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Again I stand before Ptahhotep.

'My child,' he begins, 'today you'll learn what the four faces of God are.

'It will help you very, very much to recognize them in you. The four faces of God are in everything that has been created. All of creation - including yourself - has been built up on his four faces.

'Life in the visible world, beginning with the gigantic central suns of the world systems and running all the way down to the tiniest protozoa is merely a rotation around the four faces and in the four faces of God.

'You know why we always represent divinity in its primordial state of resting within itself as an equilateral triangle. God in his three aspects is one in three and three in one. But this condition - just like the equilateral triangle - carries within itself the possibility of the number four. When the three aspects of the basic number one separate from each other - and this happens when they move from the unmanifested into the manifested state - the "one in three" becomes "one and three". In this way the number four is born.

'Cast a glance at the equilateral triangle: in it you see only one unit which has three sides, three aspects. But it contains, hidden and unmanifested, the number four, because the equilateral triangle can be divided up into four smaller equilateral triangles.

'When the triangle moves out of the unmanifested into the manifested state in the three dimensional world, a tetrahedron is formed.



'As you have already seen, the first primordial form of material manifestation - the cube - contains the tetrahedron hidden and unmanifested within itself.

'The four triangles which make up the faces of the tetrahedron are the areas of contact between the divine and the material, as they are identical with the inner areas of the truncated corners of the cube.

'When we turn the triangles of the tetrahedron outward with the help of the corners of the cube, thus manifesting the triangles of the tetrahedron, we produce the four-sided shape of the pyramid whose four sides, at one and the same time, are the four triangles of the tetrahedron turned outward and the truncated corners of the cube turned outward.

'The four sides of the pyramid symbolize the four faces of God, each of which taken alone and by itself manifests the three aspects of the first source, the divinity at rest within itself and standing above all creation. The pyramid reveals a living reality, the living law, in which God always and absolutely manifests himself in the material world, and because he does so he is indwelling in everything that has been created.

'From every point of the universe God manifests himself four-fold. In each of the four directions of the earth and the sky he radiates with a different effect. And because these streams of force, which originate at one point and yet are so very different, all come forth from the paradisiacal unity, we can speak of them figuratively as four great rivers springing up in the centre of paradise, where the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are rooted, and flowing out into the external world in four different directions.

'You will find this four-fold manifestation in everything that has been created, most noticeably in the four characteristics of the great currents of air, the winds. Even the dullest person knows that the winds coming from the four different directions have completely different effects.

'The north wind is dry, cool, with a quieting and paralysing effect. In many parts of the world it even makes water hard as stone.

'The south wind always brings heat and has an arousing, vitalizing effect.

'The east wind is cool, refreshing.

'The west wind brings warmth and dampness - in many places rain. Its effect is fatiguing and soporific.

'This is something you already know, because every child notices the different effects of the four major winds. But have you ever thought about how this is possible? Have you ever wondered how it comes about that currents of air can start at the selfsame spot on the surface of the earth and have different effects depending on the direction in which they flow? If, for example, a wind arises right where we are now, where we feel the air to be pleasant and mildly warm, and if it blows southward, it is obviously coming from the north for people living in countries to the south of us. It brings them cool weather and has a calming effect on all living creatures. But when a wind starts up from where we are and blows northward, it's a south wind for people living to the north of us. It brings them warm weather and has a stimulating effect on the organs of reproduction of all living creatures. How is it possible for both a cold and a warm wind to originate at one and the same point on the surface of the earth - a tranquilizing and a stimulating wind - bringing dampness and rain to people on one side and dry weather to people on the other? It all depends on the direction in which the air is flowing.

'You see, that is the law of space we call the four faces of God.

'The first face - the north face - is fiery and has a vitalizing effect. That's why the south wind brings heat and stimulates living creatures to conceive new life.

The second - the west face - is airy and cool. It makes everything movable, and that's why the east wind is refreshing.

'The third face of God - his eastern face - is damp, wet and lukewarm. It brings heaviness, inertia, warmth, dampness and precipitation, making all living creatures sleepy. Their consciousness withdraws into their bodies.

'And lastly the fourth face - the south face of God - is cold. It has a contracting, astringent, crystallizing, materializing effect. It brings cold and calms the nerves.

The first and most important manifestation of the four faces of God is the fiery one, because the effects of the other manifestations depend on this one. The kind of fire determines whether the weather gets hot, warm, cool or cold. That's why the fiery face of God is the father of the others. As a result of its radiation, the various specific states arise: the warm and dry together produce the gaseous airy condition: the cool and damp the aqueous; while the cold produces the hard, earthly condition.

'You find this law operating everywhere here on earth, in every tree, in every plant. Take any house, for example. The south side which receives the currents from the north face of God is warm and plants grow best on this side. The north side is cold, the east side is dry and the west side is always damp. Whenever we make rain in the pyramid, the precipitation hits all buildings from the west.

'The fourfold aspect is not only to be found in the major winds, but in everything that has been created. Look at the trees. The northern side - exposed to the radiation from the cool southern face of God - is always covered with moss. Have you ever wondered why the human being has only one face, and that towards the front? In the direction in which we face we are fiery, giving, whereas when we turn our back on something we are cool towards it. Our limbs, too, are all directed forward, and we can radiate our willpower only in the direction in which we are facing. And why do we sleep best when lying in a north to south direction? Why do all animals lie down this way? Why are even birds' nests and ant hills built in a north to south direction? Animals have no intellect to understand the reasons why, but they feel the effect of quieting radiations coming from the north and vitalizing currents from the south. Instinctively they feel it's best for the circulation of their own current of life when they build their nests in a north to south direction and when they sleep this way.

'That's the secret of why a person who is seeking connection with God and praying should face north or east, but never south or west. In the north and in the east he can find forces that lead him towards spiritualization, whereas in the south and in the west he finds stimulation which leads his consciousness to identify itself with his sensual instincts.

'The effects of God's fourfold radiation are always the same throughout the entire universe. Every point in the universe - and this includes of course every point on the face of the earth - always receives exactly the same radiation from any given direction. The four faces of God can never turn or shift. They always stand unchanged, immutable, facing in their original direction.

"Wherever members of the divine race went, they taught the sons of men this profound truth in various ways depending on the characteristics of the people around them. Here where people understand geometric forms and can grasp truth intellectually, we expressed the truth about the four faces of God in the form of the pyramid. But there are other races of people more inclined to grasp divine truths as spiritual experiences. The members of our race who fled to such countries have built gigantic figures of stone to represent divinity in the form of a human figure sitting like a triangle and having a head with four faces, one looking in each direction.

'Both representations reveal the same fact: whenever the divine creative principle leaves its timeless spaceless condition in the unmanifested state to come out into the three-dimensional world and become matter, it manifests itself - even while keeping its three aspects - in the number four. The shape of the pyramid shows this clearly in that each of its four sides, standing on the square base, forms a triangle representing the three aspects of God. Thus the pyramid manifests four times three: the number twelve.