Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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" He supposes the beginning of all things to consist of a Dark Mist of a spiritual nature, or as it were a Breath of dark mist, and of a turbid Chaos black as Erebus ; l that these were boundless, and for many an age 2 remained without a bound. ' But when,' he 3 says, ' the Spirit fell in love with his own principles,4 and they were interblended, that interweaving was called Love ; 5 and this Love was the origin of the creation of all things. But [Chaos] did not know its own creation.6 From its embrace with Spirit Mot was born.7 From her [Mot, the Great Mother] it was that every seed of the creation came, the birth of all the cosmic bodies.
" ' [First of all] there were [Great] Lives 8 devoid of sensation, and out of these came subsequently [Great]
1 This is the beginning of the out-breathing of the universe or of any system ; it is the Great Breath or Spirit moving on the Waters of Chaos, the primal nebula. Erebus was fabled to be a region of nether darkness separating Earth and Hades (not Hell). It was the Dark Side of Heaven.
2 Lit., aeon.
3 That is, Sanchuniathon ; so that we may take this passage as a direct quotation, or rather translation.
4 Or sources ; that is, the primal states of Matter or Chaos.
5 Pothos, triOos ; yearning, longing — love for all that lives and breathes. This union was symbolised not only among the Phoenicians but also among most of the other nations by an egg, round which a serpent twines. When the egg and serpent are represented apart they stand for " Chaos " and " Ether," matter and spirit ; but when united they represent the hermaphrodite or male-female first principle of the universe, spirit-matter, called in Greek translation Pothos or Eros.
6 Cf. " The Darkness comprehended it not " of the Proem to the
Fourth Gospel.
7 Here Philo, the translator, volunteers the information that some call this prime plasm of Chaos, " Slime," others explain it as " Fermentation," in a watery sort of medium.
8 The primal elements and their subdivisions.
Lives possessed of intelligence.1 The latter were called Zophasemin (that is to say, " Overseers of the Heavens "). The latter were fashioned in the form of eggs, and shone forth as Mot, the Sun and Moon, the Stars and the great Planetary Spheres.
"'Now as the [original] nebula began to lighten, through its heat mists and clouds of sea and earth2 were produced, and gigantic downpours and torrents of the waters in the firmaments. Even after they were separated,3 they were still carried from their proper places by the heat of the sun, and all the [watery and earthy elements] met together again in the nebula one with the other, and dashed together, amid thunder and lightning ; and over the crash of the thunderings the [Great] Eational Lives before-mentioned watched,4 while on the land and sea male and female cowered at their echo and were dismayed.'
" After this our author proceeds to say : ' These things we found written in the Cosmogony of Taaut, and in his commentaries, based on his researches and the evidences which his intelligence saw and discovered, and so enlightened us.' " 6
There are many other points of interest in Philo's translation, but we need not elaborate them here. One point, however, must not be omitted, because of its importance with regard to the Hermes-^sculapius tradition, an important factor in the Trismegistic writings.
1 The same distinction is made in the cosmogonic account in " The Shepherd," but with more detail.
2 Presumably still mingled together, as in the account in " The Shepherd."
3 That is to say, after the land and water were separated.
4 typ-nytprivev. The same expression is used in the Greek translation of The Book of Enoch, in speaking of the Watchers (Egregores).
6 Op. cit., i. ii., pp. 8 ff.