[Poimandres, the Shepherd of Men and Archetypal Form and Archetype of Soul.]
8. But as I was in great astonishment, He saith to me again: Thou didst behold in Mind the Archetypal Form whose being is before beginning without end. Thus spake to me Man−Shepherd.
And I say: Whence then have Nature’s elements their being?
To this He answer gives: From Will of God. [Nature] received the Word (Logos), and gazing upon the Cosmos Beautiful did copy it, making herself into a cosmos, by means of her own elements and by the births of souls.
12. A: Thy argument (logos), Thrice−greatest one, is not to be gainsaid; air is a body. Further, it is this body which doth pervade all things, and so, pervading, fill them. What are we, then, to call that space in which the all doth move?
H: The bodiless, Asclepius.
A: What, then, is Bodiless?
H: ‘Tis Mind and Reason (logos), whole out of whole, all self−embracing, free from all body, from all error free, unsensible to body and untouchable, self stayed in self, containing all, preserving those that are, whose rays, to use a likeness, are Good, Truth, Light beyond light, the Archetype of soul.
[Source: The Corpus Hermeticum, Poemandres, the Shepherd of Men, Paragraphs 8 and 12.]
