Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-great Hermes,” is the legendary sage behind the Hermetic tradition, one of the foundations of Western esotericism. He was never a historical person. The name joins the Greek god Hermes, messenger and guide of souls, with the Egyptian god Thoth, patron of writing and wisdom, a pairing that came naturally in Egypt under Greek and Roman rule.
The Hermetica and the Renaissance
The writings attributed to him, the Hermetica, were composed in Greek in Roman Egypt, roughly in the first to third centuries CE. The best known is the Poimandres, which describes a vision in which a divine Mind reveals how the cosmos was made and how a human being can ascend back through the planetary spheres to God. A Latin text, the Asclepius, calls humanity a great wonder, both divine and mortal, and also describes priests who animate statues, a passage Augustine attacked. In 1463 Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin for Cosimo de’ Medici, and Renaissance readers took it for the wisdom of the most ancient Egyptians. In 1614 the philologist Isaac Casaubon showed the texts were much younger, but by then Hermeticism had already shaped alchemy, astrology and magic.
The Emerald Tablet and “as above, so below”
The short, riddling Emerald Tablet is also credited to Hermes. It survives first in Arabic, in works of the eighth or ninth century, and later in Latin. Its line that what is below is like what is above, and what is above like what is below, is the source of the popular phrase “as above, so below.” Alchemists treated it as the root of their art, and later groups from the Rosicrucians to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn claimed Hermes as their patron.
Hermes in the modern world
The English phrase “hermetically sealed” comes from the alchemists, who credited Hermes with the airtight seal on their vessels. In 1964 the historian Frances Yates argued in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition that Hermeticism helped drive Renaissance magic and early science, a thesis later historians have debated. And in 1945 a sealed jar of ancient manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt included a Hermetic dialogue, proof that these ideas circulated alongside Gnostic and Christian texts in late antique Egypt.
The painting
Hermes appears in Egyptian dress with a winged caduceus and a glowing green tablet, standing on a coiled dragon. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- Isaac Newton made his own handwritten English translation of the Emerald Tablet. The manuscript survives in the Cambridge collection of his alchemical papers.
- In 1488 a floor mosaic in Siena Cathedral showed Hermes Trismegistus among the prophets, labeled as a contemporary of Moses. A cathedral was still treating him as a pre-Christian sage.
- Roman-era Egyptian texts call Thoth “great, great, great,” the likely source of the Greek title Trismegistus, “thrice-greatest.”
- The dragon under his feet is Typhon, the Greek monster whom Plutarch identified with the Egyptian god Set, the enemy of Isis and Osiris.
- The winged staff with two snakes, the caduceus, is the staff of Hermes. It is often mistaken for the single-snake Rod of Asclepius, the true symbol of medicine. The US Army Medical Corps adopted the caduceus in 1902.
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