Corpus Hermeticum 2: The Serapeum
§ About this work
The collection opens with the narrator's vision of the Being Man-Shepherd (Poimandres), Mind of all-masterhood, who reveals the Light, the making of Man, the ascent through the Harmony to the Eighth, and sends the narrator to preach Gnosis. In the Serapeum, Hermes leads Asclepius to establish that the bodiless space containing all motion is God, Cause named Good and Father. The Sacred Sermon narrates cosmogony from Chaos, Darkness, and Water to men born for gnosis. Hermes then addresses Tat across several discourses: the Epistles, where Mind is set as a prize in a Cup; a discourse on the Unmanifest God who is all names and no name; the All-Father, locating Good in God alone; the Seven Powers, rebuking ignorance; and the Eight Sphere, denying true death. The Decalogue treats sense and thought and Cosmos as God's Son; the Sermon on the Mount describes souls' transformations and Gnosis as the Way Up. In the Hymn, Mind instructs Thrice-greatest Hermes on God, Aeon, Cosmos, Time, and Becoming; the Prayer teaches Mind as pilot against passion and Fate; the Discourse to Tat unfolds Rebirth, the twelve Tormentors driven out by ten Powers, and the Secret Hymnody. Hermes writes to Asclepius (to Ammon) on the One Maker who sows Immortality, Change, Life, and Motion. In the Definitions, Asclepius addresses King Ammon on God as All and One, the Sun as Demiurge, and Heimarmenē; a fragmentary discourse treats bodiless things in bodies and reflexions, the King postponing converse. The Encomium of Kings closes with musician analogies, ascending to God then descending to praise Kings, where Love works the harmony.
Hermes asks Asclepius whether all that is moved is moved in and by something; Asclepius agrees, granting that the container exceeds the moved, the mover exceeds the moved, and their natures differ. They establish that the cosmos is a vast body, moved, requiring a still vaster space. Hermes argues this space is bodiless, hence godlike or God, and distinguishes space from God, who is thinkable for others but not Himself. He treats God as energy containing all space, and holds that motion occurs in the stationary. Asked how lower things move with moved ones, Hermes explains motion is against, not with—contrariety producing rest, as in the errant and inerrant spheres and the Bears. He gives the example of a swimming man whose resistance gives stability. He argues the mover is animate, the soul lifting two bodies, and that nothing that exists is void: empty vessels are full of air, itself a body of the four elements. The space in which all moves is the bodiless, Mind and Reason. God is none of these but their Cause, named Good and Father, alone truly Good, giving all and receiving nothing. Hermes states child-making is pious, while the childless are punished by daimones, their souls condemned to a sexless body. He tells Asclepius to pity the childless, and closes calling this an introduction to the gnosis of all things.
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