The Many Faces of Mercury & Hermes Trismegistus

Hello everyone –

Today, I would like to pay tribute all the ACES James Scholar alumni out there who have entered a healthcare profession, especially listmember A.M.T., an amazing M.D. who is celebrating her birthday today. Here’s an article about the “Many Faces of Mercury,” showing how that word has permeated the sciences – from the eightieth chemical element to alchemy and pharmacology, and from the innermost planet of the Solar System to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage of ancient Egypt who was reputed to be a physician of the body and of the soul. Some medieval historians and Renaissance philosophers identified him with the biblical patriarch Enoch, whereas modern Egyptologists would view him as a hybrid of the Egyptian deity Thoth and the Greek deity Hermes (a/k/a the Roman deity Mercury). It is also possible that the figure of Hermes Trismegistus was based on the historical figure of Imhotep (fl. 27^th century BCE), the first known polymath in world history, whose medical “textbook” is preserved in the Edwin Smith papyrus.

 

“The Many Faces of Mercury”

By Rob Chappell

(Adapted & Condensed from Cursus Honorum IX: 3 [October 2008]

                The planet Mercury made headlines earlier this month when it was visited by NASA’s MESSENGER probe.  Mercury is the smallest major planet in the Solar System; it is also the closest planet to the Sun.  It completes one orbit of our parent star every 88 days, but it rotates on its axis every 59 days – so its “day” lasts for two-thirds of its “year.”  Because Mercury has an extremely thin atmosphere, temperatures on its surface can vary between 800 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime to -300 degrees at night.  Needless to say, life as we know it probably doesn’t exist here.

This enhanced photo of the planet Mercury was taken by NASA’s MESSENGER probe on January 14, 2008.  (Photo Credit: NASA – Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

                Astronomical observations of Mercury are documented from the 14th century BCE onward.  Because Mercury always appears within 28 degrees of the Sun in our sky, it is only visible to the naked eye either just before Sunrise or just after Sunset.  Whether known as Hermes (to the Greeks) or Mercury (to the Romans), the innermost planet in our Solar System was named after the swift messenger of the Olympian pantheon because of its rapid movement through the sky.  Mercury was portrayed in art as wearing a pair of winged sandals and carrying a caduceus (a wand with two serpents entwined around it).

                The planet Mercury ceased to be worshiped in the Western world during late antiquity.  However, the planet named after him continued to be studied by medieval astronomers, who drew up increasingly accurate tables of its motions in the sky.  Starting in the 12th century CE, debate ensued among astronomers as to whether Mercury orbited around the Earth (as theorized by most Greek astronomers) or around the Sun (as proposed by a few late antique Roman writers).

                Mercury’s name was also given by the ancients to chemical element #80 – a liquid metal also known as quicksilver or hydrargyrum.  Discovered in early historic times, mercury was believed to have both medical and metallurgical applications.  Unfortunately, liquid mercury is poisonous to humans if ingested, and that is what led to the untimely demise of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Dì (259-210 BCE): he drank a mercury-and-jade potion that was supposed to have restored his lost youth!  In modern times, mercury has been used in thermometers, barometers, and other scientific and medical instruments.

                Perhaps Mercury’s most enduring “face” has been that of the legendary Egyptian alchemist, philosopher, and physician – Hermes Trismegistus (“Mercurius Termaximus” in Latin = “Thrice-Greatest Hermes”).  A collection of philosophical and alchemical treatises began to circulate under his name during the first three centuries CE in Alexandria, Egypt – produced by a group of scholars and sages known as the Hermetic School.  The Hermetic tractates preserved Egyptian esoteric traditions about the origin of the cosmos and humankind’s place within it.  In these treatises, Hermes Trismegistus dialogues with his disciples and encourages them to transmit his knowledge to posterity for the benefit of humankind.  After their translation into Latin by the Italian polymath, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Hermetic writings exercised a profound influence upon the Renaissance intellectuals who spearheaded the scientific revolution.  Such intellectual advancements were perhaps foreseen by one of the Hermetic philosophers of ancient Egypt:

“[Humankind] will pursue the inmost secrets of Nature even into the heights and will study the motions of the sky.  Nor is this enough; when nothing yet remains to be known than the furthest boundary of the Earth, they will seek even there the last extremities of night.”  -- Cor Mundi (Heart of the Cosmos), Hermetic Tractate, Early 1st Millennium CE

Editor’s Note: A replica of an Italian Renaissance statue of Hermes Trismegistus carrying the caduceus, an ancient symbol of the healing arts that is still used by medical practitioners today, stands in the lobby of the Carle Forum in Urbana.

 

“Hermes Trismegistus”

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Still through Egypt's desert places
    Flows the lordly Nile,
From its banks the great stone faces
    Gaze with patient smile.
Still the pyramids imperious
    Pierce the cloudless skies,
And the Sphinx stares with mysterious,
    Solemn, stony eyes. 

But where are the old Egyptian
    Demi-gods and kings?
Nothing left but an inscription
    Graven on stones and rings.
Where are Helios and Hephaestus,
    Gods of eldest eld?
Where is Hermes Trismegistus,
    Who their secrets held? 

Where are now the many hundred
    Thousand books he wrote?
By the Thaumaturgists plundered,
    Lost in lands remote;
In oblivion sunk forever,
    As when o'er the land
Blows a storm-wind, in the river
   Sinks the scattered sand. 

Something unsubstantial, ghostly,
    Seems this Theurgist,
In deep meditation mostly
    Wrapped, as in a mist.
Vague, phantasmal, and unreal
    To our thought he seems,
Walking in a world ideal,
    In a land of dreams. 

Was he one, or many, merging
    Name and fame in one,
Like a stream, to which, converging
    Many streamlets run?
Till, with gathered power proceeding,
    Ampler sweep it takes,
Downward the sweet waters leading
    From unnumbered lakes. 

By the Nile I see him wandering,
    Pausing now and then,
On the mystic union pondering
    Between gods and men;
Half believing, wholly feeling,
    With supreme delight,
How the gods, themselves concealing,
    Lift men to their height. 

Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated,
    In the thoroughfare
Breathing, as if consecrated,
    A diviner air;
And amid discordant noises,
    In the jostling throng,
Hearing far, celestial voices
    Of Olympian song. 

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!
Happy they whose written pages
    Perish with their lives,
If amid the crumbling ages
    Still their name survives! 

Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately
    Found I in the vast,
Weed-encumbered somber, stately,
    Grave-yard of the Past;
And a presence moved before me
    On that gloomy shore,
As a waft of wind, that o'er me
    Breathed, and was no more.

Until next time – keep looking up! 😊

Rob