Professor Wildberg’s reading of the texts does not necessitate a late-antique dating he finds it plausible that these texts might have been composed in the Hellenistic period in a way somewhat cognate to the origin of the Septuagint Bible – Egyptian priests seeking to render their ideas relevant in Greek, the dominant language of the day.The ‘philosophical’ terms used have very different meanings in the Hermetic texts than they do in the school-traditions. He sees the ideas in the Corpus Hermeticum not as a rehash of Greek philosophy, although they use Greek terminology which is familiar to readers of philosophy from the Hellenistic onward something quite different and distinctive is going on in these texts.Professor Wildberg’s reading of the theoretical Hermetica is independent, and questions some commonly-held scholarly beliefs about the texts. In this interview we discuss the method, the project, and so forth, and then move on to discuss the Hermetic writings more generally. Running with this method, he has had results across the board, and is preparing a new edition and translation of the Corpus Hermeticum based on simply (well, it’s not exactly simple) separating the interpolated marginal notes from the main body of the text. Professor Christian Wildberg was conducting a reading-group looking at the Corpus Hermeticum when he noticed something about CH II: in a spot where the text was obviously corrupt, it was possible to get quite a good text simply by removing what was clearly an interpolated scholium, or marginal note (see Wildberg 2013).

Hermetic teachings