Hermes Trismegistus  

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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice-great Hermes"; Latin: Mercurius ter Maximus) is the syncretism of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. In Hellenistic Egypt, the Egyptian god Thoth was given as epithet the Greek name of Hermes. He has also been identified with Enoch. Other similar syncretized gods include Serapis and Hermanubis.

Hermes Trismegistus might also be explained in Euhemerist fashion as a man who was the son of the god, and in the Kabbalistic tradition that was inherited by the Renaissance, it could be imagined that such a personage had been contemporary with Moses, communicating to a line of adepts a parallel wisdom, from Zoroaster to Plato. A historian, however, would leave such speculation to the history of alchemy and the nineteenth-century history of occultism.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Hermes Trismegistus" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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