The Thrice-Greatest

Every Page of this Order begins with the Emerald Tablet, and I have taught it to Pages for nearly forty years. In that time I have been asked a thousand questions about what it means, and perhaps a hundred about where it comes from. The second kind of question is the more dangerous, because the Hermetic stream has suffered more than either of the others from people who wished it to be older, stranger or more secret than it is. What follows is the plain account. I have tried to give it as a historian would, and to keep my own opinions for the end, where the reader may skip them.

Hermes the Thrice-Greatest

When the Greeks settled in Egypt after the conquests of Alexander, they met an Egyptian god of writing, reckoning and wisdom, Thoth, the scribe of the gods and the measurer of souls. They recognised in him their own Hermes, the messenger who goes between the worlds, and over some centuries the two became one figure. To him the Egyptians gave an honorific that the Greeks rendered as Trismegistos, the Thrice-Greatest. By the first centuries of our era this Hermes had ceased to be thought of chiefly as a god and had become, in the minds of many, a sage of immense antiquity who had taught the Egyptians all their wisdom, and in whose name a great many books were written.

Those books were of two kinds. The first kind, which scholars call the technical Hermetica, dealt with astrology, alchemy, the virtues of plants and stones, and the making of amulets: practical arts, placed under the patronage of the god of learning. The second kind dealt with God, the cosmos and the soul. These are the philosophical Hermetica, and it is these that the Order means when it speaks of the Hermetic writings. They were composed in Greek, in Egypt, by authors whose names are lost, most probably between the first and the third centuries of our era. They draw upon Platonic philosophy, upon Egyptian religion and, it seems, upon Jewish thought, and they have a voice of their own that is not quite like any of these.

The philosophical writings

The philosophical treatises survive chiefly in two bodies. The first is a collection of Greek treatises gathered by Byzantine scholars and known since the Renaissance as the Corpus Hermeticum. The second is a long dialogue called the Asclepius, which survived in a Latin translation and was read throughout the Middle Ages; Saint Augustine knew it, and argued with it. Their teaching may be put briefly. God is one, and is Mind. The cosmos is God's image, a living and ordered whole, beautiful and good. The human being is a second image, a small world reflecting the great one, made of mortal body and immortal mind. "A great miracle," says the Asclepius, "is man." The purpose of human life is to know God, and the way to know God is to know oneself; for the mind that turns from the body to its source finds that its source is also its true nature.

The Shepherd of Men

The first treatise of the Corpus, called Poimandres, is a vision. Its narrator, lying in meditation, sees a great being who names himself the Mind of Sovereignty, and who shows him in a vision of light and darkness how the world was made. He sees the first Man, made in the image of God, descend through the seven planetary spheres, receiving from each of their governors a share of its nature; he sees the Man look down through the spheres, see his own image reflected in Nature, love it, and descend to dwell with it, so that he became double, mortal in body and immortal in essence. And he is told how the soul may return: rising after death through the same seven spheres, it gives back at each the quality it received there, the power of growth and decay to the first, scheming to the second, the deceit of desire to the third, the arrogance of command to the fourth, rash daring to the fifth, the greed for wealth to the sixth and falsehood to the seventh, until, stripped of all that it acquired, it enters the eighth and sings with the powers there.

This is the map of the ascent that the Page studies in the First Degree. The Order reads it not as a description of what happens after death, though it may be that too, but as a description of the inner work that may be done in life. Each sphere names a faculty of the soul and the distortion to which it is liable, and the seeker who learns to give back each distortion in turn makes of the descent a ladder.

The Discourse on the Mountain

The thirteenth treatise is a conversation between Hermes and his son Tat, who reminds his father of a promise, made while they were walking on a mountain, to teach him about rebirth. Hermes replies that rebirth cannot be taught as a lesson is taught; it is brought about by the will of God, when the seeker has made himself a stranger to the world's deceptions. He names twelve tormentors that hold the soul captive, among them ignorance, grief, intemperance, desire, injustice, greed, deceit, envy, treachery, anger, rashness and malice, and ten powers of God that drive them out, among them knowledge, joy, self-mastery, steadfastness, justice, generosity and truth. As the powers enter, Tat is changed, and cries out that he is in heaven and in earth, in water and in air, in the animals and the plants, before the womb and after it, everywhere. The treatise ends with a hymn and a charge of silence.

I have never been able to persuade myself that Edmund Ashby did not have this treatise in mind when he fixed the number of the Articles at twelve. He always denied it, with the particular firmness he kept for things that were true.

The Emerald Tablet

The Emerald Tablet is not one of the Hermetic treatises, and it is not Greek. It first appears in Arabic writings on alchemy and natural philosophy, the earliest of them attributed to Balinas, as the Arabs called Apollonius of Tyana, and dated by scholars to somewhere between the eighth and the tenth centuries. It was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, and from then until the age of Newton, who made his own translation of it, it was the charter of the European alchemists. It is very short: a dozen or so sentences, which may be read in a minute and studied for a lifetime.

It begins by declaring that what it says is true, without falsehood, certain and most true. It continues that what is below is as what is above, and what is above is as what is below, for the working of the wonders of the one thing; that as all things came from the One, by the meditation of the One, so all things are born of this one thing by adaptation. Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind carried it in its belly; its nurse is the Earth. The seeker is told to separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, gently and with great skill; the thing ascends from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives the power of the higher things and of the lower. So, it says, you will have the glory of the whole world, and all obscurity will flee from you.

Every Page reads it with the commentary I wrote for the Order in its first year, which has been revised four times since and remains a private document of the Order. I will say here only what I say to every Page at the start: that the Tablet is not a puzzle to be solved but a pattern to be lived, and that the one thing of which it speaks is nearer to the reader than the page on which it is printed.

Florence, 1463

For most of the Middle Ages the West knew Hermes only through the Asclepius, a few quotations in the Church Fathers, and the alchemists. The Greek treatises were kept in Byzantium. When the empire of Constantinople fell in 1453, Greek scholars and Greek manuscripts came west in numbers, and some years later a monk in the service of Cosimo de' Medici brought to Florence a manuscript containing most of the Corpus. Cosimo had already engaged the young scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate the whole of Plato into Latin. He was old and unwell, and he ordered Ficino to put Plato aside and translate Hermes first, so that he might read it before he died. Ficino did so in 1463, and Cosimo died the next year.

The translation was printed in 1471 under the title Pimander and went through many editions. Its readers believed, as Ficino did, that Hermes was a real man who had lived at about the time of Moses, and that his books preserved an ancient theology, given to the Gentiles as the Law was given to the Jews, which had prepared the way for Plato and for Christ. On the pavement of the cathedral of Siena, laid in 1488, Hermes stands at the door in an inlay of marble, labelled as the contemporary of Moses. It is hard now to imagine the excitement this caused. It seemed to the scholars of the Renaissance that the wisdom of the most ancient world had been recovered entire, and that it agreed with the Gospel.

The magi of the Renaissance

Out of that excitement came the figure the Renaissance called the magus: the learned and devout man who sought to know the world as a living whole and to work with its hidden sympathies. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola opened his famous oration of 1486 with the words of the Asclepius, that man is a great miracle, and joined to the Hermetic writings the Hebrew Kabbalah, which he believed could prove the truths of the Christian faith. Johannes Reuchlin followed him, and taught the Christian Kabbalists to write the holy name of Jesus by setting the letter shin in the midst of the four letters of the Name of God, a device that the Martinists would carry into their rituals three centuries later. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa gathered the whole of this learning into his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written about 1510 and printed in 1533, which set out the ladder of being from the elements through the stars and the angels to God.

Others turned the Hermetic philosophy toward nature and medicine. Paracelsus, who died in 1541, despised the gold-makers and sought from alchemy not wealth but healing; it was he who taught that all things are composed of three principles, salt, sulphur and mercury, which answer in the human being to body, soul and spirit, the threefold composition that the Order's teaching on reintegration still assumes. John Dee, mathematician to Queen Elizabeth, compressed his whole philosophy into a single figure, the Hieroglyphic Monad of 1564, combining the signs of the seven planets and metals into one.

These men were, almost without exception, sincere Christians who believed that the study of nature was a form of worship. But the age also produced its shadow. The legend of Doctor Faustus, printed in 1587, told of a scholar who sold his soul for knowledge and power, and it has never quite been forgotten. The Order keeps the lesson of both: the magus who seeks to know creation in order to serve its Creator, and the magus who seeks to know it in order to command it. The first is the Hermetic seeker. The second is the reason the Order teaches no compulsion of anything or anyone.

1614

In 1614 the Genevan scholar Isaac Casaubon showed, by close study of its Greek, that the Corpus Hermeticum could not have been written in the age of Moses, and must belong to the first centuries of the Christian era. His argument was correct and has never been overturned. In the same year, in the town of Kassel, a small pamphlet was printed announcing the existence of a secret fraternity of the Rose Cross, which drew openly upon the Hermetic and Paracelsian learning that Casaubon had just shown to be younger than its readers supposed. The second study in this series tells that story. It is enough to say here that the Hermetic stream did not die when its antiquity was taken from it. It passed into the laboratories of the alchemists, into the manifestos of the Rosicrucians and into the lodges of the following century, and it has been flowing ever since.

What the Order makes of it

The Order accepts the dating of the scholars without reluctance. It does not think the Hermetic writings any less true for being younger than Moses, any more than it thinks the Order any less true for being younger than the Templars. Truth is not a matter of age, and a Tradition that needs to lie about its birthday has already lost the thing it was meant to carry. The Hermetic writings are what they are: the testimony of men and women in Roman Egypt who sought God by way of the mind and found that the way of the mind led inward. That testimony is worth having, and we give it to every Page.

What the Page receives from it is described on the page on the Hermetic Stream: correspondence, the elements, the map of the ascent and the science of transformation. What I would add, at the end of a long life spent with these books and with the garden at Harrowmere, is this. The Hermetic writings teach that the cosmos is a living whole and that the human being is its mirror. Most people who read them stop there, delighted. The writings themselves do not stop there. They go on to say that a mirror must be clean, that cleaning it is the work of a lifetime, and that the one who has cleaned it will find there not his own face but the face of God. That is the whole of the Hermetic stream. The rest is commentary, mine included.