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

The Patristic references to our Trismegistic literature further imform us that Osiris was regarded as the disciple of Agathodaimon, who in them bears the name of Thrice-greatest.1 There is, however, nothing to show that Hermes himself appears in them as the disciple of Chnubis, as Eeitzenstein says (p. 126). The introductory phrase of Lactantius to Frag. xix. runs : " But I [L.] will call to mind the words of Hermes the Thricegreatest ; in the ' To Asclepius ' he says : ' Osiris said : How, then, 0 thou Thrice-greatest, [thou] Good Daimon, did Earth in its entirety appear ? ' "

Here we have a sermon of Hermes quoting from a tradition in which Osiris appears as the disciple of Agathodaimon, who is also called Trismegistus ; that is, the Agathodaimou-Osiris Dialogue type was old, and presumably pertained to one of the earliest forms of the Trismegistic literature, probably contemporary with the most ancient Pcemandres type. This type seems to have borne impressions of the form of the " Books of the Chaldaeans " type of cosmogenesis, which we have seen to have strongly influenced Petosiris and Nechepso in the early second century B.C.

Agathodaimon is to Osiris as Poemandres to Hermes.

So also in the early Alchemical literature there is a treatise of Agathodaimon addressed to Osiris, and in it others are presupposed.2 These Alchemical teachings of the Good Daimon are frequently in close contact with 2our Trismegistic doctrines ; moreover, in the same literature, Hermes refers to Agathodaimon and appears to regard himself as his disciple.1 It thus may be supposed that it was from Chnum that was originally derived the tradition of the Agathodaimonites. So thinks Eeitzenstein ; but I do not think that we have sufficient evidence as yet for so general a conclusion. The term Agathodaimon is a very general one, it is true, but the whole idea cannot be refunded into Chnum ; in fact, Osiris is quite as much Agathodaimon as Chnum, and in G. H., xii. (xiii.), which deals with the General Mind, Good Mind, or Good Daimon, Agathodaimon is taken in the most general sense, and in the three quotations there made by Hermes from the " Sayings of the Good Daimon" (§§ 1, 8, 13),2 we find that they are in the words of Heracleitus as inspired by the Logos ; so that in reality Agathodaimon must be equated with Logos. The origin of Agathodaimon is then not solely Chnum ; and Hermes therefore cannot be spoken of as the disciple of Chnubis, unless we can cite texts in which Thoth is so described.

When, however, Eeitzenstein (p. 128) declares that the sentence in § 25 of the same sermon, " For this cause can a man dare say that man on earth is God subject to death, while God in heaven is man from death immune,"3 is a saying belonging to the Chnu3phis-literature, we think he is going beyond the limits of probable conjecture, unless we substitute for Chnuphis the general term Agathodaimon in the sense of Logos.

When again Reitzenstein (p. 129) says that the fragments he has adduced show that Hermes was a later addition in the Agathodaimon-literature, and gradually pushed on one side Osiris the Son of the God of Revelation, we are not convinced that we have correctly recovered the " history " — for in the great Osiris-myth it is Hermes who is always the teacher of wisdom and not Osiris.