All posts published here are presented as casual conversation pieces to provoke thought in some direction or another, they do not necessarily represent fixed opinions of the Inner Council, as our work exists beyond the spectrum of bound statement and singular clause.
Poemandres, The Shepherd of Men
The following is a transcript of Manly P. Hall’s lecture on The Pymander or The Vision of Hermes. It is an eloquent breakdown of the core concept at the centre of Hermetic thought and teaching. Enjoy!
Thus this great procedure is punctured, it is the proper and inevitable way in which growth protects its own mystery and by means of which all archetype is fulfilled, and in the fulfilment of archetype there is the end of both the dream and the dreamer. The dreamer awakens, the dream vanishes and reality fully aware of itself abides continuously in the state of conscious reasoning, the eternal state of all knowing, but liberated from the great illusion which is self-knowing. This concept gives certain comfort to Hermes 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 of 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. That he has now 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 where they belong. He returns them to the great keepers who are the guardians of these things and precedes 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. Hermes 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 Hermes 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 parts of itself. 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 accepts 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 colour 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 Samadi of the saint in Eastern mysticism.
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 a being can contemplate its own source. Therefore it stands upon the circle of the words. Tt stands as the only begotten it is selfhood, the only born of the selfless. Man therefore can attain perhaps to an heroic state, for the hero of the Greek is the anthropos of Hermes. Man can reach a condition where perhaps all knowledge shall be granted onto him, for everything knowable he shall know, for 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 of 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 the others, realised 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 as 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 and eternity. He has been only the custodian, the guardian of something he could never own.
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 universality takes over, rushes in upon man perhaps even with the terrible aspect of the great dragon, sometimes also in the subtle radiance with which that dragon later enveloped its power so that it was easier cognisable by Hermes. But in this pure reason he has 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 realises—moves the individual gradually from his own existence to something else. Hermes fully realised 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 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 a being can contemplate its own source. Therefore it stands upon the circle of the words. Tt stands as the only begotten it is selfhood, the only born of the selfless. Man therefore can attain perhaps to an heroic state, for the hero of the Greek is the anthropos of Hermes. Man can reach a condition where perhaps all knowledge shall be granted onto him, for everything knowable he shall know, for 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 of 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 the others, realised 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 as 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 and 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 attained its majority leaves man and goes back to God. It carries with it that part of man which is by a strange spiritual hereditary 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 a 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 skill and bitterness of his own disolutionments, 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, he deny God, he deny reason, tho he lock himself for a thousand lives in the small circle of his own contempt he can do nothing. This reason can not die, he must ultimately join all that has gone before and walked 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 the delay is man’s objection to the consequence of delay. The individual in his own objecting 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 the Buddha: man passes under the keeping of suffering he must pass though 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 a man should go, it is perfectly proper that a parent shall raise the child, it is perfectly proper that it should guard it and educate it and bring it through many dangerous pities perhaps and sit by the side of sickness in the night, nursing and praying that the child’s life should be spared. It is also proper that the parent should enjoy the life of the child and shall 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 shalt be so selfish as not to release the child that 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 the life which was its proper purpose. If therefore having brought the child to majority the parent continues to press its 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 which it feels it deserves for having so faithfully reared that child. This is the problem of reason and the mind. But man’s mind reaches a point of skill where by 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 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 hurt 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 realise that against the eternal will he has struggled in vain and that his waves 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 should 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 in 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 thoses who accept the teachings of the shepherd are not different from those who reject but those who have accepted have shortened the sorrow 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 realising always that it is the eternal reason that moves within him and that if he is quiet and at peace this reason will leave 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 stars. 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 for in this reason he is paying tribute to God who of all creatures 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 and in everything here is not a remote tyrannical deity but just that voice which is raised in council, 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 shall 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 mortal mind into the simple and inevitable motions of the divine mind. At the end of his wonderful discourse Hermes raises his heart and his mind to the great dragon that is writhing in space and he says to that dragon—eternal reason—the creature which tho has fashioned in thy wisdom awaits the works that tho attends to. There’s 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 can 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 reasoner, 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.
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