The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum IV
Corpus Hermeticum IV: The Mixing Bowl, or the Monad
Corpus Hermeticum IV is a short dialogue in which Hermes tells his son Tat that God gave reason to everyone but put mind (nous) in a great mixing bowl, sent down with a herald so that those who choose can immerse themselves in it and become “perfect”. Its last sections turn to the One, the monad, as the root of all number, which gives the treatise its second title.
Corpus Hermeticum IV is the Hermetic treatise of the mixing bowl: reason is given to all, but mind (nous) waits in a krater sent down to earth, and only those who immerse themselves in it receive it. It is the fourth of the seventeen Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum and runs to eleven numbered sections. Its Greek title is “Of Hermes to Tat: the Mixing Bowl, or the Monad”, and both halves of the title matter: the first half belongs to the image of the bowl (sections 3-6), the second to the closing argument about the One as the root of all number (sections 10-11).
Who speaks, and where it sits
Two voices only. Hermes teaches; Tat, his son and pupil, speaks four times, three short questions and one request to be immersed, and each moves the lesson on. There is no vision and no revealing Mind, as there is in Poimandres (CH I) or in CH XI; this is a teacher at work, and the bowl is a story he tells. The numbers used on this page are those of the critical edition by A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (Paris, 1945), which Copenhaver (1992) follows. Older books number the treatise differently: G.R.S. Mead (1906) heads it “IV. (V.) The Cup or Monad”, and John Everard’s English Divine Pymander (1650) prints it as “The Twelfth Book: His Crater or Monas”, cut into 52 short verses of its own. Mead’s eleven sections match Nock and Festugière’s; Everard’s verse numbers do not, so the key lines below give both. Parts of the treatise also travelled outside the Corpus: Mead notes that the anthologist Stobaeus (5th century) copied two passages from it, the “body” of the maker in §1 and the lines on the One in §10, under the plain heading “Of Hermes” (see The Stobaean Fragments).
CH IV section by section
The table groups the eleven sections into six movements. The headings are ours; the numbers and the content belong to the text. Mead’s public-domain translation (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II, 1906, pp. 85-91) uses the same section breaks, so you can follow along for free.
| Sections | What happens |
|---|---|
| §1-2 · The maker and the human | The craftsman made the whole cosmos by word (logos), not by hands, and by his will. Tat should think of him as present everywhere, always being, one and alone. The cosmos is his body: not to be touched, seen or measured, neither fire nor water nor air nor breath, yet all these come from it (§1). He sent the human being down as an ornament (kosmos) of the divine body, a mortal living thing adorning an immortal one. Through reason and mind the human surpasses other living things and even the cosmos, becomes a spectator of God’s works, wonders at them and comes to know their maker (§2). |
| §3-4 · Reason for all, mind as a prize | God shared reason among all people, but not mind, and not out of envy, for envy does not come from above; it grows below, in souls that lack mind. Why not give mind to all? Because God wanted it set up in the middle for souls, as a prize (§3). Where? He filled a great mixing bowl with mind, sent it down with a herald, and had the herald proclaim to human hearts: immerse yourself in this bowl, if you can, if you trust that you will rise to the one who sent it down, if you know why you came into being. Those who heeded and were immersed in mind took part in knowledge (gnosis) and became perfect people; those who missed the proclamation have reason but not mind, and do not know why or by whom they were made (§4). |
| §5-6a · Two kinds of people | Those without mind have senses like animals’, are ruled by temper and anger, admire nothing worth contemplating, and believe the human being exists for the pleasures of the body. Those who share in the gift are, judged by their deeds, immortal rather than mortal: their mind takes in things on earth, in heaven and beyond heaven, if there is anything beyond; they see the Good, count their stay here a misfortune, and hasten to the One and Only (§5). This is the knowledge of mind, the vision of divine things, the understanding of God, for the bowl is divine (§6). |
| §6b-7 · The choice | Tat asks to be immersed too. Hermes answers that unless he first hates his body he cannot love himself; loving himself he will have mind, and with mind, knowledge. Things are twofold, bodily and bodiless, mortal and divine, and whoever chooses must take one or the other, never both; as one shrinks, the other shows its power (§6). Choosing the better makes a human being a god and shows reverence to God. Choosing the worse ruins the human being but does God no harm. Such people are like processions passing down the middle of a road, which achieve nothing themselves and only get in others’ way: they parade through the world, led by the pleasures of the body (§7). |
| §8-9 · The road to the One | What comes from God is ours already; what depends on us must follow without delay, because God is not the cause of evil, we are, when we prefer it to the good. Look how many bodies we must pass through, how many choirs of daimones, how many courses of stars, to hasten to the One. The Good cannot be crossed, has no limit and no end, and no beginning in itself, though to us it seems to begin with knowledge (§8). Knowledge is not the Good’s beginning; it gives us the beginning of knowing it. It is hard to leave what is familiar and turn back to what is ancient and original; visible things delight us, and the Good is invisible, without form or shape, like itself alone and unlike everything else, for the bodiless cannot appear to a body (§9). |
| §10-11 · The monad and the image | Here the second title takes over. The monad, the One, is the source and root of all things and is in all of them as source and root; nothing is without a source, but the source comes from nothing but itself. Being the source, the monad contains every number and is contained by none, generates every number and is generated by none (§10). Whatever is generated is imperfect, divisible, open to growth and decline; whatever grows, grows from the monad and fails when it can no longer hold it. Hermes ends: this is the image of God, drawn as far as it can be; look at it with the eyes of the heart and it will become your guide upward, because the sight draws those who open their eyes to it, as a magnet is said to draw iron (§11). |
Two words in that table are already interpretations. “Immerse” renders the Greek baptizein, which means to dip or plunge, and “bowl” renders krater, the large vessel in which Greeks mixed wine with water before serving it. Neither word settles what the image means, which is the first of the disputes below.
Key lines in a public-domain translation
Quoted from Mead (1906), with Nock and Festugière’s section number, except the last, from Everard (1650, spelling modernised in the transcription we used; check the 1650 scan for the original).
“Reason (Logos) indeed, O Tat, among all men hath He distributed, but Mind not yet.” (§3, Mead 1906, p. 86)
“He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls, just as it were a prize.” (§3, Mead 1906, p. 86)
“Unless thou first shalt hate thy Body, son, thou canst not love thy Self.” (§6, Mead 1906, p. 88)
“For ’tis not God, ’tis we who are the cause of evil things, preferring them to good.” (§8, Mead 1906, p. 89)
“Dip and wash thy self, thou that art able in this Cup or Bowl.” (§4, Everard 1650, Twelfth Book, verse 15)
Set the last line beside Mead’s “Baptize thyself with this Cup’s baptism” for the same Greek, and the translation problem is already visible: Everard dips and washes, Mead baptises, and the Greek verb simply means to dip or plunge.
What the treatise does not say
It never says why some people heed the herald and others do not. The choice is the whole point of the text (mind is a prize, not an endowment), yet its ground is not given: no teacher, no practice, no sign by which a reader could tell whether they have been immersed. It also never describes a ceremony. There is a bowl, a herald and a proclamation, all inside a story Hermes tells; there is no water, no priest, no place and no day.
Disputed points
A bath or a drink? A krater is for mixing wine, and one drinks from it; baptizein means to plunge or soak. Festugière (1938) argued that the author fused two rites, a sacramental drink taken from a mixing bowl and a bath of initiation. David Pessoa de Lira (2014) reads the middle voice in §4 (“they were immersed in mind”) as soaking rather than washing, and Anna van den Kerchove (2012) adds that the heart is not cleansed but steeped in mind, becoming its new vessel. The same verb is rare in the Hermetica; outside CH IV it appears only in CH XII 2 and in one Stobaean excerpt (Kerchove, as cited by César 2023). In CH XII 2 it is used negatively: the soul, entering a body, is plunged into the pleasure and pain that seethe there (Mead 1906, p. 200).
A ritual or an image? Did Hermetists perform an actual immersion? Kerchove judges the traces of a real rite in CH IV minimal, so that any ritual behind it can be stated only as a hypothesis; Garth Fowden suggested that the herald (keryx) may be a trace of the vocabulary of the mystery cults. Mead (1906) read it as a spiritual baptism of the whole nature and went further, wondering aloud about a link with the Eucharist and the Grail. That last step is his, not the text’s.
Two textual problems. In §4, the verb “to proclaim” (keryxai) is missing from a number of manuscripts; David Pessoa de Lira (2022) argues that the omission is better attested and is probably the original reading, which leaves the herald ordered to say these things “to human hearts” without a verb of proclaiming. In §1, the line about God’s goodness comes out three ways in our three translations: Mead has God “consecrate this [Body] to Himself alone”, Everard has him dedicate “that name unto himself alone”, and César’s 2023 Portuguese version, made from Nock and Festugière’s Greek, has God not wishing to keep the offering to himself alone. Anyone quoting §1 should name the translation.
Mind for all, or for some? CH IV makes mind elective. CH XII, a few treatises later, speaks of mind as of God’s own substance, and CH I 22 has Mind present to the pious and absent from the wicked. Whether these contradict each other or describe stages of one teaching is an open question; the treatise-by-treatise guide sets them side by side. Read closely, CH XII narrows the gap: in human beings mind presides only over some souls (§3), and §1 calls only “some” people gods.
Must the body be hated? §6 is blunt. Mead argued that “hate” is a discipline for beginners and not meant literally, pointing to §8, where the cause of evil is human choice, not the body. Christian Bull (2018, p. 210, as summarised by César 2023) reads the world-denying treatises as a deliberately dualist stage of teaching, which the rebirth of CH XIII later revises (see Palingenesia).
Why “the Monad”? The last two sections switch from the bowl to arithmetic: the One contains and generates every number. César reads this as Neopythagorean number theory. Mead held that the two titles name one thing, the bowl being the monad, God’s body and image; that is an interpretation, since the text never joins the two in a sentence.
Reception
Zosimos of Panopolis (around 300 CE) is the earliest outside witness. In his Final Count he tells Theosebeia to hasten toward “Poimenandres” and receive baptism in the krater, naming CH I and CH IV together as a path to follow (see Zosimos of Panopolis). Mead (1906, p. 89, n. 1) adds that Zosimos also quotes the procession simile of §7.
Marsilio Ficino put CH IV into Latin with the rest of treatises I-XIV, finished in 1463 and printed in 1471 as the Pimander; that is how the Latin West first read the bowl (see Marsilio Ficino).
Lodovico Lazzarelli took the treatise’s image for the title of his own dialogue, the Crater Hermetis (around 1493), a Christian Hermetic work on rebirth. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples printed it in Paris in 1505 in the same volume as Ficino’s Pimander, so readers of that edition met the ancient bowl and its Renaissance namesake side by side (see Lodovico Lazzarelli).
In English, Everard’s 1650 version gave it the title “His Crater or Monas”, and Mead made it “The Cup or Monad” in 1906, telling readers to take it together with CH XI, “The Mind to Hermes”, which he called its “esoteric” counterpart: what Hermes tells Tat here, Mind reveals to Hermes there (Mead 1906, p. 93). Recent scholarship has returned to the treatise mainly through the baptism question, with commented translations and studies in Portuguese (Lira 2014; César 2023) alongside Kerchove’s study of Hermetic ritual.
Translations to read
| Translation | Where CH IV is | Status | Our note |
|---|---|---|---|
| G.R.S. Mead, 1906 | Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II, pp. 85-91 (text), 92-98 (commentary); headed “IV. (V.)” | Public domain; scan at the Internet Archive | Free and complete; made before Nock’s critical text, and the commentary is Theosophical |
| John Everard, 1650 | The Divine Pymander, “The Twelfth Book: His Crater or Monas”, verses 1-52 | Public domain; Wellcome Library copy at the Internet Archive | For the history of reception; Mead thought it was made from Ficino’s Latin, but it follows Patrizi’s text and order (Scott 1924) |
| Walter Scott, 1924 | Hermetica, vol. I (Greek and English) | Copyright status varies by country; free scan | Scott reorders and emends freely; compare, do not quote as the text |
| Brian P. Copenhaver, 1992 | Hermetica, CH IV with notes (Cambridge Core) | In copyright | The scholarly standard in English, based on Nock and Festugière |
| Salaman, van Oyen, Wharton, 1999 | The Way of Hermes | In copyright | A readable first pass |
| Danillo Camelo César, 2023 | “Tradução comentada de Corpus Hermeticum IV”, Classica 36 | Open access; article | Portuguese, from Nock and Festugière’s Greek, with notes on every crux discussed here |
For the whole Corpus, every translation we know of, in English, Polish and Spanish, is listed on the Corpus Hermeticum hub.
| Position | Fourth of the 17 Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum |
|---|---|
| Greek title | Of Hermes to Tat: the Mixing Bowl, or the Monad |
| Speakers | Hermes and his son Tat |
| Length | 11 sections (Nock-Festugière) |
| Other numberings | Mead 1906: IV (V); Everard 1650: Twelfth Book, verses 1-52 |
| Central image | A bowl (krater) of mind sent down with a herald |
| Free translation | Mead 1906, vol. II, pp. 85-91 |
Fair questions
What is the krater in Corpus Hermeticum IV?
A krater was the large Greek vessel for mixing wine with water. In CH IV God fills one with mind (nous) and sends it down to earth with a herald; souls who immerse themselves in it receive mind and knowledge, while the rest keep only reason.
Who speaks in Corpus Hermeticum IV?
Hermes, teaching his son Tat. Tat speaks only four times, three questions and one request to be immersed; there is no vision and no revealing Mind, unlike CH I (Poimandres) and CH XI.
Is the 'baptism' in CH IV a real ritual?
Unknown. The verb means to plunge or soak, and the vessel is a wine bowl, so Festugière saw two rites fused in one image; Kerchove finds the traces of an actual ceremony minimal. The text itself describes no ceremony.
Why is it also called 'the Monad'?
Its last two sections argue that the One (monad) is the source of all things, containing and generating every number while generated by none, and that this is an image of God. Whether the bowl and the monad are one symbol, as Mead held, is interpretation.
Where can I read CH IV for free?
In G.R.S. Mead's Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), pp. 85-91, and in John Everard's Divine Pymander (1650) as the Twelfth Book, both public domain and scanned at the Internet Archive. For study, Copenhaver's Hermetica (1992) is the standard.
Sources & further reading
- A. D. Nock (ed.) and A.-J. Festugière (tr.), Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I: Traités I-XII (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945): Greek text of CH IV and its section numbers 1-11.
- Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge UP, 1992), CH IV with notes.
- G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), pp. 85-98: translation, notes (Stobaeus, Zosimos) and commentary; scan at the Internet Archive.
- John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus (London: Robert White, 1650), “The Twelfth Book: His Crater or Monas”; scan at the Internet Archive.
- Danillo Camelo César, “Tradução comentada de Corpus Hermeticum IV”, Classica 36 (2023): Portuguese translation from Nock and Festugière’s text (ed. Ramelli, 2014), with the views of Festugière (1938), Kerchove (2012), Lira (2022), Fowden and Bull summarised in the notes; open access.
- A.-J. Festugière, “Hermetica”, Harvard Theological Review 31.1 (1938), pp. 1-20.
- Anna van den Kerchove, La voie d’Hermès: pratiques rituelles et traités hermétiques (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
- David Pessoa de Lira, “Inclusão ou omissão da lectio KERYXAI e suas implicações textuais no Corpus Hermeticum 4.3-6a”, Revista Philologus 83 (2022), pp. 194-212.
- Christian H. Bull, The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
- Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton UP, 1993 paperback; first ed. Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 149.
- David Pessoa de Lira, O batismo do coração no vaso do conhecimento: uma análise do Corpus Hermeticum IV.3-6a (Recife: Editora UFPE, 2014).
- Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (ACMRS, 2005).