The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum VII
Corpus Hermeticum VII: The Greatest Evil Among Men Is Ignorance of God
Corpus Hermeticum VII is a three-section sermon whose title states that the greatest evil among men is ignorance of God. It calls people drunk on that ignorance, tells those who can to find a guide to the gates of knowledge, and names the body a tunic to be torn off: a living death, a sensible corpse, a tomb you carry around (§2). It diagnoses the illness and prescribes no practice.
Corpus Hermeticum VII is a short sermon in the Hermetic collection: its title says that the greatest evil among men is ignorance of God, and its three sections call people drunk on that ignorance and the body a tomb they carry around. It is the seventh of the seventeen Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, under two pages in English, and the passage that, read on its own, makes Hermeticism look as if it hated the body. A voice shouts at a crowd to look up with the eyes of the heart, find a guide to the gates of knowledge and tear off the tunic they wear: their body. Then it stops.
It names the illness and prescribes nothing, as our treatise-by-treatise guide puts it. Almost every image in it has neighbours in Poimandres, in Plato and in early Christian and Gnostic texts, and those neighbours prove less than they seem.
Who speaks, and where it sits
No one is named: no Hermes teaching Tat or Asclepius, no revealing Mind, no pupil. The speaker addresses “men” in the plural in §1 and the first half of §2, and a single “you” from the tunic passage to the end. Richard Reitzenstein (1904, p. 194), as reported by Mead, called it a prophet’s sermon (Prophetenpredigt); the Polish scholar Wincenty Myszor (1978) classed it as a missionary speech, loosely modelled on the Greek diatribe and close to passages of Poimandres.
The title is a whole sentence: Hoti megiston kakon en tois anthropois he peri tou theou agnosia, “That the greatest evil among men is ignorance about God” (Greek as printed by Walter Scott, vol. I, p. 170). Agnosia is the exact opposite of gnosis: not stupidity in general, but not knowing God. Section numbers here follow the critical edition by A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (vol. I, Paris, 1945). Mead (1906) has the same three sections with the same breaks, which Scott subdivides as 1a-1b, 2a-2b and 3; Mead’s heading “VII. (VIII.)” adds an older count in brackets. Scott dated VII, with Poimandres, between 100 and 200 CE, because he thought both were written by the same man (vol. II, pp. 181-182); the treatises themselves are usually placed in the second and third centuries CE (Tylak 2022, p. 47).
Corpus Hermeticum VII section by section
Headings are ours; §2 is split in two because it makes two moves. The last two columns locate each part in the two free English versions, Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906) and Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650).
| Section | What happens | Mead 1906 | Everard 1650 |
|---|---|---|---|
| §1 · Drunk on ignorance | Where are you rushing, drunk on the unmixed drink of ignorance, which you cannot hold and are already vomiting up? Stop, sober up, look upward with the eyes of the heart: if not all of you, then those who can. The evil of ignorance floods the whole earth and corrupts the soul shut up in the body, keeping it from putting in at the harbours of salvation. | p. 120 | Eighth Book, verses 1-3, pp. 99-100 |
| §2, first part · The harbour and the guide | Do not be carried down by the great current. Those who can should use a counter-current, reach the harbour, anchor there and look for a guide who will lead them by the hand to the gates of knowledge. There the light is bright and clean of darkness; no one is drunk; all are sober and look with the heart toward the one who wills to be seen. He cannot be heard, spoken of or seen with the eyes, only with mind and heart. | pp. 120-121 | verses 4-6, p. 100 |
| §2, second part · The tunic | But first you must tear off the tunic you wear. Eight names for it follow: the web of ignorance, the prop of vice, the bond of corruption, the dark enclosure, the living death, the sensible corpse, the tomb you carry around, the robber in the house, who hates you through what he loves and begrudges you through what he hates. | p. 121 | verse 7, pp. 100-101 |
| §3 · The tunic’s plot | Such is the hostile tunic you have put on. It throttles you and holds you down, so that you will not look up, see the beauty of truth and the good in it, and hate the tunic’s evil once you discover its plot against you. It makes senseless what people take for their senses, blocking them with a mass of matter and filling them with foul pleasure, so that you will not hear what you should hear or see what you should see. Here the text ends. | p. 121 | verses 8-9, pp. 101-102 |
So §2 calls the body a tomb, and §3 makes it an obstacle to knowing, because it blocks the senses. Two words in the table are already readings. “Tunic” renders chiton, the garment worn next to the skin (Mead: cloak; Everard: garment and apparel). “Tomb” renders taphos, the everyday word for a grave; the famous Greek pun on body and tomb uses a different word.
Key lines in public-domain translation
From Mead (1906) and Everard (1650, long s modernised); square brackets are Mead’s.
“Whither stumble ye, sots, who have sopped up the wine of ignorance unmixed, and can so far not carry it that ye already even spew it forth?” (§1, Mead 1906, p. 120)
“No ear can hear Him, nor can eye see Him, nor tongue speak of Him, but [only] mind and heart.” (§2, Mead 1906, p. 121)
“the web of ignorance, the ground of bad, corruption’s chain, the carapace of darkness, the living death, sensation’s corpse, the tomb thou carriest with thee, the robber in thy house” (§2, Mead 1906, p. 121)
“the living Death; the sensible Carcass; the Sepulchre, carried about with us; the domestical Thief” (§2, Everard 1650, Eighth Book, verse 7, p. 101; scan)
“so that thou may’st not hear about the things that thou should’st hear, nor see the things that thou should’st see.” (§3, Mead 1906, p. 121)
A table of parallels, with exact references
In no row below can borrowing be proved: the texts are hard to date against each other, and a shared image may come from a common stock of preaching.
| Image | In CH VII | Parallel, with reference | What it shows | What it does not show |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drunk on ignorance | §1: methuontes, “drunk”; the drink is akratos, unmixed | CH I.27: “ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, be sober now” (Mead 1906, p. 17) | The same call to sobriety and the same pairing of drink with ignorance of God. Tylak (2022, p. 64) finds the comparison in these two treatises of the Corpus. | Which came first. Mead (1906, p. 122) asked whether the line produced the sermon, the sermon the line, or both a common source, and chose the last. |
| The world found drunk | §1 | Gospel of Thomas, saying 28; in Greek in Oxyrhynchus papyrus 1: “I found all men drunken, and none found I athirst among them” (Grenfell and Hunt 1897, Logion 3, pp. 11-12); in Coptic in Nag Hammadi Codex II | The same Greek verb for being drunk (methuontas) in an early Jesus saying, which Mead set beside CH VII in 1906. | Contact, or a shared source. The saying pities the drunk rather than berating them, and the Coptic ends with a promise: when they shake off their wine, they will repent. |
| Sobering up as knowledge | §1-2: the drunk below, the sober at the gates of knowledge | Gospel of Truth, Nag Hammadi Codex I,3, p. 22: the one who knows is like someone who was drunk, has turned from drunkenness and returned to himself (Myszor 1978, n. 31, cites line 17) | Knowledge pictured as sobering up, in a Christian text often linked to the Valentinians. Myszor lists further Coptic cases (Book of Thomas, NHC II, pp. 139 and 143). | That the image is Gnostic property. Myszor finds drunkenness as an image for agnosia very often in Coptic Gnostic texts, but Poimandres has it too (first row). |
| Sleep and waking | Absent from the wording: VII has drunk and sober, but no word for sleep. Scott still wrote that “drunkenness is associated with sleep in Corp. VII also” (1925, vol. II, p. 46). | CH I.27: “drunkenness and sleep”, “irrational sleep” (Mead 1906, p. 17); Gospel of Truth, parable of the nightmares, NHC I,3, pp. 28-30 | That the drink-and-sleep pair was available, and that Poimandres used both halves. | Why VII drops sleep. Of the cluster, it is the one image the sermon does not use. |
| The body as tomb | §2: ton periphoreton taphon, “the tomb you carry around” | Plato, Gorgias 493a: Socrates once heard “sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb” (tr. Lamb). Cratylus 400b-c: some (tines) call the body the sema (tomb) of the soul, “their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life” (tr. Fowler). Phaedrus 250c: souls were once “not entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body” (tr. Fowler) | A Platonic commonplace, down to the carrying: Phaedrus has peripherontes, “carrying around”, where CH VII has periphoretos, “carried around”. | The pun. Plato’s wordplay is soma/sema; CH VII says taphos, so the pun is not in its Greek, only the idea. |
| The dark enclosure | §2: ton skoteinon peribolon | Plato, Cratylus 400c: the Orphic poets think the soul “has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison” (tr. Fowler; the Greek word is peribolos); the link is noted by Myszor (1978, n. 39) | The same word for the body as a wall round the soul. | That the author read the Cratylus. In Plato the enclosure keeps the soul safe while it pays a penalty; in CH VII it keeps the soul in the dark. |
| The body as garment | §2-3: the chiton to be torn off | Myszor (1978, n. 37) suggests the “garments of skin” of Genesis 3:21, or Empedocles, fragment 126 (a daimon clothing souls in an alien garment of flesh); he also cites the Gospel of Truth, NHC I,3, p. 20, where Jesus strips off perishable rags | That the garment image had biblical, Greek philosophical and Christian Gnostic uses. | Which one, if any, the author had in mind. Myszor offers them as possibilities, not as sources. |
| The harbour of salvation | §1-2: harbours, anchoring, a counter-current | Apuleius, Metamorphoses XI.15; Philo, On Flight and Finding 50; Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 11.3 (all listed by Myszor 1978, n. 35) | A stock image of the period, used by pagan, Jewish and Christian writers alike. | A community. Mead (1906, p. 123) read the harbour as “some great organization devoted to the holy life”; the text names none. |
| The guide to the gates | §2: a cheiragogos, one who leads by the hand, to the gates (thurai) of knowledge | CH I.29: the visionary becomes “a leader of the Race towards home” (Mead 1906, p. 18); CH IV.11: the image of God becomes a guide upward (Mead’s cross-reference, p. 120, n. 2) | That the Hermetica picture knowledge as reached with a guide, human or not. | Who the guide in VII is, or how to find one. The text says only “seek”. |
For the wider Gnostic comparison, see Hermeticism and its neighbours; for the Hermetic texts found at Nag Hammadi, The Nag Hammadi Hermetica.
What the treatise does not say
It does not say how. Every verb is an order: stop, sober up, look up, steer for harbour, seek a guide, tear off the tunic. None comes with a method, a place, a rite or a sign by which you could tell you had done it. Tearing off the tunic, taken literally, would mean dying, and the text does not say whether it means that.
It does not say where ignorance comes from: §1 has it flooding the earth, §3 has the body blocking the senses, and which comes first is left open. Nor does it say who can: “If not all of you, then those who can” (§1) and “those who can” (§2) divide the audience without giving the ground; Myszor (1978, n. 33) read this as the Gnostic view that not everyone is capable of saving knowledge. CH IV does the same with its bowl of mind, offered to those who choose and silent on why some do.
Disputed points
Wine, or a doctrine? In §1 the Greek of the manuscripts has the drunkards drain the unmixed logos of ignorance: the unmixed word, or teaching. Scott (1924, p. 170) bracketed logos as not original, and Mead and Everard translate as if the drink were simply wine. Aneta Tylak (2022) keeps the word, and Myszor’s Polish keeps both, an intoxicating wine that is the teaching of ignorance. If logos stands, the crowd is drunk on a doctrine, and the sermon targets bad teaching as much as the flesh.
A corpse that feels, or a corpse that is felt? The manuscripts in Scott’s apparatus call the body aisthetos nekros, a perceptible (or sensible) corpse; a later hand in one manuscript and the 1574 edition of Flussas read aisthetikos, sentient, and Scott adopted it (apparatus, p. 172). Tylak (2022, p. 49) quotes the manuscript form, yet she and Myszor (p. 247) both translate it as a corpse that feels. One reading makes the body a dead thing that can be perceived; the other, a dead thing that perceives.
Is it Hermetic at all? Even the manuscripts are reported two ways. Reitzenstein (as reported by Mead) said they do not ascribe the sermon to Hermes; Scott’s commentary says their headings ascribe it to Hermes Trismegistus (vol. II, p. 181), and he printed that heading, Hermou tou trismegistou (“Of Hermes Trismegistus”), above the title in square brackets, his sign for manuscript words he judged not to be the author’s (vol. I, pp. 24 and 170). Scott counted VII among the treatises that “probably had nothing to do with Hermes” when first written, and held that it had been ascribed to him before it entered the collection (vol. I, p. 30, n. 1). Others read it as Hermetic teaching like the rest: Myszor (1978, p. 241, n. 1) puts VI and VII in a group of dualist treatises with I, IV, XIII and possibly X. Both views fit the evidence, since the text names no speaker.
How world-denying is the Corpus? VII is among the bluntest anti-body statements in the collection; Tylak (2022, p. 49, n. 8) thinks its metaphors were meant to turn Hermetists away from care of the body and the senses. Yet the next treatise, CH VIII, holds that nothing that exists perishes, and CH XII calls matter, body and essence energies of God. Mead (1906, p. 218) read the dualist statements in the Hermetica as a teaching device; that is a harmonisation, and the Corpus itself never reconciles the two attitudes.
Reception
Renaissance. Latin readers met CH VII in Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the fourteen treatises in his manuscript, a single Pimander in fourteen parts (I-XIV) printed at Treviso in 1471 (Scott 1924, vol. I, pp. 17 and 31).
Mead’s guess. Grenfell and Hunt’s papyrus of 1897 broke off a saying of Jesus at “blind in their heart”. In his commentary, headed “A Preaching”, Mead (1906) quoted it as ending “blind in their heart and see not ...” and proposed that the sermon’s “gaze with their hearts’ eyes on Him who willeth to be seen” could fill the gap, with God, he thought, as the missing object of seeing. The complete Coptic Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, settled it otherwise: the saying goes on that people came into the world empty and seek to leave it empty (Myszor 1978, n. 31). God is not the missing word.
Modern scholarship. Beyond the editions and translations below, two close readings are Polish: Myszor (1978), with a commentary built on Gnostic parallels, and Tylak (2022), who cites the sermon as her main example of the body as what keeps people from the good (p. 49).
Translations to read
| Translation | Where CH VII is | Status | Our note |
|---|---|---|---|
| G.R.S. Mead, 1906 | Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II, pp. 120-121 (text), 122-123 (commentary); headed “VII. (VIII.)” | Public domain; scan at the Internet Archive | Free and complete; made before Nock’s critical text, in a deliberately archaic English |
| John Everard, 1650 | The Divine Pymander, “The Eighth Book”, verses 1-9, pp. 99-102 | Public domain; Wellcome Library copy at the Internet Archive | For the history of reception; numbered as a different book |
| Walter Scott, 1924 | Hermetica, vol. I, pp. 170-173 (Greek and English) | Public domain (Scott died in 1925); free scan | Scott emends and transposes freely; compare, do not quote as the text |
| A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, 1945 | Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I: Traités I-XII (Greek and French) | In copyright | The critical text all section numbers here refer to |
| Brian P. Copenhaver, 1992 | Hermetica, “Corpus Hermeticum VII”, p. 24, with notes (Cambridge Core) | In copyright | The scholarly standard in English, based on Nock and Festugière |
| Wincenty Myszor, 1978 | “Corpus Hermeticum VI i VII”, Studia Theologica Varsaviensia 16.2, pp. 246-247 | Open access; PDF at BazHum | Polish, from Nock and Festugière’s Greek, with the parallels used in our table |
Read it straight after Poimandres §27-29 and straight before CH VIII: in ten minutes you will have the Corpus arguing with itself about the body.
| Position | Seventh of the 17 Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum |
|---|---|
| Greek title | Hoti megiston kakon en tois anthropois he peri tou theou agnosia (That the greatest evil among men is ignorance about God) |
| Speaker | An unnamed preacher addressing a crowd; no Hermes, no pupil, no dialogue |
| Length | 3 sections (Nock-Festugière and Mead 1906); Scott 1924 subdivides them as 1a-3 |
| Other numberings | Mead 1906: VII (VIII); Everard 1650: Eighth Book, verses 1-9, pp. 99-102 |
| Central images | Drunkenness on ignorance; the harbour and the guide to the gates of knowledge; the body as a tunic and a tomb carried around (§2) |
| Free translation | Mead 1906, vol. II, pp. 120-121; commentary pp. 122-123 |
| Standard translation | Copenhaver 1992, p. 24, from the Nock-Festugière text |
Fair questions
What is Corpus Hermeticum VII about?
It is a short sermon whose title states that the greatest evil among men is ignorance of God. It calls people drunk on ignorance, tells those who can to make for the harbour of salvation and find a guide to the gates of knowledge, and says they must first tear off the tunic they wear, the body, which blocks their senses. It names no method for doing any of this.
Where does Corpus Hermeticum VII call the body a tomb?
In §2, in a list of names for the tunic the hearer must tear off: web of ignorance, bond of corruption, dark enclosure, living death, sensible corpse, the tomb you carry around, the robber in the house. §3 then says the tunic blocks the senses. The Greek word for tomb is taphos, not sema, so Plato’s soma/sema pun (Gorgias 493a, Cratylus 400c) is not in the text, only the idea.
Is Corpus Hermeticum VII by Hermes?
No speaker is named in it. Reitzenstein, as reported by Mead, called it a prophet’s sermon not ascribed to Hermes in the manuscripts; Scott bracketed the heading “Of Hermes Trismegistus”, which he says the manuscripts carry, and thought the text probably had nothing to do with Hermes when first written. Others, such as Myszor (1978), read it with the dualist Hermetic treatises.
Is Corpus Hermeticum VII Gnostic?
It is one of the most Gnostic-sounding texts in the Corpus: its drunkenness and garment images have parallels in the Gospel of Thomas (saying 28) and the Gospel of Truth. But each image was in wide circulation, borrowing cannot be proved in either direction, and the same collection contains CH VIII, which holds that nothing that exists perishes.
Where can I read Corpus Hermeticum VII for free?
In G.R.S. Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), pp. 120-121, and in John Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650) as the Eighth Book, pp. 99-102, both scanned at the Internet Archive. For study, Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992), p. 24, is the standard English version.
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 VII and its section numbers 1-3.
- Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), “Corpus Hermeticum VII”, p. 24, with notes; Cambridge Core.
- G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), “Corpus Hermeticum VII. (VIII.) The Greatest Ill among Men is Ignorance of God”, pp. 120-121, commentary “A Preaching” pp. 122-123; CH I.27-29 on pp. 17-18; Mead’s heading cites the Greek in Parthey’s edition (Berlin, 1854), pp. 54-55, and Patrizi’s (Venice, 1593), fol. 18a; scan at the Internet Archive. Source of the quotations marked Mead and of the reports of Reitzenstein.
- John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, in XVII Books (London: Robert White, 1650), “The Eighth Book: That the greatest Evil in Man, is, The not knowing God”, pp. 99-102; scan at the Internet Archive.
- Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 17 (Ficino, Turnèbe, Patrizi), 24 (notation), 30 n. 1 (treatises not first written for Hermes), 31 (Ficino’s edition of 1471), 33 (Turnèbe, Paris 1554; Flussas 1574), 170-173 (Libellus VII, Greek and English, with apparatus); scan at the Internet Archive.
- Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. II: Notes on the Corpus Hermeticum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 46 (note on CH I.15: drunkenness and sleep), pp. 181-182 (commentary on Libellus VII: the manuscript headings, one author with Libellus I, date); scan at the Internet Archive.
- Richard Reitzenstein, Poimandres: Studien zur griechisch-ägyptischen und frühchristlichen Literatur (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904), p. 194, as reported by Mead (1906, p. 122) and checked in the scan; scan at the Internet Archive (unchanged reprint of 1922, same pagination).
- Wincenty Myszor, “Corpus Hermeticum VI i VII: wstęp, przekład z greckiego, komentarz”, Studia Theologica Varsaviensia 16 (1978), no. 2, pp. 241-247 (in Polish): translation from Nock and Festugière, with notes on the parallels (nn. 31-40); PDF at BazHum.
- Aneta Tylak, “Pojęcie dobra i zła w traktatach Corpus Hermeticum”, Roczniki Humanistyczne 70, no. 3 (2022), pp. 47-68 (in Polish), at pp. 47, 49 and 64; open access.
- Plato, Gorgias 493a, tr. W. R. M. Lamb, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1967 printing); Perseus Digital Library.
- Plato, Cratylus 400b-c, tr. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 12 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1921); Perseus Digital Library (Greek text checked on the same site).
- Plato, Phaedrus 250c, tr. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1925); Perseus Digital Library.
- Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, ΛΟΓΙΑ ΙΗΣΟΥ: Sayings of Our Lord from an Early Greek Papyrus (London: Henry Frowde for the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1897), Logion 3, pp. 11-12 (now counted as Gospel of Thomas, saying 28); scan at the Internet Archive.
- The Gospel of Truth (Nag Hammadi Codex I,3), tr. Mark M. Mattison, public-domain translation with the codex page numbers (drunkenness, p. 22; the nightmares, pp. 28-30); online at gospels.net.