The Light of Hermes Trismegistus

This quite remarkable book consists of new translations of seven essential hermetic texts, including the poem of Parmenides and The Poimandres, with extraordinarily illuminating commentaries and vivid, inspired translations of the texts. It is essential reading for serious students of gnosis and mystical philosophy. The first sentence of the introduction is arresting: ‘Hermes is the very principle of the mind in all its possibilities’ who stimulates both insights and delusions, liminally manifesting between things while also embodying the trickster and wholeness. Henri Corbin’s statement that the text itself is the secret is unfolded throughout the volume. The word hermeneutics has its roots in Hermes as both translation and interpretation in a manner that not only elaborates ‘the meaning of a text, but it can also bring it back to an original sense, Lost in the course of previous elaboration.’ (p. 5) Corbin used the Islamic term ta’wil to mean not only ‘the interpretation that leads the text back to its truth’, but also ‘the interpretation that leads one’s soul back to its truth,’ which involves the very being of the hermeneut, as was the case with the original alchemists and craftsmen – but this is no longer true of the detached scientist in relation to his experiments.

The text can become a theophany or spiritual incursion from a hidden dimension with deep contemplative reading corresponding to mystical union, as experienced and expressed by Parmenides. This is what George Quasha calls ‘gnosemic language,’ which he defines as ‘a minimal unit of discourse establishing a transformative relationship between word and consciousness.’ (p. 149) It literally denotes a seed of knowing ‘that releases in its readers the states of being which it intends, not by semantic reference but by direct induction. It is the aha moment, a revelation of inner meaning and correspondence. Hence, the actual concern of Parmenides’ poem ‘is to induce in the reader the intuition that is Parmenides’ vision of Being. (p. 157 ff.) Being is indivisible, continuous, the Now, so ‘to bring one’s intelligence to the thought of it is, in that very act, to Be it, to be not other than it. Thinker, thought, and thing-thought-of are not divided from one another. Only Being truly is, but appearances are indissolubly linked to Being. The translated text almost comes across as a koan that cannot be fully apprehended by the (left hemisphere) rational mind which cannot grasp the paradoxes of Zeno, who was a pupil of Parmenides. As Stein observes, if Being is undivided, I myself am not divided from it.’ (p. 172)

The short chapter on Egypt characterises the country and civilisation as an ontological incursion of timeless eternity embodied in the pyramids, while the character of human life is expressed in the diurnal journey of the sun in terms of birth, life, death, underworld dismemberment, rebirth. Ceremony and priestly action are generative ontopoiesis. Our modern desacralised culture is almost incapable of ‘hearing eternity in temporal extendedness,’ the transitory eclipses the timeless. Philosophically, this came together in Neoplatonic Alexandria in the extraordinary sophistication of Plotinus (p. 190) with his three co-inherent hypostases whereby the second, nous, ‘carries the unity of the ineffable One into a unity in multiplicity.’ Eternity is made visible in the stillness of stone and the presence imbued in statues is the result of ‘telestics’ (p. 254), ‘the process by which a material image receives a divine spirit,’ whereby the sculptor as priest-artisan must bring the god into the stone; and he himself is alchemically transformed. (pp. 293-4)

Stein describes the mystical path as involving ‘the transformation of the initiate or practitioner "from being a being to being Being."’ This is a quintessential formulation worth pondering, what Thomas Troward called Self-recognition. This must remain a living experience, rather than hardened and reified into an authoritative dogma. The journey involves a twofold agnosia of ignorance and unknowing inhabiting an awakened sentience nicely expressed by Lou Kleinsmith: ’If you think you know what you do not know, you’ll never see what you’ve never seen.’ (p. 10) We can only access this in stillness and silence – hesychia. We have to reconfigure ourselves to access our true (immortal) nature beyond conditioning. Cultural ontologies both cover and render Being in specific aspects or appearances which we must see through in both senses. We come to realise that ‘all apparencies are in Being, Being is in all apparencies, but Being itself is not restricted to these immanences.’ (p. 21) We can experience this in what the author calls incursive moments or events, insights that we can receive and then transform into creative expression.

The Poimandres is the first track in the Corpus Hermeticum characterising its voice as the Mind of the Authentic One, ‘That Light. I AM it. Mind. The First Mind is both Light and Life, bringing forth Anthropos in the same image, changed from being Life and Light, to Soul and Mind, from Life: Soul. And Mind from Light.’ (p. 206) Mind is also the Good. The seeker receives the following instructions: if then, being from Life and Light, you learn that you yourself are made of them, when you are finished here you will return to them… let the Mind in Anthropos know itself [this is gnosis]‘. (p. 208) This is recognition of one’s true being or atemporal essence: ’only noetic intuition can awaken to intuition’s noetic nature, awaken, that is, in the actuality of the Now to the Now and to one’s way of being with it that is not in time.’ (p. 219)

All this has fundamental implications for a transformation of the scientific worldview consistent with the insights of David Bohm in recovering the primacy of qualitative undivided wholeness that is hidden from the explicate realm of quantification (pp. 300 ff.) This is the Great Work that springs from our very being and is intrinsically transformative: ‘one works at the creation of a work of art as a context for the perfection of one’s own nature,’ which is the real work and self-realisation, surrendering being to Being: ‘Awareness itself is the divine property in matter’ to which we must attend. As readers can appreciate, this gnosemic volume is worthy of close study and profound inner reflection.