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The Church Fathers · c. 250–300
The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth
Anonymous
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What it is
Hermes leads a pupil through the last stages of initiation into silence, where the two of them see the eighth sphere and hear the ninth singing, and the pupil finds he can no longer speak in his own words but only in a hymn of vowels.
Why it lasted
The only surviving Hermetic text that describes the initiation rather than merely alluding to it, found bound between Christian and gnostic works in the same Coptic codex.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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