Renaissance Hermeticism and the rediscovery of Hermes

Around 1460 a monk named Leonardo da Pistoia, one of the agents commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici to search for ancient manuscripts, brought a Greek codex from Macedonia to Florence. It contained fourteen treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian sage. Cosimo, by now elderly, asked Marsilio Ficino to put it into Latin as an absolute priority. From that gesture arose one of the great intellectual movements of the Renaissance, Hermeticism, which for over a century influenced philosophy, religion, art and magic.

What the Corpus Hermeticum contained

The Hermetic treatises are dialogues and discourses on religious and philosophical subjects. The first, the Pimander, recounts a vision in which the divine intellect reveals to Hermes the creation of the world, the fall of man into matter and the way of return. Other treatises speak of spiritual regeneration, the nature of God and the soul, and the beauty of the cosmos. The tone is that of a religion of knowledge, in which salvation passes through understanding.

Ficino finished the translation in 1463 and entitled it Pimander, after the first treatise. Printed for the first time at Treviso in 1471, it went through a great many editions within a few decades. Alongside it readers had the Asclepius, a Hermetic dialogue preserved in Latin since antiquity and attributed in the Middle Ages to Apuleius, which contained the famous passage on statues animated by the gods and a dark prophecy about the end of Egyptian religion.

Diffusion in Italy and Europe

The Hermetic message found passionate interpreters. Ludovico Lazzarelli, a poet and scholar from the Marche, translated further Hermetic texts and composed the Crater Hermetis, dedicated to King Ferdinand of Naples. The Frenchman Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples prepared in 1505 an edition of the Pimander with commentary. The first edition of the Greek text was printed in Paris by Adrien Turnèbe in 1554.

Francesco Patrizi, a Dalmatian philosopher, published in 1591 the Nova de universis philosophia, to which he added a new edition of the Hermetic texts. He even proposed that the philosophy of Hermes be taught in schools in place of Aristotle's, because in his view it was more consistent with the Christian faith. Giordano Bruno, for his part, made Hermes and Egyptian religion a model of wisdom.

Hermes in occult philosophy

For Cornelius Agrippa the authority of Hermes was unquestioned. He quotes his sayings on man as a “great miracle”, on the unity of all things and on the presence of the divine in nature, and he finds in the Asclepius an ancient precedent for his reflections on images and statues. The conviction that Hermes was a contemporary of Moses, or even older, gave these texts a prestige almost equal to that of Scripture.

In 1964 the British historian Frances Yates published Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, a book that revealed the centrality of these texts in Renaissance thought. Her theses have been partly debated and scaled back, but it remains clear that without the rediscovery of Hermes one could understand neither Ficino nor Agrippa, nor the image of man as the magus of nature.