The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum VIII

That Nothing That Is Perishes
(Corpus Hermeticum VIII)

On this page: what it is · the sections · section map · translations compared · what “no death” means · where the ideas come from · where to read it

What Corpus Hermeticum VIII is

It is the eighth of the seventeen Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, and one of the shortest: five sections in Mead’s and Scott’s numbering. Hermes speaks to his son Tat, who asks one question near the end. The heading states the thesis. Mead translated it “That No One of Existing Things doth Perish, but Men in Error speak of their Changes as Destructions and as Deaths”, numbered VIII, with a second number, IX, in brackets (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, II, 1906, p. 124). Walter Scott wrote “That nothing that exists perishes” (Hermetica, I, 1924, p. 175).

In John Everard’s English of 1650 it is “The Sixteenth Book”, titled “That none of the things that are, can perish” (The Divine Pymander, p. 201). The number is not an error: Everard translated the text of Francesco Patrizi and kept Patrizi’s order, in which this treatise comes near the end of the collection (Scott, I, pp. 40 and 43 n. 3).

The first words, “Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak” (Mead, II, p. 124), assume that another lesson to Tat came before (Scott, Hermetica, II, 1925, p. 190). Nothing names the author, place or date. Scott dated it, most likely, between AD 150 and 300 (II, p. 190). Latin readers met it in Marsilio Ficino’s translation of 1471, which “contains only Corp. I-XIV” (Scott, I, p. 31).

The five sections, in plain words

The summaries follow Mead’s five sections (Scott splits §1 into a and b). They paraphrase; the lists further down quote.

§1 · There is no death. Hermes will explain how the soul is immortal and what force puts bodies together and takes them apart. Death applies to none of these things: the word is empty. Death would mean destruction, and nothing in the cosmos is destroyed, because the cosmos is a “second God” and an immortal living being, and no part of an immortal being can die. The Greek of the sentence on the word “death” is damaged; Mead found that “the translations without exception make nonsense of it” (II, p. 124 n. 2).

§2 · God first, cosmos second. First is God, eternal and unbegotten, maker of all. Second is the cosmos, made by him in his image, held together and fed by him, and made immortal by him. Ever-living is not the same as eternal: the Father was never made, while the cosmos is always being made.

§3 · The sphere and the cave. Out of the matter subject to his will the Father made a body and shaped it into a sphere. He sowed “the lives” inside it and shut them in “as in a cave” (Mead, II, p. 126), and he wrapped the whole in immortality so that matter would not slip back into its first disorder. Some of that disorder survives down here, in the growth and decay of small living things, which men call death.

§4 · Return, not loss. The heavenly bodies keep the order given them at the beginning, preserved by each one’s return to its starting point. For bodies on earth, the “return” is dissolution: their parts go back to the bodies that cannot be dissolved. What is lost is sensation, not existence.

§5 · Man, the third living being. Man is made in the image of the cosmos, but has mind beyond other earthly creatures: he feels the second God as body and grasps the first as bodiless. Tat asks whether this living being, then, does not perish. Hermes cuts him short and tells him to think what God, cosmos, an immortal and a dissoluble living being are. The cosmos is from God and in God, man from the cosmos and in the cosmos, and God is the beginning, boundary and frame of all.

Section map: three editions side by side

Everard has 26 verses, Mead and Scott five sections. Pages checked in the scans; Scott prints the Greek on even pages, the English on odd ones.

Where the translations part company

At three points the free English versions say different things (quotations checked against the scans).

1. Death as a missing letter (§1). The manuscripts add that “death” (thanatos) is “deathless” (athanatos) with its first letter dropped. Scott judged the clause ungrammatical and “inserted by a later hand” (II, p. 195).

• Everard 1650: “it is wrongly called Death … by the taking away the first letter, instead of Immortal” (v. 2, p. 202; Greek words left out)
• Mead 1906: “by the knocking off a syllable what is called ‘death,’ doth stand for ‘deathless’” (p. 124)
• Scott 1924: “The word ‘death’ is a mere name, without any corresponding fact”, with the pun cut (p. 175)

2. What is lost at dissolution (§4). The manuscripts end the section with “not loss of bodies”; Scott rewrote the last words so that they deny a loss of life instead (I, p. 176, Greek text; II, p. 199).

• Everard 1650: “there is made a privation of Sense, but not a destruction of Bodies” (v. 19, p. 205)
• Mead 1906: “Privation, thus, of sense is brought about, not loss of bodies” (p. 127)
• Scott 1924: “consciousness ceases, but life is not destroyed” (p. 177)

3. The answer to Tat (§5). Hermes’ reply opens with one Greek verb, euphêmêson, which Chambers rendered “Speak well”, with the Greek word in a note (p. 50).

• Everard 1650: “Speak advisedly, O Son” (v. 24, p. 205)
• Mead 1906: “Hush, son!” (p. 127)
• Scott 1924: “Speak not of man as perishing, my son” (p. 179)

The second row matters most. Read with the manuscripts, the bodies themselves are not lost, because their matter returns to the elements; read with Scott, life as such goes on while the individual’s awareness ends.

What “there is no death” means here

The treatise denies death as destruction, not death as the end of a life. Its proof is about the whole: the cosmos is immortal, so its parts cannot be annihilated, only rearranged. The key word in §4 is apokatastasis, “a term used of the cyclic return of stars to their original positions” (Mead, II, p. 126 n. 5). Here it is stretched to cover a dead body’s earth, water, air and fire going back to the cosmic elements (Scott, II, p. 199).

Whether a person survives, the treatise does not say outright. The opening promises to explain “in what way Soul is deathless” (Mead, II, p. 124), but the rest never mentions the soul, and Scott suspected that a passage had been lost after §1a. He took the reply to Tat as an implied answer: man “does not perish”, but only in that he is “resolved into the imperishable elements”, while individual consciousness ends. “We must conclude then that he rejected the Platonic doctrine of individual immortality”; his position “more nearly resembles that of the Stoic Epictetus” (Scott, II, pp. 190, 201).

Earlier readers saw more. Chambers, whose title page calls Hermes a “Christian Neoplatonist”, took the chapter to teach “the future immortality of the human body” after its renewal, citing Philippians 3:21 (1882, pp. 50-51 n. 1). Mead, writing as a theosophist, read the loss of sense as “a going into latency of some particular phase of consciousness” (II, p. 128). Both go beyond the text. The site’s guide to the seventeen treatises puts it plainly: “Nothing perishes” is said of the whole, and individual survival is left open. The same guide notes that CH VIII contradicts the world-rejection of CH VII, The Greatest Evil.

Where the ideas come from

Scott traced the thesis to Greek lines that were “often-quoted”: a fragment of Euripides’ lost Chrysippus (fr. 836 Nauck), in which, in our paraphrase, things born of earth return to earth and things of heavenly seed to heaven, and nothing that comes to be dies but, separated, shows another form. Euripides, he added, took the thought from Anaxagoras (fr. 17 Diels), for whom coming to be is mixing and perishing is separating (II, p. 189 and n. 1).

The rest he called “mainly Platonic, but partly Stoic” (II, p. 189). The cosmos as maker’s image and second god goes back to Plato’s Timaeus; the cosmos as a cave points to Platonists of the second and third centuries such as Numenius and Porphyry; sympatheia in §5, the bond of all parts of the cosmos, is a Stoic term (Scott, II, pp. 190-200).

The same thesis appears in CH XII, On the Mind Shared in Common (Scott, II, p. 189, citing XII ii 15b-18).

Where to read Corpus Hermeticum VIII free

Free scans at the Internet Archive, except the last two, which are in copyright. The transcriptions are not editions; quote from the scans. Links checked 4 November 2026; full details under Sources.

• Everard, 1650, pp. 201-206: Copy filmed for Early English Books; Wellcome Collection copy. Transcription with modernised spelling at the Alchemy Web Site.
• Chambers, 1882, pp. 47-50, key Greek words in notes: scan.
• Mead, 1906, vol. II, pp. 124-128: Scan, opened at p. 124; plain-text transcription at the Gnosis Archive.
• Scott, 1924-1925, Greek and English, vol. I, pp. 174-179 (scan); vol. II, notes, pp. 188-201 (scan). An emended text; the notes say what was changed.
• Parthey, 1854, Greek and Latin, pp. 56-59: scan.
• Nock and Festugière, 1945, vol. I (Les Belles Lettres), critical Greek text and French: BnF record.
• Copenhaver, 1992, Hermetica, pp. 25-26: chapter page on Cambridge Core.

M. David Litwa’s Hermetica II (Cambridge, 2018), the modern translation of the Stobaean fragments, does not contain CH VIII: Stobaeus took his extracts from the surviving treatises only from CH II, IV and X (Scott, I, p. 83).

Key facts

Position	Eighth of the 17 Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, between VII (The Greatest Evil) and IX (On Thought and Sense); Everard 1650 numbers it XVI
Title	Mead 1906: That No One of Existing Things doth Perish; Parthey 1854 (Latin): quod nullum entium pereat; other English titles under What it is
Length	5 sections (Mead 1906, vol. II, pp. 124-127); Everard 1650: verses 1-26, pp. 201-206
Key terms	second God (the cosmos); apokatastasis, return; sympatheia, bond of the cosmos
Date	Unknown; Scott: most likely AD 150-300 (1925, II, p. 190)
Checked	4 November 2026, against the scans listed under sources

Fair questions

What is Corpus Hermeticum VIII about?

A short lesson from Hermes to his son Tat arguing that nothing in the cosmos is destroyed. The cosmos is a second God and immortal, so death is only the dissolution of a body into the elements, which last for ever. Sensation ends; nothing ceases to be.

Does Corpus Hermeticum VIII teach that the soul survives death?

It promises to explain how the soul is immortal but never returns to the soul. Scott (1925) concluded that its writer “rejected the Platonic doctrine of individual immortality” (II, p. 201); Chambers (1882) read it as teaching a future immortality of the body, and Mead (1906) as some phase of consciousness going into latency. The reply to Tat implies that man does not perish, but on Scott’s reading only as a body returning to the elements; the text does not say that the person survives.

Why is the cosmos called the “second God”?

In §2 God is first, eternal and unbegotten; the cosmos is second, made by God in his image and kept immortal by him. Scott (1925) traced the idea to Plato’s Timaeus (II, p. 190); Mead (1906) compared Philo of Alexandria (II, p. 128).

What does apokatastasis mean in Corpus Hermeticum VIII?

Return to a former state. It was used of stars coming back to their starting positions (Mead, II, p. 126 n. 5). In §4 the heavenly bodies keep their order by such returns, while earthly bodies “return” by dissolving into the elements (Scott, II, p. 199).

Where can I read Corpus Hermeticum VIII for free?

Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), pp. 124-127; Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650), Sixteenth Book, pp. 201-206; Chambers (1882), pp. 47-50; and Scott’s Hermetica, vol. I (1924), pp. 174-179, Greek and English. All are scanned at the Internet Archive. Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992), pp. 25-26, is in copyright.

Sources & further reading

• John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, in XVII. Books (London, 1650), “The Sixteenth Book”, verses 1-26, pp. 201-206; copy filmed for Early English Books and Wellcome Collection copy, both at the Internet Archive, read 4 November 2026.
• Gustav Parthey (ed.), Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin: Nicolai, 1854), cap. 8, Greek and Latin, pp. 56-59; scan at the Internet Archive.
• John David Chambers (tr.), The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian Neoplatonist (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1882), chapter VIII, pp. 47-50 (note pp. 50-51 n. 1); scan at the Internet Archive.
• G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II: Sermons (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), “Corpus Hermeticum VIII. (IX.)”, pp. 124-127 (notes p. 124 n. 2, p. 126 n. 5), commentary pp. 127-128; scan at the Internet Archive.
• Walter Scott (ed. and tr.), Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 31 (Ficino), 40 and 43 n. 3 (Patrizi’s order, Everard), 83 (Stobaeus), Libellus VIII, Greek with apparatus pp. 174, 176, 178, English pp. 175, 177, 179 (n. 9 p. 177); scan at the Internet Archive.
• Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. II: Notes on the Corpus Hermeticum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), Libellus VIII, pp. 188-201 (sources p. 189; date, Epictetus and lost passage p. 190; bracketed clause p. 195; cave pp. 197-198; return p. 199; sympatheia p. 200; individual immortality p. 201); scan at the Internet Archive.
• Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), “Corpus Hermeticum VIII”, pp. 25-26; chapter page and opening on Cambridge Core, read 4 November 2026.
• M. David Litwa (ed. and tr.), Hermetica II: The Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ISBN 978-1-107-18253-0; contents on Cambridge Core, read 4 November 2026.