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 wondrous, mighty son of mighty sire Osiris, [the souls] when they go forth from bodies, are not confusedly and in a rush dissolved into the air, and scattered in the rest of boundless Breath, so that they cannot any more as the same [souls] return again to bodies ; nor is it possible, again, to turn them back unto that place from which they came at first — no more than water taken from the bottom of a jar can be poured l [back again] into the self-same place whence it was taken ; nor does the same when taken take a place peculiar to it, but is mixed up with the whole mass of water.2 Not thus is it [with souls], high-minded Horus !
3. Now as I chance myself to be as though initiate into the nature which transcendeth death, and that my feet have crossed the Plain of Truth, I will explain to thee in detail how it is ; and preface this by telling thee that water is a body void of reason condensed from many compound things into a fluid mass, whereas the soul's a thing of individual nature, son, and of a royal kind, a work of God's [own] hands and mind, and of itself led by itself to mind.
1 Reading eirixw for ^ire'xew.
2 The construction of the whole of the above paragraph is exceedingly involved.
What then doth come from " one " and not from "other," cannot be mingled with a different thing ; wherefore it needs must be that the soul's congress with the body is a concord wrought by God's necessity.
But that they are not [all] confusedly and [all] at random and by chance sent up again to one and the same place, but each to its own proper region, is clear from what [the soul] doth suffer while still it is in body and in plasm, when it has been made dense against its proper nature.
Now give good heed to the similitude recounted, Horus well-beloved !
4. Suppose in one and the same cage have been shut up both men and eagles, doves and swans, and swallows, hawks and sparrows, flies, and snakes, and lions, leopards, wolves, and dogs, and hares, and kine and sheep, and some amphibious animals, as seals and others, tortoises and our own crocodiles ; then, that, my son, at one [and the same] moment they are [all] let out.
They [all] will turn instinctively — man to his gathering spots and roofs ; the eagle to the ether, in which its nature is to spend its life ; the doves into the neighbouring air ; the hawks [to that] above [the doves] ; the swallows where men dwell ; the sparrows round the fruit-trees ; the swans where they may sing ; the flies about the earth, [but only] so far from it as they can with [-out their losing] smell of man (for that the fly, my son, is fond of man especially and tends to earth) ; the lions and the leopards towards the hills ; the wolves towards desert spots ; the dogs after men's tracks ; the kine to stalls and fields ; the sheep to pastures ; the snakes to earth's recesses ; the seals and tortoises, with [all] their kind, unto the deeps and streams, so that they neither should be robbed of the dry land nor taken from their cognate water — each one returning to its proper place by means of its internal means of judgment.
So every soul, both in a human form and otherwise incarnate on the earth, knows where it has to go, — unless some foolish person l come and say, my son, that it is possible a bull should live in water and a tortoise up in air !
5. And if this be the case when they are plunged in flesh and blood — that they do nothing contrary to what's appointed them, e'en though they are being punished (for being put in body is a punishment for them) — how much the more [is it the case] when they possess their proper liberty [and are set free] from punishment and being plunged [in body] ?
Now the most holy ordering of souls is on this wise. Turn thou thy gaze above, most noble-
1 TIS TWV Tu0«j/f&>j/— an interesting phrase as showing that Typhon was regarded as the enemy of Osiris (the Logos or Reason).