Section 4

Many people talk about getting back to nature, — about the natural life, the natural man, etc., but in our Art there is no such ideal. As a matter of fact we are striving through Art to save man from nature, to elevate him above the plane of what nature will produce, and thus through the regen- eration of the w^hole being by the generative action of the soul to bring man into the higher estate; to make the ideal life practical by having all the emotions of his physical existence directly con- trolled by the force of ideas and ideals. This is the real process of Art. The Hermetic Artist is the one who is doing it, who is actually trans- muting the body in accordance with the direct action of the soul. In a certain sense we have here a substitute for civilization and culture. Civil- ization and culture are an effort to change the nature of man, to redeem him from nature, to develop an artificial character in place of thef natural character; but this is accomplished by civilization and culture independent of a knowl- edge of the soul life, independent of any concept of the interior life. Therefore the Hermetic Art produces something altogether different than does the force of civilization and culture, seeing that their efforts are from without to transform man into something other than his particular nature, w^hile by Art we have the soul redeeming the man from nature; producing an artificial culture that is purely in accordance with the spirit. This is the real function of the Hermetic Art, v/hich has as
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its basic principle the transmutation of the body unto the end that it may act as the vehicle for the expression of the soul instead of the soul being the internalization of the body.
The Hermetic Art
That No One of Existing Things Doth Perish, But Men in Error Speak of Their Changes as Destructions and as Deaths
TEXT
Parthey (G.), Hermetis Trismegisti Poe-
mander (Berlin, 1854), 56^59. Patrizzi (F.), Nova de Universis Philo-
sophia (Venice, 1593), 48a, 48b. Mead (G. R. S.), Thrice Greatest Hermes
(London, 1906), Corpus Hermeticum
VIII (IX).
1. l^Hermes^, Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak; in what way Soul is deathless, and whence comes the activity in composing and dissolving Body.
For there's no death for aught of things [that are] ; the thought [this] word conveys, is either void of fact, or [simply] by the knocking off a syllable what is called ''death," doth stand for ''deathless."
For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life that cannot die, it can- not be that any part of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts
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of Cosmos, and most of all is man, the rational animal.
2. For truly first of all, eternal and tran- scending birth, is God the universals' Maker. Second is he after His image, Cos- mos, brought into being by Him, sustained and fed by Him, made deathless, as by his own Sire, living for aye, as ever free from death.
Now that which ever-liveth, differs from the Eternal ; for He hath not been brought to being by another, and even if He hath been brought to being. He hath not been brought into being by Himself, but ever is brought into being.
For the Eternal, in that It is Eternal, is the all. The Father is Himself eternal of Himself, but Cosmos hath become eternal and immortal by the Father.
3. And of the matter stored beneath it, the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical — wrapping it round the life — [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, that doth make materiality eternal.
But He, the Father, full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives into the sphere, and shut them in as in a cave, willing to order forth the life with every kind of living.
So He with deathlessness enclosed the uni- versal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself from body's composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder.
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For matter, son, when it was yet incorpo- rate, was in unorder. And it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] envolving the rest of the small lives — that increase-and-decrease which men call death.
4. It is round earthly lives that this unorder doth exist. For that the bodies of the heavenly ones preserve one order allotted to them from the Father as their rule ; and it is by the restoration of each one [of them] this order is preserved indissolute.
The ''restoration" then of bodies on the earth is [thus their] composition, whereas their dissolution restores them to those bodies which can never be dissolved, that is to say, w^hich know no death. Privation, thus, of sense is brought about, not loss of bodies.
5. Now the third life — Man, after the image of the Cosmos made, [and] having mind, after the Father's will, beyond all earthly lives — not only doth have feeling with the second God, but also hath concep- tion of the first; for of the one 'tis sensible as of a body, while of the other it conceives as bodieless and the Good Mind.
Tat. Doth then this life not perish?
Her, Hush, son! and understand what God, what Cosmos [is], what is a life that cannot die, and what a life subject to disso- lution.
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Yea, understand the Cosmos is by God and in God; but Man by Cosmos and in Cosmos.
The source and limit and the constitution of all things is God.
LESSON III
Soul and Body
1. {Hermes): Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak; in what way Soul is deathless, and whence comes the activity in composing and dissolving Body.
For there's no death for aught of things [that are] ; the thought [this] word conveys, is either void of Body, or [simply] by the knocking off of a syllable what is called [death], doth stand for [deathless].
For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life that cannot die, it can- not be that any part of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts of Cosmos and most of all is man, the rational animal.
{Hermes) : Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak; in what way Soul is deathless, and whence comes the activity in composing and dissolving Body.
The subject of this sermon is the relation of the soul and the body. Both principles are introduced into the discussion. The discussion relates itself to the way in which the soul is deathless, or immor- tal, and the sources of the activity composing and dissolving the body. We therefore find that the subject involved here is the immortal or deathless nature of the soul taken in conjunction with the mortality and transformations of the body. He
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indicates that there is an activity operating in the body which both composes and dissolves the body. Hence it follows that it is the same activity that composes or constructs the body that also dissolves it. We must therefore see in physical dissolution or so-called death, the disintegration of the phys- ical structure into the material elements of which it is composed. Death is, therefore, the dissolving of the body into the different elements that go to construct it. In other words the body is organized from previously existing elements, and death is the dissolution of this organism into the elements which previously constructed it. Hence it means nothing more than that those elements which in the body's life were organic become inorganic through death. At the same time we are instructed that this transformation does not touch the soul life, the soul being in no sense influenced by such disintegrating process.
For there's no death for aught of things [that are] ; the thought [this] word conveys, is either void of body, or [simply] by the knocking off of a syllable w^hat is called [death], doth stand for [deathless].
The contention made here is that there is no death for any real thing, for any of the things that are. This does not only relate to the human soul but to everything else, to every organism. There is no such thing as death. What has once been produced must forever remain. Immortality in this sense is therefore extended to all things. He goes so far as to contend that death is synonymous with the deathless, that it can have no other mean- ing than deathless. He contends that as a matter of fact nothing dies. He is not speaking here of any transcendental ideas, he does not represent ideal- ism when he says there is no death; he denies the
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fact of death ; stating plainly and emphatically that nothing dies, as a matter of fact; therefore we must not look upon this statement as being an expression of any transcendental idealism, as being spiritually understood, but he is stating as a mat- ter of physical science that nothing dies.
For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life that cannot die, it can- not be that any part of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts of Cosmos and most of all is man, the rational animal.
In this paragraph he undertakes to explain why it is that there can be no death. His reason is that death partakes of destruction. All death, in the true sense of the term, would be a destruction, and he states that nothing in the Kosmos is ever destroyed. From this we come to his argument, and his position is that Kosmos is second God. He therefore calls our attention to his doctrine of the three Gods. That is to say, the Absolute God, and the Kosmos as His manifestation and hence the second God, — the image of God in another sense, — and man as the third God. Now the Kosmos is the second God in the sense that it is the direct manifestation of the unmanifest God. In a cer- tain sense it is the manifest God. Being the mani- festation of God he holds that in order for the Kosmos to die it would be necessary for the mani- festation of God to cease, because the Kosmos in the Hermetic view of the case, is not a permanent thing in the sense of something once produced that forever remains, but rather is a something perpet- ually changing; a state of perpetual manifestation ; the process of the ever-becoming manifest of the
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activities and attributes of the unmanifest God. This being the case, Kosmos is nothing other than the mirroring in Hyle of the activities of Ku, the Motherhood of God; its divine essence in all its activities becoming mirrored in substance that constitutes Kosmos in the true sense of the w^ord. Novs^ Kosmos must continue as long as the activities of the unmanifest God continue to be mirrored in substance. Those activities must continue to be so mirrored as long as they subsist. In other words, in order that Kosmos might cease it would be nec- essary that the Absolute God should cease to make or to express itself actively, and as the unmanifest God exists or rather subsists only in the act of com- ing into manifestation it follows that were it to cease such activity it would die. Therefore the Absolute God would have to become extinct before Kosmos could ever become extinct. Kosmos is therefore as eternal as is the life of God. For this reason he says that Kosmos is a life that cannot die. It is a life that cannot die because it is the continuation on a lower plane of the life of God himself, there- fore Kosmos cannot possibly cease to be. It ever must be. This being the case Kosmos is an immor- tal life, being but a reflection of the life of God, the immortality of the Divinity is therefore contin- ued in the immortality of the Kosmos. It cannot therefore be that this immortal life should die see- ing that it is immortal, as it is completely bound up and inseparably merged in the immortality of the Divine Life, because Kosmos is not distinct from God. Kosmos is but the externalization and manifestation of the life of the unmanifest God.
He further states that all things in Kosmos are parts of Kosmos; and in this we have a distinctly Hermetic doctrine. A great many schools of philosophy have held that Kosmos was some sort of a metaphysical thing, a substratum to things, and that things were distinct from Kosmos. But
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this is not the Hermetic view. Hermes teaches that Kosmos is nothing other than the sum total of all things born. It must here be borne in mind that he repudiates the idea of creation and replaces it with the idea of birth. In other words, all things are born out of Ku and as such are born of God, — not created, — and being brought forth they are in Kosmos and Kosmos is the sum total of all such births. Kosmos is twofold; it is the act of being born, the continuous sequence of being born, and at the same time it includes the things born. Hermes was far too scientific to make any distinc- tion between the act of being born and the things that are born, because it is evident that if there was not an act of being born there would be noth- ing born and that no act of bearing can fail to result in a birth. Hence Kosmos is both the pro- duction of things and the sum total of the things produced. Were we to eliminate all the things in Kosmos there would be nothing left of Kosmos. Kosmos would cease to be. Inasmuch, therefore, as Kosmos is the mirroring of the activity of God in Hyle it follows that such mirroring can only take place in the production of things as the formal expression of the divine action. Hence the divine life lives in the act of producing all things, and likewise in all the things thus produced. There- fore all things in Kosmos are parts of Kosmos and Kosmos is nothing other than the sum total of all things engendered. Now, inasmuch as Kosmos is immortal life and that life consists in the perpetual continuity of the process of engendering things, it follows that the thing engendered by a deathless process must in the nature of things be deathless. Undoubtedly it may change its form from time to time but it will never cease to be because its ulti- mate origin is the divine thought. The divine being deathless, eternal, immortal, all of its thoughts must be deathless, eternal and immortal.
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As a deathless, eternal, immortal thought has set in motion the activity that engenders a thing, it must be that that activity w^ill be continuous, as contin- uous as is the thought that set in motion such activ- ity. This being true it w^ill follow^ that the activity that engendered the thing being continuous, the life of the thing resulting from such engendering activity must likewise be continuous; hence the immortality of all things engendered is clearly demonstrated.
And most of all is man, the rational animal. More than anything else is man the recipient of this eternal life, for the reason that man is the most complicated and the highest manifestation of this creative process. Of all things engendered man comes nearer to the divine prototype than anything else, and the reason for this is clearly shown, that he is a rational animal, he is the one animal endowed with reason. Now reason here must not be confused with what is ordinarily termed reason, — that is the capacity to learn by experience, to reach conclusions from data. That is not the reason of which Hermes speaks. To him reason is the pure, a priori reason, that has nothing to do with data but reasons from Universals to particulars. This is his concept of reason. Man is the rational animal. That is to say, he is the one and only animal endowed with this capacity to rea- son from cause to effect. As this reason is that which produces all things, is the creative wisdom that has produced everything, it follows that in his reason man is divine, he partakes of the nature of God, he is endowed with the creative power and for that reason, partaking more than any other of the attributes of divinity, he therefore approaches nearer to the divine life of God than anything else. Hence he possesses a greater measure of divinity and hence of immortality thanMoes anything else. Therefore above all kosmic things is man death- less, immortal, eternal.
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In this we have the suggestion of the Hermetic Art. Man's reason is the creative power resident within him. By the cultivation of that creative power he is able to become a creator himself to the extent that his Creative power has been awak- ened. Therefore it is through the cultivation of the reason that man is able to reach this exalted state. The Hermetic Art is therefore attained through the cultivation of the human reason. Such rational awakening is therefore the way to the attainment of the art of creation.
2. For truly first of all, eternal and transcending birth, is God the Universals' Maker. Second is he [after His image], Cosmos, brought into being by Him, sus- tained and fed by Him, made deathless, as by his own Sire, living for aye, as ever free from death.