BOOK V. OF THE MYSTERIES. HEAD III. OF HERMES, AND OF THE WRITINGS WHICH BEAR HIS NAME.

○It were premature to enter, under the present head, upon the question what writings, if any, of the ancient Egyptians have come down to us under the name of Hermes, a question which requires, for its determination, a larger examination of the testimonies than can here be given; and I propose only to set down what the testimony of the priest in Iamblichus, which I have employed in the tractate which I have already laid before the public, contributes to the account of the manner in which the learning of the Egyptians was held, and to distinguish from it, in the same place, the proof of my ancestor, by which the book that goes about under the name of Hermes is shewn not to be his.¹ The two are, as I have there endeavoured to shew, so far from being in conflict that each explains the other; but the tractate was concerned with the manner in which they agree, and I am here concerned with what the one of them, taken by itself, discovers of the condition of the order which kept the learning, and the other, taken by itself, leaves untouched. NB-58-008 NB-47-006 NB-13-034

○The Egyptian priest, as Iamblichus gives him, affirms that "HERMES, the God who presides over language, was formerly very properly considered as common to all priests," and that the power who presides over the true science concerning the gods is one and the same in the whole of things; "Hence our ancestors dedicated the inventions of their wisdom to this deity, inscribing all their own writings with the name of Hermes" (Iambl. de Myst. sect. i. cap. 1).² It is to be observed that to dedicate a writing is not to have composed it; that the name which is written upon it is the name of the patron of the order, and does not declare the hand; and that the testimony is accordingly a testimony to the manner in which the Egyptians, so far as the witnesses shew, kept their learning, and not to the authorship of any book. The ascriptions of the Greeks are to be classed with it, and, in accordance with the fifth thesis, are to be read as ascriptions, and not as the reports of an author; and the learned prelate, who supposes the Mysteries to have been invented by the legislators for the uses of the state (Warburton, Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4), has not, as it appears to me, sufficiently weighed the testimony, since a doctrine which the priests delivered under one name from the beginning, and as received, was not invented by the magistrate, nor is that properly a secret which the whole order held in common.³ NB-58-008 NB-47-006

○The proof of my ancestor, to which I have the honour to refer, is contained in the first of his Exercitationes (exercises), and is announced in the words, Probatur librum qui sub nomine Mercurii Trismegisti circumfertur, falsum esse (it is proved that the book which goes about under the name of Mercurius Trismegistus is spurious) (Is. Casaub. Exercit. i. § 10).⁴ It proceeds, as I have said in the tractate, upon two grounds: the first, that if the book were truly Hermes's, either he wrote it in Greek, or some one translated it from the Egyptian tongue, and that the style of the book is wholly unlike the language which the Greeks of his time used; and the second, that the book contains passages which, being set beside the Gospel of John, raise the question whether a heathen Egyptian older than Moses could have known the Word, the Son of God.⁵ The argument is directed against the book as we have it; and it is to be kept apart, with a care which I do not think superfluous, from the question whether there was an Egyptian Hermes, or a Thoth, to whom writings were ascribed, and from the question what those writings were: for my ancestor himself places Mercury the Egyptian "in the most ancient times, about, as it seems, the two-thousandth year from the foundation of things," a date at which, as he says, the book cannot have been written by him.⁶ NB-13-034 NB-58-008 NB-47-006

○The view which I propose, as at present sketched, is that the name of Hermes was in Egypt the title of a body of learning, and was not the signature of an author; that the writings so entitled were the common possession of the priesthood, who held them as received; and that the keeping of such a possession under a common name, by an order of which each member received what he held from those who went before him, is the form which the fourth mode of corruption assumes among the Egyptians. Whether the writings of which the priest speaks are those which now bear the name I do not determine; the testimonies at present collected do not reach it; and the place is to be examined again when the Mysteries are taken in their order, which is done in the head that follows. The relation of the name Theuth, or Thoth, to the name of Hermes belongs to the third Book, and I forbear to anticipate it.⁷ NB-47-006 NB-58-008

○It may be objected, in the first place, that the writings which have come down under the name of Hermes having been shewn to be of a later hand, the testimony of a priest who rests upon the name is deprived of its value; to which I answer, as I have answered in the tractate, that the testimony is of the custom of the order, and that the detection of the later book is not a detection of the custom.⁸ It may be objected, in the second place, that if all the writings of the priesthood were inscribed with a single name, it is not possible that all were of equal antiquity, or of one matter; to which I answer that the priest speaks of the inscribing of all their own writings, and that whether the whole of what was so inscribed were of one age I do not affirm, and do not require. And it may be objected, lastly, that the dedication of the inventions of wisdom to a deity is a practice which is found in other nations, and is not peculiar to the Egyptians; to which I answer that I have not said that it was, and that the practice, wherever it is found, falls under the same distinction between the ascription and the authorship, which it is the object of the present head to preserve.⁹ NB-58-008 NB-47-006 NB-13-034