A collection of writings from the first three centuries after Christ, combining magical, religious, and tangentially philosophical fragments. Trs. by Ficino, it had undue influence on Renaissance thought, partly through being misattributed to ancient Egyptian authorship by ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ supposedly from a time before Plato. Hermes Trismegistus (‘Thrice-Great Hermes’) is a fusion of elements of the Greek god Hermes with Egyptian god Thoth; the Hermetic corpus supposedly comprised the fundamental books of the Egyptian religion, including astrological, cosmological, geographical, medical, and pedagogic books and also hymns and instructions on how to worship. The extant corpus, in Greek, Latin, and Coptic includes astrological, alchemical, medical and philosophical works, offering insight into ‘popular Platonism’ in the Roman world.