POIMANDRES

Nous Mind the light existing in innumerable powers, and having become an unlimited cosmos, and the fire being contained by a great power and having taken a position, being held fast. I understood these things while seeing them through the word of Poimandres. As I was in amazement, he said to me again, "You saw in the Nous the archetypal form, which exists before the beginning of the endless beginning." This is what Poimandres said to me.

"From where then," I say, "did the elements of nature arise?" He replied again to this: "From the counsel of God, which, having taken the Logos Word/Reason and having seen the beautiful cosmos, imitated it, having been ordered into a cosmos through its own elements and the offspring of souls. The Nous Divine Mind, God, being male-female, existing as life and light, gave birth by Logos Word/Reason to another Nous Divine Mind, the creator, who, being God of fire and spirit, created seven administrators, containing the sensible cosmos in circles. And their administration is called Heimarmene Fate/Destiny." The Logos Word/Reason of God leaped immediately from the downward-tending elements of God into the pure creation of nature and was united to the creator Nous Divine Mind, for it was of the same substance. The irrational, downward-tending elements of nature were left behind, so as to be only matter. But the creator Nous Divine Mind, together with the Logos Word/Reason, containing the circles and spinning them with a rushing sound, turned his own creations and allowed them to turn from an unlimited beginning to an endless end. For it begins where it ends. Their revolution, as the Nous Divine Mind wills,