History of the Arabic Hermes
al-kubrā (RFK) and The Rebuke of the Soul (KZN). In the richly developed philosophical and magical Arabic pseudepigrapha of the ninth and tenth centuries, Hermes might be described as the prince of the “pseudos.” His works are cited by pseudo-Aristotle, pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana,3 and by authors writing under the alchemical pseudonym Gˇābir ibn Ḥ ayyān.4 Characteristic of these Hermetica first composed in Arabic are some of the motifs common also to ancient Hermetic texts, but with their own distinctive character: they claim to have been discovered on books or stelae in underground tunnels or in Egyptian ruins, or to be translations of ancient “hidden books”; they ask their readers to guard the texts from the unworthy; they teach techniques for deriving magical powers from the occult properties of terrestrial things and their celestial sympathies. Several of them are decorated with cryptographic scripts, at times in imitation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Much work is required to explain the interrelationships of all these Hermetic and pseudepigraphical texts. Editions of the texts will be an inevitable prerequisite for any definite conclusions. As editions become available, it should be possible to trace roughly the origins of the texts through citations of them by known authors, as well as their citations of each other, and to establish their chronology more exactly. It may well be that a large part of this Arabic pseudepigraphical literature, and not only the works Hermes, is due to a small number of individuals. If historians are lucky, it will be possible eventually to discover clusters of pseudepigraphical texts of common authorship, and even to identify individual authors. The search for authorship is not as unimportant as many interpreters of literature today think: it matters whether a book was written in the eighth or the tenth or the twelfth century, or in Toledo, Cairo, or Bag˙dād. Finding the source often means finding the context, and context provides a basis for interpretation. Without a context, these texts are more likely to appear as floating representatives of a hidden “school of thought,” that vague “Islamic Hermeticism” that we should avoid using as the basis of discussion from now on. When more of the Arabic texts are available, it will also be possible to tell even more clearly the history of their use and reception in later times. For now it is certain that Arabic Hermetica were used and cited in Arabic tradition continuously at least to the eighteenth century, and manuscripts of Arabic Hermetica continued to be copied down to the end of the nineteenth century. Translations of Arabic Hermetica are found in Latin, Persian, Hebrew, and other languages, in each case illustrating the appeal of the ancient Egyptian sage, and the promise of the teachings he offered, across confessional, ethnic, and regional boundaries. The development of the Arabic Hermetica, along with the Arabic myth of Hermes, came to an end only relatively recently, with European colonization, the adoption of the printing press, and modern systems of education, all of which together have effectively 3. Weisser 1980 (index pp. 245–246). 4. Kraus 1942–1943 (index: 1.212).