Mead - The Hymns of Hermes

THE SERVICE OF SONG

Clement of Alexandria tells us that the whole of the religious philosophythat is, the wisdom, discipline and multifarious arts and sciencesof the Egyptian priesthood was contained in the Books of Hermes, that is of Thoth. These Books, he informs us further, were classified under forty-two heads and divided into a number of groups according to the various septs or divisions of the priests.

In describing a certain sacred ceremoniala procession of priests in their various ordersClement tells us that it was headed by a representative of the order of Singers, who were distinguished by appropriate symbols of music, some of which were apparently carried in the hands and others embroidered on the robes.

These Singers had to make themselves masters of, that is, learn by heart, two of the divisions of the Books of Hermes, namely, those which contained collections of Hymns in Honour of the Gods or God, and Encomia or Hymns in Praise of the Kings (iii, 222).

Many specimens of similar hymns in praise of the Gods are preserved to us in Egyptian inscriptions and papyri, and some of them are most noble outpourings of the soul in praise of the majesty and transcendency of the Supreme, in terms that may be not unfavorably compared with similar praise-giving in other great scriptures. But, alas! the hymnbooks of Thoth, to which Clement refers, are lost to us. He may, of course, have been mistaken in so definitely designating them, just as he was indubitably mistaken in thinking that they were collections of hymns composed by a single individual, Hermes.

The grandiose conception of Thoth as the inspirer of all sacred writings and the teacher of all religion and philosophy was Egyptian and not Greek; and it was but a sorry equivalent that the Greeks could find in their own pantheon when, in the change of God-names, they were forced to translate Thoth by Hermes.

Thoth, as the inspirer of all sacred writings and the president of all priestly discipline, was, as Iamblichus tells us, a name which was held by the Egyptians to be common to all prieststhat is to say, every priest as priest was a Thoth, because he showed forth in his sacred office some characteristic or other of the Great Priest or Master Hierophant among the Gods whose earthy name was ThothTehuti.

Thoth was thus the Oversoul of all priests; and when some of the Greeks came to know better what the inner discipline of the true priestly mysteries connoted, they so felt the inadequacy of plain Hermes as a suitable equivalent for the Egyptian name which designated this great ideal, that they qualified Egyptian Hermes with the honorific epithet Thrice-greatest.

It is of the Hymns of this Thrice-greatest Hermes that I shall treat in the present small volumehymns that were inspired by the still-living tradition of what was best in the wisdom of ancient Egypt, as philosophized through minds trained in Greek thought, and set forth in the fair speech of golden-tongued Hellas.

But here again, unfortunately, we have no collection of such hymns preserved to us; and all we can do is to gather up the fragments that remain, scattered through the pages of the Trismegistic literature which have escaped the jealousy of an exclusive bibliolatry.

The main Gospel of the Trismegistic Gnosis is contained in a sacred sermon which bears in Greek the title Poemandres. This may have been originally the Greek transliteration of an Egyptian name (ii, 5O); but from the treatise itself it is manifest that it was understood by the Greek followers of this Gnosis to mean The Shepherd of Men, or Man-shepherd. This Shepherd was no man, but Divine Humanity or the Great Man or Mind, the inspirer of all spiritual initiations.

This majestic Reality or Essence of Certitude was conceived of as a limitless Presence, or Person, of Light and Life and Goodness, which enwrapped the contemplative mind of the pious worshipper of God or the Good, of the single-hearted lover of the Beautiful, and of the unwearied striver for the knowledge of the True.

And so, in His instruction to one who was striving to reach the grade of a true self-conscious Hermes, Poemandres declares:

I, Mind, Myself am present with holy men and good, the pure and merciful, men who live piously.

To such My Presence doth become an aid, and straightway they gain Gnosis of all things, and win the Father's love by their pure lives, and give Him thanks, invoking on Him blessings, and chanting hymns, intent on Him with ardent love (ii, 14).

And the same instruction is practically repeated in the sermon called The Key, where we read:

But on the pious soul the Mind doth mount and guide it to the Gnosis' Light. And such a soul doth never tire in songs of praise to God and pouring blessing on all men, and doing good in word and deed to all, in imitation of its Sire (ii, 155).

The sole conditions for reaching this consummation, so devoutly to be wished, are here laid down:

The good alone can know the Good; even as one of the invocations to Hermes as the Good Mind, preserved in the Greek Magic Papyri, phrases it:

Thee I invoke! Come unto me, O Good, Thou altogether good, come to the good! (i, 86).

The pure alone can know the Pure; and by Pure I think Hermes sometimes meant far more than is generally connoted by the term. Pure is that which remains in itself, and is neither too much nor too little; it is the equilibrium, the balanced state, the mysterious something that reconciles all opposites, and is their simultaneous source and endingthe Divine Justice.

The merciful alone can know the Merciful, the source of the infinite variety of the Divine Love.

To such the Divine Presence becomes an aid; it is in the field of this Good Land alone, in the self-cultivated soil of the spiritual naturethe good and the pure and merciful natureof man, that the Divine Presence can sow the self-conscious seeds of the heavenly Gnosis, so that from this Virgin Womb of the Virtue may come to birth the true Man, the child of Freedom, or Right Will, or Good Will.

To others, to those who are still in ignorance of spiritual things, the Divine Presence is also an aid, but unknowingly; for being manifested for them in its reversed mode, by means of the constraints of Fate, the many consider it a hindrance, as indeed it isa hindrance to their falling into greater ignorance and limitation. The soil must be cleared of tares and ploughed, before it can be sown.

But when man of his own freewill reverses his mode of life, and revolves with the motion of the heavenly spheres instead of spinning against them, the conscious contact with the Divine Presence which is thus effected, stirs the whole nature to respond; sunlight pours into the true heart of the man from all sides, and his heart answers; it wakes from the dead and begins to speak true words. The Great God gives speech to the heart in the Invisible, even as He does to the dead Osirified; and that unspoken speech is a continual praise-giving of right deeds. There is also a spoken speech, becoming articulate in human words in hymns of praise and thanks to Godthe liturgy of a piety that answers to the Divine and is thus responsible.

Indeed this is the basis of all liturgy and cult, even in their crudest forms and reflectionsin the dreams of men's sleeping hearts. But the Trismegistic writings are dealing with the self-conscious realization of true Gnostic Passion, where feeling has to be consciously transmuted into knowledge.

The singing of hymns on earth is the reflection of a heavenly mystery. Before the man can really sing in proper tune he must have harmonized his lower nature and transformed it into cosmos or fit order. Hitherto he has been singing out of tune, chaoticallyhowling, shrieking, crying, cursing, rather than singing articulately, and so offering reasonable oblations to God.