The Forbidden Universe (25 page)

That is why the second part of Casaubon’s case, which he based on the content of the Hermetica rather than the style, was important. By demonstrating that certain sections had been influenced by concepts from Plato and the New Testament – particularly John’s Gospel and some of Paul’s
letters – Casaubon believed he had proved that the texts were composed from scratch after the time of Christ.

Modern historians have roundly rejected this part of Casaubon’s argument, seeing no direct connection at all between the New Testament and the Hermetica. Any potential link is indirect, as both texts derive from the same blend of theological and philosophical speculation, drawn from various cultures including the Hellenic, Iranian, Judaic – and, of course, the Egyptian – which were being explored at that time.

As we have seen, what really excited Renaissance Hermeticists was the parallel between the description of God’s Word in the
Pimander
and the Word/Logos passage that opens John’s Gospel. However, the unknown writer of this gospel took the concept from the work of Philo of Alexandria (
c
.20 BCE–
c
.50 CE), a Hellenized Jew who blended Jewish theology with ideas from the great intellectual melting pot that was his own city. The Hermetica also drew from the same pool of ideas, so any connection between the Word in
Pimander
and the Gospel of John is indirect. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that the Hermetica came after Philo, since the ideas he drew on had been in the philosophical mix for some time. And – as we are about to see – part of this included home-grown Egyptian traditions, which almost certainly provided the inspiration for the Hermetic description of God’s Word. Although it is only too easy to pity Casaubon, there was simply not enough information available in his day to make a proper analysis.

So now we’re back where we started. As was believed before Casaubon put the feline among the feathered creatures, the Hermetic books may have contained traditions, not to say secrets, from the old Egypt, the Egypt untainted by the trendy Hellenic glamour of its occupiers. So is it possible to deduce when the Hermetica were
written, and by whom? And, more importantly, what were their sources? Was Hermeticism invented in Greek or Roman Egypt, or did it draw on older traditions?

During the eras of Greek and Roman rule, Egypt – and particularly Alexandria with its famous library – was the crucible where the intellect’s gems of the known world came together. As well as native Egyptians, those of Greek descent and peoples from all over the Empire, the great seaport also boasted large Jewish and Samaritan
communities
. Trade routes brought Iranians, Arabs and even Indians to the city, carrying their traditions with them.

Even so, and despite the flaws in Casaubon’s work, for a long time historians still assumed that the philosophy and cosmology found in the Hermetica were derived from Greece. It just had to be Greece – after all, weren’t the best things always Hellenic? Positively pickled in the classics, the academic world refused to dip a toe into any other culture. But over the years this became increasingly
untenable
, and with scholarly huffing and puffing, beard stroking and dragging of feet, it was gradually acknowledged that native Egyptian thought must have had at least a supporting role in shaping the Hermetic books.

Doubts about the purely Greek origin of the Hermetica began to surface in the early twentieth century, when university men and women realized key elements of its philosophy and cosmology could not be attributed to any identifiable Greek source. But there was controversy about where they did come from, the main candidates being native Egyptian, Judaic and Iranian traditions.

Perhaps understandably, at first it was mostly Egyptologists who held out for a home-grown influence. Then in 1904 Richard Reitzenstein, the eminent German scholar of Gnosticism and the Hellenic religions, made the
groundbreaking suggestion that the Hermetica was the product of a religious community in Egypt. (He did, however, later change his mind, looking towards Iran instead.) From the mid-twentieth century many scholars – particularly in France – joined the pro-Egypt camp. It gradually became a question of not
if
there was an Egyptian influence, but of its true extent. A consensus also emerged that at least the core parts of the Hermetica dated from the early years of Greek domination, rather than towards the end of the era, as Casaubon came to believe.

Key scholars in this process were the French historian Jean-Pierre Mahé and, more recently, Garth Fowden, the British professor of antiquity who is currently Research Director at the Institute for Greek and Roman Antiquity in Athens. As the title of his 1986 book
The Egyptian Hermes
suggests, he amassed the considerable evidence of a strong home-grown, Egyptian, influence on the Hermetica.

Although presented as a characteristic Greek dialogue, the Hermetic texts don’t quite fit that genre. Instead of presenting a discussion between philosophers, as in the Greek tradition, the texts present a question-and-answer session between master and pupil – which is more in keeping with the traditional Egyptian wisdom literature.
¹
The Hermetic texts are therefore a kind of stylistic hybrid of the Egyptian and Hellenic forms. Maybe the writers were consciously striving to make their work more
Greek-friendly
.

The books are obviously the product of different writers – which accounts for their inconsistencies – although they belonged to the same school or cult. All the authors here are anonymous, simply attributing their works to Hermes, a typically Egyptian practice.
²
This was quite different from the Greeks or Romans, who routinely hyped up their celebrity philosophers without making any claims of divine authorship. This is another important indication that, while
written in Greek, the mindset behind the Hermetica was authentically Egyptian.

Another clue comes from the astrology and astronomy described in the Hermetica. The Egyptians divided the night sky into thirty-six parts or decans, each linked to a prominent constellation or star. During the Greek period, the more familiar twelve-sign zodiac took over, but the astronomy described in the Hermetica sticks to the
thirty-six-decan
system, so at least the origin of the Hermetica in this one major respect was truly Egyptian.
³

A more important clue comes from the attribution to Hermes, the Greek deity who was always associated with the Egyptian wisdom-god, Djehuty, or Thoth in its Greek rendering. He ruled over learning and was the inventor of writing and the calendar and ‘keeper of the divine words’,
⁴
hence his titles, ‘Lord of Time’ and ‘Reckoner of Years’.
⁵
A minor function was his association with healing: he was, for example, credited with inventing the enema.

Hermes and Thoth are by no means direct parallels, though. In the Greek pantheon, Hermes was the patron deity of many aspects of life, but not of knowledge and learning. He was the god of cunning and cleverness, but that isn’t the same thing. It is thought that the association developed as a result of Hermes’ more significant role as guide of dead souls, which oddly echoes Thoth’s rather secondary job as helper and guide of the deceased, specifically the dead Osiris.
⁶
The telling fact is that the characteristics of Hermes Trismegistus as portrayed in the Hermetica are more in line with those of Thoth, not the Greek Hermes, strongly suggesting that the cult or school behind the Hermetica was Egyptian.

Then there is the famous epithet for Trismegistus, ‘Thrice Great’, which only makes sense as a Greek translation of a typical Egyptian honorific. For emphasis Egyptians repeated the glyph for ‘great’, literally saying ‘great great’.
But in cases of truly mind-blowing greatness, they would use it three times, as in the all-important ‘great great great Thoth’. The most natural Greek translation would be ‘three times great’. More significantly, this practice seems to have been specifically reserved for Thoth, which seems to be the origin of ‘Thrice Great Hermes’.

In 1965 an inscription was found dating from around 160 BCE, written by a priestly scribe named Hor (Horus). Inscribed in the late form of Egyptian script known as Demotic, it appeals to ‘Isis, the great goddess, and Thoth, the three times great’
⁷
– the last phrase simply repeating the Demotic character for ‘great’ three times. This is the earliest known use of this form of address. In his account of this inscription, Egyptologist J. D. Ray makes the following highly pertinent observation:

In fact, the mindset behind the Hermetica as a whole is Egyptian. The authors ‘think in terms of a whole milieu populated with ancient Egyptian gods and sages’.
⁹

The other characters in the dialogues are a mix of Egyptian – including Isis and Thoth himself, who appears under the name of Tat – and Greek. But even the Greek characters have specifically Egyptian associations. Agathodaimon (or Agathos Daimon), a minor god in the Greek pantheon, became patron deity of Alexandria, where he was associated with Osiris and his Hellenised semi-alter ego, Serapis. More central to the Hermetica is the character of Asclepius, a
supposed descendant of the Greek healer-god, who appears in several books. But even here there is an important clue to the origins of the Hermetica. The Greeks identified Asclepius with the Egyptian god of healing and medicine, Imhotep, who was a rare example of Egyptian deification of a living person.
¹⁰
In
Asclepius
, Hermes declares that the eponymous main character’s illustrious ancestor was a man who became a god. Imhotep was vizier to the pharaoh Zoser and architect of the first of the great pyramids, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, built around 2620 BCE. The cult of Imhotep clearly survived into classical times: our priestly scribe Hor records in 160 BCE that he was instructed by the ‘priest of the chapel of Imhotep’ in the sacred city of Heliopolis.
¹¹

For all these reasons, there is no doubt that the minds behind the Hermetic books were Egyptian, even if they chose to express themselves in the
lingua franca
of the day. But who were they?

In the second half of the twentieth century a number of historians began to argue that the Hermetica are the ‘bible’ of an Egyptian mystery cult.

In recent decades a new theory of the Egyptian origins of the Hermetica has emerged. Rather than simply being the sacred books of a mystery cult, they were part of a
concerted
, and perhaps desperate, effort to
preserve
its teachings in the face of the great threat to their culture posed by the Greek hegemony. This anxiety found its ultimate expression in the
Asclepius
’ Lament. By expressing their beliefs in the language and style of their cultural oppressors, there was a chance that the Egyptians’ precious ideas would survive. This was all the more urgent because of the myriad streams of thought flooding together in Alexandria, threatening to submerge Egypt’s own religious and philosophical traditions. Fowden points to the cities of Panopolis and (for obvious reasons) Hermopolis as centres of the Hermetic cult.
¹²

By the time the Romans took control of Egypt, the Greeks had been in charge for generations, so their culture was already entrenched at the top echelons of society. But the conquerors and conquered largely kept their distance. The Greeks regarded their culture as more advanced, while the native Egyptians saw their civilization as older and wiser. The religious and cultural resistance to the Greeks was embedded in the city of Memphis, the ancient capital, whose western plateau was the ‘Libyan mountain’ mentioned in the Lament, site of a great necropolis that includes Saqqara where it was believed Imhotep himself was buried.
¹³

The native Egyptian cults survived until Christianity became the dominant religious force in the Empire. Although the Emperor Constantine famously gave it imperial recognition, it was only in 380 CE, more than fifty years later, that Theodosius I declared it to be the one legitimate religion of the Empire. Eight years later he ordered the pagan temples of Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East to be closed down forever, a task
enthusiastically
overseen by Theophilus, the Christian patriarch of Alexandria.

The Hellenic period also produced some hybrid cults that adapted traditional Egyptian worship to be more
Greek-friendly
. A major example of this is the cult of Serapis, a new version of Osiris worship – ‘Serapis’ being a conflation of the Egyptian Asar (Osiris in Greek) and Apis, the bull-god assimilated to him. The origins of the cult are controversial: was it, as long believed, a complete invention of Greek times or, as evidence now suggests, a pre-existing religion that was merely adapted for the purpose? Wherever it came from, the early Ptolemaic rulers adopted it as the official cult that could be practised jointly by their Greek and Egyptian subjects. The main temple, the Serapeum, was located in the new coastal city of Alexandria, which was founded by
the Greeks in honour of Alexander the Great. However, Theophilus’ over-zealous thugs destroyed it during the
anti-pagan
pogrom of 392 CE.