Authors: Garth Fowden
ISBN-13: 9780691024981, ISBN-10: 0691024987
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Date Published: June 1993
Edition: REPRINT
Sage, scientist, and sorcerer, Hermes Trismegistus was the culture-hero of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. A human (according to some) who had lived about the time of Moses, but now indisputably a god, he was credited with the authorship of numerous books on magic and the supernatural, alchemy, astrology, theology, and philosophy. Until the early seventeenth century, few doubted the attribution. Even when unmasked, Hermes remained a byword for the arcane. Historians of ancient philosophy have puzzled much over the origins of his mystical teachings; but this is the first investigation of the Hermetic milieu by a social historian.Starting from the complex fusions and tensions that molded Graeco-Egyptian culture, and in particular Hermetism, during the centuries after Alexander, Garth Fowden goes on to argue that the technical and philosophical Hermetica, apparently so different, might be seen as aspects of a single "way of Hermes." This assumption that philosophy and religion, even cult, bring one eventually to the same goal was typically late antique, and guaranteed the Hermetica a far-flung readership, even among Christians. The focus and conclusion of this study is an assault on the problem of the social milieu of Hermetism.
[T]he books ascribed to Hermes . . . fall into two divisions, the technical and the philosophical, which Fowden treats separately. . . . [His] scholarly survery makes an excellent foundation for further study of points of detail and of paganism in general.
Abbreviations | ||
Preface to the 1993 edition | ||
Preface (1986) | ||
Introduction: The texts | 1 | |
Pt. I | Modes of Cultural Interaction | |
1 | The durability of Egypt | 13 |
The gods of Egypt | 14 | |
Hermes Trismegistus | 22 | |
The Hermetica | 31 | |
2 | Translation and interpretation | 45 |
Aretalogies of Isis and Asclepius | 45 | |
Manetho and Chaeremon | 52 | |
Books of Thoth and technical Hermetica | 57 | |
Instructions and philosophical Hermetica | 68 | |
Pt. II | The Way of Hermes | |
3 | Magister omnium physicorum | 75 |
Sympatheia | 75 | |
Magic | 79 | |
Occult properties and alchemy | 87 | |
Astrology | 91 | |
4 | Religio mentis | 95 |
The philosophical paideia | 97 | |
Gnosis | 104 | |
5 | Towards a via universalis | 116 |
Technique and philosophy: interactions | 116 | |
Zosimus of Panopolis | 120 | |
Pre-Iamblichan theurgy | 126 | |
Iamblichus of Apamea | 131 | |
6 | Hermetism and theurgy | 142 |
The role and understanding of ritual | 142 | |
Bitys | 150 | |
Pt. III | The Milieu of Hermetism | |
7 | Hermetism in Egypt | 155 |
The evidence of the Hermetica | 156 | |
First-century Alexandria - and beyond | 161 | |
Temples and priests | 166 | |
Upper Egypt | 168 | |
Late antique Alexandria | 177 | |
The milieu of Hermetism: a socio-intellectual description | 186 | |
8 | Aegypti sacra deportata | 196 |
Conclusion | 213 | |
Appendix: Earliest testimonies to the name 'Hermes Trismegistus' | 216 | |
Bibliography | 218 | |
Index | 237 |