Thrice-Great Hermes
The Thrice-Great Hermes, who quite possibly did represent three different teachers, is not only the reputed originator of alchemy. His name appears among the ancient masters of what is now called the Way of the Sufis. In other words, both the Sufis and the alchemists claim Hermes as an initiate of their craft. So Jafar Sadiq the Sufi, Jabir the Sufi and Hermes the reputed Sufi are all credited by alchemists of both East and West as being masters of their craft.
Who was Hermes, ar how was he generally conceived of? He was the god who carried the souls of the dead to the underworld, and carried messages from the gods. He was the link between the extrahuman and the terrestrial. He moved, like Mercury, his equivalent, at immense speed, negating time and space, just in the way that inner experience does. He is an athlete, a developed man, and is considered therefore to resemble the "perfected man" of the Sufi in his outward aspect. In his earlier statues, he is shown as a matured man, a man of age and wisdom, thought of as correct results of right development. He invented the lyre and caused, as Sufis and others do, an altered state in the hearers by menas of music, He cast a giant int a sleep with his flute, which action was taken as an indication of the hypnotic character of the personification of Hermes as a Sufic type. The connection with this hypnotic activity and both mysticism and medicine is obvious.
The ancient lore and its preservation and transmission is well anchored in this Hermes figure. He has a female double--Sesheta--associated with the building of temples, and the keeper of books in which ancient wisdom was preserved. Like the aspiring human being of the Sufis and also the Sufi Truth (simurgh), he is represented as a bird. Sometimes he is a man with the head of an ibis, where the head would indicate aspiration or attainment in the mind, localized in the head.
The world was created through a word from Thoth--eight characteristics (four symbolized as gods, four as goddesses) were made from a sound which he uttered. The eightfold character of Sufi teaching is symbolized by the octagonal diagram for the word hoo, the Sufi sound.
Whatever other deities or legends may have becom confused with the personalities of Hermes, Mercury and Thoth, the main elements of intermdiation between human and divine, wisdom, music, letters and medicine remain.
In the threefold figure--Egyptian, Greek and Roman--like has been equated with like. His association with a form of wisdom which was transmitted to man from divine sources remains. It is undoubtedly far more comprehensive than the alchemical format which was later given ot it.
For centuries people were baffled by the reputed teaching of Thrice-Great Hermes, inscribed on an Emerald Tablet, which the Arabs communicated as the great inner priciple of the Great Work. This was the ultimate authority of the alchemists, and may be rendered thus:
The truth, certainty, truest, without untruth. What is above is like what is below.
What is below is like what is above, The miracle of unity is to be attained.
Everything is formed from the contemplation of unity, and all things come about from unity, by means of adaptation.
Its parents are the Sun and the Moon. It was borne by the wind and nurtured by the Earth.
Every wonder is from it, and its power is complete.
Throw it upon earth, and the earth will separate from fire. The impalpable separated from the palpable.
Through wisdom it rises slowly from the world to heaven. Then it descends to the world, combining the power of the upper and the lower. Thus you shall have the illumination of all the world, and darkness will disappear.
This is the power of all strength--it overcomes that which is delicate and penetrates through solids. This was the means of the creation of the world. And in the future wonderful developments will be made, and this is the way.
I am Hermes the Threefold sage, so named because I hold the three elements of all the wisdom.
And thus ends the revelation of the work of Sun.
This is the Sufi dictum (Introduction to the Perception of Jafar Sadiq):
"Man is the microcosm, creation the macrocosm--the unity. All comes from One. By the joining of the power of contemplation all can be attained. This essence must be separated from the body first, then combined with the body. This is the Work. Start with yourself, end with all. Before man, beyond man, transformation."
Shah, Idries, "The Sufis" p.220-23
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