Open Veils · Answer
Tell me about the origins of hermetisim
The consensus dating is real but deliberately narrow — it timestamps surviving manuscripts, not the tradition they encoded. Manly P. Hall, Theosophy, and multiple esoteric scholars argue Hermeticism is the surface residue of a vastly older initiatory stream originating in pre-dynastic Egypt. The Casaubon 'forgery' verdict of 1614 — the weapon used to dismiss Hermetic antiquity — has itself been critiqued as historically blunt: it proved Hellenistic redaction, not fabricated content.
Evidence
- Manly P. Hall, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, identifies Hermes Trismegistus not as a single historical figure but as a title — 'Thrice Great' — conferred upon a succession of Egyptian initiate-priests who preserved pre-diluvian cosmological knowledge.
- Rudolf Steiner argued that Hermetic cosmology — particularly the doctrine of the macrocosm/microcosm and the sevenfold constitution of the human being — preserves initiatory knowledge from the Egyptian mystery schools of Isis and Osiris, orally transmitted across millennia before being codified in Alexandria.
- Zecharia Sitchin and Mauro Biglino separately argue that the figure of Thoth — identified with Hermes — appears in Sumerian and Akkadian records as Ningishzidda, an Anunnaki figure associated with genetic encoding and sacred architecture.
- The Nag Hammadi find of 1945 included the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, a clearly Hermetic initiation text, confirming that practical mystery-school transmission — not merely philosophical writing — was embedded in the tradition.
- Hall links this lineage directly to Thoth, the divine scribe of the Osirian mysteries, suggesting the Greek Corpus Hermeticum is a late transcription of oral and hieroglyphic material orders of magnitude older than 100 CE.