Source Text
THE LAST WORDS OF THRICE-GREAT HERMES ‘Wise words, although written by my decaying hand, remain imperishable through time; Imbued with the medicine of immortality by the All-Master. Be unseen and undiscovered by all those who will come and go, wandering the wastelands of life. Be hidden, until an older heaven births human beings who are worthy of your wisdom.’
The Hermetica is a collection of writings attributed to Thoth — a mythical ancient Egyptian sage whose wisdom is said to have transformed him into a god. Thoth, who was venerated in Egypt from at least 3000 BCE, is credited with the invention of sacred hieroglyphic writing, and his figure, portrayed as a scribe with the head of an ibis, can be seen in many temples and tombs. He is the dispatcher of divine messages and recorder of all human deeds.
To distinguish the Egyptian Hermes from their own, they gave him the title ‘Trismegistus’, meaning ‘Thrice-Great’, to honour his sublime wisdom. The books attributed to him became collectively known as the ‘Hermetica’.
The list of people who have acknowledged a debt to the Hermetica reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the greatest philosophers, scientists and artists that the West has produced — Leonardo da Vinci, Durer, Botticelli, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Thomas More, William Blake, Kepler, Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Sir Walter Raleigh, Milton, Ben Johnson, Daniel Defoe, Shelley and his wife Mary, Victor Hugo and Carl Jung. It heavily influenced Shakespeare, John Donne, John Dee and all the poet-philosophers who surrounded the court of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as the founding scientists of the Royal Society in London, and even the leaders who inspired the Protestant Reformation in Europe.
The Alexandrians were renowned for their thirst for knowledge, and under the enlightened Greek ruler Ptolemy I a library and museum were founded where human beings first systematically collected the wisdom of the world. At its height, the library of Alexandria housed some half a million scrolls.
In 415 CE, Hypatia, one of the last great scientists and Pagan philosophers working at the library of Alexandria, was seized by a mob of Christians, who removed her flesh with scallop shells and burnt her remains.
Another unorthodox group within the Islamic empire who also traced their ancestry back to Thrice-Great Hermes were the poets and mystics known as the Sufis.
The ruler of Florence, the philanthropist and scholar Cosimo de’ Medici, established a New Platonic Academy — a group of intellectuals and mystics who found their inspiration in the ancient Pagan philosophy. It profoundly influenced great names like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Raphael, who began painting pictures of the ancient Pagan gods.
The Florentines, already reeling from the discovery that an ancient civilisation of immense sophistication had risen and fallen nearly 2000 years before them, now believed they had in their hands the words of the most ancient sage of them all. Cosimo ordered his young Greek scholar Marsilio Ficino to cease his work on translating Plato and to begin immediately on this new Egyptian text. Ficino had it ready in time to read to Cosimo just before his death.
To help us do this, Hermes narrates a dramatic story of how God creates and maintains the cosmos. It is through appreciating the awesome beauty of the cosmos and understanding the fundamental laws by which it functions, that we can come to know the Mind of God.
AI Summary
The Hermetica by Tim Freke, Peter Gandy presents key insights from the Hermetics tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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