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Liber XII · Hermeticism

Liber XII · Hermeticism · Chapter VI: Renaissance Magic

Prisca Theologia: Moses, Zoroaster, Hermes and Ancient Wisdom

Prisca theologia explained: how Moses, Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus were placed in remote antiquity as founders of a single ancient wisdom, and why.

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Prisca theologia, the "ancient theology", is the Renaissance belief that a single true wisdom about God, the soul and the cosmos was revealed in remote antiquity and handed down through a chain of sages such as Moses, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato. Later tradition placed several of these founders in roughly the same legendary horizon, around the thirteenth century BCE or earlier; modern scholars regard the dating of Hermes as mythical and still debate when Zarathushtra lived.

The Problem of the Oldest Wisdom§

In the ancient Mediterranean, age conferred authority. Greek writers admired Egypt and Babylon for their long records and venerable priesthoods, and Herodotus and Plato both told stories of Egyptian priests who regarded the Greeks as children. When Jews and later Christians entered this debate, they made a counter-claim: the true wisdom was that of Moses, older than any Greek philosopher, and whatever was good in Greek thought had been borrowed from him.

Hellenistic Jewish authors developed this argument boldly. Artapanus, writing probably in the second century BCE, made Moses the teacher of Orpheus and claimed that Egyptian priests honoured him under the name of Hermes because he interpreted sacred writings. Aristobulus and others maintained that Pythagoras and Plato had read early Greek translations of the Law. In the second century CE the Platonist philosopher Numenius of Apamea reportedly asked what Plato was if not "Moses speaking Attic Greek", a line often quoted by Christian apologists.

Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea took over these arguments to show that Christianity, though new in appearance, rested on the oldest revelation of all. They also gathered testimonies from pagan sages who seemed to anticipate Christian doctrine. This apologetic project created the framework within which Hermes and Zoroaster would later be honoured.

Hermes Trismegistus as Contemporary of Moses§

Hermes Trismegistus, the "thrice-great", was a Greek development of the Egyptian god Thoth, patron of writing and wisdom. By the Roman period a body of Greek treatises circulated under his name, now known as the Hermetica; their history is told in Hermes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum. Many ancient readers took Hermes to be an ancient Egyptian sage or king rather than a god. Cicero listed five different Mercuries, one of whom gave the Egyptians their laws and letters, and Clement described Egyptian priests carrying forty-two books of Hermes in procession.

Early Christian attitudes were divided. Lactantius, around 300 CE, treated Hermes as a pagan witness to the one God and to the Son of God, while Augustine, in the City of God, condemned the Hermetic Asclepius for praising the animation of statues, though he too accepted that Hermes lived long ago. Medieval Latin writers inherited this double image of a venerable but suspect sage.

When the Greek Corpus Hermeticum reached Florence and was translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1463, published in 1471, the question of Hermes's age became pressing. In the preface to his translation, Ficino placed the greatest Hermes at about the time of Moses, as a near contemporary or slightly later descendant of a learned family. The pavement of Siena Cathedral, laid in 1488, shows Hermes as a robed sage with an inscription naming him "contemporary of Moses". In this chronology Hermes became a gentile parallel to the Hebrew lawgiver, receiving a comparable revelation in Egypt. The Florentine background is described in Marsilio Ficino.

Zoroaster, the Magi and Remote Antiquity§

Zoroaster, the Greek form of Zarathushtra, the prophet of the Iranian religion, was equally attractive to seekers of ancient wisdom. Greek authors associated him with the Magi, whose name gave the West the word "magic", and some placed him at fantastic dates. Pliny the Elder, citing earlier writers, reported a tradition that he lived six thousand years before the death of Plato; other Greek sources set him five thousand years before the Trojan War. Pliny also called him the inventor of magic, an image explored in The Magi.

Late antique Platonists did not know the Avesta, but they revered a set of hexameter verses, the Chaldean Oracles, as divine revelation. In the fifteenth century the Byzantine philosopher Gemistos Plethon edited a selection of these verses as the "Magical Oracles of the Magi of Zoroaster", and the attribution passed to Ficino and to later Western readers. Ficino at one stage placed Zoroaster at the head of his list of ancient theologians, followed by Hermes, Orpheus, Aglaophamus, Pythagoras and Plato. The verses themselves are discussed in The Chaldean Oracles.

The Renaissance Chain of Sages§

In Ficino's hands the "ancient theology" became a genealogy. Wisdom passed from teacher to pupil through Orpheus and Aglaophamus to Pythagoras, then to Philolaus and finally to Plato, who gave it its fullest philosophical form. This ancient theology agreed in essentials with Mosaic revelation and so prepared the way for Christianity. Platonism, in this view, was not a pagan rival but a providential ally of the faith.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola widened the chain to include Jewish Kabbalah, which he regarded as an oral tradition reaching back to Moses, and attempted to show the concord of all wisdom traditions in his 900 Theses of 1486. In 1540 the Augustinian scholar Agostino Steuco published De perenni philosophia, coining the term "perennial philosophy" for the single wisdom underlying different nations' teachings. These ideas shaped Renaissance magic, because they made it possible to read Hermetic, Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic texts on ritual and the cosmos as legitimate ancient knowledge rather than suspect superstition, as described in Occult Philosophy.

Casaubon and the Collapse of the Chronology§

The ancient theology depended on a chronology that philological criticism could test. In 1614 the Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon, in a long critique of the Catholic historian Cesare Baronio, examined the Greek style and content of the Corpus Hermeticum. He concluded that it used vocabulary and ideas of late antiquity and echoed Christian and Platonic texts, so it could not be the work of a sage contemporary with Moses. Most scholars accepted his arguments, although Hermetic and Rosicrucian writers continued to cite Hermes as an ancient authority for generations.

Modern research has confirmed and refined Casaubon's conclusion: the philosophical Hermetica are usually dated between the first and third centuries CE, though they draw in part on genuine Egyptian religious ideas. The date of Moses, meanwhile, rests on biblical chronology. One reckoning based on 1 Kings 6:1 points to the fifteenth century BCE, while the mention of the store-city Rameses in Exodus has led others to a thirteenth-century setting; many historians doubt that the Exodus narrative can be dated at all. The figure of Moses as a worker of wonders is treated in Moses as Magician.

Zarathushtra remains genuinely contested. Linguistic comparison of the Gathic Avestan hymns with the Sanskrit Rigveda leads many scholars to date him somewhere between about 1500 and 1000 BCE, while others favour a later date nearer the sixth century BCE, following a Zoroastrian tradition that placed him 258 years before Alexander. The arguments are set out in Zarathustra and the Gathas.

Legacy of the Ancient Theology§

Although its chronology collapsed, the idea of a primordial wisdom survived. It reappeared in Freemasonic and Rosicrucian legends of descent from Egypt, in Theosophy's "ancient wisdom", in twentieth-century Traditionalism and in Aldous Huxley's popular The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Historians of esotericism, from Frances Yates and D. P. Walker to Wouter Hanegraaff, regard the ancient theology as one of the defining narratives of Western esotericism: a way of claiming authority by appeal to an original, hidden revelation older than the churches. The wider field is introduced in What Is Western Esotericism?

Frequently asked questions§

What does prisca theologia mean?§

The Latin phrase means "ancient theology". It names the belief that a true knowledge of God was given to the earliest sages and transmitted through a succession of teachers, so that pagan philosophy, rightly read, agreed with biblical revelation.

Did Hermes Trismegistus live at the time of Moses?§

No historical evidence supports it. Hermes Trismegistus developed from the Egyptian god Thoth, and the writings attributed to him were composed in Greek during the Roman period. The idea that he was a contemporary of Moses was a Renaissance and late antique chronology, overturned by Isaac Casaubon in 1614.

What is the difference between prisca theologia and perennial philosophy?§

They are closely related. Prisca theologia stresses a historical chain of transmission from ancient founders, while philosophia perennis, Steuco's term, stresses a single wisdom present in all ages and nations. Later writers often use the two interchangeably.

When did Zarathushtra really live?§

Scholars do not agree. Many date him between about 1500 and 1000 BCE on linguistic grounds, while others argue for the seventh or sixth century BCE. The ancient Greek dates thousands of years earlier are legendary.

Sources and further reading§