Wing I
The Texts
The texts of the Hermetic tradition, with the later books that borrowed its name, form eleven bodies of writing across some twenty centuries. Start with the Corpus Hermeticum, or with the one “hermetic” bestseller that isn’t ancient at all.
Eleven bodies of text, three continents and some twenty centuries, and only some of it is what it says it is. This page is the map: what survives, in which language, from when, and what was invented later. Each card is a door to the full page.
Ancient
Written in Greek-speaking Egypt, first to fourth century
Corpus Hermeticum
c. 100-300 CE · Greek, complete
17 treatises; reached Europe via Byzantium, 1460
Asclepius
c. 2nd-3rd c. · Greek lost, survives in Latin
Fragments also in Coptic
Definitions of Hermes
Probably 1st c. · Greek mostly lost, survives in Armenian
Six manuscripts, 13th-16th c. · English only since 1999
Stobaean Fragments
2nd-3rd c., preserved 5th c. · Greek
~30 excerpts surviving nowhere else, incl. Korē Kosmou
Nag Hammadi Hermetica
Greek c. 2nd-3rd c., copies Coptic 4th c.
Buried until December 1945 · Codex VI
Transmitted
Written or carried later: the tradition receiving itself
The Emerald Tablet
First attested Arabic, 8th-9th c. · no Greek original
Latin Europe from the 12th c.
Picatrix
al-Andalus, c. 959 · Arabic → Castilian 1256 → Latin
Upstream of Ficino and Agrippa
Musaeum Hermeticum
Frankfurt 1625, canonical 1678 · Latin
Alchemy, not ancient Hermetica
Modern
Written recently, sold as ancient
The 72 Names
Jewish, medieval · Hebrew, derived from Exodus 14:19-21
Absorbed into Hermetic reading in the Renaissance; not a Hermetic text
Reality Transurfing
Russia, 2003 · Russian, in print
Not Hermetic and does not claim to be; the newest layer on the same shelf
The Kybalion
Chicago, 1908 · English
New Thought in Hermetic dress · the most read of them all
Ancient: composed in antiquity, whatever language it now survives in. Transmitted: genuinely old tradition, later text. Modern: recent work presented as ancient.
Where to start
With the Poimandres, the vision that opens the Corpus, or, if you have met the tradition through a bookshop, with the Kybalion and the question of why the most popular hermetic book is the youngest one on this page. To read the texts themselves free of charge, the register of lawful scans lists the public-domain editions, edition by edition. Four neighbouring texts have their own reading guides, with free scans and which translation to choose: the Chaldean Oracles, the Secretum secretorum, the Rosicrucian manifestos and the Chymical Wedding.