The lymphatic cells issuing from nests of adipose tissue, and squeezing themselves through the epithelium cells up to the surface of the intestines, absorb therein the drops of fat and loaded with their prey, travel homeward to the lymphatic canals. This faculty of selecting their special food, of assimilating the useful, and of rejecting the useless and the harmful, is common to all the unicellular organisms. Latin Lymph comes from the Greek Nymph, an inferior Goddess. The Muses were sometimes called nymphs by the poets. Hence, all persons in a state of rapture, whether seers, poets, madmen, etc., is said to be caught by nymphs. In India, Lymph-Nymph is the Goddess of Moisture fabled to be born from the pores of an aquatic deity, whether the Ocean God, Varuna, or some minor River God. The Jews consulted demons through small golden statues, shaped as nymphs. When invoked, the nymphs showed them their tasks from hour to hour. Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders, by the alliance which they may contract with man, might be made partakers of immortality. Certain mediums boast of “spirit” husbands and wives. (Consultation and deliberation with “spirits” spells the end of wisdom.) Every Principle in the Constitution of Man has its seven aspects, and every cell and organ, its seven components. A Principle may be related to an organ of the Body. However, the visible Body is not a Principle, it is the medium of every Principle and Aspect. The Liver and the Spleen cells are the most subservient to the action of our personal mind. The Heart is the organ through which the Higher Ego acts through the Lower Self. Liver and Stomach correspond to Kama-Desire. Liver is the General; Spleen, the Aide-de-camp. The Spleen is the abode of Protean model of the gross physical body, and its subtle counterpart. It is closely linked with Kama-Prana, and inseparable from it.

How the psychomagnetic life force is being stored and transmitted. The first human stock was projected by semi-divine Beings out of their own essence. They were shadows of the Shadows. Nymphs or Goddesses of Moisture were born from the pores of Varuna-Ouranos, the Ocean God. Thus late Second to early Third Root-Races oozed out the hair pores of their parents. The White Island was their land and cradle. Legend has it that Nymph Pramlocha wiped the perspiration from her body with the leaves of the trees as she passed through the air and gave birth to Marisha, the “sweat-born,” or Second Root-Race. Hair accumulates the energy of him who grew it. The electromagnetic force of animal nature resides in the hair. But today’s fashion forbids Christians wearing their hair long. Jesus being a Nazarite, worn his hair wavy and curling, flowing down upon his shoulders, and parted in the middle of the head. Animal Magnetism, the alter ego of Electricity, is none other than the universal Life-Force or Fohat, individualised and polarised to attraction and repulsion. It penetrates and moves matter regardless of porosity. How? The Will of one person traverses space, envelops the body of another, penetrates through his pores, and forces him to a predetermined action — if the latter’s faculties are weaker. Likewise, the pregnant woman transmits mental images to the unborn child. In ancient rites of initiation, the neophyte with hair streaming out in every direction, as if the head was electrified, was made to kneel before the hierophant.

About 16 centuries ago, an unknown Indian author or authors gathered together the diverse threads of already ancient traditions and wove them into a verbal tapestry that today is still the central text for worshippers of the Hindu Devi, the Divine Mother. This spiritual classic, the Devimahatmya, addresses the perennial questions of the nature of the universe, humankind, and divinity. How are they related, how do we live in a world torn between good and evil, and how do we find lasting satisfaction and inner peace? These questions and their answers form the substance of the Devimahatmya. Its narrative of a dispossessed king, a merchant betrayed by the family he loves, and a seer whose teaching leads beyond existential suffering sets the stage for a trilogy of myths concerning the all-powerful Divine Mother, Durga, and the fierce battles she wages against throngs of demonic foes. In these allegories, her adversaries represent our all-too-human impulses toward power, possessions, and pleasure. The battlefields symbolize the field of human consciousness on which our lives' dramas play out in joy and sorrow, in wisdom and folly. The Devimahatmya speaks to us across the ages of the experiences and beliefs of our ancient ancestors. We sense their enchantment at nature's bounty and their terror before its destructive fury, their recognition of the good and evil in the human heart, and their understanding that everything in our experience is the expression of a greater reality, personified as the Divine Mother.

Fohat (Cosmic Electricity), by infusing energy into primordial matter, electrifies into life and scatters into atoms. It is through Fohat that the ideas of the Universal Mind are impressed upon matter. Occultism asserts that Electricity is Matter, not mere motion. Force, or Energy, may be better names for it. Electricity is “immaterial” only in the sense that its molecules are not subject to perception and experiment; yet, Occultism says it is atomic, therefore material. Fohat is connected with Vishnu, from the root vish, “to pervade,” therefore, he is called the Pervader and the Manufacture because he shapes the atoms from crude material. From the first awakening of Kosmos to a new Day of Brahmā or Motion, which even during the periods of Rest (Night) pulsates and thrills through every slumbering atom, assuming an ever-growing tendency to circular movement. The gyratory movement of atoms and spheres exists from eternity. The Elementary Germs with which Fohat fills the Universe from the “Heaven of Mind,” are the atoms of Science and the monads of Leibniz. A perpetual exchange of atoms is taking place in Space, thus changing their combining equivalents on every planet. Atoms enter into new forms of existence, undreamt of, and incognisable to, physical Science. The essence of cometary matter, for instance, is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest chemists and physicists of the earth are familiar with. Enshrined in its pristine state within the bosom of the Eternal Mother, every atom born beyond the threshold of her realm is doomed to incessant differentiation. If we follow the atoms and molecules of the lower plane in their transformation upwards, these will come to a point where they pass altogether beyond the range of our faculties. As the spiritual Monad is One, Universal, Boundless and Impartite, whose rays form what we, in our ignorance, call the “Individual Monads” of men, so the Mineral Monad — being at the opposite point of the circle — is also One, and from it proceed the countless physical atoms, which Science is beginning to regard as individualized. Instead of saying a Mineral Monad, the more correct phraseology in physical science which differentiates every atom would have been to call it the Monad manifesting in that form of Prakriti called the Mineral Kingdom. The atom, as represented in the ordinary scientific hypothesis, is not a particle of something, animated by a psychic something, destined after aions to blossom as a man. It is a concrete manifestation of the Universal Energy which itself has not yet become individualized, i.e., a sequential manifestation of the One Universal Monad. As the monads are uncompounded things, it is the spiritual essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation, which properly constitutes the Monad — not the atomic aggregation, which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the lower and the higher degrees of Intelligence. Every form on earth and in Space strives towards self-formation following the model placed for it in the “Heavenly Man.” The atom’s evolution and involution, its external and internal growth and development, have all one and the same object — Man or Humanity at large. Not only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant and of the tree which shelters him from the sun. Each particle, whether organic or inorganic, is a life. Each atom may reach, by “self-induced and self-devised efforts,” that plane where it re-becomes the One Unconditioned All. Starting upon the long journey immaculate; descending more and more into sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested space — the Pilgrim, having struggled through and suffered in every form of life and being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half through his cycle, when he has identified himself with Humanity at large. This, he has made in his own image. Myths are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood. The Ether of Science, the Ilus of Berosus, the Protyle of Sir William Crookes, are one the same, primordial matter out of which the “Builders,” following the plan traced out for them in the Divine Thought, fashion the systems in Cosmos. Such grand metaphysical concepts can no longer be brushed aside as myths. Materialism and the malignancy of Scepticism are two evils that must remain in the world as long as man has not quitted his present gross form to don the one he had during the first and second Root-Races of this Round. The atom of the chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the mathematician, and that of the metaphysician, have absolutely nothing in common but the name! Each lower mind constructs an atom to suit his own fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he is particularly concerned. The primordial Atom belongs wholly to the domain of metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction and has nought to do with physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. The whole Universe focuses on a single metaphysical point. Atoms, Ether, and the Evolution itself of modern Science are based on the conceptions of archaic nations. “Conceptions” for the profane, under the shape of allegories; plain truths taught during the Initiations of the Elect. Force is not in the Atom: it is in the space which separates atoms from each other. Matter exists in two conditions, latent or undifferentiated, and patent or differentiated. Atomic, however, is a substance not subject to the qualities of matter, from which it is quite different. The Matter of the Esoteric Doctrine is eternal because it is Unevolved Cause. Eternal Matter becomes atomic only periodically. In the language of the Initiates, Atoms are Souls and Intelligences. The atom imagined by modern Science, now called “energy,” is inseparable from Spirit. Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical atoms are simply organic units in profound lethargy. Their coma comes to an end when their inertia becomes activity. Replace the chemical terms molecule, atom, particle, etc., by the words Hosts, Monads, Devas, etc., and one might think the genesis of gods, the primeval evolution of manvantaric Intelligent Forces, was being described. Were Leibniz’ and Spinoza’s systems to be reconciled, the essence of Esoteric Philosophy would be made to appear. From the shock of the two, as opposed to the Cartesian system, emerge the Truths of the Archaic Doctrine and the Spirit which is at the heart of the Occult Doctrine and Thought. Though both admitted but one real Entity, while Spinoza made it impersonal and indivisible, Leibniz divided his personal Deity into a number of divine and semi-divine Beings. Spinoza was a subjective, Leibniz an objective Pantheist, yet both were great philosophers in their intuitive perceptions. To the follower of the true Eastern Archaic Wisdom, to him who worships in spirit nought outside the Absolute Unity, that ever-pulsating great Heart that beats throughout, as in every atom of nature, each such atom contains the germ from which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits will give life eternal and not physical life alone. Spirit is abstract light, uncreated, latent in every atom, in whose profound and sacred repose all motion must cease for ever. Latent Electricity becomes patent under certain conditions. The “elementary atoms” are compound bodies that contain primordial globules, the gross encasement of the still finer atom-spark — the spark of Life and source of Electricity — which is matter, still. When the Life-energy is active in the atom, that atom is organic; when dormant or latent, “inorganic.” The distinction between the two states is arbitrary and spurious. Life is as much present in the inorganic as in the organic matter. Matter, in atomizing, differentiates. Restore the differentiated matter to the status quo ante, and there is no difficulty in seeing how it can pass through the interstices of dense substance in its differentiated state, as we easily conceive of the travel of electricity and other forces through their conductors. There are no “blind” forces in nature. Every atom in the universe is permeated with Universal Intelligence, from the latent spark in the mineral up to the quasi-divine light in man’s brain. Matter and force are ever allied. Matter without force, and force without matter, are inconceivable. Every atom is endowed with consciousness, yet the potential of man’s ability to control the cells and atoms of his body, have not been honoured with the imprimatur of the popes of modern science. Every atom is a little universe of its own. Every cell and organ in the human body has a brain and memory of its own, and thus also, experience and discriminative powers. Physical Science calls “atoms” that which the Occultists regard as particles or molecules. The real atoms are the inner principles and the intelligent, spiritual guides of the cells, and the particles they inform. Atom is not the smallest constituent unit of matter, not even a mathematical point. It is an immutable Entity, a reality within an appearance — the molecule being in Occult Philosophy but a figment of maya-illusion. It may be described as a compact or crystallized point of Divine Energy and Ideation. The Hermetic Divine Fire is the fons et origo of life, that Uncreated Spirit which starts from, and is immediately reabsorbed into primordial matter. It is the ultimate essence of every atom whether pertaining to animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic substance. Before that Spirit is immersed into matter, it is self-existent and independent of matter. The real Atom does not exist on the material plane, it is beyond space and time. Atom, in its eternal state, is invisible even to the eye of an Archangel. Brahmā is called Atom, because we have to imagine it as a mathematical point which, however, can be extended to Absoluteness. He who would be an occultist must not separate either himself or anything else from the rest of creation or non-creation. For, the moment he distinguishes himself from even a vessel of dishonour, he will not be able to join himself to any vessel of honour. He must think of himself as an infinitesimal something, not even as an individual atom, but as a part of the world-atoms as a whole — or become an illusion, a nobody, and vanish like a breath leaving no trace behind.

A beautifully packaged edition of one of García Márquez's most beloved novels, with never-before-seen color illustrations by the Chilean artist Luisa Rivera and an interior design created by the author's son, Gonzalo García Barcha. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.