Hermes Trismegistus
c. 1st-3rd c. AD · Esotericism · Prominent
Hermes Trismegistus is a legendary sage credited with the Hermetica, Greek writings from Roman Egypt that fuse the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth. A God beyond the world overflows into Mind and then into the cosmos, they teach, and your soul climbs back up that ladder through gnosis, direct knowledge of the divine. The phrase 'as above, so below' comes from a later Hermetic text, the Emerald Tablet, which survives first in Arabic.
Signature
The position Hermes is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity
- Knowledge
- Receptive Intellect / Intuition
Positions on the 10 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- The Divine
- mildly between Describable and Indescribable (58 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Universals
- leans Realism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- mildly leans Unchanging (33 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Order
- leans Vertical (25 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- mildly leans Transcendence (67 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Ethics
- mildly between Ends and Means (56 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
10 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Hermes refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Panentheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Union with God / Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative / Moral Realism
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Eidetic Intuition / Idealism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Receptive Intellect / Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Natural Law / Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Divine Providence / Libertarian Free Will
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Emanation
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Cyclical Return
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Logos / Sacred Speech
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Apophatic Pointer / Coincidentia Oppositorum
What is the status of paradox? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature?