Draw in breath from the rays, drawing up three times as much as you can, and you will see yourself being lifted up and rising to the height, so that you seem to be in the middle of the air.

The grand prayer over, the text becomes startlingly practical: breathe. The ascent is not granted from outside but pulled in — hélke apò tôn aktínōn pneûma, draw breath in from the sunbeams — as if light were an inhalable substance and the sun a thing you could take into the lungs. The instruction to draw “three times as much as you can” is a real hyperventilation cue; the lightheaded lift it produces is exactly the anakouphizómenon, the sensation of being buoyed off the ground. What is remarkable is the honesty of the verb dokeîn: you will seem to be in mid-air. The text does not claim you levitate; it tells you what you will experience — the felt rising, the body forgotten. This is a technology of ecstasy written down as steps, the same impulse as the Hermetica's ascent through the spheres, but here with the breathing that produces it left in. The rays you drew on in the prayer as cosmic fire are now, plainly, the air of a Mediterranean morning taken in through the mouth.