Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

6 Op. et L>ies, 741 f. This scrap of ancient gnomic wisdom Hesiod has preserved, I believe, from the " Orphic " fragments teaches that [men] ought to keep holy day only when pure of such [superfluities], and not at the sacred operations themselves have need of purification and the removal of superfluities.

5. Again, the flax grows out of the deathless earth, and yields a fruit that man may eat, and offers him a smooth pure raiment that does not weigh upon the watcher,1 but is well joined for every hour,2 and is the least cone - bearing,3 as they say, — concerning which things there is another reason (logos).

still in circulation in bis day in Bceotia among the people from an Older Greece. I have endeavoured to translate it according to the most primitive meaning of the words. In later days it was thought that " five-branched " was the hand, and that the couplet referred to a prohibition against paring the nails at a feast of the Gods ! In this sense also Plutarch partly uses it. But if I am right in my version, we have in the lines a link with that very early tradition in Greece which in later times was revived by the Later Platonic School, in a renewed contact with the ancient Chaldsean mystery - tradition of the Fire. " Five - branched " would thus mean man, or rather purified man, and the saying referred to the " pruning of this tree." In it also we have an example of a " Pythagorean symbol " three hundred years before Pythagoras. Finally, I would remind the reader of the Saying which the Master is said to have uttered as He passed to the Passion of the Crucifixion (Luke xxiii. 31) : " For if they do these things in the moist stock [A.V. green tree], what shall be done in the dry ? " — presumably the quotation of an old gnomic saying or mystery logos. The " moist nature " is the feminine side of the " fiery " or " dry."

1 Reading vKoirovvTi for ffKetrovri — that is, the soul.

2 fvdpfnoffTov St irpbs iracrav 8>pav — "well adapted for every season " is the common translation ; the " hour," however, is a technical astrological term.

3 Vulg., "lice-producing" — but <t>6eip also means a special kind of pine producing small cones ; and the great cone was a symbol of the Logos, and the small cone of physical generation. It is also connected with <p8fipu, meaning to corrupt, and so to breed corruption.

OF THE BEFRAINING FROM FLESH AND SALT AND
SUPERFLUITIES

V. 1. And the priests handle so hardly 1 the nature of superfluities, that they not only deprecate the many kinds of pulse, and of meats the sheep-flesh2 kinds and swine-flesh kinds, as making much superfluity, but also at their times of purification they remove the salts from the grains,3 having other further reasons as well as the fact that it makes the more thirsty and more hungry sharpen their desire the more.

2. For to argue that salts are not pure owing to the multitude of small lives 4 that are caught 5 and die in them when they solidify themselves, as Aristagoras said,6 is naive.

3. They are, moreover, said to water the Apis also from a special well, and by all means to keep him from the Nile, — not that they think His7 water stained with blood because of the Crocodile,8 as some think (for nothing is so precious to Egyptians as the Nile),

1 Vulg., "endure with such difficulty" or "feel such disgust at."

2 Referring usually to small animals of the sheep and goat kind, and more generally to all sacrificial animals.

3 Or, perhaps, more generally, " the salt from their food." It more probably refers to mineral and not to vegetable salts.

4 That is animalcules.