The Intelligence that deserves to be called the purest intelligence,
therefore, cannot have been born from any source, other than the first
Principle. It must, from its birth, have begotten all beings, all the
beauty of ideas, all the intelligible deities; for it is full of the
things it has begotten; it devours them in the sense that it itself
retains all of them, that it does not allow them to fall into matter,
nor be born of Rhea.[240] That is the meaning of the mysteries and
myths; "Saturn, the wisest of the divinities, was born before Jupiter,
and devoured his children." Here Saturn represents intelligence, big
with its conceptions, and perfectly pure.[241] They add, "Jupiter, as
soon as he was grown, in his turn begat." As soon as Intelligence is
perfect, it begets the Soul, by the mere fact of its being perfect,
and because so great a power cannot remain sterile. Here again the
begotten being had to be inferior to its principle, had to represent
its image, had, by itself, to be indeterminate, and had later to be
determined and formed by the principle that begat it. What Intelligence
begets is a reason, a hypostatic form of existence whose nature it
is to reason. The latter moves around Intelligence; is the light that
surrounds it, the ray that springs from it. On the one hand it is bound
to Intelligence, fills itself with it; enjoys it, participates in it,
deriving its intellectual operations from it. On the other hand, it is
in contact with inferior things, or rather, begets them. Being thus
begotten by the Soul, these things are necessarily less good than the
Soul, as we shall further explain. The sphere of divine things ends
with the Soul.