Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II (the Corpus Hermeticum) — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
To thee, thou Parent of my Bringing into Birth, as unto God I, Tat, send reasonable offerings. 6 0 God and Father, thou art the Lord, thou art the Mind. Keceive from me oblations
1 Cf. G. H., i. 32. 2 fiov\4i. 8
4 Cf., for instance, The Ascension of Isaiah, i. 6 : " In the twentieth year of the reign of Hezekiah, Isaiah had seen the words of this prophecy."— Charles' Trans. (London, 1900), p. 5.
5 Cf. above, § 18.
reasonable as thou would'st wish ; for by thy Will all things have been perfected.
Her. Send thou oblation, son, acceptable to
God, the Sire of all ; but add, my son, too,
" through the Word " (Logos).
Tat. I give thee, father, thanks for showing me to sing such hymns.
22. Her. Happy am I, my son, that thou hast brought the good fruits forth of Truth, products that cannot die.
And now that thou hast learnt this lesson from me, make promise to keep silence1 on thy virtue, and to no soul, my son, make known the handing on to thee the manner of Kebirth, that we may not be thought to be calumniators.2
And now we both of us have given heed sufficiently, both I the speaker and the hearer thou.
In Mind 3 hast thou become a Knower of thyself and of our [common] Sire.
1 Of. P. S. A., xxxii. 4.
2 Sid&oXoi, slanderers, calumniators ; compare § 13 ; also Ex. i. 16.
3 votpus.
COMMENTAKY
CONCERNING THE TITLE
"The Secret Sermon on the Mountain" is the main title given in all the MSS., with the exception of A ; the subsidiary contents-title is evidently derived from the same edition to which we owe the other contentstitles preserved in our Corpus. Eeitzenstein (p. 193), however, thinks that the main title has arisen by mistake. What the mistake is he does not tell us; perhaps he means that in our Sermon there is no mention of " On a Mountain," but rather, as in § 1, if we accept his reading, of " Down a Mountain." But in this we cannot follow him ; for the whole teaching is precisely " On the Mount " — to the top of which Tat has now come. For the " Mountain " was symbolic of stages of inner development, and in § 9 we are told precisely : " This step (the fifth) is Kighteousness' firm seat," — showing that the Mountain was conceived as an ascent or stair of steps as is so often seen in Egyptian frescoes.
THE TERM APOCRYPHON
Again, with regard to the title, the term " Secret " (a7roKpv(po$ — apocryphal) is used in its original sense of hidden away, meaning esoteric or not put into circulation, as applied to a logos or sermon, or a collection of logoi or sayings.
A logos in this sense had very much the same meaning for our Ancients as the Sanskrit malici-vakyam (" great saying") has to-day for an Indian theosophist who applies the term to the great mystical utterances of the Upanishads ; such as : " That art thou " ( Tat tvam asi), etc.
In classical antiquity these logoi or logia were regarded as words of wisdom, and were the most sacred legacies of the sages to humanity. These oracular utterances were frequently collected together, and even prior to the days of syncretism formed the most sacred " deposits " (SiaOrJKai) of various nations ; the same term being subsequently given to the Christian Bible.
Thus Herodotus calls Onomacritus, the first collector of the archaic Orphic Hymns, a " depository of oracles " (SiaOeryv x/owiwi/), — the word carrying the meaning of " one who arranges," corresponding exactly to the term Vyasa in Sanskrit, the supposed " author " of the Mahabharata.
Such collections of logoi or logia were then generally called " deposits," the word also sometimes bearing the meaning of " testaments " as containing the expression of the Divine will or dispensation. The same term is used by Strabo (x. 482) of the Laws of Lycurgus ; it was also applied by the Orphics and Pythagoreans to such sacred laws l ; while Ecclesiastical writers subsequently used it in reference to the Canonical Books. 2
The Orphics and Pythagoreans also called these collections " sacred utterances " (lepol \6yoi) ', and even Clement of Alexandria refers to such a saying of Orpheus as "that truly sacred utterance" (TOP ovrw lepov \6yov).
That such collections were kept secret is not surprising ; indeed, such must have been the case from time immemorial. But even on the ground of purely Greek and Eoman history, we are not without information of collections of oracles carefully guarded as the secret scriptures or bibles of nations.