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

The first dated use of the word in a religious sense is found in Messala (who was Consul, 53 B.C.), as Johannes Lydus tells us.1 Moreover, Lydus informs us that the Ancients (01 TraXat) celebrated a Feast of the Mon on January 5th.2 This can be no other than the Feast of which Epiphanius gives us such interesting details in treating of the Epiphany, when he writes, after describing the festival in the Koreion at Alexandria : 3

" And if they are asked the meaning of this mystery, they answer and say : To-day at this hour the Maiden (Kore), that is the Virgin, has given birth to the MOIL." 4

In the next paragraph Epiphanius designates this ^Eon as the Alone-begotten. Here, then, we have striking evidence that in its Egyptian environment the cult of the ^Eon was associated with mystery-rites reminding us strongly of the symbolism of the Christmystery.

Moreover, Messala5 tells us of this ^Eon, that He " who made all things and governs all things, joined 2together by means of the surrounding Heaven the power and nature of Water and Earth, heavy and downward, flowing down into the Depth, and that of Fire and Spirit, light and rushing upward to the measureless Height. It is this mightiest power of Heaven that hath bound together these two unequal powers."

Lydus (ibid.) furthermore tells us that the idea of the Mon was associated by the Pythagoreans with the idea of the Monad ; indeed, they seem to have derived the word aion from id, the Ionic form of /x/a (one).

Any attempt to refer this Pythagorean identification to the earlier Pythagoreans would be at once rejected by the majority of scholars, but I believe myself that the original Pythagoreans were far too close to the Borderland between mythology and philosophy not to have personified or at least substantiated their "Numbers" and the Source of them. At anyrate it is highly instructive to find Plato himself writing in the Timceus:

" And when the Father who begot it [the Cosmos] saw that by its motion and its life it had become a likeness of the Everlasting Gods, He marvelled, and in delight determined further to make it still more like its Original.1 And as the latter is an Everlasting Living Being, He sought to make this [Sensible] Universe as far as possible like it.

"Now the nature of the Living Being was eternal (cueoj/to? — seonian) ; but to bestow this quality entirely on a generable creature was not possible.

" Accordingly He determined to make a moving 3image of Eternity (Attoi/o?); and so in setting the Heaven in order He makes it an everlasting (aiwviov) image, moving according to number, of Eternity (Ateoj/o?) that rests in One — an image which we have, you know, called Time." l

Here it is very plain that ^Eon is not Time, but the Paradigm thereof — Eternity. It is the Consummation of the Eternal Gods — namely, the Pleroma, the Monad par excellence. We, therefore, find already in Plato the idea of the JE,on fully developed. Did Plato " invent " it ? Or did he put an already existing idea into philosophical terms? He presumably found it already existing. Was it then Orphic (Pythagorean), or did he learn of it in Egypt ? Who shall say precisely ?

Seeing, however, that we find the idea of the fully developed in Plato, and seeing that Plato was, so to speak, scripture for our Hermetic writers, it is exceedingly puzzling that we should find it apparently introduced at a certain stage into the Trismegistic literature as a new doctrine.

It may be, however, that those who had followed Plato on purely philosophical lines had hitherto paid little attention to the idea of the ^Eon, except as an ultimate principle beyond the reach of speculation. When, however, the enthusiastic seership of mysticism dared to soar beyond heaven into the Heaven of heavens, and so to divide the Simplicity into an Infinitude of Multiplicity, the term Mon came to be used no longer for a transcendent unity but as the connotation of a grade of Being.

., 37c,D.