A few later translators working off Ficino, like John Everard, also used the same title. This was like titling the Old Testament “Book of Genesis”. When Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin from Greek in the 15th century CE, he used the title of the first “book” (what we might call a “chapter” nowadays) as the title for the entire translation. When referring to one of the above texts, it is better to clarify by stating the author’s name, e.g. “the classical Hermetic texts” generally or the name of a specific such text instead. While one may use “the Hermetica” to refer to the collective body of Hermetic texts from the classical period, in order to reduce confusion, it is recommended to use a different term, e.g. Peter Gandy and Timothy Freke, The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs, containing their (heavily remixed, reordered, and re-Egyptianized) version of Hermetic texts.Walter Scott, Hermetica (in four volumes), containing his (highly edited and amended) version of the Greek and Latin Hermetic texts along with his thorough analysis of them.David Litwa Hermetica II, containing translations of the Stobaean Fragments, Oxford Fragments, Vienna Fragments, and various other fragments and testimonia of Hermetic doctrine Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica, containing translations of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Perfect Sermon.Confusingly, however, several modern authors and scholars have used the term “the Hermetica” to title their own books containing Hermetic texts: There is no one single classical text called “the Hermetica”, although this term is sometimes used to refer to the collective body of Hermetic texts from the classical period. Continuing our Hermeticism FAQ series (see part I on overview/history here), let’s continue today with Part II, on the texts that inform our studies of Hermeticism!

The hermetic tradition evola