Hermes' Divine Pymander, tr. Everard

Hermes Trismegistus, John Everard (T) · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 16 pages

Sixteen pages carrying the second book of the Divine Pymander, the Poimandres, *with the Greek and the English printed side by side down the page* so the two can be followed together. The translation is John Everard's, first printed in London in 1650; the Greek is noted as probably descending from Psellus's archetype of the eleventh century.

A headnote from Blavatsky places the author before the text begins: Thoth-Hermes Trismegistus is called the self-created Logos and the voice of Egypt's great hierophants, with the high priest of Memphis and author of the Book of the Dead described as simply a personification of the teachings of the Egyptian sacerdotal caste — so that the Babylonian Nebo, the Egyptian Thoth and the Greek Hermes are all gods of esoteric wisdom and agents of the sun, wisdom being inseparable from divinity. The dialogue itself opens on a state between sleeping and waking, and the description is unusually precise about the physical condition it starts from: the narrator's thoughts seriously busied about things that are, his understanding lifted up, and all his bodily senses held back as they are in a man heavy with sleep from fullness of meat or bodily labour. In that state he seems to see one of exceeding great stature and infinite greatness, who calls him by his name and asks what he wishes to hear and see, and to learn and know by understanding. Having the Greek alongside makes the file useful to anyone who wants to test a rendering rather than take it on trust — which is the reason to prefer it to a plain English text.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.8 MB, 16 pages)