The Hermetic principles

The teaching

As the Corpus Hermeticum with the Asclepius and the Emerald Tablet teaches it.

The seeker's three questions

The Hermetic books begin with a wish to know. In the first treatise a seer, his thought turned to the things that are and his bodily senses held back, is asked by a presence of boundless size what he wants to hear and see, to learn and to know. He answers that he wants to learn the things that are, to understand their nature and to know God. The world, its nature and God are the whole subject of the art, and a fourth stands within them: the one who asks, for in these books whoever comes to understand himself goes toward God.

The teaching is given as a conversation between a teacher and one pupil or a few. Hermes speaks with his son Tat and with Asclepius, Asclepius in his turn with King Ammon, and Mind itself with Hermes. The pupil first hears the general discourses, which lay out God, the cosmos and the soul, and is given the deeper teachings only when ready. The books call the life they teach reverence, and say what reverence is: knowledge of God. That knowledge, the tenth treatise says, is the only salvation for a human being, and the same treatise sums up the struggle of reverence in two parts: to know the divine and to wrong no one.

God, the Good above all

First is God, who is one, the Father of all, and above all the Good: goodness belongs to God alone, and anything else is good only by sharing in it. God is hidden in himself and yet the most manifest of all, since he is seen in everything he makes, as a maker is known by the order of his work, and the books say again and again that he wishes to be known.

The treatises speak of God in two ways, and a student holds both. The first treatise calls him Mind, the light out of which everything shone; the second says that God is not mind but the cause of mind, as he is the cause of spirit and of light, and stands above them all. What the books teach of God's goodness and hiddenness is set out on the page of the Hermetica.

The living cosmos and its seven governors

Second is the cosmos, which the books call the second god: one living being, made in God's image, ordered, beautiful and always moving, in which nothing perishes but only changes. Its frame is the heavens. Seven governors, the planets, turn in their circles around the earth, and their government is called fate: whatever lives in a body lives under it. Above the seven lies the eighth, and above the eighth the powers who sing to the Father.

The Asclepius sets the order out as a line of three: the master of eternity is the first god, the cosmos is the second, and the human being is the third. In the eighth treatise each is the image of the one before it, the cosmos of God and the human being of the cosmos; in the first, the Human bears the Father's own image.

The human being, mortal and immortal

Third is the human being, who is double: mortal because of the body, immortal because of the essential human within. The Asclepius calls a human a great wonder and gives him two works, to wonder at the heavens and revere them, and to care for the earth and govern it well. The first treatise tells how he came to be double. The Human leaned down through the circles of the governors, received from each a share of its rank, saw his own form reflected in nature below, loved it and came to dwell in it. So a person lies under fate in the body, while the mind belongs above it. The whole vision is told on the page of the Poimandres.

What makes the difference is mind, nous, the first word a student of the art must have. Speech is given to every person, the fourth treatise teaches, but mind is not; those who receive it become complete and know why they were born, and the story of the mixing bowl in which it is given is told on the page of the Hermetica. The vice of the soul is ignorance and its virtue is knowledge, gnosis, which in these books means the knowing of God.

What is below is like what is above

Because the cosmos is one living being, its parts answer to one another, and what is done in the heavens has its likeness on earth. The Emerald Tablet, a text of a dozen lines in the name of Hermes, puts it in the sentence for which it is best known: “That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.” The likeness is given for a purpose: it lets the heavens be read in a life, and a work on earth be done after the pattern of the heavens. The tablet is read line by line on its own page.

On this ground stand the practical arts that bear the name of Hermes. Astrology reads the governors and the fate they bring. Alchemy works on the one thing from which, the tablet says, all things are born. And the Asclepius teaches that people make gods of earth, the statues of the temples, ensouled by joining to them herbs, stones and spices that hold a natural divine power, as God made the gods of heaven. The treatises on God and the handbooks of the arts rest on one teaching: the cosmos is bound together, and like answers to like.

The way, step by step

The art lays out the road from ignorance to knowledge in steps. First the pupil hears the general discourses and reads them slowly, one at a time. Then comes the work of understanding: the eleventh treatise asks him to make himself as large as all things in thought and to leap clear of every body, since like is understood only by like. Then comes rebirth, which the thirteenth treatise says the teacher gives only when the pupil is ready to become a stranger to the world: the twelve torments of matter are driven out by ten powers of God, and the one reborn no longer sees with bodily eyes alone. Each step is taught in full on the page of the Hermetica.

Last is the ascent. The first treatise places it at death: the soul rises through the seven zones, gives back at each zone the habit it took on there, comes bare into the eighth and sings with those who are there, then rises to the Father and comes to be in God. That, it says, is the good end for those who have knowledge: to be made god.

Another dialogue, the Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth, shows the ascent begun in life. A pupil reminds his father of a promise to bring his mind into the eighth and then into the ninth, for that, the father had said, is the order of the tradition. They pray together, and the pupil sees the eighth, with the souls and angels in it singing in silence, and sings his own hymn in silence.

Reverence, silence and thanks

The art is practised as well as studied. Several of its treatises close in hymns and prayers. The prayer that ends the Asclepius gives thanks for three gifts, mind, speech and knowledge, through which God has made himself known, and asks only to be kept in that knowledge; its speakers say it facing south at sunset, as they would face the east at sunrise, and then go to a pure meal without meat. The highest things are given in silence: the knowledge of the Good, the tenth treatise says, is a divine silence in which all the senses rest.

From this a student can take a plain order for a day of study: one passage read slowly; a short time of quiet afterwards, with the senses let rest and no straining after visions; and a few words of thanks at the end. The hymns that close the Poimandres and the treatise on rebirth can be said aloud.

Later books in the name of Hermes

Two later teachings stand on this ground and have pages of their own. The Renaissance read the treatises as an early link in a chain of sages reaching to Plato, and drew from them a living world with a soul and a spirit through which the life of the heavens can be drawn down; that is the page on Ficino and the Renaissance. A modern book, The Kybalion, gathers seven principles under the name of Hermes, from Mentalism to Gender, and they are taught one by one on the page of the seven principles.

The old treatises do not list the seven, and the two teach differently in places. The Kybalion's first axiom is “THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental”, while the second treatise sets God above mind as its cause; and The Kybalion's second axiom, “As above, so below; as below, so above”, is the tablet's sentence made short. A student reads each for what it is, and keeps the old books and the modern one apart.

Where a student begins

A good order of reading follows the way itself. A student begins with the Poimandres, which tells in one vision how the cosmos was made, how the human came down into it and how the soul goes home. Next comes the tenth treatise, called the Key, which gathers the general discourses into one; then the fourth, on the mixing bowl, and the eleventh, in which Mind teaches Hermes; and only after these the thirteenth, on rebirth, which takes them as already learned. The Asclepius comes next, and the Emerald Tablet, a dozen lines, can be learned by heart at any point.

Of every passage the student asks three things: what it says of God, what of the cosmos and what of the human being, and where it places the reader among the three. Then one more: what it would mean to live by it for a day. The seven principles and the Renaissance are best met after the old books, so that what is new in them can be seen for what it is.