The Poimandres: Vision of the Divine Mind

In the borderland between sleep and waking, a philosopher felt his senses grow still. He was not sick, not exhausted — his mind had simply reached the edge of what ordinary thought could hold, and then something came through. A being of vast and boundless magnitude appeared, and it knew his name.

"I am Poimandres," it said, "the Mind of the Sovereignty." And the world opened.

First came light — limitless, sweet, joyous light, flooding everything. Then, as he watched, a darkness crept in from one side: gloomy, coiling like a serpent, transforming into a moist churning mass that groaned and smoked. Out of that dark moisture a Word — a Logos — cried out. It was the Word of the Light speaking into the Darkness, and creation began.

Poimandres explained what Hermes was seeing: the Light was the divine Mind; the moist darkness was the Nature into which light was descending. The Word was the Son of God, the instrument of making. And then came the most astonishing moment in the vision: a human figure descended through the seven planetary spheres, acquiring from each sphere a different quality — from Saturn, cunning; from Mars, boldness; from Venus, desire. This primordial Human looked down and saw its own image reflected in the waters of Nature, fell in love with that reflection, and descended. It became entangled in matter. And so began the human condition: divine mind imprisoned in earthly form, half free and half bound, capable of seeing the Light it came from and yet caught in the body's gravity.

Poimandres did not offer comfort. He offered understanding. The soul that recognizes its origins can begin to shed what the spheres gave it — stripping off, layer by layer, the planetary qualities acquired on the way down. At death, or in genuine illumination, the soul passes back through those same seven spheres, returning each borrowed quality, until it arrives — naked, essential, itself — in the Eighth sphere, the realm of the fixed stars, and hymns the Father alongside the divine powers.

When Hermes woke, he did not go home. He went out into the streets and began to cry out to whoever would listen: turn from sleep, turn from the darkness, turn back to the Light you came from. Most passed by without pausing. A few stopped and asked to be taught. He taught them through the night.

The Poimandres was the founding text of what became the Hermetic tradition: a river of ideas about the soul, creation, and divine knowledge that flowed through late-antique Alexandria, through Islamic alchemy, through Renaissance Florence, and into the modern West. Everything in that tradition begins with this: a man alone with his thoughts, suddenly addressed by a boundless being that called him by name.