The Hermetic Writings, Volume 1

ASCLEPIUS I: 2 a, 2 b

...for you (Parmenides) say in your poems that the All is one." The nearest approach to this in the extant fragments of Parmenides is fragment 8. 5: "Nor was it ever, nor will it be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous." Compare Aetius (Diels): "Melissus and Zeno [say] the one and all [is] God." Cicero (Academica 2. 118): "Xenophanes... [held] that all things are one, and that this is unchangeable, and that this is God."

The saying of Heraclitus and Parmenides, "all things are one," became widely current, chiefly through the mediation of the Stoics; and it was adopted by the Hermetists, in a sense modified to suit their doctrine.

"as those things which were in the creator, before he created all things."

Since all things which exist have been brought into being by God's will, they must have existed in his thought and purpose before they came into being in the world of sense. Similarly, it might be said that things which do not yet exist in the world of sense, but will come into being in the future, exist already in God's thought; and that the universe as a whole, before it came into being as a sensible cosmos original: "κόσμος αἰσθητός", already existed, as an intelligible cosmos original: "κόσμος νοητός", in God's mind. Thus Philo (On the Creation of the World) compares the intelligible cosmos to the plan of a city, which exists in the architect's mind before he builds the city.

A similar thought was expressed in mythical form in the Orphic Theogony, where it was said that Zeus prepared himself for his task of generating the sensible universe by "swallowing" all that pre-existed.

2 b. From the heavens all things... into the earth and into the water, and into the air [is] fire. Hermes begins his exposition by explaining how all living things are brought into being. The life of all organisms on earth results from movements and interactions of the four corporeal elements.

The meaning of "From the heavens all things..." may perhaps be inferred...