The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius: 1 (with quoted footnotes)

The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius is a collection of aphorisms attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus (a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth), most likely dating to the first century CE.

These aphorisms contain the core of the teachings which are found in the later Greek religio-philosophical Hermetica (writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus).

The work has mainly been preserved in a sixth-century CE Armenian translation, but the Greek original likely goes back to the first century CE. As such, it is the oldest of the religio-philosophical Hermetica, which were mainly written between c. 100 and c. 300 CE.

1. God: an intelligible world; (1world: a sensible God; man: a destructible world; God: an immovable world; heaven: a movable world; man: a reasonable world. (2Then there are three worlds. (3Now the immovable world is God, and the reasonable world is man: for both of these units are one: God and man after the species. (4)

2. Consequently there are three worlds on he whole: two units make up the sensible and one in the intelligible; one is after the species, and the third one is after its fullness. (5) All of the multiple belongs to the three worlds; two of them are visible: namely the sensible and man, that destructible world; and the intelligible is this God: (6) he is not visible, but evident within the visible things. (7)

3. Just as soul keeps up the figure (8while being within the body which cannot possibly be constituted without a soul, likewise all of that visible cannot possibly be constituted without the invisible. (9)

4. Now man is a small world (10because of soul and breath, and a perfect world whose magnitude does not exceed the sensible god, i.e. the world. The world is intelligible and God is Nous; (11he is the truly uncreated, the intelligible; by essence, the uncreated and the ineffable, the intelligible (12good. In a word, God is the intelligible world, the immovable Monad, the invisible world, the intelligible, invisible and ineffable (13good (14)

5. God is eternal and uncreated; man is mortal although he is ever-living. (15)

  1. God: an intelligible world; (1: CH 8.1 “…Mortality is a kind of destruction, but nothing in the universe is destroyed. If the second God is the cosmos, an immortal being, it is impossible for any part of an immortal being to die…” -Salaman; AH 8.0 “…When the master and shaper of all things, whom rightly we call god, made a god next after himself who can be seen and sensed… then, having made this god as his first production as second after himself, it seemed beautiful to him since it was entirely full of the goodness of everything, and he loved it as the progeny of his own divinity.”world: a sensible God; man: a destructible world; God: an immovable world; heaven: a movable world; man: a reasonable world. (2: CH 11.2 “…God makes eternity; eternity makes the cosmos; the cosmos makes time; time makes becoming. The essence of god is wisdom; the essence of eternity is identity; of the cosmos, order; of time, change; of becoming, life and death… Eternity, therefore, is in god… And while eternity has stood still in god’s presence, the cosmos moves in eternity, time passes in the cosmos, but becoming comes to be in time.”; CH 2.8 “…as they swim, observe mortal living things, those like a human, I mean; when the water rushes by, the resistance of feet and hands becomes an immobility so that the person is not swept downstream… Thus, all motion is moved in immobility and by immobility. And it happens that the motion of the cosmos and of every living thing made of matter is produced not by things outside the body but by those within it acting upon the outside, by intelligible entities, either soul or spirit or something else incorporeal…”; CH 10.11 “…Every living being, like the cosmos, is imposed of matter and Nous.” -Salaman; SH 11.2.48 “What is God? Unchanging good. What is humanity? Changing evil.”Then there are three worlds. (3: CH 10.14 “…There are these three, then: god the father and the good; the cosmos; and the human. And god holds the cosmos, but the cosmos holds the human. And the cosmos becomes the son of the cosmos, a grandson, as it were.”; SH 11.2.6 “God is first, the cosmos second, and humanity third.”{CH 10.12,14 “the cosmos is first, but after the cosmos the second living thing is the human… these are the three, then: God the Father and the good; the cosmos; and the human.”; AH 10 “The master of eternity is first God, the world is second, humankind is third.”}; CH 8 “[1] …If the cosmos is a second god and an immortal living thing, it is impossible for any part of this immortal living thing to die. All things in the cosmos are parts of the cosmos, but especially mankind, the living thing that reasons. [2] God is in reality the first of all entities, eternal, unbegotten, craftsman of the whole of existence… [5] Understand what god is, what the cosmos is, what an immortal living thing is, what dissoluble living thing is, and understand that the cosmos was made by god and is in god but that mankind was made by the cosmos and is in the cosmos; understand that god begins, contains, and composes all things.”Now the immovable world is God, and the reasonable world is man: for both of these units are one: God and man after the species. (4: tesak [տեսակ – Armenian] = eidea [ειδέα – Greek] – ’idea’ in DH 8.1 may be the ’essential’ part of man. DH 8.1 “All beings cannot possibly exceed their own capacity. Nature is everyone of the beings of this world, there is a law which is in heaven above destiny which has come into being according to the necessity of humans, there is a god who has come into being according to human opinion [idea].”)
  2. Consequently there are three worlds on he whole: two units make up the sensible and one in the intelligible; one is after the species, and the third one is after its fullness (5: ‘the world is full’: AH 33 “…thee is no such thing as a void, nor can there have ever been, nor will there ever be. For all the members of the world are completely full so that the world itself is complete and filled with bodies diverse in quality and form, each having its own shape and size… which is said to be ‘beyond the world’ (if there is any such thing, I do not believe that it is void) is full of intelligible thing resembling it in divinity, as I take it, so also is this world that we call ‘sensible’ completely full of bodies and living things that conform to its nature and quality… you are to call nothing ‘void’ unless you mean to say that what you call ‘void’ is ‘void-of’ something – void of fire or void of water and so on. Thus, though one may see something that can be void of such things as these, in no event can it be empty of spirit and air, no matter how small or large the thing seems void.” // In other contexts ‘God is fullness’: CH 16.3 “…the plentiful of all things is one and is in one, not because the one duplicates itself but because both are one… taking the term ‘all’ to mean ‘multitude’ rather than ‘plentitude’ – he will be doing the impossible, breaking the all apart from the one and destroying the all. For all must be one, if in fact one exists as it does and never ceases to be one so that the plentitude in not broken apart.”; AH 26 “Hermēs- ‘Such will be the old age of the world: irreligion, disorder, and unreason concerning all that is good… He will restrain error and every malign influence. Either he will dissolve all this is a flood, or consume it by fire, or destroy it through disease and pestilence spread through different lands. Finally he will restore the world to its ancient beauty… By these events the world will be reborn. There will be a return of all that is good, a sacred a spiritual re-establishment of Nature herself compelled by the course of time through that will, which is and was, without beginning, but remains the same; as it is now, so it will always be. For the nature of God is the purpose of his will.’ Asc.- ‘And the highest Good is this purpose, O Trismegistus?’ Hermēs- ‘Will is born from purpose, Asclepius, and acts of willing from will. And God wills nothing in excess for he has unlimited abundance of everything and he wills what he has. He wills everything good, and he has everything that he wills. Therefore all that he purposes and wills is good. Such is God, and the world a reflection of the Good.’” -Salaman; CH 6.1 ”The good, Asclepius is in nothing except in god alone, or rather god himself is always the good. If this is so, the good must be the substance of all motion and generation for nothing is abandoned by it, but this substance has an energy about it that stays at rest, that has no lack and no excess, that is perfectly complete, a source of supply, present in the beginning of all things…”; CH 6.4 “…If indeed there are things preeminently beautiful near to god’s essence, those seem perhaps even cleaner and purer in some degree which are part of him… god’s essence if, in fact, he has an essence is the beautiful but that the beautiful and the good are not to be detected in any of the things in the cosmos…”) All of the multiple belongs to the three worlds; two of them are visible: namely the sensible and man, that destructible world; and the intelligible is this God:(6: i.e. the visible worldhe is not visible, but evident within the visible things. (7: CH 5.1 “…the invisible always is, and, because it always is, it does not need to come to be seen. Also, while remaining invisible because it always is, it makes all other things visible; what begets is not itself begotten; what presents images of everything is not present to the imagination…”; CH 14.3 “…although things begotten are seen, he is unseen. And this is why he makes, in order to be seen. He is always making, so assuredly he is seen.”)
  3. Just as soul keeps up the figure (8: tesak [տեսակ – Armenian] – literally ‘species’- also used in DH 1.1while being within the body which cannot possibly be constituted without a soul, likewise all of that visible cannot possibly be constituted without the invisible. (9: CH 5.1* “…the invisible always is, and, because it always is, it does not need to come to be seen. Also, while remaining invisible because it always is, it makes all other things visible; what begets is not itself begotten; what presents images of everything is not present to the imagination…”)
  4. Now man is a small world (10: i.e. a microcosmbecause of soul and breath, and a perfect world whose magnitude does not exceed the sensible god, i.e. the world. The world is intelligible and God is Nous;(11: CH 1.6 “‘I am the light you saw, mind [Nous], your god… your mind is god the father; they are not divided from one another for their union is life.’”he is the truly uncreated, the intelligible; by essence, the uncreated and the ineffable, the intelligible (12: CH 2.12 “…god is what does not subsist of any of these since he is the cause of their being, for all of them and for each and every one of them that exists.”good. In a word, God is the intelligible world, the immovable Monad, the invisible world, the intelligible, invisible and ineffable (13: CH 1.31 “Holy is god, the father of all… whose counsel is done by his own powers… who wishes to be known and is known by his own people… who by the word have constituted all things that are… from whom all nature was born as image… of whom nature has not made a like figure… who are stronger than every power… who surpass every excellence… mightier than praises. You whom we address in silence, the unspeakable, the unsayable…”good. (14: CH 11.2* “…The essence so to speak of god is the good…”; CH 2.14-16 “[14] …Except god alone, none of the other beings called gods nor any human nor any demon can be good, in any degree. That good is he alone, and none other… [15] This is good; this is god. You should not say that anything else is good or you will speak profanely, nor should you ever call god anything but ‘the good’ since this too would be profane. [16] …The good is what is inalienable and inseparable from god, since it is god himself…God has one nature – the good… The good is what gives everything and receives nothing; god gives everything and receives nothing; therefore, god is the good, and the good is god.”; CH 6* “[1] The good, Asclepius, is nothing except in god alone, or rather god himself is always good… Yet this good belongs to nothing else except to god alone… [3] The good is in god alone, then, or god himself is the good… [4] the good that it is impossible or it to exist in the cosmos… [5] If you can understand god, you will understand the beautiful and good, the exceedingly bright whose brightness god surpasses. For this is incomparable beauty and inimitable good, as is god himself. As you understand god, then, also understand the beautiful and the good. Because they are not separated from god…”)
  5. God is eternal and uncreated; man is mortal although he is ever-living. (15: NH 6.67,29-30 “Now the gods have come into being out of pure matter and do not need learning and knowledge, for the immortality of the god is learning and knowledge, since they have come out of pure matter. Immortality serves as their learning and knowledge. Of necessity God has determined a place for humanity and established humanity in learning and knowledge… God has created a twofold nature in humanity, immortal and mortal.”; ‘aeizôos’ normally applies to the world.; CH 4.2 “so he sent the man below, an adornment of the divine body, mortal life from life immortal. And if the cos,so prevailed over living things as something ever-living, the man prevailed even over the cosmos through reason and mind. The man became a spectator of god’s work. He looked at it in astonishment and recognized his maker.”; CH 8.2* “God is in reality the first of all entities, eternal, unbegotten, craftsman of the whole of existence… God did not come to be by another’s agency, and, if he came to be, it was by his own agency. He never came to be, however; he comes to be always. This is the eternal being through whom the universe is eternal, the father who is eternal because he exists through himself…”)

-Footnoted quotes from the CH, AH, and SH are by Copenhaver and Litwa unless specified.

{Abc} – indicates a seperate footnote contained within Mahé’s original footnotes in DH.

* – indicates multiple usage of a single verse in the footnotes.

// – indicates that the footnote has been split into more than a single line of comparisons

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