A rectangular woodcut headpiece ornament featuring symmetrical scrollwork, acanthus leaves, and floral motifs.

TO THE BENEVOLENT READER

AND SINCERE SON OF PHILOSOPHY,

FROM THE HOLY SPIRIT OF UNDERSTANDING,

A decorative square initial letter 'T' featuring floral patterns and a small bird-like figure.

To you, my friend, I most gladly offer these writings of mine to be read—not to any critic original: "momo," referring to Momus, the Greek god of mockery and unfair criticism or anyone else overwhelmed by the darkness of ignorance or envy. For it is the habit of such people to deprave with their impure mouths everything adorned in the garments of truth, and even to impiously profane the very rites of the uncreated Creator uncreated Creator: a philosophical term for God as the primary cause who was not Himself created. Furthermore, I do not believe this subject of ours should be submitted to the judgments of those who claim it is too profound and divine for human grasp, and for that reason decree that these sacred secrets original: "arcana sacra" must in no way be investigated by us. They constantly insist upon that old axiom: What is above us, is nothing to us. Indeed, by attempting to withdraw us entirely from the contemplation of divine matters in this way, they seem to suggest quite clearly that humans—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 promised us that the way would be opened to those who knock? I shall pass over in silence, for now, the fact that the immortal spirit breathed into man by the Divine Mind at the first creation made him most like unto that same Mind through this "breath of life." It permitted him to look deeply into the works of the Mind, and to contemplate and examine them with his soul. This is surely what Trismegistus—the most divine of all philosophers and closest to Moses—confirms in the first discourse of his Pimander The Pimander (or Poimandres) is a foundational text of Hermeticism, a tradition of esoteric philosophy with these words: Since man, he says, had power over all things in himself, he observed the works of the seven governors; these governors, rejoicing in the meditation of the human mind, each made man a participant in their own order—