Hermetica
Encyclopedia
The Hermetica are Greek
wisdom texts from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, mostly presented as dialogues in which a teacher, generally identified with Hermes Trismegistus
or "thrice-greatest Hermes
", enlightens a disciple. The texts discuss the nature of the divine, mind, nature and the cosmos: some touch upon alchemy
, astrology
and related concepts.
's Latin translation in fourteen tracts, of which eight early printed
editions appeared before 1500 and a further twenty-two by 1641. This collection, which includes the Pœmandres
and some addresses of Hermes to disciples Tat, Ammon and Asclepius, was said to have originated in the school of Ammonius Saccas
and to have passed through the keeping of Michael Psellus: it is preserved in fourteenth century manuscripts. The last three tracts in modern editions were translated independently from another manuscript by Ficino's contemporary Lodovico Lazzarelli
(1447–1500) and first printed in 1507. Extensive quotes of similar material are found in classical authors such as Joannes Stobaeus. Parts of the Hermetica appeared in the 4th-century Gnostic library found in Nag Hammadi
. Other works in Syriac
, Arabic
, Armenian
, Coptic
and other languages may also be termed "Hermetica" - another famous tract is the Emerald Tablet
, which teaches the doctrine "as above, so below".
All these are themselves remnants of a more extensive literature, part of the syncretic
, intellectualized spirituality of their era, a cultural movement that also included the Neoplatonic philosophy
of the Greco-Roman mysteries
and late Orphic
and Pythagorean
literature and influenced Gnostic forms
of the Abrahamic religions
. There are significant differences: the Hermetica contain no explicit allusions to Biblical
texts and are little concerned with Greek mythology
or the technical minutiae of metaphysical Neoplatonism
. However most of these schools do agree in attributing the creation of the world to a Demiurge
rather than the supreme being and in accepting reincarnation
. Although Neoplatonic
philosophers, who quote apocryphal works of Orpheus
, Zoroaster
, Pythagoras
and other figures, almost never cite Hermes Trismegistus
, the tracts were still popular enough in the 5th century to be argued against by Augustine of Hippo
in the City of God ,
While they are difficult to date with precision, the texts of the Corpus were likely redacted between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. During the Renaissance these texts were believed to be of ancient Egyptian origin and even today some readers believe them to date from Pharaonic Egypt
. Since Plato
's Timaeus
dwelt upon the great antiquity of the Egyptian teachings upon which the philosopher purported to draw, scholars were willing to accept that these texts were the sources of Greek ideas. However the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon
(1559–1614) successfully argued that some, mainly those dealing with philosophy, betrayed too recent a vocabulary. Hellenisms in the language itself point to a Greek-era origin. Many lost Greek texts, and many of the surviving vulgate books, contained discussions of alchemy
clothed in philosophical metaphor. And one text, the Asclepius, lost in Greek but partially preserved in Latin, contained a bloody prophecy of the end of Roman rule in Egypt and the resurgence of pagan Egyptian power. Thus, it would be fair to assess the Corpus Hermeticum as intellectually eclectic.
More recent research, while affirming the late dating in a period of syncretic cultural ferment
in Roman Egypt, suggests more continuity with the culture of Pharaonic Egypt than had previously been believed. There are many parallels with Egyptian prophecies and hymns to the gods but the closest comparisons can be found in Egyptian wisdom literature
, which is characteristically couched in words of advice from a "father" to a "son". Demotic
(late Egyptian) papyri
contain substantial sections of a dialogue of Hermetic type between Thoth and a disciple. Egyptologist, Sir William Flinders Petrie, states that some texts in the Hermetic corpus date back to the 6th century BC. during the Persian period. Some similarities between the Demotic texts and Platonic philosophy could be the result of Plato and his followers' having drawn on Egyptian sources.
during the Middle Ages
but rediscovered in Byzantine copies and popularized in Italy
during the Renaissance
. The impetus for this revival came in the mid 1400's when Leonardo de Candia Pistoia a Byzantine monk, brought in 1460 the Hermetica manuscript and the 14 books called Corpus Hermeticum to the court of Cosimo de'Medici, ruler of Florence, whom later requested the Latin
translation by Marsilio Ficino
, a member of the de'Medici's court, who published a collection of thirteen tractates in 1471, as De potestate et sapientia Dei. The Hermetica provided a seminal impetus in the development of Renaissance thought and culture having a profound impact on alchemy
and modern magic as well as influencing philosophers such as Giordano Bruno
and Pico della Mirandola, Ficino's student. This influence continued as late as the 17th century with authors such as Sir Thomas Browne
.
Although the most famous exemplars of Hermetic literature were products of Greek
-speakers under Roman rule the genre did not suddenly stop with the fall of the Empire but continued to be produced in Coptic
, Syriac
, Arabic
, Armenian
and Byzantine Greek. The most famous example of this later Hermetica is the Emerald Tablet, known from medieval Latin and Arabic manuscripts with a possible Syriac source. Little else of this rich literature is easily accessible to non-specialists. The mostly gnostic Nag Hammadi Library
, discovered in 1945, also contained one previously unknown hermetic text called The Ogdoad and the Ennead, a description of a hermetic initiation into gnosis that has led to new perspectives on the nature of Hermetism as a whole, particularly due to the research of Jean-Pierre Mahé.
's historically important 1650 translation into English
of the Corpus Hermeticum, entitled The Divine Pymander in XVII books (London, 1650) was from Ficino's Latin translation; it is no longer considered reliable by scholars. The modern standard editions are the Budé edition by A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (Greek and French, 1946, repr. 1991) and Brian P. Copenhaver (English, 1992).
The following are the titles given by John Everard
:
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
wisdom texts from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, mostly presented as dialogues in which a teacher, generally identified with Hermes Trismegistus
Hermes Trismegistus
Hermes Trismegistus is the eponymous author of the Hermetic Corpus, a sacred text belonging to the genre of divine revelation.-Origin and identity:...
or "thrice-greatest Hermes
Hermes
Hermes is the great messenger of the gods in Greek mythology and a guide to the Underworld. Hermes was born on Mount Kyllini in Arcadia. An Olympian god, he is also the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of the cunning of thieves, of orators and...
", enlightens a disciple. The texts discuss the nature of the divine, mind, nature and the cosmos: some touch upon alchemy
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
, astrology
Astrology
Astrology consists of a number of belief systems which hold that there is a relationship between astronomical phenomena and events in the human world...
and related concepts.
Scope
The term particularly applies to the Corpus Hermeticum, Marsilio FicinoMarsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance, an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism who was in touch with every major academic thinker and writer of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin...
's Latin translation in fourteen tracts, of which eight early printed
Incunabulum
Incunable, or sometimes incunabulum is a book, pamphlet, or broadside, that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe...
editions appeared before 1500 and a further twenty-two by 1641. This collection, which includes the Pœmandres
Poemandres
Poimandres is a chapter in the Corpus Hermeticum. Originally written in Greek, the title was formerly understood to mean "Man-Shepherd" from the words ποιμήν and ἀνήρ, but recent studies on its etymology have shown that it is actually derived from the Egyptian phrase Peime-nte-rê meaning...
and some addresses of Hermes to disciples Tat, Ammon and Asclepius, was said to have originated in the school of Ammonius Saccas
Ammonius Saccas
Ammonius Saccas was a Greek philosopher from Alexandria who was often referred to as one of the founders of Neoplatonism. He is mainly known as the teacher of Plotinus, whom he taught for eleven years from 232 to 243. He was undoubtably the biggest influence on Plotinus in his development of...
and to have passed through the keeping of Michael Psellus: it is preserved in fourteenth century manuscripts. The last three tracts in modern editions were translated independently from another manuscript by Ficino's contemporary Lodovico Lazzarelli
Lodovico Lazzarelli
Ludovico Lazzarelli was an Italian poet, philosopher, courtier and alleged magician and diviner of the early Renaissance....
(1447–1500) and first printed in 1507. Extensive quotes of similar material are found in classical authors such as Joannes Stobaeus. Parts of the Hermetica appeared in the 4th-century Gnostic library found in Nag Hammadi
Nag Hammâdi
Nag Hammadi , is a city in Upper Egypt. Nag Hammadi was known as Chenoboskion in classical antiquity, meaning "geese grazing grounds". It is located on the west bank of the Nile in the Qena Governorate, about 80 kilometres north-west of Luxor....
. Other works in Syriac
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
, Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, Armenian
Armenian language
The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
, Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
and other languages may also be termed "Hermetica" - another famous tract is the Emerald Tablet
Emerald Tablet
The Emerald Tablet, also known as Smaragdine Table, Tabula Smaragdina, or The Secret of Hermes, is a text purporting to reveal the secret of the primordial substance and its transmutations...
, which teaches the doctrine "as above, so below".
All these are themselves remnants of a more extensive literature, part of the syncretic
Syncretism
Syncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...
, intellectualized spirituality of their era, a cultural movement that also included the Neoplatonic philosophy
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
of the Greco-Roman mysteries
Greco-Roman mysteries
Mystery religions, sacred Mysteries or simply mysteries, were religious cults of the Greco-Roman world, participation in which was reserved to initiates....
and late Orphic
Orpheus
Orpheus was a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music; his attempt to retrieve his wife from the underworld; and his death at the hands of those who...
and Pythagorean
Pythagoreanism
Pythagoreanism was the system of esoteric and metaphysical beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who were considerably influenced by mathematics. Pythagoreanism originated in the 5th century BCE and greatly influenced Platonism...
literature and influenced Gnostic forms
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
of the Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic religions are the monotheistic faiths emphasizing and tracing their common origin to Abraham or recognizing a spiritual tradition identified with him...
. There are significant differences: the Hermetica contain no explicit allusions to Biblical
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
texts and are little concerned with Greek mythology
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
or the technical minutiae of metaphysical Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
. However most of these schools do agree in attributing the creation of the world to a Demiurge
Demiurge
The demiurge is a concept from the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy for an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics...
rather than the supreme being and in accepting reincarnation
Reincarnation
Reincarnation best describes the concept where the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, is believed to return to live in a new human body, or, in some traditions, either as a human being, animal or plant...
. Although Neoplatonic
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
philosophers, who quote apocryphal works of Orpheus
Orpheus
Orpheus was a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music; his attempt to retrieve his wife from the underworld; and his death at the hands of those who...
, Zoroaster
Zoroaster
Zoroaster , also known as Zarathustra , was a prophet and the founder of Zoroastrianism who was either born in North Western or Eastern Iran. He is credited with the authorship of the Yasna Haptanghaiti as well as the Gathas, hymns which are at the liturgical core of Zoroastrianism...
, Pythagoras
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him...
and other figures, almost never cite Hermes Trismegistus
Hermes Trismegistus
Hermes Trismegistus is the eponymous author of the Hermetic Corpus, a sacred text belonging to the genre of divine revelation.-Origin and identity:...
, the tracts were still popular enough in the 5th century to be argued against by Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
in the City of God ,
Character and antiquity
The extant Greek texts dwell upon the oneness and goodness of God, urge purification of the soul. Their concerns are practical in nature, their ends a spiritual rebirth through the enlightenment of the mind:Seeing within myself an immaterial vision that came from the mercy of God, I went out of myself into an immortal body, and now I am not what I was before. I have been born in mind!
While they are difficult to date with precision, the texts of the Corpus were likely redacted between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. During the Renaissance these texts were believed to be of ancient Egyptian origin and even today some readers believe them to date from Pharaonic Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
. Since Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Timaeus
Timaeus
Timaeus is a Greek name, meaning "Honour". It may refer to:*Timaeus , a Socratic dialogue by Plato*Timaeus of Locri, the 5th-century Pythagorean philosopher, appearing in Plato's dialogue...
dwelt upon the great antiquity of the Egyptian teachings upon which the philosopher purported to draw, scholars were willing to accept that these texts were the sources of Greek ideas. However the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon
Isaac Casaubon
Isaac Casaubon was a classical scholar and philologist, first in France and then later in England, regarded by many of his time as the most learned in Europe.-Early life:...
(1559–1614) successfully argued that some, mainly those dealing with philosophy, betrayed too recent a vocabulary. Hellenisms in the language itself point to a Greek-era origin. Many lost Greek texts, and many of the surviving vulgate books, contained discussions of alchemy
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
clothed in philosophical metaphor. And one text, the Asclepius, lost in Greek but partially preserved in Latin, contained a bloody prophecy of the end of Roman rule in Egypt and the resurgence of pagan Egyptian power. Thus, it would be fair to assess the Corpus Hermeticum as intellectually eclectic.
More recent research, while affirming the late dating in a period of syncretic cultural ferment
Syncretism
Syncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...
in Roman Egypt, suggests more continuity with the culture of Pharaonic Egypt than had previously been believed. There are many parallels with Egyptian prophecies and hymns to the gods but the closest comparisons can be found in Egyptian wisdom literature
Wisdom literature
Wisdom literature is the genre of literature common in the Ancient Near East. This genre is characterized by sayings of wisdom intended to teach about divinity and about virtue...
, which is characteristically couched in words of advice from a "father" to a "son". Demotic
Demotic (Egyptian)
Demotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and...
(late Egyptian) papyri
Papyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
contain substantial sections of a dialogue of Hermetic type between Thoth and a disciple. Egyptologist, Sir William Flinders Petrie, states that some texts in the Hermetic corpus date back to the 6th century BC. during the Persian period. Some similarities between the Demotic texts and Platonic philosophy could be the result of Plato and his followers' having drawn on Egyptian sources.
Later history
Many hermetic texts were lost to Western cultureWestern culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
during the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
but rediscovered in Byzantine copies and popularized in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
during the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
. The impetus for this revival came in the mid 1400's when Leonardo de Candia Pistoia a Byzantine monk, brought in 1460 the Hermetica manuscript and the 14 books called Corpus Hermeticum to the court of Cosimo de'Medici, ruler of Florence, whom later requested the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
translation by Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance, an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism who was in touch with every major academic thinker and writer of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin...
, a member of the de'Medici's court, who published a collection of thirteen tractates in 1471, as De potestate et sapientia Dei. The Hermetica provided a seminal impetus in the development of Renaissance thought and culture having a profound impact on alchemy
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
and modern magic as well as influencing philosophers such as Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
and Pico della Mirandola, Ficino's student. This influence continued as late as the 17th century with authors such as Sir Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric....
.
Although the most famous exemplars of Hermetic literature were products of Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
-speakers under Roman rule the genre did not suddenly stop with the fall of the Empire but continued to be produced in Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
, Syriac
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
, Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, Armenian
Armenian language
The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
and Byzantine Greek. The most famous example of this later Hermetica is the Emerald Tablet, known from medieval Latin and Arabic manuscripts with a possible Syriac source. Little else of this rich literature is easily accessible to non-specialists. The mostly gnostic Nag Hammadi Library
Nag Hammadi library
The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman...
, discovered in 1945, also contained one previously unknown hermetic text called The Ogdoad and the Ennead, a description of a hermetic initiation into gnosis that has led to new perspectives on the nature of Hermetism as a whole, particularly due to the research of Jean-Pierre Mahé.
Standard editions
John EverardJohn Everard (preacher)
John Everard was an English preacher and author. He was also a Familist, hermetic thinker, Neoplatonist, and alchemist. He is known for his translations of mystical and hermetic literature.-Life:...
's historically important 1650 translation into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
of the Corpus Hermeticum, entitled The Divine Pymander in XVII books (London, 1650) was from Ficino's Latin translation; it is no longer considered reliable by scholars. The modern standard editions are the Budé edition by A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (Greek and French, 1946, repr. 1991) and Brian P. Copenhaver (English, 1992).
Contents of Corpus Hermeticum
The following are the titles given to the eighteen tracts, as translated by G.R.S. Mead:- I. Pœmandres, the Shepherd of Men
- (II.) The General Sermon
- II. (III.) To Asclepius
- III. (IV.) The Sacred Sermon
- IV. (V.) The Cup or Monad
- V. (VI.) Though Unmanifest God is Most Manifest
- VI. (VII.) In God Alone is Good and Elsewhere Nowhere
- VII. (VIII.) The Greatest Ill Among Men is Ignorance of God
- VIII. (IX.) That No One of Existing Things doth Perish, but Men in Error Speak of Their Changes as Destructions and as Deaths
- IX. (X.) On Thought and Sense
- X. (XI.) The Key
- XI. (XII.) Mind Unto Hermes
- XII. (XIII.) About the Common Mind
- XIII. (XIV.) The Secret Sermon on the Mountain
- XIV. (XV.) A Letter to Asclepius
- (XVI.) The Definitions of Asclepius unto King Ammon
- (XVII.) Of Asclepius to the King
- (XVIII.) The Encomium of Kings
The following are the titles given by John Everard
John Everard (preacher)
John Everard was an English preacher and author. He was also a Familist, hermetic thinker, Neoplatonist, and alchemist. He is known for his translations of mystical and hermetic literature.-Life:...
:
- The First Book
- The Second Book. Called Poemander
- The Third Book. Called The Holy Sermon
- The Fourth Book. Called The Key
- The Fifth Book
- The Sixth Book. Called That in God alone is Good
- The Seventh Book. His Secret Sermon in the Mount Of Regeneration, and
- The Profession of Silence. To His Son Tat
- The Eighth Book. That The Greatest Evil In Man, Is The Not Knowing God
- The Ninth Book. A Universal Sermon To Asclepius
- The Tenth Book. The Mind to Hermes
- The Eleventh Book. Of the Common Mind to Tat
- The Twelfth Book. His Crater or Monas
- The Thirteenth Book. Of Sense and Understanding
- The Fourteenth Book. Of Operation and Sense
- The Fifteenth Book. Of Truth to His Son Tat
- The Sixteenth Book. That None of the Things that are, can Perish
- The Seventeenth Book. To Asclepius, to be Truly Wise
External links
- The Corpus Hermeticum Translations from G.R.S. Mead's classic edition, Thrice Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis, Volume II (The Gnosis Archive)]
- Everard's translation The Divine Pymander in XVII books at Adam McLean's Alchemy Web Site
- Jeremiah Genest, "Corpus Hermeticum"
- The Kybalion Resource Page