Talk:Hermes Trismegistus

message: Added; 'is the eponymous author of the Hermetic Corpus, a sacred text belonging to the genre of divine revelation.'   — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.137.36.230 (talk) 09:41, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Preamble

message: The reason people thought Trismegistus was the same as the Egyptian Thoth, or a conflation of Hermes and Thoth, was because the rennaisance interpreters of the Hermetica thought it predated the Platonism they found in the text. That has now been proven to be absolutely false but the fallacy that Trismegistus is Thoth-Hermes lives on. The sources quoted don't support the assertion in the preamble and should nbe removed or updated in line with the facts.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.137.36.230 (talk) 08:30, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: While this article certainly is a mess, this particular claim (that the figure of Hermes Trismegistus is rooted in a conflation of Hermes and Thoth) is actually correct. The evidence for it is abundant, and documented by scholars of the highest standing. A survey may be found in Bull, Christian H. 2018. The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom. Leiden: Brill, pp. 33-96. More details in my comment below. Apaugasma (talk) 17:13, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Rennaisance Misconception

message: The Greek name is completely illegible from the version of Netscape I am using; it looks like a series of question marks.  Compare this:
:\alpha\beta\gamma\delta\varepsilon\zeta\eta\theta\iota\kappa\lambda\mu\nu\xi o\pi\rho\sigma\tau\upsilon\varphi\chi\psi\omega
Michael Hardy 23:02 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)
:I should have repaired the Greek, if your system contains the proper fonts it should display propery.  The math Greek letters are prettier than the & code Greek letters, but I don't think you can get uppercase with them. -- IHCOYC 02:24 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)
There was also a King Hermaios, last king of (West?) Bactria around 100-70 BC. An arabic source says that Hermes Trismegistus was a "persian" king that was dethroned and then he escaped to Egypt. The account fits nicely here, as the Ptolemaic Egypt was at this time the only appropiate place for an hellenistic ruler to go.
:Real kings, philosophers and ancient scientist tend to get deified or made into gods and legends. Zeus was probably a real living person and king too, I believe. It is a phenomena of ancient societies everywhere.--Jondel 23:27, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Or it could just be early folk etymology. It may even be a metaphor for how the beliefs got to Egypt (i.e. by travelling with settlers/refugees from bactria to egypt). --81.156.179.151 22:52, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: My hypothesis is Ramses: the names "Ramses" is the same as "Ermes" ("Hermes" in Greek) from a Semitic language perspective (i.e., no vowels represented). Ramses is in fact RMS in old Egyptian, the final S being an emphatic S and so transliterated as a double S. Besides, it matches the description of "thrice great": "the greatest priest, philosopher and king" as described in the article. I do however think the memory of Hermes might have been assimilated the one from Thothmosis III (or Thutmes III, "ms" meaing the same as "mss" or "moses" = "son of"), one of the greatest kings of Egypt of all times. CAM 12.49.124.128 (talk) 04:18, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Name

message: Something I'd like to add but need comments on.:
An Edgar Cayce reading indicates that Toth or Hermes was an incarnation of Jesus Christ. He built the Great Cheops Pyramid.See List of incarnations of Jesus Christ, according to Edgar Cayce --Jondel 01:54, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I suspect Cayce was thinking instead of Brian Boitano.  I'm not exactly sure if Cayce's speculations are notable enough to warrant inclusion, but if so that business ought to be clearer.  Smerdis of Tlön 11:38, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: "When Brian Boitano built the pyramids, he beat up Kubla Khan."   I thought everyone knew.  Smerdis of Tlön 02:32, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hermes /Toth was an engineer from the destroyed Atlantis and was an incarnation of Jesus Christ. 

message: Mercurius Ter Maximus. Alexander 007 11:42, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin name 

message: This statement is limited to Swedenborgians, is it not? A confusion of The Vision with the Book of Enoch? This unsourced statement shouldn't bev in the opening paragraph. Anyone have anything clearer to say on this pretended connection? --Wetman 05:16, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The identification with Enoch is discussed (though not endorsed) by William Baldwin in his Treatise of Morall Philosophie of 1547. But Enoch is just one among several Biblical figures with whom an identification has been suggested: others that I've seen include Joseph and Moses.Hce1132 13:26, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: http://www.library.rochester.edu/camelot/TEAMS/jwsfrm2.htm -76.22.99.215 06:44, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

text: THanks. User:Stroumel. I've deleted it. Found what you might have found.  Not an rs, and WP:UNDUE comes in as well I think. Doug Weller talk 20:29, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: "He has also been identified with Enoch"

message: thought this page was generally excellent and informative, but the seventh jumpdown "New Age revival" doesn't cite any refernences and seemed out of character with the rest of the page 
TopDrawerSausage (talk) 11:42, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree. This section needs work by a specialist. Estéban (talk) 11:14, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Any section that connects Hermeticism to the New Age should be mainly about astrology. Not many people are practicing theurgy or alchemy these days, but lots are checking their horoscope. DesertRat262 (talk) 00:40, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: section 7 - New Age revival

message: As part of a research on the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus in the ­Holy Trinity, I was lead to the story of Metatron, which is related to Enoch, which is also related to Hermes Trismegistus. It's difficult to explain how all these things could be related, but they certainly ought to be explained in a clearer fashion. Anyways, the story of Enoch is often misunderstood and would need to be better explained either on Wikipedia or somewhere else. ADM (talk) 20:25, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Hermes Trismegistus and the Holy Spirit

message: from the section "Hermetic Writings," I quote
however after Casaubon’s dating of the Hermetic writings as no earlier than the second or third century CE, the whole of Renaissance Hermeticism collapsed.[21]
I would question this contention, as certainly there were some practitioners who either never heard or never agreed with Casaubon's assessment. As a more honest and realistic argument, though, is that the sheer impossibility of disentangling hermeticism (unless so strictly defined as to almost negate hermeticism itself as a movement), from the Kabbalistic, alchemical, and religious perspectives on both sides of the Reformation which it was so bound up with, it is likewise nearly impossible to attribute its disintegration to one source. This far-reaching conclusion needs multiple attestation to put forward such a specific claim. No historian of the American Civil War would agree, for instance, that that war ended solely because "Lincoln was president." 173.21.106.137 (talk) 01:55, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contesting a basic contention of the article 

message: This whole article is uncorroborated speculation deriving from the rennaisance wish to believe that Hermes Trismegistus was an ancient Egyptian sage that pre-dated Moses. There are no references to Egypt in the Hermetica and many of the books are not even ascribed to Trismagistus, most appear to be dialogue between Hermes and his son Asklepios. Syncretised deities used both names of the syncretised gods such as Zeus-Ammon or Osiris-Apis, the idea that Trismegistus is Hermes-Thoth is therefore unfounded. The whole Hermetic corpus has a distinctly Greek flavor from the language it was written in to the personages mentioned in it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.25.109.197 (talk) 12:40, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: We'll need to cite reliable sources in any revision of the article. /ninly(talk) 15:59, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Just to name a few sources: the book The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West by Erik Hornung briefly describes how Hermeticism evolved from the Egyptian cult of Thoth in its sixth chapter. The paper "Preliminary Remarks on the Demotic 'Book of Thoth' and the Greek Hermetica" in the journal Vigiliae Christianae (Vol. 50, No. 4, 1996) examines the possible relationship between a late Egyptian text and the Hermetic dialogues. Hermes Trismegistus definitely has Egyptian roots. And Asklepios is Imhotep, by the way. A. Parrot (talk) 00:47, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

text:  While this article certainly is a mess, this particular claim (that the figure of Hermes Trismegistus is rooted in a conflation of Hermes and Thoth, and generally has an Egyptian background) is actually correct. The evidence for it is abundant, and documented by scholars of the highest standing. A survey may be found in Bull, Christian H. 2018. The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom. Leiden: Brill, pp. 33-96. More details in my comment below. Apaugasma (talk) 17:23, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Egyptian Hermes?

message: The article currently says that there was a myth circulating that Hermes was the grandson of Adam and Eve and built the pyramids. It is uncited. This should be taken out.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Astrohoundy (talk • contribs) 07:45, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: There were traditions that equated Hermes Trismegistus with Enoch (ancestor of Noah), and probably therefore with Enoch (son of Cain), and that attribute the Great Pyramid to him. If I remember correctly from The Arabic Hermes (2009) by Kevin Van Bladel, those traditions emerged in the Islamic world based on misreadings of misreadings of ancient chroniclers and biblical apocryphal books. But it's really complicated and should be explained much more thoroughly if it's included. A. Parrot (talk) 19:00, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adam and Eve??? 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Hermes Trismegistus. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20080915150918/http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu:80/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/26.html to http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/26.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers. —cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 07:47, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Link works and seems useful. Dhtwiki (talk) 12:39, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The first line under the "Hermes Trismegistus" sub-section of the "Identification" section reads: "A late Arabic writer wrote of the Sabaeans that their religion had a sect of star worshipers who held their doctrine to come from Hermes Trismegistus through the prophet Adimun.[29]" As far as I know, (I speak some Arabic, and am half Arab), the "un" at the end of "Adimun" is a grammatical suffix which would be removed in this case. This would turn "Adimun" into a name sounding very similar to "Adam." As far as I know, there is no prophet in Islam named Adimun, though Adam is considered the first prophet. Unless someone else has proof that "Adimun" refers to another prophet, I want to change "Adimun" to "Adam"العمصوني & البطنيج (talk) 02:12, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Change "the Prophet Adimun" to "the Prophet Adam?"

message: While this article is certainly a mess and needs a lot of clean-up, its claim that "Hermes Trismegistus may be associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth", while often attacked on this talk page as a fiction dating from the Renaissance or pushed by modern occultists, is actually correct.
The evidence for this is abundant, and documented by scholars of the highest standing. A survey may be found in Bull, Christian H. 2018. The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom. Leiden: Brill, pp. 33-96. Most of the evidence is literary in nature, but there also is some good archaeological evidence. Consider, e.g., Bull 2018, p. 34: "Ostraca found in the archive of Hor, in Saqqara around 168 BCE, by a stroke of good fortune yield both a Demotic and a Greek version of the epithet (Ḏḥwty pꜣ ꜥꜣ pꜣ ꜥꜣ pꜣ ꜥꜣ [i.e., "Thoth the great the great the great"], and μέγιστος καὶ μέγιστος θεός μεγάλος Ἑρμῆς [i.e., "the greatest and greatest great god Hermes"])".
While the precise nature of the relationship between the Greek texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and Hellenistic Egypt and its priestly class is the subject of much academic discussion (apart from Bull 2018, which should now be the standard reference, see also, e.g., Festugière, André-Jean 1944-1954. La Révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste. Vol. I-IV. Paris: Gabalda; Fowden, Garth 1986. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Van den Kerchove, Anna 2012. La voie d’Hermès: Pratiques rituelles et traités hermétiques. Leiden: Brill), the fact that there is such a relationship, and the fact that it is rooted in a Greco-Egyptian syncretism of some sort, is never seriously disputed. Apaugasma (talk) 17:08, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hermes-Thoth 

message: The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science sources the relation of Trismegistus with the Islamic astrologer Abu Ma'shar. But the OUP paper originally sourced talked about and Cornelis Drebbel. 
Now the latter have no concerns in the WP article, but it has also to be taken into account the very small number of sources available on Google. Thanks for your contribution.Philosopher81sp (talk) 19:18, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cornelis Drebbel and Abu Ma'shar