Hermes Trismegistus

Hermes Trismegistus

Behind the name Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Greatest, stands not a man but a legend and a library. The Hermetica are a body of Greek religious-philosophical writings from Roman Egypt that claimed to preserve the most ancient wisdom of all, a primordial revelation older than the Greeks. They teach the kinship of God, cosmos, and the human soul, the saving knowledge that lifts that soul back to its divine source, and the dignity of the human being as a creature poised between earth and heaven. For the thinkers of the Renaissance they were a scripture more ancient than Plato, and through them a vision of the human as a great miracle passed into the modern world.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. The Hermetica gather the Corpus Hermeticum, a set of Greek dialogues composed between roughly 100 and 300 AD, the Latin Asclepius or Perfect Sermon, and the later Emerald Tablet. This room reads them in G. R. S. Mead's 1906 translation, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, public domain by way of the Internet Archive. Hermes himself is a legendary figure, a fusion of the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth, so the dates are the composition window of the writings, not the span of a life. The chat cites by treatise and section. Expect citations of the form Poimandres (Corpus Hermeticum I), or the Asclepius.

The legend and the texts. Hermes was believed to have been an ancient Egyptian sage and priest, a contemporary of Moses, the fountain of a wisdom handed down from the dawn of the world. In fact the treatises were written in Greek in Hellenistic and Roman Alexandria, in the same ferment of Middle Platonism and Gnostic religion that produced Neoplatonism and shaped early Christianity, by anonymous authors writing under the god's name. They are works of religious philosophy, not the memoirs of a single sage. The Renaissance took them for documents of immense antiquity; in 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed on linguistic grounds that they belong to the Christian era, but by then their influence was already woven into European thought.

The Poimandres. The first and greatest of the treatises opens with a vision. The divine Mind, Poimandres, the Shepherd of Men, appears to Hermes and unveils the whole order of things: how the cosmos arose from Light and Life, which are God, and from Darkness, which is matter; how a primal Man, made in the image of God, descended through the seven planetary spheres and, looking down, fell in love with Nature and was clothed in a body; and how the soul may climb back up through those same spheres, shedding at each the passion it once took on, until it is joined again to God and becomes itself divine. The key that opens the ascent is knowledge.

Gnosis and the ascent of the soul. Hermetic religion turns on this saving knowledge, gnosis. The soul is a fallen splinter of the divine, caught in matter and forgetful of where it came from, and it is rescued not by ritual or by mere belief but by waking to its own origin, by knowing God and knowing itself as kin to God. The treatises describe a rebirth, a regeneration of the inner person, and an ascent of the awakened soul back through the cosmic spheres to the Light from which it fell. To know God truly, in the Hermetic vision, is to be made godlike.

As above, so below. The most quoted of all Hermetic sayings, the formula of the Emerald Tablet that what is above is as what is below, names the doctrine of correspondence. The cosmos is a single living whole, bound together by sympathies, and the human being is a microcosm that mirrors the great world and contains it in miniature. This vision of universal correspondence is the philosophical root of Hermetic magic, astrology, and alchemy: because every thing answers to every other, the one who truly knows can reach the higher through the lower and the lower through the higher.

The dignity of man. The Hermetica raise the human being to an extraordinary height, setting it between the mortal and the divine as the one creature able to know God and to govern the world. The Asclepius calls man a great miracle, a being who binds earth to heaven, mortal in body and immortal in mind, a kind of second god within the cosmos. It was this Hermetic exaltation of human dignity that Pico della Mirandola placed at the very opening of hisOration on the Dignity of Man, and that helped give the Renaissance its soaring image of what a human being might be.

The god-making and the lament. Two passages of the Asclepius are especially famous and strange. One describes how the ancient Egyptians drew divine powers down into the statues of their temples and so animated them, an art of theurgy that Augustine would attack in the City of God. The other is the Lament for Egypt, a sorrowing prophecy that the holy wisdom and worship of the land will be driven out and the country left desolate, among the most haunting religious writing to survive from late antiquity.

The Hermetic afterlife. The Greek treatises were lost to the Latin West, save theAsclepius, and survived in Byzantium until a manuscript reached Florence. In 1463 Cosimo de' Medici ordered Marsilio Ficino to set aside his translation of Plato and render the recovered Corpus Hermeticum first, so certain was the age of its supreme antiquity. From Ficino it poured into Renaissance Neoplatonism, into the dignity-of-man humanism, into the natural magic of the period, into the infinite living cosmos of Giordano Bruno, and into the long tradition of Western esotericism, alchemy, and theosophy that continues into the present day.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Read now, the Hermetica are a serious body of Greco-Egyptian religious philosophy on God, the cosmos, and the divinizing of the human soul, not a mere curiosity of the occult, and one of the great channels by which a Platonic and mystical vision of human dignity and cosmic unity entered modern thought. They drew on the Platonism of Plato, the cosmos of the Timaeus and the soul's ascent of the Phaedrus, and breathed the same air as the Neoplatonism of Plotinus; Marsilio Ficino translated them and made them a cornerstone of Renaissance philosophy; Giordano Bruno built upon them his daring vision of an infinite and living universe; and their image of the human as a great miracle stands at the head of Pico della Mirandola's oration. The dream they carry, that the soul is kindred to the divine and can ascend to know its source, has never left the Western imagination.