THE TRIUMPH OF HERMES

Eighty years after the rediscovery of the lost books of Hermes, Copernicus gave pride of place to the legendary Egyptian sage in his own seminal work on the movements of the planets. But why?

It is hardly surprising that Copernicus was familiar with the Hermetica, having studied in Rome and Padua in the 1480s and 90s, where it was on everyone�s lips. But evidence suggests that the works meant considerably more to him than mere intellectual fashion. The debt Copernicus owed to the Hermetica is demonstrated by the fact that the three revolutionary ideas he was to famously propose � the Earth�s motion in space, its rotation on its own axis and the orbiting of the Earth and other planets around the sun � all appeared in the Hermetica.

Asclepius, for example, provides the following statement in the middle of a discourse on �classes�, or archetypes:

The class persists, begetting copies of itself as often, as many and as diverse as the rotation of the world has moments. As it rotates the world changes, but the class neither changes nor rotates.32