ECHOES OF EGYPT IN HERMES AND FICINO

Clement Salaman

Ficino writes in his book On the Christian R.eligi,on: 'Divine Providence never allows any part of the world to be completely devoid of religion', 1 affirming that some knowledge of God and the desire to worship Him were with all peoples and in all places from the very beginning. He originally thought that sacred knowledge had been most fully developed in Egypt where it had been passed down from master to disciple as a holy tradition. He writes that Hermes Tris­ megistus (Hermes the thrice greatest) was 'the first father of Theology' and was followed by Orpheus, who occupied the second place in the ancient theology. Aglaophemus was initiated into the sacred mysteries by Orpheus, to be succeeded in theology by Pythagoras, who in turn was followed by Philolaus, the teacher of our divine Plato. 2 Hermes had been identified by the ancient Greeks with the ibis­ headed Egyptian god Thoth and is mentioned by classical, early Jewish and early Christian authors. The most important works attrib­ uted to him were the Asdepius and the Poimandres (or Pimander), the latter a collection of treatises now known as the Corpus Henneticum. In the Renaissance, the Asclepius was available in the fourth-century Latin translation attributed to Apuleius, but the Poimandres, the con­ tents of which were known to the third-century Church Father Lactantius, had disappeared. 3 Interest in Florence was therefore intense when a copy in Greek of fourteen books of this collection was dis­ covered around 1460 in Macedonia by Leonardo of Pistoia, 4 and

1 Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia, 2 vols, continuously paginated, Basie, 1576; repr. Turin, 1959 etc., p. 4. 2 Preface to Ficino's Latin translation of Pi.mander, Opera omni.a, p. 1836. 3 For references to the Corpus Hermeticum in Lactantius, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermeti.c Tradition, Chicago and London, 1964, p. 7. 4 Leonardo of Pistoia was a monk who acted as one of many agents employed by Cosimo de' Medici to collect manuscripts for him. For further discussion of this MS, see Yates, Giordano Bruno, p. 12, and P. 0. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance 17wught and Letters, 4 vols, Rome, 1956-96, I, p. 223. 116 CLEMENT SALAMAN acquired by Cosimo de' Medici, who in 1463 had installed the young Marsilio Ficino in a house near his own villa in Careggi. to trans­ late all the works of Plato. But now something had appeared that was even more important than Plato, 5 indeed, was the source, appar­ ently, for much of the wisdom of Plato: the supremacy of to agathon (the good), the divinity of the human soul, the power of the word, and much more. Had not Plato, according to Diogenes Laertius, spent five years in Egypt studying this wisdom?6 In 1463 Ficino completed the translation of the Poimandres, a title which he gave to the whole work, although in the original it is the title only of the first book. It was to become a major source in Ficino's own writ­ ings, for he believed that Hermes was not only the spring of Greek philosophy but also shared the Egypto:Judaic knowledge of Moses. According to St Augustine there were two Hermes, the younger a grandson of an earlier Hermes who was a contemporary of Moses. This elder Hermes had become a god and was supposed to have been the real author of the Hermetic works, of which the younger Hermes was the translator. 7 The second-century BC writer Artapanus had considered Hermes and Moses to be one and the same person; a view which Ficino almost seems to countenance.8 For a time, after the publication of Ficino's translation in 14 71, Ficino's view of Hermes's authority became generally accepted. By 1469 Ficino had substituted Zoroaster as the first source of the

5 Ficino, preface to his translation of Plotinus, Opera omni.a, p. 1537. 6 Diogenes Laertius, lives ef Eminent Philosophers, ed. and tr. by R. D. Hicks, 2 vols, London, 1972, 111.6 (Life of Plato), I, pp. 281 - 83. 7 Augustine, City ef God, VIII.26 and XVIII.8. Although Augustine discusses the writings of Hennes in some detail, he cautions his reader against Hennes's views. Brian Copenhaver quotes a letter wrongly attributed to Manetho by the Byzantine George Syncellus. The letter is addressed to Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282-229 BC). The quotation concludes, 'I shall present to you the sacred books that I have learnt about, written by your ancestor, Hennes Trismegistus .. .' Syncellus adds, 'This is what he says about the translation of the books written by the second Hennes.' See Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek 'Corpus Hermeticum' and the Latin 'Asclepius' in a New English Translation, Cambridge, 1992, p. xv. 8 Sebastiano Gentile in Marsilw Ficino e il ritomo di Ermete Trismegisto. Marsilw Ficino and the &tum ef Hermes Trismegistus, Biblioteca Meclicea Laurenziana exhibition cat­ alogue, Florence, 1999, p. 31. Gentile quotes Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XV.IO, in Opera omni.a, p. 400. See also M. J. B. Allen, 'Marsilio Ficino, Hennes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum' , in New Perspectwes on R.enaissance 77wught. Essays in the History ef Science, &Iucatwn and Philosophy in Memory ef C. B. &hmitt, ed. by John Henry and Sarah Hutton, London, 1990, pp. 38- 4 7, repr. in idem, Plato's 1hird Eye, Aldershot, 1995, art. XII.