Augoeides is Divine Spirit, our seventh and highest principle. Augoeides alone can redeem the soul. It is the personal god of every man. Augoeides is Atman, the Self, the mighty Lord and Protector, who shows Its full power to those who can hear the “still small voice.” It is the Inner Man released from its gross counterpart, bathing in the Light of His Essence, and reflecting the Spirit of Truth. Augoeides is our Luminous Self or Immortal Spirit. It alone can defend, champion, and vindicate Truth. And It will, if we follow Its behests, instead of demeaning It by our lower propensities. Augoeides is the Soul of the Spiritual Man lit by its own Light. The man who has conquered matter sufficiently to be illumined by his Augoeides, feels the Spirit of Truth intuitionally and cannot err in his judgment, for he is Illuminated. Then the brilliant Augoeides, the Divine Self, will vibrate in conscious harmony with both poles of the human Entity — the man of matter purified, and the ever pure Spiritual Soul. And the illuminated man, still living but no more longing, will stand in the presence of the Master Self, the Christos of the mystic Gnostic, blended, merged into with his Augoeides for ever. Augoeides is the Nous of the Greeks redeemed from the flesh, luciform and pure. When a soul begins understanding the works of the Father, it plucks the empyrean fruits of sentient life and flies from the shameless wing of Fate towards the true Light where it becomes luciform, ethereal, and pure. After a long rest in the Elysian fields the soul abandons her luciform abode and renews her earthly bonds by descending to objective existence. Augoeides sheds more or less Its radiance on the Inner Man — the Astral Soul. But It never flows forth into the living man, it just overshadows him. Upon Its last birth, the Monad, radiating with all the glory of its immortal Parent loses all recollection of the past, and returns to objective consciousness when the instinct of childhood gives way to reason and intelligence. Upon death of the personality, the Monad exultingly rejoins the radiant Augoeides and the two merge into one (with a glory proportioned to the spiritual purity of the past earth-life), the Adam who has completed the circle of necessity and is now freed from the last vestige of his physical encasement. Upon death of the soul the individual ceases to exist altogether, for his glorious Augoeides has left him. Adepts can project their Augoeides to any place of their choosing while their physical body is left entranced. The seventh and highest aspect of the “Luminous Egg,” or the individual magnetic aura in which every man is enveloped when it assumes the form of its body, it becomes the “Radiant” and Luminous Augoeides. It is this form which at times becomes the Illusionary Body (Mayavi-Rupa). Adepts rarely invoke their Augoeides, except for the instruction of some neophytes, and to obtain knowledge of the most solemn importance. With G.R.S. Mead’s essay on the Augoeides, and Bulwer-Lytton’s vision of his own Augoeides.

Long kalpas of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy, preceded today’s self-consciousness alternating between wakefulness and sleep. When asleep, the ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than those emerging from his brain and the ever-deceiving physical senses. In deep sleep, ideation ceases on the physical plane, and memory is in abeyance because the organ, through which the Ego manifests ideation and memory on the material plane, has temporarily ceased to function. Spiritual Consciousness never sleeps because she is always in the Light of Reality and acts independently of the sleeping man. Impressions projected upon the brain may survive as “conscience.” But the Occultist, who knows that his Divine Self never sleeps, and lives in the Light of the One Reality — the same Light that illuminates every man in the world of being — says that during the state of sleep his mind (seat of the physical and personal intelligence) may get glimpses of that Light revealed by the Divine Thought, which was hidden from it during his waking hours. The spiritual perceptions of the Higher Ego are beyond space and time. Space and time are the illusory perceptions of his worldly shadow, whether wakeful or asleep. To see in Nirvana annihilation amounts to saying of a man plunged in a sound dreamless sleep — one that leaves no impression on the physical memory and brain, because the sleeper’s Higher Self is in its original state of absolute consciousness during those hours — that he, too, is annihilated. Alas! the human mind, unable to transcend the limitations of its individualised consciousness, totters here on earth on the brink of incomprehensible Absoluteness and Eternity. What, then, is the process of going to sleep? As a man exhausted by one state of the life fluid seeks another — e.g., when exhausted by hot air he refreshes himself with cool water — so sleep is the shady nook in the sunlit valley of life. Somnolence is a compelling sign that waking life has become too strong for the physical organism, and that the force of the life current must be broken by changing the waking for the sleeping state. Pernicious is the influence of the moon. Only one with remarkably strong nerves can sit or sleep under the moonlight without injury to his health. Shall we sleep with the head towards the north, south, east, or west?

"When the truly worthy man is placed in difficult circumstances, yet not of such a magnitude as to prevent him from energizing intellectually, in this case it is not lawful for him to commit suicide; for the affliction is from Divinity, and is analogous to the castigation of a son by his father. For, according to the Platonic philosophy, everything afflictive in life either exercises, or corrects, or punishes. And the most worthy men sometimes require for the health of their souls, severe endurance, in the same manner as the most athletic require great exercise for the health of their bodies." — Thomas Taylor

Sphinx is Imagination lighting up our blind senses. She corresponds to Aether, or Spiritual Insight (Buddhi-Manas) opened up. There are two Oedipodes, a Divine Oedipus, being a ray of pure mind self-exiled from its celestial abode. And a Worldly Oedipus, a reflection of the same ray imprisoned in an impure body. Both are sentenced to suffer conjointly on earth. Inspired by the Imagination and Will of Divine Oedipus, animal man begins awakening his higher faculties. If he succeeds, he will ascend from star to star, from one world to another, circling onward to rebecome the once pure planetary Spirit that he had started from. Bereft of Ariadne’s thread of philosophy, Worldly Oedipus remains spiritually blind and unlearned, unable to escape from the labyrinth of matter. Enmeshed in the darkness of duality, his unmastered passions condemn him to involuntary exile from the solidarity of the One — a perfect recipe for drama. Sphinx is the greatest mystery of past, present, and future initiations. How the tetrad changing into a duad is explained by the triad. Man’s clinging to the form allowed the idea to be forgotten. Sphinx is the living palladium of humanity. But she devours only blind interpreters.

Hair is closely connected with many brain functions. Old people, as they lose their hair, lose much of their memory and become weaker. The Yanadi seer grows his hair and lets no razor pass his head. Yet fashion, which has somehow succeeded in making respectability its queer ally, forbids civilized society wearing their hair long. Samson, the personification of the Sun and the Jewish Hercules, speaks of his seven locks which, when cut off, will deprive him of his physical strength, i.e., kill the material man, leaving only the spiritual. But the Bible conceals purposely the esoteric truth, that the seven locks symbolize the septenary physical man. The fact that the Roman Church has abandoned the tradition preserved by the Greek Church, in that it has adopted the solar tonsure, demonstrates that the Church of Rome is the one that has wandered farthest from the religion of the mystical Christ.