Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 2 · 16 of 51

VIII. (IX.) That No One of Existing Things doth Perish, but Men in Error Speak of Their Changes as Destructions and as Deaths

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 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.”

For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life 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 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, 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 from the Father as their rule; and it is by the restoration of each one [of them] this order is preserved indissolute.

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.