the gods wheeling up into heaven, and others coming down. And the path of the visible gods will appear through the disk — my father, god; and likewise the so-called pipe, the source of the ministering wind.

The vision is traffic. Gods go up and gods come down, wheeling (poleúontas, the verb for turning about the celestial pole) through the sky in both directions at once — the ceaseless two-way motion the Hermetica and the ladder-visions also describe, angels ascending and descending. The whole procession is seen “through the disk” (dískou), the sun read not as a flat coin but as a doorway. Then an astonishing three words: patrós mou, theoû, “my father, god.” The initiate names the sun-disk his father — a claim of kinship with the divine that the whole rite has been working toward. And hanging from the disk he will see the aulós, the “pipe”: the origin of the wind that ministers to the world. The image is oddly mechanical, almost plumbing — a tube from which the cosmic wind is piped — and it sets up the next moment, when that pipe will swing and show the initiate which way the world's breath is blowing.