Hermeticism in the Poetry of Katherine Philips

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring the Renaissance, the mythical Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus, was regarded as the founder of medico-religious alchemy, who had conceived the wisdom texts, the Hermetica, which were printed in the English vernacular for the first time in 1649. This article proposes that the Hermetica and Hermetic alchemy provide illuminating contexts for understanding the philosophical and scientific traditions drawn on by Katherine Philips during the 1650s. The author argues that certain poems from Philips's interregnum oeuvre foreground Hermetic-alchemical formulations—in particular, the politico-religious verse essay “L’accord du bien”, the panegyric “To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist, on his Poems”, and the devotional lyric “God”. In these poems, Philips utilizes Hermetic alchemy for political, literary and spiritual purposes. Her most extensive use of the Hermetic philosophy occurs in the 1650s “Lucasia” poems, in which Philips manipulates the Hermetica’s emphasis on the “friendship, and commixture of contraries” to level the class difference between herself (a merchant’s daughter) and her friend, the gentry heiress Anne Owen. By foregrounding the transformative power of the female mind, body and spirit, Philips configures her own pro-woman hermeneutic of the Hermetic and, in so doing, distinguishes her Hermetic corpus from the male-voiced alchemical poems of her predecessors and contemporaries John Donne and Andrew Marvell.