Heptonic

Teachings

The Rebis

The master archetype, and its two shadows

Hand-coloured woodcut of a two-headed figure, a bearded man and a woman, with REBIS on the chest, holding a compass and a set square and standing on a green dragon that rests on a winged globe, with the sun, the moon and five planetary stars around them.
Heinrich Nollius, Theoria Philosophiae Hermeticae (1617), coloured. Public domain.

…that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan… the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night

— Revelation 12:9–10

Evil, in this teaching, is the choice of immaturity when maturity is the better option. A man moves along a spectrum from immaturity to maturity within each of the four archetypes of masculinity, the King, the Warrior, the Magician and the Lover, and wherever immaturity is present the archetype splits into a bipolar disorder. Above them stands the Rebis, the “master archetype” of the alchemists’ Great Work: the Union of Opposites, in which man and woman are integrated.

The Rebis has two shadows of its own. The Darmarch, the evil patriarch, pursues domination; the Soterine, the evil matriarch, pursues leveling. They despise one another, and yet they are two sides of one coin, both authoritarian and both swift to accuse. Each is born of arrested development and toxic shame, and when whole peoples collectivize around either, the result is a society that can only end in dystopia.

Beside these shadows the teaching sets two figures of hope: the mature Rebis, which neither destroys nor diminishes the evil energies but transmutes and integrates them, and the mesolucent society, the most mature yet to have existed and still short of the half-way mark, which the Darmarch and the Soterine are alike unable to recognize.

Contents

  1. Part 1Foundations5 min

    Defines evil as the choice of immaturity, then introduces the four archetypes, the Rebis as master archetype, and its two shadows, the Darmarch and the Soterine.

  2. Part 2The Sociological Bipolar Landscape12 min

    Follows the Darmarch and the Soterine as they collectivize into whole societies, and sets beside them the mesolucent society and the mature Rebis.

Begin with Part 1