Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

1 A Being with lion's head, and eagle's wings, and brute's feet, and human body, enwrapped with a serpent, standing on a globe and holding the keys of life and death in its two hands. There are many variants, however, all of them highly instructive, as pourtraying the Autozoon, or Living Creature in itself, the summation of all forms of life, including man.

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of the Mon, as Cumont supposes, but to a Chaldaean element dominating the Mithriac form of the Magian tradition.1

PROBABLE DATE OP ORIGIN OF THE HELLENISTIC - DOCTRINE

Now the Chaldaean and Egyptian wisdom-cultures had many root-ideas in common (were they not regarded by the Greeks as the wisdom-traditions par excellence ?) ; we are not therefore surprised to find that Egypt, with its ever-recurring grandiose mysteryphrases of enormous time-periods, such as " He of the millions of years," had on its own soil a highly developed idea of Eternity and of Eternities — that is, of the -5Uon and of the ^Eons; and indeed the strongly Egyptian forms of the Gnosis, which we have preserved to us under Christian overworking, are involved in the most complex seonology.

It seems, however, almost as though the evidence suggests that this Egyptian element had been revivified, and rescued from the oblivion in which it had been buried in a decadent age, in the symbolism of an almost forgotten past, by a stream of Chaldaean ideas that poured into Hellenistic circles in the early Alexandrian period. When precisely the -.^Eon-idea forced itself upon the philosophic mind of Alexandrian thinkers as an unavoidable mystic necessity, it is difficult to say with any certainty. It can, however, be said without fear of serious contradiction that it may have done so from early Ptolemaic times, and with certainty that it did so in the first century B.C. as truly as in the first century A.D.

That the term ^Eon was in frequent use in the

1 Reitzenstein (p. 276) is also of this opinion.

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popular Hermes -cult may be seen in Hermes -Prayer v. 4, where Thoth is characterised as the "^Eon of the ^ons who changes himself into all forms in visions." So also in Prayer viii. 2, the Good Daimon, who has different names given him in the different hours, is called "Wealth-giving ^Eon." So also with Isis, who is called Wisdom and Mon in the Papyri.1

In conclusion, we may glance at what Eeitzenstein
(pp. 272 ff.) has to say concerning this "Aionenlehre."

ABRAXAS

The name Abraxas, which consisted of seven elements or letters, was a mystery-designation of the God who combined in himself the whole power of the Seven Planets, and also of the Year of 365 days, the sum of the number-values of the letters of Abraxas working out to 365. This mysterious Being was the " Year " ; but the Year as the Eternity, also conceived of in a spatial aspect, as the Spirit or Name that extends from Heaven to Earth, the God who pervades and full-fills the Seven Spheres, and the Three Hundred and Sixtyfive Zones, the Inner God, " He who has His seat within the Seven Poles— AEHIOYQ," as the Papyri have it, and also without them, as we shall see.

The mysterious formula "the Name of which the figure is 365 " meets us in such connections, that it cannot be taken to mean simply the " Year-God," but is a synonym of the Highest God, a secret, mysterious Being. In brief it was, as we have seen, no other than the Lion-headed God, called in Greek ^Eon.

Indeed, we know from Philo of Byblos 2 that, at least in his day, the second half of the first century A.D. (and,

1 K. 270.

2 Ap. Euseb., Prsep. Evang., I. 10, 7 ; 34 B.

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for all we know, prior to it), there were in Phoenicia communities of the ^Eou — of the Highest and Supercelestial One.

THE FEAST OF THE ^EON