3
" If you are mindful, Asclepius, these things should seem true to you, but they will be beyond belief if you have no knowledge. To understand is to believe, and not to believe is not to understand. Reasoned discourse does get to the truth, but mind is powerful, and, when it has been guided by reason up to a point, it has the means to get the truth. After mind had considered all this carefully and had discovered that all of it is in harmony with the discoveries of reason, it came to believe, and in this beautiful belief it found rest. By an act of god, then, those who have understood find what I have been saying believable, but those who have not understood do not find it believable. Let this much be told about understanding and sensation. "
― Hermes Trismegistus , Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
5
" 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. "
― Hermes Trismegistus , The Emerald Tablet Of Hermes
7
" If you are mindful, Asclepius, these things should seem true to you, but they will be beyond belief if you have no knowledge. To understand is to believe, and not to believe is not to understand. Reasoned discourse does (not) get to the truth, but mind is powerful, and, when it has been guided by reason up to a point, it has the means to get (as far as) the truth. After mind had considered all this carefully and had discovered that all of it is in harmony with the discoveries of reason, it came to believe, and in this beautiful belief it found rest. By an act of god, then, those who have understood find what I have been saying believable, but those who have not understood do not find it believable. Let this much be told about understanding and sensation. "
― Hermes Trismegistus , Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
8
" If you are mindful, Asclepius, these things should seem true to you, but they will be beyond belief if you have no knowledge. To understand is to believe, and not to believe is not to understand. Reasoned discourse does [not] get to the truth, but mind is powerful, and, when it has been guided by reason up to a point, it has the means to get [as far as] the truth. After mind had considered all this carefully and had discovered that all of it is in harmony with the discoveries of reason, it came to believe, and in this beautiful belief it found rest. By an act of god, then, those who have understood find what I have been saying believable, but those who have not understood do not find it believable. Let this much be told about understanding and sensation. "
― Hermes Trismegistus , Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
10
" 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? "
― Hermes Trismegistus , Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
18
" 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) "
― Hermes Trismegistus , Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
