'The Corpus Hermeticum' is a collection of second or third century treatises that have survived intact the systematic destruction of the early Catholic Church. Given mainly in the form of a dialogue between Hermes and a human interlocutor, the writings reveal knowledge of the origins, nature and moral properties of the divine, and (on the principle of 'as above, so below, as below, so above') of humanity and all other spiritual beings. Using this sacred knowledge, humanity can rise above the material and enter the realms of the gods. 'The Corpus Hermeticum' is a foundation document for all students of the Hermetic tradition.

George Robert Stow Mead (1863-1933) is a key figure in the revival and interpretation of Gnosticism and indeed the entire western esoteric tradition. He joined the Theosophical Society after graduating from Cambridge in 1884, and five years later became the private secretary of the Society's founder, H. P. Blavatsky, editing most of her published works and her magazine 'Lucifer'. He also followed his own lines of research, resulting in books such as 'Plotinus', 'Pistis Sophia' and the present work, each of them scholarly, comprehensive in scope, and eminently readable. Mead shows 'The Chaldean Oracles' to be the remains of a mystery-poem forming part of the inner initiation of a School or Order, and with painstaking scholarship he interprets the fragments into a cohesive pattern.

These volumes, complete in themselves as a series of studies in a definite body of tradition, are intended to serve ultimately as a small contribution to the preparation of the way leading towards a solution of the vast problems involved in the scientific study of the Origins of the Christian Faith. They might thus perhaps be described as the preparation of materials to serve for the historic, mythic, and mystic consideration of the Origins of Christianity, -where the term mythic is used in its true sense of inner, typical, sacred and logic, as opposed to the external processioning of physical events known as historic, and where the term mystic is used as that which pertains to initiation and the mysteries. The serious consideration of the matter contained in these pages will, I hope, enable the attentive reader to outline in his mind, however vaguely, some small portion of the environment of infant Christianity, and allow him to move a few steps round the cradle of Christendom. Though the material that we have collected, has, as to its externals, been tested, as far as our hands are capable of the work, by the methods of scholarship and criticism, it has nevertheless at the same time been allowed ungrudgingly to show itself the outward expression of a truly vital endeavour of immense interest and value to all who are disposed to make friends with it. For along this ray of the Trismegistic tradition we may allow ourselves to be drawn backwards in time towards the holy of holies of the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt. The sympathetic study of this material may well prove an initiatory process towards an understanding of that Archaic Gnosis.