THE DIVINE PYMANDER v1.4

BACKGROUND

• This text has been translated all to hell and back. Started as Arabic, translated to Greek, then to Latin, then to Dutch, then to English
• Modern translations try to go from the arabic to english
• I am working from the Mead Translation
• Apparently Pymander means “The Witness”

https://www.curezone.org/upload/PDF/tatuoscuro666/Hermetica_G_R_S_Mead.pdf

https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-jcWLRBnyXg-DUcMH/The%20Corpus%20Hermeticum_djvu.txt

https://sacred-texts.com/gno/th2/index.htm

HIS FIRST BOOK

• Divinely inspired
• The ultimate end goal is Apotheosis
• “For first it must be a war against itself”
• “Forsake the body before the end”
• Huge list of “Heads” or summaries of concepts that will be dealt with later
• Lines 14-79 are Heads like:
• Every essence is immortal
• Evry essence is unchangeable
• Everything that is, is double
• God is Good; Man is evil
• Good is voluntary, or of its own accord
• Evil is involuntary, or against its will
• The Generation of Man is corruption; The corruption of Man is the beginning of Generation
• Operations or Workings are not carried upwards, but descend downwards.
• Of things that re, some re in bodies, some in their IDEAS
• The Wizard Autism is showing here hell yeah
• Avoid all conversation with the multitude or common people; for i wouldn not hve thee subject to envy, much less to be ridiculous unto the Many.
• I am not going to include all the Heads there are so many.
• Basically says “not everyone will understand, and many will use this for evil”

THE POEMANDER

• I was sleeping and saw a huge dude whisper to me
• “What wouldst thou hear and see?”
• “I am Poemander (The Shepherd of men) Mind of all-masterhood; I know what thou desirest and I'm with thee everywhere”
• Poemander gives us visions and is like “do u get it bro”
• “I am that Light, The Mind, thy God, who am before that moist nature that appeared out of darkness; and that bright and lightful Word from the mind is the Son of God”
• “Fire is comprehended or contained in, or by a great moist Power, and constrained to keep its station”
• “For the mind eing God, Male and Female, Life and Light, brought forth by his Word another Mind or Workman which being God of the Fire, and the Spirit, fashioned and formed sven other governors, wich in their circles contain the Sensible World, whose government and disposition is called Fate or Destiny”
• Hello Gnosticism nice to see you
• Theres a fun little exchange where Trism. Interrupts poemander who goes “dude stfu” and Trism replies
• “Behold, I am silent.”
• “And therefore being above all Harmony, he is made and become a servant to Harmony, he is Hermaphoridite, or Male and Female, and watchful, he is governed by and subjected to a Father, that is both Male and Female, and watchful.”
• “When he had thus said, Providence by FAte of Harmony, made the mixtures and established the Generations, and all things were multiplied according to their own kind. And he that knew himself came at length to the Supersubstantial of every way substantial good.”
• Basically, this is sorta Divine Clockmaker Deism.
• Theres a lot of depicting the suffering body as something inherently evil and dirty, something to be escaped.
• The magic here comes out to a sort of extremely advanced alchemical purification ritual
• “The senses of the body return to their font, being parts and again made up into Operations”
• To the first zone, it giventh the power it had of increasing and diminishing
• To the second, plotting and evil
• To the third, the idel deceit of Concupiscence. (lust)
• To the fourth, the desire of Rule
• To the fifth, profane boldness
• To the sixth, evil and ineffectual occasion of riches
• To the seventh, subtle falsehood, always lying in wait
• Ridding yourself of these allows one to reach the 8th state, oneness with god
• Poemander leaves like “go tell people about immortality”
• Trism. “ok”

THE THIRD BOOK THE HOLY SERMON, fragmented

• For there were in the Chaos an infinite darkness in the Abyss or bottomless Depth, and Water and a subtle in Spirit intelligible in Powerl and there went out the Holy Light, and the elements were coagulated from the sand out of the moist substance.
• Almost a daoist conception of the world here. A hierarchy with darkness at the bottom and light at the top.
• Trism shows us the world being created
• God
• The Mind
• Chaos and the abyss
• The physical world
• Nature
• Heaven
• “And the gds were seen in their Ideas of the Stars, with all their signs and the stars were numbered with the gods in them.”
• Animals
• Men
• The Soul
• The world was set in motion

THE FOURTH BOOK, The Cup, or Monad

• This is basically describing the Hermetic idea of “The Soul moves, the Body follows.”
• “The knowledge of god is a Divine Silence”
• “For it is possible for the soul, ,O son, to be deified while yet it lodgeth in the Body of Man, if it contemplates the beauty of the good.”
• “The Wickedness of a soul is Ignorance; for the soul that knows nothing of the things that are, neither the nature of them, nor that which is good, but is blinded, rusheth and dasheth against the bodily passions; and unhappy as it is, and not knowing itself, it serveth strange bodies and evil ones, carrying the Body as a burden, and not ruling but ruled: And this is the mischief of the soul.”
• Basically, ignorance makes a man live a venal life
• The virtue of the soul is Knowledge.
• “Knowledge is the gift of god; for all knowledge is bodily, but useth the mind as an instrument as the Mind useth the Body.”
• Therefore, the soul is made of Intelligible and Material things
• “What about god?”
• God is immaterial
• “The whole is a living wight, and therefore consisteth of material and intellectual.”
• Now thats interesting, the comparison of the world to a living corpse.
• Man is evil because he is mortal. The world is not evil because it is immortal.
• Idk that feels like it contradicts how Trism talks about the world, he clearly finds it a fascinating but sinful place, perhaps because of man?
• Actually, Trism seems to claim that changeability makes something evil in the sense that because something can be changed, it has the CAPACITY for evil.
• Therefore the world is not evil because it does not change?
• “The soul was the clothing of the Mind, and the Body of the Soul.”
• The body is Earthly
• The soul is Firey
• The mind is Fog, of both Air and Water
• The relationship between the Mind / Body / Soul here is interesting. The three categories kinda blend into each other. Trism talks about them as partners who need each other but also flow into each other.
• Trism conceptualizes the Mind as a sort of insulator that protects the body from the intense glory of the soul, but also the soul from being snuffed out by the earthy body.
• “The strife of piety is to know god and injure no man, and in this way it becomes the mind.”
• “When therefore the mind is Separated and departed from the Earthly Body presently it puts on its Firey Coat which it could not do when dwelling in the earthly body.”
• Weve got another hierarchy
• The beams of god are operations and the beams of the world are natures and the beams of man are arts and sciences
• All things are governed by the World and Man; but the World and Man are governed by god.

THE FIFTH BOOK - That god is not manifest and yet most manifest

• Seems to be dealing with the material nature of god. We’ve got the words Manifest and Apparent: Able to be perceived.
• Manifest: Is physical, can be touched
• God is unapparent and unmanifest, but generates all things, and is apparent in its manifestation
• Hes making the watchmaker argument.
• This entire chapter is a watchmaker argument

THE SIXTH BOOK - That in god alone is Good.

• GOD, O ASCLEPIUS, is in nothing but in God alone, or rather God himself is the Good always.
• “For in all things that re made or generated, are full of passion, Generation itself being a passion; and where Passion is, there is not the Good; where the Good is, there is no Passion; where it is day, it is not Nightl where it is night is is not day.”
• “It is impossible therefore that the Good should be here pure from Evil; for here the Good groweth Evil, and growing Evil, it doth not still abide Good, and not abiding good, it becomes Evil”
• Alright got some moral nuance here keep going
• “For all things that are subject to the eye are Idols and as it were Shadows; but those things that are not subject to the eye, are ever, especially the Essence of the Fair and the Good.”
• “And as the eye cannot see God, so neither the Fair and Good”
• Basically, everything can lie to you. Love has no color, you can’t see it. It must be known.
• “Such, O Asclepius, are the good and fair things of Men, which we can neither love nor hate; for this is the hardest thing of all, that we have need of them, and cannot live without them.”
• Awh. That’s genuinely really sweet.

THE SEVENTH BOOK - His Secret Sermon in the Mount of REgeneration, and the Profession of Silence

• “No man can be saved before Regeneration”
• “Of what seed is man born?”
• “This wisdom is to be understood in Silence, and the seed is the true Good.”
• Trismethius is asking what Herme’s nature is in relation to man, Hermes is saying Occult riddles.
• Oh okay this is genuine esoterica
• “Thou has driven me, O Father, into no small fury and distraction of mind, for I do not now see myself”
• Same bud
• Tat: Who is the Author and Maker of Regeneration?
• Hermes: “THe Child of God, one Man by the Will of God.”
• Hes doing a whole “You are the master of your own destiny” thing with an occult twist thats fun
• Herm (23) Gives us an actual riddle now
• Basically he says transcendence requires a purging of sinful Tormentors
• He names 12: Wrath, Sorrow, Ignorance, Envy, etc
• As antidote, he names 12 virtues and links them to the zodiac
• “As Pymander said by way of Oracle to the Octonary”
• I think this is a reference to Psalm 119

THE SECRET SONG

• This is basically “Big thanks to god for the world”

THE EIGHTH BOOK - The greatest evil in man is the not knowing god.

• Oh wow this is really short
• Its basically “hey being ignorant is cringe come know god”

THE NINTH BOOK - A universal Sermon to Asclepius

• Bitch you wrote this you dont get sermons
• Why are you calling this a sermon, this is a dialogue
• Hes kinda describing newtons 2nd law, kinda
• Huh hes kinda describing normal force kinda
• Okay okay hes observing natural laws and attributing them to a sort of universal animism.
• “An empty barrel is not empty, for it is full of air and spirit”
• Asclepius asks “okay but what does that make god?”
• Herm responds: “God isnt a mind, but the closest thing we can understand them as having is a mind. God is not a spirit, but acts upon the world like a spirit. God is not light, but the Cause that light is.”
• Kind of a topic change here
• He basically says God is Good and only God is Good
• Also god is called the father so you better have kids
• Lots of really long sections to say very simple things

THE TENTH BOOK - The Mind to Hermes

• Back off the moral philosophy and back into cosmology
• This is notably less intimate
• Oh we are getting into AEonology here
• “For all things are full of Light, but the Fire is nowhere”
• “How then are mortal Whights other from immortal?” (74)
• There is so much gnostic context being stripped here in favor of bland christianity
• “As man cannot live without life, God cannot live without doing good”
• Author compares Life to Motion
• If the soul moves, and the body follows, it follows that a lack of motion is death
• Wait hold up
• “And judge of this by thyself , command thy Soul to go into india, and sooner than thou cans’t bid it, it will be there”
• What
• Oh lord its a reference to Apollonius of Tyana
• Can this even be called Orientalism?
• Comparisons of understanding to freedom

THE ELEVENTH BOOK - Of the Common Mind

• The mind is the essence of god
• The mind is therefore not divided from god, but united as the light of the sun
• Therefore are some men Divine and their humanity is near divinity
• In beasts and Wights, the mind is nature, the soul is life
• “For grief and Pleasure flow like juices from the compound body whereinto the soul entereth or descendeth, she is moistened and tinctured with them”
• “The great disease of the soul is Athetism” alright buddy
• Oh huh, Trism says “And therefore hath God set the Mind over there, as a Revenger and Reprover of them.” (22)
• The idea of having a mind as a punishment is interesting. Beasts cannot comprehend their sins, but man has all the truth of clarity needed.
• Yet it is also useful to men in that one can choose to quench their anger and concupiscences, so Trism claims that the mind, the Good Mind, is a benefactor to man.
• If the mind is divine, and god is divine, and god can do whatever he wants, the mind can do whatever it wants.
• The only way to be free of the corrupting passions of the body is to be free of the body
• Are passions corrupting because they are a will that does not come from god?
• “But especially, O Son, there is nothing impossible, but all things are possible.”
• “Consier this also, O Son, that god hath freely bestowed upon man, above all other living things, these two to wit, Mind and Speech, or Reason, equal to immortality.” (60)
• “These, if any man use, or employ upon what he ought, he shall differ nothing from the Immortals.”
• “The Word is the Image of the Mind, and the Mind of God, and the Body of the Idea, and the Idea of the Soul”
• “For there is nothing dead, that either hath been or is, or shall be in the World.”
• “How, therefore, O Son, can there be in God in the image of the Universe in the fulness of Life, any dead things?”
• Good question
• “They do not die, but as Compound bodies they are dissolved.”
• “But Dissolution is not death; and they are dissovled, not that they may be destroyed, but that they may be made new.”
• “For Generation is not Life, but Sense, neither is Change Death, but Forgetfulness, or rather Occultation, and lying hid.”
• Another reference to the world as living Wight
• “But man useth all these, the Earth, the Water, the Air, and the Fire, nay, he seeth and toucheth Heaven by his senses.”
• This seems at odds with the transcendental narrative we’ve had up to this point
• “And it is no hard thing, O Son, to understand god.”
• “See the matter being most full of life, and so great a god moved, with all good, and fair, both gods, and demons, and men.”
• See there we go thats beautiful
• “This Word, O Son, worship and adore. And the only service of God, is not to be Evil.”
• Trismegistus, buddy, lead with this chapter next time this slaps.

THE TWELFTH BOOK - His Crater or Monas

• “For he divided speech among men, but not Mind, and yet he envied not anyl for Envy comes not thither, but is abde here below in the Souls of men that have not the Mind”
• Why didnt god give all men a mind?
• “Because it pleased him, (lol) O Son, to set that in the middle among all souls, as a reward to strive for.”
• “But as many as missed of the Proclamation, they received speech, but not mind; being ignorant whereunto they were made, or by whom.”
• Basically Mind is something that only believers have, everyone else is addicted to venal pleasures
• “For the Good is not to be transcended, it is unbounded and infinite, unto itself, without beginning, but unto us, seeming to have a beginning, even our knowledge of it.”
• Basically you cant transcend god, but you can be one with him
• “But the spectacle or sight hath this peculiar and prosper: Them that can see, and behold it, it holds fast and draws unto it, as they say, the loadstone doth iron.”

THE THIRTEENTH BOOK - OF Sense and Understanding

• “Yesterday, Asclepius, I delivered a perfect Discourse, but now I think it necessary, in suit of that, to dispute also of Sense.”
• Mood
• Sense =/= Understanding
• One is material and one is essential, alright plato calm down
• “For Divinity is from under God, and Understanding from the Mind, being the Sister of the Word or Speech, and they the Instruments one of another.”
• Neither is possible without sense
• “A thing proper to man, to communicate and conjoin Sense and Understanding”
• Basically, understanding is predicated upon speech, which itself is predicated upon sense.
• “For to understand is to believe, but not to believe is not to understand For my speech or words reach not unto the Truth but the mind is great, and being led for a while by Speech, is able to attain the truth.”
• Frames it kinda like a machine. Sense is interpreted by the mind into understanding.
• This book is kinda rambly.

THE FOURTEENTH BOOK - Of Operation and Sense

• Tat: “Thou has well explained these things, Father. Teach me furthermore of these things, for thou sayest, that Science nd Art were the operations of the Rational, but now thou sayest, that Beasts are unreasonable, and for want of Reason, both are, and are called Brutes, so that by this reason, it must needs follow, that unreasonable Creatures partake not of Science, or Art, because they come short of Reason.”
• Tat claims “hey if animals dont use science why do birds save nuts for winter?”
• Herm: “they just do that bro”
• As Men are Musicians, but not all; neither are all men are musicians or archers or huntsmen, or the rest, but some of them have learned something by the working of science or art.
• Learning is a critical element to the mind
• “
• If thou said that Pismires did so, and some not, thou mightest well say they gather their food according to Science and Art”
• Okay but thats literally how ants work. Many species of ant even breed specialized subspecies.
• Hes kinda describing stimulus and response
• “But to external bodies there is nothing comes nothing departs, therefor there is no sense in them”
• Okay hes defining having sense as being able to respond to something
• And this is sort of a mechanism of the universal operations
• The senses are bodily and thus evil
• Tat: “Is not the soul incorporeal, and the sense a body father? Or is it rather in the Body?”
• Herm: “If you put it in a body, O Son, we shall make it like the Soul, for the Operations; for these being bodily, we say are in bodies.”
• Ok cool makes sense
• “But Sense is neither Operation, nor Soul, nor anything else that belongs to the Body, but as we have said, and, therefore, it is not incorporeal. And if it be not incorporeal, it must needs be a Body, for we always say, that of things that are, some are bodies, and some incorporeal. ”
• Okok wait hold up
• Sense exists dormant in things until the sense is stimulated. So its not an Operation.
• Sense exists in things that do not have Souls. So it is not an element of the soul
• Sense is neither Operation nor Soul, Got that
• Sense is Corporeal. Got that.
• Therefore it must be a body.
• Okay but what sort of body?? Where is it?? TRISMEGISTUS EXPLAIN

THE FIFTEENTH BOOK - Of Truth to His Son Tat

• “Of Truth, O Tat, it is not possible that man, being an imperfect Wight, compounded of imperfect members, and having his Tabernacle, consisting of different, and many Bodies should speak with any Confidence.”
• Hes saying that “Truth is only in eternal bodies”
• Just like how our bodies are made from the elements and we recognize the elements in the world, how could man recognize truth if truth were not a part of him?
• Surprisingly cogent argument
• Therefore, all things upon the earth are but imitations of truth. Falsehoods, fancies.
• As an image describes the body but is not the body
• Heres the basis of that whole “Nothing is fundamentally true” thing I always say. I add that nothing is fundamentally untrue either.
• He ties physical change to a quality of fundamental untruth. As truth is eternal.
• But god is true, and all change comes from god, so untruth is fundamentally a servant of truth.
• Not sure I agree but I like the argument

THE SIXTEENTH BOOK - That None of the Things that Are can Perish

• “We must now speak of the soul and body O Son, after what manner the soul is Immortal, and what operation that is, which constitutes the Body and dissolves it.”
• Okay so if nothing in the world is destroyed, what does that make death?
• “For if the World be a second God, and an Immortal living Wight, it is impossible that any part of an Immortal living Wight should die.”
• He basically says that death is a physical disordering of the body
• Which, yeah, pretty much thats exactly how it works

THE SEVENTEENTH BOOK - To Asclepius, to be Truly Wise

• “Because my son tat, in thy absence, would needs learn the Nature of the things that are”
• More Heads!
• “All things that appear, were made, and are made.”
• “That which is made, and him which is the Maker; for there is nothing in the Middle, between these Two, nor is there any third.”
• All of this fits with the alchemical tradition of attempting to understand the maker through his work.
• “For these are passions that follow Generation, as Rust doth Copper, or as Excrements do the Body”
• “But neither did the Coppersmith make the Rust, nor the Maker of the Filth, nor God the Evilness.”
• “But the vicisssitude of Generation doth make them, as it were, to blossom out; and for this cause did make change to be, as one should say, The Purgation of Generation.”
• And these things are not many, but few, and easily numbered; for they are all but four, God and Generation, in which are all things.”

What is the Divine Pymander, why should you care?

Well, its a mystical text from around 100 AD that informed huge swathes of western esoteric tradition.

How so?

Well, it defined much of how magic is talked about, defines it goals.

Is that good?

Kinda? There are good parts and bad parts.

What are the good parts?

A focus on knowledge and understanding, not necessarily a scholarly tradition, but a meditative one

That is good. What are the bad parts?

Well, how it treats the body. It frames the body as something to be transcended, something evil.

Oh thats bad, people should make peace with their body.

Indeed!

REVIEW START:

The year is 100 AD and it’s a great year for soup. Emperor Trajan just became consul of a Roman Empire that is Romeing as hard as it will ever Rome. The Egyptians have been Rome’d, Judea has been Rome’d, most of Western Europe has been Rome’d. The Mediterranean sea is referred to as “Mare Nostrum” meaning “Our Sea.” Roman chefs (read: mostly slaves) have access to a mind-boggling range of ingredients. The soups they were able to create were strange, experimental, and delicious for those with a sophisticated enough palette to appreciate them.

Religion worked the same way.

The Hemetics pull ideas from Platonism, Stoicism, classical Egyptian magical thought, and a dash of pre-rabbinical Judaism. The Divine Pymander is the foundational text of Hermetica, a religio-philosophical school of thought attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, whose name means “Thrice Great.” The result is a body of esoteric work that is scholarly, meditative, and interested in understanding both the natural world and the nature of the mind.

The Hermetic school defined much of the language of magic. The way that Hermes talks about magic, the terms he uses, the points he makes, still affects how magic is discussed today.

The Pymander is framed as a dialogue between Hermes and his three mortal students: Asclepius, Tat, and Ammon. For the time, this format would have conferred a certain scholarly gravitas associated with the likes of Plato.

The Pymander is second to none when it comes to well-structured occult texts. The first lines describe Trismigestus minding his own business, pondering the world, when suddenly his thoughts are elevated to a divine state as Hermes speaks directly to him. This is framed as something that can happen to anyone, as if Hermes elevated this person's consciousness while pondering existence in line at a grocery store. Nowadays, occult texts save the overt magical events for the end of the text, once they know the reader is on board. The Pymander shows us a communication with divinity under relatively normal circumstances. The effect is strange yet gripping. The reader wants to learn more.

Within the first few pages, the reader is given a goal: “[To such] my presence doth become an aid, and straightway they gain gnosis of all things.” For those that don’t know, “Gnosis” is a Greek word that translates as “knowledge” or “awareness” and refers to a sort of direct knowledge of spiritual truth. Now, divine knowledge is all well and good, but what’s it good for? Riddle me this O Hermes, can gnosis get me a boyfriend? Will it give me a better credit score? What are the stakes here? Hermes elaborates: “make of Ignorance the sharer of your board (table); get ye from out the light of Darkness, and take your part in Deathlessness, forsake Destruction!” There we have it. Gain divine knowledge, get immortality. Simple as pie, if pie was extremely complicated and censored by the Catholic church. For, if one can gain knowledge of God through pie, the priest becomes somewhat unnecessary. But how does one know God? Where would one even start? Can God make a pie so complicated that even he cannot comprehend it?

Well, maybe! We can’t ask God directly, but we can study the pie in the hopes that we may understand the baker. This is where Hermes describes some qualities of the pie in the form of a list of axioms. These are descriptions of the laws of the physical world. Simple rules like “Every essence is immortal. Every essence is unchangeable. Everything that is, is double.” These would read today like “An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion.” If God designed the world like a clockmaker designs a clock, Hermes is asking us to look at the blueprints in an attempt to understand God’s divine thought process.

After establishing the overall goals of hermetica, we are introduced to two key concepts in the Pymander: The Hermetic conception of morality, and the Hermetic conception of the body.

Before we begin discussion of Hermetic moral philosophy, It is important to understand that within the Hermetic worldview there is a hierarchy of gods. This is a massive Gnostic rabbit hole, but for the sake of simplicity I am going to confine the discussion to the terms the Pymander uses. If the world is a vast clock, God drew up the blueprints, but a second, lesser god called The Workman built the clock, and maintains the clock when it needs fine tuning. Hermes also exists at some nonspecific point in this hierarchy, given the title of “Mind Shepherd.”

God is the source of all good, but God is not the world. Thus goodness is diffused through the world like milk into coffee; present in all things, but concentrated in some and dilute in others. In this metaphor, God made coffee, and then poured some of himself into it. The coffee, being separate from God, is inherently evil. Man is made of coffee, and thus inherently evil without the presence of god. Hermes roots all of this in a discussion of the Platonic elements, so to make a long story short:

Earth / The Body / People = Separate from God / Sinful / Evil

Fire / The Soul = Linked to God / Divine / Good

This brings us to the crux of the text: The mind. Like many of the natural philosophers of his day, Trismegistus is obsessed with the mind. Where does it live in the body? How does it work? Why is it that only humans seem to have a mind that can think about God?

Where the body is earthy and the soul is fiery, the mind is both watery and airy. The word this translation uses is “moist” but it could easily be translated as foggy, misty, or stormy. Trismegestus conceptualizes the mind as a sort of barrier or insulator between the earth and the soul, a layer of protection that keeps the soul from snuffing out on the body, and the body from being cooked to ash by the soul. Poetic, but also important for the moral philosophy of Hermetica. “The strife of piety is to know God and injure no man, and in this way it becomes the mind.” The mind is the thing making all of the choices. It finds itself sandwiched between the base instincts of the body and the moral desires of the soul. Rather than attempt to reconcile the two, Trismegistus asks that we reject the desires of the body entirely, focusing all choice upon satiating the soul. If God is the ultimate good, the only good choice in any circumstance must involve God.

But where is God anyway? We’ve been hearing quite a bit about this God character, but he doesn’t seem to do much within Hermetica besides hang around in the background. Where’s all the fun stuff? God hasn’t turned a single person into salt. The fourth chapter of the book details God sending an angel down with a vessel of water. “As many then as understood the Herald’s tidings and doused themselves in Mind, became partakers in the Gnosis.” While this is a beautiful metaphor, it is kneecapped somewhat by the following line. For it is here that we see the serpent in the orchard of every good wizard, the hair in the magical hamburger, the fed in the book club of arcane history: Arrogance. Trismegistus describes those who immersed themselves in the vessel to be “Perfect Men” drawing a clear value distinction between those who partook in gnosis, and those who did not. You either bathed in the special angel water and you’re cool, or you didn’t, and you’re lame.

But where do we go from here? We know the mind is important, but how does it work? This is a question that scientists and philosophers still wrestle with today, but Trismegistus makes solid headway given the information he has access to.

However! Before we do that, we have to talk about Chakras. Ever heard someone talking about their third eye? Ajna is the sixth primary chakra in the Hindu tradition. It is located on the brow and deals with the subconscious mind, intuition, communication,and an individual's direct link to Brahman. Now, western magic doesn’t tend to deal with a direct link to Brahman, but the idea of the “Third Eye” is quite common. In fact, the way that westerners describe the Third Eye doesn’t seem to match up with the actual definition of the Third Eye at all.

What westerners are actually describing is a concept from the Pymander that Trismegistus calls the “Eyes of the Mind” or the “Mind Sight” depending on the translation. The human mind’s ability to imagine things and make them real is similar to how God imagined the world and constructed it. Western magic considers imagination to be divine, and deeply magical.

Trismegistus expands on the idea of imagination and divinity with a discussion of thought and sense, summarizing his conception of the mind with “If the mind is divine, and god is divine, and god can do whatever he wants, the mind can do whatever it wants.”  As we all know: Anything is possible if you use your imagination.

But why would God do any of this? Why would God give us a mind? “Because it pleased him, O Son, to set that in the middle among all souls, as a reward to strive for” You know what? Hard to fault the logic there. Why did God give us minds? Because he wanted to. Trism elaborates: “And therefore hath God set the Mind over them [men], as a Revenger and Reprover of them.” The idea that God gave us a mind so we could locate and chastise ourselves for our faults is certainly a new take. Though, there is certainly something evocative about the idea that self-awareness is some sort of metaphysical self-repair process. Perhaps a more charitable reading would be that as the body heals itself when wounded, so does the mind heal the soul when wounded. Though, it should be noted that every translation of this line that I could find has some element of sin and punishment. The Hermetic mind is an augur of internal self-flagellation.

So we know what the mind is: moist. We know why the mind is: God thought it would be fun. But how does the mind work? Well first off, sense and understanding are different, so jot that down. Trism knows how much you love to say that sensory information and intellectual understanding are the same thing, but he’s here to set the record straight. Trism defines sense as a raw stimulus response. For example, we are hungry, so we eat.Then, he defines understanding by the process of learning, for example, we don’t come out the womb knowing how to do stuff. We learn from other humans how to build things like hand mirrors or spears or video games.

The Hermetic mind is a divine thing, and something that only humans are supposed to have within the Hermetic system. Problem is, animals do things that kinda seem like they’d need a mind to do. Bears build dens, ants build complex nests, and squirrels store away nuts for the winter. All of these things imply some sort of higher understanding of what they’re doing. Trismegistus’s response? They just do that. “These  things  they  do,  O  son,  neither  by  science nor by art, but by [the force of] nature.”

Regardless, the Hermetic system places a deep importance over the idea of learning. The human capacity to increase our wisdom through learning is directly paralleled with our closeness to god. The idea is summarized nicely here: “As Men are Musicians, but not all; neither are all men are musicians or archers or huntsmen, or the rest, but some of them have learned something by the working of science or art.”  Essentially saying that we all bring different things to the table, and that the intellectual diversity of humanity is a strength and not a weakness. The thing that separates humanity from beasts, even within this esoteric context of the mind, is our ability to diversify. This gives us something rare for an ancient magical text: A genuinely good idea. “Learning is holy.” Wonderful!

So we know what the mind is, why it's important, how it works, and the importance of learning. But what exactly should we be learning about? Trismegistus is fairly vague here, likely saving the topic for other texts, but the remainder of the book is concerned with a particular thing near and dear to every human heart: Death.

Death sucks! It has killed 100% of the nice people who've ever lived! One day you’re there and the next day--well, who knows? Trismegistus has an answer: “Death is a physical disordering of the body.” Which, yeah that’s pretty much exactly how it works, or rather, is in line with how most of us moderns understand death.This branch of Hermeticism has an axiom of the physical universe that states that matter cannot be created or destroyed, the world is a series of operations; physical transformations that take bodies from one form to the next. The soul, however, is immortal. The soul is housed within the body, and when death comes, the soul must shed enough of its earthly shell to return to god. The only way to shed that shell is to learn.

Throughout all of this, Trismegistus seems to forget that the body was of godly design. To ponder the nature of the world is a right and proper thing to do, no matter what one's religious beliefs may be, but to