Addenda et Scholia (1)

I'm now finally in a position to cross-reference Mead's arrangement of the Stobæus excerpts in his Thrice-Greatest Hermes with the numbering in modern academic literature (following the edition of Nock & Festugiére).

• Mead's I: sections 1-6 = SH 2B, the rest = SH 11.
• Mead's II = SH 1.
• Mead's III = SH 2B.
• Mead's IV = SH 21.
• Mead's V = SH 9 (Matter)
• Mead's VI = SH 10 (Time)
• Mead's VII = SH 5.
• Mead's VIII = SH 4.
• Mead's IX = SH 6 (Decans and Stars).
• Mead's X = SH 8 (Providence, Necessity & Fate).
• Mead's XI = SH 7 (Justice).
• Mead's XII = SH 12 (Providence and Fate).
• Mead's XIII = SH 14.
• Mead's XIV = SH 16.
• Mead's XV = SH 15 (Motion and Nature).
• Mead's XVI = SH 20.
• Mead's XVII = SH 17.
• Mead's XVIII = SH 3.
• Mead's XIX = SH 19.
• Mead's XX = SH 18 (Power of Choice).
• Mead's XXI = SH 27 (sentence on philosophical refutation).
• Mead's XXII = SH 28 (sentence on "what is God?").
• Mead's XXIII = SH 22 (from "Aphroditē").
• Mead's XXIV = SH 29 (poem on planetary gods).
• Mead's XXV = SH 23 (Korē Kosmou).
• Mead's XXVI = SH 24 (continuation of Korē Kosmou).
• Mead's XXVII: sections 1-7 = SH 25, sections 8-20 = SH 26.

SH 13, a single sentence extracted from an account of the opinions of various philosophers on the subject of Necessity, is not in Mead.

Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius.

Missed this when I last posted an update of the Mead Hermetica, but turns out that in 2018 Cambridge University Press published Hermetica II, represented as a continuation of Brian Copenhaver's 1992 (many reprints) translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius.

This comprises annotated translations of the 29 Hermetic excerpts and fragments from the anthology of Stobæus that were in tom. iii & iv of Nock & Festugière's 1946-54 edition of the texts, as well as the "Vienna fragments" mentioned by Copenhaver, fragments of Hermetic texts from a papyrus at Oxford discovered in 1991 and multiple brief quotations and references by writers of late antiquity, as well as citations from early mediæval Arabic writers, and the famous Emerald Tablet.

Litwa, M, David: Hermetica II: the Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies in an English Translation with Notes and an Introduction.  Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Unfortunately this has yet to see the kind of accessible paperback reprint that Copenhaver got; the print edition lists for over £70 new.

Verum sine mendacio, certum et verissimum

The re-set of Mead's Hermetica can now be read on Scribd, shorn of his waffling commentaries and most of the textual apparatus. The "alchemy session" line in the last post alluded to a remark which accompanied the original (?) web-posting of Mead's translation of C.H. I-XIII back in the late 1990s. Actually, sacred-texts put a complete HTML of Thrice Greatest Hermes up recently while I wasn't paying attention.

Thought in me becoming on a time concerning the Entities . . .

After several months of slackness made a start on re-setting G.R.S. Mead's translation of the Hermetica. These were originally published in 1906 as part of a three-volume work under the title Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis (London and Benares: The Theosophical Publishing Society). At some point subsequently, Mead's Englishing of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius or Perfect Sermon was extracted and issued in some form, shorn of apparatus and commentary, with an introduction by J. M. Greer. An electronic edition containing Greer's introduction and C.H. I-XIII only has been doing the rounds for some years; the present project should include not just the whole Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepuis but also the Hermetic excerpts from the anthology of Stobæus. In the meantime, I have placed page images of the three volumes of Thrice Greatest Hermes on Scribd: Vol. 1: Prolegomena Vol. 2: Corpus Hermeticum; Asclepius Vol. 3: Stobæi Hermetica; fragments and citations from writers of late antiquity