One editor, complete texts.
Spirituality Media publishes complete editions of the texts that matter, gathered from every source that can be found, translated where no English existed, and printed to be kept. It is the work of one person, and this page says how it is done.
Who
Spirituality Media is edited by Vincent Read. There is no team behind the name: one editor chooses the texts, gathers and revises the translations, sets the pages and answers the mail. The site began as the Index, a catalogue of spiritual and philosophical media, and the Editions followed in 2026 from the texts the Index kept returning to.
Questions, corrections and requests go through the contact page. Every message is read; most get a reply within a few days.
The Editions
The first edition is The Complete Hermetica: the writings of Hermes Trismegistus in one hardcover of 378 pages. It holds the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, the Stobaeus excerpts, the fragments and the ancient testimonies, the Emerald Tablet, the Coptic texts found at Nag Hammadi, the Definitions that survive only in Armenian, the Oxford fragments, the sayings of Hermes printed by Caxton in 1477, and the Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers, with twenty historic plates, a glossary and an index.
Its backbone is G. R. S. Mead’s translation of 1906, revised for today’s reader; where a meaning-carrying word was changed, Mead’s own wording is given in a footnote. The texts that had never been available outside copyrighted modern editions were translated anew for this book, from the ancient Coptic, Armenian, Greek and Latin.
Two editions are in preparation, with no dates yet: a Simplified Bible, the whole text kept chapter and verse but written to read as a story, and a Complete Book of Enoch.
How the books are made
Every text, once
An edition gathers every surviving text of its tradition in one volume, each printed once, in one translation. Where two old translations exist, one is chosen and the other is named in the notes.
Sources named
Each text carries the name of its translator and the date of the translation it comes from. The editor’s note at the end of the book says what was changed and why.
Translated where there was nothing
When a text exists in English only in a copyrighted modern edition, it is translated anew from the ancient language. For the Hermetica: the Coptic, the Armenian, the Greek and the Latin.
Made to be kept
Hardcover, with full-page plates and decorated capitals. Printed to order and shipped to your door; shipping is paid at checkout.
On the use of AI
The new translations were drafted with an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic) working directly from the ancient texts, line by line, and were then read against their originals by the editor. No specialist of Coptic or Armenian has reviewed them. The revision of Mead’s English was done the same way, under rules set by the editor and stated in the editor’s note printed in the book. Where a reading is uncertain, the book says so with a query mark rather than smoothing it over.
This is said plainly because it is the honest description of the method, and because it is the reason a book like this can exist at all at its price. Corrections from readers who know these languages are welcome and will go into the next printing.
Printing and ordering
Each copy is printed to order by Lulu in the United States and shipped directly to the buyer. Spirituality Media never handles your payment or your address: the order, the payment and the delivery happen on Lulu’s site, under Lulu’s terms. Prices are in US dollars; shipping is added at checkout at Lulu’s rates.
The Index
Before the Editions, Spirituality Media was the Index: a catalogue of teachings across traditions, in video, print and audio, each entry under one canonical name and tagged with the same vocabulary of themes, with a lexicon of terms and a journal of longer pieces. It is still there and still grows, more slowly; the editions are what it was for.
Colophon
Built with Astro, hosted on Vercel, with Supabase for the catalogue, the newsletter list and sign-in. Typeset in Cormorant Garamond, EB Garamond and Jost. The site keeps cookieless visit counts (Vercel Web Analytics) and, since October 2026, carries the Meta pixel so that the editions can be advertised on Facebook and Instagram; what that means for you is set out on the privacy page. No recommendation engine, no feed.