Starfish

[sdi]

I was looking at a pentagram the other day and noticed something. It has a threefold vertical structure to it: it has one "head" on top, two "arms" in the middle, and two "legs" on the bottom. This is a lot like the structure of a human being, both physically (you have a head, two arms, and two legs—at least, I hope you do!) and metaphysically. See, there are three worlds: the transcendent Good, the intelligible, and the sensible. The Good is inherently unitary, but you have two parts in each of the intelligible and sensible worlds, at least according to Porphyry:

world	level of being	power	element
transcendent	the Good	being	spirit
intelligible	the Intellect	intuition	fire
	soul	reason	air
sensible	pneumatic vehicle	imagination	water
	body	sensation	earth

(The pneumatic vehicle is, I think, what Plotinus calls the "lower soul." It's your mind, your imagination. Also please forgive my crude table: the pneumatic vehicle isn't a "level of reality" in the same way the others are, and exists at the level of nature alongside your body.)

Each limb of the pentagram, therefore, represents a power you possess. The head is your being (thanks to the Good). The arms are your thinking capacities: the intuitive (thanks to the Intellect) and the rational (thanks to your soul). The legs are your sensing capacities: the imaginative (thanks to your pneumatic vehicle) and the perceptive (thanks to your body). The head and arms are eternal (indeed, only one of the arms can be said to be "yours"—the other arm and head are common to all), but you periodically lose the legs and regrow them until you learn how to get around without them.

While you technically have all of these capacities, most of us are weighted towards the bottom. The point of practicing meditation is to climb your way back up the ladder as far as you're able.

Comments

[sdi]

Oh, interesting! I haven't studied modern occultism to any depth, so it's nice to see corroboration!