"Darkness will be pr...

"Darkness will be preferred to light, & death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, & the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, & the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, & the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock at, & will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven & of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed.

& so the gods will depart from mankind,

a grievous thing! & only evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, & drive the poor wretches by main force into all manner of reckless crime, into wars, & robberies, & frauds, & all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then will the earth no longer stand unshaken, & the sea will bear no ships; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, nor will the stars pursue their constant course in heaven; all voices of the gods will of necessity be silenced and dumb; the fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken in sullen stagnation. After this manner will old age come upon the world. Religion will be no more; all things will be disordered & awry; all good will disappear.

But when all this has befallen, Asclepius, then the Master & Father, God, the first before all, the maker of that god who first came into being, will look on that which has come to pass, & will stay the disorder by the counterworking of his will, which is the good. He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; he will cleanse the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence. & thus he will bring back his world to its former aspect, so that the Kosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence, and God, the maker & restorer of the mighty fabric, will be adored by the men of that day with unceasing hymns of praise and blessing.

Such is the new birth of the Kosmos; it is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-striking restoration of all nature; & it is wrought in the process of time by the eternal will of God. For Gods will has no beginning; it is ever the same, & as it now is, even so it has ever been, without beginning. For it is the very being of God to purpose good.”

• Hermes Trismegistus