The Corpus Hermeticum

Seventeen Greek treatises from Roman Egypt, mostly dialogues in which Hermes instructs a son or disciple. The first, the Poimandres, is the one that matters here: a vision of the Nous — Mind, the All — bringing forth a luminous Word, and of the primal Anthropos, the divine Man, descending through the spheres into nature. The Kabbalist reading it meets a stranger speaking in a familiar cadence: an unknowable source, an ordered descent, a Primordial Man. Recovered for the West in 1463 when Cosimo de' Medici had Ficino drop Plato to translate it first.