Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II (the Corpus Hermeticum) — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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32. Give ear to me who pray that I may ne'er of Gnosis fail, [Gnosis] which is our common Being's nature 2 ; and fill me with Thy Power, and with this Grace [of Thine], that I may give the Light to those in ignorance of the Race, my Brethren, and Thy Sons.
For this cause I believe, and I bear witness ; I go to Life and Light. Blessed art Thou, 0 Father. Thy Man 3 would holy be as Thou art holy, e'en as Thou gavesfc him Thy full authority 4 [to be].
COMMENTAEY
OF VISION AND APOCALYPSIS
The " Poemandres " treatise not only belongs to the most important type of the Trismegistic literature, but is also the most important document within that type. It constitutes, so to speak, the Ground-Gospel of the Poemandres Communities, in the form of a revelation or apocalypse received by the founder of the tradition,
1 \oyitcds.
2 rris yvaxrews TTJS «OT' ovtrlav ^/AWJ/, " our being," that is, presumably, the " being " of man and God, the " being " which man shares with God.
3 Cf. G. H., xiii. (xiv.) 20. 4 that founder, however, being not a historical personage but the personification of a teaching-power or grade of spiritual illumination — in other words, of one who had reached the " Hermes," or rather " Thrice-greatest," state of consciousness or enlightenment.
This stage of enlightenment was characterized by a heightening of the spiritual intuition which made the mystic capable of receiving the first touch of cosmic consciousness, and of retaining it in his physical memory when he returned to the normal state.
The setting forth of the teaching is thus naturally in the form of apocalyptic, and of apocalyptic of an ordered and logical nature ; for it purports to be a setting forth of the spiritual " Epopteia " of the Inner Mysteries, the Vision revealed by the Great Initiator or Master- Hierophant, Mind of all-masterhood.
This Vision, as we are told by many seers and prophets of the time, was incapable of being set forth by " tongue of flesh " in its own proper terms, seeing that it transcended the consciousness of normal humanity. Being in itself a living, potent, intelligible reality, apart from all forms either material or intellectual in any way known to man, it pervaded his very being and made his whole nature respond to a new key of truth, or rather, vibrate in a higher octave, so to say, where all things, while remaining the same, received a new interpretation and intensity.
The interpretation of this Vision, however, was conditioned by the " matter " of each seer ; he it was who had to clothe the naked beauty of the Truth — as the Gnostic Marcus would have phrased it — with the fairest garment he himself possessed, the highest thoughts, the best science, the fairest traditions, the most grandiose imagination known to him. Thus it is that we have so many modes of expression among the mystics of the time, so many varieties of spiritual experience — not because the experience itself was " other," the experience was the " same " for all, but the speaking of it forth was conditioned by the religious and philosophical and scientific heredity of the seer.
This element, then, is the basic fact in all such apocalyptic. It is, however, seldom that we meet with a document that has come to us straight from the hand of a seer writing down his own immediate experience without admixture ; for the delight of the Vision was /not that it gave new facts or ideas of the same nature as those already in circulation, but that it threw light on existing traditions, and showed them forth as being parts of a whole. Once the man had come into touch with the Great Synthesis, there rushed into his mind innumerable passages of scripture, scraps of myths, fragments of cosmogenesis, logoi and logia, and symbols of all kinds that fitted naturally. These were not any special writer's monopoly, there was no copyright in them, they were all utterances of the same Logos, the Great Instructor of humanity.