“I am Poimandres, the Nous of the sovereignty”
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Φημὶ ἐγώ, Σὺ γὰρ τίς εἶ; Ἐγὼ μέν, φησίν, εἰμὶ ὁ Ποιμάνδρης, ὁ τῆς αὐθεντίας νοῦς, οἶδα δὲ ὃ βούλει, καὶ σύνειμί σοι πανταχοῦ.
I said: And who are you? I, he says, am Poimandres, the Nous of the sovereignty. I know what you wish, and I am with you everywhere.
Hermes asks the Being who he is. The answer is the hinge of the whole book: the revealer is not a lesser spirit but Mind itself — 'the Nous of the absolute power' — present to Hermes everywhere. The name Poimandres is glossed, in the same breath, as Nous.
This is the sentence the rest of the Corpus hangs on. Asked to name himself, the Being says he is Νοῦς — Mind — the Mind belonging to the αὐθεντία, the self-originating supreme power. The revealer of the teaching is the divine Intellect in person, and later (I.6) he will say it plainly: 'that light is I, Nous, thy god.'
The name carries a second, hidden identification the interlinear can show. Read as Greek, Ποιμάνδρης sounds like 'Shepherd of men'; but the text's own gloss — 'the Nous' — and the likely Egyptian source, P-eime nte-Rē, 'the Knowledge of Re,' point elsewhere. Either way the promise 'I am with you everywhere' is not a companion's but Mind's: what teaches Hermes is the very faculty in him that can be taught.
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Corpus Hermeticum CH1.2 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/hermetica/CH1.2/