The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus by Ebeling Florian;

The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus by Ebeling Florian;

Author:Ebeling, Florian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-6488-1
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)


Hermes as father of alchemy and predecessor of the Paracelsists and Rosicrucians. Here he points to images symbolizing a sentence from the Tabula Smaragdina: “Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon.” From Michael Meier, Symbola aurae mensae duocedim nationum (Frankfurt, 1617), p. 5.

Hermes and the Dignity of Alchemy

In his foreword, titled “On the Dignity and Use of Alchemy,” to the collaborative volume Promptuarium Alchemiae (Repository of alchemy), Joachim Tancke (1557–1609) interpreted alchemy as part of biblical heilsgeschichte (salvation history).14 Thus the art of preparing effective medicines and refining substances was seen to be of divine origin, “a special present and gift of God Almighty.”15 In the Bible the mention of Tubalcain as the “first bronze and ironsmith” and the enumeration of gifts for the Tabernacle were signs of the importance of alchemy in heilsgeschichte. Because gold could not in fact be reduced to powder by burning, Tancke assumed, based on the story of the Golden Calf, that Moses had learned this means of dealing with metals in Egypt:

It is to be presumed that Moses was brought up by Pharaoh’s daughter in all the teachings and goodly arts of the Egyptians, and that the mystery of Nature was not unknown to him, as can be, to some extent, demonstrated.16

Moses an alchemist? We learn nothing further from Tancke, except that there is probably evidence, even in the Old Testament, of secret, magical knowledge—after all, even the three Wise Men from the East were undoubtedly to be understood as magi. Natural philosophy, and thus the history of alchemy and magic, were not, however, the subject matter of the Bible. The history of natural philosophy is clearly to be discerned in secular history. The forefather of this science was Hermes Trismegistus:

The earliest philosopher, who first described this art, was Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian born of royal blood. He expressed and wrote the entire art briefly in an emerald, so that it is still today called the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes.17

Like Balduff, Tancke makes no appeal to the Corpus Hermeticum. He highlights the Tabula Smaragdina and the alchemical texts regarding the Philosophers’ Stone as the most important evidence of Hermes Trismegistus. In the sense of a mythoalchemy that viewed the classical myths as symbolic encodings of the alchemical process and its history, he interpreted the narrative of the “golden fleece” as a report on the spread of alchemical knowledge through various cultures. Though Tancke wished to discern the history of alchemy in Greek mythology, he did not think that Hermetic knowledge passed directly and unadulterated from the Egyptians to the Greeks. Greek wisdom, natural philosophy in particular, was basically of Egyptian origin:

Because the philosophers in Greece understood that the Egyptian priests were excellent natural historians and learned persons who alone understood the mystery of nature, [. . .] they went to Egypt, and from the priests and philosophers, called magi among the Persians, they learned the true philosophy that was not found among any Greeks. Thus Democritus of Abdera, a man of high intellect, was prompted to go to Egypt to learn the mystery of nature and the true philosophy.



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