The Arabic Hermetica

← Encyclopedia

The Arabic Hermetica are the writings ascribed to Hermes — astrological, alchemical, magical, and philosophical — that were composed, translated, and elaborated in Arabic from roughly the eighth century onward. They are not a fixed canon but a sprawling, anonymous literature, and they form the largest single body of work attached to the figure of Hermes in any language. Much of later European esotericism’s Hermes is, by descent, this Arabic one.

When Greek learning passed into Arabic during the translation movement of early Abbasid Baghdad, Hermes came with it — though the philosophical dialogues gathered in the Greek Corpus Hermeticum were largely not what crossed over. What the Arabic writers received and multiplied was the technical Hermes: the sage of the stars, of secret properties in stones and plants, of the transmutation of metals. Scholarship has shown that Arabic authors did not merely preserve older material but composed a great deal afresh under his name, so that the line between transmission and invention is, in this literature, genuinely hard to draw.

A scheme of three Hermeses took hold in this setting and was repeated for centuries: a first Hermes before the Flood, often identified with the prophet Idrīs of the Qurʾān and sometimes with the biblical Enoch; a second in post-diluvian Babylon; a third in Egypt, teacher of the arts. The arrangement gave the pagan sage a place inside a monotheistic history of revelation, and it let astrology and alchemy be received as ancient prophetic wisdom rather than foreign superstition.

The most consequential single text to surface here is the Emerald Tablet — the Tabula Smaragdina, with its formula that what is below answers to what is above. Its earliest known form is Arabic, embedded in a longer work on the secrets of creation attributed to a sage the Arabic tradition called Balīnās, behind whom stands the Greek Apollonius of Tyana. No Greek original of the Tablet has been found; on present evidence the text the Latin alchemists revered as the oldest of all came to them through Arabic.

That last point is the broader one. From the twelfth century, translators in Spain and Sicily turned this Arabic material into Latin — astrological treatises, the magical Picatrix, the recipes of the alchemists — and through them Hermes entered the medieval and Renaissance West already shaped by his Islamic passage. When Ficino later translated the Greek dialogues for Florence, he was adding a philosophical Hermes to a technical one the Latin world had possessed, by way of Arabic, for three hundred years. The wisdom that Renaissance Europe took for the most ancient had, in good part, been written and rewritten in Arabic first.

→ In the library: Mead — Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I (Prolegomena, 1906) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Arabic Falsafa Islamic Philosophy · Astral Talismanic Magic · Arabic Ilm Al Huruf Jafr Hurufiyya · Neoplatonism