What Is Hermeticism? Hermes Trismegistus and His Tradition
What is Hermeticism? An introduction to Hermes Trismegistus, the Hermetica, their core teachings, Ficino's Renaissance revival and modern Hermetic movements.
Hermeticism is the religious and philosophical tradition based on writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the "thrice-great" sage whom Greek-speaking Egyptians of the Roman period identified with the Egyptian god Thoth. Its core texts, composed roughly between the first and third centuries CE, teach that a single divine Mind produced the cosmos, that the human being is a "mortal god" able to know God, and that this knowledge brings rebirth; revived in the Renaissance, these ideas shaped much of later Western esotericism.
Who was Hermes Trismegistus?§
Hermes Trismegistus was not a historical person but a sacred figure created in the cultural meeting of Greeks and Egyptians after Alexander's conquest of Egypt (332 BCE). Greeks equated their god Hermes, messenger of the gods and guide of souls, with Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of writing, calculation, magic and wisdom. Egyptian temple titles describing Thoth as "great, great, great" are usually considered the source of the epithet trismegistos, "thrice-greatest".
Over time Hermes Trismegistus came to be imagined as an ancient Egyptian sage, sometimes a king or priest, who had received divine revelation and written it down in books. Later Christian writers placed him near the time of Moses; Islamic authors identified him with the prophet Idris and with the antediluvian Enoch, sometimes distinguishing three Hermeses. In the Renaissance he was revered as one of the earliest "ancient theologians" (prisci theologi) who had foreseen Christian truths.
The Hermetica: technical and philosophical writings§
The writings attributed to Hermes are conventionally divided into two groups. The technical Hermetica deal with astrology, alchemy, medicine, magic and the properties of plants and stones; some are known in Greek, others survive mainly in Arabic or Latin. The philosophical Hermetica are religious dialogues in which Hermes instructs disciples such as Tat, Asclepius and Ammon, or receives revelation from the divine Mind. The distinction is modern, and scholars such as Garth Fowden have stressed that both kinds of text belonged to a single Egyptian-Greek religious milieu.
The main philosophical texts are:
- The Corpus Hermeticum — a Byzantine collection of seventeen Greek treatises, beginning with the Poimandres. See our detailed article on the Corpus Hermeticum.
- The Asclepius — a long dialogue surviving complete in Latin, known to Augustine.
- The Stobaeus fragments — excerpts preserved by the fifth-century anthologist John of Stobi.
- Nag Hammadi Codex VI — Coptic texts discovered in 1945, including The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, which shows Hermetic practice as an ascent through the heavens accompanied by hymns.
- Armenian and other versions, including the Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius.
Most scholars date the philosophical Hermetica to roughly the first to third centuries CE, while acknowledging that they draw on older Egyptian and Greek ideas.
Core teachings of Hermetic philosophy§
The Hermetic texts are not a single system, and they sometimes contradict one another, but several themes recur. God is the One, the source of all, often called Mind (Nous) or the Good, and is at once beyond the world and present throughout it. In the Poimandres, the divine Mind reveals to the narrator how the cosmos arose from light and darkness and how the first Human, made in God's image, descended through the planetary spheres and became entangled in nature.
From this follows the Hermetic view of humanity. The human being is double, mortal in body but immortal in essence, and is described as a "mortal god", capable of understanding the whole cosmos. Salvation comes through knowledge (gnosis) of God and self, achieved through teaching, piety and visionary experience. The thirteenth treatise describes a spiritual rebirth in which the disciple's vices are driven out by divine powers. Unlike many Gnostic texts, the Hermetica generally regard the cosmos as good and beautiful, the "second god", and they praise the study of nature as worship.
A famous passage of the Asclepius describes how Egyptians made "gods" by drawing divine powers into statues through rites, herbs and stones. This passage, criticised by Augustine, later inspired Renaissance theories of astral magic.
The Emerald Tablet and the alchemical Hermes§
Hermes was also patron of alchemy, which was called the "Hermetic art". The short, enigmatic Emerald Tablet, first attested in Arabic sources and widely circulated in Latin from the twelfth century, became its foundational text. Its opening statement, usually paraphrased as "as above, so below", became a slogan for the doctrine of correspondences, the idea that the heavens, the earth and the human being mirror one another.
Hermeticism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance§
In the Latin Middle Ages only the Asclepius and a few other Hermetic works were known, along with technical and pseudo-Hermetic texts such as the Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers. Hermes was respected as an ancient sage but viewed with caution because of the statue-animation passage.
The decisive change came in Florence. Around 1460 a Greek manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum reached Cosimo de' Medici, who asked Marsilio Ficino to translate it before completing his translation of Plato. Ficino's Latin version, titled Pimander, was finished in 1463 and printed in 1471, and went through many editions. For Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and their successors, Hermes stood at the head of a chain of "ancient theology" leading to Plato. Hermetic ideas fed into Renaissance magic, Christian Kabbalah, alchemy and the occult philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa. In 1614 the Swiss-born scholar Isaac Casaubon demonstrated on linguistic and historical grounds that the texts dated from the Christian era, not from Moses' time.
Modern Hermeticism§
Hermetic ideas continued in Rosicrucian and Masonic circles, Christian theosophy and nineteenth-century occultism. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888) adopted the name, and occultists such as G. R. S. Mead produced English translations for a wider public. In 1908 a book titled The Kybalion, attributed to "Three Initiates", presented seven "Hermetic principles"; it is a modern work closely related to the New Thought movement and does not derive from the ancient Hermetica.
Academic study revived in the twentieth century with the critical edition of A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière and, in 1964, Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, which argued that Hermeticism was central to Renaissance thought. Later scholars have refined or challenged Yates's thesis, and the term "Hermeticism" is now used both narrowly, for the Hermetica and their reception, and broadly, for a family of esoteric currents.
Frequently asked questions§
Was Hermes Trismegistus a real person?§
No. He is a legendary figure combining the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The writings attributed to him were composed by anonymous authors, mostly in Roman Egypt between about the first and third centuries CE.
What does "as above, so below" mean?§
The phrase is a modern paraphrase of the Emerald Tablet's opening lines, which state that what is above corresponds to what is below. It expresses the idea that the cosmos and the human being, heaven and earth, mirror and influence one another.
Is the Kybalion an ancient Hermetic text?§
No. The Kybalion was published in Chicago in 1908 and reflects the New Thought movement of its time. It uses Hermes' name but its "seven principles" do not appear in the ancient Hermetica.
How is Hermeticism related to Gnosticism?§
Both emphasise salvation through knowledge and describe the soul's ascent through the planetary spheres, and Hermetic texts were found among the Nag Hammadi codices. Unlike most Gnostic myths, however, the Hermetica generally view the cosmos and its creator positively.
Sources and further reading§
- Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius — Brian P. Copenhaver, 1992
- Corpus Hermeticum (Budé edition, 4 vols.) — A. D. Nock & A.-J. Festugière, 1945
- The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind — Garth Fowden, 1986
- Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition — Frances A. Yates, 1964
- Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination — Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 2022
- The Way of Hermes — Clement Salaman, Dorine van Oyen, William D. Wharton & Jean-Pierre Mahé, 1999