since I am about to behold today, with immortal eyes, though born a mortal from a mortal womb, made better by a mighty power and an incorruptible right hand,

The whole daring of the rite is packed into one clause: a man born mortal from a mortal womb declares he is about to look with immortal eyes. He does not pretend the mortality away — he names it flatly, the womb and all — and sets beside it the claim that he has been “made better,” bebeltiōménos, by a power not his own. The perfect tense matters: the bettering has already happened, upstream of this moment; he is not asking to become worthy but stating that he has been made so. Katopteúein, “to behold,” literally means to look down from a height — the survey a god or a watcher on a mountain makes. The mortal is claiming the god's-eye view. And the agent of his change is “an incorruptible right hand,” the same fashioning hand from the elemental prayer: the rite keeps returning to the image of being made, shaped by a hand, as if the initiate were being re-formed like the first man out of clay.