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HERMES/THOTH AND HERMETICISM throughout the Ages

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Bianca
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« on: June 07, 2007, 11:42:40 pm »




MEDITERRANEAN HERMES



One admirable quality of the ancient Greeks was the universality of their theological vision. Unlike their Semitic counterparts, the Greeks claimed no uniqueness for their deities but freely acknowledged that the Olympians often had exact analogues in the gods of other nations.

This was particularly true of Egypt, whose gods the Greeks revered as the prototypes of their own. It was a truth frequently recognized by the cultured elite of Greek society that some of the Egyptian gods, such as Isis, were of such great stature that they united within themselves a host of Greek deities.

The Romans, who were fully aware of the fact that their gods were but rebaptized Greek deities, followed the example of their mentors. As the Roman Empire extended itself to occupy the various Mediterranean lands, including Egypt, the ascendancy of the archetypes of some of the more prominent Egyptian gods became evident. Here we are faced with the controversial phenomenon of syncretism, which plays a vital role in the new manifestation of Hermes in the last centuries before Christ and in the early centuries of the Christian era.

During this period, the Mediterranean world was undergoing a remarkable religious development. The old state religions had lost their hold on many people. In their stead a large number of often-interrelated religions, philosophies, and rites had arisen, facilitated by the political unity imposed by the Roman Empire.
                                                                             
                                                                              ROMAN MERCURY - 1st Century AD
This new ecumenism of the spirit was one that we might justly admire. Though often derided as mere syncretism by later writers, it possessed many features to which various ecumenicists aspire even today. It is by no means impossible that the Mediterranean region of the late Hellenistic period was in fact on its way toward a certain kind of religious unity. The world religion that might conceivably have emerged would have been much more sophisticated than the accusation of syncretism would have us believe. Far from being a patchwork of incompatible elements, this emerging Mediterranean spirituality bore the hallmarks of a profound mysticism, possessing a psychological wisdom still admired in our own day by such figures as C.G. Jung and Mircea Eliade.

An important feature of this era was the rise of a new worship of Hermes. Proceeding from the three principal Egyptian archetypes of divinity, we find three great forms of initiatory religion spreading along the shores of the Mediterranean: the cults of the Mother Goddess Isis, the Victim God Osiris, and the Wisdom God Hermes, all of which appeared under various guises.

Of these three we shall concern ourselves here with Hermes. It was during this period that the swift god of consciousness took his legendary winged sandals and crossed the sea to Egypt in order to become the Greco-Egyptian Thrice-Greatest Hermes.
« Last Edit: June 08, 2007, 03:17:16 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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