Egyptian-Hebrew stream·Corpus Hermeticum·The Third Book. Called "The Holy Sermon."
III. The Holy Sermon — Sacred Discourse
The brief but doctrinally weighted third treatise. The cosmogony reaffirmed: God's making is by his Word; the dignity of man as the creature who can know the divine source. Establishes the high anthropology that the later treatises elaborate.
Source context
- Theme
- primordial cosmogony: divine Word, light-dark separation, and the ordering of elemental nature
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Genesis / Hebrew cosmogonyThe Holy Sermon's sequence — darkness over the abyss, divine utterance, separation of light from wet nature, and the emergence of ordered elements — exhibits cross-tradition congruence with the Bereshit account of creation-by-Word (Gen. 1:1–10).
- Platonism / TimaeusThe Hermetic demiurgic ordering of wet, dark, disordered matter into fire, water, earth, and air through divine Reason parallels Plato's Timaeus account of the Demiurge imposing rational form upon chaotic receptacle-matter.
- Stoic Logos doctrineThe sermon's identification of a fiery, rational principle (Nous / Logos) that penetrates and orders primal matter exhibits cross-tradition congruence with Stoic pneuma-logos as the active, fiery reason pervading passive matter.
The Third Book. Called "The Holy Sermon."
The glory of all things is God and the Divine —the Divine Nature—the beginning of all that exists.
God, the Mind, Nature, Matter, Operation (or Working), Necessity, the End, and Renewal.
In the chaos, there was infinite darkness in the abyss—the bottomless depth—along with water and a subtle spirit, intelligible in power. Then the Holy Light emerged, and the elements formed from the sand of the moist substance.
All the gods distinguished the nature filled with seeds.
When all things were unbounded and unformed, the light elements were separated elements were above, and the heavy established upon the moist sand, all things being divided by fire. Sustained and suspended by the Spirit, they were carried, and the heavens appeared in seven circles.
The gods were seen in their ideas of the stars, with all their signs, and the stars were numbered, with the gods within them. The sphere was entirely lined with air, carried around in a circular motion by the Spirit of God.
Each god, by his internal power, did what was commanded of him. They created four-footed creatures, creeping things, those that live in the water, and those that fly. Every fruitful seed, grass, and the flowers of all greens sowed. within themselves the seeds of regeneration.
Thus came the generations of men to the knowledge of the Divine Works, serving as a living testimony of Nature. A multitude of people, given dominion over all things under heaven and the knowledge of good things, increased and multiplied abundantly.
Every soul in flesh, through the wonderful workings of the gods in the circles, beholds heaven, the gods, Divine Works, and the operations of nature; perceives signs of good things, gains knowledge of the Divine Power, and discovers every skillful workmanship of goodness.
So it begins to live within them and become wise according to the operation of the circular gods, transforming into great monuments and remembrances of the skillful works done upon Earth, leaving them to be read through the darkness of times.
And every generation of living flesh, of fruit, seed, and all crafts, though they may be lost, must necessarily be renewed by the renovation of the gods and by the nature of a circle moving in number. For it is a divine thing that every world cycle should be renewed by nature, for in that which is divine, Nature is also established.
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