Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II (the Corpus Hermeticum) — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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10. In all the main phases there is to be observed the idea of a downward tendency followed by an upward. The Darkness descends ; it then transmutes itself and aspires above in a Cry or Yearning for Light. The Word descends ; immediately the Fire and Air ascend. The Formative Mind descends; immediately the Word ascends from the mixed Water-Earth — and at-ones itself with its co-essential emanation from the Father — to a space about the Seven, and thus leaves the still down-tending elements in the Element Water- Earth deprived of its immediate presence, after giving physical matter the initial impulse to order. This physical matter our author calls " pure matter," meaning thereby matter deprived of the immediate presence of Eeason.
11. Hereupon from the impulse she has received Nature begins her physical enformation, develops her physical elements and bodies of irrational lives. Water-Earth divides into water and earth, and also air, for this air is clearly something different from the Spirit- Air that ascended; the lower air is one of the downward elements.
THE DESCENT OF MAN
12. When this had been accomplished, there followed a Third Outpouring — the descent of Man, the consummation of the whole Enformation of things, a still more transcendent manifestation of Mind, the One Form that contains all forms, His Very Image coequal with Himself. He finally comes Himself to consummate and save the cosmos in the Form of Man — that is, to gather it to Himself and take it back into the Pleroma.
Nevertheless the Word and the Formative Mind and Man are not three different Persons ; they are all co-essential with each other and one with the Father. For the Word is co-essential with the Demiurgic Mind (§ 10), and the latter is Brother of Man (§ 13), and Man is co-equal with God (§ 12).
13. And so Man, the Beloved, descends ; and in his descent he is clothed with all the powers of his Brother's creative energy, the creative energy of Life conjoined with rational Light.
Having learned the lesson of the conformations and of the limitations of the Spheres, he desires to break right through the Great Boundary itself ; but to do this he must descend still further into matter. Before he can burst through upwards he must break through downwards.
14. Accordingly he breaks through the Spheres downwards, seeking his consort Nature below, and shows her his Divine Form radiant with all the energies bestowed on him by all the Powers above.
And she in her great love wound herself round the image of this Form mirrored upon her water, and the shadow of it thrown upon her earth; just as the Darkness wound itself, like a Great Serpent, round the lower parts of the Light, so does Nature coil herself round the shadow and reflection of Man. Man is above, yet is he below ; man is free, yet is he bound — bound willingly in love for her who is himself.
Reitzenstein (pp. 47-49) is greatly puzzled with all this, and seeks to distinguish several contradictory elements, presumably supposing that these elements are woven together into a literary patchwork from distinct traditions. I cannot myself follow him here with any clearness. Of course the writer or writers of our treatise did not discover new ideas or invent new terms; they used what was in their minds and the minds of their circle. It was, however, the weaving of it into a whole, not as a literary exercise, but as a setting forth in the most understandable terms with which they were acquainted of the " things seen/' that was their main interest. Those who had the " sight " would understand and appreciate their labours, those who had not would never understand, no matter what terms or what language were used.
When, then, Eeitzenstein (p. 47) says that in § 11, in the bringing forth by Nature of irrational lives, there is a confusion of contradictory conceptions, he fails to see that Nature is ever the World-Soul, the spouse of Mind ; though Darkness she is spouse of Light. Unaided she brings forth things irrational, a phase of that birth of Nature by herself that is incomplete.