Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II (the Corpus Hermeticum) — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

" But sober all they gaze with their hearts' eyes on
Him who willeth to be seen."

The missing word seems, therefore, to be " God."

The Gospel that is preached is the Beauty of the Gnosis, — " the Beauty of the Truth and Good that dwells therein " ; just as in 0. H., i. 27 :

"And I began to preach to men the Beauty of
Devotion and of the Gnosis."

The tempest-tossed on the Sea of Ignorance are to make for the Harbour of Salvation — evidently some great organization devoted to the holy life ; therein they must seek for one who knows, who can take them by the hand and lead them unto the Gates of the Gnosis.

This suggests that the organization consisted of a general body, within which were grades of instruction ; the many were striving for illumination, some few had reached it.

CORPUS HERMETICUM VIII. (IX.)

THAT NO ONE OF EXISTING THINGS DOTH PERISH, BUT MEN IN ERROR SPEAK OF THEIR CHANGES AS DESTRUC- TIONS AND AS DEATHS

[OF HERMES TO TAT]

(Text: P. 56-59; Pat. 48a, 48b.)

1. \Hermes.~] Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak ; in what way Soul is deathless, and whence comes the activity1 in composing and dissolving Body.

For there's no death for aught of things [that are] ; the thought [this] word conveys, is either void of fact, or [simply] by the knocking off a syllable what is called " death," doth stand for "deathless."2

1 eWpyeio.

2 The text is obscure, and the translations without exception make nonsense of it. Some words seem to be missing.

For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life * that cannot die, it cannot be that any part of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts of Cosmos, and most of all is man, the rational animal.

2. For truly first of all, eternal and transcending birth, is God the universals' Maker. Second is he " after His image," Cosmos, brought into being by Him, sustained and fed by Him, made deathless, as by his own Sire, living for aye, as ever free from death.

Now that which ever-liveth, differs from the Eternal ; for He 2 hath not been brought to being by another, and even if He have been brought to being, He hath not been brought into being by Himself, but ever is brought into being.

For the Eternal, in that It is eternal, is the all.
The Father is Himself eternal of Himself, but
Cosmos hath become eternal and immortal by
the Father.

3. And of the matter stored beneath it,8 the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical — wrapping it round the life 4 — [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make materiality eternal.

1 Living thing, " animal." 2 Sc. the Eternal.

3 Sc. beneath the cosmos, world-order or universe.

4 The text here seems to me to be very faulty ; for voi6v, void,
I read £$ovt £$a. In such unintelligible phrases as aur<p

But He, the Father, full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives l into the sphere, and shut them in as in a cave, willing to order forth 2 the life with every kind of living.

So He with deathlessness enclosed the universal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself from body's composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder.

For matter, son, when it was yet incorporate, was in unorder. And it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] enveloping the rest of the small lives3 — that increase-and-decrease which men call death.

4. It is round earthly lives that this unorder doth exist. For that the bodies of the heavenly ones preserve one order allotted to them from the Father as their rule * ; and it is by the restoration5 of each one [of them] this order is preserved indissolute.6

The " restoration " then of bodies on the earth and rb jter* avrov "xodv, the writer is evidently dealing with the Cosmos as the one life, the avrtfoov, from which all other lives are derived ; and if he did not write avrtfyov, he assuredly wrote £$ov. He wrote sense and not the nonsense of the present text.

1 Sc. the great lives or so-called heavenly " bodies."

2 Or beautify.

3 As distinguished from the great lives or animals, the so-called heavenly " bodies."

4 TV fy>xV, — or source or principle.

5 airoKaTdffTaffis, a term used of the cyclic return of stars to their original positions.

6 If we may be permitted to coin a neologism.