The Lord of this Middle World is One in his own Aeon, but in reality a reflection of the triple radiance from the Unmanifested Logos.  This Lord is the Manifested Logos, the Spirit moving on the Waters.  Therefore all its emanations or creations are triple.  The triple Light above and the triple Darkness below, force and matter, or spirit and matter, both owing their being and apparent opposition to the Mind, “alone ordering all things.”

The Diagram to be more comprehensible should be so arranged, mentally, that each of the higher spheres is found within or interpenetrating the lower.  Thus, from this point of view, the centre is a more important position than above or below.  External to all is the Physical Universe, made by the Hylic Angels, that is to say those emanated by Thought, Epinoia, as representing Primeval Mother Earth, or Matter; not the Earth we know, but the Adamic Earth of the Philosophers, the Potencies of Matter, which Eugenius Philalethes assures us, on his honour, no man has ever seen.  This Earth is, in one sense, the Protyle for which the most advanced of our modern Chemists are searching as the One Mother Element.

The idea of the Spirit of God moving on the Waters is a very beautiful one, and we find it worked out in much detail in the Hindu scriptures.  For instance, in the Vishnu Purana,[124] we find a description of the emanation of the present Universe by the Supreme Spirit, at the beginning of the present Kalpa or Aeon, an infinity of Kalpas and Universes stretching behind.  This he creates endowed with the Quality of Goodness, or the Pneumatic Potency.  For the three Qualities (or Gunas) of Nature (Prakriti) are the Pneumatic, Psychic and Hylic Potencies of the Waters of Simon.

At the close of the past (or Padma) Kalpa, the divine Brahma, endowed with the quality of goodness, awoke from his night of sleep, and beheld the universe void.  He, the supreme Narayana, the incomprehensible, the sovereign of all creatures, invested with the form of Brahma, the god without beginning, the creator of all things; of whom, with respect to his name Narayana, the god who has the form of Brahma, the imperishable origin[125] of the world, this verse is repeated:  “The waters are called Nara, because they were the offspring of Nara (the supreme spirit); and, as, in them, his first (Ayana)[126] progress (in the character of Brahma) took place, he is thence named Narayana (he whose place of moving was the waters).”

Sir Wm. Jones translates this well-known verse of Manu[127] as follows: 

The waters are called Narah, because they were the production of Nara, or the spirit of God; and, since they were his first Ayana, or place of motion, he thence is named Narayana or moving on the waters.

Substantially the same statement is made in the Linga, Vayu, and Markandeya Puranas, and the Bhagavata explains it more fully as follows: