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An Introduction to the Corpus HermeticumAn Introduction to the Corpus Hermeticumby John Michael GreerThe fifteen tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum,along with the Perfect Sermon or Asclepius,are the foundation documents of the Hermetic tradition. Writtenby unknown authors in Egypt sometime before the end of the thirdcentury C.E., they were part of a once substantial literatureattributed to the mythic figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a Hellenisticfusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.This literature came out of the same religious and philosophicalferment that produced Neoplatonism, Christianity, and the diversecollection of teachings usually lumped together under the label"Gnosticism": a ferment which had its roots in theimpact of Platonic thought on the older traditions of the HellenizedEast. There are obvious connections and common themes linkingeach of these traditions, although each had its own answer tothe major questions of the time.The treatises we now call the Corpus Hermeticumwere collected into a single volume in Byzantine times, and acopy of this volume survived to come into the hands of Lorenzode Medici's agents in the fifteenth century. Marsilio Ficino,the head of the Florentine Academy, was pulled off the task oftranslating the dialogues of Plato in order to put the CorpusHermeticum into Latin first. His translation saw printin 1463, and was reprinted at least twenty-two times over thenext century and a half.The treatises divide up into several groups. The first (CH I),the "Poemandres", is the account of a revelation givento Hermes Trismegistus by the being Poemandres or "Man-Shepherd",an expression of the universal Mind. The next eight (CH II-IX),the "General Sermons", are short dialogues or lecturesdiscussing various basic points of Hermetic philosophy. Therefollows the "Key" (CH X), a summary of the General Sermons,and after this a set of four tractates - "Mind unto Hermes","About the Common Mind", "The Secret Sermon onthe Mountain", and the "Letter of Hermes to Asclepius"(CH XI-XIV) - touching on the more mystical aspects of Hermeticism. The collection is rounded off by the "Definitions of Asclepiusunto King Ammon" (CH XV), which may be composed of threefragments of longer works.The Perfect SermonThe Perfect Sermon or Asclepius, which isalso included here, reached the Renaissance by a different route. It was translated into Latin in ancient times, reputedly by thesame Lucius Apuleius of Madaura whose comic-serious masterpieceThe Golden Ass provides some of the bestsurviving evidence on the worship of Isis in the Roman world. Augustine of Hippo quotes from the old Latin translation at lengthin his City of God, and copies remained in circulation in medievalEurope all the way up to the Renaissance. The original Greekversion was lost, although quotations survive in several ancientsources.The Perfect Sermon is substantially longer than any other survivingwork of ancient Hermetic philosophy. It covers topics which alsooccur in the Corpus Hermeticum, but touches on several other issuesas well - among them magical processes for the manufacture ofgods and a long and gloomy prophecy of the decline of Hermeticwisdom and the end of the world. The Significance of the Hermetic WritingsThe Corpus Hermeticum landed like a well-aimed bombamid the philosophical systems of late medieval Europe. Quotationsfrom the Hermetic literature in the Church Fathers (who were nevershy of leaning on pagan sources to prove a point) accepted a traditionalchronology which dated "Hermes Trismegistus," as a historicalfigure, to the time of Moses. As a result, the Hermetic tractates'borrowings from Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy wereseen, in the Renaissance, as evidence that the Corpus Hermeticumhad anticipated and influenced both. The Hermetic philosophywas seen as a primordial wisdom tradition, identified with the"Wisdom of the Egyptians" mentioned in Exodusand lauded in Platonic dialogues such as the Timaeus. It thus served as a useful club in the hands of intellectual rebelswho sought to break the stranglehold of Aristotelian scholasticismon the universities at this time.It also provided one of the most important weapons to anothermajor rebellion of the age - the attempt to reestablish magicas a socially acceptable spiritual path in the Christian West. Another body of literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistuswas made up of astrological, alchemical and magical texts. If,as the scholars of the Renaissance believed, Hermes was a historicalperson who had written all these things, and if Church Fathershad quoted his philosophical works with approval, and if thosesame works could be shown to be wholly in keeping with some definitionsof Christianity, then the whole structure of magical Hermeticismcould be given a second-hand legitimacy in a Christian context.This didn't work, of course; the radical redefinition of WesternChristianity that took place in the Reformation and Counter-Reformationhardened doctrinal barriers to the point that people were beingburned in the sixteenth century for practices that were consideredevidences of devoutness in the fourteenth. The attempt, though,made the language and concepts of the Hermetic tractates centralto much of post-medieval magic in the West.The TranslationThe translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and Perfect Sermon given here is that of G.R.S. Mead (1863-1933), originallypublished as Vol. 2 of his Thrice Greatest Hermes(London, 1906). Mead was a close associate of Helena PetrovnaBlavatsky, the founder and moving spirit of the Theosophical Society,and most of his considerable scholarly output was brought outunder Theosophical auspices. The result, predictably, was thatmost of that output has effectively been blacklisted in academiccircles ever since.This is unfortunate, for Mead's translations of the Hermetic literaturewere until quite recently the best available in English. (Theyare still the best in the public domain; thus their use here.) The Everard translation of 1650, which is still in print, reflectsthe state of scholarship at the time it was made - which is onlya criticism because a few things have been learned since then! The Walter Scott translation - despite the cover blurb on therecent Shambhala reprint, this is not the Sir Walter Scott ofIvanhoe fame - while more recent than Mead's, is a productof the "New Criticism" of the first half of this century,and garbles the text severely; scholars of Hermeticism of thecaliber of Dame Frances Yates have labeled the Scott translationworthless. By contrast, a comparison of Mead's version to theexcellent modern translation by Brian Copenhaver, or to the translationsof CH I (Poemandres) and VII (The Greatest Ill Among Men is Ignoranceof God) given in Bentley Layton's The Gnostic Scriptures,shows Mead as a capable translator, with a usually solid graspof the meaning of these sometimes obscure texts.There is admittedly one problem with Mead's translation: theaesthetics of the English text. Mead hoped, as he mentioned atthe beginning of Thrice Greatest Hermes,to "render...these beautiful theosophic treatises into anEnglish that might, perhaps, be thought in some small way worthyof the Greek originals." Unfortunately for this ambition,he was writing at a time when the last remnants of the floridand pompous Victorian style were fighting it out with the morestraightforward colloquial prose that became the style of thenew century. Caught in this tangle like so many writers of thetime, Mead wanted to write in the grand style but apparently didn'tknow how. The result is a sometimes bizarre mishmash in whichturn-of-the-century slang stands cheek by jowl with overblownphrases in King James Bible diction, and in which mishandled archaicisms,inverted word order, and poetic contractions render the text lessthan graceful - and occasionally less than readable. Seen froma late twentieth century sensibility, the result verges on unintentionalself-parody in places: for example, where Mead uses the Scotscontraction "ta'en" (for "taken"), apparentlyfor sheer poetic color, calling up an image of Hermes Trismegistusin kilt and sporran.The "poetic" word order is probably the most seriousbarrier to readability; it's a good rule, whenever the translationseems to descend into gibberish, to try shuffling the words ofthe sentence in question. It may also be worth noting that Meadconsistently uses "for that" in place of "because"and "aught" in place of "any", and leavesout the word "the" more or less at random.Finally, comments in (parentheses) and in [square brackets] arein Mead's original; those in <angle brackets> are my ownadditions. |
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