Corpus Hermeticum 10: The Sermon on the Mount · 4 of 6 · tr. G.R.S. Mead
Section 1d
Spirit pervading [body] by means of veins and arteries and blood, bestows upon the living creature motion, and as it were doth bear it in a way.
For this cause some do think the soul is blood, in that they do mistake its nature, not knowing that [at death] it is iteh spirit that must first withdraw into the soul, whereon the blood congeals and veins and arteries are emptied, and then the living creature <or life> is withdrawn; and this is body's death.
14.
Now from one Source all things depend; while Source [dependeth] from the One and Only [One].
Source is, moreover, moved to become Source again; whereas the One standeth perpetually and is not moved.
Three then are they: "God, the Father and the Good", Cosmos and man.
God doth contain Cosmos; Cosmos [containeth] man.
Cosmos is e'er God's Son, man as it were Cosmos' child.
15.
Not that, however, God ignoreth man; nay, right well doth He know him, and willeth to be known.
This is the sole salvation for a man - God's Gnosis.
This is the Way Up to the Mount.
By Him alone the soul becometh good, not whiles is good, whiles evil, but [good] out of necessity.
Tat: What dost thou mean, Thrice-greatest one?
Hermes: Behold an infant's soul, my son, that is not yet cut off, because its body is still small and not as yet come unto its full bulk.
Tat: How?
Hermes: A thing of beauty altogether is [such a soul] to see, not yet befouled by body's passions, still all but hanging from the Cosmic Soul!
But when the body grows in bulk and draweth down the soul into its mass, then doth the soul cut off itself and bring upon itself forgetfulness, and no more shareth in the Beautiful and the Good.
And this forgetfulness becometh vice.
16.
It is the same for them who go out from the body.
For when the soul withdraws into itself, the spirit doth contract itself within the blood, and the soul within the spirit.
And then the mind, stripped of its wrappings, and naturally divine, taking unto itself a fiery body, doth traverse every space, after abandoning the soul unto its judgement and whatever chastisement it hath deserved.
Tat: What dost thou, father, mean by this?
The mind is parted from soul and soul from spirit?
Whereas thou said'st the soul was the mind's vesture, and the soul's the spirit.
17.
Hermes: The hearer, son, should think with him who speaks and breathe with him; nay, he should have a hearing subtler than the voice of him who speaks.
It is, son, in a body made of earth that this arrangement of the vestures comes to pass.
For in a body made of earth it is impossible the mind should take its seat itself by its own self in nakedness.
For neither is it possible on the one hand the earthly body should contain so much immortality, nor on the other that so great a virtue should endure a body passible in such close contact with it.
It taketh, then, the soul for as it were an envelope.
And soul itself, being too and thing divine, doth use the spirit as its envelope, while spirit doth pervade the living creature.
18.
When then the mind doth free itself from the earth-body, it straightway putteth on its proper robe of fire, with which it could not dwell in an earth-body.
For earth doth not bear fire; for it is all set in a blaze even by a small spark.
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.
The structure of man mirrors the cosmos, with God containing Cosmos and Cosmos containing Man.
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.
God knows man and wills to be known, indicating active ordering of human affairs.
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] The passage explicitly outlines a descending chain of dependency from the One to the Source, then to God, Cosmos, and finally Man.
Final, collective cosmic judgment as an event in which the wicked are sentenced and the cosmos restored; distinct from psychopomp_journey (individual passage at death) and emphasising verdict where Zoroastrian frashokereti emphasises restoration.
The text mentions the soul being left to its judgement and chastisement after death.
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.
Evil is associated with motion, death, and forgetfulness rather than a positive divine substance.
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.
[auto] Man is explicitly defined as the child of Cosmos and contained within it, reflecting the divine structure on a smaller scale.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
[auto] The soul cuts itself off from the Beautiful and Good due to the body's growth, resulting in forgetfulness and vice.
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.
The soul becomes good by God's necessity and the mind is described as naturally divine.