Asclepius

The Asclepius is a Hermetic dialogue that survives complete only in a Latin translation, once attributed to Apuleius but of uncertain authorship, in which Hermes Trismegistus instructs his pupil Asclepius on god, cosmos and humanity. The Greek original is lost, though Coptic fragments turned up among the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945, confirming its late-antique date, broadly the second or third century CE, contemporary with the Greek Corpus Hermeticum and, like it, a product of Greek-speaking Egypt rather than of pharaonic antiquity, whatever its own claims. Its most famous and most troubling passage is the "god-making" section, which describes how the ancient Egyptians drew the souls of gods into temple statues to ensoul them, and laments, as a prophecy of Egypt's decline, a coming age when the gods will leave the land and the old worship fall silent. Augustine quotes and condemns exactly this passage in The City of God as devil-worship, one reason the text was read, and feared, throughout the Middle Ages. Its influence on Renaissance magic, especially on the idea that images could be made to hold spiritual power, was considerable, and Frances Yates and Brian Copenhaver trace its reception.

The Asclepius survives complete only in a Latin translation, the Greek having been lost apart from fragments, and a Coptic version of part of it turned up at Nag Hammadi. It is a dialogue in which Hermes instructs Asclepius, and it is the most theologically ambitious of the Hermetic writings.

It is remembered for two passages. The first is the god-making passage, which describes how the ancestors learned to draw divine presence down into statues by means of herbs, stones and scents, so that the images became animate and could speak and foretell. Nothing else in surviving pagan literature states the theurgic rationale for cult images so directly, and it is why the Asclepius was both prized and feared in the Renaissance. Ficino handled the topic with visible caution, and Giordano Bruno did not.

The second is the Lament, a prophecy that Egypt will be abandoned by its gods, its temples filled with corpses, and its sacred learning disbelieved. Augustine quotes it at length in the City of God in order to attack it, and that hostile quotation is part of why the text stayed in circulation through the Latin Middle Ages when most of the Hermetica did not.

The Coptic fragment recovered at Nag Hammadi covers part of the same dialogue and differs from the Latin in places, which gives scholars a rare second witness to a Hermetic text and shows the Latin translator smoothing where his source was awkward.