The Hermetic Tradition

A textbook survey will tell you that the Hermetic tradition is the body of thought and practice that takes its name from Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary “thrice-greatest” sage in whom the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth were fused. That is true, but it leaves the most interesting questions unanswered. Which texts count? In which language? Composed when, and by whom, and on the basis of what older material? Received by whom, in which centuries, and with what consequences? The story is messier than the textbook version, and the mess is where the real history is.

What follows is a tour of that mess. It is structured around the texts rather than around the figures, because the modern study of the tradition has been driven, for the last century, by textual discoveries and re-datings rather than by changes in the broader culture, and the dates matter. The reference points used throughout are the standard modern editions and translations: Brian P. Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992) for the Greek and Latin core, A.-J. Festugière’s four-volume La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste (1944–1954) for the older French scholarship, and Garth Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (1993) for the historical sweep.

The Lost Originals

The Hermetic texts present a delicate problem of transmission. The ancient lists of Hermetic books — those of Clement of Alexandria (in the Stromata), Tertullian (in the De Anima), and the lists in the Decretum Gelasianum — describe a vast Egyptian and Greek Hermetic literature that has not survived. The philosophical and theological Hermetic texts, which are the heart of the tradition as it has been received in the West, are a small and idiosyncratic subset of this larger lost body.

The earliest datable Hermetic texts, on the consensus of modern scholarship, were composed in Greek in the second through fourth centuries CE, with most of the surviving treatises probably dating from the second and third (Copenhaver 1992; Fowden 1993). The cultural setting is Hellenistic Egypt — the same milieu that produced the Gnostic and Hermetic texts of Nag Hammadi, the Greek magical papyri (PGM, of the second to fourth centuries CE), the bulk of late antique alchemy, and the philosophical schools of Alexandria.

The Corpus Hermeticum

The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of seventeen Greek treatises preserved in a single manuscript, the Codex Parisinus graecus 1220, brought from Macedonia to Italy in 1460, almost certainly by the Florentine monk Leonardo da Pistoia. The provenance of the manuscript before its arrival in Macedonia is unknown; the suggestion that it was preserved at the Macedonian monastery of Vatopedi is plausible but speculative. Marsilio Ficino translated it into Latin in 1463 at the request of his patron Cosimo de’ Medici, who was reportedly so eager for the text that Ficino set aside his Plato translation to produce it (Copenhaver 1992; Fowden 1993).

The first printed Latin edition appeared in 1471, in Ficino’s Opera (the editio princeps). The first printed Greek edition was edited by Adrien Turnèbe (Turnebus) in Paris in 1554. The first critical edition was produced in 1614 by Isaac Casaubon, whose De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes (London, 1614) demonstrated, by a combination of philological and historical argument, that the Corpus could not have been composed in pre-Mosaic Egypt and must instead be a product of the early Christian centuries. The modern standard critical edition of the Greek text remains that of A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (four volumes, Paris, 1945–1954), and the modern standard English translation is Copenhaver’s (1992).

The opening treatise of the Corpus, the Poimandres, sets the tone. It is written in the form of a vision: Hermes is in a state of deep trance, “my bodily senses having been put to sleep,” when a vast being of unimaginable size reveals itself. The vision unfolds through a series of stages. The divine mind, the poimandres from which the treatise takes its name (the Greek term is generally translated “shepherd of men” or, more cautiously, “man-shepherd”), generates the cosmos through a series of begettings. The cosmos is a living image of God. The human being is described, in the phrase Copenhaver translates as “a marvel to be wondered at,” as the only creature capable of contemplating the cosmos and so of recovering its origin. The soul is given a body and descends into the lower world, but it is also given the gift of reason, the nous, which enables it to ascend again. The ascent is described as a stripping-away: the seven planetary rulers are passed through, the harmonies of the spheres are left behind, and the soul returns to the divine.

The Poimandres is not a single coherent cosmology. It draws on more than one older tradition. It contains a Gnostic-sounding account of the soul’s descent and ascent, a Middle Platonic account of the divine mind, an Egyptian undertone in its imagery, and a moral and contemplative thread that would later be read as Christian. This mingling is characteristic of the Corpus as a whole, and it is part of what made the texts so attractive to the Renaissance: they could be read in more than one register.

The other treatises of the Corpus cover the cosmos, the soul, the mind, the nature of God, the origin of evil, the rebirth of the soul, the cultivation of the mind, and the relationship between the human being and the divine. Throughout, the central conviction is that the human being, made in the image of God, can be regenerated and restored to the divine. The most important of the later treatises include the Kore Kosmou (“The Virgin of the World”), a cosmological myth; the Discourse on the Mind to Hermes (logos 12), the most explicitly philosophical of the treatises; and the Definitions of Hermes to Asclepius (logos 11), a series of hermetic-style definitions. The Asclepius, the second main Latin Hermetic text, is treated separately below.

The Asclepius

The Asclepius is a Latin dialogue, generally treated as a translation of a lost Greek original, between Hermes and his disciple Asclepius, with a third figure, Tat, present in the opening. The text covers the nature of God, the structure of the cosmos, the role of the human being, the nature of the soul, the creation of the cosmos by the divine mind, the doctrine of fate, and the relationship between God and the material world. The most striking passage, from the point of view of later history, is the famous section on Egyptian idols, in which statues of the gods are said to be made receptive of the divine spirit through a long ritual process and to become living images of God, capable of foresight and prophecy. This passage caused considerable discomfort among Christian readers in the Renaissance. The Latin text we have is closely related to but not identical with the single treatise translated by Apuleius (the so-called Asclepius of Apuleius, in his Metamorphoses book 11); they are distinct documents that share a common Greek source (Copenhaver 1992; Faivre 1995).

The Emerald Tablet

A second foundational text, the Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, is a short, dense, aphoristic work. Its famous central sentence — “that which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below” — became the single most quoted formula of the Western esoteric tradition. The Latin text is generally treated by modern scholars as a translation, made at some point in the Latin Middle Ages, of an Arabic original usually dated to the seventh through tenth centuries CE; the Arabic text exists in several recensions, the most studied of which is associated with the corpus attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. A small number of scholars continue to defend a Latin or Syriac priority, but the Arabic-first view is the modern consensus (Holmyard 1957; Principe 2013). The Tablet became one of the most copied and most commented short texts in the alchemical tradition.

The Transmission Through Byzantium

After the closure of the pagan philosophical schools in the sixth century, the Hermetic tradition did not simply disappear, but it was carried by a small set of channels. The Greek philosophical and Hermetic texts were preserved in Byzantine monasteries and in the libraries of the Greek-speaking churches of the Eastern Mediterranean. The most important Byzantine transmitter of Neoplatonic and Hermetic material is Michael Psellos (1018–c. 1078), an eleventh-century polymath whose treatise De Daemonibus drew on the Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions; Psellos is better characterised as a Neoplatonist than as a Hermeticist in the strict sense, and his importance for the transmission of specifically Hermetic material is limited. The Corpus Hermeticum manuscript itself, as we have it, was preserved in Macedonia, probably at the monastery of Vatopedi or a similar house, until its rediscovery in 1460 (Copenhaver 1992; Fowden 1993).

The Arabic Channel

A second important channel of transmission is the Arabic tradition. From the eighth century onward, many of the Greek Hermetic and alchemical texts were translated into Arabic, often by Christian scholars working in Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs. The most important is the Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa, attributed in the Arabic tradition to Apollonius of Tyana (Latinised as “Balīnās”) but in fact of later Arabic authorship. The Jabirian alchemical corpus, the writings of al-Razi, and the encyclopaedic Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ (10th century) all incorporate Hermetic and Greek-alchemical material into the Arabic tradition. From the Arabic, many of these texts were translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, often through the intermediary of Castilian or Sicilian translations (Principe 2013; Newman 2004).

The Ficino Translations

The Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum by Marsilio Ficino in 1463 was the single most important event in the modern reception of the Hermetic tradition. Ficino, working under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, was at the same time engaged in his project of translating all the works of Plato. The Latin translation was widely read, and it shaped the imagination of the European elite for the next two centuries. It was Ficino’s Latin that was read by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, by Giordano Bruno, by John Dee, and by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa — though the last, in his De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533), is drawing on Ficino and the prisca theologia framework rather than directly on the Corpus itself. Ficino also produced a separate translation of the Asclepius and a third important work, the De triplici vita of 1489.

The Hermetic Tradition and Renaissance Magic

The combination of Hermetic, Platonic, Kabbalistic, and astrological ideas in the work of Ficino, Pico, Bruno, and their successors is what historians now call Renaissance magic, and it is the direct ancestor of the modern Western esoteric tradition. The key figure in the systematisation of this tradition is Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, whose De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533) brought together the Hermetic, Platonic, Kabbalistic, and astrological traditions into a single coherent system. Agrippa’s system assigned to each planet, sign, element, and divine name a corresponding set of images, numbers, and intelligences (typically drawing on Hebrew Tetragrammaton-derived names, the names of the angels, and the names of the planetary intelligences), and it became the standard reference for the next three centuries.

The Hermetic tradition thus enters the modern world as part of a larger synthesis that also includes the Kabbalah, the astrological tradition, the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition, and the practical arts of talismanic and ritual magic. The result is the great flowering of European occult philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Modern Reception

The Hermetic tradition has been continuously present in Western culture from the Renaissance to the present, but its visibility has risen and fallen. After the seventeenth century the Hermetic texts dropped out of the philosophical mainstream, surviving mainly in specialised esoteric and alchemical circles. The Romantic revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought a renewed interest in Hermetic and alchemical imagery, and the late nineteenth-century occult revival of figures like Helena Blavatsky, the founders of the Theosophical Society, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn brought the Hermetic tradition back into a wider spiritual marketplace.

The historical study of the Hermetic tradition has its own modern chapter. The publication of the Nag Hammadi codices — discovered in Upper Egypt in December 1945 and first published in facsimile in 1956, with the first English edition of the standard texts in 1977 — brought to light a new set of Coptic Gnostic texts that had been preserved in the Egyptian desert since the fourth century. Among these are the so-called Hermetic texts of Nag Hammadi: the Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth (Nag Hammadi codex VI, 6), the Ogdoad and Ennead (VI, 52–63), the Prayer of Thanksgiving (VI, 7), and the Asclepius of Nag Hammadi (VI, 8). The critical edition is that of Jean-Pierre Mahé in the Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi section (Quebec, 1978–1982). The modern study of the Hermetic tradition has been transformed by the appearance of these texts, by the redating of the Corpus to a period later than was previously thought, and by the recognition that the Hermetic texts are part of a much larger body of late-antique religious and philosophical writing. The standard scholarly treatment of the post-Enlightenment survival of the tradition is Antoine Faivre’s Western Esotericism (1992, English 2010) and Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2013).

Sources and Further Reading

Copenhaver, Brian P., trans. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Faivre, Antoine. The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1995.
Fowden, Garth. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Mahé, Jean-Pierre. Hermès en Haute-Égypte. 2 vols. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1978–1982.
Meyer, Marvin, ed. The Ancient Mystical and White Brotherhoods. London: Routledge, 2000.
Nock, A. D., and A.-J. Festugière, eds. Corpus Hermeticum. 4 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945–1954.
Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3rd ed. Leiden: Brill, 1988.
van den Broek, Roelof. Hermes Trismegistus: Inleiding, Teksten, Commentaren. Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2006.