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II. To Asclepius

This dialogue sets forth the difference between the physical and metaphysical worlds in the context of Greek natural philosophy. Some of the language is fairly technical: the “errant spheres” of sections 6 and 7 are the celestial spheres carrying the planets, while the “inerrant sphere” is that of the fixed stars.

It's useful to keep in mind, also, that “air” and “spirit” are interchangeable concepts in Greek thought, and that the concept of the Good has a range of implications which don't come across in the English word: one is that the good of any being, in Greek thought, was also that being's necessary goal.

The criticism of childlessness in section 17 should probably be read as a response to the Christian ideal of celibacy, which horrified many people in the ancient world. - JMG

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1. Hermes: All that is moved, Asclepius, is it not moved in something and by something?

Asclepius: Assuredly.

H: And must not that in which it's moved be greater than the moved?

A: It must.

H: Mover, again, has greater power than moved?

A: It has, of course.

H: The nature, furthermore, of that in which it's moved must be quite other from the nature of the moved?

A: It must completely.

2. H: Is not, again, this cosmos vast, [so vast] that than it there exists no body greater?

A: Assuredly.

H: And massive, too, for it is crammed with multitudes of other mighty frames, nay, rather all the other bodies that there are?

A: It is.

H: And yet the cosmos is a body?

A: It is a body.

H: And one that's moved?

3. A: Assuredly.

H: Of what size, then, must be the space in which it's moved, and of what kind [must be] the nature [of that space]? Must it not be far vaster [than the cosmos], in order that it may be able to find room for its continued course, so that the moved may not be cramped for want of room and lose its motion?

A: Something, Thrice-greatest one, it needs must be, immensely vast.

4. H: And of what nature? Must it not be, Asclepius, of just the contrary? And is not contrary to body bodiless?

A: Agreed.

H: Space, then, is bodiless. But bodiless must either be some godlike thing or God [Himself]. And by “some godlike thing” I mean no more the generable [i.e., that which is generated] but the ingenerable.

5. If, then, space be some godlike thing, it is substantial; but if 'tis God [Himself], it transcends substance. But it is to be thought of otherwise [than God], and in this way.

God is first “thinkable” <or “intelligible”> for us, not for Himself, for that the thing that's thought doth fall beneath the thinker's sense. God then cannot be “thinkable” unto Himself, in that He's thought of by Himself as being nothing else but what He thinks. But he is “something else” for us, and so He's thought of by us.

6. If space is, therefore, to be thought, [it should] not, [then, be thought as] God, but space. If God is also to be thought, [He should] not [be conceived] as space, but as energy that can contain [all space].

Further, all that is moved is moved not in the moved but in the stable. And that which moves [another] is of course stationary, for 'tis impossible that it should move with it.

A: How is it, then, that things down here, Thrice-greatest one, are moved with those that are [already] moved? For thou hast said the errant spheres were moved by the inerrant one.

H: This is not, O Asclepius, a moving with, but one against; they are not moved with one another, but one against the other. It is this contrariety which turneth the resistance of their motion into rest. For that resistance is the rest of motion.

7. Hence, too, the errant spheres, being moved contrarily to the inerrant one, are moved by one another by mutual contrariety, [and also] by the spable one through contrariety itself. And this can otherwise not be.

The Bears up there <i.e., Ursa Major and Minor>, which neither set nor rise, think'st thou they rest or move?

A: They move, Thrice-greatest one.

H: And what their motion, my Asclepius?

A: Motion that turns for ever round the same.

H: But revolution - motion around same - is fixed by rest. For “round-the-same” doth stop “beyond-same”. “Beyond-same” then, being stopped, if it be steadied in “round-same” - the contrary stands firm, being rendered ever stable by its contrariety.

8. Of this I'll give thee here on earth an instance, which the eye can see. Regard the animals down here - a man, for instance, swimming! The water moves, yet the resistance of his hands and feet give him stability, so that he is not borne along with it, nor sunk thereby.

A: Thou hast, Thrice-greatest one, adduced a most clear instance.

H: All motion, then, is caused in station and by station.

The motion, therefore, of the cosmos (and of every other hylic <i.e., material> animal) will not be caused by things exterior to the cosmos, but by things interior [outward] to the exterior - such [things] as soul, or spirit, or some such other thing incorporeal.

'Tis not the body that doth move the living thing in it; nay, not even the whole [body of the universe a lesser] body e'en though there be no life in it.

9. A: What meanest thou by this, Thrice-greatest one? Is it not bodies, then, that move the stock and stone and all the other things inanimate?

H: By no means, O Asclepius. The something-in-the-body, the that-which-moves the thing inanimate, this surely's not a body, for that it moves the two of them - both body of the lifter and the lifted? So that a thing that's lifeless will not move a lifeless thing. That which doth move [another thing] is animate, in that it is the mover.

Thou seest, then, how heavy laden is the soul, for it alone doth lift two bodies. That things, moreover, moved are moved in something as well as moved by something is clear.

10. A: Yea, O Thrice-greatest one, things moved must needs be moved in something void.

H: Thou sayest well, O [my] Asclepius! For naught of things that are is void. Alone the “is-not” is void [and] stranger to subsistence. For that which is subsistent can never change to void.

A: Are there, then, O Thrice-greatest one, no such things as an empty cask, for instance, and an empty jar, a cup and vat, and other things like unto them?

H: Alack, Asclepius, for thy far-wandering from the truth! Think'st thou that things most full and most replete are void?

11. A: How meanest thou, Thrice-greatest one?

H: Is not air body?

A: It is.

H: And doth this body not pervade all things, and so, pervading, fill them? And “body”; doth body not consist from blending of the “four” <elements>? Full, then, of air are all thou callest void; and if of air, then of the “four”.

Further, of this the converse follows, that all thou callest full are void - of air; for that they have their space filled out with other bodies, and, therefore, are not able to receive the air therein. These, then, which thou dost say are void, they should be hollow named, not void; for they not only are, but they are full of air and spirit.

12. A: Thy argument (logos), Thrice-greatest one, is not to be gainsaid; air is a body. Further, it is this body which doth pervade all things, and so, pervading, fill them. What are we, then, to call that space in which the all doth move?

H: The bodiless, Asclepius.

A: What, then, is Bodiless?

H: 'Tis Mind and Reason (logos), whole out of whole, all self-embracing, free from all body, from all error free, unsensible to body and untouchable, self stayed in self, containing all, preserving those that are, whose rays, to use a likeness, are Good, Truth, Light beyond light, the Archetype of soul.

A: What, then, is God?

13. H: Not any one of these is He; for He it is that causeth them to be, both all and each and every thing of all that are. Nor hath He left a thing beside that is-not; but they are all from things-that-are and not from things-that-are-not. For that the things-that-are-not have naturally no power of being anything, but naturally have the power of the inability-to-be. And, conversely, the things-that-are have not the nature of some time not-being.

14. A: What say'st thou ever, then, God is?

H: God, therefore, is not Mind, but Cause that the Mind is; God is not Spirit, but Cause that Spirit is; God is not Light, but Cause that the Light is. Hence one should honor God with these two names [the Good and Father] - names which pertain to Him alone and no one else.

For no one of the other so-called gods, no one of men, or daimones, can be in any measure Good, but God alone; and He is Good alone and nothing else. The rest of things are separable all from the Good's nature; for [all the rest] are soul and body, which have no place that can contain the Good.

15. For that as mighty is the Greatness of the Good as is the Being of all things that are - both bodies and things bodiless, things sensible and intelligible things. Call thou not, therefore, aught else Good, for thou would'st imious be; nor anything at all at any time call God but Good alone, for so thou would'st again be impious.

16. Delete power plan windows 10. Though, then, the Good is spoken of by all, it is not understood by all, what thing it is. Not only, then, is God not understood by all, but both unto the gods and some of the men they out of ignorance do give the name of Good, though they can never either be or become Good. For they are very different from God, while Good can never be distinguished from Him, for that God is the same as Good.

The rest of the immortal ones are nonetheless honored with the name of God, and spoken of as gods; but God is Good not out of courtesy but out of nature. For that God's nature and the Good is one; one os the kind of both, from which all other kinds [proceed].

The Good is he who gives all things and naught receives. God, then, doth give all things and receive naught. God, then, is Good, and Good is God.

17. The other name of God is Father, again because He is the that-which-maketh-all. The part of father is to make.

Wherefore child-making is a very great and a most pious thing in life for them who think aright, and to leave life on earth without a child a very great misfortune and impiety; and he who hath no child is punished by the daimones after death.

And this is the punishment: that that man's soul who hath no child, shall be condemned unto a body with neither man's nor woman's nature, a thing accursed beneath the sun.

Wherefore, Asclepius, let not your sympathies be with the man who hath no child, but rather pity his mishap, knowing what punishment abides for him.

Let all that has been said then, be to thee, Asclepius, an introduction to the gnosis of the nature of all things.

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An Introduction to the Corpus Hermeticum

by John Michael Greer

The fifteen tractates of the CorpusHermeticum,along with the PerfectSermon or Asclepius,are the foundation documents of the Hermetic tradition. Writtenby unknown authors in Egypt sometime before the end of the thirdcentury C.E., they were part of a once substantial literatureattributed to the mythic figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a Hellenisticfusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.

This literature came out of the same religious and philosophicalferment that produced Neoplatonism, Christianity, and the diversecollection of teachings usually lumped together under the label'Gnosticism': a ferment which had its roots in theimpact of Platonic thought on the older traditions of the HellenizedEast. There are obvious connections and common themes linkingeach of these traditions, although each had its own answer tothe major questions of the time.

The treatises we now call the CorpusHermeticumwere collected into a single volume in Byzantine times, and acopy of this volume survived to come into the hands of Lorenzode Medici's agents in the fifteenth century. Marsilio Ficino,the head of the Florentine Academy, was pulled off the task oftranslating the dialogues of Plato in order to put the CorpusHermeticum into Latin first. His translation saw printin 1463, and was reprinted at least twenty-two times over thenext century and a half.

The treatises divide up into several groups. The first (CH I),the 'Poemandres', is the account of a revelation givento Hermes Trismegistus by the being Poemandres or 'Man-Shepherd',an expression of the universal Mind. The next eight (CH II-IX),the 'General Sermons', are short dialogues or lecturesdiscussing various basic points of Hermetic philosophy. Therefollows the 'Key' (CH X), a summary of the General Sermons,and after this a set of four tractates - 'Mind unto Hermes','About the Common Mind', 'The Secret Sermon onthe Mountain', and the 'Letter of Hermes to Asclepius'(CH XI-XIV) - touching on the more mystical aspects of Hermeticism. The collection is rounded off by the 'Definitions of Asclepiusunto King Ammon' (CH XV), which may be composed of threefragments of longer works.

The Perfect Sermon

The Perfect Sermon or Asclepius, which isalso included here, reached the Renaissance by a different route. It was translated into Latin in ancient times, reputedly by thesame Lucius Apuleius of Madaura whose comic-serious masterpieceThe Golden Ass provides some of the bestsurviving evidence on the worship of Isis in the Roman world. Augustine of Hippo quotes from the old Latin translation at lengthin his City of God, and copies remained in circulation in medievalEurope all the way up to the Renaissance. The original Greekversion was lost, although quotations survive in several ancientsources.

The Perfect Sermon is substantially longer than any other survivingwork of ancient Hermetic philosophy. It covers topics which alsooccur in the Corpus Hermeticum, but touches on several other issuesas well - among them magical processes for the manufacture ofgods and a long and gloomy prophecy of the decline of Hermeticwisdom and the end of the world.

The Significance of the Hermetic Writings

The Corpus Hermeticum landed like a well-aimed bombamid the philosophical systems of late medieval Europe. Quotationsfrom the Hermetic literature in the Church Fathers (who were nevershy of leaning on pagan sources to prove a point) accepted a traditionalchronology which dated 'Hermes Trismegistus,' as a historicalfigure, to the time of Moses. As a result, the Hermetic tractates'borrowings from Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy wereseen, in the Renaissance, as evidence that the Corpus Hermeticumhad anticipated and influenced both. The Hermetic philosophywas seen as a primordial wisdom tradition, identified with the'Wisdom of the Egyptians' mentioned in Exodusand lauded in Platonic dialogues such as the Timaeus. It thus served as a useful club in the hands of intellectual rebelswho sought to break the stranglehold of Aristotelian scholasticismon the universities at this time.

It also provided one of the most important weapons to anothermajor rebellion of the age - the attempt to reestablish magicas a socially acceptable spiritual path in the Christian West. Another body of literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistuswas made up of astrological, alchemical and magical texts. If,as the scholars of the Renaissance believed, Hermes was a historicalperson who had written all these things, and if Church Fathershad quoted his philosophical works with approval, and if thosesame works could be shown to be wholly in keeping with some definitionsof Christianity, then the whole structure of magical Hermeticismcould be given a second-hand legitimacy in a Christian context.

This didn't work, of course; the radical redefinition of WesternChristianity that took place in the Reformation and Counter-Reformationhardened doctrinal barriers to the point that people were beingburned in the sixteenth century for practices that were consideredevidences of devoutness in the fourteenth. The attempt, though,made the language and concepts of the Hermetic tractates centralto much of post-medieval magic in the West.

The Translation

The translation of the CorpusHermeticum and Perfect Sermon given here is that of G.R.S. Mead (1863-1933), originallypublished as Vol. 2 of his Thrice Greatest Hermes(London, 1906). Mead was a close associate of Helena PetrovnaBlavatsky, the founder and moving spirit of the Theosophical Society,and most of his considerable scholarly output was brought outunder Theosophical auspices. The result, predictably, was thatmost of that output has effectively been blacklisted in academiccircles ever since.

This is unfortunate, for Mead's translations of the Hermetic literaturewere until quite recently the best available in English. (Theyare still the best in the public domain; thus their use here.) The Everard translation of 1650, which is still in print, reflectsthe state of scholarship at the time it was made - which is onlya criticism because a few things have been learned since then! The Walter Scott translation - despite the cover blurb on therecent Shambhala reprint, this is not the Sir Walter Scott ofIvanhoe fame - while more recent than Mead's, is a productof the 'New Criticism' of the first half of this century,and garbles the text severely; scholars of Hermeticism of thecaliber of Dame Frances Yates have labeled the Scott translationworthless. By contrast, a comparison of Mead's version to theexcellent modern translation by Brian Copenhaver, or to the translationsof CH I (Poemandres) and VII (The Greatest Ill Among Men is Ignoranceof God) given in Bentley Layton's TheGnosticScriptures,shows Mead as a capable translator, with a usually solid graspof the meaning of these sometimes obscure texts.

There is admittedly one problem with Mead's translation: theaesthetics of the English text. Mead hoped, as he mentioned atthe beginning of ThriceGreatestHermes,to 'render..these beautiful theosophic treatises into anEnglish that might, perhaps, be thought in some small way worthyof the Greek originals.' Unfortunately for this ambition,he was writing at a time when the last remnants of the floridand pompous Victorian style were fighting it out with the morestraightforward colloquial prose that became the style of thenew century. Caught in this tangle like so many writers of thetime, Mead wanted to write in the grand style but apparently didn'tknow how. The result is a sometimes bizarre mishmash in whichturn-of-the-century slang stands cheek by jowl with overblownphrases in King James Bible diction, and in which mishandled archaicisms,inverted word order, and poetic contractions render the text lessthan graceful - and occasionally less than readable. Seen froma late twentieth century sensibility, the result verges on unintentionalself-parody in places: for example, where Mead uses the Scotscontraction 'ta'en' (for 'taken'), apparentlyfor sheer poetic color, calling up an image of Hermes Trismegistusin kilt and sporran.

The 'poetic' word order is probably the most seriousbarrier to readability; it's a good rule, whenever the translationseems to descend into gibberish, to try shuffling the words ofthe sentence in question. It may also be worth noting that Meadconsistently uses 'for that' in place of 'because'and 'aught' in place of 'any', and leavesout the word 'the' more or less at random.

Finally, comments in (parentheses) and in [square brackets] arein Mead's original; those in <angle brackets> are my ownadditions.