The revelation of Hermes Trismegistus — mind, light, and the way of the soul back to God, in the Greek that Renaissance Florence mistook for older than Moses.
The Greek Hermetica, word by word — Greek, transliteration, gloss, and flowing English, with a lexicon on every word.
❦ Read the interlinear Corpus HermeticumA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of The Corpus Hermeticum word by word.
The book that Renaissance Europe believed was the oldest wisdom in the world — the revelation of Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-greatest, part Egyptian god Thoth and part Greek Hermes, on God, mind, and the soul's ascent.
When a Greek manuscript of these treatises reached Florence around 1460, Cosimo de' Medici ordered Marsilio Ficino to drop his translation of Plato and render Hermes first — because Hermes was thought older than Moses, a pagan prophet of the Christian God. The dating was wrong by a thousand years; the spell was not. The Hermetica shaped alchemy, astrology, Renaissance magic, and the whole Western esoteric tradition, from Bruno to Blake to Jung.
The first treatise, the Poimandres, is a vision: a being of infinite light names itself the Mind of the Sovereignty, and shows the birth of the cosmos and of Man, who was made in God's image and fell by falling in love with his own reflection in Nature. Later Hermes tells his son that God filled a great krater — a mixing-bowl — with Mind, and sent a herald crying, 'Baptize yourself in this bowl, you who can.' The Greek carries ζωὴ καὶ φῶς, 'Life and Light,' and ὁμοούσιος, 'consubstantial' — the very words the Gospel of John and the Nicene Creed would make famous.
Read slowly and word by word, the Hermetica stops being an occult curiosity and becomes what it is: a sustained argument that the divine is Mind, that the visible world is God made visible, and that a human being is an amphibian of two worlds who can climb back to the source. You come out reading John's prologue, and the alchemists, and half of Renaissance art, with new eyes — and hearing, under the English, the Greek that started it.
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