"Suddenly everything
changed before me. Reality was opened out in a moment. I saw the boundless
view. All became dissolved in Light — united within one joyous Love. Yet the
Light cast a shadow, grim and terrible, which, passing downwards, became like
restless water, chaotically tossing forth spume like smoke. And I heard an
unspeakable lament — an inarticulate cry of separation. The Light then uttered
a Word, which calmed the chaotic waters. My Guide asked: 'Do you understand the
secrets of this vision? I am that Light — the Mind of God,
which exists before the chaotic dark waters of potentiality. My calming Word is
the Son of God — the idea of beautiful order; the harmony of all things
with all things. Primal Mind is parent of the Word, just as, in your own
experience, your human mind gives birth to speech. They cannot be divided, one
from the other, for life is the union of Mind and Word.
Freke, Tim. The Hermetica: The
Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs (pp. 32-33). Tim Freke Publications. Kindle Edition.
Above is a quote from the
Hermetica as translated by Tim Freke and Peter Gandy in their book “The
Hermetica, The Lost Wisdom of the Pharoahs.” If you read the introduction of
this book, you will find that Freke and Gandy, propose that this text is
actually ancient and directly from the Egyptians. They make the claim in the
introduction that ideas similar to this are found in hieroglyphics on an
Egyptian Pyramid at Saqqara that is dated at 3,000 BCE or in other words, over
5,000 years ago.
Why does it matter? It matters
because the writings in the Hermetica most closely explain what science is
discovering about consciousness. This is especially true with the way it was written
down in the Kybalion. And, if William Walker Atkinson is the author, and I
believe it is very likely, he was wise to credit it to three unnamed initiates.
I don’t think it would have had the same appeal written in the name of a
person. And the mystery of three initiates, makes it far more appealing. I am drawn to the Kybalion because it does not
stress or project a specific afterlife. It does not anthropomorphize deity. It
settles for explaining that the creative source is mind. Albeit the mind of
God, the mind at large, the divine matrix, it only explains that it is a mind.
In other words, it is consciousness. This is most important in any theology
that may be developed going forward. And theology is merely the study of the
creative source of the universe.
So how did the Hermetica get suppressed?
Why is it not as widely known as other spiritual traditions? It was a set of
circumstances that set its suppression in motion. First off, Queen Elizabeth I
of England was very interested in the esoteric and the occult. John Dee, her
court astrologer, and adviser was highly invested in the Hermetica. At that
time, it was believed that it could be traced back to ancient Greece at the
very least. It influenced most of the thinkers of the renaissance. It was
instrumental in the return to classic ideals. When Queen Elizabeth I died, King
James I came to power, yes, the James of the King James Authorized Version of
the Bible, and the King James that Jamestown was named for. He was averse to
the occult and wanted to rid the court of all the esoteric trappings of Queen
Elizabeth I.
He subsequently invited Isaac Casaubon
to be a part of his inner circle. Casaubon was a French citizen that moved to
England and was embraced by King James. Casaubon was a Greek Scholar. Casaubon
was asked to examine the Hermetica that had been retranslated in the 1400’s and
he concluded that it was not ancient but rather likely produced by a variety of
Greeks in Alexandria in the third century CE. He called it a fraud, claiming
that it was not ancient at all. His discrediting of it resulted in it going
obscure.
Based on Casaubon’s expertise, it
was not accepted by the philosophers of the enlightenment. This further
relegated it to obscurity. The problem was that the hieroglyphs had not been
translated during Casaubon’s life. Had they been perhaps he would have taken a
different view of the Hermetica. When the Rosetta Stone was found, scholars
were able to finally decode the hieroglyphics and understand the message they gave.
A pyramid in Saqqara dated to at least 3,000 BCE had writing similar to the
Hermetica. This meant that it was a reliable source, and no doubt was brought
to Greece by Pythagoras after his trips to Egypt and Sumer. The information
found in the Hermetica was indeed ancient.
Now, returning to the above quote
from the Hermentica about the word being the son of God. The parent, father and
mother are mind, conscious potential, and the son is the Logos, word that is
the conscious expression of the mind. It brings potential thoughts into
reality. Herein lies the importance of
Jesus of Nazareth. He taught that he was the incarnation of the word. The truth
is that by virtue of consciousness we all are but as far as I know Jesus was
the first to express the idea. He went on to teach that each of us as well are
the incarnation of the word of the creative source. That makes all of us sons
and daughters of the creator by virtue of our conscious mind.
The point of this is that the
creative source, the universal mind of God has been revealing this over and
over across millennia. Now, here in the twenty-first century, science is beginning
to validate this view of the world we live in. It is a main step in developing
eclectic spirituality where all traditions can be valued, but a deeper
understanding of source can be attained.
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