HERMETIC LITERATURE 499
Christianity, this syncretic work remains basically pagan, deriving from
Egyptian platonism and contemporary Alexandrian theologies.THE LEGACY OF HERMES TRISMEGISTOS
By ancient tradition, confirmed by Lactantius in the fourth century, these ec-
static tracts derive from the occult books of an ancient Egyptian sage who
lived shortly after Moses. The word hermetic also carries an exotic lexical life
of its own. Since Hermes is commonly seen as the Greek incarnation of Thoth
and is identified with his attributes, those mysterious, hermetic writings of the
Corpus Hermeticum became seen as the work of a secret Egyptian seer, a no-
tion persisting from before Augustine, who took this to be a fact, and down to
Giordano Bruno in the Renaissance.
The mystery surrounding this Egyptian seer or thrice-greatest Hermes
contributed to his long afterlife in religion and literature and in scientific tracts
on astrology, medicine, and alchemy, in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Italian, French,
and English from antiquity to our own times. Hermes, after leaving the dark-
ness of the physical universe where he has been trapped in nature, ascends
through seven levels of spirituality to the realm of light and to immersion in
the androgynous parent of all, a divine hermaphrodite (Hermes merged with
Aphrodite). There he becomes god. Hermes' figure of Poimandres, through
gnosis, presages the paths of later mystics, who partake in similar techniques
and experiences but who are not seen as gnostics. Like Philo's ladders of spiri-
tual ascent, these non-gnostic paths include Pseudo-Dionysios's diving gloom
and ray of blackness, and John of the Cross's paradoxical ways of oblivion in
which, like the gnostics, he dies from ordinary time, moves from sensations of
the body into the soul, to vision in darkness, which is illumination, and to
union, which is an ineffable ecstasy and another oblivion. The hermetic writ-
ings have suited a fusion of writers looking elsewhere (the literal sense of ec-
stasy, from ex-histanai, "stand out of place"), including William Blake and his
mentor Thomas Taylor, who first introduced Blake to the neoplatonists and to
the hermetic texts. In H.D.'s epic Trilogy, written in London during World War
II, the second book, Tribute to the Angels, begins with an invocation to Thoth /
Hermes / Mercury, the "angel" about whom the remainder of the book revolves:
Hermes Trismegistus
is patron of alchemists;