Commentary on Genesis (Mysterium Magnum)

The Center of Eternal Nature: How the will of the Ungrund leads itself into nature and formation.

8. The desire from the eternal will of the Ungrund abyss is the first formation, and is the Fiat let it be done or creation. And the power of the free delight is God, who guides the creation and calls it both together Verbum fiat the Word [let it be done], that is, the eternal Word, which creates where there is nothing, and the original state of nature and all beings.

h. 9. The 1st property of the desire is astringent, severe, impressing, grasping itself, shading itself, and first makes the great darkness of the abyss: Secondly, it makes itself substantial, after a spiritual manner, quite rough, hard, and coarse, and is a cause of cold and all sharpness; also of all that which is called being, and is the beginning of perceptibility, where the free delight finds itself within, and leads itself into contemplation: But the desire, within itself, leads itself therewith into pain and torment, but the free delight only thus accepts the perceptibility.

☿. 10. The 2nd form or property is the drawing in of the desire; that is a sting, agitation, or movement. For every desire is drawing in, and is the beginning of movement, gnawing, and life, and the true original state of the mercurial quick-moving/volatile life of the painful torment. For here originates the first enmity between the astringency, or hardness, and the sting or agitation; for the desire makes hard, coarse, and shuts in, just as the cold shuts in the water. Thus, astringent is a vain cold, and the sting, as the pulling, is born with the compression.

11. It is here like Father and Son; the Father wishes to be still and hard, and the sting, as his Son, pulls in the Father and makes unrest; the Father, as the astringency, cannot endure that and pulls much more vehemently in the desire to hold the disobedient Son to himself and to enclose him, whereby the Son only becomes stronger in the sting, and that is the true foundation and cause of sensibility, which in the free delight is the eternal beginning of the movement of the powers, colors, and virtues, and of the Divine Kingdom of Joy: and in the dark desire is the original state of enmity, pain, and torment, and the eternal original state of God's wrath, and of all unrest and adversity.