When A.D. Nock edited the Corpus, he used twenty-eight manuscripts dating from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, but fifteen of them contain only the first fourteen treatises, or in some cases, even fewer. Two manuscripts that include all seventeen logoi also preserve a comment on C.H. I.18 written by Michael Psellus, an important Byzantine scholar of the eleventh century. Finding the words of the biblical Genesis in this heathen cosmogony, Psellus remarked of its author that "this wizard seems to have had more than a passing acquaintance with holy writ. Making an eager go of it, he tries his hand at the creation of the world, not scrupling to record the cherished Mosaic expressions themselves." It is noteworthy that a Byzantine Christian learned in Neoplatonism wished to defame the Bible-reading Hermes as a goes or "wizard," especially since the seventeen Greek treatises say so little about occult topics. Passages on astrology and magic in the theoretical Hermetica are even scarcer in C.H. I-XIV than in XVI-XVIII and the Asclepius. Could it be, then, that what we call theCorpus Hermeticum took shape just as a consequence of the abhorrence of magic expressed by Psellus? If so, it is worth noting the likelihood that he shared this pious loathing with other Byzantine scholars who transmitted the Corpus from his time to the fourteenth century, when the earliest extant manuscripts were written.[135]
Byzantine editors and copyists, then, may have immortalized their prejudices by selecting and redacting our Corpus from a larger body of Hermetica that certainly gave much attention to the occultism that is so inconspicuous in the theoretical treatises, especially the first fourteen. For Christian readers f the Latin West and Greek East alike, a Corpus purged of magic would better befit the authorship of the pagan sage described in the Suda around the year 1000: "Hermes Trismegistus….was an Egyptian wise man who flourished before Pharaoh's time. He was called Trismegistus on account of his praise of the trinity,[136] saying that there is one divine nature in the trinity." The Hermetica are full of random pieties, which is why Christians from patristic times onward so much admired them.
Before the eleventh century - when Psellus seems to have known the Corpus in roughly its present form, around the same time when the first collections of technical Hermetica were assembled by Byzantine scholars - there is no sign of the Corpus as such, although individual treatises were evidently in use as early as the third century CE. John of Stobi, or Stobaeus, seems not to have known the Corpus as a whole, but he compiled an Anthology around the year 500 that contains forty excerpts of varying lengths from hermetic writings, including parts of C.H. II, IV, IX, and the Asclepius. Excerpts that do not give partial texts (texts that represent a separate and sounder tradition than other manuscripts of the Corpus, which just on that account would seem to have been assembled after Stobaeus) or the Corpus or the Asclepius fall into four groups: Hermes, Hermes to Tat, Hermes to Ammon, and Isis to Horus.[137] Earlier than Stobaeus is an interesting remark from Cyril of Alexandria, who knew C.H. XI and XIV as well as other treatises now lost; he died around the middle of the fifth century. Much like Psellus, Cyril disapproved of Hermes as a magus and idolater, but he was fascinated by biblical and other resonances in his works, writing that
this Hermes of Egypt, although he was a theurgist (telestes), ever sitting in the temple precincts near the idols, had the good sense to acquire the writings of Moses, even if he did not use them at all blamelessly or correctly, having but a part of them….The one in Athens who collected the fifteen books called "Hermetic" (Hermaika) made himself a record of this in his own writings.[138]
Although Cyril apparently knew a Hermetic collection, his other references to Hermetic writings do not show that these "fifteen books" were a form of our Corpus. However, the earliest possible data, which comes from the texts themselves (sometimes referring to one another and to Hermetica outside the Corpus), indicate that Hermetic collections of some kind circulated as early as the second or third centuries. A scribe who copied the Nag Hammadi Hermetica, part of a mid-fourth "library," apologized for not adding more Hermetic materials to his codex because "the discourses of that one, which have come to me, are numerous," implying that he had access to more Hermetica than he had transcribed, conceivably to a collection. Authors of NHC VI, C.H. V,X,XII and XIV, S.H. III and VI and the Asclepius recognized groups of treatises by name, although the meanings of their labels to their original users remain unclear.[139]
1 -[The Corpus Hermetica]
2 -[The Corpus Hermetica : Hermetic texts]
3 -[The Corpus Hermetica : Hermetic Collections]
Source : Granta.demon.co.uk/
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