Hermes Trismegistus Quotes

As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…

The punishment of desire is the agony of unfulfillment

As above, so below. As within, so without. Originated by Hermes TRISMEGISTUS!

Birth is not the beginning of life - only of an individual awareness. Change into another state is not death - only the ending of this awareness.

No eyes will raise to heaven. The pure will be thought insane and the impure will be honoured as wise. The madman will be believed brave, and the wicked esteemed as good.

As Above, So Below

The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God. But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?

O ye people, earth-born folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, be sober now,cease from your surfeit, cease to be glamored by irrational sleep!

That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to perform the miracles of one only thing.

For the sun is situated in the center of the cosmos, wearing it like a crown

The hearer must be of one mind with the speaker, my son, and of one spirit as well; he must have hearing quicker than the speech of the speaker.

The present issues from the past, and the future from the present. Everything is made one by this continuity. Time is like a circle, where all the points are so linked that one cannot say where it begins or ends, for all points precede and follow one another for ever.

My discourse leads to the truth; the mind is great and guided by this teaching is able to arrive at some understanding. When the mind has understood all things and found them to be in harmony with what has been expounded by the teachings, it is faithful and comes to rest in that beautiful faith.

Philosophy is nothing else than striving through constant contemplation and saintly piety to attain knowledge of God.

Humanity looked in awe upon the beauty and the everlasting duration of creation. The exquisite sky flooded with sunlight. The majesty of the dark night lit by celestial torches as the holy planetary powers trace their paths in the heavens in fixed and steady metre - ordering the growth of things with their secret infusions.

Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven or, to be more precise, that everything governed and moved in heaven came down to Egypt and was transferred there? If truth were told, our land is the temple of the whole world.

83. Avoid all conversation with the multitude or common people; for I would not have you subject to envy, much less to be ridiculous unto the multitude.

That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.

As above, so below. As within, so without.

This is what you must know: that in you which sees and hears is the word of the lord, but your mind is god the father; they are not divided from one another for their union is life.

Man is the most divine of all the beings, for amongst all living things, Atum associates with him only - speaking to him in dreams at night, foretelling the future for him in the flight of birds, the bowels of beasts, and the whispering oak.

65. The generation of man is corruption; the corruption of man is the beginning of generation.

Philosophy should come to know the dimensions, qualities and quantities of the earth, the depths of the sea, the capacity of fire and the effects and nature of all these things in order to admire, revere and praise the divine artistry and intelligence.

But this discourse, expressed in our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of speech and of the Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the object they speak of. Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted, lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise, the energetic idiom of usage. For the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are full of action. (Chapter XVI)

Having made them rise, I became guide to my race, teaching them the words – how to be saved and in what manner – and I sowed the words of wisdom among them, and they were nourished from the ambrosial water.

74. The Earth is brutish; the Heaven is reasonable or rational.

80. What is God? The immutable or unalterable good. 81. What is man? An unchangeable evil.

55. Nothing in Heaven is enslaved; nothing upon Earth is free.

72. Things upon Earth, do not advantage those in Heaven; but all things in Heaven do profit and advantage all things upon Earth.

Hermes Trismegistus is the most famous Gnostic. He was the founder of the pre-Christian lineage of Greek Gnosticism.

I circle around them, my sword pointed in their direction. "Hermes Trismegistus. Ostanes the Persian. Olympiodorous of Thebes---" I stop, feeling like an idiot. These necromancers and the ridiculous names they give themselves. They're always trying to outdo one another. "You five," I said instead. "By the authority of King Malcolm of Anglia, I am commanded to arrest you for the crime of witchcraft.

The art of the alchemist, whether spiritual or physical, consists in completing the work of perfection, bringing forth and making dominant, as it were, the “latent goldness” which “lies obscure” in metal or man. The ideal adept of alchemy was therefore an “auxiliary of the Eternal Goodness.” By his search for the “Noble Tincture” which should restore an imperfect world, he became a partner in the business of creation, assisting the Cosmic Plan. Thus the proper art of the Spiritual Alchemist, with whom alone we are here concerned, was the production of the spiritual and only valid tincture or Philosopher’s Stone; the mystic seed of transcendental life which should invade, tinge, and wholly transmute the imperfect self into spiritual gold. That this was no fancy of seventeenth-century allegorists, but an idea familiar to many of the oldest writers upon alchemy—whose quest was truly a spiritual search into the deepest secrets of the soul—is proved by the words which bring to an end the first part of the antique “Golden Treatise upon the Making of the Stone,” sometimes attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. “This, O Son,” says that remarkable tract, “is the Concealed Stone of Many Colours, which is born and brought forth in one colour; know this and conceal it . . . it leads from darkness into light, from this desert wilderness to a secure habitation, and from poverty and straits to a free and ample fortune.

Hermes bowed his head in thankfulness to the Great Dragon who had taught him so much, and begged to hear more concerning the ultimate of the human soul. So Poimandres resumed: "At death the material body of man is returned to the elements from which it came, and the invisible divine man ascends to the source from whence he came, namely the Eighth Sphere... "Then, being naked of all the accumulations of the seven Rings, the soul comes to the Eighth Sphere, namely, the ring of the fixed stars. Here, freed of all illusion, it dwells in the Light and sings praises to the Father in a voice which only the pure of spirit may understand. Behold, O Hermes, there is a great mystery in the Eighth Sphere, for the Milky Way is the seed-ground of souls, and from it they drop into the Rings, and to the Milky Way they return again from the wheels of Saturn. But some cannot climb the seven-runged ladder of the Rings. So they wander in darkness below and are swept into eternity with the illusion of sense and earthiness. "The path to immortality is hard, and only a few find it. The rest await the Great Day when the wheels of the universe shall be stopped and the immortal sparks shall escape from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those who wait, for they must return again, unconscious and unknowing, to the seed-ground of stars, and await a new beginning. Those who are saved by the light of the mystery which I have revealed unto you, O Hermes, and which I now bid you to establish among men, shall return again to the Father who dwelleth in the White Light, and shall deliver themselves up to the Light and shall be absorbed into the Light, and in the Light they shall become Powers in God. This is the Way of Good and is revealed only to them that have wisdom.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Man The Destroyer   Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life…the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise, the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good – Hermes Trismegistus As we mentioned, the titanic reversals were not merely physical, but psychic. Human consciousness was as shattered as the world, and the consequences of ruined minds is seen all around us. In short, the human tendency to commit evil acts is the consequence of trauma primarily caused by four tragic events: The Destruction of Tiamat (and first deluge) Genetic Alteration The War of the Gods The Pole Shift (second deluge and subsequent global carnage and fallout) Once we accept that colossal violent upheavals took place, we cannot avoid contemplating their effect on consciousness. Strangely, no mainstream scientist or psychologist has competently addressed this fundamentally important question. Academics avoid dealing with the problem of evil because they know what a threat the answers pose to the Establishment, and particularly to religion.

This cosmos is large, then, and no body is larger?” “Agreed.” “And is it densely packed? For it has been filled with many other large bodies or, rather, with all the bodies that exist.” “So it is.” “But is the cosmos a body?” “A body, yes.” “And a moved body?” [3] “Certainly.” “The place in which it moves, then, how large must it be, and what is its nature? Is it not larger by far so as to sustain continuity of motion and not hold back its movement lest the moved be crowded and confined?

The Emerald tablet (Tabula smaragdina) by Hermes Trismegistus, which became the basic tenet of esoteric systems such as Tantra, Kabbalah, or the Hermetic tradition, confirms these observations with its message: “as above so below” or “as without, so within.” Each of us is a microcosm containing, in some mysterious way, the entire universe.

Too much meaning incapacitates the will. Not enough meaning gives us nothing to will for.

Entre las cosas admirables, sobrepasa a todas las demás el que el hombre haya llegado a conocer y a crear la naturaleza divina.

Such a person does not cease longing after insatiable appetites, struggling in the darkness without satisfaction. This tortures him and makes the fire grow upon him all the more.

Know, O man, that Light is thine heritage. Know that darkness is only a veil. Sealed in thine heart is brightness eternal, waiting the moment of freedom to conquer, waiting to rend the veil of the night. Some I found who had conquered the ether. Free of space were they while yet they were men. Using the force that is the foundation of ALL things, far in space constructed they a planet, drawn by the force that flows through the ALL; condensing, coalescing the ether into forms, that grew as they willed. Outstripping in science, they, all of the races, mighty in wisdom, sons of the stars. Long time I paused, watching their wisdom. Saw them create from out of the ether cities gigantic of rose and gold. Formed forth from the primal element, base of all matter, the ether far flung. Far in the past, they had conquered the ether, freed themselves from the bondage of toil; formed in heir mind only a picture and swiftly created, it grew. Forth then, my soul sped, throughout the Cosmos, seeing ever, new things and old; learning that man is truly space-born, a Sun of the Sun, a child of the stars.

He who by progress has grown from the darkness, lifted himself from the night into light, free is he made of the Halls of Amenti, free of the Flower of Light and of Life. Guided he then, by wisdom and knowledge, passes from men, to the Master of Life. There he may dwell as one with the Masters, free from the bonds of the darkness of night. Seated within the flower of radiance sit seven Lords from the Space-Times above us, helping and guiding through infinite Wisdom, the pathway through time of the children of men. Mighty and strange, they, veiled with their power, silent, all-knowing, drawing the Life force, different yet one with the children of men. Different, and yet One with the Children of Light. Custodians and watchers of the force of man’s bondage, ready to loose when the light has been reached. First and most mighty, sits the Veiled Presence, Lord of Lords, the infinite Nine, over the other from each the Lords of the Cycles; Three, Four, Five, and Six, Seven, Eight, each with his mission, each with his powers, guiding, directing the destiny of man. There sit they, mighty and potent, free of all time and space.

The nature of the case, and the history of the Mysteries, alike show that this book could be none other than the "Book Pet-Rome;" that is, the "Book of the Grand Interpreter," in other words, of Hermes Trismegistus, the great "Interpreter of the Gods." In Egypt, from which Athens derived its religion, the books of Hermes were regarded as the divine fountain of all true knowledge of the Mysteries. In Egypt, therefore, Hermes was looked up to in this very character of Grand Interpreter, or "Peter-Roma." In Athens, Hermes, as is well known, occupied precisely the same place, and, of course, in the sacred language, must have been known by the same title. The priest, therefore, that in the name of Hermes explained the Mysteries, must have been decked not only with the keys of Peter, but with the keys of "Peter-Roma." Here, then, the famous "Book of Stone" begins to appear in a new light, and not only so, but to shed new light on one of the darkest and most puzzling passages of Papal history.

That is, through his imagination, Goethe could, when practising ‘active seeing’, enter into the inner being of whatever he was observing, in the way that the philosopher Bergson argued ‘intuition’ could. Here ‘imagination’ is not understood in the reductive sense of ‘unreal’ but in the sense given it by Hermetic thinkers such as Ficino and Suhrawardi, as a means of entering the Hūrqalyā, the Imaginal World or anima mundi that mediates between the world of pure abstraction (Plato’s Ideas) and physical reality (in Goethe’s case, a plant or a cathedral).

According to a legend preserved in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the tormented nymph Io, when released from Argus by Hermes, fled, in the form of a cow, to Egypt; and there, according to a later legend, recovering her human form, gave birth to a son identified as Serapis, and Io became known as the goddess Isis. The Umbrian master Pinturicchio (1454–1513) gives us a Renaissance version of her rescue, painted in 1493 on a wall of the so-called Borgia Chambers of the Vatican for the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (Fig. 147). Figure 147. Isis with Hermes Trismegistus and Moses (fresco, Renaissance, Vatican, 1493) Pinturicchio shows the rescued nymph, now as Isis, teaching, with Hermes Trismegistus at her right hand and Moses at her left. The statement implied there is that the two variant traditions are two ways of rendering a great, ageless tradition, both issuing from the mouth and the body of the Goddess. This is the biggest statement you can make of the Goddess, and here we have it in the Vatican—that the one teaching is shared by the Hebrew prophets and Greek sages, derived, moreover, not from Moses’s God,17 but from that goddess of whom we read in the words of her most famous initiate, Lucius Apuleius (born c. a.d. 125): I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.

The hollow rotundity of the world, which has the shape of a sphere, is itself invisible in its totality, by reason of its quality and its form. Choose any place whatsoever at the top of the sphere to look down below, from there you cannot see what is at the bottom. Because of this many believe the world to have the appearance and quality of a place. For it is only because of the forms of individual things whose images seem to be imprinted on the sphere that one believes it in a way to be visible, since it appears to be like a painting. But in reality it is in itself ever invisible. Hence it comes about that the bottom of the sphere, if it be a part of or place in the sphere, is called in Greek Hades, for idein in Greek means to see, and the bottom of the sphere cannot be seen. Hence also ideas are called forms, because they may be seen as forms. Therefore, too, the infernal regions are called in Greek Hades, because they cannot be seen, and in Latin Inferi, because they are at the bottom of the sphere.

For the moment I want to focus on why we aren’t aware of ‘everything that is happening everywhere in the universe’ more often. The basic reason is the one that Huxley points out: we simply don’t need to be. ‘To make biological survival possible,’ Huxley writes, ‘Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.’ And ‘what comes out … is the measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet’.35 If I am trying to cross a busy street, being aware of what is happening on some planet in a galaxy many light years away is of no immediate use to me. Being overwhelmed by cosmic consciousness will not help me in the day-to-day struggle for survival, and so I — or who or whatever is responsible for human evolution — edit it out.

If all is one, why do one thing rather another? Why, indeed, wash those dishes?

And Hermes Trismegistus himself? Well, we can still learn much from him. If nothing else his call for us to be ‘caretakers’ of the Earth is clearly much needed today, and if this is all we learn from him, we shall profit from it considerably.

In response to what he saw as the ‘emptying’ of the world of significance through the rise of the rationalistic reductive view, Rilke, like many other late-Romantic souls, turned inward. The old symbols of meaning — whether religious or classical — were no longer viable; as I’ve remarked elsewhere, ‘like exhausted batteries, they could no longer hold a charge’.23 So Rilke recognized that his task — the task of the poet — was to save the visible, outer world from complete meaninglessness, by taking it into his own soul. The microcosm would save the macrocosm, by sheltering it within itself.

Gnosis, cosmic consciousness, psychedelic experiences can revive ‘the glory and freshness of a dream’. But as we’ve seen, having too much of this, as seems to happen on these occasions, is equally problematic. We seem to be stuck in the middle between too much meaning and not enough. Too much meaning incapacitates the will. Not enough meaning gives us nothing to will for. Clearly the ideal would be to find some profitable middle ground, that ‘just right’ condition I have called the ‘Goldilocks effect’, where we can open the valve and let in more meaning, so that at thirty-five or forty, we aren’t asking about life ‘Is that all there is?’ but not open the tap so wide that we are flooded with more meaning than we can do anything with.

But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.

How such views might steer clear of authoritarian dogmatism, head-in-the-sand private intuition, narrow professional specialization, or extravagantly broad but undependable

I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God. This is, I said, what I desire to hear.

I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God. This is, I said, what I desire to hear. ~ Hermes Trismegistus.

I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God. This is, I said, what I desire to hear.

There is no alternative between lived experience and the spoken unless one omits the articulation of lived experience, organization around a tacit sense, the sensorial fields where every individual is already a variant of a dimension, the exemplar of an alogical essense, what Hermes Trismegistus has called 'the scream of light'...If, on the contrary, one knows how to find in both orders these institutions of the same type, and thus not only the wild sensible but wild speech and thought, then there is no longer a choice between them: from lived experience to the spoken there is an agreement through reversal, chiasm, and one can say, with Husserl, that philosophy 'is still mute experience'...that philosophy speaks and that its speech leans against silence, that it speaks from the inside of being and not from on high or from afar, that it speaks especially of itself, that is to say, of speech, that it speaks like the trees grow, like time passes and like human beings speak.

As Philip K. Dick wrote in VALIS: Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistus, said "That which is above is that which is below." By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term. ~•~ VALIS is Dick’s equivalent of Joyce’s or the Chinese no-mind; it means vast Active Living Information system. ~•~ Joyce's equivalent is: The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes . . . solarsystemised, seriolocosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original sun.

And of the matter stored beneath it , the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical - wrapping it round the life - [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make materiality eternal.

Art is not construction, artifice, meticulous relationship to a space and a worldnexisting outside. It is truly the "inarticulate cry,* as Hermes Trismegistus said, "which seemed to be the voice of the light." And once it is present it awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of pre-existence. When through the water's thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of a pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections there; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is—which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself—the aqueous power, the sirupy and shimmering element—is in space; all this is not somewhere else either, but it is not in the pool. It inhabits it, it materializes itself there, yet it is not contained there; and if I raise my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections is playing, I cannot gainsay the fact that the water visits it, too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence. This internal animation, this radiation of the visible is what the painter seeks under the name of depth, of space, of color.

[16] And after this: “…, o my mind. I love the word also.” Poimandres said: “This is the mystery that has been kept hidden until this very day. When nature made love with the man, she bore a wonder most wondrous. In him he had the nature of the cosmic framework of the seven, who are made of fire and spirit, as I told you, and without delay nature at once gave birth to seven men, androgyne and exalted, whose natures were like those of the seven governors.

Whether the real setting and dating of the Hermetic tradition in late antiquity are, in fact, irrelevant to its reception in the Renaissance is an interesting hermeneutic question that cannot be answered here. In any case and for many other reasons, Yates’s views on the Hermetica became famous for some, notorious for others, especially when, in a 1968 article, she made Hermes a major figure in the preliminaries to the scientific revolution, just two years after J.E. McGuire and P.M. Rattansi had connected Newton’s physics with the ancient theology theme so closely associated with Hermes.

As above, so below

Khezr, the Green Man of Sufism, has been the Immortal Ruler of Hyperborea, the King of the World, Alexander's cook, Hermes Trismegistus, discoverer of the Fountain of Youth, and the Prophets Enoch, Idris and Elijah. If he was Hermes Trismegistus, then this whole tale of Moses and Khezr rendezvous where the two waters meet took place inside one person!

76. Heaven is the first element.

En el esoterismo a Poimandres se le llama el Santo Ángel de la Guarda, todo el trabajo del estudiante de los misterios consiste en obtener el estado de conciencia que le permita conversar con su Santo Ángel o Inteligencia Interior y así obtener el verdadero conocimiento esotérico que lo convierte en adepto, es el Bautismo del Espíritu Santo que menciona el Cristianismo o la adquisición del Buddhi o Iluminación que menciona el Budismo. Existe gran confusión sobre el origen de Hermes, pero ya fuera un avatar, un sabio o un grupo de hombres sabios, eso no nos importa, lo verdaderamente importante es el conocimiento que ha llegado hasta nosotros transmitido en las pocas obras que se conservan. Para la Filosofía Hermética lo importante no es el mensajero sino el mensaje. Todas las cosas de aquí abajo tienen su origen arriba, y el hombre es el puente de unión que a través de su conciencia une los dos mundos.