The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times » (New Edition)

Florian Ebeling is Lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. David Lorton, an Egyptologist, is the translator of many books, including Erik Hornung's books The Secret Lore of Egypt and Akhenaten and the Religion of Light, both from Cornell. Jan Assmann is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at Heidelberg University. His books include The Search for God in Ancient Egypt and Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, both from Cornell.

Perhaps Hermeticism has fascinated so many people precisely because it has made it possible to produce many analogies and relationships to various traditions: to Platonism in its many varieties, to Stoicism, to Gnostic ideas, and even to certain Aristotelian doctrines. The Gnostic, the esoteric, the Platonist, or the deist has each been able to find something familiar in the writings. One just had to have a penchant for remote antiquity, for the idea of a Golden Age, in order for Hermeticism, with its aura of an ancient Egyptian revelation, to have enjoyed such outstanding success."-from the Introduction

Foreword   Jan Assmann     vii
Introduction     1
Prehistory and Early History of a Phantasm     3
What Are Hermetic Texts?     7
The Hermetic Texts of Late Antiquity     9
Hermes as Preacher of Theology and Philosophy     12
Hermes: Astrologer, Magus, and Alchemist     21
What Was Ancient Hermeticism?     27
The Middle Ages: Christian Theology and "Antediluvian" Magic     37
Christian Hermeticism     38
Arab Hermeticism     44
Hermes Latinus     51
Traditions of Medieval Hermeticism     57
Renaissance: Primeval Wisdom for a New World     59
Tradition or Rediscovery?     59
Hermeticism and Paracelsism     70
Religious Hermeticism     81
Two Paths of Hermeticism in the Early Modern Period     89
Seventeenth Century: High Point and Decline     91
Casaubon and the Dating of the Hermetic Texts     91
Hermeticism and the Modern Natural Sciences     100
Hermeticism and Pietism     109
The Decrepitude of Hermeticism?     113
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Between Occultism and Enlightenment     115
Two GermanEditions of the Corpus Hermeticum     118
Hermes Trismegistus in Freemasonry     121
From Historical to Systematic Hermeticism     129
Twentieth Century: Systems and Esoterica     135
Julius Evola and Esoteric Hermeticism     137
Umberto Eco's Hermetic Semiosis and Heinrich Rombach's Hermeticism     139
Chronology     143
Glossary     147
Select Bibliography     151
Index     153