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The Great Initiates – Edouard Schuré

The ‘black’ race that succeeded the southern ‘red’ race in dominion over the world, made Upper Egypt its main sanctuary. The name Hermes-Toth, that mysterious first initiator of Egypt into the sacred doctrine, doubtless refers to an initial, peaceful mixture of the 'white' race and the 'black' race in the regions of Ethiopia and upper Egypt, long before the Aryan period.

Hermes is a generic name like Manu and Buddha. It designates a human being, a caste and a god at the same time.

As a human being, Hermes is the first and great initiator of Egypt; as a caste, Hermes is the priesthood, the depositary of esoteric traditions; as a god, Hermes is the planet Mercury including in its sphere a category of spirits and divine initiators; in brief, Hermes presides in the supra-terrestrial region of celestial initiation.

In the spiritual economy of the world all these things are bound together by secret affinities as by an invisible thread.

The name Hermes is a talisman that sums them up, a maglc sound that calls them forth. Hence its prestige. The Greeks, disciples of the Egyptians, called him Hermes Trismegistus, or three times great, because he was considered king, legislator and priest. He typifies a period when priesthood, magistrate and royalty were united in a single governing body.

Manetho’s Egyptian chronology calls this period the reign of the gods.

At that time there was neither papyrus nor phonetic writing, but sacred ideography already existed; the science of the priesthood was inscribed in hieroglyphs on the columns and walls of the crypts, considerably improved, it later passed into the temple libraries.