Handbook of Restored Physics and the Secret Work of Hermetic Philosophy

...folded up Original: complicatus. This completes the word from the previous page's catchword "com-", like a book, He shone for Himself alone; but in the production of the World, as if in labor, He opened and unfolded Himself. His work, which was previously hidden in the Divine Mind as if in a womb Matrice: literally "matrix" or "womb," used here to describe the Mind of God as the generative source where all creation is conceived, He made manifest through a certain extension of Himself. Thus, from the Ideal World Mundus Idealis: the world of perfect "ideas" or forms that exists in God's mind before they take physical shape, He brought forth the actual and material world as if it were a doubled image of His own divinity. This was signaled by

In the Pimander*

• Trismegistus Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary Hellenistic figure perceived as a great sage who combined Egyptian and Greek wisdom, when he reports that God changed His form, and all things were suddenly revealed and turned into light: for the World is nothing other than the visible image of hidden divinity. The ancients seem to have understood this origin of the universe through their story of Pallas The goddess Athena/Pallas, who represents wisdom emerging from the brain of Jove Jupiter or Zeus, the king of the gods, extracted by the help of Vulcan—that is, by the power of the fire or Divine light In mythology, Vulcan used an axe to split Jupiter's head to release Pallas; the author interprets this "fire-god" as the divine light that brings forth wisdom/creation.

3. The eternal parent of things, no less wise in organizing than He is powerful in creating, arranged the organic mass of the World into such a magnificent order that the highest things are joined with the lowest, and the lowest...