Does Hermes Trismegistus actually have Egyptian origins? I know it's claimed he is associated with Thoth, but I also know that the Ancient Greeks liked to brand their stuff as 'Egyptian' whenever they wanted to give the impression that it's old and legit. Hermeticism also seems to have a lot more Greek ideas than Egyptian ideas. Has anyone ever looked into the veracity of Hermeticism's claim on Egyptian tradition?
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>>18346512Tl;dr: Yes.Greeks and Egyptians do share some heritage thanks to the Ptolomy rulers. Greeks also liked to interpret things as aspects of their own gods, etc. If I recall Hermes Thrice Great is something like two vaguely deified egyptian sages, Thoth, Hermes and Mercury rolled into one. Definitely Thoth and Hermes, but the others were often given shrines in the same building. Sometimes he's a god, sometimes an ascended man, sometimes just a man. He became the 'source' of a lot of cultic writings as well as magic, like old astronomy. And science, not that those were noticeably different pre-enlightenment.HERMETICISM as a religion is also is often conflated with gnosticism but is nothing to do with it. Light of the nous and all that, an alchemical progression.
>>18347137Anyway, while a lot of 'ancient' hermetic works are misattributed to him to give them traction, especially during the Enlightenment, the vast bulk is actually egyptian or was preserved in egypt. The greeks tended to label their own stuff because they were philhellenes, funnily enough.
>egyptianMaybe?>ancient EgyptianDefinitely not, Isaac Casaubon proved the corpus hermetic was written ~2-3rd century AD some 400 years ago.
