The pos­sib­il­it­ies of spir­itu­al man and of bio­lo­gic­al man seem to be part­ing for good. Is there a solu­tion to this split? Or will the holy ascet­ics, in per­fect upper-chakra res­on­ance, enjoy etern­al life in the Elysi­an Fields, while bio­lo­gic­al man is left to wade through the mud of this vale of tears? It is hardly to be expec­ted that man, reared on com­fort, bereft of faith, agnost­ic and mater­i­al­ist, should sud­denly become an enlightened saint who has already shaken off every earthly van­ity.

Spir­itu­al man and bio­lo­gic­al man stand for the most exal­ted and the most fallen human con­di­tion, and this con­di­tion can be reversed about a pivot – and that pivot is the heart centre.

Man's two out­er­most chakras – the root chakra, of the earth ele­ment, and the crown chakra, which reflects high­er intel­li­gence – mir­ror his com­plex char­ac­ter. Accord­ing to the philo­sophy of yoga, man is a being of dual nature: a con­scious soul-spark of divine ori­gin (this is what the crown chakra rep­res­ents), enclosed in a body rooted in the earth (this is the sym­bol­ic mean­ing of the root chakra). That is, the finest intel­lec­tu­al-spir­itu­al sub­stance is con­gealed, as it were, into the densest mater­i­al real­ity.

In the root chakra the life force rests in the form of a coiled ser­pent. This is the kunda­lini-shakti, which cer­tain prac­tices can kindle, so that man's energy may rise to ever high­er levels. Earthly exist­ence is meant for ascent. Between the sep­ar­ate chakra levels, har­mony can be cre­ated by the light, airy power of the region of the heart, once man's emo­tion­al centre is spir­itu­ally pure enough.

The spin­al column is also a sceptre, at whose sum­mit the pineal gland reigns – that is, it is on man's cent­ral spir­itu­al column that the pos­sib­il­ity of enlight­en­ment opens. And at once we have before us the staff of Dionysus, the thyrsus, twined with ivy and vine and end­ing at the top in a pine cone. Dionysus exper­i­enced the essence of life in the ecstasy of intox­ic­a­tion, and his mys­tery school, by dar­ing the threshold of life and death, sought a taste of the drink of etern­al exist­ence. This is a kind of trans­mu­ta­tion, in which the prac­ti­tion­ers of the mys­tery are trans­figured, in their lived exper­i­ence, into the nature of Dionysus, unlike the pos­ses­sion that took place at the oracle of Delphi, where Apollo, the embod­i­ment of con­sum­mate skill, seized the con­scious­ness of his proph­et­ess and through her revealed his fate­ful proph­ecies.

The spin­al column also invites com­par­is­on with the caduceus of Her­mes, where a pair of ser­pents twine around the staff. Accord­ing to the philo­sophy of yoga, there are three energy chan­nels along the spine: the cent­ral sushumna in the spin­al cord, on the right-hand side the solar, out­ward-turned pin­gala, linked with the left hemi­sphere of the brain, and on the left-hand side the lunar, intro­ver­ted ida chan­nel of the right hemi­sphere. These, too, cross one anoth­er sev­er­al times, and they are also likened to the three sac­red rivers: the Ganges on the left, the Yamuna on the right, and in the middle the mys­tic­al Saraswati. Sym­bol­ic­ally these rivers cor­res­pond to Con­scious­ness (Saraswati), Exist­ence (Ganges) and Love (Yamuna).

And if, to this read­ing of the energy chan­nels as rivers, we add that the spin­al column itself is likened to Mount Meru, which marks the centre of the world, then at once a kind of image of para­dise stands before us, with the sac­red moun­tain and the primev­al rivers set­ting out towards the quar­ters of the world.

Jakob Böhme describes a dif­fer­ent kind of colum­nar sys­tem with­in the sym­bol­ic human organ­ism, namely a spread­ing tree. ‘The tree rooted in the heart springs from the Mir­ror of the God­head, and stretches its branches through the sphere of Reas­on to the sphere of the Senses. The roots and trunk of this tree recall man's divine nature, which we may call his spir­itu­al­ity; the branches of the tree are sep­ar­ate parts of this divine nature and may be com­pared to man's indi­vidu­al­ity, while the leaves, being tran­si­ent, may be likened to the per­son­al­ity, for the per­son­al­ity shares scarcely a single fea­ture of its own divine source.’