I | Ternary and Trinity

BEFORE we commence our study of the Far-Eastern Triad, it will be just as well if we take the trouble to put ourselves on guard against the general confusion and false comparisons and identifications that are prevalent in the West. These are chiefly the result of people’s desire to discover, quite indiscriminately, in any and every traditional ternary a more or less exact equivalent of the Christian Trinity. This error is not only due to theologians, who after all have some excuse for wishing to make everything conform to their own particular point of view. What is most remarkable is that it is even made by people who do not belong to—or are actually hostile to—all religions, Christianity included. Owing to the environment in which these people live, they are more conversant with Christianity than with any other formal tradition (which is not to say that their understanding of it is basically much greater than their understanding of any other tradition) and as a result they have more or less unconsciously made it a kind of basis for comparison to which they attempt to relate everything else. Of all the numerous examples one could give of these misguided comparisons, one of those most frequently encountered is the case of the Hindu Trimurti, which it has even become common practice simply to refer to by the name of ‘Trinity’. Yet, if misunderstandings are to be avoided, it is essential that this latter term be reserved exclusively for the Christian concept which it has always specifically been intended to designate. Undeniably in both examples we have cases of a grouping of three aspects of divinity; but in reality, that is where the resemblance ends. The aspects are not the same in the two cases; in no way can it be said that their differentiation reflects the same point of view; and it is therefore quite impossible to bring the three terms of the one ternary into conformity with the three terms of the other.^[1] will exist between them. If in addition they both belong to the same order—or, to be more precise, the same level—of reality, it may then be a case of identity (provided they are formulated from the same point of view) or at the very least a case of equivalence (if the standpoint is different).

It is first and foremost due to the failure to draw the essential distinctions between different types of ternary that the situation has arisen of people making all sorts of fanciful comparisons which have not the slightest bearing on reality. This is especially the case with the comparisons that occultists delight in making: they have only to come across a group of three terms—no matter where, no matter what—and they can hardly wait to bring it into correspondence with all the other groupings containing the same number of terms which they happen to have found elsewhere. Their works are filled with tables drawn up in this way—some of them veritable prodigies of incoherence and confusion.^[2]

As we shall see more fully in due course, the Far-Eastern Triad belongs to the type of ternary composed of two complementary terms plus a third term resulting from the union—or, if it be preferred, the reciprocal action and reaction—of the first two. Using as symbols images taken from the human sphere, the three constituents of a ternary of this kind can as a generalisation be described as Father, Mother and Son.^[3] Now it is clearly impossible to make these three terms correspond to the three terms of the Christian Trinity. In the latter, the first two terms are not complementary in the least, nor are they in any way symmetrical; on the contrary, the second derives from the first alone. As for the third term, although it does indeed proceed from the two others, this derivation is most certainly not conceived of as an act of generation or filiation. However one might choose to try and define it—a matter which there is no need for us to go into here in any greater detail—it is a question of another relationship of an essentially different kind.

What could give rise to some uncertainty is the fact that, in the Christian Trinity as well, two of the terms are referred to as Father and Son. Firstly, however, the Son is the second term and not the third. And secondly, there is no conceivable way that the third term could be made to correspond to the Mother: even if there were no other reasons to fall back on, the fact that it comes after the Son, not before, would alone be sufficient to make this identification impossible. It is true that certain more or less heterodox Christian sects have made the Holy Spirit out to be feminine—often with the specific intention of providing it with characteristics comparable to those of the Mother. Yet it is highly probable that in this they were influenced by a spurious assimilation of the Trinity to some ternary of the type we have been discussing, which would show that errors of this kind are not confined to people of today. Furthermore, and still restricting ourselves to the subject under consideration, the feminine character ascribed in this way to the Holy Spirit is not in the slightest accord with the completely contrary role—fundamentally masculine and ‘paternal’—which it incontestably plays in the ‘generation’ of Christ. This observation is of particular significance for us because it is precisely here, in the begetting of Christ, and not in the Trinity concept at all, that we are able to discover something in Christianity that corresponds (in a certain respect, and with all the reservations demanded, as always, by the difference in points of view) to ternaries of the same type as the Far-Eastern Triad.^[4]

In fact the ‘working of the Holy Spirit’ in the generation of Christ corresponds precisely to the ‘actionless’ activity of Purusha or, to use the language of Far-Eastern tradition, of ‘Heaven’. The Virgin, on the other hand, is a perfect image of Prakriti, which the same tradition calls ‘Earth’.^[5] As for Christ himself, his identity with ‘Universal Man’ is even more obvious.^[6]

Should we wish therefore to find a correspondence here, it will be necessary to say—using the terms of Christian theology—that the Triad bears no relation whatever to the generation of the Word _ad intra_ (which is implicit in the concept of the Trinity), but is closely related to the generation of the Word _ad extra_—or as Hindu tradition would say, to the birth of the _Avatar_ in the manifested world.^[7] Nor is this difficult to understand for, taking as it does its point of departure from Purusha and Prakriti (or their equivalents), the Triad must inevitably situate itself on the side of manifestation—the two poles of which are identical with its first two terms.^[8] We could in fact say that the Triad embraces manifestation in its entirety for, as we shall see later, Man figures in it as the veritable synthesis of the ‘ten thousand beings’—that is, as the synthesis of everything contained in the totality of universal Existence.