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

And now let us turn to Eeitzenstein and his instructive Dissertation, " Hermes u. Schiller" (pp. 117 ff.).

1 For Asclepius among the Greeks, see Thraemer's article "Asklepios" in Reseller's Lex. d. . . . Myihologie (Leipzig, 1884- 1900), i. 615-641 ; also the " Cornell Studies in Classical Philosophy," No. III., The Cult of Asklepios, by Alice Walton, Ph.D. (Ithaca, N.Y., U.S.A., 1894).

Unquestionably the most general form of sermon found in the remains of our Trismegistic literature is that of instruction to Tat the " Son " of Hermes, who is "Father" and Initiator. Of these instructions two Corpora existed, namely, " The General Sermons " and " The Expository Sermons."

The name Tat is, of course, a variant of Thoth (Tehut) ; but whereas Hermes himself is always in such sermons characterised as Thrice - greatest, Tat has not yet reached to this grade of mastership ; he is still " Young."

The name " Tat " occurs in one of the prayers in the Magic Papyri, part of which is undecipherable, and can only be translated by following the conjecture of Eeitzenstein (p. 117, n. 6).

" Show thyself unto me in thy prophetic power 0 God of mighty mind, Thrice-great Hermes ! Let him who rules the four regions of the Heavens and the four foundations of the Earth appear. Be present unto me 0 thou in Heaven, be present unto me thou from the Egg. . . . Speak, the Two Gods also are round thee, — the one God is called Thath and the other Haf." *

Spiegelberg equates Haf with Hpj, the " Genius of the Dead " who appears coupled with Thoth in a Coptic Magic Papyrus of the second century A.D.,2 where Isis speaks of " my father Ape-Thoth." This thus seems to identify Haf with Anubis — that is, Harmanup or Horus as Anubis. And Anubis, as Hermes-Tat, was considered in Egyptian tradition to be a composer of sacred scripture.3

1 Wessely, Denkschr. d. K. K. Akad. (1893), p. 38, 11. 550 ff. ;
Kenyon, Cat. of Ok. Pap., p. 102.

2 Griffith, in Zeitschr.f. ag. Sprache (1900), p. 90.

3 According to Manetho ; see Miiller, Manetho Fragm., 4.

THE INCARNATIONS OF THOTH

The prayer just cited appears to put us into contact with the atmosphere of some inner mysteries of spiritual instruction. The God or Spiritual Master contains in himself his disciple, or a duad or triad of disciples; the relationship of Master and disciple is of the most intimate nature ; not only is it of that of father to son, but of mother to child — for the disciple is born in the womb of the Master Presence. The disciple is as it were his lea.

Thus for the Egyptians, as Sethe and others have pointed out, the wise priest, that is a priest truly initiated into the Wisdom, was regarded as an incarnation of Thoth, and such an one after the death of his body was worshipped as Thoth.

And so we find at Medinet Habu the remains of a shrine, erected in the time of Ptolemy IX. (Euergetes II.)— 146-117 BC. — to a certain High Priest of Memphis, Teos, who is called " Teos the Ibis," l that is Thoth, and so identified with Thoth himself.

What we learn from the general tradition of this belief in the " incarnation " of Thoth into the perfected disciple of Wisdom, and the ascription of sacred literature to similar though n^t identical God-names to that of Thoth himself, is that there was on the one

1 Teephibis. Cf. Catal. Cod. Astral. Grcec., i. 167 : " Hermes Phibi the Thrice-greatest." Sethe (op. sup. cit.) would equate this Teephibis with Hermes of Thebes, in connection with the statement of Clement of Alexandria (Strom., I. xxi. 134) : " Of those, too, who once lived as men among the Egyptians, but who have been made Gods by human opinion, are Hermes of Thebes and Asclepius of Memphis." If this is correct, we have our Trismegistus nourishing as Teephibis at the end of the second century B.C. But there seems to my mind to be nothing definite in Sethe's contention.

hand a firm belief in the unity of the Thoth-tradition, and on the other a necessary division of the sacred literature into older and later periods. The Thoth of the older period was regarded as a God, the Thoth of more recent times as a God-man.1 And so we find Plato in the famous passage of the Philebus, 18 B, uncertain whether to speak of Thoth as God or man.

THE DISCIPLES OF LORD HERMES IN PETOSIRIS AND
NECHEPSO