IMAGE: Front Cover - 01 - Cycle of the Nychthemeron

"…and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night". GEN I: 4-5

The imagery of this cover situates our initial orientation in the cosmology underlying the Secret Chiefs 3 and so to begin we must establish our surrounding with the four cardinal points, North, East, South & West. These are not objects encountered but directions, which expresses human acclimatization to the world in order to maintain a familiarity with it. To have this sense is to orient oneself in the world. These ideal lines running across the horizon between the cardinal points form a system of a priori spatial evidences without which there would be neither geographic nor anthropological orientation. When seeking the light of the orient we naturally turn towards the geographical east. For, when we speak of the sun rising in the east, this refers to the light of the day as it succeeds the night. Day alternates with night, as two opposites, which by their very nature cannot coexist. They can only alternate in the state of light ascending in the east and descending in the west.

Our orientation here is put into a twofold arrangement of planes: When the sun shines on upon the Earth it is known as the 'light of day' because it illuminates the Earth and makes the inhabitants apparent under the phosphorous radiation. This plane is the geographical east; the daylight of consciousness with its criteria of ready-made notions accepted as the norm and put into action. When the sun does not shine, it is called the 'darkness of night' for it blackens and hides things with a shadow that intercepts the light and holds it captive. This plane is the geographical west; the night-time of sub-consciousness with its silent obscurity and its insatiable passions. Our very history is governed by the mysterious acts 'of night' operating behind the façade of history 'by day'. These are two impotencies to which occidental has succumbed throughout history; trapped between light & darkness.From this natural fact is shown that the day reveals and is therefore given over to that which is exoteric (zahir) and the night conceals and so governs all that is esoteric (batin). The dual nature of the nychthemeron is distributed in such a way that as there is an alternation of day and night in the creatural realm there also corresponds a 'Day & Night of the Lord'.

The 'Day of Union' (rūz-i wasl) is a 'Cycle of Unveiling' (dawr al-kashf) which marks a state of beatitude and contemplative perfection when the face of the Creator is revealed and Providence is seen in the form of benevolence. For the human beings living in such a cycle, Gnosis is proclaimed directly and openly. The 'Night of Separation' (shab-i hijrān) is a 'Cycle of Occultation' (dawr al-satr) which is caused by the evil desire of individual souls, who renounce their state of angelic individuality (ashkhās rūhānīyah) through an aberrant tendency which leads them to conceal the face of the Creator by eclipsing it with a mask of incarnated individuality.What immediately concerns us here is the twofold twilight on the borderland between night and day: the evening twilight (crepusculum vespertinum) which is no longer day but not yet night; and the morning twilight (crepusculum matutinum) which is no longer night but not yet day. Usually this is a time when the sun itself is not actually visible because it has not yet risen over the horizon (sunrise) or it has fallen below the horizon (sunset). There is an important difference between the electromagnetic information transmitted at sunrise and sunset. Dawn awakens the psyche to activity while dusk composes it for rest. This information seems to be associated as much with the direction from which the sun appears as with its angle to the horizon, and these directions are associated not only with geography but also with cultures; as it is said “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”. In the East spiritual traditions are galvanized by the sunrise while Western traditions emphasize the relaxed time of sunset. The Abrahamic traditions generally follow late afternoon and early evening hours for spiritual devotions. At this time the horns are sounded from minaret towers, vesper bells chime from churches and synagogues fill for the afternoon prayer (minchah) and evening prayer (ma’ariv).

The borderland (barzakh) of East & West are concerned with the migration of the sun through its 'arc of descent' (qaws-i nuzūlī) and 'arc of ascent' (qaws-i ‘urūjī). The descent symbolizes the ceaseless influx of the Being of creation in a recurrent effusion of eternity a parte ante and the ascent symbolizes the return movement of the Resurrection of beings in eternity a parte post. With regard to the eternity of the Divine itself, the pre-eternal (azal) and post-eternal (abad) have no meaning, since in its Essence, pre- and post- coincide in the indeterminacy of the divine Ipseity. They become coherent symbols only in relation to the revelation within the occultation. God and man are the poles of creation and it is between the eternity without beginning in regards to the origin; and the eternity without end in regard to the return, that all direction is orientated in a visionary topography whose co-ordinates are not ordered in the quantitative time of chronological events, and which consequently is neither historical, nor linear, nor progressive, but a world in the interior of which every event is presence, and every duration an instant of this presence.

Each instant of life is a negation and affirmation 'at the same time'. We can, by extension, speak of a duration as being a present hour or epoch, but each moment of this hour or epoch is a collision between the impulsion of the past and the obstacle of the future. It is a perpetual oscillation between self-revelation of the Divine in its self-concealment, and the concealment of the Divine in its self-revelation; between a Beauty (jamāl) that attracts as it repels and a Majesty (jalāl) that repels as it attracts. The oscillation between Beauty’s occultation and self-revelation and its self-revelation and occultation, is conveyed by the 'Night of Separation' (shab-i hijrān) and the 'Day of Union' (rūz-i wasl); for every separation is great with an imminent union, and every union potentially conceals a separation. This succession of repulsion and attraction, which mutually provoke each other, engenders the dialectic movement of Love, and the ascent of nostalgia marked by the 'Eternal Present' situated in the space between the two arcs forming pre-eternity (azal) and post-eternity (abad). It is to this visionary time-space we oppose a horizontal, linear time which runs between the two shores of time. It could be said, for the objective intelligence, there is a past and a future but never a present and that, in reality, there is an invariable 'Eternal Present', outside of time. Time is measured by movement. At each instant a movement can only be completed or about to start. It cannot be otherwise, as it cannot be past and future simultaneously'. The present moment cannot therefore be situated: it is outside of time, because it is outside of measurable movement. It presents the conditions of an Absolute. It is only by locating ourselves outside of time that we can speak of an 'Eternal Presence'. A given person is present: he is not elsewhere; he is here, in a specific space—that is, a movement arrested in time. Thus, presence belongs to the past and not to the future and the 'Eternal Present' belongs to symbolical act within the given moment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Meditations on the Tarot by Anonymous

Chapters: The Hermit & The Sun

Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin

Chapter: Orientation

The Green Sea of Heaven by Elizabeth T. Gray

Chapter: The Visionary Topography of Hafiz by Daryush Shayegan

Shamati (I Heard) by by Rabbi Yechuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) PDF!

Chapter: What is the Day of the Lord and the Night of the Lord in the Work

Symbol and the Symbolic: Ancient Egypt, Science, and the Evolution of Consciousness by Rene Schwaller deLubicz

Chapter: The Principle of the Present Moment