The Hermetic writings do not only describe the cosmos. They describe a way through it. The first treatise ends with a promise that the soul which has received knowledge will rise through the spheres and enter into God, and it adds that this is the good end for those who have knowledge: to be made divine. Other treatises take up the question of how such a change could happen to a living person, and their answer is a word that later traditions made their own. The word is rebirth.
In brief
- The Hermetica describe a path from instruction, through the purification of faults, to a new birth and a vision of the divine.
- Treatise XIII tells how twelve torments of matter are driven out by ten powers of God.
- A Coptic text describes the further climb to the spheres called the Eighth and the Ninth.
- The pattern recurs in the inner work of the alchemists and in many later accounts of initiation.
The way of Hermes
No single treatise sets out the whole path, and scholars reconstruct it from several. What emerges is a sequence that a pupil followed with a teacher over a long time. The stages overlap, and the texts speak of them in different words, but their order is clear.
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The first stage
Instruction
The pupil learns the general teaching: the nature of God, the cosmos and the human being. The texts call these the general discourses. They are meant to be understood, remembered and lived with, not merely heard.
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The second stage
Turning
Knowledge becomes a choice. The fourth treatise pictures a great mixing bowl filled with mind, sent down for anyone willing to immerse themselves. Those who do so turn away from a life governed by the senses. Treatise IX states the condition briefly: piety is knowledge of God.
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The third stage
Rebirth
The faults that bind the soul are driven out by divine powers, and the pupil sees in a new way. This is the subject of treatise XIII, described below.
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The fourth stage
Ascent
The renewed soul rises in contemplation beyond the seven planetary spheres to the Eighth and the Ninth, where it joins the powers that praise God in silence.
The secret discourse on the mountain
Treatise XIII opens with a complaint. Hermes has told his son Tat, in an earlier lesson, that no one can be saved before being born again. Tat has come down from the mountain where they spoke, and he wants to know what this means. From what womb is a person reborn, and from what seed?
The answer is given in images. The womb is wisdom, conceiving in silence. The seed is the true good. The one who sows is the will of God. And the one who is born is a god, a child of God, made of powers. Tat does not understand, and he says so with some heat. Hermes replies that this kind of thing is not taught but remembered when God wills it, and then he does something unusual. He speaks of his own experience. He says that he has seen within himself a vision not made by any hand, that he has passed out of himself into an immortal body, and that he is no longer what he was.
The instruction he gives Tat is short. Draw it into yourself and it will come. Will it and it happens. Let the senses of the body fall idle, and the birth of divinity will begin. Purify yourself of the irrational torments of matter.
The twelve torments and the ten powers
The torments are named one by one. There are twelve of them, and each is driven out by one of the powers of God as it arrives. Hermes calls the powers to Tat in order, and the treatise describes their coming as it happens, so that the reader witnesses a rebirth as well as hearing about it.
| Torment | Driven out by |
|---|---|
| Ignorance | Knowledge of God |
| Grief | Joy |
| Incontinence | Self control |
| Lust | Steadfastness |
| Injustice | Justice |
| Greed | Generosity |
| Deceit | Truth |
| Envy, treachery, anger, rashness and malice | The good, together with life and light |
The numbers are deliberate. Twelve is the number of the zodiac, and the treatise says plainly that the torments come from the circle of the signs, that is, from the body's subjection to fate. Ten is the number of completion, which the Pythagoreans called the decad and regarded as the source of soul. The reborn person is described as a body made of the ten powers, replacing the old one woven by the twelve.
The list repays attention for another reason. Its torments are not exotic sins. They are the ordinary faults of an ordinary life, beginning with ignorance and grief. The powers that answer them are equally plain virtues, and the first of them, knowledge, is the one on which the rest depend. Compare the seven surrenders of the ascent through the spheres, which the first treatise gives as a list of faults returned to the planets one by one. The two lists describe the same work from two angles.
Silence and the hymn
When the powers have come, Tat says that he sees not with his eyes but by the working of the powers, and that he is in heaven, in earth, in water and in air, in animals and plants, in the womb and before it and after it, everywhere. He asks for the hymn that Hermes had told him the powers sing in the Eighth, and Hermes gives it to him: a hymn to be said outdoors at sunset and at sunrise, in which all the powers within the reborn person praise God through him.
The treatise ends with an instruction to keep silent. Tat is not to make the tradition of rebirth known except to those whom God chooses. The silence is not secrecy for its own sake. The experience described cannot be handed over in words, and to talk it away is to lose it. Long before Eliphas Levi named keeping silent as the fourth power of the magus, the Hermetic teachers asked it of their pupils.
The Eighth and the Ninth
A further stage is described in a text that was lost for more than fifteen hundred years. Among the Coptic books found near Nag Hammadi in 1945 was a dialogue now called the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. In it a disciple who has passed through the seven spheres of the planets, the Hebdomad, asks his teacher to bring him into the Eighth, the Ogdoad, and the Ninth, the Ennead: the spheres beyond the planets where the purified souls and the angels sing in silence.
They pray together. The teacher receives the vision first and describes it, and then the disciple sees for himself and breaks into praise. The text is the fullest surviving account of a Hermetic initiation written from the inside, and it is remarkable for its tenderness: the two embrace, call each other father and son, and give thanks together. It closes with an instruction to carve the book in hieroglyphs on stelae of turquoise for the temple at Diospolis, with an oath to be sworn by anyone who would read it.
What rebirth can mean now
A modern reader need not suppose that rebirth arrives in an afternoon, as the dialogue form suggests. The treatises compress into a scene what the pupil's life would have spread over years. What they preserve is the shape of the process, and the shape is recognizable to anyone who has watched a person change. There is a period of learning that leaves the learner unchanged. There is a turning, when what was understood becomes what is wanted. There is a long, specific struggle with particular faults, which yield not to effort alone but to the arrival of their contraries. And there is, sometimes, a moment of seeing differently, which is followed by gratitude and by a wish to be silent about it.
The alchemists inherited this shape and gave it colors. The magicians of the nineteenth century gave it grades and ceremonies. Our page on the Great Work describes it in plainer terms. The Hermetica were the first to describe it as a birth: something that happens to a person and through them, for which they can prepare but which they cannot manufacture.
Practice
The twelve and the ten
- Copy the table of torments and powers onto a card and keep it with your diary.
- Each week, take one torment in order, beginning with ignorance. Watch for it during the day without trying to correct it, and note each occurrence in the evening review.
- Each morning of that week, name the power that answers it and spend a few minutes recalling a time when you saw that power in yourself or in someone else.
- At the end of the week, write a short account of what you observed. Then move to the next torment. The whole sequence takes twelve weeks and can be repeated for as long as it teaches you something.