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If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche by which of course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William James was anticipated by Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Ennead, that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the body and of the higher for the purposes of the Spirit, and yet constitutes a unity; an unbroken series of ascending values and powers of response, from the levels of merely physical and mainly unconscious life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness.
It separated by the Midst that-which-was from that-which-was-not, and placed veils between these twain. It placed purifying powers, so that they might purge them and make them clean. It gave in this manner an order to that-which-is and made of the Mother the chief. It gave it ten æons, and each æon has a myriad powers; there is also a Monad and an Ennead in each æon.
They ran towards Him and have engendered an innumerable multitude of æons, and in each Ennead they offered myriads and myriads of praises. In each of these Enneads there is a Monad, and in each Monad a Space called "Incorruptible": that is to say, "Holy ground."
In the middle of the second Ennead is a Basket, and three Fathers are there: an Invisible Father, an Ingenerable Father, and an Unshakable Father. In the third Ennead is also revealed a Basket which encloses three Paternities: a Solitary Father, an Unknown Father, and a Triple-Powered Father. It is through these that the Universe has known God.
The stretching out of His Hands is the manifestation of the Cross . The strain of the Cross is the Ennead, the Ninefold Being. He is the Father, the Fount whence Silence wells, He for whom the Quest is everywhere. The Father is He from whom went forth the Monad and the Spark of Light, and before this all the Worlds were dark nothings.
The great ennead of Heliopolis consisted of Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nebhat, and Horus; there were also secondary and tertiary enneads of lesser gods. When the sun-god Atmu became prominent, Horus was omitted and the eight other gods were called children of Atmu, who headed the group, as in the Pyramid texts.
The Ennead combined the older solar elements with the cult of Osiris, and this is indicated in the myth by a break in the successive generations, Nut bringing forth at a single birth the five chief gods of the Osiris cycle, Osiris himself and his son Horus, with Set, Isis, and Nephthys.
Thus Jurgen continued to impart the Praxagorean significance of each digit separately: and by and by the Queen was declaring his flow of wisdom was superhuman. "Ah, but, madame, not even the wisdom of a king is without limit. EIGHT, I repeat, then, is appropriately the number of the Beatitudes. And NINE, or the ennead, also, being the multiple of THREE, should be regarded as sacred "
She is the First Beyond Knowledge, the Mother of the Ennead, who completes a Decad, come forth from the Monad of the Unknowable. This is he who glorifies everyone and impresses upon him the seal of the Father, who brings everybody into the eternity of the First Father who is the One, He for whose sake all is and without whom nothing is.
Syncretism, as we saw, is very largely represented in Egyptian thought, and enters, indeed, into its very bone and marrow. In the ennead of a city the great gods may be arranged together after the fashion of a court where one or two rule over the rest; but in numberless passages we find the relations of gods adjusted in another way, by making them one.
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