CONTEMPLATE THE GALLOPING horse. Never does he change into a lion, although if a lion feasts on a horse the vanquished reappears bearing the likeness and silhouette of the victor. So is each substance ultimately capable of transfiguration. But while we restrict the hand to four necessary fingers, we ascribe to our succession multiple ways.
HAS NOT EACH herb been offered a profile corresponding to its essence? Certainly. And as these lineaments concur with what that herb is, so must the exterior physiognomy of each man approximate the condition of his interiority and make up a name more fundamental to him than his own, so that one might be called lark, goat, wolf or hedgehog. By stance and by carriage, upon timbre or balance of voice, by the resonance of laughter or from the passion of his stride—whether he walk with redoubled arrogance or timorous with doubt—we may assess his spirit as close as we scale the maturation of an elk by the size and complexity and thrust of its antlers, or as we deduce the private medicinalities of blossoms, nuts and legumes through odor, aspect or taste. Each discloses what he is. Who could label a fox a sheep? Who would take the hovering kestrel for a turtle dove? Each proceeds to his disposition like the creeping crocodile which cannot turn its head.
NOW IF A Prince elects to build a city he will construct moats and towers and passages and markets and citadels and fountains and everything else to agree with his design. Well, if a man is able to do this, think what marvels nature can accomplish. Is it not true that nature cripples one man, blinds the next, and makes another simple? Yes. But why? Because of a pattern to which he must contribute, hence no disproportion may ensue. So we understand how nature will create what she anticipates. What was destined for Blackness will be tinged by that color, thus with every hue and countenance, as the nettle’s purpose is to sting, or what is intended to purge will be an equisetum, or that which polishes and smoothes will be made into a smiris. Things are given their signature that we know to what end each was devised.
IT IS CLEAR how animate or inanimate things subsist with equal dignity, not one reigns supreme. Because our globe is transient and full of darkness must it be decried as inferior to the sun? No. Are sublunar unities less than those fixed in the firmament? Or what of the Spider? Was he not made equivalent to the Perch? Each entity controls an empire of its own.
LISTEN. WHAT SHOULD the Son obtain from his Mother and Father to make him proud? How does he think himself more than they? Do not his qualities succeed from them? Look to his entirety. What is he save a grumbling stomach led by a grasping brain—troubled, helpless, naked underneath his first cloak—governed by the gnomon’s journey which mocks his passage across a dial. Yet we hear many complain how our God has fabricked the world. Unlike phlegmatic animals, these will be asked before a Throne to render accounts.
WELL, SINCE OUR Lord comprehends all, humanity inherits His indefectible complement of knowledge, and as nothing might be found in humanity, nor any propension in which there is not a small facet of divinity to be registered, so shall a man complete himself by gazing upon himself. But at length every man must look up toward that image whose likeness he is, whose resemblance he should adore and whose superiority he is expected to recapitulate, just as the lodestone consummates itself among mineral.
NOW WE HEAR that Saints will not carry out their existence because they disdain idolatry and because of the simulacra that men carve, therefore they do not live adjacent to us. And we contend that our thoughts must supersede our images, which must be our highest ideal. And the higher that we rise to express ourselves, so shall what we have chosen to think. And if we adhere to this we are not apt to be disappointed in spite of vicissitude, but if we would subsist without it then we will hurry off by ourselves on some fatuous search which resembles dreaming. We know how Jacob went to sleep beside the Ladder, which symbolizes divinity within reach. And we are appointed to wake at a propitious hour.
WE HAVE BEEN instructed by the author of Novum Organum how cosmic structures shall remain inaccessible to apprehension through mortal sensibility, which provides as it does twelve thousand ambiguous paths, similitudes, complex windings or deceptive regressions and knots of nature, while the credulous mind, being unable to distinguish truth from egregious perversion, does but misconstrue to compound and defraud our innocence.
RABBI BEN JOCHAI asserts that the unequivocal presence of Man affirms the validity of all things apparent in heaven or upon earth, because nothing could exist before the human prototype. Matter subsists by us, within us. And this seems demonstrable, since without us who could imagine a world? Who should inhabit the uncircumscribed court of memory?
WE ARE TOLD that Man may be likened to an imperfect embryo which grows vulnerable to delusions of sense and phantasy until it has been rectified, neglecting every encumbrance. This we regard as the comprehending whole of alchymic law: to incite or seduce all men from disproportionate sensibles toward immanent coherence. Upon this philosophical premise and by this path we approach Heaven’s Gate.
SUPPOSE WE GIVE up our tenement, what is morality’s foundation? From the cabbalistic book of Zohar we learn that when a soul undertakes to visit earth but fails to acquire the knowledge for which it descended, so that its signature is obliterated, it occupies a subordinate body until purified by repetitious and cognitive experience. Then this must be
