Hermeticism

Hermeticism takes its name from Hermes Trismegistus, “Hermes the Thrice-Great”, a figure who emerged in Graeco-Roman Egypt from the identification of the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth, god of writing and wisdom. Over time he came to be imagined as an ancient human sage who had written down divine teachings. Many Greek texts circulated under his name, from technical works on astrology, magic and alchemy to philosophical and religious dialogues.

The philosophical writings survive mainly in two collections: the Greek treatises known as the Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius. The opening treatise, the Poimandres, describes a vision in which divine Mind reveals how the cosmos came into being and how the soul, having descended into the body, can ascend again. Other dialogues, between Hermes and his disciples Tat, Asclepius and Ammon, teach that God is one and beyond description, that the universe is full of divine life and that the human being, by knowing itself truly, may become united with God. Their themes overlap with Platonism, Stoicism and Jewish thought of the same period.

The texts had a remarkable second life. Around 1460 a Greek manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum reached Florence, and Cosimo de’ Medici asked the scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate it before he finished his work on Plato. Ficino’s Latin version, printed in 1471, was read as a wisdom older than Greek philosophy, part of an “ancient theology” (prisca theologia) that seemed to anticipate Christianity.

Belief in the great antiquity of Hermes did not survive critical scholarship. In 1614 the Swiss-born scholar Isaac Casaubon showed, through vocabulary, style and ideas, that the Corpus Hermeticum was written in the Christian era rather than in the time of Moses. Modern scholars agree that the texts were composed in Greek in Roman Egypt, most probably between the first and third centuries CE, and by more than one author.

Debate has since turned to how Egyptian Hermeticism really was. Earlier scholarship tended to see the texts as Greek philosophy in Egyptian dress. Garth Fowden and others have argued that they also reflect genuine Egyptian priestly traditions. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, which included previously unknown Hermetic works such as the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, revealed something of how Hermetic teaching was practised, with prayers, hymns and stages of instruction leading a pupil towards a vision of the divine.

Whether organised Hermetic communities existed remains uncertain; the evidence points to small circles of teachers and pupils rather than a church or order. Later works attributed to Hermes, such as the Emerald Tablet, known first from Arabic sources, belong to separate and later traditions, even though they share his name.

Renaissance thinkers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and, later, Giordano Bruno combined Hermetic ideas with Platonism and Kabbalah. The historian Frances Yates argued in 1964 that this Hermetic tradition helped shape the Renaissance view of the human being as an active, creative force in the world. Her thesis was influential but has been heavily qualified by later historians, who see Hermetic texts as one ingredient among many rather than a hidden engine of the scientific revolution.

The name of Hermes remained attached to alchemy, known as the “Hermetic art”, and survives in the everyday word “hermetic”, from the airtight seal on an alchemist’s vessel. In the seventeenth century the Rosicrucian manifestos drew on Hermetic language, as did later Masonic and esoteric groups, and in 1888 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn put it into its very title.

Today “Hermeticism” is used both by historians, for the ancient texts and their reception, and by modern practitioners of Western esotericism, who treat it as a living spiritual path. A popular book, The Kybalion (1908), presents seven “Hermetic principles”, though scholars note that it reflects early twentieth-century American New Thought rather than the ancient writings. The phrase “as above, so below”, adapted from the Emerald Tablet, has become a widely quoted summary of the Hermetic idea that the cosmos and the individual mirror each other.