The Corpus Hermeticum

by Hermes Trismegistus

  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 , the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical - wrapping it round the life - [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 into the sphere, and shut them in as in a cave, willing to order forth 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 - 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 by the Father as their rule; and it is by the restoration of each one [of them] this order is preserved indissolute.

  The “restoration” 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?

  Hermes: 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.

  09. On Thought and Sense

  This somewhat diffuse essay covers a series of topics, starting with (and to some extent from) the concept that the set of perceptions we call “thoughts” and the set we call “sensory perceptions” are not significantly different from each other. The implications of this idea play a significant role in later Hermetic thought, particularly in the areas of magic and the Art of Memory; in this tractate, though, the issues involved are barely touched, and the argument wanders into moral dualisms and the equally important, but distinct, idea that the Cosmos is itself a divine creative power.

  Section 10, in which understanding is held up as the source and precondition of belief, should probably be seen as part of the same ancient debate on the roles of faith and reason that gave rise to Tertullian’s famous credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it is absurd”). - JMG

  1. I gave the Perfect Sermon (Logos) yesterday, Asclepius; today 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 or living creatures 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) 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 the daimonials; no part of Cosmos being free of daimon, who stealthily doth creep into the daimon who’s illumined by God’s light i.e., the human soul, 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 daimons.

  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, please not the many, nor the many them. They are thought mad and laughted at; they’re hated and despised, and sometimes even put to death.

  For we did say that bad must needs dwell 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 marvelous, ‘tis he alone who maketh bad things good.

  5. But I return once more to the Discourse (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 good by exercise of their activity, are unproductive things.

  It is the working of the Cosmic Course 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 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 organized 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 all with their diversity of birth, with its n
ot 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 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 thigs 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] 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] 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 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.

  10. The Key

  This longer tractate presents itself explicitly as a summary or abridgement of the General Sermons (CH II-IX), and discusses the Hermetic view of knowledge and its role in the lives and afterlives of human beings. The attentive reader will notice certain contradictions between the afterlife-teachings of this and previous tractates.

  One of the central concepts of The Key, and of Hermetic thought generally, is the distinction between ordinary discursive knowledge which can be expressed in words (in Greek, episteme, which Mead translates somewhat clumsily as “science”) and transcendent, unitive knowledge which cannot be communicated (in Greek, gnosis, which Mead simply and sensibly leaves untranslated). The same distinction can be found in many systems of mystical thought. Unlike most of these, though, the Hermetic teachings place value on both.

  Readers without much experience in the jargon of Classical philosophy will want to remember that “hylic” means “material”, “passible” means “subject to outside forces or to suffering”, and “intelligible” means “belonging to the realm of the Mind”, and “motion” includes all kinds of change. The special implications of “good” in Greek thought - of self-sufficiency and desirability - should also be kept in mind.

  The delightful irony of the Zen moment early in section 9, when Hermes - in the middle of this very substantial lecture - defines the good and pious man as “he who doth not say much or lend his ear to much” and thus rules out both himself and his audience, seems to have been lost on subsequent commentators. - JMG

  1. Hermes: My yesterday’s discourse (logos) I did devote to thee, Asclepius, and so ‘tis [only] right I should devote toafy’s to Tat; and this the more because ‘tis the abridgement of the General Sermons (Logoi) which he has had addressed to him.

  “God, Father and the Good”, then, Tat, hath 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; which thing we ought to have in mind when treating of the Good.

  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 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 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, only by sharing in 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, 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 those who can see.

  4. For It doth will to be, and It is both Itself and most of all by reason of Itself. Indeed, all other things beside are just bacause 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 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, firelike blaze on the eyes and make them close; nay, on the contrary, it shineth forth and maketh to increase the seeing 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 in this fairest Spectacle, as was the case with Uranus and Cronus, our forebears. may this be out lot too, O father mine!

  Hermes: 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 mond, 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?

  Hermes: Of every soul apart are transformations, son.

  Tat: What meanest thou? Apart?

 
Hermes: Didst thou not, in the General Sermons, hear that from one Soul - the All-soul - come all these souls which are made to revovlve 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 creeping things change into things that in the water dwell, the souls of water things change to earth-dwellers, those that live on earth change to things with wings, and souls that live in air change to 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 the body of a man persisteth in its vice, 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.