An Introduction To
An Introduction To The Corpus Hermeticum
By John Michael Greer
The fifteen tractates of the "Corpus Hermeticum",
along with the "Perfect Sermon" or "Asclepius",
are the foundation documents of the Hermetic tradition. Written
by unknown authors in Egypt sometime before the end of the third
century C.E., they were part of a once substantial literature
attributed to the mythic figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a Hellenistic
fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.
This literature came out of the same religious and philosophical
ferment that produced Neoplatonism, Christianity, and the diverse
collection of teachings usually lumped together under the label
"Gnosticism": a ferment which had its roots in the
impact of Platonic thought on the older traditions of the Hellenized
East. There are obvious connections and common themes linking
each of these traditions, although each had its own answer to
the major questions of the time.
The treatises we now call the "Corpus Hermeticum"
were collected into a single volume in Byzantine times, and a
copy of this volume survived to come into the hands of Lorenzo
de Medici's agents in the fifteenth century. Marsilio Ficino,
the head of the Florentine Academy, was pulled off the task of
translating the dialogues of Plato in order to put the "Corpus"
"Hermeticum" into Latin first. His translation saw print
in 1463, and was reprinted at least twenty-two times over the
next century and a half.
The treatises divide up into several groups. The first (ch I),
the "Poemandres", is the account of a revelation given
to Hermes Trismegistus by the being Poemandres or "Man-Shepherd",
an expression of the universal Mind. The next eight (ch Ii-ix),
the "General Sermons", are short dialogues or lectures
discussing various basic points of Hermetic philosophy. There
follows the "Key" (CH X), a summary of the General Sermons,
and after this a set of four tractates - "Mind unto Hermes",
"About the Common Mind", "The Secret Sermon on
the Mountain", and the "Letter of Hermes to Asclepius"
(ch Xi-xiv) - touching on the more mystical aspects of Hermeticism.
The collection is rounded off by the "Definitions of Asclepius
unto King Ammon" (CH XV), which may be composed of three
fragments of longer works.
"The Perfect Sermon"
The "Perfect Sermon" or "Asclepius", which is
also included here, reached the Renaissance by a different route.
It was translated into Latin in ancient times, reputedly by the
same Lucius Apuleius of Madaura whose comic-serious masterpiece
"The Golden Ass" provides some of the best
surviving evidence on the worship of Isis in the Roman world.
Augustine of Hippo quotes from the old Latin translation at length
in his City of God, and copies remained in circulation in medieval
Europe all the way up to the Renaissance. The original Greek
version was lost, although quotations survive in several ancient
sources.
The Perfect Sermon is substantially longer than any other surviving
work of ancient Hermetic philosophy. It covers topics which also
occur in the Corpus Hermeticum, but touches on several other issues
as well - among them magical processes for the manufacture of
gods and a long and gloomy prophecy of the decline of Hermetic
wisdom and the end of the world.
"The Significance of the Hermetic Writings"
The "Corpus Hermeticum" landed like a well-aimed bomb
amid the philosophical systems of late medieval Europe. Quotations
from the Hermetic literature in the Church Fathers (who were never
shy of leaning on pagan sources to prove a point) accepted a traditional
chronology which dated "Hermes Trismegistus," as a historical
figure, to the time of Moses. As a result, the Hermetic tractates'
borrowings from Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy were
seen, in the Renaissance, as evidence that the "Corpus Hermeticum"
had anticipated and influenced both. The Hermetic philosophy
was seen as a primordial wisdom tradition, identified with the
"Wisdom of the Egyptians" mentioned in "Exodus"
and lauded in Platonic dialogues such as the "Timaeus".
It thus served as a useful club in the hands of intellectual rebels
who sought to break the stranglehold of Aristotelian scholasticism
on the universities at this time.
It also provided one of the most important weapons to another
major rebellion of the age - the attempt to reestablish magic
as a socially acceptable spiritual path in the Christian West.
Another body of literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
was made up of astrological, alchemical and magical texts. If,
as the scholars of the Renaissance believed, Hermes was a historical
person who had written all these things, and if Church Fathers
had quoted his philosophical works with approval, and if those
same works could be shown to be wholly in keeping with some definitions
of Christianity, then the whole structure of magical Hermeticism
could be given a second-hand legitimacy in a Christian context.
This didn't work, of course; the radical redefinition of Western
Christianity that took place in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation
hardened doctrinal barriers to the point that people were being
burned in the sixteenth century for practices that were considered
evidences of devoutness in the fourteenth. The attempt, though,
made the language and concepts of the Hermetic tractates central
to much of post-medieval magic in the West.
"The Translation"
The translation of the "Corpus Hermeticum" and Perfect
Sermon given here is that of G.R.S. Mead (1863-1933), originally
published as Vol. 2 of his "Thrice Greatest Hermes"
(London, 1906). Mead was a close associate of Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, the founder and moving spirit of the Theosophical Society,
and most of his considerable scholarly output was brought out
under Theosophical auspices. The result, predictably, was that
most of that output has effectively been blacklisted in academic
circles ever since.
This is unfortunate, for Mead's translations of the Hermetic literature
were until quite recently the best available in English. (They
are still the best in the public domain; thus their use here.)
The Everard translation of 1650, which is still in print, reflects
the state of scholarship at the time it was made - which is only
a criticism because a few things have been learned since then!
The Walter Scott translation - despite the cover blurb on the
recent Shambhala reprint, this is not the Sir Walter Scott of
"Ivanhoe" fame - while more recent than Mead's, is a product
of the "New Criticism" of the first half of this century,
and garbles the text severely; scholars of Hermeticism of the
caliber of Dame Frances Yates have labeled the Scott translation
worthless. By contrast, a comparison of Mead's version to the
excellent modern translation by Brian Copenhaver, or to the translations
of CH I (Poemandres) and VII (The Greatest Ill Among Men is Ignorance
of God) given in Bentley Layton's "The Gnostic Scriptures",
shows Mead as a capable translator, with a usually solid grasp
of the meaning of these sometimes obscure texts.
There is admittedly one problem with Mead's translation: the
aesthetics of the English text. Mead hoped, as he mentioned at
the beginning of "Thrice Greatest Hermes",
to "render...these beautiful theosophic treatises into an
English that might, perhaps, be thought in some small way worthy
of the Greek originals." Unfortunately for this ambition,
he was writing at a time when the last remnants of the florid
and pompous Victorian style were fighting it out with the more
straightforward colloquial prose that became the style of the
new century. Caught in this tangle like so many writers of the
time, Mead wanted to write in the grand style but apparently didn't
know how. The result is a sometimes bizarre mishmash in which
turn-of-the-century slang stands cheek by jowl with overblown
phrases in King James Bible diction, and in which mishandled archaicisms,
inverted word order, and poetic contractions render the text less
than graceful - and occasionally less than readable. Seen from
a late twentieth century sensibility, the result verges on unintentional
self-parody in places: for example, where Mead uses the Scots
contraction "ta'en" (for "taken"), apparently
for sheer poetic color, calling up an image of Hermes Trismegistus
in kilt and sporran.
The "poetic" word order is probably the most serious
barrier to readability; it's a good rule, whenever the translation
seems to descend into gibberish, to try shuffling the words of
the sentence in question. It may also be worth noting that Mead
consistently uses "for that" in place of "because"
and "aught" in place of "any", and leaves
out the word "the" more or less at random.
Finally, comments in (parentheses) and in [square brackets] are
in Mead's original; those in are my own
additions.
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