The Historical Background of Hermeticism

Hermes & Thoth

Hermeticism takes its name from the God Hermes Trismegistos or Thrice-Greatest Hermes. Trismegistos, in turn, was so-called because of His identification with the great Egyptian God of Wisdom and Magic, Thoth. Thôth is a Greek attempt to phonetically render Tehuti, the late antique form of the very ancient Egyptian name Djehuti. In an effort to express Tehuti’s majesty, when writing His name Egyptian scribes would often append the epithet Ao, Ao, Ao (literally "Great, Great, Great," meaning "Greatest"). Greeks and Greek-speaking Egyptians translated the Egyptian epithet as Trismegistos, also using it for ‘their’ Thoth — Hermes.

Just as Thoth was considered the all-wise font of sacred knowledge and author of all sacred books in Egypt, so in the Græco-Roman world, and later, in Renaissance Europe, Hermes Trismegistos was considered to be an unimpeachable authority on things sacred and author of the influential body of literature known as the Hermetica.

Hermetic Syncretism

Hermetism (the original Hermetic source from which the broader tradition of Hermeticism derives) was one of the many products of the meeting of the ancient Hellenic and Egyptian cultures in the centuries surrounding the beginning of the Common Era. Hermetism, described most simply, combined Egyptian and Greek theology, philosophy, and spiritual practice. But of course, it was not that simple.

Perhaps the principle reason the origin of Hermetism is complex is that it found its most fertile home in the great syncretic Græco-Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria, when that city was the cultural capital of the Mediterranean under the Pax Romana. Religious and philosophical wisdom flowed from many cultures into the city, the great spiritual Krater or Mixing Bowl which gave birth to the new synthesis of religion, philosophy, and practice which was Hermetism. Nominally Egyptian, and attributed to the Egyptian God Thoth in the guise of an enlightened ancient master, the Hermetic elixir was composed of ingredients from all the great Traditions active in Alexandria. To the millennia-rich stock of Egyptian religion, philosophy, and magic were added many elements from Greek Paganism (itself influenced throughout its development by Egypt, Anatolia, Phoenicia, and Syria), particularly the Mysteries and the philosophical schools of Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, and Neo-Pythagorism; Alexandrian Judaism, with its Angelology, Magic, and deep reverence for the sacred Book; the many forms of Christianity (Gnostic and otherwise); Persian Zoroastrianism, with its deep concern with good and evil; as well as the new developments springing up alongside Hermetism and cross-fertilizing with it, such as Alchemy and Iamblichan Theurgy.

Modern Hermeticism maintains this spiritual eclecticism, exploring and assimilating what is compatible and valuable from the Traditions with which it comes into contact, and sharing its own insights with other Traditions.

Hermetic Philosophies

There was almost certainly not a single late antique Hermetic School; the conspicuous philosophical diversity in the surviving Hermetic treatises seems to preclude this. Instead the writings of the early Hermetists display the same independent spirit we recognize among members of the alternative spirituality community today. Probably they studied together in small groups, often with a single teacher and a group of students, on the model of the Hellenic philosophical schools. Some Hermetists, inspired by the Divine, inevitably added their own new insights and revelations to the Hermetic teachings. As do modern Hermeticists, the ancient Hermetists considered their Tradition a living, evolving Path, changing to reflect the results of their search for Divine Truth — not merely as an abstract philosophical concept, but as a very real, very personal part of their spiritual lives.

Hermeticism Banished — and Returned

When Christianity was adopted as the official state religion of the Roman Empire, Hermetism was suppressed along with the whole vast range of non-Christian religions, cults, sects, and schools that had flourished in the Empire, as well as the many forms of Christianity now perceived as competitors with the wealthy and powerful Church of Rome.

Yet, against all odds, some few of the Hermetic books dealing with philosophy, mysticism, and particularly those dealing with Alchemy, were preserved through the long Middle Ages by scholars and collectors in Greek Byzantium.

The group of texts now known as the Corpus Hermeticum finally returned to the Latin West during the Italian Renaissance when the Florentine philosopher prince Cosimo de Medici obtained a set of manuscripts from one of his agents in the Greek East and commissioned the scholar, priest, magician, and philosopher Marsilio Ficino to translate the Corpus into Latin.

Yet these were, after all, Pagan texts. How was it that these Pagan scriptures could be even passably acceptable in the very Christian world of Renascimento Italy? The solution was in the form of a fortuitous mistake. Two centuries before the advent of European textual criticism, Ficino and the other Renaissance philosophers, magicians, and artists who studied the Hermetic texts accepted the largely legendary pseudo-historical milieu claimed for themselves by the Hermetica (much as Biblical scholars for centuries uncritically accepted late pseudepigraphic texts as ancient history) and believed that the Hermetic texts were far more ancient than they actually were. Ficino therefore believed that Hermetic philosophy was an ancient forerunner of Christianity rather than its contemporary. So when the Hermetic texts showed influence from Jewish or Christian myth, this was understood not as the syncretism of a late age, but as the prophetic prefiguring of an earlier one. As such, the Hermetica could be viewed as predicting the supposed triumph of Christianity and their obvious Paganism forgiven, just as the Hebrew "Old Testament" could justifiably, in spite of its Judaism, be studied by Christians for its Messianic prophecies, all of course applied to Jesus by the Church.

Because of this mistaken assumption of prophetic antiquity, conjoined with the self-proclaimed Orphic Ficino’s simultaneous re-interpretation of Magic in a much brighter and less controversial form than that of the Mediæval period (which itself contained many clandestinely preserved elements of Hermetism), the new figure of the Hermetic Renaissance Magus entered the cultural consciousness of the era. Ficino’s ‘Natural Magic’ moved out of the shadows of the grimoires and once more into the light of general philosophical and theological consideration. A student at Ficino’s Florentine Platonic Academy, the brilliant and daring enfant terrible Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, added the crucial catalytic element of the Jewish Qabalah to the new Pagan-Christian Hermetic amalgam, and transformed Hermetism forever. It is here that Hermeticism was born of ancient Hermetism, once more entering into a syncretic union, this time with Christianity, Renaissance Neo-Classicism and Humanism, Natural Magic, and Qabalah.

The resulting vigorous Hermetic influence spreading out from the court of the Medicis and the Academy of Ficino clearly served as one of the most potent inspirations for the spiritual, artistic, and scientific renewal of the Renaissance.

Hermeticism as Western Esoteric Tradition

In addition to the religious and philosophical traditions already mentioned, Hermeticism has of course included the beauty of Rosicrucianism since the 17th century, and has illuminated the symbolic ritual of Freemasonry since the 18th. It was the motivating force behind the foundation of the most influential esoteric schools of the fin de siecle — Theosophy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Martinism of Papus — and the great Occult Revival to which they gave birth, and has strongly influenced the 20th-century Pagan Renaissance.

The profoundly influential work of psychologist C.G. Jung may also reasonably be considered a Hermetic legacy with its Alchemical symbolism, god-like archetypes, and concern with the subtle realms of the psyche. Letters survive in which a correspondent reported to Jung that she had come across the concepts of Animus and Anima in the 18th-century British novel Tristram Shandy, and asked Jung if he had been inspired by the book. He replied that he had been unaware of the occurrence of the ideas in the book and could only assume that Sterne, the author, had been privy to the teachings of the esoteric — probably Rosicrucian — circles of his day, clearly indicating Jung’s acknowledgement of his own indebtedness to the Hermetic Tradition.

Today, as we draw near the dawn of a new millennium, many groups — such as the Hermetic Fellowship — are the inheritors of the still vibrant Hermetic Current.