The History of Freemasonry

by Albert Gallatin Mackey

Chapter 10 - The Legend of Hermes

The Legend of Lamech's Sons and the Pillars - Contents - The Tower of Babel

THE next part of the Legend of the Craft which claims our attention is that which relates to Hermes, who is said to have discovered one of the pillars erected by the sons of Lamech, and to have communicated the sciences inscribed on it to mankind. This may, for distinction, be called "The Legend of Hermes."

The name has suffered cruel distortion from the hands of the copyists in the different manuscripts. In the Dowland MS. it is Hermarynes; in the Landsdowne, Herminerus; in the York, Hermarines; in the Sloane, 3,848, Hermines and Hermenes, who "was afterwards called Hermes"; and worst and most intolerable of all, it is in the Harleian, Hermaxmes. But they all evidently refer to the celebrated Hermes Trismegistus, or the thrice great Hermes. The Cooke MS., from which the story in the later manuscripts is derived, spells the name correctly, and adds, on the authority of the Polychronicon, that while Hermes found one of the pillars, Pythagoras discovered the other. Pythagoras is not mentioned in any of the later manuscripts, and we first find him referred to as a founder in Masonry in the questionable manuscript of Leland, which fact will, perhaps, furnish another argument against the genuineness of that document.

As to Hermes, the Legend is not altogether without some histoical support ahhough the story is in the Legend mythical, but of that character which pertains to the historical myth.

He was reputed to be the son of Taut or Thoth, whom the Egyptians deified, and placed his image beside those of Osiris and Isis. To him they attributed the invention of letters, as well as of all the sciences, and they esteemed him as the founder of their religious rites.

Hodges says, in a note on a passage of Sanchoniathon, (1) that "Thoth was an Egyptian deity of the second order. The Graeco- Roman mythology identified him with Hermes or Mercury. He was reputed to be the inventor of writing, the patron deity of learning, the scribe of the gods, in which capacity he is represented signing the sentences on the souls of the dead." Some recent writers have supposed that Hermes was the symbol of Divine Intelligence and the primitive type of Plato's " Logos." Manetho, the Egyptian priest, as quoted by Syncellus, distinguishes three beings who were callcd Hermes by the Egyptians. The first, or Hermes Trismegistus, had, before the deluge, inscribed the history of all the sciences on pillars; the second, the son of Agathodemon, translated the precepts of the first; and the third, who is supposed to be synonymous with Thoth, was the counsellor of Osiris and Isis. But these three were in later ages confounded and fused into one, known as Hermes Trismegistus. He was always understood by the philosophers to symbolize the birth, the progress, and the perfection of human sciences. He was thus considered as a type of the Supreme Being. Through him man was elevated and put into communication with the gods.

The Egyptians attributed to him the composition of 36,525 books on all kinds of knowledge. (2) But this mythical fecundity of authorship has been explained as referring to the whole scientific and religious encyclopoedia collected by the Egyptian priests and preserved in their temples.

Under the title of Hermetic books, several works falsely attributed to Hermes, but written, most probably, by the Neo-Platonists, are still extant, and were deemed to be of great authority up to the 16th century. (3)

It was a tradition very generally accepted in former times that this Hermes engraved his knowledge of the sciences on tables of pillars of stone, which were afterward copied into books.

Manetho attributes to him the invention of stylae, or pillars, on which were inscribed the principles of the sciences. And Jamblichus

(1) Cory's "Ancient Fragments," edited by E. Richmond Hodges, Lond., 1876, p. 3. (2) Jamblichus, citing Selencos, "de Mysteries," segm. viii., c. 1. (3) Rousse, Dictionnaire in voc. The principal of these is the "Poemander," or of the Divine Power and Wisdom.

says that when Plato and Pythagoras had read the inscriptions on these columns they formed their philosophy. (1)

Hermes was, in fact, an Egyptian legislator and priest. Thirty- six books on philosophy and theology, and six on medicine, are said to have been written by him, but they are all lost, if they ever existed. The question, indeed, of his own existence has been regarded by modern scholars as extremely mythical. The Alchemists, however, adopted him as their patron. Hence Alchemy is called the Hermetic science, and hence we get Hermetic Masonry and Hermetic Rites.

At the time of the composition of the Legend of the Craft, the opinion that Hermes was the inventor of all the sciences, and among them, of course, Geometry and Architecture, was universally accepted as true, even by the learned. It is not, therefore, singular that the old Masons, who must have been familiar with the Hermetic myth, received it as something worthy to be incorporated into the early history of the Craft, nor that they should have adopted him, as they did Euclid, as one of the founders of the science of Masonry.

The idea must, however have sprung up in the 15th century, as it is first broached in the Cook MS. And it was, in all probability, of English origin, since there is no allusion to it in the Halliwell poem.

The next important point that occurs in the Legend of the Craft is its reference to the Tower of Babel, and this will, therefore, be the subject of the next chapter.

(1) Juxta antiquas Mercurii columnas, quas Plato quondam, et Pythagoras cum lectitas-sent, philosophism constituerunt. Jamblichus, " de Mysteries," segm. i., c. 2.

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