Hermetica

Translated from the Latin and Greek by Walter Scott

(with a Foreword by Adrian Gilbert)

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The Hermetica is the name given to an extra-ordinary collection of writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Ancient Egyptian prophet, deified as the god Thoth. The collection consists of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, extracts from the anthology of Stobaeus and fragments from other writings.

'The Hermetica have had a long and chequered career and attitudes towards them have alternated between the extremes of enthusiasm for a lost source of knowledge to scholarly disdain. The first response is exemplified by the decree of Cosimo de Medici who, knowing that he had only a short time to live, ordered Marsiglio Ficino to put aside the works of Plato and get on with translating the Corpus Hermeticum, which had just come into his possession. The ideas contained in the Hermetica had a profound effect upon such Renaissance thinkers as Pico della Mirandola, Ramon Lull and Giordano Bruno. They regarded Hermes Trismegistus as an Egyptian Moses and therefore treated his supposed writings with the same sort of veneration normally reserved for the Bible. The Hermetic Philosophy brought a much needed breath of fresh air into the stagnant atmosphere of Late Medieval Europe. It provided a justification for studying astrology and this in due course led inevitably to the discovery that the Sun and not the Earth lies at the centre of the solar system. It is no exaggeration to say that the Corpus Hermeticum, most especially the Pimander, was the manifesto which shocked Europe out of the Middle Ages, paving the way for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which was to follow two centuries later in the 1600s.' (from the Foreword by Adrian Gilbert)

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