The Arabic Hermes
How an ancient god became a Muslim prophet
In Baghdad, the heart of the largest empire the world has ever seen, Abbasid literary development was remarkable in its scale and prestige. The translated texts became classical models written in Arabic.
The Arabic Hermetica appeared amid the bloom of Arabic literature in every field of human knowledge. The Arabic Hermes was a result of an exchange of civilizations. He was mentioned in the earliest known Arabic scientific books. Hermes’ works were thought to have been transmitted from the extremely distant past as part of the heritage of the ancient world and recovered by Arabic Muslim scholars.
The knowledge of the three separate Hermes, a reflection of the ancient Greek epithet Trismegistos known in Arabic as Al Mutallat bil Hikma (Triplicate in Wisdom) was common among Medieval Arab scholars. This legend of the three Hermeses later passed from the Arabs to Europe and became the basis for the Hermetic texts in Latin. The first Hermes was a cultural hero for Arabs; a figure mentioned under different names in the mythology of all peoples. He is the inventor and savior of sciences and things useful for mankind. They explained Hermes’ name as a laqab, meaning alim “one who knows”, an epithet of the discoveries of sciences. The Arabic Hermes did not just have ancient scientific authority but became a prophet whose revelation formed the very beginning of science. He was identified with the Quranic Idris (generally accepted by several Muslim commentators as the biblical Enoch).
The Arabs portrayed Hermes as an ancient sage who founded human religion before the Flood, ascended to the heavenly spheres of the planets, and then returned to instruct his people in the sacred arts and sciences, especially astrology, alchemy, and medicine. The Arab-Andalusian Sufi master Ibn Arabi reflected this long tradition of hierarchical correspondence between the macrocosmic universe and the microcosm of the human being in the light of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension to the Heavens (Al Miraj). He followed the Prophet’s example by placing the human prophetic realities rather than the planets at the very center of the spheres.
In Arabic chronicles, Idris was the first man to build temples and praise God and the first person to study the science of medicine. The Abbasid scholar Abu Mashar al Balkhir wrote:
He was the first man to give warning of the Flood, and he foresaw the advent on Earth of a great catastrophe coming from the skies by fire and water. He resided in Upper Egypt. He had chosen this place and built the pyramids and the earthen cities there. He was afraid that science would perish in the Flood and so he built the Temples, that is, the mountain which is known as al-Birba, the temple of Akhmim. In them, he engraved all the crafts and craftsmen. He drew all the tools of the craftsmen and showed in the drawings the characteristics of sciences for those who would come after him and feared that their traces might varnish from the world. The tradition of the ancestors has it that Idris was the first to study books and to think about sciences and that Allah revealed to him thirty pages. He was the first man to sew clothes and to wear them. Allah raised him to a high place.
According to the Arab historian Al Idrisi, the Prophet Idris did not know for certain whether the Earth would be destroyed by fire or by flood so he built earthen and stone temples, thinking that the former would resist the fires whereas the latter would endure the flood. There was a widespread opinion among Medieval Arabs that the Egyptian pyramids were the graves of ancient Kings. Hermes, who was a prophet, king, and philosopher, was buried in one of them. The name of Abu Hirmis of the two great pyramids was used in the writings of various Abbasid scholars including Abdelhakam and Ibn al Nadim.
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Works Cited
- The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science. By Kevin Thomas Van Bladel
- The Arabic Legend of the Three Hermeses from The Way of Hermes.
- The Origins of the Arabic Legends of the Pyramids by Fodor.
- The 7 Planets and the 7 Representatives from The Way of Hermes
