The Flame and the Clay

About this book

A human being is made of clay, yet a flame burns within. The thirteenth Point Loma Theosophical Manual uses these two substances to describe the tension between bodily existence and what its authors understood as a higher spiritual nature.

Issued in 1907 within Katherine Tingley's Theosophical series, The Flame and the Clay develops a view of human life shaped by moral choice, inner evolution and the possibility of self-mastery. Its symbolism comes from the movement's belief that the divine and the animal coexist in humanity. The two images make that abstract doctrine unusually easy to grasp.