hangover
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From Isis unveiled.EVOLUTION TAUGHT BY HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.
But to descend from universals to particulars, from the ancient theory of planetary evolution to the evolution of plant and animal life, as opposed to the theory of special creation, what does Mr. Proctor call the following language of Hermes but an anticipation of the modern theory of evolution of species? "When God had filled his powerful hands with those things which are in nature, and in that which compasseth nature, then shutting them close again, he said: 'Receive from me, O holy earth! that art ordained to be the mother of all, lest thou shouldst want anything'; when presently opening such hands as it becomes a God to have, he poured down all that was necessary to the constitution of things." Here we have primeval matter imbued with "the promise and potency of every future form of life," and the earth declared to be the predestined mother of everything that should thenceforth spring from her bosom.
More definite is the language of Marcus Antoninus in his discourse to himself. "The nature of the universe delights not in anything so much as to alter all things, and present them under another form. This is her conceit to play one game and begin another. Matter is placed before her like a piece of wax and she shapes it to all forms and figures. Now she makes a bird, then out of the bird a beast now a flower, then a frog, and she is pleased with her own magical performances as men are with their own fancies."*
Before any of our modern teachers thought of evolution, the ancients taught us, through Hermes, that nothing can be abrupt in nature; that she never proceeds by jumps and starts, that everything in her works is slow harmony, and that there is nothing sudden not even violent death.
The slow development from preexisting forms was a doctrine with the Rosicrucian Illuminati. The Tres Matres showed Hermes the mysterious progress of their work, before they condescended to reveal themselves to mediaeval alchemists. Now, in the Hermetic dialect, these three mothers are the symbol of light, heat, and electricity, or magnetism, the two latter being as convertible as the whole of the forces or agents which have a place assigned them in the modern "Force-correlation." Synesius mentions books of stone which he found in the temple of Memphis, on which was engraved the following sentence: "One nature delights in another, one nature overcomes another, one nature overrules another, and the whole of them are one."
The inherent restlessness of matter is embodied in the saying of Hermes: "Action is the life of Phta"; and Orpheus calls nature [[polumechanos meter]]], "the mother that makes many things," or the ingenious, the contriving, the inventive mother.