J.R. Ritman Library - Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica

George Robert Stowe Mead was born into a military family in 1863. He preferred scholarship above the army and read classical languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, after a brief stint studying mathematics. When he graduated in 1884 he joined the fairly young Theosophical Society. Mead had become interested in the Society after having read A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism while still a student at Cambridge. Three years later he met H.P. Blavatsky and became her private secretary; he was appointed Secretary General of the European section of the Theosophical Society in 1890. Almost two decades later, in 1909, he left the British Section of the Theosophical Society together with some 700 other members to protest the rehabilitation of C.W. Leadbeater by Annie Besant, Blavatsky’s successor as head of the Society. Mead went on to establish The Quest Society and became editor-in-chief of its periodical The Quest: A Quarterly Review, which existed until 1931.

Mead, an accomplished classics student, occupied himself with the Greek and Latin Hermetica from 1898. Eight years later he published the result of his studies: his translation of virtually all of the then known Hermetic literature, in three parts, with an introduction and an extensive commentary, under the title Thrice-Greatest Hermes. Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis (1906). Mead regarded the Hermetica as a happy synthesis between the religious beliefs of Egypt and the philosophical ideas of Greece.

An earlier but equally monumental work was Fragments of a faith forgotten (1900), the work which introduced the public to the gnostic movements of the first centuries CE:

For if we look back to the evidence of the first two centuries of our era (and to our mind no evidence with regard to the origins subsequent to this period is of any validity) for an understanding of the actual state of affairs, instead of one Church and one form of faith, we find innumerable communities and innumerable modes of expression (….) So far from hiding the sharp divorcement between science (or philosophy) and religion (or theology) which has characterised all later periods of the Christian era up to our own day, it was just the boast of many of these communities that religion was a science; they boldly claimed that it was possible to know the things of the soul as definitely as the things of the body (…) They strove for the knowledge of God, the science of realities, the gnosis of the-thingsthat-are; wisdom was their goal; the holy things of life their study (pp. 30-32)

Mead already demonstrated with this work that he was a dedicated scholar, whose mission it was to acquaint a wide audience with the spiritual roots of the Christian and Hermetic gnosis. Although a few gnostic codices had been published, the works of the gnostics were relatively unknown or could only be read through the mainly hostile perspective of the Church Fathers.

To Mead, the study of gnosis and the Hermetica was not a strictly academic discipline: he was deeply engaged personally. In Some mystical adventures (1910) he wrote that spiritual ignorance was the cause of man’s enslavement ( p. 297), in itself almost an echo of treatise VII of the Corpus Hermeticum: ‘That the greatest evil in mankind is ignorance concerning god’. He opposed the great German authority in the field of the Hermetica, Richard Reitzenstein, who had dismissed this particular treatise as a ‘Prophetenpredigt’ (a prophet’s sermon). Mead interpreted the following exhortation in treatise VII: ‘Seek a guide to take you by the hand and lead you to the portals of knowledgs’ as proof for the existence of gnostic-Hermetic communities with degrees of initiation (Thrice-greatest Hermes, pp. 120-23). According to Roelof van den Broek, claims for the existence of such communities have only become more generally accepted in recent decades.

Echoes from the gnosis, the series Mead published between 1906 and 1908, was another successful attempt at informing the interested though non-specialized public about gnostic thought. With eleven published volumes, the series turned into a miniature library of gnostic literature. They were published by the Theosophical Publishing Society in a pocket format. Each new instalment carried Mead’s mission statement:

There are many who love the life of the spirit, and who long for the light of gnostic illumination, but who are not sufficiently equipped to study the writings of the ancients at first hand, or to follow unaided the labours of scholars. These little volumes are therefore intended to serve as introduction to the study of the more difficult literature of the subject; and it is hoped that at the same time they may become for some, who have, as yet, not even heard of the Gnosis, stepping-stones to higher things.

Mead was a scholar on a mission, or, in the words of R.A. Gilbert, someone whose own quest ‘led him from purely objective historical study to inner experience – but without ever compromising his fine critical faculty’. This evolution from historical study to inner quest was captured by Mead himself in his article ‘On the nature of the Quest’ in the first instalment of The Quest. A Quarterly Review, p. 33:

So while research – investigation and comparative study – is one of our chief interests, the purpose of our Society, I would believe, embraces something far deeper, far more subtle, something more spiritual in the highest and profoundest sense of the word – a more living, more vital, more immediate quest.

Echoes from the gnosis. Centennial edition, ed. John Algeo. Wheaton, Il.: The Theosophical Publishing House, 2006, introduction by R.A. Gilbert. Roelof van den Broek, Hermes Trismegustus. Inleiding, Teksten, Commentaren. Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2006

This photograph from 1890 shows H.P. Blavatsky in a so-called ‘Bath chair’, a vehicle for invalids, sided by James Morgan Pryse (on the left) and G.R.S. Mead (on the right). Pryse (1849-1942) later emigrated to the United States, where he founded the Gnostic Society.

The secretary of the Theosophical Society at work: in this letter, Mead informed F.H. Palmer, a member of the theosophical lodge in Bristol, about admisison to a higher grade. The BPH has three letters by Mead to Palmer.

| Fragments of a faith forgotten. Some short sketches among the gnostics mainly of the first two centuries – a contribution to the study of christian origins based on the most recently recovered materials
London and Benares: The theosophical publishing society, 1900

In the introduction to his study of early gnosticism, Mead paused to consider the fairly new discipline of comparative religion studies. A German scholar had recently argued that it would be better to speak of ‘comparative theology studies’. Mead rejected the proposal, as it meant an altogether undesirable focus on the differences dividing religions and an unnecessary eye for intricate detail. He preferred the term ‘religion’, which implied that any man, of whatever religious view, was capable of experiencing the manifestation of divine Wisdom. If Mead did not know Lactantius’s explanation of the word ‘religion’, as derived from liga, the bond between God and man (Divine institutions, IV, 28), he would probably have approved.

| Thrice-greatest Hermes. Studies in Hellenistic theosophy and gnosis, being a translation of the extant sermons and fragments of the Trismegistic literature, with prolegomena, commentaries, and notes
London and Benares: The theosophical publishing society, 1906 1906

The French scholar André-Jean Festugière (1898-1982) argued in favour of a sharp distinction between the magical, astrological and alchemical Hermetica on the one hand and the religious-philosophical works on the other. Earlier Mead, too, had distinguished between the two, suggesting the term ‘Trismegistic literature’ for the religious-philosophical works (p. 3). The sharp divide between the ‘technical’ and philosophical Hermetica became untenable after the discovery of the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth Sphere, a treatise found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Mead was greatly touched by the ‘fine theosophical treatises’ contained in the Corpus Hermeticum. At the same time, he owed it to scholarship to provide a thorough explanation of their importance in context of religious thought in the West. As a motto for Thrice greatest Hermes, he chose parts of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, written two months before his death in 1882, here reproduced with the selection in bold:

The BPH has the complete series of Echoes from the gnosis in their original bindings.

The first instalment in the Echoes from the Gnosis series is itself an echo of Mead’s qualification of the Hermetica as the ‘Religion of the mind’. He celebrated the Hermetic gnosis as the gnosis which

has as its foundation the Single Love of God, it endeavours to base itself upon the True Philosophy and Pure Science of Nature and of Man, and is indeed one of the fairest forms of the Gnosis of the Ages. It is replete with Wisdom (Theosophia) and Worship (Theosebeia) – the Religion of the Mind. It is in its beginning Religion, true devotion and piety and worship, based on the right activitiy and passivity of the Mind, and its end is the Gnosis of things-that-are and the Path of the Good that leads man unto God. (pp. 8-9)

Like The vision of Aridaeus (Echoes 3) and the Chaldaean oracles I and II (Echoes 8 and 9), The hymns of Hermes originated in Alexandria in the first centuries CE. According to Mead, the hymns here presented were inspired by ‘the best of ancient Egyptian wisdom’ filtered through Greek philosophy. He greatly regretted the fact that only fragments had survived of the Hermetic literature. The discovery of the virtually intact Treatise on the Eight and Ninth Sphere, describing the spiritual experience of the divine world in a dialogue between Hermes and a pupil, has greatly increased our knowledge of the nature of Hermetic hymns. According to Roelof van den Broek (Hermes Trismegistus. Inleiding, Teksten, Commentaren) this text supports Mead’s claim that Hermetic communities must have once existed, offering instruction, rituals and initiations.

In The vision of Aridaeus Plutarch described a vision of the underworld (Moralia 566F). The protagonist Aridaeus, a man of loose morals, literally suffers a fall and loses consciousness. He has a vision of Hades and regains consciousness as a reformed character (his guide in the vision gives him a new name: Thespesius (‘the wondrbous one’)). Mead regarded this vision as a gnostic initiation rite wrapped in a literary cloak.

The hymn of Jesus is part of the Acts of the apostle John, a text rejected at the second council of Nicaea (787). Mead thought it was ‘almost certain’ that the hymn was actually a mystery rite, and ‘possibly the earliest Christian rite to have survived’. Modern scholars still think this is a very plausible suggestion and assume the intention was to meditate on the text and reach an altered state of consciousness. The Hymn of Jesus in Mead’s version was set to music by the composer Gustav Holst in 1916.

Mithra was worshipped as the god of the sun in ancient Persia; the first extant records of his name date from around 1400 BCE. His cult was revived in the Roman empire, where Mithras (as he was called by the Romans) was known as sol invictus, the invincible sun. Mead claimed that the purpose of the cult was to bring about an inner reformation. He also offered the reader a cultural and historical survey of Mithraism up to the early modern period. He described for instance an image of Mithras, interpreting the subsidiary figures as ‘torch-bearers having the power of life and death’, as, again according to Mead, they were also to be found in the ‘Alchemical and Rosicrucian traditions’. Although the binding is badly chafed, it shows that part of the series was issued in a more luxury version, bound in gold-tooled leather; the standard binding was linen.

The next instalment in the Echoes series was the translation of a fourth-century manuscript which had only recently been discovered by the German scholar Albrecht Dieterich in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1900 and published by him in 1903. Prior to this edition, the knowledge of Mithraism was based on a few fragments; for the first time an entire text became available. Mead added an introduction and a commentary to his translation.

The Gnostic crucifixion is also part of the Acts of the apostle John; along with The hymn of Jesus (Echoes 4), the Hymn of the robe of glory (Echoes 10) and The wedding song of Wisdom (Echoes 11) it belongs to the Christian-gnostic works. The apostle John receives a vision in which Christ explains to him the signficance of the true, cosmic and mystic crucifixion: his passion and death were not physical but are part of a spiritual mystery which can only be fully understood by means of Gnosis. The BPH acquired the volumes from Echoes from the Gnosis piecemeal; this volume has a library stamp of the Glasgow Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and the ownership inscription of William McLellan, a publisher of theosophical texts in the 1920s.

Mead had already discussed the Hellenic adaptation of ancient Egyptian wisdom in his Thrice-Greatest Hermes; the two volumes of Chaldaean oracles were intended to introduce his public to the ancient wisdom of ‘Chaldea’ (southern Mesopotamia) as it had been transmitted in Alexandria in the first centuries. The Chaldaean oracles were enthusiastically received from the moment they were circulated. Mead’s edition was not the only modern one: they had been published in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Thomas Taylor and by William Wynn Westcott at the end.

The Hymn of the robe of glory is also known as the Hymn of the pearl and belongs to the Acts of Thomas, which were written in Edessa around 225. The hymn narrates how a prince encounters the ‘robe’ which he had left behind ‘at home’ (in heaven):

The idea of the mirror image as a spiritual double can also be found in Mani, and in the Gospel of Thomas (logos 84), part of the Nag Hammadi discovery of 1945:

When you see your likeness you rejoice.
But when you see your images
which came into being before you,
and which neither die nor become manifest,
how much you will have to bear!

The wedding song of wisdom is also part of the Acts of Thomas. The hymn has survived in a Greek and a Syrian version and in a fragmentary Armenian one. Mead concluded that the Greek version had preserved the original, Syrian text better than the surviving Syrian version, which he believed had a strong Catholic colouring, whereas the Greek version was gnostic. He considered the text of great importance as evidence that the mystery of the Sacred Wedding or Mystical Union was one of the foremost sacraments of the Christian gnostics.

The Echoes from the Gnosis were translated into Dutch fairly soon, by Jan Brandt, and published by the Theosofische Uitgeversmaatschappij between 1908 and 1911. There do not appear to have been any contemporary translations into French or German.

This copy of the Echo’s uit de gnosis was once in the library of the controversial collector Frans Eduard Farwerck (1889-1978), an active member of the National Socialist Movement (NSB) in the Netherlands until he was ejected from the party in 1940 because of his masonic past. Farwerck had in fact already quit the masonic brotherhood in 1934, but apparently it was not a mitigating factor.While still a party member, Farwerck did oppose the anti-semitic course the movement was taking in imitation of the German National-Socialist Party.

Mead’s The Quest was published by the well-known publisher of esoterica John M. Watkins. Part 1 came out in October 1909 and contained contributions by a.o. William Kingsland, like Mead a former disciple of Blavatsky, Arthur Edward Waite, who wrote an essay on ‘The romance of the holy Graal’ and the biblical scholar Robert Eisler, like Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin loosely connected to the University of Muri (Switzerland). Mead himself published ‘The nature of the Quest’ (pp. 29-43), the lecture he held in London at the inaugural meeting of The Quest Society on 11 March 1909. In conclusion, he wrote that when the spirit of The Quest touched a man, ‘He is started on his way home.’

To mark the transition from the ‘old series’ (1909-1926) to the new one (1926-1931), Mead offered a candid insight into his personal engagement in the Theosophical Movement and the reasons for his own ‘separatist movement’ The Quest Society. Mead wrote he had become ‘utterly disgusted’ with the Theosophical Society, with its

innumerable dogmatic assertions, its crooked methods and reprehensible proceedings. I had never, even while a member, preached the Mahatma-gospel of H.P. Blavatsky, or propagandized Neo-theosophy and its revelations. (pp. 296-97)

According to Mead, true theosophy consisted of: ‘The wisdom element in the major world religions and philosophies.’ As with the earlier distinction between ‘comparative religion studies’ and ‘comparative theology studies’ which Mead took issue with in his introduction to Fragments of a faith forgotten, his interpretation of theosophy is clearly inclusive, not meant to divide or exclude.

Hermes Trismegistus

Still through Egypt's desert places
    Flows the lordly Nile,
From its banks the great stone faces
    Gaze with patient smile.
Still the pyramids imperious
    Pierce the cloudless skies,
And the Sphinx stares with mysterious,
    Solemn, stony eyes.

But where are the old Egyptian
    Demi-gods and kings?
Nothing left but an inscription
    Graven on stones and rings.
Where are Helios and Hephaestus,
    Gods of eldest eld?
Where is Hermes Trismegistus,
    Who their secrets held?

Where are now the many hundred
    Thousand books he wrote?
By the Thaumaturgists plundered,
    Lost in lands remote;
In oblivion sunk forever,
    As when o'er the land
Blows a storm-wind, in the river
   Sinks the scattered sand.

Something unsubstantial, ghostly,
    Seems this Theurgist,
In deep meditation mostly
    Wrapped, as in a mist.
Vague, phantasmal, and unreal
    To our thought he seems,
Walking in a world ideal,
    In a land of dreams.

Was he one, or many, merging
    Name and fame in one.
Like a stream, to which, converging
    Many streamlets run?,
Till, with gathered power proceeding,
    Ampler sweep it takes,
Downward the sweet waters leading
    From unnumbered lakes.

By the Nile I see him wandering,
    Pausing now and then,
On the mystic union pondering
    Between gods and men;
Half believing, wholly feeling,
    With supreme delight,
How the gods, themselves concealing,
    Lift men to their height.

Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated,
    In the thoroughfare
Breathing, as if consecrated,
    A diviner air;
And amid discordant noises,
    In the jostling throng,
Hearing far, celestial voices
    Of Olympian song.

Who shall call his dreams fallacious?
    Who has searched or sought
All the unexplored and spacious
    Universe of thought?
Who, in his own skill confiding,
   Shall with rule and line
Mark the border-land dividing
    Human and divine?

Trismegistus! three times greatest!
    How thy name sublime
Has descended to this latest
    Progeny of time!
Happy they whose written pages
    Perish with their lives,
If amid the crumbling ages
    Still their name survives!

Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately
    Found I in the vast,
Weed-encumbered sombre, stately,
    Grave-yard of the Past;
And a presence moved before me
    On that gloomy shore,
As a waft of wind, that o'er me
    Breathed, and was no more.

(From: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, In the Harbor, 1882)