The Region of Light

As for the birth of this Mercury, and its place, I find few philosophers who mention it. Zoroaster points towards it, very obscurely, when he speaks of his Iynges, or Ideas, in these words:

Many of these ascend the shining worlds, Leaping: their summits are three. Beneath them lies the primal meadow.

This meadow of the Ideas, a place well known to the philosophers, is a certain secret yet universal region. Flamel calls it their garden and the mountain of the seven metals: see his Summary, where he describes it most learnedly, having been instructed by a Jew. One calls it the “region of light”; but to the Kabbalist it is the “night of the body,” an extremely apt and significant term. In a few words, it is the meeting place of all spirits: here the Ideas, descending from the bright world into the dark, are embodied. To understand this better, know that spirits, while moving in heaven, which is the fire world, contract no impurities at all, in accordance with Stellatus:

“Know that everything above the moon is eternal and good; No sorrowful thing touches the heavenly realms.”

Everything above the moon, he says, is eternal and good, and there is no corruption of heavenly things. Conversely, when spirits descend into the elemental womb and dwell in her kingdom, they are stained with matter’s original leprosy. Here the curse rages and rules; in heaven it does not predominate. To conclude this point,

let us hear the admirable Agrippa state it: he from whose lips Truth breathed, knowing no other oracle. “The heavenly powers, while they exist in themselves and flow from the Giver of Lights through the holy intelligences and the heavens, have a good influence as far as the moon, as though in the first degree. Afterwards, however, when that influence is received in a baser subject, it too becomes base.” [Vaughan’s English:] the heavenly powers or spiritual essences, while existing in themselves, or before union with matter, are showered down from the Father of Lights through the holy intelligences and the heavens until they reach the moon. Their influence is good, as in the first degree; but when received in a corrupt subject, the influence too is corrupted. So much for Agrippa. Now astronomers claim a strange familiarity with the stars, and natural philosophers talk in the same way. An ignorant person might well think they had been in heaven and conversed, like Lucian’s Menippus, with Jove himself. But in earnest these people are no more eagles than Sancho. Their fancies resemble his flights in the blanket and fall equally short of the skies. Simply ask where and how the influences are received; require them to prove through sound experience that they are present in the elements, and you have undone them. If

On Occult Philosophy.

you choose to trust the four corners of a figure or the three legs of a syllogism, you may: this is all their evidence. Long live the magicians, then, whose art can demonstrate these things and place the very influences in our hands. Make it your study to know their region of light and to enter its treasures; then you may converse with spirits and understand the nature of invisible things. Then the universal subject will appear to you, and the two mineral sperms, white and red, about which I must say something before concluding.