Hermes' Virgin of the World, tr. Kingsford and Maitland

Hermes Trismegistus, Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland (T) · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 97 pages

*Ninety-seven pages, the largest file in this batch — the complete Virgin of the World in the English of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, published in 1885 under the auspices of the Hermetic Society. It carries the whole of their apparatus as well as the text: a note by the original publisher, two introductory essays by Maitland on the Hermetic books and on the significance of the system's revival, and Kingsford's own introduction. The contents page lists the Virgin of the World in three parts and the treatise on initiations, or Asclepios*, in six.

The same headnote from Blavatsky that prefaces the Divine Pymander in this series appears here too, identifying Thoth-Hermes as the self-created Logos and the voice of Egypt's hierophants, and placing Nebo, Thoth and Hermes together as gods of esoteric wisdom. What distinguishes this file from the other Hermetic text in the section is the weight of introduction around it: Maitland's essays are not a preface in the ordinary sense but an argument for why the Hermetic system was being revived in the 1880s at all, and Kingsford's introduction sets out how she read the dialogue. The subtitle given on the title page states the reading the series takes from it — the Virgin as personifying the purity of ideal nature. Because it is a complete book rather than an extract, and because the introductory matter is nearly as long as some of the studies in this section, this is a file to sit down with rather than to consult.

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