There was certainly no Hermetism per se in ancient Egypt. (Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt,Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 17.)

However later, Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic, became fused with the Greek Hermes, and this syncretic god was to become a powerful influence on the whole development of esoteric thought from its ancient roots right through to Renaissance Europe.

From earliest times, Thoth, one of the most popular Egyptian gods, was associated with the moon. As a moon god, he served the solar divinity Ra as both his secretary and counselor. This identification of Thoth with the moon was of practical importance to Egyptian culture for the moon's phases governed the great rhythms of flood and drought across the Nile delta. It was from these rhythms that the Egyptians measured time and seasons, and Thoth became associated with the governance of Time itself as well as the arbiter of individual destinies. As a psychopomp, Thoth conducted the souls of the dead to the kingdom of the gods, where he presided at the judgment of their souls. (Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 22f.)

All of Egyptian national life fell under his jurisdiction, for he was the origin of order, both in the great world of the cosmos and in the little world of religious and civil institutions. He was lawgiver, divine scribe, and magus. From him the priesthood and temple cults derived their wisdom and sacred literature, including parts of the Book of the Dead. All magical and occult powers were attributed to Thoth.

The cult of Thoth continued to inspire allegiance throughout the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. At the beginning of the Christian era, Alexandria was the chief center of Hellenistic culture; here Greek philosophy encountered Eastern ideas, myths, and beliefs. Because of his power and influence, Greek settlers in Egypt quickly came to identifY Thoth with their god Hermes, whose cultic center was at, Hermoupolis. (Ibid., pp. 25f.)

Hermes'" was also a psychopomp associated with the moon. In addition to their formidable attributes as arbiters of time and national life, both Thoth and Hermes had a lighter side which sealed their popularity; they were seen as trickster figures, inventive and playful, even as they functioned as messengers of the gods and interpreters of divine will.

Greek magical papyri present the new composite Hermes as a cosmic power, creator of the universe, presiding over night and day, life and death, fate and justice. In time the Hellenistic Hermes became identified among the Stoics with the logos and demiurge (pantoerator, cosmoerator).

 To him is revealed "all that is hidden under the heavenly vault, and beneatt the earth." Magical spells addressed to Hermes seek arcane knowledge or oracles, or they invite the god himself to appear in a dream and to bestow the blessings of a favored life (food, success, happiness). At the same time, he is one who can be known intimately in oneself. "I know you, Hermes, and you know me. I am you and you are me." This self-identification with Hermes may have derived, as Fowden and Faivre suggest, from an euhemerist tendency to see Thoth as a divinized human being. Once human and mortal in the long-distant past, Hermes-Thoth became, through his own efforts of spiritual advancement, an intermediary hovering between the divine and human worlds, rather like a Bodhisattva who has attained immortality but remains in the human world as a channel for the divine.( Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes from Greek God to ALchemical Magus, 1995, pp. 15-16.)

The Hermetica consist of several small scattered works. These include both the technical Hermetica on magic and the philosophical collections. Brian Copenhaver has commented that both the technical and philosophical works of the Hermetica most probably derive from a common environment. The distinction between them owes something to the circumstances of their Byzantine transmission and edition. However, it is evident that the philosophical collections blend theology, cosmology, soteriology, and eschatology, with scant reference to magic and other occult sciences aside from traces of astrology. Forty Hermetic texts including the Kore Kosmu (The Virgin of the World) are gathered in the anthology of Stobaeus (early fifth century A.D.), some late second- or third-century fragments are preserved at Vienna, while the discovery of mainly Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in 1945 also included a number of philosophical Hermetica. However, in the history of Western esotericism, the most famous and influential philosophical text, discovered in 1460, is the Corpus Hermeticum, which brings together seventeen treatises written in Greek in the second and third centuries A.D. (Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, Cambridge University Press, 1992, , pp. xxxii-xxxiii.)

These treatises are variously addressed: some by Hermes to his son and disciple Tat; others by Hermes to his disciple Asclepius and others; others, including the famous first book Poimandres (The Divine Pymander), by the god Nous (Supreme Intellect) to Hermes. Throughout the treatises, Hermes Trismegistus plays the role of initiator into wisdom and mysteries. Man is summoned to make himself equal to God, in order to apprehend God. "See what power you have and what speed! You can do all these things and God cannot? Reflect on God in this way as having all within Himself as ideas: the cosmos, Himself, the whole. If you do not make yourself equal to God you cannot understand him. Like is understood by like." (The Way of Hermes: The Corpus Hermeticum, translated by Clement Salaman, Dorine van Oyen, and William D. Wharton, London:, 1999, citation is from CH 11.20.)

The Corpus Hermeticum strongly implied a partnership between the human spirit and God. Whereas Judaism and Christianity tended to regard God as transcendent and thus beyond human comprehension, the Corpus Hermeticum attributed a divine intellect to humans, whereby they could reflect the whole universe in their minds. The theme of the divine intellect as a "mirror," on which "speculating" is a continuous exchange with higher spiritual entities, is a major theme of esotericism. Because God created the universe, it is saturated with his spiritual symbols. Once humans learn to read these symbols, they can know God directly. In this way, Hermetism negates any absolute ontological dualism between God and his Creation. Antoine Faivre, "Ancient and Medieval Sources of Modem Esoteric Movements," in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, edited by Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, 1993, p. 5.)

Alexandrian Hermetism also emphasized the mythical themes of fall and reintegration. Notions of humanity's fall into matter through the attraction of the sensual were balanced by ideas of reascension to the godhead. This did not imply a contempt for nature, but rather a discovery of the intermediary spiritual intelligences or astral elements, which the human intellect can then ascend like a spiritual ladder to higher planes of being. These ideas hark back to the neo-Pythagoreans Nicomac of Gerase and Moderatus of Gades, who linked numbers to an ordered procession of souls after death and a whole series of mediating processes in which the planets and stars are the stages. Plutarch (A.D. 46-120?) gave a bold interpretation of Plato's Timaeus in which souls rise toward the moon after death. Only with this Hermetic model of spiritual hierarchies, whose ascent gives ever greater insights into God's will and the meaning of the cosmos, can one understand the Renaissance magic which runs from the astrology of Marsilio Ficino to the theurgic invocations and angelology of John Dee and Edward Kelley. (Ibid., pp. 1, 5. )

With the exception of the Asclepius, the Hermetic treatises were unknown to the Middle Ages. However, their recovery from Byzantine Greece by Cosimo de' Medici of Florence and translation into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1463 marks the revival of Hermetic ideas and esotericism in the modern era.
Closely related to Hermetism in its ancient context is pagan (i.e. pre-Christian) Neoplatonism. Plato had clearly separated the higher world of Ideas from the lower world, but he provided for a soul which was capable of being reminded of the higher world through its sensory experience of things in this lower world. The Neoplatonists gave new direction to Platonic philosophy between the third and the sixth centuries A.D. They conceived of reality as spiritual activity or states of consciousness and regarded the human soul as a voyager, fallen and encumbered by bodily existence but perfectible by a path of ascent to its divine origins. Neoplatonic philosophy held a particular appeal for the educated classes of the later Roman Empire, who were beset by a sense of material decline and religious anxiety.( John Gregory, The Neoplatonists, London, 1991, p. vii.)

Neoplatonic thought is characterized by the idea that there exists a plurality of spheres of being, arranged in a descending hierarchy of degrees of being. The last and lowest sphere of being comprises the universe existing in time and space perceptible to the human senses. Each sphere of being derives from its superior by a process of "emanation," by which it reflects and expresses its previous degree. At the same time, these degrees of being are also degrees of unity, whereby each subsequent sphere generates more multiplicity, differentiation, and limitation, tending toward the minimal unity of our material world.

The leading figure of this movement was Plotinus (A.D. 205-270), who studied in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas. As a young man, Plotinus sought acquaintance with the ideas of Persia and India by joining Emperor Gordian's disastrous military campaign against the Persians in A.D. 238-244 and then went to live in Rome from A.D. 245 until his death. Here he gathered various disciples, including Porphyry, who published Plotinus's works as the Enneads.

Plotinus posited an absolute, transcendent One or Good, defined in Aristotle's phrase as "that to which all things aspire." Its existence was inferred from the necessity of unity in everything that exists. Below the One, Plotinus described a cosmology of continuous creative emanation, whereby the higher level of reality is imparted to the lower without being diminished. However, each new level of emanation is necessarily less perfect than its begetter, to which it longs to return. Plotinus posited three grades of higher being: Intellect; the higher Soul, whether World Soul or individual Soul, which transcends the physical and enjoys eternal contact with Intellect; and the lower Soul or Nature. Both Intellect and Soul are termed the logos of their previous higher state, meaning that they represent it as formative and regulative principles at the subsequent, lower level of creation. At the outset of creation, unformed Intellect begins to fill with intelligible forms, which are themselves perfect archetypes of everything that will exist in the world of sense. These ideal forms within Intellect contain not only generic forms or species, but also forms of individuals. Plotinus used Platonic arguments to establish the immortality of the incorporeal soul as the cause of life and movement. However, Plotinus differed from Plato by referring to the individual soul and the unique value of the personal self.

Plotinus also insisted on the unplanned and spontaneous creation of the material world by the lower Soul, or Nature, a marked contrast with Plato's conception of creation as conscious design described in Timaeus and in Jewish and Christian scripture. Plotinus's emphasis on the creative emanation of the material universe from the thought of God was essentially cosmological. The idea was closely linked to the Ptolemaic view of the universe as a hierarchical system of nine concentric spheres, ranging from the outermost sphere of God as Prime Mover through the sequence of planetary spheres to the lowest sphere of earth. Plotinus saw the universe as "a single living being embracing all living beings within it." Possessed of a single Soul permeating all its parts, the material universe participates in this World Soul and is influenced by other parts to the extent of their integration and the correspondence of their constituent elements. Thus a sympathy pervades this universe, manifested as a system of correspondences existing among the stars, animals, plants, minerals, and human organs, giving rise to the idea of a mapping between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of a human being. Plotinus wrote about astrological divination, prayer, and the votive cult of statues, in which the powers of a god were embodied in its sculptured form, to show the effectiveness of affinities, which connected different parts of the world to each other. Magical results were not the result of a god's direct action but rooted in the sympathy that linked different particular emanations of the World Soul-a direct result of the underlying "cousinhood" of all creation.

Though Plotinus believed in the efficacy of prayer, magic, and astrological divination, there is no evidence that he practiced them. A philosopher by nature, he regarded these phenomena primarily as evidence of spiritual harmony and the interdependence of the universe. By representing reality as ordered and harmonious, everywhere tending to the Good, Plotinus offered a powerful comfort in times of change and instability. The individual soul, discovering its identity with the World Soul, has perfection within its reach. Evil and suffering cannot touch the true self, and external events and physical circumstances are irrelevant to happiness. Plotinus is thus important as a systematic philosopher to refine concepts of macrocosm-microcosm correspondences, hierarchies, the equivalence of the World Soul and individual soul and its spiritual reintegration. In his case, Neoplatonism is primarely a philosophy for the purification and ascent of the soul.

Born in Tyre, Porphyry (ca. A.D. 232-3o5) went to Athens in his early twenties to study under the philosopher Longinus. There he mastered literary, textual, and historical criticism and possibly became acquainted with Platonic and Pythagorean traditions. On learning of Plotinus's teachings around A.D. 263, Porphyry resolved to go to Rome and study under him. In his Life of Plotinus, Porphyry describes his master's spiritual life as a "continuous turning in contemplation to his intellect." Plotinus kept his soul pure and ever strove toward the divine. "He did everything to be delivered and escape from the bitter wave of blood-drinking life here." A strict asceticism, little food, abstinence from flesh-eating and from sexual relations all reflect a regime of purification intended to remove oneself from the sensible world. However, this asceticism extended neither to outright worldrejection nor to withdrawal from human affairs. Plotinus actively concerned himself with his disciples and with the education of the children of high-ranking Romans entrusted to him. Porphyry's account also recorded the Plotinian experience of union with God. In ascending through the hierarchical levels of reality, the human soul passed through distinct stages of spiritual progress. It became conscious of itself and discovered its dependence on the divine Intellect, which illuminates it and gives it the power of thought. The soul also realized that it ultimately emanated from the transcendent Good that is in turn superior to Intellect. The soul thereby separates from the body, leaping up above the sensible world to apprehend the eternal and all things in the intelligible world. This process here reflects the ascent to the Beautiful described by Diotima in Plato's Symposium, whereas the intelligible world is the world of Forms or Ideas. (Porphyry, Life of Plot in us, in Plotinus, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library,1966, quoted in Hadot, "Neoplatonist Spirituality," pp. 230f.)

Porphyry wrote many works, including The Life of Pythagoras, Life of Plotinus, an Epistle to Anebo the Egyptian (on the topic of theurgy), a Commentary on the Harmonics of Ptolemy, On the Abstinence from Animal Food, the Homeric Questions, and his Launching-Points to the Realm of Mind (otherwise known as Auxiliaries to the Perception of Intelligible Natures). He also wrote two works relating to Christianity. Against the Christians contained a critique of the historical accuracy of the Book of Daniel and highlighted the inconsistencies of the gospel narratives. His commentary on the Chaldean Oracles noted that the gods of the oracles spoke highly of Jesus as a spiritual teacher, but he considered it erroneous that Jesus's followers identified Jesus with the supreme principle. Porphyry also insisted on the value and purifYing effect of theurgy in assisting the soul's release from the sensible world and ascent through intermediaries to the intelligible realm. This concept of mystical ascent is given expressive formulation in his Letter to His Wife Marcella concerning the Life of Philosophy and the Ascent to the Gods. (Porphyry's Letter to His Wife Marcella, translated by Alice Zimmern, introduction by David Fideler, 1991.)

Iamblichus, a disciple of Porphyry, was born at Chalcis in Syria around A.D. 260 and died in A.D. 330. As a Neoplatonic philosopher, his reputation as a teacher and thinker was widespread, even earning the praise of Emperor Julian. Iamblichus went much further than Porphyry in asserting the claims of theurgy as a means of putting men in contact with the gods or constraining spirits. Iamblichus wrote his famous work On the Mysteries of the Egyptians as a response to Porphyry's Letter to Anebo. The philosophical defense of theurgy influenced the Christian theology of sacraments. Iamblichus subordinated philosophy to theurgy, claiming that the gods are responsive to us. Oracular inspiration was sought through the manipulation of symbolic objects and the use of occult linguistic formulas. In Iamblichus's account, the theurgist receiving divine inspiration behaves in a manner suggestive of modern mediumship (descent of a spiritual form into medium, enlargement or floating of body, changes in voice). This process of divine possession is viewed as an ascent and reversion to a higher spiritual plane. Such divination unites humans with the gods. It enables humans to share in the life of the gods and thereby attain to divinity.

Proclus (A.D. 410-485), the last major pagan Neoplatonist teaching at Athens, also asserted the unitary principle of all things, which expressed itself in henads, or primal unities within the first plane of being. Proclus addressed the problem of how higher realities can be both transcendent and yet immanent at lower levels. He claimed that each form has a transcendent, unitary, or "unparticipated" aspect and an immanent, or "participated" aspect. The One is thereby unparticipated unity, while the henads are participated unity. As the influence of the gods reach down through all levels of creation, theology becomes for Proclus the study of the nature and powers of the henads. Proclus's thought thereby anticipates the overlap between theology and natural philosophy in modern esotericism. Proclus was also strongly sympathetic to the ideas and practices of theurgy based on the magical sympathy among all things. (See Lucas Siorvanes, Proclus: NeoPlatonic Philosophy and Science,Yale University Press, 1996.)

The later Neoplatonists' interest in theurgy indicates a shift from Plotinus's philosophical appraisal of the ensouled universe to acts of magical intervention based on a knowledge of its correspondences. The practical operation on the spiritual realities of a sympathetic universe clearly anticipate the concerns of Renaissance magic at the dawn of modern esotericism.

Theurgy means "acting on the gods" through knowledge of the theory and practice of estabrlshing contact with gods and spirits. This contact is achieved not only by raising or purifYing our consciousness but also through rituals, cer-emonies, invocations, and material objects that will set in motion divine influences or conjure angelic and demonic beings into our presence. The Chaldean Oracles were a cardinal statement of ancient theurgy. Produced by Julian the Theurgist during the second century A.D. in Syria, possibly through mediums' trances, this text elaborated a complex cosmology including an ensouled or animated universe replete with spiritual and demonic intermediaries.