STUDY ON THE ORIGIN OF HERMETIC BOOKS

BY LOUIS MENARD


PARIS
ACADEMIC BOOKSHOP
DIDIER ET CIE, BOOKSELLERS-PUBLISHERS
35, QUAY DES AUGUSTINS

1867



The books of Hermes Trismegistus enjoyed great authority during the early centuries of the Church. The Christian doctors often invoked the testimony of it with that of the Sibyls, who had announced the coming of Christ to the pagans while the prophets announced it to the Hebrews: "Hermes, says Lactantius, discovered, I do not know how, almost all the truth . He was regarded as a kind of inspired revealer, and his writings passed for authentic monuments of the ancient theology of the Egyptians. This opinion was accepted by Marsilio Ficino, Patrizzi, and other Renaissance scholars who translated or commented on the Hermetic books. They believed to find there the first source of the Orphic initiations, of the philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato. Nevertheless, doubts soon arose about the authenticity of these books and those bearing the name of the Sibyls, and the progress of criticism ended up demonstrating the apocryphal character of both. A scholarly commentary has fixed the date of the different series of Sibylline oracles, a work partly Jewish, partly Christian, which Lactantius and other doctors of the Church, themselves dupes of the fraud of their predecessors, often oppose to the pagans. to convince them of the truth of Christianity.

The origin and date of the books bearing the name of Hermes Trismegistus have not been established with the same certainty. Casaubon attributed them to a Jew or a Christian. The author of the Pantheon Aegyptiorum, Jablonski, believes he recognizes in it the work of a Gnostic. Today they are classed among the last productions of Greek philosophy, but it is admitted that in the midst of the Alexandrian ideas which form their basis, there are some traces of the religious dogmas of ancient Egypt. It is on this opinion that Creuzer and his learned interpreter M. Guigniaut decided.

In a recent work where the state of the question is exposed with great clarity, M. Egger expresses the wish that a practiced philologist publish a good edition of all the texts of Hermes, accompanying them with a commentary. This wish has already been partly realized. M. Parthey has published, in Berlin, an excellent edition of the fourteen pieces of which we possess the complete Greek text. He brings them together, as is usually done, under the name of Pœmander.[1] But this title, according to Patrizzi's remark, is only suitable for one of them, the one that the manuscripts place first. There is also a long dialogue entitled Asclepios, of which we have only a Latin translation falsely attributed to Apuleius; finally numerous fragments preserved by Stobeus, Cyril, Lactantius and Suidas; the three main ones are taken from a dialogue called the Sacred Book. M. Parthey announces the publication of these various fragments; unfortunately this part of his work has not yet appeared. For some pieces one can supplement it by the text of Stobée; for others, notably for the Definitions of Asclepius, which serve as an appendix to the books of Hermes, we are reduced to the very incorrect edition of Patrizzi, the only complete one up to now. The Poimandres and the Asclepios have been translated into Old French; there is no translation of the Sacred Book, of the Definitions of Asclepius, nor of the other fragments. For some pieces one can supplement it by the text of Stobée; for others, notably for the Definitions of Asclepius, which serve as an appendix to the books of Hermes, we are reduced to the very incorrect edition of Patrizzi, the only complete one up to now. The Poimandres and the Asclepios have been translated into Old French; there is no translation of the Sacred Book, of the Definitions of Asclepius, nor of the other fragments. For some pieces one can supplement it by the text of Stobée; for others, notably for the Definitions of Asclepius, which serve as an appendix to the books of Hermes, we are reduced to the very incorrect edition of Patrizzi, the only complete one up to now. The Poimandres and the Asclepios have been translated into Old French; there is no translation of the Sacred Book, of the Definitions of Asclepius, nor of the other fragments.

The one we publish includes both fragments and complete pieces; we have classed them in the order which is generally adopted, although it is quite arbitrary. In the first book, the Poimandres and the thirteen dialogues associated with it have been brought together. The Asclepios, whose true title, kept by Lactantius, is the Discourse of Initiation τέλειος λόγος, forms the second book. Among the fragments, those which are taken from the Sacred Book must, because of their extent and their importance, receive a place apart; they compose the third book. Finally, the fourth book includes the Definitions of Asclepius and the other fragments. Most of these fragments are uninteresting on their own, but a full translation had to be offered. Besides,

One is almost always led, when one reads a translation, to cast obscurities on the account of the translator which are often due to the style of the author or to the subjects he deals with. The difficulty of a translation of Hermes is due to several causes: the incorrectness of a large part of the texts, the excessive subtlety of thought, the insufficiency of our philosophical language. The words that come up most often in the works of philosophers and especially Platonists, νοῦς, λόγος, γένεσις, and many others, have no real equivalents in French. Some of these words have two or three meanings in Greek, and the Alexandrians amuse themselves by playing on these different meanings. Add to this the neutral participles, which we can only render by circumlocutions, for example κινοῦς, κινούμενον, πρὸ ὄν, and a crowd of words whose meaning is very precise in Greek, and to which usage has given, in French, a very vague and very general meaning. Thus the world if nature mean the same thing to us, while κόσμος and φύσις represent very different ideas. We constantly oppose spirit to matter: in Greek πνεῦμα almost always has a material meaning and ὕλη an abstract meaning. The word soul very imperfectly renders ψυχή, which for the Greeks was almost synonymous with ζών, life. All the subtleties of the psychological analysis of the Greeks escape us; we don't even have words to render Θύμος and ἐπιθυμετικόν. Thus the world if nature mean the same thing to us, while κόσμος and φύσις represent very different ideas. We constantly oppose spirit to matter: in Greek πνεῦμα almost always has a material meaning and ὕλη an abstract meaning. The word soul very imperfectly renders ψυχή, which for the Greeks was almost synonymous with ζών, life. All the subtleties of the psychological analysis of the Greeks escape us; we don't even have words to render Θύμος and ἐπιθυμετικόν. Thus the world if nature mean the same thing to us, while κόσμος and φύσις represent very different ideas. We constantly oppose spirit to matter: in Greek πνεῦμα almost always has a material meaning and ὕλη an abstract meaning. The word soul very imperfectly renders ψυχή, which for the Greeks was almost synonymous with ζών, life. All the subtleties of the psychological analysis of the Greeks escape us; we don't even have words to render Θύμος and ἐπιθυμετικόν. All the subtleties of the psychological analysis of the Greeks escape us; we don't even have words to render Θύμος and ἐπιθυμετικόν. All the subtleties of the psychological analysis of the Greeks escape us; we don't even have words to render Θύμος and ἐπιθυμετικόν.

These word difficulties are not the greatest. Although the language of Hermes offers none of those scholarly constructions which make a literal translation of Thucydides, Pindar, or tragic choruses so difficult, its style is almost always obscure, and the translator cannot make it any clearer, for this darkness is even more in the thought than in the expression. The Asclepios, which exists only in Latin, offers the same difficulties as the Greek texts. Some passages quoted in Greek by Lactantius allow us to believe that this old translation, which appears to predate Saint Augustine, must have been quite exact as regards the general meaning; but, despite the manuscripts, it is impossible to attribute it to Apuleius. It has already been noticed for a long time that the style of Apuleius has nothing in common with this heavy and incorrect form. I hope, moreover, to be able to demonstrate that not only the Latin translation, but the very text of the Asclepius goes back only to the time of Constantine.

We will try, in this introduction, to determine the age and the origins of the hermetic books, by comparing them, according to the program drawn up by the Academy of inscriptions and belles-lettres, with the documents that the Greek authors left us on the Egyptian religion, and with the facts that can be taken for granted to the science of hieroglyphs. The development of Egyptian studies gives particular interest to this comparison. Races, like individuals, retain their own original character over time. The Greek philosophers often reproduced in their systems the physics of the mythological poets, perhaps without noticing it. We find in the same way between the religious period of Egypt and its philosophical period some of those general relations which give a family resemblance to all the expressions of the thought of a people. Nobody today admits the pretended immobility of Egypt; it could not remain stationary between the time of the pyramids and the Christian era. Everything that is alive is transformed, theocratic societies like others, although more slowly, because their life is less active. To write the history of Egyptian religion as we did that of Greek religion, we must follow its transformations. The oldest can only be known by an exact chronology of hieroglyphic monuments; the latter are attested to us by the different manner in which the Greek authors speak of them at different times. Finally, from the meeting of the religious doctrines of Egypt and the philosophical doctrines of Greece came Egyptian philosophy, which left no other monuments than the books of Hermes, and in which we recognize, in a form abstract, the ideas and tendencies that had occurred before in a mythological form. Another comparison which interests us even more directly is that which can be established between some of the Hermetic writings and Jewish or Christian monuments, notably Genesis, the works of Philo, the Pastor of Hermas, the fourth gospel. The advent of Christianity presents, at first sight, the aspect of a radical revolution in the customs and beliefs of the Western world; but history has no abrupt changes or unforeseen transformations. To understand the transition from one religion to another, we must not oppose two extreme terms: Homeric mythology and the symbol of Nicaea; it is necessary to study the intermediary monuments, multiple products of an epoch of transition when primitive Hellenism, disputed by philosophy, deteriorated more each day by its mixture with the religions of the East which overflowed confusedly on Europe. Christianity represents the last term of this invasion of Eastern ideas in the West. He did not fall like a thunderbolt in the midst of the surprised and bewildered old world. It had its incubation period, and while it was seeking the definitive form of its dogmas, the problems whose solution it was pursuing preoccupied minds also in Greece, in Asia, in Egypt. There were wandering ideas in the air that combined in all sorts of proportions.

The multiplicity of sects which have arisen in our day under the name of socialism can only give a faint idea of ​​that astonishing intellectual chemistry which had established its principal laboratory in Alexandria. Humanity had challenged great philosophical and moral questions: the origin of evil, the destiny of souls, their fall and redemption; the prize offered was the government of consciences. The Christian solution prevailed and caused the others to be forgotten, most of whom were engulfed in the shipwreck of the past. When we find a wreck of it, let us recognize the work of a defeated competitor and not of a plagiarist. The triumph of Christianity was prepared by those very people who believed themselves to be its rivals and who were only its precursors; this title suits them, although several are contemporaneous with the Christian era, others a little later; for the advent of a religion dates only from the day when it is accepted by the people, as the reign of a pretender dates from his victory. It is humanity that gives ideas their right of citizenship in the world, and science must give back to those who have worked for a revolution, even while wanting to fight it, the place that belongs to them in the history of thought. human.

We will seek to distinguish what belongs either to Egypt or to Judea in the books of Hermes Trismegistus. When one encounters Platonic or Pythagorean ideas in these books, one may wonder whether the author found them in ancient sources from which Pythagoras and Plato would have drawn before him, or whether a purely Greek element must be recognized there. It is therefore necessary first to discuss the real or supposed influence of the East on Hellenic philosophy. People are too inclined in general, on the faith of the Greeks themselves, to exaggerate this influence and especially to postpone its date. It was only after the foundation of Alexandria that permanent and daily relations were established between the thought of Greece and that of other peoples, and in these exchanges of ideas Greece had much more to give than to receive. The Eastern peoples, at least those who found themselves in contact with the Greeks, do not seem to have ever had a philosophy properly so called. The analysis of the faculties of the soul, the search for the foundations of knowledge, moral laws and their application to the life of societies, are things absolutely unknown in the East before the conquest of Alexander. The word that Plato attributes to the Egyptian lents on his compatriots: "Ο Greeks, you are only children, and there are no old men among you," could be referred to the East and to Egypt itself. -even. The scientific spirit is as foreign to these peoples as the political sense. They can last for centuries, they never reach manhood; they are old children, always led by the edges, as incapable of seeking the truth as of conquering justice. Initiated into philosophy by Greece, the East could only give him what he had, the exaltation of religious sentiment. Greece accepted the exchange; weary of the skepticism produced by the struggle of its schools, it threw itself by reaction into mystical outbursts precursors of a renewal of beliefs. The books of Hermes Trismegistus are a link between the dogmas of the past and those of the future, and it is by this that they are connected with living and current questions. If they still belong to paganism, it is to the paganism of the last hour,


I

The population of Alexandria consisted of Greeks, Egyptians and Jews, and the perpetual contact, if not the mixture of three different races, facilitated the fusion of ideas. The distinctive characters of these three races explain how this fusion of ideas must have taken place and in what proportion each of them contributed to it. The Greek race was dominant, if not in numbers, at least in intelligence; so it imposed its language, but respecting the native customs and traditions. The Greeks, who easily classified the religious conceptions of other peoples within the broad framework of their polytheism, accepted the Gods of the Egyptians and limited themselves to translating their names into their language. They even readily admitted that religious initiation had come to them through Egyptian colonies. This concession cost them very little, for they had never claimed great antiquity, and it singularly flattered the pride of the Egyptians; it prevented them from regarding the Greeks as foreigners; they were settlers returning to the mother country. Also Egypt, which had never voluntarily submitted to the domination of the Persians, accepted from the beginning and without resistance that of the Ptolemies.

The Jews, on the contrary, delivered long ago by the Persians from the Babylonian yoke, had easily submitted to their distant suzerainty, but they rejected with horror the direct and immediate authority of the Seleucids. The Jewish religion was much closer to Iranian dualism than to Hellenic polytheism. The Greeks could have ranked Jehovah like all the other Gods in their pantheon, but he did not want to be ranked; he wouldn't even have settled for first place, he wanted to be alone. The Seleucids, whose domination extended over peoples of different religions, could not accept this claim, and the Jews, on their side, rejected the influence of Greek genius in the name of national feeling and religious feeling. But in Alexandria, the conditions were not the same as in Palestine. The Egyptians were at home, the Greeks did not believe themselves foreigners anywhere, the Jews, on the contrary, insisted on remaining foreigners everywhere; only, outside their country, they did not aspire to domination, they were satisfied with hospitality. From then on, it became easier to get along; they translated their books into the language of their hosts, whose philosophy they studied.

Plato especially seduced them by his unitary doctrines, and it was said in speaking of the most famous of them: "Either Philo platonizes, or Plato philonizes." Philo, no doubt imagining that Greece had always been what it was in his time, claims that Greek tutors came to the court of Pharaoh to educate Moses. More often than not, however, patriotism prevailed among the Jews over gratitude, and instead of acknowledging what they owed to Greek philosophy, they maintained that it had borrowed its principles from the Bible. Until the Christian period, the Greeks do not seem to have taken this assertion into account. It is true that we quote this saying of an Alexandrian eclectic, Noumenios of Apamea: "Plato is only an Attic Moses." But what can we conclude from an isolated sentence taken from a lost work? All it could prove is that Noumenios only knew Moses from the allegories of Philo, for only a very undemanding critic can find the theory of ideas in the first chapter of Genesis. .

The borrowings of the Greeks from the Bible are hardly more probable than the Greek tutors of Moses. If Plato had taken anything from the Jews, he would not have failed to introduce one into his dialogues, as he introduced Parmenides and Timaeus. Far from denying their debts, the Greeks tend to exaggerate their importance. Besides, to borrow something from the Jews, one would have had to know them, and before Alexander, the Greeks did not even know their name. Later, under the Roman empire, when the Jews were already widespread in all the occident, Justin, telling their history according to Trogue Pompée, connects their origin with Damascus; the successors he gives to this Damascus are Azelus, Adores, Abraham and Israel. What he says about Joseph is almost consistent with the biblical account, but it makes Moses a son of Joseph and the leader of a colony of lepers driven out of Egypt. He adds that Aruas, son of Moses, succeeded him, that the Jews always had their priests as kings and that the country was submitted for the first time by Xerxes. Trogue Pompey may have consulted some Egyptian or Phoenician tradition, but he certainly had not read the Bible; it seems, however, that it would have been easy in his time. No one knew religion better than their history. We knew they had a national God; but what was he? Dedita sacris incerti Judoea Dei. Plutarch suspects that this god might well be Dionysus, who is basically the same as Adonis. He relies on the resemblance of Jewish ceremonies to bacchanalia and on a few Hebrew words for which he believes he finds the explanation in the Dionysian cult. As for the horror of the Jews for the pig, it comes, according to him, from the fact that Adonis was killed by a boar. It would have been much simpler to interrogate a Jew. But Plutarch had little criticism; instead of informing himself before concluding, he wanted to guess everything.

The Egyptians were probably better known than the Jews; however, all the Greeks who speak of the Egyptian religion give it a Greek physiognomy, which varies according to the time in which each of them lived and according to the school to which he belongs. The oldest Greek author who wrote about Egypt is Herodotus. He finds there a polytheism similar to that of Greece, with a hierarchy of eight primitive Gods and twelve secondary Gods, which supposes a synthesis analogous to the theogony of Hesiod.

On the other hand, each city has, according to him, its local religion; the cult of Osiris and Isis is the only one common to all Egypt and greatly resembles the mysteries of Eleusis. However, Herodotus is struck by a feature peculiar to Egyptian religion: the cult rendered to animals; but he does not seek the reason for this symbolism, so different from that of the Greeks. He also notes that, unlike the Greeks, the Egyptians do not worship heroes. For Diodorus, it is the opposite; the Egyptian gods are deified ancient kings. It is true that there are also eternal Gods: the sun, the moon, the elements; but Diodorus does not concern himself with it: the pseudo-historical system of Euhemerus reigned in his time in Greece, he applies it to Egypt. Then comes Plutarch, to whom is attributed the treatise on Isis and Osiris, the most curious document that the Greeks have left us on Egyptian religion; however, he too dresses this religion in the Greek style; only, since Diodorus, the fashion has changed: it is no longer euhemerism that is honoured, it is demonology. Plutarch, who is a Platonist, sees in the Gods of Egypt no longer deified men, but demons; then, when he wishes to explain the names of the gods, alongside some Egyptian etymologies, he gives others drawn from the Greek, and which he seems to prefer. His treatise is addressed to an Egyptian priestess, but instead of asking her for information, he offers his own conjectures. the most curious document that the Greeks have left us on the Egyptian religion; however, he too dresses this religion in the Greek style; only, since Diodorus, the fashion has changed: it is no longer euhemerism that is honoured, it is demonology. Plutarch, who is a Platonist, sees in the Gods of Egypt no longer deified men, but demons; then, when he wishes to explain the names of the gods, alongside some Egyptian etymologies, he gives others drawn from the Greek, and which he seems to prefer. His treatise is addressed to an Egyptian priestess, but instead of asking her for information, he offers his own conjectures. the most curious document that the Greeks have left us on the Egyptian religion; however, he too dresses this religion in the Greek style; only, since Diodorus, the fashion has changed: it is no longer euhemerism that is honoured, it is demonology. Plutarch, who is a Platonist, sees in the Gods of Egypt no longer deified men, but demons; then, when he wishes to explain the names of the gods, alongside some Egyptian etymologies, he gives others drawn from the Greek, and which he seems to prefer. His treatise is addressed to an Egyptian priestess, but instead of asking her for information, he offers his own conjectures. it is demonology. Plutarch, who is a Platonist, sees in the Gods of Egypt no longer deified men, but demons; then, when he wishes to explain the names of the gods, alongside some Egyptian etymologies, he gives others drawn from the Greek, and which he seems to prefer. His treatise is addressed to an Egyptian priestess, but instead of asking her for information, he offers his own conjectures. it is demonology. Plutarch, who is a Platonist, sees in the Gods of Egypt no longer deified men, but demons; then, when he wishes to explain the names of the gods, alongside some Egyptian etymologies, he gives others drawn from the Greek, and which he seems to prefer. His treatise is addressed to an Egyptian priestess, but instead of asking her for information, he offers his own conjectures.

As for Porphyre, he is content to question; he raises doubts on the various philosophical questions which interest him, and asks the priest Anébo what the Egyptians think of it. What worries him above all is that, according to the Stoic Cheremon, the Egyptians would have known only the visible Gods, that is to say the stars and the elements. Had they then no idea of ​​metaphysics, demonology, theurgy, and all the things outside of which Porphyry could not conceive of a possible religion? “I would like to know, he said, what the Egyptians think of the first cause: whether she is intelligence or above intelligence; whether it is unique or associated with another or several others; whether it is incorporeal or corporeal; whether it is identical to the creator or above the creator; whether everything derives from one or from several; whether the Egyptians know matter, and what are the first bodies; whether matter is for them created or uncreated; for Cheremon and the others admit nothing above the visible worlds, and in the exposition of the principles they attribute to the Egyptians no other Gods than those who are called wandering (the planets), those who fill the zodiac where rise with them and the subdivisions of the Decans and the Horoscopes, and those who are called the powerful leaders and whose names are in the almanacs with their phases, their risings, their sunsets and the signs of things to come. He (Chérémon) sees indeed that the Egyptians call the creator sun, that they always revolve around Isis and Osiris and all the sacerdotal fables, and the phases, appearances and occultations of the stars; waxes and wanes of the moon, the course of the sun in the diurnal hemisphere and in the nocturnal hemisphere, and finally of the river (Nile). In a word, they speak only of natural things and explain nothing of incorporeal and living essences. Most submit free will to the movement of the stars, to I do not know what indissoluble bonds of necessity, which they call destiny, and attach everything to these Gods, who are for them the only arbiters of destiny, and whom they honor with temples, statues and other forms of worship. »

To this letter of Porphyry Iamblichus replies under the name of the Egyptian priest Abammon; at least, a note placed at the beginning of this answer attributes it to Iamblichus, according to a testimony of Proclos. To prove that the Egyptian religion is excellent, he makes an exposition of his own ideas and attributes them to the Egyptians. This treatise, entitled Mysteries of the Egyptians, is filled with interminable dissertations on the hierarchy and functions of souls, demons, and gods; on divination, destiny, magical operations; on the signs by which one can recognize the different classes of demons in theophanies, on the use of barbarous words in evocations. After all this theurgy, which sometimes makes one doubt whether the author is a charlatan or a madman, he hardly devotes a few lines to the Egyptian religion, and these few lines are full of uncertainty and obscurity. He speaks of the steles and obelisks from which he claims that Pythagoras and Plato drew their philosophy, but he is careful not to translate a single inscription. He asserts that the books of Hermes, although they were written by people initiated into Greek philosophy, contain hermetic opinions; but what are they? It was so easy to quote. although they were written by people initiated into Greek philosophy, they contain hermetic opinions; but what are they? It was so easy to quote. although they were written by people initiated into Greek philosophy, they contain hermetic opinions; but what are they? It was so easy to quote.

From this comparison of the Greek documents on the Egyptian religion, must we conclude that Egypt has always been for the Greeks a closed book, and that by questioning the land of the sphinxes they have obtained only riddles for answers, or the echo of their own questions? Such a conclusion would be unfair to the Greeks; the information they provide us has been completed, but not contradicted, by the study of hieroglyphics. In this information, it is necessary to make the part of the facts and that of the interpretations. The facts which the Greeks transmitted to us are generally true and do not contradict each other: only, the explanations which they give of them are different. The same differences are observed when they speak of their own religion; they are due to a general law of the human mind, the law of transformation over time, which applies to societies as well as to living beings. The language of symbols is the natural language of emerging societies; as peoples age, it ceases to be understood. In Greece, even before Socrates, the philosophers attacked the religion of the poets, because they did not penetrate its meaning and because they conceived the laws of nature and of the mind better under abstract forms than under poetic. However, the people remained attached to their religious symbols; the philosophers wanted then, by explaining them, to adapt them to their ideas. Three systems of interpretation arose: the Stoics explained mythology by physics; others thought they saw in it historical facts embellished by the imagination of poets, it is the theory which bears the name of Euhemerus; the Platonists looked for mystical allegories there. Although the hermeneutics of the Stoics was most in conformity with the genius of the old religion, the three systems of explanation had partisans, because each of them answered a need of the public conscience, and it is thus that philosophy, after having shaken religion, transformed it and merged with it.[2]

Things could not happen quite the same way in Egypt, where, instead of a philosophy discussing religion, there was a theocracy which guarded the deposit of ancient traditions. But nothing can prevent races from aging. If the priesthood could maintain the letter of the dogmas and the external forms of the worship, what it could not preserve it is this intelligence of the symbols which is the privilege of the creative times. When the Greeks began to study the Egyptian religion, the symbolism of this religion was already a dead letter for the priests themselves. Herodotus, who questioned them first, could not obtain any explanation from them, and as he was not a theologian, he stopped at the envelope of symbols. His successors sought in good faith to find the key to it, and applied to it the different systems of hermeneutics which were current in Greece. If the work of the Stoic Cheremon had been preserved for us, we would probably find in it more connections with the hieroglyphic monuments than in those of Diodorus or Iamblichus; for, for the Egyptian religion as for Hellenism, the Stoic explanations had to be closer to the truth than euhemerism or Platonic metaphysics. Plutarch often gives us, in passing, much more satisfactory physical explanations than the demonology at which he stops. But, without giving all the systems the same value, we can recognize that all had their reason to occur. The old religion was above all a general physics; however the divine names and attributes given to the kings in the inscriptions, the divine dynasties placed at the beginning of history, could make the gods look like deified men. The incarnation of Osiris and his human legend accorded with euhemerist theories. One could take for demons all these subordinate powers which are so often mentioned in the Funeral Ritual. Finally, as minds were drawn towards the abstractions of ontology, one sought to separate the principles of the world from their visible manifestations, and the symbols which lent themselves ill to these transformations were set aside; we respected them out of habit, but we didn't talk about them.

As the external forms of this religion had not changed, it was believed to be immobile, and the more one adapted its spirit to the philosophical systems of Greece, the more one was persuaded that these systems had issued from her. The Greeks had begun by attributing their religious education to Egypt, an opinion which modern science has not ratified; they similarly attributed their philosophical education to it, and there too the traces of Egyptian influence vanish when one seeks to grasp them. All Plato's borrowings from Egypt are limited to an anecdote about Thoth, inventor of writing, and to this famous story of Atlantis, which he says was told to Solon by an Egyptian priest, and which appears to be only a fable of his invention. As for the idea of ​​metempsychosis, he had received it from the Pythagoreans. Had Pythagoras borrowed it from Egypt? This is not impossible, but we find the same idea among the Indians and the Celts, who must not have received it from the Egyptians. It can be deduced from the religion of the mysteries, and as the Pythagoreans are not clearly distinguished from the Orphics, one cannot know whether there was an action of religion on philosophy or a reaction of philosophy on religion. According to Proclos, Pythagoras was initiated by Aglaophamos into the mysteries brought from Egypt by Orpheus. This is the Egyptian influence transported beyond historical times. who must not have received it from the Egyptians. It can be deduced from the religion of the mysteries, and as the Pythagoreans are not clearly distinguished from the Orphics, one cannot know whether there was an action of religion on philosophy or a reaction of philosophy on religion. According to Proclos, Pythagoras was initiated by Aglaophamos into the mysteries brought from Egypt by Orpheus. This is the Egyptian influence transported beyond historical times. who must not have received it from the Egyptians. It can be deduced from the religion of the mysteries, and as the Pythagoreans are not clearly distinguished from the Orphics, one cannot know whether there was an action of religion on philosophy or a reaction of philosophy on religion. According to Proclos, Pythagoras was initiated by Aglaophamos into the mysteries brought from Egypt by Orpheus. This is the Egyptian influence transported beyond historical times. Pythagoras would have been initiated by Aglaophamos into the mysteries brought back from Egypt by Orpheus. This is the Egyptian influence transported beyond historical times. Pythagoras would have been initiated by Aglaophamos into the mysteries brought back from Egypt by Orpheus. This is the Egyptian influence transported beyond historical times.

The action of Egypt on Greek philosophy before Alexander, although less unlikely than that of Judea, is therefore very uncertain. All that could be attributed to it is the predilection of most philosophers for unitary dogmas and theocratic or monarchical governments; yet this predilection is explained just as well by the natural tendency of philosophy to react against the environment in which it develops. In a polytheistic and republican society, this reaction was to lead to unity in religion and authority in politics, for these two ideas are correlative. The human mind is seduced by simple formulas which allow it to embrace all things without fatigue; self-esteem finds it difficult to resign itself to the idea of ​​equality, and philosophers are inclined, like other men, to prefer domination to a share in the liberty of all. Those who traveled in Asia or in Egypt, finding there ideas and customs in conformity with their tastes, were to attribute to these peoples a high wisdom and to offer them as an example to their fellow-citizens. The Egyptian priesthood resembles that aristocracy of intelligence which the philosophers would have liked to see cropped up in Greece, on condition of belonging to it; the Jewish priesthood would have inspired them with the same admiration if they had known it, and they would have had no reason to hide it. should attribute to these peoples a high wisdom and offer them as an example to their fellow citizens. The Egyptian priesthood resembles that aristocracy of intelligence which the philosophers would have liked to see cropped up in Greece, on condition of belonging to it; the Jewish priesthood would have inspired them with the same admiration if they had known it, and they would have had no reason to hide it. should attribute to these peoples a high wisdom and offer them as an example to their fellow citizens. The Egyptian priesthood resembles that aristocracy of intelligence which the philosophers would have liked to see cropped up in Greece, on condition of belonging to it; the Jewish priesthood would have inspired them with the same admiration if they had known it, and they would have had no reason to hide it.

Greek philosophy, which had attached itself, from its origin, to the search for a first principle of things, conceived unity in an abstract form. The Jews represented it in a more vivid form; the world was for them a monarchy, and their religion was the most complete expression of monotheism in antiquity. For the Egyptians, the divine unity was never distinguished from the unity of the world. The great river which fertilizes Egypt, the dazzling star which vivifies all nature furnished them with the type of an interior force, unique and multiple at the same time, manifested variously by regular vicissitudes, and perpetually reborn from itself. . Mr. de Rougé points out that almost all the glosses of the Egyptian Funeral Ritual attribute everything that constitutes the essence of a supreme God to Ra, who, in the Egyptian language, is none other than the sun. This star, which seems to give itself a new birth every day, was the emblem of the perpetual divine generation. Although the symbolic forms are as varied in Egypt as in India, it does not require a great effort of abstraction to reduce all these symbols to pantheism.

“I had occasion to show,” says M. de Rougé, “that the belief in the unity of the supreme being was never completely stifled in Egypt by polytheism. A Berlin stele from the 19th dynasty names him the only living one in substance. Another stele from the same museum and from the same period calls it the only eternal substance, and further, the only generator in heaven and on earth which is not begotten. The doctrine of one God in the double personage of father and son was also preserved in Thebes and Memphis. The same Berlin stele, coming from Memphis, calls him God becoming God, existing by himself, the double being, generative from the beginning. The Theban lesson is expressed in almost identical terms on Ammon's account in Mr. Harris's papyrus: to be double, generator from the beginning. God making himself God, begetting himself. The special action assigned to the character of the son did not destroy the unit; it is evidently in this sense that this God is called ua en ua, the one of one, which Iamblichus will later quite faithfully translate by the terms πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου θεοῦ, which he applies to the second divine hypostasis.[3 ] When the philosophical doctrines of Greece and the religious doctrines of Egypt and Judea met at Alexandria, they had too much in common not to borrow from each other. From their rapprochement and their daily contact emerged several schools whose general character is eclecticism, or rather syncretism, that is to say the mixture of the various elements which had contributed to their formation. These elements are all found, although in varying proportions, in each of these schools. The first is the Jewish school, represented by Philo, who, by dint of allegories, draws Platonism from every page of the Bible. Philo is regarded as the main precursor of Gnosticism. We unite under this name several Christian sects which mix Jewish traditions with those of other peoples, mainly Greeks and Egyptians. The word gnostic, which is sometimes applied to Christians in general, for example in Clement of Alexandria, simply those who possess gnosis, superior science, the intuition of divine things. in each of these schools. The first is the Jewish school, represented by Philo, who, by dint of allegories, draws Platonism from every page of the Bible. Philo is regarded as the main precursor of Gnosticism. We unite under this name several Christian sects which mix Jewish traditions with those of other peoples, mainly Greeks and Egyptians. The word gnostic, which is sometimes applied to Christians in general, for example in Clement of Alexandria, simply those who possess gnosis, superior science, the intuition of divine things. in each of these schools. The first is the Jewish school, represented by Philo, who, by dint of allegories, draws Platonism from every page of the Bible. Philo is regarded as the main precursor of Gnosticism. We unite under this name several Christian sects which mix Jewish traditions with those of other peoples, mainly Greeks and Egyptians. The word gnostic, which is sometimes applied to Christians in general, for example in Clement of Alexandria, simply those who possess gnosis, superior science, the intuition of divine things.

After Philo and the Gnostics comes the great school of Ammonios Saccas and Plotinus, which, while borrowing their unitary and mystical tendencies from Asia and Egypt, attaches itself directly to Greek philosophy, from which it seeks to melt all divergent sects. In the last days of polytheism, people were no longer exclusively Stoics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, or even Platonists; all these sects had brought their contingent to the sum of ideas, and all were represented, in some way, in the common philosophy. These compromises were not new, Plato had borrowed a lot from the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans. Demonology, which occupies so much space in Alexandrian philosophy, was not an invention of Plato, nor even of Empedocles or Pythagoras; we find it in germ in the Works and Days of Hesiod.

Alongside these schools, and as if to serve as a link between them, another develops which is not attached to any historical name and is represented only by the hermetic books. These books are the only monuments we know of what can be called Egyptian philosophy. It is true that they have come down to us only in Greek, and it is not even probable that they were ever written in the Egyptian language; but Philo also writes in Greek and is no less a true Jew. We can also say that the hermetic books belong to Egypt, but to a strongly Hellenized Egypt and on the eve of becoming Christian. One would not find in a true Greek that ecstatic adoration which fills the books of Hermes; the piety of the Greeks was much calmer. What is still more foreign to the Greek character is that apotheosis of royalty which we find in some hermetic books, and which recalls the divine titles bestowed on the Pharaohs and later on the Ptolemies. These apocryphal works are always written in the form of dialogues. Sometimes it is Isis who transmits to her son Horus the initiation she received from the great ancestor Kamephes and from Hermes, secretary of the Gods; sometimes the good demon, who is probably the god Knef, instructs Osiris. Most often it is Hermes who initiates his disciple Asclepius or his son Tat. Sometimes Hermes plays the role of disciple, and the initiator is Intelligence (νοῦς) or Poimandres. Porphyry's letter is addressed to the prophet Anebo,

But who is this Hermes Trismegistus under whose name these books have come down to us? Is it a man, is it a God? For commentators, it seems to be both. The multiple aspects of the Greek Hermes had caused him to be confused with several Egyptian gods who had a lot of relationships with each other and with him. It was thought to avoid confusion by genealogies, and it was said that there were several Hermes. According to Manetho, Thoth, the first Hermes had written on stelae or columns the principles of the sciences in language and hieroglyphic characters. After the flood, the second Hermes, son of the good demon and father of Tat, had translated these inscriptions into Greek. In this passage, these Hermes are given as historical figures. In Egypt, the priests as well as the kings took names borrowed from the Gods, and as in the hermetic books the initiator has a character rather priestly than divine, the first editors attributed them to this family of prophets. It would have cost them too much to believe that these works which they greatly admired were by some obscure and anonymous writer, putting his ideas under the name of a God. However, the fraud was very innocent; the author of the Imitation, who puts speeches in the mouth of Christ, is not regarded as a forger. In the hermetic books, philosophy is supposed to be revealed by the intelligence or by the God who is its personification. early publishers attributed them to this family of prophets. It would have cost them too much to believe that these works which they greatly admired were by some obscure and anonymous writer, putting his ideas under the name of a God. However, the fraud was very innocent; the author of the Imitation, who puts speeches in the mouth of Christ, is not regarded as a forger. In the hermetic books, philosophy is supposed to be revealed by the intelligence or by the God who is its personification. early publishers attributed them to this family of prophets. It would have cost them too much to believe that these works which they greatly admired were by some obscure and anonymous writer, putting his ideas under the name of a God. However, the fraud was very innocent; the author of the Imitation, who puts speeches in the mouth of Christ, is not regarded as a forger. In the hermetic books, philosophy is supposed to be revealed by the intelligence or by the God who is its personification. is not viewed as a counterfeiter. In the hermetic books, philosophy is supposed to be revealed by the intelligence or by the God who is its personification. is not viewed as a counterfeiter. In the hermetic books, philosophy is supposed to be revealed by the intelligence or by the God who is its personification.

“Hermes, who presides over speech,” says Iamblichus, “is, according to ancient tradition, common to all priests; it is he who leads to true science; he is one in all. This is why our ancestors attributed all the discoveries to him and put their works under the name of Hermes. Hence the prodigious quantity of books or speeches attributed to Hermes. Iamblichus speaks of twenty thousand, but without giving the title of a single one. The forty-two books mentioned by Clement of Alexandria constituted a veritable priestly encyclopedia. According to Malien, the priests wrote on columns, without the name of the author, which was found by one of them and approved by all. These columns of Hermes were the stelae and the obelisks, which were the first books before the invention of the papyrus. According to Jablonski, Thoth's name means column in Egyptian. It is unfortunate for science that instead of the books mentioned by Clement of Alexandria and those in which, according to Plutarch, the names of the Gods were explained, we have only philosophical works of an age of decadence. However, the hermetic books that we possess also have their relative value. They make known to us the religious thought of antiquity, not in the most beautiful form, but in its latest form. However, the hermetic books that we possess also have their relative value. They make known to us the religious thought of antiquity, not in the most beautiful form, but in its latest form. However, the hermetic books that we possess also have their relative value. They make known to us the religious thought of antiquity, not in the most beautiful form, but in its latest form.

To expose the whole of hermetic theology, I cannot do better than to reproduce the summary that M. Vacherot has given of it in his Critical History of the School of Alexandria. "God," he says, "is conceived there as a principle superior to the intelligence, to the soul, to everything of which he is the cause."[4] The good is not one of its attributes, it is its very nature; God is good, as good is God. It is non-being insofar as it is superior to being. God produces all that is and contains all that is not yet. Absolutely invisible in itself, it is the principle of all light.[5] Intelligence is not God, it is only of God and in God, just as reason is in intelligence, soul in reason, life in soul, body in life. [6] Intelligence is distinct and inseparable from God as the light of his hearth; it is as well as the soul the act of God, his essence, if he has one.[7] For God, producing and living are one and the same.[8] Finally, the proper character of the divine nature is that nothing that belongs to other beings can be attributed to it; he is the substance of all without being anything.[9] By this sign we recognize the father of all beings, God. It is the radiance of good that illuminates the intelligence, then the whole man, and converts him into a truly divine essence.[10] God is universal life, the whole of which individual beings are only parts; he is the beginning and the end, the center and the circumference, the basis of all things, the overflowing source, the vivifying soul, the virtue that produces, the intelligence that sees, the spirit that inspires.[11] God is everything, everything is full of him; there is nothing in the universe that is not God.[12] All names befit him as the father of the universe, but, because he is the father of all things, no name is his proper name.[13] One is all, all is one; unity and totality are synonymous terms in God.[14] The first idea which presents itself to the mind when one studies this philosophy is to bring it closer to that of the Brahmins. By comparing the hermetic books with the Baghavat-Gîta, one often sees the same ideas present themselves under almost identical expressions: “I am the origin and the dissolution of the universe, Nothing is greater than me; things depend on me, like beads hanging from a cord. I am moisture in the waters, splendor in the sun and the moon, the holy word in the Vedas, strength in the air, virility in man. — I am the perfume of the earth, the brightness of the flame, the intelligence of the intelligent, the strength of the strong. I know past, present and future beings, but no one knows me. — I penetrate the universe of heat, I retain and pour down the rains, I am death and immortality, I am being and nothingness, O Arjuna! — I am the generator of all things, from me the universe develops. I am the spirit that resides within all beings; I am the beginning, the middle and the end.[15] As there is no positive evidence of any communication between India and Egypt, these analogies cannot be explained by borrowings. It is only curious to find, among different peoples, the same doctrines side by side with the same social forms: pantheism responds to the caste system, as monotheism responds to the monarchy and polytheism to the republic.

M. Vacherot recognizes in hermetic theology some Neoplatonic thoughts and expressions, others borrowed from Philo and other Jewish books; it is easy to recognize there also Egyptian pantheism stripped of its symbolic forms and clothed in the abstract forms of Greek philosophy. Thus, in an inscription from the temple of Sais quoted by Plutarch and by Proclos, Neith said: “I am all that is, what has been, what will be.[16] » According to M. de Rougé, the supreme God is defined in several formulas of the Funeral Ritual as « the one who exists by himself » — « the one who engenders himself eternally; other texts call him "the lord of beings and non-beings."[17] This is indeed this God of hermetic pantheism by whom and in whom everything exists, this universal father whose only function is to create, the one whose books of Hermes tell us: "The eternal was not engendered by another, he produced himself, or rather he creates himself -even forever[18]; » — « if the creator is none other than the one who creates, he necessarily creates himself, because it is by creating that he becomes a creator;[19] » — « he is what is and what is not is not.[20] The idea that the old texts render by ua en ua, the one of one, the πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου of Iamblichus, or by pau ti, the double God or double being, that is to say father and son, according to the face of the mystery that we mainly want to consider,[21] is also found in the books of Hermes, where it is often a question of the son of God,[22] of the begotten God. the one about whom the books of Hermes tell us: “The eternal was not begotten by another, it produced itself, or rather it creates itself eternally[18]; » — « if the creator is none other than the one who creates, he necessarily creates himself, because it is by creating that he becomes a creator;[19] » — « he is what is and what is not is not.[20] The idea that the old texts render by ua en ua, the one of one, the πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου of Iamblichus, or by pau ti, the double God or double being, that is to say father and son, according to the face of the mystery that we mainly want to consider,[21] is also found in the books of Hermes, where it is often a question of the son of God,[22] of the begotten God. the one about whom the books of Hermes tell us: “The eternal was not begotten by another, it produced itself, or rather it creates itself eternally[18]; » — « if the creator is none other than the one who creates, he necessarily creates himself, because it is by creating that he becomes a creator;[19] » — « he is what is and what is not is not.[20] The idea that the old texts render by ua en ua, the one of one, the πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου of Iamblichus, or by pau ti, the double God or double being, that is to say father and son, according to the face of the mystery that we mainly want to consider,[21] is also found in the books of Hermes, where it is often a question of the son of God,[22] of the begotten God. it produced itself, or rather it creates itself eternally[18]; » — « if the creator is none other than the one who creates, he necessarily creates himself, because it is by creating that he becomes a creator;[19] » — « he is what is and what is not is not.[20] The idea that the old texts render by ua en ua, the one of one, the πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου of Iamblichus, or by pau ti, the double God or double being, that is to say father and son, according to the face of the mystery that we mainly want to consider,[21] is also found in the books of Hermes, where it is often a question of the son of God,[22] of the begotten God. it produced itself, or rather it creates itself eternally[18]; » — « if the creator is none other than the one who creates, he necessarily creates himself, because it is by creating that he becomes a creator;[19] » — « he is what is and what is not is not.[20] The idea that the old texts render by ua en ua, the one of one, the πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου of Iamblichus, or by pau ti, the double God or double being, that is to say father and son, according to the face of the mystery that we mainly want to consider,[21] is also found in the books of Hermes, where it is often a question of the son of God,[22] of the begotten God. for it is by creating that he becomes creator;[19]” — “he is what is and what is not.[20] The idea that the old texts render by ua en ua, the one of one, the πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου of Iamblichus, or by pau ti, the double God or double being, that is to say father and son, according to the face of the mystery that we mainly want to consider,[21] is also found in the books of Hermes, where it is often a question of the son of God,[22] of the begotten God. for it is by creating that he becomes creator;[19]” — “he is what is and what is not.[20] The idea that the old texts render by ua en ua, the one of one, the πρῶτος τοῦ πρώτου of Iamblichus, or by pau ti, the double God or double being, that is to say father and son, according to the face of the mystery that we mainly want to consider,[21] is also found in the books of Hermes, where it is often a question of the son of God,[22] of the begotten God.

This second God is the world, the visible manifestation of the invisible God.[23] Sometimes this role is attributed to the sun,[24] which creates living beings, as the Father creates ideal essences. In this form, hermetic thought comes close to ancient Egyptian theology. “A stele in the museum of Berlin, says M. Mariette, calls the sun the first born, the son of God, the Word. On one of the walls of the temple of Philae... and on the door of the temple of Medinet-Abou, we read: "It is he, the sun, who has made all that is, and nothing has been done without him ever; » what Saint John, in precisely the same terms, will say fourteen centuries later of the Word.[25] The third God of the hermetic books, man,[26] considered in his abstract essence, is not without analogy with Osiris, who is sometimes taken for the ideal type of humanity; in the Funeral Ritual, the soul that presents itself for judgment is always called “so-and-so osiris”. This hermetic trinity, God, the world, man, is no further removed from the ancient Egyptian triads than from the abstract conceptions of the Platonists.


II

The general unity of the doctrines expounded in the hermetic books enables them to be referred to the same school; but this unity is not such that one cannot distinguish three main groups, which I will call Jewish, Greek and Egyptian, without attributing to these words an exclusive and absolute value, but only to indicate the relative predominance of such or such a thing. such an element and the various tendencies which in turn bring the hermetic school closer to each of the three races forming the population of Alexandria. Attention must first be directed to the Jewish group, which is more directly connected with the history so interesting for us of the origins of Christianity. Between the first Gnostic sects and the Hellenic Jews represented by Philo, a link was missing: it can be found in some hermetic books, particularly in the Poimandres and the Sermon on the Mount; perhaps we will also find there the reason for the differences often observed between the first three Gospels and the fourth.

Poimandres means the pastor of man; the choice of this word to designate the sovereign Intelligence is explained by this passage from Philo: "Our intelligence must govern us as a shepherd governs his goats, his oxen or his sheep, preferring for himself and for his cattle the useful pleasantly. It is above all and almost solely to the providence of God that the parts of our soul owe not being without direction, and having an irreproachable and perfectly good pastor, who prevents our thought from wandering to chance. One and the same direction must lead us to a single goal; nothing is more unbearable than obeying several commandments. Such is the excellence of the functions of pastor that they are justly attributed not only to kings, sages, to souls purified by initiation, but to God himself. He who affirms it is not the first comer, he is a prophet whom it is good to believe, the one who wrote the hymns; here is what he says: "The Lord is my pastor and I shall lack nothing." Let each say the same for himself, for this song should be meditated on by all the friends of God. But above all it is suitable for the world: as a kind of herd, earth, water, air, fire, all plants and all animals, mortal things and divine things, nature of the sky, the periods of the sun and the moon, the revolutions of the other stars and their harmonious dances follow God as their pastor and their king, who leads them according to justice and rule, directing them by his right reason (Word), his first-born son, entrusted with the care of this sacred flock and with the functions of minister to the great king; for it is said somewhere: “Here, it is I; I will send my angel in front of your face to keep you on your way. So let the whole world, the most great and most perfect flock of the true God, say: The Lord is my shepherd and I shall lack nothing.[27] »

The Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus has been compared to the Pastor of Saint Hermas or Hermes, a contemporary of the apostles. This Pasteur is an apocalyptic work very badly written and which is hardly read any more, but it enjoyed great authority in the primitive Church. I will quote a passage which can serve as an explanation of the title and in which we find the germ of the doctrine of purgatory: "I came into a field, and he showed me a young child dressed in yellow clothes and grazing cattle. many. And these cattle were like in delights, frolicking merrily and leaping hither and thither. And the pastor himself was very cheerful in his pasture and running around his flock. And I live in a place of other cattle frolicking in delight, but not leaping. And he said to me: Do you see this pastor? "I see it, Lord," I replied. “He is,” he said, “the angel of delight and illusion; it corrupts the souls of God's slaves, turns them away from the truth, deceives them with evil desires in which they lose themselves, forgetting the precepts of the living God, and walking in the foolish delights and illusions of this life. And he said to me: Listen, he said (sic); the cattle that you saw joyful and leaping, they are those who separated themselves from God until the end and gave themselves up to the desires of this age. There is no repentance in them that brings life back, because the name of God is blasphemed by them. The life of such is a death. Those whom you saw not leaping, but grazing in one place, are those who indulged in delight and delusion, but did not blaspheme the Lord, they are separated from the truth, but there is in them the hope of repentance which gives life. Their corruption therefore has some hope of resurrection; but death (of others) is eternal destruction.

“We came forward a little and he showed me another pastor, tall and wild looking, wrapped in a white goatskin; and he had a satchel over his shoulder and a rough, knotty stick, and he had a bitter look, so that I was afraid of him. This pastor received the cattle of the first young pastor, those who frolicked in delight but did not leap, and he drove them to a certain very steep place, full of thorns and brambles, so that the cattle could not extricate themselves, but remained embarrassed in thorns and briars. And he overwhelmed them with blows and thus walked around them without giving them either rest or truce. And seeing them thus beaten and tormented, I was distressed that they were tortured relentlessly. And I said to the angel who spoke to me: Lord, who is this bitter, heartless pastor? And he said to me: This is the angel of punishment; he is one of the just angels, but appointed to punish. He receives those who have strayed from God and walked according to their desires, and he punishes them as they deserve, with terrible and varied chastisements.[28] »

What is especially important to note is that Philo and Saint Hermas represent two different aspects of this Jewish world, so multiple in its apparent unity, and of which the Poimandres will offer us a third nuance. The Jews, despite their efforts to isolate themselves, had become, through transportation, exile or voluntary emigration, what their elder brothers the Phoenicians had been through trade, agents of communication between other peoples. Philo is as Greek as he is Jewish; the author of the Pasteur is a Jew barely Hellenized; in the Poimandres, Egyptian doctrines, perhaps even some vestiges of Chaldean or Persian beliefs mingle with the Timaeus, the first chapter of Genesis and the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John.

The subject of the work is a cosmogony presented in the form of a revelation made to the author by Poimandres, who is the νοῦς of Greek philosophy, Intelligence, the supreme God. As in the Timaeus, God is above matter, but he does not draw it out of nothing. Intelligence orders the world according to an ideal model which is its reason or its word, the λόγος of Plato and Zeno. By this word, God engenders another creative intelligence, the God of fire and breath or spirit, πνεῦμα. One could see there an Egyptian reminiscence; according to Eusebius,[29] Phta was born from an egg taken from Knef's mouth. But this cosmogony of Poimandres can also be linked to Greek philosophy, especially to Timaeus, because this creative breath is very similar to the soul of the world. A scholium which is at the head of the manuscripts attributes to Hermes an anticipated vision of the Christian trinity and even derives from this an absurd explanation of the name of Trismegistus. Suidas reproduces this opinion and quotes a hermetic fragment analogous to this passage from Poimandres. It is certain that this theology recalls the dogma of the Trinity in the form given to it by the Greek Church, which causes the Spirit to proceed from the Father through the Son. But it should not be concluded that the Poimandres is later than the time when this dogma was established. Ideas exist in germ in people's minds long before they take on a definitive form. Suidas reproduces this opinion and quotes a hermetic fragment analogous to this passage from Poimandres. It is certain that this theology recalls the dogma of the Trinity in the form given to it by the Greek Church, which causes the Spirit to proceed from the Father through the Son. But it should not be concluded that the Poimandres is later than the time when this dogma was fixed. Ideas exist in germ in people's minds long before they take on a definitive form. Suidas reproduces this opinion and quotes a hermetic fragment analogous to this passage from Poimandres. It is certain that this theology recalls the dogma of the Trinity in the form given to it by the Greek Church, which causes the Spirit to proceed from the Father through the Son. But it should not be concluded that the Poimandres is later than the time when this dogma was established. Ideas exist in germ in people's minds long before they take on a definitive form.

This second creator, whom God engenders by his word, produces seven ministers who govern the spheres of heaven and who recall the Amschaspands of Persia. As for man, God created him in his own image. This is probably a memory of the Bible, although this idea also exists in polytheism:

Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta Deorum.

According to Philo, the angels would have participated in the creation of man; this is how he explains the use of the plural in the account of Moses: “After having said that the remnant had been created by God, in the creation of man alone he shows an alien cooperation. God says: Let us make man in our image. This word do indicates plurality. The universal Father addresses his powers and charges them to form the mortal part of our soul by imitating the art with which he himself has formed our reasonable part, for he sees fit that the directing faculty of the soul be the work of the ruler, and that which must obey be the work of the subjects.[30] This opinion is found in the Poimandres; the typical man created by God crosses the seven spheres, whose governors make him participate in their nature. The same idea is expounded by Macrobius in his commentary on Scipio's Dream. As for the body, it is man who creates it himself by contemplating his reflection in the water and his shadow on the ground; he falls in love with his image, matter returns his love, and form is born of their union. There is perhaps an allusion to the fable of Narcissus. This fable, explained by a commentator on Plato, was connected with the religion of the mysteries; it was one of the many expressions of that belief common to religions and mystical philosophies: the life of the body is the death of the soul, which, carried along by desire, falls into the waves of matter. it is man who creates it himself by contemplating his reflection in the water and his shadow on the ground; he falls in love with his image, matter returns his love, and form is born of their union. There is perhaps an allusion to the fable of Narcissus. This fable, explained by a commentator on Plato, was connected with the religion of the mysteries; it was one of the many expressions of that belief common to religions and mystical philosophies: the life of the body is the death of the soul, which, carried along by desire, falls into the waves of matter. it is man who creates it himself by contemplating his reflection in the water and his shadow on the ground; he falls in love with his image, matter returns his love, and form is born of their union. There is perhaps an allusion to the fable of Narcissus. This fable, explained by a commentator on Plato, was connected with the religion of the mysteries; it was one of the many expressions of that belief common to religions and mystical philosophies: the life of the body is the death of the soul, which, carried along by desire, falls into the waves of matter. explained by a commentator of Plato, was connected with the religion of the mysteries; it was one of the many expressions of that belief common to religions and mystical philosophies: the life of the body is the death of the soul, which, carried along by desire, falls into the waves of matter. explained by a commentator of Plato, was connected with the religion of the mysteries; it was one of the many expressions of that belief common to religions and mystical philosophies: the life of the body is the death of the soul, which, carried along by desire, falls into the waves of matter.

The androgynous character of primitive man in the Poimandres could be linked to Plato's Banquet, where this idea is presented in a grotesque way; but it is more likely a recollection of the Bible word, "he created them male and female." According to Philo, who comments extensively on the Mosaic account from Platonic theories, God first created the human race before creating individuals of different sexes. Poimandres seems to be inspired even more directly by Genesis, when he adds that after the separation of the sexes God said to his creatures: "Grow in increase and multiply in multitude." It is true that this redundant form, although fairly consistent with the Hebrew genius, is not found in the Bible, which simply says: "Increase and multiply." One could therefore suppose that the author had in view some other cosmogony now lost. However, this slight difference should not cause serious doubt. A scholium by Psellos on this passage announces that Jewish influence has long been recognized there. "This sorcerer," says this scholia, speaking of Hermes, "seems to have known Holy Scripture very well... It is not difficult to see who the Poimandres of the Greeks was: he is the one we call the prince of the world. , or one of his own, for, says Basil, the devil is a thief, he plunders our traditions. » A scholium by Psellos on this passage announces that Jewish influence has long been recognized there. "This sorcerer," says this scholia, speaking of Hermes, "seems to have known Holy Scripture very well... It is not difficult to see who the Poimandres of the Greeks was: he is the one we call the prince of the world. , or one of his own, for, says Basil, the devil is a thief, he plunders our traditions. » A scholium by Psellos on this passage announces that Jewish influence has long been recognized there. "This sorcerer," says this scholia, speaking of Hermes, "seems to have known Holy Scripture very well... It is not difficult to see who the Poimandres of the Greeks was: he is the one we call the prince of the world. , or one of his own, for, says Basil, the devil is a thief, he plunders our traditions. »

The relationship of the Poimandres with the Gospel of Saint John is even more obvious:


POIMANDRES: “This light is I, intelligence, your God, prior to the humid nature that comes out of darkness, and the luminous Word of Intelligence is the Son of God.
SAINT JOHN: “In principle was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

POIMANDRES: “They are not separated, because the union is their life.
SAINT JEAN : “He was in principle with God.

POIMANDRES: “The word of God rushed from the lower elements towards the pure creation of nature, and united with the creative Intelligence, for it is essence (ὁμοούσιος).
SAINT JOHN: “All things were born by him, and nothing was born without him, likewise with everything that was born.

POIMANDRES: “In life and light is the father of all things.
SAINT JOHN: “In him was life, and life was the light of men.

POIMANDRES: “Soon descended from the darkness... which changed into a damp and troubled nature, and there issued an inarticulate cry which seemed the voice of light; a holy word came down from light on nature.
SAINT JOHN: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not contain it.

POIMANDRES: “What in you sees and hears is the Word of the Lord; Intelligence is the Father God.
SAINT JOHN: “It is the true light which illumines every man coming into this world.

POIMANDRES: “I believe in you and bear witness to you; I walk in life and light. Ο Father, be blessed, the man who belongs to you wants to share your holiness as you have given him the power to do so. »
SAINT JOHN: “To those who received her she gave the power to become children of God, to those who believe in her name. »

It is very probable that the Poimandres and the Gospel of Saint John were written at dates not very distant from each other, in circles where the same ideas and the same expressions were current, one among the Judeos -Greeks of Alexandria, the other among those of Ephesus. There is, however, a profound difference between them which is summed up in these words of Saint John: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. The incarnation of the Word is the fundamental dogma of Christianity, and as there is no trace of this dogma in the Poimandres, it is not likely that the author knew of it; otherwise he would have alluded to it, either to adhere to it or to oppose it.

What seems certain is that the Poimandres came out of this school of Egyptian therapists, who have often been mistakenly confused with the Essenes of Syria and Palestine. Philo establishes quite notable differences between the two. “The Essenes,” he says, “consider the reasoning part of philosophy as not being necessary to acquire virtue, and they leave it to lovers of words. Physics seems to them above human nature; they leave it to those who lose themselves in the clouds, except for questions relating to the existence of God and the creation of the world. They are above all concerned with morality. Philo then describes the manners of the Essenes, and this description could apply to the first Christian communities, so striking is the resemblance. We can therefore believe that it was among them that the apostles recruited their first disciples. It seems probable to me that Pasteur d'Hermas came out of this group, and that the title of the work and the name of the author inspired, in a spirit of rivalry, some Judeo-Egyptian therapist the idea of ​​composing in turn a kind of less moralistic and more metaphysical apocalypse, and to attribute it, not to a contemporary Hermas or Hermes, but to the famous Hermes Trismegistus so celebrated throughout Egypt.

In the Poimandres, in fact, we find several features which agree perfectly with what Philo says of the therapists, whom he takes as a type of the contemplative life: "In the study of the holy books, they treat the national philosophy by allegories, and divine the secrets of nature by interpreting symbols. This sentence, which applies so well to the allegorical system of Philo himself, makes one think at the same time of the cosmogony of Poimandres, although the biblical texts are not invoked there as authority. We already have a presentiment of the Gnostic systems which will emerge from a more intimate combination of Judaism and Hellenism. Philo also says that the therapists, constantly occupied with the thought of God, find, even in their dreams, visions of the beauty of the divine powers. “There are some,” he says, “who discover by dreams during their sleep the venerable dogmas of sacred philosophy. Now, the author of the Poimandres begins his work with these words: “I reflected one day on beings; my mind soared in the heights, and all my bodily sensations were numb as in the heavy sleep that follows satiety, excess or fatigue. » He then recounts his vision, then, after having written it down, he falls asleep full of joy: « The sleep of the body produced the lucidity of intelligence, my closed eyes saw the truth. According to Philo, therapists used to pray twice a day, morning and evening; the author of Poimandres, after having instructed men, invites them to prayer at the last rays of the setting sun. who discover by dreams during their sleep the venerable dogmas of sacred philosophy. Now, the author of the Poimandres begins his work with these words: “I reflected one day on beings; my mind soared in the heights, and all my bodily sensations were numb as in the heavy sleep that follows satiety, excess or fatigue. » He then recounts his vision, then, after having written it down, he falls asleep full of joy: « The sleep of the body produced the lucidity of the intelligence, my closed eyes saw the truth. According to Philo, therapists used to pray twice a day, morning and evening; the author of Poimandres, after having instructed men, invites them to prayer at the last rays of the setting sun. who discover by dreams during their sleep the venerable dogmas of sacred philosophy. Now, the author of the Poimandres begins his work with these words: “I reflected one day on beings; my thoughts soared in the heights, and all my bodily sensations were numb as in the heavy sleep that follows satiety, excess or fatigue. » He then recounts his vision, then, after having written it down, he falls asleep full of joy: « The sleep of the body produced the lucidity of the intelligence, my closed eyes saw the truth. According to Philo, therapists used to pray twice a day, morning and evening; the author of Poimandres, after having instructed men, invites them to prayer at the last rays of the setting sun.

After having spread among the Jews of Asia, the Christian missionaries carried their doctrines among the Jews of Egypt. Instead of the laborious mores of the Essenes, who, according to Philo, exercised manual trades, pooled the products of their labor, and reduced philosophy to morality and morality to charity, the monasteries of therapists offered Christian propaganda a much more Hellenized population, accustomed to abstract speculations and mystical allegories. From these tendencies, combined with the dogma of the incarnation, came the Gnostic sects. The Poimandres must be prior to these sects; we do not yet find there the mythological luxury which characterizes them: the divine powers, life, light, etc., are not yet distinguished or personified there, and above all there is not yet any question of the incarnation of the Word. But we already find there the idea of ​​gnosis, that is to say of the mystical science which unites man to God; this authorizes, not to suppose, with Jablonski, that the author is a Gnostic, but to regard him as a precursor of Gnosticism, as well as Philo. In the one it is the Jewish element which dominates, in the other it is the Greek element in one and in the other all that was missing to be Gnostics was to admit the incarnation of the Verb. but to regard him as a precursor of Gnosticism, as well as Philo. In the one it is the Jewish element which dominates, in the other it is the Greek element in one and in the other all that was missing to be Gnostics was to admit the incarnation of the Verb. but to regard him as a precursor of Gnosticism, as well as Philo. In the one it is the Jewish element which dominates, in the other it is the Greek element in one and in the other all that was missing to be Gnostics was to admit the incarnation of the Verb.

Either the Jews of Ephesus were more directly related than those of Syria and Palestine with the Jews of Alexandria, or either in Ephesus as in Alexandria the Greek influence gave rise to the same philosophical and mythological tendencies. , Gnosticism seems to have developed in these two cities at about the same time. Mr. Matter, in his history of Gnosticism, presents certain passages of the New Testament as allusions to the first Gnostic sects; for example, the recommendation that Saint Paul makes to his disciple Timothy to remain in Ephesus to oppose those who taught another doctrine and occupied themselves with useless myths and genealogies, producing rather discussions than the edification of God, which consists in faith. The words of myths and genealogies can, in fact, designate allegorical mythology and the generations or divine emanations which, in the Gnostic systems, descend from the supreme God to the material world. These tendencies must have manifested themselves as soon as Christianity spread among the Hellenized Jews. Mr. Matter goes so far as to think that the Gospel of Saint John was composed mainly to combat the nascent Gnosticism. For me, in the first chapter of this Gospel, I believe I see less an indirect polemic than an intention of propaganda. The first three evangelists, addressing the Jews of Palestine, said to them: “This Messiah for whom you are waiting has come; it is Jesus, in whom we show you all the characteristics attributed to the Messiah by the prophets. The fourth gospel is addressed to the Hellenized Jews and says to them: "This Word of whom you speak, by whom everything was made, who is light and life, he became flesh, he dwelt among us." His own did not receive him, but you receive him, and he will make you children of God. Such is the language that Saint John must have held, not to Gnostics, since there were none yet, but to disciples of Philo, to men living in the same order of ideas as the author of the Poimandres.

It is not only in the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John that we can discover the relations between Christianity and the hermetic doctrines; the idea of ​​regeneration or rebirth (palingenesia) forms the subject of the third chapter of this gospel and of a dialogue of Hermes entitled Mysterious Word or Secret Sermon on the Mount. This very title and the passage where Hermes attributes regeneration to the son of God, to the unique man, indicate that the author lived at a time when Christianity had already penetrated into Alexandria, and that he found himself in contact with some Christians. However, an attentive examination hardly authorizes us to suppose that he knew their books, nor even that he was initiated into their dogmas.

The first Christian societies were true secret societies. If the ardor of proselytism could stifle the fear of persecution, there always remained the danger of exposing the new beliefs to the insults and ridicule of those who were not prepared to receive them. It is true that the apostles and their first disciples, being Jews, addressed themselves first to their co-religionists; but experience had taught them from the start that the Jews' attachment to tradition made them wary of any attempt at reform. The freedom of Greek morals made it possible to preach the unknown God in the public square of Athens, but one would have been stoned, like Saint Stephen, by announcing the Incarnation in a synagogue. Besides, the fashion was for mysteries; the secret of the initiations was a means of propaganda and a bait for curiosity, everyone wanted to be initiated into something.

The Christians had not created this situation, but they accepted it, preparing the ground little by little, addressing themselves successively to one and the other and not revealing all their doctrine at once. The main points of this doctrine were summarized in the Gospel sermon entitled: Discourse on the Mount; these words were to return from time to time to the ears of Jews not yet initiated into the Gospel. That one of these should have imagined producing a revelation under the same title, nothing is more natural; but, just as between the Poimandres and the Pasteur d'Hermas, the resemblance here stops at the title. The Sermon on the Mount reported in the Gospel of Saint Matthew contains a purely moral teaching; it is not about regeneration, than in the Gospel of Saint John. The author who writes under the name of Hermes, to whom this idea of ​​regeneration had doubtless reached like a vague rumor, expounds it in an emphatic and pretentious form which has nothing in common with the simplicity of the Gospel style. The son of God, the unique man, is not for him a real and historical character, he is rather an abstract type of humanity, analogous to the ideal man of the Poimandres, to the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah, to the Osiris of the Funerary Ritual of the Egyptians. It is true that the Gnostics gave this character to Christ, distinct for them from the man Jesus; but in the hermetic dialogue the regenerator is not designated by the name of Christ: one cannot therefore recognize in it the work of a Christian Gnostic.

To admit that the author was a Christian, one would have to suppose that he deliberately hides part of his beliefs, that his written teaching is only an introduction to an oral teaching, and that he reserves the great mystery of the incarnation and the very name of Christ. This hypothesis is not absolutely inadmissible, however it does not seem that we should dwell on it. It is true that, according to the custom of his time, the author adopts the tone of a hierophant; but there is no hint that he has anything in store beyond what he says. Poimandres is the only authority he invokes; he even adds: "Poimandres, the sovereign Intelligence, revealed nothing to me more than what is written, knowing that I could for myself understand and hear what I would like, and see all things. After much reluctance and amphigouric aphorisms, Hermes ended up letting his secret be wrested from him, and, despite his disciple's astonishment and the difficulty he seemed to have in understanding, this secret was reduced to a very simple idea: is that, to rise in the ideal world, it is necessary to free oneself from the sensations. One thus becomes a new man, and moral regeneration takes place of itself. One has only to fight each vice by a corresponding virtue, it is not more difficult than that. in spite of his disciple's astonishment and the difficulty he seems to have in understanding, this secret is reduced to a very simple idea: it is that, in order to rise in the ideal world, one must free oneself from sensations. One thus becomes a new man, and moral regeneration takes place of itself. One has only to fight each vice by a corresponding virtue, it is not more difficult than that. in spite of his disciple's astonishment and the difficulty he seems to have in understanding, this secret is reduced to a very simple idea: it is that, in order to rise in the ideal world, one must free oneself from sensations. One thus becomes a new man, and moral regeneration takes place of itself. One has only to fight each vice by a corresponding virtue, it is not more difficult than that.

This piece can be placed, in the order of ideas and times, between the Poimandres and the first Gnostic sects; he must be slightly earlier than the founders of Gnosticism, Basilides and Valentin. We already find there the Decade, the Dodecade, the Ogdoade, this taste for sacred numbers that the Gnostics borrowed from the Pythagoreans and the Kabbalists. The body is compared to a tent, a metaphor that is found in the Axiochos attributed to Plato and in the second epistle to the Corinthians. The word devil, διάβολος, is employed there almost in the Christian sense. The general tone of exaltation which reigns there, this obscurity which aims at depth, intoxicates itself and takes this intoxication for ecstasy, everything makes one foresee the mystical aberrations of Gnosticism, against which the Fathers of the Church and the philosophers of Alexandria will also protest. They are already announced in words like these: “Holy Gnosis, illuminated by you, through you I sing of the ideal light; — “O my son, ideal wisdom is in silence; » — « through your creations, I found the blessing in your eternity. We know that silence, σιγή, eternity, αἰὼν, or centuries, αἰῶνες, were personified by the Gnostics and played a role in their mythology. There are also curious indications about the society within which Christianity was to develop: thus the virtue that Hermes opposes to avarice is community or communion, κοινωνία. If we remember that the Essenes, according to Josephus and Philo, pooled their daily wages, as the Mormons are said to do, one is less astonished at the communist tendencies which have manifested themselves in some Christian societies. The Nicolaitanes, against whom Saint John rises in the Apocalypse, have even been accused of extending this community to women; their leader was said to have pooled his own.

One can follow in hermetic books the destinies of this Judeo-Egyptian gnosis which, in the first century, rubbed shoulders with Christianity without letting itself be absorbed, passing imperceptibly from the Jewish school of Philo to the Greek school of Plotinus. In Philo, Judaism was openly avowed by continual allusions to the Bible. In the Poimandres and the Sermon on the Mount, he betrays himself here and there by a few reminiscences. One can still find traces of the Jewish element in speech VII, entitled: The greatest evil is the ignorance of God; it is a rather insignificant preaching in favor of the contemplative life, a development of the allocution addressed to men in the Poimandres. There are other dialogues, of a mixed character, which can be traced with as much probability to Greek or Jewish influence. Such is the one whose title is the Crater or the Monad. This cup of intelligence in which the soul is immersed or baptized is perhaps an image borrowed from the Orphic initiations; there may also be found, as Fabricius has pointed out, baptism and regeneration in the Christian sense. Allusions to mystical ceremonies are very frequent in Greek authors; Plato speaks of the crater where God mixes the elements of the world. The legend of Empedocles plunging into the crater of Etna to become a god may have come from a similar metaphor. We can therefore see a memory of the mysteries in these words of Hermes: “Those who were baptized in intelligence possessed gnosis and became initiates of intelligence, perfect men: such is the blessing of the divine crater. But we can also compare this passage with a word from the Gospel of Saint John: “Whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of living water which will well up into eternal life. » “Whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of living water which will well up into eternal life. » “Whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of living water which will well up into eternal life. »

Between all the rival doctrines which shared minds, the distance was not as great as one might think. So one passed easily from one religion to another; we even had several at the same time for greater security. There was then a universal thirst for beliefs, and people drank from all sources. In the midst of so many sects, subdivisions and nuances, a few made a choice, but most took with both hands, right and left, whatever presented itself.

A letter from the Emperor Hadrian, quoted by Vopiscus from Phlegon, makes clear the restless activity of the inhabitants of Alexandria, an activity which involved both commerce and religion. "Egypt, of which you spoke so highly of me, my dear Servianus, I found it light, mobile, changing mode at any moment. The worshipers of Sarapis are Christians, those who call themselves bishops of Christ are devotees of Sarapis. There is not a leader of a Jewish synagogue, a Samaritan, a Christian priest who is not an astrologer, haruspex, drug maker. The patriarch himself, when he comes to Egypt, is forced by some to adore Sarapis, by others to adore Christ. What a race, seditious, vain and impertinent! The city is rich, opulent, fertile, no one lives there without doing anything. Some blow glass, others make paper, all are canvas merchants, and they look good. The gouty have work, the lame work, the blind too; no one is idle, not even those who have gout in their hands... Why doesn't this town have better morals. It deserves by its importance to be at the head of all Egypt. I gave it everything, gave it back its old privileges, and added so many new ones that there was much to thank me for. I had hardly left when they had a thousand words against my son Vérus; as for what they said of Antinous, you must suspect it. I only wish them one thing, that is to eat what they feed their chickens to hatch them, I dare not say what it is. I am sending you iridescent vases of various colors given to me by the priest of the temple; they are specially intended for you and my sister for the use of meals, on feast days; take care that our Africanus does not break them. »

These Christian worshipers of Sarapis, of whom Hadrian speaks, are probably the Gnostics, who were very numerous at that time. The hermetic books contain here and there allusions to these Christian Gnostics. But what shocks Hermès is not the confusion they make of all the symbols, he doesn't even mention them; he reproaches them only for regarding the world as an evil work and for distinguishing the Creator from the supreme God: "The earth is the abode of evil, but not the world, as some blasphemers will say;[31]"—"let us leave aside gossip and empty words, and conceive two terms, the begotten and the creator; between them there is no place for a third.[32] It is also on this ground that Plotinus attacks the Gnostics; it does not speak of the incarnation of the Word,

The questions weren't asked then as we would be asking them today; what seemed fundamental to us was relegated to the background, and we discussed as far as the eye could see on points which seemed to us to be of little importance. One often perceives, in reading the history of philosophical and religious sects, that it is almost always between the closest schools that the keenest struggles take place. Separated from the Gnostics by a few particular principles, the Neoplatonists, and especially the Hermetics, approached them in all of their ideas: “The only way that leads to God is piety united with gnosis;[33] » — « gnosis is contemplation, it is the silence and rest of all sensation; whoever has achieved it can no longer think of anything else, neither to look at anything, nor even to move one's body;[34]” — “the virtue of the soul is gnosis; he who achieves this is good, pious and already divine.[35] By these mystical tendencies, which manifest themselves on every page, the books of Hermes place themselves between the Gnostics and the Neoplatonists. Such a resemblance of doctrines would almost suffice to bring them back to the same period--I find, moreover, in the dialogue entitled Common Intelligence, a passage which seems to me to confirm this induction, and which may help to fix a more precise date. . The author speaks of a good demon whose teachings, if they had been written down, would be very useful to men; he then quotes some opinions of this good demon: they are pantheistic aphorisms. Can we not suppose that we are dealing here with Ammonios Saccas, leader of the Neoplatonists, who, as we know, never put his teachings in writing? It is true that the Good Demon is generally taken for an abstract character who merges with the Supreme Intelligence: this allusion to Ammonios Saccas would therefore be very vague; but it could not be clearer, since the author wrote under the pseudonym of Hermes. Between the fear of betraying his fraud by naming a contemporary and the desire to bear public testimony to his master, he had to take a middle term and designate under the name of good demon the one who had initiated him into philosophy. The author of this dialogue would thus be some obscure fellow student of Plotinus, a hypothesis confirmed by the resemblance of the doctrines,

In this mixed population of Alexandria, the fusion was to take place rapidly between ideas, perhaps even between races. Where are the Jewish therapists at the end of the 2nd century? Some, converted to Christianity, became anchorites or Basilidian and Valentinian Gnostics; the others approach more and more paganism. I say paganism and not polytheism, because at that time everyone admitted into the divine order a well-defined hierarchy with a supreme God at the top; only this supreme God is for some in the world, for others outside the world. Every moment, in the books of Hermes, one reads a tirade on divine unity; we believe we are dealing with a Christian or a Jew, and, a few lines below, we find phrases that remind you that it is a question of the God of pantheism: "not only does he contain everything, but truly he is everything;[36]" — "he is everything, and there is nothing that either he;[37]” — “he is what is and what is not, the existence of what is not yet.[38] To designate these doctrines, which derive much more from those of Egypt than from those of Greece, the name Hellenism would not be apt; it is better to retain the vague and general term of paganism, which is commonly applied to all the beliefs that Christianity has replaced. the existence of what is not yet.[38] To designate these doctrines, which derive much more from those of Egypt than from those of Greece, the name Hellenism would not be apt; it is better to retain the vague and general term of paganism, which is commonly applied to all the beliefs that Christianity has replaced. the existence of what is not yet.[38] To designate these doctrines, which derive much more from those of Egypt than from those of Greece, the name Hellenism would not be apt; it is better to retain the vague and general term of paganism, which is commonly applied to all the beliefs which Christianity has replaced.

Under the influence of the Greek school of Alexandria, a sort of pagan Gnosticism succeeded, in the hermetic school, to the Jewish Gnosticism of the Poimandres and the Secret Sermon on the Mount. Instead of a few expressions reminiscent of the Bible, there are memories of Greek mythology, very vague memories presented in an euhemeristic form: "Those who can drink from this divine light leave the body to enter the blissful vision, like our ancestors Ouranos and Kronos; may we resemble them, O my father![39] We see from the Sibylline books that the Jews and the Christians adopted the system of Euhemerus and regarded the Gods of polytheism as deified men; but they condemned this apotheosis as a superstition. The pagans, on the contrary, believed in it, and if they admitted that most of the gods had been men, they added that their benefits had raised them to divinity. When Hermes speaks of his ancestors Ouranos and Kronos, he believes in their apotheosis; this is therefore a pagan euhemerism, and not Christian or Jewish like that of the Sibylline books. Sometimes he calls the sky Olympus; elsewhere, he borrows from Stoicism this proud thought: "Man is a mortal God."[40] But after having noted these characteristic signs of Greek influence, it must be added that the doctrine has remained the same as a whole, and moreover, that this doctrine is rather that of an epoch than that of a school. We find it, except for a few particular features, in Plotinus and his successors, in Apuleius, in Macrobius, and even in Origen and other doctors of the Church. There is thus in each century a sum of ideas common to all even rival and enemy sects, and this was especially true at that time, when political unity favored the universal tendency of minds towards religious unity.


III

I will not dwell on each of the fragments addressed to Tat, to Asclepius, to Ammon; they add nothing new to the doctrines contained in the larger and more complete works of which we have spoken. They are psychological analyses, rather obscure metaphysical studies, theories on God, on the soul, on the world, on the Decans. Among these fragments, several are united under the title of Definitions, a title which nothing justifies, and are written under the name of Asclepios, disciple of Hermes. The author complains that the Greeks translated his master's books into their language; he mistreats Greek philosophy, which he calls a vain noise of words. It may be a forger's ruse to make people believe that his work is an authentic Egyptian monument. The shape is modern, and there is an allusion to the Greek usage of chariot racing. The sun is compared to a coachman, an image borrowed from Greek mythology, because in Egypt the sun was carried on a boat. However, the importance attributed to the sun in the work of creation suggests that the author is Egyptian. "The sun," says M. de Rougé, "is the oldest object of Egyptian worship that we find on monuments... we know the very basis of religion. It is the sun itself that is usually found there invoked as the supreme being.[41] » for in Egypt the sun was carried on a boat. However, the importance attributed to the sun in the work of creation suggests that the author is Egyptian. "The sun," says M. de Rougé, "is the oldest object of Egyptian worship that we find on monuments... we know the very basis of religion. It is the sun itself that is usually found there invoked as the supreme being.[41] » for in Egypt the sun was carried on a boat. However, the importance attributed to the sun in the work of creation suggests that the author is Egyptian. "The sun," says M. de Rougé, "is the oldest object of Egyptian worship that we find on monuments... we know the very basis of religion. It is the sun itself that is usually found there invoked as the supreme being.[41] » What was no doubt at first only a symbol has become, on the Egyptian monuments that we know, the very basis of religion. It is the sun itself that is usually found there invoked as the supreme being.[41] » What was no doubt at first only a symbol has become, on the Egyptian monuments that we know, the very basis of religion. It is the sun itself that is usually found there invoked as the supreme being.[41] »

The doctrine of divine unity is presented in a pantheistic form which excludes the idea of ​​a Jewish influence: “The master of the universe, the creator and the father, who is all in one and one in all; and further: “Everything is a part of God, so God is everything; in creating, he creates himself. Although these ideas are found more or less in the Timaeus, they still more recall the God of the Egyptian religion, who engenders himself. What is said of the demons can be connected with Egypt as well as with Greece. One of the functions attributed to them is the distribution of punishments. Among the Greeks, it was the role of the Eumenides, of the demon Eurynomos, painted by Polygnotus in the Leschè of Delphi, [men [with bodies of fire who, according to Plato, punish tyrants and other great criminals in Tartarus; but demons exist with the same character in Egyptian religion: the Funeral Ritual speaks of “executioners who prepare torture and immolation; one cannot escape their vigilance; they accompany Osiris. Don't let them get hold of me! may I not fall into their crucibles![42]”

Another fragment contains an allusion to Phidias and an anecdote about the musician Eunomios of Locri. Patrizzi, who makes Hermes a contemporary of Moses, goes to great lengths to explain these passages. He also admits that the piece as a whole is rather insignificant, and he hesitates to attribute it to the disciple of such a great man. I don't know why he doesn't extend his doubts to the next fragment, because one is worth the other. They are cold amplifications of a rhetorician who feigns enthusiasm and confuses the praises of kings with those of God. In this dull apotheosis of royalty, alongside a few expressions which recall those one reads on the ancient monuments of Egypt, we find an etymological explanation of the Greek word βασιλεύς, and even phrases which seem to allude to the name of Valens: "It is the virtue of the king, it is his name which guarantees peace." The king's name alone is often enough to repel enemies. His statues are beacons of peace in the storm. The only image of the king produces victory, gives everyone security and makes one invulnerable. It is, in more modern forms, the same monarchical servility as in the Egyptian inscriptions: "The king of Egypt, the governor of the deserts, the supreme sovereign, master of all the barbarians, etc."[43] The author sometimes speaks of the king, sometimes of kings; I suspect it is the two brothers Valens and Valentinien. His statues are beacons of peace in the storm. The only image of the king produces victory, gives everyone security and makes one invulnerable. It is, in more modern forms, the same monarchical servility as in the Egyptian inscriptions: "The king of Egypt, the governor of the deserts, the supreme sovereign, master of all the barbarians, etc."[43] The author sometimes speaks of the king, sometimes of kings; I suspect it is the two brothers Valens and Valentinien. His statues are beacons of peace in the storm. The only image of the king produces victory, gives everyone security and makes one invulnerable. It is, in more modern forms, the same monarchical servility as in the Egyptian inscriptions: "The king of Egypt, the governor of the deserts, the supreme sovereign, master of all the barbarians, etc."[43] The author sometimes speaks of the king, sometimes of kings; I suspect it is the two brothers Valens and Valentinien. [43] “The author sometimes speaks of the king, sometimes of kings; I suspect it is the two brothers Valens and Valentinien. [43] “The author sometimes speaks of the king, sometimes of kings; I suspect it is the two brothers Valens and Valentinien.

In other fragments, amid philosophical subtleties, we find here and there traces of Egyptian ideas. A passage quoted by Suidas, and of a Gnostic character, ends with an invocation in which one can recognize, in an altered form, Orphic verses. The fragments preserved by Cyrille are quite short; there is one, taken from the Digressions, where the Good Demon explains to Osiris the creation of the world. But of all the hermetic books which have come down to us, the most curious, the one in which the Egyptian element is most apparent, is the Sacred Book, also called the Virgin of the world or the Apple of the world, for the Greek word has two meanings, and neither is explained in the work, of which we have only fragments. Fabricius is mistaken when he says that Patrizzi completed these fragments from a manuscript found in the monastery of Enclistra, in the island of Cyprus; Patrizzi only says that the manuscript of Enclistra, besides the Poimandres and the pieces following, contained this book, which Stobeus inserted in his Physical Eclogues. But Patrizzi's edition contains nothing more than what is in Stobeus. I don't know why Patrizzi translates κόρη κόσμου as Minerva mundi; there is no mention of Minerva in this book. It is an interview between Isis and her son Hôros on the creation of the world, the incarnation of souls and metempsychosis. The ideas, some borrowed from the Timaeus, others from religious traditions, are expounded in an apocalyptic form, with that oratorical swelling that the literatures of decadence take for the majesty of the hieratic style: "It was a spectacle worthy of admiration and desire that these magnificences of the sky, revelations of the still unknown God, and this sumptuous majesty of the night, illuminated with a penetrating light, though less than that of the sun, and all those other mysteries which move in the sky in rhythmic periods, regulating and leading things here below by occult influences. » and all those other mysteries which move in the sky in rhythmic periods, regulating and leading things down here by occult influences. » and all those other mysteries which move in the sky in rhythmic periods, regulating and leading things down here by occult influences. »

The creation story is far from clear. The author tells us, it is true, that Hermes, "Universal Intelligence," had explained everything in his books; but he adds that these precious documents were embalmed and wrapped in bandages immediately after they were written, and that they are buried “near the secrets of Osiris. It is difficult to undertake excavations according to this indication. We must limit ourselves to knowing that the general inertia lasted until the moment when the creator, on the prayer of the inferior gods, decided to order the universe. “Then God smiled, and he told Nature to exist; and, coming out of her voice, the Feminine came forward in her perfect beauty. The Gods with amazement contemplated this marvel, and the great ancestor, pouring a drink to Nature, ordered her to be fruitful; then, penetrating everything with his gaze, he said this: "May the sky be the plenitude of all things, and the air, and the ether!" God said, and it was. »

This last sentence seems reminiscent of the Bible; however it is difficult to find in the whole of the work a Jewish influence. The author addresses several questions that hold an important place in Christian theology, and the solutions he gives are very different from those of Christianity. He describes the creation of souls, of which the Bible says nothing, and he describes it minutely, as a chemical operation. The discourse that God addresses to them after having created them recalls the allocution of the Supreme God to the lower Gods in Plato's Timaeus: "Ο souls, beautiful children of my breath and of my solicitude, you whom I have brought to devote yourselves to my world, listen to my words as laws, do not deviate from the place which is fixed for you by my will. The abode that awaits you is heaven with its procession of stars and its thrones filled with virtues. If you attempt any innovation against my orders, I swear by my sacred breath, by this mixture of which I have formed the souls and by my creative hands, that I will not delay in forging you chains and punishing you. »

God then associates souls with the work of creation; he invites them to form the animals, giving them the signs of the zodiac and the other celestial animals as models. The souls, proud of their work, deviate from the prescribed limits, and in punishment for their disobedience are condemned to inhabit the bodies. There is nothing here like the dogma of original sin; the fall of souls is the consequence of a fault which is their own, and not the heritage of a common ancestor. It would rather be something analogous to the doctrine of the descent of souls as it is exposed in the works of the Platonists and especially in the Den of the Nymphs of Porphyry, with this difference however, that for the Greeks the incarnation is an act freely accomplished: the soul, driven by desire, voluntarily descends into the sphere of life. This doctrine was not peculiar to the Platonists; it was found in the poem of Empedocles and in other writings of the Pythagorean school. The authors who speak of it often relate it to mystical initiations: it is therefore difficult to say whether we should do honor to philosophy or to religion; even less can we know from what source the author of the sacred Book drew. it is therefore difficult to say whether it is to do honor to philosophy or to religion; even less can we know from what source the author of the sacred Book drew. it is therefore difficult to say whether it is to do honor to philosophy or to religion; even less can we know from what source the author of the sacred Book drew.

Macrobi, in his commentary on the Dream of Scipio, shows us the souls descending from heaven by successive degrees and receiving in each of the seven spheres a special faculty. The action of the planetary gods on human life is also exposed, but in a more obscure way, by the author of the Sacred Book. He then describes the despair of the souls after their condemnation: “The souls were going to be imprisoned in the bodies; some moaned and lamented: thus, when wild and free animals are chained, at the moment of undergoing hard servitude and quitting the dear habits of the desert, they fight and revolt, refuse to follow those who have tamed them, and , if the occasion arises, put them to death. Most hissed like snakes; another uttered shrill cries and words of pain, and looked haphazardly up and down. "Great sky," she said, "principle of our birth, ether, pure air, hands and sacred breath of the sovereign God, and you, dazzling stars, eyes of the Gods, tireless light of the sun and the moon, our first family, what tearing and what pain!... To leave these great lights, this sacred sphere, all the magnificence of the pole and the blessed republic of the Gods, to be thrown into these vile and miserable dwellings!...» And they beg the Creator, « become so quickly indifferent to his works,” to say a few last words to them while they can still see the whole luminous world.

God answers this last prayer, and shows them the way of return by a series of purifications through successive existences. In this theory of metempsychosis, Greek spiritualism is oddly mixed with Egyptian naturalism. The author seems to place men and animals on the same line; in some as in others there are just souls of a divine nature, who animate, among the men of kings, priests, philosophers, doctors; among birds eagles, among quadrupeds lions, among reptiles dragons, among fish dolphins. In another passage, Isis returns to the transmigration of souls and speaks of men and animals who transgress the laws of their nature, without making any clear distinction between them.

The bodies are made by Hermès with the residue of the mixture which had been used to prepare the souls, and this new chemical operation is described as the first. While Hermes is completing his work, Mômos arrives, who objects to him and urges him to set limits in advance to the future audacity of humanity by mixing into life some elements of trouble and pain: "Ο generator , do you think it good that he should be free from worries, this future explorer of the beautiful mysteries of nature? Do you want to leave him free from pain, the one whose thought will reach the limits of the earth? Men will pull out the roots of plants, study the properties of natural juices, observe the nature of stones, dissect not only animals, but themselves, wanting to know how they were formed. They will stretch out their bold hands even on the sea, and, cutting the woods of the spontaneous forests, they will pass from one bank to the opposite bank in search of one another. They will pursue the intimate secrets of nature even in the heights, and will want to study the movements of the sky. This is still not enough; all that remains to be known is the extreme point of the earth: there they will want to seek the last extremity of the night. If they know no obstacle, if they live free from pain, free from care and fear, even heaven will not stop their audacity, and they will want to extend their power over the elements. And Mômos urges Hermes to give men desire and vain hope, care and the painful bite of deceived expectation, to inspire in them mutual loves and desires sometimes satisfied, sometimes disappointed, so that the very sweetness of success may be a bait which attracts them towards greater evils. Isis interrupts herself and adds: "Do you suffer, Horos, listening to your mother's story?" Are you astonished and amazed at the evils that befall poor humanity? What you are about to hear is sadder still. The words of Mômos pleased Hermes; he thought the advice was wise, and he followed it. And the author describes in a rather enigmatic way a brake that Hermès imagines to impose on human life, the harsh law of necessity. listening to your mother's story? Are you astonished and amazed at the evils that befall poor humanity? What you are about to hear is sadder still. The words of Mômos pleased Hermes; he thought the advice was wise, and he followed it. And the author describes in a rather enigmatic way a brake that Hermès imagines to impose on human life, the harsh law of necessity. listening to your mother's story? Are you astonished and amazed at the evils that befall poor humanity? What you are about to hear is sadder still. The words of Mômos pleased Hermes; he thought the advice was wise, and he followed it. And the author describes in a rather enigmatic way a brake that Hermès imagines to impose on human life, the harsh law of necessity.

This character from Mômos is not without analogy with the Satan of the book of Job, but this analogy cannot pass for an imitation. The bitter tone with which the author speaks of human civilization is reminiscent of the book of Enoch, which represents the arts and sciences as evil works, taught by the Angels to the Giants born of their union with the daughters of men . These accursed sciences, which the book of Enoch confuses with witchcraft, lead to the condemnation of angels and the destruction of giants by the flood. The hatred of civilization was to occur with more violence among the Jews, because of the horror inspired in them by the great civilized peoples who threatened their independence; however, it is found, albeit in lesser forms, in other religious traditions, for example in the myth of Pandora and in the torture of Prometheus, audax lapeti genus. Civilization is a struggle of man against the Gods, that is to say against the powers of nature, and as its benefits are accompanied by inevitable evils and vices unknown to the pastoral tribes, it is natural that one regarded the invention of the arts as impious audacity.

The fall of man and that of the Angels or the Titans, the struggle of the Giants against the Gods are found in all mythologies; but sometimes these symbols present themselves under a physical aspect, which is doubtless their primitive form, sometimes they take on an exclusively moral and human character. In the Sacred Book, the souls, irritated by their incarnation, indulge in all sorts of excesses. Unable to do anything against the Gods, men tear each other apart, like the sons of the earth born from the teeth of the dragon, and the men of the brazen race in Greek legends. The elements, soiled by the spilled blood and by the odor of murder, complain to God of the crimes of men. The fire is condemned to burn the flesh, the impiety of men alters its purity; the air is corrupted by the exhalations of corpses, it becomes pestilential and unhealthy. “Ο father, says the water, marvelous creator of all things, uncreated demon, order the water of the rivers to be always pure, because today I wash the murderers and I receive the victims. The earth says: 'O king, chief of the celestial choirs and lord of the orbits, master and father of the elements which cause everything to increase and decrease, and into which everything must return; the impious and foolish crowd of men covers me, O venerable one! because I am by your orders the seat of all the beings, I carry them all, and, for my shame, I receive in me all that is killed. And the elements beg God to send an effluvium of himself to earth to correct the evil and regenerate humanity. it becomes pestilential and unhealthy. “Ο father, says the water, marvelous creator of all things, uncreated demon, order the water of the rivers to be always pure, because today I wash the murderers and I receive the victims. The earth says: 'O king, chief of the celestial choirs and lord of the orbits, master and father of the elements which cause everything to increase and decrease, and into which everything must return; the impious and foolish crowd of men covers me, O venerable one! because I am by your orders the seat of all the beings, I carry them all, and, for my shame, I receive in me all that is killed. And the elements beg God to send an effluvium of himself to earth to correct the evil and regenerate humanity. it becomes pestilential and unhealthy. “Ο father, says the water, marvelous creator of all things, uncreated demon, order the water of the rivers to be always pure, because today I wash the murderers and I receive the victims. The earth says: 'O king, chief of the celestial choirs and lord of the orbits, master and father of the elements which cause everything to increase and decrease, and into which everything must return; the impious and foolish crowd of men covers me, O venerable one! because I am by your orders the seat of all the beings, I carry them all, and, for my shame, I receive in me all that is killed. And the elements beg God to send an effluvium of himself to earth to correct the evil and regenerate humanity. order the water of the rivers to be always pure, because today I wash the murderers and I receive the victims. The earth says: 'O king, chief of the celestial choirs and lord of the orbits, master and father of the elements which cause everything to increase and decrease, and into which everything must return; the impious and foolish crowd of men covers me, O venerable one! because I am by your orders the seat of all the beings, I carry them all, and, for my shame, I receive in me all that is killed. And the elements beg God to send an effluvium of himself to earth to correct the evil and regenerate humanity. order the water of the rivers to be always pure, because today I wash the murderers and I receive the victims. The earth says: 'O king, chief of the celestial choirs and lord of the orbits, master and father of the elements which cause everything to increase and decrease, and into which everything must return; the impious and foolish crowd of men covers me, O venerable one! because I am by your orders the seat of all the beings, I carry them all, and, for my shame, I receive in me all that is killed. And the elements beg God to send an effluvium of himself to earth to correct the evil and regenerate humanity. master and father of the elements which make everything grow and decrease, and into which everything must return; the impious and foolish crowd of men covers me, O venerable one! because I am by your orders the seat of all the beings, I carry them all, and, for my shame, I receive in me all that is killed. And the elements beg God to send an effluvium of himself to earth to correct the evil and regenerate humanity. master and father of the elements which make everything grow and decrease, and into which everything must return; the impious and foolish crowd of men covers me, O venerable one! because I am by your orders the seat of all the beings, I carry them all, and, for my shame, I receive in me all that is killed. And the elements beg God to send an effluvium of himself to earth to correct the evil and regenerate humanity.

The book of Enoch likewise shows us the clamors of the earth, flooded with blood, rising to the gate of heaven with the groans of the dead. But in the Sacred Book, instead of destroying the human race, God sends it a saviour, Osiris, who brings peace to the earth by teaching men the principles of religion and the laws of morality. This regeneration operated by Osiris is not a true redemption, since there is not, as in Christianity, the idea of ​​the sacrifice of a God for the salvation of men; one could rather compare it to the work accomplished in India by the Buddha, in Greece by Heracles and Dionysos.

Such is in substance the first and most important fragment of this strange book. All this is strewn with mythological names, several of which must have been altered by the copyists. We have tried to correct and explain them, but I fear that in these attempts at restitution we have sometimes given too much place to hypothesis. On the strength of a suspicious text and an arbitrary correction, a Goddess Hephaistoboulè, perfectly unknown elsewhere, has been admitted into the Egyptian pantheon. Hermes does not seem to me to be an authority on Egyptian mythology; otherwise we would also have to accept Arnébaskenis, God of philosophy, and the cold allegory of Invention, daughter of Nature and Labor. I doubt the ancient Egyptians ever knew of such deities. As to the date of the Holy Book, I don't see any clue to establish it. It belongs to this period of religious renewal produced by the meeting of Greek philosophy and Eastern and Egyptian doctrines; but this movement lasted several centuries, and of the works by which it left its mark only a small number have come down to us. To classify the Sacred Book, we would need terms of comparison which we lack.

As it is, however, the Sacred Book represents Greco-Egyptian philosophy, as Philo represents Greco-Jewish philosophy. Despite the author's pompous rhetoric, the result of his Greek education, there are certain signs that he is recognized as Egyptian.

Thus, Horos asks his mother why the Egyptians are so superior to other men. Isis answers him by comparing the inhabited earth to a reclining man, with his head to the south, his feet to the north: Egypt represents the chest and the heart, the abode of the soul. What Isis says elsewhere of royal souls also denotes an Egyptian. It is true that there are, here and there, among the Greek philosophers monarchical tendencies: thus, in his Politics, Plato draws a fantastic portrait of royalty; but, even when they reacted against the principles of equality which formed the basis of the social morality of the Greeks, the philosophers still underwent their influence; they dream of a king in their likeness, but their republican education preserves them from the worship of royalty such as one finds it among the barbarians, where the feeling of human dignity does not exist. There is not a compatriot of Demosthenes who would not have been revolted by the forms taken in Egypt by flattery towards kings. Egypt gave the example of those servile apotheoses of princes which dishonored the end of the old world. We can therefore see a feature of the Egyptian character in the passage of the Sacred Book where the kings are presented as true Gods on earth; their souls, according to the author, are of a different species from those of other men. We can therefore see a feature of the Egyptian character in the passage of the Sacred Book where the kings are presented as true Gods on earth; their souls, according to the author, are of a different species from those of other men. We can therefore see a feature of the Egyptian character in the passage of the Sacred Book where the kings are presented as true Gods on earth; their souls, according to the author, are of a different species from those of other men.

There is another hermetic cosmogony, but much shorter, called the Sacred Speech. The title of this discourse could lead one to believe that it is attached to the Sacred Book, but the style is quite different; the Sacred Discourse has nothing Greek about it, it is even incorrect, and it could well be a translation. We read there this sentence, which is found in the same form in the Poimandres: "To grow in increase and to multiply in multitude." The general tone is reminiscent of Hebrew forms; but by all ideas this piece is rather Egyptian than Jewish. The gods of the stars intervene in creation; their action is even more direct than that of the supreme God, who has only an abstract and impersonal character. Plutarch and Elien tell us that in the Egyptian cosmogony darkness precedes light; here we find the same idea: "There was boundless darkness over the abyss, and the water, and a subtle and intelligent breath contained in the chaos by divine power." Then sprang the most holy light, and under the sand the elements came out of the moist essence, and all the Gods unraveled the fruitful nature. This passage makes one think of the beginning of Genesis, of the darkness covering the face of the abyss, of the breath of God hovering over the waters; but we find there still more resemblance to the Egyptian cosmogony, which, according to Damaskios, admitted as first principles darkness, water and sand. Finally, the influence of the stars on human destiny is clearly indicated by these words: “Their life and their wisdom are originally regulated by the course of the circular Gods, and will resolve themselves there. We can also find traces of Egyptian ideas in the Discourse of Initiation, commonly designated by the name of Asclepius. This work, of which there is now only a Latin translation falsely attributed to Apuleius, is linked, by ideas as well as by form, to Alexandrian philosophy, and has nothing of the hieratic tone of the Sacred Book and the Sacred Discourse. . In a very curious passage, Hermes announces, in the form of a prophecy, the triumph of Christianity, the apostasy of Egypt and the persecution exercised against the last faithful of the national religion. This piece, in which the author rises to true eloquence,

"However, as the sages must foresee everything, there is one thing you must know: a time will come when it will seem that the Egyptians have observed the worship of the Gods in vain with so much piety and that all their holy invocations have been sterile and unfulfilled. The divinity will leave the earth and ascend to heaven, abandoning Egypt, its ancient abode, and leaving it a widow of religion, deprived of the presence of the Gods. Foreigners filling the country and the earth, not only will holy things be neglected, but, what is even harder, religion, piety, the worship of the Gods will be proscribed and punished by the laws. Then this land sanctified by so many chapels and temples will be covered with tombs and the dead. Ο Egypt, Egypt! All that will remain of your religions are vague stories that posterity will no longer believe, words engraved on stone and telling of your piety. The Scythian or the Indian, or some other barbarous neighbor, will inhabit Egypt. The divine will ascend to heaven, all abandoned humanity will die, and Egypt will be deserted and widowed of men and gods.

“I speak to you, most holy river, and I announce to you the future. Streams of blood, defiling your divine waves, will overflow your banks; the number of the dead will exceed that of the living, and if there remain a few inhabitants, Egyptians only in language, they will be foreign in manners. Are you crying, Asclepius? There will be sadder things still: Egypt itself will fall into apostasy, the worst of evils. She, formerly the holy land, loved by the Gods for her devotion to their worship, she will be the perversion of the saints; this school of piety will become the model of all violence.

“Then, full of disgust for things, man will no longer have either admiration or love for the world. He will turn away from this perfect work, the best there is in the present as well as in the past and the future. In the boredom and fatigue of souls, there will be nothing but disdain for this vast universe, this immutable work of God, this glorious and perfect construction, multiple set of forms and images, where the divine will, prodigal of marvels, brought it all together in a single spectacle, in a harmonious synthesis, forever worthy of veneration, praise and love. We will prefer darkness to light, we will find death better than life, no one will look to the sky. The religious man will pass for a madman, the impious for a sage, the furious for the brave, the worst for the best. The soul and all the questions connected with it, — was it born mortal or can it hope to conquer immortality? - all that I have exposed to you here, we will only laugh at it, we will see only vanity.

“There will even be, believe me, danger of death for whoever keeps the religion of intelligence. New rights will be established, a new law; not a word, not a holy, religious belief, worthy of heaven and heavenly things. A deplorable divorce between gods and men! only the bad angels remain; they mingle with miserable humanity, their hand is on it; they push it to all evil audacities, to wars, to plunder, to lies, to everything that is contrary to the nature of souls. The earth will no longer have equilibrium, the sea will no longer be navigable, the regular course of the stars will be disturbed in the sky. Every divine voice will be condemned to silence, the fruits of the earth will rot, and it will cease to be fruitful; the air itself will become numb in a lugubrious torpor. Such will be the old age of the world, irreligion and disorder, confusion of all rules and all good. »

This passage is significant; this book, which paints in such vivid colors the anguish of cultivated minds in the face of the inevitable fall of ancient civilization, must have been composed under a Christian emperor, and as Lactantius, who lived under Constantine, quotes several times from the Discourse of initiation, we must conclude that it was during the reign of this emperor that the work was written. One might wonder how Lactantius could take seriously the authenticity of a book containing such clear allusions to contemporary facts; but we know that the ecclesiastical authors of this period did not shine with their critical sense. Lactantius constantly cites pretended Sibylline oracles in which the hand of the forger betrays itself on every page, and he imagines himself thus combating paganism with his own weapons. The hermetic books are in his eyes an ancient and very venerable authority. The book he most often invokes is precisely the Initiation Discourse, without noticing that it was composed in his time. If it were possible to regard the passage I have just quoted as a later interpolation, nothing would fix the date of the work any longer. But it is easy to prove that Lactantius really had this passage before his eyes, only he did not understand it. Hermes is in his eyes a true prophet who has discovered, no one knows how, almost the whole truth. In the author's clear allusions to the fall of paganism, he sees only a picture of the end of the world; it borrows its main features, and quotes[44] the lines which come immediately after and in which Hermes announces a general renewal awaited by pagans as well as by Christians. In the summary of his work, Lactantius returns to this great catastrophe by using images taken verbatim from the Initiation Speech: “It will be, he says, an execrable and accursed time when it will not be good to live. Things will come to a place where they will mourn over the living and rejoice over the dead. Towns and cities will perish either by sword, or by fire, or by frequent earthquakes and floods, or by pestilence and famine. The earth, become sterile by the excess of cold or heat, will cease to produce; the water will turn to blood... the year, the month, the day, will be shortened, and that will be, says Trismegistus, old age and the end of the world.[45] »

One easily recognizes the expressions of Hermes, sometimes diverted from their true meaning: “Death will seem better than life; » — « the most holy river will become a torrent of blood; — “the earth will cease to produce; — "such will be the old age of the world, etc." Elsewhere Lactantius, comparing the end of the world to the plagues of Egypt under Moses, says that Egypt will be punished the first of its foolish superstitions and that blood will overflow it like a river.[46] It is the counterpart of the passage where Hermes speaks of the evils which will punish Egypt for having abandoned its religion. Finally, in another part of his work,[47] Lactantius says in speaking of demons: “Trismegistus calls them bad angels. Now, in the writings which remain to us of Hermes, this expression is found only once, and it is precisely in the passage in question. All these reasons clearly prove that this passage is not interpolated, that the Discourse of Initiation has come down to us as it was in the time of Lactantius, and that it could not have been written until the reign of Constantine.

The great persecution of paganism took place only under the successors of Constantine, and it must be remarked, indeed, that Hermes does not speak precisely of a bloody persecution. He complains only of the progress of impiety, of the oblivion into which religion has fallen, of the tombs which replace the temples, an allusion to the worship of the saints,[48] and he adds, as if expressing the fear of a probable and imminent misfortune, that fidelity to the Gods will become a mortal danger. If he had written under Theodosius or even under Constantius, his expressions would have been more precise, and probably the work would not have come down to us. Under the first Christian emperor, on the contrary, he could, keeping the tone of prophecy,

The idea of ​​the destruction and the renewal of the world, which reappears so often in the sibylline books and in the works of Christians, especially millennial Christians like Lactantius, is also found in Stoic philosophy and in the religion of Egypt. It should not have been difficult for an Egyptian attached to the national religion to make the official advent of Christianity coincide with the end of some great mythological or astronomical period. The author of the Discourse of Initiation, who believes in this catastrophe, must have been an Egyptian. He laments the apostasy of Egypt, he does not even speak of other peoples. It is Egypt which is the holy land, "the temple of the world, the image of heaven, the projection here below of the whole order of heavenly things." When the world is regenerated, those who are to rule it will be established in Egypt. Elsewhere he reminds Asclepius that his ancestor, the inventor of medicine, is adored near the shore of the crocodiles, at the place where his body is buried, and he adds: “My ancestor Hermes gave his name to his country. It is true that these names are Greek, and that these mythological memories are presented in an euhemeristic form; but it must be remembered that at that time the confusion of the Greek Gods and the Egyptian Gods was universally admitted. Besides, it is then a question of Isis and Osiris, purely Egyptian deities, and, what is even more important, of the worship that the Egyptians rendered to animals. Further on there is mention of a God whom the Latin translation calls Jupiter Plutonius, and who is probably Sarapis, the great God of Alexandria; one could also relate to Egyptian beliefs what is said of the thirty-six Horoscopes and of the Pantomorph. These are, no doubt, well-effaced vestiges of a religion which has held so much place in the world; but one would hardly find more traces of Hellenic mythology in such and such a Greek philosopher, Aristotle for example.

The Discourse of Initiation is perhaps the only work of antiquity in which there is not only an excuse, but a formal and avowed theory of the worship of images. Until then, philosophers had considered idolatry to be a dangerous consequence of a misuse of language. “Those who do not know the true meaning of words, says Plutarch, manage to be mistaken about things; thus the Greeks, instead of calling bronze or stone statues, or paintings, simulacra in honor of the gods, used to call them gods, and therefore they are not afraid to say that Lachares despoiled Athene, that Dionysius stripped Apollo of his golden hair, that Capitoline Jupiter was burned in the civil war. Such are the errors which vicious locutions entail in their train. [49]” Maxime de Tyr justifies the worship of images and explains it by the weakness of our nature, which needs to attach thought to a material sign. “Those whose memory is robust and who have only to raise their eyes to heaven to feel in the presence of the Gods perhaps do not need statues; but these are very rare, and one would hardly find a man in a large crowd who could recall the divine idea without needing such help.[50] » and scarcely would one find a man in a large crowd who could recall the divine idea without needing such help.[50] » and scarcely would one find a man in a large crowd who could recall the divine idea without needing such help.[50] »

The cult of images has been the most common text of the reproaches addressed to the Greeks by the Jews and the Christians; later, the Protestants brought the same accusations of idolatry against the Catholics. In the struggle between parties, one seeks less to persuade one's adversaries than to convince them, and in wanting to convince them one irritates them. So they disdain to answer the accusations, they accept them and adorn themselves with the insults thrown at them. It is thus that the Beggars of the Netherlands, the Sans-culottes of the French Revolution, gloried in titles which their adversaries gave them out of contempt. The same thing happened to the pagans accused of idolatry; they accepted the reproach, they made a point of deserving it, and they erected the worship of images into a thoughtful system. Hermes declares to his disciple that the most beautiful privilege of man is to be able to create Gods: "As the father and the lord made the eternal Gods similar to himself, so humanity made its Gods his own likeness. "Do you mean the statues, O Trismegistus?" “Yes, the statues, Asclepius; see how you lack faith! Animated statues, full of feeling and inspiration, which do so many and such great things, prophetic statues, which predict the future by dreams and all sorts of other ways, which strike us with illnesses or heal our pains according to our merits.[51] » thus humanity has made its Gods in its own likeness. "Do you mean the statues, O Trismegistus?" “Yes, the statues, Asclepius; see how you lack faith! Animated statues, full of feeling and inspiration, which do so many and such great things, prophetic statues, which predict the future by dreams and all sorts of other ways, which strike us with illnesses or heal our pains according to our merits.[51] » thus humanity has made its Gods in its own likeness. "Do you mean the statues, O Trismegistus?" “Yes, the statues, Asclepius; see how you lack faith! Animated statues, full of feeling and inspiration, which do so many and such great things, prophetic statues, which predict the future by dreams and all sorts of other ways, which strike us with illnesses or heal our pains according to our merits.[51] »

It is still only a declaration of principles: further on, he returns to the same idea by explaining it clearly, and gives the theory of the worship of images: "Our ancestors found the art of making gods, and the Having found it, they mixed in it a suitable virtue, drawn from the nature of the world. As they could not create souls, they evoked those of demons or angels, and fixed them in holy images and divine mysteries, thus giving idols the power to do good or evil.[52] These beliefs were common to pagans and Christians; but some approved of what others condemned, the worship rendered to the demons who inhabited the statues. The Christians maintained that these demons were evil powers; the pagans confessed that their action was sometimes bad and that they were subject to passions and error. This concession made the victory of their adversaries too easy; why should man not have reserved his worship and his prayers for this supreme God whom all equally recognized? There were still some pious regrets for this magnificent past, the very memory of which was about to disappear; a few obstinate loyalties still turned towards the setting sun, but humanity has none of these melancholies. She marches in front of her, not knowing whether it is towards night or towards light, mercilessly crushing the belated defenders of vanquished causes and letting the dead bury their dead.

Hermetic books are the last monuments of paganism. They belong both to Greek philosophy and to Egyptian religion, and through mystical exaltation they already touch on the Middle Ages. They well represent the common opinion of this mixed Alexandrian population, constantly torn in opposite directions by religions of all kinds, and creating a confused mixture of heterogeneous dogmas. Between a world which is ending and a world which is beginning, they resemble those beings of an indecisive nature which serve as a passage between the classes of organized life: the zoophytes, kinds of animal-plants; amphibians, half-reptiles, half-fish; ornithodelphs, which are neither birds nor mammals. These mixed creations are always below each of the groups that they attach to each other. In the history of ideas as in natural history, there are not linear series, but divergent scales, which are united by their lower rungs.

The books of Hermes Trismegistus cannot bear comparison either with the religion of Homer or with the Christian religion, but they make it clear how the world was able to pass from one to the other. In them, the beliefs that are born and the beliefs that die meet and join hands. It was right that they should be placed under the patronage of the God of transitions and exchanges, who explains, appeases and reconciles; of the conductor of souls, who opens the gates of birth and death; of the twilight God, whose golden wand shines in the evening at sunset to lull weary races into eternal slumber, and in the morning in the East to bring new generations into the restless sphere of life.



HERMES TRISMEGISTE Corpus Hermeticum (including Poimandres)
HERMES TRISMEGISTE Kore Kosmou
HERMES TRISMEGISTE The Emerald Table (with explanations by Hortulain)
HERMES TRISMEGISTE The Emerald Table *
HERMES TRISMEGISTE The XV Tablets of Thoth
HERMES TRISMEGISTE Seven Treatises or Golden Chapters


NOTES

[1] Hermetis Trismegisti Pœmander, Berlin, 1854. The Greek form Poimandres should be retained. As M. Egger points out, Poemander responds to the Greek Poimandros, and not to Poimandres.

[2] Louis Ménard, Hellenic Polytheism, book IV, chapter II, Greek religion and philosophy.

[3] De Rougé, Study on the Funeral Ritual of the Egyptians. (Archaeological Review, 1860, p. 357.)

[4] “God is not intelligence, but the cause of intelligence; he is not the spirit, but the cause of the spirit; he is not the light, but the cause of the light. » (Book I, Universal Discourse.) — « God is above everything and around everything. (I, the Key.)

[5] “Invisible itself, it manifests all things. (I, the invisible God is very apparent.) — What he is, he manifests; what is not, he has in himself. (I, the Key.)

[6] There is confusion here; the text means: “Intelligence is in the reason, the reason in the soul, the Soul in the spirit, the spirit in the body. (I, the Key.)

[7] Intelligence is of the very essence of God, if God has an essence. Intelligence is not separate from the essence of God; she is united to him as to the sun his light. (I, Common intelligence.) — "Intelligence is in God, reason is in intelligence." (IV, Fragm.)

[8] As man cannot live without life, so God cannot live without doing good. (I, Intelligence at Hermes.)

[9] M. Vacherot quotes from the Patrizzi edition; here is the meaning of the passage, according to the Parthey edition, which is more correct: "God, the Father, the Good, what is it, if not the existence of what is not yet?" This existence of beings, here is God, here is the Father, here is the Good; it is nothing else,” (Ι, the Key.)

[10] “The splendor that floods his whole mind and his whole soul tears him from the bonds of the body and transforms him entirely into the essence of God. (I, the Key.)

[11] “All things are parts of God; so God is everything. " (IV, Definitions, I.) - "For of all things he is the lord and the father, and the source, and the life, and the power, and the light, and the intelligence, and the spirit. (IV, Fragments after Suidas.)

[12] “All this together is God, and in the universe there is nothing that God is not. (I, On Common Intelligence.) — "For everything is full of God." (I, Intelligence at Hermes.)

[13] “For he alone is all; that is why he has all the names, because he is the only father, and that is why he himself has no name, because he is the father of all. (I, the invisible God is very apparent.)

[14] “The all that is one, and the one that is all. (IV, Definitions, I.)

[15] Baghavat-Gita, VII, IX, X.

[16] Plutarch, Isis and Osiris; Procl., In Tim., I, p. 30.

[17] De Rougé, Study on the Funeral Ritual. (Archaeological Review, 1860, p. 236, 347, 356, 357.)

[18] Hermès, I, Nothing is lost, etc.

[19] Ibid., I, Hermes to Asclepios.

[20] Ibid., I, the invisible God is very apparent.

[21] De Rougé, Study on the Funeral Ritual. (Archaeological Review, 1860, p. 337, 356, 357.)

[22] Hermès, I, the Key.

[23] Hermes, II, Disc, of initiation, VI, and I, the Key.

[24] Ibid., II, 10; IV, Defin., I.

[25] Mariette, Memoir on the mother of Apis.

[26] Hermes, II, VI.

[27] Philo, De Agricultura.

[28] S. Hermae Pastor, lib. III, similar. VI.

[29] Eusebius, Prep. evangelism, III, II.

[30] Philo, De profugis.

[31] Hermès, I, chap. IX, Of Thought and Sensation.

[32] Ibid., ch. XIV, Hermes to Asclepios, Wisdom.

[33] Hermes, I, Good is in God alone.

[34] Ibid., I, The Key.

[35] Ibid., I, The Key.

[36] Of Thought and Sensation.

[37] Common intelligence.

[38] The invisible God is very apparent. - The key.

[39] The Key.

[40] Common Intelligence, — The Key.

[41] De Rougé, Summary notice on the Egyptian monuments of the Louvre.

[42] De Rougé, Study on the Funeral Ritual (Archaeological Review, 1860, p. 342).

[43] De Rougé, Study on an Egyptian Stele, p. 175.

[44] Lactantius, Divine. Institute, VII, 18.

[45] Lactantius, Epitome, 8.

[46] Lactantius, Divine. institute, VII, 15.

[47] Ibid.9 II, 15.

[48] ​​The pagans even accused the Christians of worshiping a dead man; the Christians, basing themselves on the system of Euhemerus, said as much of the pagans. We can compare, on this occasion, Julien and Minucius Félix. In times of struggle, the parties throw the same reproaches at each other.

[49] Plutarch, Isis and Osiris.

[50] Maxim of Tyre, XXXVIII.

[51] Hermes, II, Disc. of initiation, IX.

[52] Hermes, II, Disc. of initiation, XI.