Every word here is his, or the gospel’s where it is marked as quoted. 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 names the First Mystery more than two hundred times, and all but a handful are in one book, his last:
Pistis Sophia Unveiled, where he reads the old gospel verse by verse and unveils it. Most of those
verses name it in passing. What is gathered here is where he says what it is. Where a verse of the gospel is
needed to understand his line, it is printed before it, in italics, and marked as quoted.
The first part is what it is:
“The First Mystery is Kether, the Ancient of Days.” “Each one of us has his own Father.”
The second part is the First that is the Last:
“The First Mystery is the Mystery of the Father, and this is why it is also the Last Mystery.” “The First Mystery is the completion of completions, the Head of the Universe, and the total Fullness.”
The third part is creation out of it:
“The same Universe in which we live, moves, and has our Being in, emerged and came into existence when the Sun ascended through the First Mystery.” “The Ancient of Days is the cause of the great universal arising.”
The fourth part is its three spaces:
“The three spaces of the First Mystery are the regions of the Demiurge Creator.” “We find all the workers of the Great Work within the Second Space of the First Mystery.”
The last part is what comes forth from it, and what it is for us:
“The command of the First Mystery is equivalent to the command of the Father.” “Only the commandment of the First Mystery can conduce the Initiate out of the Chaos.”
How this was made. All fifty-two books were extracted (73,105 paragraphs,
2,157,671 words) and swept for the First Mystery by name, for the Last and the Four-and-Twentieth Mystery, and for the First, Second and Third Space; the paragraph either side was taken where his sentence ran across. Introduction to Gnosis was left out, by the editor’s ruling. That returned 396 candidate paragraphs in 2 books, nearly all of them in Pistis Sophia Unveiled. Every candidate was read
twice, by independent readers working from a written brief. The two passes agreed on whether to print
93.2% of the time and on the class 87.1%. The 27 disagreements on printing were settled by the editor: most were whether a clear line was the clearest of several that say the same, or whether a verse of the gospel is unveiled by the line after it. 49 were judged printable, and each of them is printed here, carrying with it the paragraphs his sentences run into, so 49 passages are printed here.
The rest are recorded with the reason each was set aside.
What was set aside. 210 were the gospel’s own verses that he does not unveil here, its litanies, the disciples’ questions and headings. 47 named the First Mystery only in passing while the line teaches something else: the repentance of Pistis Sophia, the rulers of the Aeons, the twelve Saviours. 14 belong to other works: the Ineffable and the regions of the Treasury (The Treasury of the Light), the Intimate Christ in general (The Intimate Christ), and the Father’s will (The Will of the Father), and 13 were neighbours on another subject. 49 more were
judged and not printed, most of them the same teaching said again, and 14 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 17 ranges run over more than one paragraph.
42 passages also stand in a finished work, and every one is marked where it
stands, the most in The Treasury of the Light (36) and The Intimate Christ (7). The Treasury of the Light gathers the regions beyond the Ain and gives the First Mystery one of its parts; this book takes the First Mystery alone, as a step in the making of a world, so most of his clearest lines on it stand in both. 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. Eleven mends were made, and they are listed: two words split by the scanner (“i nstructeth”, “Twentie th”); four misreadings (“Conmiandment” for Commandment, “four-aridtwentieth” for four-and-twentieth, “Arid he” for And he, “Stella Mans” for Stella Maris); one dropped letter (“he Last” for the Last); three lost hyphens (Four-and-Twentieth twice, Light-Power as on the same page); and one lost full stop. Every other printed word stands as the source has it, the gospel’s old forms included.
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 the Divine Mother Kundalini is named here, she works and weaves in the second space; and where he speaks of ascending, it is with the Intimate Christ and by intensive sexual work.
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 First Mystery stands sixth in that order, as the head of the universe, out of which the universe arose. The family wears the rose sand of first dawn; this book’s colour is the purple of the crown.
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