Laudator Temporis Acti

Corpus Hermeticum 7.1-3 (tr. Brian P. Copenhaver):

[1] Where are you heading in your drunkenness, you people? Have you swallowed the doctrine of ignorance undiluted, vomiting it up already because you cannot hold it? Stop and sober yourselves up! Look up with the eyes of the heart — if not all of you, at least those of you who have the power. The vice of ignorance floods the whole earth and utterly destroys the soul shut up in the body, preventing it from anchoring in the havens of deliverance.

[2] Surely you will not sink in this great flood? Those of you who can will take the ebb and gain the haven of deliverance and anchor there. Then, seek a guide to take you by the hand and lead you to the portals of knowledge. There shines the light cleansed of darkness. There no one is drunk. All are sober and gaze with the heart toward one who wishes to be seen, who is neither heard nor spoken of, who is seen not with the eyes but with mind and heart. But first you must rip off the tunic that you wear, the garment of ignorance, the foundation of vice, the bonds of corruption, the dark cage, the living death, the sentient corpse, the portable tomb, the resident thief, the one who hates through what he loves and envies through what he hates.

[3] Such is the odious tunic you have put on. It strangles you and drags you down with it so that you will not hate its viciousness, not look up and see the fair vision of truth and the good that lies within, not understand the plot that it has plotted against you when it made insensible the organs of sense, made them inapparent and unrecognized for what they are, blocked up with a great load of matter and jammed full of loathsome pleasure, so that you do not hear what you must hear nor observe what you must observe.

I borrowed the title from Arthur Darby Nock, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 27. See also Walter Scott, Hermetica, Vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), pp. 181-188; C.H. Dodd, The Bible and the Greeks (1935; rpt. Hodder & Stoughton, 1954), pp. 187-194; and Christian H. Bull, The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 201-209.