CONTENTS 

About the Author
Preface
Abbreviations

¶ PART I: Introduction to the Way of Immortality
1. ch 1: The Poimandres of Hermes Thrice Great
2. ch 7: The Greatest Vice among Humans is Ignorance about God
3. ch 6: In God Alone is Goodness, and Nowhere Else
4. ch 4: Hermes to Tat: The Mixing Bowl

¶ PART II: General Discourses
5. ch 3: A Sacred Discourse of Hermes (On Creation)
6. ch 14: (On God as Creator)
7. ch 16: Definitions of Asclepius to King Ammon (On the Sun as Creator and On Daimones)
8. ch 2: General Discourse of Hermes to <Asclepius> (On Space)
9. ch 8: No Being is Destroyed, though Deceived People Call Changes “Losses” and “Deaths”
10. ch 17: (On Divine Images)
11. (The Asclepius or Complete Discourse) A Sacred Volume of Hermes Thrice Great Spoken to Asclepius
12. ch 9: On Thought and Sensation

¶ PART III: Detailed Discourses
13. ch 12: On Common Consciousness
14. ch 11: Higher Consciousness to Hermes
15. ch 5: Hermes to his Son Tat: God Invisible is Most Visible
16. ch 10: The Key of Hermes Thrice Great

¶ PART IV: Revelatory Discourses
17. ch 13: Discourse of Hermes Thrice Great to His Son Tat on a Mountain, a Hidden Discourse on Rebirth and the Pledge of Silence
18. <The Eighth Reveals the Ninth>
19. The Prayer of Thanksgiving

¶ Appendix
20. ch 18: (On Music and the Praise of Kings)

¶ PART V: Essays
Hermetic Spirituality: The Sixteen Principles
Hermetic Deification

Bibliography
Index

(…)

This volume presents the Hermetic writings as a central and enduring current within Western spirituality, born from the encounter between Egyptian religious wisdom and Greek philosophical thought in late antiquity. Composed at a time when traditional cults and forms of knowledge were under threat, the Hermetica preserve a vision of spiritual rebirth, divine knowledge, and inner transformation that continued to shape later philosophical and Christian traditions, often without acknowledgment. These texts are not peripheral speculations but articulate a serious and integrated spiritual worldview aimed at awakening higher consciousness and participation in divine life.

Rather than treating the Hermetica as a loosely assembled anthology or merely as historical documents, this book approaches them as a corpus structured by initiation and spiritual formation. Guided by indications within the texts themselves, the tractates are arranged to reflect a movement from exhortation and preparation, through doctrinal grounding, toward revelatory experience. Reading, in this context, becomes a disciplined engagement—one that ancient readers understood as capable of effecting genuine inner change rather than serving purely intellectual ends.

The Hermetic path presented here resists easy categorization. It does not collapse into abstract philosophy, nor does it reduce spiritual experience to dogma or belief. Instead, it unfolds in stages, holding together cosmology, ethics, and contemplative practice, and culminating in rebirth and direct vision of the divine realms. Apparent tensions within the corpus—between world-affirmation and renunciation, or between unity and distinction—are shown to reflect different moments within a coherent process of spiritual transformation.

Although grounded in years of careful scholarship and translation, this book is not written for specialists alone. It speaks to readers who wish to understand the historical depth of the Hermetic tradition while remaining attentive to its spiritual demands. For practitioners and academics alike, it offers an invitation to encounter the Hermetica not only as texts to be analyzed, but as writings intended to shape perception, practice, and inner life.

ERRATA NOTICE

With all care and best intentions in production and proofreading, no “true” first edition or first print run is entirely without minor imperfections.

Within Hermetica I by Dr. M. David Litwa, PhD, we have identified the following typographical issues:

• p. 31 — The numbered passages are missing entry #17, which should appear before the paragraph beginning with “So the generation…”

• p. 49, 51, 53 — In the running heads of Chapter IV, the title incorrectly reads “Hermes to Tat: The Mixing Nowl” instead of “Hermes to Tat: The Mixing Bowl”.

We thank readers for their understanding and continued support.