The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind

Garth Fowden is a scholar of late antiquity, and this Cambridge University Press book is his standard scholarly study of the Hermetica and Hermeticism situated within their actual late-antique Egyptian and Greco-Roman historical context. Its strength is that Fowden establishes, against the Hermetica's own traditional claim of vast Egyptian antiquity, that modern scholarship dates the surviving texts to the early centuries CE, grounding the tradition in its real historical setting rather than its own legendary self-presentation. Its limit is that as a critical academic history it deliberately does not endorse the Hermetica's traditional claims about its own origin, so a claim describing the tradition's own self-understanding needs to be attributed to the tradition rather than to Fowden's historical account.