Chapter 45. Thrice-Great Hermes: The Corpus Hermeticum and Hermetic Spirituality

Hermes Trismegistus had two careers in the history of ideas. The first was in late antique Egypt, where Greek-speaking authors wrote dialogues of revelation in his name. The second was in the Renaissance, which took him for a sage older than Moses. This chapter deals mainly with the first career: the treatises, how they were composed and dated, their visionary core, and the Coptic Hermetica found at Nag Hammadi. It marks clearly where later alchemical and esoteric reception begins. The library’s main witnesses are the Romanian Herald edition of the Corpus Hermeticum, Wouter Hanegraaff’s 2022 monograph, the Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer, and Luke Myers’ Gnostic Visions. A group of later esoteric authors carries the story forward.

The figure: Hermes, Thoth and “Thrice-Great”

The preface to the Romanian edition says that “from the fourth century BCE the Greeks designated the Egyptian god Thoth by the… name of Hermes Trismegistos”. Thoth was revered as the creator of the arts and sciences and the inventor of hieroglyphs. The epithet Trismegistos, however, “is of relatively late origin and is not found in any author earlier than the second Christian century” [Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum (Herald 2012), #40797, Preface §1]. The preface records the ancient explanations. The Chronicon Alexandrinum says Hermes taught one God with three supreme powers. The alchemical tradition says he held “three parts of the philosophy of the whole world”: alchemy (“the work of the Sun”), astrology (“the work of the Moon”) and theurgy (“the work of the stars”) [#40797, Preface §2]. It also gives the pious chronologies that made Hermes a contemporary of Moses, or even Adam, Enoch or Joseph. Its footnote adds that in 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed the writings “belong to the Christian era” [#40797, Preface §3, n. 2]. On dating, the preface concludes that the treatises were “composed probably in Egypt, roughly between the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD”. Hermes himself was “a Hellenistic fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth”. The literature, it says, “comes from the same religious and philosophical setting that produced Neoplatonism, Christianity and the various groups of writings gathered under the name ‘gnosticism'” [#40797, Preface §6]. The reference shelf gives c. 100 to c. 300 CE and notes that earlier dates, such as Flinders Petrie’s 500-200 BCE, “have been rejected by most other scholars” [Wikipedia: Corpus Hermeticum].

The shape of the corpus

The Romanian editors divide the surviving Greek and Latin Hermetica into five classes. They are (A) the Corpus Hermeticum, (B) the Latin Asclepius or Perfect Sermon, (C) the extracts preserved by Stobaeus, including the Kore Kosmou (“Virgin of the World”), (D) fragments in the Church Fathers, and (E) fragments in Zosimus, Fulgentius, Iamblichus and Julian. They “have followed here the structure given by G. R. S. Mead in Thrice-Greatest Hermes (London, 1906)”, while “A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugière, Corpus Hermeticum (Paris, 1945), present a slightly different classification” [#40797, Preface §3 and n. 3; the same apparatus in Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum (Dumbrăveanu & Anghel), #65517]. Within the corpus they describe CH I, the Poimandres, as a revelation from “the Shepherd of men, an expression of the universal Mind”. CH II-IX are “general sermons”, CH X “The Key” sums them up, CH XI-XIV deal with particular aspects, and CH XVI contains the Definitions of Asclepius to King Ammon [#40797, Preface §3].

Byzantine editors assembled the compilation, and it is first attested in Michael Psellos. Ficino translated treatises I-XIV and Lodovico Lazzarelli translated the rest, which is why the conventional numbering skips chapter XV [Wikipedia: Corpus Hermeticum].

The Poimandres: vision, cosmogony, fall and ascent

The preface calls the Poimandres “one of the oldest Hermetic treatises in existence”, reworked “probably in the period of the first centuries of the Christian era” but containing “many of the original concepts of the Hermetic cults”. It also makes the unusual claim that the work “is composed of seventeen fragmentary writings gathered together and presented as a single work” [#40797, Preface §4]. The editors discuss the name at length. Reitzenstein linked it to the Shepherd of Hermas and to the Gnostic sense of authentia. Granger proposed a Coptic etymology meaning “the witness”. Griffith and Scott proposed “knowledge of the Sun-God”. The editor’s own etymology is “the reason of sovereignty”, which reflects the Stoic hegemonikon [#40797, Preface §4].

The treatise opens with the visionary state itself. In the Romanian translation it reads: “Once, when I was deeply absorbed in thought about the things that are, my thought rose to a great height, with all the bodily senses restrained as far as possible, as when they are numbed by sleep… It seemed to me that I saw someone immeasurably great… calling me by name: What do you wish to hear and see, and what do you wish to know and understand?” The figure answers: “I am Poimandres, the Mind (nous) of the supreme sovereignty (authentia)” [Corpus Hermeticum, #40797, CH I §§1-2]. Everything then becomes Light, and a serpentine Darkness descends. A holy Word (Logos) comes down on the moist nature. Poimandres explains: “I am that Light, Mind, your God… and the luminous Word that came forth from Mind is the Son of God” (§6). The Mind-God, “being male and female”, produces a Demiurge-Mind, who fashions seven Governors “whose government is called Fate” (§9).

The anthropology follows. The Father begets Anthropos in his own image. Anthropos enters the Demiurge’s sphere, bends down through the Harmony and shows Nature his form. She “smiled with love”, he desired to dwell in his reflection, and “Nature… wrapped herself wholly around him” (§§12-14). For this reason man is double: “mortal because of the body, and immortal because of the essential Man”, and “though above the Harmony, he became a slave of the Harmony” (§15). Salvation is ascent. At death the soul gives back a vice to each of the seven zones and reaches “the Eighth Nature, clothed in its own Power”. It then enters God: “This is the good end of those who have attained knowledge: to become one with God” (§§24-26). Hermes is then sent to preach: “O you earth-born men, who have given yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, wake up” (§27) [#40797, CH I].

Revelation or literature? Hanegraaff’s thesis

Hanegraaff arranges the Hermetic texts in concentric circles. “At the center of the circle we find first of all the divine revelation of CH I, to which I attach the visionary’s sermon based on that revelation (CH VII)”. He defines CH I as “Revelation by the divine nous in a visionary state, including an account of the loss and regaining of knowledge, after which the visionary embarks on a mission to spread the word” [Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination, #63731]. His close reading rests on the vocabulary. Hermes first reflects using “fairly conventional terms for thinking or intellectual reflection, ennoia and dianoia“, but Poimandres asks what he would understand “by his nous”. The nous is at once “an ultimate reality” in ontology and a faculty in epistemology. Poimandres then takes “one further and truly radical step” and makes clear that the divine nous Hermes perceives is not external to him [#63731]. From this Hanegraaff concludes that “different modalities of consciousness imply different types of knowledge”. He holds that Hermetic gnosis “was not concerned with domination but with knowledge and understanding – or, more precisely, with knowledge as understanding”. He criticises “conventional patterns of resistance against straightforward textual evidence” of ecstasy, and cites colleagues’ “discomfort” and “embarrassment” [#63731, notes]. Hanegraaff’s point is that the texts report visionary practice, and that reading them only as philosophy ignores what they say about themselves.

The Romanian editors defend Hermetism against the charge of world-hatred in a similar spirit. The Hermetist “recognises the Divinity in every part of nature” and sees in “ignorance of God the greatest of all evils”. “The pessimism attributed to some Hermetic sentences, especially in the Poimandres, is only apparent, not real”, and comes “only from the imperfection of existence compared with pure and divine Being”. They add that the system values beauty and the union of the sexes, and that the Fall is an allegory “which does not imply… a sin or a state of inferiority for any individual or sex” [#40797, Preface §5].

The Asclepius and the Nag Hammadi Hermetica

The Asclepius survives whole only in Latin. Wikipedia describes it as a dialogue “set in the sanctuary of an Egyptian temple” between Hermes and Asclepius, Tat and Hammon, probably written in Alexandria between 100 and 300 CE. It was falsely attributed to Apuleius in the Middle Ages and was the only religio-philosophical Hermetic text available in Latin before Ficino [Wikipedia: Asclepius (treatise)]. Its best-known passage concerns the making of gods: “Just as the Lord and Father… is the creator of the heavenly gods, so man is the creator of the gods in the temples”. These gods have “two natures”, one divine and one human, the latter being the matter of which they are made. Asclepius asks, “Are you speaking of statues?” and Hermes replies that he means statues “so full of life, feeling and aspiration, which work so many wonders; prophetic statues which give dreams and foretell the future”. He continues: “Egypt is the image of heaven… this land is in truth the temple of the whole world” [Corpus Hermeticum (Herald), #40797, Asclepius XXIII-XXIV]. A prophecy follows. Divinity will abandon Egypt, foreigners will fill the land, worship of the gods will be “forbidden and punished by laws”, the land “will be filled with tombs and the dead”, and only “words inscribed in stone” will bear witness to its piety (XXIV-XXV). The Romanian notes record that Augustine quotes this passage in De Civitate Dei [#40797, Asclepius XXIII n.].

The Romanian edition also notes that “in 1945, among the Gnostic manuscripts of Nag Hammadi, writings of a Hermetic character were also discovered (in the form of conversations between Hermes and Asclepius) and texts about the Ogdoad and Ennead, written in Coptic”. It cites Stephan Hoeller [#40797, Preface §3 n. 1; #65517]. Meyer’s edition presents these texts as tractates of Codex VI. They are On the Eighth and Ninth, The Prayer of Thanksgiving and an Excerpt from the Perfect Discourse, translated by Jean-Pierre Mahé and Marvin Meyer [The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (Meyer ed.), #69839]. The introduction notes that when the Greek original of On the Eighth and Ninth was written in the second century CE, “these terms would have evoked astrological ideas, namely, the eighth and the ninth heavenly spheres, rather than the primeval deities of Egypt”. In the text the initiator tells his son: “copy this book for the temple at Diospolis, in hieroglyphic characters… copy the contents of the book on turquoise steles” [#69839, On the Eighth and Ninth 61,18-63,32]. Mahé’s introduction contrasts the Perfect Discourse, which “seems at first glance confused, down-to-earth, and polytheistic”, with “such initiatory texts as Poimandres and the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth” [#69839]. Wikipedia reports that the 1945 find led Mahé and others to suggest a background in Hellenistic Egyptian texts [Wikipedia: Corpus Hermeticum].

Hermetism, Gnosticism and Egypt

Luke Myers places Hermetism inside the Gnostic phenomenon. “The Egyptian Hermetic tradition has been defined as a form of Gnosticism. It represents a non-Christian lineage of Hellenistic Egyptian Gnosticism. The central texts of the Egyptian Hermetic tradition are known as the Corpus Hermeticum”. These texts, in his reading, show the same “visionary experience of gnosis and union with the divine mind that is found in later Christian Gnosticism” [Myers, Gnostic Visions, #70923, ch. 4 “The Egyptian Hermetic Tradition”; “Hermetism & Gnosticism”]. Myers’ wider argument, discussed in the next chapter, is that these visions had ritual and pharmacological causes. The Romanian editors’ notes support the link between the two traditions. They compare the serpentine Darkness of CH I §4 with the Sethian “coiled Water” in Hippolytus, and with a Sethian or Ophite system preserved by Irenaeus’ Latin translator and by Theodoret [#40797, CH I nn.].

Later reception: the Emerald Tablet and the Renaissance (marked as later)

The material in this section belongs to medieval and modern reception, not to the ancient corpus. The Romanian preface says the Tabula Smaragdina first appeared in the West in the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum. Its oldest surviving copy is Arabic, probably from Syriac and ultimately from a Greek original, possibly Alexandrian. The editors give its thirteen maxims, starting with “What is below is like what is above” [#40797, Preface §2]. Dennis William Hauck, an alchemical writer, says the spirit of Hermes lives on “in seventeen documents containing teachings ascribed to him and known as the Corpus Hermeticum”. He also claims that phrases of the Tablet “can be found much earlier in the Papyrus of Ani” and the Book of the Dead [Hauck, The Emerald Tablet, #83313, ch. 2]. Clare Goodrick-Clarke writes that “as we might expect of a work coming out of Alexandria at the beginning of the Christian era, the Corpus Hermeticum combines Hellenistic and Gnostic ideas with Egyptian cosmology”. She also records that when Leonardo of Pistoia brought the manuscript to Cosimo de’ Medici in 1460, “it was considered a work more venerable than that of Moses or Plato” [Goodrick-Clarke, Alchemical Medicine for the 21st Century, #68643, “Corpus Hermeticum”]. Christian Rebisse says Ficino gave the West its first translations of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus and Dionysius the Areopagite, and dates his published translation of the Corpus Hermeticum to 1471 [Rebisse, Rosicrucian History and Mysteries, #66262, ch. 2]. The reference shelf dates the start of Ficino’s work to 1462-1463 and calls the result central to his prisca theologia [Wikipedia: Corpus Hermeticum]. Later parts of this study follow that line of reception.

Key points

• Hermes Trismegistus is a Hellenistic fusion of Hermes and Thoth. The epithet is not attested before the second century CE, and the treatises are dated to c. 100-300 CE in Egypt, from the same milieu as Neoplatonism, Christianity and Gnosticism.
• The Romanian edition follows Mead’s 1906 arrangement and notes that Nock and Festugière (1945) classify the texts slightly differently. Casaubon’s 1614 analysis removed the claim that Hermes predated Moses.
• The Poimandres (CH I) describes a vision of Nous with the senses “numbed as by sleep”, a Logos cosmogony, the fall of Anthropos into Nature, the soul’s ascent through seven zones to the Eighth, and a mission to preach.
• Hanegraaff places CH I and CH VII at the centre of the corpus as revelation and sermon. He argues that Hermetic gnosis is “knowledge as understanding” tied to an altered state, and criticises scholarly discomfort with the evidence of ecstasy.
• The Romanian editors reject the charge of pessimism. For them “ignorance of God” is “the greatest of all evils”, and the Hermetist sees God in all nature.
• The Asclepius teaches that humans make temple gods, living and prophetic statues, and prophesies the abandonment of Egypt. Coptic Hermetica, including On the Eighth and Ninth, came to light at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
• The Emerald Tablet, the alchemical Hermes and Ficino’s Renaissance Hermes belong to later reception. Hauck, Goodrick-Clarke and Rebisse represent that later reading.