TO THE BENEVOLENT READER

AND SINCERE SON OF PHILOSOPHY,

FROM THE HOLY SPIRIT OF INTELLIGENCE,

To you, my friend, I most willingly offer these writings of mine to be read—not to Momus The Greek personification of mockery and harsh criticism or to anyone else overwhelmed by the darkness of ignorance or envy. Indeed, it is the nature of such people to defile with an impure mouth everything adorned in the garments of truth, and even to impiously profane, as they often do, the very rites of the uncreated Creator original: "opificis increati". Furthermore, I do not believe this subject of ours should be submitted to the judgments of those who claim it is too deep and divine for the human grasp, and who for that reason decide that these sacred secrets original: "arcana sacra" are by no means to be searched out by us. They constantly drum in that old axiom: What is above us is nothing to us original: "Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos". By trying to withdraw us entirely from the contemplation of divine things in this way, they seem to clearly imply that humans—though made in the image of the immense Creator—differ little or not at all from brute beasts devoid of all reason.

But is it not found in the Holy Scriptures that the Wise man shall rule the stars, and that the very offspring of the uncreated Creator has promised us that the way will be opened to those who knock? To say nothing, meanwhile, of the fact that the immortal spirit breathed into man at the first creation by the divine mind made him closest to that same mind through this breath of life. It allowed him to look more deeply into the works of the mind, and to contemplate and investigate them with his soul. Indeed, this is what the most divine of all philosophers, and the one closest to Moses, Trismegistus Hermes Trismegistus: a legendary Hellenistic figure and reputed author of the Hermetic Corpus, central to alchemy and Western esotericism, confirms in the first discourse of his Pimander The Poimandres: a foundational text of Hermeticism describing the creation of the world and the nature of humanity with these words: “Since man,” he says, “had power over all things within himself, he observed the handiwork of the seven governors The celestial spirits associated with the seven planets who govern the material world; these governors, rejoicing in the meditation of the human mind, each made man a sharer in his own order—”