Hermetica refers to a category of popular Late Antique literature purporting to contain secret wisdom, and generally attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Several such texts, in Greek, were compiled into a Corpus Hermeticum by Italian scholars during the Renaissance. Other Hermetic works, however, existed in Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, and other languages.
Unlike Gnostic writings, the Hermetica contain no explicit allusions to Jewish or Christian texts - and this choice seems deliberate. They do, however, contain some unconscious echoes of Biblical themes, underscoring the close if uneasy intermingling of Jewish, Greek and Egyptian in HellenisticAlexandria. Unlike Orphic literature, they are unconcerned with the genealogical tedia of Greek mythology. And compared with Chaldaean Oracles and Neoplatonist philosophy, the Hermetic texts dwell far less on the technical minutiae of metaphysical philosophy: their concerns are practical in nature.
The predominant literary form is the dialogue: Hermes Trismegistus instructs a perplexed disciple on some point hidden wisdom. The dialogue itself is played out upon a spectral canvas of hoary temples marked with hieratic inscriptions, most of which the authors of these works would have been unable to read.
Renaissance enthusiasts often pointed to Hermetic documents as the apex of pagan thought. Several factors, however, suggest that the tracts had a more popular character. For example, Neoplatonist philosophers - who happily and prolifically quote apocryphal works of Orpheus, Zoroaster, Pythagoras and other legendary figures - almost never cite Hermes. The anti-Greek and anti-Roman attitudes present in the texts reinforce their subaltern character. The Corpus Hermeticum therefore offers us an almost unparalleled view into the religious thinking of non-elite and politically marginal pagans under the Roman Empire.
Another question persists: did the "Hermetists" who produced and read these books constitute a kind of "sect", comparable to Gnostic groups? Certainly, Hermetic writings were of interests to members of alternative religious communities: parts of the Hermetica appeared in the Gnostic library found in Nag Hammadi. On the other hand, the diffuseness style and subject matter, the widespread distribution of the texts, and also as the ease with which anonymous tracts can be produced, would suggest that a great many of the texts were produced by lone individuals or small groups without formal organization.
Although the most famous exemplars of Hermetic literature were products of Greek-speakers under Roman rule, the genre did not suddenly stop with the fall of the Empire, nor was it confined to the Greek language. Rather, Hermetic literature continued to be produced, in Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian and Byzantine Greek. The most famous example of this later Hermetica is the Emerald Tablet, known from Medieval Latin and Arabic manuscripts, with a possible Syriac source. Sadly, little else of this rich literature is easily accessible to non-specialists.
John Everard's historically important 1650 translation into English of the Corpus Hermeticum, entitled The Divine Pymander in XVII books (London, 1650) was from the Ficino Latin translation.
