Hermeticism is built on the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, a supposed ancient prophet who combined the wisdom of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.

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Hermeticism is built on the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, a supposed ancient prophet who combined the wisdom of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Renaissance scholars believed his texts, the Hermetica, were written at the dawn of time and contained the purest, original magic of the universe that anticipated Christianity. Later linguistic analysis brutally crushed this fantasy by proving the texts were actually written by various anonymous Greek authors in the second and third centuries AD, long after the philosophical concepts were already popular. An entire esoteric tradition that influenced alchemists, magicians, and secret societies for centuries was basically built on a piece of historically inaccurate fan-fiction