HERMETICA 100-400 C.E.

 

Hermes as Creator and Sun

 

[God] having drawn forth a portion of his manifold power; that is the Hermes of my fathers in his youth. To him He gave full many a command, to make an Universe of fairest Order, and gave him a golden wand, his regulator, wise parent of every serviceable art. With this the son of Zeus went forth to accomplish all his father’s bidding; Zeus sat on a place of vantage, and rejoiced as he beheld the works of his illustrious son. He, clad in wondrous fourfold shape, closed his eyes....over the brightness... and spoke “Hearken.... of air... Zeus himself bids the elements cease their former strife. Obey the word of God, and fall apart! Hereafter you shall come together in better sort; for I will create mutual friendship and love among you in your day of separation, towards a better destiny.” So spoke he, and with his golden wand he touched... and quietude and peace at once prevailed over all the elements, and they ceased... and straight way stood each in his appointed place, the gleam... united, they forgot their immemorial conflict. Now the son of the God who created all things..... first the bright air... revolving round and round, whirling unspeakably,... the heavens he made a sphere,... and he divided it into seven zones, and to govern each were seven leaders of the stars. Their wandering revolves the constellations; one below another they roam in close array. And on all sides blazed at once around...... He fastened earth in the centre with unmovable bonds; to the burning south and the frosty north he stretched the oblique path of the peaceful and unmoving axis.... two poles bind fast the axis at each end.... (Traces of five more lines)... The circle of Hyperion was not yet, nor yet the Moon shook the reins of her shambling oxen; but night without day flowed on alone unbroken, faintly gleaming under the thin rays of the stars. With this in mind Hermes went through the grey skies- not alone, for with him went Reason, his noble son, adorned with swift wings, ever truthful, with holy persuasion on lips that never lie he is the swift herald of his father’s pure intention. With him went Hermes to the earth, looking about.... seeking a temperate clime where he might found a city,....[1]

 

On Daemons

 

And to the Sun is subject the troop of daemons, or rather troops; for there are many and diverse troops of them, placed under the command of the planets, an equal number of daemons being assigned to each planet. Thus marshalled in separate corps, the daemons serve under the several planets.[2]

 

They are both good and bad in their natures, that is, in their workings; for the being of a daemon consists in his working. To these daemons is given dominion over all things upon the earth,...They are also the authors of the disturbances upon the earth, and work manifold trouble both for the cities and nations collectively and for individual men: Far they mould our souls into another shape, and pull them away from themselves, being seated in our sinews and marrow and veins and arteries and penetrating even to our inmost organs. For at the time when each one of us is born and made alive, the daemons who are subject to some one planet for the planets replace one another from moment to moment; they do not go on working without change, but succeed one another in rotation.

 

These daemons then make their way in through the body, and enter into the two irrational parts of the soul; and each daemon perverts the soul in a different way, according to his special mode of action. But the rational part of the soul remains free from the domination of the daemons, and fit to receive God into itself. If then the rational part of a man’s soul is illumined by a ray of light from God, for that man the working of the daemons is brought to naught; for no daemon and no planet-god has power against a single ray of the light of God. But such men are few indeed; and all others are led and driven, soul and body, by the daemons, setting their hearts and affections on the workings of the daemons. This is the love which is devoid of reason; that love which goes astray and leads men astray.

 

The daemons then govern all our earthly life, using our bodies as their instruments; and this government Hermes called ‘destiny’. The intelligible Kosmos then is dependent on God; and the Sun receives from God, through the intelligible Kosmos, the influx of good, that is, of lifegiving energy, with which he is supplied.[3]

 

And round about the Sun, and dependent on the Sun are the eight spheres, namely, the sphere of the fixed stars, and the six planet spheres, and the sphere which surrounds the earth; and the daemons are dependent on these spheres; and men are dependent on the daemons. Thus all things and all persons are dependent on God. God then is the father of all; the Sun is the Demiurgus; and the Kosmos is the instrument by means of which the Demiurgus works... Thus is marshalled the army of gods and daemons. Working through gods and daemons, God makes all things for himself; and all things are parts of God. And inasmuch as all things are parts of God, God is all things. Therefore in making all things God makes himself.[4]

 

 

Hermetic Creation Myth

 

[And God ordained the] births of men, and bade mankind increase and multiply abundantly And He implants each soul in flesh by means of the gods who circle in the heavens And to this end did He make men, that they might contemplate heaven, and have domination over all things under heaven, and that they might come to know God’s power, and witness natures workings and that they might mark what things are good and discern the diverse natures of things good and bad and invent all manner of cunning arts.[5]

 

Heavens as God’s Design

 

Whereas the student of philosophy undefiled, which is dependent on devotion to God, and on that alone, ought to direct his attention to the other sciences only so far as he may thereby learn to see and marvel how the returns of the heavenly bodies to their former places, their halts in pre-ordained positions, and the variations of their movements, are true to the reckonings of number; only so far as, learning the measurements of the earth, the depth of the sea, the... air, the force of fire, and the properties, magnitudes, workings, and natures of all material things, he may be led to revere, adore, and praise God’s skill and wisdom.[6] [see page 36, Cicero, On the Good Life]

 

Birth and Forgetfulness

 

Look at the soul of a child, my son, a soul that has not yet come to accept its separation from its source; for its body is still small, and has not yet grown to its full bulk. How beautiful throughout is such a soul as that! It is not yet fouled by the bodily passions; it is still hardly detached from the soul of the Kosmos. But when the body has increased in bulk, and has drawn the soul down into its material mass, it generates oblivion; and so the soul separates itself from the Beautiful and Good, and no longer partakes of that; and through oblivion the soul becomes evil.

 

But when men quit the body, the process is reversed.[7]

 

Learning

 

The forces which accompany the soul do not all arrive at the same time. Some of them arrive at the moment of the man’s birth, entering into his body together with the soul, and acting on the irrational parts of the soul; but the purer forces arrive when he reaches the age of adolescence, and co-operate with the rational part of the soul.[8]