A sacred discourse — the glory of all, and the darkness on the deep
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Hermes — Δόξα πάντων ὁ θεὸς καὶ θεῖον καὶ φύσις θεία· ἀρχὴ τῶν ὄντων ὁ θεός, καὶ νοῦς καὶ φύσις καὶ ὕλη, σοφία εἰς δεῖξιν ἁπάντων ὤν· ἀρχὴ τὸ θεῖον καὶ φύσις καὶ ἐνέργεια καὶ ἀνάγκη καὶ τέλος καὶ ἀνανέωσις. ἧν γὰρ σκότος ἄπειρον ἐν ἀβύσσῳ καὶ ὕδωρ καὶ πνεῦμα λεπτὸν νοερόν, δυνάμει θείᾳ ὄντα ἐν χάει. ἀνείθη δὴ φῶς ἅγιον καὶ ἐπάγη ὑπ' ἅμμῳ ἐξ ὑγρᾶς οὐσίας στοιχεῖα καὶ θεοὶ πάντες καταδιαιροῦσι φύσεως ἐνσπόρου.
The glory of all is God, and the divine, and divine nature. The beginning of the things that are is God — and Mind and nature and matter — wisdom existing for the showing-forth of all. A beginning is the divine, and nature, and activity, and necessity, and end, and renewal. For there was boundless darkness in the abyss, and water, and a subtle, intelligent spirit, existing by divine power in chaos. Then holy light was sent forth, and the elements were made fast beneath the sand out of the moist substance; and all the gods divide up a seedful nature.
The Sacred Discourse opens as a cosmogony. God is the glory of all things, and the divine, and divine nature. God is the beginning of the things that are — Mind, nature, matter — wisdom existing for the showing-forth of all. The beginning is the divine, and nature, and activity, and necessity, and end, and renewal. For there was boundless darkness in the abyss, and water, and a subtle intelligent spirit, existing by divine power in chaos. Then holy light was sent forth, and the elements were made fast beneath the sand out of the moist substance; and all the gods divide up a seedful nature.
The third treatise abandons dialogue for the high style of a cosmogony, and the interlinear's first task is to catch how deliberately it echoes Genesis. 'There was boundless darkness in the abyss, and water, and a subtle intelligent spirit (σκότος… ἐν ἀβύσσῳ καὶ ὕδωρ καὶ πνεῦμα… ἐν χάει)' is the Hermetic rewriting of Genesis 1:2 LXX — 'darkness upon the abyss (ἄβυσσος), and a spirit of God (πνεῦμα θεοῦ) borne upon the water.' The same three words — darkness, abyss, spirit-over-water — stand here, which is why the reveal layer keeps ἄβυσσος and πνεῦμα visible: a reader who knows the Greek Bible sees the treatise reaching for the same primal scene, then adding its own philosophical vocabulary (χάος from Hesiod, the 'subtle intelligent' breath of the Stoics).
The opening piles up divine names in apposition — God is the 'glory of all,' the ἀρχή (beginning/first-principle) of all that is, and is somehow Mind and nature and matter and wisdom together. This is not loose praise but a compressed metaphysics: God is both the source and the stuff, the beginning that is also 'necessity and end and renewal (ἀνάγκη… τέλος καὶ ἀνανέωσις).' That last word sets the treatise's theme — a cosmos that does not simply begin but renews. Then the first act of order: 'holy light was sent forth (ἀνείθη… φῶς ἅγιον),' Genesis's 'let there be light' in the middle voice, and the elements congeal out of the wet deep. The Sacred Discourse is the Corpus at its most scriptural, a Greek Genesis with Nous woven into the water.
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