In the Asclepius the Egyptian teacher tells his pupil that the ancestors learned how to make gods, calling powers down into statues so that the images foretell the future, send illness and cure it. The passage survived in Latin and was known through the Middle Ages when the Greek Hermetica were not, and it is the single reason Hermeticism carried a reputation for magic for so long. Augustine quotes and condemns it at length in the City of God, and Renaissance defenders of Hermetic learning had to argue their way around it. The claim connects Hermeticism to Neoplatonic theurgy, which works on the same assumption that the divine can be drawn into a properly prepared material vessel, and to the much older practice of image consecration in Egyptian and Mesopotamian temple religion, where a statue was made able to receive its god by rite. The same passage carries a lament for the coming end of Egyptian religion, which modern readers have generally found more striking than the god-making.
Facts
Position Profile
Key TextThe Asclepius, in which the Egyptian teacher tells his pupil that the ancestors learned how to make gods, calling powers down into statues so that the images foretell the future, send illness and cure it. 1 Principal CriticAugustine, who quotes and condemns the passage at length in the City of God, and whose condemnation is a large part of why Renaissance defenders of Hermetic learning had to argue their way around it. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteThe claim connects Hermeticism to Neoplatonic theurgy, which works on the same assumption, and to the much older practice of image consecration in Egyptian and Mesopotamian temple religion, where a statue was made able to receive its god by rite. 2 Status
Status Within the TraditionDefined and binding within this tradition 1 Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 1 Doctrinal category (class) Learn More
The Translation Cosimo de Medici Wanted Before He Died
The Corpus Hermeticum reached the Latin reading world of Renaissance Europe because of a specific, well documented commission. Cosimo de Medici, ruler of Florence and patron of the scholar Marsilio Ficino, had Ficino already at work translating Plato when a manuscript of the Hermetic texts arrived in Florence, and Cosimo, elderly and reportedly eager to read it before he died, ordered Ficino to set Plato aside and translate the Hermetica first. Ficino completed the Latin version in 1463, and it was the Asclepius rather than this new translation that had circulated in the Latin Middle Ages, since the Asclepius alone had survived antiquity in a Latin text, so Ficino's work was most readers' first encounter with the rest of the corpus at all. The urgency behind the commission reflects the reputation these texts already carried, a belief that Hermes Trismegistus was an Egyptian sage of tremendous antiquity whose wisdom anticipated and confirmed Christian revelation, a dating later scholarship overturned when the corpus was shown to be Greek philosophical writing from the early centuries after Christ rather than ancient Egyptian material. Ficino's translation, made under a dying patron's order and resting on a mistaken date, is nonetheless the single act most responsible for Hermeticism's influence on the following two centuries of European thought.
Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Source Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin AsclepiusBrian P. Copenhaver
Sources
1. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
2. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind
Garth Fowden, Cambridge University Press, 1986
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.