Ebook: Egyptian and Hermetic Doctrine

As an Egyptological contribution to the debate on the origin of Hermetic doctrine, the present study has been strictly limited to the consideration of certain fundamental concepts of Hermetic and Egyptian cosmology in an attempt to show their basic accordance. Ever since the beginning of the century when this debate was inaugurated by Reitzenstein, the discussion has been conducted almost exclusively by classical scholars and on the premisses of classical philology, with Cumont, Petrie, Stricker and Derchain as notable exceptions.

The fact that most Hermetic doctrines could be traced in the philosophical and religious literature of Greece and other Mediterranean cultures led to the generally accepted assumption that those were the natural sources of a compilation considered a typical product of Hellenistic syncretism, on which the Egyptian influence was at most peripheral or negligible.

The Egyptian setting of the singular treatises as well as the national fervour often displayed in them were considered literary pastiche, and the explicit statement of Jamblichus and other contemporary scholars that they contained genuine Egyptian concepts translated into philosophical terms was disregarded or disbelieved. The demonstration that these statements were in fact basically correct, and that direct parallels to the Hermetic doctrines couched in concrete mythical terms are regularly found in Egyptian cosmological texts ages before there is evidence of them elsewhere is, as already stated, the principal aim of the following comparison.

How they found their way into the Greek texts we do not know, and this crucial question must at present be left unanswered, the more so since it can only be considered in direct connection with an even more intricate and controversial problem never comprehensively considered: the survival and diffusion of Egyptian lore in the later tradition, and its influence on the later cultural development.