Energy of Creation

The Environment of manifestation, the ocean of potential, mythologically expressed as the Great Mother, has two fundamental hypostases.

On the one hand, she is space, the Basis in which manifestation unfolds, and on the other, she is its energy.

Each of these hypostases further has, as noted in two faces, a Benign and a Dark side reflecting aspects of Birth and Death, which together form the Environment’s quaternary aspect.

Ancient Egyptian mythology pays much attention to the fierce goddesses — manifestations of the “Eye of the Sun” — Maat and Hathor, in their “wrathful” aspect as Wadjet, expressing in their figures the creative energy that reflects aspects of wisdom as both Principle and Energy.

Kabbalah considers this energy of the environment as the duality of the Shekhina and Mazal, the “ascending” and “descending” currents, or the binary of Shekhina and Da’at, the “acting” and “present” aspects of the great Wisdom of the Deity. The Gnostics define these two energies more sharply as Pronoia (First-Thought) and Epinoia (Higher Thought), considered as the “call” of the Deity and the “response” to it from Creation.

In Hinduism, this energy in its fullness is called Shakti (“energy, capacity, power, exertion”) and represents the dynamic forces believed to seethe throughout the universe, creating its reality. This energy is regarded as creative and sustaining, but also destructive (when such destruction is necessary for further development), and is sometimes called the auspicious energy.

Despite such vivid and varied expressions of the Mother’s “energetic” aspect in mythologies, it is often overlooked or reduced to a “ministering,” secondary image.

Meanwhile, it is precisely the awakening of the Shekhina that provides the resource for advancement up the evolutionary ladder, and it is the operation of that energy that distinguishes the Magus from the philosopher.

Shekhina is not merely life-energy; she is the energetic foundation of both life and awareness, she is action itself, whereas the Spirit is the transcendental ground of awareness, the formative principle. One might say the world is “woven from Shekhina according to the Spirit’s design,” and it is this energy that constitutes the essence, the basis of any manifestation.

Just as, on the level of the psychocosm, a being draws the power of awareness from the ocean of pneuma, so, on the level of being, the Environment, prime matter, gives rise to the play of the Shekhina. The process of mutual actualization of world and mind, which from the psychocosm’s standpoint is expressed in the reflection of the world’s energies in the mirror of mind, can, from the standpoint of the environment, be considered as the play of those energies themselves.

Therefore Shekhina can be represented as the “mind of the Environment” or the “soul of matter,” and interaction with her is absolutely necessary for any creative act.

Moreover, any influence upon the Environment, the telesmi, occurs, in fact, through the Shekhina.

It is in this sense that Shekhina is called the “Mother of Angels,” and, in fact, she also turns out to be the Mother of the Grey Spirits: their vortices form in the telesmatic environment, and are a play of the Shekhina.

This ambivalence of the Mother manifests in her two faces — Zhiva and Morena, Eve and Lilith, the White and the Dark Goddess.

It is important to understand that the Environment–Energy/Life–Death quaternary is, on the one hand, the same Mother, but on the other, all her faces can also appear independently as distinct autonomous Goddesses.

For the Magus, interaction with the Maternal principle of the Universe inevitably constitutes one of the primary foundations of his activity; the degree of awareness of this interaction determines whether the play of the waves of the Great Ocean will carry him onto the mystic’s Way, or whether he will be able to travel those waters by following the example of the Incarnate Logos.