Hermeticism: The Philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus

In 1460, the Florentine humanist Leonardo Dati was walking through the countryside outside Florence when he was stopped by a stranger. The stranger was carrying a Greek manuscript. The manuscript contained fourteen treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, “Hermes the Thrice-Greatest,” the mythical sage of late antiquity whom the Renaissance believed to have been a contemporary of Moses. Dati bought the manuscript, brought it to Florence, and gave it to his older colleague Marsilio Ficino. Ficino was already at work on his translation of Plato, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici, and he put the Plato aside. The Corpus Hermeticum, he judged, was more important. By the time he finished his translation in 1463, the Hermetic tradition had arrived in the Latin West, and the arrival transformed the European intellectual landscape for the next hundred and fifty years.

That is Frances Yates’s version of the story, told in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), and Yates may have dressed the anecdote up a bit. But the substance is right. Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (the Pimander, as it was known in the Latin translation, from the Greek title of the first treatise) was a foundational text of the Renaissance. The historical reality, as Casaubon showed in 1614, was different from what Ficino and his readers believed. The Hermetic texts were Hellenistic, not ancient Egyptian, and the dating destroyed their claim to be a pre-Mosaic source of pagan revelation. But the historical correction did not extinguish the philosophical influence, and the philosophical influence is the reason the Hermetic tradition is still worth reading.

Who Hermes Trismegistus is

Hermes Trismegistus — “Hermes the Thrice-Greatest” — is a composite figure who emerged in the Hellenistic period from the fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Hermes, in the Greek tradition, was the messenger of the gods, the patron of travellers, thieves, and merchants, and the guide of souls to the underworld. Thoth, in the Egyptian tradition, was the god of writing, wisdom, magic, and the moon, and the patron of scribes and the keepers of sacred knowledge. The fusion of the two gods produced a single figure who combined the Greek associations with communication and transition with the Egyptian associations with writing, wisdom, and the divine. The composite figure was the supposed author of an enormous body of religious, philosophical, and technical writing, and he was treated as the most ancient and authoritative of the sages. The Renaissance believed that Hermes had lived in the time of Moses, that the Hermetic texts were a source of pagan wisdom older than Greek philosophy, and that the texts were a witness to the prisca theologia, the ancient theology that united all the wisdom traditions of the world in a single divine revelation. The historical reality is that Hermes Trismegistus is not a historical person. Isaac Casaubon’s De Rebus Sacris et Ecclesiasticis Exercitationes (1614) demonstrated, by careful philological analysis of the Greek vocabulary, that the Hermetic texts were the product of the Hellenistic period, not the work of an ancient Egyptian sage. The dating effectively destroyed the prestige of the Hermetic tradition as a source of ancient Egyptian wisdom, though it did not extinguish the philosophical and religious influence of the texts. The Hermetic writings were produced in Egypt between the first and fourth centuries CE by anonymous authors who used the legendary Hermes as a literary device. Copenhaver (Hermetica, 1992, introduction) is the standard scholarly treatment.

The two Hermeticas

The Hermetic tradition falls into two main bodies of writing: the philosophical Hermetica, which are religious and philosophical dialogues, and the technical Hermetica, which are short alchemical and magical texts.

The philosophical Hermetica

The philosophical Hermetica are a body of religious and philosophical texts that present a systematic account of the cosmos, the soul, and the path to divine knowledge. The most important of the philosophical Hermetica is the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of seventeen Greek treatises known to the Latin West since Ficino’s translation in the 1460s (with a single Coptic Hermetic text, the Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth, later found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 alongside the famous Gnostic gospels). The related texts in the Codex Askewianus (the Asclepius, in the Latin translation) and the Codex Berlinensis round out the philosophical Hermetica.

The Corpus Hermeticum presents a unified vision. The cosmos is a single living, ensouled whole, created by a single divine mind (the Nous) and animated by a single divine breath (the Pneuma). The human being is a microcosm in which the structure of the cosmos is repeated. The soul is a spark of the divine that has fallen into the body. The work of the sage is to recover the original unity of the soul with the divine through a transformative ascent, a process that involves the cultivation of knowledge (gnosis), the practice of virtue, and the ritual and contemplative disciplines of the Hermetic art.

The most famous of the philosophical Hermetica are the Poimandres, a vision of the creation of the cosmos and the descent of the soul into matter, and the Asclepius, a dialogue on the nature of the divine and the human. The Asclepius was known in the Latin West from the fourth century on (translated by Apuleius of Madauros) and was a major influence on Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thought. The Poimandres is the opening treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum and is the most quoted of the philosophical Hermetica.

The technical Hermetica

The technical Hermetica are short alchemical and magical texts that present recipes and procedures under the name of Hermes. The most famous of the technical Hermetica is the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. The technical Hermetica also include the Kore Kosmou (“The Maiden of the World”), a cosmogonic and theurgic text; the Iatromathematika, a short astrological-magical work; and several shorter alchemical and magical recipes.

The principle of correspondence

The most famous principle of Hermeticism is the doctrine of correspondence, expressed in the Emerald Tablet’s central maxim: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.” The principle is the axiom of the Hermetic worldview, and the axiom has been the foundation of every Hermetic and alchemical theoretical system since.

The principle anchors the entire Hermetic worldview. It holds that the cosmos is structured by a network of correspondences between the higher and the lower, the celestial and the terrestrial, the spiritual and the material. The planets correspond to the metals, the days of the week, the organs of the body, the colours, the humours. The human being is a microcosm in which the structure of the macrocosm is repeated.

The principle is not a metaphor but a metaphysical claim about the structure of reality. The Hermetic tradition holds that the correspondences are not merely analogical but real, that the higher and the lower are bound together by the Pneuma, the divine breath that animates all things. The alchemist who works on the lower is actually participating in the higher through the lower. The claim is strong, and the claim is the reason the Hermetic tradition could sustain a serious alchemical project. Without the principle of correspondence, the alchemical project is incoherent. With it, the project is one of the most ambitious theoretical programmes in the history of Western thought.

The ascent of the soul

The second great theme of Hermeticism is the ascent of the soul, and the Poimandres is the foundational text. The Poimandres describes the descent of the soul from the divine into the material world and the corresponding ascent of the sage back to the divine. The descent is the story of the fall of the soul. The divine mind contemplates itself, and the soul, a spark of the divine, descends through the planetary spheres, taking on the qualities of each sphere in turn. The descent culminates in the incarnation of the soul in the human body, where the soul is subject to the passions and distractions of the material world.

The ascent is the recovery of the original unity. The sage, by cultivating knowledge and virtue, by practising the contemplative disciplines of the Hermetic art, and by the help of the divine, rises through the planetary spheres, casting off the qualities that the soul took on in the descent, and is reunited with the divine. The alchemical reading of the ascent is that the operations of the laboratory are a material support for the inner work. The alchemist who is heating the prima materia in the athanor is also working on the soul of the practitioner. The transformation of the matter is the transformation of the self. The two are not separate. Copenhaver (1992, introduction) is the right place to read the modern scholarly assessment.

The Pneuma and the cosmic sympathy

The Hermetic tradition holds that the cosmos is animated by a single divine breath, the Pneuma, which permeates all things and binds them together. The Pneuma is the medium of sympathy and antipathy, the principle by which distant things act on one another, and the basis of astrology, magic, and the alchemical theory of celestial influence.

The doctrine of cosmic sympathy underwrites the alchemical theory of metallic composition. The alchemists held that the metals are formed in the earth under the influence of the planets, and the character of a metal is determined by the planet under whose influence it is formed. Gold is the metal of the sun; silver is the metal of the moon; mercury is the metal of the planet Mercury; and so on. The alchemist, by working with the right planetary influences, can produce the corresponding metals. The philosopher’s stone is not merely a chemical preparation; it is a concentration of the cosmic Pneuma, capable of acting on any substance and transforming it according to the will of the alchemist. The elixir of life is the Pneuma itself, taken internally to restore the soul’s original unity with the divine.

The Hermetic revival of the Renaissance

The Hermetic tradition entered the Latin West in the late medieval period through the translation of the Asclepius and a few other short texts. But the great revival of Hermeticism in the West began in 1460, when the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. The story of Ficino’s receipt of the manuscript from Leonardo Dati, possibly embellished by the later biographers, captures something real about the moment. The Hermetic texts were treated as the most ancient and authoritative of the pagan sources of wisdom.

Ficino himself drew heavily on the Hermetic texts in his own philosophical and theological work. His Platonic Theology presents a synthesis of Platonic, Christian, and Hermetic thought that was enormously influential in the late Renaissance. The Florentine Platonic Academy, of which Ficino was the leading figure, became a centre of the Hermetic revival.

The most important figures of the Hermetic revival after Ficino are Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) presents a Hermetic vision of the human being as the link between the divine and the material worlds. Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1533) is a comprehensive synthesis of the Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and cabalistic traditions that became one of the most influential esoteric texts of the early modern period. Yates (1964) is the standard treatment, though her argument that the Hermetic tradition was the engine of the Scientific Revolution is now generally regarded as overstated. Principe (2013, ch. 3) is the right caution.

The Hermetic revival of the Renaissance was closely linked to the alchemical revival of the same period. Paracelsus drew heavily on the Hermetic texts, and his medical and alchemical system is a Christian-Hermetic synthesis (Pagel, Paracelsus, 1958). The Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century — the Fama Fraternitatis (1614), the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615), the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616) — present an explicitly Hermetic programme, and the visual tradition of alchemy in art is densely interwoven with the Hermetic iconography.

The Hermetic tradition in the modern era

The Hermetic tradition was severely criticised in the early modern period, and the criticism did real intellectual work. Casaubon’s 1614 demonstration that the Hermetic texts were Hellenistic rather than ancient, together with the rejection of the qualitative alchemical framework by Boyle and Lavoisier, stripped the Hermetic tradition of its claim to ancient Egyptian antiquity. The mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century further undermined the Hermetic framework by substituting a corpuscular theory of matter for the living cosmos of the Hermetic tradition.

But the Hermetic tradition did not disappear. The occult revival of the late nineteenth century, including the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Anthroposophical Society, made Hermeticism a central part of the modern esoteric programme. Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy (2012) is the best critical survey of the modern reception.

The Hermetic tradition and modern thought

The Hermetic tradition has had a significant influence on modern thought, often in ways that are not immediately visible. The Jungian reading of alchemy, developed by Carl Gustav Jung beginning with Psychologie und Alchemie (1944), is deeply indebted to the Hermetic tradition. The depth psychology of the twentieth century, including the work of James Hillman and the archetypal psychology movement, has drawn on the Hermetic tradition for its theoretical framework.

The philosophical Hermetica have been translated into English by Copenhaver (1992), and the texts are now taught in courses on ancient philosophy, late antiquity, and the history of Western esotericism. The reader who wants to take the Hermetic tradition seriously should start with Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992) and then move on to Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (1986); the two books, read together, give a serious introduction on the tradition’s own terms.

FAQ

Q: Is the Nag Hammadi find relevant to Hermeticism? A: Yes. The 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in Upper Egypt included the Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth, a Coptic Hermetic text that is the only surviving Coptic witness to the philosophical Hermetica and that overlaps in content with the Corpus Hermeticum. Its discovery is the single most important papyrological event for the study of Hermeticism (Copenhaver, 1992; Meyer, ed., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 2007).

Q: What did Casaubon’s 1614 critique do? A: Isaac Casaubon’s De Rebus Sacris et Ecclesiasticis Exercitationes (1614) demonstrated, by philological analysis of the Greek vocabulary, that the Corpus Hermeticum postdated the Greek philosophical tradition rather than preceding it. The dating effectively stripped the Hermetic texts of their claim to ancient Egyptian antiquity, though it did not extinguish their philosophical and religious influence.

Q: How did Hermeticism shape the Scientific Revolution? A: Frances Yates (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964) argued that the Hermetic worldview, with its vision of a living cosmos bound by sympathy and correspondence, was a major influence on the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, including the work of Bruno, Kepler, and Newton. The current scholarly consensus (Principe, 2013; Newman, 2018) is more cautious: the Hermetic framework was one influence among many, and it is no longer credited with being the engine of the Scientific Revolution.

Q: Is Jung’s reading of Hermeticism still influential? A: Yes, but contested. Jung’s Psychologie und Alchemie (1944) used Hermetic and alchemical imagery as a map of individuation, and the Jungian reading has shaped the modern reception of both traditions. Principe and Newman have criticised it as a modern projection onto a working laboratory tradition.