This is a useful book for the student of the history of magic in the West. Hermes begins as one of the Olympian gods, son of Zeus and Maia, god of thieves, merchants and travelers, messenger of the gods and conductor of souls. However Faivre concentrates on Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice greatest magician and guide for magicians who was credited with the authorship of various hermetic and alchemical texts. The author traces the texts attributed to this figure and the many commentaries on them through the ages. One strand of commentary is that made by those who wish to use the material for their own practice of magic. A different strand is that of those studying beliefs about magic as part of a history of ideas. The book contains a section of plates, all black and white, of images of the mage--most of them illustrations from books, but a few paintings. While one chapter of the book explains each in image in detail it would be more helpful to have the images printed hear their explanatory text rather than grouped together. Some of the reproductions are also hard to make out, being either greatly reduced from their original size or perhaps losing detail in the process of being transferred from one medium to another. The book contains extensive quotations from cited sources and a comprehensive list of sources both original and secondary. I would recommend this book for anyone determined to plunge into the study of the history of hermeticism. It would not be useful as a guide to actual practice. ( )

THE ETERNAL HERMES: FRO GREEK GOD TO ALCHEMICAL MAGUS

PREFACE

The title of this collection encompasses two figures who are both
distinct and complementary: Hermes-Mercurius, the God with the
caduceus, who belongs to Greek and Roman mythology, and
Hermes Trismegistus, whose appearance can be traced back to the
early Alexandian epoch. Each of the six chapters stands on its own,
having been published separately, and deals either with the God
Hermes, or with Hermes Trismegistus-or with both. Given the
similar inspiration running through all six essays, David Fideler
and Joscelyn Godwin suggested that they might constitute an
anthology endowed with some homogeneity. Therefore, for the
purpose of the present edition, the articles in this volume have been
for the most part corrected and enlarged, and their inevitable
overlappings have been reduced. In their original version, they were
published as follows:

Chapter 1: "Hermès," in Dictionnaire des mythes littéraires, ed
Pierre Brunel (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1988), pp.705-732.

Chapter 2: "The Children of Hermes and the Science of Man,
published in English in Hermeticism in the Renaissano
(Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europel,
ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Washington: The
Folger Shakespeare Library; London and Toronto: Associated
Presses, 1988), pp.24-48. From Symposium held in March
1982, at the Institute for Renaissance and Eighteenth Century
Studies in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C

Chapter 3: "D'Hermès-Mercure à Hermès Trismégiste: au
confluent du mythe et du mythique," in Présence d'Hermès
Trismégiste, ed. Antoine Faivre and Frédérick Tristan (Paris
Albin Michel, series "Cahiers de l'Hermétisme," 1988). From
Symposium held in July, 1985, in Cerisy-La-Salle on "The
Myth and the Mythical.'"

Chapter 4: "Présence d'Hermès dans la ville (Le Picatrix, Gustav
Meyrink, Luis Buñuel, George Miller)," in O Imaginário da...

Knowledge of the myths about Hermes is essential to understanding "the long path of the Western imagination, from the Middle Ages to the present." The appeal of Hermes/Mercury is not difficult to grasp, but his complexity is astonishing. He has been recognized through the ages variously as messenger of the gods, a psychopomp (i.e., conductor of souls), discoverer of the arts and sciences, inventor of the seven-stringed lyre, the master of knowledge, master of words (see Acts 14) and other things.

During the Middle Ages his Greco-Roman mythology became entwined with lore about a figure known as Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice-great Hermes"), a sage of ancient Alexandria who was credited with authoring many books that have been handed down under the rubric Hermetica, the most famous being the Corpus Hermeticum. This book appears to be at the very core of esoteric learning from the Renaissance forward.

The Eternal Hermes is a collection of six essays about the many and varied roles played by Hermetic lore in the course of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic and even the Symbolist era. The book is largely historiographical and amounts to a survey of the literature—mostly in French and German—from ancient times to the present. Once again, it is a bit of a slog getting through it all, but it is useful especially for the bibliographic essay at the end.

After the Corpus Hermeticum was discovered during the early Italian Renaissance, it was translated by Marsilio Ficino, and soon thereafter was appropriated to a large degree by scholars and adepts who were interested in alchemy, Kabbalah and other esoteric pursuits.

In the course of reading, I leaned a few things that were quite surprising. For instance, I did not know that the Greeks in the third century B.C. "saw the gods as actual human beings who were divinized after death." This deification of humans is known as "euhemerism," and it led to a belief in Hermes as a historic figure who had been deified. This helps to explain how the Greek god Hermes became conflated with a supposedly historical figure Hermes Trismegistus.

Considering the scholarly nature of this book, I will give it three stars. It is not exactly beach reading, although it is very interesting for what it is. ( )