The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum XI
Mind to Hermes
(Corpus Hermeticum XI)
Mind to Hermes is the eleventh treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, a Greek dialogue in which Mind (Nous) teaches Hermes Trismegistus about eternity, cosmos, time and becoming, argues that God is one and never idle, and tells Hermes that he cannot know God unless he makes himself equal to God.
Mind to Hermes is the eleventh treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum: a short Greek dialogue in which Mind (Nous) teaches Hermes Trismegistus what eternity, the cosmos, time and becoming are, and then tells him that he cannot know God unless he makes himself equal to God. It is best known for that last instruction and for the thought experiment that prepares it, in which the soul travels anywhere in an instant. Everything else in the treatise serves one argument: God is never idle, is one, and is visible in everything he makes.
Who speaks, and where it sits
The teacher is Mind itself, speaking in the first person. Hermes is addressed by name, “Thrice-greatest Hermes”, and speaks only briefly: a request in §1 and questions in §3, 10, 11 and (in Mead’s version) 22. In that respect the treatise recalls Poimandres (CH I), where Mind also reveals itself to a seer, with one difference: the seer of CH I is never named in the text, while here the pupil is Hermes from the first line. In most other treatises the teacher is Hermes and the pupil is Tat or Asclepius. The manuscripts give the plain title “Mind to Hermes”.
The treatise stands eleventh in the collection, between X, The Key, and XII, On the Mind Shared (see the treatise-by-treatise guide). No date specific to it is secure; like most of the collection it is placed in the Roman imperial period, roughly the 1st to 3rd centuries CE. It was certainly in circulation by the 5th century, when Cyril of Alexandria quoted its closing section.
Mind to Hermes section by section
The treatise runs to 22 short numbered sections. The section numbers are those of the critical edition by A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I, 1945), which modern translations follow. G.R.S. Mead’s public-domain translation (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II, 1906, pp. 175-189) divides the text into the same 22 sections, so you can follow the table in his version for free.
| Sections | What happens |
|---|---|
| §1 · The request | Mind opens by telling “Thrice-greatest Hermes” to hold on to what is about to be said. Hermes answers that many people say many different things about the All and the Good and he has not learned the truth; he asks Mind to make it clear, because he trusts an explanation that comes from Mind alone. |
| §2-4 · God, Aion, Cosmos, Time, Becoming | The chain that gives the treatise its theme: God makes aion (eternity), aion makes the cosmos, the cosmos makes time, time makes becoming. Each link gets its essence and its energies: the Good for God, sameness for aion, order for the cosmos, change for time, life and death for becoming (§2). God is the source of everything, aion its essence, the cosmos its matter; because aion is indestructible, the cosmos will never be destroyed (§3). Becoming and time are unchanging in heaven and subject to change on earth; the whole body of the world is full of soul, soul of mind, mind of God (§4). |
| §5-6 · Nothing is like God, and God is never idle | Aion preserves the cosmos, whether one calls that necessity, providence or nature; all of it is God at work (§5). Mind warns Hermes never to think anything above or below is like God, and never to think anyone else shares his power; idleness is a word that applies neither to the maker nor to what is made. God makes all things, is in all of them, and is not separate from what he makes (§6). |
| §6-8 · Look at the cosmos through Mind | Hermes is told to gaze “through Me” at the visible cosmos: a body ever young, the seven subject worlds keeping aion’s order, everything full of light and nowhere fire, the Moon as the boundary between deathless and mortal lives, the Earth at the centre as nurse of earthly things (§6-7). All are full of soul and move each in its own way (§8). |
| §8-11 · Why there is one maker | Bodies that differ so much yet keep one ordered speed cannot have two or more makers; many makers would compete, and a maker of mortals would want to make immortals too (§8-9). Every living body is soul plus matter (§10). Hermes asks why the deathless Life does not make animals immortal, and then who the maker is; Mind answers that soul, life and matter are each one, so the maker is one: God (§10-11). |
| §12-14 · You do many things; God does all | An argument from the human case: you see, speak, hear, smell, taste, touch, walk, think and breathe, and it is one person doing all of it. If you stopped, you would no longer be alive; if God stopped making, he would no longer be God (§12). Whatever God did not make would leave him imperfect (§13). Begetting is offered as a partial likeness, with the reservation that God takes no pleasure in it and has no partner (§14). |
| §14-18 · Life, death and the chain of images | Life is the union of mind and soul; death is not destruction but the loosening of that union (§14). Aion is the image of God, the cosmos of aion, the Sun of the cosmos, and the human being of the Sun; what people call death is change (§15). The cosmos takes all forms within itself, so its maker has one bodiless idea of his own, shown through bodies (§16), like the way mountain tops in a painting seem to stand out though the surface is flat (§17). Everything is in God, but not as things lie in a place; nothing is more capacious, swift or powerful than the bodiless (§18). |
| §19-20 · The exercise: become aion | “Think from yourself”: send your soul to any land, across the ocean, up through the heavens and beyond the cosmos, and it is there at once (§19). If you can do this, so can God, who holds the whole cosmos in himself as thoughts. Then the instruction: unless you make yourself equal to God (Mead: like unto God) you cannot know him, for like is known by like; grow to the measureless, leap out of every body, rise above all time, become aion, and hold every place, every age and every condition in thought at once (§20). |
| §21-22 · The straight way, and God manifest | If you lock your soul in the body and say you know nothing and can do nothing, you have nothing to do with God; the greatest evil is not to know God, while being able to know, to will and to hope is a straight road that meets you everywhere, waking or asleep (§21). Asked whether God is unseen, Mind answers that nothing is more manifest: he made all things so that he could be seen through all of them. Mind sees itself in thinking, God in making. The rest, Hermes is told, he can work out in the same way within himself (§22). |
The headings are ours; the numbers and the content belong to the text. The order is deliberate: a chain of cosmic levels (§2-4), an argument that God is one and always at work (§5-14), a chain of images descending from God to the human being (§15), and only then the turn to the reader, who is asked to do in thought what God does in fact (§19-20).
Key lines, in public-domain translation
The lines below are from Mead (1906) and Everard (1650), both in the public domain. Section numbers are the standard ones; Everard numbers his own short paragraphs, so his are given separately.
“God maketh Æon; Æon, Cosmos; Cosmos, Time; and Time, Becoming.”
CH XI §2, tr. G.R.S. Mead (1906)
“If, then, thou dost not make thyself like unto God, thou canst not know Him. For like is knowable to like [alone].”
CH XI §20, tr. G.R.S. Mead (1906)
“If therefore thou wilt not equal thy self to God, thou canst not understand God. For the like is intelligible by the like.”
The same sentence, CH XI §20, tr. John Everard (1650), Book X, §126-127, spelling modernised
“Make, [then,] thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure; leap forth from every body; transcend all Time; become Eternity; and [thus] shalt thou know God.”
CH XI §20, tr. G.R.S. Mead (1906); “Eternity” renders aion
“Mind sees itself in thinking, God in making.”
CH XI §22, tr. G.R.S. Mead (1906)
Where readers disagree
“Equal” or “like”? The most quoted sentence of the treatise exists in English in two strengths. Everard in 1650 has Hermes “equal” himself to God, and so does the version Frances Yates quoted in 1964; Mead in 1906 softened it to “make thyself like unto God”. The Greek verb (exisazein) means to make equal; the word for “like” appears only in the reason that follows, that like is known by like. Likeness to God is an old philosophical ideal; equality is a much stronger claim. Which strength you meet depends on the translation you open, so check before you quote.
A practice, or a step in an argument? §19-20 read like instructions for a meditation, and they have been read that way. But in the text the journey of the soul is a premise: “canst thou do all of these things, and God not [do them]?” The exercise shows how God can hold the whole cosmos as thoughts, and the command to become aion follows from it. The treatise never says how often, in what posture or with what result the exercise is to be done, or what would count as having done it (see the treatise guide). Mead called it “a marvellous ‘yoga’ system”; that is his reading, not the text’s word. For what the Hermetic texts do and do not prescribe, see Hermetic meditation.
“Any land” or “India”? In §19 the soul is first sent somewhere on earth. Mead translated “any land” and called the transmitted reading hopeless; he reports that Francesco Patrizi emended it to “India” and that Gustav Parthey’s Greek edition of 1854 adopted the emendation. Everard’s English of 1650 already sends the soul “into India” (Book X, §120, p. 133). Mead was tempted to see Indian ideas behind the passage and warned in the same breath that nothing firm could be built on an emendation.
Smaller textual problems. In §13 a word has dropped out of the Greek; Mead supplied “inactive” where the usual conjecture was “apart from God”. In §17 he rejected earlier translators who saw “margins” of manuscripts in a word he took to mean mountain tops in paintings. And the question that opens §22, whether God is unseen, is Hermes’ in Mead, but part of Mind’s own speech in Everard (“And yet thou sayest, God is invisible”, §135).
Is it the inner teaching of the Mixing Bowl? Mead argued that this treatise gives, almost point for point, the advanced version of what CH IV, The Mixing Bowl, teaches in general form, and dated it to the time of Philo of Alexandria on the strength of a parallel about God, the cosmos and time. Neither claim rests on anything the treatise says about itself: it never mentions the bowl, and the Philo parallel shows a shared idea, not a date.
Reception
Late antiquity. Cyril of Alexandria, writing against the emperor Julian in the 5th century, quoted the opening of §22, on God being more manifest than anything, as words of Hermes. Mead noted that Cyril described them as written by Hermes “to his own mind”, a misreading of the title; Mead took it as a sign that Cyril was careless or quoting at second hand.
Renaissance. The treatise reached Latin readers in Marsilio Ficino’s Pimander, translated in 1463 and printed in 1471, which covered treatises I-XIV. Lodovico Lazzarelli later translated the three treatises Ficino lacked (XVI-XVIII), so XI first reached Latin readers through Ficino's version. Francesco Patrizi printed his own Latin version of the Hermetica in Nova de universis philosophia (1591), the source of the “India” reading Mead discusses. In English the treatise first appeared as the tenth book of Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650), under the title “The Minde to Hermes”.
Modern. Mead’s 1906 translation and commentary is the version most of the internet still reproduces, together with his theosophical framing. Frances Yates quoted the “equal to God” sentence in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), reading Bruno’s art of memory as a Hermetic discipline of reflecting the universe in the mind; her larger thesis about Bruno has since met strong scholarly criticism. Today the sentence circulates mostly as a free-floating quotation about gnosis, cut off from the argument about one ever-working God that gives it its sense.
Translations to read
- Free, public domain: G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), “Mind unto Hermes”, pp. 175-189, commentary pp. 190-198. Mead heads it “XI. (XII.)”: the first number is the one used today, the bracketed one an older count.
- Free, public domain, early modern: John Everard, The Divine Pymander (1650), Book X, “The Minde to Hermes”, in 141 short numbered paragraphs.
- Greek, public domain: G. Parthey, Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin, 1854), the text Mead translated; R. Reitzenstein, Poimandres (1904), gives a critical text of the §20 passage (p. 238, per Mead).
- Standard modern: Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge, 1992), with notes; the Greek with a French translation is Nock and Festugière, vol. I (1945). The Way of Hermes by Clement Salaman and colleagues offers a readable modern version. Walter Scott’s Hermetica (1924) rearranges the text heavily and is best used with care.
Read it after Poimandres, and read §2-18 before §19-20: the famous instruction makes sense only as the end of the argument that precedes it.
| Position | Treatise XI of the Corpus Hermeticum, between X (The Key) and XII (On the Mind Shared) |
|---|---|
| Speakers | Mind (Nous), teaching; Hermes Trismegistus, asking |
| Length | 22 short sections (Nock-Festugière numbering) |
| Theme | God, aion (eternity), cosmos, time, becoming; one ever-working God |
| Best-known line | §20: make yourself equal to God (Mead: like unto God) in order to know him; like is known by like |
| Date | No secure date; collection usually placed in the 1st-3rd centuries CE; quoted by Cyril of Alexandria in the 5th century |
| Free translations | Mead 1906 (vol. II, pp. 175-189); Everard 1650 (Book X) |
Fair questions
What is Corpus Hermeticum XI about?
It explains the chain God, aion (eternity), cosmos, time and becoming, argues that there is one maker who never stops making, and ends by telling Hermes to make himself equal to God, through a thought experiment of the soul being everywhere at once, because like is known by like.
Who speaks in Corpus Hermeticum XI?
Mind (Nous) speaks in the first person and does almost all the talking; Hermes Trismegistus is named as the pupil and asks a few short questions. In Poimandres (CH I) Mind also teaches, but the seer is not named.
Where does 'make yourself equal to God' come from?
From CH XI, section 20. Everard (1650) has 'equal thy self to God'; Mead (1906) has 'make thyself like unto God'. The sentence continues: for like is known by like.
Is it XI or XII? Mead's numbering looks different.
It is XI. Mead heads it 'XI. (XII.)': the first number is the standard one used by Nock-Festugière and modern translations, the bracketed number an older count. Everard calls it Book X.
Is section 20 a meditation technique?
The text presents it as a step in an argument: if your soul can be everywhere in thought, God can hold everything as thoughts. It gives no method, frequency or expected result; reading it as a practice is an interpretation, made among others by Mead.
Sources & further reading
- G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), “Corpus Hermeticum XI. (XII.) Mind unto Hermes”, pp. 175-189, commentary pp. 190-198; scan at the Internet Archive. Source of the quotations marked Mead and of the notes on §13, §17, §19, Cyril and Philo.
- John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, in XVII Books (London, 1650), Book X, “The Minde to Hermes”, §120 (p. 133), §126-127 (p. 134), §135; Wellcome Collection copy at the Internet Archive, pages consulted 29 October 2026.
- 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 XI and its section numbers.
- Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), CH XI with notes.
- Clement Salaman, Dorine van Oyen, William D. Wharton and Jean-Pierre Mahé (tr.), The Way of Hermes (London: Duckworth, 1999).
- G. Parthey (ed.), Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin, 1854), pp. 85-99 (CH XI, per Mead); scan at the Internet Archive.
- R. Reitzenstein, Poimandres (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904), p. 238; scan at the Internet Archive.
- Walter Scott (ed. and tr.), Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).
- Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).