Hermes Trismegistus

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Part of a series on
Hermeticism
Mythology
Hermes Trismegistus
Hermetic arts
Astrology Alchemy Magic
Hermetic writings
Liber Hermetis (astrological) Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus Corpus Hermeticum Asclepius Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth Korē kosmou Cyranides The Book of the Secrets of the Stars The Secret of Creation Emerald Tablet Kitāb al-Isṭamākhīs Liber Hermetis de alchemia
Related historical figures (ancient and medieval)
Zosimos of Panopolis Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (may be legendary) Abū Maʿshar Ibn Umayl Maslama al-Qurṭubī Aḥmad al-Būnī
Related historical figures (early modern)
Marsilio Ficino Lodovico Lazzarelli Giovanni da Correggio Pico della Mirandola Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa Paracelsus John Dee Giordano Bruno Jakob Böhme Robert Fludd Christian Rosenkreuz (legendary, see Rosicrucianism)
Modern offshoots
As above, so below Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Kybalion
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Hermes Trismegistus (from Ancient Greek: Ἑρμῆς ὁ Τρισμέγιστος, "Hermes the Thrice-Greatest"; Classical Latin: Mercurius ter Maximus) is a legendary Hellenistic figure that originated as a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.^[1] He is the purported author of the Hermetica, a widely diverse series of ancient and medieval pseudepigraphical texts that lay the basis of various philosophical systems known as Hermeticism.

Origin and identity[]

Thoout, Thoth Deux fois Grand, le Second Hermès, N372.2A, Brooklyn Museum

Hermes Trismegistus may be associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.^[1][2] Greeks in the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt recognized the equivalence of Hermes and Thoth through the interpretatio graeca.^[3] Consequently, the two gods were worshiped as one, in what had been the Temple of Thoth in Khemenu, which was known in the Hellenistic period as Hermopolis.^[4]

Hermes, the Greek god of interpretive communication, was combined with Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. The Egyptian priest and polymath Imhotep had been deified long after his death and therefore assimilated to Thoth in the classical and Hellenistic periods.^[5] The renowned scribe Amenhotep and a wise man named Teôs were coequal deities of wisdom, science, and medicine; and, thus, they were placed alongside Imhotep in shrines dedicated to Thoth–Hermes during the Ptolemaic Kingdom.^[6]

A Mycenaean Greek reference to a deity or semi-deity called ti-ri-se-ro-e (Linear B: