Corpus Hermeticum 12: The Prayer
§ 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 tells Tat that the Mind is of God's essence, united to God as light to sun, and that Mind in men is God, quoting the Good Daimon: "Gods are immortal men, and men are mortal gods." In irrational lives Mind is their nature, but in men's souls Mind counteracts the pleasure and pain that deprave the embodied soul, showing its light like a physician inflicting pain for health; the great ill of the soul is godlessness. Souls lacking Mind as pilot share the fate of irrational lives, God having set Mind as judge and executioner over passions. Tat objects concerning Fate; Hermes answers that all works are Fate's, and it is fated that the doer of ill shall suffer. Hermes distinguishes reason-led and unreasoning men: the Mind-led man suffers as though he had sinned yet can free himself from vice. Hermes reports the Good Daimon's words that all things are one and Mind, Soul of God, rules over Fate. Tat argues Mind must be passion; Hermes discusses incorporeals, action, and passibility. Hermes states God gave man mind and speech, leading him to the Choir of Gods; speech is one, the same in Egypt, Persia, Greece, and cites the Good Daimon on the hierarchy Soul, Mind, Reason, God. Hermes describes the chain of images and that Cosmos is full of Life, nothing dead. He explains lives are not dying but dissolved; Earth is stable yet in motion; life is sensation, death forgetfulness. Man, co-essential with God, receives foretellings by birds, inward parts, wind, tree. God surrounds and permeates all. Contemplating the Cosmos's ordering, Tat calls these energies; Hermes affirms all are energized by God, who is the All. The one way to worship God is not to be bad.
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