_Hermetic literature_.--The strangest and most interesting manifestation that the ancient records have preserved for us of this fusion of Hellenic culture and Oriental religious sentiment is presented by the Hermetic literature. The origins of this fantastic product of the human mind are traced by Professor Petrie[149.1] back to the sixth or fifth centuries B.C. But, though much of it is pre-Christian, its philosophic diction proves that it cannot be earlier than 300 B.C., and the bulk of it is probably later.[149.2] A frequent Hermetic formula, addressed to the deity--ἐγώ εἰμι σὺ καὶ σὺ ἐγώ, “I am Thou and Thou art I”--may be taken as the master-word of these hieratic writings. This unnatural alliance between Greek philosophy and Oriental mystic theosophy is a momentous phenomenon of later Paganism; and the study of the origins of Christian metaphysic is much concerned with it. Such theosophy had a natural affinity with magic; and magic, always a power in an age of intellectual decay, begins to be most powerful in this latest age of Hellenism. It is a just reproach that Augustine brings against Porphyry, the most notable of the Neoplatonists that he ‘wavered between philosophy and a sacrilegious curiosity,’ that is, a vicious interest in the black art.[149.3] In these strange forms of faith and speculation the clearness and sanity of the pure Hellenic intellect appear clouded and troubled, the lineaments of the {150} old types of the Hellenic thought and imagination almost effaced. And the learning and science of the Hellenistic age stood mainly aloof from the religious forces that moved the masses of the people. _Daimonism_.--The mystic and theosophic literature of the Hellenistic and Græco-Roman period was markedly ‘daimonistic,’ being infected with the polydaimonism of the East and positing the existence of good and evil ‘daimones’ as a metaphysic dogma. We can trace a corresponding change in the popular Hellenic imagination. In the earlier period, as has been shown, the native Hellene was, as compared with other races, fairly strong-minded in respect of the terrors of the demon-world; but the later people of the Greek area were certainly tainted in some degree with this unfortunate superstition of the East, and various forms of exorcism, conjuration and evocation became more prevalent. The modern Greek temperament appears to be morbidly possessed with this disease[150.1]; and we may suppose that the germs have been inherited and developed from this last period of the old civilisation.