Near the end of Codex VI of the Nag Hammadi library, a scribe stops copying and writes a note to whoever ordered the book. It reads a lot like the sticky note you’d leave on a stack of photocopies for a coworker:

“I have copied this one of his discourses. A great many have come into my hands, but I have not copied them because I thought they were already in your possession. I even hesitate to copy these things for you, since perhaps you may already have received them and the matter may annoy you.”

“His discourses” means the discourses of Hermes Trismegistus. The scribe had a pile of them, assumed the reader already owned most, and worried about sending duplicates. So whoever collected the books that ended up buried beside the Gospel of Thomas wasn’t stumbling onto Hermes for the first time. They were a regular reader.

Three Strangers in Codex VI

When the jar was dug up near Nag Hammadi in 1945, most of what came out was Christian, and a lot of it was Gnostic. Codex VI is the odd book on the shelf. It holds Thunder: Perfect Mind and a scrap of Plato’s Republic, and then it closes with three texts in a row that never mention Jesus at all.

  • The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. A teacher called Hermes leads a student he calls “my child” through an initiation. Nobody had seen this text before Nag Hammadi.
  • The Prayer of Thanksgiving. A short hymn that follows the Discourse. It also turns up in a Greek magical papyrus and at the end of the Latin Asclepius, so it clearly got around.
  • An Excerpt from the Perfect Discourse. A Coptic translation of the middle of a longer Hermetic dialogue that Latin readers knew as the Asclepius.

If you read my older post on Thoth the Atlantean, you’ve met Hermes Trismegistus already. He’s the Greek god Hermes merged with Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, and “Thrice-Greatest” is his title. A body of Greek writings in his name circulated in Roman Egypt. These three are part of it, and they’re the best way I know to see where the Hermetic and Gnostic traditions touch.

A Teacher, a Student, and a Kiss

The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth is the one I keep going back to. It opens mid-conversation, with the student reminding Hermes that yesterday he promised to take his mind “to the eighth stage” and then on to the ninth.

Those numbers come from ancient astronomy. Seven planets were thought to circle the earth, each in its own sphere, and each one held a piece of human fate. The eighth sphere sat above all seven, out of their reach, and the ninth was closer still to God. Rising to the Eighth and Ninth meant getting free of the planets and everything they controlled.

Jean-Pierre Mahé, who introduces the text in Meyer’s edition, points out an Egyptian layer under the astronomy. Thoth was called “the lord of the city of the Eight,” Hermopolis, whose Coptic name comes from the word for eight. The Discourse even ends with orders to carve the book in hieroglyphs on turquoise steles, watched over by guards with the faces of frogs and cats.

Most of what happens in between is prayer. The two pray together, Hermes says “let us embrace in love,” and then the vision comes over him in short, broken sentences.

“I see myself,” he says. “I wish to speak. Fear seizes me.” He tells the student that the souls and angels in the eighth “sing a hymn in silence.”

The student asks the obvious question, which is how anyone sings through silence. Hermes doesn’t explain. He tells him to try it. A few lines later the student is praying on his own, and he lands on the same words his teacher used: “I see myself.”

I love that the peak of the whole initiation is a person seeing himself. Any reader of the Gospel of Thomas will hear the echo. “When you know yourselves,” Jesus says in saying 3, “then you will be known.”

Mind, Word, and Knowledge

After the vision comes the Prayer of Thanksgiving. It’s short enough to read in a minute, and the center of it is this:

“it grants us mind, word, and knowledge:
mind, that we may understand you,
word, that we may interpret you,
knowledge, that we may know you.
We are happy,
enlightened by your knowledge.”

Mahé reads the three gifts as stages on a road. Words can take you partway toward the truth, and mind has to carry you the rest of the way. Knowledge is where you arrive, and the prayer is pretty clear that it’s a kind of knowing that changes you. A few lines later it says, “While we were in the body, you have made us divine through your knowledge.”

That phrase “in the body” stops me every time. The change happens now, in this life, with skin on. And the scene doesn’t end on a mountaintop. It ends with the line, “When they prayed and said these things, they embraced and went to eat their sacred bloodless food.”

Where Hermes and the Gnostics Agree

You can see why a Gnostic reader would have wanted these pages. The Prayer of Thanksgiving says, “The thanksgiving of one approaching you is this alone: that we know you.” Change a few nouns and that line could sit in the Gospel of Truth. Both traditions believed that knowing God, and knowing yourself, was what actually saves.

They also share a map. In the oath at the end of the Discourse, Hermes swears by “seven rulers of substance.” A Gnostic reader would hear archons, the planetary powers who guard the heavens and hold the soul down.

Gnostic ascent texts teach the soul passwords to get past those rulers one by one. The Hermetic student gets past them with prayer and a teacher’s embrace, and both are headed for the same eighth sphere.

Where They Part Ways

Then you read the Perfect Discourse and the agreement starts to crack. At one point Asclepius asks the question every Gnostic would answer differently: “Trismegistus, is the world good?”

“Yes, Asclepius, it is good,” Hermes says. Elsewhere he calls it “the beautiful world of God, an incomparable work.” The power that rules between heaven and earth here is called Zeus, “which means life,” and nobody accuses him of arrogance or blindness. There’s no prison in this cosmos and no jailer.

The Perfect Discourse goes further and defends the temple statues of Egypt. People “create gods,” Hermes says. Asclepius, a little alarmed, asks, “you are not talking about idols, are you?” Hermes scolds him for calling them idols.

Then Hermes predicts a day when Egypt’s gods will leave, and its land “will not be full of temples but of tombs.”

I don’t know how that read to a Christian in a century when the church was replacing the old temple religion. Maybe as a prophecy that had come true. Maybe as a warning about what gets lost when one faith clears away another.

Why a Christian Kept These

We don’t know for sure who owned the Nag Hammadi books. The common guess links them to monks living nearby, and plenty of scholars doubt even that. So any answer here is partly a guess.

Mine is that the collector cared about the climb more than the label on it. Mahé notes that Hermetic writers saw no wall between Egyptian and Jewish wisdom at all, since in their telling Moses had been a student of Hermes. Someone who read that way could put a Hermetic initiation next to a Gnostic gospel without feeling any contradiction. Both were about a soul getting out from under the planets and seeing itself clearly.

The disagreement about the world didn’t seem to bother them either. I find that freeing. You can take what a text teaches about prayer and leave its cosmology on the table.

Try It at Sunset

Before the prayer, the Latin Asclepius gives an instruction. When someone wants to pray at sunset, “he should direct his gaze to that quarter, and likewise at sunrise toward the direction they call east.” For one week, try it. Face the light as the sun goes down and read the Prayer of Thanksgiving slowly, out loud if you can.

Then do what the student did, and sit without words for two minutes afterward. Notice which of the three gifts you lean on most. For me it’s word, every time, which is probably why the silence is hard.

Hermes could have let the Discourse end with the vision, two figures alone above the planets. Instead it ends with a hug and dinner.

The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth (NHC VI,6), the Prayer of Thanksgiving with its copyist’s note (NHC VI,7), and the Excerpt from the Perfect Discourse (NHC VI,8) are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), along with Jean-Pierre Mahé’s introductions to all three, which supply the sunset rubric from Asclepius 41. Gospel of Thomas saying 3 is quoted from Meyer’s translation in the same volume.