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m V nly when we have succeeded in recapturing a living and W "symbolic” sensitivity toward everything modern man has fossilized as dead "nature” and abstract concepts will we arrive at the first principle of the true hermetic teaching. This principle is unity, and the formula that expresses it can be found in the Chrysopoda. of Cleopatra.-⁶⁶ "One the All”- £V xd 7WCV—to which we can connect the "Telesma, Father of all things” of the Emerald Tablet. Certainly it is not a question, in this case, of a philosophical theory—a hypothesis reducing everything to a single principle—but of an actual state brought about by a certain suppression of the law of opposition between 1 and not-I and between "inside” and "outside” [subjective/ objective]. These dualities, with rare exceptions, dominate the common and most recent perception of reality The experience of this state is the secret of what the literature calls the "Materia of the Work” or "First Matter of the Wise.” Only from this state is it possible to "extract” and "shape,” by "ritual” and "art”— xsx Vi Ktog—every thing that the tradition promises, in spiritual as well as operative (i.e., "magical”) terms.
The alchemical ideogram of "One the All,” is O, the circle: a line or movement that encloses within itself and contains in itself both its end and beginning. In hermetism this symbol expresses the universe and, at the same time, the Great Work.² In the Chrysopoda it takes the form of a serpent -Ouroboros—biting its own tail, containing within the space of the circle that it creates, the ev TO 7tav. In the same palimpsest is found another pantacle formed by two rings, the inner bearing this inscription: "One is the serpent, which contains the poison, according to the double sign [eigeuti v 6 d
6 ££G)v tov idv fl£TCf &UO while in the outer circle it says: "One is the all, the source of all and the culmination of all: if the all did not contain the all, it would be nothing.”³
This "all” has also been called chaos ("our” chaos), and cgg—(bdv Kpanoyovov— because it contains the undifferentiated potentiality of every development or gen­eration: it sleeps in the depths of each being as a sensed myth, to use Olympiodorus’s expression, and it extends to the chaotic multiplicity of scattered things and forms in space and time here below. The closed line O, the circle of Ouroboros, also has another meaning: it alludes to the principle of exclusion or "hermetic" sealing that metaphysically expresses the idea of a unilaterally conceived transcendence being extraneous to this tradition. Here the transcendence is conceived as a mode of being contained in the "one thing," which has a "double sign”: it is both itself and ultimately the overcoming of itself; it is identity and at the same time poison, that is to say, it has the capacity to alter and dissolve; it is both dominating (male) principle and dominated (female) principle — Kpatovcra Kdi KpcxTOVgevrf—and hence androgynous. One of the most ancient hermetico-alchemical testaments is the saying that Ostanes confided to Pseudo-Democritus as the key to the books of the "Art": "Nature rejoices in nature, nature triumphs over nature, nature dominates nature” (t) (phmg vrj vo£i TEpnerai, r} tpvoig n)g v(Jiv vikcc, t) (j)V(Jig rfjn
⁴ But Zosimos says in the same vein, "Nature fasci­nates [T^pKEl], conquers, and dominates nature” and, he. adds: "By the Sulfurs^:! arc the Sulfurs dominated and restrained”—a principle found recurring throughout the development of the tradition, from the Turha philosophorum⁶ on.
There proceeds from this a whole series of symbolical expressions intended to indicate the absolute self-sufficiency of the unique principle in every "operation”:
' Agarhodiimon, cited by Olyinpiodurus, CAG. 2 80; 3:27 ⁴ Marciano codex, ins. 2325, fol. 188b.