Hermetica

Another problem that I ran into is the order of the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum. I thought that this order had long been fixed and agreed upon, but even fairly recent editions of the text, have different orders and different treatises even! I may have to let you down admitting that I own only two version of the text, which are the Dutch translation by Roelof van den Broek and Gilles Quispel (1990) who use the ‘official counting’ of I-XIV and XVI-XVIII, which I will explain lateron and the four books of Jan van Rijckenborgh (see below). Further, the internet, information of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica by email (thank you Cis), the small library of the local temple of the Lectorium Rosicrucianum and later a book by Frank van Lamoen (see bookreviews section), have made me able to compare four other versions: Van Beyerland (1643), Everard (1650), Mead (1906),… Read More »The order of the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum

This article comes forth from a lack of (easily findable) information that I have been looking for and is the result of a series of adaptations and investigations during november 2003. There may still be changes still, but I think the information is fairly complete now. I had two ‘problems’ with Hermetic scriptures. Nowhere could I find a list with books ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus and second, the order of the ‘libelli’ and the content of the Corpus Hermeticum differs from translation to translation. In this article I have looked into the first problem, what are the Hermetic texts? This means, writings that we nowadays believe to be genuinely ‘Hermetic’ (this does not mean: written by Hermes). Because I could’t find this list either in my personal library or on the internet, I started to make one myself. Later I ran into such a list on the internet AND on… Read More »What are the Hermetic texts?

Hermetism is becoming more and more popular. But how many people will be able to say much about what are the ideas that can be found within the Hermetic texts? I decided to take a few subjects and work them out with quotes from different texts. These texts are not by one author or one group of authors, so they may contradict eachother. This does not matter, because the underlying philosophy is always the same. For this comparison of concepts I used the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, the Hermetic texts from the Nag Hammadi library, the Stobaeus and Tertulianus fragments and De Castigatione Animae. For more information about Hermetic texts see my article on this subject. Of most the texts I have Dutch translations, and of almost all I also have English translations. For the quotes I mostly used the very literal translation of Walter Scott (1855-1925), sometimes I prefered… Read More »Hermetic concepts