Hellenic · Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II · 18 of 21
The Encomium of Kings (Part 2)
“Of this Twofold Nature he calls the one side the Hidden and the other the Manifest, saying that the concealed [parts] of the Fire are hidden in the manifest, and the manifest produced by the concealed. . . .
“And the manifest side of the Fire has all things in itself which a man can perceive of things visible, or which he unconsciously fails to perceive. Whereas the hidden side is everything that we can conceive as intelligible, . . . or which a man fails to conceive.” 1
2. “The Lord begrudgeth not Himself to any thing.” Compare this with C. H., iv. (v.) 3: “Not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not from Him”; and compare both with the saying of Plato in the Timæus (29 E):
“He was Good, and to the Good there can never at any time be any grudging of aught.”
THE HIGHER PANTHEISM OR PANMONISM
10. With the soul-satisfying pantheism of § 10 we may with interest compare the address to the Logos in The Martyrdom of Peter, which still retains many Gnostic elements.
“Thou that art to be understood by spirit alone! Thou art my father, Thou my mother, Thou my brother, Thou my friend, Thou my servant, Thou my master. Thou art the all, and all is in Thee. Yea, all that is, is Thou; and there is nothing else that is but Thee alone!” 2
HYMN TO ALL-GOD
The treatise ends with one of the most magnificent Hymns to God ever written in any language—a hymn which some foolish copyist has spoilt by tagging on to it the gloss of a reader noted on the margin of the MS. from which our scribe copied.
With the sentence: “All are in Thee, all are from Thee,” compare the Naassene Hymn (quoted in Hippolytus’ Introduction, in “The Myth of Man”):
“‘From Thee’ is Father, and ‘Through Thee,’ Mother,—the two Immortal Names, Parents of Æons, O Thou who hast the Heaven for Thy City, O Man of Mighty Names!”
Footnotes
107:1 Perhaps a by-name of Basilides; see F. F. F., p. 554.
108:1 Hipp., Philos., vi. 9; see my Simon Magus (London, 1892), p. 13.
108:2 Lipsius (R. A.) and Bonnet (M.), Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha (Leipzig, 1891), i. 98.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM VI. (VII.)
IN GOD ALONE IS GOOD AND ELSEWHERE NOWHERE
(Text: P. 48-53; Pat. 14a-15a.)
1. Good, O Asclepius, is in none else save God alone; nay, rather, Good is God Himself eternally.
If it be so, [Good] must be essence, from every kind of motion and becoming free (though naught is free from It), possessed of stable energy around Itself, never too little, nor too much, an ever-full supply. [Though] one, yet [is It] source of all; for what supplieth all is Good. When I, moreover, say [supplieth] altogether [all], it is for ever Good. But this belongs to no one else save God alone.
For He stands not in need of any thing, so that desiring it He should be bad; nor can a single thing of things that are be lost to Him, on losing which He should be pained; for pain is part of bad.
Nor is there aught superior to Him, that He should be subdued by it; nor any peer to Him to do Him wrong, or [so that] He should fall in love on its account; nor aught that gives no ear to Him, whereat He should grow angry; nor wiser aught, for Him to envy.
2. Now as all these are non-existent in His being, what is there left but Good alone?
For just as naught of bad is to be found in such transcendent Being, so too in no one of the rest will Good be found.
For in them all are all the other things 1—both in the little and the great, both in each severally and in this living one 2 that’s greater than them all and mightiest [of them].
For things subject to birth 3 abound in passions, birth in itself being passible. But where there’s passion, nowhere is there Good; and where is Good, nowhere a single passion. For where is day, nowhere is night; and where is night, day is nowhere.
Wherefore in genesis the Good can never be, but only be in the ingenerate.
But seeing that the sharing in all things hath been bestowed on matter, so doth it share in Good.
In this way is the Cosmos good; that, in so far as it doth make all things, as far as making goes it’s Good, but in all other things it is not Good. For it’s both passible and subject unto motion, and maker of things passible.
3. Whereas in man by greater or by less of bad is good determined. For what is not too bad down here, is good; and good down here is the least part of bad.
It cannot, therefore, be that good down here should be quite clean of bad, for down here good is fouled with bad; and being fouled, it stays no longer good, and staying not it changes into bad.
In God alone, is, therefore, Good, or rather Good is God Himself.
So then, Asclepius, the name alone of Good is found in men, the thing itself nowhere [in them], for this can never be.
For no material body doth contain It,—a thing 1 bound on all sides by bad, by labours, pains, desires and passions, by error and by foolish thoughts.
And greatest ill of all, Asclepius, is that each of these things that have been said above, is thought down here to be the greatest good.
And what is still an even greater ill, is belly-lust, the error that doth lead the band of all
the other ills—the thing that makes us turn down here from Good.
4. And I, for my own part, give thanks to God, that He hath cast it in my mind about the Gnosis of the Good, that it can never be It 1 should be in the world. 2 For that the world is “fullness” 3 of the bad, but God of Good, and Good of God.
The excellencies of the Beautiful are round the very essence [of the Good]; nay, they do seem too pure, too unalloyed; perchance ’tis they that are themselves Its essences.
For one may dare to say, Asclepius,—if essence, sooth, He have—God’s essence is the Beautiful; the Beautiful is further also Good.
There is no Good that can be got from objects in the world. For all the things that fall beneath the eye are image-things and pictures as it were; while those that do not meet [the eye are the realities 4], especially the [essence] of the Beautiful and Good.
Just as the eye cannot see God, so can it not behold the Beautiful and Good. For that they are integral parts of God, wedded to Him alone, inseparate familiars, most beloved, with whom God is Himself in love, or they with God.
5. If thou canst God conceive, thou shalt conceive the Beautiful and Good, transcending Light, made lighter than the Light by God. That Beauty is beyond compare, inimitate that Good, e’en as God is Himself.
As, then, thou dost conceive of God, conceive the Beautiful and Good. For they cannot be joined with aught of other things that live, since they can never be divorced from God.
Seek’st thou for God, thou seekest for the Beautiful. One is the Path that leadeth unto It—Devotion joined with Gnosis.
6. And thus it is that they who do not know and do not tread Devotion’s Path, do dare to call man beautiful and good, though he have ne’er e’en in his visions seen a whit that’s Good, but is enwrapped with every kind of bad, and thinks the bad is good, and thus doth make unceasing use of it, and even feareth that it should be ta’en from him, so straining every nerve not only to preserve but even to increase it.
Such are the things that men call good and beautiful, Asclepius,—things which we cannot flee or hate; for hardest thing of all is that we’ve need of them and cannot live without them.
Footnotes
111:1 That is, things not Good.
111:2 Or animal; that is, cosmos as a single life or living creature.
111:3 Or genesis.
112:1 Sc. the body.
113:1 Sc. the Good.
113:2 Cosmos.
113:3 Or plērōma. The “world” is the plērōma of evil, but ‘God” the plērōma of good.
113:4 A lacuna unfortunately occurs here in the text.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
COMMENTARY
THE TITLE
This sermon, which bears no proper title, but has been headed by some editor with the enunciation of the subject taken from the opening sentence of the treatise itself, belongs to the Asclepius-group.
Reitzenstein (p. 194) thinks that this tractate and the previous Asclepius-Dialogue—C. H., ii. (iii.)—may very well have formed part of the same collection of Asclepiana.
DUALISM?
The teaching of our sermon is apparently dualistic; but is it not only formally so, and as an exercise to raise the thought of the pupil away from the “things he has grown used to”? For at the end Hermes declares:
“Such are the things that men call good and beautiful, Asclepius—things which we cannot flee or hate; for hardest thing of all is that we’ve need of them and cannot live without them.”
This is a clear advance on the formal Tat-teaching as to “hating” the body given in C. H., iv. (v.) 6, and points clearly to an instruction in which the cosmos was not regarded as the plērōma of bad, in spite of the formal and emphatic statement in § 4:
“ὁ γὰρ κόσμος πλήρωμά ἐστι τῆς κακίας.”
Moreover, if we turn to C. H., ix. (x.), 4—another treatise of Hermes to Asclepius, and curiously enough having as superscription almost the same proposition as heads our present treatise we read:
“χωρίον γὰρ αὐτῆς [κακίας] ἡ γῆ, οὐχ ὁ κόσμος, ὡς ἔνιοι ποτὲ ἐροῦσι βλασφημοῦντες.”
“Bad’s place is earth, and not the world, as some will sometimes say with impious tongue.”
Here we have a formal denial in an Asclepius-tractate of the formal proposition in our Asclepius-sermon.
The cosmos is not evil; it is the beautiful world-order. Evil is a thing connected with the earth; there is no such thing as a πλήρωμα of evil; evil has at best only a χωρίον. They who say such things blaspheme.
This is strong language, and there seems no other conclusion to be drawn from it but that there were various schools within the Trismegistic tradition, and that they wrangled theologically together.
Is it, however, possible that the Hermes of our treatise is only speaking metaphorically, so that he may intensify the ideal of the Good, and that he was subsequently taken as speaking literally? For he must have known that the Cosmos was regarded as the Son of God, par excellence, the fairest and best-beloved of all, God’s Very Image.
On the other hand, we know that in the Trismegistic doctrine the “cosmic man” was opposed to the “essential man,” that, in fact, the term “cosmic” was used in the nomenclature of the time in a theological as well as in a philosophical sense. This was especially the case in Christianity. Many instances could be cited from the New Testament documents; and we have also a striking example of the use of “cosmos” in this sense in the second logion of the First Oxyrhynchus Fragment:
“Jesus saith: Except ye fast to the world (τὸν κόσμον), ye shall in no wise find the Kingdom of God.”
As, moreover, we nowhere else find mention of a “pleroma of evil,” we may permissibly conclude that it is here not intended to be taken literally, but only as a metaphorical expression.
GOD THE PLEROMA OF GOOD
“God is the Pleroma of Good, and Good is the Pleroma of God.”
And so, speaking of the Triumphant Christ as the Cosmic Logos, Paul writes:
“And Him hath He (God) given as Head over all things unto the Church, 1 which is His Body—the Fullness (Plērōma) of Him who doth fulfil all things in all.” 2
The thought-atmosphere in which the idea of the “Church” as the Pleroma arose may be sampled from Philo, De Prœm. et Pœn., § xi. (M. ii. 418, p. 920; Ri. v. 232):
“And thus the soul, becoming a Pleroma of virtues by means of the three best [blessings]—nature, instruction (mathēsis) and practice (askēsis),—leaving no vacant spot in her for entrance of aught else, brings unto birth a perfect number,—her two hexads of sons, a miniature and copy of the circle of the types of life, 3 for the improvement of the things down here.
“This is the House 4 that naught can harm, the perfect and continual in the public scriptures, and also in the secret meanings of the mystic ones,—the House that won the prize, as I have said, of lordship o’er the tribes of its [own] race.”
“It was thus from this House in course of time, as it increased and became populous, that well-regulated cities were established, yea, disciplines of wisdom and of righteousness and holiness, in which the
transmutation (μεταποίησις) of the rest of virtue was sought out in manner worthy of so high a work.”
In the Trismegistic tradition, however, the idea is simpler, as we learn from “The Definitions of Asclepius,” C. H. (xvi.) 3:
“For that the Fullness of all things is One and is in One,—this latter One not coming as a second One, but both being One. . . .
“For should one try to separate what seems to be both All and One and Same from One,—he will be found to take his epithet of ‘All’ from the idea of multitude and not from that of fullness (plērōma),—which is impossible; for if he put All for the One, he will destroy the All.”
Nevertheless, the Pleroma 1 of Life is more specially the Cosmos as the Son of God—that is, as the Logos. Thus in C. H., xii. (xiii.) 15, we read:
“Matter is one; and the World-order (Cosmos), as a whole,—the Mighty God and Image of the Mightier One, both with Him unified, and the Conserver of the Will and Order of the Father,—is Life’s Fullness (Plērōma). . . .
“How then, O son, could there be in the God,—the Image of the Father, the Plenitude (Plērōma) of Life, 2—dead things?”
And again in C. H., ix. (x.) 7:
“For [Cosmos] being a most wise Breath, bestows their qualities on bodies together with the one Pleroma—that of Life.”
5. This Pleroma of God is the Good and Beautiful. The Path to this True Good is one of balance,—for it
is the Way of Devotion united unto Gnosis—in Sanskrit terms, the Bhakti-Mārga and Jñāna-Mārga combined. 1
6. Finally we learn, though inferentially, that things are not bad in themselves; the evil is that men are content with the little goods they have and cling desperately to these, in ignorance of the greater blessings to which they could attain, did they but open their spiritual eyes for the True Vision of the Good. For even the psychic visions of the soul, in spite of their beauty, give man no hint of that Most Blessed Sight of All.
Footnotes
117:1 τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ, that is, the Spiritual Body of the “Elect.”
117:2 Eph. i. 23. Cf. Col. ii. 19: “In Him dwelleth the whole Fullness of the Godhead as in a body.”
117:3 Sc. the Zodiac.
117:4 Sc. of God.
118:1 Cf. John i. 16: “Of His Fullness we have all received, and grace on grace.”
118:2 Cf. John i. 4: “In Him was Life and the Life was the Light of men.”
119:1 Compare C. H., i. 27: “And I began to preach to men the beauty of Devotion and of Gnosis.”
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM VII. (VIII.)
THE GREATEST ILL AMONG MEN IS IGNORANCE OF GOD
(Text: P. 54, 55; Pat. 18a.)
1. Whither stumble ye, sots, who have sopped up the wine of ignorance unmixed, and can so far not carry it that ye already even spew it forth?
Stay ye, be sober, gaze upwards with the [true] eyes of the heart! And if ye cannot all, yet ye at least who can!
For that the ill of ignorance doth pour o’er all the earth and overwhelm the soul that’s battened down within the body, preventing it from fetching port within Salvation’s harbours.
2. Be then not carried off by the fierce flood, but using the shore-current, 1 ye who can, make for Salvation’s port, and, harbouring there, seek ye for one to take you by the hand and lead you 2 unto Gnosis’ gates.
Where shines clear Light, of every darkness clean; where not a single soul is drunk, but sober all they gaze with their hearts’ eyes on Him who willeth to be seen.
No ear can hear Him, nor can eye see Him, nor tongue speak of Him, but [only] mind and heart.
But first thou must tear off from thee the cloak which thou dost wear,—the web of ignorance, the ground of bad, corruption’s chain, the carapace of darkness, the living death, sensation’s corpse, the tomb thou carriest with thee, the robber in thy house, who through the things he loveth, hateth thee, and through the things he hateth, bears thee malice.
3. Such is the hateful cloak thou wearest,—that throttles thee [and holds thee] down to it, in order that thou may’st not gaze above, and, having seen the Beauty of the Truth, and Good that dwells therein, detest the bad of it; having found out the plot that it hath schemed against thee, by making void of sense those seeming things which men think senses.
For that it hath with mass of matter blocked them up and crammed them full of loathsome lust, so that thou may’st not hear about the things that thou should’st hear, nor see the things that thou should’st see.
Footnotes
120:1 Lit. back or up-current.
120:2 Cf. C. H., iv. (v.) 11; ix. (x.) 10; x (xi.) 2; R. 23, n. 5.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
COMMENTARY
A PREACHING
There is little to be said about this powerful appeal to cease from the drunkenness of physical sensations and to awaken to the Light.
Reitzenstein (p. 194) calls it a “Prophetenpredigt” and says that nowhere in the MSS. is it ascribed to Hermes; by which he can only mean that it bears no other superscription than the descriptive sentence which heads it.
The style and spirit remind us not so much of C. H., iii. (iv.), as Reitzenstein (p. 206, 1) suggests, as of the interpolated or superadded passages in the “Pœmandres” treatise (§ 27):
“O ye people, earthborn folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness, and sleep, and ignorance, be sober now, cease from your surfeit, cease to be glamoured by irrational sleep!”
Did this sentence give rise to our little sermon; or is the sentence a summary of the preaching? Or do both sentence and sermon come from a common stock?
THE PROBABLE COMPLETION OF AN OXYRHYNCHUS LOGION
The last hypothesis seems to be the most satisfactory choice; and we may compare what would appear to be a familiar figure of speech among such communities with logion 3 of the First Oxyrhynchus Fragment:
“Jesus saith: I stood in the midst of the world (τοῦ κόσμου), and in the flesh did I appear unto them; and I found all men drunken, and none found I athirst among them; and my soul grieveth over the souls of
men, because they are blind in their heart and see not . . .”
Can we fill up the missing word from our sermon?
“But sober all they gaze with their hearts’ eyes on Him who willeth to be seen.”
The missing word seems, therefore, to be “God.”
The Gospel that is preached is the Beauty of the Gnosis,—“the Beauty of the Truth and Good that dwells therein”; just as in C. H., i. 27:
“And I began to preach to men the Beauty of Devotion and of the Gnosis.”
The tempest-tossed on the Sea of Ignorance are to make for the Harbour of Salvation—evidently some great organization devoted to the holy life; therein they must seek for one who knows, who can take them by the hand and lead them unto the Gates of the Gnosis.
This suggests that the organization consisted of a general body, within which were grades of instruction; the many were striving for illumination, some few had reached it.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM VIII. (IX.)
THAT NO ONE OF EXISTING THINGS DOTH PERISH, BUT MEN IN ERROR SPEAK OF THEIR CHANGES AS DESTRUCTIONS AND AS DEATHS
[OF HERMES TO TAT]
(Text: P. 56-59; Pat. 48a, 48b.)
1. [Hermes.] Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak; in what way Soul is deathless, and whence comes the activity 1 in composing and dissolving Body.
For there’s no death for aught of things [that are]; the thought [this] word conveys, is either void of fact, or [simply] by the knocking off a syllable what is called “death,” doth stand for “deathless.” 2
For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life 1 that cannot die, it cannot be that any part of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts of Cosmos, and most of all is man, the rational animal.
2. For truly first of all, eternal and transcending birth, is God the universals’ Maker. Second is he “after His image,” Cosmos, brought into being by Him, sustained and fed by Him, made deathless, as by his own Sire, living for aye, as ever free from death.
Now that which ever-liveth, differs from the Eternal; for He 2 hath not been brought to being by another, and even if He have been brought to being, He hath not been brought into being by Himself, but ever is brought into being.
For the Eternal, in that It is eternal, is the all. The Father is Himself eternal of Himself, but Cosmos hath become eternal and immortal by the Father.
3. And of the matter stored beneath it, 3 the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical—wrapping it round the life 4—[a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make materiality eternal.
But He, the Father, full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives 1 into the sphere, and shut them in as in a cave, willing to order forth 2 the life with every kind of living.
So He with deathlessness enclosed the universal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself from body’s composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder.
For matter, son, when it was yet incorporate, was in unorder. And it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] enveloping the rest of the small lives 3—that increase-and-decrease which men call death.
4. It is round earthly lives that this unorder doth exist. For that the bodies of the heavenly ones preserve one order allotted to them from the Father as their rule 4; and it is by the restoration 5 of each one [of them] this order is preserved indissolute. 6
The “restoration” then of bodies on the earth
is [thus their] composition, whereas their dissolution restores them to those bodies which can never be dissolved, that is to say, which know no death. Privation, thus, of sense is brought about, not loss of bodies.
5. Now the third life—Man, after the image of the Cosmos made, [and] having mind, after the Father’s will, beyond all earthly lives—not only doth have feeling with the second God, but also hath conception of the first; for of the one ’tis sensible as of a body, while of the other it conceives as bodiless and the Good Mind.
Tat. Doth then this life not perish?
Her. Hush, son! and understand what God, what Cosmos [is], what is a life that cannot die, and what a life subject to dissolution.
Yea, understand the Cosmos is by God and in God; but Man by Cosmos and in Cosmos.
The source and limit and the constitution of all things is God.
Footnotes
124:1 ἐνέργεια.
124:2 The text is obscure, and the translations without exception make nonsense of it. Some words seem to be missing.
125:1 Living thing, “animal.”
125:2 Sc. the Eternal.
125:3 Sc. beneath the cosmos, world-order or universe.
125:4 The text here seems to me to be very faulty; for ποιόν, ποιά, I read ζῷον, ζῷα. In such unintelligible phrases as αὐτῷ τὸ ποιόν, and τὸ μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ ποιόν, the writer is evidently dealing with the Cosmos as the one life, the αὐτόζῳον, from which all other lives are derived; and if he did not write αὐτόζῳον, he assuredly wrote ζῷν. He wrote sense and not the nonsense of the present text.
126:1 Sc. the great lives or so-called heavenly “bodies.”
126:2 Or beautify.
126:3 As distinguished from the great lives or animals, the so-called heavenly “bodies.”
126:4 τὴν ἀρχήν,—or source or principle.
126:5 ἀποκατάστασις, a term used of the cyclic return of stars to their original positions.
126:6 If we may be permitted to coin a neologism.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
COMMENTARY
THE COSMOS AS “SECOND GOD”
The superscription enunciates the nature of the treatise. It is evidently taken from the Dialogues to Tat, and originally formed part of some General Dissertation or of a collection of Dissertations.
It formed part of an instruction in which the Cosmos
was treated of as “Second God,” as we find it also in Philo 1; but just as Philo guards against any idea of duality, so does our treatise when it ends with the words (§ 5):
“The source and limit and the constitution of all things is God.”
The Great Body of the Cosmos, the Sphere or Perfect Form, the root of all forms, seems to be bounded by the idea of the Æon or Eternity, or Deathlessness. It is, as it were, the Cave or Womb of all things in genesis, centred in the Pleroma of ideas, the Intelligible Cosmos, which is full-filled with the ideas of God (§ 3).
THE LAW OF APOKATASTASIS
The eternal order and life of Cosmos is preserved by the law of apokatastasis or restoration (§ 4), the law of ever-becoming, and cyclic renewal, the making-new-again (ἀνανέωσις) of C. H., iii. (iv.) 1.
There is no question of loss of body,—this is an illusion; there is a privation of sense, a going into latency of some particular phase of consciousness.
There are then Great Lives—God, Cosmos, Man. Cosmos is made in the image of God, Man in the image of Cosmos. Therefore has Man sense and mind; by the former he is “in sympathy with” the Cosmos, as Body by the latter he is conscious of God as Mind,—that is the Bodiless. Or as we might phrase it, by sense Man knows the Sensible Cosmos, by mind the Intelligible Cosmos, the Good Mind; for God is Source and Limit and the Constitution of all things—the Cosmos, both Intelligible and Sensible, included.
Footnotes
128:1 Leg. Alleg., § 21; M. i. 82; P. 1103 (Ri. i. 113); Quæst. Sol., i. (quoted by Euseb., Præp. Evang., vii. 13). See in the “Prolegomena,” “Philo Concerning the Logos.”
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM IX. (X.)
ON THOUGHT AND SENSE
THAT THE BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD IS IN GOD ONLY AND ELSEWHERE NOWHERE
(Text: P. 60-67; Pat. 14, 15.)
1. I gave the Perfect Sermon (Logos) yesterday, Asclepius; to-day I think it right, as sequel thereunto, to go through point by point the Sermon about Sense.
Now sense and thought do seem to differ, in that the former has to do with matter, the latter has to do with substance. But unto me both seem to be at-one and not to differ—in men I mean. In other lives 1 sense is at-oned with nature, but in men thought.
Now mind doth differ just as much from thought as God doth from divinity. For that divinity by God doth come to be, and by mind thought, the sister of the word (logos) 2 and
instruments of one another. For neither doth the word (logos) find utterance without thought, nor is thought manifested without word.
2. So sense and thought both flow together into man, as though they were entwined with one another. For neither without sensing can one think, nor without thinking sense.
But it is possible [they say] to think a thing apart from sense, as those who fancy sights in dreams. But unto me it seems that both of these activities occur in dream-sight, and sense doth pass out of the sleeping to the waking state.
For man is separated into soul and body, and only when the two sides of his sense agree together, does utterance of its thought conceived by mind take place.
3. For it is mind that doth conceive all thoughts good thoughts—when it receives the seeds from God, their contraries when [it receiveth them] from one of the daimonials; no part of Cosmos being free of daimon, who stealthily doth creep into the daimon who’s illumined by God’s Light, 1 and sow in him the seed of its own energy.
And mind conceives the seed thus sown,
adultery, murder, parricide, [and] sacrilege, impiety, [and] strangling, casting down precipices, and all such other deeds as are the work of evil daimones.
4. The seeds of God, ’tis true, are few, but vast and fair, and good—virtue and self-control, devotion. Devotion is God-gnosis; and he who knoweth God, being filled with all good things, thinks godly thoughts and not thoughts like the many [think].
For this cause they who Gnostic are, 1 please not the many, nor the many them. They are thought mad and laughed at 2; they’re hated and despised, and sometimes even put to death.
For we did say 3 that bad must needs dwell here on earth, where ’tis in its own place. Its place is earth, and not Cosmos, as some will sometimes say with impious tongue.
But he who is a devotee of God, will bear with all—once he has sensed the Gnosis. For such an one all things, e’en though they be for others bad, are for him good; deliberately he doth refer them all unto the Gnosis. And, thing most marvellous, ’tis he alone who maketh bad things good.
5. But I return once more to the Discourse
[paragraph continues] (Logos) on Sense. That sense doth share with thought in man, doth constitute him man. But ’tis not [every] man, as I have said, who benefits by thought; for this man is material, that other one substantial.
For the material man, as I have said, [consorting] with the bad, doth have his seed of thought from daimons; while the substantial men [consorting] with the Good, are saved by God.
Now God is Maker of all things, and in His making, He maketh all [at last] like to Himself; but they, while they’re becoming 1 good by exercise of their activity, are unproductive things.
It is the working of the Cosmic Course 2 that maketh their becomings what they are, befouling some of them with bad and others of them making clean with good.
For Cosmos, too, Asclepius, possesseth sense-and-thought peculiar to itself, not like to that of
man; ’tis not so manifold, but as it were a better and a simpler one.
6. The single sense-and-thought of Cosmos is to make all things, and make them back into itself again, as Organ of the Will of God, so organised that it, receiving all the seeds into itself from God, and keeping them within itself, may make all manifest, and [then] dissolving them, make them all new again; and thus, like a Good Gardener of Life, things that have been dissolved, it taketh to itself, and giveth them renewal once again.
There is no thing to which it gives not life; but taking all unto itself it makes them live, and is at the same time the Place of Life and its Creator.
7. Now bodies matter [-made] are in diversity. Some are of earth, of water some, some are of air, and some of fire.
But they are all composed; some are more [composite], and some are simpler. The heavier ones are more [composed], the lighter less so.
It is the speed of Cosmos’ Course that works the manifoldness of the kinds of births. For being a most swift Breath, it doth bestow their qualities on bodies together with the One Pleroma—that of Life.
8. God, then, is Sire of Cosmos; Cosmos, of [all] in Cosmos. And Cosmos is God’s Son; but things in Cosmos are by Cosmos.
And properly hath it been called Cosmos [Order]; for that it orders 1 all with their diversity of birth, with its not leaving aught without its life, with the unweariedness of its activity, the speed of its necessity, the composition of its elements, and order of its creatures.
The same, then, of necessity and of propriety should have the name of Order.
The sense-and-thought, then, of all lives doth come into them from without, inbreathed by what contains [them all]; whereas Cosmos receives them once for all together with its coming into being, and keeps them as a gift from God.
9. But God is not, as some suppose, beyond the reach of sense-and-thought. It is through superstition men thus impiously speak.
For all the things that are, Asclepius, all are in God, are brought by God to be, and do depend on Him—both things that act through bodies, and things that through soul-substance make [other things] to move, and things that make things live by means of spirit, and things that take unto themselves the things that are worn out.
And rightly so; nay, I would rather say, He doth not have these things; but I speak forth the truth, He is them all Himself. He
doth not get them from without, but gives them out [from Him].
This is God’s sense-and-thought, ever to move all things. And never time shall be when e’en a whit of things that are shall cease; and when I say “a whit of things that are,” I mean a whit of God. For things that are, God hath; nor aught [is there] without Him, nor [is] He without aught.
10. These things should seem to thee, Asclepius, if thou dost understand them, true; but if thou dost not understand, things not to be believed.
To understand is to believe, to not believe is not to understand.
My word (logos) doth go before [thee] 1 to the truth. But mighty is the mind, and when it hath been led by word up to a certain point, it hath the power to come before [thee 2] to the truth.
And having thought o’er all these things, and found them consonant with those which have already been translated by the reason, it 3 hath [e’en now] believed, and found its rest in that Fair Faith.
To those, then, who by God[’s good aid] do understand the things that have been said [by
us] above, they’re credible; but unto those who understand them not, incredible.
Let so much, then, suffice on thought-and-sense.
Footnotes
129:1 Or animals.
129:2 There is here the usual play on the meanings, reason, word, sermon or sacred discourse.
130:1 That is to say man, or rather the ego in man. The translators seem to make nonsense of this passage through rejecting the original reading.
131:1 οἱ ἐν γνώσει ὄντες, lit. they who are in Gnosis.
131:2 Cf. Plat., Phædr., 249 D: The wisdom-lover “is admonished, by the many as though he were beside himself.”
131:3 Sc. in some other sermon.
132:1 Or being made.
132:2 It is difficult to bring out the full delicacy of wording of the original in translation. First God’s ultimate intention is stated to be the making all things like (ὅμοια) Himself; this is the great sameness of union with Him. But meantime while this making, creating or becoming, is going on, these imperfections cannot produce—that is, become creators in their turn; they are unproductive (ἄφορα). That which is the instrument of God’s making is the cosmic course (φορά). We are finally (§ 7) told that it is bodies which are the cause of difference or diversity (ἐν διαφορᾷ), the opposite pole, so to speak, to the likeness (ὅμοια) with God.
134:1 Or adorns.
135:1 Cf. C. H., iv. (v.) 11; vii. (viii.) 2; x. (xi.) 21; R. 23, n. 5.
135:2 That is, presumably, before the pupil of the Gnosis is conscious of it in his physical brain.
135:3 Sc. the mind.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
COMMENTARY
TITLE AND ORDERING
This treatise bears a double title:—“On Thought and Sense,” and “That the Beautiful and Good is in God only.” The former heading is clearly taken from the concluding words: “Let so much then suffice on thought-and-sense”; whereas the introductory sentence speaks of the Sermon on Sense only. The latter heading seems to be a thoughtless repetition of the title of C. H., vi. (vii.).
The opening words: “I gave the Perfect Sermon yesterday, Asclepius,” inform us not only that we have to do with an Asclepius Dialogue, but also that our sermon followed directly on the “Perfect Sermon,” a Latin version of which has fortunately been preserved to us. 1
It is, therefore, of very great interest to find that Lactantius, 2 in quoting a sentence from our treatise (§ 4)—“Devotion is God-gnosis”—continues with the words: “Asclepius, his hearer, has also explained the same idea at greater length in the Perfect Sermon.”
Lactantius had, therefore, a collection before him in which these two sermons stood in close connection.
Reitzenstein (p. 195) thinks that our sermon must be an extract from a longer one, because he cannot bring himself to believe that so short a treatise could have been found in immediate connection (as the opening words suggest) with so lengthy and detailed a tractate as the “Perfect Sermon.” This may be so; and yet the formal beginning and ending of our sermon would seem to suggest that we are dealing with a complete tractate and not with an extract.
“SENSE-AND-THOUGHT”
The doctrine that in men “sense-and-thought” together constitutes human “sense” throws some light on the meaning of the term “sense” as used elsewhere in the Trismegistic literature, where we should expect to find “mind” employed, and that, too, in the sense of the higher mind.
Normal human “thought,” then, is, so to say, sensible, entirely bound up in sense-impressions; it is the mind alone that can soar beyond the senses, for it alone can be “illumined by God’s Light” (§ 3).
The mind is, as it were, a womb or woman, that can be impregnated either by the “Seeds of God” or by the “Daimonial Energy”; she thus conceives and brings forth virtues or vices.
All of this is precisely the same doctrine as Philo preaches, as may be seen by the passages we have quoted in the “Prolegomena” on the subject of the “Sacred Marriage.”
THOSE IN GNOSIS
The Seeds of God are Virtue and Self-control and Devotion or Piety; and Devotion in its true sense
is God-gnosis, or Knowledge of God. The Gnostics, then, “they who are in Gnosis”—a curious expression—because of their natural divorcement from the “world,” “please not the many, nor the many them.”
“They are thought mad and laughed at; they’re hated and despised, and sometimes even put to death.”
Mark the impersonal note, the calm laying down of the causes of misunderstanding between the “many” and the “few’’; and compare this with the more personal note of the saying underlying the following Synoptic accommodations:
“Blessed are ye when men hate you and excommunicate you, and revile and expel your Name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake” (Luke vi. 22).
“Blessed are ye when men revile you and persecute you and say all evil against you, lying, for My sake” (Matt. v. 11).
It is clear, at least it seems so to me, that “Luke” has kept closer to the original, and that that original was addressed not only to the members of a community, but to those who had been cast forth from some other community “for the sake of the Son of Man”—that is, because of the immediate inspiration of the Logos, which doubtless did not pay sufficient attention to the prejudices of the “many” of that community.
“Matthew,” on the contrary, seems to have adapted the Saying for general purposes and the necessities of the Cult of Jesus. 1
THE TRUE GNOSTIC
Excellent also is the doctrine that the true “Gnostic,” the man who is consciously growing into the stature of
the Christ, the true “Devotee of God,” “will bear with all,” for he is beginning to know the Reason of things.
“For such an one all things, e’en though they be for others bad, are for him good; deliberately he doth refer them all unto the Gnosis.”
He sees the Good, he sees God, in all things. He is the true Alchemist. For “thing most marvellous, ’tis he alone who maketh bad things good”; by spiritual alchemy he transmutes the evil of the world to good; he drains the “cup of bitterness” unto the dregs, and transmutes it into the pure Water of Life.
In every Man, then, there are two “men,” the material (or hylic) and the substantial (or spiritual, οὐσιώδης).
Evil, however, is not a permanent thing; it is but the process of “becoming good,” the productive side of things (§ 5).
THE GOAL OF THE GNOSIS
It is difficult to bring out the delicacy of the wording of the original in translation. First God’s ultimate intention is stated to be the making of all things like unto (ὅμοια) Himself; the world-process is to be ultimately consummated in the Great Sameness of Union with Him. But meantime while this making, creating or becoming, or transformation, is going on, the imperfections cannot produce, that is, become creators in their turn; they are unproductive (ἄφορα). That which is the instrument or organ of God’s making is the Cosmic Course (φορά). We are finally (§ 7) told that the differences of bodies are conditioned by the speed of this Cosmic Course; therefore the opposite poles, Other and Same, are both ultimately referable to Cosmos, the Likeness of God.
The end to be achieved is to develop the “sense-and-thought” of the Cosmos, the One Sense, not manifold,
but simple. This is the deliberate working with the Will of God, the Cosmic Will, the perpetual renewing of all things (ἀνανέωσις).
The Cosmos, then, as the Logos of God, is the Good Gardener of Life; it is both the place of Life and its Creator—that is to say, both female and male, both Mother and Father.
THE POSSIBILITY OF KNOWING GOD
But the Cosmos is not apart from God, nor even in God; God does not have Cosmos as a possession, but is Cosmos and all therein (§ 9). Cosmos is Son of God, His Very Self (§ 8).
Therefore we can learn to know somewhat of the nature of God by sense and thought, for, “God is not, as some suppose, beyond the reach of sense and thought” (ἀναισθητὸς καὶ ἀνόητος); that is, God does not entirely transcend sense and thought, for God is all things.
“As some suppose” doubtless refers again to the “blasphemers” of § 4—that is, the apparently dualistic doctrine set forth in C. H., vi. (vii.). 1
And so, finally, we learn that Faith, in the true sense, is a certitude of the mind, or of true manhood. “To understand is to believe” (§ 10). Gnosis and not belief is the Fair Faith.
Compare with this the “Perfect Sermon,” x. 1:
“The reason for a thesis such as this, O my Asclepius, I would that thou should’st grasp, not only with the keen attention of thy soul, but also with its living power as well.
“For ’tis a reason that most men cannot believe; the Perfect and the True are to be grasped by the more holy minds.”
Footnotes
136:1 For it would, of course, be absurd to suppose that the “Perfect Sermon” could in any way be thought to indicate C. H., vi. (vii.), the last Asclepius Dialogue in our Corpus; especially when our sermon (§ 4) directly combats the teaching of C. H., vi.
136:2 Div. Institt., ii. 15 (Ed. Fritz., i. 106); cf. also v. 14.
138:1 R. (p. 213, 1) brings this passage of our sermon into connection with some assumed persecution of the Pœmandres communities in the course of the fourth century; but I cannot myself see the slightest ground for such an assumption.
140:1 Reitzenstein (p. 171, 2) compares this doctrine of the insensibility and incognizability of God with the Sabæan Gnosis.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM X. (XI.)
THE KEY
OF THRICE-GREATEST HERMES
(Text: P. 67-84; Pat. 9b-12.)
1. Hermes. My yesterday’s discourse (logos) I did devote to thee, Asclepius, and so ’tis [only] right I should devote to-day’s to Tat; and this the more because ’tis the abridgment of the General Sermons (Logoi) which he has had addressed to him.
“God, Father and the Good,” then, Tat, hath 1 the same nature, or more exactly, energy.
For nature is a predicate of growth, and used of things that change, both mobile and immobile, that is to say, both human and divine, each one of which He willeth into being.
But energy consists in something else, as we have shown in treating of the rest, both things divine and human things 1; which thing we ought to have in mind when treating of the Good. 2
2. God’s energy is then His Will; further His essence is to will the being of all things. For what is “God and Father and the Good” but the to be of all that are not yet? Nay, subsistence 3 self of everything that is;—this, then, is God, this Father, this the Good; to Him is added naught of all the rest.
And though the Cosmos, that is to say the Sun, is also sire himself to them that share in him; yet so far is he not the cause of good unto the lives, he is not even of their living.
So that e’en if he be a sire, he is entirely so by the compulsion of the Good’s Good-will, apart from which nor being nor becoming could e’er be.
3. Again, the parent is the children’s cause, both on the father’s and the mother’s side, 4 only by sharing in 5 the Good’s desire [that doth pour] through the Sun. It is the Good which doeth the creating.
And such a power can be possessed by no one
else than Him alone who taketh naught, 1 but wills all things to be; I will not, Tat, say makes.
For that the maker is defective for long periods (in which he sometimes makes, and sometimes doth not make) both in the quality and in the quantity [of what he makes]; in that he sometimes maketh them so many and such like, and sometimes the reverse.
But “God and Father and the Good” is [cause] for all to be. So are at least these things for who can see.
4. For It doth will to be, and It is both Itself and most of all by reason of 2 Itself. Indeed all other things beside are just because of It; for the distinctive feature of the Good is “that it should be known.” Such is the Good, O Tat.
Tat. Thou hast, O father, filled us so full 3 of this so good and fairest Sight, that thereby my mind’s eye hath now become for me almost a thing to worship.
For that the Vision of the Good doth not, like the sun’s beam, fire-like blaze on the eyes and make them close; nay, on the contrary, it shineth forth and maketh to increase the seeing 4 of the eye, as far as e’er a man hath the capacity
to hold the inflow of the radiance that the mind alone can see.
Not only does it come more swiftly down to us, but it does us no harm, and is instinct with all immortal life.
5. They who are able to drink in a somewhat more than others of this Sight, ofttimes from out the body fall asleep into this fairest Spectacle, as was the case with Uranus and Cronus, our forebears. 1 May this be our lot too, O father mine!
Her. Yea, may it be, my son! But as it is, we are not yet strung to the Vision, and not as yet have we the power our mind’s eye to unfold and gaze upon the Beauty of the Good—Beauty that naught can e’er corrupt or any comprehend.
For [only] then wilt thou upon It gaze when thou canst say no word concerning It. For Gnosis of the Good is holy silence and a giving holiday to every sense.
6. For neither can he who perceiveth It, perceive aught else; nor he who gazeth on It, gaze on aught else; nor hear aught else, nor stir his body any way. Staying his body’s every sense and every motion he stayeth still.
And shining then all round his mind, It shines
through his whole soul, and draws it out of body, transforming all of him to essence.
For it is possible, my son, that a man’s soul should be made like to God, e’en while it still is in a body, if it doth contemplate the Beauty of the Good.
7. Tat. Made like to God! What dost thou, father, mean?
Her. Of every soul apart are transformations, son.
Tat. What meanest thou? Apart!
Her. 1 Didst thou not, in the General Sermons, hear that from One Soul—the All-soul—come all these souls which are made to revolve in all the cosmos, as though divided off?
Of these souls, then, it is that there are many changes, some to a happier lot and some to [just] the contrary of this.
Thus some that were once creeping things change into things that in the water dwell, the souls of water things change to earth-dwellers, those that live on the earth change into things with wings, and souls that live in air change into men, while human souls reach the first step of deathlessness changed into daimones.
And so they circle to the choir of the Inerrant Gods; for of the Gods there are two choirs, the
one Inerrant, and the other Errant. And this is the most perfect glory of the soul.
8. But if a soul on entering in the body of a man persisteth in its vice, 1 it neither tasteth deathlessness nor shareth in the Good; but speeding back again it turns into the path that leads to creeping things. This is the sentence of the vicious soul.
And the soul’s vice is ignorance. 2 For that the soul who hath no knowledge of the things that are, or knowledge of their nature, or of Good, is blinded by the body’s passions and tossed about.
This wretched soul, not knowing what she is, becomes the slave of bodies of strange form in sorry plight, bearing the body as a load; not as the ruler, but the ruled. This [ignorance] is the soul’s vice.
9. But on the other hand the virtue of the soul is Gnosis. For he who knows, he good and pious is, and still while on the earth 3 divine.
Tat. But who is such an one, O father mine?
Her. He who doth not say much or lend his ear to much. For he who spendeth time in arguing and hearing arguments, doth shadow
fight. For “God, the Father and the Good,” is not to be obtained by speech or hearing.
And yet though this is so, there are in all the beings senses, in that they cannot without senses be.
But Gnosis is far different from sense. For sense is brought about by that which hath the mastery o’er us, while Gnosis is the end of science, 1 and science is God’s gift.
10. All science is incorporal, the instrument it uses being the mind, just as the mind employs the body.
Both then come into bodies, [I mean] both things that are cognizable by mind alone and things material. 2 For all things must consist out of antithesis and contrariety; and this can otherwise not be.
Tat. Who then is this material God of whom thou speakest?
Her. Cosmos is beautiful, but is not good 3—for that it is material and freely passible 4; and though it is the first of all things passible, yet is it in the second rank of being and wanting in itself.
And though it never hath itself its birth in time, but ever is, yet is its being in becoming,
becoming for all time the genesis of qualities and quantities; for it is mobile and all material motion’s genesis. 1
11. It is intelligible 2 rest that moves material motion in this way, 3 since Cosmos is a sphere—that is to say, a head. And naught of head above’s material, as naught of feet below’s intelligible, 4 but all material.
And head itself moved in a sphere-like way—that is to say, as head should move, 5 is mind.
All then that are united to the “tissue” of this “head” (in which 6 is soul) are in their nature free from death,—just as when body hath been made in soul, are things that have more soul than body.
Whereas those things which are at greater distance from this “tissue”—there, where are things which have a greater share of body than of soul—are by their nature subject unto death.
The whole, however, is a life; so that the universe consists of both the hylic and of the intelligible. 7
12. Again, the Cosmos is the first of living
things, while man is second after it, though first of things subject to death.
Man hath the same ensouling power in him as all the rest of living things 1; yet is he not only not good, but even evil, 2 for that he’s subject unto death. 3
For though the Cosmos also is not good in that it suffers motion, it is not evil, in that it is not subject unto death. But man, in that he’s subject both to motion and to death, is evil. 4
13. Now then the principles 5 of man are this-wise vehicled: mind in the reason (logos), the reason in the soul, soul in the spirit, 6 [and] spirit in the body.
Spirit pervading [body] 7 by means of veins and arteries and blood, bestows upon the living creature motion, and as it were doth bear it in a way.
For this cause some do think the soul is blood, in that they do mistake its nature, not knowing that [at death] it is the spirit that must first
withdraw into the soul, whereon the blood congeals and veins and arteries are emptied, and then the living creature is withdrawn; and this is body’s death.
14. Now from One Source 1 all things depend; while Source [dependeth] from the One and Only [One]. Source is, moreover, moved to become Source again; whereas the One standeth perpetually and is not moved.
Three then are they: “God, the Father and the Good,” Cosmos and man.
God doth contain Cosmos; Cosmos [containeth] man. Cosmos is e’er God’s Son, man as it were Cosmos’s child.
15. Not that, however, God ignoreth man; nay, right well doth He know him, and willeth to be known.
This is the sole salvation for a man—God’s Gnosis. This is the Way Up to the Mount. 2
By Him alone the soul becometh good, not whiles is good, whiles evil, but [good] out of necessity.
Tat. What dost thou mean, Thrice-greatest one?
Her. Behold an infant’s soul, my son, that is not yet cut off, 3 because its body is still small and not as yet come unto its full bulk. 4
Tat. How?
Her. A thing of beauty altogether is [such a soul] to see, not yet befouled by body’s passions, still all but hanging from the Cosmic Soul!
But when the body grows in bulk and draweth down the soul into its mass, then doth the soul cut off itself and bring upon itself forgetfulness, and no more shareth in the Beautiful and Good. And this forgetfulness becometh vice.
16. It is the same for them who go out from the body.
For when the soul withdraws into itself, the spirit doth contract itself within the blood, and soul within the spirit. 1 And then the mind, stript of its wrappings, and naturally divine, taking unto itself a fiery body, doth traverse every space, after abandoning the soul unto its judgment and whatever chastisement it hath deserved.
Tat. 2 What dost thou, father, mean by this? The mind is parted from the soul and soul from
spirit? Whereas thou said’st the soul was the mind’s vesture, and the soul’s the spirit.
17. Her. The hearer, son, should think with him who speaks and breathe with him 1; nay, he should have a hearing subtler than the voice of him who speaks.
It is, son, in a body made of earth that this arrangement of the vestures comes to pass. For in a body made of earth it is impossible the mind should take its seat itself by its own self in nakedness.
For neither is it possible on the one hand the earthy body should contain such immortality, nor on the other that so great a virtue should endure a body passible in such close contact with it. It taketh, then, the soul for as it were an envelope.
And soul itself, being too a thing divine, doth use the spirit as its envelope, while spirit doth pervade the living creature.
18. When then the mind doth free itself from the earth-body, it straightway putteth on its proper robe of fire, with which it could not dwell in an earth-body.
For earth doth not bear fire; for it is all set in a blaze even by a small spark. And for this cause is water poured round earth, to be a guard and wall, to keep the blazing of the fire away.
But mind, the swiftest thing of all divine out-
thinkings, and swifter than all elements, hath for its body fire.
For mind being builder 1 doth use the fire as tool for the construction of all things—the Mind of all [for the construction] of all things, but that of man only for things on earth.
Stript of its fire the mind on earth cannot make things divine, for it is human in its dispensation. 2
19. The soul in man, however,—not every soul, but one that pious is—is a daimonic something and divine.
And such a soul when from the body freed, if it have fought the fight of piety—the fight of piety is to know God and to do wrong to no man—such soul becomes entirely mind.
Whereas the impious soul remains in its own essence, chastised by its own self, and seeking for an earthy body where to enter, if only it be human.
For that no other body can contain a human soul; nor is it right that any human soul should fall into the body of a thing that doth possess no reason. For that the law of God is this: to guard the human soul from such tremendous outrage. 3
20. Tat. How father, then, is a man’s soul chastised?
Her. What greater chastisement of any human soul can there be, son, than lack of piety? What fire has so fierce flame as lack of piety? What ravenous beast so mauls the body as lack of piety the very soul?
Dost thou not see what hosts of ills the impious soul doth bear?
It shrieks and screams: I burn; I am ablaze; I know not what to cry or do; ah, wretched me, I am devoured by all the ills that compass me about; alack, poor me, I neither see nor hear!
Such are the cries wrung from a soul chastised; not, as the many think, and thou, son, dost suppose, that a [man’s] soul, passing from body, is changed into a beast.
Such is a very grave mistake, for that the way a soul doth suffer chastisement is this:
21. When mind becomes a daimon, the law requires that it should take a fiery body to execute the services of God; and entering in the soul most impious it scourgeth it with whips made of its sins.
And then the impious soul, scourged with its sins, is plunged in murders, outrage, blasphemy, in violence of all kinds, and all the other things whereby mankind is wronged. 1
But on the pious soul the mind doth mount and guide it 1 to the Gnosis’ Light. And such a soul doth never tire in songs of praise [to God] and pouring blessing on all men, and doing good in word and deed to all, in imitation of its Sire. 2
22. Wherefore, my son, thou shouldst give praise to God and pray that thou mayst have thy mind Good [Mind]. It is, then, to a better state the soul doth pass; it cannot to a worse.
Further 3 there is an intercourse 4 of souls; those of the gods have intercourse with those of men, and those of men with souls of creatures which possess no reason.
The higher, further, have in charge the lower; the gods look after men, men after animals irrational, 5 while God hath charge of all; for He is higher than them all and all are less than He.
Cosmos is subject, then, to God, man to the Cosmos, and irrationals to man. But God is o’er them all, and God contains them all.
God’s rays, to use a figure, are His energies; the Cosmos’s are natures; the arts and sciences are man’s. 6
The energies act through the Cosmos, thence through the nature-rays of Cosmos upon man; the nature-rays [act] through the elements; man [acteth] through the sciences and arts.
23. This is the dispensation 1 of the universe, depending from the nature of the One, pervading [all things] through the Mind, than which 2 is naught diviner or of greater energy; and naught a greater means for the at-oning men to gods and gods to men.
He, [Mind,] is the Good Daimon. Blessed the soul that is most filled with Him, and wretched 3 is the soul that’s empty of the Mind.
Tat. Father, what dost thou mean, again?
Her. 4 Dost think then, son, that every soul hath the Good [Mind]? For ’tis of Him we speak, not of the mind in service 5 of which we just were speaking, the mind sent down for [the soul’s] chastisement.
24. For soul without the mind “can neither speak nor act.” 6 For oftentimes the mind doth leave the soul, and at that time the soul nor sees
nor understands, but is just like a thing that hath no reason. Such is the power of mind.
Yet doth it not endure a sluggish 1 soul, but leaveth such a soul tied to the body and bound tight down by it. Such soul, my son, doth not have Mind; and therefore such an one should not be called a man. 2 For that man is a thing-of-life 3 divine; man is not measured with the rest of lives of things upon the earth, but with the lives above in heaven, who are called gods.
Nay more, if we must boldly speak the truth, the true “man” is e’en higher than the gods, or at the [very] least the gods and men are every whit in power each with the other equal.
25. For no one of the gods in heaven shall come down on the earth, o’er-stepping heaven’s limit; whereas man doth mount up to heaven and measure it; he knows what things of it are high, what things are low, and learns precisely all things else besides. And greater thing than all; without e’en quitting earth, he doth ascend above. So vast a sweep doth he possess of ecstasy. 4
For this cause can a man dare say that man on earth is god subject to death, while god in heaven is man from death immune.
Wherefore the dispensation of all things is brought about by means of 1 these, the twain—Cosmos and Man 2—but by 3 the One.
Footnotes
141:1 The three are only different names for one idea; the verb is in the singular in the Greek. Cf. C. H., ii. (iii.) 16 and 17: “Good then is God and God is Good”; and “The other name of God is Father.”
142:1 That is to say, presumably, in the General Sermons.
142:2 Lit. of this.
142:3 ὕπαρξις. Cf. C. H., xvi. 4.
142:4 Lit. both with regard to seed and nourishment.
142:5 Lit. taking.
143:1 Cf. C. H., ii. (iii.) 16: “The Good is He who gives all things and naught receives.”
143:2 Lit. for.
143:3 ἐπλήρωσας,—reminding us of πλήρωμα.
143:4 Lit. light.
144:1 See Lact, D. Institt., i. 11; P. S. A., xi. 4, xxxvii. 3; and Ex. i. 4.
145:1 From here to end of § 8 is quoted by Stobæus, Phys., I. xli. 48 (G. i. 429, 430; W. 416, 18 ff.).
146:1 ἐὰν κακὴ μείνῃ.
146:2 Cf. C. H., xii. (xiii.) 3: “The great ill of the soul is Godlessness”; also below § 20: “What greater chastisement of any human soul can there be, son, than lack of piety?”
146:3 Lit. already.
147:1 ἐπιστήμης.
147:2 Or hylic.
147:3 But cf. P. S. A., xxvii. 1.
147:4 That is capable of suffering, or impressionable by agencies other than itself.
148:1 Genesis and becoming are both γένεσις in Greek.
148:2 Noëtic as opposed to hylic—the antithesis and contrariety mentioned above.
148:3 Namely the ever-becoming of genesis.
148:4 Or mental, in the sense of being of the same nature as the mind.
148:5 κεφαλικῶς.
148:6 In which “tissue.”
148:7 §§ 12, 13 are quoted by Stobæus, Phys., I. xxxix. 9 (G. i. 307; W. 350, 13 ff.).
149:1 That is to say, the world-system itself and all the globes in it.
149:2 Cf. Ex. i. 11 and 15.
149:3 Whereas the system and its globes are regarded as practically immortal.
149:4 Reitzenstein (p. 40, 1) gives a revised text of the major part of this utterance of Hermes, from “Cosmos is beautiful” onwards, but unfortunately he omits just the most obscure sentences in it.
149:5 Lit. a man’s soul, where ψυχὴ is used in a general sense, and not in the particular sense applied to it in the category which immediately follows.
149:6 πνεύματι.
149:7 Cf. P. S. A., vi. 4.
150:1 ἀρχή.
150:2 Lit. to Olympus.
150:3 Sc. from the world-soul.
150:4 Cf. the instructive exposition of Basilides in F. F. F., pp. 274 f.
151:1 This is generally translated “the spirit is contracted into the blood, and the soul into the spirit,” but such a translation contradicts § 13, where we are told that “the spirit withdraws into the soul” at death. It seems to mean that the spirit passes within, out of the blood, and the soul is then clothed in a spirit-vesture, or borne in a spirit-vehicle.
151:2 From here to the end of § 18 is quoted by Stobæus, Phys., xl. 3 (G. i. 312, 313; W. 310, 25 ff.); only the dialogue is ascribed in error to Asclepius and Tat and not to Hermes and Tat.
152:1 Cf. P. S. A., x. i.
153:1 δημιουργός.
153:2 τῇ διοικήσει, i.e. in its economy.
153:3 This paragraph is quoted by Stobæus, Phys., xli. 49 (G. i. 430, 431; W. 417, 15 ff.). For the idea, cf. P. S. A., xxxii. 2.
154:1 Cf. P. S. A., xxv. 4 and xxviii. 1.
155:1 Cf. C. H., iv. (v.) 11; vii. (viii.) 11; ix. (x.) 10; R. 23, n. 5.
155:2 Namely, the Good.
155:3 From here to the end is quoted by Stobæus, Phys., I. xxxix. 8 (G. i. 305-307; W. 303, 14 ff.).
155:4 κοινωνία. Cf. P. S. A., xxiii. 1.
155:5 Cf. P. S. A., v. 1.
155:6 Cf. Ex. viii. 1.
156:1 διοίκησις, compare 19.
156:2 Sc. the Mind.
156:3 κακοδαίμων, as opposed to ὁ ἀγαθὸς δαίμων. It is impossible to reproduce the original word-play in translation.
156:4 Stobæus (Gaisford) here reads “A.”—that is, Asclepius.
156:5 τοῦ ὑπηρετικοῦ, compare § 21, “the services of God” (τὰς τοῦ θεοῦ ὑπηρεσίας); that is to say, Hermes speaks of the Universal Mind and not of the mind in man.
156:6 A quotation from the ancient gnomic poet Theognis (v. 177). Theognis lived c. 570-490 B.C.
157:1 νωτρᾶς,—? νωθρᾶς. Everard translates “an idle or lazy soul,” in his usual slipshod fashion of inserting doubles; Parthey gives “inertem animam”; Ménard, “l’âme vicieuse”; Chambers, “inert.” Several of the old editors omit the entire sentence.
157:2 Cf. Philo, De Som., § 20; M. i. 639; P. 584 (Ri. iii. 241): “not for those who are called men, but for those who are truly so.”
157:3 Or animal.
157:4 ἐκστάσεως, lit. extension, or consciousness.
158:1 διά.
158:2 Cf. P. S. A., x. 3.
158:3 ὑπό.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
COMMENTARY
THE CONSUMMATION OF THE “GENERAL SERMONS”
What “yesterday’s sermon,” which Hermes addressed to Asclepius, may have been, we have no means of deciding. The similarity of the phrase with the opening words of C. H., ix. (x.) is noticeable, and points, perhaps, to a collection of Sermons to Asclepius and Tat strung together in some chronological order, as delivered day by day. If this be the fact, however, we must assume that such introductions were prefixed by the editor of that collection.
“The Key of Thrice-greatest Hermes” must have been considered one of the most remarkable documents of the school, for, as we have already mentioned in the case of “The Cup” treatise, the apocryphal “Books of Moses” plagiarize the title. 4
That it was an important treatise may also be seen from the fact that Stobæus reproduces no less than five extracts from it under the title, “From the [Sermons] of Hermes to Tat,” or simply “Of Hermes.” Strangely enough in two cases (xxxix. 8 and xl. 3) Stobæus makes
the persons of the dialogue Asclepius and Tat; this, however, must be a mistake, for it contradicts his own headings, it contradicts the nature of the sermon, it contradicts the supposed introduction of the editor of the collection from whom the redactor of our Corpus has taken his text, and it contradicts Chalcidius, who quotes from our treatise as a treatise of Hermes. 1
Nevertheless, in spite of the importance of the treatise, it purports to be an epitome, 2 an abridgment of the “General Sermons” (οἱ γενικοὶ λόγοι) 3 addressed to Tat.
The sermon itself, however, has by no means the appearance of being an abridgment; on the contrary, it is one of the most complete and fundamental expositions that we have.
I would, therefore, suggest that the general reference in the words, “as we have shown in treating of the rest” (§ 1), and the precise reference to “The General Sermons,” in § 7, have originated this wording of the introduction with the editor of the collection of Asclepius and Tat Sermons which I have previously supposed. It is a gloss of the editor and no part of the original text.
If this argument holds good, “The Key,” instead of
being an epitome, is a further teaching that presupposes a prior instruction already given in “The General Sermons,” and so stands out as a more intimate exposition of the inward doctrine of the higher grades of the school.
Reitzenstein (p. 461) would have it that the doctrine of Sermons, ix. (x.) and x. (xi.), is a mediate one between the dualism of vi. (vii.) and the pronounced pantheistic mysticism of v. (vi.) and xi. (xii.); but I should fancy that these labels, even if they are correctly attached, would not represent such overwhelming contradictions to the Trismegistic doctors as they appear to do to their modern critics. There were different points of view; there were different grades of instruction; every doctrine had more truth in it at the proper time and in the right place. In any case this sermon is one of the most beautiful tractates preserved to us.
THE WILL OF GOD
1. Our treatise begins with the statement that the universe and all therein is due to the Energy or Effective Working of God—that is to say, His Will. This Will is immutable and constant—the Law of the universe.
How subtly these philosophers in their most intimate circles used these terms may be seen from the Gnostic Doctor, Basilides, who writes:
“Naught was,—neither matter, nor substance, nor voidness of substance, nor simplicity, nor impossibility of composition, nor inconceptibility, nor imperceptibility, neither man, nor angel [Hermeticè, daimon], nor God; in fine, neither anything at all for which man has ever found a name, nor any operation which falls within the range either of his perception or conception.
“Such, or rather far more removed from the power of man’s comprehension, was the state of Non-Being, when the Deity beyond Being, without thinking, or feeling, or determining, or choosing, or being compelled, or desiring, willed to create universality.”
“When I use the term will,” writes Basilides, “I do so merely to suggest the idea of an operation transcending all volition, thought, or sensible action.” 1
2. God’s Energy, or Self-realization, is, then, His Will (θέλησις); His Essence (οὐσία) or Substance is “to will the being of all things”; in brief, He is the Very Subsistence (ὕπαρξις) of all—a term which subsequently came into great prominence in the later Platonic philosophy.
3. In § 3 we have a clear distinction drawn between the transcendent idea of God as Creator or Willer, and the ordinary conception of God as Maker or Fabricator or Demiurge—a distinction that meets us in almost every Gnostic system. In our treatise, however, there is no setting of the one idea over against the other in any sense of antagonism. It is only stated that the self-operation of Deity transcends all such limited conceptions as that of a Maker or Fabricator.
OF GNOSIS AND ECSTASIS
4. The distinctive feature of God as the Good, or the Desirable, the Supreme Consummation, is “that He should be known” (τὸ γνωρίζεσθαι); in other words, the science of all sciences is the Gnosis of God.
5. The Vision Glorious, the One Sight, is next spoken of under the simile of the shining of a Ray of the Light
and Life of the Spiritual Sun into the mind. This consummation of Ecstasis, 1 we are told, was a transcending of the limitations of body, and was a faculty possessed by the forebears (πρόγονοι) of the “race” into which Hermes and now Tat are being born; these ancestors are mentioned under symbolic Greek names, evidently a substitute for Egyptian ones, for the reference is clearly to the priesthood of some past civilization of the Nile Land. At the same time, it can be referred to certain grades of super-men, regarded as gods, who had reached to certain stages of celestial dignity. 2
To this idea of ancient Masters of the Gnosis in Egypt, Lactantius refers as follows:
“And so it appears that he [Cronus] was not born from Heaven (which is impossible), but from that man who was called Uranus; and that this is so, Trismegistus bears witness, when, in stating that there have been very few in whom the perfect science has been found, he mentioned in their number Uranus, Cronus, and Hermes his kinsfolk.” 3
Lactantius seems to be somewhat under the fascination of the theory of Euhemerus, and has no credence in the Heaven-born, in spite of the Christ Birth. We, however, learn from him that he knew of a statement by Hermes in this connection in which, besides Uranus and Cronus, an ancient Hermes was mentioned. Now in our treatise this is not the case, and Tat and not Hermes is the speaker; whereas in P. S. A., xxxvii., where Hermes speaks of his progenitor Hermes, no
mention is made of Uranus and Cronus. Therefore Lactantius refers to a lost treatise of Hermes.
OF APOTHEOSIS
6. The nature of Ecstasy is then further explained; it is the fruit of meditation or contemplation, the consummation of the Theoretic Life.
“The Gnosis of the Good is holy silence and a giving holiday (καταργία) to every sense.”
The Holy Silence reminds us of the Sigē of the Christian Gnostics; here, however, instead of the Mother-Æon of Cosmos, it is used in the sense of the pure mother-nature of the little cosmos of man, the divine womb that brings to birth the true man.
With this may be compared C. H., xiii. (xiv.) 2:
“Wisdom conceived by mind in silence, such is the matter and the womb from out which man is born, and the true Good the seed.”
It is hardly necessary to add that this is the Yoga of the Upaniṣhads. Indeed, the first part of § 6 might be taken word for word from those sublime treatises of Vaidik theosophy, and shows how identical is the thought of those who have first-hand experience of the higher consciousness.
“For it is possible, my son, that a man’s soul should be made like to God (ἀποθεωθῆναι), e’en while it still is in a body, if it doth contemplate the Beauty of the Good.”
This is the “deification” (ἀποθέωσις), or “apotheōsis” of a man; he becomes like unto God, in that he becomes a god. The Beauty of the Good is the Cosmic Order; and the mode of this meditation was to bring the soul into sympathy with the Cosmic Soul.
THE METAMORPHOSES OF THE SOUL
7. The secret of this divine operation (or theurgy) is based upon the fact that the soul can be transformed
into every likeness. The Great Likeness of God is the Cosmic Order, the making oneself into this Likeness is the supreme transformation or transfiguration of the soul.
The separated or individual soul is in perpetual pilgrimage, revolving on the wheel of transformation. This doctrine was shared in by many other faiths, and it was also Egyptian.
In this connection we may refer instructively to Hippolytus’ quotations from the Naassene Document (§ 3 S.):
“And they 1 say that the soul is very difficult to discover, and hard to understand; for it never remains of the same appearance, or form, or in the same state, so that we can describe it by a general type, or comprehend it by an essential quality.”
On this Hippolytus comments:
“These variegated metamorphoses they 2 have laid down in the Gospel superscribed ‘According to the Egyptians.’”
The Gospel according to the Egyptians is lost, with the exception of a few fragments. We, however, here learn that it described the metamorphoses of the soul. It was a Gospel having its origin in Egypt and suited to Egyptian modes of thought. It follows, therefore, that the doctrine of the soul’s transformation was Egyptian. 3
THE LADDER OF BEING
The Hermetic doctrine of the evolution of the soul, by means of multitudinous transformations, is characterised by certain main moments, for in the course of it it passes through definite stages of existence designated as animal, human, daimonic, and god-like; there being, further, two grades of being within the choir of gods—the errant and inerrant. The final stage is the most perfect glory (δόξα) or power of the soul.
With all of this there is a strikingly exact parallel of ideas in the Pauline Letters.
“But some one will say: How do the dead rise, and with what body do they come [? back]?
“Thou foolish one! That which thou sowest is not made quick unless it die.
“And that which thou sowest—’tis not the body that shall be thou sowest, but a naked grain of wheat or of one of the other seeds. 1
“’Tis God that gives to it 2 a body as he will,—yea to every one of the seeds its proper body.
“Not every flesh is the same flesh; but there is one of men, another flesh of beasts, another flesh of birds, and another of fishes.
“There are also bodies celestial, as well as bodies terrestrial. But the glory of the celestial [bodies] is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.
“[And of the former] the glory of the sun is one, and the glory of the moon is another, and [yet] another is the glory of the stars; for star differeth from star in glory.
“So also is the resurrection of the dead.” 3
And by “resurrection of the dead,” I believe that Paul meant what all the instructed of the time meant—namely, the “reaching the first step of deathlessness,” as Hermes has it in our treatise. The death or vice of the soul is ignorance, the virtue or life of the soul is Gnosis.
“For he who knows, he good and pious is, and still while on the earth, divine.”
CONCERNING TRANSMIGRATION
8. With § 8, however, we are confronted with what appears to be a great difficulty. Hermes here seems to teach distinctly that a vicious (that is, an ignorant) soul, one who has not attained to Gnosis, goes back to attachment to animal bodies, while in §§ 19 ff., he at great length denies that a human soul can possibly do so. Is there any solution of this apparently complete self-contradiction in one and the same treatise?
Far as I am from desiring to play the apologist for any scripture, I am prevented from appending an impatient “No” to this query, for the following considerations:
In the first place, Hermes in § 8 is speaking of the vicious or ignorant soul, while in § 19 he is speaking not only of the “human” soul, but of the human soul that hath the Good Mind (§ 23); whereas the ignorant soul “doth not have Mind, and, therefore, such an one should not be called a man” (§ 24). Here, then, we have a fundamental distinction in souls incarnated into the “body of a man” (§ 8); they are of two classes.
The doctrine of § 8 applies to one class, the doctrine of § 19 to another.
Metempsychosis, in the sense of continued revolution on the wheel of life and death, is only for him who “persisteth in his vice”—that is to say, is
still ignorant. Gnosis thus means the freedom from saṁsāra, to use a common Brāhmanical and Buddhistic term.
The ignorant soul does not see the Light, being “blinded by the body’s passions, and tossed about”; this is the “turmoil” of which Plato speaks in the Timæus.
And here I must refer the reader to “Plato Concerning Metempsychosis,” in the “Prolegomena,” a chapter which I have written mainly in elucidation of the problems raised by our treatise.
GNOSIS THE VIRTUE OF THE SOUL
9. So much, then, for the soul which persisteth in its vice or ignorance; but the virtue of the soul is Gnosis.
“For he who knows, he good and pious is, and still while on the earth, divine.”
This is precisely the same idea as that of the Jīvanmukta in Indian theosophy—namely, the man who has reached Mukti or Liberation while still living in the body.
Hermes thus proceeds to distinguish Gnosis, the end of human science, from sense or opinion. Gnosis is the apotheosis of the mind, its immediate perception of the things-that-are—namely, the Intelligible Cosmos.
11. The Sensible or Hylic Cosmos is then explained, and also the nature of man, and his relationship to the Cosmos and God.
THE VEHICLES OF THE SOUL
13. The vehicles of man’s “Soul” are then categorized (ψυχὴ δὲ ἀνθρώπου ὀχεῖται τὸν τρόπον τοῦτον), the Soul being here used in the sense of the Self, and as distinguished from the “soul” in the category. They are
as follows, one within the other, in the sense of being respectively more intimate to the true nature of man:
Mind (νοῦς); reason (λόγος); soul (ψυχή); spirit (πνεῦμα); body (σῶμα).
The remarkable similarity of this category with the psychology of the Upaniṣhads cannot fail to strike the student of those mother-treatises of Vaidik theosophy. Thus we read in the Kaṭhopaniṣhad, I. iii. 10, 11:
“Beyond the senses are the rudiments 1; beyond the rudiments impulsive mind; beyond the mind, the reason; beyond the reason, the Great Self.
“Beyond the Great, the Increate 2; beyond the Increate, the Man 3; beyond the Man, not any thing; That is the goal; That is the final end.”
The analogy is striking. Body = gross elements; spirit = subtle elements; soul = impulsive mind (manas); reason = reason (buddhi 4); Mind = the Great (Mahat); Source (ἀχρή) = the Increate; the One and Only (τὸ ἕν καὶ μόνον) = the Man.
These so-called “vehicles,” “envelopes,” or “sheaths” (koshas), are elsewhere given in the Upaniṣhads as: anna-maya-kosha—that is, the kosha composed of, or resulting from, food (body); prāṇa-maya-k., of life (spirit); mano-maya-k., of impulse (soul); vijñāna-maya-k., of discrimination (reason); ānanda-maya-k., of bliss (Mind).
“Spirit” is thus seen to correspond to life (prāna); it is that which “bestows upon the living creature motion, and, as it were, doth bear it” (i.e. support it) “in a way” (§ 13). It is not Life, but individualized
life, and in the Aupaniṣhad literature is differentiated into five modes, which may be almost translated as etheric currents or modes of motion in the body. 1
The quotation from Proclus in “Plato Concerning Metempsychosis,” will have sufficiently shown that this “life” is of the same nature as the animal life. It is that principle of soul which man shares with the animals.
THE DUAL SOUL
And here we may refer to Jamblichus (De Myst., viii. 6), when referring to the “Hermaic writings” he says:
“Man has two souls, as these writings say. The one is from the first Mind, and partakes also of the power of the Creator, while the other, the soul under constraint, comes from the revolution of the celestial [spheres]; into the latter the former, the soul that is the seer of God, 2 insinuates itself at a later period.
“This being so, the soul that descends into us from the worlds [or spheres] keeps time with the circuit of these worlds, while the soul from the Mind existing in us in an intelligible fashion is free from the whirl of genesis; by this the bonds of Destiny are burst asunder; by this the Path up to the Gods whom mind alone can see is brought to birth; by such a life as this is that Great Art Divine, which leads us up to That beyond the spheres of genesis, brought to its consummation.”
Hermes in our treatise is, however, more precise as to the so-called “vehicles” or “souls,” for he writes (§ 17):
“Mind taketh, then, the soul for, as it were, an
envelope. And soul itself being, too, a thing divine, 1 doth use the spirit as its envelope, while spirit doth pervade the living creature.” 2
“HE WHO STANDS”
The Supreme Principle of all, the One and Only One, who “standeth perpetually” (§ 14), is the Intelligible Logos (ἡ νοητὴ στάσις, cf. § 11), the ὁ ἑστὼς of the Christianized Gnosis, as seen especially in the Simonian Great Announcement. He is the Cause of the perpetual motion of the Hylic Cosmos. Compare this with the following passage of Numenius:
“Now there are two modes of life, the first of the First and the second of the Second God. For it is evident that the First God should be standing (ἑστὼς), and the Second, on the contrary, moved. The First, then, is occupied about things intelligible, and the Second about things intelligible and sensible.
“Marvel not that I say this; for thou shalt hear what is still more marvellous. For I say that it is not the motion that appertains to the Second, but the rest that pertains to the First, which is the innate ‘motion’ from which both their cosmic order and their eternal community and their preservation [or salvation] is poured forth on things universal.” 3
THE OLYMPIAN PATH
15. In § 15 the Gnosis is again declared to be the only Path of Salvation or Safety. 1 It is the Way Up to the Mount, 2 the Olympian Path.
The term Eleusis was also interpreted as Anabasis, or the Way Up. 3 Compare the Jewish commentator in the Naassene Document (§ 27):
“First is the Mystery called ‘Eleusis’ and ‘Anaktoreion’—Eleusis because we come from Above, 4 streaming down from Adamas, 5 . . . and Anaktoreion from ‘Returning Above.’”
“WHEN MIND BECOMES A DAIMON”
16. The next main doctrine touched on is one of immense importance, for it gives us the inner teaching which illuminates the “dark saying” in the “Pœmandres” (§ 24), when treating of the Way Up (ἄνοδος):
“And thou surrenderest thy way of life unto the daimon.”
For in our treatise Hermes tells us that at death:
“The mind stript of its wrappings, and naturally divine, taking unto itself a fiery body, doth traverse every space, after abandoning the soul unto its judgment and whatever chastisement it hath deserved.”
The key to this is the sentence (§ 21):
“When mind becomes a daimon, the law requires that it should take a fiery body to execute the services of God.”
At death, the mind, of its own nature, perforce becomes a “servant of God,” a Therapeut 1; the man is his own judge and his own chastizer.
The “fire of hell” is then but the reflection of the light of the mind; it is the burning remorse of a mind that now sees the inevitable results of every selfish action—thought, word, and deed; that each of these comes inevitably back on the sender forth of it.
The soul, thus, lives out (and that too in the most realistic fashion, it realizes the actuality of the law in all its most minute details) the inevitable consequences of its past vicious deeds in body.
Here we have the hint of a psychology and of an inner teaching that persuades us there was a profound wisdom at the back of the intermediate instruction of these schools.
Compare this most reasonable theory of after-death “illumination” with the crudities of the eternal torment idea of popular religion with which we are so familiar, and reflect on what a “falling off” there has been from the Gnosis of the early days.
And what is the “fiery body” of the mind but the ray-like or starry vehicle of the man, the αὐγοειδὲς ἢ ἀστροειδὲς of Philoponus? 2
This is the true “Astral Body” of a man, and not the “watery vesture” which is referred to under the term in modern nomenclature.
This is the true Body of Purification, that burns up all impurities, and in the light of the conflagration burns into man the memory of the Gnosis.
The soul is thus “chastised by its own self”; and if Hermes had taught us nothing else, he would have amply deserved the gratitude of humanity, and the title
of Thrice-greatest. Yet is “Hermes” no single man, but a mind illuminated by the Mind.
THE “SCOURGE” OF THE CHRIST
21. So then “the impious soul, scourged with its own sins, is plunged in murders, outrage, blasphemy, in violence of all kinds, and all the other things whereby mankind is wronged.”
This is the “scourge” by which the Christ drives the unworthy out of His Temple. It does not mean that the soul is driven into doing these things, but that it is made to realize or suffer them—the consequences of its prior misdeeds. Whatever wrong it has done to its fellows, such it suffers, in the realization of its true nature, whereby the Light of Gnosis brings into amazing contrast the darkness or ignorance of its past actions. 1
THE DISPENSATION OF THE UNIVERSE
22. And so Hermes explains the nature of “the dispensation of the universe”—the interlinking of the grades of being from God downwards the intercourse or communion of souls.
God, Cosmos and Man are grades of being. Each is a sun, as it were, in their operations, or powers or rays. God’s rays are His energies or self-realizing operations; those of Cosmos are the natures of things, those of Man are the arts and sciences.
This communion or intercourse of higher with lower natures is to be realized on the side of man by the consummation of the sacred marriage, whereby man becomes a god, and finally God.
He only is blessed who is filled with God—that is to
say, the true Gnostic who has received the consecration of the Fullness or Plērōma. 1
Whereas the soul that is empty of God is deprived of that Fullness, cut off from it, and so empty of the Mind. This is the state of Emptiness (κένωμα) or Insufficiency (ὑστέρημα).
24. Such souls, says Hermes, should not be called men. For a true man is not only equal to a god, but even higher than the gods. Such a man we should, in Christian nomenclature, call a Christ—one animated or illuminated by the Mind or Spirit of God.
Footnotes
158:4 R. 182, 3; 190, 2.
159:1 Chalcid., Comment. in Timæum (ed. Fabric.), p. 350.
159:2 Compare also the introduction to C. H., xvi. (see R. 191, 1); and also Ex. i. 16 and Comment.
159:3 Cf. § 7, below; C. H., xiii. (xiv.) 1; and Exs. ix. 1 and xviii. 1. The title must be so translated, I think, in spite of the fact that in the introductory words of the above treatise the term is immediately followed by the antithesis “rebirth” (παλιγγενεσία), as though the Sermons were on birth or genesis (γένεσις),—which, as we know from the Naassene Document, was the subject of the Lesser Mysteries, whereas Rebirth was that of the Greater. Everard gives “in the general speeches”; Parthey, “in communibus”; Ménard, “dans les discours généraux”; Chambers, “in the Generalities.”
161:1 Hipp., Philos., vii. 21 (ed. D. and S., p. 358); F. F. F., pp. 257, 258.
162:1 Cf. § 25, where ecstasis is explained as an extension of consciousness,—a certain “greatness” (μέγεθος).
162:2 See the “Chart of Orphic Cosmogony,” facing p. 87 of my Orpheus (London, 1896), where Uranus and Cronus are referred to the two lower of the three Noëtic “planes” transcending the Sensible Universe.
162:3 Div. Institt., i. 11 (ed. Fritz., i. 29, 30).
164:1 The quotation is from the text of the Hellenistic Commentator, who is referring to the Chaldæans.
164:2 The Gnostics Hippolytus calls the Naassenes.
164:3 Reitzenstein (p. 22, 2) says that it was in error that the Greeks stated the Egyptians believed in metempsychosis; in this I believe that Reitzenstein is himself in error. The Egyptians at any rate demonstrably believed in soul metamorphosis; and when we find people who lived in Egypt teaching this metamorphosis in connection with metempsychosis, it is but natural to conclude that the Greeks, who were in touch with the living tradition of Egypt, knew more about the matter than modern scepticism.
165:1 The “grain of mustard seed”—“wheat” if a good body comes therefrom, “tares” if an imperfect growth results.
165:2 Sc. the soul as grain.
165:3 1 Cor. xv. 35-42.
168:1 The subtler elements.
168:2 Avyakta, undifferentiated cosmic substance.
168:3 Purusha, the True Man.
168:4 The manas and buddhi of the Upaniṣhads are not to be confounded with these terms as at present employed in modern Theosophical literature.
169:1 Cf. K. K., 44, 45, Comment.
169:2 Cf. C. H., ix. (x.) 3: “The daimon who’s illumined by God’s Light.”
170:1 That is, being logos, as from the Creator or Second Mind.
170:2 Cf. Exx. iv. 2; xv. 2; xix. 3; and Frag. xviii.
170:3 Quoted by Eusebius, Præp. Evang., XI. xviii. 20, 21 (539 B), ed. Dindorf (Leipzig, 1867), ii. 41. We do not know Numenius’ date, but it was probably about the first half of the first century A.D. Though Numenius is almost invariably designated as a Pythagorean, he was rather a universalist, for his object was not only to trace the doctrines of Plato up to Pythagoras, but to show that they were not at variance with the doctrines and mysteries of the Brāhmans, Jews, Magi and Egyptians.
171:1 Cf. the passage from Jamblichus quoted above.
171:2 Cf. C. H., xiii. (xiv.) 1: “The Passing o’er the Mount.”
171:3 Cf. C. H., i. 24.
171:4 Eleusis meaning Coming, Advent.
171:5 The Man or Mind.
172:1 Cf. 23: “The mind in service.”
172:2 See my Orpheus, pp. 292 ff.
173:1 With this compare the function of the Mind on the soul in incarnation, as described in C. H., xii. (xiii.) 4.
174:1 Cf. John i. 16: “Of His Fullness have we all received.”
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM XI. (XII.)
MIND UNTO HERMES
(Text: P. 85-99; Pat. 20b-23.)
1. Mind. Master this sermon (logos), 1 then, Thrice-greatest Hermes, and bear in mind the spoken words; and as it hath come unto Me to speak, I will no more delay.
Hermes. As many men say many things, and these diverse, about the All and Good, I have not learned the truth. Make it, then, clear to me, O Master mine! For I can trust the explanation of these things, which comes from Thee alone.
2. Mind. Hear [then], My son, how standeth God and All.
God; Æon 2; Cosmos; Time; Becoming. 3
God maketh Æon; Æon, Cosmos; Cosmos, Time; and Time, Becoming.
The Good,—the Beautiful, Wisdom, Blessedness,—is essence, as it were, 1 of God; of Æon, Sameness 2; of Cosmos, Order; of Time, Change; and of Becoming, Life and Death.
The energies of God are Mind and Soul; of Æon, lastingness 3 and deathlessness; of Cosmos, restoration and the opposite thereof 4; of Time, increase and decrease; and of Becoming, quality.
Æon is, then, in God; Cosmos, in Æon; in Cosmos, Time; in Time, Becoming.
Æon stands firm round God; Cosmos is moved in Æon; Time hath its limits 5 in the Cosmos; Becoming doth become in Time.
3. The source, 6 therefore, of all is God; their essence, Æon; their matter, Cosmos.
God’s power is Æon; Æon’s work is Cosmos—which never hath become, yet ever doth become by Æon.
Therefore will Cosmos never be destroyed, for Æon’s indestructible; nor doth a whit of things in Cosmos perish, for Cosmos is enwrapped by Æon round on every side.
Her. But God’s Wisdom—what is that?
Mind. The Good and Beautiful, and Blessedness, and Virtue’s all, and Æon.
Æon, then, ordereth 1 [Cosmos], imparting deathlessness and lastingness to matter.
4. For its 2 becoming doth depend on Æon, as Æon doth on God.
Now Genesis 3 and Time, in Heaven and on the Earth, are of two natures.
In Heaven they are unchangeable and indestructible, but on the Earth they’re subject unto change and to destruction.
Further, the Æon’s soul is God; the Cosmos’ soul is Æon; the Earth’s soul, Heaven.
And God’s in Mind; and Mind, in Soul; and Soul, in Matter; and all of them through Æon.
But all this Body, 4 in which are all the bodies, is full of Soul; and Soul is full of Mind, and [Mind] of God.
It 5 fills it 6 from within, and from without encircles it, making the All to live.
Without, this vast and perfect Life 7 [encircles] Cosmos; within, it fills [it with] all lives 8; above, in Heaven, continuing in sameness; below, on Earth, changing becoming.
5. And Æon doth preserve this [Cosmos], or by Necessity, or by Foreknowledge, or by
[paragraph continues] Nature, or by whatever else a man supposes or shall suppose. And all is this,—God energizing.
The Energy of God is Power that naught can e’er surpass, a Power with which no one can make comparison of any human thing at all, or any thing divine.
Wherefore, O Hermes, never think that aught of things above or things below is like to God, for thou wilt fall from truth. For naught is like to That which hath no like, and is Alone and One.
And do not ever think that any other can possibly possess His power; for what apart from Him is there of life, and deathlessness and change of quality? For what else should He make 1?
God’s not inactive, 2 since all things [then] would lack activity; for all are full of God.
But neither in the Cosmos anywhere, nor in aught else, is there inaction. For that “inaction” is a name that cannot be applied to either what doth make or what is made. 3
6. But all things must be made; both ever
made, and also in accordance with the influence of every space. 1
For He who makes, is in them all; not stablished in some one of them, nor making one thing only, but making all.
For being Power, He energiseth in the things He makes and is not independent of them,—although the things He makes are subject to Him.
Now gaze through Me 2 upon the Cosmos that’s now subject to thy sight; regard its Beauty carefully—Body in pure perfection, though one than which there’s no more ancient one, ever in prime of life, and ever-young, nay, rather, in even fuller and yet fuller prime!
7. Behold, again, the seven subject Worlds 3; ordered 4 by Æon’s order, 5 and with their varied course full-filling Æon!
[See how] all things [are] full of light, and nowhere [is there] fire; for ’tis the love and blending of the contraries and the dissimilars
that doth give birth to light down shining by the energy of God, 1 the Father of all good, the Leader of all order, and Ruler of the seven world-orderings!
[Behold] the Moon, forerunner of them all, the instrument of nature, and the transmuter of its lower matter!
[Look at] the Earth set in the midst of All, foundation of the Cosmos Beautiful, feeder and nurse of things on Earth!
And contemplate the multitude of deathless lives, how great it is, and that of lives subject to death; and midway, between both, immortal [lives] and mortal, [see thou] the circling Moon.
8. And all are full of Soul, and all are moved by it, each in its proper way; some round the Heaven, others around the Earth; [see] how the right [move] not unto left, nor yet the left unto the right; nor the above below, nor the below above.
And that all these are subject unto Genesis, 2 My dearest Hermes, thou hast no longer need to learn of Me. For that they bodies are, have souls, and they are moved.
But ’tis impossible for them to come together into one without some one to bring them [all]
together. It must, then, be that such a one as this must be some one who’s wholly One.
9. For as the many motions of them [all] are different, and as their bodies are not like, yet has one speed been ordered for them all, it is impossible that there should be two or more makers for them.
For that one single order is not kept among “the many”; but rivalry will follow of the weaker with the stronger, and they will strive.
And if the maker of the lives that suffer change and death, should be another, 1 he would desire to make the deathless ones as well; just as the maker of the deathless ones, [to make the lives] that suffer death.
But come! if there be two, 2—if Matter’s one, and Soul is one, in whose hands would there be the distribution 3 for the making? Again, if both of them have some of it, in whose hands may there be the greater part?
10. But thus conceive it, then; that every living body doth consist of soul and matter, whether [that body be] of an immortal, or a mortal, or an irrational [life].
For that all living bodies are ensouled; whereas, upon the other hand, those that live not, are matter by itself.
And, in like fashion, Soul when in its self is, after its own maker, cause of life; but the cause of all life is He who makes the things that cannot die.
Her. How, then, is it that, first, lives subject unto death are other than the deathless ones? And, next, how is it that that Life which knows no death, and maketh deathlessness, doth not make animals immortal?
11. Mind. First, that there is some one who does these things, is clear; and, next, that He is also One, is very manifest. For, also, Soul is one, and Life is one, and Matter one.
Her. But who is He?
Mind. Who may it other be than the One God? Whom else should it beseem to put Soul into lives but God alone? One, then, is God.
It would indeed be most ridiculous, if when thou dost confess the Cosmos to be one, Sun one, Moon one, and Godhead 1 one, thou shouldst wish God Himself to be some one or other of a number!
12. All things, therefore, He makes, in many [ways]. And what great thing is it for God to make life, soul, and deathlessness, and change, when thou [thyself] dost do 2 so many things?
For thou dost see, and speak, and hear, and
smell, and taste, and touch, and walk, and think, and breathe. And it is not one man who smells, a second one who speaks, a third who touches, another one who smells, another one who walks, another one who thinks, and [yet] another one who breathes. But one is he who doth all these.
And yet no one of these could be apart from God. For just as, shouldst thou cease from 1 these, thou wouldst no longer be a living thing, so also, should God cease from them (a thing not law to say), no longer is He God.
13. For if it hath been shown that no thing can inactive 2 be, how much less God? For if there’s aught He doth not make (if it be law to say), He is imperfect. But if He is not only not inactive, but perfect [God], then He doth make all things.
Give thou thyself to Me, My Hermes, for a little while, 3 and thou shalt understand more easily how that God’s work is one, in order that all things may be—that are being made, or once have been, or that are going to be made. And this 4 is, My belovèd, Life; this is the Beautiful; this is the Good; this, God.
14. And if them wouldst in practice 1 understand [this work], behold what taketh place with thee desiring to beget. Yet this is not like unto that, for He doth not enjoy.
For that indeed He hath no other one to share in what He works, for working by Himself, He ever is at work, Himself being what He doth. 2 For did He separate Himself from it, 3 all things would [then] collapse, and all must die, Life ceasing.
But if all things are lives, and also Life is one; then, one is God. And, furthermore, if all are lives, both those in Heaven and those on Earth, and One Life in them all is made to be by God, and God is it 4—then, all are made by God.
Life is the making-one of Mind and Soul; accordingly Death is not the destruction of those that are at-oned, 5 but the dissolving of their union.
15. Æon, moreover, is God’s image; Cosmos [is] Æon’s; the Sun, of Cosmos; and Man, [the image] of the Sun.
The people call change death, because the body is dissolved, and life, when it’s dissolved, withdraws to the unmanifest. But in this
sermon (logos), Hermes, my beloved, as thou dost hear, I say the Cosmos also suffers change,—for that a part of it each day is made to be in the unmanifest,—yet it is ne’er dissolved.
These are the passions of the Cosmos—revolvings and concealments; revolving is conversion and concealment renovation.
16. The Cosmos is all-formed,—not having forms external to itself, but changing them itself within itself. Since, then, Cosmos is made to be all-formed, what may its maker be? For that, on the one hand, He should not be void of all form; and, on the other hand, if He’s all-formed, He will be like the Cosmos. Whereas, again, has He a single form, He will thereby be less than Cosmos.
What, then, say we He is?—that we may not bring round our sermon (logos) into doubt; for naught that mind conceives of God is doubtful.
He, then, hath one idea, 1 which is His own alone, which doth not fall beneath the sight, being bodiless, and [yet] by means of bodies manifesteth all [ideas]. 2 And marvel not that there’s a bodiless idea.
17. For it is like the form of reason (logos) 3
and mountain-tops in pictures. 1 For they appear to stand out strongly from the rest, but really are quite smooth and flat.
And now consider what is said more boldly, but more truly!
Just as man cannot live apart from Life, so neither can God live without [His] doing good. 2 For this is as it were the life and motion as it were of God—to move all things and make them live.
18. Now some of the things said 3 should bear a sense peculiar to themselves. So understand, for instance, what I’m going to say.
All are in God, [but] not as lying in a place. For place is both a body and immovable, and things that lie do not have motion.
Now things lie one way in the bodiless, another way in being made manifest.
Think, [then,] of Him who doth contain them all; and think, that than the bodiless naught is more comprehensive, or swifter, or more potent, but it is the most comprehensive, the swiftest, and most potent of them all.
19. And, thus, think from thyself, and bid
thy soul go unto any land; and there more quickly than thy bidding will it be. And bid it journey oceanwards; and there, again, immediately ’twill be, not as if passing on from place to place, but as if being there.
And bid it also mount to heaven; and it will need no wings, nor will aught hinder it, nor fire of sun, nor æther, nor vortex-swirl, 1 nor bodies of the other stars; but, cutting through them all, it will soar up to the last Body [of them all]. 2 And shouldst thou will to break through this as well, and contemplate what is beyond—if there be aught beyond the Cosmos 3; it is permitted thee.
20. Behold what power, what swiftness, thou dost have! And canst thou do all of these things, and God not [do them]?
Then, in this way know 4 God; as having all things in Himself as thoughts, the whole Cosmos itself.
If, then, thou dost not make thyself like unto God, thou canst not know Him. For like is knowable to like [alone].
Make, [then,] thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all
measure; leap forth from every body; transcend all Time; become Eternity 1; and [thus] shalt thou know God.
Conceiving nothing is impossible unto thyself, think thyself deathless and able to know all,—all arts, all sciences, the way of every life. 2
Become more lofty than all height, and lower than all depth. Collect into thyself all senses of [all] creatures,—of fire, [and] water, dry and moist. Think that thou art at the same time in every place,—in earth, in sea, in sky; not yet begotten, in the womb, young, old, [and] dead, in after-death conditions. 3
And if thou knowest all these things at once, 4—times, places, doings, qualities, and quantities; thou canst know God. 5
21. But if thou lockest up thy soul within thy body, and dost debase it, saying: I nothing know; I nothing can; I fear the sea; I cannot scale the sky; I know not who I was, who I shall be;—what is there [then] between [thy] God and thee?
For thou canst know naught of things beautiful and good so long as thou dost love thy body and art bad.
The greatest bad there is, is not to know God’s Good 1; but to be able to know [Good], and will, and hope, is a Straight Way, the Good’s own [Path], both leading there and easy. 2
If thou but sett’st thy foot thereon, ’twill meet thee everywhere, ’twill everywhere be seen, both where and when thou dost expect it not,—waking, sleeping, sailing, journeying, by night, by day, speaking, [and] saying naught. For there is naught that is not image of the Good.
22. Her. Is God unseen?
Mind. Hush! Who is more manifest than He? For this one reason hath He made all things, that through them all thou mayest see Him.
This is the Good of God, this [is] His Virtue,—that He may be made manifest through all. 3
For naught’s unseen, even of things that are without a body. Mind sees itself 4 in thinking, God in making. 5
So far these things have been made manifest to thee, Thrice-greatest one! Reflect on all the rest in the same way within thyself, and thou shalt not be led astray.
Footnotes
175:1 Or thy reason.
175:2 Eternity; the ideal world, beyond time. Cf. P. S. A., xxx., xxxi.
175:3 Genesis.
176:1 That is to say, the term “ess-ence” cannot really be applied to God, for He is beyond “be-ing.”
176:2 Or identity.
176:3 Or duration.
176:4 ἀνταποκατάστασις.
176:5 Or is accomplished.
176:6 πηγή.
177:1 Or adorneth.
177:2 Sc. Matter’s Becoming or Genesis.
177:3 Or Becoming.
177:4 Sc. Cosmos.
177:5 Sc. Soul.
177:6 Sc. Body, of Universe or Cosmos.
177:7 Or Animal; that is, Soul.
177:8 Or animals.
178:1 Sc. than those which are Himself.
178:2 ἀργός. There is a word-play in the terms ἔργον (work), ἐνεργῶν (working in, energizing), ἐνεργής (active, energetic), ἐνέργεια (in-working, activity), and ἀργός (not-working, inactive, idle), ἀργία (inactivity, idleness), which it is impossible to bring out fully in English.
178:3 Or what becomes.
179:1 This seems to mean, that all things in the world of genesis (making, creating, or becoming) have their root-activity, first from the sameness of becoming of the one sphere or space, and then their differentiated activity from the seven spheres, spaces, or planes, which are the instruments of God in the differentiation of the Cosmos.
179:2 Mind—i.e. with the mind’s eye, or spiritual sight, or by the help of the Master’s illuminating power. Cf. C. H., i. 7 and xiii. (xiv.) 11.
179:3 κόσμους, cosmoi or world-orders.
179:4 Or adorned, or made beautiful.
179:5 The order of the Æon (Eternity, the Spiritual Space), æonian or everlasting order.
180:1 The text from “Now gaze . . .” to here is given in R. 36, n. 1.
180:2 Or becoming.
181:1 From the maker of the immortals.
181:2 Sc. makers.
181:3 Sc. of matter and life.
182:1 Or Divinity.
182:2 Or make; a play on the double meaning of the Greek verb.
183:1 Lit. become inactive of (καταργηθῇς).
183:2 A word has here dropped out in the text, which I have supplied by ἀργὸν (inactive), and not by the usual conjecture “apart from God.”
183:3 Cf. P. S. A., iii. 1: “Now lend to me the whole of thee.”
183:4 Sc. work, doing, making, or creating.
184:1 ἔργῳ, in deed, in work.
184:2 Or makes.
184:3 Sc. His work, or creation.
184:4 Viz., this Life.
184:5 That is, Mind and Soul, sc. the Logos and World-Soul, or ego and animal soul.
185:1 The root of form; used also loosely in Greek to denote form.
185:2 Or forms.
185:3 Or idea of the sermon.
186:1 καὶ ἐν ταῖς γραφαῖς ἀκρώρειαι. All the translators talk of “margins” in MSS., and make entire nonsense of the passage. I can find absolutely no authority for translating ἀκρώρειαι margins.
186:2 Or making the Good; that is, Æon.
186:3 Or points of the sermon.
187:1 ἡ δίνη, presumably the vortex or “whorl” of the solar system (cf. “Vision of Er”).
187:2 Sc. the body or limit of the whole cosmos.
187:3 Cf. C. H., iv. (v.) 5: “And things above the heaven—if there be aught.”
187:4 Or think.
188:1 Lit. Æon.
188:2 παντὸς ζῷου ἦθος,—or nature of every animal.
188:3 Cf. C. H., xiii. (xiv.) 11.
188:4 Or art simultaneously conscious of.
188:5 A critical text from “Make, then, thy self” to here is given by R., p. 238.
189:1 τὸ θεῖον—lit. the Godly, or Divine.
189:2 Cf. Ex. i. 4.
189:3 The preceding question and answer is quoted with very slight verbal variants by Cyril, Contra Julianum, ii. 52.
189:4 Or is seen.
189:5 Or doing.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
COMMENTARY
TITLE AND FORM
The title in the MSS. is simply “Mind to Hermes.” When, therefore, Cyril, in quoting the first three paragraphs of § 22 of our treatise, says that Hermes wrote these words “to his own mind,” 1 he is evidently either a very careless reader, 2 or had not seen at first hand the treatise from which he quotes.
From its contents, moreover, it is very evident that our treatise, as far as its form is concerned, looks back to the “Pœmandres” as the type of instruction to Hermes (or to a Hermes).
This highly authoritative form of enunciating doctrine was evidently chosen because it was desired to impart a more intimate instruction than that of the “General Sermons” and the like,—to wit, the inculcation of the Æon-doctrine, in connection with the marvellous doctrine of At-one-ment with all things which constitutes the Path of the Good. The doctrine is no longer “Become (or make thyself like) Cosmos,” but “Become Æon” (§ 20).
Now it is remarkable that the instruction given in our treatise by the Mind to Hermes is, almost point for point, the “esoteric” teaching of which the Sermon of Hermes to Tat, entitled the “Cup or Monad”—C. H., iv. (v.)—is the “exoteric” form.
That the instruction in these Trismegistic schools of initiation was divided into grades is manifest on all sides; and, therefore, nothing is more natural than to find these two sermons standing in such intimate relations to one another as to doctrine, the one containing
the more intimate and advanced explanation of the more general instruction of the other.
And that this inner instruction on the “Cup” doctrine must have been thought to be of very great value, is evident when we reflect that “The Cup” sermon was one of the most famous of all the treatises of Hermes, for, as we have seen, its title was worth being plagiarized, and the Baptism of the Cup, of which it treated, constituted the goal of the endeavour of the disciples of the School, as Zosimus tells us.
Mystically, then, the main interest of our treatise centres in the doctrine of the At-one-ment (as the inner consummation of the Baptism in the Cup or Monad), to which the Æon-idea is but a formal introduction; historically, however, the introduction of the Æon-idea presents itself as a critical problem, for the term is not found in the ‘‘Pœmandres,” and, therefore, presumably was not used in the earliest documents of the School.
THE ÆON-LORE
When, then, did this Æon-idea impose itself upon the older form of tradition of the Trismegistic schools? This is a most important question; for if we can in any way answer it, we shall be in a position to assign a terminus ad quem for the earlier forms of Hermetic doctrine.
The answer to the question seems to me to be involved in the supposition that the Æon-doctrine must have influenced “Hermeticism” at more or less the same date as that at which it influenced “Gnosticism.”
Now “Gnosticism,” in its Christianized forms, is practically never found without the Æon-lore.
The earliest forms of Christian Gnosis referred to
by the later Patristic hæresiologists are bound up with Æonology. Not only so, but the very earliest reference to Gnosticism by any Christian writer presupposes the Æon-doctrine, and uses it in illustration of the spiritual state of the writer. 1
The widespread influence of the Æon-doctrine can thus be traced back to at least the origins of Christianity.
Now as the Gnosis existed before any Christian form of it was developed, the question of the date when the Æon-doctrine was introduced into it must be referred to pre-Christian times.
And, indeed, the very simple character of the Æon-lore in our treatise, 2 as compared with the mind-bewildering complexity and transcendency of first and second century Christian Gnosticism, is all in favour of an early date for its introduction into “Hermeticism,” which is only another name for “Gnosticism” of a preponderatingly Hellenic form.
If this line of reasoning holds good, we have in it a very strong presumption that the older forms of the Trismegistic treatises were pre-Christian.
And that this is so may be seen by the absolute identity of the teaching of our treatise (§ 2) with that of Philo, when he writes:
“But God is the Artificer of Time as well. For He is Father of its Father; and Time’s Father is the Cosmos, which manifests its motion in the genesis of Time. . . .
“This [Cosmos] then, the Younger Son, the Sensible, being set a-moving, has caused Time’s nature to appear
and disappear; so that there nothing is which future is with God, who has the very Bounds of Time subject to Him. For ’tis not Time, but Time’s Archetype and Paradigm, Eternity (or Æon), which is His Life. 1 But in Eternity naught is past, and naught is future, but all is present only.” 2
This passage of Philo is of the utmost importance for estimating the date of our treatises; for not only does it prove that the oldest forms of the Trismegistic literature were pre-Christian, but it further persuades us that our treatise, which belongs to a later type of this literature, may be dated as contemporary with Philo.
Chapter xi. in the Prolegomena, “Concerning the Æon-Doctrine,” should be taken in close connection with this treatise, for it is not only introductory to it, but frequently refers directly to it.
For the rest, it is not necessary to attempt any detailed comments, since the instruction of the writer is clear enough for any careful reader to follow with ease after making himself acquainted with the general ideas in the preceding treatises. One or two notes on special points, however, may be attempted.
THE ROOT OF FORM
Thus in § 16, the sentence: “The Cosmos is all-formed (παντόμορφος),—not having forms external to itself, but changing them itself within itself,”—reminds us of P. S. A., xix. 3: “The ‘Thirty-six’ who have the name of Horoscopes are in the self-same space as the fixed stars; of these the essence-chief, or prince,
is he whom they call Pantomorph, or Omniform (παντόμορφος, vel omniformis),who fashioneth the various forms for various species”; and also of P. S. A., xxxv.: “But they are changed as many times as there are moments in the hour of that revolving circle in which abides that God whom we have called All-form.”
Compare also C. H., xiii. (xiv.) 12, where, speaking of the “Circle of the types of life,” Hermes says it is “composed of elements, twelve in number, but of one nature, an omniform idea.”
With this compare Hermes-Prayer iv., addressed to Thoth as the Logos:
“Thee I invoke alone, thou who alone in all the Cosmos dost impose order on gods and men, who dost transform thyself in holy forms, making to be from things that are not, and from the things that are, making the not to be.”
But the main interest of our treatise is not that the Intelligible Cosmos or Logos can create and destroy and transmute all forms at will, but that man as the microcosm has potential in him this great magic power.
“BECOME ALL THINGS”
The daring instruction given to Hermes in §§ 19 and 20 is distinctly a discipline of the Egyptian Wisdom; for though it is here set forth plainly and without circumlocution, as a straightforward intimate instruction, stripped of all mysterious hints or hesitating subterfuges, 1 it is clearly in the same circle of ideas of which popular Egyptian theurgy had some inkling. But whereas the philosopher-mystic was bidden to do this for himself of his own volition and achievement, the theurgist had to beg some god to do it for him.
Thus in the same Prayer, to which we have already referred, we read (§§ 2, 3):
“O holy Thoth, the true sight of whose face none of the gods endures! Make me to be in every creature’s name [or ‘true form’],—wolf, dog, or lion, fire, tree, or vulture, wall, or water, or what thou will’st, for thou art able so to do.”
So also in P. S. A., vii., we have the same idea, for certainly the phrasing of the sentences suggests something beyond the ordinary powers of the mind or imagination.
“He mingles with the elements by reason of the swiftness of his mind. He plunges into the sea’s depths by means of its profundity. He puts his values on all things.
“Heaven does not seem too high for him; for it is measured by the wisdom of his mind as though it were quite near.
“No darkness of the air obstructs the penetration of his mind. No density of earth impedes his work. No depth of water blunts his sight.
“Though still the same, yet is he all, and everywhere is he the same.”
It is indeed a marvellous “yoga” system that is sketched for us in our treatise. There is no question here of abstraction or negation, but a courageous identification or At-one-ment of oneself with all that lives and breathes. This is the Path of the Gnosis, the Way to Know God.
In other words, man is to copy his prototype, the Mind, and just as the Mind or Man, in the “Pœmandres” treatise, “had a mind to break right through the Boundary of the spheres” (§ 13), so is our philosopher bidden to “soar up to the Last Body of them all” (§ 19), that Last Body being the One Element of Cosmos itself.
“And shouldst thou will to break through this as well, and contemplate what is beyond—if there be aught beyond the Cosmos; it is permitted thee.”
That the hard and fast distinctions which modern commentators would draw between words, in considering these mystical treatises, would have been laughed at by the writers of them, is amply manifested when the writer with enthusiastic fervour bursts forth:
“Then in this way know God, as having in Himself as thoughts the whole Cosmos itself.
“If, then, thou dost not make thyself like unto God, 1 thou canst not know Him. 2 For like is knowable to like [alone]. Make, then, thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure; leap forth from every body; transcend all time; become Eternity; and thus shalt thou know God.”
Every body or space must be transcended, even the Body of Cosmos itself; for the man must grow into the “stature of the Greatness that transcends all measure,” that is, the intelligible superspatial Plērōma, the Æon as the Logos and Paradigm of Cosmos. And every time and all Time must also be transcended; for the man must become Eternity—that is, the Æon as the Paradigm of Time.
THE GOOD’S OWN PATH
In no scripture that I know is this Path more admirably set forth—the Good’s own Path. All things, all spaces, and all times have to be realized as being within oneself simultaneously; if this is realized or known, not only imagined, then a man becomes a true Knower of God, a Gnostic.
Nor has ever a truer sentence been written than the wonderful words concerning this Path to the Supreme:
“If thou but sett’st thy foot thereon, ’twill meet thee everywhere, ’twill everywhere be seen, both where and when thou dost expect it not—waking, sleeping, sailing, journeying, by night, by day, speaking, and saying naught. For there is naught that is not image of the Good.”
CONCERNING INDIA
In conclusion, I would only point out that if for the hopeless reading in the first sentence of § 19 we were to take Patrizzi’s emendation, which has been adopted by Parthey, we should have the interesting sentence:
“And, thus, think from thyself, and bid thy soul go unto India.”
If this should be the original reading, it is remarkable that India should have been selected of all places. We know, however, from a study of what is known of the life of Apollonius of Tyana, that this “Gnostic” philosopher made an enormous propaganda of Indian ideas among the philosophic and mystic communities and schools of the first century. Apollonius must have known something, perhaps a great deal, concerning the siddhis acquired by yoga-practices. At any rate, we find his biographer Philostratus making him write the following letter to his Eastern hosts on his return from India:
“I came to you by land and ye have given me the sea; nay, rather, by sharing with me your wisdom ye have given me power to travel through heaven. These things will I bring back to the mind of the Greeks, and I will hold converse with you as though ye were
present, if it be that I have not drunk of the Cup of Tantalus in vain.” 1
That an intensely great interest was taken in Indian ideas at Alexandria is shown by the fact that we find Plotinus himself in 242 starting off with the expedition of Gordian to the East in the hope of coming in contact with the Indian Wisdom.
But all these considerations, though interesting in themselves, do not immediately concern us, unless we are subjectively persuaded that the emendation of Patrizzi is firmly established. Should, however, this reading in any way be confirmed by objective evidence, we should have to reconsider the question of date by the light of it, though, I fear, with little chance of any definite result. For though the propaganda of Indian ideas by Apollonius could not have begun prior to the middle of the first century, we have in this fact no very sure criterion, for “India” must have been in the air, and strongly in the air, even prior to Apollonius’ visit to India, or why should he have been induced to make so long and dangerous a journey? Indeed, “India” had been in the air ever since the expedition of Alexander—that is, from the beginning of the Alexandrian period—the second quarter of the fourth century B.C. onwards.
Footnotes
190:1 C. Jul., ii. 52; ed. Migne, col. 580 B.
190:2 Cf. R. 128, i.; 196, 3.
192:1 Namely, Paul in his Letters, which are the earliest of all Christian documents. See my article, “Some Notes on the Gnostics,” in The Nineteenth Century and After (Nov. 1902), pp. 822-835; and D. J. L., pp. 353 ff.
192:2 Perhaps the clearest exposition is to be found in P. S. A., xxx. and xxxi.
193:1 Cf. C. H., i. 6; the Union of the Logos and Mind—or First-Born Son and Father—is Life; they are united in Æon.
193:2 Quod Deus Im., § 6; M. i. 277; P. 298 (Ri. ii. 72, 73).
194:1 Or, as the writer of the Pistis Sophia would say, ἐν παρρησίᾳ, “face to face without a parable.”
196:1 Sc. as Cosmos.
196:2 Sc. as Father of this Only Son.
198:1 Philos., Vit. Ap., iii. 51. Cf. my Apollonius of Tyana, the Philosopher Reformer of the First Century A.D. (London, 1901), p. 88.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM XII. (XIII.)
ABOUT THE COMMON MIND
OF HERMES TO TAT
(Text: P. 99-113; Pat. 23b-25b.)
1. Hermes. The Mind, O Tat, is of God’s very essence—(if such a thing as essence of God 1 there be)—and what that is, it and it only knows precisely.
The Mind, then, is not separated off from God’s essentiality, but is united unto it, as light to sun.
This Mind in men is God, and for this cause some of mankind are gods, and their humanity is nigh unto divinity.
For the Good Daimon said: “Gods are immortal men, and men are mortal gods.”
2. But in irrational lives Mind is their nature. For where is Soul, there too is Mind; just as where Life, there is there also Soul.
But in irrational lives their soul is life devoid of mind 1; for Mind is the in-worker of the souls of men for good;—He works on them for their own good.
In lives irrational He doth co-operate with each one’s nature; but in the souls of men He counteracteth them.
For every soul, when it becomes embodied, is instantly depraved by pleasure and by pain.
For in a compound body, just like juices, pain and pleasure seethe, and into them the soul, on entering in, is plunged. 2
3. O’er whatsoever souls the Mind doth, then, preside, to these it showeth its own light, by acting counter to their prepossessions, just as a good physician doth upon the body prepossessed by sickness, pain inflict, burning or lancing it for sake of health.
In just the selfsame way the Mind inflicteth pain upon the soul, to rescue it from pleasure, whence comes its every ill.
The great ill of the soul is godlessness 3; then
followeth fancy 1 for all evil things and nothing good.
So, then, Mind counteracting it doth work good on the soul, as the physician health upon the body.
4. But whatsoever human souls have not the Mind as pilot, they share in the same fate as souls of lives irrational.
For [Mind] becomes co-worker with them, giving full play to the desires towards which [such souls] are borne,—[desires] that from the rush of lust strain after the irrational; [so that such human souls,] just like irrational animals, cease not irrationally to rage and lust, nor ever are they satiate of ills.
For passions and irrational desires are ills exceeding great; and over these God hath set up the Mind to play the part of judge and executioner.
5. Tat. In that case, father mine, the teaching (logos) as to Fate, 2 which previously thou didst explain to me, risks to be over-set.
For that if it be absolutely fated for a man to fornicate, or commit sacrilege, or do some other evil deed, why is he punished,—when he hath done the deed from Fate’s necessity?
Her. All works, my son, are Fate’s; and without Fate naught of things corporal—or good, or ill—can come to pass.
But it is fated too, that he who doeth ill, shall suffer. And for this cause he doth it—that he may suffer what he suffereth, because he did it.
6. But for the moment, [Tat,] let be the teaching (logos) as to vice and Fate, for we have spoken of these things in other [of our sermons]; but now our teaching (logos) is about the Mind:—what Mind can do, and how it is [so] different,—in men being such and such, and in irrational lives [so] changed; and [then] again that in irrational lives it is not of a beneficial nature, while that in men it quencheth out the wrathful and the lustful elements.
Of men, again, we must class some as led by reason, and others as unreasoning.
7. But all men are subject to Fate, and genesis and change, for these 1 are the beginning and the end of Fate.
And though all men do suffer fated things, those led by reason (those whom we said the Mind doth guide) do not endure like suffering with the rest; but, since they’ve freed themselves from viciousness, not being bad, they do not suffer bad.
Tat. How meanest thou again, my father? Is not the fornicator bad; the murderer bad; and [so with] all the rest?
Her. [I meant not that;] but that the
[paragraph continues] Mind-led man, my son, though not a fornicator, will suffer just as though he had committed fornication, and though he be no murderer, as though he had committed murder.
The quality of change he can no more escape than that of genesis.
But it is possible for one who hath the Mind, to free himself from vice.
8. Wherefore I’ve ever heard, my son, Good Daimon also say—(and had He set it down in written words, He would have greatly helped the race of men; for He alone, my son, doth truly, as the First-born God, gazing upon all things, give voice to words (logoi) divine)—yea, once I heard Him say:
“All things are one, and most of all the bodies which the mind alone perceives. Our life is owing to [God’s] Energy and Power and Æon. His Mind is Good, so is His Soul as well. And this being so, intelligible things know naught of separation. So, then, Mind, being Ruler of all things, and being Soul of God, can do whate’er it wills.”
9. So do thou understand, and carry back this word (logos) unto the question thou didst ask before,—I mean about Mind’s Fate.
For if thou dost with accuracy, son, eliminate [all] captious arguments (logoi), thou wilt discover that of very truth the Mind, the Soul
of God, doth rule o’er all—o’er Fate, and Law, and all things else; and nothing is impossible to it,—neither o’er Fate to set a human soul, 1 nor under Fate to set [a soul] neglectful of what comes to pass. Let this so far suffice from the Good Daimon’s most good [words]. 2
Tat. Yea, [words] divinely spoken, father mine, truly and helpfully. But further still explain me this.
10. Thou said’st that Mind in lives irrational worked in them as [their] nature, co-working with their impulses.
But impulses of lives irrational, as I do think, are passions.
Now if the Mind co-worketh with [these] impulses, and if the impulses of [lives] irrational be passions, then is Mind also passion, taking its colour from the passions.
Her. Well put, my son! Thou questionest right nobly, and it is just that I as well should answer [nobly].
11. All things incorporal when in a body are subject unto passion, and in the proper sense they are [themselves] all passions.
For every thing that moves [another] is incorporal; while every thing that’s moved is body.
Incorporals are further moved by Mind, and movement’s passion.
Both, then, are subject unto passion—both mover and the moved, the former being ruler and the latter ruled.
But when a man hath freed himself from body, then is he also freed from passion.
But, more precisely, son, naught is impassible, but all are passible.
Yet passion differeth from passibility; for that the one is active, while the other’s passive.
Incorporals 1 moreover act upon themselves, for either they are motionless 2 or they are moved; but whichsoe’er it be, it’s passion.
But bodies are invariably acted on, and therefore are they passible.
Do not, then, let terms trouble thee; action and passion are both the selfsame thing. To use the fairer sounding term, however, does no harm.
12. Tat. Most clearly hast thou, father mine, set forth the teaching (logos).
Her. Consider this as well, my son; that these two things God hath bestowed on man beyond all mortal lives—both mind and speech
[paragraph continues] (logos) equal to immortality. He hath the mind for knowing God and uttered speech (logos) for eulogy of Him. 1
And if one useth these for what he ought, he’ll differ not a whit from the immortals. 2 Nay, rather, on departing from the body, he will be guided by the twain unto the Choir of Gods and Blessed Ones.
13. Tat. Why, father mine!—do not the other lives make use of speech (logos)?
Her. Nay, son; but use of voice; speech is far different from voice. For speech is general among all men, while voice doth differ in each class of living thing.
Tat. But with men also, father mine, according to each race, speech differs.
Her. Yea, son, but man is one; so also speech is one and is interpreted, and it is found the same in Egypt, and in Persia, and in Greece.
Thou seemest, son, to be in ignorance of Reason’s (Logos) 3 worth and greatness. For that the Blessed God, Good Daimon, hath declared:
“Soul is in Body, Mind in Soul; but Reason (Logos) is in Mind, and Mind in God; and God is Father of [all] these.”
14. The Reason, then, is the Mind’s image, and Mind God’s [image]; while Body is [the image] of the Form; and Form [the image] of the Soul.
The subtlest part of Matter is, then, Air; of Air, Soul; of Soul, Mind; and of Mind, God. 1
And God surroundeth all and permeateth all 2; while Mind surroundeth Soul, Soul Air, Air Matter.
Necessity 3 and Providence and Nature are instruments of Cosmos and of Matter’s ordering; while of intelligible things each is Essence, and Sameness is their Essence.
But of the Bodies 4 of the Cosmos each is many; for through possessing Sameness, [these] composed Bodies, though they do change from one into another of themselves, do natheless ever keep the incorruption of their Sameness.
15. Whereas in all the rest of composed bodies, of each there is a certain number; for without number structure cannot be, or composition, or decomposition.
Now it is units that give birth to number and increase it, and, being decomposed, are taken back again into themselves.
Matter is one; and this whole Cosmos—the mighty God and image of the mightier One, both with Him unified, and the conserver of the Will and Order of the Father—is filled full of Life. 1
Naught is there in it throughout the whole of Æon, the Father’s [everlasting] Re-establishment, 2—nor of the whole, nor of its parts,—which doth not live.
For not a single thing that’s dead, hath been, or is, or shall be in [this] Cosmos.
For that the Father willed it should have Life as long as it should be. Wherefore it needs must be a God.
16. How, then, O son, could there be in the God, the image of the Father, 3 in the plenitude 4 of Life—dead things 5?
For that death is corruption, and corruption is destruction.
How then could any part of that which knoweth no corruption be corrupted, or any whit of him the God destroyed?
Tat. Do they not, then, my father, die—the lives in it, that are its parts?
Her. Hush, son!—led into error by the term in use for what takes place.
They do not die, my son, but are dissolved as compound bodies.
Now dissolution is not death, but dissolution of a compound; it is dissolved not so that it may be destroyed, but that it may become renewed.
For what is the activity of life? Is it not motion? What then in Cosmos is there that hath no motion? Naught is there, son!
17. Tat. Doth not Earth even, father, seem to thee to have no motion?
Her. Nay, son; but rather that she is the only thing which, though in very rapid motion, is also stable.
For how would it not be a thing to laugh at, that the Nurse of all should have no motion, when she engenders and brings forth all things?
For ’tis impossible that without motion one who doth engender, should do so.
That thou shouldst ask if the fourth part 1 is not inert, is most ridiculous; for that the body which doth have no motion, gives sign of nothing but inertia.
18. Know, therefore, generally, my son, that all that is in Cosmos is being moved for decrease or for increase.
Now that which is kept moving, also lives; but there is no necessity that that which lives, should be all same.
For being simultaneous, the Cosmos, as a whole, is not subject to change, my son, but all its parts are subject unto it; yet naught [of it] is subject to corruption, or destroyed.
It is the terms employed that confuse men. For ’tis not genesis that constituteth life, but ’tis sensation; it is not change that constituteth death, but ’tis forgetfulness.
Since, then, these things are so, they are immortal all,—Matter, [and] Life, [and] Spirit, Mind [and] Soul, of which whatever liveth, is composed.
19. Whatever then doth live, oweth its immortality unto the Mind, and most of all doth man, he who is both recipient of God, and co-essential with Him.
For with this life alone doth God consort; by visions in the night, by tokens in the day, and by all things doth He foretell the future unto him,—by birds, by inward parts, by wind, by tree.
Wherefore doth man lay claim to know things past, things present and to come.
20. Observe this, too, my son; that each one of the other lives inhabiteth one portion of the Cosmos,—aquatic creatures water, terrene earth, and aery creatures air; while man doth use all these,—earth, water, air, [and] fire; he seeth heaven, too, and doth contact it with [his] sense.
But God surroundeth all, and permeateth all, 1 for He is energy and power; and it is nothing difficult, my son, to conceive God.
21. But if thou wouldst Him also contemplate, behold the ordering of the Cosmos, and [see] the orderly behaviour of its ordering; behold thou the Necessity of things made manifest, and [see] the Providence of things become and things becoming; behold how Matter is all-full of Life; [behold] this so great God in movement, with all the good and noble [ones]—gods, daimones and men!
Tat. But these are purely energies, O father mine!
Her. If, then, they’re purely energies, my son,—by whom, then, are they energized except by God?
Or art thou ignorant, that just as Heaven, Earth, Water, Air, are parts of Cosmos, in just the selfsame way God’s parts are Life and Immortality, [and] Energy, and Spirit, and Necessity, and Providence, and Nature, Soul, and Mind, and the Duration 2 of all these that is called Good?
And there is naught of things that have become, or are becoming, in which God is not.
22. Tat. Is He in Matter, father, then?
Her. Matter, my son, is separate from God,
in order that thou may’st attribute unto it the quality of space. But what thing else than mass 1 think’st thou it is, if it’s not energized? Whereas if it be energized, by whom is it made so? For energies, we said, are parts of God.
By whom are, then, all lives enlivened? By whom are things immortal made immortal? By whom changed things made changeable?
And whether thou dost speak of Matter, or of Body, or of Essence, know that these too are energies of God; and that materiality is Matter’s energy, that corporality is Bodies’ energy, and that essentiality doth constitute the energy of Essence; and this is God—the All.
23. And in the All is naught that is not God. Wherefore nor size, nor space, nor quality, nor form, nor time, surroundeth God; for He is All, and All surroundeth all, and permeateth all.
Unto this Reason (Logos), son, thy adoration and thy worship pay. There is one way alone to worship God; [it is] not to be bad. 2
Footnotes
199:1 That is, if we can use such a term with respect to God.
200:1 That is, of the mind manifested in man as distinguished from the general Mind.
200:2 βαπτίζεται.
200:3 ἀθεότης. Cf. C. H., x. (xi.) 8, 9: “And the soul’s vice is ignorance”; and § 20: “What greater chastisement of any human soul, can there be, son, than lack of piety?” The only way of salvation from the bonds of Fate is thus “piety” or “godliness.” See R. 102, 1, for references.
201:1 δόξα.
201:2 Heimarmenē.
202:1 Sc. genesis and change.
204:1 Cf. Lact., D. I., ii. 15.
204:2 The critical text of this paragraph is given R. 78.
205:1 Reading ἀσώματα for σώματα.
205:2 The words I have translated by “act,” “active” and “action,” may be more literally rendered by “energize,” “energic” and “energy.” The “motionless” has “energy” because it is the cause of motion to that which it moves.
206:1 Following the emendation of R.
206:2 The critical text of the above paragraphs is given R. 156, n. 6.
206:3 It is impossible to bring out the word-play of the original in English; and so the double meaning is lost.
207:1 This sentence is tagged on to the end of C. H., v. (vi.) by some scribe.
207:2 Cf. § 20 below.
207:3 Reading ἀνάγκη for ἀνάγκῃ; see § 21 below.
207:4 Sc. the elements.
208:1 Lit. a Plērōma of Life.
208:2 ἀποκατάστασις.
208:3 Reading πατρὸς for παντός.
208:4 Plērōma.
208:5 A critical text of the last five paragraphs is given R. 25, n. 1.
209:1 Sc. element.
211:1 Cf. § 14 above.
211:2 Sc. Æon.
212:1 Probably in the sense of “quantity.”
212:2 Lactantius, D. I., vi. 25, translates the last two sentences into Latin, with the strange remark that Hermes so spake in treating “About Justice.” See the following Commentary on § 6, and Ex. xi.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
COMMENTARY
THE SAYINGS OF THE GOOD DAIMON
This Sermon has as its subject the Common or General Mind—Great Mind, Good Mind, Good Daimon. For Mind, as we are told (§ 2), is the Benefactor of men (εὐεργέτης ἀνθρώπων); He is the Good Shepherd, the Good Husbandman, the Good Physician, as He is called in different tractates.
From a critical standpoint, the point of greatest interest is that our Hermes in no less than three places (§§ 1, 8, 13) quotes certain Sayings of the Good Daimon.
Now the first of these quotations (§ 1)—“Gods are immortal men, and men are mortal Gods”—is one of the most cited Sayings of Heracleitus. 1 Hermes, however, does not mean to say that Heracleitus was Agothodaimon, but that Heracleitus was the mouthpiece of the Good Mind when he uttered this “word” (logos).
Nor was this the opinion of Hermes only; it was the belief apparently of Heracleitus himself when he declared:
“Not because you hear me say so, but because you hear the Reason (Logos) so declare, is it wise to confess that All are One.” 2
At any rate the term Logos, as used by Heracleitus, in connection with such a declaration, is taken by Hippolytus 3 to mean the All-pervading Reason, and not the normal reason of man.
What, then, is our surprise to find the second of
[paragraph continues] Hermes’ quotations of a Saying of the Good Daimon qualified by the words (§ 8): “And had He set it down in written words” or “in writing,” when that quotation begins with the words: “All are One” 1—the root-formula of Heracleitus.
Such Sayings of Heracleitus must have been the common property of all the philosophers of the time and of their pupils. But the quotation of Hermes does not end with the formula of Heracleitus; it continues, how far exactly it is difficult to determine. Reitzenstein (p. 127) would apparently make it end with the word “Æon,” but I am inclined to think it goes to the end of § 8. In either case it includes the term “Æon.”
If, now, we turn to the third quotation from the Sayings of the Good Daimon (§ 13), we are at once struck with its remarkable resemblance to the form of teaching in C. H., xi. (xii.) 4. Though there is no precise verbal agreement, there is a striking identity of style of formula.
In our treatise, however, the Saying is used in authoritative illustration of the meaning of the Reason (Logos), whereas in the “Mind to Hermes,”—that is, in the Sermon of the Good Daimon Himself to Hermes—Reason is omitted, Mind and Reason being there transcended by Æon and Mind.
Moreover, the whole style of what follows this quotation in our treatise is exactly the same as the style of instruction in C. H., xi. (xii.)—short categorical formulæ; and, further, the previous quotation (§ 8) contains the key-word Æon, which characterizes the teaching of the “Mind to Hermes.”
I therefore conclude that our Hermes is using a more
intimate instruction, known only to the Hermes-grade, and not published for the Tat-degree; and that this is the meaning of his saying that it has not been written down. He means simply that it has not yet been allowed to be published for those in the Tat-stage.
There were, then, other treatises now lost of the same type as that of the “Mind to Hermes”; in them there were quotations from the Sayings of Heracleitus; the “Obscure Philosopher” being regarded as one who had come into direct contact with the Logos or Mind, and as one, therefore, who spoke with the authority of direct revelation.
HERMES AND BASILIDES
The next point of critical interest is the sentence in § 7:
“I meant not that, but that the Mind-led man, my son, though not a fornicator, will suffer just as though he had committed fornication, and though he be no murderer, as though he had committed murder.”
If we now turn to the quotation which Clement of Alexandria 1 gives us from Book XXIII. of the Exegetica, of Basilides, we read:
“For just as the babe, who, although it hath done no wrong previously, or actively committed any sin, yet hath the capacity of sin in it,—whenever it is subjected to suffering, is advantaged and reaps many benefits, which otherwise are difficult to gain; in just the selfsame way is it, that although a perfect man may not have sinned in act, and yet doth suffer pains, he suffereth them in just the selfsame fashion as a babe; having within himself the tendency to sin, but refusing to embrace the opportunity to sin, he doth not
sin. So that even for such a man as this we ought not to suppose the incapacity for sin.
“For just as it is the will to commit fornication that constitutes the fornicator, even though he does not find the opportunity of actually committing fornication, and the will to commit murder that constitutes the murderer, although he may not be actually able to effect his purpose; so also in the case of the ‘sinless’ man I mean, if I see him suffering, even if he has actually done no sin, I shall say he is evil by his will to sin. For I will say anything rather than that Providence is evil.” 1
Providence, as in our treatise, is here the instrument of the Good (§ 14), of the Will of God; it is the will of man that is the source of evil, as we learn from C. H., iv. (v.) 8: “For ’tis not God, ’tis we who are the cause of evil things, preferring them to good.”
In our treatise, then, the very same problem is treated as in the Exegetica of Basilides. Hermes speaks of the “Mind-led man,” the “man who has the Logos in him”; Basilides speaks of the “perfect man.” So also in C. H., iv. (v.) 4, the “perfect man” is he who has “received the Mind.”
The ideas of Hermes and of Basilides are practically identical; the words of both are strikingly similar when they cite fornication and murder as typical sins, and these and no others.
Compare again with this idea of the babe in Basilides the words of Hermes in C. H., x. (xi.) 15:
“Behold an infant’s soul, my son, that is not yet cut off, because its body is still small and not as yet come unto its full bulk. . . . A thing of beauty altogether is such a soul to see, not yet befouled with body’s passions, still all but hanging from the Cosmic Soul.”
And with this compare what Hippolytus 1 tells us of Valentinus:
“Valentinus says that he once saw a babe that had only just been born, and that he proceeded to question it to find out who it was. And the babe replied and said it was the Logos.”
And also the Psalm of Valentinus quoted by the same heresiologist 2:
All things depending from Spirit I see; All things supported by Spirit I view; Flesh from Soul depending; Soul by Air supported; Air from Æther hanging; Fruits borne of the Deep; Babe borne of the Womb.
Here, then, as in other instances, we have intimate points of contact between the Hermetic and Christian Gnosis. Is there, however, any question of direct plagiarism? I think not; but that the Christian doctors and the Hermetic philosophers were both in contact with the same body of inner teaching.
4. With the action of the Mind on the soul in incarnation (§ 4) compare C. H., x. (xi.), 18, 19, where the office of the Mind in respect to the soul out of incarnation is graphically described.
THE SERMONS ON FATE
6. In § 6 Hermes tells us that he has already spoken about Fate in others of his Sermons; while in §§ 14 and 21 he three times refers to Necessity and Providence.
In this connection it is to be noticed that Lactantius (D. I., vi. 25), in quoting the last two sentences of our
treatise, says that he takes them from a Sermon by Hermes “On Justice.”
Now, Stobæus has preserved for us an Extract (xi.) from a Sermon dealing with Justice, Providence, Necessity and Fate; also an Extract (x.) from a Sermon of Hermes to Tat dealing with Fate, and ending with the words: “Such is the Sermon on the rule of Providence, Necessity and Fate.” We have also an Extract (xiii.) “Of Hermes from the Books to Ammon,” entitled “Of the General Economy,” which deals with Providence, Necessity and Fate.
There were, then, according to Hermes, already existing not one but several Sermons on Fate, and, as we learn from Stobæus, not only in the Tat-literature but also in the Ammon-literature. It seems, then, probable that in the collection used by Lactantius the Tat-Sermons on Fate immediately preceded our treatise, and that one of these sermons (the one immediately preceding our treatise, presumably) was entitled “On Justice,” thus confirming the title I have prefixed to the Stobæus Extract xi.
MATERIALITY AND CORPORALITY ARE ENERGIES OF GOD
22. Finally, in § 22 it has to be noticed that with the express teaching that Matter and Body are so far from being evil that they are Energies of God—His materiality and corporality—the charge of dualism against our philosophers must for ever be abandoned. Their doctrine was that of pan-monism; and, therefore, wherever we find signs of dualism, or even distinct statements of an indubitably dualistic nature, we must understand that this was a formal convenience for the better insistence upon the need of strenuous exertion to solve the mystery of the opposites, rather than an essential doctrine of the Gnosis.
Footnotes
213:1 Diels, 62; Bywater, 67; Fairbanks, 67 (p. 40), which see for references to ancient authors who quote it.
213:2 Diels, 50; Bywater, 1; Fairbanks, 1 (p. 24).
213:3 Philos., ix. 9.
214:1 Cf. C. H., x. (xi.) 25, and xvi. (“Definitions of Asclepius”) 3; for references to the Magical and Alchemical literature, see R. 39, 1; 106, 5; 127, 3.
215:1 Strom., IV. xii., § 82 (P. 600; S. 217): Dindorf., ii. 363.
216:1 See F. F. F., 274, 275.
217:1 Philos., vi. 42 (D. and S., 302); F. F. F., p. 306.
217:2 Philos., vi. 37 (D. and S., 290); see emended text in Hilgenfeld (A.), Die Ketzergeschichte des Urchristenthums (Leipzig, 1884), p. 304; F. F. F., p. 307.
Gnosticism and Hermetica
CORPUS HERMETICUM XIII. (XIV.)
THE SECRET SERMON ON THE MOUNTAIN
CONCERNING REBIRTH AND THE PROMISE OF SILENCE
OF THRICE-GREATEST HERMES UNTO TAT HIS SON
(Text: R. 339-348; P. 114-128; Pat. 15b-17b.)
1. Tat. [Now] in the General Sermons, 1 father, thou didst speak in riddles most unclear, conversing on Divinity; and when thou saidst no man could e’er be saved before Rebirth, 2 thy meaning thou didst hide.
Further, when I became thy Suppliant, in Wending up the Mount, 3 after thou hadst conversed with me, and when I longed to learn the Sermon (Logos) on Rebirth (for this beyond all
other things is just the thing I know not), thou saidst, that thou wouldst give it me—“when thou shalt have become a stranger to the world.” 1
Wherefore I got me ready and made the thought in me a stranger 2 to the world-illusion.
And now do thou fill up the things that fall short 3 in me with what thou saidst would give me the tradition 4 of Rebirth, setting it forth in speech or in the secret way.
I know not, O Thrice-greatest one, from out what matter and what womb Man comes to birth, or of what seed. 5
2. Hermes. Wisdom that understands 6 in silence 7 [such is the matter and the womb from out which Man is born], and the True Good the seed.
Tat. Who is the sower, father? For I am altogether at a loss.
Her. It is the Will of God, my son.
Tat. And of what kind is he that is begotten, father? For I have no share of that essence in
me, which doth transcend the senses. 1 The one that is begot will be another one from God, God’s Son?
Her. All in all, out of all powers composed.
Tat. Thou tellest me a riddle, father, and dost not speak as father unto son.
Her. This Race, 2 my son, is never taught; but when He willeth it, its memory is restored by God.
3. Tat. Thou sayest things impossible, O father, things that are forced. Hence answers would I have direct unto these things. Am I a son strange to my father’s race?
Keep it not, father, back from me. I am a true-born son; explain to me the manner of Rebirth.
Her. What may I say, my son? I can but tell thee this. Whene’er I see within myself the Simple Vision 3 brought to birth out of God’s mercy, 4 I have passed through myself into a Body that can never die. And now I am not what I was before; but I am born in Mind.
The way to do this is not taught, and it cannot be seen by the compounded 5 element by means of which thou seest.
Yea, I have had my former composed form dismembered for me. I am no longer touched, yet have I touch; I have dimension too; and [yet] am I a stranger to them now.
Thou seest me with eyes, my son; but what I am thou dost not understand [even] with fullest strain of body and of sight.
4. Tat. Into fierce frenzy and mind-fury hast thou plunged me, father, for now no longer do I see myself.
Her. I would, my son, that thou hadst e’en passed right through thyself, as they who dream in sleep yet sleepless.
Tat. Tell me this too! Who is the author 1 of Rebirth?
Her. The Son of God, the One Man, by God’s Will.
5. Tat. Now hast thou brought me, father, unto pure stupefaction.