"Was he one or many, merging

Name and fame in one,

Like a stream, to which, converging,

Many streamlets run?

Who shall call his dreams fallacious?

Who has searched or sought

All the unexplored and spacious

Universe of Thought?

Who in his own skill confiding,

Shall with rule and line,

Mark the border-land dividing,

Human and divine?

Trismegistus! Three times greatest!

How thy name sublime,

Has descended to this latest,

Progeny of time!

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hermes Trismegistus

Since the time of the Sumerians, every ancient people had seen the establishment of an exoteric Order in the Universe as being fundamentally important to securing their lives from the ravages of Chaos.

By the beginning of the Alexandrian period, however, western religious traditions experienced a socio-religious shift from this need for exoteric Logos to an esoterically based Logos, which emphasized the ordering of the individual�s internal self through a personally fulfilling relationship with their god.

To achieve this unity, the adherent needed to be imbued with sacred, hidden knowledge, or gnosis, through some aspect of divine revelation. Beginning with the esoteric roots of mysticism in the gods Thoth and Hermes, and later through their amalgam, Hermes Trismegistus, a metaphysical tradition embodying these concepts was created that eventually centered on a body of sacred knowledge, the Corpus Hermeticum. This corpus offered an ancient, infallible means of finding gnosis for early Christians and gnostics, as well as Muslims and sufis, laying down the keystones of the Western mystic tradition via the establishment of esoteric Logos based on sacred knowledge, spiritual ascension, and the sciences.

In order to understand the theophilosophical, mystical, and Logos-oriented aspects of Hermes Trismegistus, it is necessary to first investigate these qualities in the two gods which compose him: Thoth and Hermes.

Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing, scribes, and knowledge, but also the god of transmogrifying physical matter through himself, literally embodying the art of magic and the science of alchemy (Faivre 76 & 77). By extension of this ability to manipulate the prime material plane, he is the god of all the arts and sciences, as well as protector of temple archives, libraries, and scribes (Mead 34).

He is also the �assembler and maintainer� through the Divine Word, who in some mythic accounts not only creates the exoterically ordered universe itself through Ptah, but functions on an esoteric level to secure Order within the hearts of his adherents (Mead 35). Thoth was the �heart and tongue of Ra, the Herald of the will of Ra, and the Lord of Sacred Speech,� signifying him as the Divine Logos, the �Controller of the life and Instrument of the utterance of the Supreme Will� (Mead 35, 44).

While Memphitic myths depict Ptah himself as creating the physical world and establishing primordial Order in the Universe, Middle Egyptian mythos purports that Thoth himself manifested his Will through the vessel of Ptah to create �the heavens and the Earth� with his Divine Word (Mead 35).

Yet other myths show Thoth as a secondary creator god who is the harbinger �of all rule and law in the Universe,� establishing a secondary Order through the spoken, as well as written, Divine Word (Mead 44). Thus, any one of these accounts attest to the power of Thoth�s Word, his Logos, in his establishing Order over Chaos in the exoteric world.

Yet, Thoth �was said to exist within the hearts of all living beings, consequently becoming �the heart of the world�� and, indeed, �the master of the heart and reason in all men� (Mead 34). As �Lord of Sacred Speech,� Thoth was not only the �vehicle of knowledge� that exoterically manifested itself by the Divine Word, but also �the Revealer of the Hidden� who imbued the worshipper with gnosis and the Word through their heart (Mead 34).

Thus, Logos was seen not only as the orderly and reasoned Word by which the outer world was maintained, but also ��the saving medicine for all wounds and passions of the soul� which we should restore before �the sun�s going down,� or one�s death (Mead 44, 168). As such, Thoth was the one who �illumes those who are learned within� through gnosis, while simultaneously cleansing and curing these worshippers of mental corruption and degeneration through esoteric Logos (Mead 35). This inculcation of Logos and gnosis was critical for the adherent, as it ordered the heart of the individual so as to purify it in preparation for the weighing of it against Ma�at (Mead 34).

Yet, Thoth is not only the curative agent of the heart (soul), but the body itself. One Thothian class of priests, for instance, were solely �devoted to the healing of the body, just as another [class] was devoted to the soul� (Mead 35). Hence, Thoth not only represented all life, but �gives all life through magic formulae� and medicinal practices to his followers (Mead 35).

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