The Corpus Hermeticum

Seventeen Greek treatises, mostly dialogues in which Hermes instructs a son or a pupil on God, mind, matter, the soul's descent and its way back up. They are not one system: they disagree with each other about whether the world is beautiful or a prison, and the disagreement is part of the record.

The tradition's actual text — the thing that exists, as against the thing the Renaissance thought existed. Older than the Bahir by a thousand years and older than the Zohar by twelve hundred.