Introduction

        One of the esoteric religious belief systems to come out of Hellenistic Greece was the Hermetic tradition that rose in the second and third centuries. A tremendous amalgam of many different ideas, some old and some new, this tradition is in a small way emblematic of religious practice in Hellenistic Greece. In order to more fully understand the religious ideas at work here several aspects of Hermeticism need to be examined. First, the Hermetic beliefs need to be established and understood through an analysis of hermetic texts.  Next, the religious syncretism and historical context that gave birth to the tradition will be looked at to give a contextual framework as to the origin of these ideas. Finally Hermeticism can be compared to one of its most similar seeming contemporaries, Gnostic Christianity.

Hermetic Belief

        While the Hermetic belief system is a very broad topic that could be an entire paper on its own, the central pieces that will be discussed in this section can be broken down into Hermetic cosmology, the duality of the soul and Nous with the material world and body, and the nature of salvation and rebirth in the tradition.

        The Hermetic creation story is revealed in the first chapter of the Corpus Hermeticum. This story establishes the origin of man and the soul and is crucial in defining the order of the world. According to the Poimandres (the title of Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum) the Nous of the supreme being shows to an unnamed human what the world looked like prior to the creation. There was a chaotic and watery darkness that was pierced by a fire. About this vision Poimandres says to the man, “ You saw in Nous the first form, which is prior to the beginning of the beginningless and endless.”(Salaman, 17) After this the man asks of Poimandres where the elements come from, to which he is told that the original Nous gave birth to the Word, another Nous. The Word then then created the world of the elements as well as creatures that were imbued with no intelligence(Nous) and could not speak. After this the Creator Nous created Man who was given the power to create. Descending to Earth, Man united with Nature, falling in love and becoming trapped in the world. In the process of creation 9 celestial planes are created, with man residing on the lowest planes, and the highest two (the eighth and ninth planes) being the domain of god. (23)

        This cosmology naturally leads to the split nature of man. Hermeticism is a dualistic faith that portrays the body of men and their interactions with the material world as being antagonistic to the soul. Because the original Man had gone to earth and united with nature he became different from all the other creatures of earth. In Book I of the Hermeticum, Poimandres says about man:

“For this reason, of all living being on earth, Man alone is double: mortal because of the body, immortal because of the real Man, For although being immortal and having authority over all, he suffers mortal things which are subject to destiny. Then, although above the harmony of the Cosmos, he has become a slave within it.”(Salaman, 20).

 Man has a dual nature that is totally unique in the cosmos. His true nature is enslaved to the desires and material nature of his body, fallen from his true place and under the influence of the lower 7 spheres of existence. In his book Hellenistic Religions Luther H. Martin notes that, “…acquisition of planetary characteristics by descending through their spheres  is an astrological principle that accounted for the influence of the planets over human existence. Hermeticism sought escape from the astrological claims of the planetary powers through practices that negated their influence. ”(149) In a way the true soul (Nous) of Man was at war with his current material circumstances.

        This duality in man, while a problem, does have a solution presented in the texts in the form of salvation through gnosis. In order to free oneself from the world, man has to learn of his true nature in order to be saved and reborn. Book XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum is a dialogue between a Disciple named Tat and Hermes. In this text Hermes tells Tat, “This kind of knowledge is not taught, O son, but through God it is remembered, whenever he wills.” (Salaman, 65) This remembrance is the gnosis that will free a soul from the bonds of the earth. In order to accomplish this, Hermes tells Tat that he must “Make idle the senses of the body and the spirit will be reborn.”(66) A crucial part of this salvation is the disconnection from the world of the senses. Another way that salvation is portrayed in the hermetic tradition is as the ascent through the spheres of existence. Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth is a dialogue where in a disciple asks Hermes to bring his mind into the Eighth and Ninth spheres of existence. Before their ascension Hermes and the disciple say a prayer that does a good job of capturing the essence of hermetic thought on duality and salvation, “And acknowledge the spirit that is in us. For from you the universe received soul. Save that which is in us and grant us the immortal wisdom.” (Robinson, 324) In the Eighth the seeker sees ascended souls and angels singing hymns to God in the ninth. (Robinson, 325) The order of the ascension is important to note, as first the traps of the material world must be cast off, then the soul can rise. (Mahé, 81). Salvation is possible to a hermetic by understanding the origin of the soul and learning to differentiate between what is important and what is trapping them on earth.

Religious Syncretism and the Hermetic Tradition

        A defining part of the nature and history of Hermeticism is it’s religious syncretism. Syncretism is defined as “the combination of different forms of belief or practice” which is exemplified in how the figure of Hermes Trismegistus came to be from the two disparate gods of the Greek Hermes, and the Egyptian Thoth. In addition to this though, Hermeticism is a syncretic tradition in general drawing from many ancient sources. Luther H. Martin notes in his book:

“The hermetic texts are often cited as examples of the extent of late Hellenistic syncretism, for they exhibit traits of magic, astrology, alchemy, Platonism and Stoicism, and the Mysteries, as well as Judaism and Gnostic thought. Such influences are not arbitrary borrowings but express systemic assumptions of the late Hellenistic age generally”(146)

Some of the syncretism between hermetic thought and  Gnostic thought will be examined later, but in this section the relationship between the Greek and Egyptian traditions that produced Hermes will be explained, and some of the history of the hermetic texts will be looked at.

        In antiquarian Greek thought, Hermes was the messenger of the gods, as well as being known as a trickster trickster (he was also the patron god of thieves). In addition to this, Hermes shuttled souls to the underworld, mixing between gods and men. (Ebeling,4-5) Thoth was an ancient Egyptian Ibis headed god. He invented writing and mathematics, allowing the Egyptian people and kingdom to flourish. Thoth also was the one who brought the souls of the dead to to the gods after the burial ritual. (Ebeling, 3-4) This similarity in the movement of souls between the upper worlds of life and death would certainly not have been lost on the ancient Greeks, as Ebeling says in his The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus:

“In the interpretatio graeca, foreign deities, including those of Egypt, were understood as equivalents of greek gods and goddesses; they were different in form, but identical in essence…In the fifth century, Herodotus wrote that Hermes and Thoth corresponded to each other, for both were considered to be tricksters, and sometimes even thieves, who, equipped with magical capabilities, were messengers of the gods and conductors of the dead.”(6).

This syncretic linkage would evolve from a mere joining of the two Gods into Hermes Trismegistus.

       In The Egyptian Hermes Garth Fowden indicates that the Hermes Trismegistus presented in the hermetica was viewed by the Greeks as having once been a mortal man, but who has been transformed by being in the presence of gods. “Hermes is a mortal who receives revelations of the divine world. and eventually himself achieves immortality through self-purification, but remains among men in order to reveal to unveil to them the secrets of the divine world.” (28) Hermes is then a sort of mix between god and man, a go between that can reveal truth and a sort of ascended form. Fowden also notes that by portraying Hermes as having been formerly a man, he can have a divine character while also maintaining a historical character that would remind the Greek reader of Socrates or Plato. This ambiguousness would have been considered a feature of the faith, not a problem. (28-29)

         This newly made Hermes Trismegistus then went on to be written about in the Corpus Hermeticum.  According to Martin, “The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of texts from the second and third centuries of our era that survived from a more extensive literature.”(146) These texts, while portrayed as dialogues with Hermes, were not widely believed to have been written by Hermes himself. These works were earlier Egyptian works that had been translated by Greek philosophers. (Ebeling,8) A quote that nicely frames this idea from Ebeling is that they were, “Egyptian-Hermetic doctrine in origin but Greek philosophy in form.” (8-9) Further emphasizing the Greek origin of the texts themselves, in the first chapter of her book, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Frances A. Yates says “…they were certainly not written in remotest antiquity by an all-wise Egyptian priest, as the Renaissance believed, but by various unknown authors, all probably Greeks, and they contain Popular Greek philosophy of the period.” The origin of Hermes Trismegistus is thus a syncretism of disparate traditions coming together to form something new, a common practice in the Hellenistic age.

Gnostic Christianity and Hermeticism

        One of the faiths that is most readily comparable to Hermeticism is Christian Gnosticism. Indeed when the large cache of Gnostic texts was found at the Nag Hammadi site, among them was a manuscript of The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, one of the Hermetic texts discussed earlier. (Martin, 137) Gnostics, like Hermetics, also identified as seekers of some inner truth. Jesus, in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, is quoted as saying, “let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds” (140) Much like the Hermetic idea of discovering an inner truth forgotten and blocked out by the material world, so too did Gnosticism promote the idea of “remembering one’s forgotten but original and true self.”(141) Like Hermeticism, gnosis was achieved when the seeker knew where they were in the cosmos, where they came from, and the nature of salvation and rebirth. (142)

        While Hermeticism and Gnosticism seem similar in general, they differ from each other in the specifics. The categories and analysis of these differences are laid out by Roelof van den Broek in “Gnosticism and Hermeticism in Antiquity”. In this piece, van den Broek lays out the frame work that Hermetics and Gnostics differ on their notions of god, the world, and mythology.

        While both Hermetics and Gnostics utilized negative theology to describe god, the Hermetics posit that god is knowable, at least in some small way, via the nous inside man. Differing from this, the Gnostics would never say such a thing. Their literature indicates that God is totally unknowable to man. (7-8) Secondly the two traditions differ on the nature of the world and cosmos. In Gnosticism the world is inherently bad, a thing created out of evil with no redeeming qualities. To the gnostic the very creator of the world was evil.  The Hermetics, however do not take this hard line approach. They instead seem to show that while the cosmos contain bad things, they themselves are not inherently bad, nor was it created by an evil creator, “God ordered the cosmos, and that order is beautiful.”(10) The last major difference put forth by van den Broek is the use of mythology in the two faiths. In the Gnostic tradition there are many myths, “mostly of an artificial character, carefully constructed to be the vehicles of Gnostic ideas…the Pleroma, is densely populated with divine powers and attributes” (13) Conversely in all the Hermetic texts there is a single myth, the story in the Poimandres where the world is created and man descends to earth.

        One final difference between the two is given by Jean-Pierre Mahé in “Gnostic and Hermetic Ethics” regarding sexual purity and morality. Mahé raises the point that in the Hermetic tradition “continence is by no means a Hermetic virtue; on the contrary, procreation is a religious duty for every human being. Nevertheless after the spiritual rebirth of initiation…It no longer needs an exterior partner” (27) This is in total contrast the the prevailing sexual ethics of the Gnostics. To the Gnostic mind, Jesus represents freedom from the need to procreate. By procreating you bring another being into the world, trapped from it’s true nature. (28) Indeed it seems that Gnosticism and Hermeticism are deeply different from each other. van den Broek attributes the seeming similarities, “due to the fact that both movements originated and developed at the same time, in the same oriental part of the Mediterranean…and in the same spiritual climate.” (17)

Conclusion

        By examining these three aspects of Hermeticism we can get a better understanding of an esoteric Greek faith that at first glance seems rather difficult to understand. In addition to this Hermeticism serves as a good vehicle to understand the nature of religious syncretism in general.

Annotated Bibliography