— and in the soulless and the ensouled, uēi aui euōie. And if it seem good to you, meterta phōth ierezath, to hand me over to immortal birth, in keeping with my underlying nature,

Here the rite does something magic rarely does: it asks. The great imperative machinery pauses on a conditional — eàn dóxēi, “if it seem good to you.” The initiate does not command the immortal powers to remake him; he petitions, and leaves the verdict to them. The verb he chooses for what he wants done is metaparadônai, “to hand me over, to transfer me across” — he asks to be passed, like something delivered, from one birth into another. And the transfer is bounded by phýsis. He asks to be remade “in keeping with my underlying nature” — not against what he is, but out of it. The Greek keeps the verb of growth alive inside the noun: his phýsis is the mortal stock he is growing out of, the thing that must be handed over before the immortal génesis can take. The Hermetica stages the same passage in its treatise on rebirth (CH XIII), where a man is born again not in body but in mind; here the plea is still tentative, still asking permission.