Hermes Trismegistus — Pimander — Asclepius [3 pieces]

Pieces drawn for David Litwa’s edition of the Hermetica I: The Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, and Nag Hammadi Hermetica Ordered as a Path of Initiation, published by Fount Ultd., in 2026.

Hermes’ portrait on follows the pavement of Siena cathedral and early printed editions of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera. 

The two horizontal pieces stand for the two major beginning and ending treatises of the Corpus. Namely the Pimander, which opens with Hermes’ great vision of the cosmic serpent and the planetary spheres. Visually, it is largely based on the frontispieces of Pignoria’s exposition on the Mensa Isiaca, and the Hieroglyphs are from the Metternich Stele, often called the magical stele, which I could draw at the MET, New York. The volcano in the background is a reference to Khunrath’s depiction of the emerald tablet in his Amphitheatrum of 1595. The Latin text of the tablet is also inscribed on the following drawing’s corner. The triple herma pillar of Hermes is based on Johannes Hergavius’ (1557–1558) printer’s mark. 

The opposite piece, the Asclepius, illustrates the prophecy therein on Egypt’s spiritual decline, that has been called “the Lament” by Frances Yates (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964), when Egypt will no longer be full of temples, but it will be full of tombs, hence the mourning figure. The late Alexandrian character of the text is stressed by composite deities, like the dog-headed Hermanubis or the so-called Canopus Deus of the Nile. 

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