Christian H. Bull

Christian H. Bull is a leading contemporary scholar of ancient religion and Western Esotericism. His 2018 book, The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom, serves as the definitive modern update to Fowden's thesis.

The Priestly Authorship Thesis

Bull forcefully argues that the authors of the Hermetica were actual, ethnically Egyptian priests of Thoth (acting in temples at places like Hermopolis). Confronted by the cultural dominance of the Greeks and later the Romans, these priests translated their indigenous theology—specifically the Memphite theology of creation via the heart and tongue (Nous and Logos)—into the language of Middle Platonism.

The "Way of Hermes"

Bull reconstructs the "Way of Hermes" as a graduated initiatory path. Neophytes began with the "General Discourses" to purify the mind, advanced to the "Detailed Discourses" mapping the cosmos, and culminated in the ecstatic, silent union with the divine mind (the Ogdoadic revelation), often facilitated by temple rituals like statue animation.