The Poimandres (Lecture 1)
Presented on: Tuesday, February 4, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 5 of 52
The Poimandres, Part 1
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 4, 1986
Transcript:
The date is February the 4th 1986. This is a fifth lecture in the series by Roger Weir of the Hermetic tradition from Egypt to America, Osiris to Franklin.
...that took place 2,000 years ago was a complete change of emphasis about where wisdom belongs. We saw in the first month that the ancient tradition. We saw in the first month that the ancient tradition was that wisdom belonged with those after death. All of the Egyptian wisdom literature was geared towards instruction for the soul in its journey after death. And the major change that came 2000 years ago was that the instruction was for the living. And this is a monumental change. And as far as we know, as far as we can tell, barring confirmation of very large metaphysical histories this is the first time that it ever happened. In the Western world. the change in China of course came about a thousand years before.
If it is the living who are to receive wisdom then it does no good whatsoever to put the text in the tombs. It seems obvious. The text then belong in the hands of the living. But the difficulty with the texts is that this wisdom literature requires a guide. Because man in his natural state cannot understand wisdom. He just is not suited to it. We don't have to use terms like higher or lower. But it's that untransformed human beings cannot understand wisdom. First of all it doesn't appeal to them. And if there is an appeal it becomes paradoxical and ironic. And if the paradoxes and the ironies are seen it becomes metaphorical to the nth degree. And becomes very, very difficult for intelligence to sustain itself. And finally it fragments and splits. Because attempts to naturally acquire wisdom always fail. they have to fail. It's almost by design if you wish to say. That they have to fail.
So that there needs to be a basic transformation and what needs to transform is the mind. And the Greek word for that was metanoia. Metanoia. And in the metanoia what happens is that the mind changes and acquires a pronoia, a foresight. And of course this is the Promethean gift. Prometheus steals from the Gods for man the gift of foresight. In Greek it's called pronoia. And you only have that, you only acquire that, after this metanoia. After this turning around of the mind. The change of the mind. The transformation of the mind.
Individuals had had metanoias but 2,000 years ago an entire civilization had it enmass. And of course the only individual that we can place at the focus of this massive change of mind is Jesus. It sounds didactic I know. But after reviewing this material for an awful long time many, many, many years. Patiently sifting over and over again the pattern discloses a focus exactly where he was. Exactly at that time, at that place. And if he wasn't there then it's an invisible focus that did it anyway.
The focus of the metanoia was not in Israel. It was in Egypt. It was in Alexandria. just like the focus of the Metanoia now is in Los Angeles. here in California. In the USA. This is where the change of mind is happening. Where the transformation is happening. And this is dangerous. It's a dangerous thing. Because the accepted pattern of natural intelligence is no longer valid. What flew now doesn't fly. What was understandable now is highly problematic. Because the transformation looks like from one side that the mind is shattering. But from the other side it looks like the mind is transforming. And so this is a very, very difficult problem. To instruct the living with wisdom.
The main Hermetic literature began to surface as early as about the 2nd century B.C. in Egypt. Especially in Alexandria. I'm going to give you a little bit here from G.R.S. Mead who was the Secretary to Madame Blavatsky for many years. Editor of Lucifer for many years. The reprint of thrice greatest hermes, three volumes studies in Hellenistic theosophy and Gnosis. Being a translation of the extant sermons and fragments of the Trismegistus literature with prolegomena commentaries and notes. And this was published originally 1906. This is the third impression, 1964. I think there were 500 sets. I bought this in San Francisco in 1964 at the Fields Bookstore on Polk Street.
"A name. Petosiris. Petosiris. Petosiris and King Nechepso." N-e-c-h-e-p-s-o. Petosiris and King Nechepso. Mead writes, "Of still greater interest are the Greek fragments of Petosiris and King Nechepso which have come down to us. These Greek fragments are to be dated at least before the end of the 2nd century B.C. And afford us striking parallels with our extant Trismegistic literature."
Now this is profound. And it doesn't seem profound unless one has a lot of experience with these matters. The 2nd century B.C. material has a tremendous striking parallel with the 2nd century A.D. material. Let's approach this in another way. If you drop a stone into a pond the proverbial ripples come out. If you draw a line across the pond while those ripples are coming out the line will cross the ripples twice. It is the same ripple. It's just that your straight line across the field where the ripple is occurring intersects it twice. Coming and going. The field of spirit is a unity. And occurrences that happen in time-space have resonances in that field just like the ripples on a pool of water. Real events therefore are detectable twice in history. This is one of the Hermetic ways of telling what's real. What's going on. You run into it before it's going to happen and you run into it after it happened. And by a little not so nifty computation you can tell when it was. And there are ways to tell where it was. There are ways to be specific and exacting. So that this material of the 2nd century B.C. and the material of the 2nd century A.D. are parallel.
In them, in the 2nd century BC material, we find the Prophet, Egyptian prophet Petosiris represented as the teacher and counselor of Nechepso. And later on in the Hermetic literature it will be like Asclepius and Amman. Or Hermes and Tot(?). So forth.
Petosiris tells us that he was an Egyptian philosopher who wrote on comparative Greek and Egyptian theology. Making selections from holy books. And treating of astrology in the Egyptian mysteries. What are these holy books? These are the books of the Dead. The books of the coming forth by day. Especially it would be in the third generation of the the material. Not from the Heliopolian recension so much or the Theban recension. But from the Saite recension of the Egyptian Books of the Dead. Which were current incidentally up to about 200 A.D. But by 200 B.C. they began to be replaced and not displaced. Notice that in the BC it's selections are taken out of them. The funerary texts are not presented whole but selections are taken out. They're rearranged so that what is different is the matrix that contains the selections. First off. This is how a spiritual change happens, the matrix changes. The content becomes selected out. Later on the matrix will disappear and the content will rearrange itself into a transformed new order. A new series.
This is what happens in a human personality when it becomes spiritual. You need a new matrix. Then you need to select out what you're going to keep. What you're going to retain. what you're going to emphasize. And you live with that for a while. And in the natural process of growing with that, of living with, that getting used to being with that, the matrix which was mental at first fades and becomes, drops out of consideration just about the time that the new order comes to be.
So Petosiris in the 2nd century B.C. made selections from the Egyptian Books of the Dead. And moreover Proclus. Proclus was a great Neoplatonic philosopher of about 500 A.D. Proclus tells us that Petosiris had an intimate knowledge of every order of the Gods and angels. And refers to a high erratic formula of theolergic invocation to the greatest of the Goddesses for inducing the vision of this power. Inducing the vision of this power. This is complicated. He had a knowledge of the order of the Gods and angels, of celestial hierarchy. He had a knowledge of the order, the celestial hierarchy. And from this knowledge he was able to come up with a high erratic formula and various practices. Theolergic practices. And the formula and the practices were able to invoke from the greatest of the Goddesses the inducing of the vision of this power. And the ritual of the manner of addressing her when she appeared as she handed on this, these revelations, these prophetic revelations to Petosiris.
Let's put this into a psychoanalytic analogy just for a second. The anima soul is responding to a life practice which has been organized with a mental understanding. The mental understanding is a selection from a manipulation of a hierarchical order of reality. And that the soul responds to this activity. This is in fact true. That it does happen. To put it colloquially, prayer works. Incantations work. Holy rituals work. Tapas does build up.
So in the 2nd century B.C. we have this. The mystical nature of this literature is still more clearly shown in what a historian Vettius Valens tells us of Nechepso. Who surpassed the ammon of our literature and attained to direct knowledge of the inner way. Direct knowledge of the inner way. When the matrix disappears for oneself the knowledge then, the understanding, is direct because there's no longer a mental parenthetical level between you and and the divine. First of all there has to be a mental parenthetical matrix which one carries. And after a while. And it has to be of such a nature that it doesn't stay in the mind. Because if it stays there it's like a stuck frame of reference. I have, I have made all of these mistakes and it is just like a stuck frame of reference. And you can actually force the image to come up and it'll be just like a, like a picture frame that's caught in the gate of a film projector that is on its edge and is staggering because it won't go. It's just like that. You can actually have that image come up. Or you can have the feeling, tone, of that frame of reference that's stuck. And Jung refers this as mysterium tremendum. And it can be anxiety. Or if you want to really put yourself in the line you can actually get to where you shake. It's a bad experience. There's nothing about it that's nice.
What has happened is that the direct knowledge of the inner way is linking the individual up with a tremendous source of power. And if you keep something in between so that the power doesn't flow, then the power hits that. And so you want to have a mental matrix that will get out of the way. You can take it because your spiritual. The mind can't take that. It's not made for that. It's it's just like a template. A series of templates. And it's good for that. And that's what it's good for. Just that.
Vettius in the first half of the 1st century A.D. laments that he did not live in those days of initiate kings and rulers and sages who occupied themselves with the sacred science. Singular. The sacred science. What is the sacred science? The sacred science is transforming the soul originally after death so that it could come back to life. And in the A.D. centuries it will be transforming the person so that they are deathless. So that they never die in the first place. The deathless water The Poimandres will say. Here is the deathless water. Isis gives to Horus the deathless water.
"Those initiate kings and rulers and sages who occupied themselves with the sacred science. When the clear ether spoke face-to-face with them without disguise are holding back in answer to their deep scrutiny of holy things. In those days so great was their love of the holy mystery, so high their virtue that they left the earth below them and their deathless souls became heaven walkers and knowers of things divine."
But this material in the B.C. centuries was directed only to those sages and individuals who could deal with the experience on a high-powered level. But in the A.D. centuries it had to be made available for everyone. Not just a few. Not just kings and sages. Not just the esoteric. But for everyone. So that in the A.D. centuries the literature that presents this tends to be apocalyptic. And The Poimandres is a Hermetic apocalypse.
So let's go to The Poimandres without too much more in this. And let's just start with it. I'm going to use several translations. I have four different translations of it. Five actually. One is a selection of three of the others. The Mead Thrice Greatest Hermes is available now in paperback. And that's probably the one I'm most familiar with. Having read it for about 22 years now. There is a version that's in the shrine of wisdom that's available for about seven dollars. But it's a selection of the Mead and of two others which I'll show you. This one translated by Dr. Everard in 1650. And so it has a kind of, of a English mid 17th century tone to it. And it's not too bad. And it's published by the Wizards Bookshelf from the Secret Doctrine series. The third translation is very difficult to find you probably won't find it anywhere. This is from 1882. This is the the John David Chambers, The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus. And this is almost a rare book. So the Mead is probably the easiest one to get to. The one I'm going to start out with though which is now coming in paper bound is the Scott. Walter Scott. And The Hermetica by Scott is in four volumes and in the first volume is The Poimandres. I think you can buy these at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore.
Here's how The Poimandres begins. Now remember now this is a Hermetic apocalypse dealing with this powerful metanoia. Dealing with setting up a matrix in the mind which will be powerful enough to hold a new selection of material. And yet capable of being transparent enough to be completely dispensed with at a certain stage.
"Once in a time when I had begun to think about the things that are. And my thoughts had soared high aloft, while my bodily senses had been put under restraint by sleep. Yet not such sleep is that of men weighed down by fullness of food or by bodily weariness. I thought there came to me a being. A vast and boundless magnitude who called me by my name. And said to me what do you wish to hear and see and to learn and to come to know by thought? Who are you? I said. I said he am Poimandres. The mind of the sovereignty." Poimandres can also mean shepherd. Mind shepherd. The mind Shepherd is coming. Has come.
"I would learn said I the things that are and understand their nature and get knowledge of God. These are the things of which I wish to hear. He answered I know what you wish for indeed I am with you everywhere. Keep in mind all that you desire to learn and I will teach you." All right he's going to keep in mind. What is he going to keep in mind? He's going to keep in mind the questions: What are the things that are? What is the knowledge of the divine? And where, where are those questions going to be? They're going to be in his mind. Now the mind Shepherd is going to come in with instruction. And he is going to move that matrix full of those questions and those ideas. He's going to move that in a special way. This is the way hermetic master teaches.
"When he had thus spoken forth with all things changed in aspect before me and were opened out in a moment. And I beheld a boundless view. All was changed into light. A mild and joyous light and I marveled when I saw it. And in a little while there had come to be in one part a downward tending darkness terrible and grim." All right he quiets his...himself. Keeps his questions in mind and this matrix is held there. Then an experience happens and there's a vast boundless field. And in it there's light. A joyous emulous light. but in that comes a darkness. Part of it. Which as it settles it takes on a shape. And the shape that it takes on is of a serpent, large serpent. Not only serpent but dragon. We can talk in that way. It's like a dragon shape that comes in then. And it comes from the settling in the light of the counterpart. The light is vast boundless ebulate and the counterpart to that is dark sinuous dragon-like. And as it settles it begins to belch out fire. A voice of fire. The Poimandres uses that phrase in the Greek. The voice of fire comes out of this. And the voice of fire is sent back up from the dark serpentine dragon shape. Huge shape. Which is settled in this light and that voice as it goes up the voice of fire. The fire goes up as a voice. And the air follows that. And air and fire going up, the water in the earth the other two elements are chaotically mixed together. So that they're like mud or clay if you wish. Clay. So that the formative materia is left below and the actualizing energy is raised above. So that there's a separation. And then they're gonna come back together. And they're gonna come back together.
"There after I saw the darkness changing into a watery substance which was unspeakably tossed about and gave forth smoke as from fire. And I heard it making an indescribable sound of lamentation. And there went forth from it an inarticulate cry. But from the light there came forth a holy word, logos. And logos. Which took its stand upon the watery substance. And I thought this word was the voice of light." The voice of the light. The light has a voice. The dragon has a voice. The dragon has a voice of fire. the light has a voice which is a logos. Those who hear that voice are called logoy. There are no longer human beings. They're no longer naturally just human beings but they are logoy. They can hear this voice from the light.
"And Poimandres spoke for me to hear and said to me, do you understand the meaning of what you have seen? Tell me its meaning, I said, and I shall know." It is possible to drift into speculation at this point. If one has built up a habituation of leaning on the mind to figure things out the temptation at this particular stage is to try and figure it out by the mind. In terms of the very questions that one has held in suspension. In terms of the real basic concerns that one has. The temptation is to do that. This is real spiritual temptation. That needs to be foregone. This is where patience is a real virtue. Not patience of waiting for the other guy to give up. But patience in the sense here that one doesn't leap into an impulsive, reactive way of seizing upon the experience in trying to figure out what it was. So that Poimandres is instructing and saying have you understood? And the Hermetic student is saying, tell me and then I shall know. Continue the instruction.
"That light, Poimandres said, is I. Even mind the first God who was before the watery substance which appeared out of the darkness. And the word which came forth from the light is son of God. How so? Said I. Learn my meaning, said he. By looking at what you yourself have in you. For in you two the word is son and the mind is father of the word." Is he saying the mind in terms of the content that is being held in suspension? No. He's saying mind in a Pythagorean structural sense. Which means then that we have to direct a sense of awareness to this Pythagorean structural sense of the mind. We have to become minded about our mind.
"Said I, for this I thank you." When he is able to experience that there comes a thankfulness. You see though it's crimped and reading it you have to articulate it. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. "Now fix your thought upon the light, he said, and learn to know it." Now the mind that had been fixed upon the Pythagorean structure of the mind is able to sense the light. Fix your thought upon the light and learn to know it. How does one know the light? Not in any content way. Not in any objective way. But in a structural awareness sense of wholeness. The whole mind awareness is then directed at the light. It's a technique. It's difficult to learn.
"And when he had thus spoken he gazed long upon me eye to eye. So that I trembled at this aspect." This is the mysterium tremendum. Eye to eye so that there is a direct to vision. What is that eye to eye? The eye sees the eye. And what is in the eye? The pupil is the other eye. And what's in that eye is the other the eye and the pupil you see. the seeing eye to eye is not just a colloquial phrase but it's a Hermetic phrase. If the mind is speculative at this point it becomes an infinite regression. It becomes parenthetically absurd. But if the experience is wholesome and direct that look is like the look of love. It is penetrated through all of the layers to the essential nature. And the trembling comes because one is not used to this. He's like a car that hasn't been started for a long time. And it takes a while to get it going. So that he shakes.
"And when I raised my head again I saw in my mind that the light consisted of innumerable powers and had come to be an ordered world. But a world without bounds." So that the mind has been transformed. It's all jammed together in a few paragraphs. There's probably not much more than about 25 lines. But you have to articulate it. This instruction was given esoterically over a very, very carefully spaced time in Alexandria. About 1,800 years ago. This would have been the way. Just this sort of a setting. No different.
"I raised my head again and I saw in my mind that the light consisted of innumerable powers." What was an undifferentiated light before now is seen as an ordered hierarchy. The hierarchy is there. But is not there because the mind has put it there. Not there because of a speculation. There because the cosmos has an order. Where's the most peculiar startling aspect of reality that it's ordered. Because it's not at all problematical or ambiguous it's ordered. The order can be understood. But this order is a world without bounds. That is it's an order that does not have a finite shapedness to it. But because the instruction is so profound at this point, the mind of the initiate not being able to entertain this there is now going to be an apocalyptic image of this coming out. And it will end up as a circle of fire. A huge cosmic circle of fire. Which does have its end but the context in which it occurs is, is boundless and endless. It's the perfect image of a galaxy. Of a galactic structure in, in deep intergalactic space. If you wish. Or it's the circle where Shiva Nataraja dances through. There are all sorts of ways to present this.
"This I perceived in thought seeing it by reason of the word which Poimandres had spoken to me. And when I was amazed he spoke again and said to me, you have seen in your mind the archetypal form which is prior to the beginning of things. And is limitless." Limitless. This is the Greek term limitless is Pythagorean. One of the great Pythagorean polarities was the limited and the unlimited. And the unlimited can be cognized only by the transformed mind. Only by a mind that has gone through a metanoia. Otherwise the unlimited is unthinkable.
"But tell me, said I, where did the elements of nature come into being?" And so now there is a little cosmic Genesis given. And Poimandres gives this and he talks about how everything is formed. And the basic motion that's here is life and light. Life as a feminine and light as a masculine. light and life coming together. Remember the the way the logic, spiritual logic is given in Saint John's Gospel. In the beginning was the word and the word was life light and the light was the life of men. That's it. In the beginning was the word and the word was light and the light was the life of men. That word was coming into the world. He from the beginning was that. That's how though the logic ran. So that the Hermetic Poimandres is extraordinarily close to the gospel of Saint John. They're very, very close.
"The mind. The first mind. That mind which is life in light gave birth to another mind which is a maker of things." And this begins to be a little Gnostic now. Like a Demiurge. The maker of things. The informer as the as the Greek phrase might be. The, the, the one that makes forms happen. Comes out from light and life coming together. And this...and the child of that is the mind of the maker of things.
The second mind was made out of fire and air. And made out of the fire and air seven administrators. This is the...these are the planets who encompass with their orbits the world perceived by sense. And their form their administration is destiny. Destiny. The seven planetary levels. And this will be very important because when there's a Renaissance of this about twelve hundred years later. And the with Ficino in Florence when the Hermetic tradition comes back to the surface this will be an extraordinary thing. Because the the theme of Ficino is that the planets are within. And how does one contact the planets which with, which are within? Through music. Through music. Because the seven planets in order to have a shape are bounded by an eighth sphere. Which is the form of the whole. It isn't any one of the seven levels. But the eighth is the form of the whole. So the octave will be the this, the sealer of the whole of the seven. The seven count, the eighth is the as a sealer of the whole. It's like in the octave you return back to dough.
But that eighth, Hermetically will be said that eight will reveal the ninth. Because once one has the shape, one what one seeing the Ogdoad hears the Aeneid. Which is the ninth. This is how the eighth reveals the ninth. That's why this the spiritual instruction of the highest order is always not, not what you've seen but what you've heard. Thus have I heard.
Because in the seven levels, the seven planets, the seven notes, that order which is ordered according to a mental structure is a harmony. But it's the kind of harmony that keeps you in. And it's only the eighth which allows you finally to free yourself from being in. And it's only when you're freed from being in. Freed from the influence of the planets. Freed from astrology. Freed from these hierarchies. Freed from this seven tiered order. When one goes to the eighth one is able to then hear something which was not constrained by the harmony. Not constrained by the chord. And this is what The Poimandres is trying to establish now.
"The word. The word of God, the logos lept up from the downward tending elements of nature to the pure body which had been made. And was united with mind the maker. For the word, the logos, was of one substance with that mind. And the downward tending elements of nature were left devoid of reason so as to be mere matter." So that there's a separation. There's this voice that comes up. The voice of the fire that goes up unites with the voice of the light which is coming down. Which is there. But what is left down below then will be matter. Inorganic dead matter. Clay. Which needs to be transformed.
Let's shift over to our friend Mead. Mead is clearer in his translation here.
Please turn your cassette now and we'll commence playing again on the other side after a brief pause.
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...Mead is clearer in his translation here.
"This is why beyond all creatures on the earth man is two. Fold he's mortal because he has a body made of made of this clay. But because of the essential man is immortal. Because of his aspirant voice of fire, which can come forth from him and unite with the voice of light which can come down to him, he is immortal. But he is also mortal because of the body." The emphasis in the Herm...The Poimandres, in the early Hermetic literature, is that the body is a is a harmony. That for sure. But that the harmony of the body is like subject to the harmony of the spheres. And that ultimately in a spiritual sense this is a prison. You can put the body into good order. You can put a life into a good destiny. But doing that has done nothing. Except make the optimum use of the jail of orderedness which keeps one in. So that one has to rise up to the eighth level.
This harmony because of its nature, because it's polarized, and this is why it traps us, is both male and female. This is how one gets to fourteen. The seven levels have a maleness and femaleness, each one of them. And so this is where fourteen comes in.
"The Shepherd said this is the mystery kept hidden till this day nature embraced man and brought forth a wonder. For he had the nature of the concord to the seven. Who as I said to thee were made of fire and spirit. nature delayed not but immediately brought forth seven archetypal men." And these archetypal we should use the translation human beings. Or, or sentient beings. These sentient beings are doubled. They're like male and female as a whole. When they're together in the right way they are a whole. And there are seven of these wholes.
"In correspondence with the nature of the seven." Where are the seven wholes? They're like within ourselves. You can think of the chakras if you have to have some analogy to begin with. There within ourselves. But those ordering those seven, the only purpose for that would be to see that one is not defined there by. That even ordering them complete does not define one thereby. That whatever it is that one is really floats free from that. About to here when you first feel it. Or back here like that. What's the symbol of that? It's that the Pharaoh wears a Horus hawk on his head. Or that as Alexander had, loved the symbol, he has a roaring lion on his head. The lion's mouth is open. It's right here. It's that his royal self is manifest. And that the psychophysical body with its limitations is no longer the limitation. Yes it works. Yes it's ordered. But the control of it, the purposefulness of it, is spiritual. The spiritual presence. Later on it will be like a halo or a Nimbus. And someone who has that then, if I can be colloquial here is in business. Then you are ready because one is no longer constrained by destiny. No longer constrained by what the planets can configure. No longer constrained by what the inner planets can configure.
When that constraint is gone it isn't so much that the Harmony then is rejected, it's that the Harmony strikes one as a whole chord. And when you're able to hear the whole chord together what occurs to one is that the silence of the intervals that made the various notes is articulate also. And this is the music that the ninth has. The silent music. That the intervals are intelligible. How does one experience that? Initially as vast space that flows. And that ninth that Aeneid is the only way that one can be I to I with the divine. The divine is a tenth. It is the only way.
So The Poimandres is working on this metanoia and says, "Nature embraced by man brought forth a wonder. For he had the nature of the concord of the seven. Made of fire and spirit. There were seven men and correspondence with the nature's of the seven male and female and moving in the air. I said, o Shepherd I am now filled with great desire and long to hear. The Shepherd's said, keep silent. For not as yet have I unrolled to thee the first logo. Lo I am still, I said. In such wise then as I have said the generation of the seven came to pass. Earth was as woman, her water filled with longing. Ripeness she took from fire. Spirit from ether. nature thus brought forth frames to suit the form of man. And man from life and light changed, transformed into soul and mind. From life to soul. From light to mind." The metanoia. What was the metanoia? The metanoia that happened was that the light and life became soul and mind. And that's what a human being is soul and mind. So that the metanoia that a man has changes him back into his cosmic nature of life and light. It's like we have, we are the engraving as William Blake said, we're the engraving upside down and backwards. And only when we realized that it's not us as we are that's real. But it's that what we actually transform to in reality when we print out that is real. And what do soul and mind print out? Life and light.
But if they were self-satisfied with their mind and with their soul. It's my soul and I'm going to keep it. That kind of hubris dams one to the prison of harmonies. Then one spends eternity trying to figure out the correlations through speculation again and again and again. It fools play. Fool's gold. It's not real. But it appeals to the mind. And appeals especially to the soul. And it is the soul in the Hermetic understanding in this sense that becomes ego bound. When it keeps to this mind. When it keeps to that an analogous kind of an ordering. And it has to be transformed. One has to give it up. One has to fork it over. And what happens then is that they print out life and light through this metanoia. But the Shepard, the mind Shepard, is telling the initiate this is the time to be still. Keep silent. Why? Because the silence is the mode. The silence is the mode.
He talks in here then about the, the coming of pronoia. Of forethought. "By seeing this," he said, "his forethought did by means of fate and harmony affect their couplings and their generations founded. And so all things were multiplied according to their kind." Fate or destiny. The Greek term was moira. Fate, destiny and harmony. The Harmony is because of the levels. The seven levels. And the the fate is that as long as one is dealing only in terms of those seven levels one is fated to follow what they will determine. They can't do anything else except that. And that's what they do. And they do that all the time. And as long as you play with them in that sense in their field you can only play their game. And their game is a harmony. But the object is not to have beautiful harmony. The object is to see that the harmony as a chord has a different reality as a whole. That's what to see, the eighth. The eighth. The ogdoad. Because when one sees it as a whole one then understands that the silence is also important in the ninth. Thus the Aeneid is the spiritual field.
I guess we're getting...we're gonna have to come back to this next week. There's just too much here. Let's, let's let it go at that. And we'll come back next week and just finish up the, The Poimandres.
Thank you very much.
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