The House of Song and the Eighth Heaven
What the Hermetic Ogdoad Inherited from Zoroastrian Paradise There is a moment in the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum — the Poimandres , the foundational text of Greco-Egyptian Hermetic literature — when the soul of the initiated, having ascended through the seven planetary spheres and shed at each one a vice belonging to it, arrives at the eighth sphere. What it does there is precise and worth pausing over. It sings.
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What the Hermetic Ogdoad Inherited from Zoroastrian Paradise There is a moment in the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum — the Poimandres , the foundational text of Greco-Egyptian Hermetic literature — when the soul of the initiated, having ascended through the seven planetary spheres and shed at each one a vice belonging to it, arrives at the eighth sphere. What it does there is precise and worth pausing over. It sings. It joins the powers above the cosmos in hymning the Father, and the hymning is not preliminary to some further beatitude. The hymning is the beatitude. Highest heaven, in this Greco-Egyptian text composed somewhere in the first or second century of the common era, is constituted by the activity of singing praise to the supreme God. This is a strange thing for a Hellenistic Greek text to say. Greek paradises do not generally sing. The Elysian Fields are pastoral.
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Yasna · Gathas · Avesta · Vendidad · Bundahishn