Of all the stories history offers of ancient knowledge lost, the story of the Library of Alexandria is perhaps the most dramatic. Called a Museum, in the truest sense of the word as the seat or shrine of the Muses, it was really more of a university, with many scholars invited to study their great repository of texts. Built in 306 BCE as one of the flagship projects of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, Ptolemy appointed scholars to live in and work there and sent groups all over the Mediterranean to acquire texts for the library. Eventually, they even demanded that all ships mooring at Alexandria surrender any scrolls they were carrying to be copied. In this way, they accumulated, by some reckonings, as many as half a million papyrus scrolls in the library at Alexandria. They set about comparing and emending all known copies of Homer’s epics, work that resulted in the versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have inherited today. Under chief librarian Eratosthenes, that learned bane of all flat-earthers who figured out a simple proof of the Earth’s curvature in antiquity, the library secured ancient official versions of the great tragedies of Athens by offering a huge sum of money as security, a deposit they afterward chose to forfeit so they could keep the culturally invaluable, and some might say stolen, texts at Alexandria. And aside from literature, the vast breadth of scientific knowledge housed in one place at Alexandria has led some to speculate that if it weren’t for the destruction of the library, mankind would have made certain major breakthroughs in steam power and chemistry far sooner. Thus the supposed destruction of the library at Alexandria goes hand in hand with the notion of a Dark Age after the fall of Rome, an idea that has been challenged by historians for several reasons that I have discussed before. Certainly the loss of the library at Alexandria dealt a blow to the development of human knowledge and achievement, but was it as dramatic as destruction by fire? It does appear that the library may have been burned at some point. Julius Caesar, during his involvement with the war between Cleopatra and her brother, set fire to his enemy’s fleet, a fire that is said to have spread through the city and might have been the culprit. However there were actually two libraries at Alexandria, one, a “daughter” library, at the Temple of Serapis, so even if some or all of one library had burned, the repository in the other may have survived. A few centuries later, however, in 391 CE, a Christian bishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, destroyed the Temple at Serapis and turned it into a Christian church. It is said that non-Christian texts were likely destroyed, just as the next Patriarch, Cyril, had the pagan head librarian, Hypatia, pulled from her chariot and murdered with broken pieces of tile. Thus, by this version of events, early Christians saw to it that the knowledge of the ancient, pagan world was destroyed forever. Yet another version of events has it that the library remained intact until 642 CE—if not at the razed Temple of Serapis, then perhaps at the main repository, having escaped the fires set by Julius Caesar or having simply been built back up over the course of centuries. It was in this 7th century that the Muslim Caliph Omar conquered the city of Alexandria. Since by his reckoning, the books at Alexandria either contradicted the Koran, making them heretical, or agreed with the Koran, making them redundant, he ordered all the books burned to heat bathwater. It was said it took half a year to burn everything the library held. But the problem is that this story is a fictitious libel against Muslims that did not appear until the age of the Crusades. What is more likely is that, rather than a sudden and dramatic destruction of ancient knowledge at Alexandria, there was a gradual decline, influenced by social changes. And whatever ancient works remained in 642 CE, the Arabs that looted Alexandria likely carried them home, for there is one topic, explored in works attributed to one particular Egyptian author, that reappeared in the Middle Ages in Arab literature. That topic, was magic, and like the Library Alexandria, it had much to do with ancient knowledge lost.

A depiction of the Library of Alexandria. Public domain image.

Before reading this post, I would recommend reading last year’s post on Zoroaster, the First Magus, the first entry in my Encyclopedia Grimoria. And as I mentioned in the previous post, you may also want to listen to the first Apocryphal Catechism episode, Gnostic Genesis, as some talk of Gnosticism will come up as well. But my post on the idea that ancient Persian Zoroaster was the originator of all magic, and that priests of the Zoroastrian faith, or magi, were responsible for spreading the knowledge of magic serves as a preamble to this continuation of the history of magic. As that piece concluded, I wrote about the pseudepigrapha bearing the name Zoroaster, the books of magical spells that scholars have examined closely and argue originated in Hellenistic Egypt rather than ancient Persia. Thus now we continue our search for the source of all magic in Egypt, where the Library of Alexandria likely housed the works of one Hermes Trismegistus, a mysterious and towering figure in the history of magic. Even his name, Hermes, is for many synonymous with magic and that particular field of magic, alchemy. When one says that a thing is “hermetically sealed,” for example, it’s hyperbole indicating that something is very tightly, almost magically sealed. The history of the so-called Ars Hermetica, or Hermetic art of magic, is one of ancient knowledge supposedly lost in a Dark Age and then found again in the Renaissance, although this too, like most conceptions of a Dark Age, isn’t entirely accurate, as it will be seen that Hermetic texts were written about throughout the Middle Ages by both Western Christian writers and Arab scholars alike. However, as the word Renaissance indicates, there was certainly a resurgence of interest in Hermes Trismegistus during the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 1460s, one Marsilio Ficino was tasked by the Medicis with translating ancient Greek works into Latin, including the works of Plato and the work of the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus. In the early 1500s, working with Arab texts, the Swiss philosopher Paracelsus also became aware of the Corpus Hermetica, or the works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. However, working as they were from different source material, the Hermes of Ficino and the Hermes of Paracelsus were entirely different. To Ficino and Italian humanists, Hermes Trismegistus was a philosopher and perhaps even a prophet, for his conception of god and cosmology could be interpretated as complementary to Christian doctrine. But for Paracelsus, Hermes was the heir of a primeval knowledge, a preserver of hidden truth, the transmitter of the art of sorcery and alchemy to mankind.

So who was Hermes Trismegistus? This is the principal question with which we must wrestle really for the rest of the episode. According to Ficino, he was a man who lived in Egypt who was called Trismegistus by the Greeks, meaning “thrice-great,” because he had proven himself to be the greatest of men in three ways. He was first the greatest of philosophers, which earned him a place in the priesthood, where he then proved himself the greatest of priests, thereby earning him a kingship, in which role he became renowned as the greatest of Egyptian kings. To Ficino, this figure was not so ancient as Zoroaster or even Moses, and he saw in Hermetic philosophy a monotheistic tradition and hints of a foreknowledge of Christ and Christian doctrines like the Trinity. However, Paracelsus, working with Arab texts found a different history for the figure. By this telling, Hermes was “thrice-great” because he was three different men of greatness. First, he was the grandson of Adam and Eve, called Idris by the Muslims and Enoch by Jews. This first Hermes was the originator of astrology, rather than Zoroaster—or perhaps was one and the same as Zoroaster?—and was also a skilled builder, having presided over the construction of the pyramids. Although there will be further clarification of the name Hermes, by this telling, Hermes was only a title, from a Syrian word meaning “the knowing one,” for he had been the heir of a primeval knowledge of magic and science, which he thereafter preserved by carving it into the walls of a temple before the Great Flood. The next Hermes or “knowing one,” lived in Babylon after the flood and revived the primeval knowledge, for example teaching mathematics to Pythagoras. Finally, the third great Hermes according to the Arab texts studied by Paracelsus was the Egyptian figure who had brought forth the knowledge of alchemy, and this Hermes’ writings preserved the antediluvian knowledge that had allowed those before the flood to live to very advanced ages: knowledge of a little something called the Philosopher’s Stone. This ancient knowledge, according to alchemical texts, was not invented by Hermes but rather discovered by him. Some stories have it that he found it inscribed on a tablet in a cave, and likewise, rather than simply transmitting his secret knowledge to future generations in books that could easily be translated, he engraved his alchemical secrets onto tablets and hid them to be discovered only by the worthy.

The monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten. Public domain image.

These are not the only ideas that have emerged regarding the historical identity of Hermes Trismegistus, and a brief look at another may provide give some further depth to the Hermetic legend. A Coptic account has it that there were several Hermeses, and that the first had built a city in Egypt with a temple to the sun. Such claims, along with the strongly monotheistic teachings in Hermetic religious writings, has led to speculation that Hermes Trismegistus was actually none other than the Pharoah Akhenaten who had famously rejected the Egyptian pantheon of gods to establish a monotheistic religion worshipping the sun, a deity he called Aten. As it has been said of the first Hermes, Akhenaten built great temples to Aten in a solar city devoted to the worship of this Sun-Disk. Some enthusiasts of ancient alien contact have suggested that Akhenaten, who claimed to be the sole arbiter between a disk-shaped deity and man and was depicted as having an elongated skull, may have been some kind of extra-terrestrial or human hybrid, despite the fact that the sun was always seen as a disk shape in the sky and that such head shapes could easily be explained by a medical syndrome like hydrocephaly or a cultural practice like infant head binding. A more compelling but no less peculiar theory about Akhenaten was that he was one and the same as Moses, or at least that Moses was a follower of Akhenaten who applied Akhenaten’s monotheistic doctrines in creating the Hebrew religion. This was something of a pet theory of Sigmund Freud’s, and those who subscribe to it will point out that the word for the Hebrew God, Adonai, may even be derived from the name of Akhenaten’s solar disk, Aten. If some connection can be made between Akhenaten and Moses, we find even stronger parallels with Hermes Trismegistus, who according to much Hermetic tradition was a contemporary of Moses. And more than this, both Hermes and Moses were said to have revealed divine knowledge to the world in the form of engraved tablets. However, Moses is consistently portrayed as a separate personage in Hermetic texts, and too many elements of Moses’s story must be changed to identify him with the pharaoh Akhenaten. Furthermore, Akhenaten only reigned about 16 years, from 1352 to 1336 BCE, whereupon his son, King Tut, promptly reverted Egypt to the worship of its former pantheon, making it seem less likely that he was responsible for so vast a corpus as the collection of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, or even that he would have inspired such a widespread tradition. So perhaps it’s just that the stories of these two figures contributed useful elements to the writers of the legend of Hermes Trismegistus.

The secrets of Hermetic knowledge are then said to have been transmitted to future generations in a like fashion. Certain apocryphal traditions speak of Noah receiving from an angel divine ancient knowledge concerning building practices that helped him construct the ark and concerning medicine so that he might preserve it for the benefit of mankind during the flood. This knowledge passed to Noah, according to one version, in the form of a tablet that had formerly been discovered by Enoch, grandson of Adam, in a cave. The tablet was an engraved sapphire, which Noah stored in a golden chest that would eventually be handed down to King Solomon. Another story has it that the antediluvian secrets of Hermes Trismegistus were given by Aristotle to Alexander the Great, or that Alexander found them in a cave, and that he thereafter hid them inside a temple wall, where they were later discovered by an Abbasid caliph and thereby entered the Arabic esoteric tradition. Yet another tale has it that Apollonius of Tyana discovered them when he found a hidden tomb beneath the feet of a statue of Hermes Trismegistus. Inside, he found a very old Hermes himself, seated upon a throne of gold, holding an engraved emerald tablet on his lap, with a book at his feet that revealed the “Mystery of Creation.” This last is from a Hermetic text titled “Mystery of Creation” attributed to Apollonius himself, or Balinus. This makes for an even more dramatic notion considering some of the claims made about Apollonius, an itinerant neo-Pythagorean teacher who was a contemporary of Jesus Christ. It was said Apollonius’s mother was visited by a heavenly being who told her her son would be divine, and that Apollonius healed the ill and resurrected the dead. After his enemies schemed to put him to death, his followers claimed he reappeared and then ascended. These parallels have led many to suggest he and Christ were the same person. And if you combined this notion with the idea that he achieved his perfection because of his discovery of this emerald tablet, then it suggests Christ himself was nothing but an adept of the Hermetic arts. However, most scholars see these stories about Apollonius as fictions spread by the later hagiographer Philostratus, who cites a disciple of Apollonius named Damis as his source, a disciple that appears to have been wholly invented by Philostratus. And regardless of the legitimacy of the Apollonius/Christ parallels, the later appearance of the Hermetic text attributed to Apollonius indicates it was pseudepigrapha, written by a pseudo-Apollonius.

Wandering philosopher Apollonius of Tyana. Public domain image.

But the legend of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus would endure and be taken very seriously by such great minds as Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, John Dee, and Isaac Newton. According to an early Latin translation of a Hermetic texts that purported to give the entire content of the Emerald Tablet, it reads as follows:

I speak not fictitious things, but what is true and most certain. What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. And as all things were produced by the mediation of one Being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation. Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind carries it in its belly, its nurse is the earth. It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole world. Its power is perfect if it be changed into earth. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment. Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then again descend to the earth, and unite together the powers of things superior and things inferior. Thus you will obtain the glory of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far away from you. This thing is the fortitude of all fortitude, because it overcomes all subtle things, and penetrates every solid thing. Thus were all things created. Thence proceed wonderful adaptations which are produced in this way. Therefore am I called Hermes Trismegistos, possessing the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I had to say concerning the operation of the Sun is completed.

Whether or not it originated on a tablet of emerald, a few clear motifs can be discerned within this text. First, we find here the famous Hermetic saying “As above, so below.” This can simply be interpreted as an explanation of the central concept of astrology, that the movements of the planets above correspond to what happens here on Earth. At the end, we have a vague indication that the name “Thrice-Great” refers to his knowledge of three different aspects of the world’s philosophy, although it doesn’t clarify what those are. Much of its talk of the oneness of all things and the one Being that originated them could be construed as reflecting the Pythagorean concept of the Monad, which made its way into Neoplatonic and Gnostic cosmologies. In fact, some scholars see a lot in common between Gnosticism and Hermeticism, and it should be noted that some of the oldest Hermetic texts we have were unearthed alongside Gnostic scrolls at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

However, the text of the Emerald Tablet is not generally looked at by Hermeticists as a philosophical or religious text only, but rather as encrypted instructions for creating or revealing the Philosopher’s Stone. A common view of Hermetical writings is that they are encoded with metaphorical and symbolic language, for the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone could destroy humanity if it fell into the wrong hands as immortality and unlimited wealth would ruin men of low character. Indeed, alchemical texts are so packed with cryptic phrasing that from the name of one particular writer, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, we have derived the word “gibberish.” In the Emerald Tablet text, we do see some indication that it may have been hinting at the steps in some process with the verbs “separate” and “unite,” but the Magnum Opus or “great work” of finding the Philosopher’s Stone would always be left up to trial and error and guesswork. It was something like a bunch of literary critics picking apart a classic poem and each coming up with a wildly different interpretation of its themes. It came to be commonly believed that one would first have to isolate the prima materia, or the first matter, and change it through a spiritual transmutation process. But ideas for how to find prima materia and transmute it varied wildly, such that in 1669, the German alchemist Hennig Brandt thought he could isolate it by boiling down more than a thousand gallons of little boys’ urine, uniting the resulting tarry material with sand and charcoal, and heating it at as high a temperature as he could manage. This resulted in white vapor drops that condensed into a waxy, glowing material that he called “light bearer,” or phosphorous. Thus the mystery of alchemical texts resulted in just the kind of unusual experimentation needed for advances in chemistry to be made. And one could argue that this was the Magnum Opus all along, the struggle for the advancement of science symbolized as a search for mystical treasure able to improve the human condition.

A 17th century depiction of the Emerald Tablet. Public Domain image.

But, the Hermeticism inherited and propagated by Ficino in Italy is difficult to reconcile with the Hermeticism of Paracelsus and other alchemists. Working from entirely different sources, the two appear like entirely separate traditions, with Italian Hermetic texts portraying Hermes as a great teacher and prophet who invented the writing system of hieroglyphics and instituted the religious practices of the culture, a religion that seemed curiously compatible with Christianity, despite Egypt’s polytheism. It was these monotheistic teachings that may have caused Hermetic writings to have survived the purging of pagan texts from the library of Alexandria. Indeed, Clement of Alexandria, a Christian convert teaching in the early 200s CE, sought a way to unite pagan belief with Christian theology, suggesting that beliefs preceding the birth of Christ were not evil but rather served the purpose of preparing pagans for Christ’s coming. And after him, Lactantius, the Christian advisor to Constantine I, would explicitly argue that the Corpus Hermetica was congruous with Christian doctrine because of its description of a single creator god that is unfathomable, of mankind having a dual nature of spirit and flesh and that we might transcend to take part in the divine. In the syncretistic hotbed of Hellenistic Egypt, the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus seem to have appealed to many groups, Christians, Gnostics, Neoplatonists. But by how much did they predate such belief systems? According to Clement of Alexandria, who counted the number of ancient sacred books attributed to Hermes Trismegistus carried by Egyptians in their processions, there were about 36 books, but the further back into antiquity scholars look, the more texts are attributed to him. An author named Seleucus has been cited as numbering Hermetic texts at 20,000, and Manetho, an Egyptian priest figure from the third century BCE whose own existence has been debated, is credited as writing that there were more than 36,000 texts written by Hermes Trismegistus. Manetho also, however, does not call Hermes Trismegistus a man but rather a god. And it is here that we find the final origin story of Hermes Trismegistus, another story of syncretism.

Writings attributed to Manetho identify Hermes as the Egyptian god Thoth, which would trace the origin of this legend all the way back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom, to more than 3000 year before the common era, when a god portrayed as a man with the head of an ibis named Thoth invented mathematics and writing, regulated the movement of the stars, saw the future and served as an oracle, conveyed the dead to the nether realm, and generally acted as the arbiter between mankind and the gods. Millennia later, when the Greek and Egyptian cultures clashed within Alexander’s empire, and afterward, during the Hellenistic period, Greeks attempted to understand and explain the beliefs of other cultures in terms of their own culture, a process called interpretatio graeca. In other words, when hearing the pantheon of Egyptian gods described to them, they suggested that, because of similarities in their characters or powers, they were analogues or even one and the same with the goods of the Greek pantheon. So the sun god Ra must have been one and the same as their Apollo. By this reasoning, Thoth, a trickster and conductor of the dead with magical powers, must be the same as their god Hermes, the messenger of the gods. This is the understanding of Hermes Trismegistus that scholars of antiquity have settled on. Through the process of interpretatio graeca and syncretism generally, the god Thoth, inventor of language and astrology and bringer of ancient knowledge, came to be known as Hermes and thereafter as Hermes Trismegistus, and with a millennia worth of texts written in his name, he eventually came to be thought of as a flesh and blood man who had taken quill to papyrus and recorded his wisdom for all futurity. By this understanding, then, the many thousands of texts supposedly written by Hermes Trismegistus were actually written by any number of ancient scholars or priests, and perhaps not as pseudepigrapha as we would understand it, in the sense of falsely claiming your work was written by some other famous or legendary figure. Rather, more like the Bible, which was written by men but claimed to be the literal Word of God written through them, placing the name of Hermes Trismegistus on a text could have been a way of asserting your work’s canonical value or divinity.

The Egyptian God Thoth. Image courtesy the Brooklyn Museum, no known copyright restrictions.

So how can we reconcile the religious texts of ancient Egypt attributed to Thoth/Hermes and the magical texts of alchemy attributed to what seems to be the same figure? If we search for instructions of alchemy in texts that are known to be ancient, we find no evidence of the Magnum Opus or other alchemical references. Indeed, there is no evidence that any of the Arab works of Hermetica from which alchemical lore and practices derive were genuinely ancient texts. However, the first known alchemist, Zosimos of Panopolis, a Greek Gnostic working at the end of the 3rd century did make reference to Hermes Trismegistus, but only as a source of spiritual wisdom, not as a teacher or practitioner of alchemy. Certainly there are ancient Egyptian works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that discuss astrology, which we have addressed before as a form of magic, in that it is oracular, but much of the Hermetic work on astrology is more concerned with astral medicine, with the movements of planets and configurations of stars corresponding to certain ailments and whether the ill will recover, and the selection of plants for treatment likewise being closely connected to what is seen in the heavens. Astral medicine may have been of great interest to many an alchemist, who were often also physicians, such as Paracelsus himself. Perhaps, though, this relationship between the heavens and the creation of poultices and tinctures may have over a very long time evolved into the more recognizable notions of alchemy. Certainly the most wild magical practice discussed in ancient Hermetic texts, that of creating living statues, literally ensouling an inanimate figure with a spirit that can talk to you and help you, sounds very similar to the later claims of alchemists that they could create a miniature living person, called a homunculus.

Interestingly, in the 17th century, French scholar Isaac Casaubon looked at the corpus hermetica and instead of remarking how these ancient Egyptian works were surprisingly consistent with Neoplatonic notions about the creation of the Earth, or how remarkably compatible their monotheistic doctrines were with Christianity, he argued that these aspects of the texts proved they were frauds. Rather than ancient pagan works that seemed to hint at Christian concepts like the Trinity or even prophesy the coming of Christ, Casaubon said they must be forgeries written during the time Christ or the dawn of Christianity in an effort to evangelize to pagans. He looked at the language, arguing that certain words used or certain figures referenced in the texts were anachronistic and proved they could not have been written at the time of Moses, as it was claimed. And while many have disagreed with Casaubon, his thesis makes sense not only for the Christian theological elements found in Hermetica, but also the Gnostic, and the Neoplatonic concepts reflected therein. Moreover, it helps to explain why the Arab alchemical texts translated into German appear not to have any connection to the ancient works. Much as we saw with Zoroaster, the name Hermes Trismegistus became an easy way to lend authority and authenticity to a work. So with a history going all the way back to the most ancient gods of Egypt, and through the Hellenistic world developing a human persona whose name would thereafter be misused in pseudepigrapha or outright forgery to proselytize and create the false impression of ancient origin, we find the figure of Hermes Trismegistus no less indistinct than that of Zoroaster, and in seeking out the origins of magic, we again find nothing but uncertainty and dubious legend.

A Renaissance-era depiction of a Hermeticist. Public domain image.

Hermes Trismegistus, Father of Alchemy (an Encyclopedia Grimoria volume)

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