The Corpus Hermeticum
Over the holidays I read Francis Yates's The Rosicrucian Enlightenment as part of my general mission to read as much of her as I can. Whereas, I had started Giordano Bruno many months ago and never finished it, I read all the way through The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment is fascinating, if for nothing else, the fact that it has very little to do with Rosicrucianism. It is, instead, a wonderful example of contextualizing thought and philosophy within a historical political environment. We cannot understand ideas without understanding the culture and society and the times from which these ideas spring or take root. This is true as much for our time as it was for the Renaissance, and as it was for the late Roman empire.
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment made me return to Yates's Giordano Bruno book. Which is probably her most famous book. Bruno begins with Marsilio Ficino and his translation of the Corpus Hermetica. This little story is remarkable in what it says about the Hermetica. Following the collapse of the Roman empire, and the general stamping out of literacy that followed (on this see also How the Irish Saved Civilization), many of the books of Plato were lost to the libraries of the west. Only the Timaeus remained intact alongside a few scattered commentaries, snippets, and fragments of other dialogues. All the original texts of all the other dialogues had been lost. Then when the Eastern empire, the Byzantine empire, was in its crisis (in the fourteenth century), and as the wealth of the Italian city-states was rising, Lorenzo Medici came into possession of a number of Greek manuscripts, including the complete works of Plato which Medici turned over to Marsilio Ficino to translate. But then also among these manuscripts was the Corpus Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus. And Medici told Ficino to stop the translation of the complete works of Plato (which remember had been lost for over a millennium by then), and turn all your attention to the translation of the Hermetica. Clearly to the mind of Medici, and probably to that of Ficino as well, the Hermetica contained greater wisdom and was more significant than the complete works of Plato. Chew on that for a second.
So given that significance, I decided it was time to read the Corpus Hermetica. And I am almost all the way through Walter Scott's translation, and I find that the Hermetica to be rather consistent with my thoughts on philosophy, theology, cosmology, and so on.
Scott's translation is from 1924, but he's very well versed in ancient Greek, Latin, and hermetic philosophy to make this both readable and enjoyable. His introduction alone covers (probably) every known publication or redaction of the Corpus Hermiticum since the first century—an impressive bit of erudition.
If you want your Hermes to be a little more contemporary, we also have The Way of Hermes a 2000 translation by Clement Salaman and others.
image: Hermes Trismegistus, Sienna Cathedral Mosaic by Giovanni di Stefano. Wikimedia Commons.