Hermetic Literature and Translations in Late Antiquity

Kevin van Bladel - Yale University

This communication presents aspects of Hermetic texts -- that is, texts attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus -- previously unknown because of the modern concentration on a limited number of the Greek Hermetica. The modern special concern with the so-called "Corpus Hermeticum" is only an effect of the interests of European scholars from the Renaissance onward. However, the Hermetica of Late Antiquity were much more diverse and circulated widely in translation. Hermetic texts survive in most of the literary languages around the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity, including Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic. No other known ancient group of texts was translated into (or composed in) so many languages without the support of proselytizing religious organizations, such as the Christian and Manichaean churches. Any general discussion of Late Antique literature should therefore take the Hermetica into account. One of the historical trends by which we may define "Late Antiquity" is the slow decline in prestige of Greek and Latin in at least half of the former Roman Empire and the sudden increase of documentation in other languages of that region. The diversity of the Hermetica is an apt example of this gradual cultural change.

General consensus of modern scholars attributes the origin of the Hermetica to a group of Hellenized Egyptians in the early Roman Imperial period who presented their religious and philosophical ideas through a cast of divine characters, at the head of which was Hermes Trismegistus, a version of the syncretic Egyptian Thoth-Hermes. The texts dealt with a large number of topics with the common theme of revelation about the nature physical world and the human position within it: alchemy, astrology, cosmography, medicine, philosophy, religion, and ethical instruction.

Hermetic texts became and remained popular because of their claim to an ancient authority antedating the great classical philosophers. Citations of Hermes were used by Christian apologists in Greek, Latin, and Syriac to prove that there had been a praeparatio evangelica and that non-Greek wisdom was valid. In the early fifth century, the Egyptian monks Panodorus and Annianus used a Hermetic source for their chronographic works, trying to reconcile ancient Egyptian dating with Biblical dating in order to vindicate the records of their ancient nation against the charges of Eusebius. At least from that time onward, Hermes came to be considered a historical figure from the primordial age before the Deluge. An Arabic report from the eighth century tells us that in the Sasanian Persian Empire, Hermetic works were translated into Middle Persian in the third century court of Shapur I, to be included somehow with an Imperial Zoroastrian canon. This Iranian Hermetic tradition, like most Middle Persian literature, is lost in its original form, but is definitely represented in translations surviving in Arabic. As for the Arabic Hermetica, they seem to be of greater quantity than those surviving in any other early language, even considering the number of Latin pseudepigraphs forged in the later Middle Ages. Muslims identified Hermes with the Qur'anic prophet Idris, with the strange result that the pagan Greek god turned into a prophet of Islam. Works of Hermes translated from Arabic into Latin preceded any knowledge of the so-called Corpus Hermeticum (with the exception of the Asclepius) in Western Europe by at least three and a half centuries.

This communication concludes by arguing that these various adoptions of Hermetic texts were only made possible by the development of world chronology, a major concern of Late Antique scholarship. Once Hermes was given authority antedating the founders of the great religions, and a good Biblical genealogy close to the creation of the human race, the teachings attributed to him were licit and attractive to members of all religious communities who could claim them as universally true, or at least not heretical.