The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum IX

On Thought and Sense
(Corpus Hermeticum IX)

On this page: what it is · the sections · section map · translations compared · the key terms · those in knowledge · where to read it

What Corpus Hermeticum IX is

It is the ninth of the seventeen Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum. Hermes teaches; in the free English versions Asclepius never speaks. Everard printed it as the Thirteenth Book, “Of Sense and Understanding” (1650, p. 168), Mead as “On Thought and Sense” (II, 1906, p. 129), Scott as “Concerning thought and sense” (I, 1924, p. 179). A second title in the manuscripts, “that the Beautiful and Good is in God only”, belongs to CH VI: Mead called it “a thoughtless repetition” (p. 136), Scott a transfer “by error” (II, 1925, p. 205).

The first sentence points to another text: “Yesterday, Asclepius, I delivered a perfect Discourse” (Everard, p. 168). The Perfect Discourse, Logos teleios, is the dialogue that survives complete only in Latin as the Asclepius (Scott, I, p. 179 n. 2; Mead, p. 136). Scott thought the writer of CH IX had it in front of him and may have compiled it himself (II, p. 203), and from this link conjectured a date of about 280-300 CE (II, p. 204). Latin readers met the treatise in Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation, printed in 1471, which “contains only Corp. I-XIV” (Scott, I, p. 31).

The ten sections, in plain words

The summaries follow Mead’s ten sections (Scott splits §1 into a-c and §4 into a-b). They paraphrase; the lists below quote.

§1 · Sense and thought are one. Today’s topic is sensation. People say it deals with matter and thought with true being, but in humans the two are joined; in other animals sensation is joined to nature instead. Mind differs from thought as God from divinity: divinity comes from God, thought from mind (Mead, p. 129). Thought and speech need each other.

§2 · Even in dreams. No one thinks without sensing or senses without thinking, and dreams use both. When the bodily and the inner side of sensation agree, mind brings a thought to birth. Scott calls the Greek “badly damaged” (I, p. 181 n. 1).

§3 · Seeds. Mind conceives every thought: from God’s seed good ones, from a daemon’s adultery, murder, sacrilege and the other works of evil daemons.

§4 · Piety and its price. God’s seeds are few: virtue, self-control and piety, and “Devotion is God-gnosis” (Mead, p. 131). Those who know God are thought mad, hated and perhaps killed. Evil lives on earth, not in the whole cosmos. The pious person bears everything and alone turns bad things into good.

§5 · Two kinds of thinkers. Some take the seed of thought from daemons, others are saved by God. God makes all things like himself, but the turning of the cosmos fouls some births with evil and cleanses others.

§6 · The cosmos senses and thinks. Its sense and thought have one task: to make all things and unmake them into itself, as the instrument of God’s will, renewing what dissolves “like a Good Gardener of Life” (Mead, p. 133).

§7-8 · Bodies, breath, the name. Bodies are compounds of the elements, varied by the speed of the cosmic movement. The cosmos is rightly called kosmos, order or adornment. Living things breathe in sense and thought from outside; the cosmos received them once, from God.

§9 · God senses and thinks. God is not without sense and thought, as some claim. All things are in him; his sense and thought is to move all things always, and nothing that is will cease. God does not have all things: “He is them all Himself” (Mead, p. 134).

§10 · To understand is to believe. Speech leads the mind part of the way; the mind, having found everything consistent, believes and rests in that belief.

Section map: three editions side by side

Everard numbered 55 verses (two carry the number 34 and none 35), Mead and Scott ten sections. Scott prints the Greek on even pages (178-186), the English on odd ones.

Where the translations part company

At four points the free English versions disagree; quotations are checked against the scans.

1. Who is illumined (§3). In the manuscripts the daemon creeps into one lit by God; Scott inserted a “not” (I, p. 180; II, p. 212).

• Everard 1650: “no part of the World voyd of the Devil, which entering in privately, sowed the seed of his own proper operation”, with no illumination (v. 14, p. 170)
• Mead 1906: “the daimon who’s illumined by God’s Light”, that is, man; the translators “seem to make nonsense of this passage” (p. 130 and n. 1)
• Scott 1924: “the man that has not been illuminated by God” (p. 181)

2. Who will call the cosmos evil (§4). The Greek verb is future.

• Everard 1650: “as some will sometimes say, Blaspheming” (v. 19, p. 171)
• Mead 1906: “as some will sometimes say with impious tongue” (p. 131)
• Scott 1924: “as some will blasphemously say in days to come” (p. 181)

3. Why some deny God thought (§9). The Greek word is deisidaimonia.

• Everard 1650: “some who Blaspheme through superstition” (v. 45, p. 176)
• Mead 1906: “It is through superstition men thus impiously speak” (p. 134)
• Scott 1924: they “blaspheme through excess of reverence” (p. 185)

4. Does speech reach the truth (§10). Parthey’s text says the teacher’s word does: “sermo enim meus pertingit usque ad veritatem” (1854, p. 66). Scott read mou, “my” (codex A; Q and Turnebus have moi), as ou, “not” (I, pp. 184-185).

• Everard 1650: “my speech or words reach not unto the Truth” (v. 52, p. 177)
• Chambers 1882: “For my discourse attains even up to the truth” (p. 55)
• Mead 1906: “My word (logos) doth go before [thee] to the truth” (p. 135)
• Scott 1924: “Speech does not attain to truth” (p. 185)

The last point changes the lesson most. With Parthey’s text the teacher’s word reaches the truth; with Scott, words only set the pupil on the way and he must see for himself, as Plotinus says of teaching (II, p. 224).

Sense perception, thought and belief: the key terms

The Greek pair is aisthêsis, sensation, and noêsis, thinking: “Sense and Understanding” in Everard, “thought and sense” in Mead, “sensation” and “understanding” in Copenhaver (1992), whose version opens “I delivered the perfect discourse” (p. 27). Mead read the treatise as saying that ordinary thought is “entirely bound up in sense-impressions” and that mind alone rises above them (p. 137); see nous.

Scott saw a deliberate correction of the Platonists, who held that the highest thinking has no sensation in it, and of the Perfect Discourse, which teaches the same; he traced the view to Stoic sources, close to the Peripatetic Strato (II, pp. 206-208). The “thought” of §§3-5, he noted, is mostly a decision to act (II, pp. 203, 211). “To understand is to believe” (Mead, p. 135) makes belief the result of thinking; Mead’s gloss: “Gnosis and not belief is the Fair Faith” (p. 140). See gnosis.

Those in knowledge, and their enemies

§4 calls the pious “they who are in Gnosis” (Mead, p. 131 n. 1) and says the many mock, hate and may kill them. The text names no one. Mead and Scott both cite Plato’s Phaedrus 249D, where the lover of wisdom is thought mad (Mead, p. 131 n. 2; Scott, II, p. 204). Scott went further and took the enemies to be Christians (II, p. 204); Mead could not “see the slightest ground” for Reitzenstein’s link to a fourth-century persecution of Poimandres communities (p. 138 n. 1).

The blasphemers of §4 who call the cosmos evil were for Scott perhaps chiefly Christians too, though he admits that CH VI says the same (II, p. 213); Mead read the passage as an answer to CH VI (p. 136 n. 1). In his note on a similar future in §9, which refers back here, Scott read it as the writer speaking of his own contemporaries through a prophecy put in the mouth of the ancient Hermes (II, p. 222). Lactantius quotes a Greek sentence saying that piety is knowledge of God, which Mead tied to §4 (p. 136); Scott found the wording “not quite identical” (II, p. 213).

Where to read Corpus Hermeticum IX free

Scans at the Internet Archive, checked on 4 November 2026; full details under sources.

• Everard, 1650. Thirteenth Book, vv. 1-55, pp. 168-178: Wellcome copy, Early English Books copy.
• Chambers, 1882. Chapter IX, pp. 50-55: scan.
• Mead, 1906. Vol. II, pp. 129-140 with commentary: scan at p. 129. Follows the manuscripts.
• Scott, 1924-1925. Greek and English, vol. I, pp. 178-187 (scan); notes, vol. II, pp. 202-225 (scan). Heavily emended.
• Parthey, 1854. Greek and Latin, cap. 9, pp. 60-67: scan.
• In copyright: Nock and Festugière (1945), the critical Greek text with French; Copenhaver (1992), pp. 27-29, on Cambridge Core.

Scott records no Stobaeus excerpt of CH IX, as he does for CH X (I, p. 186), and the contents of Litwa’s Hermetica II (2018), which translates the Stobaeus excerpts and testimonies, do not list it.

Key facts

Position	Ninth of the 17 Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, between VIII and X (The Key)
Title	Mead 1906: On Thought and Sense; Parthey 1854 (Latin): de intellectu et sensu
Length	10 sections (Mead 1906, vol. II, pp. 129-136); Everard 1650: verses 1-55
State of the text	Damaged in places; Scott emends throughout, including §§3 and 10
Date	Unknown; Scott conjectured about 280-300 CE (1925, II, p. 204)

Fair questions

What is Corpus Hermeticum IX about?

A short lesson from Hermes to Asclepius: in humans sensation and thought cannot be separated, God seeds good thoughts and daemons bad ones, the cosmos and God also sense and think, and to understand is to believe.

What is the “Perfect Discourse” mentioned at the start of CH IX?

The Logos teleios, which Hermes says he gave Asclepius the day before. It is the dialogue now known from its Latin translation as the Asclepius. Scott (1925) thought the author of CH IX may have compiled it.

Does CH IX say we can think without the senses?

No. In humans, it says, no one can think without sensing or sense without thinking, even in dreams. Scott (1925) read this as a correction of the Platonists, probably from Stoic sources.

What does “to understand is to believe” mean in CH IX?

Belief follows understanding: the mind, led part of the way by the teacher’s words, checks everything and then rests in belief. Whether the words themselves reach the truth depends on the reading: yes in Parthey’s text and Chambers, nearly so in Mead (“doth go before [thee] to the truth”), no in Everard and Scott.

Where can I read Corpus Hermeticum IX for free?

Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), pp. 129-136; Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650), pp. 168-178; Chambers (1882), pp. 50-55; Scott’s Hermetica, vol. I (1924), pp. 178-187. All are scanned at the Internet Archive. Copenhaver (1992) is in copyright.

Sources & further reading

• John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus (London, 1650), “The Thirteenth Book. Of Sense and Understanding”, vv. 1-55, pp. 168-178.
• Gustav Parthey (ed.), Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin: Nicolai, 1854), cap. 9, pp. 60-67.
• John David Chambers (tr.), The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1882), ch. IX, pp. 50-55.
• G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), “Corpus Hermeticum IX. (X.) On Thought and Sense”, pp. 129-136; commentary pp. 136-140.
• Walter Scott (ed. and tr.), Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924): p. 31; Libellus IX, pp. 178-187.
• Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. II: Notes on the Corpus Hermeticum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), Libellus IX, pp. 202-225.
• 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 University Press, 1992), “Corpus Hermeticum IX”, pp. 27-29; opening read on Cambridge Core, 4 November 2026.
• M. David Litwa, Hermetica II: The Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies (Cambridge University Press, 2018); contents on Cambridge Core, read 4 November 2026.