Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 3 · 5 of 46

Excerpt V. Of Matter

EXCERPT V

[OF MATTER]

(I have added the title, it being the same as that of the main section of Stobæus, Patrizzi (p. 51) giving only the simple heading “From the [Sermons] to Tat.”

Text: Stobæus, Phys., xi. 2, under the heading: “Of Hermes from the [Sermons] to Tat”; G. p. 121; M. i. 84, 85; W. i. 131.

Ménard, Livre IV., No. viii. of “Fragments from the Books of Hermes to his son Tat,” p. 250.)

Her. Matter both has been born, O son, and it has been [before it came into existence]; for Matter is the vase of genesis, and genesis, the mode of energy of God, who’s free from all necessity of genesis, and pre-exists.

Insight

Matter is the vase of genesis, and genesis the mode of energy of God. The metaphor is jar-and-pouring. God is the activity; matter is the receptacle that takes the activity in and becomes shaped by it. Plato's Timaeus had used the same figure — chora, the place or receptacle, that takes on form. Aristotle's matter-and-form will refine it; the medieval scholastics will receive it; modern process philosophy in Whitehead will still be playing with it. The Hermetic version makes a striking point: matter is not eternal alongside God, it is born out of God's energy, but as the receptacle of further genesis it has a kind of priority of its own. The metaphor is good enough that two thousand years of philosophy have not exhausted it.Plato, Timaeus 48e-52d (the chora); on Hermetic matter: Festugière, La révélation, IV.46-50; Whitehead, Process and Reality, on receptacle motifs.

[Matter], accordingly, by its reception of the seed of genesis, did come [herself] to birth, and [so] became subject to change, and, being shaped, took forms; for she, contriving the forms of her [own] changing, presided over her own changing self.

The unborn state of Matter, then, was formlessness; its genesis is its being brought into activity.

Footnotes

26:1 Or receptacle or field of genesis, or birth (ἀγγεῖον γενέσεως). The idea of a vessel or vase of birth was a familiar symbol with the Pythagoreans; μεταγγισμός (from the simile of pouring water out of one vessel into another) being one of their synonyms for metempsychosis.

27:1 ἀγεννησία

27:2 ἀμορφία. Compare this with the Christian Gnostic commentator of the Naassene Document, quoted by Hippolytus (Philos. v. 7), and the comment of Hippolytus on him: “Their first and Blessed Formless Essence (ἀσχημάτιστος οὐσία), the cause of all forms” (“Myth of Man,” § 7).