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This prophetic science—insofar as it is a science, and not a sporadic or sponta­neous phenomenon—proceeds, as a rule, from a new experience of time and events that is peculiar to the hermetically renewed consciousness. It is not explained by fatalism (wherein the future is predetermined and therefore foreseeable), but by an ego-state united with certain influences that determine the events of the external world, in the same way that the ordinary person is united with the active powers of his material body.
It is stated clearly in this passage from Plotinus:
For a superior soul the. stars are not only prognostics, but die soul is part of and evolves internally along with the All, in which it participates ,,. the knowledge that (the superior man) has of the future diat we attribute to him does not at all. resemble the knowledge of fortune-tellers, but is like that of active participants who have a certainty of what must be; and such is the case with genuine rulers. For them nothing is undetermined, nothing is uncertain.
Their decision persists as it was in the first moment. Their judgment of things to come is just as firm as their vision of present things is exact. . . . The adept persists in wanting that which he must do and, in this persistence, he will do only what he wills, and nothing else but that which derives from the idea in himself. , . . When one rules alone, on whom does he depend? On whose desires? To such an agent action does not come from anything else, any more than Wisdom comes from others. He needs nothing else: neither argument, nor memory, since these things (compared to the superrational and absolute ’'awakening” that he possesses) are useless.^{468 469}
In this sense prophetic knowledge, rather than being based on fate, is based on its mastery. Moreover, the unanimous teaching of hermetism, especially hellenistic hermetism, is that the power of fate does not extend beyond a certain limit and that this limit does not stop an adept. Zosimos’s declaration has been repeatedly quoted, according to which the race of Philosophers is beyond destiny and "autonomous”: "The race of Philosophers acts without undergoing the action {ejzadcoc, yap ipya^etat]’'⁴ after having "separated the sulfurous Soul from the elements,” it has
been reintegrated into the principle of pure action and is no longer subject to conditions.
Thus Agrippa speaks of a magical power "acting without limits or external help,” residing in the "permanent and nondecaying soul.”¹ The relation of this power to the "separation” is confirmed by this passage from Braccesco: "The subtle and formal substance, submerged in quantity and matter, cannot exercise its potentialities, but the more spiritual and formal it is, and the more separated from matter and quantity, the more it can extend its powers to produce many effects. And since our medicine is composed of subtle spirits and is almost separated from all elemental matter it can, but without any obstacle, be extended to all curable infirmities.” And here we can interpret "infirmity” in the more general sense of imperfection, limitation, and privation of being.^{470 471}
But to speak in detail of the different powers it is necessary to consider, by reason of the various occult "entities” enclosed in corporeality, the profundities that the work of separation and recomposition, of solve ec coagula can reach.