The Gnostic Bible: Gnostic Texts of Mystical Wisdom form the Ancient and Medieval Worlds

500 HERMETIC LITERATURE

his province is thought,

inventive, artful and curious;

his metal is quicksilver,

his clients, orators, thieves and poets.^1

In other gnostic works the soul (psyche) is of a lower order than spirit

(pneuma), and soul is associated with earthbound entities, particularly with

the biblical creator god. But in Poimandres, soul rather than spirit designates

the highest divine quality of anthropos, or earthly man: both nous and psyche

refer to this higher meaning. As in other gnostic texts, primal or first man (or

human) descends through the cosmos to the earth, where he mingles with

darkness and matter; that is, he becomes trapped in nature. To be free of that

darkness, he must abhor the senses, the body, all matter. After death, the

soul's ascent back through the sphere is a privilege of the select. After first

man's cosmic fall, a human being returns to become one with god. Hans

Jonas points out that the myth of cosmic return after death was transformed

in neoplatonic and Judeo-Christian mysticism into a technique of spiritual

ascent while alive and in the body. We see this phenomenon, of course, in

Plotinos, the last original neoplatonist, and in the practices of shamans and

mystics, east and west, whose principal aim is ecstatic transcendence. Jonas

summarizes brilliantly:

In a later stage of "gnostic" development (though no longer

passing under the name of Gnosticism) the external topology

of the ascent through the spheres, with the successive divesting

of the soul of its worldly envelopments and the regaining of its

original acosmic nature, could be "internalized" and find its ana-

logue in a psychological technique of inner transformations by

which the self, while still in the body, might attain the Absolute as

an immanent, if temporary, condition. An ascending scale of

mental states replaces the stations of the mythical itinerary: the

dynamics of progressive spiritual self-transformations, the spa-

tial thrust through the heavenly spheres. Thus could transcen-

dence itself be turned into immanence, the whole process

become spiritualized and put within the power and the orbit of

i. H.D., Trilogy, vol. 2, Tribute to the Angels, 63.