Ian Nottingham
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Member # 2232
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posted 12-20-2005 12:25 AM
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There's also no physical proof that the Colossus of Rhodes, then Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus, the Temple of Artemis or most of the other ancient wonders ever existed either, we know of their existence, though, from the ancient writers:
quote:
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As a divine fountain of writing, Hermes Trismegistus was credited with tens of thousands of writings, of immense antiquity and high standing. Plato's Timaeus and Critias state that in the temple of Neith at Sais, there were secret halls containing historical records which had been kept for 9,000 years. Clement of Alexandria was under the impression that the Egyptians had forty-two sacred writings by Hermes, encapsulating all the training of Egyptian priests. Siegfried Morenz has suggested (Egyptian Religion) "The reference to Thoth's authorship...is based on ancient tradition; the figure forty-two probably stems from the number of Egyptian nomes, and thus conveys the notion of completeness." The Neo-Platonic writers took up Clement's "forty-two essential texts".
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, known as the Hermetica enjoyed great credit and were popular among alchemists. The "hermetic tradition" therefore refers to alchemy, magic, astrology and related subjects. The texts are usually distinguished in two categories the "philosophical" and "technical" hermetica. The former deals mainly with issues of philosophy, and the latter with magic, potions and alchemy. Among other things there are spells to magically protect objects, hence the origin of the term "Hermetically sealed".
The texts that were traditionally written at the dawn of time,
the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon in De Rebus sacris et ecclesiaticis exercitiones XVI (1614) showed, by the character of the Greek, to be more recent: most of the "philosophical" Corpus Hermeticum can be dated to around AD 300.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_Trismegistus --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posts: 240 | From: the void | Registered: Nov 2004