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

Now in our Trisrnegistic literature we have a deposit addressed to a King Ammon. Is it then possible that this King, whoever he was, was the initiator of a change of policy in the immemorial practice of the priests ? It may be so, but at present we have not sufficient data to decide the point.

BITYS

A further scrap of information concerning Bitys, however, may be gleaned from Zosimus (§ 8), when, speaking of the Logos, the Son of God, pouring His Light into the soul and starting it on its Eeturn Above, to the Blessed Region where it was before it had become corporeal (as described in the Trismegistic tractate, entitled " Concerning the Inner Door ") — he writes :

" And there shall it see the Picture (TTIVGL^) that both Bitos hath described, and thrice-greatest Plato, and tenthousand-times-great Hermes, — for Thoythos translated it into the first sacred tongue, — Thoth the First Man."1

The identity of Bitys and Bitos is thus unquestionable.2 Reitzenstein, however, asserts that neither of these name-forms is Egyptian, and therefore approves of the identification of our Bitys with "Pitys the Thessalian " of the Papyri,3 as Dieterich has suggested. The headings of the fragments of the writings of Pitys in the Papyri run : " The Way [or Method] of Pitys " ; "Pitys to King Ostanes Greeting"; "The Way of Pitys the King" ; " Of Pitys the Thessalian."

From this Reitzenstein (n. 2) concludes that already in the second and third centuries (? A.D.) Pitys is included among the prophetical theologi and Magians. What the precise date of these Papyri may be it is not easy to determine, but, whether or not they belong to the second and third centuries, it is evident that Pitys was regarded as ancient and a contemporary of the Magian Sage Ostanes.

King,4 referring to a passage of the Elder Pliny (Nat.
Hist., xxx. 4), which remarks on the similarity of the

1 See notes appended to the extract from Zosimus.

2 As has already been supposed by Hoffmann and Kiess in
Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyklopadie, i. 1347. R. 108.

3 Dieterich, Jahr. f. Phil, Suppl., xvi. 753 ; Wessely, Denkschr. d. K. K. Akad. (1888), pp. 92, 95, 98.

4 King (C. W.), The Gnostics and their Remains, 2nd ed.
(London, 1887), p. 421, who, however, does not document his
statement.

Magian Gnosis with the Druidical Gnosis of Gaul and Britain, says : " Pliny by his ' Magica ' understands the rites instituted by Zoroaster, and first promulgated by Osthanes to the outer world, this Osthanes having been 1 military chaplain ' to Xerxes during his expedition to Greece."

This date, if we can rely upon it, would take us back to the Persian Conquest of Egypt, but what has a Thessalian Pitys to do with that ?

Curiously enough also Pliny in his xxviiith Book makes use of the writings of a certain Bithus of Dyrrachium, a city on the coast of Illyricum in the Ionic Gulf, known in Grecian history as Epidamnus.

All of this is puzzling enough; but whatever conclusions may be drawn from the evidence, the clearest indication is that Bitys was ancient, and therefore that whatever translating or rather " interpreting " there may have been, it was probably from hieroglyphic into demotic, and the latter was subsequently further " interpreted " into Greek.

OSTANES-ASCLEPIUS

But is Ostanes the Magian Sage of tradition, or may we adopt the brilliant conclusion of Maspero, and equate Ostanes with Asclepius, and so place him in the same circle with Bitys, or rather see in Bitys an "Asclepius"?

At any rate the following interesting paragraph of Granger l deserves our closest attention in this connection, when he writes:

" Maspero, following Goodwin, has shown that Ostanes is the name of a deity who belongs to the cycle of

1 Granger (F.), " The Poemander of Hermes Trismegistus," in The Journal of Theological Studies, vol. v., no. 19, ap. 1904 (London), p. 398.