Hermes Trismegistus

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE READING:
This document, an extension of Seraphnb's Alternate Alternate Prehistory Story [http://pastebin.com/i0883SQ8], was written before I was introduced to the rational arts. In fact, at the time, I was under the influence of a community of spiritualists at [http://thespiritscience.net/forum/]. After removing my texts from that site upon realizing how damaging or harmful they might be to their blind believers, I attempted to edit them into a rationally acceptable state. However, I quickly realized that much of the story was salvageable, as its premises had themselves flawed premises. I explore these flaws in the document [http://pastebin.com/7n45q6Zw]. Thank you. And the story begins:

The principles exposed in the Emerald Tablet go back to at least 3000BCE, when the Phoenicians settled on the Syrian coast. Phrases from the tablet, including references to the One Mind, the One Thing, and the correspondences between the Above and the Below, were discovered in many Egyptian papyrii, such as Papyrus of Ani and the Book of the Dead (1500 BCE), the Berlin Papyrus (2000 BCE), and a few scrolls that range from 1000 to 300 BCE. One early Hellenistic papyrus known as An Invocation to Hermes might refer directly to the Emerald Tablet and its author: "I know your names in the Egyptian tongue," it reads, "and your true name as it is written on the Holy Tablet in the holy place at Hermopolis, where you did have your birth."

That "true name" is the same name that all the Egyptian records point to as the author of the tablet: Hermes. In the Emerald Tablet, the author states "Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistus, possessing the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world." This is the first reference to Hermes Thrice-Greatest. The origin of this moniker is unkown, but it may very well come from Hermes’ legendary reputation as the greatest philosopher, king, and priest in the entire world.

Manetho says Hermes Trismegistus wrote over 35000 books, only a few of which are left to us today. Clement of Alexandria knew of forty-two “indispensable” books attributed to Hermes: ten concerning the Egyptian priests and gods; ten of sacrifices, rites, and festivals; ten with paraphernalia of the sacred rites; six on medicine, concerning the body, diseased, instruments, eyes and women; four dealt with astronomy and astrology; the last two were hymns to the gods and rules for the king. It is difficult to know which of these books were or were not really written by Hermea; so many thousands of years have passed that it is difficult to separate the fiction from the fact. Even today, conflicting views exist on whether Hermes Trismegistus was a man or a god.

On once side of the opinion, Frances A. Yates states that those living in Renaissance times believed he was a man: "It was on excellent authority that the Renaissance accepted Hermes Trismegistus as a real person of great antiquity and as the author of the Hermetic writings." A city known as Hermopolis that existed in Egypt in ancient times strengthens the claim. However, many other scholars have long held Hermes Trismegistus to not be a real person, instead a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, as "Trismegistus" was also used as an epithet of the Egyptian god- "Thoth the great, the great, the great".

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Hermes was a man elevated to deity status, fitting both bodies of evidence, and even if Hermes Trismegistus did not write the texts attributed to him, it is likely that a priest of the Egyptian god Thoth did. He was the god of mathematics, writing and scholars, as well as the reason why alchemy is now often known as the "Hermetic art". Indeed, Hermes was the patriarch of alchemy, and perhaps its most important ancient figure.

Hermes Thrice-Born had three incarnations: Thoth the Atlantean, philosopher, in c.10000BCE; Akhenaten, king of Egypt, in about 1300BCE; Apollonius of Tyana, priest, in the century after 0CE. Let's take a close look at each of these incarnations.


Thoth the Atlantean
=========================
In c.10000BE, the Golden Age, or "Zep Tepi", the relatives of Enoch, the creator of the Atlas Grid, lived on the Island of the Atla, or Atlantis, in what is now known as Antarctica. Thoth lived in this land, being the leader of the Deucalion people, or those 2 degrees of relation away from Enoch. He was employed by Enoch to help save the population of Earth from the Comet Lupis, which threatened to destroy the Atlas Grid. Thoth saved all of the animals by guarding a DNA bank as Enoch protected the volunteering humans in a spaceship above Earth.

For whatever reason, things went wrong on the spaceship front, and Enoch had to use auric energy to resist the comet's gravity and magnetism. Thus, when he descended to our planet after the Deluge caused by the Comet smashing into the Gulf of Mexico, he was in a greatly weakened state. Laying in Thoth's arms, he whispered his last secrets into his ear before dying.

Thoth, now empowered with new knowledge, had a plan for the salvation of mankind forming in his mind. First, he organized a meeting of the two conflicting groups of Atla, the "bird" (mountain dwelling) and "snake" (island dwelling) peoples, in the plains between Mount Ararat and the Aegean Sea. He forced them to come to a deadlock in their war for the sake of mankind as a whole. He divided the population of survivors into six groups, each with Ille kings as rulers and common people as their subjects. Each group was sent out to another section of the world, to work on, repair, or strengthen the Atlas Grid.

One went to the fertile plain between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. They became the foundation of the Sumerian civilization. Next was to Egypt on the Nile, and then to the Indus River Valley, and then to the Andes mountains, strongholds of the bird-men. To strengthen and supplement the Grid, communities were also formed along the Yellow River in China and in Mesoamerica as the Xia and Olmec people, respectively. The last group- the Atla, the gods of the Seven Civilizations- stayed in Asia Minor as the Proto-Indo-European Anatolians [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis#Revision_of_the_theory].

Thoth went to Egypt, as that was the heart of the Atlas Grid. There, he transcribed Enoch's brief advice in what is now known as the Emerald Tablet. He then hid it in a pillar. Egyptian holy books refer to two such pillars, one located in Heliopolis and the other in Thebes, as the "Pillars of the Gods of the Dawning Light". They were moved to a third temple where they later became known as the two "Pillars of Hermes." The Greek legislator, Solon, saw them and noted that they memorialized the destruction of Atlantis. The pillars were what the historian Herodotus described in the temple of an unidentified Egyptian god he visited. "One pillar was of pure gold," he wrote, "and the other was as of emerald, which glowed at night with great brilliancy." In Iamblichus: On the Mysteries, Thomas Taylor quotes an ancient author who says the Pillars of Hermes dated to before the Great Flood and were found in caverns not far from Thebes. The mysterious pillars are also described by Achilles Tatius, Dio Chrysostom, Laertius, and other Roman and Greek historians.

The Book of What Is In the Daat, the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian funerary texts speak of Thoth as the god of science and mathematics. Usually depicted as a man with the head of an ibis (a wading bird with a long curved beak; a symbol for truth and the heart), this Egyptian neter seems a simple personification of the powers of mind. He was said to be responsible for teaching the Egyptians how to interpret things, arrange their speech in logical patterns, and write down their thoughts. As the inventor of hieroglyphics, Thoth instituted record keeping and taught the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.

Paradoxically, Thoth embodies the rational powers of the Sun as well as the intuitive, irrational energies of the Moon. The ibis is the Egyptian symbol for the heart, and, as "Recorder and Balancer," Thoth presides over the Weighing of the Heart ceremony, which determines who is admitted into the Egyptian afterlife. Thoth is the final judge, who weighs individuals’ "true words," the innermost intent in all of our thoughts and actions.

By summarizing and preserving all Enoch's wisdom- and thus the accumulated knowledge of the entire Atlantean civilization- Thoth, the philosopher, can be considered the true author of the Emerald Tablet. He is the archetypal Hermes, the Hermes above, the first of three incarnations of Hermes Trismegistus.


Akhenaten
=========================
Egyptian; studied under the priesthood Thoth at an early age; converted Egypt to monotheism
Wrote books on Egyptian life, priests, religion

The "second Hermes" arrives on the scene sometime after the Great Flood. According to the Ebers Papyrus, such a person actually lived during the Amenhotep dynasty, and there is only one person who seems to have promulgated the spirit of the Emerald Tablet during those centuries. It was Amenhotep IV, who ruled from 1364 to 1347 BCE. Shortly after he took the throne, he suddenly changed his name from Amenhotep (meaning "Amen is Satisfied") to Akhenaten ("He Who Serves the Aten"). His name change signaled his break with the powerful priests of Amen to set up a new monotheistic religion that recognized the sun as the One Thing, the source of all creative energy. This new religious ideal may have been influenced by Judaism, as Akhenaten's older brother, the Crown Prince Thutmose- also known as Moses- lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Akhenaten's new Egyptian supreme god, called the Aten or simply "the Disk," was never personified like previous gods but was thought of as an abstract energy. Pictures of the Aten show the Disk with rays coming down from heaven and terminating on earth in hundreds of tiny hands.

"The Aten is Radiant Energy personified," wrote one twentieth-century Egyptologist, "that is to say, an all-pervading reality of an immanent character. Akhenaten deliberately brushed aside the distinction between the god, maker of the solar Disk, and the solar Disk itself, the distinction between creative energy and created matter. The Disk was, like all matter that falls under our senses, but a visible manifestation of something more subtle, intangible, everlasting- its essence. And the heat and light, the energy of the sun, was the manifestation of that One Thing of which the visible flaming Disk was yet another manifestation."

Akhenaten rediscovered the Emerald Tablet at the beginning of his rule as pharaoh. According to at least one ancient papyrus, without the writings of Thoth the larger pyramids could not be built, so a great search throughout Egypt was conducted until they were found. Akhenaten tried to apply the tablet’s principles and spread its spirit throughout his reign. Known as the heretic pharaoh, he espoused the revolutionary concept of "living in truth" and acting in natural accord with cosmic principles that the tablet called the "Operation of the Sun." He referred to this universal ideal as Maat, which meant the "real thing" or absolute truth, the original will of the One Mind. The agent of Maat was the One Thing, of which the physical sun, or the solar Disk, was the physical expression.

Akhenaten's Hymn to the Aten is considered one of the best pieces of Egyptian lyric poetry ever discovered, and several scholars have noted its similarity in spirit to Emerald Tablet. A few lines reveal Akhenaten's passionate belief in the One Mind: "How manifold it is, what You have made yet hidden from the face of man. Oh One God, like whom there is no other, You created the world according to your desire, while You were alone: all men, cattle, and wild beasts, whatever is on earth, going on its feet, and what is on high, flying with its wings." (The Hymn to Aten may also have been the basis for famous Psalm 104.)

The principle of "living in truth" permeated every level of Egyptian society under Akhenaten. Most noticeable was the sudden change in the stiff and lifeless style that dominated Egyptian art. For the first time, Egyptian reliefs and paintings portrayed natural subjects such as plants and animals in exacting detail, and traditional scenes of sterile Egyptian society were replaced by such ungodly behavior as Akhenaten kissing his wife or bouncing his daughters on his knee. In another striking break with tradition, Akhenaten ordered the abandonment of the old capitol of Thebes and built a new capitol city, Akhetaten ("Horizon of the Aten"), on a desolate stretch of land along the east bank of the Nile near the modern Egyptian city of Asyut. Scandalously, villas in the 60,000-population city were constructed without separate quarters for men and women, and women in particular were treated with more respect there.

Yet for the disenfranchised patriarchal priests, Akhenaten might as well have been from another planet. He had alienated them by destroying their gods, and was unpopular for writing several degrading books on the old religion and its followers. After just seventeen years of rule, Akhenaten and Nefertiti disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and it seems likely that the former priests of Amen did away with them. Akhenaten was well aware of the brewing unrest among the priests but never hesitated spreading the precepts contained in the tablet.

The heretic pharaoh replaced by his son, a ten-year-old boy. His given name, Tutankaten ("Servant of the Aten"), was changed to Tutankamen ("Servant of Amen") after Akhenaten’s murder. The child pharaoh was tightly controlled by fundamentalist priests, who restored the capitol to Thebes, destroyed the city of Akhetaten, and erased all traces of monotheism from Egypt. Unlike the magnificent golden mummy of King Tut, the bodies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti were never found. The only written references to the Aten after the Akhenaten's death were enigmatic allusions that associated the Disk with the great Sphinx on the Giza Plain.


Apollonius
=========================
Wrote Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius (The Perfect Sermon)

Whereas the Emerald Tablet remains lost to modern civilization, the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of religious and philosophical books, presents a different tale. The texts of the Corpus Hermeticum remained comparatively obscure until 1460, when Cosimo de Medici received them as a gift. He immediately commanded the texts be translated into Latin so he might read them for himself. Almost two hundred years later, in 1650, a man by the name of John Everard translated the texts into English.

Much of the Corpus Hermeticum is theoretical in nature, but the teachings often clearly set out the nature of alchemy. It also records accurate scientific observations, such as the polarity of objects and the principle of cause and effect. Over the centuries, it has received considerable attention from scholars and those interested in the occult. Most of its seventeen or eighteen books were probably written in the second century. While some Egyptian influence may be present in the pious spirit and words of the writers, the bulk of the philosophy expressed is Greek, largely Platonism modified by Neoplatonism and Stoicism.

The first and chief work of the Corpus is entitled The Pymander. It gives an account of the creation of the world by a luminous Word, Logos. A mystical hymn in this work was often recited by alchemists. Other works in the Corpus deal with the ascent of the soul to the divine when, for a chosen few, it has freed itself from the material world and become endowed with divine powers. The astrological control of man through the seven planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac is prominent.

(To read The Pymander and The Emerald Tablet, see [http://pastebin.com/JU0PzXzi].)

Besides the works of the Corpus, a work entitled The Asclepius exists in a Latin translation. The work, a dialogue between Asclepius and Trismegistus, is of interest for its purported description of the ancient Egyptian religion. Originally called “The Perfect Word", The Asclepius describes how the Egyptian idols were made animate by magic and contains a lament that the ancient religion of Egypt is to come to an end.

The magical and philosophical literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistus received widespread currency in the Renaissance. Traditional Hermetism was erroneously considered to be of ancient Egyptian origin and thus much older than the esteemed Greek philosophers who had been influenced by Egyptian beliefs. Both philosophical and magical Hermetism declined rapidly in the seventeenth century after Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614 that the Hermetic writings were of the post-Christian era. Hermetism continued thereafter only among the Rosicrucians and other secret societies and occult groups.

The Corpus Hermeticum was invaluable in advancing learning throughout the Renaissance. In the book Hermetica, Adrian Gilbert writes: "The Hermetica have had a long and checkered career and attitudes towards them have alternated between the extremes of enthusiasm for a lost source of knowledge to scholarly disdain… It provided a justification for studying astrology and this in due course led inevitably to the discovery that the sun and not the Earth lies at the center of the solar system."

Despite the significance of the Hermetic texts to the study of ancient civilizations and the belief systems of ancient times, the study of alchemy quickly became the poor cousin of chemistry as the world entered the Industrial Revolution and the modern age. However, it is without a doubt that the Corpus and Asclepius were a bastion of learning in ancient times and allow us a fascinating insight into the progression of knowledge up to the present day. The University of Bristol School of Chemistry even features Hermes Trismegistus on its website.

The Emerald Tablet is one of the most revered documents in the Western World, and its Egyptian author, Hermes Trismegistus, has become synonymous with ancient wisdom. His tablet contains an extremely succinct summary of what Aldous Huxley dubbed the "Perennial Philosophy," a timeless science of soul that keeps popping up despite centuries of effort to suppress it. The basic idea is that there exists a divine or archetypal level of mind that determines physical reality, and individuals can access that realm through direct knowledge of God.

The teachings of Hermes- called the Hermetic tradition- are one of the oldest spiritual traditions in the world, and, while no direct evidence links the Emerald Tablet to Eastern religions, it shares uncanny similarities in concepts and terminology with Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In the West, the tablet found a home not only in the pagan tradition but also in all three of the orthodox Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and many of the most heretical beliefs of the Gnostics are also openly expressed in it. Like the author of the tablet, the Gnostics believed that direct knowledge of reality could be attained through psychological discipline and meditative exercises. They also shared a common view of the universe in which "All Is One," a pattern of creation and decay symbolized by the Ouroboros.

Without doubt, the Emerald Tablet was the inspiration behind many other esoteric traditions, including over 1,700 years of alchemy. Most medieval alchemists hung a copy of the tablet on their laboratory wall and constantly referred to the "secret formula" it contained. In fact, during the sixteenth century, Hermes Trismegistus was such a revered figure that there was a movement to have his teachings replace those of Aristotle in European schools.

(For The Axioms of Alchemy followed by the medieval alchemists, see [http://pastebin.com/Jimt9nA0].)

Five hundred years later, the tablet's words are still held in high regard. "The Emerald Tablet is the cryptic epitome of the alchemical opus," noted Jungian analyst Dr. Edward Edinger, "a recipe for the second creation of the world." Ethnobotanist and consciousness guru Terence McKenna agrees, calling the tablet "a formula for a holographic matrix" that is mirrored in the human mind and offers mankind its only hope for future survival. "Whatever one chooses to believe about it," sums up John Matthews in The Western Way, "there is no getting away from the fact that the Emerald Tablet is one of the most profound and important documents to have come down to us. It has been said more than once that it contains the sum of all knowledge- for those able to understand it."

Part of the problem trying to figure out the origins of the Emerald Tablet comes from the many legends that cloud its history. In one of the earliest of these fabled scenarios, Hermes was a son of Adam and wrote the tablet to show mankind how to redeem itself from his father's sins in the Garden of Eden. Jewish mystics identify the tablet's author with Seth, who was the second son of Adam. They credit him with writing the Emerald Tablet, which was taken aboard the ark by Noah. After the Flood, Noah supposedly hid the tablet in a cave near Hebron, where it was later discovered by Sarah, wife of Abraham. Another version describes Hermes giving the tablet to Miriam, daughter of Moses, for safekeeping. She allegedly put it in the Ark of the Covenant, where it remains to this day. Occult historians generally agree that the tablet was found in a secret chamber under the pyramid of Cheops around 1350 BCE. Another interesting legend describes Hermes as a philosopher traveling in Ceylon in the fifth century BCE. He found the Emerald Tablet hidden in a cave, and after studying it, learned how to "travel in both heaven and earth." This Hermes spent the rest of his life wandering throughout Asia and the Middle East teaching and healing.

Probably the only constant in all these legends is what the Emerald Tablet looked like. It is always described as a rectangular green plaque with bas-relief lettering in an alphabet similar to ancient Phoenician. It is made of emerald or green crystal, and the workmanship is exquisite. Caves, corpses, ancient Egypt, and secret wisdom are common themes in many of the stories.

The history of the tablet was further complicated when its alleged author became associated with the Corpus Hermeticum in the Middle Ages. The seventeen treatises of the Corpus expand on the principles of the Emerald Tablet and appear to be records of intimate conversations between Hermes and his disciples. For over three centuries, they were thought by the Catholic Church to be very ancient and held in the highest esteem. The church fathers believed the Corpus Hermeticum lent support to Christian doctrines, and the documents were required reading for European scholars. Images of Hermes adorned cathedrals all over Europe, and to this day, a giant fresco dominates the Borgia Apartments of the Vatican that shows Hermes, adorned with Hermetic symbols, walking in the company of Moses.

So it caused a great scandal in 1614 when Protestant scholar Isaac Causabon declared these documents forgeries written by Gnostics sometime between 200 and 300 AD. He based his conclusion on a linguistic analysis that dated the writings to that era. For the next two hundred years, the Hermetic literature, which had been embraced by the early followers of Christ, was condemned by Christians everywhere. Although it was not officially part of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Emerald Tablet suffered the fate of all writings attributed to Hermes and went underground in a variety of secret organizations such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasonry.

Today, most scholars agree that the Emerald Tablet is separate from or predates the Corpus Hermeticum and was probably the inspiration for them.

(For the principles of Hermetic teaching, see [http://pastebin.com/RfKRnMFY].)



The history of Hermes Trismegistus continues with the life of another king, the Greek Alexander the Great, who became pharaoh when he conquered Egypt in 332 BCE. As pharaoh, he gained access to all the treasures of Egypt, including the whereabouts of Thoth's (Akhenaten's) tomb. Convinced it was his destiny to reveal the ancient secrets, Alexander headed across the Libyan desert to an ancient temple at Siwa near where the tomb was located. According to Albertus Magnus and others, that is where Alexander found the Emerald Tablet.

Alexander took the tablet and scrolls he found in the tomb to Heliopolis, where he placed the scrolls in the sacred archives and put the Emerald Tablet on public display. Construction of the city of Alexandria to house and study the Hermetic texts began immediately, and he assembled a panel of priests and scholars to prepare Greek translations. According to Manly P. Hall, the mysterious Emerald Tablet caused quite a stir. One traveler, who had seen it on display at Heliopolis, wrote: "It is a precious stone, like an emerald, whereon these characters are represented in bas-relief, not engraved. It is esteemed above 2,000 years old. The matter of this emerald had once been in a fluid state like melted glass, and had been cast in a mold, and to this flux the artist had given the hardness of the natural and genuine emerald, by his art."

When Alexander left Egypt, it has been suggested that he took the original tablet with him and hid it for safekeeping before going on to conquer Babylonia and India. Meanwhile, copies of the tablet became primary documents at Alexandria, and scholars issued revised Greek translations in 290 BCE, 270 BCE, and 50 BCE. Several papyrii in the British Museum mention a canon of Egyptian teachings that included the writings of Hermes that was still in existence at the time of Clement of Alexandria (around 170 CE). Fortunately, before Alexandria's libraries were detroyed, copies of the Emerald Tablet had made their way into Arabia and from there eventually reached Spain and Europe.

After Alexander died from a fever on his return from India, his body was interred in a tomb somewhere in the Egyptian desert, although to this day, no one knows where. However, someone did discover the hiding place of the Emerald Tablet. It is said that a brilliant Syrian youth named Balinas found it hidden in a large cavern just outside his hometown of Tyana in Cappadocia. It was Balinas who absorbed the tablet’s teachings and once again brought them to light in the Western world. The youth became known as Apollonius of Tyana (after Apollo, Greek god of enlightenment and brother of Hermes). Respected for his great wisdom and magical powers, Apollonius traveled throughout the world and eventually settled in Alexandria.

He was raised in Tarsus as a religiously precocious child. His beliefs were influenced by Plato. Later in life, he visited Jerusalem and Rome, as well as spending much time in Antioch and fighting ‘wild beasts’ in Ephesus. He also reportedly spent three years in the East, a period during which he was enlightened and learned from sages. During these missionary journeys around the Mediterranean, he attracted several followers and associates: Demas; Titus; Demetrius; Lucius; Stephanus. All the while, he renounced wealth, embraced poverty, followed abstinence and asceticism, remained unmarried and childless, and wore long hair and robes. On these trips, he performed miracles, cast out demons, healed the sick, and wrote epistles instructing far-away followers in spirituality. This earned him fame as a religious reformer far and wide- even causing some to mistake him for a god!

Unfortunately, not all of the publicity was positive. He spoke authoritatively to temple priests and founded a controversial religious community at Corinth, acts which provoked several threats against his life. Partly due to this, his travels were laced with danger. At one point he was shipwrecked, and, at another, he was condemned by a Roman emperor and was imprisoned in Rome! Thankfully, he miraculously escaped prison.

One particular example of this danger was when he arrived in Jerusalem from Egypt in around 58 CE. He declared that he was a prophet and advised the masses of the common people to go out with him to the Mount of Olives, which lay opposite the city. He said that he wished to demonstrate from there that at his command, Jerusalem's walls would fall down. When Felix, the Roman governor, heard of this, he ordered his soldiers to take up their arms. They fell upon the man and his followers, slaying 400 of them and taking 200 prisoners. The man himself, however, escaped from the battle and disappeared into Jerusalem, where the Jews said to him, “Are you not the Egyptian, who before these days stirred up and led out at the Wilderness 4000 men of the Sicarii?" However, he was unharmed there.

Several years later, he died uneventfully. So, now that his story is over, I ask: Who was I talking about? Paul of Tarsus or Apollonius of Tyana? Are they the same person?

Oddly enough, the book of Acts mentions an "Apollos" at Ephesus with Paul, the name "Apollos" being an abbreviation of "Apollonius." Not only are the journeys of Paul and Apollonius very similar, their names are as well. While Paul is "Paulos" in Greek, Thayer's Lexicon states that "Apollos" is, according to some ancient authorities, contracted from "Apollonios."

Interestingly, "Apollos" is mentioned in five places in Paul's 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, in such a way - juxtaposed with the names of Paul, "Cephas" and Christ; Paul and Christ; or Paul alone - as to attribute great significance to him. It has further been asserted that this contraction of the name Apollonius, Apollos, was found uncontracted in the Codex Bezae of the New Testament. It has further been asserted that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews was not "Paulos" but "Apollos," an interesting claim in consideration of the fact that Hebrews is written in "Hebraistic Greek" and that Apollonius was said to be a native speaker of the Hebraistic language of Aramaic. Oddly, Hebrews was one of the three epistles that were missing in the first New Testament compiled by Marcion. Furthermore, there are various "Pauline" writings that appeared after the alleged death of Paul, during the period when Apollonius was said to be still alive.

In the Pauline Epistles, which, in their original form, were undoubtedly written by Apollonius, Damis is referred to as "Demas", a companion of the apostle (Paul, or Pol, representing Apollonius, who also appears in the epistles as "Apollos," who is said to have preached a similar doctrine and in a similar manner as Paul).

“I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one.”
- 1 Corinthians 3:1-8

Unfortunately, Apollonius was a contemporary of Christ, and early Christians felt he was much too like their own Son of God. By 400 AD, every one of the scores of books Apollonius wrote in Alexandria and all of the dozens of temples dedicated to him were destroyed by Christian zealots. But Apollonius still stands as the third Hermes, because he did more than any other person in the modern era to assure that the Emerald Tablet and its principles survived.

The earliest surviving translation of the Emerald Tablet is in an Arabic book known as the Book of Balinas the Wise on Causes, written around 650 AD and based on Apollonius’ Alexandrian writings. It also appears in the eighth century Kitab Sirr al Asar, an Arabian book of advice to kings. Another Arabic text, written by alchemist Jabir Hayyan around 800 AD, contains a copy of the Emerald Tablet and also gives Apollonius as the source. In all these texts, Apollonius describes finding the Emerald Tablet in the underground cavern in Tyana. He never claims credit for it, though he spent the rest of his life writing about it and demonstrating its principles to anyone who would listen.



What have we learned from our review of Hermes' history? Can we even tell if the author of the Emerald Tablet was a man or a god? The answer down through the ages has always been both, and whether portrayed as man or god, Hermes is always the revealer of ultimate knowledge hidden to mankind. He is like a spirit who reincarnates through time to guide us in our struggle toward enlightenment. It is a tradition that goes all the way back to the first Hermes, the god Thoth, who was said to inspire people with direct perception of truth. "May Thoth write to you daily," utters the 3,500-year-old Papyrus of Ani.