Hermes Trismegistus: Who Wrote the Hermetic Books?
The "thrice-great" Egyptian sage, part Thoth and part Hermes, credited with the books behind alchemy and Renaissance magic.
Hermes Trismegistus, "thrice-great Hermes," is a legendary sage born from the Greek fusion of Hermes with Egypt's Thoth. The Hermetic texts under his name were written around 100 to 300 CE.
Hermes Trismegistus, "thrice-great Hermes," grew out of Greek and Egyptian culture in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, where Greeks identified their god Hermes with Thoth. By the Roman period he had become less a god than a primeval human sage, the author of books of wisdom, astrology, magic and alchemy. The epithet thrice-great echoes Egyptian praise titles of Thoth.
The core surviving texts are the Corpus Hermeticum, a set of Greek dialogues, and the Asclepius, preserved in Latin. The first treatise, Poimandres, describes a vision in which divine Mind reveals the creation of the cosmos and how the soul can rise back through the planetary spheres. The Asclepius calls Egypt "the image of heaven" and foretells a time when the gods will abandon it.
In 1463 Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin for Cosimo de' Medici, who had him set aside Plato to do it. Renaissance thinkers believed Hermes was an ancient contemporary of Moses. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed from the Greek style that the texts were written in the Christian era, a blow to their prestige.
Medieval Arabic writers identified Hermes with the prophet Idris and with Enoch, and some described three Hermeses, the first living before the Flood. For many readers today he remains the bridge between a lost primeval wisdom, Egypt, and the Western esoteric tradition. His name still gives us the word hermetic, as in hermetically sealed.
Cosimo de' Medici had Ficino pause his translation of Plato so that Hermes could be translated first.
Scholars date the Hermetic texts to the Roman era and see them as Greek philosophy with Egyptian coloring, not as works of an ancient Egyptian author.
