Lisette Thooft

Hermetic texts suit the spirit of the times*

God is a pregnant womb The idea that all is one – and that consequently man is part of God – is one of the fundamental principles of Hermetism. According to Roelof van der Broek, Christians can draw inspiration from reading the Hermetic texts. “It requires some thought to combine it with Christianity. But the Hermetic idea of man and of God is something we can use.”

“…God holds within him the things that are; none are outside of him; and he is outside none.”
Open the Corpus Hermeticum, the translation of Hermetic treatises by Roelof van den Broek and Gilles Quispel, at any given page, and you will find passages of a similar nature. According to Hermetism, a religious movement around the beginning of our era revolving around the mythical wisdom teacher Hermes Trismegistus, God, the divine, permeates all. So God also permeates us? “In deepest essence man is related to the divine”, Van den Broek explains. “This is not to say that man is God – rather, we participate in the divine, via the cosmos, which is a child of God. We are children of the cosmos, and therefore in a manner of speaking grandchildren of God. God is an endlessly productive force, and man is not separate from the cosmos. But physical reality can certainly draw man down spiritually; which happens when you are possessed with money, power, sex, things that drag you away from your essential being.”

To rid yourself of that possession, to rediscover your essential being, and develop yourself until you become ‘divine’, is the aim of Hermetic belief. “You can even become a god if you want, for it is possible. Therefore want and understand and believe and love: then you have become it!”, we read, and “Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing. (…) But if you shut your soul up in the body and abase it and say: ‘I understand nothing, I can do nothing; I fear the sea, I cannot go up to heaven; I do not know who I was, I do not know what I will be’, then what have you to do with God?” He who knows himself, knows God, the Hermetists claim, because man in his deepest being coincides with God. “Reverence is knowledge of God, and one who has come to know God, filled with all good things, has thoughts that are divine and not like those of the multitude.”

Hermetism was an exclusive body of thought, meant for the initiates of small, rather elite cultic groups, and not intended for broad layers of the population as was Christianity, which is essentially democratic and inclusive. However, the ‘multitude’ of our times would appear to be much more receptive to the mystical language and inner experiences of Hermetica than in the first centuries CE. “There are indications for the growth of a sort of modern pietistic religiosity, which sometimes takes the form of mystical sensitivity”, Joep de Hart writes in his study God in Nederland. “The greater majority of the Dutch feels that truth must be experienced from within. Half of them do not exclude having experienced the presence of a higher power, higher force or God one way or another (27% is certain of it) and a wide range of events appears to be able to evoke such an experience (death, encounters, silence, nature, music, religious meetings). Nearly eight out of ten respondents indicates having been deeply touched by the beauty of nature, 30-36% once had the sensation of complete perfection, of being one with all things, or being in close touch with something sacred.”

There is, therefore, a considerable number of Dutchmen who one way or another have an affinity with truth, with God, or with the sacred. In short, the ‘multitude’ may be ready for the convictions and the spiritual self-development of Hermetism. No wonder that more than 12,000 copies of the Dutch Corpus Hermeticum have already sold, and that the next two volumes in the series, Asclepius, in a translation by Quispel, and Hermes Trismegistus, translated by Van den Broek, massive and not altogether inexpensive volumes, also sell readily. What is the attraction of Hermetic belief?

Womb of grace
“There is much interest in gnosis in the Church in the Netherlands”, Van den Broek explains. “I am continually invited to talk about the Gospel of Thomas, the Nag Hammadi codices and so on. But whichever way you turn it, ancient gnosticism is extremely negative about earthly reality. The God of the Old Testament is a lower, evil demiurge, the body is a prison. This is altogether contrary to our modern sensibilities. Hermetism, too, departs from the idea of gnosis – inner knowledge of God – but the cosmos and earthly reality is generally speaking judged in a positive sense, its world picture is more optimistic. This is its Greek, and also Jewish, background. Asclepius says: ‘Man is a great miracle.’ This alone makes Hermetism far more interesting than gnosticism. It is also better accommodated to current ideas about man and the world.”

Take for instance the twenty-first chapter of the Asclepius, in which it is argued that the sexual union of man and woman is a sacred mystery and a symbol of the love of God. In the preceding chapter Hermes said about God that he is: “only one and all, completely full of the fertility of both sexes and ever pregnant with his own will, always begets whatever he wishes to procreate. His will is all goodness. From his divinity the same goodness that is in all things came to be.” Chapter 21 opens with a question. Asclepius: “Do you say that god is of both sexes, Trismegistus?” Hermes answers: “Not only god, Asclepius. (…) Grasp this in your mind as truer and plainer than anything else: that god, this master of the whole of nature, devised and granted to all things this mystery of procreation unto eternity, in which arose the greatest affection, pleasure, gaiety, desire and love divine. One should explain how great is the force and compulsion of this mystery, were it not that each individual already knows from contemplation and inward consciousness.”

The final part of the Asclepius in Quispel’s edition ends with the ‘Prayer of thanksgiving’ (Nag Hammadi codex VI, 7), which gives thanks to God and praises him with the following words: “Womb of every creature, we have known you. Womb pregnant with the nature of the Father, we have known you. Eternal permanence of the begetting Father.” The androgyny of God could not be expressed in more graphic terms. “Typically Egyptian”, says Quispel and continues: “The Christian gnostic Valentinus, who almost became Pope of Rome, is the true heir of this component of Egyptian religion. Copulation and procreation is the basic principle of his system. According to him, God is both male and female, Depth and Silence. From Him proceeds Consciousness (nous) which is paired with Truth (alètheia, disclosedness). Together they are a union (Greek: syzygia). The ideas and concepts flowing from this true consciousness, called aeons, eternities, or moments in the self-unfolding of the godhead, are all androgynous. The female is on a par with the male and is its complement (Greek: pleroma). Together they bring forth spiritual fruit.” This digression on Valentinus (100-153), later much maligned by the established Church, makes clear that in some respects Hermetism was ahead of its time by some two thousand years.

Magical gestures
Another remarkable text is the ‘Discourse on the eighth and ninth’, translated from the Coptic, and also part of Van den Broek’s Hermes Trismegistus. Father Hermes guides his son along a spiritual experience which finally makes him call out: “I see! I see indescribable depths. (…) I see another Mind, the one that moves the soul! I see one that moves me from pure forgetfulness. You have given me power! I see myself! I want to speak! Fear restrains me. I have found the beginning of the power that is above all powers, the one that has no beginning. I see a fountain bubbling with life. (…) I have seen! Language is not able to reveal this.”

“This mystical stammering is the reflection of an authentic religious experience”, Van den Broek writes in his introduction. “It is unthinkable that someone thought this up behind his desk.”

The text is important for a variety of reasons. First of all it proves that Hermetism was not just a literary tradition, as has long been assumed, instead there must have been an existing mystery school or at least a flourishing cult which produced these texts. A steady spiritual growth, a gradual ascent in inner development, coupled with study and an exemplary life, can be witnessed in these texts. Another striking aspect is the use of magical formulas during the initiation: singing the name of the godhead in a eulogy of vocals. Like this:

“Zoxathazo
A oo
Ee ooo
Eee oooo
Iiii ooooo
Ooooo oooooo
Uuuuuu ooooooo
Ooooooo oooooooo
Zozazoth.”

This is an invocation, it looks like pure magic. Were the Hermetists magi? The answer is positive, and has to do with their idea of an all-embracing unity. “When all is related to all, it is possible to achieve effects in the spiritual world by performing certain acts and by enunciating words in the physical world”, Van den Broek explains. “Actually there is not all that much difference between the formula still used in the Roman Catholic rite – hoc est corpus meum – whereby the host is transubstantiated to become the body of Christ. It is important to understand that the idea of cosmic unity was generally accepted before the rise of modern science. Philosophy and science used to go hand in hand with astrology and alchemy. Newton, too, was a practising alchemist as well as a scientist.”

Did he ever try out one of these invocations himself? “Yes”, he answers with a smile, “but there are proscribed gestures to go with them – you had to pronounce the ‘a’ facing east witht both hands turned left, the ‘e’ turned to the north with your right fist extended, for instance – and we no longer know how it went exactly. If you made the slightest mistake, mispronounced something or forgot something, you had to start all over. It doesn’t really mean anything to me. I do feel I am a part of the universe, but influencing physical reality by means of certain formulas … no”.

All the same he willingly owns that he regards Hermetism as an important dimension for deepening his Christian faith. “It requires some thought to combine it with Christianity. But the Hermetic idea of man and of God is something we can use. The thought that everything springs forth from the same primal source and that everything is interrelated – this is ecologically sound theology. In the Hermetic view, man is held to be responsible for nature.”

What are the Hermetica? The Hermetica are texts attributed to the mythological wisdom teacher Hermes Trismegistus. This legendary figure is based on the Egyptian god Thot, who was Hellenized to Hermes, and acquired the epithet ‘the thrice greatest’. The Hermetica include philosophical-religious texts, magical texts containing invocations and formulas, alchemical recipes and astrological treatises. The philosophical-religious texts have now been completely translated into Dutch by Roelof van den Broek and Gilles Quispel. The Hermetic texts were probably composed in Alexandria, a cultural melting-pot of Egyptian, Greek and Jewish traditions, in the first centuries CE. The authors, who are unknown, were not Christians nor were they influenced by Christianity. On the other hand various patristic authors were demonstrably influenced by Hermetic ideas, in which they detected several Christian motives. The early Church did not fight Hermetism: in contrast to gnosticism, there was no reason to do so. Hermetic texts were rediscovered in the fifteenth century and introduced in Europe. Their effect on thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and through him the entire humanist Renaissance was enormous. It was believed that the Hermetica contained ancient Egyptian traditions, and that Hermes Trismegistus was a contemporary of Moses. In 1614 the Swiss philologer Isaac Casaubon argued that this was impossible; the evidence of the influence of Plato and later Platonists in these texts was too strong. The philological arguments clinched the matter of the credibility of Hermetic philosophy, which from then on remained popular in Rosicrucian and masonic circles only. “The mechanistic world picture supplanted the organic cosmology of the Hermetists, in which God, cosmos and man were regarded as one”, Van den Broek and Quispel wrote in their introduction to the Corpus Hermeticum. This book was published by the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in 1990; it contains translations from the Greek of seventeen treatises which were brought together in a single codex as early as the eleventh century. Volume two in the series, Asclepius, is translated from Latin and Coptic and is written in the form of a colloquy between the wisdom teacher Hermes Trismegistus and the equally legendary figure Asclepius. Volume three, Hermes Trismegistus, includes the translation of various Greek and Armenian texts, plus the Coptic Discourse of the eighth and ninth found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Although these are mainly philosophical-religious texts, not magical or astrological, the Discourse shows that the distinction between these genres is not always clear.

* Translation of an article which appeared in VolZin, 4 May 2007, pp. 28-31.
Hermetic quotations are taken from Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica. The Greek `Corpus Hermeticum' and the Latin `Asclepius' in a new English translation with notes and introduction (1992), The Nag Hammadi library in English, ed. J.M. Robinson (1998) and The way of Hermes. The Corpus Hermeticum. The definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius, tr. J.-P. Mahé et al. (1999)