The Hermetica

The teaching

As the Corpus Hermeticum with the Latin Asclepius teaches it.

God, the One and the Good

The treatises begin and end with God, whom they call the One, the Father and above all the Good. God is not mind, nor spirit, nor light, but the cause that makes mind, spirit and light to be. The Good belongs to God alone; God is the Good, always, and nothing else is good except by sharing in it. God is not grudging: he wills to be known, and the whole teaching of Hermes is an answer to that will.

God is unmanifest in himself and yet the most manifest of all, because he is seen in everything he makes. Whoever wants to see him, Hermes tells his son Tat, should look at the Sun, at the course of the Moon, at the order of the stars, and ask who keeps that order; nothing so ordered can exist without one who orders it.

The cosmos, the second god

Below God stands the cosmos, which the treatises call the second god: a living being, made in God's image, beautiful, ordered and always in motion. It is everlasting because its maker is, and nothing in it dies. What people call death is only the loosening of a body that was put together: its parts are not destroyed but return to their places and are made again into new things. Change is the life of the cosmos, not its ruin.

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.

The human being, the third

A human being, says the Asclepius, is a great wonder, a living thing to be honoured, for he can pass into the nature of a god as though he were one. He is made double, of the mortal and the divine, so that he can do two works: wonder at the things of heaven and revere them, and look after the things of earth and govern them well. The body ties him to the world and the mind ties him to God, and of all living things on earth he alone has both.

The mixing bowl of mind

Not everyone has mind. The fourth treatise tells how God gave speech to all people, but not mind. He filled a great mixing bowl with mind and sent it down with a herald, who was to cry to human hearts: immerse yourself in this bowl, you who can, you who trust that you will rise to the one who sent it, you who know why you came to be. Those who heard and were immersed received mind and became complete, knowing people; those who missed the call have speech without mind, and do not know why they were born or by whom.

The treatise draws the lesson plainly. There are two kinds of things, the bodily and the bodiless, the mortal and the divine, and no one can give themselves to both; whoever wants the one lets go of the other. The choice is left to each person, and it decides which way they are carried.

Ignorance and knowledge

The greatest evil among people, the seventh treatise says, is not knowing God. It cries out to its readers as to people drunk on ignorance, and asks them to find a guide who will lead them to the doors of knowledge, where the light is clean of darkness and no one is drunk, but all are sober and look with the heart toward the one who wishes to be seen. First, it says, they must tear off the robe they wear, which it calls a web of ignorance, a dark prison, a living death and a tomb carried about.

The vice of the soul is ignorance and its virtue is knowledge. This knowledge is not learning many things but knowing God, and it comes in silence: the knowledge of the Good, the tenth treatise says, is a divine silence in which all the senses are at rest.

Like is known by like

In the eleventh treatise Mind itself teaches Hermes the way, and it is an exercise of the imagination. Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God, for like is understood by like. So grow to a size beyond measure; leap clear of every body; rise above all time and become eternity. Think that nothing is impossible for you and that you are deathless, able to understand every art, every science and the nature of every living thing. Be higher than every height and lower than every depth; be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, in the womb, young, old, dead and beyond death. Hold all of this in thought together, and then you can understand God.

The treatise also names what blocks the way. If you shut your soul in the body and abase it, saying I understand nothing, I can do nothing, I fear the sea, I cannot rise to heaven, I do not know who I was or who I shall be, then you have nothing to do with God. To be able to know, to will it and to hope is the straight road to the Good.

Rebirth

The thirteenth treatise, spoken on a mountain, teaches being born again. The womb of that birth, Hermes tells Tat, is wisdom that understands in silence; the seed is the true good; the one who sows it is the will of God; and the one born is a god, a child of God. It cannot be taught, only remembered when God wills, and the one reborn no longer sees with bodily eyes alone.

Rebirth drives out twelve torments that matter sets in a person: ignorance, grief, intemperance, lust, injustice, greed, deceit, envy, treachery, anger, recklessness and malice. Ten powers of God come in and drive them out: knowledge of God, joy, self-control, steadfastness, justice, generosity, truth, and with them the Good, life and light. When the ten have come, Tat says he is everywhere: in heaven and on earth, in water and in air, in animals and plants, in the womb, before it and after it.

Hermes then gives him a hymn to be sung by the reborn, calling on all of nature, the earth, the rain and the trees, to be still and listen while the One and the All is praised, and he asks Tat to keep this teaching of rebirth to himself.

The gods of earth

The Asclepius adds a teaching of its own. As God made the gods of heaven, so people make the gods of earth, the statues of the temples, which it calls ensouled: filled with spirit through rites that join to them the hidden powers of herbs, stones and spices, so that, it says, they foretell what is to come and send dreams. It holds Egypt to be the image of heaven and the temple of the whole world, and it foretells a time when the gods will leave Egypt and its worship will be abandoned; after that age of ruin God will call the world back to its first order and make it new.

Prayer, silence and the pure meal

The treatises teach in a fixed way. A teacher speaks with one pupil or a few, often one who has already read the more general discourses; the words are kept from the crowd, and the highest things are given in silence. Several dialogues end in a hymn or a prayer of thanks, and the Asclepius closes with the teacher and his pupils turning to pray, facing the south, for at sunset, it says, that is the way to face, as at sunrise one faces the east.

Their prayer gives thanks for the gift of mind, speech and knowledge, rejoicing that God has shown himself to them and made them, while still in the body, divine through knowing him. It asks one thing only, to be kept in that knowledge and never to fall from that way of life. Then they embrace one another and go to a pure meal, with no meat in it.