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

"ineffable apparitions" (&ppijra ^07*0x0) of Aristides (Orat., xix. p. 416, ed. Dindorf) ; the " divine apparitions " (06?o ^o^ara) of Himerius (Eclog., xxxii., p. 304, ed. Wernsdorf),— those sublime sights the memory of which was said to accompany the souls of the righteous into the after-life, and when they returned to birth. Cf. Lenormant (F.) on "The Eleusinian Mysteries" in The Contemporary Review (Sept. 1880), p. 416, who, however, thinks that these famous philosophers and writers bankrupted their adjectives merely for the mechanical figures and stage-devices of the lower degrees. See my "Notes on the Eleusinian Mysteries" in The Theosophical Review (April, May, June, 1898), vol. xxii., p. 156.

1 De Is. et Os., xxi.

2 Berl phil. Wochenschr. (1896), p. 1528 ; R. 137, n. 3.

3 R. 133, n. 2.

4 irporoydvcp — cf. the irpoytvfffrfpov trdvTuv above.
6 Epeius, ap. Eusebius, Prcep. Ev., i. 10, p. 41 D.
6 Ap. Euseb., Prcep., iii. 11, 45, p. 115.

a sceptre, and wearing a crown of regal wings. This symbolism, says Porphyry, signified that he was the representative of the Logos or Eeason, difficult to discover, hidden,1 not manifest2; it is he who gives light and also life 3 ; he is the King. The winged crown upon his head, he adds, signifies that he moves or energizes intellectually.

Kamephis, then, stands in the Isis- tradition for the representative of Agathodaimon, the Logos-creator. He is, however, a later holder of this office, and has had it handed on to him by Hermes, or at any rate he is instructed in the Logos-wisdom by Hermes.

HERMES I. AND HERMES II.

In this connection it is instructive to refer to the account which Syncellus4 tells us he took from the statement of Manetho.

Manetho, says Syncellus, states in his Books, that he based his replies concerning the dynasties of Egypt to King Ptolemy on the monuments.

" [These monuments], he [Manetho] tells us, were engraved in the sacred language, and in the characters of the sacred writing, by Thoth the First Hermes ; after the Flood they were translated from the sacred language into the then common tongue, but [still written] in hieroglyphic characters, and stored away in books, by the Good Daimon's son, the Second Hermes, the father of Tat, in the inner shrines of the temples of Egypt."

1 Cf. the epithet " utterly hidden" found in the " Words (Logoi) of Ammon," referred to by Justin Martyr, Cohort., xxxviii., and the note thereon in " Fragments from the Fathers."

2 Typified by the dark- coloured body.

3 CWOTTO^S— typified, presumably, by the girdle (the symbol of the woman) and the staff (the symbol of the man).

* Chron., xl. (ed. Dind., i. 72).

Here we have a tradition, going back as far as Manetho, which I have shown, in Chapter V. of the " Prolegomena " on " Manetho, High Priest of Egypt," cannot be so lightly disposed of as has been previously supposed, — dealing expressly with the Books of Hermes.

This tradition, it is true, differs from the account given in our Sermon (3-5), where the writer says nothing expressly of a flood, but evidently wishes us to believe that the most ancient records of Hermes were magically hidden in the zones of the unseen world, and that the flood, if there was one, was a flood or lapse of time that had utterly removed these records from the earth. For him they no longer existed physically.

Manetho's account deals with another view of the matter. His tradition appears to be as follows. The oldest records were on stone monuments which had survived some great flood in Egypt. These records belonged to the period of the First Hermes, the Good Daimon par excellence, the priesthood, therefore, of the earliest antediluvian Egyptian civilization. After the flood they were translated from the most archaic language into ancient Egyptian, and preserved in bookform by the Second Hermes, the priesthood, presumably, of the most ancient civilization after the flood, who were in time succeeded by the Tat priesthood.

That this tradition is elsewhere contradicted by the Isis-tradition proper, which in a somewhat similar genealogy places Isis at the very beginning prior even to Hermes I.,1 need not detain us, since each tradition would naturally claim the priority of those whom it regarded as its own special founders, and we are for the moment concerned only with the claims of the Hermes-school.

1 Varro, De Genie Pop. Rom., ap. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, xviii. 3, 8 ; R. 139, n. 3.