33. The Order and the Teaching
FOURTH STAGE – EPIPHANY
The Adept -- The Woman Initiate -- Love and Marriage
With Pythagoras we have reached the summit of ancient initiation. From this summit, earth appears in deep shadow like a dying star. From above, sidereal perspectives open and like a marvelous unity the Epiphany of the Universe unfolds.59 But the purpose of the teaching was not to absorb man in contemplation or ecstasy. The master had walked with his disciples in the measureless regions of the cosmos; he had plunged with them into the depths of the Invisible. From this awesome journey the true initiates were to return to earth better, stronger and more suited for the tests of life than before.
The initiation of the intelligence was to be followed by that of the will, the most difficult of all. For now it was for the disciple to cause truth to descend into the depths of his being, to apply it in his daily life. To attain this, according to Pythagoras it was necessary to bring together three perfections: to realize truth in the intellect, virtue in the soul and purity in the body. A wise hygiene and temperate continence was to preserve corporeal purity. This was required not as an end, but as a means. All bodily excess leaves a trace, a stain, as it were, in the astral body, the living organism of the soul, and also in the spirit. For the astral body contributes to all the deeds of the physical body, in fact, it effects them since without it the material body is an inert mass. It is necessary, therefore, for the body to be pure in order that the soul also may be pure. Therefore, in the constant light of intelligence the soul must acquire courage, abnegation, devotion and faith -- in short, virtue, and make of the latter a second nature which substitutes for the first. Finally, it is necessary for the intellect to attain the wisdom to distinguish good and evil in everything, and to see God in the smallest of beings as well as in the totality of worlds.
At this height man becomes an "adept," and if he is able to summon sufficient energy, he enters into possession of new faculties and powers. The inner senses of the soul open and will radiate into the outer faculties. His bodily forces, penetrated by the effluvia of his astral nature, electrified by his will, acquire a seemingly miraculous power. In certain instances he is able to heal the sick by the laying on of hands, or by his presence alone. Often he reads the thoughts of men at a single glance. Sometimes in the waking state he sees events which are taking place afar off.60 From a distance, through the concentration of thought and will, he acts upon persons who are attached to him by bonds of personal sympathy, causing his image to appear to them as though his astral body could be transported outside his physical body. Finally, the adept feels himself surrounded and protected by invisible, higher, luminous Beings who lend him their strength and help him in his mission.
Rare are the adepts; rarer still are those who attain this power. Greece knew but three: Orpheus, at the dawn of Hellenism; Pythagoras, at its height; Apollonius of Tyana, in its decline. Orpheus was the great inspired one, the great initiator of Greek religion; Pythagoras, the organizer of esoteric science and the philosophy of the Schools; Apollonius, the Stoic moralist and the popular magician of the period of decadence. But in all three the divine fire shines; their spirits are aflame for the well-being of souls, their undaunted energy is clothed with gentleness and serenity. But one must not come too close to those great, calm countenances. One feels the furnace of ardent but eternally controlled will burning underneath.
Pythagoras represents an adept of the first rank who is most accessible to the modern mind. But he himself could not, nor did he pretend to make perfect adepts of his disciples. A great age always has a great inspirer at its inception. His disciples and their pupils form the magnetic chain which spreads his thought through the world. At the fourth stage of initiation Pythagoras therefore contented himself with teaching his faithful ones the application of his doctrines in life. For "Epiphany," seen from a higher viewpoint, provided a collection of deep and regenerating attitudes toward earthly things.
The origin of good and evil remains an incomprehensible mystery for one who has not taken into account the origin and end of things. A morality which does not consider the supreme destinies of man will be only utilitarian and very imperfect. Moreover, real human freedom does not exist for those who are slaves of their passions, and it rightfully does not exist for those who do not believe in the soul or in God, those for whom life is a lightning bolt between two vacuums. The first live in bondage to the soul, chained by passions; the second, in bondage to the intellect limited to the physical world. This is not true for the religious man, for the true philosopher, and certainly not for the initiate, who recognized truth in the threefoldness of his being.
In order to understand the origin of good and evil, the initiate looks at the three worlds with the eye of the spirit. He sees the dark world of matter and animality where ineluctable Destiny reigns. He sees the luminous world of the Spirit, which for us is the invisible world, the great hierarchy of freed souls where divine law reigns. These freed souls are Providence in action. Between the two he sees mankind rooted in the natural world on the one hand and touching the summits of the divine world on the other. The genius of humanity is Freedom, for from the moment man perceives truth and error, he is free to choose between them. He is at liberty to unite with Providence in fulfilling truth, or to fall under the law of Fate by following falsehood. Evil causes man to descend toward the fatality of matter; Good causes him to climb toward the divine law of Spirit. Man's real destiny is forever to climb higher by his own effort. But in order to do this, he must also be free to descend again.
The scope of freedom widens to the infinitely great as one ascends; it shrinks to the infinitely small as one descends. The higher one climbs, the freer one becomes; the more one enters into the light, the more one acquires strength for good. The more one descends, the more one becomes a slave, because each fall into evil weakens one's understanding of truth and one's capacity for doing good. Therefore, destiny reigns over the past, Freedom, over the future, and Providence, over both. Providence rules over the ever-existing present, which can be called Eternity.61
From the combined action of Destiny, Freedom and Providence come innumerable destinies, hells and paradises of souls. Evil, being a lack of accord with divine law, is not the work of God but of man. It has only a relative, illusory, temporal existence. Good, since it is in accord with divine law, has a real, eternal existence. The priests of Delphi and Eleusis, as well as the philosopher-initiates never wished to reveal these profound ideas to the people, for the latter would have understood them only imperfectly and would have abused them. In the Mysteries this doctrine was symbolically represented by the dismemberment of Dionysus, thus hiding what were called "the sufferings of God" beneath an impenetrable veil for the uninitiated.
Another major factor in social and political relationships is the inequality of human conditions. The spectacle of evil and pain is something frightening in itself. In addition, the distribution of these two, apparently arbitrary and unjust, is the source of all hatreds, revolts and denials. Here again as in the problem of the origin of good and evil, esoteric wisdom brings into our earthly darkness its sovereign light of peace and hope. As a matter of fact, the diversity of souls, conditions and destinies cannot be justified except by the plurality of existences, and by the teaching of reincarnation. If a man is born for the first time into this life, how can one explain the numberless evils which seem to fall upon him? How can one believe that there is eternal justice, when some men are born into a condition which brings misery and humiliation while others are born into good fortune and live happily? However, if it is true that we have lived previous lives, that we shall live still others after death, that over all these existences rules the law of recurrence and repercussion, then the differences of soul, of condition and of destiny are but the effects of former lives and represent the manifold applications of this law. Differences in human conditions stem from an unwise use of freedom in preceding lives, while differences in human intelligence arise from the fact that men go through earth existences in highly varying stages of evolution, extending all the way from the primitive conditions of backward peoples to the angelic states of saints and even to the divine royalty of genius.
In reality, earth resembles a boat, and all of us who inhabit it are travelers who come from far countries and are scattered to all points of the horizon. The teaching of reincarnation gives a reason for existence in line with justice and eternal logic. It explains the cause of the most frightening evil as well as the most desirable happiness. All physical and moral suffering, all happiness and unhappiness, will appear in their manifold aspects as the natural and wise fruits of the instincts and actions, the mistakes and virtues of a long past. For in its hidden depths the soul preserves all that it accumulates in its various earth lives. Lysis expresses this truth under a veil in his Golden Verses:
You will see that the evils which devour men
Are the fruit of their choice; and that these unhappy ones
Seek far from them the good whose source they bear.Far from weakening the sentiment of fraternity and human solidarity, the teaching of reincarnation can but reinforce it. We owe help, sympathy and charity to all, for all of us are of the same human race, though at various stages of development. All suffering is sacred, for pain is the crucible of souls. All sympathy is divine, for it makes us feel the invisible chain which links all worlds. The virtue of grief is the reason of genius. Indeed, sages and saints, prophets and divine creators shine with a more supernal beauty for those who know that they too have come out of universal evolution. How many lives, how many victories were required for this power which amazes us? From what heavens already traversed does this inborn light of genius come? We do not know. But these lives have been, and these heavens exist. Therefore the conscience of nations is not mistaken, the prophets did not lie when they called men the sons of God, the ambassadors of the Most High. For their mission is willed by eternal Truth; invisible legions protect them, and in them speaks the living Word!
Among men is a diversity which comes from the primitive essence of individuals. Another, as has been said, arises from the degree of spiritual evolution which men have attained. From the latter point of view one recognizes that men can be grouped in four categories, comprising all subdivisions and variations:
1st. For the great majority of men, the will acts mainly in the body. Therefore they can be called instinctive persons. Their activity is not only physical, but also includes the exercise and development of their intelligence in this world. Hence they have a genius for commerce and industry.
2nd. At the second stage of human development the will and consciousness reside in the soul, that is, in sensitivity reacted upon by intelligence, which constitutes understanding. These are the spirited or passionate persons. By temperament they are adapted to be soldiers, artists or poets. The great majority of men of letters and scientists are of this type, for they live in relative ideas, modified by passions or bound by a limited horizon without having risen to the pure idea or universality.
3rd. In a third class of much rarer men the will has acquired the habit of acting principally in the pure intellect. It works to free intelligence from the tyranny of passions and limitations. This gives all their concepts the character of universality. These are the intellectuals. These men are the hero-martyrs, the poets of the first rank and above all, the true philosophers and sages, who, according to Pythagoras and Plato, should govern humanity. In these men passion is not extinct, for without passion nothing is done. Passion constitutes the fire and electricity of the moral world. However, among these men the passions have become the servants of intelligence, while in the second category, the intelligence is frequently the servant of the passions.
4th. The highest human ideal is realized by the fourth group of men. To the majestic control of soul and instincts by intelligence, they have added dominion over all their being. Through the mastery and control of all their faculties they exercise the great mastery. They have brought about a unity in the human threefoldness. Thanks to this marvelous concentration of all the powers of life, their will acquires an almost unlimited strength, an all-pervading, creative magic. These men have had various names in history. They are the archetypal men, the adepts, the great initiates, the sublime geniuses who transform humanity. They are extremely rare in history; Providence dispenses them upon earth at long intervals of time, like stars in the sky.62
It is evident that this last category of human beings is beyond rule or classification. But a constitution of human society which does not take into account the first three categories, which does not provide each of them with its normal life and the necessary means of developing, is merely external and is not organic. It is evident that in a primitive age, which probably dates from Vedic times, the Brahmans of India established the division of society into castes on the threefold principle. But with time this highly just and fruitful division changed into priestly and aristocratic privilege. The principle of vocation and initiation gave way to that of heredity. The closed castes ended by becoming petrified, and the irremediable decadence of India followed.
Under the reigns of all the Pharaohs, Egypt preserved the threefold constitution with its open and mobile castes. The principle of initiation applied to the priesthood, and that of examination to all civil and military functionaries; this arrangement continued for five to six thousand years without changing its form. As for Greece, its volatile temperament caused it to pass rapidly from aristocracy to democracy, from democracy to tyranny. It revolved in this vicious circle like a sick person who goes from fever to lethargy, only to return to fever. Perhaps it needed this stimulus in order to produce its unique work: the translation of the profound but obscure wisdom of the Orient into a clear, universal language, the creation of the Beautiful through art, and the establishment of exoteric, rational science following secret, intuitional initiation. Greece also owed her religious organization and her highest inspirations to this principle of initiation. Socially and politically speaking, it can be said that she always lived in the provisional and in the excessive. In his capacity as an adept, from the heights of initiation, Pythagoras understood the eternal principles which rule society, and pursued the plan of a great reform according to these truths. We shall see how he and his school were shipwrecked in the storms of democracy.
From the pure summits of his teaching the life of worlds unfolds in harmony with the rhythms of eternity. What a splendid Epiphany! But in the magic rays of the unveiled firmament, earth, humanity and life also reveal their hidden depths to us. One must find the infinitely great in the infinitely small in order to feel the presence of God. This is what the disciples of Pythagoras experienced when, as the crown of his teaching, their master showed them how eternal truth is manifest in the union of man and woman in marriage. They were about to find in the very heart of life the beauty of the sacred numbers which they had heard and viewed in Infinity, and God would shine forth for them out of the great mysteries of the sexes and of love.
Antiquity understood a major truth which the succeeding ages have all too greatly misunderstood. In order to fulfill her functions of wife and mother, woman needs instruction, a special initiation. Hence purely feminine initiation, that is, one entirely reserved for women, existed in India in Vedic times, and the woman was the priestess at the domestic altar. In Egypt this initiation dates back to the Mysteries of Isis. Orpheus organized it in Greece. Until the extermination of paganism it flourished in the Dionysian Mysteries as well as in the temples of Juno, Diana, Minerva and Ceres. It consisted in symbolic rites, ceremonies, nocturnal festivals and in special teaching given by the older priestesses or by the high priest, and dealt with the most intimate things of conjugal life. Advice and rules concerning the relationship between the sexes as well as information on times of the year and of each month favorable to successful conception were given. The greatest importance was placed upon physical and moral hygiene of the woman during pregnancy so that the sacred work, the creation of the child, might be accomplished according to divine laws. In brief, the science of conjugal life and the art of maternity were taught. The latter extended far beyond the birth of the child.
Until seven years of age, the children remained in the gyneceum, which the husband did not enter, under the exclusive care of the mother. The wisdom of antiquity considered the child to be a delicate plant which needs the arm of maternal environment in order not to become stunted. It was believed that the father would deform the child. Therefore in order to cause it to unfold properly the kisses and caresses of the mother were considered necessary. The powerful, enveloping love of woman is needed to defend the soul, frightened by the attacks of external life. Because in full consciousness she fulfilled these lofty functions considered divine by antiquity, woman was really the priestess of the family, the guardian of the sacred fire of life, the Vesta of the hearth. Feminine initiation therefore can be considered the true cause of the beauty of the race, of the power of generation, the continuance of families in ancient Greece and Rome.
By establishing a section for women in his institute, Pythagoras only refined and intensified what had existed before him. Through him, along with the rites and precepts, the woman initiates received the supreme principles of their function. Thus he gave to those who were worthy the consciousness of their role. He revealed to them the transfiguration of love in perfect marriage, in other words, the interpenetration of two souls at the very center of life and truth. In his power, man is the representative of principle and of creative mind. Woman personifies nature in its plastic force, in its marvelous earthly and divine achievements. Therefore, when these two beings succeed in entering into one another completely, into body, soul and spirit, they will form by themselves a miniature of the universe.
But in order to believe in God, woman needs to see Him living in man. For this reason, man must be initiated. Man alone, through his profound knowledge of life and his creative will, can fertilize the feminine soul, thus transforming it through the divine ideal. And the beloved woman transmits this ideal to him, multiplied in her vibrant thoughts, in her subtle sensations, in her profound insights. She transmits to him his image, transfigured by enthusiasm, because she becomes his ideal. For she brings this about through the power of love in her own soul. Through her his ideal becomes alive and visible; it becomes flesh and blood. Man creates through desire and will; woman physically and spiritually generates through love.
In her role as lover, wife, mother, or inspired one, woman is no less great, and is even more divine than man. For to love is to forget. Woman, forgetting herself, lost in her love, is always sublime. In this forgetfulness she finds her celestial rebirth, her crown of life, the immortal radiation of her being.
Love has reigned as master in literature for two centuries. This is not the purely sensual love which lights up at the beauty of the body, as with the ancient poets; neither is it the tasteless cult of an abstract, conventional ideal, as in the Middle Ages. No, this is love both sensual and psychic which, released in full freedom and in complete individual fantasy, gives itself unbounded expression.
Frequently the two sexes make war on one another, even in love. This takes the form of a revolt of woman against the egotism and brutality of man, the disdain of man for woman's infidelity. Vanity, expressing itself in cries of flesh, and powerless rage of the victims of pleasure, makes them slaves of debauchery. Here, profound passions and attractions become all the more powerful when they are bettered by the worldly conventions of social institutions. Hence those loves, filled with tempest, moral collapse and tragic catastrophe, around which the modern novel and drama revolve almost exclusively.
Weary, finding God neither in science nor in religion, man seeks Him desperately in woman. And he does well, but it is only through the initiation into the great truths that he will find God in her, and she will find God in him. Between these souls who know neither each other nor themselves, who sometimes leave one another with curses, there is a deep thirst to penetrate one another and to find in this fusion impossible happiness. In spite of the aberrations and outbursts which result, this desperate search is necessary; it comes from a divine unconsciousness. It will be a vital point in the rebuilding of the future. For when man and woman have found each other through deep love and initiation, their union will be a radiating and creative power par excellence.
Psychic love, the love-passion of the soul, has entered literature comparatively recently, and through it, universal consciousness. But it has its origin in ancient initiation. If Greek literature scarcely lets the existence of psychic love be suspected, this is due to the fact that it was a profound secret of the Mysteries. Nevertheless, religious and philosophical tradition has preserved the trace of the initiate woman. Behind official poetry and philosophy a few female forms appear, half-veiled but luminous. We already know the Pythoness Theoclea who inspired Pythagoras; later will come the priestess Corinne, the often successful rival of Pindar, himself the most initiated of the Greek lyricists; finally, the mysterious Diotime appears in Plato's Banquet to give the supreme revelation of love.
Beside these exceptional roles, the Greek woman exercised her function as a veritable priestess in the home and in the gyneceum. Those heroes, artists and poets whose songs, works in marble and sublime deeds we admire, were rightly her own creation. It was she who conceived them in the mystery of love, who molded them in her womb with the desire for beauty, who caused them to unfold by nestling them under her maternal wings. In addition, for a man and a woman who are truly initiated, the creation of the child has an infinitely more beautiful meaning, a greater import than otherwise. When father and mother know that the soul of the child exists before its earthly birth, conception becomes a sacred act, the call of a soul to incarnation. Between the incarnated soul and the mother is almost always a great degree of similarity. As evil, perverse women attract demonic spirits, tender mothers attract divine spirits.
Is this invisible soul which one awaits and which will come and go so mysteriously and so certainly, not a thing divine? Its birth, its imprisonment in flesh, will be a painful thing, for between it and the heaven it has left behind, a crude veil is interposed. If it ceases to remember, it will suffer no less! And sacred and divine is the task of the mother, who must create for it a new home, must make its prison livable, its trial easier to bear.
Thus, the teaching of Pythagoras which had begun in the depths of the Absolute with the divine Trinity, ended in the very center of life with the human trinity. In the father, mother and child, the initiate now knew how to recognize Spirit, Soul and Heart of the living Universe. For him this last initiation constituted the foundation of a social work conceived in all the sublimity and beauty of the ideal, -- a creation to which each initiate was to bring a building-stone.
Notes for this chapter:
54. In transcendent mathematics, it is demonstrated algebraically that Zero multiplied by Infinity is equal to One. Zero, in the order of absolute ideas, means indeterminate Being. The Infinite, the Eternal in the language of the temples, was indicated by a circle or by a serpent biting its tail, which meant the Infinite moving itself. And, from the moment Infinity becomes determined, it produces all the numbers it contains in its great unity and which it governs in perfect harmony.
This is the transcendent meaning of the first problem of the Pythagorean theogony, the reason which brings it about that the great Monad contains all the small ones, and that all numbers originate from the great Unity in movement.
55. This doctrine is identical with that of the initiate St. Paul, who speaks of the spiritual body. (See Rudolf Steiner: The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul -- Ed.)
56. One must place Fabre d'Olivet (Golden Verses of Pythagoras) in the first rank of these. This living concept of the forces of the universe permeating it from top to bottom has nothing to do with the empty speculations of the pure metaphysicians, for example, thesis, antithesis and synthesis of Hegel, which are simply intellectual exercises.
57. Certain strange definitions in the form of metaphors which have been transmitted to us and which come from the secret teaching of the master, allow one to surmise the grandiose concept that Pythagoras had of the Cosmos. Speaking of the constellations, he called the Great and Little Dipper: the hands of Rea-Kybele. Now, Rea-Kybele esoterically means astral light returning, the divine wife of the universal fire, or creative spirit which, in concentrating in the solar systems, attracts the non-material essences of beings, grasps them, and causes them to enter the cycle of lives. He also called the planets the Dogs of Proserpine. This unusual expression has no meaning other than an esoteric one. Prosperpine, the goddess of souls, was present at their incarnation into matter. Pythagoras therefore called the planets Dogs of Proserpine because they keep the incarnated souls as the mythological Cerberus guards souls in hell.
58. The law is called Karma by the Brahmans and Buddhists. (See Rudolf Steiner: The Manifestations of Karma, 1910. -- Ed.)
59. The Epiphany or vision from above; the autopsy, or direct view; the theophany, or manifestation of God, are so many correlative ideas and expressions which indicate the state of perfection in which the initiate, having joined his soul to God, contemplates complete Truth.
60. We shall cite two famous absolutely authentic events of this kind. The first took place in Antiquity, and the hero is the famous philosopher-magician, Apollonius of Tyana.
The Second-sight of Apollonius of Tyana. "While these things (the assassination of the Emperor Domitian) were taking place in Rome, Apollonius saw them at Ephesus. Domitian was attacked by Clement around noontime; the same day at the same hour, Apollonius was making a speech in the gardens near the Xystes. Suddenly he lowered his voice a little, as if he had been gripped by a sudden fright. He continued his speech, but his language did not have its usual power, as happens with those who speak while thinking of something else. Then he became silent, like those who have lost the train of their thought. He cast terrified glances toward the earth, moved three or four steps forward, and cried out, 'Kill the tyrant!' One would have said that he saw, not the reflected image of the event as in a mirror, but the event itself in all its reality. The Ephesians (for all Ephesus went to hear Apollonius' speeches) were struck with amazement. Apollonius stopped, like a man who waits to see the outcome of an uncertain event. Finally he cried out, 'Be of good cheer, Ephesians, the tyrant was killed today! What am I saying? -- Today? By Minerva! He was killed at the very instant I interrupted myself!' The Ephesians thought that Apollonius had lost his mind; they indeed hoped that he had told the truth, nevertheless they feared that some danger would result for him from this discourse . . . But soon messengers came to announce the good news and gave testimony in favor of Apollonius' science: for the murder of the tyrant, the day it was consummated, the hour of noon, the author of the murder whom Apollonius had encouraged, -- all these details were in perfect agreement with those the gods had shown him the day of his speech to the Ephesians." -- Life of Apollonius by Philostratus. (See Emil Bock, The Three Years for an account of Apollonius of Tyana -- Ed.)
The Second-sight of Swedenborg: The second event refers to the greatest seer of modern times. One can have reservations regarding the objective reality of Swedenborg's vision, but one cannot doubt his second-sight, attested to by a host of facts. The vision that Swedenborg had at thirty leagues' distance from the fire of Stockholm created an uproar in the second half of the eighteenth century. The famous German philosopher, Kant had an inquiry made by a friend at Gothenburg in Sweden, the city where the event took place, and this is what he writes about it to one of his friends:
"The following occurrence appears to me to have the greatest weight of proof, and to place the assertion respecting Swedenborg's extraordinary gift beyond all possibility of doubt. In the year 1759, toward the end of September, on Saturday, at four o'clock in the afternoon, Swedenborg arrived at Gothenburg from England, when Mr. William Castel invited him to his house, together with a party of fifteen persons. About six o'clock, Swedenborg went out and returned to the company quite pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm, at the Södermalm (Gothenburg is about 50 German miles -- about 500 English -- from Stockholm), and that it was spreading very fast. He was restless and went out often. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock, after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, 'Thank God! The fire is extinguished, the third door from my house.' The news occasioned great commotion throughout the whole city, but particularly amongst the company in which he was. It was announced to the governor the same evening. On Sunday morning, Swedenborg was summoned to the governor, who questioned him concerning the disaster. Swedenborg described the fire precisely, how it had begun, in what manner it had ceased, and how long it had continued. On the same day the news spread through the city, and as the governor had thought it worthy of attention, the consternation was considerably increased, because many were in trouble on account of their friends and property, which might have been involved in the disaster. On Monday evening a messenger arrived at Gothenburg, who was dispatched by the Board of Trade during the time of the fire. In the letters brought by him, the fire was described precisely in the manner stated by Swedenborg. On Tuesday morning the royal courier arrived at the governor's with the melancholy intelligence of the fire, of the loss which it had occasioned, and of the houses it had damaged and ruined, not in the least differing from that which Swedenborg had given at the very time when it happened; for the fire was extinguished at eight o'clock." -- Letter from Immanuel Kant to Charlotte von Knobloch, written at Königsburg. (Quoted in George Trobridge, Emanuel Swedenborg, Life and Teaching, page 197-8. -- Ed.)
61. This idea comes logically from the human and divine ternary, from the trinity of the Microcosm and Macrocosm which we have discussed in the preceding chapters. The metaphysical correlative of Destiny, Liberty and Providence has been admirably deduced by Fabre d'Olivet in his analysis of The Golden Verses of Pythagoras.
62. This classification of men corresponds to the four stages of Pythagorean initiation, forming the basis of all initiations up to that of the original Free Masons, who possessed a few bits of esoteric doctrine. (See Fabre d'Olivet, The Golden Verses of Pythagoras.)
34. The School and its Destiny