Mystical systems
Corpus Hermeticum
Direct answer
Corpus Hermeticum: The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of seventeen Greek treatises written in Roman Egypt under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, and the chief source for ancient Hermetic teaching.
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At a glance
- Also called
- the hermetica, hermetic corpus, hermetic treatises, pimander ficino
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Hermeticism, Hermes Trismegistus, Poimandres, Nous
The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of seventeen Greek treatises written in Roman Egypt under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, and the chief source for ancient Hermetic teaching.
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What is the Corpus Hermeticum?
The Corpus Hermeticum is a set of seventeen short works in Greek. Most are dialogues in which Hermes instructs a pupil, his son Tat or the physician Asclepius, and in the first a divine mind instructs the seer himself. Their subjects are the nature of God, the making of the cosmos, the place of the human being in it and the way by which a soul comes to know its source. They do not agree on every point: some speak of the world as good and full of God, others as a place to leave.
The treatises were written by different hands between about the first and the third century. They belong with the Latin Asclepius and with the excerpts kept by the anthologist Stobaeus, which stand outside the collection.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The Hermetic principles.
What sets Corpus Hermeticum apart
The collection is an accident of copying and not a canon its authors planned. Seventeen pieces by different hands were bound together in Byzantium, and modern editions still number them up to eighteen, because a sixteenth-century editor slipped in a fifteenth item that later editors took out again. The treatises disagree among themselves: some call the cosmos a second god and a thing of beauty, others a place of exile. That spread is why scholars speak of an optimist and a pessimist strand within one book.
- Contents: seventeen Greek treatises, numbered 1 to 14 and 16 to 18 in modern editions
- Written: by several unknown authors in Roman Egypt, about the first to the third century
- Speakers: Hermes, his son Tat, Asclepius and King Ammon; in the first treatise, the mind Poimandres
- First Latin: Marsilio Ficino, treatises 1 to 14, finished 1463 and printed at Treviso in 1471
- First Greek printing: Adrien Turnèbe, Paris, 1554
- Critical edition: A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, four volumes, 1945 to 1954
Often mistaken for something else: The Hermetica is the loose name for everything written under Hermes, handbooks of astrology and alchemy included; the Corpus Hermeticum is one fixed collection of seventeen philosophical treatises within it.
The story behind Corpus Hermeticum
The collection was put together by Byzantine copyists, and the scholar Michael Psellos knew it in the eleventh century. A manuscript reached Florence about 1460, and Marsilio Ficino put its fourteen treatises into Latin; the book was printed in 1471 under the title Pimander. The Greek text was first printed in Paris in 1554. Isaac Casaubon redated it in 1614, and the modern critical edition by A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière appeared between 1945 and 1954.
Why Corpus Hermeticum matters
Corpus Hermeticum is the ground on which any statement about what Hermeticism teaches has to stand, and it shows how much later books added to the name.
How to read Corpus Hermeticum
Readers take one treatise at a time in a modern translation and note where it agrees or disagrees with the others, since the collection holds more than one view.
Corpus Hermeticum in practice: an example
Someone told that Hermetic teaching turns its back on the world can open the fifth treatise, which finds God shown plainly in the order of what can be seen.
Where readings of Corpus Hermeticum go wrong
The seven principles of The Kybalion are not found in it; a saying is Hermetic in the old sense only if it stands in these texts.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- corpus hermeticum meaning, the hermetica, hermetic corpus, hermetic treatises, pimander ficino
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the Corpus Hermeticum?
It is a collection of seventeen Greek treatises written in Roman Egypt in the name of Hermes Trismegistus. They are short dialogues on God, the cosmos and the soul.
How old is the Corpus Hermeticum?
Its treatises date from about the first to the third century of the Christian era. They were once believed to be far older, until Isaac Casaubon showed otherwise from their Greek in 1614.
Is The Kybalion part of the Corpus Hermeticum?
No. The Kybalion is a separate book published in Chicago in 1908. Its seven principles do not appear in the ancient treatises.
