Thrice Greatest Hermes, Volume 3 by George Robert Stowe Mead

Description

Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Volume 3 is a book by George Robert Stowe Mead, first published in 1906. This third volume in Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes completes his comprehensive survey of Hermetic literature by gathering the many excerpts and fragments of Trismegistic and related philosophical writings that survive only in second- or third-hand sources. Included are substantial fragments preserved in the works of Stobaeus, many citations and polemical quotations from the Church Fathers (such as Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Augustine, and others), and references in later pagan philosophers like Zosimus, Jamblichus, and Fulgentius, among others. Mead supplies his own commentary on each fragment, aiming to situate them historically and philosophically. Volume 3 plays a vital role in Hermetic scholarship: it offers resources not found in more polished or “canonical” Hermetica by making available texts that would otherwise be lost to obscurity, allowing deeper study of how Hermetic ideas percolated through early Christian, pagan, and philosophical traditions. For students of Gnosticism, comparative religion, esotericism, and the history of ancient mysticism, this volume enriches one’s understanding of Hermeticism’s afterlife — how its themes of God, nature, matter, soul, time, and truth persisted, were contested, adapted, or distorted in later sources.

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