Politesse
Lux Aeterna
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So we have this whole forum on Religious Texts, but seldom a discussion of texts other than the Bible. I thought it would be fun to take a little dive into the esoteric!
The modern history of the Corpus Hermeticum begins in 1471, when Marsilio Ficino working under the auspices of Cosimo de Medici published a Latin translation of the mysterious set of tractates claiming to hail from deep antiquity, originally penned by an author whose name or pseudonym was Hermes Trismegiston: "Hermes, the Thrice Greatest". We know nothing of this author. Many modern Pagans believe that this Hermes was a God in truth; Ficino claimed that he was a philosopher and magician from 1st c. BCE Egypt. It is popular now to accuse Ficino himself or one of the other Medici agents of having written the document, though the work is mentioned in other ancient texts it was seldom quoted, so they may have filled in the blanks. Either way, it is a remarkable book. Primarily a collection of magical spells, writings, and formulae, many works lapse into treatises on the nature of existence. At the heart of it all are two promises. First, that the magician working in earnest and having duly disciplined his mind, there is no limitation on his action because the universe is infinite but it is replicated in the microcosm that is the human soul. Whatever is true of God is also true of us, because our souls are a mirror into the unseen. In Hermes' own aphoristic words: As Above, So Below. There is an ineffable but unbreakable connection between God and Man, and that means that the man whose mind is opened and whose soul is pure has the powers of any god at his disposal. Second, that the practice of magic is more than just a means of accomplishing cheap tricks and needed miracles, though it can do these things, the primary purpose of magic is the utter transformation of Man himself. It makes him into the image of the unseen God. The Hermetic magician, in understanding the universe and the self, is always becoming God.
Given their nature, you may be wondering how these books managed to get published in the first place. There are probably a few factors at play:
They may have regretted it later, though! Once in wide publication, the books had an enormous influence on nearly every esoteric or magical movement that troubled the Vatican for all of the centuries that followed. Giordano Bruno, magician and proto-scientist, made one of Hermes' sermons a cornerstone of his own philosophical writings, leading to a revival of magic that ended only with Bruno's execution by the Holy Office. Martyr to modern pagan and modern scientist alike. Many other alchemists cited it routinely, especially under the cover of coded manuals documenting the path to the Magnum Opus: the Grand Work. You often find oblique references to these works in other books, that do not specify the author but causally drop in well-worn codas like the aforementioned "As Above, So Below". The extent to which the texts were available, even after they became banned in most of Europe, is in some cases surprising. The witch trial years give us a rich window into the life of esoteric communities then in existence. There are references to Healers and Cunningmen in many nations who seem to have had a copy of the supposedly forbidden texts in their libraries, and certain spells and remedies from the collection seem to have been put into real use for medieval patients. When alchemy began to transition to the discipline we now know as chemistry, it lost almost all of its mystical over-structure along the way, but you nevertheless find that the Corpus was as popular on the less public bookshelves of the Enlightenment ponderer as it had been to the medieval tinkerer. The various reconstructionist magical traditions known as Paganism or Neopaganism certainly value Hermes Trismegiston, and he may be responsible or partially responsible for the Neoplatonic edge often found in the philosophies of that tradition. Many of the rituals and spells used by the Order of the Golden Dawn at the beginning of the 20th c. were directly lifted from the Corpus, and thereby passed down to modern Wicca, Feri, Druidry, and many of Western European magickal traditions. The modern revival of Gnostic Christianity, itself inherently Neoplatonic in character, also reveres the texts for obvious reasons, and in my partner's very esoteric church I often hear them cited, sometimes even used in the daily readings. In the secular realm, it was known to both Karl Jung and Sir James Frazer, traveling therefore into the writings of early psychology and folkloristics respectively.
Some other interesting quotations from the anthology:
For further information, everything you could possibly want to read is in here, including the text itself:
http://gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm
-----
What are your thoughts? Had you ever heard of this work before? How valuable is it, if at all, as a philosophical work or commentary? Have you ever practiced European-style magic within modern circles, and if so, do you find the idea of divine Gnosis to be an adequate explanation for why magic exists and its fundamental purpose?
I look forward to your thoughts!
The modern history of the Corpus Hermeticum begins in 1471, when Marsilio Ficino working under the auspices of Cosimo de Medici published a Latin translation of the mysterious set of tractates claiming to hail from deep antiquity, originally penned by an author whose name or pseudonym was Hermes Trismegiston: "Hermes, the Thrice Greatest". We know nothing of this author. Many modern Pagans believe that this Hermes was a God in truth; Ficino claimed that he was a philosopher and magician from 1st c. BCE Egypt. It is popular now to accuse Ficino himself or one of the other Medici agents of having written the document, though the work is mentioned in other ancient texts it was seldom quoted, so they may have filled in the blanks. Either way, it is a remarkable book. Primarily a collection of magical spells, writings, and formulae, many works lapse into treatises on the nature of existence. At the heart of it all are two promises. First, that the magician working in earnest and having duly disciplined his mind, there is no limitation on his action because the universe is infinite but it is replicated in the microcosm that is the human soul. Whatever is true of God is also true of us, because our souls are a mirror into the unseen. In Hermes' own aphoristic words: As Above, So Below. There is an ineffable but unbreakable connection between God and Man, and that means that the man whose mind is opened and whose soul is pure has the powers of any god at his disposal. Second, that the practice of magic is more than just a means of accomplishing cheap tricks and needed miracles, though it can do these things, the primary purpose of magic is the utter transformation of Man himself. It makes him into the image of the unseen God. The Hermetic magician, in understanding the universe and the self, is always becoming God.
Given their nature, you may be wondering how these books managed to get published in the first place. There are probably a few factors at play:
1. The Medici family was extremely powerful and had Papal connections; this was not the only time a Medici scholar got away with something surprising.
2. Theologians before the Reformation Era were less wary of Pagan texts than you might think, especially those of ancient origin. Since the texts were claimed to predate Christianity, in the eyes of many, it was on the same shelf as, say, Plato or Aristotle. The ancients occasionally produced enlightened works, and medieval scholars were allowed to consider them as an artifact of their studies, as long as they did not overtly endorse non-Christian ideas in their own writings and commentaries.
3. The language of the tracts is heavily Neoplatonic. While magic is employed and discussed throughout, and polytheism repeatedly implied, the main thrust of the tractates do not mention gods or spirits as anything other than manifestations of the one Platonic Source from which the universe emanated. Even the Orthodox wing of the Roman church admired and came close to endorsing Neoplatonism as a sort of philosophical precursor to Christianity itself, and it was not unusual for a monkish scholar to cite, say, Porphyry, as long as he clarified that it was the work of a very enlightened pre-Christian Gentile, not the church itself.
2. Theologians before the Reformation Era were less wary of Pagan texts than you might think, especially those of ancient origin. Since the texts were claimed to predate Christianity, in the eyes of many, it was on the same shelf as, say, Plato or Aristotle. The ancients occasionally produced enlightened works, and medieval scholars were allowed to consider them as an artifact of their studies, as long as they did not overtly endorse non-Christian ideas in their own writings and commentaries.
3. The language of the tracts is heavily Neoplatonic. While magic is employed and discussed throughout, and polytheism repeatedly implied, the main thrust of the tractates do not mention gods or spirits as anything other than manifestations of the one Platonic Source from which the universe emanated. Even the Orthodox wing of the Roman church admired and came close to endorsing Neoplatonism as a sort of philosophical precursor to Christianity itself, and it was not unusual for a monkish scholar to cite, say, Porphyry, as long as he clarified that it was the work of a very enlightened pre-Christian Gentile, not the church itself.
They may have regretted it later, though! Once in wide publication, the books had an enormous influence on nearly every esoteric or magical movement that troubled the Vatican for all of the centuries that followed. Giordano Bruno, magician and proto-scientist, made one of Hermes' sermons a cornerstone of his own philosophical writings, leading to a revival of magic that ended only with Bruno's execution by the Holy Office. Martyr to modern pagan and modern scientist alike. Many other alchemists cited it routinely, especially under the cover of coded manuals documenting the path to the Magnum Opus: the Grand Work. You often find oblique references to these works in other books, that do not specify the author but causally drop in well-worn codas like the aforementioned "As Above, So Below". The extent to which the texts were available, even after they became banned in most of Europe, is in some cases surprising. The witch trial years give us a rich window into the life of esoteric communities then in existence. There are references to Healers and Cunningmen in many nations who seem to have had a copy of the supposedly forbidden texts in their libraries, and certain spells and remedies from the collection seem to have been put into real use for medieval patients. When alchemy began to transition to the discipline we now know as chemistry, it lost almost all of its mystical over-structure along the way, but you nevertheless find that the Corpus was as popular on the less public bookshelves of the Enlightenment ponderer as it had been to the medieval tinkerer. The various reconstructionist magical traditions known as Paganism or Neopaganism certainly value Hermes Trismegiston, and he may be responsible or partially responsible for the Neoplatonic edge often found in the philosophies of that tradition. Many of the rituals and spells used by the Order of the Golden Dawn at the beginning of the 20th c. were directly lifted from the Corpus, and thereby passed down to modern Wicca, Feri, Druidry, and many of Western European magickal traditions. The modern revival of Gnostic Christianity, itself inherently Neoplatonic in character, also reveres the texts for obvious reasons, and in my partner's very esoteric church I often hear them cited, sometimes even used in the daily readings. In the secular realm, it was known to both Karl Jung and Sir James Frazer, traveling therefore into the writings of early psychology and folkloristics respectively.
Some other interesting quotations from the anthology:
"As above, so below. As within, so without."
“If then you do not shape of yourself the equal of God, you cannot apprehend God; for like calls to like."
"We know that the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they can demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks: an inane 'fool's wisdom' (this is a Greek pun on 'philosophy') of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches that are but sounds, but rather sounds that are full of (literally, "made of") action.
“Hush, my child, for you are led into error by the appearance of the phenomenon. Living beings do not die, but, being composite bodies, they are dissolved; this is not death but the dissolution of a mixture. If they are dissolved, it is not to be destroyed but to be renewed... Contemplate then the beautiful arrangement of the world and see that it is alive, and that all matter is full of life.”
“The present issues from the past, and the future from the present. Everything is made one by this continuity. Time is like a circle, where all the points are so linked that one cannot say where it begins or ends, for all points precede and follow one another for ever.”
"The world, too, is a god, image of a greater God. United to Him and performing the order and will of the Father, it is the totality of life. There is nothing in it, through all the duration of the cyclic return willed by the all-Fathering, which is not alive. The all-Fathering has willed that the world should be living so long as it keeps its cohesion; hence the world is necessarily God."
“If then you do not shape of yourself the equal of God, you cannot apprehend God; for like calls to like."
"We know that the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they can demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks: an inane 'fool's wisdom' (this is a Greek pun on 'philosophy') of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches that are but sounds, but rather sounds that are full of (literally, "made of") action.
“Hush, my child, for you are led into error by the appearance of the phenomenon. Living beings do not die, but, being composite bodies, they are dissolved; this is not death but the dissolution of a mixture. If they are dissolved, it is not to be destroyed but to be renewed... Contemplate then the beautiful arrangement of the world and see that it is alive, and that all matter is full of life.”
“The present issues from the past, and the future from the present. Everything is made one by this continuity. Time is like a circle, where all the points are so linked that one cannot say where it begins or ends, for all points precede and follow one another for ever.”
"The world, too, is a god, image of a greater God. United to Him and performing the order and will of the Father, it is the totality of life. There is nothing in it, through all the duration of the cyclic return willed by the all-Fathering, which is not alive. The all-Fathering has willed that the world should be living so long as it keeps its cohesion; hence the world is necessarily God."
For further information, everything you could possibly want to read is in here, including the text itself:
http://gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm
-----
What are your thoughts? Had you ever heard of this work before? How valuable is it, if at all, as a philosophical work or commentary? Have you ever practiced European-style magic within modern circles, and if so, do you find the idea of divine Gnosis to be an adequate explanation for why magic exists and its fundamental purpose?
I look forward to your thoughts!
