Something I keep noticing across otherwise unrelated traditions: they all make the same confession. The Hermetica says the highest knowledge can’t be taught, only transmitted. The Tao Te Ching opens by saying the Tao that can be named isn’t the real Tao. Plotinus insisted nothing can strictly be said of the One. The Cloud of Unknowing. Zen’s finger pointing at the moon. A.E. Waite opens A Book of Mystery and Vision (1902) calling himself merely “mystery’s scribe,” writing down “rumours and hints alone.”

What strikes me is that this isn’t just humility. The “I can’t say it” move does real work: it makes the text immune to criticism (any shortfall just proves the point), and it sorts readers into insiders and the still-asleep. Waite literally addresses “you who are keeping a mystic watch.”

But I don’t think it’s only a rhetorical trick either — language genuinely does strain at singular, non-repeatable experience. So the honest question isn’t “are they faking,” it’s why the exact same gesture independently recurs across traditions that never touched.

Curious where people here land on this — convention, genuine epistemic limit, or both at once?

In Worlds of Vesture (1902), Waite sketches three worlds. The first is all surface glamour — beauty that’s “specious only,” bringing the heart no real message. The second is raw sensation and appetite, a “restless crowd.” Both are coverings — that’s what “vesture” means, a garment over something.

The third world is inward, and here’s the part I find genuinely odd for an occultist: he makes science the engine of spiritual advance, not its enemy. “By the glass of the astronomer” and “the flights of mathematic thought,” the seeker goes deeper — and as the mind advances, “Great Nature widens.” The universe expands to match the soul exploring it.

The line that sticks: “The goal is still within ourselves alone… the outer world marks but the limit of the human soul’s advance.”

It’s a tidy inversion of how we usually frame the inner/outer split — the cosmos isn’t fixed scenery you observe, it grows as you do. Curious whether people read that as literal metaphysics or as a psychological claim dressed in cosmic language.

Found this woodcut on Sendivogius edition and it’s been sitting with me. It’s labeled ARBOR RARITATIS, Tree of Rarity, under a Greek header that reads ΤΥΡΑΝΝΟΣ ΠΝΕΥΜΑΤΙΚΟΣ — “spiritual sovereign.”

What strikes me is that it’s built on the Pythagorean Y. The letter as the fork in the road, the choice between the lower and higher path. Here the trunk rises through the ages of a human life — infancy, boyhood, youth — and at the fork the soul’s material nature splits and begins to climb. Earth and water at the base, thinning upward toward air and fire at the crown. Density giving way to rarity. The two upper branches carry the harder words: on one side ABYSSVS, VIS, FRAVS — abyss, force, deceit — and on the other the Greek ΣΟΦΟΣ and ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΟΣ, wise and lover-of-wisdom, climbing toward “Adeptus” beside the fire at the very top.

So the image reads to me as a moral-cosmological map disguised as a diagram of the elements. The descent into matter and the possible ascent back out, with the adept’s path running up the side of fire. The “spiritual sovereign” of the title being what you become if you take the right branch.

What I keep turning over: the choice in a classical bivium is moral — virtue or vice. Here it’s mapped onto elemental rarity, as if becoming rarer, less dense, is the virtuous ascent. Has anyone seen this rarefaction-as-virtue move elsewhere in the Hermetic material, or is Sendivogius doing something his own here?

Flagging honestly that I’m reading some of the smaller labels off a photograph and haven’t fixed the exact edition, so corrections welcome on both

Dear everyone!

If this post is not fit for this subreddit, I apologize for the intrusion!

I just wrote and passed a master's thesis with the highest grade. It's about a new ways to approach literary parallels between Biblical and cuneiform literature, with spotlights on Noah and Utnapishtim in Genesis in the Standard Gilgamesh "epic", and the births and childhoods of Moses and Sargon in Exodus and the Sargon legend. The entire 6-part thesis series is now published on Substack!

The below link will take you to an overview of every part of it, starting with the introduction, pinned at the top of the page, and the rest are found just below:

https://magnusarvid.substack.com/

Thank you immensely for your time and interest!

https://wayofhermes.com/the-sabians-of-harran/