FRAGMENTARY

What we have here
is the story of…*

The Legendary Sage
Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus
Known to the Egyptians as Tat, Taut
Or Thoth; this all-knowing hero
Was named Hermes by the Greeks
Linked to Mercury by the Romans
And given the panegyric Trismegistus
Sometime before the Fall of Rome.

In the first few centuries after Christ
He became a useful figurehead
Under which to combine a potpourri
Of Neo-Platonic philosophy
Hellenistic Judaism and the Kabbalah
Challenging the rise of Christianity.

The fragmentary texts attributed to
This syncretic fusion – spouting the mystical
Insights of Egypt, Greece and Rome -
Were then translated in the Renaissance
As a compendium of Cosmogony
Anthropogony and Eschatology
Forming The Corpus Hermeticum:
Ancient wisdoms that were founded
In the long pre-history of the Aegean
And Mesopotamian Bronze Ages.

There is poetry yet in his confabulations.
Quizzing his interlocutor, Poimandres:

… Said I, Who art Thou?
I am, quoth he, Poemander**
The mind of the Great Lord he suffers
Then, although above the harmony
Of the cosmos, he is a slave within it.***

Now Hermes speaks
In what terrible way do the ignorant go wrong
That they have been deprived of immortality?
Poimandres replies
Why are those who are in death
Worthy of death?
Hermes responds confidently
Because the grim darkness is the first origin
Of one’s own body, from which darkness
Arose the watery nature..from which
Darkness the body is formed
In the sensory world of which death drinks.****

It is in these luscious renderings of
The ultimate mysteries of Life and Death
That we find both our place in History
And comfort in the pre-rational
Cloacal antecedents of Modernity.

 *From Anne Carson
Plainwater, Essays And Poetry, 1995
**Archaic spelling of Poimandres
*** Fragment from
The Divine Pymander
Doctor Everard, 1650
**** Text taken from
The Way of Hermes, A New Translation
Of The Corpus Hermeticum
Inner Traditions International, 2000