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The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science. By kevin van bladel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 296 pp. $74.00 (cloth).
Only a few other fictive personalities left such a lasting mark on Eurasian and North African cultures as did Hermes Trismegistus. He shows up in the imagination of ancient and medieval peoples of the Near East, North Africa, Europe, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and beyond as a god, sage, prophet, scientist, possessor of occult knowledge, and the author of numerous works ranging from chemistry and medicine to talismans and divine revelations, who lived either before or after the Deluge. Hermetic thought currents (sometimes religion and other times philosophy) and literature attributed to this persona figured prominently in not only late antique thought in its pagan, Christian, and Islamic varieties, but also in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic occultism since medieval times. Not surprisingly, therefore, Hermes has been a subject of much scholarly as well as popular interest in the twentieth century. Yet, we still lack the necessary groundwork that would allow us a more nuanced and elaborate understanding of Hermes and Hermetica, and illuminate better the cross-cultural interactions on the vast geography of Eurasia and North Africa. By studying the representations of Hermes in the vast medieval Arabic literary corpus, Kevin van Bladel addresses a significant gap in our knowledge. The author should be commended for such a competent artisanship.
Divided into six chapters in two parts (the introduction and conclusion included) The Arabic Hermes represents the author's response to the following questions: Who did early Arabic writers think Hermes Trismegistus was, and how did they arrive at this concept? The introduction, a historiographical review (on this there will be more later), offers a brief survey of the reception of Hermes in Latin Europe and antiquity to ease the reader into the main subject of the study, the Arabic reception of Hermes. Given the terminological confusion in scholarship, the author duly clarifies in the introduction how he uses "Hermetism," "Hermetic," and "Hermetic tradition," which I will not indulge in this review.
Chapter 2 argues that the earliest Arabic image of Hermes originated in Sasanian Iran in Middle Persian translations of Hermetica, by and large concerned with astrology, which explains why his name was first...