THE CORPUS HERMETICA
By
Secretum Secretorum ©
The
Corpus Hermeticum
is a collection of texts from the second and third centuries of our era that
survived from a more extensive literature. Reflecting the generalized
spiritual orientation of late Hellenistic gnosis rather than a tradition in
any organized sense, these sometimes contradictory texts share only their
claim to a common source of revelation, Hermes Trismegistus. In most of the
texts his revelations are presented as a dialogue with one of three pupils:
Tat, Asclepius, or Ammon. According to Augustine[115], Asclepius was the
grandson of the great Greek god of the same name, and Tat was likewise the
grandson of his divine namesake (the Roman deity Mercurius, the same as the
Greek god Hermes).
The
Hermetic texts are often cited as examples of the extent of late Hellenistic
syncretism, for they exhibit traits of magic, astrology, alchemy, Platonism
and Stoicism, and the Mysteries, as well as Judaism and gnostic thought.
Such influences are not arbitrary borrowings but express the systemic
assumptions of the late Hellenistic age generally: the Ptolemaic delineation
of a hierarchical cosmos under the rule of
heimarmene,
the sympathetic parallel between macrocosm and microcosm, the attendant
understanding of the consubstantial nature of all existent entities, the
devoted or fallen feminine nature of reality, and the masculine redemptive
possibility of cosmic and temporal reversal and thus of the effects of fall
by means of a spiritual participation in the golden antiquity of origin.
Hermeticism may
be illustrated from the Poimandres, the first and most well known of the
tractates. The Poimandres opens with the visionary account of an unnamed
seeker:
One day, when I began to
reflect on existence, and my thoughts had soared, and my bodily senses were
held down like people heavy with sleep through surfeit of food or physical
exhaustion, it seemed to me that a giant creature of immeasurable dimensions
approached, called me by name, and said: "What do you wish to hear and to
see and to learn and to know with understanding?" And I said: "Who are you
then?" "I," he said, "am Poimandres, the Nous (Intellect) of the Absolute
Sovereignty. I know what you wish, and I am with you everywhere." And I
said: "I desire to learn the things that exist, to understand their nature
and to know God. How much I do desire to hear!" Again he said to me: "Hold
fast in your mind what you wish to learn and I will teach you."
The passage is
characterized by a dualistic distinction between the corporeality of the
"bodily senses" and Nous, the inner-thought or intellect of the seer, which
soars aloft to receive spiritual revelation. The redemptive knowledge of
"the things that exist," of their nature, and of (what was the same thing)
the knowledge of God, is revealed in this noncorporeal vision by Poimandres.
Let us
look at the
dramatis personae before going
further. The
Hermetica are presented as
revelations of divine truth, not as the product of human reason; and in the
philosophical texts as in the technical texts those who do the revealing are
the typical deities of Graeco-Egyptian syncretism.[116] Alongside Hermes
Trismegistus himself and Isis, who had long been associated in the Egyptian
as well as the Greek tradition,[117] we find Asclepius, identified with the
Egyptian Imhotep/Imouthes;[118] Ammon, the Egyptian god Amun,
euhmeristically regarded by some as one of the country's early kings;[119]
Horus, the son of Isis;[120] and Agathos Daimon. Rather more unusually, the
Kore
kosmou
alludes to Kamephis as an intermediary between Hermes and Isis, while
S.H.
XXVI.9 identifies the god of philosophy as Arnebeschenis, a Greek
transcription for 'Horus of Letopolis. Both of these divinities are attested
elsewhere in Greek literature of or on Egypt, but they were considerably
less well known than the other figures mentioned, and their presence can be
taken to indicate more than a superficial familiarity with the native
milieu. There are also figures unique to the Hermetica: Poimandres, Tat and
the priest Bitys. The origin and meaning of the name Poimandres is unclear,
though it may be Egyptian.[121] As for Tat, he began humbly enough as a
Greek misspelling of Thoth, but ended up taking on an identity of his own as
Thoth-Hermes's son, both bodily and spiritual. The Hermetists apparently saw
nothing inconsistent in this-an indication that philosophical Hermetism is
not just a haphazard accumulation of separate elements, but a
self-validating structure with its own conventions.
Most
modern experts on the
Hermetica
distinguish the "popular" occultist writings attributed to Hermes from the
"learned" or "philosophical" treatises. Garth Fowden, in his
The Egyptian Hermes,
argues persuasively that all the
Hermetica,
whether practical or theoretical, magical or philosophical, can be
understood as responses to the same milieu, the very complex Graeco-Egyptian
culture of Ptolemaic, Roman and early Christian times.[122] With regard to
origins and interrelations, the claim that both types of Hermetica come from
a common environment rings true, yet two other facts also bear
consideration: first, that the seventeen Greek treatises of the
Corpus Hermeticum
came to be treated as a distinct body of writing, though perhaps for no
better reason than the accidents of textual transmission or the prejudices
of Byzantine compilers; and second, that these seventeen Greek
logoi
are not much concerned with astrology, very little with magic and not at all
with alchemy. They deal with theological, or, in some loose sense,
philosophical issues: they reveal to man knowledge of the origins, nature
and moral properties of divine, human and material being so that humanity
can use this knowledge to save themselves. The same pious philosophy or
philosophical piety-a blend of theology, cosmogony, anthropogony, ethics,
soteriology and eschatology-also characterizes the Latin
Asclepius,
the forty Hermetic texts and fragments collected in the
Anthology
of Stobaeus, the three Hermetica found with the
Nag Hammadi Codices,
the Armenian
Definitions and the Vienna
fragments. Although traces of occult belief, astrology especially, is
evident in many of these works, even dominant in some, their central
philosophical and theological concerns do, in fact, distinguish the from
what Festugiere called "popular Hermetism."[123]
Around 200
CE the Christian writer Clement of Alexandria knew of "forty-two books of
Hermes" considered indispensable for the rituals of Egyptian priests; the
list, four of whose items he calls "the astrological books of Hermes,"
somewhat resembles a description of sacred writings inscribed in the second
century BCE on the wall of an Egyptian temple in Edfu.[124] Clement's report
accords with our fragmentary knowledge of the Graeco-Egyptian astrology that
began to develop as early as the third century BCE. Although it was a Greek
work of the third or second century BCE, composed perhaps in Alexandria and
dealing with configurations of stars regarded as divinities, the title and
other features of the
Salmeschiniaka
hint of Babylonian origins, though nothing proves such a connection. In the
middle of the second century BCE, the unknown author of an astrology manual
fathered his work on a pharaoh who ruled five centuries earlier, Nechepso,
and on the high priest Petosiris, who reputedly took his revelation from
Hermes and may correspond to an historical figure of the fourth century. The
fragments of the handbook bearing the names of Nechepso and Petosiris
survive mainly in the
Anthology
of Vettius Valens, a Roman astrologer who wrote in Greek in the second
century CE. The most important of the astrological
Hermetica
known to us is the
Liber
Hermetis,
a Latin text whose Greek original contained elements traceable to the third
century BCE. This
Book of Hermes describes the
decans, a peculiarly Egyptian way of dividing the zodiacal circle into
thirty-six compartments, each with its own complex of astrological
attributes. Some Hermetic texts were tight in their focus, applying
astrological theory to special circumstances: a
Brontologion
analyzed the significance of thunder as it was heard in various months, and
a treatise Peri
seismon related earthquakes to
astrological signs. Of broader use were the
Iatromathematika
or tracts on astrological medicine, such as the
Book of Asclepius Called
Myriogenesis that discussed
medical consequences of the theory of correspondence between human microcosm
and universal macrocosm. Astrological botany and mineralogy were also
favored topics. The
Holy Book of Hermes to Asclepis
based its botanical prescriptions on the relations between plants and decans,
while the Fifteen
Stars, Stones, Plants and Images
singled out particular stars as determinants of pharmaceutical power.[125]
Another
kind of occult wisdom attractive to Hermetic authors was alchemy, which made
its first literary mark on Egypt after 200 BCE in the writings of Bolos
Democritus of Mendes: the vestiges of his work show that Bolos described
processes involving gold, silver, gems, dyes and other substances that
became the main ingredients of the alchemical work. After Bolos but before
the Christian era, a number of alchemical treatises began to appear under
the names of Hermes, Agathodaimon, Isis and others. The latest date from the
second or third century CE, and today we know them only as fragments - no
more than thirty or so - from later alchemical treatises that mention either
Hermes or another Hermetic figure. One of the larger remains of this
literature, the
Anepigraphos, cites the
authority of Hermes and Agathodaimon for an allegory on the making of
silver, called "the moon," by cooking and melting various substances. In
another, entitled
Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horus,
the angel Amnael reveals the alchemical mystery: that just as wheat
engenders wheat or person begets person so gold breeds gold. These
alchemical Hermetica were known to Zosimus, a native of Panopolis who lived
in Alexandria around 300 CE. Zosimus is of great interest because he mingled
Hermetic theosophy with the alchemist's pragmatic aims and left at least two
works that shed light on the larger Hermetic project, especially on the
kinship between the technical and philosophical texts.[126]
The
collection of the first book of the collection called
Kuranides
says that "the god Hermes Trismegistus received this book from the angels as
god's greatest gift and passed it on to all individuals fit to receive
secrets." The book also claims to be a compilation from two others by
Kuranos, which may be a version of the Persian name Cyrus, and by
Harpocration, an otherwise unknown author of late imperial times; the same
work refers to an
Archaikos Biblos, probably an
early bestiary. This first of the six surviving
Kuranides
has twenty-four chapters, one each for the letter of the Greek alphabet that
begins the names of the plant, bird fish and stone treated in the chapter.
The second Kuranis
has forty-seven alphabetized chapters on quadrupeds and their medical
properties; the four others handle birds, fish plants and stones in the same
way. Manuscripts of all but the last two books carry ascriptions to Hermes
Trismegistus, but philology has traced them to the same Bolos Democritus who
was a fountainhead of alchemical wisdom. If Bolos was their progenitor, the
Kuranides
represent the largest survival in Greek of a literature initiated by him
that treated a wide range of natural phenomena and emphasized their medical
and magical uses.[127]
If Fowden
is right to claim that "the technical and philosophical books...are related
aspects of...a practical spiritual 'way,'" then in the philosophical
treatises one expects to find the theory behind the praxis of the technical
Hermetica.
When one looks, however, in the
Corpus Hermeticum,
the Asclepius,
the Stobaeus excerpts or the Nag Hammadi
Hermetica
for a theory of magic, something like what Proclus wrote
On the Hieratic Art according
to the Greeks, this seems not to
be the case, although there are passages that assume such a theoretical
framework for remarks on astrology, demonology or related topics. Instead of
a theory of magic, the theoretical
Hermetica
present a theory of salvation through knowledge or
gnosis,
yet this theory was the product of a culture that made no clear, rigid
distinction between religion as the province of such lofty concerns as the
fate of the soul and magic as a merely instrumental device of humbler
intent.[128] In the Papyri many spells have as their goal
enpneumatosis
or "inspiration," literally, filling with
pneuma
or spirit. Was it a religious or a practical aim to seek such inspiration
from Hermes? What we know of the role of
pneuma
in Gnostic and early Christian religion and of its place in Stoic physics
and Galenic medicine should convince us that the question implies a false,
unhistorical dichotomy.[129] Salvation in the largest sense - the resolution
of man's fate wherever it finds him - was a common concern of theoretical
and technical Hermetica alike, though the latter texts generally advertised
a quotidian deliverance from banal misfortunes of disease, poverty and
social strife, while the former offered a grander view of salvation through
knowledge of God, the other and the self.
This
distinction, as Fowden and others have shown, gives us only rough,
provisional categories better suited to some texts than to others. Although
the excerpts in the
Anthology
of Stobaeus have commonly been treated as "philosophical," a term that fits
most of them as well as it suits the
Corpus Hermeticum
proper, some of the Stobaean material clearly qualifies as technical.
Excerpt
VI deals with astrology, in particular with the decans and their "sons," the
star demons. Festugiere highlighted the conclusion of this treatise, which
promises that "one who has not ignored these things can understand god
precisely and, if one dare say so, even see god with his own eyes and,
having seen god, become blessed." In other words, the Hermetic authors found
technical information on the decan stars a suitable prelude to
gnosis.[130]
The longest and most interesting of the Stobaean excerpts, the
Kore
Kosmou,
or "Daughter of the Cosmos," forthrightly declares that "no prophet about to
raise his hands to the gods has ever ignored any of the things that are, so
that philosophy and magic may nourish the soul and medicine heal the body";
this suggests that all knowledge - magical, medical and any other - bears on
the quest for gnostic salvation. Magic comes closest to philosophy, perhaps,
in the famous "god-making" passages of the
Asclepius
(23-4, 37-8) which shows that material objects can be manipulated to draw a
god down into a statue and thus ensoul it.[131]
The
writings of Zosimus, like the contrary advice of the
Kore kosmou,
show that categories roughly to modern usage of such terms as "magic,"
"philosophy" and "religion" were available to the very people who so
frequently mixed them. Mixed aims and methods are evident in the sixth
tractate of the sixth
Nag Hammadi Codex,
the "Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth." This work is a leading example of
what Fowdencalls an "initiatory" hermetic text concerned with the final
phases of a "philosophical
paideia,"
the last steps that the initiate takes to recognize his true nature and
then, in knowing God, to attain godhood.
NHC
VI.6 shares these sublime intentions with some parts of the Corpus
Hermeticum, especially
C.H.
I and XIII, but most of the other seventeen Greek treatises are
"preparatory" in Fowden's taxonomy. The describe various lower stages in the
progress toward wisdom that the initiate must acquire before enjoying the
rebirth offered in
C.H. XIII or
NHC
VI.6.[132]
If the
preliminary states of spiritual growth differed from one another, the
changes among them may explain a striking feature of the
Corpus,
the apparently great divergences in doctrine between its component treatises
and even within an individual
logos.
Scholars have taken pains to analyze and schematize parts of the Corpus as
monist or dualist, optimist or pessimist, but Fowden proposes to see such
variations as sequential rather than contradictory. Thus, a positive view of
the cosmos as good and worth understanding would suit an earlier stage of
the initiate's labors and, hence, a treatise focusing on a time when the
body's needs were still great, while a negative treatment of the world as
evil and unworthy of thought might befit a farther station in the spirit's
journey and a different treatise on topics closer to the culmination of
gnosis,
which entailed liberation from the body. In any event, the texts themselves
show that the Hermetic authors felt no obligation to respect the boundaries
drawn around their writings by modern critics.
NHC
VI.6, for example, seeks nothing less than "the great divine vision," but it
also contains two ritual passages that would not be out of place in the
Magical Papyri (one of which includes the same prayer that concludes the
Asclepius).
In the second such passage, the initiate says,
I give thanks by singing a
hymn to you. For I have received life from you, when you made me wise. I
praise you. I call your name that is hidden within me: a ö ee ö ëë öö ii
öööö oooo ööö uuuuu öööööööööööö. You are the one who exists with the
spirit. I sing a hymn to you reverently.
Hermes, the
mystagogue, then directs his "son to write this book for the temple at
Diospolis in hieroglyphic characters, entitling it 'The Eighth Reveals the
Ninth.'"[133] This exchange between Trismegistus and his disciple confirms
what Iamblichus said about Egyptian theology, that
they certainly do not just
speculate about these things. They recommend rising up through priestly
theurgy toward the higher and more universal levels above fate, to the god
and craftsman, and without material attachment or any other help at all
except observing the proper time. Hermes also gave instruction in this way,
which Bitus the prophet translated for King Ammon after finding it carved in
hieroglyphic letters in shrines of Sais in Egypt.
Although
Iamblichus seems to exclude any "material attachment" from Hermetic theurgy,
the same cannot be said of the
Asclepius,
which in its "art of making gods" permitted "a comformable power arising
from the nature of matter" and even mentioned "a mixture of plants, stones
and spices, in describing the nature of the gods called down to animate
their statues. PGM
IV.475-829, formerly known as the "Mithras Liturgy," begins by calling for
"the juices of herbs and spices," and it addresses the elementary powers of
spirit, fire, water and earth with mystical noises like those that appear on
almost every page of the Magical papyri: "EY EIA EE, water of water, the
first of the water in me, OOO AAA EEE, earthy material, the first of the
earthy material in me, YE YOE, my complete body." The same invocation seeks
deliverance beyond the bodily elements "to immortal birth and...to my
underlying nature, so that...I may gaze upon the immortal." Just as
Iamblichus said, this famous document exhorts the initiate to rise up
through theurgy to a divine rebirth; its devices are concrete and technical,
but it sets those procedures in a matrix of theory explored more thoroughly
in the Corpus
Hermeticum and the
Asclepius.[134]
Hermetic
Collections
When A.D.
Nock edited the
Corpus, he used twenty-eight
manuscripts dating from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries,
but fifteen of them contain only the first fourteen treatises, or in some
cases, even fewer. Two manuscripts that include all seventeen
logoi
also preserve a comment on
C.H.
I.18 written by Michael Psellus, an important Byzantine scholar of the
eleventh century. Finding the words of the biblical Genesis in this heathen
cosmogony, Psellus remarked of its author that "this wizard seems to have
had more than a passing acquaintance with holy writ. Making an eager go of
it, he tries his hand at the creation of the world, not scrupling to record
the cherished Mosaic expressions themselves." It is noteworthy that a
Byzantine Christian learned in Neoplatonism wished to defame the
Bible-reading Hermes as a
goes
or "wizard," especially since the seventeen Greek treatises say so little
about occult topics. Passages on astrology and magic in the theoretical
Hermetica
are even scarcer in
C.H.
I-XIV than in XVI-XVIII and the
Asclepius.
Could it be, then, that what we call theCorpus
Hermeticum took shape just as a
consequence of the abhorrence of magic expressed by Psellus? If so, it is
worth noting the likelihood that he shared this pious loathing with other
Byzantine scholars who transmitted the
Corpus
from his time to the fourteenth century, when the earliest extant
manuscripts were written.[135]
Byzantine
editors and copyists, then, may have immortalized their prejudices by
selecting and redacting our
Corpus
from a larger body of
Hermetica
that certainly gave much attention to the occultism that is so inconspicuous
in the theoretical treatises, especially the first fourteen. For Christian
readers f the Latin West and Greek East alike, a
Corpus
purged of magic would better befit the authorship of the pagan sage
described in the
Suda around the year 1000:
"Hermes Trismegistus....was an Egyptian wise man who flourished before
Pharaoh's time. He was called Trismegistus on account of his praise of the
trinity,[136] saying that there is one divine nature in the trinity." The
Hermetica are full of random pieties, which is why Christians from patristic
times onward so much admired them.
Before the
eleventh century - when Psellus seems to have known the Corpus in roughly
its present form, around the same time when the first collections of
technical Hermetica were assembled by Byzantine scholars - there is no sign
of the Corpus as such, although individual treatises were evidently in use
as early as the third century CE. John of Stobi, or Stobaeus, seems not to
have known the
Corpus as a whole, but he
compiled an Anthology around the year 500 that contains forty excerpts of
varying lengths from hermetic writings, including parts of C.H. II, IV, IX,
and the Asclepius. Excerpts that do not give partial texts (texts that
represent a separate and sounder tradition than other manuscripts of the
Corpus,
which just on that account would seem to have been assembled after Stobaeus)
or the Corpus
or the Asclepius
fall into four groups: Hermes, Hermes to Tat, Hermes to Ammon, and Isis to
Horus.[137] Earlier than Stobaeus is an interesting remark from Cyril of
Alexandria, who knew C.H. XI and XIV as well as other treatises now lost; he
died around the middle of the fifth century. Much like Psellus, Cyril
disapproved of Hermes as a magus and idolater, but he was fascinated by
biblical and other resonances in his works, writing that
this Hermes of Egypt, although
he was a theurgist (telestes),
ever sitting in the temple precincts near the idols, had the good sense to
acquire the writings of Moses, even if he did not use them at all
blamelessly or correctly, having but a part of them....The one in Athens who
collected the fifteen books called "Hermetic" (Hermaika)
made himself a record of this in his own writings.[138]
Although
Cyril apparently knew a Hermetic collection, his other references to
Hermetic writings do not show that these "fifteen books" were a form of our
Corpus.
However, the earliest possible data, which comes from the texts themselves
(sometimes referring to one another and to
Hermetica
outside the Corpus),
indicate that Hermetic collections of some kind circulated as early as the
second or third centuries. A scribe who copied the Nag Hammadi
Hermetica,
part of a mid-fourth "library," apologized for not adding more Hermetic
materials to his codex because "the discourses of that one, which have come
to me, are numerous," implying that he had access to more Hermetica than he
had transcribed, conceivably to a collection. Authors of
NHC
VI, C.H.
V,X,XII and XIV,
S.H. III and VI and the
Asclepius
recognized groups of treatises by name, although the meanings of their
labels to their original users remain unclear.[139]
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