3 How Everything Was Born

Chapter outline

The first water is heated and putrefied by its indwelling spirit.

One matter unfolds into the two principles, three chymical modes, four elements and a fifth perfected state.

The elements emerge in ordered degrees of subtlety and coarseness.

Each created realm receives both particular reproductive power and a share in universal generation.

Heavenly influx and earthly efflux continually renew a common seed.

What has been said establishes that primordial water-vapour, or water and spirit, is, after God, the first matter of every single thing in this great, wide world. This twofold vapour thickened into water. Through the invisible spirit implanted within it, the water became lukewarm, warm, heated and hot, until it began to work within itself, rise, grow viscous and make bubbles, ferment, putrefy and stink. At first this water was bright and clear, transparent and pure, without any particular taste or smell, like spring water. But through its active spirit it became turbid, gave birth to an earth from itself, and emitted a putrid, dead smell. It divided into different parts: a subtle spiritual part, a part half spiritual and half bodily, and a wholly bodily part. At first it was one and two. Now it is one, two and three, and also four and five. It was one insofar as it appeared a simple water; two insofar as it was water concealing its spirit within itself; three when it passed into the volatile, the half-volatile and half-fixed, and the fixed—in the chymists’ terms, volatile, acid and alkali; spirit, soul and body. Four when it divided into the four elements: fire or heaven, air, water and earth. Five when it presented itself for perfection into something indestructible, beyond destructible elemental being. Once this water has reached the term of its putrefaction, one subtle part after another is separated, down to the coarsest, according to its own order and rule, without compulsion. Necessarily the subtle rises before the coarse, the coarse before the coarsest, the thin before the thick, and the thick before the thickest. Everything proceeds as children learn the degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative.

From the subtlest part God made heaven and its inhabitants, because it was the subtlest, clearest, purest and most spirit-filled part, full of life and soul: the most vividly fiery, fruitful and mobile. From the next part, one degree below it, God made the firmament; next comes air, then water, and then earth. Thus God separated one thing after another, gave them names and the power to act, and commanded each to bring forth its like. All this was through a power implanted by the divine word and an impressed reproductive virtue, as of an immortal seed; in accordance with it, he enjoined upon them the word of multiplication as his command, and so forth. Heaven was to bring forth its inhabitants and stars, air its meteors, water its fish, and earth its plants, animals and ores. God gave each of these separated parts not only a power of multiplication specific to its kind but also an individual virtue, so that every particular thing receiving its being within these separated parts should possess this reproductive power. God also expressly willed that together they should generate a common, universal seed and sperm. He did so because he saw that the primordial chaotic water was now divided and could never come together into one again, as it had been at the beginning, without destroying all created things.

He therefore commanded all these four—heaven or fire, air, water and earth—to bring forth a seed from their centre. Their fourfold number was to come together into one and pour forth a single common seed for the generation, preservation, destruction and regeneration of all things. To accomplish this he implanted in every part and thing its agent and patient, through which each thing, in continual movement, is brought to lukewarmness and from lukewarmness to heat. This heating causes every thing to give off vapour and sweat out whatever surplus its body can spare. This sweat is generally called influence when it comes from above and efflux when it comes from below. In its generating matter, however, this vapour becomes water. That water is likewise twofold and can take the place of the first primordial water, because it comes from that same primordiality and has the same shape, form, effect and virtue, as will be explained in detail below. From this we can see and conclude that God not only generates a universal seed, the sperm of the entire universe, but has also commanded heaven, air, water and earth each to have its own. Again, in the most beautiful order, he has commanded every individual creature of heaven, air, water and earth to have its own seed and bring forth its like, so that the power of multiplication should be spread throughout the universe.

That heaven awakens new seed is clear, because we continually experience new influences and effects. To put it briefly: if the father gives a new seed, the mother must necessarily bring forth a new fruit. Heaven as father thus causes a renewal of all the seeds differentiated in descending order within air, water and earth. New births must therefore follow both below and above. It follows in turn that each particular seed depends on the universal sperm, and that the universal seed causes particulars, always descending from the greater to the lesser, and conversely. To understand how and in what manner this universal seed arises, and from it the particular seeds—or the universal and particular world spirit—attend to the following chapter.