Related Texts • The Corpus Hermeticum • The Hermetic Arcanum • Aureus, or the Golden Tractate of Hermes Related Subjects • Gnosticism • Alchemy • Rosicrucianism • Thelema • Hermeticism

Alternative Religion/ Library

Of Vision and Apocalypse

The Pymander treatise not only belongs to the most important type of the literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistus but is also the most important document within that type. It constitutes, so to speak, the Ground Gospel of the Hermetic Communities, in the form of a revelation or apocalypse received by the founder of the tradition. That founder, however, is not so much a historical personage as the personification of a teaching-power or grade of spiritual illumination -- in other words, of one who had reached the Hermetic or rather "Thrice-greatest" state of consciousness or enlightenment.

This stage of enlightenment is characterized by a heightening of the spiritual intuition that made the mystic capable of receiving the first touch of cosmic consciousness, and of retaining it in his physical memory when he returned to the normal state. The setting forth of the divine teaching is thus naturally in the form of apocalyptic scenes but of an ordered and logical nature. The treatise purports to be a setting forth of the spiritual "Epopteia" ("seeing beyond") of the Inner Mysteries, the Vision revealed by the Great Initiator or Master Hierophant, the One Mind of all-masterhood.

This Vision, as we are told by many seers and prophets of the time, was incapable of being set forth by "tongue of flesh" in its own proper terms, since it transcended the consciousness of normal humanity. Being in itself a living potent, intelligible reality, apart from all forms either material or intellectual in any way known to man, it pervaded his very being and made his whole nature respond to a new key of truth, or rather, vibrate in a higher octave so to say, where all things while remaining the same, received a new interpretation and intensity.

The interpretation of this Vision, however, was conditioned by the "matter" of each seer; he it: was who had to clothe the naked beauty of the Truth -- as the Gnostic Marcus would have phrased it -- with the fairest: garment he himself possessed: the highest thoughts, the best science, the fairest traditions, the most grandiose imagination known to him. Thus it is that we have so many modes of expression among the mystics, so many varieties of spiritual experience -- not because the experience itself was "other;" the experience was the "same" for all -- but the describing of it was conditioned by the religious, philosophical, and scientific background of the seer.

This element, then, is the basic fact in all such apocalyptic vision. It is, however, seldom that we meet with a document that has come to us straight from the hand of a seer writing down his own immediate experience without admixture of the personal viewpoint. For the delight of this Vision is not that it gave new facts or ideas of the same nature as those already in circulation, but that it threw light on existing traditions, and showed them forth as being parts of a whole. Once a man had come into touch with the Great Synthesis, there rushed into his mind innumerable passages of scripture, scraps of myths, fragments of cosmogenesis, facts, and symbols of all kinds that fitted naturally. These were not any special writer's monopoly, there was no copyright in them, and they were all utterances of the same Logos, the Great Instructor of humanity.

The Corpus Hermeticum

Thus the literature that was produced in the Corpus Hermeticum was anonymous or pseudographic. There was first of all a nucleus of personal vision and direct illumination, then a grouping of similar matter from various sources into a whole for didactic purposes. Nor was there any idea among these mystics and scripture-writers that the form once issued should become forever stereotyped as infallible; there were many recensions and additions and interpolations. It was left to those without the sense of illumination to stereotype the forms and claim for them the infallacy of verbal dictation by the Deity. Those who wrote the apocalypses from personal knowledge of vision could not make such claim for their scriptures, for they knew how they were written and the nature of their hearing and sight at the time they were experienced.

Traditionally, we have to treat all such documents as natural human compositions, analyzing them with microscopic attention as literary compositions put together from other sources, overwritten, redacted, and interpolated. On the other hand, we have also to bear in mind that this was not done by clever manipulators and literary charlatans, but by men who regarded such work as a sacred and spiritual task, who endeavored to arrange all under the inspiration of a sweet influence for good, who believed themselves under guidance in their selection of matter, and in recombining the best in other scriptures into a new whole that might prove still better for the purpose of further enlightenment more suitable to their readers.

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