This is the twelfth and final lesson from the series which began with the Cancer lesson shared earlier this year. At the conclusion I will share this one comment based on my narrow expertise as an author whose only book in the 21stc was about the Civil War experiences of ancestors in a small area.
Sarah’s lessons are a valuable record of how the Civil War influenced the spiritual literature of the rest of the 19th century in America.
LESSON VIII.
THE AIRY TRIPLICITY.
♊ ♎ ♒
♊, OR CARRYING ARMS.
The signs of the Airy Triplicity have especial reference to motion. ♊, more especially, or directly, is concerned with projecting, hurling, etc.; ♎ with balancing, maintaining equilibrium between opposites; ♒ with floating and undulating, as represented by the action of air upon the surface of the water, producing waves.
♊ implies, first, a grasping of the hands, or combining forces (Gemini), the effects of knowledge gained so far on his journey; second, an impulsive force from the will, directed to the muscles of the shoulders and arms, by means of which the object is hurled through the air. Therefore I can be no warrior and hurl my lance until I understand the meaning of these twins and how to train and use them effectually.
First, I discern that these twins are not two of the same kind, but they are opposites, or counterparts, and fit together like two hemispheres of one sphere. The one is right, the other left; the one positive, the other negative.
Ancient mythology allegorized one, the right half, the positive, as Castor, a star of the first magnitude, the Immortal, while the other, the left, the negative, was Pollux, the lesser star in brilliancy, the Mortal; and thus they expressed the fact that it is the positive, active force of the soul which, reaching out, attains immortality; i. e., there must be action before there could be reaction. But, again, as the action itself must have its reaction in order to complete its orbit, as the positive pole of the battery is nothing without its negative pole, just so the immortal Castor is represented in the myth as one-half of the time foregoing his privilege among the Celestials in order to pass the other half of the time with his brother, who was mortal, yet whom he so dearly loved; or, in other words, they were polar opposites, which mutually implied each other, and were utterly meaningless and unthinkable apart.
(And one quite noticeable fact of twins is that, even while of the same sex physically, in temperament and disposition one is more positive, the other more negative. Usually this difference is very marked.)
In regard to the hands, I observe that, while the right is positive to the left, yet the different parts of each hand are relatively positive and negative to each other, Thus the knuckles are positive in relation to the palm, the nails positive in relation to the balls of the fingers, etc. The elbows are aggressive, while the muscles of the inner arm are indrawing and caressive.
The hands are the great avenues of the sense of touch. The hands are the means by which we grasp at treasures, reach out for that which we wish to attain, manipulate, formulate materials about us in order to provide for the necessities, comforts and luxuries of physical life.
And from these two, following the law of correspondences, I discern the esoteric meaning of the hands, and from thence the application of bearing arms. The right hand has been educated almost to the exclusion of the left (or female) in our present generation. Otherwise it would be self-evident to us that sensation is not completely obtained only through the right, and when we examine anything critically we instinctively use both hands. Our right hand gives us more the external, intellectual, positive qualities of an object, the left the interior, intuitional, negative qualities; and thus the first great use of the hands is to teach polar opposites, the Twins. All the infinite variety of weapons or arms the warrior can ever have to deal with can be classed under these two words — Polar Opposites. Every force throughout the boundless universe has its pole, or Divine center, which embraces the positive and negative attributes in one, and in order to correspond to that pole all life is evolved in pairs — twins, male and female. Whenever they appear to be separated it is only in seeming, and because the external eye is blinded to the shadow of illusions.
Again, just as we have neglected the education of the left hand, just so have we lost, through this neglect, that inner consciousness of the esoteric meaning of the thousands of exoteric, or physical, uses with which we daily employ our hands. Our treasures are accumulated only for this world, regardless of the swift-coming subjective state, upon whose borders we may this very instant be drifting.
This, then, is the lesson for the warrior. The arms of warfare are polar opposites. Bearing arms is learning their esoteric uses.
Right here, for the warrior, must come his great renunciation. He must come to care for the external only for the sake of the interior. He must “renounce luxury and be chaste.” But chastity is by no means celibacy nor asceticism. For the true soul love is in very truth the purest chastity.
The word chaste is here, however, used in its true and larger sense. Polar opposites is only another word for sex; hence the word chaste applies to every word and ought.
Let the warrior, then, cleanse his hands and remember that the blessings of the Lord are promised to one who “hath clean hands and a pure heart.”
The force which binds polar opposites together, the point of equilibrium where the two are one, is love, and from love is evolved life, while truth may be defined as knowledge, or understanding, of the relation of polar opposites. The warrior must first comprehend truth, and truth must be in him and he in the truth before he can possibly know anything whatever of life and of love. But he must renounce the things of sense and seeming in order to say: u Oh, Truth! Thy Kingdom Come.”
But it directly follows the fact of the uneducated left hand, and the consequent non-comprehension of polar opposites, that mankind to-day can have no conception whatever of the Law of Unity, or the love by which the two polar opposites are one. And thus the world has utterly lost the esoteric meaning of the love which exists exoterically between man and woman. Marriage is only a name and a form, a legal, conventional and mechanical union, and the empty symbol no longer teaches the spiritual reality.[i] With the Divine element of love lost to our sight, atheism and materialism at once follow. The days of true chivalry are the days of true religious growth.
Man cannot know God without knowing love, for God is love, and if the exoteric symbol of love does not lead to an insight to spiritual truth, to an actual knowledge of truth (which is also God), then that exoteric symbol is the grossest unchastity, and leads to perdition and damnation.
But the warrior, having put aside, or renounced, all the showy and glittering weapons of sense and seeming, arming himself only with truth, as symbolized in his lance, with its two ends, and, balancing this trusty lance in his hands, he discerns the sublime truth of the Twins (II), and knows that somewhere in the vast universe there exists a missing half, from whom his soul, in reality, never has been and never can be separated.