Hermes Trismegistus in Alexandria

I know some have asked where's the Taoist lectures because they were on Tuesday nights for six months. The Taoist series is continuing but it's been changed to Tuesday nights and it's at my institute at 2029 Hyperion which is only about a mile from here. So, at Tuesdays at 8 p.m. is the Taoist series on Taoism and we'll just– we're going to continue that through the year. So if you came expecting to learn about Secret of the Golden Flower and those kinds of things, that's Tuesday nights.

This series, at least in the first three lectures, is a recap of something that we worked on for six months at this address earlier in the year. And we have– how many cassettes do we have then? We have about twenty-five cassettes on this series. So what I'm presenting to you is an encapsulatization of something that took us a half year to talk about in some detail, but that half-year was based on about four or five years investigation. So if it seems a little outrageous from time to time it's that I'm taking a huge pirouette over material that we have covered, or hopefully a pirouette that– material that we have covered in detail.

The basic thing that I wish to present to you tonight is that we are magical in our very nature. That is to say, compared with human beings who lived two thousand years ago, we are very surreal. We live in our minds in a way that would not have occurred to them at all. And we do it in an everyday fashion. And one of the drawbacks to this is that we tend to have mental worlds which surround us rather than the real world. And only by going back to this enormous change in human consciousness about two thousand years ago can we have a chance to untangle for ourselves all of the mental fictions that have become like the clutter and the furnishings and the decor of our lives which are actually extraneous. That is, we don't really need them. But there is a quality distinct from mental worlds which is called ‘mind’ which we do need. And it is ‘mind’ which came into possession of its own self-reflectiveness about two thousand years ago. And it was such an enormous change at that time that when we look at individuals who live 200 BC and then compare them immediately to individuals that live 200 AD there is almost no comparison. It might as well be a different planet. And this is one reason why the ancient histories, which had been intact for thousands of years, were ineffective after about 100 AD. They no longer could structure, not only governments as we would understand governments - like the Roman Empire - but they could not structure human personality. You could not make a human person anymore on the terms that had been there.

This enormous change, catastrophic really if you were trying to cling to the old, a liberating if you were ready to live in the new. But this enormous change has a term, and the term is enantiodromia. And it's a term first used by Heraclitus in classical Greece about 500 BC and refurbished in our time by Carl Jung especially in his psychological investigations on large strategic scales of the human psyche – the collective unconscious. And when he was dealing with certain issues which had come up in his investigations into these large scale events of the human psyche. The book that chronicles it most poignantly is Answer to Job – Answer to Job. Because the Book of Job in the Old Testament is one of the fine high watermarks of human consciousness and the figure of Job is relentlessly honest and accurate about what the real issue is. And so in Answer to Job, Jung brought the term enantiodromia back into play. And if you were to look at Answer to Job, one of the other terms that is used in there a lot is Paraclete – Paraclete`. And Jung from time to time goes into a Christian ethos and uses the term Holy Spirit. But he, being quite accurate in his classical background, constantly refers back to Paraclete. And we were going to see tonight that the Hermetic tradition comes into its formulation in a whole new phase, and that Hermes Trismegistus is a Paraclete– he is a Holy Spirit and that the Hermetic tradition as we know it in the West over the last two thousand years has been an esoteric speaking and teaching really of a Holy Spirit, but not a Holy Spirit in the sense of a doctrinaire Holy Ghost, but of a clearly esoteric advisor and counselor who lives within, who is not a friend outside, but is a friend quality which is engendered within oneself – an advisor, but more than an advisor, someone who will be an attorney for one before a day of judgment, before the highest court of judgment and that we need, in fact, to have this Hermetic figure with us and he becomes, later on in Plotinus, the guardian spirit for instance and that passes on into the Christian mythology and the idea of a guardian angel then accompanies that.

So you can see that we're going to deal tonight with a lot of interesting materials, but I thought I would lighten it up at the beginning to give you what you always wanted to hear – a real classic love spell. This is from the Greek Magical Papyri in translation. And the reason I'm giving you this. And I'll give you a couple of other Greek magical spells of the first and second century AD is to contrast this, in a moment, with the mythological spells which are there in ancient Egypt. These Greek magical papyri are also largely from Egypt, but they are from the Hellenistic mind as opposed to the Egyptian character so that we have in Egypt mythological papyri in the BC centuries and in the common era in the AD we have the magical papyri. So we move in a way from myth to magic. And somehow this movement from myth to magic requires us to recognize that there is in between them a fulcrum. And we will come to understand, increasingly as the lectures penetrate deeper and deeper into the way in which the tradition manifested– we will come to understand that at the fulcrum the change from myth to magic required a symbol, a symbolic vision, and that there was in fact a central synthesizing symbol at this time. And the central symbolizing synthesizing symbol, two thousand years ago was a star, a star, or as one might now call it quite accurately, a guiding star. The star of a birth; the interior star; the guiding star; a star. And I might mention in a corollary way that in our time the late 20th century because we are going through again the other end of this cycle that star, that single star, is being translated into a pattern of stars.

So what is archetypally symbolic for us today is not a single star so much but a pattern of stars. This is why for instance the– the notion of a zodiac appeals to so many people at this time. All of the shapes of stars within the ecliptic seem to us to be of great wondrous, almost charismatic, attention. But on deeper reflection one will come to understand that it's not just the pattern of stars within the ecliptical constellations called the zodiac, but that all the stars together as a single pattern is what is the controlling archetypal symbol of our time. And that shape is a galaxy. And it is the shape of a galaxy – sometimes seen as a flying saucer, as an ellipse, sometimes seen as a kaleidoscopic spinning wheel, sometimes seen as a Milky Way, a sacred thread wending its way through the kaleidoscopic night of life. There are many ways in which this occurs but the central synthesizing symbol of our age and of the next several thousand years is the image of the pattern of all the stars that belong together – a galaxy.

It takes a great deal of consciousness to be able to image to oneself this material with– with this kind of clarity. Generally what happened, in the classical age, was that human beings like ourselves who would be largely untaught ran into this kind of mentality and used the magic in this way. And the magic here, instead of understanding a star in its symbolic synthesizing fashion, is understood in this kind of correlation. Here's a love spell of attraction over myrrh and you have to offer this myrrh – which usually comes in little granules about the size of petite peas frozen peas and you place these on coals and then you recite this love potion spell.

“You are Myrrh, the bitter, the difficult, who reconciles / combatants, who sears and forces those to love who do not acknowledge Eros. Everyone calls you Myrrh, but I call you Flesh-eater and / Inflamer of the heart. I am not sending you to far-off Arabia; I am not sending you to Babylon, but I am sending you to her whose mother is NN, so that you may serve me on the mission to her, so that / you may attract her to me. If she is sitting, let her not [continue to be] sitting; if she is chatting with someone, let her not [be able to continue] chatting…” And of course he goes down the litany getting closer and closer to what's on his mind. May she not continue this but immediately think of me. And he says, “Rather, let her hold me / alone in her mind…” And now we start to get the– the subtle undertone that's there. “Let her hold me.” Not in her arms but in her mind. It's curious you see. “...let her desire me alone; let her love me alone; let her do all my wishes. Do not enter through her eyes or through her side or through her nails / or even through her navel or through her frame, but rather through her ‘soul.’”

And at last we get to some comprehension. Even at this popular level, even at this mixed up level, there's a conviction that somehow what is the controlling feature of a person is not their decision making based upon their character, rooted in their life, but is the attitude of their mind which is somehow the central moving focus of their soul. And that if you have someone's attention in their mind, you can influence their soul. And if you have their soul you have them. This is new; this is a different kind; this is a cosmo politics rather than a state politics. This is a universal vision and this is different. It is new and it comes out suddenly in the AD centuries, second century especially.

Here is the kind of magical papyri spell that is characteristic of about three hundred pages of this. This is, “A restraining seal for skulls that are not satisfactory for use in divination, and also to prevent them from speaking or doing anything [out of order]. [You] Seal the mouth of the skull with dirt from the floors of a temple of Osiris / and from a mound covering graves. [and] Taking iron from a leg fetter, work it cold and make a ring on which [to] have a headless lion engraved. Let him have, instead of his head, a crown of Isis, and let him trample with his feet / a skeleton (the right foot should trample the skull of the skeleton). In the middle of these should be an owl-eyed cat with its paw on a gorgon's head; in a circle around all of them, [and then recite] these names: IADOR INBA NICHAIOPLEX BRITH.”

And of course this is indicative of a confused mentality. But what is important to us to understand is that what is of primary importance here was the mentality. There is nothing natural in this concern. What is here is a supernatural concern. It is not based upon a life which you would ordinarily or simply lead, but it is based upon a mental correspondence selecting out odd juxtapositions of fragments from nature. An owl-eyed cat whose paws are stepping upon this skull which is a circle of Isis engraved upon a leg fetter iron around this skull whose mouth is sealed with the dirt from the Temple of Osiris. If we imagine that image-base, and because of our sophistication psychologically today we can imagine it, and we hold that out – that image in our minds clearly, it's called eidetic imaging – if we hold that image in our minds we can see that this is a pastiche. This is in fact surreal – surreal. That there is no organic natural connection between these items or elements. That what is being put together here is a correspondence not based upon nature, but a correspondence based upon a mental system, a mental fictioning. And all of the Greek magical papyri – hundreds of pages of it, which are translated for the first time here just in the last year or so brought together in English – all of these are indicative of people unused to living by their minds and being lost in mental correspondences which they cannot control, which they don't have a clue of how to handle, of how to live by.

If we turn back to the mythological papyri of Egypt, and let's go to the New Kingdom, let's go back to about 1000 BC – in biblical chronology this is about the time of Solomon, the time of the Judges. If we come to the mythological papyri at this time we find in the New Kingdom in Egypt a similar kind of concern, a similar kind of confusion, but instead of there being magical pastiches, there are mythological pastiches. What was mythological sound in the Old Kingdom some fifteen hundred years before them, now has been distorted, mythologically, in the way that the Greek magical papyri will distort the New Kingdom synthesis. And so you can see that there is a kind of a cycle that is happening here. A large-scale cycle happening and reoccurring in the human psyche. And that in some periodic way enormous changes, a wheel of circumstance comes full round. And that one of the qualities of it coming full round is that everything is up for grabs psychologically for a while. That the disorientation is a characteristic of a catastrophic change.

When we look at the New Kingdom, and the New Kingdom becomes extremely symbolic. It's not only the time of Solomon which then becomes proverbial the wisdom of Solomon. It is the time of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey are written at this time. And it's not just limited to the shared classical world. It's the time of the Zhou dynasty in China where the I Ching was humanized by King Wen. So the era of 1000 BC becomes a very interesting era and it is about midway between the change that happens about every two thousand years so that when we're looking at 0 BC, the 1000 BC becomes extraordinarily interesting because it's sort of the– the middle, the high watermark of the kind of change that's happening. And when we go back to 2000 BC we can see that the beginnings are there. And of course, one of the great prototypes, one of the ways to understand this very quickly– everyone is acquainted with Alexander the Great. The archetypal prototype for Alexander the Great was Sargon and Sargon lives about two thousand years before Alexander, and Sargon's Empire is the great fertile crescent that touches the Mediterranean and makes its way across to the Persian Gulf. And that great Fertile Crescent, and Sargon 2300 BC, is the first human being to ever unite all the land between the two seas and put that together. And when Alexander lived the God, that archetype took control of his situation and he was able charismatically to magically project out that symbol, and make it happen, and make it work. And so we're dealing with that scale, that kind of quality.

What is of interest to us in this course is not just the massive events themselves but the key to understanding those events, the conscious insight. And it is the Hermetic tradition that records and keeps, in its lineage, the constant– the constant attention which accumulates as consciousness of the esoteric thread of meaning which controls all of this. And we will see that in the New Kingdom, for the first time, Thoth is no longer referred to just as Thoth, but as a twice great Thoth. And a thousand years later he will be referred to for the first time as thrice greatest Hermes, and Hermes Trismegistus occurs in that mind of Egypt which was ancient archetypal Alexandria about 100 AD. Hermes Trismegistus as the– as the great instructor of consciousness will occur there. And we'll see how this is actually foreshadowed and– and made possible. And we're going to go, in about 20 minutes or so, to the Gospel of John and see how John's great spiritual vision and insight keys for us the very decade of the transition.

In the Mythological Papyri – we're going to go back now to 1000 BC in Egypt. This is the time of the appearance of twice great Thoth. The whole purpose of wisdom at this time was to prepare yourself for the complete cycle of life. All of the wisdom was geared towards that and the great cycle of life was that the life that you live is only one half of this cycle. And after you die your life in the afterworld, the netherworld, is the other part of the cycle. And only the life and the death together formed a complete cycle. And that complete cycle was called eternal life – eternal life. So that the vision that took in both life and death was the vision of eternal life. A vision which would have taken life in, no matter how full, a concept of life would have been incomplete and idiotic to the wisdom tradition at this time.

The two transitions that concern one are the moment of death, of entering into the netherworld and the moment of resurrection, of coming back into life. And the concern was that with everlasting life with mastering these two junctures, these two positions – that the sun setting and the sun rising symbolically – mastering life and mastering rebirth did not allow you just to be reborn once, but once you had mastered eternal life everlasting life you could come forth at any time night or day. You were then liberated, you were free from the bondage of either just life or death. And all of the mythological papyri and texts of the ancient Hermetic Wisdom in Egypt are all establishing the reason why there are pyramids for hundreds of miles along the Nile and temples because these are the homes, the eternal homes, of the liberated spirits of those individuals who are then free to come and go at any day. And so this is their kingdom on earth.

By the New Kingdom this was beginning to be understood in a new way. For instance, in The Book of the Dead, in the Theban Recension of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, actually The Book of Coming Forth by Day. You see if you're– if you're completely instructed in wisdom you not only can come forth in the netherworld, but by day, and chapters one, two, and eight, and nine, are the instructions for coming forth by day after death. In this litany that comes out, the two central figures Osiris and Re dominate the mythology. Osiris as the god of the netherworld, and Re or Ra as the god of the upper world. The sun by day. Osiris or a moon-like quality by night. And both of these are live in born again. The cycle, Re is a sun god born in the morning from the sky and the sky, mythologically seen as the goddess Nut, the goddess Nut arched over and Djed, the earth as a god. So a goddess and a god. The sky with its starry expanse and Djed as the earth. And notice here that the sun then moves through the body of Nut through this starry body and then sinks below the horizon. This abstractly symbolized became the Shem the Egyptian symbol Shem and very often that was the linking symbol in the mythological iconography of ancient Egypt.

I'm sorry I don't have slides. Maybe we can get some of these made up. But the Chantier is in Egyptian religious mythology all of the time. Much more effective than the ankh at this time, the Shen is the symbol of eternity, of the eternity of the world, of the everlasting life of individuals who have mastered the whole of the spiritual wisdom. They may carry the Shen. It's not just that you carry life but you carry everlasting life. You carry eternity with yourself. Later on we will see in Hellenistic times that this everlasting life becomes a quality of consciousness and that it manifests itself as ‘mind’ as opposed to mentality and that the quality of ‘mind’ then is the symbol for everlasting life. One has mastered the complete cycle and then has this integration.

I'm skipping over here. The– the qualities in the mythological pampering. This is a– this is a quotation from– That's fine– This is a quotation from Henri Frankfort's book Kingship and the Gods. “There is no denying that to us [today the] spreading net of associations…” – that the ancient ancient Egyptians had the– “...spreading net of associations and identifications [proliferating– proliferating] seems to [us to] destroy the significance of the symbols involved.”

We tend to think of it as being watered down and– and not being useful. That somehow a limit must– a symbol must limit meaningfulness in order to have power. But Frankfort will point out that, in the ancient world a symbol, in order to have power, had to reach out and have a proliferate significance that was without end, and thus one had to have more and more applications. For instance, if you're thinking of the name of a god it had to be linked with eventually every god so that a really powerful symbol used to be that its significance and meaningfulness was its far extending array of associations.

He writes, “Moreover, the primitives, far from sharing our passion for precise definition and distinction, appreciate each relationship which can be established between seemingly disparate phenomena as a strengthening of the fabric of understanding in which they attempt to comprehend the world.”

This is the disposition, this basic disposition of trying to establish connections and relationships to extend the symbol out, to extend the God out, so that the god becomes a combination, becomes syncretic eventually with every aspect. That is the Achilles heel of the classical mentality. And at the change of consciousness where the symbol then imploded upon itself and became like a star, compacted like a star, and became exclusive this old associative way of thinking, this old world where the fabric of associated meanings had to be extended, became in fact a darkness. It became the enemy. It became the alien context which one should free oneself from. That the new savior figure was to be a light in that darkness to free you from being associated with that world and to lead you to another realm via this compacted symbol whose meaningfulness is not only limited but becomes extremely selective until it represents but one esoteric quality of unity, the all – the all. And that this is what is eternal. And we'll see that this becomes in the Hermetic tradition the very definition of what mind is. Mind is that unified quality of attention which we can engender within ourselves which records the unity of the universe. And thus the universe becomes a cosmos. And in the Hermetic tradition the cosmos will be the face of God.

Well let's take a little break and then we'll come back to this and– and clear this up.

I thought that you would also since you got to hear what a real love spell was like, you'd like to hear what real demons are like. And here they are describing themselves. And this is from the New Kingdom in Egypt about 1000 BC, this volume is entitled, The Triumph of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama, and published by the University of California Press. And it is a ritual drama from about three thousand years ago, from the New Kingdom, the same time period from which we took our mythological papyri and it concerns the ritual harpooning of a hippopotamus by the protagonist Horus, and the hippopotamus is Seth. And then there's a ritual dismemberment of the hippopotamus. All this is done symbolically. It's done on a stage with costumes and music. Actually here are some of the demons describing themselves so you can see what people were up against.

“I am Chief-of-the-Two-Lands-when-he-rises.” – all that's hyphenated.
“I guard thee from him who is hostile to thee;
[And] I protect Thy Majesty with my charms.
[And] I rage against thy foes as a savage baboon.”

And this is what he does, punishing the transgressions of thine enemies:
“I break his bones, I smash his vertebrae,
I crunch his flesh, [and] I swallow his gore.”

The gore is when your entrails are masticated. This demon is:

“I am His-Speech-is-Fire.
I make ruby-red my eyes and blood-red my eyeballs.
I repel those who come with evil intent toward thy seat.
I eat their flesh, I swallow their gore.
I burn their bones with fire.”

And one last demon.

“I am Death-in-his-Face-Loud-Screamer.
I encompass Thy Majesty about as a wall,
A palisade protecting thy spirit on the day of conflict.
I watch over thy temple by day and night,
Warding off the foe from thy shrine.

And…

“I drink the blood of him who would overthrow thy sanctuary,
I cut in pieces the flesh of him who would violate thy shrine.”

Notice that the demons here are not freelance agents; that the demonic is always a protective threshold of the sacred; that in fact, the occurrence of the demonic is the smoke of the fire of the spirit. Where there's smoke there's fire. Where the demonic threshold is there, some sacred space is being protected. But the psychological penetration, the realization, which we are capable of in an almost everyday fashion but which was so esoteric to people two thousand years ago they had to have special instruction to understand it. When there is a sacred space that needs protecting from whom are you protecting this? From the world? Why does it need protecting from the world? Because the world is corrupt and this sacred space would be in jeopardy were it to be open to the world. So the appearance, increasingly, of a demonic threshold shows that a split is taking place, that the world at large is becoming corrupt and sacred spaces are dwindling and need protecting. Those who are initiated, who are able to move in those sacred spaces, and in a special way, transform them so that they become the world. They are the masters of those thresholds. They understand the demonic and are able to call them out by name and dispel them so that if someone is caught in this liminal realm, this threshold realm, this consciousness where one isn't quite in a sacred space, and yet not completely inured in the world, one then needs a healer who is able to cast out the devils. And usually they are cast out by having their names called – thus and so get out, leave this person.

And so as we come to 0 BC we find more and more of the world is no longer at home either in the sacred or the worldly. But increasingly the realm where human beings live is in this threshold and instead of being a narrow threshold, whereas in 1000 BC a couple of demons who protected the sacred shrine in one or two locations along the Nile it was the province of daily life for tens of millions of people. But instead of being able to control it visually as protagonist or elements of a sacred drama for the Pharaoh, or for the royalty, or for temple wisdom it became the stew in which one lived year in and year out, day after day, with no definition, with no insight that this was even just a temporary phenomenon, that it was a limited psychological function. It had become the entire world. And of course the classical statement, written quite early in our terms, written about 70 BC by Lucretius in his great scientific work De Rerum Natura, not in any magical text at all. But Lucretius writes in there that, we can neither stand the world that we have made nor can we stand the cure needed to repair it. And so we are caught in this limbo. And that was the experience of intelligent individuals in Rome of 70 BC. And of course by 70 AD it was the experience of the classical world at large. Nero burning Rome to the ground was simply one more grand gesture of this demonic threshold that had taken hold of everything.

In this– in this the hero is Horus, but Horus is only able to be the hero because he has an instructor in Thoth, and Thoth says of himself: “I overthrow thy enemies, I protect thy bark with my potent spells.” And what are those potent spells? Those potent spells are the demagnetizing of the demonic. Not by fighting against the demonic, not by trying to crush it – that would only energize the demonic because they are made to protect against opposition and the more that one fights the more energy they have. But that the spells of Thoth demagnetize, in the sense that they take away the power from the demonic by permeating the sacred so that it may flow into the world and thus restore a balance. And when the world and the sacred come into a balance, into this permeation, the demonic disappears when there is an equilibrium. The whole purpose of Hermetic instruction was to restore the individual to what we would call sanity – calm, clarity of mind.

In fact when we turn to the first of the Hermetic Discourses – the Poimandres. The Greek term, ‘poi,’ ‘poi’ – like in Poiesis – which from which we get poetry. Poiesis is a making. Poimandres – mandres, mind, a mind-maker. It's translated here as a mind-shepherd and we have to understand that this is symbolic, a shepherd symbolically – one shepherds the mind. He who can make the mind as shepherd to the mind. Shepherd is no longer a natural phenomenon watching a flock of sheep. But a shepherd now is he who is watching over the shaping of the mind. What is that mind? The mind is the interior context, that demagnetized threshold where the demonic used to be and now it's calm. And on that threshold instead of the demonic being there, the reflection from the interior symbol was able to come and register there. And what registers there is that quality which Hermes Trismegistus teaches.

The Poimandres begins, and notice right away the change in tone from the magical papyri. Do we need a reminder?

“A restraining seal for skulls that are not satisfactory… Seal the mouth of the skull with dirt from the– tour doors– floors of a temple of Osiris.” Et cetera, et cetera. “…iron from a leg fetter.”

Contemporaneous with that is this:

“Once upon a time when I had begun to think about the things that are and my thoughts soared high aloft while my bodily senses had been put under restraint by sleep. Not such sleep as that of men weighed down by fullness of food or by bodily weariness. A thought there came to me a being.” Now the sleep is– is this quieting down of this threshold the quieting of it down so that it becomes transparent and in its transparency becomes a being of 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 sovereignty.’ ‘I would learn,’ I said, ‘the things that are and understand their nature and get knowledge of God. These,” I said, “are the things I wish to hear.” He answered, “I know what you wish for indeed I have come for that. I am with you everywhere. Keep in mind all that you desire to learn and I thus will teach you.” And when he had thus spoken forthwith all things changed in aspect before me, the world.”

Everything changed in aspect before me and were opened out in a moment. There is a spontaneity. There's an instantaneous sense of unity. D. T. Suzuki once in an interview bent the English language around. He said this kind of experience is where every particular has a totalistic quality to it. That the poignancy is not in its relatedness. Nothing is connected. Everything is a unity.

All things are one. So it's this. And in this changed aspect we're opened out in a moment. “And I beheld then a boundless view. You see the transparency of his own mind a boundless view. And in this boundless view all was changed into light a mild and in 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.”

It's not a shape that he's seeing but it's a primordial feeling tone is what we would say. It is an element separating itself out, a downward tending motion. and it becomes darkness because the mind is light and that– that movement makes it dark by feel like darkness.

“Terrible and grim by contrast. And thereafter I saw the darkness changing into a watery substance which was unspeakably tossed about and gave forth smoke as from fire. It's a primordial chaos. And I heard it making an indescribable sound of lamentation. For there was sent from it an inarticulate cry. But the light there also issued a holy word which took its stand upon the watery substance and methought this word was the voice of 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, ‘then I shall know.’ ‘That light,’ he said ‘is I even I 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 the Son of God.’ ‘How so,’ said I. ‘Learn my meaning,’ said he, ‘by looking at what you yourself have in you. For in you too the word is son and the mind is father of that word. They are not separate from one from the other. For life is the union of word and mind.’”

So now we have a very interesting presentation. You can see the quality of consciousness is extraordinarily refined. This is associatively chaotic. This is still imitating a world which can no longer be a quality of life and human experience which no longer can form personality. It doesn't have the power anymore to allow human personality to form. But this new capacity, which has the power to allow human personality to form, is different. It's interior as opposed to exterior. It is conscious in distinction to purely natural. It does not belong to the world but belongs to an inner world. And the quality in this inner world is a mixing together of language purified to a word, and mind which is a threshold of attentiveness purified to light. And that this language and this mind brought together in a harmony that is life, that is now what life is. Life is no longer blood. But life is spirit. And so a difference has come about. And by 100 AD, in Alexandria, this was understood – not by many – but it was understood.

How does this happen? How does this occur? In seemingly a flash. When we go, as we must because we have limited resources we just don't have a lot of documents from this time and we have to use what we have. And oddly enough one of the most interesting is the Gospel of John. And in the Gospel of John there are two short sections – one of them in the 14th chapter, and one of them in the 16th chapter – where Jesus is talking to his disciples in in a way which at first seems so ordinary to us now because it's kind of like a a doctrine which has been worked and reworked to death. And the language seems– when we read it in some kind of a standard Bible it seems so familiar and mediocre that we hardly pay any attention to it anymore. Except maybe to wonder occasionally what it might have meant. But here in the Anchor Bible, which is an interdenominational inter-religious publication, 1984. Let's take a look at this translation. This new translation made from the original Greek. Saint John's Greek is very difficult.

This is about the– the Paraclete. Now there is no word in Aramaic or Hebrew for Paraclete. There– there is no word in Greek for Paraclete really. It's a special usage that John distills out of para-kalein which means to– to stand beside one, for– for someone who would be beside you and that the reason that they're beside you is to help you, they can help you. But mainly the way in which they can help you is that they advise. And you can see the archetype of– of Thoth, the archetype of Hermes. Only now it's going to be instead of just Thoth or twice greatest Thoth – which is a hermetic mode – now it's Hermes Trismegistus. And this figure that's coming up now is– is like a guiding star companion, spirit companion, guardian spirit, and is coming into manifestation and in fact is not only just beside one but is so closely related to oneself that he stands inside of one. It's that quality– that quality. So Hermes Trismegistus will be like this.

Here's the way in which John, about 90 AD, in a– in a visionary mode is trying to speak from something that he heard and he's trying to present it in this imploded symbolic visionary language. Jesus speaking:

“ ‘If you love me
and keep my commandments
then at my request
the Father will give you another Paraclete
to be with you forever.’ ”

Meaning that he is temporary. But this other Paraclete is forever, everlastingly.

“ ‘He is the Spirit of Truth
whom the world cannot accept…’ ”

See, the world cannot accept it.

“ ‘since it neither sees nor recognizes him;
but you do recognize him
since he remains with you and is within you.
I [will] not leave you orphans:’ ”
He will come.

Okay, that's in the 14th book. John is struggling with this imploded convoluted Greek of his to try and specifically envision a figure an interior figuration of light and mind where language has become simplified to a single word symbol and that this is a spirit life now that's manifesting. This is the 16th chapter. Jesus speaking again:

“ ‘At the beginning I did not tell you this
because I was with you;
but now I am going to Him who sent me.
Yet not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’
Just because I have said this to you,
your hearts are full of sadness.
Still I am telling you the truth:
[for it is] for your own good that I go away.
For if I do not go away,
the Paraclete will never come to you;
whereas, if I do go,
I shall send him to you.
And when he does come,
he will prove the world wrong.
But three things prove it wrong about sin;
prove it wrong about justice;
and prove it wrong about judgment.
First, about sin–
in that they refuse to believe in me.
Then, about justice–
in that I am going to the Father
and you can see me no longer.
Finally, about judgment–
in that the Prince of this world has been condemned.
I have much more to tell you now,
but you cannot bear to hear it.
When he comes, however,
being the Spirit of Truth,
he will guide you along the way of all the truth.
For he will not speak of on his own,
but will speak only what he hears
and will declare to you the things to come.’ ”

And so this is the way in which John struggles, in his gospel, to try and present this about 90 AD. The Gospel of John reached Alexandria about 95 AD; the Poimandres was written about five years later in Alexandria about 100 AD. Here's the way the Poimandres then speaks, and you can notice that the similarities and yet there's a disparateness because the Hermetic tradition is not a Christian tradition purely. Here's the way it is in the Poimandres:

“And mind the maker, worked together with the word, and encompassing the orbits of the administrators, and whirling them around with a rushing movement set circling the bodies he had made and let them revolve. Traveling from no fixed starting point to no determined goal. For the revolution begins where it ends. And nature even as mind the maker willed brought forth from the down tending elements animals devoid of reason. For she no longer had with her the word. The air brought forth birds and water and fishes and water. And by this time had separated from one another. And the earth brought forth creatures and creeping things. But mind the father of all, he who is life and light gave birth to man a being like himself. And he took delight in man as being his own offspring, for man was very goodly to look upon bearing the likeness of his father.”

And man then, has a peculiar quality in that he understands the order of nature. And the ordering of nature is this– this cosmos. But his understanding of the ordering of nature has been opaque. It's been opaque not because nature has been corrupted but because his mentality has been corrupted, and he can't see through his mind anymore. All he sees is the ossification of the chaos of his mentality. And only when that mentality is leached of its demonic qualities which are protective now of a sacred space. How are they leached of their power? By making them permeable so that the world, nature, and the interior sacred space can flow together and establish an equilibrium. Then that quality of ossification of mentality resolves itself into that quality of mind and in that purified mind. Then the light and the life are freed.
1:03:10
And so we find in a Hermetic treatise, number ten in the Corpus Hermeticum.

“Mind is the maker of things. And in making things it uses fire as its instrument. The mind of the universe is the maker of all things, but the human mind is the maker of earthly things alone. For the mind, which is in man, is stripped of its vesture of fire and therefore cannot make divine things being merely human by reason of its place of abode. Now the human soul, and not indeed every human soul, but the pious soul is demonic and divine” – at the same time, has that psychic polarity demonic and divine. The demonic is protective; the divine is harmonic.

“And such a soul when it has run the race of piety when it has gone through this journey of purification. And this means when it has come to know God and has wronged no man becomes mind throughout. And it is ordained that after its departure from the body, when it becomes then a spirit” – spiritual demon – “it shall receive a body of fire so that it may work in God's service. But the impious soul retains its own substance, unchanged. And it suffers self-inflicted punishment and seeks again an earthly body into which it may enter.” – It incarnates again – “But it can only enter a human body for no other kind of body can contain a human soul. It is not permitted that a human soul should fall so low as to enter the body of an irrational animal. It is a law of God that human souls must be kept safe from such an outrage as that.”

And so we find in the– in the Hermetic literature– now this– we're getting into about the second century AD with this quality– there's an understanding here that there is a cosmos and that this cosmos is not separated from the divine, but the cosmos and the divine are the same. But that the cosmos is a protector of the divine. This is its function is to protect the divine against unlawful incursions and so the cosmos becomes demonic to those who would without purification seek to come to sacredness, seek to come to the divinity. For them then nature in its cosmos becomes a phantasmagoria, becomes a static stodgy obstacle and stops them, becomes resistant and so the material world matter becomes a resistance stopping them caging them, leading them astray. And here we begin to see the– the roots of the Hermetic doctrine of the transmutation of materiality by spiritual affinity. That all this world can be transmuted into whatever we wish it to be if we are pure in spirit and may permeate this false bifurcation. What makes the false bifurcation? A mentality. And that mentality, when purified, returns back to mind and mind then has contact with the creative word and can change, can transmute, can transfigure.

“I will not shrink from speaking says Hermes as the thought has come to me. Many men have told me many diverse things concerning the universe and God and yet I have not learned the truth. I ask you therefore, a master, to make this matter clear to me. You and you alone I shall believe if you will show me the truth about it.”

This is interesting because this is Hermes now speaking. Well now who is the teacher of Hermes? Isn't Hermes supposed to be the teacher? And the teacher of Hermes? Is mind, not the mind, but simply mind. And mind says:

“Hearken to me then my son and I will tell you how things are. As to God and the cosmos. Look upon things through me and contemplate the cosmos as it lies before your eyes. That body which no harm can touch, the most ancient of all things yet ever in its prime and ever new.”

And so the cosmos is an everlastingness. It is the most ancient of all things, and yet always prime in its newness.

“See to the seven subject worlds, marshaled in everlasting order and filling up the measure of everlasting time as they run their diverse courses.”

And these seven worlds will be these spheres the spheres of the planets the astrological spheres.

“And they will be the new daemons. They will not be like the mythological daemons of ancient Egypt but they will be protectors nevertheless, protecting as thresholds should protect, that no one who has has not matured their sacredness to that point will be able to pass through them.”

And those thresholds will stop them effectively. And there are seven of them and only when one has been able to perfect oneself enough to pass through all seven does one come to a realm which is a pure threshold called the eighth the eighth the ogdoad. The seven are called the heap du monde and the eighth becomes the ogdoad. And we're going to see next week a very special hermetic treatise called, the eighth reveals the ninth, which was found just about 30 years ago. And it's in the Nag Hammadi material. But I'm going to give you Louis Kaiser's great translation of it that Doctor Heller got from Louis Kaiser. And it's a great translation. We're going to use that instead of the one from the Nag Hammadi library that James Robinson shepherded the translations. And we'll see that the distilled hermetic wisdom is that the eighth reveals a ninth, a hidden realm that we had no idea even occurred because its occurrence is a mystery. The eighth becomes mysterious because it's an all, it is the threshold– the protecting threshold that is transparent that only one who is purified to perfection may pass through the transparency. And when they pass through that the ninth occurs to them.

So in the Hermetic material, this discourse of mind to Hermes has the beginning that I read to you, but then there was an esoteric presentation of this, of the same treatise, that was given to the more advanced students. And I'll just read you the first part of this. This is again mind to Hermes, but this is the esoteric symbolic presentation of it:

“God, aeon, cosmos, time coming to be.”

God aeon, cosmos, time coming to be – very esoteric.

“God makes the aeon. The aeon makes the cosmos. The cosmos makes time, and time makes coming to be. Tthe essence of God is the good. The essence of the aeon is sameness. The essence of cosmos is order. The essence of time is change. The essence of coming to be is life. The workings of God are mind and soul. The workings of the aeon are immortality and duration. The workings of the cosmos are reinstatement in identity and reinstatement by substitution. The workings of time are increase and decrease. The workings of coming to be are quality and quantity. The aeon then is in God; the cosmos is in the aeon; time is in the cosmos; and coming to be is in time. The aeon stands fast in connection with God. The cosmos moves in the aeon. Time passes in the cosmos. And coming to be takes place in time.”

Very sophisticated. We'll see some more next week.