Fragments of the Lost Mystery-Poem, with Commentary by G.R.S. Mead

The Chaldean Oracles are the surviving fragments of a Hellenistic mystery-poem in hexameter verse, probably composed in the first or second century CE, which profoundly influenced the entire later tradition of Neoplatonic philosophy. From the time of Porphyry onward, the Later Platonic school held these Oracles in the highest estimation — Iamblichus, Julian the Emperor, Synesius, Syrianus, Proclus, and Hierocles all praised and commented upon them. The fragments survive only because they were quoted and preserved in the works of these philosophers. The poem's central symbol is Holy Fire — at once intelligible and material, the creative power of the Father-Mind that shapes the cosmos. The oracular utterances address the deepest mysteries of creation, the nature of Mind, the Great Mother, and the pathway of mystical ascent.

G.R.S. Mead (1863–1933) collected and translated these scattered fragments in his "Echoes from the Gnosis" series, contextualizing them within the broader landscape of Hermetic and Gnostic wisdom. His commentary draws connections to the Trismegistic writings, the Simonian tradition, and the Mithraic mysteries. The text below preserves both the oracle fragments and Mead's scholarly commentary, as his interpretive work is integral to recovering the meaning of these often obscure poetical utterances.

Introduction

The Chaldean Oracles are a product of Hellenistic (and more precisely Alexandrian) syncretism. The Alexandrian religio-philosophy proper was a blend of Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, and Stoic elements, and constituted the theology of the learned in the great city which had gradually, from the third century B.C., made herself the centre of Hellenic culture. In her intimate contact with the Orient, the mind of Greece freely united with the mysterious and enthusiastic cults and wisdom-traditions of the other nations, and became very industrious in "philosophizing" their mythology, theosophy and gnosis, their oracular utterances, symbolic apocalypses and initiatory lore.

The two nations that made the deepest impression on the Greek thinkers were Egypt and Chaldea; these they regarded as the possessors of the most ancient wisdom-traditions. How Hellenism philosophized the ancient wisdom of Egypt, we have already shown at great length in our volumes on Thrice-greatest Hermes. The Chaldean Oracles are a parallel endeavour, on a smaller scale, to philosophize the wisdom of Chaldea. In the Trismegistic writings, moreover, we had to deal with a series of prose treatises, whereas in our Oracles we are to treat of the fragments of a single mystery-poem, which may with advantage be compared with the cycle of Jewish and Christian pseudepigraphic poems known as the Sibylline Oracles.

The Great Library of Alexandria contained a valuable collection of manuscripts of what we may term the then "Sacred Books of the East" in their original tongues. Many of these were translated, and among them the "Books of the Chaldeans." Thus Zosimus, the early alchemist, and a member of one of the later Trismegistic communities, writes, somewhere at the end of the third century A.D.:

"The Chaldeans and Parthians and Medes and Hebrews call him the First Man Adam, which is by interpretation virgin Earth, and blood-red Earth, and fiery Earth, and fleshly Earth.

"And these indications were found in the book-collections of the Ptolemies, which they stored away in every temple, and especially in the Serapeum."

The term Chaldean is, of course, vague, and scientifically inaccurate. Chaldean is a Greek synonym for Babylonian, and is the way they transliterated the Assyrian name Kaldu. The land of the Kaldu proper lay south-east of Babylonia proper on what was then the sea-coast. We find "Chaldeans" used in Daniel as a name for a caste of wise men. As Chaldean meant Babylonian in the wider sense of a member of the dominant race in the times of the new Babylonian Empire, so after the Persian conquest it seems to have connoted the Babylonian literati and became a synonym of soothsayer and astrologer. We shall, however, see from the fragments of our poem that some of the Chaldeans were something more than soothsayers and astrologers.

As to our sources: the disjecta membra of this lost mystery-poem are chiefly found in the books and commentaries of the Platonici — that is, of the Later Platonic school. In addition to this there are extant five treatises of the Byzantine period, dealing directly with the doctrines of the "Chaldean philosophy": five chapters of a book of Proclus, three treatises of Psellus (eleventh century), and a letter of a contemporary letter-writer, following on Psellus.

But by far the greatest number of our fragments is found in the books of the Later Platonic philosophers, who from the time of Porphyry (fl. c. 250–300) — and, therefore, we may conclude from that of Plotinus, the corypheus of the school — held these Oracles in the highest estimation. Almost without a break, the succession of the Chain praise and comment elaborately on them, from Porphyry onwards — Iamblichus, Julian the Emperor, Synesius, Syrianus, Proclus, Hierocles — till the last group who flourished in the first half of the sixth century, when Simplicius, Damascius and Olympiodorus were still busy with the philosophy of our Oracles.

Some of them — Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus — wrote elaborate treatises on the subject; Syrianus wrote a "symphony" of Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato with reference to and in explanation of the Oracles; while Hierocles, in his treatise On Providence, endeavoured to bring the doctrine of the Oracles into "symphony" with the dogmas of the Theurgists and the philosophy of Plato. All these books are, unfortunately, lost, and we have to be content with the scattered, though numerous, references, with occasional quotations, in such of their other works as have been preserved to us.

It had been, more or less, generally held that the Oracles were a collection of sayings deriving immediately from the Chaldean wisdom, and even by some as direct translations or paraphrases from a Chaldean original. This was the general impression made by the vagueness with which the Later Platonic commentators introduced their authority; as, for instance: The Chaldean Oracles, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Foreigners, the God-transmitted Wisdom, or Mystagogy handed on by the Gods; and, generally, simply: The Oracles, the Oracle, the Gods, or one of the Gods.

Kroll has been the first to establish that for all this there was but a single authority — namely, a poem in hexameter verse, in the conventional style of Greek Oracular utterances, as is the case with the Sibyllines and Homeric centones. The fragments of this poem have, for the most part, been preserved to us by being embedded in a refined stratum of elaborate commentary, in which the simple forms of the poetical imagery and the symbolic expressions of the original have been blended with the subtleties of a highly developed and abstract systematization, which is for the most part foreign to the enthusiastic and vital spirit of the mystic utterances of the poem.

To understand the doctrines of the original poem, we must recover the fragments that remain, and piece them together as best we can under general and natural headings; we must not, as has previously been done, content ourselves with reading them through the eyes of the philosophers of the Later Platonic School, whose one pre-occupation was not only to make a "harmony" or "symphony" between Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato and the Oracles, but also to wrest the latter into accommodation with their own elaborations of Platonic and Plotinian doctrine. When we have done this, we shall have before us the remains of a mystery-poem, addressed to "initiates," and evidently forming part of the inner instruction of a School or Community; but even so we shall not have the clear original, for there are several interpolations, which have crept in with the tradition of the text from hand to hand of many scribes.

What is the date of this original poem? It was known to Porphyry. Now Porphyry (Malek) was a Semite by birth and knew Hebrew; he may also have known "Chaldean." At any rate we know he was a good scholar and had good critical ability, and that he was at pains to sift out "genuine" from spurious "Oracles," thus showing that there were many Oracles circulating in his day. The genuine ones he collected in his lost work entitled, On the Philosophy of the Oracles, and among them was our poem.

Kroll places this poem at the end of the second century or the beginning of the third, chiefly because it breathes the spirit of a "saving cult," and such cults, he believes, did not come into general prominence till the days of Marcus Aurelius (imp. 161–180). But saving cults had been a common-place of the East and in Alexandria for centuries, and this, therefore, does not seem to afford us any indication of date.

The two Julians, father and son, moreover, the former of whom Suidas calls a "Chaldean philosopher," and the latter "the Theurgist," adding that the son flourished under Marcus Aurelius, will hardly help us in this connection; for the father wrote a book On Daimones only, and, though the son wrote works on theurgy and also on the oracles of theurgy and the "secrets of this science," Porphyry did not associate him with our Oracles, for he devoted a separate book of commentaries (now lost) to "The Doctrines of Julian the Chaldean," while Proclus and Damascius dissociate this Julian from our Oracles, by quoting him separately under the title "The Theurgist."

Porphyry evidently considered our Oracles as old, but how old? To this we can give no precise answer. The problem is the same as that which confronts us in both the Trismegistic and Sibylline literature, which can be pushed back in an unbroken line to the early years of the Ptolemaic period. We are, therefore, justified in saying that our poem may as easily be placed in the first as in the second century.

It remains only to be remarked that, as might very well be expected with such scattered shreds and fragments of highly poetical imagery and symbolic and mystical poetry, the task of translation is often very arduous, all the more so owing to the absence of truly critical texts of the documents from which they are recovered. Kroll has supplied us with an excellent apparatus and many emendations of the tradition of the printed texts; but until the extant works of the Later Platonic School are critically edited from the manuscripts a truly critical text of our Oracle-fragments is out of the question. With these brief remarks we now present the reader with a translation and comments on the fragments of what might be called "The Gnosis of the Fire."

Fragments and Comments

The Supreme Principle

In the extant fragments of our Oracle-poem the Supreme Principle is characterized simply as Father, or Mind, or Mind of the Father, or again as Fire.

Psellus, however, in his commentary, declares that the Oracles hymned the Source of all as the One and Good; and there can be little doubt that in the circle of our poet, the Deity was either regarded as the "One and All" — according to the grand formula of Heraclitus (fl. 500 B.C.), who had probably to some extent already "philosophized" the intuitions and symbols of a Mago-Chaldean tradition — or, as with so many Gnostic schools of the time, was conceived of as the Ineffable.

Cory, in his collection of Oracle-fragments, includes a definition of the Supreme which Eusebius attributed to the "Persian Zoroaster." This may very well have been derived from some Hellenistic document influenced by the "Books of the Chaldeans," and may, therefore, be considered as generally consonant with the basic doctrine of our Oracles:

"He is the First, indestructible, eternal, ingenerable, impartible, entirely unlike aught else, Disposer of all beauty, unbribable, of all the good the Best, of all the wisest the Most Wise; the Father of good-rule and righteousness is He as well, self-taught, and natural, perfect, and wise, the sole Discoverer of sacred nature-lore."

The End of Understanding

If, however, we have no excerpt bearing directly on the Summum Mysterium, we have enough, and more than enough, to support us in our conjecture that it was conceived of in our Oracles as being itself beyond all words, in a fragment of eleven lines which sets forth the supreme end of contemplation as follows:

Yea, there is That which is the End-of-understanding, the That which thou must understand with flower of mind.

For should'st thou turn thy mind inwards on It, and understand It as understanding "something," thou shalt not understand It.

For that there is a power of the mind's prime that shineth forth in all directions, flashing with intellectual rays.

Yet, in good sooth, thou should'st not strive with vehemence to understand that End-of-understanding, nor even with the wide-extended flame of wide-extended mind that measures all things — except that End-of-understanding only.

Indeed there is no need of strain in understanding This; but thou should'st have the vision of thy soul in purity, turned from aught else, so as to make thy mind, empty of all things else, attentive to that End, in order that thou mayest learn that End-of-understanding; for It subsists beyond the mind.

The "That which is the End-of-understanding" is generally rendered the Intelligible. But for the Gnostic of this tradition, in this connection it signifies the Self-creative Mind, that is, the Mind that creates its own understanding. It is both the simultaneous beginning and end, or cause and result of itself; and thus is the end or goal of all understanding. It has, therefore, to be distinguished from all formal modes of intellection; the normal mind that is conditioned by the opposites, subject and object, cannot grasp it. So long as we conceive it as object, as other than ourselves, as though we are "understanding 'something,'" so long are we without it. It must be contemplated with the "flower of mind," by mind in its "prime," that is, at the moment of blossoming of the growing mind, which rays within and without in intellectual brilliance, both penetrating its own depths and becoming one with them.

"Flower of mind," however, is not the fruit or jewels of mind, though it is a power of fiery mind, for flowers are on the sun-side of things. To understand "with flower of mind" thus seems to suggest to catch, like petals, in a cup-like way, with the deeps of mind, the true fiery intelligence of the Great Mind, as flowers catch the sun-rays, and by means of them to bring to birth within oneself the fruit or jewels of the Mind, which are of the nature of immediate or spiritual understanding, that is to say, the greater mind-senses, or powers of understanding.

The fragment seems to be an instruction in a method of initiating the mind in understanding or true gnosis — a very subtle process. It is not to be expected that the normal, formal, partial mind can seize a complete idea, a fullness, as it erroneously imagines it does in the region of form; in the living intelligible "spheres" there are no such limited ideas defined by form or outline; they are measureless.

In this symbolism flame and flower are much the same; flame of mind and flower of mind suggest the same happening in the "mineral" and "vegetable" kingdoms of the mind-realms. The mind has to grow of itself towards its sun. Most men's minds are at best smouldering fire; they require a "breath" of the Great Breath to make them burst into flame, and so extend themselves, or possess themselves of new re-generative power. Most men's minds, or persons, are unripe plants; we have not yet brought ourselves to the blossoming point. This is achieved only by Heat from the Sun. A blossoming person may be said to be one who is beginning to know how to form fruit and re-generate himself.

In this vital exercise of inner growth there must be no formal thinking. The personal mind must be made empty or void of all preconceptions, but at the same time become keenly attentive, transformed into pure sense, or capacity for greater sensations. The soul must be in a searching frame of mind, searching not enquiring, that is to say synthetic not analytic. Enquiry suggests penetrating into a thing with the personal mind; while searching denotes embracing and seizing ideas, "eating" or "digesting" or "absorbing" them, so to say; getting all round them and making them one's own, surrounding them — it is no longer a question of separated subject and object as with the personal and analyzing mind.

Mystic Union

The whole instruction might be termed a method of yoga or mystic union of the spiritual or kingly mind, the mind that rules itself. But there must be no "vehemence" (no "fierce impetuosity," to use a phrase of Patanjali's in his Yoga-sutra) in one direction only; there must be expansion in every direction within and without in stillness.

The "vision" of the soul is, literally, the "eye" of the soul. The mind must be emptied of every object, so that it may receive the fullness. It becomes the "pure eye," the Aeon, all-eye; not, however, to perceive anything other than itself, but to understand the nature of understanding — namely, that it transcends all distinctions of subject and object.

And yet though the Reality may be said to be "beyond the mind," or "without it," it is really not so. It may very well be said to be beyond or transcend the personal or formal mind, or mind in separation, for that is the mind that separates; but the Intelligible and the Mind-in-itself are really one. As one of the fragments says:

For Mind is not without the That-which-makes-it-Mind; and That-which-is-the-End-of-Mind doth not subsist apart from Mind.

The One Desirable

The Father is the Source of all sources and the End of all ends; He is the One Desirable, Perfect and Benignant, the Good, the Summum Bonum, as we learn from the following three disconnected fragments:

For from the Paternal Source naught that's imperfect spins.

The soul must have measure, rhythm, and perfection, to spin, circulate or throb with this Divine Principle.

The Father doth not sow fear, but pours forth persuasion.

The Father controls from within and not from without; controls by being, by living within, and not by constraining.

Not knowing that God is wholly Good.

O wretched slaves, be sober!

Compare with this the address of the preacher inserted in the Trismegistic "Man-Shepherd" treatise: "O ye people, earth-born folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, be sober now!"

And also the Oracle quoted as follows:

The soul of men shall press God closely to itself, with naught subject to death in it; but now it is all drunk, for it doth glory in the Harmony beneath whose sway the mortal frame exists.

The Divine Triad

How the Divine Simplicity conditions its self-revelation no fragment tells us. But the Later Platonic commentators were not wrong when they sought for it in the riddle of the triad or trinity. The doctrine of the Oracles as to the Self-conditioning of the Supreme Monad may, however, perhaps, be recovered from the passage of the Simonian Great Announcement. This striking exposition of the Gnosis was "philosophized" upon a Mago-Chaldean background, and that, too, at a date at least contemporaneous with the very origins of Christianity.

Centuries before Proclus this tripartite or triadic dogma was known to the Greeks as pre-eminently Assyrian, that is Syrian or Chaldean. Thus Hippolytus, commenting on the Naassene Document, in which the references to the Initiatory Rites are pre-Christian, writes: "And first of all, in considering the triple division of Man, they fly for help to the Initiations of the Assyrians; for the Assyrians were the first to consider the Soul triple and yet one."

In the same Document the early Jewish commentator gives the first words of a mystery-hymn which run: "From Thee is Father and Through Thee Mother"; and, it might be added: "To Thee is Son." Curiously enough one of our Oracles reads:

For Power is With Him, but Mind From Him.

Power always represents the Mother-side (the Many), the Spouse of Deity (the Mind, the One), and Son is the Result, the "From Him" — the Mind in manifestation. Hence we read of the Father, or Mind Proper, as becoming unmanifested or withdrawn, or hidden, after giving the First Impulse to Himself.

The Father withdrew Himself, yet shut not up His own peculiar Fire within His Gnostic Power.

"His own peculiar Fire" seems to mean that which characterizes the One Mystery as Father, or creative. He withdrew Himself into Silence and Darkness, but left His Fire, or Fiery Mind, to operate the whole creation.

God-Nurturing Silence

In the first passage from the Simonian Great Announcement the Great Power of the Father is called Incomprehensible Silence, and, as is well known, Silence was, in a number of systems of the Christianized Gnosis, the Syzygy, or Co-partner, or Complement, of the Ineffable. Among the Pythagoreans and Trismegistic Gnostics also Silence was the condition of Wisdom.

Though there is no verse of our Oracle-poem preserved which sets this forth, there are phrases quoted by Proclus which speak of the Paternal Silence. It is the Divine "Calm," the "Silence, Nurturer of the Divine"; it is the unsurpassable unity of the Father, the that concerning which words fail; the mind must be silenced to know it — that is, to "accord with" it.

Proclus in all probability had our Oracles in mind when he wrote: "For such is the Mind in that state, energizing prior to energizing, in that it had in no way emanated, but rested in the Father's Depth, and in the Sacred Shrine, held in the Arms of Silence, 'Nurturer of the Divine.'"

Silence is known through mind alone. While things are objective to one, while we are taught or told about things, they cannot be real. The Great Silence on the mind-side of things corresponds with the Great Sea on the matter-side of things; the latter is active, the former inactive; and the only way to attain wisdom, which is other than knowledge, is to "re-create" or re-generate oneself. Man only "knows" God by getting to this Silence, in which naught but the creative words of true Power are heard. He then no longer conceives formal ideas in his mind, but utters living ideas in all his acts — thoughts, words and deeds.

The Fatherhood is equated by Proclus with Essence, or Subsistence; the Motherhood with Life or Power; and the Sonship with Operation or Actuality. These philosophical terms are, of course, not the names used in the Oracles, which preferred more graphic, symbolic and poetical expressions.

The Holy Fire

Thus Mind "in potentiality" is the "Hidden Fire" of Simon the Magian (who doubtless knew of the "Books of the Chaldeans"), and the "Manifested Fire" was the Mind "in operation" or Formative Mind. As the Great Announcement of the Simonian tradition has it:

"The hidden aspects of the Fire are concealed in the manifest, and the manifest produced in the hidden.

"And the manifested side of the Fire has all things in itself which a man can perceive of things visible, or which he unconsciously fails to perceive; whereas the hidden side is every thing which one can conceive as intelligible, or which a man fails to conceive."

And so in our Oracles, as with Simon, and with Heraclitus, who called it "Ever-living Fire," the greatest symbol of the Power of Deity was called "Holy Fire," as Proclus tells us. This Fire was both intelligible and immaterial and sensible and material, according to the point of view from which it was regarded.

Mind of Mind

The fiery self-creative Energy of the Father is regarded as intelligible; that is, as determined by the vital potencies of Mind alone. Here all is "in potentiality" or hidden from the senses; it is the truly "occult world." The sensible, or manifested, universe comes into existence by the demiurgic, or formative, or shaping Energy of the Mind, which now, as Architect of matter, is called Mind of Mind, or Mind Son of Mind, as we have Man Son of Man in the Christianized Chaldean Gnosis. This is set forth in the following lines:

For He doth not in-lock His Fire transcendent, the Primal Fire, His Power, into Matter by means of works, but by energy of Mind. For it is Mind of Mind who is the Architect of this fiery world.

"Works" seem here to mean activities, objects, creatures — separation. This Father, who is wholly beyond the Sea of Matter, does not shut up His Power into Matter by in-locking it in bodies, or works, or separate objects, but energizes by means of some mysterious abstract and infinite penetration — thus laying down as it were the foundations of root-form, the ground-plan so to speak, the nexus of the first Limit; this makes Matter to assume the first beginnings of Mass. As soon as the Father, or Mind of all minds, has made this frame-work or net-work of Fire, Mind of Mind is born; and this Mind is the Fiery Cosmic Mind, which by contacting Matter in its first essential nature generates the beginnings of the World-Body and of all bodies.

So also we find the Supreme addressing Hermes in "The Virgin of the World" treatise as: "Soul of My Soul, and Holy Mind of My own Mind." And again in another Trismegistic fragment we read: "There was One Gnostic Light alone — nay, Light transcending Gnostic Light. He is for ever Mind of Mind who makes that Light to shine."

For as our Oracles have it:

The Father out-perfected all, and gave them over to His second Mind, whom ye, all nations of mankind, sing of as first.

"Out-perfected" seems to mean that the Father of Himself is the Complement or Fulfilment of each separate thing. In a certain mystic sense, there are never more than two things in the universe — namely, any one thing which one may choose to think of, and its complement, the rest of the All; and that completion of every imperfection is God.

The Monad and Dyad

This Mind of Mind is conceived as dual, as containing the idea of the Dyad, in contrast with the Paternal Mind which is the Monad — both terms of the Pythagorean gnosis. His duality consists in His having power over both the intelligible and sensible universe:

The Dyad hath His seat with Him; for He hath both — both power to master things intelligible, and also to induce the sense of feeling in the world of form.

Nevertheless, there are not two Gods, but one; not two Minds, but one; not two Fires, but one; for:

All things have for their Father the One Fire.

The Father is thus called the Paternal Monad.

He is the all-embracing Monad who begets the Two.

In connection with this verse we may take the following two verses of very obscure reading:

From both of these there flows the Body of the Three, first yet not first; for it is not by it that things intelligible are measured.

This appears to mean that, for the sensible universe, the Body of the Triad — that is, the Mother-substance — comes first as being the container of all things sensible; it is not, however, the measurer of things intelligible or ideal. It is first as Body, or the First or Primal Body, but Mind is prior to it.

Once Beyond and Twice Beyond

The Three Persons of the Supernal Triad were also called in the Oracles by the names Once Beyond, Twice Beyond and Hecate; when so called they seem to have been regarded by the commentators as either simply synonyms of the three Great Names, or else as in some way the self-reflection of the Primal Triad, or as the Primal Triad mirrored in itself, that is in the One Body of all things.

It is difficult to say what is the precise meaning of the mystery-names Once Beyond and Twice Beyond. If we take them as designations of the self-reflected Triad, it may be that Once Beyond was so called because it was regarded as Beyond, not in the sense of transcending, but as beyond the threshold, so to say, of the pure spiritual state, or, in other words, as raying forth into manifestation; and so also with Twice Beyond.

Hecate seems to have been the best equivalent our Greek mystics could find in the Hellenic pantheon for the mysterious and awe-inspiring Primal Mother or Great Mother of Oriental mystagogy.

The Great Mother

Hecate is the Great Mother or Life of the universe, the Magna Mater, or Mother of the Gods and all creatures. She is the Spouse of Mind, and simultaneously Mother and Spouse of Mind of Mind; she is, therefore, said to be centered between them.

'Mid the Fathers the Centre of Hecate circles.

She is the Mother of souls, the Inbreather of life. Concerning this cosmic "vitalizing," three obscure verses are preserved:

About the hollows beneath the ribs of her right side there spouts, full-bursting, forth the Fountain of the Primal Soul, all at once ensouling Light, Fire, Aether, Worlds.

It was probably in the mouth of the Great Mother that our poet placed the following lines:

After the Father's Thinkings, you must know, I, the Soul, dwell, making all things to live by Heat.

But why does the great Life-stream come forth from the Mother's right side? The fragments we possess do not tell us; but the original presumably contained some description of the Mother-Body, for we are told:

On the left side of Hecate is a Fountain of Virtue, remaining entirely within, not sending forth its pure virginity.

And again:

And from her back, on either side the Goddess, boundless Nature hangs.

This suggests that Nature is the Garment or Mantle of the Goddess-Mother. The Byzantine commentators ascribe to every Limb of the Mother the power of life-giving; every Limb and Organ was a fountain of life. Her hair, her temples, the top of her head, her sides or flanks, were all so regarded. One verse still preserved to us reads:

Her hair seems like a Mane of Light a-bristle piercingly.

The Great Mother is also called Rhea in the Oracles, as the following three verses inform us:

Rhea, in sooth, is both the Fountain and the Flood of the blest Knowing Ones; for she it is who first receives the Father's Powers into her countless Bosoms, and poureth forth on every thing birth and death that spins like to a wheel.

All Things Are Triple

The statement of Hippolytus that the Assyrians "were the first to consider the soul triple and yet one," is borne out by several quotations from our Oracle-poem.

The Mind of the Father uttered the Word that all should be divided into three. His Will nodded assent, and at once all things were so divided.

The Father-Mind thought "Three," acted "Three." Thought and action agreed, and it immediately happened. An apparent continuation of this is found in the lines which characterize the Forth-thinker as:

He who governs all things with the Mind of the Eternal.

This fundamental Triplicity of all things is "intelligible," that is to say, determined by the Mind. The Mind is the Great Measurer, Divider and Separator. Thus Philo of Alexandria writes concerning the Logos, or Mind or Reason of God: "So God, having sharpened His Reason, the Divider of all things, cut off both the formless and undifferentiated essence of all things, and the four elements of cosmos which had been separated out of it, and the animals and plants which had been compacted by means of these."

We learn from Damascius also that, according to our Oracles, the "ideal division" was the "root of every division" in the sensible universe. This law was summed up as follows:

In every cosmos there shineth a Triad, of which a Monad is source.

It is this Triad that "measures and delimits all things" from highest to lowest. And again:

All things are served in the Gulphs of the Triad.

From this Triad the Father mixed every spirit.

The "Three" is the number of determination, and therefore stands for the root-conditioning of form, and of all classification. But if the "Three" from one point of view is formative, and therefore determining and limiting, from another point of view, it endows with power; and so one of our Oracles runs:

Arming both mind and soul with triple Might.

The Mother-Depths

The Bosoms or Gulphs — Vortices, Voragines, Whirl-swirls, Aeons, Atoms — are also called Depths, a technical term of very frequent occurrence in all the Gnostic schools of the time. The Great Depth of all depths was that of the Father, the Paternal Depth. Thus one of our Oracles reads:

Ye who, understanding, know the Paternal Depth cosmos-transcending.

This Paternal Depth is the ultimate mystery; but from another point of view it may be regarded as the Intelligible Ordering of all things. It is called super-cosmic or cosmos-transcending, when cosmos is regarded as the sensible or manifested order; it is the Occult, or Hidden, Eternal Type of universals, or wholes, simultaneously interpenetrating one another, undivided sensibly yet divided intelligibly. We are told, therefore, concerning this super-cosmic Depth, that:

It is all things, but intelligibly all.

That is to say, in it things are not divided in time and space; there is no sensible separation. It is not the specific state, or state of species; but the state of wholes or genera. An Oracle characterizes it as:

That which cannot be cut up; the Holder-together of all sources.

As such it may be regarded as the Mother-side of things, and thus is called:

Source of all sources, Womb that holds all things together.

The Oracles regard it as the Womb of Life, the Divine Mother.

She is the Energizer and Forth-giver of Life-bringing Fire.

"She fills the Life-giving Bosom of Hecate" — the Supernal Mother's self-reflection in the sensible universe — says Proclus, and:

Flows fresh and fresh into the wombs of things.

The "wombs of things" are, literally, the "holders-together of things." That which she imparts is called:

The Life-giving Might of Fire possessed of mighty power.

The Aeon

On the Aeon-doctrine, which probably occupied a prominent position in the mysticism of our Oracle-poem, we unfortunately possess only four verses.

One of the names given to the Aeon was "Father-begotten" Light, because "He makes to shine His unifying light on all," as Proclus tells us.

For He alone, culling unto its full the Flower of Mind from out the Father's Might, possesseth both the power to understand the Father's Mind, and to bestow that Mind both on all sources and upon all principles — both power to understand, and ever bide upon His never-tiring pivot.

The nature of this Aeonic Principle, according to the belief of the Theurgists, is described by Proclus: "Theurgists declare that He is God, and hymn His divinity as both older than old, and younger than young, as ever-circling into itself and Aeon-wise; both as conceiving the sum total of all numbered things that move within the cosmos of His Mind, yet, over and beyond them all, as infinite by reason of His Power, and yet again, when viewed with them, as spirally convolved."

The "ever-circling" is the principle of self-motivity. On the spiral-side of things there is procession to infinity; while on the sphere-side beginning and end are immediate and "at once."

"God energizing in the cosmos, Aeonian, boundless, young and old, in spiral mode convolved."

"For Eternity, according to the Oracles, is Cause of Life that never falleth short, and of untiring Power, and restless Energy."

The Utterance of the Fire

In connection with the idea of the Living Intellectual Fire as the Perfect Intelligible, Father and Mother in one, conceived of sensibly as the "Descent into Matter," we may take the following verses:

Thence there leaps forth the Genesis of Matter manifoldly wrought in varied colours. Thence the Fire-flash down-streaming dims its fair Flower of Fire, as it leaps forth into the wombs of worlds.

For thence all things begin downwards to shoot their admirable rays.

The origin of matter and the genesis of matter is thus to be sought for in the Intelligible itself. The doctrine of the Pythagoreans and Platonists was that the origin of matter was to be traced to the Monad. The Flower of Fire is here the quintessence of it.

Limit the Separator

To the same part of the poem we must also refer the following:

For from Him leap forth both Thunderings inexorable, and the Fireflash-receiving Bosoms of the All-fiery Radiance of Father-begotten Hecate, and that by which the Flower of Fire and mighty Breath beyond the fiery poles is girt.

The "Thunderings" are the Creative Utterances of the Father; the "Bosoms" of Hecate are the receptive vortices on the Mother-side of things. Yet Father and Mother and also Son are all three the Monad. She is "Father-begotten" — the Monad perpetually giving birth to itself. The Son is the that which "girds" or limits or separates, the Gnostic Horos or Limit, the Form-side of things, which shuts out the Below from the Above, and determines all opposites.

The commentators have turned this into a technical term, making it a special name; but in the Oracles it is used more simply and generally as the separator. Proclus characterizes this as the prototype of division, the "separation of the things-that-are from matter," basing himself apparently on the verse:

Just as a diaphragm, a knowing membrane, He divides.

The nature of this separation is that of "knowing" or "gnostic" Fire. The Epicureans called the separation between the visible and invisible the "Flaming Walls" of the universe. Compare the Angel with the flaming sword who guards the Gates of Paradise.

The simpler use may be seen in the following two verses:

The Mind of the Father, vehicled in rare Drawers-of-straight-lines, flashing inflexibly in furrows of implacable Fire.

This seems to refer to the Rays of the Divine Intelligence vehicled in creative Fire. It is the Divine Ploughing of primal substance. Straight lines are characteristic of the Mind. It is the first furrowing of the Sea of Matter in a universal pattern that impresses upon the surface a network of Light from the Ruler of the Sea above.

The Emanation of Ideas

In close connection with the lines beginning "For from Him leap forth," we may take the longest fragment (16 lines) preserved to us:

The Father's Mind forth-bubbled, conceiving, with His Will in all its prime, Ideas that can take upon themselves all forms; and from One Source they, taking flight, sprang forth. For from the Father was both Will and End.

These were made differentiate by Gnostic Fire, allotted into different knowing modes.

For, for the world of many forms, the King laid out an intellectual Plan not subject unto change. Kept to the tracing of this Plan, that no world can express, the World, made glad with the Ideas that take all shapes, grew manifest with form.

Of these Ideas there is One only Source, from which there bubble-forth in differentiation other ones that no one can approach — forth-bursting round the bodies of the World — which circle round its awe-inspiring Depths, like unto swarms of bees, flashing around them and about, incuriously, some hither and some thither — the Gnostic Thoughts from the Paternal Source that cull unto their full the Flower of Fire at height of sleepless Time.

It was the Father's first self-perfect Source that welled-forth these original Ideas.

These living Ideas or creative Thoughts are emanations of the Divine Mind, and constitute the Plan of that Mind, the Divine Economy. They are more transcendent even than the Fire, for they are said to be able to gather for themselves the subtlest essence or Flower of Fire. "At height of sleepless Time" is a beautiful phrase. The "height of Time" is, perhaps, the supreme moment, and thus may mean momentarily — not, however, in the sense of lasting only the smallest fraction of time, but referring to Time at its limit where it touches Eternity.

The Thoughts of the Father-Mind are on the Borderland of Time. They are living Intelligences of Light and Life, of the nature of Logoi.

Thoughts of the Father! Brightness a-flame, pure Fire!

The Bond of Love Divine

Next we may take the verses referring to the Birth of Love, the Bond-of-union between all things.

For the Self-begotten One, the Father-Mind, perceiving His own Works, sowed into all Love's Bond, that with his Fire o'ermasters all; so that all might continue loving on for endless time, and that these Weavings of the Father's Gnostic Light might never fail. With this Love, too, it is the Elements of Cosmos keep on running.

The Marriage of the Elements and their perpetual transmutation was one of the leading doctrines of Heraclitus. The Elements married and transformed themselves into one another. The idea is summed up in the following fine lines from a Hymn of Praise to the Aeon in the Magic Papyri:

"Hail unto Thee, O Thou Beginning and Thou End of Nature naught can move! Hail unto Thee, Thou Vortex of the Liturgy unweariable of Nature's Elements!"

In close connection with the above verses of our poem we must plainly take the following:

With the Bond of admirable Love, who leaped forth first, clothed round with Fire, his fellow bound to him, that he might mix the Mixing-bowls original by pouring in the Flower of his own Fire.

The Mixing-bowls are the Fiery Crucibles in which the elements and souls of things are mixed:

Having mingled the Spark of Soul with two in unanimity — with Mind and Breath Divine — to them He added, as a third, pure Love, the august Master binding all.

This Chaste and Holy and Divine Love is invoked as follows in the Paris Papyrus: "Thee I invoke, Thou Primal Author of all generation, who dost out-stretch Thy wings o'er all the universe; Thee the unapproachable, Thee the immeasurable, who dost inspire into all souls the generative sense, who dost conjoin all things by power of Thine own Self."

Elsewhere in the same Papyrus, Love is called: "The Hidden One who secretly doth cause to spread among all souls the Fire that cannot be attained by contemplation."

What men think of as love, is, as contrasted with this Divine Love, called in our Oracles, the "stifling of True Love." True Love is also called "Deep Love," with which we are to fill our souls. Elsewhere in the Oracles this Love was united with Faith and Truth into a triad, which may be compared with another triad in the following verse quoted by Damascius:

Virtue and Wisdom and deliberate Certainty.

The Seven Firmaments

As we have seen above, in treating of the Great Mother, it is she who, as the Primal Soul, "all at once ensouls Light, Fire, Aether, Worlds."

The Later Platonist commentators regard this Light as a monad embracing a triad of states — empyrean, aetherial, and hylic (that is, of gross matter). They further assert that the last state only is visible to normal physical sight.

The Sensible Universe was thus divided by them, basing themselves on the pregnant imagery of the Oracles, into three states or "planes" — the empyrean, aetherial, and hylic. To these planes they referred the mysterious septenary of spheres mentioned in the verse:

The Father caused to swell forth seven firmaments of worlds.

This Father is, of course, Mind of Mind, and the "causing to swell forth" gives the idea of the swelling from a centre to the limit of a surround. The most interesting point is that those who knew the Oracles did not regard these seven firmaments as the "planetary orbits." One of the seven they assigned to the empyrean, three to the aetherial, and three to the gross-material or sublunary.

Moreover, as to the hylic world, which had three spheres or states, we learn:

The centres of the hylic world are fixed in the Aether above it.

The True Sun

As to the Sun, the tradition handed on a mysterious doctrine. Proclus tells us that the real Sun, as distinguished from the visible disk, was trans-mundane or super-cosmic — that is, beyond the worlds visible to the senses. It belonged to the Light-world proper, the monadic cosmos, and poured forth thence its "fountains of Light." The tradition of the most arcane of the Oracles was that the Sun's "wholeness" was to be sought on the trans-mundane plane; "for there," he says, "is the 'Solar Cosmos' and the 'Whole Light,' as the Oracles of the Chaldeans say, and I believe."

As the Enforming Mind was called Mind of Mind, so was the "truer Sun" called in the Oracles "Time of Time," because it measures all things with Time, as Proclus tells us; and this Time is, of course, the Aeon. It was also called "Fire, Sluice of Fire," and also "Fire-disposer."

The Moon

If the visible sun was not the true Sun, equally so must we suppose the visible moon to be an image of the true Moon reflected in the atmosphere of gross matter. Concerning the Moon we have these scattered shreds of fragments:

Both the aetherial course and the measureless rush and the aerial floods of the Moon.

O Aether, Sun, Moon's Breath, Leaders of Air!

Both of the solar circles and lunar pulsings and aerial bosoms.

The melody of Aether and of Sun, and of the streams of Moon and Air.

And wide Air, and lunar course, and the aetherial vault of Sun.

The Elements

From what remains we learn that the Sun-space came first, then the Moon-space, and then the Air-space. The Elements of cosmos, however, were not simply our Earthy fire, air, water, and earth, but of a greater order. The elements at the highest points of the earth were also thought of as elements of cosmic Water — as it were Watery air; and this air in its turn was moist Aether, while Aether itself was the uttermost Aether; it was in that state that were to be sought the "Aethers of the Elements" proper, as the Oracles call them.

The Shells of the Cosmic Egg

The diagrammatic representation of cosmic limit was a curve. Damascius, quoting from the Oracles, speaks of it as a single line — "drawn out in a curved outline"; and adds that this figure was frequently used in the Oracles. It signified the periphery of heaven.

In the Orphic mythology the dome of heaven is fabled to have been formed out of the upper shell of the Great Egg, when it broke in twain. The Egg in its upper half was sphere-like, in its lower "conical" or elliptical.

Proclus tells us that the Oracles taught that there were seven circuits of the irregular spheres, and in addition the single motion of the eighth or perfect sphere which carried the whole heaven round in the contrary direction towards the west.

The Physiology of the Cosmic Body

To this eighth sphere we must refer the "progression," spoken of in the verses:

Both lunar course and star-progression. This star-progression was not delivered from the womb of things because of thee.

Man, the normal mind of man, was subject to the irregular spheres; he is egg-shaped and not spherical. And if there were spheres there were also certain mysterious "centres," and "channels" — pipes, canals, conduits, or ducts; but what and how many these were, we can no longer discover owing to the loss of the original text. One obscure fragment alone remains:

And fifth, and in the midst, another fiery sluice, whence the life-bringing Fire descendeth to the hylic channels.

This apparently concerns the anatomy and physiology of the Great Body. These channels or centres were clearly ways of conveying the nourishing and sustaining Fire to the world and all the lives in it.

The Primal Centre of the universe is presumably referred to in the following verse:

The Centre, from which all rays to the periphery are equal.

The Globular Cosmos

In any case the root-plan of the universe was globular. Proclus tells us that God as the Demiurge, or World-shaper, made the whole cosmos:

From Fire, from Water, Earth, and all-nourishing Aether.

He tells us further that the Maker, working by Himself, framed the cosmos, as follows:

Yea, for there was a Second Mass of Fire working of its own self all things below, in order that the Cosmic Body might be wound into a ball, in order that Cosmos might be made plainly manifest, and not appear as membrane-like.

The appearance of cosmos as membranous suggests the idea of the thinnest skin or surface — that is the lines, or threads, or initial markings, on the surface of things; that is to say, that the action of the Enforming Fire rolls up the surfaces of things into three-dimensional things or solids. The underlying idea may be seen in another Oracle, which referring to the Path of Return warns us:

Do not soil the spirit, nor turn the plane into the solid.

The World or Cosmos is, so to say, the "Outline" of the Mind turned to the thought of Body:

For it is a Copy of Mind; but that which is brought forth has something of Body.

The whole of Nature, of growth and evolution, depends or derives its origin from the Great Mother:

For Nature that doth never tire, rules over worlds and works; in order that the Heaven may run its course for aye, down-drawn, and the swift Sun, around its Centre, that custom-wise he may return.

The Principles of the Sensible World

In the fragments that remain it is very rare to find the Powers that administer the government of the universe given Greek names. One phrase runs:

Yea, verily, full-armed within and armed without, like to a goddess.

In the mystery of re-generation this may refer to the re-making of all man's "bodies" according to the cut and pattern of the Great or Cosmic Body. It is the gestation of the true Body of Resurrection.

It is clear that corresponding with what are called Fountains when considered as Sources of Light and Life, in the Intelligible, there were Principles, Rulerships or Sovereignties, which ruled and ordered the Sensible Cosmos. Concerning these Principles the following lines are preserved:

Principles which, perceiving in their minds the Works thought in the Father's Mind, clothed them about with works and bodies that the sense can apprehend.

The chief ruling Principles of the sensible world were three in number. Damascius quotes the following three verses with regard to the threefold division of the sensible world:

Among them the first Course is the Sacred one; and in the midst the Airy; third is another one which warms the Earth in Fire. For all things are the slaves of these three mighty Principles.

This seems to mean that corresponding with the Heaven, Earth, and the Interspace, Air, there are three Principles; or rather, there is One Principle in three modes — heavenly, middle, and terrene.

The difference between Fountain and Principle is clear enough; one wells out from itself, the other rules something not itself. Proclus endeavours to draw up a precise scale of terms in connection with this imagery of Fountains or Sources: the highest point of every chain is called a Fountain; next came Springs; after these Channels; and then Streams. But this is probably a refinement of Proclus' and not native to the Oracles.

Colophon

This text presents G.R.S. Mead's translation and commentary on the Chaldean Oracles, published as part of his "Echoes from the Gnosis" series (London, 1908). Mead's principal scholarly source was Kroll's De Oraculis Chaldaicis (Breslauer philologische Abhandlungen, 1894), the first truly critical treatment of the Oracle fragments. Additional fragment numbering follows Cory's Ancient Fragments (London, 2nd ed., 1832). Digitised from the Gnostic Society Library.

The Chaldean Oracles are among the most influential lost texts of the ancient world — a single mystery-poem whose fragments shaped the entire later tradition of Neoplatonic theurgy. From Porphyry to Proclus to the last Platonists of the sixth century, this poem was revered as scripture. What survives are shards embedded in commentary, recovered here by Mead with characteristically luminous scholarship.

Restored from staging by the Sub-Miko of the New Tianmu Anglican Church. The full text was hand-read: a scraped table of contents removed, all Kroll and Cory reference markers stripped, standalone page numbers and running headers cleaned, garbled diacriticals corrected throughout (Aether, Aeon, Hecate, Pythagorean, etc.), wall-of-text paragraphs broken for readability, heading hierarchy regularized, blockquote and colophon written. Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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