XII
The Significator of the Body
The Hanged Man · The Body
Archetype XII · Significator · The Body
The self that actually lives the body's catalyst — its experience set by how sharply that catalyst is felt and used.
“The experience of the Significator of this potentiated activity is, of course, dependent upon the acuity of its processes of Catalyst and Experience.”
Ra · 92.34 · read in context ›
Card Twelve carries almost no imagery of its own in the record — what Ra gives this station is architecture, not description, and even that architecture had to be corrected once before it stood.
The concept
The significator's whole existence traces to one Logoic decision: to posit mind, body, and spirit as complex, granting each significator, in order to be what it is not, the Creator's own free will (, ). Mind, body, and spirit accordingly each run under their own Matrix, Potentiator, and Significator — three architectures that resemble one another in function but are not identical or interchangeable (). The Significator of the Body is this station's body-cycle instance: not a symbol worked out in imagery but the self that actually lives what the body's Matrix and Potentiator hand it.
The record's history with this particular card is unusually tangled. Asked directly what the Hierophant was, Ra answered that it is the Significator of the Body complex () — then opened the very next working, before any question was asked, by correcting the error: the Hierophant is the Significator of the Mind (). No replacement description of Card Twelve followed; the correction simply removed a false identification and left this station undescribed by name for the rest of the sessions. What stands in its place is the general significator principle Ra had already stated: each potentiation reached for by a Matrix is recorded by the Matrix but experienced by the Significator, and that experience is set by the acuity of the entity's own processes of Catalyst and Experience () — a dynamic elsewhere put, for the mind's significator specifically, as being both actor and acted upon (). Applied to the body, the same shape holds: whatever the body's Matrix and Potentiator make possible becomes something actually lived, for better or worse, only here — and only as sharply as the body's own catalyst is felt and used.
In Ra's words
The Logoic decision that made any significator possible, the body's included:
The first Logos to instill what you now see as free will in the full sense in its sub-Logoi came to this creation due to contemplation in-depth of the concepts, or possibilities of conceptualizations, of what we have called the significators. The Logos posited the possibility of the mind, the body, and the spirit as being complex. In order for the significator to be what it is not, it then must be granted the free will of the Creator.
Mind, body, and spirit each run under their own Significator — not one shared, not interchangeable:
The body, the mind, and the spirit each contained and functioned under the aegis of the Matrix, the Potentiator, and the Significator. The Significator of the mind, body, and spirit is not identical to the Significator of the mind, body, and spirit complexes.
The correction, opened before any question was asked in the next working:
Before we initiate this working we would wish to correct an error which we have found in previous material. That archetype, Five, which you have called the Hierophant, is the Significator of the Mind complex.
The Significator elsewhere: the Significator of the Mind · the Significator of the Spirit
Study passages
I will just, then, attempt an example of the Potentiator of Mind acting. Would, as the infant gains time in incarnation, it experience the Potentiator offering both positive and negative potential acts (or thoughts, shall I say) for the Matrix to experience, which then begin to accumulate in the Matrix, and color it one way or the other in polarity depending upon its continuing choice of that polarity offered by the Potentiator? Is this in any way correct?
Could you tell me what they correspond to?
Then I will just ask for the one of the archetypes which I am least understanding at this point, if I can use that word at all. I am still very much in the dark, so to speak, with respect to the Hierophant and precisely what it is. Could you give me some other indication of what that is, please?
So the original, the first evolution then was planned by the Logos, but the First Distortion was not extended to the product. At some point this First Distortion was extended, and the first service-to-self polarity emerged. Is this correct, and if so could you tell me the history of this process and emergence?