The Late Antique synthesis
Hermes Trismegistus
A syncretic sage figure joining Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth, under whose name a body of philosophical and technical literature circulated.
- Dates
- no historical lifespan
- Dating
- legendary identity
The life
The writings survive; the sage to whom they are attributed does not belong to recoverable biography.
Place in the tradition
Renaissance readers believed the writings came from remote antiquity, and that supposed age gave Hermetism much of its prestige.
a note on the record
History and later legend
Hermes Trismegistus is a legendary author, not one historical person. The chronology therefore marks the period of the writings, which modern scholarship places in the Roman imperial world rather than remote Egyptian antiquity.
the written record
Principal works
-
mainly c. 100–300 CE
Corpus Hermeticum
Philosophical-religious dialogues on God, Mind, cosmos, humanity, rebirth and divine knowledge. Its central movement is inward and contemplative: humanity awakens to its divine origin through gnosis.
-
roughly 2nd–3rd centuries CE
Asclepius
A Hermetic dialogue surviving complete in Latin, containing cosmology, theology and the famous discussion of statues animated through divine or spiritual powers.
-
earliest secure forms medieval, probably Arabic
Emerald Tablet
A very short alchemical text that eventually produces the formula usually paraphrased as 'as above, so below'. Its legendary attribution to ancient Hermes is much older than the surviving evidence for the text itself.