(6) "I understand mind, Hermes. You cannot be known, since you stay in yourself. I am happy, father. I see you laughing. The universe is happy. No creature will lack your life, for you are the lord of the inhabitants everywhere. Your forethought keeps watch. I call you father, eternal realm of eternal realms, great divine spirit, who through spirit sends moisture on everyone. What do you tell me, father Hermes?"

(4) Thou seest, then, Asclepius, on what we are [already] founded, with what we occupy ourselves, and after what we dare to strive. But unto Thee, O God most high, I give my thanks, in that Thou hast enlightened me with Light to see Divinity! And ye, O Tat, Asclepius and Ammon, in silence hide the mysteries divine within the secret places of your hearts, and breathe no word of their concealment !

(1) But now I’ll finish for you what I have begun. For I was speaking at the start of union with the Gods, by which men only consciously enjoy the Gods’ regard,—I mean whatever men have won such rapture that they have obtained a share of that Divine Sense of intelligence which is the most Divine of Senses, found in God and in man’s reason.

[Asclepius] Are not the senses of all men, Thrice-greatest one, the same?

[Trismegistus] Nay, [my] Asclepius, all have not won true reason ; but wildly rushing in pursuit of [reason’s] counterfeit, they never see the thing itself, and are deceived. And this breeds evil in their minds, and [thus] transforms the best of animals into the nature of a beast and manners of the brutes.

(1) [Asclepius] Thou dost not mean their statues, dost thou, O Thrice-greatest one?

[Trismegistus] [I mean their] statues, O Asclepius,—dost thou not see how much thou even, doubtest?—statues, ensouled with sense, and filled with spirit, which work such mighty and such [strange] results,—statues which can foresee what is to come, and which perchance can prophesy, foretelling things by dreams and many other ways,—[statues] that take their strength away from men, or cure their sorrow, if they do so deserve. Dost thou not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is the image of the Heaven ; or, what is truer still, the transference, or the descent, of all that are in governance or exercise in Heaven? And if more truly [still] it must be said,—this land of ours is Shrine of all the World.