The Secret Doctrine
It is the Root that never dies; the Three‐tongued Flame of the Four Wicks. The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three‐tongued Flame shot out by the Seven—their Flame—the Beams and Sparks of one Moon reflected in the running Waves of all the Rivers of Earth.
(a) The “Three‐tongued Flame that never dies” is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The “Four Wicks,” that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.
“I am the Three‐wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,” says the Defunct. “I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin‐ creating Four Wicks].”
“The Three‐tongued Flame of the Four Wicks” corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.
(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad‐Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon‐beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the “Running Waves” of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the “Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother‐Source.