Hermes Trismegistus

"Who shall call his dreams fallacious?

Who has searched or sought

All the unexplored and spacious

Universe of thought?

Who, in his own skill confiding,

Shall with rule and line

Mark the border-land dividing

Human and divine?

Trismegistus! three times greatest!

How thy name sublime

Has descended to this latest

Progeny of time!

Happy they whose written pages

Perish with their lives,

If amid the crumbling ages

Still their name survives!"

excerpt from Hermes Trismegistus

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thoth is the Greek name for the Egyptian God Tehuti. He is depicted as having the body of a man and the head of an ibis. Tehuti also aided in the judgment of the dead in the hall of Maat. He is related to Hermes Trismegistus, the merging of Tehuti with the Greek god Hermes. The name Hermes Trismegistus translates from Greek to English as "thrice great Hermes," and he is credited with invention of the spoken and written word, astronomy, astrology, geometry, and medicine.

Hermes Trismegistus was believed to be the author of thousands of sacred texts known as the Hermetica. The Hermetica cover a wide range of subjects including magic and ritual incantation. These texts form the basis of the ancient and present study of Alchemy, a spiritual discipline in which the practioner attempts to transform the dross of his/her worldly self to the gold of his/her higher consciousness, thereby attaining enlightenment.

Among the most important of the Hermetic texts is The Emerald Tablet, thought to be the revelation of Hermes Trismegistus containing a direct recipe for transmutation. The Emerald Tablet was translated by many scholars, including Isaac Newton. One of the most known bits of wisdom contained within the Emerald Tablet is "as above, so below." In other words, our dimension is composed of the same possibilities and magnificence as the heavenly realms.

The Emerald Tablet, along with many other Hermetic writings and hundreds of important spiritual works from many different religions can be found on the web at The Internet Sacred Text Archive.