DeConick A.D

87
SUPERPOWERS AND MONSTERS
Hermetic Rescue
One of the distinctive features of the pagan pathway of Gnostic spirituality
is its more favorable view of the cosmos than we find in the biblical
pathway. That said, the Hermetics did not think that the world is without
fault. It is conceived by the Hermetics as a place of entrapment, and the
body as a hideous prison that bars us from the truth.
Yet the cosmos also is viewed as an inundation that ultimately flows
from the all-lord (Corpus Hermeticum VII.1–3). It is the result of the
diversification of the One and Only (XI.5). So the cosmos is perceived
to be a second god, an immortal living thing. It partakes of the eternal
being of the primal God, its originator and sustainer (VIII.1–2). What is
beautiful and good about the universe is that it comes into being from
the constant procreative activity of the all-lord, the life giver (XI.13–14).
When we contemplate the universe, we are seeing God made visible (V.5).
Still, the Hermetics were aware that there is vice all around us (VI.3–4).
So where did the vice come from, according to their philosophy? What
happened?
This is not entirely clear from the Hermetic literature that has survived.
What we do know is that the Hermetics understood the nested incarceration
of the human mind within the soul within the material body to be
problematic. It made the immortal soul and the mind subject to fate and
mortality, desire and suffering. It crippled them like kryptonite cripples
Superman.
This first occurred when man, the archetypal clone, lusted after his
material form in the pool of water, when he wanted more than anything
to mate with it, and did. This desire for the body keeps the mind, soul,
and body mated, it keeps the psyche and the nous embedded in material
existence.
So the Hermetics identified lust and bodily desire as the problem behind
all evil. Procreation itself was viewed as sacred, between Hermetic
men and women, but lust was something that had to be controlled even
during their own sexual trysts (Asclepius 21). If it wasn’t, then the True
Man would never be freed but would continue to live in darkness and
error, suffering the effects of death (Corpus Hermeticum I.19). The True
Man would remain attached and bound to a mortal body, with all its
limitations.