The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum III

The Sacred Sermon
(Corpus Hermeticum III)

TL;DR

Corpus Hermeticum III, the Sacred Sermon (Greek logos hieros), is a four-section account of creation with no dialogue: from darkness, water and breath in chaos to seven heavens, living things, human life and renewal by nature. The Greek is badly damaged, so Everard (1650), Mead (1906) and Scott (1924), all free to read in scans, sometimes translate different Greek. Scott held that its author had read Genesis.

Corpus Hermeticum III, the Sacred Sermon (Greek logos hieros, also translated “Sacred Discourse” and “Holy Sermon”), is a short Hermetic account of creation: God as the source of all things, darkness, water and breath in chaos, a holy light, seven heavens, the living creatures, and a human life that ends while nature renews the world. It is the third of the seventeen Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum and one of the shortest: four sections that fill three pages in G.R.S. Mead’s English of 1906. It is also among the hardest to read, because the Greek that reached us is corrupt. Below: the four sections, the translations side by side, the Genesis question and where to read it free, in scans and plain text.

What the Sacred Sermon is

No character speaks and no one is addressed. The treatise has no dialogue frame: no Tat, no Asclepius, no revealing Mind. Hermes appears only in the heading, which Walter Scott printed as “Hermou tou Trismegistou logos hieros” and translated “A holy discourse of Hermes Trismegistus” (Hermetica, I, 1924, pp. 144-145). John Everard calls it “The Third Book Called The Holy Sermon” (The Divine Pymander, 1650, p. 36). Mead numbers it III (IV), the second number coming from his own count, which includes a General Sermon whose title survives without its text (1906, II, pp. 58 and 75).

Mead read a good deal into the title: a “Sacred Sermon” leads us to expect “a basis of doctrine”, and he found in it a summary of the creation story of the Poimandres “adapted to the needs of a simpler formularization” (1906, II, p. 78). Scott went further: “there is nothing in the document itself to connect it with Hermes”, and the heading may have been added when the text “had passed into the hands of a Hermetist” (Hermetica, II, 1925, p. 118).

It reached the Latin West with the rest of the first fourteen treatises. Marsilio Ficino’s Latin, printed at Treviso in 1471, translated the Greek of a single manuscript and so, in Scott’s words, “contains only Corp. I-XIV” (Scott 1924, I, p. 31). Everard, who translated Francesco Patrizi’s text in Patrizi’s order (Scott 1924, I, p. 43 n. 3), put it third and closed it with a warning to the reader: “The end of the Fragments of the third Book, very unperfect” (1650, p. 39).

The four sections, in plain words

The summaries below follow Mead’s four sections and paraphrase his English; the comparison further down shows where the Greek is uncertain.

§1 · God, then chaos, then light. The opening is a string of titles rather than a sentence: God, the divine and divine nature are the “glory” of all things; God, mind, nature and matter are the source of what exists; the divine is also nature, energy, necessity, end and renewal. Then the story starts. Boundless darkness lay in the abyss, with water and a fine, intelligent breath, all held in chaos by divine power. A holy light went out, elements took shape out of the moist substance, and the gods divided up a nature full of seed. Mead called this opening “almost mnemonic”, “quite in sutra style” (II, pp. 78-79).

§2 · The world sorts itself. While everything was still unbounded and unformed, the light things went up and the heavy ones settled on moist sand, the whole marked off by fire and held up by breath. Heaven appeared in seven circles; the gods became visible as stars with their constellations; the outer circle began to turn, carried round by the breath of God.

§3 · Living things, then human beings. Each god, by his own power, brought out what he was ordered to: four-footed beasts, creeping things, water creatures, birds, grass and flowering plants, each carrying in itself “the seed” of its own renewal (the Greek word is palingenesia). Then come human births: humans are made to know the works of God and to witness nature’s working, to rule what lies under heaven, to “increase in increasing and multiply in multitude” (Mead, II, p. 77), to watch the sky, to learn what follows good and bad deeds, and to invent the arts. Each soul is put into flesh through the circling movement of the gods of the heavens. Scott thought the actual making of the first humans “must have been here described in a passage now lost” (I, p. 147, n. 7).

§4 · A life, a name, a renewal. Human beings live, grow wise and die as the turning heavens fix their lot; Scott, changing one Greek word, has them “live their lives and pass away” instead (I, p. 149; II, p. 130). Some leave great memorials of their work on earth. Everything born of flesh or seed decays, and everything that decays is renewed by the gods and by nature’s circling course, because the divine keeps renewing the mixture of the cosmos and nature itself rests in the divine. The last words return to the first: God, the divine, nature.

That return is why Scott read the piece as finished, not as a broken-off extract: “it appears to be a complete whole in itself, and it is rounded off by a recurrence, in the concluding words, to the same thought with which it began” (II, p. 110). Everard had called it fragments; Mead at one time “thought it incomplete”, then allowed that it “may very well end” with the mighty deeds of the men of old (II, p. 78).

Section map: four editions side by side

Everard cut the treatise into eleven verses of his own; Mead used four sections; Scott, who rearranged the Greek, split the first three sections into a and b. Pages are those of the printed books; Scott’s Greek is on the even pages and his English on the odd ones, and his notes are in vol. II.

Section	Everard 1650	Mead 1906, vol. II	Scott, vol. I (notes, vol. II)
§1	vv. 1-4, pp. 36-37	pp. 75-76	§1a-1b, pp. 144-147 (pp. 118-123)
§2	vv. 5-6, p. 37	p. 76	§2a-2b, pp. 146-147 (pp. 123-127)
§3	vv. 7-9, pp. 37-38	pp. 76-77	§3a-3b, pp. 146-149 (pp. 127-131)
§4	vv. 10-11, pp. 38-39	p. 77	§4, pp. 148-149 (pp. 130-131)
Notes	none; ends “very unperfect”	pp. 78-84	apparatus under the Greek (pp. 110-134)

Where the translations part company

The English versions sometimes translate different Greek. Scott said plainly that the manuscript text “is almost entirely meaningless, and sense can be made of it only by altering it largely” (I, p. 145, n. 3), and that he had altered it “with a free hand” (II, p. 110). Here are the three public-domain versions at five points, quoted short and checked against the scans.

Opening (§1). Everard: “The glory of all things, God, and that which is Divine, and the Divine Nature” (v. 1, p. 36). Mead: “The Glory of all things is God, Godhead and Godly Nature” (p. 75). Scott: “That God is the first of all things”, printed as a heading (p. 145). Scott could find no sense in God as the “glory” of things and read protos hapanton, “first of all”, for doxa panton, “glory of all” (II, pp. 118-119).
The seed (§3). Everard: “the Seeds of Regeneration” (v. 7, p. 38). Mead: “seed of again-becoming”, with a note: “Or ‘reincarnation’” (p. 76). Scott: “the seed by which their races should be renewed” (p. 147). One Greek word, palingenesia, read as rebirth, as reincarnation or as the renewal of a species; Chambers (1882) has “the seed of the reproduction” (p. 26).
Human births (§3). Everard: “As also the Generations of men” (v. 8, p. 38). Mead: “And they selected out the births of men” (p. 76). Scott: “(... And God ordained the) births of men” (p. 147). Scott marks a gap where the making of humans should be; Everard and Mead translate across it.
Memorials (§4). Everard: “great Monuments, and Remembrances of the cunning Works done upon Earth, leaving them to be read by the darkness of times” (v. 10, p. 39). Mead: “memorials mighty of their handiworks upon the earth, leaving dim trace behind when cycles are renewed” (p. 77). Scott: “the names of the many time will hide in darkness” (p. 149). Scott rewrote the clause by conjecture (apparatus, p. 148); Mead’s cycles and Scott’s forgotten names come from different Greek.
Last words (§4). Everard: “for in that which is Divine, is Nature also established” (v. 11, p. 39). Mead: “Nature herself is also co-established in that Godhead” (p. 77). Scott: “for it is in God that nature has her being” (p. 149). The one place where all three agree in substance.

Corpus Hermeticum III and Genesis

The opening of the creation story is close to the Greek Bible. Mead set §2, “all things being undefined and yet unwrought”, beside the Septuagint of Genesis 1:2, where the earth was “invisible and as yet unwrought”, and noted that the Greek word for “unwrought”, akataskeuastos, appears in both (1906, II, p. 81); he called it a “somewhat peculiar term” (p. 82). Chambers had already marked it as “the same word as in the Septuagint” (1882, p. 24). The phrase “increase in increasing and multiply in multitude” echoes the blessing of Genesis 1:28 and recurs in the Poimandres, CH I §18 (Mead, II, p. 82; Scott, II, p. 128).

The two editors drew opposite conclusions. Mead did not think the writer copied Genesis: such phrases were “in the air”, and the Septuagint translators may have taken akataskeuastos from the philosophical language of their own time (II, p. 82). Scott was certain of the opposite: “The author of Corp. III had read the first chapter of Genesis. It is impossible to doubt this, when we compare the corresponding passages in detail” (II, p. 110). He printed the two Greek texts in parallel columns (II, pp. 110-112) and argued that the writer also knew Stoic physics and tried to harmonise the two, “to ‘reconcile Genesis with science’” (II, p. 112). He also saw the writer correcting Genesis: dissatisfied with plants appearing before the stars, he moved the plants down to sit with the animals (II, p. 127).

Scott called the result “Judaeo-Stoic”, with “hardly a trace of Platonism”, “nothing distinctively Egyptian” and no sign of Christian influence (II, pp. 117-118). Mead, by contrast, looked for Egyptian and Chaldaean background and compared a cosmogony that Epiphanius attributed to the Nicolaitans, with darkness, abyss, water and spirit (II, pp. 79-81). The guide to reading the Poimandres covers the larger creation story with the same elements, and the Alexandria chapter the city where Greek scripture and Greek physics met.

Palingenesia: rebirth, reincarnation or replacement?

The two editors read the seed of palingenesia in §3 in opposite ways. Mead took it as a doctrine of “palingenesis or ‘re-incarnation’”, renewal on what he called “the karmic wheel of birth-and-death”, and rejected the idea that it meant only the survival of the species (II, p. 83). Scott read the whole of §4 as excluding personal survival: “Not only is there no mention of a survival of the individual soul after the dissolution of the body, but the contrary is clearly implied”; renewal happens “only by substitution. The individual perishes, but the race is immortal” (II, pp. 130-131).

The same Greek word carries a third meaning elsewhere in the collection. In CH XIII, On Rebirth, palingenesia is a spiritual rebirth that happens in this life, as the site’s page on palingenesia explains. The CH XIII meaning should not be read back into CH III: here the word belongs to plants, animals and the cycle of births, not to an initiation. For the souls that do move between bodies in other treatises, see CH X, The Key.

Date and author: what can be said

Nothing in the treatise names its author, its place or its time. Scott weighed the limits: it could have been written at any time after Genesis was put into Greek and Stoicism arose in the third century BCE, and before the latest Hermetic writings, “probably not far from A.D. 300”. He thought an early date “hardly probable”, because blending Genesis with Stoic cosmology and stressing astral influence points to later Stoicism, and he was “inclined to conjecture” the first century CE (II, p. 118). That is a conjecture, labelled as one by the man who made it.

Mead offered no date. He found that the text “seems to be very corrupt” (II, p. 78) and read it as “the heads of topics” to be explained in teaching, so condensed that “for us, in our ignorance of detail” it can have little precise meaning; he blamed copyists who glossed the short text and blurred it (II, p. 82). On the “memorials” of §4 he went further: he took the writer to be looking back to a mighty race that lived before a great Flood, and then added a speculation of his own about remains of prehistoric buildings beneath the pyramids (II, pp. 83-84). Both the Flood and the pyramids are Mead’s reading, not the treatise’s words: none of the three translations above mentions a flood, and Scott, who prints different Greek at this point, suggested only that “perhaps the writer was thinking of the old kings who built the pyramids” (II, p. 130).

A newer study takes the glosses further. Christian Wildberg, in “The Genesis of a Genesis: Corpus Hermeticum, Tractate III” (2013), argues that marginal notes were later copied into the body of the text, so that it now carries a debate between the original author and the annotator (as summarised in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2014.10.12). In a handout with his Greek text and translation he prints the suspected additions in small italics and gives the lines on animals and plants in §3 to a redactor who knew Genesis 1. Any detailed reading therefore depends on whose emendations you accept; the same caution applies to CH IV, The Mixing Bowl, which begins after a lacuna in Scott’s edition.

Where to read Corpus Hermeticum III free

All of the following are free and legal to read, except the two modern scholarly editions at the end, which are in copyright. Scans are at the Internet Archive, checked on 3 November 2026; the plain-text transcriptions, easier on a phone, were checked on 4 November 2026.

Everard, 1650. The Divine Pymander, “The Third Book Called The Holy Sermon”, verses 1-11, pp. 36-39. Copy filmed for Early English Books; Wellcome Collection copy; plain-text transcription (The Alchemy Web Site). Seventeenth-century English, eleven short verses.
Chambers, 1882. The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian Neoplatonist, chapter III, “Sacred Discourse”, pp. 24-29, with biblical verses in the footnotes. Scan.
Mead, 1906. Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II, “The Sacred Sermon of Hermes”, pp. 75-77, commentary pp. 78-84. Scan, opened at p. 75; plain-text transcription (Gnosis Archive). The easiest of the free versions to read, with Mead’s own theosophical commentary.
Scott, 1924-1925. Hermetica, vol. I, Libellus III, Greek and English, pp. 144-149 (scan); vol. II, notes, pp. 110-134 (scan). A heavily emended text; read the notes to see what he changed.
Parthey, 1854. Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander, chapter 3, “Hermetis Trismegisti Sermo Sacer”, Greek with a Latin version, from p. 31. Scan. For readers of Greek.
Nock and Festugière, 1945. Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), the critical Greek text with French. In copyright.
Copenhaver, 1992. Hermetica (Cambridge University Press), CH III at pp. 13-14, with notes at the back. Chapter page on Cambridge Core. In copyright.

The guide to all seventeen treatises places it in the collection.

Key facts
Position	Third of the 17 Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, between II (To Asclepius) and IV (The Mixing Bowl)
Title	Greek logos hieros; Everard 1650: The Holy Sermon; Mead 1906: The Sacred Sermon; Scott 1924: A holy discourse; Parthey 1854 (Latin): Sermo Sacer
Speakers	None: no dialogue and no listener; Hermes is named only in the heading
Length	4 sections (Mead 1906, vol. II, pp. 75-77); Everard 1650: verses 1-11, pp. 36-39
Subject	Creation from darkness, water and breath; seven heavens; animals, plants and humans; death and renewal
State of the text	Badly damaged; Scott (1924, I, p. 145 n. 3) called the manuscript text “almost entirely meaningless” without large alterations
Date	Unknown; Scott conjectured the first century CE (1925, II, p. 118)
Free English	Everard 1650, Chambers 1882, Mead 1906, Scott 1924, all scanned at the Internet Archive; Everard and Mead also as plain text
Checked	3 November 2026, against the scans listed under sources; additions 4 November 2026

Fair questions

What is the Sacred Sermon in the Corpus Hermeticum?

It is Corpus Hermeticum III, a short Greek account of creation headed “holy discourse of Hermes Trismegistus”: from darkness, water and breath in chaos to seven heavens, living creatures, human life and the renewal of everything by nature. It has no dialogue and no named listener, and fills three pages in Mead’s 1906 translation.

Is Corpus Hermeticum III based on Genesis?

Its language is close to the Greek Genesis: the unusual word for “unwrought” in Genesis 1:2 appears in §2, and “increase and multiply” echoes Genesis 1:28. Walter Scott (1925) held that the author had certainly read Genesis; G.R.S. Mead (1906) thought such phrases were simply “in the air”.

Does Corpus Hermeticum III teach reincarnation?

Editors disagree. Mead (1906) read the “seed of palingenesia” in §3 as reincarnation; Scott (1925) argued that the treatise implies no survival of the individual soul and that new births replace the dead. In CH XIII the same word means a rebirth in this life.

Why is the Sacred Sermon so hard to understand?

Because the Greek that survives is damaged. Everard (1650) printed it as “Fragments ... very unperfect”; Mead (1906) found it “very corrupt” and blamed copyists’ glosses; Scott (1924) rewrote it by conjecture; Christian Wildberg (2013) argues that marginal notes were copied into the text. The translations therefore sometimes render different Greek.

Where can I read Corpus Hermeticum III for free?

In scans at the Internet Archive: Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), pp. 75-77; Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650), pp. 36-39; Chambers (1882), pp. 24-29; and Scott’s Hermetica, vol. I (1924), pp. 144-149, Greek and English. Mead’s and Everard’s versions are also online as plain text. Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992) is in copyright.

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