3-057-430 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Isaac Casaubon's copy of the Hermetic texts, 1554. 'Mercurii trismegisti poemander, suede potestate ac sapiential divina Aesculapii definitiones ad Ammonem regem Typis Regiis, Parisiis, M.D.LIIII. Apud A dr. Turnebum typographum Regium'. The title page from the copy of the Hermetic texts owned and annotated by the seventeenth-century scholar Isaac Casaubon. His researches demonstrated that these texts were not the product of ancient Egypt, but of the second century AD. These texts preserve a form of Hellenistic gnosticism, and events in this world are considered to be ruled by the stars and planets. One of the texts describes Egyptian rituals for drawing down cosmic power to animate the statues of their gods.