Corpus Hermeticum (Hermetica)

The Corpus Hermeticum collects the Greco-Egyptian Hermetic philosophical and religious treatises composed across the early centuries CE and traditionally attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus rather than to any one identifiable author. As the primary Hermetic corpus itself, it is the correct source for what these texts actually say about the divine mind, the cosmos and the soul's ascent, in their own words rather than in later paraphrase. Its limit follows from its own layered history: the treatises were assembled over generations by different unknown hands rather than composed as a single unified system, so a claim treating Hermeticism as one coherent doctrine should be checked against modern scholarship on the corpus's compositional history rather than read straight off the text.