Tin: gates of Hecivm are open; 'Ihe gates of Earth are open; 'ihe Way of the Current is open; Tiy spirit has been heard by all the gods and genii; By the. spirit of Heaven—and Earth—the Sea —and the Currents.-* And such is the teaching of the Corpus Hermettcum: "Rise up above every height; descend deeper than any depth; concentrate into thyself ail the sensations of created things of Water, Fire, Dry and Wet. Think of finding yourself simultaneously everywhere, in the earth, sea or sky; think of having never been bom, of still being an embryo: young and old, dead and beyond death. Embrace everything at the same time: all times, places, things, qualities and quantities."
These possiblities of perception and communication, this aptitude for connections, despite what we believe today, were not "fantasies," wild superstitions, or extravagant exaggerations. On the contrary, they were, part of an experience as real as that of physical things. More precisely: the spiritual constitution of the man of "traditional civilizations" was such that any physical perception had simultaneously a psychic component, which "animated” it, adding to the naked image a "meaning” and at the same time a special and powerful emotional overtone, "4 This is how ancient "physics" could be both a theology and a transcendental psychology: it derived from quite universal metaphysical essences, primarily from the superconscious world, in sudden flashes of light wherein matter was provided by the sense organs. Natural science was a corollary spiritual science and the many meanings of its symbols reflected different aspects of a single knowledge.
^ Corpus Hcrmeticum, IS. 18, Leiden papyrus V in M. Berthelot, Introduction i 1 etude de la chimie des ancicns (Laris, 1889).
Investigations undertaken by sociologists (Durkheim, Levy-Bruhi, etc.) have uncovered somedung very similar today m the ways that so-called primitive people perceive; which people, in reality, ate not primitive, but the degenerating remains of a cycle of premodem civilisation.
