THE HUMAN DESCENDS INTO THE WORLD OF NATURE
“Then the primal person, who possessed all authority over the world of mortal creatures and irrational animals, leaned down through the harmony and, having broken the vault, showed lower nature the beautiful form of God. When nature saw the beautiful form of God, it smiled on the human with love, for it had seen the wondrous beauty of the human reflected in the water and its shadow on the earth. And the human too, on seeing this form, a form similar to his own reflected in the water, loved it and wanted to live in it. And his wish was immediately realized, and he began to inhabit a form devoid of reason. And nature received its loved one, embraced him, and they mingled, for they were lovers.”
HUMANKIND IS MORTAL AND IMMORTAL
“And this is why the human, of all creatures on the earth, is twofold: mortal in his body but immortal through the eternal human. Though he is immortal and has power over all things, he also suffers mortality, since he is subject to destiny. Though above the world of the spheres, he is a slave of destiny. Though he is male and female, being born of a father who contains male and female, and is sleepless as his father is sleepless, he is vanquished by love and oblivion.”
SEVEN EARTHLY HUMANS ARE BORN
“And after this I said, ‘O mind, tell me the rest. I too love your teaching.’ And Poimandres answered, ‘Here is the mystery that has been hidden until this day. Nature, intimately mingled with the primal person, produced a most wondrous miracle. The human had in himself the world of spheres of the seven rulers, which, as I told you, was made of fire and air. Nature immediately made seven humans corresponding to the natures of the seven rulers, and they were androgynous and sublime.” ~Poimanders
Man Descends Into Nature
What Poimanders means by saying that Man descended into the world of nature is that Man, being originally pure spirit as created by God, descended into the realm of matter that was created by the Demiurge, meaning that we took on a physical body. Exactly how we ended up here is open to conjecture. The story of Adam and Eve is one variation, but we must remember that most stories in scripture are allegorical, and the story of the fall of Adam and Eve is no exception. The most important allegorical reference in that story is that of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that Eve ate from and then convinced Adam to do the same. The result of their action was that they “fell” into the lower-level realm of matter.
Form of God
Nature looked upon Man and saw the beautiful form of God. That is because it was looking at man in the original form as a spirit, not a material being. That nature “ached for Man” and loved his form is definitely an allegory. Poimanders makes it sound as if Nature grabbed Man and pulled humanity down into matter, thereby releasing Man of all blame for what happened. Most other tales of The Fall, however, have Man sharing, along with Satan, much of the responsibility for what happened to them. The Bible tells us that when man gained a certain type of intelligence through the fall, Adam and Eve realized they were naked and covered themselves with fig leaves. Most paintings and drawings of this even have Adam and Eve hiding only the sex organs with the fig leaves. This idea is based on a later concept that sex was somehow evil, even though it is necessary for the procreation of most physical beings. If you read the Gnostic “First Book of Adam and Eve,” also known as the “Conflict of Adam and Eve,” you will read that they were not embarrassed about having their sex organ uncovered, but about having a physical body, period. It was the entire physical body they found embarrassing, if not outright disgusting, not because of its shape or form, but because it was dense matter and they were used to being in bodies of Spiritual Light. So the paintings like this one have it wrong:
The reality was more like this one, where they are hiding as much of their physical bodies as possible:
Mortal and Immortal
Humans are mortal and immortal because we have an immortal spirit in a mortal physical body and mind. In order for us to become truly immortal beings, we must awaken our spirits while we are still alive on the mortal plane and become one with it. Then that which we think of as our Self will survive physical death.
From the SUN TALK collection by Harold Boulette