hermetism also hermeticism, a philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that human salvation depends on revealed knowledge (gnosis) of God and of the human and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Greek and Latin is a product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the same literature exist in Greek, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of a discovery made at Nag Hammadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the same period but surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy, magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iamblichus, pagan philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic figure, Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had its first large effects in the Latin West among the twelfth-century Platonists of Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Greek discourses in the main body of the Corpus Hermeticum (as distinct from the many Greek fragments preserved by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino). Ficino was willing to move so quickly to Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the ‘ancient theology’ (prisca theologia), a tradition of pagan revelation that ran parallel to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he called the Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which he theorized later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original motivation. The Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance, when Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Symphorien Champier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco Patrizi, and others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed Greek Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the nineteenth century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline in the reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614 that the Greek Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of primeval Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion with most Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of the ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures even later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science, so Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd, whose opponents (Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi) turned away from the Hermetica and similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth century, only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom, but he was then rediscovered by German students of Christianity and Hellenistic religions, especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 1904. The ancient Hermetica are now read in the 1946–54 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugière. See also FICINO. B.P.C.