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22 November 2013
©W.J.Hanegraaff

Butchering the Corpus Hermeticum:
Breaking News on Ficino’s Pimander

Wouter J. Hanegraaff

In the spring of 2002, a group of devoted Ficino aficionados met at the home of
Prof. Sebastiano Gentile to discuss the need for modern critical editions of the
great Florentine Platonist’s writings. One of the young scholars present at this
meeting, Maurizio Campanelli, decided to take a closer look at Ficino’s famous
translation of treatises I-XIV of the Corpus Hermeticum, first published in Treviso
in 1471 as Hermes Trismegistus’ book on the Power and Wisdom of God (De
Potestate et Sapientia Dei) but better known by its alternative title Pimander. He
was in for an unexpected surprise. Although certainly no beginner in Latin
anymore, he notes, “the number of passages of which I failed to really
understand the significance followed one another at a disquieting pace.”1 In
other words, much of the text just didn’t make sense at all. Clearly something
was wrong – but what was it? Since the Greek original is perfectly
comprehensible, the initial suspicion fell on Ficino himself: could it be that his
famous translation, finished in 1463, had in fact been so bad as the edition would
seem to suggest? But no: a crucial manuscript from 1466, heavily annotated with
corrections in Ficino’s own hand, showed otherwise. Apparently the problem
was with the famous Treviso edition of 1471 itself, on which the great majority
of 16th-century editions would later be based.

Now all of this may not seem like such a big deal to general readers. For anyone
familiar with scholarship of Renaissance Hermeticism, however, the implications
are far-reaching, even bordering on the sensational. Ever since Frances Yates’
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), countless scholars and
popular authors have been telling us that the revival of the “Hermetic Tradition”
began with Ficino’s Pimander of 1471, and that ever since, throughout the
sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth, Hermes’s writings had become a
very significant factor in the development of religious and intellectual life during
the Renaissance and after. Presumably, this means that people had actually been
reading Hermes’s writings. But if so, had nobody noticed that Ficino's Pimander
was, in fact, an incomprehensible muddle? And if they had noticed, what had
they done about it? Perhaps most importantly: was it at all possible, for such
Renaissance readers, to distill the actual contents of the Hermetic writings from
the translations available to them? If not, what did “Hermetism” actually mean
for them? And what about all those modern scholars who have written large
books and learned articles about Renaissance Hermetism? One cannot help
wondering how many of them ever bothered to sit down and actually read the
foundational classic of the entire tradition.

Spurred on by his initial discovery, Campanelli began working on a critical
reconstruction of Ficino’s original Pimander, and the final result has been

1 Maurizio Campanelli, “Premessa,” in: [Marsilio Ficino], Mercurii Trismegisti
Pimander sive De Potestate et Sapientia Dei, nino aragno: Torino 2011, VII-XII, here X.
published with an Italian publisher in 2011. It is a very impressive example of
painstaking philological scholarship, and a good reminder that, in the world of
textual research at least, der liebe Gott lebt im Detail. So bear with me. In the first
chapter of his 260-page Introduction, Campanelli analyzes Ficino’s repeated
attempts at sketching a profile of Hermes Trismegistus, concluding that he was
mostly trying to flatter his maecenas Cosimo de’ Medici by providing him with all
the attributes of the ancient Egyptian sage, or the reverse.2 Campanelli then gets
down to his real core business, analyzing all the editions of the Corpus
Hermeticum that were published during the Renaissance. It is important to
realize that Ficino himself never tried to get the Pimander published: the Treviso
edition, published on 18 December 1471, was the unauthorized initiative of two
humanists, the Flemish Geraert van der Leye (Gherardo de Lisa) and his Italian
colleague Francesco Rolandello, who seems to have provided the manuscript.
And it is here that something went awfully wrong, for the printed version is so
corrupt that Campanelli does not hesitate to speak of an “authentic textual
disaster” based upon “scandalous negligence.” 3 Most likely, according to his
analysis, the printers were working under such heavy time pressure that they
made countless errors, and neither van der Leye nor Rolandello ever took the
trouble to check and correct the proofs… The troubling fact is that precisely this
butchered version of the Pimander became, nevertheless, the basis for the great
majority of later editions of the Corpus Hermeticum: the 3rd one (Venice 1481),
the 4th (Venice 1491), the 5th (Venice 1493), the 6th (Paris 1494), the 7th (Mainz
1503), the 8th (Paris 1505), the 10th (Venice 1516), the 12th (Lyon 1549), and the
14th (Basle 1551). This does not mean that the text remained unchanged. On the
contrary: from one edition to the next, and especially since the 1494 version of
Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, successive editors tried to improve the text, thus
creating a wide range of variant readings of an original that had been wholly
corrupt in the first place. Hence it is hardly surprising that when Gabriel du
Preau was preparing his French translation (published in 1549) he admitted
being “vexed & tormented” by all the contradictions he discovered between the
three Latin versions at his disposal.4
What then about the other editions, absent from the list above? The 2nd edition
(Ferrara, 8th of January 1472: just a few weeks after the 1st) was based upon a
separate manuscript of Ficino’s translation; but although it is much more reliable
than the princeps, it seems to have remained a “stand-alone” edition without
much further influence. The 9th edition (Florence 1513), edited by Mariano Tucci,
was again based upon a separate manuscript of Ficino’s translation and became
the basis for two later editions: the 11th (Basle 1532, edited by Michael Isengrin)
and the 16th (Cracow 1585, edited by Annibale Rosselli, with huge
commentaries). And finally (not counting vernacular versions such as du
Preau's), we have three editions independent of Ficino’s text: the 13th Corpus
Hermeticum edition in succession consists of the first publication of the Greek
original by Adrien Turnèbe (Paris 1554); the 15th was a new Latin translation by

2 Campanelli, “Introduzione,” in: [Ficino], Mercurii Trismegisti Pimander,
XLI, LIX.
3 Ibid., CX-CXI.
4 Gabriel du Preau, Mercure Trismegiste Hermes … de la puissance &
sapience de Dieu, Estienne Groulleau: Paris 1549, Introduction.
François Foix de Candale (Bordeaux 1574); and finally, the 17th was yet another
new Latin translation by Francesco Patrizi (Ferrara 1591). This certainly
suggests that interest in the Hermetica was growing during the second half of the
sixteenth century, especially its last three decades; but Campanelli claims that, in
fact, none of these three new editions had any success at all, leaving Ficino’s
Pimander as “almost the only vehicle of the Corpus Hermeticum in Europe” in this
period.5 One might want to question that point, but it seems clear that van der
Leye and Rolandello (and of course their printers) created a mess that would
continue to create enormous confusion about the Hermetic message throughout
the sixteenth century.

Having established the history of the printed editions, Campanelli proceeds to
delve deep into the “vast archipelago”6 of surviving manuscripts of the Pimander
(those that were used for the first two editions of 1471 and 1472 are no longer
extant). Demonstrating great philological expertise and attention to technical
detail, he finally ends up selecting fifteen manuscripts most suitable for
reconstructing Ficino’s original translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, published
in a meticulous critical edition on pp. 1-111 of his book. In the final chapter of his
Introduction, he goes into considerable detail about the nature and quality of
that translation. His conclusions are very interesting. Ficino appears to have
been much concerned with improving the literary style of the Greek original,
trying to make it all more elegant and beautiful. Sometimes he changes the
original meaning, 7 and his formulations tend to be far more expansive and
dramatic than the wording of the Greek text (not least in cases that reflect his
own hostily towards the body8). More importantly, he tends to read the Hermetic
content through his own lense of Neoplatonic Christianity9; and one can see that,
understandably enough, he looks to the Latin Asclepius as a model for his own
translation.10

5 Campanelli, “Introduzione,” LXXXIII.
6 Ibid., CXXI.
7 See esp. ibid., CCXLVIIff, for what looks like intentional modifications.
8 Ibid., CCXXVII.
9 Ibid., CCXXXVII.
10 Ibid., CCXLVII.

In conclusion, even the most reliable version of Ficino's Pimander turns out to
have been quite different from what we find in the Greek manuscript that had
been brought to Florence by Leonardo da Pistoia.11 But what really messed up
things for the Thrice-Greatest was the famous 1471 edition. In the wake of that
disaster, and as the number of editions increased, the original meaning of the
Corpus Hermeticum was bound to get buried under an ever-expanding number of
mistranslations, misinterpretations, and well-meaning but counterproductive
emendations. Hence, what we have is a lively Renaissance discourse about
Hermes, but no Hermetic Tradition.12

11 Ibid., CCL.
12 For further discussion of the implications of Campanelli’s research, see
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “How Hermetic was Renaissance Hermetism?”, Aries 15
(2015), 179-209.