The Texts · Where to read them free

Where to read the Hermetica free:
a register of lawful scans

A Corpus Hermeticum PDF does not have to come from a pirate site: the older editions, from Marsilio Ficino’s Latin of the 1470s to Walter Scott’s Hermetica of 1924, are in the public domain in the United States and the European Union, and lawful scans of them are online, most made by the libraries that own them. The modern scholarship is another matter. The critical text of A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (1945-1954) and Brian Copenhaver’s English Hermetica (1992) are in copyright, so a free file under either name is not an authorised copy. This page is a register of the lawful copies: for each Hermetic text, the edition, what it contains, the library that holds it, the call number or record, the link and the legal status. We opened every link on 31 October 2026.

Why the free copies are the old ones

Copyright runs on dates, and the dates sort the Hermetica into two piles. In the United States everything published before 1931 is now in the public domain, according to the chart Cornell University Library keeps (updated 1 January 2026), which notes one narrow exception for some foreign-language books. In the United Kingdom protection ends 70 years after the end of the year the author died (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, s. 12), and the European Union applies the same 70 years, with one exception that matters here: Spain keeps 80 years for authors who died before 7 December 1987 (Intellectual Property Act, consolidated text of 1996, fourth transitional provision). G.R.S. Mead died in 1933 and Walter Scott in 1925, according to library authority records, so their translations are free on both sides of the Atlantic, in Spain too.

The price of a free copy is age. Mead (1906) and Scott (1924) translated before the critical edition of Nock and Festugière (1945), and Scott printed in brackets the words he supplied and the passages he moved by conjecture (1924, I, p. 24). The Renaissance printings show how the text was read, not the text scholars cite today. Read the free copy for access; before you build an argument on a passage, check it against the critical text (our Method note explains how we treat pre-critical translations).

The register: free copies, edition by edition

One row per edition. “Status” repeats the rights statement the library attaches to its scan where there is one; “public domain” alone means the book is old enough on both sides of the Atlantic. CH stands for the Corpus Hermeticum, SH for the Stobaean Hermetica.

Free translations in Polish and Spanish

Polish has what Spanish lacks: a complete modern translation under an open licence. Aneta Tylak’s book of 2021 translates all seventeen Greek treatises, with the Greek text, and journal translations add single treatises, two Stobaean excerpts and the first book of the Picatrix. In Spanish the free items are two Mexican theses of 1985, one on CH X, The Key, the other on the Asclepius.

Which copy to open first

To read the treatises in English, open Mead’s second volume in the Toronto copy; the same volume holds the Asclepius. In the United States you can also read all three volumes in HathiTrust, from university copies in full view (record 001381148); HathiTrust marks them public domain in the US only, so outside the US it may not show them in full. The treatise-by-treatise guide tells you where to start.

If you read French, Scott himself sends you to Ménard: “For those who wish to make acquaintance with the Hermetists, but do not read Greek and Latin, Ménard’s book is, I think, to be recommended in preference to any other work on the subject that has yet been published” (1924, I, p. 44). He also warns that Ménard renders what he took the author’s meaning to be, not the words.

To check the Greek, use Reitzenstein’s critical text of 1904 where it exists, for treatises I, XIII and XVI-XVIII; for the others, start with Turnèbe’s editio princeps of 1554, not with Parthey. Scott found Parthey’s reports of the manuscripts untrustworthy and his edition “useless, if not misleading” for anyone who can reach the text of 1554 (1924, I, p. 44).

To see what Renaissance readers held, open Ficino’s Latin in the Ferrara printing of 1472, Patrizi’s Latin of 1591 and Everard’s English of 1650, which follows Patrizi’s text and order, not Ficino’s (Scott 1924, I, p. 43 n. 3). The Corpus Hermeticum page tells that history; the register gives you the books.

The Asclepius, the Stobaean excerpts and the Emerald Tablet

For the Asclepius the best free edition is a recent one: Dorothee Gall’s Latin text with German translation (2021), open access, which also carries Joachim Quack’s German version of the Coptic chapters. The Greek of the Stobaean excerpts is in Wachsmuth and Hense’s Stobaeus; our page on them gives the volume and page of all 29 excerpts, which turns the scans into something you can use.

The Emerald Tablet has no ancient Greek text to scan, so the free part is the scholarship. Steele and Singer’s paper, read on 2 November 1927, publishes a translation “made, probably early in the twelfth century, from an Arabic collection of explanations and commentaries” on the Tablet, as a supplement to Ruska’s study of the Tablet “in its Arabic and Latin forms” (1928, p. 485). PubMed Central has it as page scans and a PDF.

Alchemy, astral magic and a book of 1908

The Musaeum Hermeticum is an anthology of Latin alchemical treatises, not ancient Hermetica; both the first edition of 1625 and the enlarged one of 1678 are scanned under the Public Domain Mark. The Warburg Institute offers free PDFs of its two Picatrix volumes, which remain in copyright: Pingree’s Latin edition (1986) and Ritter and Plessner’s German translation from the Arabic (1962). The Kybalion (Chicago, 1908) is public domain in the United States and free on Project Gutenberg; its free status comes from its date, and its date is the point: it is a modern book.

How to tell a lawful copy from a pirate PDF

When we searched “corpus hermeticum pdf” on 31 October 2026, the first page of results mixed a subscription library, download pages on domains unrelated to any library or publisher, and a PDF named after Copenhaver’s 1992 translation on a university domain that is not its publisher’s. Four questions sort them.

• Who owns the book? A lawful scan names a library and gives a call number or catalogue record. Nearly every row of the register does; for Scott’s volumes only the scan of volume I names one, with the stamp of a University of Turin library.
• How old is it? A translation published after 1930 whose translator died less than 70 years ago is, as a rule, still in copyright in the United States and Europe. It is free only when its publisher has opened it, as the Warburg Institute, the University of Łódź and Mohr Siebeck did.
• What does the rights statement say? Look for the Public Domain Mark, a Creative Commons licence or “No Copyright, non-commercial use” next to the scan.
• Does the host match the book? A Copenhaver PDF on a site that is neither Cambridge University Press nor a library is not an authorised copy.

What is missing, and why

The first printing of Ficino’s Latin (Treviso, 18 December 1471) survives in 63 copies or fragments in public collections, according to the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW 12310), which also lists a digitised copy at Uppsala University Library and links it to Gallica (ark:/12148/bpt6k60830b). Gallica refused our requests, so we could not confirm that copy, and the register sends you to the Ferrara printing of 1472. We found Holmyard’s note of 1923 only on the publisher’s site. Of Ruska’s Tabula Smaragdina the only library scan we found is chapter VIII, although Ruska died in 1949 and the book is out of copyright in the United States and in the EU countries that apply 70 years; in Spain, with its 80 years, it stays protected until the end of 2029.

In Spanish we found no complete open translation. Complete modern ones, among them Xavier Renau Nebot’s (Gredos, 1999, reissued 2025) and Jorge Cano Cuenca’s (Alianza, 2024), are in copyright, as is the bilingual Latin and Spanish Asclepio coordinated by Claudia D’Amico (Buenos Aires, 2017), reviewed by Mourad Kacimi in eHumanista/IVITRA 13 (2018), pp. 553-556; we found no open copy of it. The critical editions stay in copyright as well: Nock and Festugière for the Corpus, Matteo Stefani (2019) for the Latin Asclepius. For those, a library is still the lawful route.

Key facts

Rows in the register	31: 22 for texts in Latin, Greek, English, French and German; 9 for translations into Polish and Spanish
Oldest scan we could open	Ficino’s Latin, Ferrara, 8 January 1472 (Munich, BSB, 4 Inc.c.a. 33 m)
First printing	Treviso, 18 December 1471 (GW 12310): 63 copies or fragments; no open scan we could confirm
Greek editio princeps	Turnèbe, Paris, 1554 (Munich, BSB, Res/4 A.gr.b. 690)
Free in English	Everard 1650 (the scan lacks pp. 3-14), Chambers 1882, Mead 1906 (3 vols), Scott 1924-1925 (vols I-II); Scott vol. III (1926) in the US
In copyright	Nock and Festugière 1945-1954; Copenhaver 1992; The Way of Hermes 1999; Stefani 2019
Complete in Polish	Aneta Tylak, 2021, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Open in Spanish	No complete translation; two UNAM theses of 1985 (CH X, Asclepius)
Links checked	31 October 2026

Fair questions

Is there a free, legal PDF of the Corpus Hermeticum?

Yes. In English, the second volume of Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906) has the whole Corpus and the Asclepius, and Chambers’s translation (1882), Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650; the free scan lacks pp. 3-14) and the first two volumes of Scott’s Hermetica (1924-1925) are free too. The Greek is free in Turnèbe’s editio princeps (Paris, 1554, scanned by the Bavarian State Library) and, for treatises I, XIII and XVI-XVIII, in Reitzenstein’s critical text (1904).

Is Copenhaver’s Hermetica free to download?

No. Brian Copenhaver’s translation (Cambridge University Press, 1992) is in copyright and available from the publisher, including on Cambridge Core; a free PDF of it on another site is not an authorised copy. The same holds for the critical edition of Nock and Festugière (1945-1954) and for The Way of Hermes (1999).

Is Walter Scott’s Hermetica in the public domain?

Volumes I (Oxford, 1924) and II (1925) are: in the United States everything published before 1931 is public domain, and in the United Kingdom and the European Union protection ended 70 years after Scott’s death in 1925 (in Spain, with its 80 years, at the end of 2005). Volume III (1926) is public domain in the US, but A. S. Ferguson, who saw it through the press, added a preface and some notes, and he died in 1958. The free scans of volumes I-III at the Internet Archive are of University of Turin library copies (the stamp is in the volume I scan; the records name no library); we found no free copy of volume IV. Scott reorders and supplements the Greek by conjecture, so check passages against Nock and Festugière.

Where can I read studies of the Emerald Tablet free?

Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, ‘The Emerald Table’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1928), pp. 485-501, is free in PubMed Central as page scans and a PDF. Of Julius Ruska’s Tabula Smaragdina (Heidelberg, 1926) the only library scan we found is chapter VIII, in the Wellcome Collection; we found E. J. Holmyard’s note of 1923 in Nature only on the publisher’s site.

Is there a free Corpus Hermeticum in Polish or Spanish?

In Polish, yes: Aneta Tylak’s translation of all seventeen treatises (Łódź, 2021) is open access under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, and journal translations by Tylak, Wincenty Myszor and Agata Ewa Sowińska cover single treatises and two Stobaean excerpts. In Spanish we found no complete open translation; two UNAM theses of 1985, on treatise X and on the Asclepius, are free to read (the records give CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; the PDFs say all rights reserved).

Sources & further reading

• Cornell University Library, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States”, chart updated 1 January 2026, online; UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, s. 12(2), legislation.gov.uk; European Union, Your Europe, “Copyright”, online; Library of Congress name authorities for Walter Scott, 1855-1925 (n82089970), G. R. S. Mead, 1863-1933, Richard Reitzenstein, 1861-1931, Julius Ruska, 1867-1949, John David Chambers, 1805-1893 (n87895455), and A. S. Ferguson, 1883-1958 (n87944948); Spain, Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996, consolidated Intellectual Property Act, fourth transitional provision (authors who died before 7 December 1987), BOE, and Law of 10 January 1879, art. 6 (“ochenta años”), BOE. All checked 31 October and 1 November 2026.
• Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke: GW 12310 (Treviso, Gerardus de Lisa, 18 December 1471: 8°, 56 leaves; 63 copies or fragments in public collections; reproductions listed include a digitised copy at Uppsala University Library) and GW 12311 (Ferrara, Andreas Belfortis, 8 January 1472: 4°, 40 leaves; the Munich copy digitised, BSB-Ink H-114).
• Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, records and scans in the Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum: Ficino, Pimander (Ferrara, 1472), 4 Inc.c.a. 33 m, bsb00067142, Public Domain Mark; Mercurii Trismegisti Poemander (Paris: Adrien Turnèbe, 1554), Res/4 A.gr.b. 690, bsb10150774, title page at image 7; Patrizi, Nova de universis philosophia (Ferrara: Mamarellus, 1591), 2 Ph.u. 58, bsb10149781, Hermes section leaf 3 at image 433; both “No Copyright, non-commercial use”.
• François Foix de Candale (Flussas), Mercurii Trismegisti Pimandras utraque lingua restitutus (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1574), BIU Santé, Bibliothèque de pharmacie, RES 22176: Medica; Internet Archive copy, Licence Ouverte (Etalab).
• Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 17-19 and 34 (Flussas and the “Caput XV”), p. 24 (brackets for words supplied and passages transposed by conjecture), p. 43 n. 3 (Everard follows Patrizi’s text and order), p. 44 (Parthey: an edition of CH I-XIV, “useless, if not misleading”; Ménard: CH I-XIV, the Asclepius, 26 Stobaean excerpts, fragments and CH XVI-XVIII, recommended to readers without Greek and Latin), p. 45 (Reitzenstein 1904), the Stobaean excerpts from p. 380; scan at the Internet Archive; vol. II, Notes on the Corpus Hermeticum (1925), scan; vol. III, Notes on the Latin Asclepius and the Hermetic Excerpts of Stobaeus (1926), preface signed by A. S. Ferguson, 1 March 1926 (“Some additional notes have been inserted [...]; these are distinguished by square brackets”), scan.
• John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, in XVII Books (London: Robert White for Thomas Brewster and Gregory Moule, 1650), Wellcome Library copy at the Internet Archive, Public Domain Mark; record note: “Pp. 3-14 are wanting”. John David Chambers (tr.), The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian Neoplatonist (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1882), xxiv, 170 pp., Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark. HathiTrust, record 001381148 (Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, 1906): copies of vols I-III from Harvard, Michigan, Minnesota and other libraries, “Full view”, rights code pdus (public domain in the US), checked through the HathiTrust volumes API on 1 November 2026.
• Gustav Parthey (ed.), Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin: Fr. Nicolai, 1854), preface p. vi (the Latin version of Ficino, Flussas and Patrizi, revised by Parthey, printed under the text), University of Michigan copy; Richard Reitzenstein, Poimandres: Studien zur griechisch-ägyptischen und frühchristlichen Literatur (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904), University of Toronto copy.
• Louis Ménard, Hermès Trismégiste: traduction complète, précédée d’une étude sur l’origine des livres hermétiques (Paris: Didier, 1866), table of contents: CH I-XIV (book I), the Asclepius (book II, pp. 113-172), the Kore Kosmou fragments (book III), fragments to Tat and to Ammon (book IV), the Definitions of Asclepius from p. 285; University of Michigan copy.
• G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, 3 vols (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), University of Toronto copies: vol. I (prolegomena), vol. II (the Asclepius at pp. 307-390), vol. III (excerpts and fragments); public domain, pre-critical.
• Dorothee Gall (ed.), Die göttliche Weisheit des Hermes Trismegistos: Pseudo-Apuleius, Asclepius (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, SAPERE 38, 2021), open access, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, doi:10.1628/978-3-16-160108-8. Curt Wachsmuth and Otto Hense (eds), Ioannis Stobaei Anthologium, vols I-II (1884) and III (1894) (Berlin: Weidmann), University of Toronto copies: vols I-II, vol. III.
• Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, “The Emerald Table”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21, no. 3 (1928), pp. 485-501, read 2 November 1927, PMC2101974 (quotations from p. 485); E. J. Holmyard, “The Emerald Table”, Nature 112 (1923), pp. 525-526, doi:10.1038/112525a0; Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der hermetischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1926), ch. VIII, “Rückblick und allgemeine Ergebnisse”, pp. 163-176, offprint, Wellcome Collection copy.
• Musaeum Hermeticum (Frankfurt, 1625), SLUB Dresden, Chem.359,misc.1, scan; (Frankfurt, 1678), ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 8231, e-rara, and Getty Research Institute, Internet Archive. David Pingree (ed.), Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim (London: Warburg Institute, 1986), Warburg Library Commons; Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner (trans.), ‘Picatrix’: Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Magriti (London: Warburg Institute, 1962), Warburg Library Commons, both with the rights statement In Copyright. The Kybalion (Chicago: Yogi Publication Society, 1908), Project Gutenberg ebook 14209, “Public domain in the USA”.
• Aneta Tylak, Bóg - świat - człowiek w traktatach Corpus Hermeticum na tle greckiej tradycji filozoficznej (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2021), DOI 10.18778/8220-500-8, repository, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; Aneta Tylak, “Corpus Hermeticum XVI”, Collectanea Philologica 17 (2014), pp. 29-36, repository; Wincenty Myszor, translations in Studia Theologica Varsaviensia 15/1 (1977) to 17/1 (1979), free PDFs in BazHum (table); Agata Ewa Sowińska, CH VIII, Vox Patrum 79 (2021), pp. 541-552, doi:10.31743/vp.12276, and SH 11, Vox Patrum 81 (2022), pp. 233-280, doi:10.31743/vp.13018, both CC BY-ND 4.0; Joanna Komorowska, “Picatrix Latinus: kilka słów wprowadzenia”, Terminus 17, no. 1 (2015), pp. 147-199, open access; Aneta Tylak, “O prawdzie: II hermetyczny fragment Stobajosa. Przekład i komentarz”, Collectanea Philologica 26 (2023), pp. 91-103, doi:10.18778/1733-0319.26.08, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
• Marcela Lechuga Téllez, Corpus Hermeticum: Tratado X, La llave, tesis de licenciatura (Mexico City: UNAM, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1985), UNAM repository; María Luisa Hernández Ibar, Asclepio: su tiempo y sus temas. Introducción, traducción y notas, tesis de licenciatura (UNAM, 1985), UNAM repository; Mourad Kacimi, review of Claudia D’Amico (coord.), Asclepio. Un texto sapiencial (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UBA, 2017), eHumanista/IVITRA 13 (2018), pp. 553-556, PDF.