Of Hermes' books, the "Big Three Times", from the country of the Nile, there have been very few data and few originals worthy of authentic faith.
According to ancient chronicles, in the famous Library of Alexandria, during the reign of the last dynasty of the Ptolemies, 42 esoteric books that summed up all the wisdom of the ages were kept from Hermes, the wisest teacher of antiquity.
But, after the immense catastrophe that meant the great fire that devastated said Library following the landing of the Roman army of Julius Caesar in the port of Alexandria, it was not possible to recover but some fragments that are supposed to be derived from faithful Greek translations made by scribes and scholars commissioned by the Pharaohs Pharaohs.
They are "The Pymander", "The Kybalion", certain books of loose poems and "The Book of the Daylight", better known as "Book of the Dead", for having found copies of it inside the sarcophagus of the mummies of some prominent Egyptians. Some loose fragments come from quotes from which various schools of the time were depositaries: Gnostic, Theosophical, Platonic, Hermetic or Eclectic, hosted in Alexandria and later grouped and interpreted under the generic title of "Books of Toth-Hermes."
Such Toth books circulated profusely during the period of Roman domination across the three continents of Africa, Europe and nearby Asia under the motto of “Corpus-Herméticum” in Latin translation which, together with the Greek, others of Arab origin and the Egyptians in the popular language have come to this day.
The essential line of all hermetic ideology is the basic affirmation of a single immense god and a single root, scientific and philosophical religion, which morally and spiritually exceeded sages served, since he could not embody such a high doctrine in those who were not endowed with true spiritual experience. This is justified by the hermetic sages.
It follows that the hermetic truths could not be transferred integrally except through an authentic and proven merit.
The most peremptory path of such achievement was knowledge, but not through mentalized studies, but through the so-called enlightened or superior mind, what we could call intuition attached to super-reasoning, translated by NOUS by Greeks and hermeneutical exegetes.
The opinion of the ancients regarding the teachings of Hermes is objective in this image: it is an open door to a vast perspective of green, immense, sun-filled meadows and beautiful and multicolored flowers.
That marvelous "open door" to the unknown, and whose high viewpoint crossed Hermes's writings, constituted the great vital breath, the breath of the spirit of every selective human grouping, whose purpose was the investigation of truth in man and in the cosmos. And its common currency, the famous phrase of the so-called Emerald Table of Hermes himself: “As below, so it is above; as above, so below. ”
In this way, the founder of religion-philosophy, putting into play the study and the deep and direct experience through the supermind and the spirit, fed, from that remote time, every effort of man to glimpse the real essences of the divine life, as well within the individual as in the Universe, in all its transcendencies and its mysteries. Children of hermetic wisdom were, therefore, the spiritual messages of Persia, Syria, Judea, Anatolia, Greece, and others born and derived from that spiritual seed deposited in the fertile waters of the Nile. All ancient civilizations have, therefore, The same source.
Because from Egypt Hermes moved to Greece, supported by his transcendent mythology and contributing to it all his baggage of wisdom. The deep and legendary message of the “Big Three Times” was spilled from the Nile Delta, from Alexandria to the entire Mediterranean.
Among the hermetic works lost due to catastrophes, wars, ignorance, fanaticism and the lack of subsequent understanding, it seems that there was a work called "Book of the Breaths or the Breathes", whose science was taught by the great Hermes, and whose lessons were they collected in India and were disseminated through Hatha Yoga, and, in its most transcendent effectiveness, through Raja Yoga or Real Yoga. In any case, there are also reliable witnesses of these specific teachings of the Egyptian master and his very important book in the West. Mead, the great hermetic writer of the ancestral century, carried out an exhaustive study of hermetic works. He tells us about them that he concluded that such works originate in another Hermes predecessor of the "Three Times Big", an ancient Hermes, before the flood, that is, before the sinking of Atlantis. This would confirm our assertion that wisdom, science, the arts all of primitive Egypt, so extraordinarily advanced, were bequeathed to them by the Atlanteans before the sinking. The most accurate data are engraved on a stone pylon of one of the oldest buildings in Egypt. And throughout the successive millennia, especially during the Alexandrian period, other sages witnessed several successive Hermes, cyclic avatars that renewed the message of the ages by cyclical adaptation of the same eternal wisdom. This is why hermetic teachings constitute a synthesis of perennial truths.
The wise men who have attested the original teachings of Hermes and the aforementioned principles, were Manethon, Cicero, Ammiano, Josefo, Heródoto, in certain way Plinio, as well as many others.
When the epochs and the dynasty happened on the banks of the Nile, fragments of the Toth Books were found in inscriptions of ancient origin, especially inside the secret crypts of the great temples, especially in those near the Delta, where the first centers of Egyptian civilization flourished, not far from the Sphinx and the Pyramids. In the near east these truths compiled in a work were known for many centuries He wore the title The Prophecy of Hermes .
The hermetic teachings achieved an immense boom with the spread of Platonism in the cult world, during the splendor of the Greek civilization that was born intertwined with the Egyptian. It also seems that hermetic teachings constituted the background of the stoic school ideology; which implies its strength and its importance and the harvest of its powerful effective sowing in the ancient world, as well as its transcendental roots continued and recognized in the field of mother ideas and the behavior of the superior man.
As we have hinted at the beginning, it was the illustrious Greeks who translated neatly and faithfully the hermetic teachings, causing them to survive and spread in the ancient world after the great catastrophe of the fire of the Library and the disappearance of the Alexandrian School. These translations were later cited and poured into Syrian, Arabic, various Asian languages, until reaching our days and our time, which is in the process of being spiritually reborn at the beginning of a new zodiac cycle of civilization worldwide: the Age of Aquarius. Because due to the action of this cyclical law and its waves of advance and apparent setback, the origins of these immense spiritual roots that fed ages and that constituted the divine heritage of the world are investigated of all times.
It seems that the last Egyptian dynasty of Pharaohs, that of the Ptolemies, exceptionally encouraged the study and the faithful version of several ancient languages of hermetic works. In Alexandria's classrooms, in its library and museum, supported by the pharaohs, there were hundreds of scribes consecrated to the manual copy of such primitive cdicts deposited there, filed as authentic jewels. ethics of knowledge on the shelves of the most prominent cultural center of the ancient world.
It consists in the ancient scattered chronicles that the Books of Hermes, fragmentedly saved, later constituted the spiritual food of philosophers, prophets, pedagogues, scientists, researchers, poets and mystics of all countries in all known cultured languages. The desire for research and study encouraged all those anxious for the truth that were eager to gather knowledge in those clean sources of knowledge, without discrimination of school, tendency, religion, psychology, training or race. Due to that eclectic element prevailing in the best Alexandrian era, we can still take advantage of the ancient offering of those pure teachings.
With regard to the Hermetic Books, Duncan Grenlees cites a passage from Ephraim Syrius, in which it is said that in 365 AD, c. There were several Hermes books in Syria, no doubt translated from Greek or Latin.
Others claim that the first Muslims protected the sect of the hermetic, and that their books were inspired. The truth is that until the eighth century, several fragments could be found in Syria.
The hermetic writer Scott states that in the eleventh century a copy of such books passed to Constantinople, then the capital of Christianity. This copy, it seems, came later to Florence, the center of the rebirth of all classical cultures, especially driven by the hegemony of the Medici and their Neoplatonic School, which attracted the best Asian talents when the Turks invaded Constantinople.
Returning to the Alexandrian period, Jámblico, the great Syrian teacher based in Egypt, affirms that hermetic thought permeated Platonic philosophy at that time.
Subsequently, ignored authors spread Hermes' books in a fragmented and perhaps mystified form, as brief dialogues between Hermes and his son or disciple Tat. Two such dialogue fragments were known as Isis teachings to his son Horus. According to ancient critics, such dialogues were the best because they constituted a faithful translation of the ancient Egyptian original, which is doubtful. However, in such dialogues the Gnostic or Hebrew influence is not noticed, nor the tendencies of other schools of the Alexandrian era. According to this statement, it seems that Plutarch's works on Isis and Osiris, and the same writings of Manethon, the favorite of the second Ptolemy, are inspired by the direct hermetic texts that fed, in turn, the successive copies.
Of all these hermetic books, partially violated their original meaning through time and the exclusive ideological tendencies, the one known as "Asclepius" is of the utmost importance for hermetic students, despite the natural corruptions. It seems that its best part has been compiled under the title of "Pymander" and that it has retained its original breath quite well thanks to having been carefully translated into the demotic or popular hieroglyphic language in the aftermath of the great Egyptian civilization.
