Three Major Elements Of The Cosmic Hermeticum

In the Corpus Hermeticum, it also emphasizes the kinship between the created and the creator. Everything in creation, accordingly has its root in the transcendent, or the “One Thing”. The Emerald Tablet itself teaches in veiled language how to produce the alchemical Elixir of Life or “Quintessence”, the “fifth element”, that which is born from the “One Thing”. The father of this final product is the sun and the mother being the moon, which “defeats all subtle things and permeates all solids”. The sun symbolizes the fire, the moon, water, wind, air, and the earth, obviously, the earth. The first three elements also correspond to Sulphur, Salt and Mercury.

The Sun provides its life giving rays to all life in the solar system in a cyclical manner by providing its solar seeds into the earth so that they may be “perfected” or manifested in life. These all come from the One as adaptations, splitting off into specialized roles. The first three principal aspects of the One gather together to form the Earth. When the three principal elements are separated out from the fourth element and purified and then recombined to form a new type of Earth, being the Fifth Element being the “Cosmic Quintessence.” That is the key to understanding all alchemy. The “Hermetic art” of alchemy itself may act a mirror for psychological or spiritual transformation has a long
tradition, going back at least to the time of Zosimos and way before that.

“Separate the Earth from the Fire, the Subtle from the Gross, repeatedly with great skillfulness.” This is corresponds to the alchemical axiom of the Latin “Solve et Coagula”, meaning dissolve and coagulate or reconstitute. Any alchemical operation will involve these two fundamental steps. This process involves lessening the influence of the lower and solidifying the influence of the higher and crystallizing it as a permanent substance on earth. This process dissolves all of the impurities of matter and darkness until all that is left is the”True image” or the true expression of the “One Thing” being a reflection of the Divine Mind in the world below. In this instance, we can see how Plato may have been playing on Hermetic and alchemical ideas when he wrote in Timaeus 28a6, about how the divine Craftsman (the “Demiurge”), imitated the unchanging, eternal model above and imposes an ordered mathematical order pre-existent primal chaos to generate the cosmos we know. The Demiurge, in this instance, can be seen as a cosmic alchemist or initiator who dissolves and perfects the chaotic realm into multiple structures and shapes based on the Eternal Forms above.

The alchemist raises the subtle into heaven, from the below to the above, and allows it to descend again, by dissolving one’s “wish” or “will”, then coagulating it again after it has been in the “above”.
The alchemist allows that creative imagination to descend into earth and bringing with it the perfected substance. By the power of the “One Thing” it becomes so. This is the true meaning behind the idea of transforming base metals like lead into gold. In the Corpus Hermeticum, Poimandres the Man-Shepard (1), we find this idea of ascending into the higher spheres, where the material body is dissolved into light and
ascends:

To this Poimandres said: “First, in releasing the material body you give the body itself over to alteration, and the form that you used to have vanishes. To the demon you give over your temperament, now inactive. The body’s senses rise up and flow back to their particular sources, becoming separate parts and mingling again with the energies. And feeling and longing go on toward irrational nature. Thence the human being rushes up through the cosmic framework...

“The unique is of all the strengths the strongest strength. It defeats all subtle things and permeates all solids. In this way, the cosmic was created.” An alchemist might argue that this “strength” or force is that of the Philosopher’s Stone, the Pearl of the Great Price, the Divine Hermaphrodite, the Astral Fire, or the Elixir of Life, being the “perfected” (Greek: teleios) or the “complete” result of the Great Work (Magnum Opus) of self-transformation. These objects and symbols represent something that has completed the work, that represents this perfect completion of the alchemical process. By its very nature, it is materialized spirit, and spiritualized matter. It is the solid, unchanging realization of the above, which stands firm and “unshakable”. The spiritual is ironically represented as a physical object; the alchemical offspring or manifestation of the divine itself. The stone has completed the journey which encases both worlds of “perfected” matter and spirit in its alloy. It is the result being from uniting the opposites or what Carl Jung called the “coniunctio oppositorum”.
One can emulate this process and apply it admirably by becoming “co-creators” of manifestation through the imagination since man is created in the “image of God” and is able to define reality as Adam named the animals in the Garden of Eden. The occult author, Tracy Twyman makes a poignant observation about this point: “If man is made in ‘God’s image,’ it seems to me that part of our role is to act as his eyes, and his imagination, collapsing the trajectories of probability curves as we observe and thus define the reality around us. In other words, I think we are integral to the process of creation, and that is the crushing responsibility that we must bear. That is one way in which we hold aloft the Heavens on our shoulders.” This is the “Hermetic” Law of Attraction in a nutshell.