Man had fallen, but not by the tempting of the serpent. For, with the Phoenicians, the serpent was deemed to partake of the Divine Nature, and was sacred, as he was in Egypt. He was deemed to be immortal, unless slain by violence, becoming young again in his old age, by entering into and consuming himself. Hence the Serpent in a circle, holding his tail in his mouth, was an emblem of eternity.
-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

***

A serpent, having its tail in its mouth and thus forming a circle, held to represent "the immensity of the power of God," which has neither beginning nor end.
-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite  of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

 En-Sof in Hebrew literally means "there is no end...the very absolute as such, or positive nothing ...the principle of unconditional unity or 'unityness' as such, the principle of freedom from all forms, from all manifestations, and, consequently, from all being)... eternally finds its opposite in itself, so that only through a relationship to this opposite can it assert itself, so that it is perfectly reciprocal."
-- Vladimir Solov'ev on Spiritual Nationhood, Russia and the Jews, by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt

***

"A living mobile trinity of moments": [Hegelian] Dialectics describes the movement of the subject of history, the spirit [Geist], passing through three main stages: first it is posed in itself (an sich, thesis), then it develops out of itself and for itself in its manifestation (fur sich, antithesis), in order to return then into itself (an und fur sich, synthesis) and be with itself as an actualised and manifested being.
-- History, Sophia and the Russian Nation, by Manon de Courten

***

"The outer darkness is a great dragon, whose tail is in his mouth, outside the whole world and surrounding the whole world. And there are many regions of chastisement within it. There are twelve mighty chastisement-dungeons and a ruler is in every dungeon and the face of the rulers is different one from another....the soul[s] of the blasphemers and of those who are in the doctrines of error and of all who teach doctrines of error, and of those who have intercourse with males, and of those stained and impious men and of atheists and murderers and adulterers and sorcerers, -- all such souls then, if while still in life they do not repent but remain persistently in their sin, and all the souls which have stayed behind without, that is those which have had the number of the circuits which are appointed them in the sphere, without having repented, -- well, at their last circuit will those souls, they and all the souls of which I have just told you, be led out of [?] the jaws of the tail of the dragon into the dungeons of the outer darkness. And when those souls of the doors of the dungeons have been led into the outer darkness into the jaws of his tail, he turneth his tail into his own mouth and shutteth them in. Thus will the souls be led into the outer darkness....

And the disk of the sun was a great dragon whose tail was in his mouth and who reached to seven powers of the Left and whom four powers in the form of white horses drew.
-- Pistis Sophia, translated by G.S.R. Mead

[I]n the idea of each power the lower derives its intelligibility from the higher: and the highest must be presumed to inhere latently or potentially in the lowest, or this latter will be wholly unintelligible, inconceivable -- you can have no conception of it. Thus in sensibility we see a power that in every instant goes out of itself, and in the same instant retracts and falls back on itself: which the great fountains of pure Mathesis, the Pythagorean and Platonic Geometricians, illustrated in the production, or self-evolution, of the point into the circle.
-- On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each; With Aids Toward a Right Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

***

In October of the same year, Jung presented two talks to the Psychological Club. The first was titled "Adaptation." This took two forms: adaptation to outer and inner conditions. The "inner" was understood to designate the unconscious. Adaptation to the "inner" led to the demand for individuation, which was contrary to adaptation to others. Answering this demand and the corresponding break with conformity led to a tragic guilt that required expiation and called for a new "collective function," because the individual had to produce values that could serve as a substitute for his absence from society. These new values enabled one to make reparation to the collective. Individuation was for the few. Those who were insufficiently creative should rather reestablish collective conformity with a society. The individual had not only to create new values, but also socially recognizable ones, as society had a "right to expect realizable values." The second talk was on "Individuation and collectivity." He argued that individuation and collectivity were a pair of opposites related by guilt. Society demanded imitation. Through the process of imitation, one could gain access to values that were one's own. In analysis, "Through imitation the patient learns individuation, because it reactivates his own values."...

Jung argued that one needed to separate oneself from the unconscious by presenting it visibly as something separate from one. It was vital to differentiate the I from the non-I, namely, the collective psyche or absolute unconscious. To do this, "man must necessarily stand upon firm feet in his I-function; that is, he must fulfil his duty toward life completely, so that he may in every respect be a vitally living member of society."

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

However greatly the soul itself labours, it cannot actively purify itself so as to be in the least degree prepared for the Divine union of perfection of love, if God takes not its hand and purges it not in that dark fire.
-- Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross

***

According to the Rosicrucian tenets, as handled and explained by the profane for once correctly, if only partially, so “Light and Darkness are identical in themselves, being only divisible in the human mind”; and according to Robert Fludd, “Darkness adopted illumination in order to make itself visible” (On Rosenkranz). According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism, Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and Darkness pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an illusion, or Maya.
-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

The hierarchy of Creative Powers is divided into seven (or 4 and 3) esoteric, within the twelve great Orders, recorded in the twelve signs of the Zodiac; the seven of the manifesting scale being connected, moreover, with the Seven Planets. All this is subdivided into numberless groups of divine Spiritual, semi-Spiritual, and ethereal Beings. The Chief Hierarchies among these are hinted at in the great Quaternary, or the “four bodies and the three faculties” of Brahma exoterically, and the Panchasyam, the five Brahmas, or the five Dhyani-Buddhas in the Buddhist system. The highest group is composed of the divine Flames, so-called, also spoken of as the “Fiery Lions” and the “Lions of Life,” whose esotericism is securely hidden in the Zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the nucleole of the superior divine World. They are the formless Fiery Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad, which is placed by the Kabalists in the “Archetypal World.”
-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

    Herakleitus, the Ephesian, who lived five centuries before our era; the "crying" philosopher who declared that "fire was the great cause, and that all things were in a perpetual flux -- his opinions about the origin of things were the same as those of Hippocrates. Both entertained the same views of a supreme power, and, therefore, if their notions of primordial fire, regarded as a material force, in short, as one akin to Leibnitz's dynamism, were "less precise" than those of modern philosophers, a question which remains to be settled yet, on the other hand their metaphysical views of it were far more philosophical and rational than the one-sided theories of our present-day scholars. Their ideas of fire were precisely those of the later "fire-philosophers," the Rosicrucians, and the earlier Zoroastrians. They affirmed that the world was created of fire, the divine spirit of which was an omnipotent and omniscient GOD. Science has condescended to corroborate their claims as to the physical question.

       Fire, in the ancient philosophy of all times and countries, including our own, has been regarded as a triple principle. As water comprises a visible fluid with invisible gases lurking within, and, behind all the spiritual principle of nature, which gives them their dynamic energy, so, in fire, they recognized: 1st. Visible flame; 2d. Invisible, or astral fire — invisible when inert, but when active producing heat, light, chemical force, and electricity, the molecular powers; 3d. Spirit. They applied the same rule to each of the elements; and everything evolved from their combinations and correlations, man included, was held by them to be triune. Fire, in the opinion of the Rosicrucians, who were but the successors of the theurgists, was the source, not only of the material atoms, but also of the forces which energize them. When a visible flame is extinguished it has disappeared, not only from the sight but also from the conception of the materialist, forever. But the Hermetic philosopher follows it through the "partition-world of the knowable, across and out on the other side into the unknowable," as he traces the disembodied human spirit, "vital spark of heavenly flame," into the Æthereum, beyond the grave.

-- Isis Unveiled, by Helena P. Blavatsky

There is no thoughtful soul that does not at times despair. There is perhaps none, of all that think at all of anything beyond the needs and interests of the body, that is not at times startled and terrified by the awful questions which, feeling as though it were a guilty thing for doing so, it whispers to itself in its inmost depths. Some Demon seems to torture it with doubts, and to crush it with despair, asking whether, after all, it is certain that its convictions are true, and its faith well founded: whether it is indeed sure that a God of Infinite Love and Beneficence rules the Universe, or only some great remorseless Fate and iron Necessity, hid in impenetrable gloom, and to which men and their sufferings and sorrows, their hopes and joys, their ambitions and deeds, are of no more interest or importance than the motes that dance in the sunshine. The philosophical and scientific world becomes daily more and more unbelieving. Faith and Reason are not opposites, in equilibrium; but antagonistic and hostile to each other; the result being the darkness and despair of scepticism, avowed, or half-veiled as rationalism. Many a thoughtful mind has so doubted and despaired. How many of us can say that our own faith is so well grounded and complete that we never hear those painful whisperings within the soul? Thrice blessed are they who never doubt, who ruminate in patient contentment like the kine, or doze under the opiate of a blind faith; on whose souls never rests that Awful Shadow which is the absence of the Divine Light.
-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

***

Perhaps no word in the English language has been so misinterpreted and abused as the word "Faith." In the various creeds Faith has been degraded to a caput mortuum of dogmatic teaching, which neither saved nor damned anybody but in the imagination of those who framed the creeds; whereas faith -- used in its real sense -- is that condition of mind essential not only to "salvation," but to the performance of any act whatsoever. Without faith I could not take a single step, or write a single line. Faith is the very groundwork of our lives. It is a living force within man, not a dead make-believe in events which are recorded as having occurred in certain places and at certain times. Faith is a power, the manifestation of which lifts man to inconceivable heights of might and grandeur, and the absence of which renders him a helpless molecular mass. "He that believeth not shall be damned." "I don't believe it," says the sceptic. But, all the same, it is true that he who does not believe, not only shall be damned, but is already damned by the negative state of mind he is in -- damned much more effectually than he could be by the fire and brimstone of theology.
-- Ars Vivendi (Art of Living), by Arthur Lovell

***

This precious jewel
Upon the which is every virtue founded...
That as unjust our justice should appear
In eyes of mortals, is an argument
Of faith, and not of sin heretical.
-- Paradiso, from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"While embodied in matter," [the ancient Nyaya Philosophers] said, "the Soul is in a state of imprisonment, and is under the influence of evil passions; but having, by intense study, arrived at the knowledge of the elements and principles of Nature, it attains unto the place of THE ETERNAL"
-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike