Hermes Trismegistus

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Hermes Trismegistus, floor mosaic in the Duomo of Siena

The god figure of Hermes Trismegistos ( ancient Greek Ἑρμῆς ὁ Τρισμέγιστος Hermē̂s ho Trismégistos "the three times greatest Hermes") is a syncretistic fusion of the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth . Until the early modern times it was believed that Hermes Trismegistus actually lived and was the author of the Hermetic writings named after him .

Thoth and Hermes

The Greek gods were identified with the Egyptian early on. Herodotus writes that “almost all the names of gods came to Greece from Egypt”, and notes especially with regard to Hermes that the Egyptians did not portray him with an erect limb; the Greeks adopted this custom from the Pelasgians .

Hermes was named after piles of stones that served as waypoints for travelers, later steles with a head and a phallus , the so-called hermen . Hermes was the god of travelers, shepherds, merchants and thieves, messenger of Zeus and companion of the dead ( psychopompos ). That the god identified with Hermes was the Egyptian Thoth cannot be inferred from Herodotus.

The ibis-headed Thoth was considered the god of the moon and the phases of the moon, which associated him with the principle of change. Since the observation of the regular waxing and waning of the moon made time calculable, measurement in general and time in particular became divine responsibilities. Thoth's other attributes are those of writing, the invention of writing, as well as visual representation, science and magic. Together with the dog-headed Anubis , he acted as a scribe at the judgment of the dead, making him a fitting equivalent of the Greek companion for the dead.

An explicit identification can only be found in Manetho , an Egyptian priest from the 3rd century BC. At the beginning of the Hellenistic era in Egypt. The relevant fragment of a work by Manetho called "Book of Sothis " has come down to us from Georgios Synkellos , a Byzantine monk († after 810). Manetho writes to Ptolemy II and gives the source of his knowledge:

“Inscriptions from the land of Seir, from Thoth, the first Hermes, with hieroglyphics in the holy language, translated into the Greek language after the flood and recorded in books by the son of Agathodaimon , the second Hermes, the father of Tat Shrines of the temples of Egypt. "

In De natura deorum (3, 56) Cicero lists five incarnations of Hermes and says about the fifth:

“The fifth is worshiped by the Pheneates and he is considered to be the one who, according to legend, killed the Argus and therefore fled to Egypt and gave the Egyptians their laws and taught them the alphabet. The Egyptians call it Theuth, and they use the same name for the first month of the year. "

This means that the identification of Hermes and Thoth in Egypt was already established at the beginning of the Ptolemaic period and was also known to the Romans as Mercurius-Teuth.

The nickname "Trismegistos"

In the preface to his Latin translation of Poimandres , Marsilio Ficino stated that the nickname Trismegistus ("three times greatest") stems from the fact that this Egyptian Hermes was also the greatest of the philosophers, the greatest priest and the greatest king.

The corresponding epithet of Thoth is first documented on an ostracon of an Egyptian priest named Hor from Sebennytos from the time of King Ptolemy IV. The name is also mentioned in the case of the already mentioned Manetho (also from Sebennytos).

The Roman god Mercurius, in turn, was identified with the Greek Hermes within the framework of the Interpretatio Romana , which is why the Hermes Trismegistos could be Latinized to Mercurius Termaximus .

Hermetic writings

The dialogues known as Corpus Hermeticum were not rediscovered until the Renaissance. In 1462 Cosimo de Medici came into possession of a Greek manuscript, which he had Marsilio Ficino translated into Latin. From late antiquity to the early modern period, Hermes Trismegistus was the author of a number of philosophical, astrological, magical and alchemical writings, which were valued as evidence of ancient knowledge due to his equation with Thoth, which can at least be dated to the time of Moses. It was not until 1614 that Isaac Casaubon came to the conclusion that these texts must have been Hellenistic treatises that could hardly have been written before the 2nd century .

The most famous hermetic script in the Middle Ages was the dialogue Asclepius , which was handed down together with the works of Apuleius of Madauros, as this was believed to be the translator of the lost Greek original. Fragments from the Asclepius are also included in the Coptic Nag Hammadi Codices , which were discovered in 1945.

An astrological collection of aphorisms with the title Centiloquium Hermetis , of which over 80 manuscripts and several prints from the period between 1484 and 1533, the Tabula Smaragdina and the pseudepigraphic Liber XXIV philosophorum have been preserved, was similarly popular .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Histories 2, 50.
  2. ↑ Histories 2, 51.
  3. ↑ Gerald P. Verbrugghe, John Moore Wickersham: Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated. Native Traditions in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2001, ISBN 0-472-08687-1 , p. 174.
  4. ↑ Mercurius [...] quintus, quem colunt Pheneatae, qui Argum dicitur interemisse ob eamque causam in Aegyptum profugisse atque Aegyptiis leges et litteras tradidisse: hunc Aegyptii Theyt appellant eodemque nomine anni primus mensis apud eos vocatur.
  5. ↑ Trismegistum vero inter maximum nuncuparunt quoniam et philosophus maximus et sacerdos maximus et rex maximus extitit .
  6. ^ John D. Ray: The Archive of Hor (= Texts from Excavations , Volume 2), London 1976, ISBN 0-85698-061-7 .
  7. ↑ "According to your [Ptolemaios II] order, I will deliver you the sacred writings of your ancestor Hermes Trismegistos, of which I have news ..." In view of the uncertain tradition of the work of Manethos, the ostraca from the archive of Hor are the earliest evidence.
  8. ↑ De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI. London 1614.

literature

  • Hans Bonnet: Hermes Trismegistus. In: Lexicon of Egyptian Religious History. Hamburg 2000, pp. 289f., ISBN 3-937872-08-6
  • Florian Ebeling: The Secret of Hermes Trismegistos. History of Hermetism. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52816-3
  • Brian P. Copenhaver: Hermetica. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0-521-36144-3 (English translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asklepius with useful introduction and extensive bibliography)
  • Maria M. Miller: The treatises of the Corpus Hermetikum. Novalis, Schaffhausen 2004, ISBN 3-907260-29-5 (German translation of the Corpus Hermeticum with detailed comments)
  • André-Jean Festugière : La révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste . 3 volumes, Paris 1981, 2006, ISBN 2-251-32660-X

Web links

Commons : Hermes Trismegistus  - collection of images, videos and audio files