The Chaldean Oracles by G.R.S. Mead

by G.R.S. Mead

Contains both original volumes. Vol. I The Supreme Principle; The End of Understanding; Mystic Union; The One Desirable; The Divine Triad; God-nurturing Silence The Holy Fire; Mind of Mind; The Monad and Dyad; Once Beyond and Twice Beyond; The Great Mother; All Things are Triple; The Mother-Depths; The Æon; The Utterance of the Fire; Limit the Separator; The Emanation of Ideas; The Bond of Love Divine; The seven Firmaments; The True Sun; The Moon; The Elements; The Shells of the Cosmic Egg; The Physiology of the cosmic Body; The Globular Cosmos; Nature and Necessity; The Principles and Rulers of the Sensible World. Vol. II The Starters; The Maintainers; The Enders; The Daimones; The Dogs; The Human Soul; The Vehicles of Man; Soul-Slavery; The Body; Nature; The Divine Spark; The Way of Return; The Armour of Sounding Light; The Way Above; Purification by Fire; The Angelic Powers of Purification; The Sacred Fires; The Fruit of the Fire Tree; The Pæan of the Soul; The Mystery-Cultus; The Mystic Marriage; Purifying Mysteries; Fire-Gnosis; Manifestations of the Gods; Theurgic Art; Royal Souls; Light-Spark; Unregenerate; Perfecting of the Body; Reincarnation; Darkness; Infernal Stairs; On Conduct; Gnosis of Piety.

Genres: Religion, Esoterica

Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

George Robert Stowe Mead, who always published under the initialism G.R.S. Mead, was a historian, writer, editor, translator, and an influential member of the Theosophical Society, as well as founder of the Quest Society. His scholarly works dealt mainly with the Hermetic and Gnostic religions of Late Antiquity, and were exhaustive for the time period.

Reviews

[John Cairns · Rating 3 out of 5]

By mistake I bought volume 2. This doesn't much matter since the book consists of comments on obscure oracular utterances. The commentator explains the individual soul-spark is a light spark which is also a life-spark or rather life-flood. he's commenting on 'The Father of men and gods placed Mind in Soul, and Soul in inert Body'. That should give you some idea of the book's contents. I picked this excerpt because when a child I thought of individual generation as two sparks coming together to make the individual flame of life. What else snagged my interest was the comment that the resurrection of the gross physical body was a superstition of the ignorant. Resurrection is wishful thinking, derived from a sense of dispensability in concurrence with a self-importance necessary for life, and possible in the past because heaven could be placed above the mountain tops in a place one was otherwise ignorant of. If you're going to think like that you would think it was the physical body that was resurrected. Augustine, hanging on to the concept, makes it not as it was but of an angelic substance though it all seems rather unnecessary since where's it going? Where is heaven now? Believers elide over such difficulties. Besides, the soul is what gives life. The body dies when it dies. It's dead. Is it revivified? How? It's likened by believers to a seed but it's dead and a seed isn't. They can't have it both ways. Assuming its resurrection, a body is needed by them to put it in.