Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 1: Prolegomena

REMAINS OF THE TRISMEGISTIC LITERATURE

THE EXTANT TRISMEGISTIC LITERATURE

To distinguish our writings both from the Egyptian “Books of Thoth” and the Hermes Prayers of the popular Egyptian cult, as found in the Greek Magic Papyri, and also from the later Hermetic Alchemical literature, I have adopted the term Trismegistic literature in place of the usual designation Hermetic.

Of this Greek Trismegistic literature proper, much is lost; that which remains to us, of which I have endeavored to gather together every fragment and scrap, falls under five heads:

A. The Corpus Hermeticum includes what has, previous to Reitzenstein,¹ been known as the “Poimandres”² collection of fourteen Sermons and the “Definitions of Asclepius.”

B. The Perfect Sermon, or the Asclepius, is no longer extant in Greek, but only in an Old Latin version.

C. There are twenty-seven Excerpts, from otherwise lost Sermons, by John Stobæus, a Pagan scholar of the

¹ Reitzenstein (R.), Poimandres: Studies on Greek-Egyptian and Early Christian Literature (Leipzig; 1904).
² Variously translated, or transformed, as Pœmandres, Pœmander, Pœmandre, Pymandar, Pimander, Pimandre, Pimandro. Already Patrizi, in 1591, pointed out that only one treatise could be called by this title; but, in spite of this, the bad habit inaugurated by the editio princeps first printed edition (in Latin translation) of Marsiglio Ficino has persisted to the last edition of the text by Parthey (1854) and the last translation by Chambers (1882).