Hermes Trismegistus

The name Hermes Trismegistus is commonly associated with occult sciences, such as theurgy, alchemy, and astrology, which partly originated in the technical Hermetic literature circulating in the Roman empire from as early as the second century B.C.E. Our modern expression “hermetically sealed” derives from the name Hermes. Apollonius of Tyana, the Pythagorian philosopher of the first century C.E., is less well known. Greek and Latin sources do not connect these two figures doctrinally, but in the Arabic Hermetic literature, some of which was translated from pagan Syrian sources in the time of Caliph Ma’mún (813 - 833), Apollonius (in Arabic Balínús) is often associated with Hermes. There he is depicted as the discoverer and representative of Hermes’ teachings on the secrets of creation that had been lost to the generations before him. It is this later picture of Hermes and Apollonius that is most relevant to this study, for it is the tradition that is adopted by Bahá'u'lláh in his writings. In his Lawh-i-Hikmat (Tablet of Wisdom), for example, Bahá'u'lláh states: “It was this man of wisdom [Balínús] who became informed of the mysteries of creation and discerned the subtleties which lie enshrined in the Hermetic writings.”

 According to the Eastern, Islamic tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes was a divine philosopher or Prophet who lived before the time of the Greek philosophers, and he was the first person to whom God instructed the secrets of wisdom and divine and natural sciences. Muslims equate Hermes to the Prophet Idrís, whom the Jews know as Enoch. In the Qur’án, it is written: “Commemorate Idrís in the Book; for he was a man of truth, a Prophet; and we uplifted him to a place on high” (Q. 19:57-58). Hermes is also called the "father of the philosophers" in the Muslim Hermetic tradition, because he was believed to be the most ancient of those who propagated wisdom and sciences. In accord with this tradition, Bahá'u'lláh writes in his Lawh Basít al-Haqíqat (Tablet on the Uncompounded Reality):

The first person who devoted himself to philosophy was Idrís. Thus was he named. Some called him also Hermes. In every tongue he hath a special name. He it is who hath set forth in every branch of philosophy thorough and convincing statements. After him Balínús derived his knowledge and sciences from the Hermetic Tablets and most of the philosophers who followed him made their philosophical and scientific discoveries from his words and statements.

In this quotation, “after him” represents a long period of time, since Balínús lived in the first century C.E. The “philosophers who followed him” would, accordingly, refer to philosophers after the first century C.E. who followed the Hermetic tradition.

            Inasmuch as Bahá'u'lláh refers to Hermes and Apollonius in his writings, (1) what relevance does the Hermetic legacy in Islam have to Bahá'í thought in general, and (2) what attitude should Bahá'ís take toward these references in view of the declared infallibility of Bahá'í scripture? The first question is important as part of an investigation of the sources of Bahá'u'lláh’s cosmological teachings; the second question is significant insofar as it concerns the issue of scriptural interpretation for Bahá'í theology. Before answering these questions, however, it is first necessary, in order to obtain a more balanced picture, to see how Hermes and Apollonius were viewed in the Roman empire before the conquest of Islam, and then to see how they were incorporated into the Islamic worldview. Furthermore, what of their writings were known, and how did they influence religious and philosophical thought?

            Since, from the fragmentary textual evidence remaining from the Roman empire, the names of Hermes and Apollonius are not associated with each other at that time, they will be examined separately. The legendary name of Hermes Trismegistus in the Roman empire is, firstly, connected to the Egyptian god Thoth, whom Herodotus associated with the Greek Hermes in the fifth century B.C.E. In Egypt, in the most ancient period, Thoth was a powerful national god associated with the moon. As the moon is illuminated by the sun, likewise Thoth derived his authority from the sun god Re, to whom he acted as secretary and advisor. The moon ruled the stars and distinguished the seasons and months of the year, thus becoming the lord of time and the regulator of individual destinies. Thoth came to be viewed both as the source of cosmic order and of religious and civic institutions, and, as such, he presided over temple cults and laws of state. According to one account, "Tiberius enacted his laws for the World in the same way as Thoth, the creator of justice."

            As the lord of wisdom, a role in which he was widely recognized, he was regarded as the origin of sacred texts and formulae, and of arts and sciences. The tradition that Thoth had revealed the arts of writing, number, geometry, and astronomy to King Ammon at Thebes was known to Plato and related by him in the Phaedrus.[4] As the scribe of the gods, he was the inventor of writing. Plutarch explains that the first letter of the Egyptian alphabet is the ibis, the sacred bird symbol of Hermes, because Hermes invented writing.

            Thoth was also a physician. In a representation of him from the time of Tiberius, he appears holding the stick of Asclepius with the snake. When a person died, he guided the soul to the afterlife, where he recorded the judgments of Osiris. Because the Greek Hermes, like Thoth, was associated with the moon, medicine, and the realm of the dead, and both served as a messenger for the gods and were known for inventiveness, the Greeks assimilated Hermes to Thoth.[9] It is the Egyptian Thoth, however, who comes down to us as Hermes Trismegistus. Walter Scott believes that to distinguish this Hermes from the Greek Hermes, the Greeks added the epithet Trismegistus, meaning "thrice-great," which they borrowed from the Egyptian epithet for Thoth, aá aá, meaning "very great."

            But another view of Hermes also prevailed in the Roman empire, probably due to the appearance of the Hermetic writings between the late first and late third centuries C.E. In this view, Hermes is not a god but as a divinely-guided man or Prophet. Long before, Plato had already questioned whether Thoth was a god or just a divine man. In the writings ascribed to Hermes, he is usually pictured as the mortal agent of a holy revelation from God which offers salvation to the soul from the bondage of matter and promises to disclose the secrets of creation. Ammianus Marcellinus, the fourth-century pagan historian, refers to Hermes Trismegistus, Apollonius of Tyana, and Plotinus as individuals with a special guardian spirit. To both Christians and pagans of the Roman empire, the Egyptian Hermes was a real person of great antiquity. Some considered him to be a contemporary of Moses, and they regarded him as the first and greatest teacher of gnosis and sophia, from whose teachings later philosophers derived the fundamentals of their philosophy. For example, Iamblichus (d. ca. 330 C.E.), one of the Neoplatonic successors of Plotinus, wrote that Plato and Pythagoras had visited Egypt and there read the tablets of Hermes with the assistance of native priests.

            Bahá'u'lláh does not explicitly support a direct philosophical connection between Hermes and the early Greek philosophers, as Iamblichus does, but only between Hermes and Balínús and the philosophers who followed after Balínús in the Hermetic tradition. This is significant because part of the Islamic Hermetic tradition from which Bahá'u'lláh draws, as will be seen below, places Balínús prior in time to Aristotle, which is impossible in the light of historical evidence. Bahá'u'lláh, therefore, may be deliberately recounting those parts of the tradition he believes to be true while remaining silent about those parts that he believes to be false. In regard to a possible Egyptian influence on the early Greek philosophers, Jonathan Barnes writes: “Although some [Egyptian] fertilization can scarcely be denied, the proven parallels are surprisingly few and surprisingly imprecise.”

Lactantius, one of the early fathers of the Christian Church, believed Hermes to be the Gentile Prophet, who not only predicted the coming of Christ but recognized the Logos as God's son. He writes in his Institutes:

And even though he [Hermes] was a man, he was most ancient and well instructed in every kind of learning--to such a degree that his knowledge of the arts and of all other things gave him the cognomen or epithet Trismegistus. He wrote books--many, indeed, pertaining to the knowledge of divine things--in which he vouches for the majesty of the supreme and single God and he calls Him by the same names which we use: Lord and Father. Lest anyone should seek His name, he says that He is “without a name,” since He does not need the proper signification of a name because of His very unity.

Augustine, likewise, allows that "Hermes makes many...statements agreeable to the truth concerning the one true God Who fashioned this world," but he also castigates Hermes for what appears to be his sympathy for the gods of Egypt.