The 245 Canons

Enchiridion Physicæ Restitutæ

God is eternal being, infinite unity, the root principle of all things. His essence is immeasurable light; his power, omnipotence; his will, perfect good; his nod, a finished work. Whoever desires more encounters wonder, silence, and the deepest abyss of glory.

GOD.

Many of the wise have held that the world was delineated from eternity in its archetype. That archetype, being wholly light, was folded within itself like a book before the creation of the universe and shone for itself alone. In producing the world, however, it opened and unfolded itself as though giving birth. Through a certain extension of itself it made manifest its work, previously hidden in the mind as in a womb, and brought the ideal world into actual, material existence, as though the image of divinity had been doubled. Trismegistus intimates this when he relates that God changed his form and that all things were suddenly revealed and turned into light. For the world is nothing other than the manifest image of hidden divinity. The ancients seem to have understood this birth of the universe through their Pallas, drawn from Jupiter's brain with the aid of Vulcan, that is, divine fire or light.

THE WORLD.

* In the Pimander.

The eternal parent of things, no less wise in ordering than powerful in creating, arranged the world's organised mass in so splendid an order that the highest things are mingled with the lowest, and the lowest with the highest, without confusion, and resemble one another through a certain analogy. Thus the extremes of the entire fabric adhere most closely to one another through imperceptible intermediaries, bound by a secret connection. All things willingly agree in obedience to the supreme governor and for the benefit of lower nature; they will allow themselves to be dissolved only at the nod of him who bound them together. Hermes therefore rightly affirmed that what is below is like what is above.

* In the Emerald Tablet.

Whoever transfers the supreme authority of the universe to a nature other than divine nature denies God. For it is not lawful to acknowledge any other uncreated divinity of nature in either producing or preserving the individual things of this vast fabric than that spirit of the divine maker which brooded over the first waters. It brought the seeds of things, confused in chaos, from potentiality into actuality and, turning what it brought forth through the constant wheel of alteration, governs these lower things geometrically by composing and dissolving them.

NATURE.

Whoever does not know that this spirit, the world's creator and governor, is the soul of the world is ignorant of the universe's laws. It is poured into nature's works like a continual breath and spread abundantly through all things, moving all together and each individually according to its kind by a secret, unceasing act. For he who created claims the right to govern what he created, and we must acknowledge that the same spirit presides over creation, generation and preservation.

Yet whoever recognises nature as a universal secondary cause, serving the first and, like an instrument moved by it, directly moving individual things in the material world in their proper order, will not depart from the understanding of philosophers and theologians. They called the former nature creating and the latter nature created.