Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Hymns to Hermes


        



                      I

            O
You winged roads, you fleet
Bearers of the flashing infinite, of the golden
Cars of subtle and illimitable dreams on the roads of time,
Of the swift, fleeting dreams of the lives of ephemeral men
And passing gods
Whom endlessly commute your quicksilver paths
Making their way
Between waking and sleeping between day and night,
Between living and dying
Between these your winged eternities
Trodden by souls whose destinies
Blow in your wind.

                O
Your crossroads softly conversing between themselves
Like the whispering of swords, 
Like the silent clash of evolving metals.
The sword-edged stone of destinies,
That adamantine force of all lives
Perilously blown forth from your lips
Adrift beside these star-cut paths

Keenly forged through the infinite, forged through necessity,
Keenly forged through the infinite necessity
Of conveying All
Through the tumbling violet kiss of dust
Of stars and planets falling
Through dark space;
Projected into your swirling alkahest
Sublimating within the alchemical vessel
Of life and death, of stars and gods and men,
Rotating in infinite necessity.

                O
These whirling, empty roads
Of your perpetual breaths
Majestically uprising in magical revolutions
Of violet air exploding into a volatile dance
Of slashing etheric swords
Blown into the Flaming Body
Of Speech, the Body which never dies,
The body of endless revelation, the Path
To the end of perfection, the Way
Of the Word Made Flesh, the Mystery of
The immanence of the Logos.

                O
Continuous flaming utterance
Of the Word of Life
On the Wind
Gyring through the electrum landscapes of worlds,
Gyring through your endless alchemical  conversions
Of Sound and Light,
Into your most sacrosanct and sacred, lawless forms
Of gold and medicine
Brought forth with a sharp wave
Of your caduceus, Hermes 
Hermaphrodite, Psychopomp, guide of travelers
And protector of thieves, O, great trickster
Bringer of the message, bringer of the dance
Bringer of the ultimate journey across all barriers

                O
These your alchemic conversions 
Only long, eternally faithful conversations
Between two rare and invisible lovers
Clothed only in the Holy Spirit,
Nakedly moving through stillness
Along a sword, prophetically revealing to each other
Their ardent dreams of will and desire
To endure every fortune of initiation and adventure
Within the Five Dimensions
And be together forever,
Together amidst the distant falling stars of entire galaxies.
The rarefied stars of lovers
Transformed by you into magical, occult metals
And eventual, sudden gods
In the wake of your constant return,
               
                O
Hermes, you White Lion, who is the very power of transmutation
Throughout the ten ages of the timeless alchemical universe.

                                                II

            O
You winged roads, you goldening paths of Hermes
Nothing stops you, nothing holds you back.
Nothing halts your endless alchemies,
Neither their long suffering
Nor their immediate victories.
The fire and water with which you seethe untold mysteries
Of formative smoke,
This sacred, intoxicating incense of your Holy Spirit
Which inspires poetry
And all making, Mercurius.

                O
Your miraculous, quicksilver transformations and adaptations
Of the One Thought carried along your winged paths,
Converging into an abstract universe of
Vast conjunctions and  cosmic analogies,
Carried into flesh and blood,

Carried into the long circulation
Of the Procession of the Ages
Through the vast Body
Of the Eternal Idea
Of Man under God
And God under Man.

Turned over and over again
By you, Hermes Mercurius,
Turning in your magical revolutions
The Stone of Destinies
Which you roll to the peak
Of your hermetic mountain top
To stand and survey in a summit of solitude
The vast, unbroken flow of your illimitable knowledge of things
Which become quick, concrete reality, which become your verses,
Singing over and over your ineffable, nameless poem of the universe,
Playing on your tortoise lyre
The Lost, Eternal Chord
Which joins the Manifest to the Unmanifest
Singing rightly and precisely the Nameless Name,
Shouting Tetragrammaton, “Yo, Hey, Wow, Hey!”

                O
Hermes Mercurius,
You who churns with the sun, the moon, the Earth
Heaving forth the Stone of Destinies
Of the incarnate manifold
You in your winged sandals and cap upon sterling winds
Abarrel through the heavens,
I hymn you on your spiral way
Across the All’s Horizon.
I hymn you
                                As you turn those roads to gold, as you turn
                                Everything in time to gold...

Lo, within your blowing womb
You carry to constant birth - undying, unborn
The  lapis gem of the One Eye
Which perceives like Argus
Each shuttering, blinding moment.
The Eye of Insight, the Eye of Precision, the Eye of Calm
The Eye of Wisdom balanced within your spiral storm
Unblinkingly looking on like Argus
                At the telescoping million worlds
                Telescoping million spheres,
                Telescoping million planes
                Telescoping million stars,
                And telescoping million things,

The million points arising therein
And the million, million motes
And musical notes breathing within them,
Glittering like packed theaters
Trailing in your whirling progress
As you drive them like golden nails that connect
This express globe of mystery,
Making all these points appointments with Knowledge
Of you, Mercurius
               
                O
You bellying winds
So of and for yourself, so free
I hymn thee, I praise thee, and I am overcome,
For you are the wind that blows beyond
The gate of my eyes,
The wind that will someday blow
My life away through that windoor
Across the black river and beyond to Elysian fields
As yet you still blow across all life on Earth,
And what is hidden in you yet, you still explain
Endlessly at the end of your hammering sword of wind
That nails the heart back
To hear its own beating,
As everything falls back at the occasion or your arrival,
As all obscurity flees before your driven dance
As He who guides all souls.
Hermes, I say you are the child of love and knowledge and art.


I say you made love to Aphrodite, your foam born sister
And sired yourself when She gave birth
To the Hermaphrodite,
Your artifice and wiles unmatched.

                O
The sublimity of this terrible child of tricks, the terror of this thieving lord,
O, the sublimity and terror of love and its knowledge

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Greetings, My name is Jon Landon. I am a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. I I can write everything from Poetry to Technical Writing, I am a UC Berkeley Alumni ('88)