Notes from ‘The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus’, by Gary Lachman

Hermes Trismegistus tells us, is a ‘divine being’ and ‘is not to be counted amongst the other creatures on earth’. He really belongs among the gods, or ‘to speak the truth boldly, the true man is above the gods, or at least fully their equal in power’- This is because while the gods are fixed in their place in the great cosmic scheme, man, according to Hermes, is free to rise to the heights, or plunge to the depths, partaking of all the universe offers. Man isn’t limited to one niche in the macrocosm, whether that of the angels or the apes, for the simple reason that he is a microcosm, a little universe himself.

Another aspect of Egyptian religion that seems to have found its way into Plato’s Philosophy and also into the Hermetic books, is the Duat, the name the Egyptians gave to the spirit world. Although it is usually presented as an ‘underworld’ one arrives at in the ‘afterlife’, the Duat is really just an ‘overworld’ and a ‘beforelife’.

Yet although it is the ‘destination’ of all that is old and worn out’, it is also the ‘origin of all that is fresh and new’. Is contains all the forms which belong to the past or the future, and in this, Nalder argues, it is more like Plato’s world of archetypal forms; thus, by studying Philosophy — which for Plato and his followers was not, as it is today, a circumscribed…