Who was Hermes Trismegistus, and did Hermes really exist?

Hermes Trismegistus, “Hermes the thrice-greatest”, is the name the Greeks of Egypt gave to a blend of their god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth, god of writing and wisdom, and the author to whom the so-called “Hermetic” writings are attributed. As a person, there is no evidence that Hermes existed: the texts bearing the name are written in Greek, most of them in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, according to Wikipedia.¹ The previous article told how Ficino interrupted a translation of Plato to translate these texts, believing them far older. Here is what ancient authors said of Hermes, which I read in Latin, what the first of the Hermetic books says, which I read in Greek, and how the legend was taken apart in 1614.

Who was Hermes Trismegistus?

According to Wikipedia, the Greeks of Ptolemaic Egypt identified their god Hermes, messenger and interpreter, with Thoth, and worshipped the two as one in Thoth's temple in the city they called Hermopolis. The epithet seems to come from a title of Thoth himself found in the temple of Esna, “Thoth the great, the great, the great”, and it is attested in writing as early as 172 BCE, in the minutes of an ibis cult near Memphis.¹ In other words: before being an author, Hermes Trismegistus was a god with a title.

Five Mercuries: what Cicero says

The first explanation I read is Cicero's, in On the Nature of the Gods, from 45 BCE. Discussing how much the stories about the gods contradict each other, Cicero counts five Mercuries (Mercury is the Latin name of Hermes), and of the fifth says that this one is worshipped at Pheneus, in Arcadia, “who is said to have killed Argus, and for that reason to have fled to Egypt and given the Egyptians their laws and letters: the Egyptians call him Theyt”, and they name the first month of their year after Theyt.² Cicero does not believe it: it is told as an example of how little is known.

A very ancient man: Lactantius

Some 350 years later Lactantius, a Christian author, takes that passage of Cicero and turns it into something else. Of the fifth Mercury, Lactantius writes: “Although a man, he was nevertheless most ancient and most learned in every kind of knowledge, so that his knowledge of many things and arts gave him the surname Trismegistus.” And adds that this Mercury wrote many books on divine matters, asserting the majesty of a single God, called “God and father”, who has no name because God is one.³ For Lactantius, Hermes is a very ancient pagan sage who had already glimpsed Christian truth.

After Moses: Augustine

Augustine, in the early 5th century, dates Hermes with the Bible in hand. The City of God says that philosophy flourished in Egypt “about the times of Mercury whom they called Trismegistus, long before the sages and philosophers of Greece, but yet after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and even after Moses himself”: in Moses's time lived Atlas, the great astronomer, maternal grandfather of an elder Mercury, “of whom that Mercury Trismegistus was the grandson”.⁴ Augustine had read Hermes, too, and disliked the reading: The City of God quotes the Asclepius, a Hermetic dialogue preserved in Latin, in which Hermes explains that humans know how to “make gods” by drawing spirits into statues: “so man is the maker of the gods who are in the temples”. Augustine condemns it as idolatry.⁴

Is Hermes Trismegistus in the Bible?

No. Augustine places Hermes in biblical chronology, but the Bible does not mention Hermes. According to Wikipedia, Islamic tradition identified Hermes with the prophet Idris, whom Muslims in turn identified with the Enoch of Genesis, although the Qur'an does not name Hermes; and the Persian astrologer Abu Maʿshar, in the 9th century, explained the “thrice” with three different Hermeses: one in Egypt, one in Babylon and a third, the teacher of alchemy.¹ I did not read Abu Maʿshar.

What the Poimandres itself says

The first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum is called Poimandres, and I read it in the Greek of Gustav Parthey's edition (Berlin, 1854). It begins: “Once, when I had begun to think about the things that are and my thought had soared high, while my bodily senses were held down like those of someone heavy with sleep after too much food or after weariness, I seemed to see someone enormous, beyond all measure, calling my name.” The narrator asks who it is, and the figure answers: “I am Poimandres, the mind of sovereignty” (Ἐγὼ μέν, φησίν, εἰμὶ ὁ Ποιμάνδρης, ὁ τῆς αὐθεντίας νοῦς).⁵

The curious thing is what is missing. In the text of the treatise, the name Hermes does not appear once: the narrator speaks in the first person and is never introduced. “Hermes” is in the title, “of Hermes the thrice-greatest”, and in the notes a reader wrote in the margins of one of the manuscripts, which Parthey records. One of them explains the surname like this: “this Hermes was called Trismegistus because he said that God has three powers but one substance; these powers are mind, word, spirit: three without beginning, one godhead”.⁵ It is a Trinitarian, Christian explanation.

Casaubon, 1614: “the mere invention of a half-Christian”

In 1614 the scholar Isaac Casaubon published in London a book against the Annals of Cardinal Baronius, and in it, in passing, took Hermes apart. I read it in Latin, in the images of the pages. Casaubon writes that “the whole book which has been circulating for some centuries under the name of Mercurius Trismegistus” is a pseudepigraphon, a falsely attributed work, “being the mere invention of some Christian, or, to put it better, of a half-Christian” (Christiani alicuius, vel vt dicam melius, semichristiani merum figmentum).⁶

The arguments are those of an attentive reader. That the book contains no Egyptian doctrine, but doctrine “partly Greek, drawn from the books of Plato and the Platonists, and very often in their very words, and partly Christian, drawn from the sacred books”. That Poimandres, the “Shepherd”, is Christ, who in John's Gospel says “I am the good shepherd”, and that when Poimandres says “that light is I, mind, your god” and calls the Word “son of God”, no Christian needs to be told where that comes from. And a proof from style: “the very first sentence is an open imitation of Xenophon”.⁶ I checked: Xenophon's Cyropaedia begins “It once occurred to us…” (Ἔννοιά ποθ’ ἡμῖν ἐγένετο), and the Poimandres, “It having once occurred to me…” (Ἐννοίας μοί ποτε γενομένης).⁵⁷

And one sentence that says a lot about the method: “who this Mercury was, or when he lived, I omit to ask here”.⁶ Casaubon did not need to know whether Hermes existed to know that those books were not Hermes's.

Was Casaubon right?

About the date, yes; about the rest, only in part. According to Wikipedia, summarising current scholarship, the treatises of the Corpus date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, written by unknown authors, probably Greeks, with a mixture of Platonism and Stoicism and Jewish and perhaps Persian influences; they are not a Christian invention. And in 1945 three Hermetic texts translated into Coptic turned up at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, among them one unknown until then; building on them, scholars such as Jean-Pierre Mahé have shown more continuity with Egyptian culture than had been thought.¹ Nothing indicates there was a sage called Hermes in the time of Moses, but the Hermetic books are not a mere forgery either: they are Greek texts written in Egypt. I did not read those studies.

And the seven laws of Hermes?

They are not in the Corpus Hermeticum. The “seven principles” (“the All is Mind”, “as above, so below”, “everything vibrates”…) come from The Kybalion, a book published in 1908, which is the subject of the next article on the reading path.

What I could not read

I read in Latin the passages of Cicero (On the Nature of the Gods III.56), Lactantius (Divine Institutes I.6) and Augustine (City of God VIII.23-24 and XVIII.39), and in Greek the Poimandres with Parthey's notes; of Casaubon, pages 74-77 and 87 of the 1614 edition. I did not read the other treatises of the Corpus, the whole Asclepius, the Nag Hammadi texts, Abu Maʿshar or Ficino's translation. The temple of Esna, the ibis cult, Idris, Nag Hammadi, the dates of the Corpus and the view of today's scholars come from Wikipedia.

What we do with this

The name of this project, Anima Mundis, comes from the same tradition that read Hermes as a most ancient sage. Casaubon teaches something useful to us: a text is judged by what it says and how it says it, not by the name in its title. The Observatory tries to do the same: show only what can be counted.