Secret of Secrets

...was pleasing to the first Creator of things. But those which were given over to obscure acts and beastly pleasures are cast down into a sad circle and tartarus, where they are tormented by darkness, sadness, and perpetual fire. Plato once said that rational souls, freed from their bodies, approach their kindred stars and are there blessed or saddened according to their merits and demerits. We have said in our writings concerning the soul that the human intellect is unmixed with the soul, impassible, and incorruptible, and in the book On the Nature of the Gods we taught that it remains after separation from the body with those affections which it had acquired while in the body. Therefore, the souls of the wicked, when they remain with the passions of gluttony, luxury, ambition, and avarice, desire to exercise those acts again; and since they lack the bodies and organs proportioned to them, they are held by this lust for exercising them perpetually, and thus they have this perpetual misery. The souls of the good, however, which possessed virtue and speculative sciences and were elevated by heroic virtue, remain after death capable of beatitude, and are thus blessed by this: that God and the intelligences adhere to them as forms, and they are most beloved of God. The place of beatitude is the kindred star, the mistress of the sign of the horoscope through which the soul descends; for indeed, since it descends through it, it is right that it should return to it in order to be beatified. Wherefore, Alexander, gird yourself with your whole mind to grasp virtue and the sciences, rejecting vices, lest after death your soul be saddened for eternal time.

That this book is held by us to be mutilated. Sixth.

That this book is not complete, but in some places mutilated, can be easily gathered; for the author promises in this same [work] to declare certain things which are not found in it. Ioannes Mesues and Alexander Achillinus also cite certain things from the book of Aristotle to Alexander which are missing here; but in order that greater faith may be given to us...