Every word here is his. Nothing has been paraphrased, joined or improved. Each passage
was cut out of the book it belongs to by reference, and each carries that book and the
paragraph it came from, so anything on this page can be found again in the source.
He speaks of the cosmic night and day in nearly forty of his books, most often only in passing, as a measure of
time. What is gathered here is where he teaches it: in Tarot and Kabbalah, My Return to Tibet,
Runic Magic and Hermetic Astrology above all. A universe is not made once. It breathes out and is,
breathes in and is not, and the soul's whole work is set inside that breath.
The first part is the two words:
“Its exhalation is called the Cosmic Day (Mahamanvantara), the inhalation, Cosmic Night (Great Pralaya).” “The great cosmic days and the great cosmic nights are taking place, one after the other, within an eternal instance.”
The second part is the night:
“…the unique form of existence without limits, infinite and without cause, was extended alone in a dream without fantasies.” “They die to the universe and are born to the Absolute.”
The third part is the dawn:
“When the Aurora of the Cosmic Day was proclaimed, the universe shuddered with terror.” “Go, fertilize my wife, chaotic matter, the Great Mother, so that life will emerge.”
The fourth part is the great mother substance:
“Everything is born from the Prakriti, everything returns to the Prakriti.” “During the Great Pralaya, the Prakriti is unitotal, integral.”
The fifth part is how a day ends:
“…the Universe will ascend from octave to octave before its total dissolution.” “It is the spark that returns into the flame of the Being.”
The last part is what it means for the soul:
“It is then absolutely false to asseverate that at the end of a Mahamanvantara (Cosmic Day), all of the living beings attain the state of Paranishpana or Absolute Perfection.” “The Ain Soph Paranishpana rebuilds its four bodies…”
How this was made. All fifty-two books were extracted (73,105 paragraphs,
2,157,671 words) and swept for the Pralaya and the cosmic night, the Mahamanvantara and the cosmic day, the dawn and the dissolution of a universe, Prakriti and Mulaprakriti (where no guna is named; those are The Three Gunas’), and the return of all things to the Absolute; the paragraph either side was taken where his sentence ran across. Introduction to Gnosis was left out, by the editor’s ruling. That returned 510 candidate paragraphs in 36 books. Every candidate was read
twice, by independent readers working from a written brief. The two passes agreed on whether to print
95.5% of the time and on the class 86.9%. The 23 disagreements on printing were settled by a third reading; the book is trimmed hard, to the passages where the night and the day are what he teaches, so most were whether a clear passage was the clearest of several that say the same. 50 were judged printable, and each of them is printed here, carrying with it the paragraphs his sentences run into, so 50 passages are printed here.
The rest are recorded with the reason each was set aside.
What was set aside. 125 named the cosmic day or night only in passing, most often as a measure of time while the paragraph teaches the Moon, the races, karma or an initiation. 50 belong to other works: the gunas (The Three Gunas), the Ain Soph as such (Ain, Ain Soph, Ain Soph Aur), the Great Breath (The Sacred Absolute Sun), the names of the Mother (The Eternal Mother Space), the races and rounds (The Root Races), and the Elohim and the Army of the Voice building a world. 70 were the gospel's verses not unveiled here, questions, headings and lists, and 20 neighbours on another subject, and 15 turns of speech. 155 more were
judged and not printed, most of them the same teaching said again in another book, and 25 were judged the second halves of sentences begun in the paragraph before.
No sentence of his is cut in half. Each range was extended against the corpus until his
sentence closed, and 16 ranges run over more than one paragraph.
40 passages also stand in a finished work, and every one is marked where it
stands, the most in Ain, Ain Soph, Ain Soph Aur (18) and The Eternal Mother Space (12). An overlap is allowed wherever the teaching needs it, so that a reader who comes to this one book has the whole of it. What is not allowed is an
overlap a reader cannot see.
Checked against the source. Every passage was proved word for word against the raw text of its own
book, and the printed text against the paragraphs it joins, with no failures. Ten mends were made, and they are listed: in Tarot and Kabbalah five words had been split by the scanner (“Universal”, “Himself”, “defined”, “shuddered”, “itself”) and two misread (“Horns” for Horus, “Am Soph” for Ain Soph); in Runic Magic “Am Soph” for Ain Soph; in Zodiacal Course “unmanitested” for unmanifested; and in Hermetic Astrology “Mahamuantara” for the Mahamvantara of the same sentence. The old spellings of the translations (Mahamvantara, manhanvantara, Mahanvantara) are left as they stand. Every other printed word stands as the source has it.
No editor’s notes. The doctrine search over his passages and over every word of ours found nothing that ties the fire to anything but the couple’s work. Where he speaks of awakening here, it is the awakening of consciousness: the sons of the dawn came out of the Absolute because they had not awakened it.
A work of Creation. Creation is a family of small books, each on one step in the making of a
world, set in the order the making unfolds. The Cosmic Night and Day stands fourth in that order, as the great breath in which every world is made and unmade. The family wears the rose sand of first dawn; this book’s colour is the blue of the cosmic night.