De sex rerum principiis
De sex rerum principiis (On the Six Principles of Things) is a 12th-century Latin cosmological treatise, composed c. 1147–1175. It is most plausibly attributed to Gilbert of Poitiers (Gilbertus Porretanus), though Renaissance manuscripts sometimes label it a work of Hermes Trismegistus — a Hermetic misattribution that guaranteed its survival and influence.
The Six Principles
The treatise extends Aristotle's Categories with six higher metaphysical 'co-principles' that explain the structure of all created reality:
Subsistentia — Being itself; how creatures participate in divine existence.
Species — Form or intelligibility; the intelligible pattern conferring identity.
Ordo — Order or relation; the hierarchical disposition of parts to the whole.
Numerus — Number and proportion; the mathematical ratio reflecting divine harmony.
Figura — Shape; the visible manifestation of invisible intelligible order.
Motus — Motion; the dynamic temporal unfolding of creation (the exitus-reditus cycle).
Mark Damien Delp's Reading
The decisive modern study is Mark D. Delp's Notre Dame dissertation (1994) and his co-edition with Paolo Lucentini for Brepols (2006). Delp argues the six are modes of participated being: not physical categories but ontological ratios, each expressing how creatures participate in divine being and intelligibility. Numerus is not mere counting but the proportion between a creature's being and its divine exemplar. This reading situates the text within the Boethian-Augustinian tradition of participation metaphysics, anticipating Aquinas's act-and-potency doctrine.
Hermetic Resonance and Renaissance Legacy
The text's hexadic structure evokes the six days of creation (hexaemeron) and was read by Renaissance scholars as an encoded Hermetic cosmology. Cornelius Agrippa cites De sex rerum principiis explicitly in De Occulta Philosophia I.3, treating the six principles as the metaphysical foundation of natural magic. Robert Fludd's hexadic cosmological diagrams in Utriusque Cosmi Historia echo the same schema.
David Porreca and the Hermes Latinus Project
David Porreca (University of Waterloo) — co-translator of the Latin Picatrix (Penn State Press, 2019) — sits on the editorial board of the Hermes Latinus series and has documented how texts like De sex rerum principiis and the Liber XXIV Philosophorum were used in 12th- and 13th-century classrooms with full scholastic commentary, not as occult curiosities but as philosophical teaching aids alongside Aristotle and Boethius.