Hermeticism

What it is

The body of teaching attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — Hermes the Thrice-Great — a syncretic figure combining the Greek Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth, god of writing and wisdom, and presented as an ancient Egyptian sage.

The material divides into two kinds, and both matter:

Philosophical Hermetica — cosmological and salvific texts, chiefly the Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius. Their subject is the structure of the cosmos, the nature of God and mind, and the ascent of the soul through the planetary spheres to its origin. Salvation comes through gnosis — knowledge, in the sense of realisation rather than information.

Technical Hermetica — a much larger and less studied body of practical writing on astrology, alchemy, medicine and magic, also circulating under Hermes' name.

Its most quoted line comes from the Emerald Tablet, a short later text of Arabic origin: as above, so below — the doctrine of correspondence between the cosmos and everything within it.

Where it came from

The texts were composed in Greek in Roman Egypt, most probably between the first and third centuries CE, in an environment where Greek philosophy, Egyptian religion, Jewish thought and early Christianity were all in circulation.

What happened next is the important part.

In about 1460 a Byzantine manuscript of the Corpus reached Florence. Cosimo de' Medici instructed Marsilio Ficino, then engaged in translating the complete works of Plato, to stop and translate Hermes first. Ficino did, publishing in 1471.

The reason for the urgency was chronological. On the accepted account, Hermes Trismegistus was a contemporary of Moses or earlier — an Egyptian sage who had received the same divine wisdom independently. That made these texts a prisca theologia, an ancient theology predating and confirming Christianity, and made their agreement with Christian doctrine miraculous rather than derivative.

For a century and a half this was the intellectual foundation of Renaissance magic and much of its philosophy. Pico della Mirandola built on it. Giordano Bruno took it to conclusions that contributed to his being burned in Rome in 1600.

Then in 1614 Isaac Casaubon read the Greek. In a work on ecclesiastical history he demonstrated, on linguistic and stylistic grounds, that these texts could not be ancient Egyptian: they used vocabulary, forms and philosophical terminology characteristic of the early Christian centuries. They quoted Greek philosophy. Their agreement with Christian doctrine was not miraculous anticipation but ordinary contemporaneity.

The demonstration was correct and it was devastating. Hermeticism's prestige collapsed within a generation, and Casaubon's argument is a founding achievement of modern philology — one of the first cases of a text being dated and a tradition undone by close reading alone.

How it is practised

The philosophical Hermetica describe a path of contemplative ascent rather than a ritual system: the mind purified of bodily concern, rising through the spheres, shedding at each the vice associated with that planet, until it reaches the eighth sphere and beyond.

Later practitioners took the technical Hermetica in an operative direction — talismans, planetary magic, the drawing down of celestial influence — and it is that strand that runs into Renaissance magic and onward into the Golden Dawn.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the dating is settled. These are Graeco-Egyptian texts of the Roman period, not Pharaonic wisdom.

We can say the picture has become more interesting since Casaubon rather than less. Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes (1986) argued that although the texts are Greek in composition, they draw on genuinely Egyptian religious material and reflect a real Egyptian milieu. So Casaubon was right about the date and the Renaissance was not entirely wrong about the Egypt — the texts are late, and they are not simply Greek philosophy in fancy dress.

We can say the influence is enormous and largely invisible. "As above, so below" is probably the single most repeated sentence in modern spiritual writing, and almost nobody using it knows it comes from a short Arabic-transmitted text attached to a Graeco-Egyptian corpus.

We can say Newton belongs in this story. His alchemical and theological manuscripts — around a million words, largely unpublished until the twentieth century — show him working within this tradition seriously. Keynes, who bought a large portion of the papers at auction in 1936, concluded that Newton was not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians. That judgement is too neat, and it points at something real: the boundary that makes the Principia science and the alchemy embarrassing was drawn after Newton, not by him.

We cannot say what the Hermetic texts are ultimately worth as philosophy. What can be said is that they were believed for a century and a half to be something they were not, that a single careful reader established otherwise, and that this is one of the clearest demonstrations in intellectual history of what scholarship is for.

Further reading

• Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica (1992) — the standard English translation with commentary.
• Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (1986).
• Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text (1991) — on Casaubon and what philology did.