What Hermeticism says about reverence
Hermetic writing is often read as technique, but the older texts spend most of their attention on what cannot be handled at all. The divine source is called The All, or the Father, or the Good, and the recurring instruction is that naming it is the one thing that will not work. Nine concepts follow, from the Corpus Hermeticum and from The Kybalion, the latter a modern book of 1908.
Understanding The All
The All is the reality underlying everything, and the text concedes at once that a finite mind cannot get round it. Understanding it is named as the goal and full comprehension is ruled out in the same breath.
The Kybalion, Chapter II
The All in All
Two claims are held together: everything is within The All, and The All is fully present in each part of what it makes. Nothing is outside it and no place lacks it.
The Kybalion, Chapter VI
The Silence of the Father
The source is called unspeakable, so silence is treated as the nearest approach. Words are allowed to point, not to hold.
Corpus Hermeticum, Book V
God as Father and Good
God is identified with the Good itself, and creation is attributed to overflowing goodness rather than to need. That takes bargaining out of the relationship.
Corpus Hermeticum, Book II
The Cosmos as Divine Order
The universe is read as ordered mind, so studying nature counts as attention to the divine. The Asclepius puts the cosmos second and the human third after God.
Asclepius
Nous - The Divine Mind in Humanity
Nous is the divine mind present in a person as their highest faculty, held to be there whether or not they have noticed. Waking to it is where the path is said to begin.
Corpus Hermeticum, Book XII
Gnosis - Direct Knowledge
Gnosis is meant as direct knowledge rather than belief or theory, and the stated requirement is steep: make yourself like God or you will not understand God.
Corpus Hermeticum, Book XI
The Laboratory and Oratory
The alchemical tradition pairs the workbench with the prayer room and treats neither as sufficient alone. Work and prayer are described as supporting each other.
Alchemical Tradition
Secrecy and Discretion
Discretion is part of the reverence here: material is withheld from those held not ready for it. It also, plainly, makes the tradition hard for anyone outside it to check.
Traditional Instruction
There is a tension in this material worth keeping in view. The same body of writing promises technique and mastery, and insists that its object cannot be named or grasped. The unknowing is the older strand of the two; the confident technique belongs largely to the modern books.