Corpus Hermeticum

The Corpus Hermeticum is a body of Greek philosophical and religious texts composed in Greco-Roman Egypt and attributed to the legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus. Its central vision is of a divine Mind, Nous, from which the cosmos emanates and to which the human soul may ascend through gnosis, establishing mind as the ground of reality.

Blending Middle Platonism, Stoic cosmology, and Egyptian theology, the texts articulate the doctrine of correspondence, "as above, so below," and present an emanationist cosmology in which reality descends in graded stages from divine Mind into matter. Salvation and power are framed as the fruit of knowledge and altered consciousness rather than ritual sacrifice.

Although shown in 1614 to be post-Christian rather than primordial, the writings deepened their influence in occult and metaphysical streams. They supply the foundational claim, later distilled in The Kybalion, that the universe is mental, the seed of all later mind-causes-reality doctrines.