Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. III — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
" 0 Souls, Love and Necessity shall be your lords,1 they who are lords and marshals after Me of all.2 Know, all of you who are set under My unageing rule, that as long as ye keep you free of sin, ye shall dwell in the fields of Heaven ; but if some cause of blame for aught attach itself to you, ye shall dwell in the place that Destiny allots, condemned to mortal wombs.
" If, then, the things imputed to your charge be slight, leaving the bond of fleshly frames subject to death, ye shall again embrace your [father] Heaven, and sigh no more; but if ye shall commit some greater sins, and with the end appointed of your frames be not advanced, no longer shall ye dwell in Heaven, nor even in the bodies of mankind, but shall continue after that to wander round in lives irrational." 3
1 Of. Tim. 42 A : " When they should be implanted in bodies by necessity . . . they should have . . . sensation . . . and love."
2 Vf. Frag, xxiii.
3 Cf. Tim., 42 B : " He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth, he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would be continually changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the * same' and the ' like ' within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state." Notice the omission of any reference to the inferior status of woman in the Egyptian tradition.
23. Thus speaking, Horus mine, He gave to all the gift of breath,1 and thus continued :
"It is not without purpose or by chance I have laid down the law of your transformings 2 ; but as [it will be] for the worse if ye do aught unseemly, so for the better, if ye shall will what's worthy of your birth.
" For I, and no one else, will be the Witness and the Watcher. Know, then, it is for what ye have done heretofore, ye do endure this being shut in bodies as a punishment.
" The difference in your rebirths, accordingly, for you, shall be as I have said, a difference of bodies, and their [final] dissolution [shall be] a benefit and a [return to] the fair happiness of former days.
" But if ye think to do aught else unworthy of Me, your mind shall lose its sight so as to think the contrary [of what is true], and take the punishment for benefit ; the change to better things for infamous despite.
" But the more righteous of you, who stand upon the threshold of the change to the diviner state, shall among men be righteous kings, and genuine philosophers, founders of states, and lawgivers, and real seers, and true herb-knowers,
1 Lit. "their spirits" — which apparently link the souls with their bodies.
2 Reading ncra&o\<is.
and prophets of the Gods most excellent, skilful musicians, skilled astronomers, and augurs wise, consummate sacrificers, — as many of you as are worthy of things fair and good.
24. " Among winged tribes [they shall be] eagles, for these will neither scare away their kind nor feed on them ; nay more, when they are by, no other weaker beast will be allowed by them to suffer wrong, for what will be the eagles' nature is too just [to suffer it].
"Among four-footed things [they will be] lions, — a life of strength and of a kind which in a measure needs no sleep, in mortal body practising the exercises of immortal life — for they nor weary grow nor sleep.1