Hermes Trismegistus

Every tradition has a founder, and the Hermetic tradition has one of the strangest. Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice Great, was revered for some fifteen centuries as an Egyptian sage who had written down the wisdom of the world in the time of Moses. He was not a historical person. He was a god who became a man in the imagination of his readers, and then an author to whom anonymous writers gave their books. To understand the tradition that bears his name, it helps to see how he was made.

Thoth of Egypt

In Egyptian religion Thoth was the god of writing, reckoning and knowledge. He was pictured as an ibis, or as a man with the head of an ibis, and sometimes as a baboon. He measured time by the moon, kept the records of the gods, and wrote down the verdict when the heart of the dead was weighed against the feather of truth. Scribes regarded him as their patron. He was also a master of magic, because in Egyptian thought the right word, correctly spoken and correctly written, had power in itself.

His chief temple stood in the city the Egyptians called Khemenu. The Greeks called it Hermopolis, the city of Hermes, which tells us that by the time they named it the two gods had already been joined.

Hermes of Greece

The Greek Hermes was a god of crossings. He carried messages between gods and mortals, guided the souls of the dead to the underworld, and watched over roads, boundaries, travelers and trade. He was credited with the invention of the lyre and of many clever devices, and his staff, the caduceus with its two serpents, became the badge of heralds. He was quick, inventive and not always honest. Ancient writers connected his name with the Greek word for interpretation, hermeneia, and whether or not the connection is sound, it fits him well.

Greeks who traded and settled in Egypt met Thoth and recognized in him their own god of messages, learning and cunning. By the fifth century BCE the historian Herodotus already called Thoth's city the city of Hermes, and after Alexander of Macedon conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, under the Ptolemaic kings, the identification became settled. The Egyptian god of writing and the Greek god of crossing were henceforth one: a divine scribe who could also pass between worlds.

Why thrice great

The title Trismegistus, thrice greatest, is a Greek and Latin rendering of an Egyptian formula. Egyptian scribes expressed the highest degree by repetition, and in the last centuries before the common era Thoth was praised in temple documents as great, great, great. Greek texts written in Egypt translated the phrase, and by the first centuries of the common era Hermes Trismegistus had become a name.

Later readers, who no longer knew the Egyptian background, supplied explanations of their own. Marsilio Ficino, who translated the Hermetic treatises into Latin, repeated an older tradition that Hermes was called thrice great because he was at once the greatest philosopher, the greatest priest and the greatest king. Christian readers were struck by the number and supposed that he had glimpsed the Trinity. The Emerald Tablet gives a reason of its own in its closing lines, where Hermes speaks in his own person.

Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes

The three parts of the philosophy

The tablet does not say what the three parts are. Commentators have filled the gap in several ways, and one scheme has become standard in modern writing. It divides the wisdom of Hermes into three operations, each with its own field of work. The tablet's last line, which calls its teaching the operation of the Sun, supplies the name of the first.

The scheme is late and tidy, and it should not be read back into the tablet as though Hermes had said it. But it is a fair description of what the philosophical and technical Hermetica actually cover, and of what the Renaissance meant by Hermetic learning: one understanding of the cosmos put to work in the furnace, in the reading of the heavens, and in the worship and ascent of the soul. The three are not separate crafts. They are one knowledge applied at three levels.

One Hermes or several

Once Hermes was thought of as a man, his life had to be written, and the result was a crowded family tree. Writers in Arabic by the ninth century described three Hermes. The first lived before the Flood, was identified with the patriarch Enoch, and carved the sciences in stone so that they would survive the waters. The second lived in Babylon after the Flood and restored learning. The third lived in Egypt and wrote on alchemy and the arts. Versions of this account passed into Latin and gave medieval readers a way of explaining why so many different books bore one name.

In the Latin West the question was rather when he lived. Some early Christian writers had quoted him as a pagan prophet who foresaw their own teaching, and later readers made him a contemporary of Moses or placed him a little after. Renaissance scholars set him near the head of a line of ancient theologians that ran through Orpheus and Pythagoras to Plato. In the pavement of the cathedral at Siena, laid in 1488, he appears as a venerable figure in a robe and a tall hat, handing a book to two men, above an inscription that calls him Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, the contemporary of Moses.

The edifice began to fall in 1614, when the Hermetic treatises were shown to belong to the early centuries of the common era, though the verdict took decades to be generally accepted. The story is told in our history of the tradition.

The author of books

Egyptian priests had long attributed their sacred books to Thoth, as the god of writing, and the Greek world inherited the habit. Around the year 200 Clement of Alexandria described a procession of Egyptian priests carrying the books of Hermes, which he numbered at forty two: thirty six containing the whole philosophy of the Egyptians, and six on medicine. A century later the philosopher Iamblichus reported that one ancient authority credited Hermes with twenty thousand books and another with more than thirty six thousand.

Such numbers are not a claim about one man's industry. They express a conviction that all sacred learning flowed from a single divine source, and they explain why so many anonymous authors were content to write under his name. To write as Hermes was to place one's work within that stream, much as later alchemists signed their treatises with the names of famous masters. The writers of the Hermetica were not forgers in the modern sense. They were adding to a library that already belonged to the god.

What the figure means now

The modern student loses nothing by knowing that Hermes Trismegistus never lived. The figure remains useful, and in a sense it is more truthful than the legend. He stands for the meeting of cultures that produced the Hermetica: Egyptian temple religion, Greek philosophy and the mixed world of Roman Alexandria. He stands for translation, the carrying of meaning from one language and one level to another, which is what the whole tradition attempts. And he stands for a particular idea of the teacher, not as an authority to be obeyed but as a guide who, like the Hermes of the Greeks, leads the soul to a boundary and lets it cross on its own feet.

The treatises themselves make the same point. In the first of them the teacher is not Hermes but Mind, Poimandres, who appears in a vision to a seeker whom tradition has always identified with Hermes. Hermes is a pupil before he is a master, and the treatise ends with him sent out to teach others what he has received. That is the pattern the tradition asks of its students: to learn, to be changed by what is learned, and to pass it on.