Hermes Trismegistus & The Three Initiates: The Emerlad Tablet of Hermes & The Kybalion

 At last, something that makes sense.  It is not these works' antiquity that gives them their credibility.  The former seems indeed to be ancient, but the latter is scarcely a hundred years old.  No, it is their nature that keeps them from the traps that religion--including Wicca, New Age, and even systems that spring from these works themselves, such as The Golden Dawn, etc.--fall into.  These systems invariably make the mistake of building a narrative around the universal truths that they purport to channel.  They get specific and detailed, and to the extent they do, they obscure reality under the veils of perception, interpretation, and judgement.  

What made this book so edifying, and I cannot overstate how thoroughly it has occupied my mind and transformed my thinking, was its universality.  There are very few specifics offered, and no "How to . . ."s.  These works merely state that which is true, and leave it at that.  Thus they allow the reader to apply it however she or he sees fit, whether it be candles or crystals or star charts.   Every step removed something is from the fundamental and general corrupts it.  These first steps are unavoidable to some extent: meaning, and language, for example.  But one need not progress through all the degrees of separation from these basic truths and end up with something so far removes as to be not only useless, but demonstrably false.

I recently uncovered the original quote that my friend Jim White often (incorrectly, as it turns out) referenced when describing the Divine.  Heinrich Zimmer is reported to have said,

"The best things can't be told," because they transcend thought. "The second best are misunderstood," because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck in the thoughts."The third best are what we talk about.”

 

Too often, we are left with the sixth or seventh best things instead, and build an entire belief system around them.  In these works, at least, I can see something as close to "True" as could be hoped for.