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Home Preface 5 Planes of Existence Introduction Five Planes of Manifestation A to Z Contact Related Information BIBLE VERSES |
GREEN LION HUNTINGA symbol of the pursuit and capture by the spiritual and ethical qualities of the lower personality with its passions and appetites. "The Green Lion is the First Matter of the Great Work: hence, in spiritual alchemy, natural man in his wholeness—Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury in their crude state. Our lyon wanting maturitic is called greene for his unripeness" (Alchemic Tract). Here the common opinion that a pious effeminancy, a diluted and amiable spirituality is the proper raw material of the mystic life, is emphatically contradicted. It is not by the education of the lamb, but by the hunting and taming of the wild, intractable lion, instinct with vitality, full of ardour and courage, exhibiting heroic qualities on the sensual plane, that the Great Work is achieved. The Green Lion, then, in his strength and wholeness is the only creature potentially able to attain Perfection. The Kingdom of heaven is taken by violence, not by amiable aspiration. "The Green Lion," says one alchemist, "is the priest by whom Sol and Luna are wed." The transmuting process is described as the hunting of the Green Lion through the forest of the sensual world. When the Lion is caught, when Destiny overtakes it, as the preliminary to the necessary taming process, its head must be cut off; and its removal is that "death of the lower nature" which is the object of all asceticism—i.e. Purgation. The lion, the whole man, is, as it were, slain to the world, and then resuscitated; but in a very different shape. By its passage through this mystic death, the colour of unripeness is taken away. Its taming completed, it receives wings, wherewith it may fly up to Sol, the Perfect or Divine, and is transmuted, say the alchemists, into the Red Dragon. For the Spiritual Chemistry, then, the Red Dragon represents Deified Man. Man has transcended his lower nature, has received wings wherewith to live on higher levels of reality." — E. Underhill, Mysticism, pp. 174–6. The personality full of the desires of the astral plane (green lion), and a union of mind (salt), desire (sulphur), and hidden Spirit (mercury), requires to be disciplined in suffering and sorrow (hunted), and finally spiritualized and made perfect (captured), which causes its death on the lower planes, and transmutation to the higher (Great Work). |
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ALCHEMY |