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

3. For it is mind that doth conceive all thoughts — good thoughts when it receives the seeds from God, their contraries when [it receive th them] from one of the daimonials ; no part of Cosmos being free of daimon, who stealthily doth creep into the daimon who's illumined by God's Light,1 and sow in him the seed of its own energy.

And mind conceives the seed thus sown, adultery, murder, parricide, [and] sacrilege, impiety, [and] strangling, casting down precipices, and all such other deeds as are the work of evil daimones.

1 That is to say man, or rather the ego in man. The translators seem to make nonsense of this passage through rejecting the original reading.

4. The seeds of God, 'tis true, are few, but vast and fair, and good — virtue and self-control, devotion. Devotion is G-od-gnosis ; and he who knoweth God, being filled with all good things, thinks godly thoughts and not thoughts like the many [think].

For this cause they who Gnostic are,1 please not the many, nor the many them. They are thought mad and laughed at 2 ; they're hated and despised, and sometimes even put to death.

For we did say3 that bad must needs dwell here on earth, where 'tis in its own place. Its place is earth, and not Cosmos, as some will sometimes say with impious tongue.

But he who is a devotee of God, will bear with all — once he has sensed the Gnosis. For such an one all things, e'en though they be for others bad, are for him good ; deliberately he doth refer them all unto the Gnosis. And, thing most marvellous, 'tis he alone who maketh bad things good.

5. But I return once more to the Discourse

1 ol eV yvtaffei oi/res, lit. they who are in Gnosis.

2 Of. Plat., Phcedr., 249 D : The wisdom-lover " is admonished, by the many as thoughr»he were beside himself."

3 Sc. in some other sermon.

(Logos) on Sense. That sense doth share with thought in man, doth constitute him man. But 'tis not [every] man, as I have said, who benefits by thought ; for this man is material, that other one substantial.

For the material man, as I have said, [consorting] with the bad, doth have his seed of thought from daimons ; while the substantial men [consorting] with the Good, are saved by God.

Now God is Maker of all things, and in His making, He maketh all [at last] like to Himself; but they, while they're becoming1 good by exercise of their activity, are unproductive things.

It is the working of the Cosmic Course 2 that maketh their becomings what they are, befouling some of them with bad and others of them making clean with good.

For Cosmos, too, Asclepius, possesseth senseand-thought peculiar to itself, not like to that of

1 Or being made.

2 It is difficult to bring out the full delicacy of wording of the original in translation. First God's ultimate intention is stated to be the making all things like (Voia) Himself ; this is the great sameness of union with Him. But meantime while this making, creating or becoming, is going on, these imperfections cannot produce — that is, become creators in their turn ; they are unproductive (&0opo). That which is the instrument of God's making is the cosmic course (<£op<£). We are finally (§7) told that it is bodies which are the cause of difference or diversity (eV the opposite pole, so to speak, to the likeness (fyxom) with God.

man ; 'tis not so manifold, but as it were a better and a simpler one.

6. The single sense-and-thought of Cosmos is to make all things, and make them back into itself again, as Organ of the Will of God, so organised that it, receiving all the seeds into itself from God, and keeping them within itself, may make all manifest, and [then] dissolving them, make them all new again ; and thus, like a Good Gardener of Life, things that have been dissolved, it taketh to itself, and giveth them renewal once again.

There is no thing to which it gives not life ; but taking all unto itself it makes them live, and is at the same time the Place of Life and its Creator.

7. Now bodies matter [-made] are in diversity.
Some are of earth, of water some, some are of
air, and some of fire.