Corpus Hermeticum 1: Poimandres · 2 of 6 · tr. G.R.S. Mead
Section 1b
But when He raised His head, I see in Mind the Light, [but] now in Powers no man could number, and Cosmos grown beyond all bounds, and that the Fire was compassed round about by a most mighty Power, and [now] subdued had come unto a stand.
And when I saw these things I understood by reason of Man-Shepherd's Word (Logos).
8.
But as I was in great astonishment, He saith to me again: Thou didst behold in Mind the Archetypal Form whose being is before beginning without end.
Thus spake to me Man-Shepherd.
And I say: Whence then have Nature's elements their being?
To this He answer gives: From Will of God.
[Nature] received the Word (Logos), and gazing upon the Cosmos Beautiful did copy it, making herself into a cosmos, by means of her own elements and by the births of souls.
9.
And God-the-Mind, being male and female both, as Light and Life subsisting, brought forth another Mind to give things form, who, God as he was of Fire and Spirit, formed Seven Rulers who enclose the cosmos that the sense perceives.
Men call their ruling Fate.
10.
Straightway from out the downward elements God's Reason (Logos) leaped up to Nature's pure formation, and was at-oned with the Formative Mind; for it was co-essential with it.
And Nature's downward elements were thus left reason-less, so as to be pure matter.
11.
Then the Formative Mind ([at-oned] with Reason), he who surrounds the spheres and spins them with his whorl, set turning his formations, and let them turn from a beginning boundless unto an endless end.
For that the circulation of these [spheres] begins where it doth end, as Mind doth will.
And from the downward elements Nature brought forth lives reason-less; for He did not extend the Reason (Logos) [to them].
The Air brought forth things winged; the Water things that swim, and Earth-and-Water one from another parted, as Mind willed.
And from her bosom Earth produced what lives she had, four-footed things and reptiles, beasts wild and tame.
12.
But All-Father Mind, being Life and Light, did bring forth Man co-equal to Himself, with whom He fell in love, as being His own child; for he was beautiful beyond compare, the Image of his Sire.
In very truth, God fell in love with his own Form; and on him did bestow all of His own formations.
13.
And when he gazed upon what the Enformer had created in the Father, [Man] too wished to enform; and [so] assent was given him by the Father.
Changing his state to the formative sphere, in that he was to have his whole authority, he gazed upon his Brother's creatures.
They fell in love with him, and gave him each a share of his own ordering.
And after that he had well learned their essence and had become a sharer in their nature, he had a mind to break right through the Boundary of their spheres, and to subdue the might of that which pressed upon the Fire.
14.
So he who hath the whole authority o'er [all] the mortals in the cosmos and o'er its lives irrational, bent his face downwards through the Harmony, breaking right through its strength, and showed to downward Nature God's fair form.
Eckhart's signature doctrine that the Father eternally begets the Son in the ground of the soul; the human interior as the actual site of the divine generative act, distinct from inner_light's static indwelling.
The Logos is identified as what 'sees in thee', locating the divine generative principle within the human.
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.
Nature 'gazing upon the Cosmos Beautiful did copy it', reflecting the higher order in the lower.
The Stoic and Plotinian doctrine that all parts of the cosmos are bound by hidden affinities, so that a movement in one part resonates through the whole; the metaphysical basis for astrology, magic, and divination.
Man learns the essence of creatures and becomes a 'sharer in their nature'.
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.
The cosmos turns 'as Mind doth will' and Nature acts 'as Mind willed'.
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.
[auto] A flow is described from Mind (Father-God) to Logos to Nature, which then copies the Archetypal Form to create the cosmos.
Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.
Matter is described as 'reason-less', implying evil or deficiency is a lack of Reason/Logos.
The doctrine of the universe as boundless and without center or circumference, populated by innumerable worlds — Bruno's rejection of the closed Aristotelian sphere; the divine and the cosmos as ontologically infinite.
The vision includes a 'Cosmos grown beyond all bounds' and circulation from 'beginning boundless unto an endless end'.
The divine reason, word, or ordering principle through which the universe was created; mediates between the transcendent God and the material world.
[auto] The passage explicitly identifies the Lord's Word (Logos) as the perceptive faculty within humans and the agent through which Nature creates the cosmos.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
Man is described as the 'Image of his Sire' and given authority over the creatures of the spheres.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
Man is brought forth 'co-equal to Himself' and God bestows all formations upon him as His own child.