Thrice-Greatest Hermes

trans. G. R. S. Mead · 1906

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About the book

Mead's three-volume gathering of the Greek and Latin Hermetic writings — the Poemandres, the Asclepius, the scattered fragments — with the arguments about who wrote them left in. This is the Hermes literature the Kybalion only alludes to.

Try the short course

Part 1 · Who Hermes Thrice-Greatest was meant to be. The first six slides, free.

Who Hermes Thrice-Greatest was meant to be

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Open any sermon in this collection and the cast is small and steady. Hermes teaches. His pupils are Tat and Asclepius, and now and then a king called Ammon listens in. It is very easy to picture one ancient Egyptian sage, white-haired, writing it all down.

Mead asks you to drop that picture on the first page of his commentary. The founder of the tradition, he says, was not a historical personage but “the personification of a teaching-power or grade of spiritual illumination.”

So the name on these books works less like an author's signature and more like the name of a rank. That is the strange, useful thing to hold before anything else: Hermes is who is speaking whenever the teaching itself is speaking.

Inside the course

18 parts

Who «Thrice-Greatest Hermes» was supposed to beFree above
Mead's problem: Egyptian wisdom, or Greek philosophy?
The Poemandres, and the vision that opens the corpus
Mind, Word, and the making of the world
The descent of man, and the fall into nature
The ascent of the soul, and the eighth sphere
The general sermon, and «To Asclepius»: God, space, and the plenum
The sacred sermon: a creation in a page
The cup, the monad, and the choice offered to souls
«Though unmanifest, God is most manifest»: the fifth and sixth sermons
The greatest ill among men is ignorance of God: sermons seven to nine
The key: Mind to Hermes, and the nature of the soul
Rebirth: the thirteenth sermon, step by step
The Asclepius, and the lament for Egypt
Matter, fate and providence in the Hermetic scheme
Silence, and the teaching that cannot be written down
The fragments in Stobaeus, and what they add
What later hermeticists took — and what they invented

Questions

Is Thrice-Greatest Hermes free to read in Astra Trainer?

Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.

What is the short course?

18 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.

Where do I get the app?

Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. Thrice-Greatest Hermes is waiting in the app’s library.