Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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The mythological interpretation of that name, namely Khmun (Khemen-nw), which Budge transliterates Khemennu, Griffiths says is " the eighth city," i.e. " the eighth in Upper Egypt going up the river. " x
We are loth to deprive any one of a so fair adaptation to environment in the evolution of purely physical interpretation ; but we are afraid that our readers will have already learned for themselves that Khemennu was the City of the Eight, the City of the Ogdoad, and will expect some less mundane explanation of the name ; not that we altogether object to Khemennu being the " Eighth City up the Kiver," if that river is interpreted as the Celestial Nile on which the soul of the initiated sailed in the solar boat.
Eeitzenstein then is wrong in supposing (p. 117, n. 6) that Griffiths connects the honorific title Trismegistus with the eight cynocephali who form the paut of Thoth ; but we may do so.
The nature of this symbolic Ogdoad is most clearly seen in the inscription of Der-el-Bahari, of the time of the Twenty-second Dynasty which Maspero has lately published.2
In it the Osirified says to the Supreme :
" I am One who becomes Two ; I am Two who becomes Four ; I am Four who becomes Eight ; I am the One after that."
So also in the first Hermes Prayer, quoted in a preceding chapter, addressed to Hermes as Agathodaimon, Thoth is he " whom the Eight Wardens guard."
1 Of. Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch. (1899), p. 279.
2 Recueil des Travaux relat. a la Phil, et a FArcheol. egypt. et assyr., xxiii. 196. Cf. R. 54.
These Eight, we may perhaps be permitted to speculate, were generated Two from One, aa aa, Greatest ; Four from Two, Twice-greatest; Eight from Four, Thrice-greatest.
Such a combination would specially commend itself to men trained in Pythagorean mathematical symbols, as were doubtless many who took part in compiling the Egyptian Hellenistic theosophical literature.
I, therefore, conclude that the honorific title Thricegreatest can very well go back to early Ptolemaic times ; and therefore, as far as I can see, the authenticity of Manetho's Sothis stands unimpugned as far as any arguments so far brought against it are concerned. I therefore regard the quotation of Syncellus as a most valuable piece of information in tracing the genesis of the Trismegistic literature. Whether or not any of our extant sermons can be placed among these earlier ftfrms of this literature will be discussed later on.
THE EARLIEST TRISMEGISTIC LITERATURE
That, however, literature of a similar nature existed in early and middle Ptolemaic times we have already seen from the material adduced at the beginning of this chapter ; we may therefore fitly conclude it by pointing out that in later Ptolemaic times, and down to the first century A.D., we find in the same literature specimens of cosmogenesis closely resembling the main elements of the world-formation given in our " Shepherd " treatise.
An excellent example is that of the fragmentary cosmogonical poem, the text of which Reitzenstein has printed in his Zwei religionsgesch. Fragen, to which we have already referred. This poem Eeitzenstein (p. 92) dates as belonging to the first century B.C., though it may probably be earlier ; it declares itself to be of the Hermes tradition, both in its statement about itself and also in the fact that it is Hermes, the Beloved Son of Zeus, who is the Logos-Creator of the cosmos, and also the progenitor or "father" of the prophetpoet who writes the vision.
PHILO BYBLIUS
But not only did the tradition of Egyptian Hermes dominate the Greek forms of cosmogony which emanated from Alexandria and spread through the Hellenic world, but it also imposed itself upon the forms of cosmogony and the history-writing of other nations; the most striking example of this is to be found in the Phoenician Histories of Philo Byblius, who lived in the second half of the first century A.D.
The fragments of this work are of great interest to our present enquiry, as they tend to show that both Egypt and Phoenicia, the two most sacred nations, derived their cosmogonical knowledge and mysterytraditions from the same source ; that source being traced to the most archaic Books of Thoth.
This is all, no doubt, an overwriting of Phoenician records in the light of Egyptian tradition ; Philo, however, would have us regard his work as a Greek translation or paraphrase of a compilation made by an ancient and learned Phoenician priest, Sanchuniathon, based immediately upon archaic Phoenician records by one who was also learned in the oral tradition of his own mysteries.