrors to reflect the full frame of their faculties. This is the aim and the final object of all their generations and of this final reason is deriving the extreme fatherly and motherly love that would, otherwise know itself only in a hidden and dark way and would not have the proof of its virtual power nor the manifest demonstration of its existence; But it is only in reflecting the faculties of generation and conservations that the mirrors of the material and animal class limit themselves; this class has no mirrors that reflect to itself the characteristics of its wisdom and in which it can contemplate itself, like man is doing; it doesn’t need it because it has no works of wisdom to produce.

The progressive chain of mirrors, of which the order of things is made, lies entirely on this hierarchy of units that we have earlier established; because, at the likeness of the predominant unity, no class of beings can exist but only in the partial unity of its own powers and it is only by that each class of beings is used as a mirror and rest place for the immediate class that comes above her; because the whole unity is a mirror.

This is why the role of man was so important, because, if it is true that by maintaining himself in the harmony of his partial unity, he was becoming the mirror of the supreme and universal unity, he could ‘t lack, in ceasing maintaining himself in the harmony of his partial unity, ceasing being also the mirror and the resting place of the predominant unity; and at the same time, this mirror of man, in tarnishing, was severed to the chain of all the mirrors that were after him and making them tarnish also.

This is why also up to today, as the corporeal eye is deteriorating and darkening, he has no more connection with all the natural objects that surround him, all which are under his rule and are awaiting (expecting) from him care and nurturing and finally, their embellishment.”

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 French original 

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