The Corpus Hermeticum

Mead's Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Volume II, issued as Sermons by the Theosophical Publishing Society in London and Benares in 1906, translates the Greek sermons of the Corpus Hermeticum. It also translates the Latin Perfect Sermon, or Asclepius, as a separate text. The ancient authors are unnamed, and tradition attributes the writings to Hermes Trismegistus, who appears in them as teacher to his son Tat and as pupil of a divine Mind. Read across several sermons, the collection argues that knowledge of God changes the condition of the person who receives it, and that claim ties its account of how the cosmos came forth to its account of how a person should live. The connection is the reason to read the volume as a book. Poemandres explains why a human being is mortal in body and divine in origin. The Cup sermon makes the higher knowledge a prize that must be chosen, and Mind's discourse to Hermes argues that a mind must grow toward what it would understand. The Secret Sermon names the vices that rebirth drives out, and the Asclepius closes its prayer by offering thanks in place of incense.

Mead's apparatus needs attention from the first page. His headings carry two numbering systems, so the discourse of Mind appears as XI (XII). The General Sermon survives as a bare title, and his note reports that its text vanished with a lost quire or quires before the parent copy reached Psellus. His bracketed supplements and footnotes, some of which point to other volumes of the set, speak in his voice and should be kept separate from the voices he translates.

Poemandres supplies the premises the other sermons assume. All-Father Mind, being Life and Light, brings forth Man "co-equal to Himself" and loves him as His own Form. When Man wishes to create in turn, the Father gives assent. In the sections that follow, Man's desire for his reflection in Nature joins him to a body and makes the human being of this sermon double from the start. The ascent at the close of the narrative undoes the descent. Rising through seven zones, the one who ascends gives up an energy at each, among them Growth and Waning, the Guile of the Desires, Domineering Arrogance and Ensnaring Falsehood, until he reaches the Eighth and hymns the Father with "those-that-are." Because the vices occupy places in the cosmos, the text can present moral purification and ascent as one movement. These are claims of revelation, and a reader can study how a cosmology furnishes premises for an ethics while withholding assent from both.

In the Cup sermon Tat asks why God did not give every soul a share of Mind. Hermes answers that God distributed Reason (Logos) among all men and set Mind up "in the midst for souls" as a prize, filling a mighty Cup with it and sending a Herald to proclaim it to human hearts. Grudging, he adds, has its place below, in souls that lack Mind. Ordinary reasoning is therefore common property, while the knowledge the sermon calls Gnosis must be accepted by choice. Hermes then explains why the choice is hard. Leaving "the things we have grown used to" is difficult, and appearances delight. Evils are the more apparent things, while the Good, having neither form nor figure, stays invisible to bodily eyes. The sermon's renunciation of the body is severe, and it resists conversion into a modern program of wellbeing.

Mind's discourse to Hermes trades narrative for argument. Hermes complains that men say many diverse things about the All and the Good, and Mind answers with a nested order in which God makes Aeon, Aeon makes Cosmos, Cosmos makes Time and Time makes Becoming. The reasoning then moves from life to unity. If all things are lives and Life is one, God is one. Since Life is the making-one of Mind and Soul, death is the dissolving of that union, which the sermon distinguishes from destruction. Later sections apply the principle that like knows like and urge the mind to enlarge its conception beyond ordinary place and time, so understanding God becomes a condition the knower has to meet. Mead's footnote glosses Mind and Soul as "the Logos and World-Soul, or ego and animal soul". Set beside Mind's speech, that gloss shows how much interpretation the commentary adds. We read the enlarging exercise as a discipline of conception inside a religious argument, which gives it no standing as evidence about travel or physical science.

The Secret Sermon on the Mountain makes the vices the subject of rebirth. Hermes counts twelve torments, from Not-knowing and Grief through Avarice and Envy to Malice, with many more beneath them. He tells Tat that they depart, though not all at once, from the one God has taken pity on, and that this "constitutes the manner of Rebirth." In the sections that follow, powers of God, among them self-control and righteousness, drive the torments out. Later Hermes recites a Hymn of Rebirth that he says is kept hid in silence, and he instructs Tat to worship under open sky, facing the south wind at sunset and the east at sunrise. Mead's notes on the seven zones of Poemandres point to this sermon. On our reading, the comparison shows one account of the human being in two registers, cosmological in the ascent and ritual in the rebirth. Rebirth here depends on divine mercy and initiation, which places it among religious transformations with ethical content and outside the category of secular technique or tested therapy.

The Asclepius, which Mead prints as a separate Latin text after the Greek sermons, ends with a prayer that gathers these threads. Thanks given by men, the speaker says, are "the best incense in God's sight," and in the closing section added incense is refused as unnecessary before the company shares a pure meal free of flesh. The prayer thanks God for sense so that we may feel Him and for reason so that we may track Him out "from the appearances of things." It also rejoices that people still "entombed in bodies" have been consecrated to Eternity. The appearances that the Cup sermon treated as a lure become, in this prayer, material from which reason traces God. Beside the prayer, Mead's footnotes refer readers to Lactantius for three of its paragraphs and propose that the One God here is the Cosmos, and in them his comparative method can be seen at work.

The volume suits a reader who wants to see, in the translated sermons themselves, how these writers argued that knowing God could reshape a person's conduct and condition. Expect 1906 English with capitalized technical terms and bracketed supplements, and a commentator whose comparisons should be weighed as his own. Readers with textual questions will need a modern critical edition beside it, and the sermons' claims about the soul and its ascent remain religious claims, outside the reach of empirical or medical evidence. The other volumes of Mead's set carry his prolegomena and the Hermetic excerpts and fragments that this one leaves aside.

Our own server holds the complete scan of this 1906 Volume II as an unmodified PDF, copied from the University of Michigan file at the Internet Archive. Identical copies are mirrored at nostr.download and 24242.io. All three match the source file's SHA-256 digest, 7a24364d63883d4348b4390ccf4d3ba3bfa640333cbc4a8704ce30df328dee8f. Mead's 1906 translation and commentary are in the public domain in the United States because the maximum copyright term has expired. Readers in other countries should check their own law. The cover image above comes from a separate University of Toronto library copy.