Two Literatures Under One Name

The Hermetica is not one thing, and the division inside it is the first thing to understand. The philosophical treatises are dialogues on God, mind, cosmos and the ascent of the soul, written in Greek in Roman Egypt and owing a great deal to the Platonism of their day. The technical Hermetica are something else entirely: recipes and procedures for astrology, alchemy, talismans, medicine and the properties of plants and stones, far larger in bulk and much less read. Ancient and medieval readers did not separate them, and the same name authorised both.

The figure of Hermes Trismegistus was understood as an Egyptian sage of immense antiquity, and a text bearing his name carried that authority whether it discussed the descent of the soul or the engraving of a stone. In Arabic transmission the technical material was the more influential of the two by a considerable margin. The atlas keeps the whole under one entry for that reason, while noting the split. Treating the philosophical treatises alone as the Hermetica is a modern preference, formed when those particular texts were edited and translated as philosophy and the technical material was left to specialists, and it makes the tradition look considerably more unified, more coherent and more respectable than it ever was in the hands of the people who used it.