Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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" Now to the selfsame state from which each Soul hath come, she cometh not again for some ten thousand years. For sooner than this period no Soul [re-]gains
1 Sc. as a germ or seed.
2 It is low down in the scale, indeed, that Plato places the soothsayers and hierophants ; he is, however, " ironical," for he places poets even lower down, and still lower sophists and tyrants, all in keeping with his well-known views about these people as known in his own time.
its wings, except the Soul of him who has loved wisdom naturally or contrary to nature.1
" Such Souls in the third period of a thousand years, if they have chosen thrice this life successively, thus getting themselves wings, depart in the three thousandth year.2
"But the other Souls, when they have ended their first life, are brought to judgment ; and being judged, some go to places of correction below the Earth and pay the penalty, while others are rewarded by being raised unto a certain space in Heaven where they live on in a condition appropriate unto the life they lived in a man's form.
" But in the thousandth year both classes come to the lottery of lives, and each doth make choice of its second life, whatever it may choose.3
"And now is it that a Soul that once had had a man's life doth pass into a brute's life,4 and from a
1 % vaiSfpaffr-fiffavrof /terefc <pi\offo<pias — Stewart, " Of loved his comrade in the bonds of wisdom " ; Jowett, " or a lover who is not devoid of philosophy " ; Taylor, " or together with philosophy has loved beautiful forms.1' I fancy that Plato has used this graphic expression simply to designate a man who has not true union with wisdom, but is seeking for union though ignorantly.
2 " The numbers three and ten are called perfect ; because the former is the first complete number, and the latter in a certain respect the whole of number ; the consequent series of numbers being only a repetition of the numbers which this contains. Hence , as 10 multiplied into itself produces 100, a plane number, and this again multiplied by 10 produces 1000, a solid number ; and as 1000 multiplied by 3 forms 3000, and 1000 by 10, 10,000 ; on this account Plato employs these numbers as symbols of the purgation of the soul, and her restitution to her proper perfection and felicity. I say, as symbols ; for we must not suppose that this is accomplished in just so many years, but that the soul's restitution takes place in a perfect manner." — Taylor, op. oit., iii. 325.
3 Cf. the "Vision of Er."
4 We must not understand by this that the soul of a man brute, he who was once a man, passes again into a man ; for that indeed the Soul that never hath seen truth, will never come into this configuration.1
" For we must understand ' man,' in the sense of form, as one proceeding from many sensations and collected into a unit by means of ratiocination.2 But this3 is recollection (avdfjwrjo-is) of those things which our Soul once did see when she journeyed with God,4 and looked beyond the things we now call things that are, by raising her face 5 to That-which-really-is.
" Wherefore of right, alone the understanding of the Wisdom-lover hath got wings ; for he is ever engaged upon those things in memory as far as he can be, on being engaged at which, as being a God, he is divine.
becomes the soul of a brute ; but that by way of punishment it is bound to the soul of a brute, or carried in it, just as daemons used to reside in our souls. Hence all the energies of the rational soul are perfectly impeded, and its intellectual eye beholds naught but the dark and tumultuous phantasms of a brutal life." — Taylor, loc. tit.
1 Viz., the form of a man ; it is, however, also an astrological term.
2 There seems to be no agreement among translators as to the meaning of this sentence : Se7 yap bvQptnitov tyvifvat KO.\ elSos
\ty6fJ.tvc»>, fK iro\\tov Ibv a.lfff)4i<rt<av fls ev Koyiff^ tvvaipou/j.tvov.