The Corpus Hermeticum

Older Than Plato, Until 1614

First attested
1st centuryThe treatises themselves, dated by Copenhaver to roughly 100–300 CE on language and content. The collection of seventeen is a Byzantine compilation — Michael Psellos annotated it in the eleventh century — and the surviving Greek manuscripts are late medieval. The oldest physical witnesses to Hermetic literature are earlier and lie outside this collection: Greek papyrus fragments, and the Coptic Hermetica of Nag Hammadi Codex VI, copied in the fourth century. The second-century anchor is a scholarly dating, argued rather than fixed by a dated manuscript.
Claimed
around 1300 BCEasserted by Ficino's 1471 Pimander and the Renaissance readers after it, following Lactantius (c. 305), who took Hermes Trismegistus for an Egyptian sage of great antiquity, older than the Greek philosophers; the synchronism with Moses is the Renaissance's own, and Siena Cathedral's pavement labels him contemporaneus Moysi in 1488. The figure of 1300 BC is only a conventional chronology for Moses, used to place the claim on a timeline.

The claim runs about 1.4 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

Cosimo de' Medici had Ficino set Plato aside to translate the Hermetica first, believing them pharaonic; Ficino finished in 1463, and Casaubon showed from the Greek in 1614 that they are Roman.

The soul's ascent through the spheres — on authority a borrowed name supplied, outliving its correction.

Seventeen Greek treatises — numbered I–XVIII with no XV, an accident of their editorial history — mostly dialogues in which Hermes Trismegistus instructs Tat or Asclepius on God, cosmos and mind. Copenhaver dates them to roughly 100–300 CE, the work of Greek-writing Roman Egypt; Michael Psellos annotated the collection in the eleventh century. A Byzantine manuscript reached Florence about 1460, and Cosimo de' Medici had Marsilio Ficino set Plato aside to translate it first; Ficino finished in 1463, and Treviso printed it in 1471 as the Pimander, the first treatise's name given to the whole. His exemplar held only I–XIV; Lodovico Lazzarelli rendered XVI–XVIII, printed 1507. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed from the Greek that it is Roman, not pharaonic. The Emerald Tablet, quoted everywhere alongside it, is not in it — that text first surfaces in Arabic.

Light

In CH I a being naming himself Mind shows Hermes the world made of light, and the soul's return through the spheres, shedding its passions; CH XIII makes rebirth something a teacher hands to a son. Ficino read them as one wisdom beneath many faiths.

Shadow

Its authority rested on a borrowed name: Lactantius took Hermes for a sage older than Plato in about 305, and the mistake held until 1614. It outlived the correction — The Kybalion (1908) still sells seven 'Hermetic principles' found in no treatise of the Corpus.

Sources and verification9 sources · 11 links

Primary source

  • A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, Corpus Hermeticum, 4 vols, 1954, Les Belles Lettres; Greek and Latin text with French translationThe critical Greek text and the standard sigla underlying Copenhaver's English — the authority for any manuscript variant, lacuna or disputed reading in the corpus.
  • Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction, 1992, Cambridge University Press; Introduction, and the translation of CH I–XVIIIThe default English wording and section numbering for the seventeen treatises — CH I–XIV and XVI–XVIII, with no treatise XV — and their dating to roughly 100–300 CE as Greek philosophical-religious literature of Roman Egypt rather than pharaonic wisdom.
  • Marvin Meyer (ed.) et al., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition, 2007, HarperOne; NHC VI,6–8Nag Hammadi Codex VI carries three Hermetic texts in Coptic — the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, the Prayer of Thanksgiving, and a portion of the Asclepius — none of which belongs to the seventeen-treatise Greek collection.

Scholarship

  • Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der hermetischen Literatur, 1926, Heidelberg; Arabic and Latin texts with GermanThe Emerald Tablet's earliest surviving attestation is Arabic, embedded in the Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa of about the eighth or ninth century — which is why it stands outside the Greek Corpus Hermeticum entirely.
  • Anthony Grafton, Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus, 1983, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46, pp. 78–93What Casaubon actually demonstrated in 1614 and on what philological grounds, and that the argument appeared as an excursus inside his attack on Baronio's Annales ecclesiastici rather than as a disinterested debunking — the corrective to the popular telling.
  • Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind, 1986, Cambridge University PressThe setting of the Hermetica in Roman Egypt, and the case for a real Egyptian substrate behind the Greek — argued against Festugière's view that they are essentially Greek. The disagreement is live, and neither side holds the treatises to be translations from Egyptian.
  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents, 2005, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 281, Tempe, AZFicino's exemplar contained only CH I–XIV; Lazzarelli obtained a fuller Greek manuscript including the last three treatises and translated CH XVI–XVIII into Latin, published by Symphorien Champier in 1507.
  • Florian Ebeling (trans. David Lorton), The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, 2007, Cornell University PressThe reception history end to end: Ficino's translation for Cosimo de' Medici, the 1471 Pimander, Casaubon's redating of 1614, and how Hermetic claims entered later esoteric circulation.

Further reading

  • M. David Litwa, Hermetica II: The Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies, 2018, Cambridge University PressEverything Hermetic outside the Corpus and the Asclepius — the Stobaean excerpts including the Korē Kosmou, the Vienna and Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragments, the Armenian Definitions — showing both how much of this literature the seventeen treatises do not contain and that Greek papyrus witnesses to Hermetica are older than any manuscript of the collection.

Linked entries

  • Attributed toHermes TrismegistusTraditional

    Hermes Trismegistus is the teacher throughout the dialogues, and the collection carries his name; the actual authors are unknown, and the corpus is composite rather than the work of one hand.

  • Often confused withThe Emerald TabletA modern connection

    Popular Hermetic anthologies print the Tablet with the Corpus and quote 'as above, so below' as its doctrine. It is not among the seventeen treatises: its earliest surviving version is Arabic, in the Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa of about 750–850, as Ruska showed in 1926.

  • Often confused withThe KybalionA modern connection

    The Kybalion, Chicago 1908, presents seven principles as the ancient Hermetic teaching readers assume the Corpus contains. No treatise of the Corpus states them, and Philip Deslippe argued in 2011 that the book is New Thought written by William Walker Atkinson.

  • Set againstThe Nag Hammadi LibraryAttested

    Nag Hammadi Codex VI, copied in the fourth century, carries three Hermetic texts in Coptic — the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, the Prayer of Thanksgiving and part of the Asclepius — and none of them is in the Byzantine collection of seventeen. Hermetic literature was circulating in Egypt long before the Corpus was assembled.

  • Set againstThe Egyptian Book of the DeadTraditional

    Ficino's readers took the Corpus for the wisdom of Thoth, whom the Greeks identified with Hermes; the Egyptian literature of Thoth, including the funerary spells collected as the Book of the Dead and in use from about 1550 BC, is in Egyptian and far older. Fowden argued in 1986 for a real Egyptian substrate behind the Greek dialogues, not for an Egyptian original.

  • Set againstThe ZoharAttested

    Two bodies of teaching whose deep antiquity philology later withdrew: Isaac Casaubon dated the Hermetica to the Christian era in 1614, and Leon Modena in 1639 and Jacob Emden in 1768 made the parallel case against the Zohar's second-century setting.

  • Often confused withThe Pyramid TextsA modern connection

    What Western esotericism calls Egyptian wisdom is usually the Hermetica — Greek texts of Roman Egypt, c. 100-300 CE on Brian Copenhaver's dating, well over two thousand years after Unas and unconnected to these spells.

  • Set againstPseudo-Dionysius the AreopagiteAttested

    Two late-antique Greek corpora that Europe read as far older than they are, and both undone by philology rather than by theology - Casaubon redated the Hermetica in 1614, Koch and Stiglmayr the Dionysian corpus in 1895.

  • Set againstThe Greek Magical PapyriAttested

    Same country, same centuries: the Corpus is what Hermetic teachers wrote down, these are the handbooks ritualists kept on the shelf — and one Hermetic prayer is in both.

  • Gave rise toHeinrich Cornelius AgrippaAttested

    Agrippa quotes Hermes throughout, including the Asclepius on the animating of statues and its line "O Asclepi, magnum miraculum est homo" - the Latin Hermetica, not the Greek Corpus proper, was what a Renaissance reader actually had.

  • Set againstTheurgyAttested

    The nearest Hermetic parallel is the Latin Asclepius — transmitted apart from the Greek Corpus — on Egyptians drawing spirits into statues to make gods, which Augustine quotes at City of God VIII.23 to condemn it, two books before he turns on theurgy in Book X.

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