The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum II

To Asclepius: On Motion and Place
(Corpus Hermeticum II)

On this page: what it is · the sections · where translations differ · where to read it

What Corpus Hermeticum II is

It is the second of the seventeen Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum. It is not the Asclepius, the long Latin dialogue that shares the pupil’s name; CH II is a few pages of Greek, and Asclepius is simply the listener.

Its heading in the manuscripts is a puzzle. They call it “Of Hermes to Tat, a general discourse” (logos katholikos; Scott, I, p. 134), yet the pupil is Asclepius and Tat never appears. Following Reitzenstein, Scott explained it as damage to a lost ancestor manuscript: leaves were torn out after a page that ended with the title of a treatise to Tat, taking away that whole treatise and the start of this one, so the orphaned title came to stand over our text (II, p. 75). Mead accepted this, printed the lost “General Sermon” as an empty CH (II), numbered this dialogue II (III) and headed it simply “To Asclepius” (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, II, 1906, pp. 58-59, 68-70).

The opening (§§1 to the start of 4b in Scott’s numbering) is missing from every Corpus manuscript, which begin in mid-sentence. It survives because Johannes Stobaeus quoted three passages of the dialogue in his fifth-century Anthology (1.18.2, 1.19.2 and 1.18.3): two under headings naming Hermes’s discourses to Asclepius, the third headed “in the same”; the Renaissance editor Francesco Patrizi restored it, the first to see where Stobaeus had taken it from (Scott, I, p. 134; II, p. 75 n. 1). Stobaeus’s other Hermetic excerpts are on the site’s page on the Stobaean fragments.

Scott found the doctrine “mainly Platonic”, with one Aristotelian doctrine (the soul as an unmoved mover) and an argument directed against the Stoic idea of a void outside the cosmos; he saw “nothing distinctively Egyptian” and “no trace of Christian influence”, and conjectured a date between 100 and 250 CE (II, pp. 76-77). The site’s guide to all seventeen treatises describes it as technical and Greek-philosophical.

The six parts, in plain words

Section numbers follow Mead (seventeen sections); the opening of Copenhaver’s version shown on Cambridge Core is numbered the same way, and Scott splits some sections into a and b. These are paraphrases; quotations come in the next part.

§§1-5 · The place of motion. Whatever moves, moves in something and is moved by something. The cosmos is the largest body and it moves, so what it moves in must be larger and of the opposite nature: bodiless. The bodiless is either something divine or God himself. Hermes then argues that this place is not God himself; Scott calls the text of §§4b-6a “badly corrupted” (I, p. 135 n. 1).

§§6-9 · What moves things. Things move in what stands still, and the mover stands still too. Asked how the planets can be carried by the sphere of fixed stars, Hermes answers that their motions run against each other; he points to the Bears turning round one point and to a swimmer who holds his place against a current. What moves a body is never a body but soul or something else bodiless. When a man lifts a stone, his soul moves both bodies, so the soul is the one weighed down: it carries two bodies at once.

§§10-11 · There is no void. Asclepius suggests things move in empty space. Nothing that exists is empty, Hermes replies; only what is not is empty. An “empty” jar is full of air, so it should be called hollow, not void.

§12 · The place is Mind. The bodiless place in which the universe moves is Mind, whole, self-contained, untouched by body, holding and preserving all things. In Mead the Good, Truth and Light are the rays of this Mind; Scott rearranges the sentence so that Mind and Truth are rays of the “archetypal Light”, which he takes to be the Good (Mead, pp. 65-66; Scott, I, p. 141; II, p. 105).

§§13-16 · God and the Good. God is none of these. He is not Mind but the cause that Mind exists, and likewise of spirit and light. No other god, no man and no daemon can be good; people call gods and some men good out of ignorance, and the other gods bear the title as an honour. Only God is good by nature. God is to be worshipped by “two names”: Mead fills them in as “[the Good and Father]”, Scott reads God and the Good (Mead, p. 66; Scott, I, p. 143 n. 2). To call anything else good, or to call God anything but good, is impious. The Good gives all and receives nothing.

§17 · The Father, and a warning. God’s other name is Father, because a father makes. So begetting children is a pious duty, and the soul of a man who dies childless is punished by daemons with a body that is neither male nor female. The lesson closes as “an introduction to the gnosis of the nature of all things” (Mead, II, p. 68).

Where the translations differ

Quotations are checked against the scans; Copenhaver’s against the opening that Cambridge Core shows.

1. Place or space (§3). The Greek word is topos.

• Everard 1650: “what a kinde of place must it be, wherein it is moved” (v. 15)
• Mead 1906: “Of what size, then, must be the space in which it’s moved” (p. 60)
• Copenhaver 1992: “The place in which it moves, then, how large must it be” (opening on Cambridge Core)

Scott also chose “space” (I, p. 135), Chambers “place” (1882, p. 17). The choice matters, because §12 answers the question what this bodiless place is with nous, Mind; Scott’s notes call it the topos-nous (II, p. 103). Scott traced that usage to Jewish speech, where God or his Word could be called “the Place”, as in Philo, and judged the writer “directly or indirectly influenced by some Jewish authority” (II, pp. 90-91).

2. Mind and Reason, or whole Mind (§12). The Corpus manuscripts read nous, logos, “mind, reason”; Stobaeus reads nous holos, “whole mind”, and Scott follows him, taking logos as a corruption of holos (I, p. 140, apparatus; II, p. 103).

• Everard 1650: “The Minde and Reason” (v. 58)
• Mead 1906: “’Tis Mind and Reason (Logos), whole out of whole” (p. 65)
• Scott 1924: “It is Mind, entire and wholly self-encompassing” (p. 141)

3. The punished soul (§17).

• Everard 1650: “a Body that neither hath the nature of a man, nor of a woman, which is an accursed thing under the Sun” (v. 78)
• Mead 1906: “a body with neither man’s nor woman’s nature, a thing accurst beneath the sun” (p. 68)
• Scott 1924: childlessness “is a thing accursed in the sight of the Sun”, and the soul is sent into “a body that is neither that of a man nor that of a woman” (p. 145)

Scott moved the clause about the Sun, arguing that childlessness, not the new body, is what is accursed, and read the body as an animal’s: reincarnation as a beast (II, pp. 109-110). He also judged the whole of §17a “probably added by another person” (I, p. 145 n. 2).

Scott thought the writer was arguing against people who found it more comfortable to stay childless (II, p. 109). The passage states an ancient religious view; it is reported here, not endorsed.

Scott treated the star passage in §§6b-8a as an insertion “by some one who misunderstood the meaning” and called the swimmer example “absurdly inappropriate” (I, p. 137 n. 1; II, p. 98). Mead prints both as part of the dialogue.

Where to read Corpus Hermeticum II

The first five are free scans at the Internet Archive, checked on 4 November 2026; the rest are in copyright.

• Everard, 1650. The Divine Pymander, “The Ninth Book. A Universal Sermon to Asclepius”, verses 1-80, pp. 103-116, with the Stobaeus opening. Scan, opened at p. 103; transcription at the Alchemy Web Site.
• Chambers, 1882. Chapter II, “To Asclepius. Catholic Discourse”, pp. 16-23. Scan.
• Mead, 1906. Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II, “To Asclepius”, pp. 59-68, commentary pp. 68-74. Scan, opened at p. 59; transcription at the Gnosis Archive.
• Scott, 1924-1925. Hermetica, vol. I, Libellus II, Greek and English, pp. 134-145 (scan, opened at p. 134); notes in vol. II, pp. 75-110 (scan, opened at p. 75). Heavily emended.
• Parthey, 1854. Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander, cap. 2, Greek with a Latin version, pp. 19-30. Scan.
• Nock and Festugière, 1945. Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I: Greek text edited by Nock, with a French translation by Festugière.
• Copenhaver, 1992. Hermetica, “Corpus Hermeticum II”, pp. 8-12. Cambridge Core.
• Litwa, 2018. Hermetica II: the Stobaeus excerpts outside the Corpus, not CH II itself.
• Löhr, 1997. Verherrlichung Gottes durch Philosophie, a German study of CH II in the setting of ancient philosophy and religion, 412 pages (WUNT 97).

The transcriptions are text only; quote from the scans.

Key facts

Position	Second of the 17 Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, between I (Poimandres) and III (the Sacred Sermon)
Not to be confused with	The Latin Asclepius, a different and much longer dialogue
Title	Manuscripts: “Of Hermes to Tat, a general discourse”, on Scott’s explanation a title from a lost treatise (1925, II, p. 75); Mead 1906: To Asclepius
Opening	Lost in the Corpus manuscripts; known from Stobaeus, Anthology 1.18.2
Date	Unknown; Scott conjectured 100-250 CE (1925, II, p. 77)
Checked	4 November 2026, against the scans listed under sources

Fair questions

Is Corpus Hermeticum II the same as the Asclepius?

No. The Asclepius is a long dialogue that survives in Latin. CH II is a short Greek dialogue in the Corpus Hermeticum in which Asclepius is the pupil. Scott (1925) counted both among a series of dialogues of Hermes with Asclepius.

Why is Corpus Hermeticum II called “the general discourse”?

The manuscripts head it “Of Hermes to Tat, a general discourse”, but Tat does not appear. Reitzenstein (1904) explained that pages were lost from an ancestor manuscript, taking a treatise to Tat with them and leaving its title over this dialogue. Following him, Mead (1906) headed the dialogue “To Asclepius”, and Scott (1925) accepted the same explanation.

What is Corpus Hermeticum II about?

Motion and place. Whatever moves needs something larger and bodiless to move in; for the cosmos that is Mind. God is above Mind, as its cause, and alone deserves the names Good and Father.

Does Corpus Hermeticum II say childless people are punished?

Its last section says that the soul of a man who dies childless is punished by daemons with a body neither male nor female. Scott (1924-1925) thought this section was probably added by another writer and read the body as an animal’s. It is an ancient religious claim, reported here as such.

Where can I read Corpus Hermeticum II for free?

Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), pp. 59-68; Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650), Ninth Book, pp. 103-116; Chambers (1882), pp. 16-23; Scott’s Hermetica, vol. I (1924), pp. 134-145, Greek and English. All are scanned at the Internet Archive. Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992), pp. 8-12, is in copyright.

Sources & further reading

• John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus (London: Brewster and Moule, 1650), “The Ninth Book”, verses 1-80, pp. 103-116; scan at the Internet Archive.
• Gustav Parthey (ed.), Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin: Nicolai, 1854), cap. 2, pp. 19-30; scan.
• John David Chambers (tr.), The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1882), chapter II, pp. 16-23 (“place” p. 17); scan.
• G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), CH (II) “The General Sermon” p. 58; CH II (III) “To Asclepius” pp. 59-68; commentary pp. 68-74; scan.
• Walter Scott (ed. and tr.), Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), Libellus II, pp. 134-145: manuscript title and Stobaeus references p. 134, apparatus p. 140, §12 p. 141, notes p. 135 n. 1, p. 137 n. 1, p. 143 n. 2, p. 145 n. 2; scan.
• Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. II: Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), Libellus II, pp. 75-110: lost leaves, title and Patrizi p. 75; contents, sources, date pp. 75-77; topos pp. 89-91; stars and swimmer pp. 97-98; nous holos and topos-nous p. 103; archetypal Light p. 105; §17a pp. 109-110; scan.
• A. D. Nock (ed.) and A.-J. Festugière (tr.), Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I: Traités I-XII (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945); BnF catalogue.
• Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), “Corpus Hermeticum II”, pp. 8-12; Cambridge Core, opening read 4 November 2026.
• M. David Litwa, Hermetica II: The Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), General Introduction (publisher’s excerpt); Cambridge Core.
• Gebhard Löhr, Verherrlichung Gottes durch Philosophie: Der hermetische Traktat II im Rahmen der antiken Philosophie- und Religionsgeschichte, WUNT 97 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997); publisher’s page. Not consulted for this page.