he had not proceeded to the work because he had failed to meet with an elect woman who was necessary thereto”; and proceeds to say:  “I suppose that the statement will awaken in most minds only a vague sense of wonder, and I can merely indicate in a few general words that which I see behind it.  Those Hermetic texts which bear a spiritual interpretation and are as if a record of spiritual experience present, like the literature of physical alchemy, the following aspects of symbolism:  (a) the marriage of sun and moon; (b) of a mystical king and queen; (c) an union between natures which are one at the root but diverse in manifestation; (d) a transmutation which follows this union and an abiding glory therein.  It is ever a conjunction between male and female in a mystical sense; it is ever the bringing together by art of things separated by an imperfect order of things; it is ever the perfection of natures by means of this conjunction.  But if the mystical work of alchemy is an inward work in consciousness, then the union between male and female is an union in consciousness; and if we remember the traditions of a state when male and female had not as yet been divided, it may dawn upon us that the higher alchemy was a practice for the return into this ineffable mode of being.  The traditional doctrine is set forth in the Zohar and it is found in writers like Jacob Boehme; it is intimated in the early chapters of Genesis and, according to an apocryphal saying of Christ, the kingdom of heaven will be manifested when two shall be as one, or when that state has been once again attained.  In the light of this construction we can understand why the mystical adept went in search of a wise woman with whom the work could be performed; but few there be that find her, and he confessed to his own failure.  The part of woman in the physical practice of alchemy is like a reflection at a distance of this more exalted process, and there is evidence that those who worked in metals and sought for a material elixir knew that there were other and greater aspects of the Hermetic mystery."[1b]

[1a] MICHAEL MATER:  Atalanta Fugiens (1617), p. 97.

[1b] A E. WAITE:  “Woman and the Hermetic Mystery,” The Occult Review (June 1912), vol. xv. pp. 325 and 326.

So far Mr WAITE, whose impressive words I have quoted at some length; and he has given us a fuller account of the theory as found in the Zohar in his valuable work on The Secret Doctrine in Israel (1913).  The Zohar regards marriage and the performance of the sexual function in marriage as of supreme importance, and this not merely because marriage symbolises a divine union, unless that expression is held to include all that logically follows from the fact, but because, as it seems, the sexual act in marriage may, in fact, become a ritual of transcendental magic.