The seven born of the elements — Man becomes soul and mind
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Ἐγένετο οὖν, ὡς ἔφην, τῶν ἑπτὰ τούτων ἡ γένεσις τοιῷδε τρόπῳ. θηλυκὸν γὰρ ὁ ἀήρ, καὶ ὕδωρ ὀχευτικόν. τὸ δὲ ἐκ πυρὸς πέπειρον, ἐκ δὲ αἰθέρος τὸ πνεῦμα ἔλαβε. καὶ ἐξήνεγκεν ἡ φύσις τὰ σώματα πρὸς τὸ εἶδος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. ὁ δὲ ἄνθρωπος ἐκ ζωῆς καὶ φωτὸς ἐγένετο εἰς ψυχὴν καὶ νοῦν, ἐκ μὲν ζωῆς εἰς ψυχήν, ἐκ δὲ φωτὸς εἰς νοῦν. καὶ ἔμεινεν οὕτω τὰ πάντα μέλη τοῦ αἰσθητοῦ κόσμου μέχρι περιόδου τέλους ἀρχῶν καὶ γενῶν.
It came to pass then, as I said, the generation of these seven in this manner: the air was female, and the water generative; from fire it took ripeness, and from the aether it took the breath. And Nature brought forth the bodies according to the form of Man. And Man, from Life and Light, became soul and mind — from Life into soul, and from Light into mind. And thus all the members of the sensible world remained until the end of a period, of beginnings and kinds.
How the seven came to be: the elements are assigned generative roles (air female, water generative, fire giving ripeness, aether giving breath), and Nature brings forth bodies on the pattern of Man. And the key formula of Hermetic anthropology: Man, from Life and Light, became soul and mind — from Life into soul, from Light into mind — and so the sensible world held until a cycle's end.
The birth of the seven is given a physics: the elements take generative roles — air female, water fertilizing, fire lending ripeness, aether lending breath — and Nature casts bodies in the mould of Man. Creation here is frankly sexual and elemental, the divine pattern pressed into matter.
The heart of the section is a formula the interlinear can hold up cleanly: Man 'from Life and Light became soul and mind — from Life into soul, from Light into mind.' The two divine names of I.9,12 (ζωὴ καὶ φῶς) become the two faculties of the human being — ζωή→ψυχή, φῶς→νοῦς. It is a precise map: the soul is condensed divine Life, the mind condensed divine Light. To climb back, later, is to trace each faculty to the name it came from.
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Corpus Hermeticum CH1.17 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/hermetica/CH1.17/