The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind

by Garth Fowden

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.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Occult, Egypt, Esoterica

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Garth Lowther Fowden(1953) , is British historian. Since 2013, he has been Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths at the University of Cambridge.

Reviews

[Stephen Miletus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although an academic-quality discussion of Hermes Trimegistus in the context of Late Antiquity, I found this book quite readable & the subject matter fascinating. Fowden does an admirable job of recreating the mentality of this distant age from the primary sources, and explaining this expression of "popular culture" (if this term can be applied to a subgroup of the elite) and its relationship to Neo-Platonism & Gnosticism (on the one hand) & to occult practices such as magic, astrology, & alchemy (on the other).

[MikeCar · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very good investigation into a complicated subject. I think the author did a decent job trying to balance explanations with narrative. However there are so many players in this time period and the landscape is so complex that there are times the book descends into short biographies to explain all the involved people. There are times where readability suffers and the book can become highly technical at times. A familiarity with the time period of the first few centuries CE and its basic players as well as platonism and the hermetic corpus are recommended. However I'm not sure why you would read this if you don't already have that. Lots of things are left unsaid we know frustratingly little it seems. It was a good book but I was left wanting more and so often we have to resort to speculation because of the lack of evidence and information. It is a decent survey into the historical context.

[Lanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't have this book anymore, but I remember reading it
almost 10 years ago. Its a wonderful study of late classic
Hermetic religion in Egypt and Greece using only extant evidence and a minimum of supposition. What I can recall is the description of magical practices meant to garner for the initiate knowledge by direct contact with Hermes or Thoth.
I wish people would return my damn books when they borrow them!

:)

[DAJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fowden's book was a landmark in the study of Hermeticism. Scholars in the mid-20th century thought that the Hermetic texts' claim to be age-old Egyptian wisdom was largely fictitious, and that they were simply a strain of Greek philosophical thought with some exotic coloring. The French orientalist Jean-Pierre Mahé argued otherwise as early as the 1970s, based largely on some little-known Armenian Hermetica, but Fowden was the first to do so in English, and his argument seems to have been wider-ranging than that of Mahé. Nearly 40 years later, Fowden's general arguments have clearly won the day.

Yet in itself, it's not an entirely satisfying treatment of its subject. Much of the time, Fowden discusses the general intellectual climate in the Roman world, making the case that it is plausible for Greek philosophy and Egyptian religion to have interacted to produce the Hermetica, rather than connecting specific aspects of the Hermetic texts to Egyptian traditions. He casts a wide net, encompassing all the important literary evidence about the interaction between Greek and Egyptian culture (Herodotus, Hecataeus, Manetho, Chaeremon, the aretalogies of Isis) as well as the evidence about Hermeticism itself.

You might think that that level of generality would make it a good introduction to that climate, but I'm not sure it is. Fowden's style is difficult and clearly aimed at people who are already familiar with most of the Greco-Roman authors he refers to. As someone who is reasonably aware of the shape of the Greco-Roman intellectual world, I found the book difficult to closely follow, and when giving it a rating, I keep vacillating between three and four stars. The uninitiated reader would be better served by the lucid portrayal of the on-the-ground reality of Roman Egypt in Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination by Wouter Hanegraaff—even though the later sections of that book turn into a dense interpretation of Hermetic philosophy.

That said, in the years since Fowden's book came out, a great deal of scholarship has touched on related subjects and strengthened his case. Conversations in the House of Life describes a recently pieced-together Egyptian priestly text that seems like a plausible relative of the format and abstruse thought of the Hermetica. David Frankfurter's Religion in Roman Egypt pointed out that Greco-Roman stereotypes about weird-but-wise Egyptian priests may have inspired the priests to play into those stereotypes and absorb the mystical Greek philosophy that Greek and Roman audiences expected them to spout. Jacco Dieleman (in Priests, Tongues, and Rites), Christian Bull (in The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus) and Hanegraaff have all used this point to argue that the Hermetica originated among the people who sought such priestly wisdom, or even with the priests themselves—though a recent book about Egyptian priests argues that Frankfurter's thesis is ill-founded.

Though I think more highly of many of these books than I do of Fowden's, none of them is as wide-ranging in its treatment of the intellectual world that produced the Hermetica. If you feel able to follow it, it could serve as the first stage in a chronological study of the history of Hermeticism, continuing with The Arabic Hermes, the definitive study of Islamic traditions about Hermes Trismegistus, and The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus, which traces Hermetic influence in medieval and early modern Europe.

[Mitchell Stern · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid overview of the ideas of Hermes Trismegestus and the particular milieu his work developed within.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely essential book about the world in which the writings known to us as the 'Corpus Hermeticum' were produced. Sure, the writing style is often quite dry, but if you want to see how a real historian approaches the social background of these texts, then this is the book to go to.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dense, rather impenetrable work on the history of Hermeticism, perhaps as odd as Hermeticism itself . . .

[Mitchell26 McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-rounded scholarly look at Hermes and Late Paganism. Not of much use for my purposes but a good historical grounding in the subject is never a bad thing.

[SmokingMirror]

So very dry.