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MM He wish to call attention to one final aspect of ■ the analogy. According to the hermetic con­ception, as the elements of the cosmos corre­spond to those within man, so both the process of creation—and die process by which man, through die Art, reintegrates himself within himself—follow an idem deal path and have the same meaning. The analogy between the alchemical Art - Xrfpsict- and the Act of the Demiurge—Kocrponna—goes back to the first Greek texts of Pdagius, Comarius, Zosimos. We can easily recognize the phases of Creation in the different phases of the hermetic work: the initiation experience f urnishes the key to cosmogony, and vice versa: according to the hermetic exegesis, every traditional cosmogony and mythology has, among other meanings, an explanation shaped and veiled by the enigmas of the different operations and transformations of the Art.⁹⁶
In order to make sense of this teaching it is clearly necessary to abandon the idea
of the Creation as a historical fact over and done with in the spatial and temporal past. We must conceive of it as functioning in an ongoing state, metaphysical in its own right and therefore beyond space and time, beyond past as well as future, which is more or less that same state that some mystics, even Christian mystics, have called eternal creation. On such a basis, creation is an ever-present event that consciousness can always recover by actualizing itself in states, which—according to the "principle of immanence”—constitute the possibilities oi its profound na­ture—its "chaos''—while in the cosmogonic myth, they are presented to us in the form ot symbols, gods, images, and primordial acts.⁹⁷ And given that the goal of the "ambula ab intra," of the. hermetic "inner path" descending to the "interior of the earth” is precisely that "profound nature," this aspect of the hermetic teaching is easily explained. And as the alchemists not only take the different phases of the Hesiodic, or even biblical, creation for a paradigm, but sometimes extend the analogy to the same episodes in the life of Christ and particularly to the Herculean and Jasonic lahors, all of these to them are neither "historical facts” nor "fables” but allusions to extratemporal spiritual states and acts.
We must add to the above that this "living ot the myth” has, in hermetfsm, nothing even vaguely "mystical” about it. Aside from all that has been said, "living the myth” means to arrive by means of symbols at a perception of that metahlstorical order in which nature and man himself, so to speak, are found in a state of creation and which, among other things, contains for us the secret of the energies that activate within and behind visible things and human corporeality. We shall see that none other is the premise in all strictly alchemical (i.e., not simply initiatic) operations.
For now we shall confine ourselves to pointing out the connection between such ideas and the deepest understanding of the ancient traditions according to which gods, demons, or heroes are the introducers to "physical reality” or to living consciousness, of the mysteries of nature. Hermetically "to know” a god is to realize a "creative state” that is at the same time a metaphysical significance, the "secret soul” and the occult power of a specific process of nature.

The different references in the texts to "genii," gods, etc,, which in dreams or visions have revealed to the "Sons of Hermes" the secrets of the Art, must be understood in the same sense.
Now we shall go on to consider the developments of the hermetic doctrine in regard to the principles comprising the "one knowledge."