A Teacher
Hermes Trismegistus
As above, so below
The transmission
Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Greatest Hermes”) is not a historical individual but a syncretic, legendary authorial figure arising in Greco-Roman Egypt, formed by the fusion of the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth, both patrons of writing, magic, and the passage between worlds.
The name is attached to a body of texts—the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, and the lapidary Emerald Tablet—composed largely in Greek between roughly the first and third centuries CE by anonymous authors working within Hellenistic philosophical and Egyptian religious milieus.
Ancient and Renaissance readers, however, took Hermes to be a real sage of immense antiquity, a contemporary or predecessor of Moses, which lent the writings extraordinary prestige. The intellectual content attributed to Hermes blends Middle Platonism, Stoic cosmology, Jewish elements, and Egyptian theology into a vision of a divine Mind (Nous) from which the cosmos emanates and to which the human soul may ascend through gnosis.
In 1614 the philologist Isaac Casaubon demonstrated that the texts were post-Christian rather than primordial, collapsing their claimed antiquity, yet their influence only deepened in occult and metaphysical streams.
The legendary Hermes thus functions historically less as a person than as a vessel for a durable doctrine: that mind is the ground of reality and that the structure of the cosmos is mirrored within the human being.
What they gave
Mentalism as first principle: Establishes the foundational claim, later distilled in The Kybalion, that “THE ALL is Mind; the Universe is Mental”—the seed of all later mind-causes-reality doctrines.
- The doctrine of correspondence: Articulates “as above, so below” (from the Emerald Tablet), supplying the structural logic by which inner mental states are held to govern outer physical conditions.
- Ascent through gnosis: Frames salvation and power as the result of knowledge and altered consciousness rather than ritual sacrifice, anticipating the New Thought emphasis on inner realization.
- Emanationist cosmology: Provides the template of reality as a graded descent from divine Mind into matter, which New Thought re-read as vibration descending from spirit to dense form.
In their words
That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.
The line they stand in
Drew from / Influenced by: Egyptian theology of Thoth; the Greek figure of Hermes; Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism; Stoic cosmology; Hellenistic Jewish thought.
- Influenced: Renaissance Hermeticists (Marsilio Ficino, who translated the Corpus in 1463; Giordano Bruno); Western occult and Rosicrucian traditions; The Kybalion (1908) and the “Three Initiates”; Thomas Troward and, through him, the broader New Thought and modern manifestation lineage.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Corpus Hermeticumc.100-300 CE
- The Emerald Tabletn.d.
- Asclepiusc.200 CE