authorised them to inscribe their own commentaries with the name of Hermes. He may also be considered analogous to the "septenary intellectual agents" of modern philosophers. "These are called by Hesiod guardians of mankind, bestowers of wealth, and royal demons; are described by Plato as a middle order of beings between the Gods and men, ministering to their wants, carrying the prayers of mortals to heaven, and bringing down in return oracles and all other blessings of life." *

According to the fabulous account of the Egyptian Mercury, "he was reported to have invented letters †, regulated the language, given names to many things, and taught men the proper mode of approaching the Deity with prayers and sacrifice. He instructed them in the system of the stars, and the harmony and nature of voices. He was the inventor of the palestra, and of the lyre, to which he gave three strings, in accordance with the three seasons of the Egyptian year; the treble to correspond to summer, the bass to winter, the tenor to spring. He was the patron of elocution, whence called Hermes, the interpreter,' by the Greeks. In the sacred rites of Osiris he was represented as the scribe of the Deity, and his counsellor; and it was to him that the Egyptians supposed mankind indebted for the olive, and not to Minerva, as is the opinion of the Greeks."‡ He was distinct from the Mercury, who ushered the souls of the dead into the region of Hades, answering to the Anubis of Egypt, as already stated;

*Plut. s. 26.; suprà, Vol. I. (2d Series) p. 222. + Conf. Plato, Phileb. p. 374.

Diodor. i. 16.

and also from Hermes Trismegistus, whom I shall have occasion to mention presently.

The circumstance of the God Lunus being the dispenser of time, and represented noting off years upon the palm branch, appears to argue that the Egyptians, in former times, calculated by lunar instead of solar years; and the hieroglyphic of a month, which is a lunar crescent, shows their months to have been originally regulated by the course of the moon. *

I have once met with the figure of an Ibis-headed Deity as a female†, but I am uncertain respecting the character and office of that Goddess, nor is it certain that the name of Thoth was applied to her. Thoth at the temple of Samneh appears to be styled the son of Neph.

According to Cicero ‡, the Greeks reckoned in their mythology five Mercuries; "one the son of Heaven and the Day Another of Valens and Phoronis, the same who is beneath the Earth, and called Trophonius. A third the son of the third Jupiter and Maia, and who is said to have begotten Pan by Penelope. A fourth the son of the Nile, whom the Egyptians consider it unlawful to name. A fifth, worshipped by the Pheneatæ, who is said to have slain Argus, and on that account to have fled to Egypt, and to have given laws and letters to the Egyptians. He was styled by them Thoyth, and bore the same name as the first month of their

* Vide suprà, Vol. I. (2d Series) p. 13.

A green porcelain figure in the possession of Chevalier Kestner, the Hanoverian minister at Rome.

year." Of the two last, the former was probably Anubis, whom, in his mysterious office connected with Osiris and the final judgment of the dead, it may have been unlawful to mention; and the latter, the Ibis-headed Deity Thoth, in his character of the dispenser of intellectual gifts to man, and the God of Letters.

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.

The epithet Trismegistus, "thrice great," has been applied by some to Thoth; but the Deity here represented is shown by numerous Greek inscriptions upon his temple at Pselcis to have been distinguished from the God of Letters by this name, with the additional title, "Lord of Pautnouphis."

Much confusion has arisen in consequence of these two Deities having the name Hermes; many having ascribed to Trismegistus the honour of inventing letters, which in reality belongs to Thoth alone, as the monuments of Egypt prove beyond the possibility of doubt.

The temple of Pselcist, now Dakkeh, in Nubia, was erected by the Ethiopian king Ergamun, a contemporary of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and completed by the Lagidæ, in honour of this Hermes. On the towers of the area, and in the portico,

numerous Greek inscriptions; the general

* Or even Thoth, as scribe of Amenti. Vide suprà, Vol. I. (2d Series) p. 441.

Pselcis was probably called from the Goddess Selk, if we may judge from a legend given in pl. 15. of M. Champollion's

Pantheon.

purport of which is that the writers came and "adored the very great God Hermes," (frequently with the title)" Pautnouphis."

The name Pautnouphis probably refers to the town of which he was the presiding Deity, since the name in hieroglyphics, Taut-n-pnoubs, or Tautñ-pa-noubs, is followed by the sign of land and the female sign; which last may perhaps be read as part of the name, making it Taut-ñ-pa-t-noubs. A tree also seems to be a demonstrative sign accompanying the name, as if it ended with "the land of the tree." The word Nouphis, however, does not appear to connect him with Neph, the great God of this part of the country; nor does his hieroglyphic legend, Taut-n-pnoubs, apply to the town of Pnoups, which was much farther to the south, probably at Samneh, placed by Ptolemy in lat. 22°, and opposite Tasitia. We might even suppose the word Paut-nouphis to be a corruption of Taut-nouphis. But I cannot agree with the ingenious Champollion *, in reading it "Pahit-nouf" ("celui dont le cœur est bon"), especially as the Greek inscriptions write the name Paut-nouphis, even in the oblique cases, proving that s is the Egyptian, and not the Greek termination.

The Ibis was sacred to him as to Thoth, of whom, indeed, he may possibly be an emanation ; to its perch is attached an ostrich feather, the emblem of Truth, which, like the head-dress he wears of four plumes, belongs also to the God Ao. In his hand he frequently bears a staff, surmounted by the head of a hawk, the emblem of Re, with a snake

twined round it, accompanied by a scorpion, the symbol of the Goddess Selk. From this the idea of the caduceus of Mercury may have been derived, signifying, as some suppose, prudence. In the opinion of many writers, as Eusebius, Psellus, and others, Hermes Trismegistus was a priest and philosopher, who lived a little after the time of Moses, and taught his countrymen mensuration, theology, medicine, and geography, upon which subjects he wrote forty-two books. According to others, he was a cotemporary of Osiris; but this fable is contradicted by the fact of no Egyptian individual having been raised to the order of Gods. It is possible that the works of some philosopher (perhaps of the same name, the Egyptians having the custom of forming the names of individuals from those of their Gods) may have been ascribed in after times, through the ignorance of the Greeks, to a Deity, who was, in fact, no other than the abstract quality of the understanding, the supposed cause of that success which the human mind obtained on the various subjects they ascribed to him.*

Their motive for separating this Hermes from Thoth it is difficult to ascertain. It was probably one of those subtle distinctions which philosophy had established, and religion had deified as a separate attribute of the divine wisdom, as modern inquiries have shown the difference between the understanding and the reasoning faculty.

"The principal books of this Hermes," according to Clemens † of Alexandria, "forty-two

* Vide suprà, p. 9.

+ Clem. Alex. Strom. lib. vi. p. 196.