The Digital Ambler

This post is part of a series, “49 Days of Definitions”, discussing and explaining my thoughts and meditations on a set of aphorisms explaining crucial parts of Hermetic philosophy. These aphorisms, collectively titled the “Definitions from Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius”, lay out the basics of Hermetic philosophy, the place of Man in the Cosmos, and all that stuff. It’s one of the first texts I studied as a Hermetic magician, and definitely what I would consider to be a foundational text. The Definitions consist of 49 short aphorisms broken down into ten sets, each of which is packed with knowledge both subtle and obvious, and each of which can be explained or expounded upon. While I don’t propose to offer the be-all end-all word on these Words, these might afford some people interested in the Definitions some food for thought, one aphorism per day.

Today, let’s discuss the twentieth definition, part V, number 3 of 3:

Who does not understand speech has no Nous, who talks without Nous says nothing: since he understands nothing, he has no Nous and he talks, for his talk is a crowd and a crowd has neither Nous nor (reasonable) speech. Speech endowed with Nous is a gift of God; speech without Nous is a finding of man. Nobody sees heaven and what (is) therein, but only man. Only man has Nous and speech.

This definition continues the theme from the prior one, which started the idea that there are two kinds of speech that Man is possible of making: speech-from-speech and speech-from-silence. Speech-from-speech is the use of voice for worldly ends from worldly purposes; it is not oriented towards the Nous, nor does it accomplish anything spiritual. In fact, speech-from-speech is “perdition”, the ruin of spirit and soul, because it keeps Man focused on and bound into the world. Speech-from-speech is sensibile speech for the sake of the sensible and produced to further the sensible in the sensible world. On the other hand, there’s speech-from-silence, which is the exact opposite; speech-from-silence comes from understanding of the intelligible God, which is Nous, which is given to Man through Man’s own Nous. This reasonable speech is produced through silence because in silence do we understand the intelligible by means of the Logos; this can be communicated to others through reasonable speech to bring others to Logos. However, only further silence and direct communion with Nous is possible once one can silently understand things; speech beyond this point is merely speech-from-speech. Only Man is capable of speech-from-silence, although he is also capable of speech-from-speech as animals are.

We know that Man has Nous (IV.1); this makes Man a “reasonable world” (I.1), and is alone among the living creatures with Nous (IV.2). However, this is talking in the abstract; in general, Man is reasonable. This new definition, however, states that not all have Nous: “who does not understand speech has no Nous, who talks without Nous says nothing”. So now we have a problem: there are people that don’t have the capability of reason, either through a lack of sensible understanding or intelligible understanding. If one does not understand speech (which, here, I would say is more properly meaning Logos), then one is unable to come to terms with the Nous, since the Logos is the means by which we approach the Nous. This is kind of a bad thing, since Nous is the only thing that distinguishes us among the living beings as Man; we become fully worldly without our connection to the intelligible Nous, which ends in perdition.

Thus, one who does not understand Logos has no Nous; one without Nous “says nothing”. This is meant in the sense that nothing reasonable is said; one does nothing divine, one does not serve Nous, one does not speak intelligibly about creation without Nous. Without Nous, one cannot have Logos; without Logos, one cannot have reason; without reason, one cannot have understanding. “Since he understands nothing, he has no Nous and he talks”; without understanding, one cannot have silence, so one talks without a divine purpose; one talks using speech-from-speech, which only serves to perpetuate itself. It, like fire, perpetuates while destroying the mortal; it builds up without providing for growth or fertility. Fire is the ruin of mortal beings, and speech-from-speech is the ruin of Man; the two have a strong parallel here.

Because speech-from-speech builds itself and spreads itself like fire, “[speech-from-speech] is a crowd and a crowd has neither Nous nor reasonable speech”. Now we know that not only do some humans lack Nous, but whole groups of people lack it, as well. If not a single person in a crowd has Nous, then the entire group is without it; they cannot bring Nous into themselves without there already being Nous, and without Nous, they cannot have reasonable speech or Logos, and so they continue talking amongst themselves, spreading speech-from-speech since it’s the only kind of speech they’re capable of. Crowds are driven by inertia or according to some outside force; much like the geomantic figure Populus, it is entirely passive, and is incapable of doing anything on its own for the larger scheme of things. Crowds can be extrapolated to mean the groups of the world that have no Nous, for if at least one person has no Nous, then we know that there are many people that also have no Nous. Hermes Trismegistus laments this in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter IX, part 4):

The seeds of God, ’tis true, are few, but vast and fair, and good—virtue and self-control, devotion. Devotion is God-gnosis; and he who knoweth God, being filled with all good things, thinks godly thoughts and not thoughts like the many [think]. For this cause they who Gnostic are, please not the many, nor the many them. They are thought mad and laughed at; they’re hated and despised, and sometimes even put to death.

Things of the world bring death; death begets death, as all living beings that increase and decrease with worldly bodies must suffer. Thus, a crowd of people is only a thing of the world; if they despise those who understand, they not only lack Nous but are completely ignorant of it. If they kill those who understand, they only kill the bodies while the Nous of those killed goes to the Nous, while they themselves will die and remain in the world, accomplishing nothing except the continuation of the world for the sake of the world by the world. And all because of a lack of Nous, which results in speech-from-speech. It’s a vicious circle.

If reasonable speech is the servant of Nous, and if one is without Nous, one cannot serve Nous since one is incapable of reasonable speech with which to serve Nous. This forms a kind of chicken-and-egg problem; if one wants to serve Nous but has no Nous, and if Nous is required to serve Nous, where does one start? Nous is not an inherent part of humanity, though it is an inherent part of Man; there’s a distinction to be drawn here, that just as speech can be imbued with Logos or denied it, so too can someone be imbued with Nous or denied it. Thus, Nous has to come from somewhere, and “speech endowed with Nous is a gift of God”. The Nous decides whom the Nous should accept, and does so freely and gladly (it is a gift, after all). Once bestowed with the reasoning capacity, the animalian human becomes spiritual Man, which allows for reasonable speech and all the rest.

However, speech without Nous is a “finding of man”, no gift from God. Findings of humanity indicate things that are derived from or made by humanity for the purpose of humanity. It is entirely worldly, having come from the world, and thus is completely sensible. While the sensible world is not independent of or lacking intelligibility, without being at least aware of something insensible, nothing outside the sensible world can be known or understood. Basically, this is where atheism and materialism come under fire in Hermetic thought; if only that which is sensible is thought to be real, then anything insensible and only intelligible is thought to be unreal and without existence. Anything found by man, created by man, and given worldly sensible form is only ever going to remain in the world; it will never exceed it or go past it. Thus, speech without Nous does nothing reasonable or useful in terms of spiritual capacity, but it can go so far as denying the existence of intelligible things without sense.

Humanity needs Nous to become more than simply animal, and Nous gives itself to humanity so that they can become Man. However, Nous is only intelligible, and Man is sensible; the gap between the two is bridged by Logos, the Word, which manifests as reasonable speech in the world. Logos brings humanity to Reason to become Man, since upon being able to reason humanity receives Nous; upon becoming Man, one proceeds from Logos to Nous. All humanity is capable of Logos as they are; they may lack it or the use of it, but they are at least capable of it. Otherwise, speaking reasonably to one without Nous would accomplish nothing, and Hermes Trismegistus would never have taught others except to those who wouldn’t need it. Unlike the capability for Logos, however, one is without Nous until one receives it through the active use and reception of Logos. This is explained by Hermes to Tat in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter IV, parts 2 through 6):

Her. So down [to Earth] He sent the Cosmos of this Frame Divine,—man, a life that cannot die, and yet a life that dies. And o’er [all other] lives and over Cosmos [too], did man excel by reason of the Reason (Logos) and the Mind. For contemplator of God’s works did man become; he marvelled and did strive to know their Author. Reason (Logos) indeed, O Tat, among all men hath He distributed, but Mind not yet; not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not from Him, but hath its place below, within the souls of men who have no Mind.

Tat. Why then did God, O father, not on all bestow a share of Mind?

Her. He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls, just as it were a prize.

Tat. And where hath He had it set up?

Her. He tilled a mighty Cup with it, and sent it down, joining a Herald [to it], to whom He gave command to make this proclamation to the hearts of men: Baptize thyself with this Cup’s baptism, what heart can do so, thou that hast faith thou canst ascend to Him that hath sent down the Cup, thou that dost know for what thou didst come into being! As many then as understood the Herald’s tidings and doused themselves in Mind, became partakers in the Gnosis; and when they had “received the Mind” they were made “perfect men.” But they who do not understand the tidings,these, since they possess the aid of Reason [only] and not Mind, are ignorant wherefor they have come into being and whereby. The senses of such men are like irrational creatures’; and as their [whole] make-up is in their feelings and their impulses, they fail in all appreciation of those things which really are worth contemplation. These centre all their thought upon the pleasures of the body and its appetites, in the belief that for its sake man hath come into being. But they who have received some portion of God’s gift, these, Tat, if we judge by their deeds, have from Death’s bonds won their release; for they embrace in their own Mind all things, things on the earth, things in the heaven, and things above the heaven,—if there be aught. And having raised themselves so far they sight the Good; and having sighted It, they look upon their sojourn here as a mischance; and in disdain of all, both things in body and the bodiless, they speed their way unto that One and Only One. This is, O Tat, the Gnosis of the Mind, Vision of things Divine; God-knowledge is it, for the Cup is God’s.

Tat. Father, I, too, would be baptized.

Her. Unless thou first shalt hate thy Body, son, thou canst not love thy Self. But if thou lov’st thy Self thou shalt have Mind, and having Mind thou shalt share in the Gnosis.

Tat. Father, what dost thou mean?

Her. It is not possible, my son, to give thyself to both,—I mean to things that perish and to things divine. For seeing that existing things are twain, Body and Bodiless, in which the perishing and the divine are understood, the man who hath the will to choose is left the choice of one or other; for it can never be the twain should meet. And in those souls to whom the choice is left, the waning of the one causes the other’s growth to show itself.

Notice the distinction between chasing after the embodied and the bodiless; just as the body is sensible, so to is speech, and just as the bodiless is intelligible, so too is silence. Speech-from-speech is produced by the sensible for the sensible to produce the sensible. Speech-from-silence is produced by the intelligible for the intelligible to produce the intelligible. The two cannot mix. Speech-from-silence encourages one not only to understand, but to strive for Nous, which they then receive into themselves. Nous is a gift freely given, but humanity has to work to actually take hold of it. If we’re not ready for it, we won’t have it; if we strive for it, we’ll get it; if we are at one with our Nous, then we have already laid claim upon it.

So much for how one obtains Nous. The definition, and the whole section, ends with a final discussion on the Nous-able quality of Man: “nobody sees heaven and what is therein, but only man”. This means that, of all the creatures, only Man is able to see into heaven and to the places beyond it; only Man can see the immortal living creatures made of fire and air. Why? Because “only man has Nous and speech”. Man has both worldly, earthy, and earthly parts to him that give him life and death; however, he also has a divine, eternal, and reasonable part to him that gives him immortality and holiness. By means of this, Man is capable of seeing and understanding, of listening and keeping silent, of reasoning and knowing. Man, by virtue of having Nous and Logos, is capable of being God, just as God is Nous and Logos. Hermes explains this in the Corpus (chapter X, part 25):

For no one of the gods in heaven shall come down on the earth, o’er-stepping heaven’s limit; whereas man doth mount up to heaven and measure it; he knows what things of it are high, what things are low, and learns precisely all things else besides. And greater thing than all; without e’en quitting earth, he doth ascend above. So vast a sweep doth he possess of ecstasy.

For this cause can a man dare say that man on earth is god subject to death, while god in heaven is man from death immune.

Man is able to use his body for the sake of the Nous, instead of using his body for the sake of his body. We have that choice, of course: to be animal or to be divine. However, one path leads to endless worldliness and perdition, while the other leads to eternal holiness and salvation. The difference is a matter of speech: reasonable speech serves the Nous, while unreasonable speech serves the body. Logos is the combination of Nous and speech for us, and since we have both, only Man is capable of Logos. Other living creatures only have voice without Nous, and so understand nothing and are capable of only worldly things. Speech is the means by which Nous accomplishes its will, and is also the means by which we approach the Nous when we speak from silence and understanding of Reason and reasonable things. By these things, Man is unique in being able to look up into heaven and to find out things that are not only not earthy, but even not sensible; Man is unique in his capability of understanding the purely intelligible. And by that, Man is unique in his capability to not only have Nous but to become Nous. Man is unique in his capability to become God.

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-first definition, part VI, number 1 of 3:

Just as the gods are God’s possession, (so is) man too; and man’s possession is the world: if there were nobody to see (it), what would be seen would not even exist. Only man understands the intelligible (things) and sees the visible, for they are no aliens to him. Man has at once the two natures, the mortal and the immortal (one). Man has the three essences, (namely) the intelligible, the animated and the material (one).

Previously we learned that among all of the created things and creatures, Man alone has Nous or Mind, which enables him to dwell among both the sensible-intelligible and solely-intelligible worlds. Although other living creatures may have voice, Man alone has the ability to use speech, which is voice used in a reasonable way due to the presence and use of Nous through the means of Logos, or the reasonable speech that the Nous itself is able to use. However, not all of Man can use reasonable speech; although Man generally has Nous, not all of humanity has the means of understanding or using it. Nous is what enables Man to be divine, and without it, we become simply animal creatures.

This definition continues into the relationship between God and Man, as well as between Man and the world, as well as Man and Man. First, “just as the gods are God’s possession, so is man”; we know from before that God is not only everywhere that exists and includes everything, but is also outside everything, both immanent within creation as well as transcendent of it. In a sense, everything that exists within God can be said to belong to God, hence they are in “God’s possession”. This part of the definition also brings up another point: there are many divinities and gods in the world. From the Greek Olympians and Hadeans to the Egyptian court to the Romans or Gaulish or Chinese, there are many gods in the world that dwell among us or apart from us; they’re probably among the heavenly beings mentioned before (II.5, IV.1). None of these gods, however great, is properly God, because there is always something that they are not. Ares, for instance, is not Athena, nor an aspect of her, nor a power within her; God inhabits all things, and so is part of both Ares and Athena. While both Ares and Athena obey Zeus and are said to belong to him (being his children), we also know that there are things that Zeus is not; God, however, rules and owns all things, and is also part of them. Thus, we can say that God is a sort of meta-entity, beyond and above any entity we know or think exists. This is something that distinguishes Hermetic philosophy from Abrahamic or other types of divine philosophies: God is not any one thing, but All things as One.

In a sense, the gods and Man are equal in that they are both part of God. There are other differences, such as the ability for Man to die physically while the gods are immortal, but we are all part of God, and are all related to each other through and by God. However, Man is unique in that “man’s possession is the world”. Ownership, rulership, and maintenance of the world is our duty as Man, which is kind of a radical idea. We’d think that everything is ruled by and owned by the gods or by the divine, and while that’s technically true, of all the entities that are not God, only Man rules the world down here. It makes sense in a way: the gods are without the earth element, and so have no bodies, being composed of fire; the world, however, is earthy, and so the gods generally have no similarity with it. This is distinct from gods-of-the-earth, which might be said to be the soul of the world, but that’s another topic for another day; generally speaking, the gods are without tangible earthy form, and so are separated by air from the earthy world. Man, however, being possessed of Nous and earth, is essentially the god of the earth. Just as God rules the gods and all under them, Man rules humanity, the world, and all under it.

What makes Man so special? As ever, Nous, which enables Man to know and reason about the world, God, and itself. Without the ability to know, the core and the whole point to Nous would be meaningless and would preclude anything further from happening; without the intelligible being, well, intelligible, they would be nothing. Hermes Trismegistus says as much in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter X, part 4):

For [the Nous] doth will to be, and It is both Itself and most of all by reason of Itself. Indeed all other things beside are just because of It; for the distinctive feature of the Good is “that it should be known.” Such is the Good, O Tat.

In a similar sense, if that which is sensible were to be unsensed, it wouldn’t matter that they were sensible at all; they effectively wouldn’t be sensed and would cease to become sensible. Thus the definition: “if there were nobody to see [the world], what would be seen would not even exist”. Based on this, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the world exists because of the ability to sense by other things in it, which itself depend on the world. If the world could not be seen, it wouldn’t matter that it’s visible; it would be meaningless (one might say unreasonable) that it should exist at all. If nothing actually distinguishes the sensible (which is intelligible) and the intelligible, then sensibility would cease to be a distinguishing factor, and would become a moot point.

Because Man is a sensible creature possessed of earthy body, he can understand the sensible world, unlike heavenly beings who can only understand the heavenly aspects of other things. Because Man is also an intelligent creature possessed of Nous, he can understand the intelligible world, unlike animals or other creatures who can only understand the sensible, worldly things around them. Thus, “only man understands the intelligible things and sees the visible, for they are no aliens to him”. While “seeing the visible” can be understood to refer to “sense the sensible”, it’s a little more than that, too; not all sensible things are visible. Consider breath, for instance; it is invisible, though it can be sensed. Likewise, consider light; light requires some surface to be reflected off of or some source that provides it, but itself cannot be seen though it enables other things to be seen. While it may be agreed that animals, plants, and the like can sense or see (depending on their organs) what’s around them, what about heavenly beings who possess only fire and air for their bodies? Well, they have no eyes in the sense that we have eyes; they have no physical substance that enables them to reflect light; they are composed only of Nous, soul, and spirit (IV.2), all of which are invisible; they might be intelligible and able to understand the intelligible and possibly the same for some kinds of sensibility, but the same does not hold for the visible. Thus, there is nothing among the heavens that is visible, though it may be sensible; the invisible cannot see the visible, since that which is capable of seeing (apparently?) requires a visible nature. Again, alone among all the living creatures, Man is unique in this.

So, Man has a physical body composed of earth and the other elements, as well as Nous which enables Man to understand and reason. Thus the definition: “man has at once the two natures, the mortal and immortal one”. The physical body, the worldly part of ourselves, is mortal; due to the change, growth, increase, decrease, destruction, and death involved with any physical body, the body in Man must die. However, the Nous within us and the Logos that is transferred between us is no less a part to Man than the body; these things are imperishable, and so are “immortal”. This was said already in I.5: “man is mortal although he is ever-living”. There is a part of us that does not die with the body; this part, the Nous, is immortal and even eternal.

Between the interplay of the immortal and mortal natures of Man, we have three “essences”: the intelligible, animated, and material. The intelligible essence is the Nous itself; it’s what enables us to understand the intelligible, God, and everything else. The material essence is the physical body of Man, which enables us to increase and decreases, to live and die, with Nous. The animated, however, is the aspect of soul; it’s what gives us motion. Because of soul, we can be more than plants or stones which have matter for their bodies but no motion besides the increase and decrease afforded by the elements themselves. Because of soul, we can speak reason and Logos through spirit or breath and through the motion of our bodies. Because of soul, we can bridge the gap between the intelligible and sensible parts of ourselves. Spirit and soul are closely intertwined, since “breath is the body of soul or the column of soul” (II.1), so we might equate them both. Hermes links mind, reason, soul, spirit, and body together in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter X, part 13):

Now then the principles of man are this-wise vehicled: mind [the Nous] in the reason (logos), the reason in the soul, soul in the spirit, [and] spirit in the body. 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.

The interplay between Nous, Logos, soul, spirit, and body is a highly complex one, but all comes together in the form of Man. Alone among all the worldly creatures is Man which has all of these qualities, while the other creatures have some subset of them; some have only body, while some have body and spirit, and some have spirit, soul, and body. None of them have Nous or Logos like Man, however. Because of this uniqueness and connection to God by Nous, we are essentially the Nous of the world; we are the god of the world, and just as God “possesses” all things, so too does Man “possess” the world. Again, this goes back to the whole bit about Man being made in the image of God, or “after the species” (I.1); Man is a microcosm that reflects the higher world (I.3). So, how far can this connection be made? How Godly can Man truly be?

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-second definition, part VI, number 2 of 3:

Just as you went out of the womb, likewise you will go out of this body; just as you will no longer enter the womb, likewise you will no longer enter this material body. Just as, while being in the womb, you did not know the (things which are) in the world, likewise when you are outside the body, you will not know the beings (that are) outside the body. Just as when you have gone out of the womb, you do not remember the (things which are) in the womb, likewise, when you have gone out of the body, you will be still more excellent.

The last definition described the power and place of Man in the world: “…the gods are God’s possession…and man’s possession is the world”. Because of the combination of body, breath, soul, Logos, and Nous, being made after the image of God, Man is this weird, complex entity that spans both the sensible and the intelligible worlds like nobody and nothing else except for God. Because of that same weird mixture, though, we have this weird quandry like no other entity has, being both partially mortal and partially immortal. This isn’t something that hasn’t been talked about much besides the fact that we have this problem until now.

This definition is basically one big comparison between Man as the body dies and a baby being born from a womb. There are basic statements made here:

A baby leaving the womb vs. Man leaving the body
A baby having left the womb unable to reenter vs. Man having left the body unable to reenter
A baby in the womb ignorant of the world outside vs. Man outside the body ignorant of the physical things outside the body
A baby having left the womb ignorant of the inside of the womb vs. Man having left the body being “still more excellent”

First, why is the comparison between Man and the body and a baby and the womb being used? Because it shows how things are able to develop over time. A baby in the womb is both made in the womb and nurtured by it, but it is not a permanent thing. Once the baby is fully-formed (assuming no accidents along the way), the baby leaves the womb through birth. Until then, however, the baby will remain in the womb and continue to develop. The baby’s senses are not only being developed while this happens, but are limited to the womb itself; the baby will not know of anything outside the womb, such as who the mother is or where the womb might be placed on the earth. The baby’s world is limited to the womb, but only for so long. After that point, the baby is born from the womb and lives independently of it, never returning for it but continuing to grow and develop apart from the womb; however, the person now born will always be marked by how it developed in the womb, forming a link to it through its own existence.

With that said, let’s talk about each of these comparisons. The first comparison says that “just as you went out of the womb, likewise you will go out of this body”. Simple enough; a baby born cannot be un-born, nor can it be re-born from the same womb with the same body. Once born, that’s it; the baby is separated, the umbilical cord cut, the placenta removed, and the baby now lives as an independent human being. This is contrasted with the process to ”go out of this body”, i.e. physical death of the body while the immortal part of us lives on. Thus, once we die, we “go out” from the body; it’s the immortal part that is not part of the mortal body that leaves, i.e. the Nous. There is a part of Man that survives physical death, but it’s tied to the body just as a baby is tied to the womb: temporarily until it can survive on its own. This implies that the Nous, the immortal essence within Man, develops in some way within the body until it is developed enough to leave it to exist on its own apart from the body.

The second comparison says that “just as you will no longer enter the womb, likewise you will no longer enter this material body”. Simple enough; once a baby exits the womb, it cannot be stuffed back in nor will it grow back into the same womb. The baby will grow, mature, and live on its own independent of it, having left the womb where it developed only but so long enough to continue the process on its own. Likewise, when Man dies, the immortal part of Man cannot reinhabit the body that it left. When the body dies, it dies; it’s no longer good for anything, and the immortal part of Man cannot reenter or be stuffed back inside it. The Nous, the immortal essence within Man, can be said to develop in the body for just as long as it needs to, then leaves the body to live on its own, independent of the body. It’s like the parable of the raft from before: just as we don’t need to carry a raft with us after we’ve crossed the river, we similarly don’t need the womb to continue developing after we’ve left it, and we similarly don’t need the body to develop ourselves after the bodiless part of us leaves it.

Let’s skip ahead to the fourth and final comparison in this definition before tackling the third. The last part of this definition suffers from a bit of a mistranslation: “just as when you have gone out of the womb, you do not remember the things which are in the womb, likewise, when you have gone out of the body, you will be still more excellent”. This last part was written in Greek, but the Armenian text has it written as “you will remember nothing of what belongs to it”, which I like a little more but with the connotation of what the Greek says. Consider your experience with your life: do you remember what it was like before you were born? Do you remember the warmth of the womb, the texture of the umbilical cord? I highly doubt it; most people don’t remember what happened last week, much less what happened in the nine months while they were forming, especially since a good chunk of that was before we even had the ability to sense or become aware of things. Upon leaving it, we simply started new, and don’t recall the experience of being inside; we had known nothing before it, and only know the things after birth since it was the first contrasting experience we could have. The case is similar with the immortal aspect of Man with the body: upon dying, the immortal part of Man leaves the body and essentially forgets the experience of the body. After all, if everything we’ve ever known is regulated and determined by the body, imagine what it’s like to be bodiless. It’s about as hard for an as-yet unborn child to imagine worldly existence. This allows us to be “still more excellent”, which seems to imply that being bodiless and purely immortal is preferable and better than being mortal and worldly. It’s an interesting thought that we’ll develop later on, but at the risk of developing an anti-matter dualistic viewpoint, it’s not wholly unreasonable to say here that immortality and bodiless living is overall preferable to mortality and bodily living.

Let’s go back a bit now. The third comparison is a little difficult, and I question whether there’s an error in the text. The text says ”just as, while being in the womb, you did not know the things which are in the world, likewise when you are outside the body, you will not know the beings that are outside the body”. Consider the baby in the womb: it isn’t aware of what’s going on outside the womb, since its ability to sense what’s going on around it is limited to the womb itself. Its ability to sense lies in its body (cf. VI.1), and since its body is tied to the womb, it cannot sense things that are outside its body and the womb. Thus, the baby cannot know what’s going on in the world outside the womb: who’s standing nearby, whether it’s daytime or nighttime, and so forth. When it comes to Man and the body, it seems like the comparison should read “likewise when you are in the body, you will not know the beings that are outside the world” (my suggestion being bolded). After all, it makes sense, right? We’d be limited to the body and that which the body is connected to, i.e. the world. But we know that this isn’t the case; we know that Man even within the body can look into the world and outside the world due to Nous; “nobody sees heaven and what is therein, but only man” (V.3), and “man’s possession is the world” (VI.1). Man is indeed fully capable of knowing the things inside and outside the body and the world.

However, all these comparisons describe the immortal nature of Man leaving the mortal nature, so let’s try that third comparison again: “…likewise when you are outside the body, you will not know the beings that are outside the body”. The immortal part of Man, once it leaves the body, will not know the things outside the body. It’s important to notice that, since the same word and phrasing is used for “body” in both parts of this statement, and since this statement only refers to the physical body itself as opposed to the etheric or spiritual immortal part of Man, we need to reinterpret this statement with that notion. If a baby in the womb does not know the world outside it, then a baby having left the womb becomes aware of the world outside. Thus, if the immortal part of Man in the body knows does not know what’s going on outside the body, the immortal part of Man having left the body…still doesn’t know what’s going on outside the body? Again, it would make sense for this to read that the immortal Man would be aware of what goes on outside the physical world, unless our initial comparison with the baby leaving the womb was off. If a baby in the womb does not know the world outside, then it knows the world inside; thus, when it leaves the womb, the baby…still wouldn’t know what goes on outside the world? Isn’t that what the whole point of being Man is about?

I’m really tempted to correct this part of the definition, since something here seems off and contradictory to the other definitions we’ve been through; something in this comparison keeps breaking. Without changing the definition, we might draw a connection here between the third comparison and the fourth one here. Remember that the fourth comparison basically says that when the immortal nature of Man leaves the body, it forgets all the experiences it had with the body, though it still relied on the body to develop it. Thus, once we leave the body, we lose all memory of it and knowledge of it, just as we know wombs exist but don’t remember ours or our experiences within it. To connect it back to the third definition, once we leave the body, we lose our memories of it, and therefore our connection to it; what happens to the body is no longer anything we care about or have control over. We “will not know the beings that are outside the body” once we’ve left it, since it’s nothing we can sense anymore, since being bodiless we have no more sense to sense the sensibility. This does actually fit with the comparison made to being in the womb: a baby’s sense is limited only to itself, and it is entirely in the womb, so it is unable to know anything outside the womb. The immortal part of Man understands itself (which is quite a bit), but is unable to know anything outside of the intelligible. It may know that bodies exist, but is unable to remember, sense, or use the body; thus, once the immortal part of us leaves the body, we are unaware of what’s outside the body. Physical embodiment is meaningless to something bodiless.

So, what does all this say about Man? The two parts of us, the mortal body and the immortal part of us which is as yet unspecified (possibly Nous?), are not so tightly coupled that they live and die at once. Instead, the body can die but the immortal part of us will live on independently of it. As the body lives, the immortal part dwells within it; once the body dies, the immortal part leaves it forever, and the body becomes inert material that returns to the four elements. Further, once the immortal part leaves the body, it essentially becomes its own independent thing of the body, forgetting and severing all connections with the body into an utterly new kind of existence. While Man may be a combination of the mortal and the immortal, it seems more like a detachable pieces of paper than something so deeply intertwined and coupled together.

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-third definition, part VI, number 3 of 3:

The present (things) follow close upon the past, and the future (close upon) the present. Just as the body, once it has gained perfection in the womb, goes out, likewise the soul, once it has gained perfection, goes out of the body. For just as a body, if it goes out of the womb (while it is still) imperfect can neither be fed nor grow up, likewise if soul goes out of the body without having gained perfection, it is imperfect and lacks a body; but the perfection of soul is the knowledge of the beings. Just as you will behave towards your soul when it is in this body, likewise it will behave towards you when it has gone out of the body.
—Contain yourself, O Trismegistus!

Let’s skip the connections with the past few definitions and get right into this one. The first part of this definition simply says that things follow in a logical order from point A to point B: “the present things follow close upon the past, and the future close upon the present”. There is nothing coming that isn’t already being made now, and there’s nothing currently that wasn’t made in the past. Essentially, the cosmos is causal in some way; certain events follow each other in time, and importantly, only in one direction in time. The past does not follow the present, nor does the present follow the past, but the other way around. Things once done cannot simply be undone or nullified. Whatever happens in the future happens because of things happening now, which themselves happen because of things that happened in the past; thus, everything that happens in the future happens because of things in the past. How things happen, in what ways, and for how long, however, are left unspecified by this definition.

Continuing the comparisons between the baby in the womb and Man in the body, this definition affords a few more comparisons. The first is that “just as the body, once it has gained perfection in the womb, goes out, likewise the soul, once it has gained perfection, goes out of the body”. First, we now know what part of the immortal Man survives death: the soul, not (only) the Nous! (Then again, the Nous may be said to be part of or within the soul, but that’s another point.) We know that all Man must eventually die and leave the body, just as an unborn child must leave the womb at some point; we now know that the soul “goes out of the body” once it has gained “perfection”. “Perfection” here is first used to describe a fully-formed baby in the womb, when birth is supposed to happen so the baby can “go out” of the womb. Thus, the soul only leaves the body when it is fully-formed; while we can summarize what this means for a body, we aren’t yet told in what ways the soul develops (besides being given Nous and Logos and the ability to use reasonable speech from definition set V).

Of course, there are times when babies miscarry or are stillborn, and we often talk about people dying or being killed “before their time”. What of them? Well, “if [a baby] goes out of the womb while it is still imperfect can neither be fed nor grow up, likewise is soul goes out of the body without having gained perfection it is imperfect and lacks a body”. A prematurely-born child, though in some cases is well-developed enough to survive on its own, often has significant problems that prevent its viability. If born too early, then the baby will be unable to function as an independent entity and will not “grow up”, i.e. it will die. Likewise, the soul is in the body for a reason: to attain perfection. If the soul “goes out of the body” before it attains perfection, the soul is stunted and will have significant soul-related problems, like the lack of reasonable speech or understanding of the cosmos. How might this happen? An early death, catching a plague, murder, suicide, and many other causes.

It’s important to note that what happens to the body isn’t synonymous with what happens to the soul. Based on what we know, a soul can attain perfection at any time or through many means; any soul can technically be perfect, and murder can destroy the body of one whose soul is perfect just as it can destroy the body of one whose soul is imperfect. The soul needs time to develop on its own within the body; depending on how the body treats the soul and how the soul acts on its own, this may be a fast process or a slow process. What is the perfection of the developed soul? The definition says that it is “knowledge of the beings”, which is a faily obsure statement, but remember that what the Nous is: mind. Nous is the ability to understand the intelligible, the sensible, and all things that exist and can exist within itself. Nous is, essentially, gnosis, and gnosis is knowledge. Thus, perfection of the soul is the knowledge of God. This statement echoes that of Hermes Trismegistus when he proclaimed his wishes to Poemander in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter I, part 3): “I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God”.

Thus, in order for us to properly develop our souls, we need to come to know God; this is the “perfection of soul”. How do we do that? Through the use of reasonable speech or Logos (section V), which is made possible through Nous and the body. The body nurtures the progress of the soul much as the womb does to the baby; thus, we need to use the sensible, mortal body to come to know the intelligible, immortal God. This is kind of a shocking revelation, but it follows from the rest of the comparisons and definitions. To know God is to know all the things within God, all the gods, all the worlds, and ourselves, and “know thyself” is among the most holy maxims ever uttered or written.

The penultimate part of the definition sounds like a warning: “just as you will behave towards your soul when it is in this body, likewise it will behave towards you when it has gone out of the body”. In order for us to be treated well, we need to treat our souls well and guide our souls towards God in this life and body; if we mistreat our souls and lead it away from gnosis, it will lead us away from life, pleasure, and perfection. Then again, this same warning also has something of an issue: what is Man if neither body nor soul? After all, the warning says that the soul will treat us in a certain way after it leaves the body, so there’s something else besides soul or body that is also part of Man. Remember that, although we have two natures according to definition VI.1 (the immortal and the mortal), we also have three essences: the intelligible Nous, the animated soul, and the material body. There is another part of us, the Nous, that is not soul. Nous is the image after which Man is made, and Nous is bestowed upon Man who deserves it. After all, even if Nous is generally with Man, not all of Man has Nous (V.2, V.3).

Essentially, what this warning says is that if we want perfection of Nous and its presence in our lives, we need to strive for it by perfecting our soul; by denying the soul’s perfection, Nous is removed or blocked from our lives. This is said as much in definition V.3, but the Poemander says more in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter I, parts 22 and 23):

I, Mind, myself am present with holy men and good, the pure and merciful, men who live piously. [To such] my presence doth become an aid, and straightway they gain gnosis of all things, and win the Father’s love by their pure lives, and give Him thanks, invoking on Him blessings, and chanting hymns, intent on Him with ardent love. And ere they give the body up unto its proper death, they turn them with disgust from its sensations, from knowledge of what things they operate. Nay, it is I, the Mind, that will not let the operations which befall the body, work to their [natural] end. For being door-keeper I’ll close up [all] the entrances, and cut the mental actions off which base and evil energies induce.

But to the Mind-less ones, the wicked and depraved, the envious and covetous, and those who murder do and love impiety, I am far off, yielding my place to the Avenging Daimon, who sharpening the fire, tormenteth him and addeth fire to fire upon him, and rusheth on him through his senses, thus rendering him the readier for transgressions of the law, so that he meets with greater torment; nor doth he ever cease to have desire for appetites inordinate, insatiately striving in the dark.

Thus, good actions produce good fruit, and bad actions produce bad fruit. Simple enough; we see similar rules in many religions and philosophies from Buddhist karma/kamma and Christian salvation and sin. To know Mind, our creator and our true selves, is our purpose; by denying our purpose, we get enmeshed in the pains and sufferings of life and death, but by fulfilling our purpose, we find holiness and blessing from that which we seek to know.

The final part of this definition is confusing; it seems to be an injunction from…someone to tell Hermes Trismegistus himself to calm down or keep quiet. It’s not something I fully understand in the text; it could be an injunction or addition from some manuscriptist telling Hermes “enough” or “I’m tired of this”, or one telling Hermes to contain his soul in his body to teach more or show more perfection of the soul and Nous to his students. It might similarly be an injunction from Nous itself as is seen in the Poemander for Hermes to keep still or silent. It might even be an order to “contain yourself” in good conduct, i.e. behavior towards the soul. In any case, it doesn’t seem to properly belong, considering the abrupt change in voice and style, but my hunch that it’s a student (say, Asclepius?) calming Hermes after an ecstatic state of gnosis and wisdom.

Overall, this section of three definitions elaborated on the position and power of Man in the cosmos, and how we’re made more special than other entities by our weird combination of body, spirit, soul, reason, and mind. Being both mortal and immortal, we can split ourselves (the soul and the Nous) from the body by death, but this can be risky, since we only want to do that when we have perfection of the soul, which is gnosis of God. In other words, we should try really hard not to die until we’re fully ready. It’s a difficult prospect, but further definitions will begin to describe how to become “fully ready”. This will have the ability for us to raise our eyes to heaven, see within, and overcome our mortal condition.

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-fourth definition, part VII, number 1 of 5:

But now, what is man? What (else) if neither body nor soul?

Aye, dear Asclepius, who(ever) is not soul, is neither Nous nor body. For (one) thing is what becomes the body of man, and (another) thing is what comes in addition to man. Then what should be called truly a man, O Asclepius, and what is man? the immortal species of every man.

This definition starts off with a question, and it seems to be posed to Hermes Trismegistus and not a rhetorical question of Hermes. The answer, in the second paragraph, would be spoken by Hermes to Asclepius, his disciple; in fact, coupled with the last definition (VI.3), we might say that the “Contain yourself!” bit was spoken by Asclepius to calm him down or get him to clarify something otherwise unclear. This happens enough in the Corpus Hermeticum, and these are the “Definitions from Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius”, so it makes sense that there’d be at least a passing reference to dialog here.

The last section of definitions elaborated on the position and power of Man in the cosmos, and how we’re made more special than other entities by our weird combination of body, spirit, soul, reason, and mind. However, as Man, we’re more than the sum of the parts; what is it that makes Man Man? What is the essence of Man? Or, as Asclepius asks, “what is man…if neither body nor soul?” This is a valid question to ask; we know we consist of various parts, but we also know that there’s still something distinct that allows Man to be more than animal and different than heavenly body.

First, remember what the relationships are between Nous, body, and soul. Bodies that move on their own need soul to perform it, and bodies that live and grow on their own need breath or spirit which allows the soul (if any) to enact itself (IV.2). Thus, stones are mere bodies; plants are bodies and breath; animals are body, breath, and soul. The combination of body, breath, and soul allow animals to use voice and utterance. Man, however, is a special type of animal that has the capacity for Nous, or Mind, which allows his voice to be reasonable and thus allow him access to Logos, or reasonable speech, which can endow him with Nous. Nous, however, isn’t something guaranteed among all of Man, but only to those worthy of it (V.3).

We know that we are neither just body (we breathe and move with animation and soul), nor just soul (it doesn’t make sense to be a soul without a body), nor just Nous (which is God); this is what Asclepius and Hermes agree on. After all, bodies are “what become the body of man”, implying that our material side comes from material causes, but doesn’t constitute all of Man with his dual nature. The other thing, Nous, is “what comes in addition to man”, since it is a “gift of God” (V.3). We are not merely soul, either, since soul “is a necessary movement adjusted to every kind of body” (II.1), so souls go along with that which have bodies.

There’s still something beyond all this, something else, some essential quality of Man which makes Man Man. Hermes says that it is the “immortal species of every man”, but what does this mean? We find the term “species” elsewhere so far: Man is the “reasonable world…after the species” (I.1). We’re not exactly told what the species of Man exactly is, and that’s because Man is distinctly Man. In other words, there is a form, a quality, an essence, a form, an idea of Man that distinguishes Man apart from all else in the world, just as there are chairs and the idea of a chair as distinct from phones and the idea of phones. Man is something unique in the world, and not because of the ability to be both immortal and mortal at once, though this is another result of the same cause. Man is distinct in the cosmos and is made distinct.

This is probably a confusing idea, but contrast what modern scientists would think of species of creatures versus other thinkers. To a modern biologist, a species of animal or plant or fungus or what-have-you is made distinct only because of subtle, gradual changes from other species on the same phylogenic tree or path. Evolution causes these small changes and, over time, these accumulated changes become so distinct that one branch of the phylogenic tree from another that they can no longer breed or intermingle successfully. Species, then, is just a matter of random subtle differentiation over a period of time. However, a premodern thinker would conceive of species as distinct units or groups that do not change over time, though they might be grouped into categories. Consider felines: all felines share certain characteristics, though there are characteristics that distinguish tigers from housecats. These groups are species and were made so from The Beginning (i.e. that of Creation Itself), but not necessarily in a merely physical way. The spiritual form and type of these creatures was also made separate, such that the “soul” of tigers would be distinct from the “soul” of cats.

This gets into some heavy Platonic notions of forms and ideas, which I honestly don’t care to get into or explain at this point. Suffice to say that a “species” here is an abstract generalized perfect concept that can be manifested in imperfect ways through material means. Thus, we have the immortal “species” of Man, and the mortal humans that are made in the image of Man. The essential quality that defines Man is, simply, the essence of Man itself. Compare with what Hermes is taught by the Poemander in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter I, part 15):

And this is why beyond all creatures on the earth man is twofold; mortal because of body, but because of the essential Man immortal. Though deathless and possessed of sway o’er all, yet doth he suffer as a mortal doth, subject to Fate. Thus though above the Harmony, within the Harmony he hath become a slave. Though male-female, as from a Father male-female, and though he’s sleepless from a sleepless [Sire], yet is he overcome [by sleep].

Of course, when we start talking about ideas and forms, those too can undergo a type of speciation. For instance, I belong overall to the idea of Man; I also belong to the idea of Magus, and that of Caucasian, and so forth. There are a lot of archetypes, cosmic roles, or ideas that I fulfill; would it not also be said that I fulfill an idea of polyphanes? That there is a perfect me, and this physical, material body is just an imperfect manifestation of that perfect idea? This, to me, is the implication I get from all this; we might even consider the idea of our perfect selves as what makes us immortal within the broader immortal idea of Man, and the bodies that are moved by breath and soul the material manifestations of those ideas, and the Nous that visits us the bridge between our imperfect bodies and the perfect ideas to make our bodies more perfect and, thus, more in line with our perfect selves and God, which is what Nous has us strive to do.

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-fifth definition, part VII, number 2 of 5:

And the species of every living (being) is (only) in one part of the world, but the sole species of man (is) at once in heaven, on earth, in the water, and in the air. Just as the body is marvelously molded in the womb, likewise the soul in the body.

The last definition began the talk of what exactly makes Man Man, what the essential quality of Man is that enables Man to be made distinct from other animals or forms. Simply, the essence is the essence itself. There is an idea, a “species” of Man, that all humankind have that enables them to be made in the form of Man. Individual humans may differ, but they all share that essential Man-ness, much as how all chairs are different but all share an essential chair-ness. However, one cannot use or see or sense the essence of chairs; one senses and interacts with and sits upon the actual manifestation of chairs. The idea of something is perfect and immortal, while the manifestation of that idea may be mortal and temporary and corruptible.

This definition talks about “species” again, but this time about other kinds of species aside from just that of Man. First, “the species of every living being is only in one part of the world, but the sole species of man is at once in heaven, on earth, in the water, and in the air”. The idea of something created is much like a design for software code: it specifies its behaviors, qualities, and natural environment. If Man belongs “at once in heaven, on earth, in the water, and in the air”, then we know that there are these four parts of the world; other living creatures belong to only one. We might assume that fish and other aquatic animals belong to the watery parts of the world, birds and aerial animals to the airy parts of the world, terrestrial and subterranean creatures to the earthy part of the world, and the heavenly beings only to the heavenly parts of the world. Mankind, however, partakes of all of these natures, and can go anywhere and everywhere. After all, “man’s possession is the world” (VI.1).

This weird tetraphysical form isn’t necessarily just related to our physical bodies, but also to our ability to sense. Recall that “man has at once the two natures, the mortal and the immortal” and “only man understands the intelligible and sees the visible, for they are no aliens to him” (VI.1). We are the only ones that can comprehend both the solely-intelligible and sensible-intelligible; this distinguishes us from other living beings, especially those down here in the material part of the world. Consider a fish: a fish, living in water, has no awareness of what fire is like, nor what air can do for the body. In fact, both would kill the fish, since it requires water to live; its awareness is limited to its life and its natural environment. (Of course, this starts to break down when we consider that some animals can be amphibian or change “modes” in life, but bear with me here.) Generally, the four types of living creatures can be broken down into four groups, generally by element:

Fire: Heavenly beings (angels, gods, planets)
Air: Aerial beings (birds, flying insects)
Water: Aquatic beings (fish, squid, crabs, swimming animals)
Earth: Terrestrial beings (most beasts, livestock, crawling animals)

Cornelius Agrippa gives a similar division (book II, chapter 7):

Fire: Walking creatures
Air: Flying creatures
Water: Swimming creatures
Earth: Crawling creatures

It’s interesting to note that “walking creatures” would certainly include humans, linking us to the heavenly creatures in another scheme; this isn’t wholly unfitting, as Man is the closest of the living mortal creatures to the heavenly immortal ones.

The final part of this definition is another comparison between the soul and body with the body and the womb: “just as the body is marvelously molded in the womb, likewise is the soul in the body”. We’ve seen this before in section VI of the Definitions, but those all dealt with the body leaving the womb (or the soul leaving the body), or the body forgetting the things in the womb (soul forgetting the body’s experiences), and the like. This definition gives us the missing “first half” of those comparisons: before the body can leave the womb, the body must first be developed in the womb. Likewise, before the soul can leave the body, the soul must first be developed within the body. But why? Because the soul “is a necessary movement adjusted to every kind of body” (II.1), and more importantly, it “keeps up the figure while being within the body” (I.3). The soul is necessary to allow the body to function as an animated being, something more than an inanimate rock, metal, jewel, or plant.

It’s technically true that, even at birth, the human body has all the muscles it needs to write, sing, run, and the like. The muscles themselves may not be that strong, but there’s nothing inherently prohibiting these actions starting right from birth (indeed, myths of gods like Hermes have them doing this and more right out of the womb). But if we consider the motions and actions of the body to be provided by soul, then we might say that the soul is that which needs to develop first before writing, singing, running, or the like can be done. Without a developed soul that can make use of the entirety of a body, pulling on all its experiences and memories and senses, the body is not being used to its full capacity. Likewise, the womb is not being used to its full capacity until the fetus inside is fully grown; once the fetus is fully grown and ready to leave, it will, but not before lest the fetus be premature and undeveloped. Similarly, the soul should leave the body only when it is fully developed, lest it be deprived of the experiences and richness it needs to be perfected.

How can this be done? Look towards the first part of the definition: while other creatures and other bodies are suited to only one part of the world, Man is suited to all parts: the earthy, the watery, the airy, and the heavenly/fiery. While a fish is only intended to live and develop in the water, Man is intended to live and develop across all parts of the world. We need to pull on and develop all the parts of ourselves, the earthy physical body, the watery emotional soul, the airy logical breath, and the fiery heavenly Nous. It is only in this way can we properly develop the soul, which allows us to get ever closer to bringing our material manifestations of Man into the ideal perfection of our species.

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-sixth definition, part VII, number 3 of 5:

From the murk into light the body goes out of the womb, but soul enters the body from the light into darkness. The sight of the body is the eye; but that of soul is Nous. Just as a body which as (got) no eyes sees nothing, likewise a soul which has (got) no Nous is blind. Whatever the (babe) in the womb will crave for, so will the pregnant woman desire the same; likewise whatever (Nous) in soul will crave for, so will man desire the same.

Ah, yet another comparison between the development of the soul in the body and the development of the body in the womb! Yet what’s that? This is actually a contrasting statement for once! Before we’ve only ever seen things that liken the soul/body and body/womb images, but here we get an inversion. “From the murk into light the body goes out of the womb”; simple enough. The body, once formed, leaves the womb from a small enclosed space with little to sense, witness, or experience into the greater world as an independent being. Its eyes are opened and it can finally see. However, the case is different from the soul and the body. When the soul enters the body, it does so “from the light into darkness”. It’s like the reverse of the body and the womb; the body cannot really be un-born, but if it were, it’d also enter into darkness from light. Thus, the soul, in order to develop, has to be taken out of a bigger world and put into a darker, corruptible body. This implies some sort of affectation or impediment on the soul, especially given the connotation of “light” here.

Recall that “light is a good, a clear vision, which makes appear all of the visible things” (II.6). It is good when we enter into light, which helps us see and sense and make intelligible the things in the world to ourselves. Thus, it is good when a body is born from the womb, since it enters into light and is then able to see; after all, “the sight of the body is the eye”, and “eyes [see] all corporeal things” (V.1). However, when the soul enters the body, it enters into darkness, and thus it cannot see. Or can it? If the eye is the sight of the body, then “that of soul is Nous”, and “Nous sees everything” (V.1). We know that all of Man has the capability for Nous, but does not always possess it depending on their progress towards Nous through Logos (V.3).

So, when a body is born from a womb, its eyes are free and open to see the world; while in the womb, it cannot see, since it has no eyes apart from that which are in the womb. What about the soul, though? “Just as a body which has got no eyes sees nothing, likewise a soul which has got no Nous is blind.” The Nous, which sees everything, allows the soul to likewise see everything just as Man is able to be part of the entire world and not just any single part (VII.2). However, not all souls are given Nous, and so some souls are blind. It is by the development of our souls through using the entirety of the essence of Man that we can obtain and be gifted with Nous, enabling our souls to see clearly, and thus reenter into light. After all, light is a good, just as the Nous is the Good; light and Nous are very tightly coupled. We don’t call it “enlightenment” for nothing, after all. By entering into light, we enter into the Nous, and thus enter into God, which is everywhere at all times, just as Man is in all parts of the world at all times. However, just as the world exists only as one part of God, individual humans exist only as one part of Man and in one part of the world at any given time.

Now we start to get a better notion of what this whole “perfection of the soul” thing is. When is the soul ready to leave the body? When is the soul fully formed? We’ve read comparisons saying that the soul develops in the body just as a body is developed in the womb, but we haven’t seen what that completion criterion might be. Now we do: it’s when the soul is given Nous. After all, when a body is fully formed in the womb, it has all the parts and pieces of the body that should be there, not least of which are eyes, which is sight; sight is only used, or rather the eyes are only used, once the body leaves the womb, “from the murk into light”. Entering into light is the mark of full development; thus, when the soul can see again, it can be considered fully developed within the body and can attain perfection, “from the murk into light”. Thus, to know God, to be gifted with Nous and to serve it with reasonable speech, this is the mark of perfection in the soul.

Of course, the soul was already in light to begin with; after all, it “enters the body from the light into darkness”. Thus, the soul was already in contact with and part of the Nous; the soul, then, comes from Nous. We already know that “every move of soul is perceived by Nous” (II.6), but to say that souls come from Nous is interesting. Where else would they come from, though? They are not sensible, and so cannot be part of the world; they are only intelligible, and thus part of God that dwells within the world. When the soul enters the body, it becomes separated or cut off somehow, entering into darkness and therefore separation from God where it can no longer see or maintain contact with God. This is an interesting idea, but goes along with the division of the cosmos into the world, heaven, God, and the like. After all, the soul inhabits a sensible body, which can only sense other sensible things; God is not sensible, and so God cannot be sensed by the body, though it dwells within and as a part of God. Just as the body within the womb cannot sense things outside the womb, the soul within the sensible body cannot sense things outside the sensible bodies it can sense.

The body within the womb develops according to how it must, and in order to develop properly, it requires certain needs: food, drink, activity, and the like. We often joke about mothers eating bizarre things like pickles and ice cream at midnight while pregnant, but that’s not wholly unfounded; dehydration, exhaustion, pica, and similar conditions can happen to women who aren’t preparing for a proper pregnancy. This was known even in ancient times: “whatever the babe in the womb will crave for, so will the pregnant woman desire the same”. The same holds true for the Nous and the soul while the soul develop in the body: “whatever Nous in soul will crave for, so will man desire the same”. Nous is the core function of the soul, the heart of the soul, the home of the soul, and it is Nous that guides the soul and provides it with the impetus for the motion the soul gives to the body. The needs of the Nous are, thus, the needs of the soul. While the soul develops in the body, the needs of the soul must be tended to, and so the body that develops a soul will be driven to act in whatever ways the soul needs to benefit from.

Of course, just like a mother who denies eating or acting right to provide for the proper development of her child, a human can ignore the impulses the soul gives him so as to provide for the proper development of the soul. It’s like speech: whereas “speech endowed with Nous is a gift of God, speech without Nous is a finding of man” (V.3). When we act with Nous, we act properly and for the development and good of our souls. When we act without Nous, we act only for the benefit of the body. The soul, however, is insensible, invisible, and immortal, while the body is mortal, corruptible, and temporary. The Definitions are getting pretty clear where we should set our priorities; after all, “just as you will behave towards your soul when it is in this body, likewise it will behave towards you when it has gone out of the body” (VI.3).

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-seventh definition, part VII, number 4 of 5:

Soul enters the body by necessity, Nous (enters) soul by judgment. While being outside the body, soul (has) neither quality nor quantity; (once it is) in the body it receives, as an accident, quality and quantity as well as good and evil: for matter brings about such (things).

We know from before that “soul is a necessary movement adjusted to every kind of body” (II.1), although not all bodies have souls (IV.2). Of those that do, however, they are animated, both in the classical sense of being “ensouled” as well as in the modern sense of having motion and movement. Plants and stones, for instance, do not move beyond their natural tendencies to increase or decrease, and so have no souls; animals, humans, and heavenly beings move in addition to their tendencies to increase and decrease, and so have souls. Thus, “soul enters the body by necessity”, especially the bodies of Man, since it is there that soul can develop into perfection.

However, it is only the souls with Nous that do this, and why? Because Nous wants to: “Nous enters soul by judgment”. This, to me, has a double meaning, because other parts of the definitions don’t seem to make complete sense. All souls come from Nous, and are given a touch of Nous that give it impetus for motion within the body (VII.3). However, not all creatures have Nous, since this is a gift from the Nous itself and only visits to those who serve Nous through Logos (V.3, V.1). Trying to reconcile this gap between “all souls in bodies have Nous within” to “not all bodies have Nous” requires a bit of a reach here, at least at this point in our understanding:

Nous enters soul because it wants to. While the Nous is God and God is in all things, not all things are consciously aware of being part of God. Nous wants us all to be aware of that, since Nous is all about knowing and awareness. Nous gives life through soul that it inhabits because it wants the life to be made fully part of God and aware that it is God. In other words, there’s a much bigger party going on in the intelligible world than in the sensible world, and God wants us to join it by enabling ourselves to be aware of it and how to get in. We can call this type of Nous within the soul the “seed Nous” or “heart Nous”; it’s not much different than what other definition say about God being part of all things: since the soul is a thing, God must be part of it.
Nous enters soul because the soul is ready for it. While the Nous within the soul may be the heart of the soul, it is not the same thing as the soul, and the soul may not be in full command or contact with the Nous. It’s like how humanity has their conscious minds as well as their subconscious, and while the subconscious can drive or influence the conscious, we’re not aware of the subconscious desires doing this to us. By bringing the subconscious to the conscious level, we become more fully aware of ourselves and our whole being. Likewise, the Nous is buried so deep within ourselves that we are effectively cut off consciously from it, though we still retain that divine spark within ourselves. By coming to know Nous through Logos, we bring the Nous closer and closer to the surface in ourselves, enabling perfection of ourselves. This is only something that is done when we are ready for it, and requires active work on our part.

Thus, what this definition is saying is basically that wherever there is a body, there must be a soul, but souls on their own may not have Nous since they may not be necessary to a body, and so may not exist if Nous does not judge there to be a need for it. God makes things happen and gives things life, and without God nothing could happen; thus, the soul exists only as God has allowed it to exist, but even so it must continue developing. Just as a seed takes time to grow into a full tree, a soul takes time to grow into a full perfected soul. This is done by helping it develop within the body across the four parts of the world (VII.2) Only when the soul is properly developed can it receive Nous into itself wholly and fully; instead, we might say that the soul returns to and is fully connected to the Nous again, regardless of whether it is contained within a body.

The soul entering into the body has more effects than simply dimming the connection between Nous and itself, too. The soul is an invisible and insensible thing that supports the body, and “while being outside the body, soul has neither quality nor quantity”. In other words, there are no characteristics or details about the soul that we can know while it is outside a body. It is only ever intelligible, and so is part of God in the intelligible world. However, when a soul enters a body, “it receives, as an accident, quality and quantity”. The soul, by entering into a body, picks up sensible qualities, but it does not enter into the body so as to do this. This happens “as an accident”, or a side-effect of the animation of a body. This is because “matter brings about such things”, and all matter is based on the element of earth (II.3), without which nothing sensible could exist.

Consider any arbitrary measurement or metric you might conceive of. Length is a property of how much matter can be arrayed in a given distance. Volume is several lengths in different directions. Weight is how much mass can be packed into a particular object. Density is the proportion of weight to volume. These are all quantities, numbers that are all based in the physical realm. Any measurement based on these or similar metrics is also a quantity, and therefore based in the physical, material realm. What about qualities? As opposed to an objective measurement, a quality is a subjective measurement. Does something feel good or bad? Do sour foods taste better than bitter foods? How strongly do you like a particular object? Does a certain action cause pride or shame in the actor? These and more are all qualities, which although not directly based on material measurements, use the body and spirit to interpret them for us, and since these things are based on the material body, qualities too become material accidents.

The soul, much like God, has none of these to start with. We cannot describe any quality or quantity of the soul without a body; it is, in a sense, ineffable, much as God is (I.4). Moreover, the soul has no notion of these things either until it gains a body, since the soul is separated from the body, and as we puzzled out before in VI.2, without having a body we cannot sense the sensible or visible things, which are measured and interpreted according to their quantity and quality. With a body, however, the soul can suddenly discern these things, as well as become these things by means of the body. I don’t mean to say that God cannot sense things, since God senses and sees all things (V.1), but rather that God, who is Nous, who is both Mind as well as the faculties and exercise of Mind, is these things. The soul, however, is not God, though it is a part of God, and so until it obtains Nous as given by God, it cannot similarly see, sense, or witness things in the same way as God does. On its own, the soul cannot do much; in a body, it can act as and work as the body.

In addition to quantity and quality, however, by entering into the body the soul also picks up “good and evil”. We know of things that are good, which we can associate with both light (II.6) and God (I.4). Whatever evil is, we are not yet certain, but we have a few clues. These are things that only exist where bodies exist; good and evil are not things that exist outside of the world or as part of God, but exist only as sensible things. Hermes Trismegistus goes on about good and evil in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter XIV, part 7):

And do not thou be chary of things made because of their variety, from fear of attribution of a low estate and lack of glory unto God. For that His Glory’s one,—to make all things; and this is as it were God’s Body, the making [of them]. But by the Maker’s self naught is there thought or bad or base.

These things are passions which accompany the making process, as rust doth brass and filth doth body; but neither doth the brass-smith make the rust, nor the begetters of the body filth, nor God [make] evil. It is continuance in the state of being made that makes them lose, as though it were, their bloom; and ’tis because of this God hath made change, as though it were the making clean of genesis.

Basically, good and evil exist as a special set of qualities in the sensible world, and are related to the process of increase and decrease, which only exists because of the element of earth. Water helps to increase (“fecund essence”, II.4); fire helps to decrease (“destruction of the mortal”, II.5); air helps to join together (“heavens and earth are united with each other by the air”, II.2). Death is a result of decrease without increase; creatures that are not heavenly and made of fire are therefore earthy and mortal (IV.1, IV.2); death prevents the soul from obtaining perfection when the soul is not yet ready (VI.3); bodies serving their own end without care for the soul serves only death (V.2). Therefore, death, decay, and decrease that prevent the soul from fulfilling its perfection and Nous can be considered evil, and this can only be done in the material world that bodies live in. These things on their own are not bad at all, and are necessary in the world, but when they interfere with ourselves, they become a harmful influence. However, we must choose to let them interfere with ourselves, even if we choose inaction against them.

This is a crucial difference between the material world and the immaterial world: good and evil only exist where a chance to turn away from God exists. Outside the material world, one is only ever part of God, and thus cannot turn away from God. In the sensible world, it’s harder to be aware of God, and thus easier to turn away from God. Turning towards God and rejoining with him, coming into the perfect “knowledge of the beings” and light of Nous, is therefore good; turning away from God and ignoring the impetus of Nous and the directions that would lead us to God is therefore evil. This sort of thing is not possible outside the sensible world, where Nous can be absent from speech or action due to our own actions or speech. Outside the sensible world, there is nothing (so far said, at least) that can distinguish us from God, therefore having us become God and God becoming us wholly, so that whatever God wills, we ourselves will, and whatever we do, God does.

This ties in tightly to notions of True Will and divine providence, too, and the ideas are similar. When we do what God wants us to do, carrying out and serving our divine purpose, that’s our True Will, the will we are meant to fulfill which we ourselves can know once we can see ourselves clearly enough. To do that, however, we have to carry out the Great Work, which helps us prepare ourselves across the four parts of the world and begin to hear and use Logos. This allows our sensible, material bodies to better heed and serve our souls, which can then develop properly into a fully-knowledgeable and divine soul with Nous. With Nous being known to ourselves, we then can carry out what it is we’re supposed to do; at that point, any distinction between what we want and what God wants is meaningless, because our wills have become God’s will and vice versa.

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-eighth definition, part VII, number 5 of 5:

God is within himself, the world is in God, and man in the world. His (i.e. man’s) deficiency is ignorance, his plenitude in the knowledge of God. ※ He says that evil (consists) in ignorance and good in knowledge ⍜.

A short definition to finish up this section! The first part of this definition sounds awfully like the first definition from the third set, which said that “where heaven is, God is too, and where the world is, heaven is too”, and also that “God is in heaven, and heaven in the world”. Here, we have some more relationships between God and the world: namely, that God is within himself, that the world is in God, and that Man is in the world.

That God is within himself should come as no surprise. We already know that “nothing is uninhabited by God” (III.1), and that God is “the father of the intelligible” (III.4) while being intelligible himself (I.1). In other words, God is God, all things are within God, and God is in all things; everything is a complete Whole, and that Whole is the All, the One, or God. If you want to translate this into set theory of mathematics, we can say that God is a set that includes all things including itself. From this, it logically follows that the world, which is a thing that exists, exists within God. Man exists in the world, or at least the physical bodies of Man and the idea of Man; since these things exist in the world, and since they exist, and since the world exists within God, Man also exists within God. This basically rephrases III.1 using some more terms about Man now that we’ve been talking about Man for some time.

As for Man, however, we have some more talking to do. The last definition brought up the terms “good” and “evil”, and we said this about the two terms:

Turning towards God and rejoining with him, coming into the perfect “knowledge of the beings” and light of Nous, is therefore good; turning away from God and ignoring the impetus of Nous and the directions that would lead us to God is therefore evil.

The current definition talks about the deficiency and the plentitude of Man, or rather, wherein he is evil and wherein he is good. “His plentitude is the knowledge of God”; this accords with what we said before. We can tie this back further with the perfection of the soul, which is “the knowledge of beings” (VI.3), and this is effectively the knowledge of God. After all, to know God is to know all the things within God, all the gods, all the worlds, and ourselves, and “know thyself” is among the most holy maxims ever uttered or written. This is what is good for us to do.

If knowledge of God is good, and evil is the opposite of good, then the opposite of knowledge of God must be evil. The opposite of knowledge is ignorance, and that is indeed what this definition says: “[Man's] deficiency is ignorance”. To not know God is evil, then, yet this is the state of us as we are; to know God, we must have Nous, and not all beings are accorded Nous consciously. Does that mean we were born evil? Not really, but kinda? This is where the Gnostic and Neoplatonic strains of thought shows itself within Hermeticism: because we have a material body, we are at least in some way cut off from God. Indeed, the past few definitions have talked about this, and it’s hard to come in contact with God while being in body. Moreover, because we have a body, we have the capacity for good and evil, which simply don’t exist outside the physical, material realm of bodies and matter. We can choose evil and thus choose to be ignorant; we can likewise choose good and thus choose to be knowledgeable of God.

But what about as we are in the world, as we were born? When we were born, we didn’t know how to walk or control our poop, much less high philosophy and God. But that’s okay, because we were still in possession of souls made in the idea of Man, and those souls we have provide us with the actions and movement to move us towards knowledge of God, so long as we listen and act accordingly. Soul is movement, and even more than that, a “necessary movement” (II.1); we cannot help but act. The soul can often be considered like water, which is always in motion; it will take the path of least resistance, one way or another. If water is dammed up or blocked off, it will find a new path or simply overflow it. There is no way to completely stop water without turning it into something else. Likewise, with the soul, we are always compelled to act, though how we act is determined by our own conscious choices and may not always be what the soul would ideally prefer.

The last part of this definition basically says the same thing as the second sentence here, but makes it explicit that ignorance is evil, not just the deficiency of Man, and that knowledge is good, not just the plentitude of Man. However, this is made awkward by the inclusion of two symbols, which I cannot replicate well on a computer. I tried to find similar Unicode characters to represent them, and they indicate common concepts or abbreviations in medieval Armenian manuscripts: ※ means “star”, while ⍜ means “sinner”. The footnotes provided by Jean-Pierre Mahé to the Definitions say that these are glosses provided by the scribe, and suggest some sort of connection between sin and stars. The Corpus Hermeticum talks about such connections, and suggests that sins and evil come from the stars high up in the heavenly part of the world (chapter XVI, parts 13 through 16), though I won’t get into it here. Suffice it to say that, because we have material bodies, we are at the whim of various influences that affect our bodies and, therefore, our souls. Many of these influences come from the stars, the “living beings in heaven”, and cause us or lead us to act in certain ways. Not all of these influences agree with what the Nous within our souls desires, and so may lead us into ignorant and evil actions. This complicates our role and job down here, but it’s also part and parcel of living within a large and complex system.

By acting in a good manner and striving to know God, ourselves, and all other things, we can attain our “plenitude”, our fullness and grace, that allows us to achieve perfection. Perfection is this very thing, and is moreover marked by the awareness of and reception of Nous into our bodies and souls, enabling us to be made closer to God as well as to the ideal humanity we should be anyway. This is what we’re supposed to do, and it’s difficult, but it’s worth it; moreover, it’s what we’re driven to do when left to our own devices and free from detrimental influences that would cause us to act otherwise. However, to attain our fullness of knowledge, we also have to use the full range of human experience and power; although different living creatures can only experience one type of world, humanity can explore all worlds, including those which are immaterial. To know all things, we must know all the worlds, and transcend them to become more and better than we are in any one world.

Today, let’s discuss the twenty-ninth definition, part VIII, number 1 of 7:

All (beings) cannot possibly exceed their own capacity. Nature is everyone of the beings of this (world); there is a law which is in heaven above destiny, and there is a destiny which has come into being according to a just necessity; there is a law which has come into being according to the necessity of humans, there is a god who has come into being according to human opinion.

At this point in the Definitions, we’re a little more than halfway done, and we have only three sets of definitions left. However, nearly all of these are lengthy, and the sets themselves have more definitions within them than the previous sets. We’re just now getting to the real meat of philosophy; everything before was basically setting up the groundwork for the philosophical and theological structures we’ll be building in these sets.

First, “all beings cannot possibly exceed their own capacity”. We’re not given a definition or context for this phrase, but from the other definitions, we know enough to explain this. First, all beings that are not God are finite (based on I.4); they are not infinite, unending, immovable, or the like, since these are only things that belong to God. Something that is finite has an end; it is defined, or set in by boundaries. The maximum extent of these boundaries can be called something’s capacity. Further, we know that when a being is created from body and soul, these obtain “quality and quantity as well as good and evil” (VII.4); these things can be measured, sensed, described, and defined in many ways. However, because they can be defined and measured, there will always be things that they are not; these things are outside the being’s capacity. So, because I’m six feet tall, I am not taller than my own height, so I cannot be seven feet tall; my shirt is red, and so it cannot be any color but red; and so forth. Anything that can be sensed can only be sensed in a particular time, location, and condition; it cannot be sensed elsewhere or elsewhen, since those lie outside the thing’s capacity.

A common word used to replace “capacity” when used like this is “fate”, and Hermes Trismegistus talks a little about fate in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter XII, part 7):

Her. But all men are subject to Fate, and genesis and change, for these are the beginning and the end of Fate. And though all men do suffer fated things, those led by reason (those whom we said the Mind doth guide) do not endure like suffering with the rest; but, since they’ve freed themselves from viciousness, not being bad, they do not suffer bad.

Thus, everything that exists has a certain way of existing up to a certain point, whether it be in quantity or quality or good or evil; these things cannot act outside or beyond that point, because then it would “exceed their own capacity”. It makes sense, after all; I cannot be immortal, because I only have an approximate lifespan. I can lengthen or shorten that lifespan depending on my life choices, but it’s certain that I will eventually run through my lifespan and eventually die, because it is in my nature to die, being a mortal human being.

What is nature, though? “Nature is everyone of the beings of this world”, so it basically sounds like the microcosm of the sensible world in relation to the macrocosm of the intelligible world. Nature is the whole of increase and decrease, the four elements, sense and vision, and all the bodies here. Nature is the restrictions, capacities, and abilities that we have. Nature is, in effect, everything that sensibly exists and each of their qualities along with it. Alternatively, however, a footnote provided by Jean-Pierre Mahé in the text suggests that this same statement might be translated another way, which I prefer: “every being in this (world) has a nature”. Thus, our natures are our own capacities and tendencies; it is in the nature for the wolf to hunt and form packs, for the tiger to hunt and remain solitary, for the deer to graze and run, and for all animals to be born, live, and die. In effect, our natures are our design, the Idea of ourselves and the things we are. It might be said that nature is, in a way, our fate or destiny.

Of course, though, destiny isn’t the only force we have to deal with, nor is it the greatest force. “There is a law which is in heaven above destiny” suggests that there are things that even destiny itself must bow down to. After all, the destiny of something exists so long as that thing itself exists or can exist. And, even if all ideas were formed in the beginning of time, they were still formed by something else, and thus preceded by something else: God (III.4). Things work according to the divine plan of the Nous, which in turn creates destiny, which then acts on heaven, which then acts on the world (cf. the bit about astral demons affecting human actions in VII.5) and, thus, on Man and all other entities. In effect, destiny is brought into existence because without it there could be no design or form for things that exist. Destiny is “a just necessity”, providing for and supporting forms, species, and ideas just as souls are “a necessary movement” to provide for and support bodies of all kinds. Destiny is a law in its own way; certainly not the highest one, but not the lowest one, either.

Of those other laws, one has “come into being according to the necessity of humans”. This could be interpreted in several ways on its own, but the context for this is provided by the next statement: “there is a god who has come into being according to human opinion”. Thus, as humans work and live and exist down in the world, there are certain needs that we have that we also fulfill. Of those, there are human laws, such as prohibitions on stealing or usury or land management or equal pay. These are laws that humans need that other beings or realms don’t need; it doesn’t make sense to talk about food and drug regulation in a realm where there is no matter to constitute food or drugs, and it likewise doesn’t make sense to discuss same-sex marriage laws for species that have no capability for abstract social connections, much less marriage benefits and contracts. These are not laws of the Most High, but they’re needed by us all the same to help us live our lives down here.

Likewise, to help us live our lives, we also have invented gods for ourselves: “there is a god who has come into being according to human opinion”. This smacks of Voltaire’s famous quote, “si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer”, or “if God did not exist, we would have to invent him”. What this definition is saying is that, much as we have set up laws and regulations for ourselves in our endeavor to be human, we have also set up religions and gods for ourselves for the same endeavor. Whether it be the gods of Olympus or Meru or the various Buddhafields or Yggdrasil, or whether it be the physical world itself, we have these opinions and conceptions of divinity that we rely on to help us understand and make sense of the world. I wrote about some of these different views about materialists and spiritualists a ways back, and some people (notably the atheists in the crowd) essentially make the material, physical world their God, their All, their Whole. They may not worship, pay reverence, or make offerings to the world, but it fills the same role that YHVH would have for an Abrahamist, or moksha or paranirvana to a Dharmist.

Everything in creation, whether it be in the intelligible or the sensible worlds, is needed; nothing is out of place, and everything has a purpose. However, there are purposes, whole destinies, that individual things are not meant to fulfill; whether it’s a certain quality or quantity or characteristic, or a use or experience, there are things that other things cannot be. This is okay; these are needed just as much as anything else. Further, everything even down to the nitty-gritty of human transactions have needs and laws; much as the law of destiny governs all beings and were set up by God to manage the affairs of the world, the laws of humanity govern all human interactions and were set up by Man to manage the affairs of the human world. Of these, we have developed notions of divinity and whole gods and religions to help us manage our understanding of God and the world.

But note that, even though the text distinguishes the gods of human invention from the God of Hermes Trismegistus, there is no word on which is right or wrong. It may be that these different opinions and notions of divinity may reflect true Divinity, depending on how they arise. It’s much like reasonable speech, Logos, as Hermes explains to Tat in the Corpus Hermeticum (chapter XII, part 13):

Tat. Why, father mine!—do not the other lives make use of speech (logos)?

Her. Nay, son; but use of voice; speech is far different from voice. For speech is general among all men, while voice doth differ in each class of living thing.

Tat. But with men also, father mine, according to each race, speech differs.

Her. Yea, son, but man is one; so also speech is one and is interpreted, and it is found the same in Egypt, and in Persia, and in Greece.

Logos is not restricted to any one language, or to any language at all; Logos is reason derived from silent understanding and knowledge of God. Reasonable speech is speech with Logos imbued in it by Nous; it doesn’t matter what language it’s spoken in, since the reason itself is universal to all languages. It’s like communicating a mathematical problem; you can solve it through geometry, infinitesimal calculus, or even a memory-bounded Turing machine, but the mathematical problem itself and the answer will be the same. Reason is abstract, much as ideas are; speech is manifest, and helps to manifest ideas to others. Thus, reasonable speech “is found the same in Egypt, and in Persia, and in Greece”, because it all reflects the same reason. Similarly, it may be that the gods of Egypt and of Persia and of Greece, while appearing different, all reflect the same God, just as their languages can reflect the same Logos. More on that later.

Today, let’s discuss the thirtieth definition, part VIII, number 2 of 7:

Divine bodies do not have access paths for sensations, for they have sensations within themselves, and (what is more) they are themselves their own sensations. What God does, man does not do it; and whatever God does, he does it for man; but what man does, he does it for soul.

This definition shifts gears a bit from the previous one, but it helps to form an overall thesis with the rest of the definitions in set VIII. In the last definition, Hermes mentioned that there “is a god who has come into being according to human opinion”: much as we have set up laws and regulations for ourselves in our endeavor to be human, we have also set up religions and gods for ourselves for the same endeavor. This need not be any one god or pantheon of gods, but any concept of divinity that we have is an artifice like our own laws. However, these are just gods that have arisen out of human opinion, not by Divinity itself, and our own knowledge of Divinity is stunted to say little, so how can we make something comparable?

Basically, we can’t. This definition describes some of the qualities of divinity by talking about “divine bodies”, which is a term I understand to be a synonym for the Whole of creation itself, which is God. We read that “divine bodies do not have access paths for sensations, for they have sensations within themselves”. Basically, God himself does not sense though he has sensations inside. The use of a sense to sense sensations (sorry for the unfortunate phrasing) implies that there is something that senses and that there is another thing that is sensed. In other words, there is a duality set up here: sensor and sensed. The sensed has to be external to the sensor in order for the sensor to sense the sensed; otherwise, there’s nothing to sense.

Consider humans: humans exist in the world, and there are lots of things in the world that humans are not. Humans can sense these things because they themselves are external of other things, just as those other things are external of humans. We can sense cold water, because cold water exists outside ourselves. We can sense material processes going on inside us, too, like the passage of gas and food waste through the intestines or the pressure of blood in our heads, but that’s because the actual sensory organs that deliver this information to the brain are separate from the things that produce these sensations. In other words, human bodies are not one cohesive undifferentiated unit, but a mass and combination of many different parts that interact with each other to form something resembling a whole.

God, however, is much different. God himself does not sense things; what would there be to sense? “Nothing is uninhabited by God” (III.1); “God is within himself [and] the world is in God” (VII.5). There is nothing external to God, because God is literally everything that is and could be, everything actual and everything potential. Because there is nothing external to God, there is nothing that God can sense externally; there is no means by which God can sense something else, because there is no “something else”, and therefore no means by which he can sense (my interpretation of “access paths”). However, on the other hand, everything that exists exists within God, including things with sense. All possible sensations, all sensors, all the sensed things, every means of sensation exists within God. Add to it, God “sees everything” (V.1), and to God “nothing is incomprehensible” (V.2). However, everything that exists is only part of God, thus God only sees, comprehends, and knows itself. Because of that, God is constantly experiencing and knowing itself; thus, it can be said that God senses himself, and therefore God is God’s own sensations. Everything exists in God to be experienced by God; it’s like a weird bird’s-eye recursive exploration of all possible configurations of matter and energy and thought.

So, that which is God only ever experiences itself, since there’s nothing else that can be experienced by anything. However, the gods that have come into being “according to human opinion” aren’t presented that way at all; they fight amongst each other, they listen to other things, they’re swayed by drink and dance and sex and war, they live in only one part of the world. The gods of humanity are much closer to humanity than they are to God, and do many of the same things as humans do. In this way, then, according to the definition of “divine bodies” given above, the gods of humanity aren’t truly divine, not in the same sense that God is. I don’t intend for this to be a discouragement or refutation of non-Abrahamic or pagan gods in any way. Any god that does not act and have the qualities of God according to the Definitions is, simply, not God. They’re still gods and heavenly beings with bodies, sensations, and the rest, but are not God. Thus, Dionysus, Osiris, IHVH, and all the rest of the gods invented and named by humanity are all gods but are not God, though they exist within him and as a means to him. God is something far bigger and far more encompassing than any one concept, entity, name, or act.

It is the acts of God that transcend all other acts; God literally does everything all the time, across all of creation. There’s a lot more that God does that Man cannot do: we cannot move the stars, nor create the weather (no matter how much technology we try to throw into faking it), nor absolutely control nature. These things are not in the realm of Man to do; thus, “what God does, man does not do it”. Moreover, “whatever God does, he does it for man”; this is a profound statement, and is one of the clearest pointers to the fact that all of the cosmos, all of creation is geared…for us. For humanity. For Man. We are alone in the cosmos to be made in the image of God, we alone given Nous, we who can be both mortal and immortal. And God favors us with this, and with the rest of the cosmos as well. After all, we are alone among the living creatures to belong to all the parts of the world (VII.2), and it is our job to perfect ourselves by living as such and coming to know all the things that are, i.e. God. And, since God knows everything inside itself, God therefore knows (only) God; God helps us to know God by giving us Nous, which is also God, thus making us into God. Though it seems cyclical, what this all boils down to is this: God wants us to excel and works everything in the cosmos toward that end because we are, in effect, God. God experiences itself, after all; why wouldn’t God also work for itself to benefit itself? By benefitting Man, God benefits God. God wants us to become God.

However, we humans don’t always see it that way. While God acts and does everything for humanity, “what man does, he does it for soul”. That last part, “for soul”, can also be translated “for himself”; in either case, the gist is that we humans act for ourselves and for our own good, whatever we think that good might be (which might be good or bad towards our souls, depending on whether we listen more to our souls and Logos than to external humans). We don’t often consider the bigger picture, generally because we lack the sense to know what the bigger picture holds. We don’t necessarily act for God, because we lack knowledge of what God is, though we have some ideas and opinions about it (the “god who has come into being according to human opinion”). Because we’re so individualized and seemingly separated, and because we have such an external-centric view of the world (“I am not that”) rather than a cohesive unified Whole (“tat tvam asi“), we think in terms of me-first and not All-first. Thus, what we do, we “do it for [ourselves]“.

Keep in mind that what we said about the divinity of God not sensing but having sense doesn’t just contrast with what we consider to be gods. It also contrasts with humanity ourselves. We sense other things that we perceive to be not-us; God has no such means since there is nothing not-God. Sense is important here, because it’s sense that helps to direct our actions. Because we sense things to be external to us, we perceive it better to act for ourselves than for others for various reasons (avarice, gluttony, self-preservation, etc.). Likewise, we act for our own opinions of the gods, rather than God itself. God, however, has all sensations in itself, and so is not able to act for itself in opposition to anything else; God acts for God, because that’s all there is. Because Man is made in the image of God and bestowed with the Mind of God, God can be said to act for God by means of acting for Man; thus, “whatever God does, he does it for man”.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-first definition, part VIII, number 3 of 7:

Those who worship idols (worship plain) pictures. For if they worshipped with knowledge, they would not have gone astray, but since they do not know how they should worship, they have gone astray, (far) from piety. Man has the faculty of killing, God of giving life.

More about gods and divinity in this definition, to follow up with the previous one. In the previous definition, we talked about the difference between the “body” of God and other bodies: other bodies have things external to them, so they sense external things. God, however, has nothing external to itself, and so by definition cannot sense anything external nor does God have a means to do so, but still has sensations (literally all the sensations) within itself. God wants us to know God, and to do that we have to properly listen to our souls’ needs to understand Logos, by which we come to attain Nous, by which we know God.

However, if we distract ourselves with “human opinion” (VIII.1) and talk without reason for the sake of other humans (“speech without Nous is a finding of man”, V.3), then we end up getting mislead. We end up mistaking our human opinions and human talk for true divinity, and end up mixing IHVH or Jesus or Aten with God who’s actually, truly, wholly the Whole. We shouldn’t confuse the two, since the Whole/God/Nous is far more than any one entity (and, for that matter, all possible entities), but that’s where human speech without Nous can lead us. If we consider any such human creation to be a human construction, then we can liken these not-God gods to idols, and “those who worship idols worship plain pictures”. God is not in an idol or any one god; God is God, and nothing else is God though is a part of God.

Why would we get gods and God mixed up? Because of our lack of knowledge and Nous, which leads us to say unreasonable, non-Logos things (V.2), which leads our bodies astray despite the urgings of our souls (VII.3). Thus, “since they do not know how they should worship, they have gone astray, far from piety”. Those who have knowledge, and therefore Logos and potentially Nous, worship God, either by means of the idols or through some other means, but they do not worship the idols themselves. In more Christian terms, that’d be like worshipping a saint, which is a big no-no. You may venerate saints, but you never worship a saint; worship goes to God, and the saints are approached to get to God through intercession and aid. In this worldview, then, only God is worthy of worship; all else is not God, so why should we worship it? Just because it may be a god does not make it the God, in the Hermetic sense.

Compare what the Asclepius says (chapter XXXVII, parts 1 and 2):

Less to be wondered at are the things said of man,—though they are [still] to be admired. Nay, of all marvels that which wins our wonder [most] is that man has been able to find out the nature of the Gods and bring it into play.

Since, then, our earliest progenitors were in great error,—seeing they had no rational faith about the Gods, and that they paid no heed unto their cult and holy worship,—they chanced upon an art whereby they made Gods [for themselves]. To this invention they conjoined a power that suited it, [derived] from cosmic nature; and blending these together, since souls they could not make, [they set about] evoking daimons’ souls or those of angels; [and thus] attached them to their sacred images and holy mysteries, so that the statues should, by means of these, possess the powers of doing good and the reverse.

Again, even if our human opinion of divinity is good, it itself is not the end goal of it all. That’d be like confusing a raft to cross a river en route to a city as the end destination itself. If we worship idols for the sake of their own worship, we end up worshipping things that are not God, and that’s no bueno, since this is how people “have gone astray, far from piety”. Humans worshipping, effectively, their own opinions of divinity is effectively humans acting for the sake of humans; “what man does, he does it for soul/himself” (VIII.2).

The thing is, though, that we have a choice in this. We don’t have to end up with our opinions of divinity as the end result of all this philosophy and sophistry; we can heed our soul and act properly according to it for the sake of Logos and Nous, or we can ignore it or distort the urges of our soul and act for the sake of ourselves and humanity. The former leads us to Nous, while the latter leads us back to the world (V.2). The realm of Nous, the immortal and eternal realm of God, is knowledge and therefore perfection; ignorance and going astray from God, however, leads us back to the world, and therefore to death and destruction and perdition (VII.5). If we keep talking without Logos and are content with it, we then are complacent with the mortal, destructible realm and are headed right back to it. If we conceive speech with Nous and Logos, we end up with knowing God, and then while our bodies may die (as they should), that which is the essence of Man will live forever as opposed to enduring death.

So what do we choose? Do we choose to seek life, or seek death? Seeking death is effectively the natural course of Man without Nous, but God chooses to give Nous to those who earnestly seek it and are worthy of it. Thus, “man has the faculty of killing, God of giving life”. Yes, humanity has the power to kill whatever’s mortal, but it also has the power to kill off ourselves through our own action or inaction. We, however, do not have the power of giving (eternal) life, which is something that only God does by bestowing Nous upon Man. If we follow this comparison through, though, we end up saying that God does not have the power to kill. But if God is all things, God is therefore in control of it all, isn’t it? Shouldn’t offing something be within the power of God, especially if by God’s own choice God does not give Nous to Man?

Not at all, actually. “Whatever God does, he does it for Man” (VIII.2); God does nothing except to benefit us. If God does not bestow Nous upon someone, it’s because that someone has not yet earned it or is turning it away; according to the definitions, God is precluded from acting against Man, even by God’s own inaction. After all, if we are made in the image of God, why should God maim or prevent us from becoming God, which is our own perfection? For us to not reach perfection is out of God’s power; we have that power, and it’s up to us to willingly (whether in these terms or not) turn away from Logos and Nous or to accept it by acting according to how we ought according to our souls’ directives. We have more to listen to than the chatter of humans, after all.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-second definition, part VIII, number 4 of 7:

The body increases and reaches perfection due to nature; and soul fills up with Nous. Every man has a body and a soul, but not every soul has Nous. Consequently there are two (types of) Nous: the one (is) divine and the other (belongs to) soul. Nevertheless there are certain men who do not even have that of soul. Who(ever) understands the body, also understands soul; who(ever) understands soul, also (understands) Nous, because the admirable is (a) natural (object) of contemplation: each of the two is seen by means of the other.

From the last several definitions, we know that Man is meant to become God by means of knowledge of God. This is accomplished through our natural gifts of voice and speech, along with Logos or reason, to attain Nous or Mind. With this, we can come to know all of creation, which is God, and by this attain perfection of the soul. However, although we’re meant to do this, this is not always an assured thing; by means of voice and speech without Logos, we end up talking for the sake of talking, or talking for the sake of mankind. This applies to worship and our knowledge and opinions of divinity, too; with true knowledge of God, we endeavor to worship God by becoming God. However, with only our human and incomplete ideas and opinions of gods, we may worship them instead, preventing us from reaching our full goals and true gnosis of God. No one god is God, no matter how great, since God is always greater than everything else. The choice of attaining God or not attaining God is entirely up to us.

Of course, the definitions suggest that we already know what’s proper for us: “the body increases and reaches perfection due to nature; and soul fills up with Nous”. Our nature, as discussed in VIII.1, is basically what we’re meant to do and what we’re meant to accomplish; our nature is our design and core operating procedures. We’re meant to live, and in the process attain fullness and perfection of the body. (While “increase” is used here, according to J.-P. Mahé’s footnotes, the Armenian has “decrease”; in either case, it’s implied here that the body is meant to live and all that comes along with living). Further, in the course of the body attaining perfection, the soul also attains perfection by “fill[ing] up with Nous”. This, too, is our nature; every human being alive can be perfect and made holy by being anointed with Nous and coming to know God. This is our nature.

That said, we humans have the choice of going against our nature. We can purposefully or unreasonably ignore God and our souls, preventing our souls from filling up with Nous. Thus, while our bodies may be perfect, our souls may not be; perfection of the one does not mandate perfection of the other. Thus, “every man has a body and soul, but not every soul has Nous”. Even though Man generally and by design should have Nous, not all humans actually do; this is based on the humans’ own development and progress towards that goal. Just as it’s the goal of the fetus to be born whole in body, so too is it the human’s goal to be made whole in body and soul. Many things can prevent this, of course, which in turn prevents Nous being bestowed upon every human. This is no fault of God’s; after all, “whatever God does, he does it for man” (VIII.2), so the blame must then be laid on the shoulders of Man (or in astral demons, cf. VII.5, but even then, Man still deserves some of the blame).

We’ve mentioned the idea of there being two kinds of Nous before in set VII, but here we find it made explicit: “consequently there are two types of Nous: the one is divine and the other belongs to soul”. The former refers to Nous as a whole, which is identical with God; the divine Nous is God, and thus is the Whole and the All and the One. The other Nous is that which is in the soul itself and guides it to lead the body (cf. VIII.3). It’s that divine-Nous that we are meant to obtain, that saving perfection-grace, that the soul-Nous which comes from the divine-Nous leads us toward. Thus, it’s both true and untrue that all humans have Nous; we each have a tiny sliver of Nous (soul-Nous) within us that guides us, but not all of us are filled with divine-Nous. It’s the soul-Nous that leads us to divine-Nous once we’re spiritually mature enough to accept it from God. God/Divine-Nous wants us to have this at all points, but we’re not able to accept this until a certain point.

Even though all souls are designed by nature to be perfected with divine-Nous, not all souls have it; worse, there are even some humans who lack even soul-Nous, and are entirely unguided by Nous: “there are certain men who do not have even that [Nous] of soul”. This isn’t fully explained, and seems somewhat contradictory to our previous statements; in these cases, these particular Nous-less humans are made no better than animals, who only have soul without Nous. We might consider this severe mental disease or simply growing up feral, but these are essentially humans whose development was so stunted that they are unable to listen to or possess soul-Nous. This might be the result of not developing the soul enough to possess soul-Nous, which gives yet another darker and urgent shade to the development of the soul in the body (cf. VI.3). We must constantly strive to not only protect our shard of soul-Nous, but enjoin it with divine-Nous through perfection of the soul.

Of course, there’s more to perfecting the soul than the soul itself. If we were just focused on the soul and going right to Nous, there would be no need for our bodies; we’d be like the heavenly beings made of fire and soul. But no; that would relegate us to only the heavenly world, and we need to learn about all the parts of the world (VII.2), since it is our possession (VI.1), after all. Thus, because we need to experience the material world, we need to have material bodies. By fully using the body we have, we can come to understand it, and by understanding and perfecting the body, we can come to understand and perfect the soul (VI.3): “whoever understands the body also understands the soul”. Once we understand the soul, we can progress onto using the body and soul together with Logos to perfect the soul and attain Nous: “whoever understands soul, also understands Nous”.

That said, why is it that working with the soul leads to the Nous? Or that contemplating the Nous leads to perfection of the soul? That’s just part of the design and nature of humanity: our souls are designed to partake in Nous and soul-Nous to inhabit our souls. That is, after all, part of the nature of Man, made distinct from other living creatures in our capacity for Nous. The connection isn’t made absolutely clear yet about the manner in which this is done, though, but this definition teases us with a hint: “the admirable is a natural object of contemplation: each of [soul and Nous] is seen by means of the other”. Soul leads to Nous, and Nous leads to soul. Listening to the soul leads to Nous, since Nous is the sight of the soul just as “the sight of the body is the eye”, and listening to Nous leads to soul, since “whatever Nous in soul will crave for, so will man desire the same” (VII.3). The Nous looks out for soul and the soul is the means by which Nous is obtained. Working with one works with the other; it’s just that the soul-Nous is what connects us to divine-Nous, which we have yet to obtain. Yet.

Between all the writing for the 49 Days of Definitions project I’ve got going on, I’ve also been able to finish up a new ebook for publication on my blog. It’s up for sale on the Services page, but you can find the PayPal button below as well. As before, this new ebook is is US$10 through PayPal. (And just in time for the winter celebrations where everyone suddenly gets money and gifts!)

This new book is the “Lectura Geomantiae”, my translation of a 15th century work on astrological geomancy, applying the geomantic figures in the 12 houses of an astrological house chart. It’s a fascinating look of geomancy as practiced by more common people than, say, Robert Fludd or Cornelius Agrippa, and it contains interesting bits of advice and some new quirks that haven’t been observed before. I translated the text once before from Latin to English, but I went through it again and re-translated it to my satisfaction, as well as including a number of appendices and corrections that can help geomancers understand the text better. The Lectura Geomantiae is a useful and easy-to-use resource for geomancers who are interested in the astrological side of geomancy. It’s never been translated into English before I did, as far as I can tell; John Michael Greer plans to include it in his forthcoming “Geomancer’s Sourcebook”, but that project has been on hold for a long while. Clearly, you should buy this now instead.

Also, if divination’s your thing, don’t forget that I also wrote an ebook on grammatomancy, a method of divination using Greek letters not unlike runes, which also incorporates astrological, qabbalistic, and numerological influences to form a complete and coherent system of occult knowledge. That’s also available up on the Services page, too!

Also, I’ve noticed that I’m starting to get some more email about questions, either about general occult issues or about specific things on commissions and services. To make things easy, please use the new Contact page to send me an email straight through the blog.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-third definition, part VIII, number 5 of 7:

Nature is the mirror of truth; the latter is at once the body of the incorporeal (things) and the light of the invisible. The generous nature of this (world) teaches all (the beings). If it seems to you that nothing is a vain work, you will find the work and the craftsman, if it seems to you (like) a mockery, you will be mocked at.

We’ve been having a hard time defining the word “nature” in a Hermetic sense since it popped up a few definitions ago. There, we read that “nature is everyone of the beings of this world” or that “every being in this world has a nature”, and also that “the body increases and reaches perfection due to nature”. But what is nature? Nature is the whole of increase and decrease, the four elements, sense and vision, and all the bodies here. Nature is the restrictions, capacities, and abilities that we have. Nature is, in effect, everything that sensibly exists and each of their qualities along with it. Nature is, in a way, fate and destiny.

But beyond all that, in this definition we get an actual explanation, or about as much as one as we’re likely to get: nature is “the mirror of truth”. Nature reflects true things. It is not itself true things, but it shows them to those who look and observe. Consider your reflection in a mirror: the mirror is not you, but it shows how you are. It shows your form, your age, your condition; it shows you. Likewise, nature shows all these things, but it is not these things on its own. Nature is a reflection, a microcosm of something greater, and what’s greater than the cosmos we find ourselves in? God is bigger than the world, after all; is God truth? (Well, duh.) What is truth? Truth is “the body of the incorporeal and the light of the invisible”. These statements must be meant metaphorically, because they on their own don’t make sense.

What are bodies? Bodies are corporeal masses, things with form and length and breadth and depth, things with “quality and quantity” (VII.4). These things do not belong to incorporeal things, since quality and quantity are sensible just as bodies are. The solely intelligible, however, are without bodies, and as such cannot be sensed. However, they can be known. They have some sort of substance, but it is not material substance. The concepts, the words, the knowledge itself has a form, and that form is the “body” of the incorporeal. What they are is truth; a truth is something intelligible that exists.
What is light? Light is “a clear vision which makes appear all of the visible things” (II.6). However, the invisible cannot be seen, so light does it no good. However, light can be used to see visible things in the darkness, clearing away ignorance of the physical world around ourselves. Likewise, truth can be used in the same way to know the invisible things in ignorance. Truth is the means by which we come to know the things that are invisible without seeing them.

Nature, then, is the reflection of things that are. Nature is the material, corporeal result of the intelligible and incorporeal; just as software code is the reflection of its design, or a constructed building the reflection of its blueprints, nature is the reflection of truth. If what is intelligible is truth, then God is also truth.

Just as “whatever God does, he does it for man” is a truth (VIII.2), so too does the world reflect that: “the generous nature of this world teaches all the beings”. If perfection of the soul is knowledge of the beings (VI.3), and it is our soul’s directive to come to know God by knowing all the beings (VII.3, VIII.4), then the world exists to help us do that. The soul works within the body to learn; the world offers itself to learn from. Again, “man’s possession is the world” (VI.1), so it would almost (maybe not quite?) be tautological to say that it’s for our benefit. Further, Man’s job is to experience the entire world in all its parts for the benefit of the soul and body (VII.2), so we must fully experience and learn from the world in all that it has to teach us and offer us. Every part of the world is necessary to experience and know for ourselves to be perfected in body, soul, and Nous. Add to it, if we make use of the Hermetic maxim “as above, so below”, then we might also say that because everything God does is for Man, then everything the World does is also for Man, since the World is a microcosm reflecting the macrocosmic God. This makes sense because “nature is the mirror of truth”, so whatever is done above is done below; that which is below represents, reflects, and indicates that which is above; if the nature of God is to act for Man, then the nature of the world is to do the same, as is the nature of Man (which gives the actions of Man a dual meaning here, both for himself as well as for soul/soul-Nous/God).

Since nothing God does is not for Man, then nothing the World is or does is not for Man. Thus, nothing is made, done, or created in vain; this is similar to the statement in VI.1, where “if there were nobody to see [the world], what would be seen would not even exist”. All things exist for a purpose and that is to act by God within God for Man and God. Further, by properly seeking to learn what the world generously teaches us, we come to fully experience the world, perfecting our bodies and our souls in the process, coming to the perfection of the soul, which is the knowledge of beings as well as of God. Thus, “if it seems to you that nothing is a vain work, you will find the work and the craftsman”, where the work is the body, soul, world, and beings and where the craftsman is God. Neglecting this, however, yields the opposite result: “to you like a mockery, you will be mocked at”. This is another thinly-veiled warning, much as from VI.3: “just as you will behave towards the soul when it is in this body, likewise it will behave towards you when it has gone out of the body”.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-fourth definition, part VIII, number 6 of 7:

You have the power of getting free since you have been given everything. Nobody envies you. Everything came into being for you, so that by means of either one (being) or of the whole, you may understand the craftsman. For you have the power of not understanding with your (own) will; you have the power of lacking faith and being misled, so that you will understand the contrary of the (real) beings. Man has as much power as the gods. Only man (is) a free living (being), only he has the power of good and evil.

At last, Hermes takes on the role of Captain Planet and tells us definitively that the power is ours! What power is that? That of “getting [ourselves] free”. But free from what? That’s something that’s only been hinted at before: lack of divine-Nous (VIII.4, V.2), which is that which we seek in order to perfect ourselves by means of perfecting our souls (VI.3). After all, our deficiency or evil is ignorance of God, since our grace and good is in knowledge (VII.5) of the world (VI.3, VIII.4). We free ourselves from being deprived of and separated consciously from God to rejoin God as God, while those who are not (yet) free are those who “have gone astray” and worship human opinion (VIII.1, VIII.3) instead of worshiping truth and God reasonably (V.2, V.3, VIII.3). By being in our current body-soul state, we end up with good and evil (VII.4), and having to choose between them. While this choice is apparent down here, it’s only a reflection of true existence of God (VIII.5), and it’s ultimately a false choice, since such things only exist down here in this material realm. By freeing ourselves of this false choice, we return to the original grace and plenitude of real knowledge, of harmony with the divine.

But how can this be accomplished? We must strive to become godly by emulating and becoming close to God because we “have been given everything”; after all, our possession “is the world” (VI.1), and it’s our duty to fully explore and understand the world to complete ourselves (VII.2), by means of which we understand our body, thence our soul, thence God (VIII.4). Literally everything that exists, especially within the world but also beyond it, exists for our own sake (VIII.5), because Nous dwells within us and wants us to rejoin fully with Nous. See how all these definitions are to building upon itself into a cohesive philosophy and guide to salvation? It’s been taking some time, but now we start to see how we’re able and meant to do the Work we’re called to do.

Does that make us, as humans and part of Man, special? After all, we’re the only beings capable of being endowed with Nous. In a sense, yes, but not in the sense that we have to jealously guard our specialness. ”Nobody envies [us]“, but what does that mean, really? People often confuse jealousy and envy, but the two are subtly different: jealousy is desire to keep others from possessing something of our own, while envy is desire to obtain something that someone else has that we lack. Thus, if someone were to envy us, they’d envy us for either our capability of having Nous or our actual obtaining of Nous, but Hermes tells us that nobody envies us for that. Why? Well, other beings without the capability of Nous don’t know any better. Of the animate creatures, animals only concern themselves with themselves and don’t process death or birth like we do, and the heavenly beings are already immortal and detached from the material realm; while they are part of God, they are without the reason that enables them to realize it or perform acts that only humans can. Of the inanimate creatures, plants and stones…well, they’re plants and stones. They don’t do much of anything in terms of motion, since they have no animating soul.

But what about other humans? Well, other humans are similarly capable of possessing Nous and themselves have soul-Nous to link them back to the divine Nous/God, so they can’t envy anyone else for something they already have. (The humans who lack soul-Nous, like those mentioned in VIII.4, are basically relegated to the realm of animals, which sounds cruel, but that’s just a result of the maldevelopment of body and soul.) We’re all given the starting chance, capability, and resources to apply ourselves to our goal and to our Work, so we’re all on the same starting line, more or less. The only thing that some of us might envy others is the possession of divine-Nous within ourselves, those who have been bestowed Nous through their use of reason. But then, they worked for it. They used the chances and resources they had that everyone has. They earned what they did and completed their objective.

Why should other people who strive for obtaining divine-Nous envy those who have already obtained it? They shouldn’t; to do so is unreasonable, and inhibits their progress towards obtaining divine-Nous through reasonable work. Thus, if they do, they’re not really striving for divine-Nous as they ought, and end up going astray and ending up content in their own world of human opinion and unreasonable speech. What about those who don’t bother striving for divine-Nous? These people (and I have materialist atheists who call all religion and spirituality hokum in mind) don’t see the point in any such endeavor, and thus mock those who strive and have striven for divine-Nous; they find that the Nous-strivers and their worldview are mockeries, and they “will be mocked at” in turn (VIII.5). These, too, end up in a world of human opinion and unreasonable speech (as far as Hermes is concerned), and they will have their own rewards in time; they don’t care nor work towards Nous, so they don’t envy the Nous-strivers anyway. Thus, nobody can really envy those who strive for Nous, either for their starting point or their destination.

Again, we humans have the power to free ourselves from mortality and lack of God. Everything that exists exists, in effect, for us: “everything came into being for you, so that by means of either one being or of the whole, you may understand the craftsman”. Nothing in this cosmos or Creation was created in vain or for uselessness, because “whatever God does, he does it for man” (VIII.2). Further, by inspecting the nature of the world, we come to know truth, and truth is the existence and body of the intelligible without body. Truth is God, and truth was made by God; God is the “craftsman” (VIII.5), and by understanding God’s work, we understand God. This, again, is both “knowledge of the beings” (VI.3) and knowledge of God (VII.5), and this is the perfection of the soul, our aim and directive. We can either inspect just one thing that exists, such as ourselves or the nature of a particular function of the world, or we inspect all things that operate as a whole, but either way it leads to God. Inspecting any nature leads to truth (VIII.5), and since truth is intelligible, truth has no body, no quantity nor quality as bodies do. Truth is, in effect, divinely simple: there are no parts to Truth, but there is only Truth. It’s like understanding the entirety of the human body to understand how it develops, or a single cell and its DNA which represents all of it in a compressed manner; both represent human nature in their own ways at different levels. All of the things that exist are not really distinguished from each other except in appearance, since all things are part of and within God, and also God itself. So long as we actually do the work of understanding, we’ll get to our goal.

Of course, we have the choice to do the opposite, as well: “for you have the power of not understanding with your own will”. Remember that as a soul descends into the body, it gains good and evil as well as quantity and quality (VII.4), and we can be good and choose knowledge or we can be evil and choose ignorance (VII.5). Further, we have the “faculty of killing”, which is to say that we have the ability to continue death and mortality for ourselves or we can shed it by returning to our immortal natures. It’s all up to us, really, and goes hand-in-hand with what we understand and what we choose to understand: “you have the power of lacking faith and being mislead, so that you understand the contrary of the real beings”. If the perfection of the soul is knowledge of the beings, then the imperfection of the soul is the lack of knowledge of beings, or believing other things that aren’t real or true. In either case, we unreasonably distance ourselves from knowledge, and therefore lengthen our path to perfection or shut it down entirely into perdition (V.2).

We can choose salvation and knowledge or perdition and ignorance; we can choose Heaven or Hell for ourselves; we can choose Life or Death. This is no trivial thing; these are things that were only ascribed to major powers before Hermeticism, and indeed, Hermes says that “man has as much power as the gods”. We are powerful in similar, though not the same, ways as the gods are; we own and use and work with and live in the world because it is our possession, just as we and the gods are God’s possession. The world is the lot of Man, and we essentially rule it and manage it. Our powers are vast, and incredibly potent, though they should not be confused with that of the other gods or heavenly beings. For instance, Venus is the goddess of love, lust, beauty, and luxury; she bestows these things, because she is these things. She does what she is, and thus acts according to her nature. We have our own natures and our own powers, and we use them in similar ways on our own targets.

However, unlike gods, Man is different in that we don’t always act for the Good like other living creatures do: “only man is a free living being, only he has the power of good and evil”. Venus does what she does because that’s what she is; she can do no other, and she can choose no other thing to do. She has her own mode of operation, her own directive, and nothing that inhibits her from doing it. Man, however, doesn’t have to follow his nature and soul-Nous; we can choose good and evil, knowledge or ignorance, life or death. In that sense, Man is given free will in a manner utterly unlike other living creatures. Plants can only grow and synthesize energy; animals can only act according to instinct; gods can only act according to their divine natures. Man, however, can act according to or against his nature, for better or for worse. And it’s pretty clear at this point what those choices are and manifest as, and which of those choices we should be picking.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-fifth definition, part VIII, number 7 of 7:

You do not have the power of becoming immortal; neither does, indeed, the immortal (have the power) of dying. You can even become a god if you want, for it is possible. Therefore want and understand and believe and love; then you have become (it)!

So the rest of this section of definitions has been building up a theme involving the power of Man: we are powerful, and have the power within ourselves as bestowed by God to stay in the world as mere animals or to transcend it as part of God. It’s really all up to us; our actions, our thoughts, our opinions, our worship, our experiences all help us develop ourselves to perfection or inhibit our development. In that sense, “man has as much power as the gods” (VIII.6); we have the power of choosing for ourselves (each and every one of us) mortal, material perdition or immortal, transcendent salvation. Again, the whole goal of perfection and development according to the Definitions as a whole is knowledge of God, and by knowing God we come to know everything that exists and ourselves, and vice versa.

That said, keep in mind that despite all this power we’re entitled to have, we’re not omnipotent. We’re still human, and therefore consist of body and soul; we’re dual-natured, which means we still have some sort of nature, and since we’re sensible, we are not purely intelligible as God is. Our nature as humans is to die; we are mortal, after all, and the nature of things with material bodies is to die eventually. Remember that “all beings cannot exceed their own capacity” and that “every being in this world has a nature” (VIII.1); we have our own nature that we cannot change. Thus, even though we have the choice of choosing immortality for our souls, we “do not have the power of becoming immortal”. To do so is simply not in our nature, and we cannot change our nature. This natural law is something above destiny or choice, and while our nature is capable of possessing Nous, our nature is not capable of becoming a heavenly being, since human beings are not heavenly beings (owing to the different bodies, forms, and natures we possess). Likewise, “neither does, indeed, the immortal have the power of dying”; it’s not in their nature to. So it’s not just that we’re declined the power of changing natures, but everything is; whatever something is according to its nature, that is going to be how it will be for that being.

Despite that we cannot change our natures, we still have great power: “you can even become a god if you want”. This may pose something of a problem, since we’re told at once that we cannot change our natures, and yet we can become divine. Our nature as Man is to be human; this is understood. We’re subject to natural law, the human condition, “quality and quantity as well as good and evil” (VII.4). That said, it is also the nature of Man to be godly, if only we come to know God in the process, which we’re all capable of doing. This is because we are made like God “after the species” (I.1), so whatever God is, we inherently are in a way apart from other living creatures. But because of our twofold nature, this is complicated by the presence of the soul inhabiting the body. We alone dwell in the sensible world and understand (or are capable of understanding) the intelligible world, and we alone dwell throughout and in all parts of the sensible world. This is similar to how God exists throughout and in all parts of the intelligible world, which extends beyond the sensible world in all possible ways (IV.3, IV.4). Thus, by becoming gods in our own right within God, we’re simply following our nature and expanding upon it into the fullness of knowledge that is the fullness of the world within God.

This is complicated, I know, since it seems contradictory. Aren’t gods immortal? Yes: gods, as heavenly beings such as those made of fire, do not die, the quality of being immortal. However, Man dies, or more properly, the body of Man dies while the soul lives on in its own way. We know that the soul is not so tightly coupled with the body that the soul perishes with the body (VI.2); rather, the soul leaves the body upon the body dying, and the soul leaves. However, while the body requires the soul to move, the soul requires the body to develop. If the body dies before the soul completes its development, it is “imperfect and lacks a body” (VI.3), but we don’t yet know what happens to remedy that. If the soul requires the body to develop and it is made to leave the body before it can finish developing, then perhaps the soul returns to another body in a sort of reincarnation or transmigration; it hasn’t yet been said in the Definitions, but it’s also immaterial here. The point is that the soul is immortal, as is the essence of Man, though the realization of Man as human beings is imperfect as all realizations of ideas are. We are not just our bodies, and in a sense our bodies are not truly who or what we are, no more than any given pine tree is the idea of pine trees or the DNA of pine trees.

As humans with perfected souls, we are enjoined with God in perfect knowledge of God, which is in our nature, capability, and reason to do; this is what makes us gods in our own nature. This is not just some grand, divine theological statement, but a practical one: “you can even become a god if you want, for it is possible”. It is possible for us to perfect our souls; it doesn’t state when, how, or under what circumstances. It’s possible for us no matter who, what, or where we are. It’s possible for us, this very moment in each of our lives even, to perfect our soul. Every moment that we have not perfected our souls or done what is necessary for perfection is one in which we’ve essentially chosen not to, since if we were to just listen to the urges of our souls, we would naturally come to perfection and therefore godhood (VII.3). In a way, it’s almost Buddhist in its similarity to realization of one’s Buddha-nature; we just need to see through the inane material BS going on in our lives, wipe away the dirt and grime, and let the truth of our existence shine.

Of course, this is more difficult than it sounds. Many people are entrenched in unreasonable words or living or choices, or are made to be so by others, and it’s hard for many of us to understand or even listen to our souls and its urgings to do the right thing for ourselves. If it were easy, then we wouldn’t need Hermeticism or Christianity or Thelema or Buddhism or any other path; we’d just naturally do what comes to us. But it’s in our nature to choose what we do, beyond what animals or heavenly beings do; this set of choices that faces us each and every moment can lead us to knowledge of God or away from knowledge of God. But the fact remains that it’s possible to do the right thing for ourselves no matter who we are, so even in our present lives, we can attain perfection and, thus, godhood and godliness.

So what do we do? Hermes gives four commands to us to guide us to perfection: “therefore want and understand and believe and love”. By following these injunctions, we will “have become [gods]“. So what do these four commands really tell us to do?

Want. Many of our choices are fueled by what we like and what we don’t like, or what we fear and what we desire. From our lizard brain to our emotional brain to our logical brain, all our choices are backed up by some sort of logic based on what we want to happen for ourselves. If we are to perfect ourselves, we must want to perfect ourselves in every way, so that our entire body works in unison with what our soul wants. Our soul wants perfection; we must consciously recognize that want, and similarly want it as well. We have to consciously want perfection in order for us to obtain it.
Understand. It’s all well and good to want perfection, but if we don’t know why we want something or how to accomplish it, then we’re going to be stranded at square one. In order to properly want something, we need good logic behind it that appeals to our lizard, emotional, and rational brains. These logical reasons must be reasonable; thus, we must employ Logos, reasonable speech, in ourselves and in our lives. This helps us to understand ourselves and how we work, and likewise how we function across the entire world that we’ve inherited and possess. By understanding ourselves, we understand the world, and vice versa; by understanding ourselves, we understand God, and vice versa; by coming to understand God, we perfect ourselves. Thus, we must be completely aware of ourselves and our entire existence, both in and of the world, so as to be immanent within it and transcendent of it.
Believe. There’s a lot of things in the cosmos that we cannot yet understand; this is natural, since it takes time for us to understand any one thing. For instance, if you don’t understand the principle of heat, you won’t understand how cooking with heat changes food. Likewise, until we understand the sensible world, we won’t understand the intelligible world, which is where truth really lies. However, even if we don’t fully understand it, we can still believe in it. Belief is where we hold something to be true without having reason for it yet; we must use reason to test that belief, and if it holds up to actually be true, then that belief becomes understandable knowledge. Understanding little things helps us to believe larger things, even if we don’t yet fully understand the larger things. This is especially true of that which is purely intelligible e.g. God, so we must believe in God and the intelligible for us to understand it. Thus, we must believe things properly just as we must reason about things properly. We must believe “that nothing is a vain work”, for then we “will find the work and the craftsman”, but if we believe that everything exists as some sort of nihilist joke, then we “will be mocked at” (VIII.5), which is a euphemistic threat for nothing good.
Love. This isn’t something that’s come up before, but it’s a natural progression of belief, just as belief was from understanding and understanding from wanting. We must love perfection as something to be worshipped, or seen as worthy of our entire selves and work. We must hold perfection, and the object and goal of perfection of God, close to us as something that we not just adore but aspire to join with. We have to give ourselves wholly in body, in soul, in spirit, and in mind to God so as to become perfect. We need to devote ourselves in a passionate, almost lustful way that makes use of our entire selves, leaving nothing leftover, to the highest goal we possibly can. We must love perfection. We must love God.

Note how, by that last injunction of love, this forms a type of cycle, an iterative process towards perfection. After all, if we devote ourselves to perfection and we yet lack it, we must follow it and chase it and strive to obtain it. This is, essentially, wanting perfection. So if we want to love perfection, we must believe in it; if we are to believe in it, we must understand it; if we are to understand it, we must want it; if we are to want it, we must love it. Even with just a curious desire to do something, this will open the door and start one off on the path to perfection, but it may be a long road. It’s an iterative process that builds upon itself; we want a little, then eventually we want more, then we want even more, and so on. Eventually, our wanting, our understanding, our believing, our loving will become so great that it will completely overwhelm any evil, ignorant, unreasonable choice we might possibly make, and we will end up in perfection of ourselves.

Want, understand, believe, and love. This is the Work.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-sixth definition, part IX, number 1 of 7:

Every man has a notion of God: for if he is a man, he also knows God. Every man, by the very (fact) that he has (got) a notion of God, is a man, for it is not (given) to every man to have (such a) notion. Man and the gods and all things (exist) by God and because of man. God is everything and there is nothing outside God, even that which does not exist: since as to God, there is no such thing, even one single <that he is not himself>. Man (comes) from another man, the gods (exist) because of God. Man (exists) because of God; everything because of man. God rules over man; man over the whole.

As we get towards the final 14 of these definitions, you’ll note that a lot of them get pretty lengthy, but are no less important. Sections VIII, IX, and X all have seven definitions each, and every word here counts, just as in all the others. Don’t let the length of these final few definitions get to you; we’re getting into some of the really juicy stuff now that we’ve tackled the foundations and groundwork of Hermetic philosophy according to the Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus.

Remember that, as human beings made as Man in the image of God, we are bestowed with both body and soul. Heavenly beings and animals also have body and soul, but we’re different from both; heavenly beings are immortal while we are immortal, and neither heavenly beings nor animals are capable of possessing Nous. True, Nous dwells within all souls, since not only is God within everything and transcendent of it all, but they are only capable of possessing the Nous that directs them according to their nature. Man, on the other hand, mortal as he is, is capable of possessing the divine Nous that connects him to God and makes him into a god; this is radically different, and separates us out from the rest of all sensible living creatures. Because we have that sliver of God within ourselves as well as the capability of understanding God, we’re attuned to the realm of divinity in a way that other creatures are not.

Thus, “every man has a notion of God”. After all, we naturally according to our soul’s urgings would follow and understand God, so it’s pretty much an inborn quality of Man for us to know God, or at least have opinions of God or gods. It’s natural for us to think in terms of the divine and heaven, even if by our choices and understanding relegate it strictly to a material point of view (not just modern atheistic physicists, but also classical Stoics held this notion). We are made in the image of God, after all, and thus, if we have any knowledge of ourselves at all, we have at least some knowledge of God: “if he is a man, he also knows God”. Further, “every man, by the very fact that he has got a notion of God is a man”, which logically follows; this is just a repetition of the nature of Man, made in the image of God and whose perfection rests in knowing God.

But “it is not given to every man to have such a notion”. How can this be, if we just said that every man has a notion of God? We’ve seen a similar backtracking before in VIII.4: “every man has a body and a soul…there are two types of Nous: the one is divine and the other belongs to soul…there are certain men who do not have even that of soul”. Just as some men are incapable of possessing even soul-Nous, there are some men who are incapable of conceiving of God, i.e. the intelligible, i.e. anything not-sensible. This sounds unfair, but again it’s a result of the maldevelopment of souls and bodies. Just as not all souls with soul-Nous yet have divine-Nous, there are some souls who do not have soul-Nous…perhaps yet? Constant development may be needed to even begin the work of becoming human, or we might better say evolution here. Just as plants are more complex than stones, and animals more complex than plants, humans are more complex than animals; however, humans with soul and without soul-Nous are relegated to the same qualities as animals, just as humans without notions of God are. These two qualities or accidents may very well be linked, but there’s nothing concrete in the definitions to say as much yet. Suffice it to say for now that Man includes only those life forms who are both physically and spiritually mature enough to fall into the category of human beings with the capability of reason or Logos.

Again, how do we evolve so as to be physically and spiritually mature enough to wield Logos, have a notion of God, and “want and understand and believe and love” perfection of knowledge of God (VIII.7)? We must use that which we have: our natures, the world, and everything that exists. Everything exists for our sake, after all; “whatever God does, he does it for man” (VIII.2) and “everything came into being for you, so that by means of either one being or of the whole, you may understand [God]” (VIII.6). Thus, “man and the gods and all things exist by God because of man”. Everything exists for our sake, not just the world which is “man’s possession” (VI.1), but everything intelligible and sensible.

In a sense, God itself exists for our sake. Consider that everything God does is for the sake of Man; God cannot act on things other than God, because nothing is not God and everything is within and part of God. God acts on itself and within itself for the sake of Man. Everything is within God and part of God: “God is everything and there is nothing outside God”, which accords with much of what we’ve seen before (III.1, III.4). Moreover, there is nothing outside God “even that which does not exist: since as to God, there is no such thing, even one single (thing) that he is not himself”. Basically, there is no such thing as something that “does not exist”. God is literally everything: everything that is, everything that isn’t, everything that was and is no longer, everything that isn’t but yet will be, everything that never will be, everything that ever could be, everything that always is, everything that is some combination of the above, everything that is none of the above, and everything that is something else. God is infinite, without end, encompassing every possibility. It’s hard to grasp this without any kind of sensible example (being the sensible creatures that we are), but suffice it to say that no matter what you can imagine or how big you imagine it, God is always going to be that and far more.

As a result, all things come from God, since God is “previous to all the intelligible beings” (III.4) and the intelligible world is “larger than everything [sensible]” (III.3). Whatever exists does so because of God (as creator) and because of Man (as purpose). Thus, just as “man comes from another man” through birth, “the gods exist because of God”; God creates all heavenly beings, and indeed all beings that exist (or don’t exist). Similarly, “man exists because of God”, because God creates all things and is the “father of the intelligible”, which itself is the ”maker of the body” (III.4). However, because all things exist because of God, everything also exists because of Man, because God does nothing that is not for Man. Man may not be the maker of all things, but we are the beneficiary of all things.

As beneficiaries, we basically own that which exists for us; thus, “man [rules] over the whole”, referring to the whole of existence, including the world. We already know that “man’s possession is the world” (VI.1), and that Man has as much power as the gods themselves do (VIII.6), especially since we ourselves can become gods (VIII.7). However, we are not all-powerful; that alone goes to God, and “God rules over man”. After all, the scope of Man’s action is far less than what God does (VIII.2), as well as our knowledge and understanding of things. However, God is effectively the only thing that truly rules over the immortal being of Man, since we are made in the image of God by God.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-seventh definition, part IX, number 2 of 7:

The exterior (things) are understood by the external (organs): the eye sees the exterior (things), and Nous the interior. The exterior (things) would not exist, if there were not the interior (ones). Where(ever) Nous (is), there is light; for Nous is light and light is Nous. Who(ever) has Nous is enlightened, and who(ever) has not Nous is deprived of light.

Okay, so not all of the final definitions are long, and in fact this one is pretty straightforward. Let’s jump in, shall we? First, recall that there’s a crucial difference between that which is sensible and intelligible: the intelligible cannot be sensed unless it is has a sensible nature. It might be known or understood, but it cannot be sensed. All sensible things are intelligible, but not all intelligible things are sensible. That which makes the intelligible sensible is the presence of a body: all things with bodies are sensible.

We witness and observe the sensible things by the sensations they give us by means of our sensory organs. Thus, we see visible things with our eyes; we hear audible things with our ears; we smell odiferous things with our nose; we feel motion with our sense of balance. Some things are triggered by more than one sense, such as luminescent food that triggers both sight and taste. Some things trigger only one, some things trigger all of them at once. If something is registered as existing by at least one sense organ, it is sensible; moreover, it is external to the essential Man. The act of sense only makes logical sense if we have the sensor and sensee; if there is nothing external to someone, then nothing can be sensed. That’s why God has no senses and cannot sense anything, for God has all sensations within itself (VIII.2). Humans, however, are not everything like how God is, and so there are things that are not-humans, and so can be sensed by humans, including other humans.

Thus, “exterior things are understood by external organs”: things that are sensible are registered by the senses. As an example, the definition gives that of the eye: “the eye sees the exterior things”. However, the definition also gives a comparison, where the “Nous [sees] the interior [things]” just as “the eye sees the exterior things”. This accords with V.1, where “Nous sees everything, and eyes all corporeal things”. And about that bit about Nous seeing everything, where this definition says that Nous sees all internal things? This is about the things that cannot be sensed but still exist, i.e. the intelligible. Remember that “all of that [which is] visible cannot possibly be constituted without the invisible”. Nous sees “every move of soul” (II.6), and has all sensations and understanding within himself (VII.2); this is confirmed as the definition says “the exterior things would not exist, if there were not the interior ones”.

Nous is capable of understanding and “sensing” (in its own way) everything, while the corporeal body can only sense that which is sensible. However, all of that sensible stuff is fed as data to the Nous: “the eyes [become an observer] for Nous” (V.1). But Nous sees everything to begin with; Nous is both the means of sensing, the source of it, and the result of it. Without Nous, nothing would be known; with Nous, we can know things. There’s another word for this, introduced way back in II.6: light. Recall that light “makes appear all of the visible things”, and “light appears just as it is by itself”. The connections between Nous and light back there are made more clear here: “wherever Nous is, there is light; for Nous is light and light is Nous”. Think about that: we recognized light as a “good”, just as Nous is the Good (II.1); we assumed a connection between the two there, and now it’s confirmed here. Nous is what makes everything appear “as it is by itself”. Nous is what helps us to understand the intelligible things that we may come to know them. Light is what helps us to see the sensible things that we may come to know them. Nous is light, light is Nous.

This parallel can be seen earlier in VIII.5. Recall that “nature is the mirror of truth”, where truth is the form and essence of the intelligible things, and that we come to know truth by means of looking at nature. However, how do mirrors work? If we can’t see anything, the mirror doesn’t reflect anything. Mirrors work by reflecting light. Light is the means by which mirrors can reflect images. Light is what helps us see truth from nature, and which helps us see nature from truth. By coming to understand even part of the world, we come to understand God by the illumination of sense, observation, and understanding. What exists in the intelligible world is reflected down into the sensible world, and what exists in the sensible world is reflected up into the intelligible world. Light is what makes either of these things known to us by means of the other. And, since light is Nous and vice versa, Nous is what helps us understand everything.

When we come to a state of complete understanding, we often refer to this as “enlightenment”. We use it to translate the nirvana/nibbana of the Buddhists, the moksha of the Hindus, and for other states of awareness and at-one-ness in other paths. Note the root of that word: “en-light-enment”. One who is enlightened has the quality of being made or put into light. A similar term is “illumination”, coming from the Latin word lux, also meaning light. When we have Nous, we then have light; as our souls are joined with Nous, we are joined with light. We are literally made into light; we are enlightened. Thus, “whoever has Nous is enlightened”.

Similarly, the converse is true: “whoever has not Nous is deprived of light”. If one does not have Nous, one does not have light. Without Nous, we cannot reach enlightenment, since we cannot understand things as they are. That’s the whole point of Hermeticism, to perfect the soul through knowledge of the beings and of God. Without light, we cannot see, and without Nous, we cannot understand. If Nous sees by means of the eyes, and we have no Nous, then our sight is basically wasted, like having functional eyes for someone who is otherwise blind. That sight information, spiritually speaking, goes nowhere except the body itself; this is an animal condition, if we see for ourselves and not for Nous. Further, if we go back to the “nature is the mirror of truth” image, if we have no light, then we cannot see into the mirror. Without sight, we cannot understand the natures of sensible things and so cannot understand the corresponding intelligible things. Without Nous, we cannot understand the truth of intelligible things and so cannot see the corresponding sensible things.

The connection between eyesight and soulsight is important. Remember that Man is the only one among the living beings with capacity for Nous; although Nous exists within all souls, it’s our special capacity for divine Nous that allows us to become closer to and as God once we’re spiritually mature enough for it. This involves, again, a process of experience of the state, condition, and situation we’re in as human beings with a mortal body and immortal soul. We alone among the living beings belong to and experience all the parts of the sensible world, and since the sensible reflects the intelligible and vice versa, we can come to know all the things by means of that which we see and understand down here. Mankind is a very sight-based animal, and we’ve evolved to have fairly good eyesight as our primary sense. By using imagery associated with sight, Hermes does us a solid and makes things a little easier to understand.

Today, let’s discuss the thirty-eighth definition, part IX, number 3 of 7:

Who(ever) knows God, does not fear God; who(ever) does not know God fears God. Who(ever) knows none of the beings fears everyone; who(ever) knows all of them fears none.

So we know that the perfection of the soul, the whole point of living according to Hermes Trismegistus, is to know God; this is our “plenitude”, our “good” (VII.5). This is equivalent to knowing all that exists (VI.3), both in the mutually-reflective sensible world and intelligible world (VIII.5). In coming to know God, we come to know ourselves; by coming to know ourselves, we come to know God. Our nature is godly; as “nature is the mirror of truth”, we can see and know God through ourselves. Cool stuff, cool stuff.

Recall also from the last definition that Nous is light and light is Nous. Since God is Nous and Nous is God, we can also say that God is light and light is God. Nous, the divine Mind, is both the thing that knows as well as the action of knowing and the object of knowledge all at once; recall the identification in V.1 between Nous and Logos, Mind and Word; the Mind is what it does. Likewise, light is knowledge, knowing, and knower all at once. When we understand something by knowing it, we know what it’s like, how it acts, how it manifests, how it comes into being and passes out of being (if possible). We see it, experience it, and as a result come to be it. After all, as we join with divine Nous, we return to God and know God, and since God is literally everything everywhere all the time constantly forever eternally, we come to know all things. We become all things, everything everywhere all the time constantly forever eternally. Again, cool stuff.

As a result, “whoever knows God, does not fear God”. We haven’t yet encountered the concept of fear yet in the Definitions, but we have encountered warnings and threats to our immortality and well-being by choosing ignorance and evil instead of knowledge and good. We don’t choose ignorance because we enjoy being ignorant; we choose ignorance because that’s what we think is good for us (VIII.1, VIII.6), despite what our soul urges us to do (VII.7). If we know God, we completely hear and understand what is good for us, and so we do what we must and are urged to do because that’s what we know for a fact to be good. We understand what is good and what the Good is, and how we relate to it. There is nothing to fear here, nothing to make us choose anything else but good and knowledge, since we are not swayed by unreasonable opinions.

However, those who are swayed by unreasonable opinions choose ignorance of God, and “whoever does not know God fears God”. There really isn’t anything to fear to begin with, of course; Man is blessed to be made in the image of God, and we are in our own ways part of God. God has nothing against us, since we are within God. However, people who fear God have no understanding of what God is, and since “nature is the mirror of truth”, they have no understanding of who they themselves are. They lack knowledge generally of themselves, of the beings, and of God.

Let’s go back to the imagery of light for a bit. If you’re in a well-lit room, you can see what’s around you; nothing is hidden from you, you know where to step to avoid harm and enjoy luxury, you know what’s present and what’s missing. With light, you see and know what’s in the room. If there are people in it, you can see them too, and can see who they are, what they have, and the like. Nothing surprises you, nothing hides from you, nothing is hidden from you. Without light, however, you’d be in a pitch black room without any means to know what’s going on. You can’t see whether there’s a chair in front of you or not, so you fear to walk forward lest you hurt yourself. You can’t see whether there’s a dog or a murderer in the room, so you fear for your livelihood. Everything is hidden from you, even if there’s really nothing even there, and you end up in fear.

It’s the same with the world. By knowing everything by God through Light with Nous, we see and understand all the things that exist. We’re aware of them, how to act with them, how to keep ourselves well while avoiding or interacting with them, how to talk with them, and so forth. Without knowledge, we don’t know what to do. We fear these things. Even if we have nothing to fear, we fear them; this is unreasonable, because we don’t understand them, and a lack of understanding is a lack of reason. Thus, “whoever knows none of the beings fears everyone; whoever knows all of them fears none”. If we know even one being, we know them all (“by means of either one being or of the whole, you may understand”, VIII.6), but if we don’t know even one being, we know nothing at all. And, even by understanding one being, we understand God.

How might we go about fearing God through a lack of knowledge? Human opinion (VIII.1), mostly, and unreasonable speech (V.3). Both of these things work hand-in-hand and serve to lead Man astray on his path to God, either by setting up false gods who end up getting worshipped instead of God, or by letting others determine one’s action for oneself instead of listing to one’s soul. By not understanding the truth of God, we don’t understand ourselves and our relationship to God. Thus, we might assume God is capable of punishing and murdering us (when definition VIII.3 suggests otherwise), or that God is eternally separated from us (when VII.5 and other definitions contradict that), or that God is a material, living entity with a beginning (when III.4 says that’s wrong). In another sense, we might think that God acts on behalf of some humans or does their bidding, or we might think that God acts in political ways within religions or groups; these are likewise wrong, and are fueled by human opinion for human needs, just as unreasonable speech serves unreasoning humans (V.2).

As for the world, if we know God, then we know all beings, and we fear them no longer. At the risk of sounding like a trite New Age guru, by becoming enlightened through God we come to be at one with all things, understanding all things as part of ourselves as we are part of God through the ubiquitous Nous that sees and knows all things. Just as we don’t (or shouldn’t) properly fear our own hands or our teeth, when we are at one with other beings, we don’t fear them, either; they are us and we are them, just as we are God and within God. The whole illusion of duality and separation that we have in the meanwhile leads us to unreasonably think that “they can hurt me” or “they will kill me”, since we perceive other beings to external to us and not as extensions of us or as us. We end up seeing ourselves as victims of the world instead as owners of it, and we fear that which we rule (IX.1).

I’m tempted to draw a connection between the use of “fear” in this definition and the use of “love” from VIII.7. There, we are told that one of the ways we are to perfect ourselves is to “love”, which comes about from belief and which leads into desire of perfection and God. If we love something, we come to understand it and know it, we chase after it, we long to be with it, we strive to serve it. If we fear something, we run away from it, we disavow it, we defend ourselves against it, we shut it out. Those who know God are those who are perfected, and those who are perfected are those who love. What do they love? God, and by extension, themselves and all beings. In love they are at one with God and the cosmos; in fear they separate themselves from them and shut them out.

49 Days of Definitions: Part V, Definition 3

49 Days of Definitions: Part VI, Definition 1

49 Days of Definitions: Part VI, Definition 2

49 Days of Definitions: Part VI, Definition 3

49 Days of Definitions: Part VII, Definition 1

49 Days of Definitions: Part VII, Definition 2

49 Days of Definitions: Part VII, Definition 3

49 Days of Definitions: Part VII, Definition 4

49 Days of Definitions: Part VII, Definition 5

49 Days of Definitions: Part VIII, Definition 1

49 Days of Definitions: Part VIII, Definition 2

49 Days of Definitions: Part VIII, Definition 3

49 Days of Definitions: Part VIII, Definition 4

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49 Days of Definitions: Part VIII, Definition 5

49 Days of Definitions: Part VIII, Definition 6

49 Days of Definitions: Part VIII, Definition 7

49 Days of Definitions: Part IX, Definition 1

49 Days of Definitions: Part IX, Definition 2

49 Days of Definitions: Part IX, Definition 3