Customer Reviews

The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I was wary of this book when I first purchased it, but to my delight it turned out to be the best introduction to the Hermes/Thoth literature available. Beyond the value of its clear and readable presentation of some of the oldest wisdom tracts in the Western World, the authors also briefly touch on the provinence of the works. Because the Hermes Corpus was declared a fraud in the 17th century, the heavy lifting required to point out that they are not is simply beyond the scope of this volume. But any reader who is intrigued by the material can go on and discover for themselves the story of Hermes and make their own judgement. I place the rediscovery of the Hermes Corpus on the same level as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts, so this fine introductory volume should be considered by anyone interested in ancient literature and spirituality.

The book is very easy to read and follow: which is the intention of the authors. The chapters are excellently introduced and short. I liked also the authors arguments that the Hermetica is an ancient Egyptian wisdom, and NOT Greek. Hermes is a Greek god equated to Tehuti: Tehuti (Egyptian) is the author of the "Hermetica", who is also called Thoth, or Hermes. The focus of the book is on the origin of existence and its intricacies. A good summarized book on Hermetic wisdom.

I found this an interesting book. It begins with a history of the Hermetica, which is an ancient Egyptian religious/philosophical work, which gives an insight into the nature of God Man and the Universe. The analogies are very easy to follow and understand and give a new insight into what it's all about, and often fills many blanks left by other religions. The history also relates how the Greeks adopted the teachings and how during the last several thousand years the work has resurfaced from obscurity many times and each time caused a renaissance and advancement of mankind.

The original Hermetica is then presented in a condensed form which is designed to be easily read and accessable. This is a good method as it gives the reader the main ideas and if they like this form of philosophy they can then read the entire book Corpus Hermetica which is the whole teaching.

Despite being Egyptian texts, they predate the Isis/Osiris religion and are monothesist. It is surprising that few people are aware of the Corpus Hermetica which also predates the bible and old testament. Many ideas in more than one religion can be attributed to having roots in Hermetica. It is only beaten into first place as the oldest religious texts by the epic of Gilgamesh. Whilst many occult groups are referred to as being Hermetic, this does no justice to Hermetic thought which is easily compatable with most religions.

5 stars for making Corpus Hermetica easily accessable to the reader.

This is more a text "inspired by" the Greek and Latin Hermetica, and not a translation. For example, where the latin text has "deus", meaning of course "god", Freke & co. consistently translate as "Atum". Deus/theos in the Hermetica is not a proper name, but an honorific for the supreme principle, which is NEVER identified as the egyptian god Atum in the texts.
Buy instead "Hermetica" by Brian Copenhaver, or "The Way of Hermes" by Clement Salaman et al.

Unfortunately this is a terribly pointless book that splices questionable "translations" of arbitrary excerpts from the corpus hermeticum together to make up a whole new series of poems. The relationship between these poems to the original ideas is left unclear, and you must basically rely on the understanding and synthesis of the ideas by the authors. Given any book and one can splice random segments together to say just about anything, and the qualifications of the authors seem unclear at best. What is unfortunately clear is that they mostly want to sell the book to silly new agers, not to anyone who may have a serious interest in the original ideas and their sources, which are an interesting multi-cultural mishmash of late pagan neoplatonism, Christianity and yes, local but very degenerated Egyptian folk ideas. The arguments about the relationship to very ancient Egyptian ideas is totally feeble, and has no basis is fact. What is clear is there are no sources in the actual (and extensive) ancient Egyptian texts that have survived that give any credence to the hypothesis that real corpus hermeticum is some kind of faithful transmission of ancient Egyptian ideas (especially not from the time of the old kingdom) much less this hopelessly re-edited mishmash. If you want to learn about real ancient Egyptian religious ideas about the cosmos there are plenty of translations of the real thing. If you are interested in the origin of hermetic ideas you would be better off buying another book, either a real translation, or any honest book on the subject.

The shallowness of this book is for me summarized by the silly meaningless hieroglyphics that are included along side of the text, presumably to convince somebody that the poems are a kind of translation of the ancient Egyptian (for example, they stop just where the text of the poems stop). Of course the hieroglyphics are just a decoration, with the same meaningless series of signs repeated over and over again. They haven't even tried to reproduce the actual appearance of real hieroglyphics. The whole book smacks of a deliberate manipulation in favor of something that might sell well to shallow new agers. This books should be called not "The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs" but "The Wisdom of Freke and Gandy", something which clearly has questionable value. They get no points from me for their poem since they so deliberately obscure the actual sources of their composition (not translation!).

Those who tend to disparage the value of this book are doing a disservice to those of us who want to know more about hermeticism and the hermetic tradition and are new comers to this area. Mr. Freke in his introduction clearly states how influential these writings have been. Yes this was written in late antiquity but it incorporates many teachings that would have come from the Mind of Thoth. This book serves as an ideal introductory book for furthur explorations into the hermetic tradition.

This book really gives very little idea of the majestic scope, philosophic depth and range of authentic Hermeticism: it in effect just provides a watered-down New Age pastiche carefully censoring out those tractates from the original 'Corpus Hermeticum' which teach an uncompromising Iranian-derived Spirit-Matter dualism and pessimist Gnosis concerning the material world or other presently unfashionable ideas.Even those translations of the 'Hermetica' now considered outdated such as those of W.Scott and G.R.S. Mead are vastly preferable and the Scott text published by Shambala is a far better investment and contains the whole 18 complete tractates and Stobaea Hermetica to boot. Avoid this insipid conflation of watered-down extracts and turn instead to the real wisdom-teaching of Hermes Trismegistos.

Although this book is a subset of the Corpus Hermeticum, it covers the essentials in a nice format with author synopses at the beginning of each section. Being a Christian, I found this book fascinating due to the many parallel teachings of the Bible. I found myself having a much deeper appreciation and respect for the Egyptian religious system (at least the first Egyptians). One cannot help but wonder where the two cultures strayed from each other considering the fundamental similarities. Although polytheistic, there is plenty of good, solid wisdom within these pages.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME.
This is a chipped chopped and sloppy version if the Hermetica.

I suggest to those interested Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum
by Brian P. Copenhaver from Cambridge Univ. Press ISBN-10: 0521425433
ISBN-13: 978-0521425438 this is the best and most recent eddition.

Speaking from the perspective of a fundamentalist Christian, this book has a lot of very revealing information concerning one of the most influential collections of literature on early Christian philosophers such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen. It's just one more reason that Christians should avoid philosophy altogether (Col. 2:9). Even so, it's well worth the time to read it. Did the idea of being "born again now" have its origin, in part, in the Hermetica? Possibly. Did the idea of mystic contemplation of the unknowable god, in contradistinction to Jer. 9:23-24, have its origin, in part, in the Hermetica? Again, possibly. This book is a good place to begin such investigative studies.

This book gives only an overview of the material contained in the Hermetica. For more advanced studies, I would recommend "The Egyptian Hermes" by Garth Fowden and "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" by Frances Yates. What's annoying is that a bibliography is given at the end of the book, but there are NO FOOTNOTES in the text. Comments such as "The pyramid texts of Saqquara...are over 5000 years old and yet contain doctrines that are identical to those expounded in the Hermetica [which were composed, most likely from pre-existing material, in the 2nd and/or 3rd cent. AD]" may or may not be found in the texts in the bibliography. There's no easy way to tell, other than purchasing and reading the listed titles. It's even more annoying that one of the books in the bibliography is badly misrepresented. The author's name is Lucie Lamy, not Lucy Lamy, and the title is "Egyptian Mysteries: New Light on Ancient Knowledge" not "The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt." This is the one that the aforementioned comment most likely came from, but it took me several weeks to realize the authors' mistake.

Okay, I'm done griping now. Enjoy the read. :-)