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

In the " Prolegomena " we have established an unbroken line of tradition in which Gnosis and Mystery-teaching have been handed down through pre- Christian, Pagan and Jewish, and through Christian hands. We have further shown that the Gnosis of our Trismegistic documents is a simpler form than that of the great doctors of the Christianised Gnosis, Basilides and Valentinus, who flourished in the first quarter of the second century. The earlier of our sermons, therefore, represent one of the main streams, perhaps the main stream, of the Unchristianised Gnosis. We have further shown that, together with many other schools, both our Pcemandrists and the writers of the New Testament documents use a common theological or theosophical nomenclature, and have a common body of ideas.

What is clear from all this is that there is no plagiarism, no deliberate copying, no logoklopia of other men's secrets, though there was the freest drawing on a common fund. The condition of affairs and the nature of the problems involved are such, that any theory of plagiarism at once becomes a two-edged sword ; he who says that Trismegisticism copied from Christianity, can at once have his argument reversed into the form that Christianity copied from Trismegisticism.

As to date, then, we are dealing with a period when there was as yet no divorcement between Gnosis and Faith even in Christianity itself, and therefore the canons of judgment erected in later times by ecclesiastical self-limitation cannot be made to apply.

THE BLEND OF TRADITIONS

The view of General Christianity, gradually narrowed down by the Church Fathers into dogmatic Nicene Christianity, looked to one tradition only as the schoolmaster of the Faith — the tradition of Israel as the God-favoured Folk. Nevertheless it was the fair Greek tongue and the Greek method of thought that were used in evolving this special dispensation into a world-cult for the many.

The Trismegistic tradition laboured under no such limitation; its sympathies were more catholic. It is true that its main source was in Egypt, but it embraced with whole-hearted affection the wisdom of Hellas and the genius of Greece which were developed under Divine Providence to teach the Western Nations the glory and beauty of the mind. At the same time its sympathies were not divorced from the tradition of the Hebrews, though it refused to set them apart from the rest of humanity, and looked rather to the great river of wisdom in the Books of the Chaldseans, Persians, Medes, and Parthians, than to the single stream shut off in the Books of Israel. The spirit of our Trismegistic writings is the same as that which inspired the Pagan and Jewish and Christian Gnostic scribes of the Naassene Document, all of whom believed that there was but one Mystery which all the mystery-institutions of the world attempted to adumbrate.

If, then, we were to say for the sake of convenience that our Trismegistic writings enshrine the Wisdom of Egypt in Greek tradition, we should not divorce that Wisdom from the Wisdom of the Chaldseans and the rest. The Wisdom was one, the forms were many ; and both

Egypt and Chaldsea looked back to an Archaic Gnosis that was the common mother of their most ancient forms of Mystery-teaching.