Vision of Hermes - M.P.H.

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It is indeed heartwarming to see how many dedicated students have come together to explore the fascinating subject of the Divine Reason. The wisdom of Hermes is truly remarkable and offers valuable insights into the nature of reality. The Divine Pymander, with its 17 fragments, holds a central authority in the Hermetic system. The Vision, or Paimandres, is particularly significant, shedding light on the hermetic theory and the rise of symbolic alchemy. The Vision presents a sacred book filled with traditional elements of divine revelation, not plagiarized from other systems, but drawing on earlier and contemporary thought. As we approach this profound work, we are reminded of apocalyptic literature and ancient religious fragments. The Vision stands out for its unique arrangement of elements, offering new insights and wisdom. It combines past knowledge and provides a key to unraveling the mysteries of antiquity. It reduces theological mysteries to a recognizable order, defending comparative religion with a broad scope. The Vision delves into the concept of archetypes, linking to psychological theories and emphasizing the psychological qualities of human nature. Much like Buddhism and Taoism, the Vision underscores the importance of the mind, reason, and the journey to transcend disturbing influences of thoughts. The work also touches upon the subtle nuances of wording, requiring careful examination to grasp its full depth and meaning. Over the centuries, the profound inferences embedded in the Vision may have had a minor impact, but in the restoration of learning, we can now appreciate its place in modern thought. 

Hermes's journey through the mystical realms and encounters with symbolic dragons and pillars represent the ascension of the soul towards enlightenment. Through the transformation from material existence to spiritual understanding, Hermes embodies the quest for divine wisdom and the illumination of reason. As Hermes contemplates the divine mysteries and the unfolding of truth, he acknowledges the eternal nature of reason and the harmonious workings of the universe. His reverence for the great dragon, representing the pinnacle of rational insight, reflects a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all things in the grand design of existence. In conclusion, Hermes's journey towards enlightenment through the guidance of divine reason exemplifies the eternal quest for spiritual awakening and the realization of universal truth. His teachings resonate with the timeless principles of reason, faith, and self-discovery, offering a path to inner transformation and profound wisdom.

The Divine Pymander, as revealed by Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, offers insight into the nature of reason and its place in the universe. Reason, described as the highest faculty of human understanding, leads individuals to the ultimate truth and unity with the divine. It signifies the awakening of the soul and the liberation from the illusions of the material world. The message of reason is spread to all, with acceptance or rejection being determined by individual readiness. Those who accept reason find their path back to the divine, while those who reject it delay their return through the cycle of rebirth. Hermes acknowledges reason as the guiding force in his life, leading him to fulfill his purpose and serve as a messenger of truth. Ultimately, reason is seen as the eternal, all-knowing power that orchestrates the harmony and order of the cosmos, leading individuals to the realization of their true nature and the attainment of divine perfection.

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It is nice to see, after nearly 2,000 years, that the subject of this evening has brought together so many interested, serious students on a very remarkable, fabulous subject. The greatest of the books of Hermes is that which is called today the Divine Paimanda. It consists of 17 fragments. These fragments, together, cannot be said to form the corpus hermeticum, but they certainly constitute the greatest core of central authority in the hermetic system. Of these works, the Paimandres, or the Vision, is by far the most important. They usually place second in the collection. The analysis of this work must begin with some effort to determine its place in the literary-religious structure of our world knowledge. Actuated by structure, the Vision is a sacred book. It contains within itself nearly all of the traditional elements of a divine revelation. We have no real right to say that it is a plagiarization from other systems, although, as in the case of nearly all sacred books, it shows some indebtedness to earlier or contemporary thought. This must also be said of the Bible, or of the teachings of Buddha, or of the writings of Confucius. Thus, we may say that the Vision not only gives us a firm insight into the hermetic theory, but also explains clearly why this gradually came to be of unusual interest to chemists, and how it made possible, perhaps, the rise of symbolic alchemy. We know immediately, when we approach the book, that we are in the presence of something resembling an apocalypse. There is a reminiscent likeness to the Vision of Ezekiel, or to other ancient literary and religious fragments. On the other hand, there is also a strange note of uniqueness running through the book. This uniqueness is not in the words, nor necessarily in the word pictures which are produced. It is in the arrangement of other available elements. That these elements existed prior to the production of the hermetic writings, we cannot doubt. Therefore, it is the sequence in which they are placed. It is the order and descent of ideas which bring with them a certain newness, as though we had taken old and familiar pigments and paints, used a traditional canvas, and well-understood brushes and palette, and yet painted a picture that was new. A picture that combined much of the wisdom of the past, and provided a kind of key to open doctrines which had already attracted and held public attention. Thus, I think we may say that the Vision represents a kind of key to the great theological mysteries of antiquity. It reduces them to a reasonable and recognizable order. It is a powerful defense of comparative religion, unlike the Apocalypse of John, shows that the author or authors had a wide acquaintance with religions apart from the area in which this work is believed to have been produced. In broad structure, therefore, we have this work that has come down to us as the divine vision of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, who is described as a priest of the mysteries of Egypt, and whose writings, according to their own content, bear not the stamp of a man, but the stamp of heaven. And, in this work, Hermes, in advance, as a prophet, as a minister and missionary of God, has run peculiarly and divinely favored to reveal an essential doctrine to mankind. The work is brief, comparatively, and we can sometimes wonder why it did not gain a greater spirit influence. In many respects, it has a drama missing in other sacred books. It certainly has a wonderful symbolism which could inspire the minds of many persons to the contemplation of mysteries. Yet, through it all, there runs a thread of intellectualism so broad in its scope, so deep in its implication, that, in all probabilities, it decreed or destined that the work should have a minority audience, that it could only be understandable by certain types of persons. While it was a wonderful picture story, it was only for a certain kind of minds. These minds were not sufficient in number to integrate around this work the kind of religion or the kind of a common descent of beliefs which we find with simpler, more obvious revelations. The work also brings into focus a number of contexts with which we are becoming increasingly familiar today. One of these is an extension and application of the platonic concept of archetypes. The term archetype actually occurs in the vision. Therefore, there is a link between it and the psychological concepts of archetypes which we have today. Also, like Buddhism, and to a measure like Taoism, the vision strongly emphasizes the psychological quality in human nature. It deals with mind, it deals with reason, and it deals with the pitfalls into which the mind may lead, and the method of rescuing the individual from the disturbing influences of his own thoughts. Thus, the work may be regarded in modern terms as psychological, and it presents religion as a psychological mystery. It presents theology not in its traditional or conventional form, but more as a philosophy, and we must assume from the collected product of a nomadic group that the work was that of a philosophic religious body in which, perhaps, philosophy took predominance, but in turn became the instrument for the clarification of spiritual principles. There is much subtle wording in the vision also, wording which has to be rather carefully examined. It is quite probable that, for 1,500 or 1,800 years from the decline of Greco-Egyptian culture to the rise of modern humanism, that these subtle inferences would have a slight impact on the public mind. There were very little abilities to equate them, to finding them for many responses through the long, dark ages which we call the medieval world. Now, however, we have restored much of the learning which would enable us to give this great dialogue, which it essentially is, its place in our modern world of thought. We come across two or three important points which call for, well, a certain divergence from our principal theme or stream, so that we'll have to be prepared to reach out in a comparative religion just a little in order to clarify the issue. The story takes, as in the case of the vision of Ezekiel or in the Apocalypse of John, the general pattern of the recounting of a mystical experience which occurred to the principal person in this case Hermes. There is nothing whatever within the visions, as it is called, that would give us any clue to the historical orientation of Hermes or his character and personality. There is no description of him. He simply appears as a person passing through an extraordinary internal revelation, and having received the instruction, achieving to a dedication by means of which he went forth to share it with all who would listen. Thus, the Hermes of the vision is a person without a crystallized personality. He is an archetypal kind of person. Perhaps he represents all truth-seekers, or the truth-seeker. Certainly, he experiences that which all truth-seekers hope to experience, the kind of a reward by which they come, in the end, to the substance of their soul's desire. So, we find, according to the vision itself, this man wandering forth alone into the wilderness. He comes to a distant place, a place apparently barren and forlorn, but one apart from the ordinary habitations of men. Here he exceeds himself, and begins the quiet internal meditation upon the mystery of truth. Now, in this meditation, we are told in the vision, for example, that Hermes defines himself, or separates himself from his body and his senses. This almost immediately gives us a certain hint of yoga or madanda, the presence of a discipline by means of which the conscious energies are directed away from objective things. It's clearly indicated. Hermes was following a formula, or a pattern. He was performing a certain kind of devotion, and the implication further is that this devotion is that which was taught in the mysteries, or in the secret schools of initiation. In any event, he retired into the inner part of himself. He relaxed his objective senses. He depended not upon them, but upon the extension of an intuitive nature within him. And, as he internalized, separating himself totally from all the concerns of this world, departing not only into the wilderness of a desert place, but into the inner wilderness of his own life, apart from all things. He suddenly beheld the universe open around him. It seemed to break, burst, unfold in incredible rapidity, and he beheld, filling the universe, filling space, a strange monster. This monster was a great winged dragon, which writhed and turned and twisted in the air. And, when we come to this, we come to our first exploration of comparative religion. Well, the description of this dragon is almost identical with the description given by Confucius of the mind of Laozi. It was this strange, incredible, howling monster. Something like the Chinese dragon, particularly the imperial five-clawed symbol of heaven. To the Chinese, the dragon was the symbol of universal energy. It was the symbol of light for faith. It was the symbol of all power, and of God as power. In the vision, this dragon becomes the personification of universal mind, the intellect of the world. It is a creature of vast strength and mysterious appearance, both inviting and menacing, and, as the vision tells us, utterly unfamiliar to the normal senses or to the expectancies of man's outward perceptions. Hermes, beholding the dragon, is terrified, but there is nothing whatever in the vision to indicate that this dragon was a monster of evil. It was not. It was the dragon of the mysteries. It was the winged serpent of the ancient Egyptian high elements. It was the combined symbol of light, consciousness, motion, and mind. It was all these qualities and powers as one eternal, rising thing. In the Chinese philosophy, the dragon is a most sacred and important symbol, inasmuch as it represents an animal that feeds from the sky. It derives no nutrition from the earth. It does not place its feet upon the earth. It abodes in space. It sleeps upon clouds. It never approaches man, and those who would discover it must journey to the most difficult and inexpressible areas. Yet, this dragon in China is also the guardian of the pearl of great price. It is the guardian of the mysterious golden ball of light. It is even, to some degree, the barbara of the sun. And, among the Chinese, of course, it was also the particular emblem of absolute sovereignty and royalty. Now, Hermes, beholding this dragon, uses, symbolically, almost in the form of pictures, a story that we must also give some consideration to. It tells us that the nature of true mind is unknown to man, that what we call the mind is not the mind, that this thing that is really the mind is as incredible as the dragon, that it is utterly beyond our experience. And, he tells us in one of the fragments that the mind that we know is not the mind, that what we call the source of thought is simply an aggregate of physical faculties and powers within us, that what we call the thinker is not the thinker, what we call reason is not the reason, with a capital R. What we call the God-concept is not the true God-concept, that what we are trying to define and defile in the very process is utterly beyond us. An incredible thing that, in its first impact, terrifies and brings us to our knees, beseeching it to conceal something of its radiance from us, because it is beyond our knowledge and beyond our power to endure. Thus, we have in the vision the immediate clarification of this thing which Hermes is later to refer to as reason. But, this is not the reason of the book man, this is not the reason of scholarship, this is not the reason which arises only from the experience and contemplation of worldly things, this is not worldly wisdom, this is not the wisdom that is derived from the researches that we know, this is the wisdom which abhors and forever exists free in space. A reason that never feeds upon earthy things, but has a life in itself. A reason that is wisdom with wounds. An immortal creature, a creature forever emotion, forever fronty or fearful in its aspect, but at the same time this fearfulness of appearance only, for this reason, destroys nothing, attacks nothing, injures nothing. The only way in which it hurts man is because it frightens him. It does nothing actually to injure him. Hermes, however, fearful of the tremendous impact of this mind in the form of the great dragon, beseeches reason to present itself to him in some more familiar or more simple form, and the heavenly thing sort of falls back into itself again, and in the place of it is a gray area of radiance. There is only light, and this light is, therefore, the appearance of reading. This light is a radiance abiding in space. This light carries within itself the power of the dragon, yet it is not of the same terrible and menacing appearance. This radiance, then, to Hermes, obviously permeates all space, and reason takes upon itself the power of enlightenment. It is revealed as the enlightener, or the bringer of the light of the mind, and Hermes feels himself lifted up, and he is placed in the midst of this radius, and he stands there supported only by space and the light, having a foundation in everlastingness because he is in the substance of light itself. And, from this substance, there can be no falling, and there can be no injury, and there can be no lack of anything. And yet, because Hermes has asked for wisdom, and asked to know the mystery of the great reason which is the master of the great mystery of the world, he beholds something else remain possible to him out of the power of the divine mind. And, this thing that happens to him is that gradually he perceives something. He does not know what it is exactly. It seems like dark curtains, or mysterious streamers of mist, or a strange obscuration that flows down from above as though it were water putting out fire. And, this strange mist-like darkness descending in every direction slowly causes the radiance to fade out. The radiance is dissolved into this mist, and the mist becomes more and more dense and impenetrable, until at last Hermes finds himself standing only in the mist. Yet, where he stands has been the radiance, but a water has put out the fire of light. Yet, it was not earthquake water. It was not anything that we know. It was a kind of conditioned darkness. Not simple darkness, but a darkness that poured like water, or moved like some strange mysterious fluid. And, as this darkness finally caused the radiance to vanish into itself so that it was no longer apparent or visible, Hermes became aware of sighing, and of moaning, and of strange sounds coming out of the mist. And, in the midst of all of this strange moaning and sound, he became aware that another transformation was taking place. He knew inwardly that what had happened was that matter, a mysterious tangible substance, had gradually fallen from the sky and had devoured the radiance, and that this radiance was now locked in this strange, melidic mist, and that this mist was what some of our mystics of the early twentieth century referred to as the mist of matter. It was this material something that had swallowed up the light, and, because of this, there was a strange moaning, and crying, and sighing. As this condition continued for a time, another strange and wonderful thing happened. There arose out of this mist and this darkness, now ascending from below a great column, a pillar. And, this pillar became a great, raining thing, standing in the midst of the mist. And, Hermes heard the voice of reason, the great invisible dragon that was no longer to be seen. And, the invisible dragon declared that this mysterious thing that had risen out of the darkness was the word of the mind, the power, that this mysterious mind-word power represented a kind of instrument that was brought forth and created out of mind itself, out of being, out of reason, that was to stand under everlastingness as the symbol, like the column of Enoch, of the enduring fact. It was the pillar, perhaps, set up in Egypt, referred to in the Old Testament. Anyway, it was the steadfastness of the Lord, standing forever like a rock, like a great column, a great lighthouse or tower, forever standing in the darkness. Now, this thing that stood in the darkness was a symbol also, but it was a symbol that, in the Hermetic history, and particularly with some of the later Hermetists, takes on a great many attributes. This power takes on some of the qualities of the mysterious rainbow of Noah, because this tower is the tower of the covenant. While this tower stands, there also stands the power which stood, stands, and shall stand. This column represents the presence of reality in the midst of all things. In fact, the great mind instructs Hermes that this tower is the certainty in the midst of the darkness. It was the ever-present and indestructible monument, the lighthouse, the testimony unto the ages. And, perhaps, Hermes is not so far from the fact when he tells, indirectly, that to him this tower means law. This tower is the law, and this law is the law that stands in the darkness, that remains whether man knows it or not, sees it or not, understands it or not. And, modern science, looking out into the universe, beholds a tower of law which it cannot break, and that which, in its own nature, is forever invisible, reveals itself by the immutability of the seasons, by the motions of planets, by the great forces of cosmic systems, by the principles of growth in all things, by the harmonies of elements, by the structure of cells, and by the mysterious formulas which, by their reversal, can even split the atom. Every one of these things stands as a strange lighthouse in the darkness, bearing witness to the fact that this world in which we live is forever supported and sustained by the single column of the divine will, and that this will is the proof that God cannot, has not, and never will depart from his world. That this principle stands forever. So, in the midst of all uncertainty, man's searching for truth may detect the presence of these eternal landmarks, these principles and invariable patterns which, in parallel, begin to say on one occasion that it is not necessary for God to prove himself by miracles, for if commonest works are in themselves miraculous, this thought perhaps is the principle behind this concept. Certainly, it is the column standing as the inevitable, visible, knowable, tangible proof to the eternal power that never ceases, never changes, and can never be destroyed. From this tower, then, also comes other thinking and other values. For, this tower, more or less, bears witness to the power of deity. The strange, intangible dragon which is, in a sense, reason as universal will, gave place to radiance which is reason as universal love. This, in turn, destroyed by matter the strange veil of the senses which descends over a man's spiritual emotion, gradually dimming these emotions and perverting them. This, in turn, gives witness to the final manifestation of the invisible through the immutable structure of a universe upon eternal foundations, arising as a column out of the darkness. Now, the great reason, meaning power of things, then further explains that Hermes has beheld the descent of the eternal into the darkness of illusion. That the darkness in the midst of which rises the column is, in truth, the darkness of mortal mind which stands in the presence of the column, but does not see it, does not know it, does not know how to comprehend it or to realize it. It is only given to those whom God shall love that they shall look out into chaos, and see not chaos, but the rising of the great column of the Lord. The others are not given to see these things. Non-reason also explains how all this mystery came about. It explains, for example, that the divine mind, within itself, conjured up archetypes. These archetypes are its own thoughts, and the divine power of mind-reason, reflecting upon its own nature, caused to arise within itself thought-forms. These thought-forms being what the modern psychologists might call the wishful thinking of the infinite. The infinite possessing within itself absolute potential, and with also the power of absolute transformation of potential into potency. The universal mind began to devise out of itself the devisements of itself. It began to project its own eternal reason into the products of reason, fashioning out of itself many patterns as though upon a potter's wheel, and each of these patterns was a magnificent, effulgent blossom of thought. Each of these patterns was a tremendous dynamic symmetry of divine idea, and the eternal mind, having daydreamed these beautiful things within itself, having in its meditation realized that of which it was capable, and having in itself the infinite good which it could not but wish to express through the perpetual visualization of good things. It is said in the vision that the reason fell in love with its own thought, and because it formed a partnership with its own thought, it descended out of its own nature and became one with its thought, and this descent or this departure from its own center into the center of its own production was the first motion, and from this came the supreme illusion which is existence as we know it. Thus, Fermi goes on to say that illusion always arises from reason falling in love with its own thoughts. That illusion for man is the dedication of the energy of his mind to the service of the productions of that same mind. Therefore, if a man shall have a fear, and shall create a thought in which this fear is objectified as a pattern, as an impulse, as a design causing negative attitudes to arise within him, then his reason becomes identical with his own thought. It falls in love with his own idea or archetype, and unites with it, and begins to serve this idea rather than the truth. Wherever this occurs, negative habits set in, a man loses his own center, becoming the servant of thought, and forgets that every thought is a production of himself. Therefore, that the service of his thought is merely the service of a lesser part of its own nature. Forgetting this, he dedicates his life to the fulfillment of his own thoughts, and in so doing wanders further and further into space like Dionysus following the magic mirror held by the Titans. And, when he has been lured away from the great throne of heaven, the Titans set upon Dionysus the Reasoner and destroy him, and then they eat of his flesh. They, in turn, are destroyed by the thunderbolts of Zeus, and from the ashes of the Titans containing the blood of Dionysus was fashioned the bodies of mortal men. This is your brief myth, and carries the same essential point. In the beginning, reason is lured into space by its own archetypal thoughts, thus establishing a pattern which maintains upon all the levels of life, and every man is lured toward chaos by his own thoughts, which he becomes enamored of, thinking them greater than the thoughts of any other man, and most of all regarding them as greater than the thoughts of heaven. And, in so doing, he sets up darkness, he sets up illusion, he sets up a mysterious falseness by which his entire future is strangely possessed and obsessed. The next point in the vision begins with another very interesting and curious thing. Having fashioned out of its own nature this mysterious symbol of the word mind, the great power takes the word and uses it as a kind of hammer, so that, like the mysterious hammer of the Nordic deity Thor, this hammer is used to beat out space, to carve or cut great holes in space. And, we are again reminded of the Chinese, because Tang ku, the symbol of the divine mind personified, is given a hammer and a chisel, and is given the power to carve out holes in space, and these holes become suns, and planets, and worlds. Now, here's an interesting point that Hermes makes, namely that these are not bodies in space, but holes in space, and that what we call the solidness of a physical thing is actually a solid within a density, and the density is the true solid. Therefore, matter is not a solid in space, but a deprivation or a hole, and density which is space itself, life itself, the divine mind itself, finds its own productions as small areas of negation within its own nature, rather than forms or structures more positive than itself. The word or the mind moving upon the great deep, upon this strange mist of matter, causes something that Hermes in the vision describes as striving. Therefore, here we have an alchemical principle of motion releasing fire. We have motion as friction, and out of the motion of the world in the form of a hammer, or in the form of the active agent, we find there emerging out of space the seven children of friction, called by Hermes the sons of striving, and these are the seven deities, or the seven planetary gods, and together these gods constitute what Hermes calls the second mind. Therefore, there is the first mind, or the reason which is the dragon, and there is the second mind which is composed of the seven governors, or the seven cosmopropors, the objective forces of creation. These seven governors form the Demiurges, or the second type of deity, the secondary god, and to such orders of deities would belong Zeus in the Greek order, or Jupiter in the Latin. These deities are the objectifications, the coming forth out of the darkness of cause into the great world of effects. Universal reason, the first mind, therefore operates through the second mind which is the orderly sequence of creative bodies and words, and these seven governors have their power from the great reason which is the dragon, but they disseminate this power from themselves into the world, calling forth out of the darkness the shadowy substance of creation. These are indeed the spirits that move upon the face of the waters. These are the Elohim of Genesis. These are the Ammonian artificers of Egypt. These are the sacred bowels from whose combinations are formed the names of God. These seven, then, become the carriers of the word. They are the disseminators, they are the diffusers and the distributors, and they sit upon their ancient thrones, or drive their chariots around the golden altar of the sun. Here we have, therefore, now the concept of the emergence of a universe, of a solar system, or of a power. Now, in the midst of these procedures, Ernest beholds something still further. He beholds, rising out of the deepness and darkness of things, Anthropos, the divine man. Anthropos seems to stand in the midst of all things. He appears to stand as an isolated and lonely creation, as Gator says, which haven't enough dominion wielding. This is the mysterious, primordial, archetypal, universal man. This is the total man, this mysterious great man of the Zohar, who stands with his head in the heavens, one foot upon the earth and the other upon the oceans. This is the great, make-for-cosmic man, and this man, in the hermetic doctrine, is the one and only begotten son of the Father, and this is the man that stands forth as Anthropos, the man which is the son of the mind, the son of reason. In nature have been gathered all of the celestial elements, for this man is the final and most perfect of the archetypal projections of the mind of the creator. This man, therefore, is that being made and fashioned in the image of the reason of God. Now, we said that this man, we mentioned in a previous lecture, efforts have been made to parallel this man with the Christ of Christianity as the only begotten, and also, strangely, as the celestial atom. This power, which is also found in the writings of Damien, is symbolized by an upright, light letter A, even as the relaxed atom is represented by a black letter A. This celestial man, however, is not truly a Christian figure. This does not mean that it is opposed to Christianity, but it cannot be said that this archetypal man of her knees is simply patterned upon the Christ concept, nor could it be safely said that the Christ concept could have been patterned upon this. It stands apart. For, this man, fashioned by the Father, is truly the redeemer of the world. It is truly the creature that was made to be proprietor over all things. It was this creature that was given the right to be a citizen in space, to wander from star to star, to gather experience in the great meadows of the constellations. This great man, this mysterious, shadowy archetype, was a perfect, magnificent, heroic creature, almost in itself a god, yet a product of a god. And, into this archetype, all of the essentials and essences of the divine nature were united, so that truly it was the noblest work of the creator, and was really a kind of projection of himself. There may be a parallel to this in the idea of Osiris being reborn in his own son Horus. For, it was through this great man, or universal being which it had fashioned, that reason came into its perfect rulership over matter. Because, this archetypal being was virtuous, gracious, full of light and wisdom, defective in nothing, deficient in nothing. Because, within it were all the potentials and powers of the eternal reason. Thus, in a way, eternal reason is conservated in the concept of archetypal human reason. Not the reason of this schoolman, but the reason of the internal intuitive being. For, this being was not embodied. It was simply a great design, a great living archetype. Into this archetype, however, the creator placed not only the tremendous potential of its own being, but he placed therein also the peculiar habit of itself, namely the habit of daydreaming. This creature, like its father, could project thoughts from its own mind. It, likewise, could conjure up ideas, fall in love with them, become possessed by them, and wander away from its own strange, ethereal space foundations. And, there is a wonderful word picture of this universal man, this Anthropos, standing upon the rings of the seven governors, or the masters of the planets, and gazing downward into the mystery of the unknown. Fermi tells us, then, also a very interesting fact that I believe has become quite a point in Jungian psychology, namely that in the presence of the unknown, man is always in the position of being liable to a fall. The human being cannot, apparently in his own personal psychology, survive a kind of mystery which, if it ever grasps him or embalms him, leads him into the strangest and most distant departures from reason and common sense. And, in the vision, this Anthropos, this divine man, standing with the governors of all things, looks down into the abyss, looks down into the strange, swirling shadows, somewhere in the midst of which there is a broad, desolate, plain-like area, matter. Matter which has swallowed up the radiance of the dragon. Matter all of the atoms of which are seminal with God, filled with the seed of God, filled with the power to bring forth dragons of themselves, filled with life. This life be more or less than the thought of reason. The eternal thought of the eternal thinker. And then, the Luke by Pymander shows a certain indebtedness to Greek mythology. For this Anthropos, this heavenly man, gazing down into the abyss, gazes as though into the depths of a steel pool, or from the surface of a burnished mirror. And, looking down into the abyss, he is like Melchizedek in the Greek legend. He sees, looking back up at him, a strange, shadowy likeness of himself. This is the projection of his own thought in the daydream of creation. It is his first sensing of the power which he possesses within himself to create by reason. That reason generates, gives birth to things, but it is not merely for the constant remembering and handling of dead facts. That reason is a living thing, a god, and that that which possesses it can bestow life. And, this Anthropos, looking down, becomes enamored of its own mysterious reflection, and descends, or hurls itself, from the ring of the governors down into the darkness of the underworld. It goes not because of sin, it goes rather because of fascination. It goes because, within the nature of mind, is an eternal inquiry that the thinker cannot exist without his thought. That reason cannot escape the instinctive desire through reason. That the noun is forever giving birth to itself in the form of the verb. Therefore, that the thinker, without a labor, is inconceivable. An existence which does not seek to solve the mystery of itself is inconceivable, and an existence that is not fascinated by the projected shadows of its own creation is also inconceivable. So, we find this universal man moving downward precipitously, but voluntarily, and, as it moves downward, there is a reaction from below. A mysterious veiled being, like Canada, the great earth mother of the Nordic rites, a mysterious mother, mother principle, rises out of the darkness of the below, and envelops the Anthropos with robes of mist and of darkness, envelops it with strange protecting garments, and in these garments it falls into darkness and into sleep. And, suddenly, it is born again, and its birth is in the birth of body, and this thing which fell from the rings of the stars and reborn as the weeping infant coming into this world. Now, clearly it is not really telling us the story of human birth, primarily. That is not its motive. Remember, our Anthropos, or our man now, is a kind of mind. The cloth the great mother, the enveloping mother, is form or body which, to protect this mind in the darkness of the abyss, wraps it in a kind of swaddling garment which is also not different from a grave cloth, and thus protecting it, protecting the power of the mind by encasing it in a form, it then leads it downward into the world of thought, and we find then archetypal man passing from the state of a spiritual existence to the state of a material existence, and, symbolically, man the thinker is born into this world. Man, not as a person, but as an instrument of reason. Man is a projection of the father. Man really is the wish fulfillment of the eternal. Man as reason, exploring the darkness of the field of its own thought. So, what has actually happened now is that the dragon, having projected the archetype of creation, creates an instrument by means of which it can move into its own archetype. This instrument, this archetypal man, the symbol of Manus, the mind thinker, and taking upon itself the likeness of its own mind, it moves into his thought, into its thought, falls with it into nature or into matter, and comes forth as embodied reason. This embodied reason is a strange thing, for it has a tremendous invisible and a comparatively limited visibility. This creature, wrapped in cloths and robes, is almost incapable of motion. It has lost all memory, as in the famous Gnostic hymn of the robe of glory, it has lost all memory of its own origin. It has, however, come into existence with a spark, and this spark is the seed of reason. And, it is this seed of reason without which no thing can be created, and which is intrinsic in every atom, every electron, every indivisible, ultimate, minute particle of energy or substance. Every one of these contains the seminal reason of the infinite, contains the seed of eternal truth. This mind, then, coming forth and becoming the archetypal material man, becomes the parallel of the Adam-Kadmon of the Kabbalists, for this is the Adam made of the red earth. This is the Adam whose nature is outwardly earthy, but whose inward parts still belong in and to heaven. Now, this man, or this eternal power, this wonderful anthropos, has stood upon the rings of the seven governors, and, descending into the darkness of material obscuration, has brought not only with it the power of the divine reason, but also brings with it the powers of the seven governors. These seven governors being the active agencies by means of which reason is served, by which reason projects its purposes, and by which reason is gradually brought into orientation in the material universe. Thus, we find in the Pymanda, or the Great Vision, that Bernays describes a multiplication of this primordial man. Having become absorbed into the mystery of material diffusion, this man becomes seven men, multiplying itself according to the mysterious powers of the giants, or the governors of the world, and therefore the archetypal man now embodied. But, although embodied not obvious to us, for we see no giant standing with its head in the sky, this becomes a totality which is broken up within itself to produce the seven men. Now, it is pretty obvious that Bernays is now telling us the story of the archetypal man by which we shall say humanity, the totality, humanity as one. Later, by the action of the differentiation of the seven governors, we find the one man as humanity, a reversal of position. So, out of the one man come the seven androgynous male-female beings, and these, in the Hermetic tradition, represent the seven races. They are the seven differentiations by means of which humanity can be variously distinguished into levels, and each of the races, therefore, is an embodiment of the power of one of the seven guardians sitting upon the circle of the stars, and the infinite progression of things. And, these generations are reflected as the gradual individualization of the power of reason. Each of these seeds develops within its own nature its own individuality, for the symbol of the Anthropos, or the universal man, is the symbol of individuality rising in the universality of divine reason. So, out of all of this comes the mortal mind, mortal reason, the human thought, the human projection of its own thought purpose. And, the result of all of this combines to produce individuality. And, the final statement of individuality, I, or selfness. And, this I is a pillar set up in the soul of man, just exactly like the great column was set up in space. And, this pillar of selfhood, or stealthness, becomes man's great center of assurance. It becomes the mysterious axis tree upon which turns the entire wheel of his existence, and it is this same wheel which, as Buddha taught, he clings to so desperately in the cycle of transmigratory existence. So, there is an I, a column set up in the soul, which to each individual becomes the peculiar symbol of his godhood. But, this symbol of his godhood is a strange and illusionary thing, and in the pursuit of it, man passes into a constant procedure of separation, segregation, division, further division. And so, finally, out of the one comes the circumference of ultimate diversity. And, while the eyes shine like little stars, matter becomes an incredible area of stealthness. And, these for the new kind of matter, which is interesting and curious in itself, for just in theory, is made up of an infinite number of small material particles. So, what we call culture, civilization, the vast area of human project, is composed of a kind of substance made up of an infinite number of stealthnesses grouped together to form structures. These structures we may call economic, political, religious, artistic. They become schools, and sects, and creeds. They become doctrines, and arts, and sciences, forming like bodies, and are composed of infinite units, compounds, each one which must ultimately be dissolved. Thus, all mental and emotional forms, cultural forms, and concepts are temporary kinds of bodies composed of a voluntary cooperation of selves, of selfless. They stay as long as they wish to stay, or endure as long as they can endure, and then depart. So, we have another interesting level, namely the stealth, iota. The angel is a column set up in the midst of our own natures, by which we seem to see or feel the presence of a tremendous and enduring power. But, this power is purely symbolical. Hermes, then, beseeches the great mind reason, which is the eternal dragon, to reveal to him something more. He has now learned of how Leviathan, this dragon, gathering unto itself a third of the stars of heavens, carried them forth into the abyss. We have, again, a biblical parallel. Now, according to Hermes, comes the greater mystery of it all. How, then, how this infinite number of separate highnesses shall finally be reconciled? How, from the base metals and substances of nature, the infinite mind shall be rescued and restored and revived? And, reason explains to Hermes that all these forms and bodies set up in nature are merely the instruments of its own purpose, and that its purpose is the complete and full discovery of its own unity. Man, in order to experience that which is good, must have certain need, must have desire, and must be capable of the archetypal thought of good. It must have the ultimate archetype of unity in order to experience its own eternal unity. That which is undivided knows not its own unity unless it passes through the experience of apparent diversity, and discovers itself. Thus, reason, through this vast pageantry and circuit of things, is forever concerned with its ultimate goal, self-discovery. That, from the exploration of the not-self, it shall be restored to the equilibrium of the self-knowing. And, the great mind, or reason, tells Hermes that the course of this is a vast stifle on which the death of man is a miniature representation or replica. And, the reason says to Hermes that man is separate from truth because of the various deflections which affect its minds, which affect its attitudes, and, particularly, divide it from others of its own kind. The formula for regeneration as set forth in the vision is almost completely Buddhistic, but it is not certain that it was brought from India, although it is possible that it could have been, because the doctrine of Buddhism had been well-established in Asia for 450 years before the probable date of the confirmation of the Paramhanda. In any event, this pattern, perhaps supported by the Babylonian account of the adventure of Ishtar at the seven gates, certainly gives us a clue to what we want. The stone passing out of the body at death, therefore, proceeds toward the goal of liberation. What is death to the body is achieved by a certain disenchantment of the mind. Thus, as body must die to release its occupant, so illusion must die in order that the true content in reason may rise victorious over error. Here, again, is strong psychological position, and, in this sense, death thus becomes disenchantment, the reason escaping from the wiles of the senses, and from the pressures of material situation. We have something a little reminiscent, also, of the Parthival legend, and the young prince in his experiences in the enchanted garden of Kingsmore, the black magician. This disenchantment, like in the story of Muhammad's night journey to heaven, consists of the reason ascending through the seven orbits of the planets, ascending through the seven gates of the governors of the world, and voluntarily returning to each of the governors the conditioning qualities which that governor has bestowed. Otherwise, man fell by taking on attributes and qualities. He rises by renouncing them. So, we have a bit of astrology coming into this pattern, which is perfectly consistent with the times, for in those days astrology was as sound a science as physics is today. People regarded it with just as much appreciation and keenness of affection. So, the disembodied being, the disenchanting one, who has wakened from the sleep of material life, and has passed out of this world of matter into the sidereal world of the divine machinery, moves first upward through the gate of the moon, and there, as Hadee says, it relinquishes the power to increase and decrease. In other words, it ends the moods, or renounces its strange allegiances by which man has become servant of the moon, servant of change, servant of vacillation, servant of mood, servant of generation, servant of all these things which, in their inconstancy, hold up the mirror of illusion in which the being sees the distorted reflection of itself. So, to all the strange illusions of night and darkness, the waxing and waning, from the strange laws governing the 28-day cycle of the moon, to all the strange world of phenomena which is associated by the ancients with the lunar awe, and constitute together the lunacy of old time, these are rejected, cast off, returned again to their custodian, where they shall be held to be used by others who need them. But, now, the soul is returning to its homeland, and having relieved itself from all of these mysterious bonds and bondages, the soul then ascends to the gate of Mercury, and here it returns to the guardian, or the worker of the gate, in its own way, those things which belong to the world of Mercury. But, Hermes says that these include all manner of deceit, all manner of false thinking, all schemes, all plots and strategies, all brilliant intellections which have no substance in themselves, false knowledge, false learning, sophistication, that by which brilliance is mistaken for truth, and the light of sophistry is substituted for the light of reason. These things must return again, and man to pass through the gate and ascend must pay the fee of the gatekeeper, and at each gate the gatekeeper demands his allotment from the nature of man, so that at each gate man loses something of his mortal or corporeal nature, and he ascends to the third gate, and here he must restore to Venus those things which are the peculiar products of this goddess, and most of that which he must restore is vanity. Vanity must cease. He must never again be moved by appearances and the outward semblances of things. He must not chase the will of the wist of gratification, or of idle fortune, nor must he in any way be deceived by the seemingness of anything. He must penetrate appearances, seeking for that beauty which is in the soul of things, and not indoctrinated only by those symmetries and braces of form which he has mistaken for the presence of reality. Having paid the keeper of this gate, he goes on and approaches the gate of the sun, and here to this guardian, to this one of the seven governors, he must restore its substance which is ambition, for here he must return to the gatekeeper all of those things which bear upon greatness, all desire to expel others, all comparative discourage to self-aggrandizement, to escape from the illusion of high office, or the delusion of humility and humble station, to escape also from the temptation of possession, and the great temptation of all, to use what we have to the detriment and destruction of those who have less. This must be left with the keeper of the gate of the sun, and then the soul proceeds onward to the gate of Mars, and here the gatekeeper also demands his fee, and to him must be returned all contention, all discord, all hate, all warlikeness, either of the mind or of the body. Here, likewise, there must be an arbitration of every conflict which can possibly affect adversely the spiritual destiny of the soul. To Mars, therefore, must be given back temper, anger, even righteous indignation has no place. All things but gentleness must be renounced, and then on to the gates of Jupiter the soul stands, and here it must perhaps sacrifice more than in any other place in our way of thinking today, for here we must sacrifice judgment of others. Here we must sacrifice the type of thinking which many people regard as philosophical. We must give up the mental solution to the mystery of life. Here we must end forever the discussions, discourses, debates of the learned. Here we must also seek to escape from theoretical knowledge, from the common mistake that if we name a thing we know it. Here we must reform the whole concept of our higher learning, making it identical with the quest for reality rather than the accumulation of a wealth of ideas which may seem to be a marvelous fortune, but really are only a burden to the spirit. And, having passed through this gate, the soul comes finally to the gate of Saturn, and here it must give up those things which are its most basic ideas. Its belief in life and death, its belief in happiness and sorrow, its belief that this world bears anywhere within the substance of itself any injustice. Also, we must give up all compromise about the laws of nature and the laws of God. Here we must give up all evasions. We must give up everything which seems to point to the permanence of our illusionary state, so that, indeed, from the gravity of this planet, we have gained a gravity which holds us down, and we must return it so that we are once more free of motion, that we move with the moment, that we master the mystery of time, that we overcome forever past, present, and future in ourselves, becoming now not only bodiless, but timeless, a glowing in space. And, having so done according to the old beliefs, we were returned again to the infinite from the strange whirling rings of Saturn, and the soul which has ascended above the seven heavens there enters into what Hermes calls the blessed state of the eighth sphere. This eighth sphere, which in the old astronomical system corresponded with the imperium, or the abode of the angels, or the abode of blessed spirits, was also the sphere of the fixed stars. Here the reason, having liberated itself now from all worldliness, as this is the contemplation of the divine universe, not again necessarily coming face to face with the great dragon, but beholding directly the works of reason, beholding as Hermes did in his vision the unfolding of the resplendent world of absolute law, beholding truly the angels of the stars aiming the wide-eyed chariot in, beholding a magnificent garden in space, a garden filled with the flowers of truth. Here, the being comes into the certainty of the divine good, lives in the world directly as a fashioning of God, and beholds inwardly the faces and substances of the divine powers. Thus, having ascended through the mystery of the latter, or of the seven conditions, the being no longer conditioned moves again into the archetypal state of pure reason. This, to a certain degree, corresponds also with the ladder of illumination described by Plotinus the Neophytist, where it represents undoubtedly the progressive refinement of man's consciousness, and is motioned from opinion to sense, from sense to knowledge, from knowledge to wisdom, from wisdom to understanding, from understanding to intuition, from intuition to illumination, and from illumination to God. It is an ascending order, and this constitutes unquestionably the presence, in the hermetic doctrine, of a distinct discipline, perhaps corresponding somewhat to the scholar system of Yoga and Vedanta, and again in the vision of the Apocalypse of John, these levels and layers through which the scroll ascends are, of course, the seven churches which are in Asia, and the victory of the seven governors corresponds to the opening of the seven seals. These analogies and parallels bring us again, finally, to the contemplation of released or illumined reason. Reason which, by virtue of itself, now reels about the one subject, and that is deity. Not deity theologically, but deity as totality. Deity is the end of all learning, the summit of all sciences, the source and perfection of all arts. We no longer think of reason either as philosophical or as theological. It is now simply the total knowing of the total thing to be known. Bernays, having received this part of the revelation, brings to us another interesting situation for us to consider. He asks the great mind, the great reason, the dragon, something about the nature of the expectancies and hopes of mankind about all this. He knows, and perhaps has already been told, because the original sequence of the verses or sections of the vision is not really known. He anticipates, at least, that he is about to set forth upon the ministry of service, that he is to bring the message of the great dragon, that he is to become the instrument for reason, that, truly, it is not himself but the divine reason in him which is to speak. And, he asks, naturally, to whom shall the reason speak, and who shall understand the reason? How shall this strange ministry be promoted? And, the dragon answers him very definitely, but, of course, as always in these cases, a dogmatic way which is not clearly practical, at least not in its first presentation. First of all, the reason assures Bernays that the secret of the final liberation of all things is that the same reason which, in its substance, overshadows and permeates is also the same reason which, in its fragments, divided and embodied, must accept the doctrine. Thus, reason speaks only to itself. It speaks from the total appearance of itself to the divinified appearance of itself. And, because every germ of life contains the seed of reason, this seed can be restored. It can be released, can ultimately be raised from the darkness of its ignorance into an abiding in eternal light. However, this reason, in the case of mankind, is deeply buried and hidden within the structure of mortality. It is obscured, punished, almost destroyed by the senses. It has slight, if any, opportunity, in the confusion of our outward living, to achieve its proper and purposeful end. Therefore, the divine reason tells Hermes, very simply, that the course of procedure, much as in the biblical parable, is that Hermes shall go forth and stall the seeds of reason, that he shall bring the message, and the message shall fall upon fertile ground and upon starry ground, and there shall be some who will immediately accept. There are others who will ultimately accept. There are many who will not accept, for time, or time and a half times. But, there will be those who, understanding will, in various degrees of intensity, rise from the darkness of their sleep, and search for this reason which is the true substance of themselves. There are others, again, who will believe it, but will not seek. There are some who will say, this is true, but it is not for me. There are others who will say, sometime, for when things are different, I will search, but now I cannot. There are others who still will say, I would like to search, but my worldliness is stronger than my faith. Therefore, I shall cling to that which I know, as sometime, perhaps, I shall know more. All kinds of humanity, and there are some who shall blaspheme the reason, shall deny that it exists, and say that man comes out of the earth and will return to it, and that is all. And, these shall be considered as abiding in a strange, thrice-dark darkness, for they are not only without the light, but they are without the vision of the need of the light, and they are without the possibility of the hope of the light. These different beings will variously react, and some may turn upon her knees and injure him, some will ridicule him, some may attempt to destroy him, others will pass him by and ignore him, and a few will listen, more will argue, and some, in turn, will attempt to convert him to their ways. But, in all cases, it is his duty to preserve all this, the vision and the reason, to serve it in every way that he can. And, if it shall happen that a man shall not come to know the reason of the world, because the voice of Hermes has not reached him, or the voice of other prophets sent by God have not come to him, or men have so deluded the words of the prophets that they can no longer guide their lives by the ancient ways, these men are not lost, they are not destroyed, nor is that for them any great and eternal evil. They shall simply at death go to sleep, and they shall sleep and they shall move in their sleep through the gates and the keepers of the gates, and in their sleeping they shall pay no fee, and they shall return nothing to the keeper of the gates, and they shall return again into the great eighth sphere, but they shall sleep, and they shall sleep through the mystery of this, and in their sleeping they shall float into the sphere of the stars, and in the sphere of the stars is a river flowing forever which is called by us the river of stars. The milky way, and this new milky way is the nurse of little souls, and it nourishes them out of the milk of life, and only when the souls reach this, they shall enter upon the stream as little ships upon a river, and they shall float and float and float, and they shall float back again down into the world and be born again, and so they shall float back into the dream, and into the illusion from which they have never awakened, and they shall rest for a little time among the stars, and then they shall be born again in this world, and they shall keep on this cycle until they awaken, for they cannot be released until consciously and voluntarily they return to the seven guardians, the thieves of the payments of the seven spheres. This, Hermes is told by the eternal reason, is not because God loves or hates, because God punishes or rewards, for there is nothing that God could hate by himself, nothing he can reward by himself. There is nothing that he can say well done to, except the doing of himself. There is no way in which a part of himself can be lost to himself, for he is all and he is forever. Therefore, this great cycle goes on, not by fear, not by hate, not by punishment, nor by reward, but because it is under the mysterious axis which is called the spindle of necessity, upon which all things turn, and these are the roads and the ways and the machineries by means of which the divine power fulfills his own work. They are the functions of his body, just as circulation and assimilation and excretion are functions of the mortal body of man, and because the rotations and revolutions of the bloods and fluids of the body maintain the body, so the mutations and revolutions of beings maintain the vast circulation of that infinite one who alone is the essential substance of things. Thus, this great procedure is function. It is the proper and inevitable way in which growth perfects its own mystery, and by means of which all archetype is fulfilled, and, in the fulfillment of archetypes, there is then the end of both the dream and the dreamer. And, there, the dreamer awakens, the dream vanishes, and reality, fully aware of itself, abides continuously in the state of conscious reason, the eternal state of all-knowing, but liberated from the great illusion which is self-knowing. This concept gives certain comfort to Ernest, who then declares himself as willing to accept it. He also declares that it has come upon his consciousness that he knows that the sleeping of the body is the waking of the soul, and that the waking of the body is not the sleeping of the soul. That man has two ways of life, two kinds of life, a life in which the senses are awake and the soul sleeps, and a life in which the soul is awake and the senses sleep, and that he now has joined himself consciously to the wakefulness of his soul, and that, by this waking, he does not destroy the senses, nor does he turn upon them as upon some evil thing, nor does he hate them. He simply returns them to the substances of space to which they belong. He returns them to the great keepers, or the guardians of these things, and proceeds on his own victorious journey back to his own native land. He has completed his odyssey, he has fulfilled the terrible journey which began at the siege of Troy, and ends when he reaches the land of his birth. Hermia, then conceiving these things, meditates upon them, and he tries to give us a certain further insight as to the meaning of religion, and of the place of reason in all things. The word reason is hard. It is a word that we have to use. Perhaps some of the things we have said have indicated its extra-intellectual dimension. Certainly, Hermia did not mean rationality as we use it. He did not mean the reasoning power as we have it. He meant, rather, the self-knowing consciousness of deity which achieves a kind of existence by liberating itself from the self-knowing of all the parts of itself. But, while the parts remain self-knowing, the total is not. When the total becomes self-knowing, the parts are not. It is a formula, and it is a formula that is to be found in many ancient works, but perhaps nowhere evolved and developed with as much dramatic insight as in the Hermetic legend or fable. Also, Hermes extracts this reason as a kind of complete and total insight without condition. In other words, reason implies complete freedom from the pressure of sensory perception. It implies complete liberation from any false pressure of thought or emotion. Reason is the pure power of rational cognition. It is that which inevitably turns upon fact and moves into identity with truth. Reason is, therefore, a kind of undisturbed ability to approach the thing in its substance, and is utterly impossible so long as pressures of any kind, mental, emotional or physical, color or influence cognition. Thus, we have in the concept of this pure reason almost a Buddhistic idea. The sense of nirvana, as we find it, the submodity of the strange in Eastern mysticism, this condition of the total experience of reality without the recognition of self-existence, the drifting of the personality to sleep in which, in this moment when the personality ceases, the universal heart, the universality takes over, opens and rushes in perhaps even with the terrible aspect of the great dragon, sometimes also in the subtle radiance with which that dragon later enveloped its powers, so that it was more easily recognizable by Hermes. But, in this pure reason is pure knowing, the knowing of causes, the knowing of things not by their names but by their substances and natures. Pure reason is, therefore, the utter cognition of total existence, total life, total energy, total God. And, this cognition by its very nature, as Hermes himself realizes, moves the individual gradually from his own existence to something else. Hermes fully realized that this ultimate state of reason could not belong to man. This perfection of cognition, this total apperception and apprehension of all things, was no longer a human faculty. There could be only one all-knowing power. There could be only one reason behind all things reasonable. Therefore, man himself could not ever become totally perfect in this rational faculty. The only answer was that, as man ascends and leaves his humanity behind, he leaves also behind the mysterious image of the redeeming man, the Anthropos. For, the Anthropos represents man's awareness of his nearest proximity to reason, or reality. Thus, the Anthropos represents the extreme of conscious learning, conscious wisdom, conscious understanding. It is the highest state in which any being can contemplate its own source, and, therefore, expands above the circle of words. It expands as the only begun. It is selfless, the only born of the selfless. Man, therefore, can attain, perhaps, to the right state. For, the hero of the Greek is the Anthropos of Hermes. Man can reach a condition where, perhaps, all knowledge shall be granted unto him. Where everything knowable, he shall know. Where everything learnable, he shall learn, and everything capable of being understood, he will understand. But, when he attains that, he stands on the borders of space. He stands gazing out upon the final expanse of actual participation, identification, by means in which all things observed and contemplated have their intervals removed. This man cannot achieve by his own reason. So, Hermes, following the Eastern mystics, Buddha, and others, realized that, at the last step, human reason simply ceases, and something else goes on. And, this thing that goes on is that which grew up through human reason, which became, so to say, the tutoring power. For, if man brings forth his children, and raises them to their maturity, man, likewise, within himself, brings forth his reason, educates it, directs it, disciplines it, and brings it to its maturity. But, when his child is mature, that child no longer belongs to him, but has a life of itself in time of eternity. He has been only the custodian, the guardian of something he could never own. This is Hermes' concept of reason. Namely, that this reason which man disciplines, tutors, and uses for so many diverse purposes, was never his own, and can never be his own. By means of the cultivation of it, he gains certain joys, certain experiences, certain opportunities. But, as he shares the companionship of his children in their growing years, only to have them leave him when they reach their own majority. So, reason, having obtained its majority, leaves man, and goes back to God. It carries with it that part of man which is by a strange spiritual heredity associated with reason. It more or less carries back the only thing that is left of man by that time, and that is his own reason. But, his own reason, leaving the world behind, leaves its own selfhood behind, and becomes again universal reason. So, as Hermes is told by the great mind, or the great dragon, the only reason that man can be saved is because the divine reason is in him. That it cannot be taken from him. He may conceal it, and if he shall rise against this reason with all of the steel and bitterness of his own disillusionments, if he shall become like a fallen angel, a rebel in space, so that he raises his hand against heaven to destroy it, though he deny heaven, though he deny God, though he deny reason, though he lock himself for a thousand lives within the small circle of his own contempt, he can do nothing. This reason cannot die. He must ultimately join all that has gone before, and walk the path that all others have followed. For this reason will never die, will never rest, will never surrender itself. It will survive all antagonism and all resistance, and will ultimately proceed to its own source, drawn by the power of itself, which is greater than the power of the whole world put together. Therefore, nothing can ultimately fail, but things can be unreasonably and unnecessarily delayed. What is the objection to delay if men want it? The universal reason says the objection to delay is man's objection to the consequence of delay. The individual, in his own objective, becomes miserable. The individual, burdened with the results of illusion in his own character, comes under pain, suffering, misery, and loss. As in the philosophy of Buddha, man passes under the keeping of suffering. He must pass through all causations and consequences due to his own ineptitudes. Therefore, the way of reason is the way of peace. It is the way of release from obstacle. It is the natural and proper way that man should go. It is perfectly proper that a parent shall raise the child. It is perfectly proper that it shall guide and educate it, and bring it through many dangerous areas, perhaps, and sit by the side of sickness in the night, nursing and praying that the child's life shall be spared. It is also proper that the parent shall enjoy the life of the child, as you look forward to the fullness of that life for the child. But, when the child grows up, which is like human reason reaching its majority, the parent, the old body, the personality with its senses and its limitations and restrictions, shall be so selfish as not to release the child. The parent shall try to dominate the child, shall hold its life beyond the proper time, shall make this child a servant of its own happiness, instead of freeing the child to live a life that was its proper purpose. If, therefore, having brought the child to majority, the parent then continues to press his own will upon the child, then this child's life is damaged. Then there are sorrows for both child and parent, and perhaps the child will rebel, or perhaps the parent will have a broken heart because it has not received the sympathy and understanding that it feels it deserves for having so faithfully raised that child. This is the problem of reason and the mind. When man's mind reaches a point of skill whereby it is capable of sustaining itself and having its own life, it is then the proper purpose that this mind-reason should be allowed to grow. Man should not bind it to merely the satisfaction of his senses. He should not overshadow it like the ambitious parent. Man should not take the life of this free reason and bind it merely to avarice, to selfish personal gain, nor should make this reason the servant only of its senses, of its passions, of its hates, and its fears. In so doing, it oppresses the child which it brought up. It refuses to free the reasoning part to fly upward to the sky and to the light according to its natural destiny. Thus, man can delay the return of the seed of reason to its eternal ground. But he cannot prevent it, for in time this struggle, this conflict, will exhaust the selfishness of man. He cannot go on forever, he cannot be heard forever. At last, raising his eyes, asking the heavens for pity, he must come face to face with the column of law that rises in the sky, and he must realize that against the eternal will he has struggled in vain, and that his ways breaking against reality are themselves broken, but reality stands unmoved. Thus, in the return to reason, Hermes points out that eternal reason, speaking through him Hermes, gave its message to his disciples who are also reason, that one speaking to another is one speaking to the same, that everywhere the message goes forth, and it shall come as a ray of light to the sleeping seeds of itself, that they shall burst forth out of the earth, and those who are ready shall follow, and those who are not ready will not follow. This following is of no importance, nor does it have any meaning, because all these things are within the common reason which is the infinite good. No man should be surprised by the conduct of another, because reason embraces all conduct, and understands it, and knows why it is as it is. So, those who accept the teachings of the shepherd are not different from those who reject, but those who have accepted have shortened the song of their own journey, and have found their way back. And so, Hermes, having seen the nature of his ministry, that his ministry is merely to pass along that road to teach, and to go his way, realizing always that it is the eternal reason that moves within him, that if he is quiet and at peace, this reason will lead him, and it will make those who know him receive his words, and it will be acceptable to those who are ready, and for the others there must be the silence, and the return to the starch. And, having more or less put this whole pattern in order in his own consciousness, Hermes then raises his voice to him, this eternal reason, and his words of praise are the words of the priest, who, in this reason, is paying tribute to God, who, of all the preachers alone, is completely reasonable. He is thinking of God now not as an ancient power standing with thunderbolts, or upon a gilded throne on some Olympian island. God is a kind of wonderful common sense, a common sense common to all things, but uncommon to the human experience. This commonness of God, this God that is everywhere, in everything, is not a remote tyrannical deity, but just that voice which is raised in counsel, the elder speaking to the child, the child looking wide-eyed both to the elder and to the world, seeking light. Wherever the child's eyes should go, whether it knows it or not, it beholds the reason of the world. It beholds all things in reasonableness, and must learn sometime to apply this lesson to its own nature. Beholding order in the world, the child must grow to know order in itself. Beholding everything lawful, the child must act in all things lawful. And, by so doing, it worships. For worship is nothing more or less than the living of the common sense of God in nature. This simple procedure of departing from the complexity of moral mind into the simple and inevitable motions of the divine mind, at the end of his wonderful discourse, when he raises his heart and his mind to the great dragon that is rising in space, and he says to that dragon, eternal reason, the creature which thou hast fashioned in thy wisdom awaits the works that thou can do. There is nothing of self, only that the eternal reason moving in all things shall perfect its perfect works, and that the wise man is not the master of the world, but the handmaiden and servant of that reason which alone knows the good, and shall alone lead man to goodness, to union with itself in the perfect state of timeless, ageless good. Thus, the reason is all these things which we have variously named, but most of all it is the total reasonableness of existence bearing witness to the great reason, to the great power that does all things in a reasonable way, and that, in this reasonable way, all hope, all faith, all love, all friendship have their perfect works, for these things are the most reasonable of all. So, time's up, folks.