The science of numbers is of remotest antiquity. Among the Aryans and Greeks, the Assyrians and Egyptians, we find indications of a development which gave to numbers their real significance and employed them in a system of symbolism which had respect to something more than mere enumeration.
While it is true that a figure is a symbol denoting a quantity, it is also a fact that a quantity thus symbolised may denote much more than a mere number, as we may learn from chemical analysis, where two bodies consisting of an equal number of atoms of the same elements are of an entirely different chemical nature. This is the case as between phenylisocyanide and benzonitrile. But here we have a difference in the arrangement of the atoms, the single atom of nitrogen being active in the one and passive in the other molecule. The position serves, however, for a general thesis which regards all bodies as compounded of elements drawn from a single base, their specific differences being due to the domination of one over another element in them. The astrologers affirm that individual character answers to a similar analysis, for where as all men are constituted from the same cosmic forces, one has more of Saturn in him than others, being born under the dominance of that planet, while another has more of the nature of Mars, on account of its ascendancy or elevation at his birth, corresponding differences of character being observable in them, the one being ponderous, melancholic and tacturn, the other energetic, enterprising and demonstrative. Man, in fine, is a modification of cosmic elements, a composite of cosmic forces, like any other body. But also something more. Behind the coloured glass there is always the light. The intelligence striking through the composite of personal organisation reveals itself as character.
Similarly, behind the cosmos there is an Intelligence which manifests to us through cosmic elements as Nature. God geometrises, and in Nature we have the geometrical expression of the Divine Intelligence. Crystallisation takes place according to definite laws. All the superior metals crystallise at the angle or complemental angle of a regular polygon, which may be inscribed in a circle and theses angles are those which are indicated by the astral science as operative. Water, which the ancients referred to in a mystical sense as the
mother of all things, their material base, crystallises at an angle of 60 degrees. The universe is but the crystallised ideation of God it is a divine thought- form. It is by the study of numbers, therefore, that we may learn the laws of divine expression, from the constitution of the universe down to the most trivial occurrence in its evolutional progress. What we call an event is but a displacement and rearrangement of the parts of our sphere of reality. Changes taking place in the cosmos are accompanied by changes in all its constituents, and these changes may converge to a cataclysm. They may also produce a shower of rain, an epidemic, or a rise of a penny per cental in the price of wheat. Admitting mans relations to the cosmos, and it would be difficult to deny them, there is really no end to the concatenation of effects which may arise from any single cosmic disposition, as for instance, Sun oppose Mars, when our earth lies in the diameter of the Martian sphere of influence.
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