Saturday, July 18, 2026

Litwa, HERMETICA I (Fount ULTD)

IN THE MAIL:
M. David Litwa, HERMETICA I: The Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, and Nag Hammadi Hermetica Ordered as a Path of Initiation (The Definitive Edition) (QC Canada: Fount ULTD; Rev. ed. 2026)
This new English translation of the philosophical Hermetica has been out for a while, but I've only recently ordered a copy. Copenhaver's translation, with notes, is unrivaled for use when you are working through the Greek and Latin Hermetica line by line. But the latter makes relatively little effort to evaluate each tractate as whole, asking what it says and what that means.

Litwa's approach is different. He orders the tractates, not in the traditional order as passed down in medieval manuscripts, but by sense, in what he reconstructs as their likely order when used as a path of initiation. His commentary at the end of each tractate takes into account the scholarly literature, but it focuses on what the text is saying and what it meant (and means) for practitioners. He also includes a Coptic text from the Nag Hammadi Library which was not covered by Copenhaver. Using both translations gives a nice rounded view of the surviving, more or less complete, classical philosophical Hermetica.

Litwa has also published a second volume of translated philosophical Hermetica, which I have already noted here. It collects the surviving fragments and quotations of and testimonies about the otherwise lost texts.

There was also a substantial corpus of "technical Hermetica," which dealt with astrology, alchemy, and magic. There are English translations of varying reliability of many of the major works, but they have to be tracked down individually.

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