XI.
TO HERCULES.
The FUMIGATION from FRANKINCENSE.
HEAR, pow'rful, Hercules untam'd and strong, To whom vast hands, and mighty works belong, Almighty Titan, prudent and benign, Of various forms, eternal and divine, Father of Time, the theme of gen'ral praise, 5 Ineffable, ador'd in various ways.
Magnanimous, in divination skill'd And in the athletic labours of the field.
'Tis thine strong archer, all things to devour, Supreme, all-helping, all-producing pow'r; 10 To thee mankind as their deliv'rer pray, Whose arm can chase the savage tribes away: p.
134 Uweary'd, earth's best blossom, offspring fair, To whom calm peace, and peaceful works are dear.
13 p.
135 Self-born, with primogenial fires you shine, 15 15 And various names and strength of heart are thine.
Thy mighty head supports the morning light, And bears untam'd, the silent gloomy night; From east to west endu'd with strength divine, Twelve glorious labours to absolve is thine; 20 p.
136 Supremely skill'd, thou reign'st in heav'n's abodes, Thyself a God amid'st th' immortal Gods.
With arms unshaken, infinite, divine, Come, blessed pow'r, and to our rites incline; The mitigations of disease convey, 25 And drive disasterous maladies away.
Come, shake the branch with thy almighty arm, Dismiss thy darts and noxious fate disarm.
Footnotes 134:13 Ver.
13] Earth's best blossom .
Since, according to the Orphic theology, there are two worlds, the intelligible and the sensible, the former of which is the source of the latter; so, according to the same theology, the first contains in a primary, causal, and intellectual manner, what the second comprehends secondarily and sensibly.
Hence it contains an intellectual heaven and earth, not like the material, existing in place, and affected with the circulations of Time; but subsisting immaterially in the stable essence of eternity.
In this divine world, another sun, and moon, and stars shine with intellectual light; for every thing there is perfectly lucid, light continually mingling with light.
There, as Plotinus divinely observes, every star is a sun: and though all things are beheld in every thing, yet some things are more excellent than others.
Now from this intellectual heaven and earth, resident in Phanes, the king and father of the universe, Orpheus, according to Proclus, derives the orders of the Gods, subordinate to this sensible heaven and earth: and among these he relates the following progeny of the intellectual earth, as preserved by Proclus in his excellent Commentary on the Timæus, p.
295, and by Athenagoras in Apol.
"She produced seven beautiful pure virgins with voluble eyes, and seven sons, all of them kings, and covered with downy hair; the daughters are Themis and prudent Tethys, and fair-haired Mnemosyne, and blessed Thea; together with Dione, having an illustrious form, and Phœbe and Rhea the mother of king Jupiter.
But this illustrious earth generated celestial sons, which are also sirnamed Titans, because they took revenge on the great starry heaven; and these are Cæus and great Cræus, and robust Phorcys, and Saturn, and Ocean, and Hyperion, and Iapetus." Now Hercules is celebrated in this Hymn as the Sun, as the nineteenth and twentieth lines particularly evince; and the Sun is the same with Hyperion; p.
Themes
◆Anthropomorphismtheology
Attributing human characteristics, emotions, or form to the divine; embodied divine imagery.
The deity is described with human features such as 'vast hands,' 'arm,' and 'head.'
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
Footnotes explain that the intelligible world contains what the sensible world comprehends secondarily.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
Hercules is called 'all-helping, all-producing pow'r' who delivers mankind and drives away disaster.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
Footnotes describe orders of Gods subordinate to the intellectual earth, flowing from a primary source.
Iamblichean ritual practice that engages the gods directly through consecrated material symbols and actions, on the premise that divine power descends into properly prepared matter — distinct from philosophical contemplation alone.
The passage describes fumigation and rites intended to invoke divine power for healing and protection.