The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times (review)

Florian Ebeling’s central objective in The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus is to delineate two parallel Hermetic traditions. Even if the discourses of the Hellenistic technical and philosophical-theological Hermetica cannot be considered to be entirely divergent, Ebeling argues that the history of their later dissemination became more or less rigidly divided between two camps—on one hand, the Italian Renaissance philosophers, who occupied themselves primarily with the “learned” Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius, and on the other, the German alchemists and Paracelsian natural philosophers, who drew primarily from Arabic technical Hermetica of which their colleagues south of the Alps were largely ignorant. In delineating these traditions, Ebeling seeks to dispel the myth of the rediscovery of Hermeticism by the Italian humanists—not only was Hermeticism alive and well in medieval Europe thanks to Arabic scholars and the Church Fathers, but the image of Hermes Trismegistus promoted by “alchemo-Paracelsism” was informed by sources very different to those of Italian Renaissance Neoplatonism.

Ebeling commences his work with the disclaimer that it does not pretend to be a comprehensive history, but rather only one possible history, with a focus on German literature and the early modern period. In the course of what is a short but wide-ranging survey, the author gives an engaging and competent account of the origins of the Hermetic texts and their transmission to the Latin West; he explores the role of Hermeticism in the genesis of modern science, the employment of the authority of Hermes by forces of both the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, and even supplies a short consideration of Hermeticism in twentieth-century esotericism and postmodern philosophy.

At a time when many scholars are deconstructing conceptions of a unified Hermetic tradition, Ebeling attempts to sidestep the thorny question of exactly what Hermeticism might be by stating that his history is based on all those texts referring explicitly or implicitly to Hermes Trismegistus as their author, rather than on texts containing themes regarded a priori as Hermetic. Nevertheless, in reality Ebeling is forced to straddle these two approaches a little uncomfortably as his aforementioned objective leads him to identify commonalities both within and between the great epochs of Hermetic tradition. Thus a lengthier consideration of the doctrinal relationship between the Arabic and the Hellenistic technical Hermetica would have been in order, given that it is clearly implied that they do indeed form a unitary tradition (p. 50).

By simultaneously eschewing an approach that seeks to identify defining features of a Hermetic philosophy—such as esoteric revelation and a theory of correspondence—and allowing the mere legitimation of a text through the name of Hermes to determine the form of his history, Ebeling leaves important themes in the history of Hermeticism, and specifically in this avowedly Germanocentric history of Hermeticism, untouched. A significant omission in this regard is an account of the work of Paracelsus and his transformation of alchemical theory and practice. While criticisms of omission have limited validity when an author only claims to be writing “a” history rather than “the” history, mention might also have been made of the considerable influence of Ficino on the German late Renaissance via Agrippa, or of the influential tale related in the Fama Fraternitatis, in which the journey of Christian Rosenkreutz allegorizes the Arabic transmission of “Egyptian” wisdom to Germany, and the discovery of his tomb mirrors the legendary unearthing of Hermes Trismegistus and his Tabula Smaragdina. And even within the parameters set by Ebeling, the reception of the Tabula Smaragdina by influential figures such as Johannes Trithemius and Gerhard Dorn was more worthy of inclusion than its reception by relatively unknown writers such as Christoph Balduff and Joachim Tancke.

The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus is a revised version of Ebeling’s doctoral thesis, written under the supervision of the noted Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who provides a foreword to the work. Indeed, this book imparts...