Trismegistus Research Articles

Hermes Among the Jews: Hermetica as Hebraica from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Hermes Among the Jews: Hermetica as Hebraica from Antiquity to the Renaissance Fabrizio Lelli Introduction More than forty years ago, Dame Frances Yates argued with great effect that the ancient Greek treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1463 were key documents of the Renaissance transition to modernity.1 Dame Frances, relying on Eugenio Garin’s authoritative studies of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and on works by Gershom Scholem that brought kabbalah within the reach of modern scholarship, also recognized that Pico, Ficino’s younger contemporary, had uncovered a parallel channel of primordial wisdom in the Jewish theosophy or kabbalah that he explored in greater depth than any Christian before him.2 In succeeding decades, as Moshe Idel and others have extended and refined the study of kabbalah, Yates’s notion of a “Hermetic tradition” in postmedieval Europe has inspired—and provoked—an enormous body of scholarly inquiry and learned interpretation.3 [End Page 111] Despite the frequent confluence of these two currents of investigation—one focused on Hebraica, the other on Hermetica—the conjoined topic of Hebrew Hermetism has had little systematic or comprehensive attention since Moritz Steinschneider’s pioneering work in the nineteenth century.4 To fill that gap, this study and review of the literature introduces the topic of Hermetism and then describes its impact on Jewish thought in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, with special attention to updating the bibliography on Hebrew Hermetism. Hermetic treatises in Hebrew dealing with magic, astrology, medicine, and other scientific and technical topics will therefore be analyzed in their cultural context. The basic thread of the story is the emergence of Hebrew Hermetica in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, their reception in the high Middle Ages by Abraham Ibn Ezra, the opposition of Maimonides to Ibn Ezra’s Hermetism, and the reception of Hermetism by learned Jews of the Italian Renaissance. Beginnings Hermes Trismegistus, the “thrice-greatest” Hermes, was a legendary figure of the Greco-Roman world, an all-knowing sage whose mythic attributes derived both from the Greek Hermes, god of roads and trade, and from the Egyptian Thoth, the moon-god who invented counting and writing, made the first measurement of time, and gave order to civil and religious life. Long before the Greeks came to Egypt, Hermes was the master of all speech and communication and thus the mediator between gods and humans. In the Hellenistic period, when Hermes and Thoth were first amalgamated, the Greek god was also identified with the Logos of the philosophers and eventually worshipped as the creator of the world.5 Imhotep-Asclepius, Ammon-Zeus, and other products of Greco-Egyptian syncretism also entered the company of Thoth-Hermes, and with Trismegistus [End Page 112] they all relayed information about the divine world to earthly mortals from on high. Texts in Greek attributed to these gods—writings venerated as if their originals had been copied in the sacred hieroglyphs of pharaonic Egypt—were actually composed in the early centuries of the Common Era, after which they circulated widely in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.6 Hermetica in Latin and in eastern languages soon followed, eventually forming a large literature that promised to reveal the secrets of the universe and uncover the true knowledge of the divine world and the human soul.7 Hermetic knowledge or gnôsis, disclosed only to the elect, was required for the soul’s salvation and the understanding and hence the control of nature.8 For this reason, beneath its theosophical surface, the large and diverse literature of Hermetica has a great deal to say about what we would call “science” and “technology.” In the twentieth century, however, Hermetic treatises dealing with theological and philosophical subjects were carefully segregated by scholars from those that dealt with scientific or technical issues, including magic, astrology, and alchemy.9 This distinction notwithstanding, many Hermetic “theological” texts show traces of “technical” doctrines, especially astrology, while the technical corpus, also labeled “popular” or “occultist,” sometimes assumes or expresses the same theological issues that are at stake in the works called “speculative,” “theoretical,” or “philosophical.” Naturally, the ancient followers of Trismegistus saw magic, astrology, and related techniques as...

Some North African Turning Points in Christian Apologetics

Apologetics take their place beside miracles of healing and courage in the face of persecution as an important means of furthering the early Christian mission. In the first two centuries AD, when the popular perception was that Christianity was closely allied to Judaism, the argument from Old Testament prophecy was important. In the third century, however, as the Church gained ground among the educated classes in east and west, the emphasis changed to an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over its pagan rivals as a philosophy with a more convincing understanding of the role of providence. Apologists in the north African tradition, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Arnobius and Lactantius, all played their part in this process. The prophecies of the Old Testament had to be confirmed by other prophecies, notably the Sibylline oracles and the sayings of Hermes Trismegistus. Finally, in the fourth century, many north Africans who, like Augustine for ten years, adhered to Manichaean Christianity relied wholly on these authorities, rejecting the Old Testament altogether.

Hermes trismegistus in Thomas of York : a 13th-century witness to the prominence of an ancient sage

Résumé L’œuvre principale de Thomas d’York, le Sapientiale , témoigne de l’apogée de l’influence des textes attribués à Hermès Trismégiste au Moyen Âge. Thomas avait une très bonne connaissance et une révérence particulière pour l’ Asclepius et le Liber de VI rerum principiis . Le développement de sa conception des propriétés de Dieu et des liens entre le monde divin et la création en porte l’empreinte. L’article propose également l’édition des passages de ses ouvrages qui comportent des citations d’Hermès Trismégiste.

Neostoic Pyrotechnics in Franciso de Aldana and San Juan de la Cruz

The early Stoic Cleanthes says in a hymn to Zeus: “All mortals should salute you, for we are of your lineage, and similar to you in having reason and speech” (Barth 84).1 These two shared characteristics are also the basis of creative activity for both the human being and the divinity. According to the Stoics, the creator of the cosmos is the pyr technikon, from whence today’s ‘pyrotechnics’. This pyr technikon is a divine and artistic fire, sometimes called logos, or word, that issues from nous or mens, that is, from reason or divine thought (Ortiz Garcia 25).2 The founder of Renaissance Neostoicism, Justus Lipsius, describes the artistic nature of this creative fire and calls it the teacher of all other arts: “Natura, magistra artium reliquarum.”3 Lipsius cites to a number of authorities in support of his argument, including Hermes Trismegistus, who describes the moment of his own intimate union with Poimandres or Mens, that is, divine Thought, when he witnessed the activities of this creative fire, which he glosses as sacred ‘reason’ or ‘word.’4 Hermes Trismegistus is the author of the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of tractates dating to the first centuries of the Common Era, and printed in 1471 in Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation. The texts incorporate the teachings of a number of cultures and philosophies, including a healthy dosis of Stoic thought, and they became what in today’s terms would be called a runaway best-seller throughout Europe; by the end of the sixteenth century, there were two dozen editions of the work. Its author, Hermes, is one of Lipsius’s favorite authorities in his Physiologia stoicorum.5 That he should be so is not surprising, and not only for Hermes’ importance to the Neoplatonists of the fifteenth and sixteeenth centuries; the importance of ‘will’ or ‘volition’ to the Stoa is well known, and Hermes is named the king of volition in the works of another favorite authority of Lipsius, the fifth and sixth century Byzantine, Stobaeus.6 The Stoics teach that one should study nature so as to understand divine creation,7 and then make correct use of one’s volition in order to filter the ‘representations’ received from the outside world without

Ambiguities of the Prisca Sapientia in Late Renaissance Humanism

The wisdom of the ancients, says Marsilio Ficino, was a pious philosophy.1 Born among the Egyptians with Hermes Trismegistus—and, according to Ficino's later writings, concurrently among the Persians with Zoroaster—it was raised by the Thracians under Orpheus and Aglaophemus. It later matured under Pythagoras among the Greeks and Italians and culminated in Plato. As is well known, this genealogy was not merely a historical thesis for Ficino and his followers but also a program for revival, a utopia achieved through restoration. For the assertion of a concordance between these early philosophies and their accordance with Christianity—in the sense of a Christian Platonism—implied the synthesis of fragementary philosophemes into a fully developed doctrine in the service of a uniform and timely philosophia pia. This program was formulated in a variety of ways during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with differing protagonists and with diverse aims. Thus one could supplement the genealogy in a cabalist vein, introduce biblical characters such as Solomon or Moses, or (as was done by Bruno) use it to contest Christian doctrine. The genealogy could be read as culminating in various notable modern figures such as for example, Paracelsus. Aristotle could be included or excluded from it, depending on whether one wanted to assimilate the Aristotelian tradition or to distance oneself from it; and one could leave the end [End Page 1] of this genealogical lineage open in order to exhort the necessity of a scientific and moral reform. Here, however, we shall be occupied with the question of what became of this program during the late Renaissance, when two developments took place simultaneously: on the one hand, the utopia of the prisca sapientia set about to conquer the field formerly reserved to the Aristotelians, namely, natural philosophy; on the other hand, the first doubts arose about the overall validity of the historical-philological foundation of the program, especially the dating of the works of Hermes Trismegistus. The latter began with the publication of the first part of Patrizi's Discussiones peripateticae in 1571,which aimed to rehabilitate, contrary to Aristotle's critique, old presocratic natural philosophies, and in so doing it cleared the way for interpreting the latest advancements in non-Aristotelian natural sciences as resumptions of these very philosophies.2 This initiated a period of complex interaction between late humanist philology, innovative natural science, and speculative metaphysics. This phase, however, not only entailed the grand synthesizing endeavors that one finds in Patrizi's Nova de universis philosophia;it also introduced historical critique—no doubt provoked by Patrizi—of the Hermetic prisca sapientia, understood in Frances Yates's sense, which was performed in careful detail long before Casaubon at the end of the Renaissance.3 Further, it was a phase characterized by an attempt to reevaluate Aristotelian philosophy against its opponents, which paradoxically was also motivated by Patrizi yet which managed to keep the venture open to "esoteric" depths. All of these developments were intertwined, and each effected the articulation of encyclopedic projects at the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the basis of manuscripts, letters, and some neglected texts, I want to introduce two such countercurrents, which illustrate how the migration of arguments from one cultural context to another can lead to wholly divergent and unexpected results. Moreover, these results show the diverse consequences that a prisca sapientia-utopia could have for different visions of encyclopedic scholarship. I. In the bookshop of Paolo Meietti in Padua, Teodoro Angelucci and Antonio Persio met accidentally on an autumn day in 1558. Meietti was the publisher of Angelucci's medical textbook as well as of texts by Patrizi and his [End Page 2] colleague Giannini, and it is possible that Persio was out to discuss publishing possibilities for his forthcoming manuscript De natura ignis. In any case, they were there for business-related matters, so it was quite natural for Persio to...

« Hermès Trismégiste, Moïse et Apollonius de Tyane dans un oracle d’Apollon »

This article tackles an Apollinian oracle cited in the Tübingen Theosophy. These verses, which are ascribed to Apollo by this Christian compilation of pagan prophecies, gather Hermes Trismegistus, Moses and Apollonius of Tyana; all of them are considered as being sacred characters who enjoyed the privilege of coming near to the deity. This analysis deals with the different problems of interpretation posed by these six hexameters and questions the authenticity of the passage, the reasons why it was produced and its appropriation by the Christians.

Maria Alchemista, the First Female Jewish Author

It is well-known — though not undisputed — that from the beginning Jews played a not insignificant role in the development of the ‘science’ of alchemy.1 It is much less well-known, however, that one of the earliest identifiable alchemist authors of whose work(s) fragments have been preserved, was a Jewish woman with the name of Maria.2 This long neglected author — the credit for whose rediscovery goes to the late Raphael Patai — is important in more than one respect. Firstly, Mary is the first non-fictitious alchemist of the Western world (most of the ‘ancient alchemists’ are mythical personalities, such as Ostanes, Hermes Trismegistus, and Pibechius);3 and secondly, she is the first Jewish woman in history we know to have written and published under her own name.4

The Hermetica as Ancient Science

The Corpus Hermeticum1(CH) is a compilation of philosophical, theosophical, mystical and cosmological texts dating, in their present form, from the third-fourth centuries C.E. and attributed, according to tradition, to Hermes Trismegistus. These texts exerted considerable influence upon western philosophers, scientific thinkers and mystics throughout the Middle Ages, especially influencing the Renaissance Neoplatonists. Scholarly discussions of the Hermetica once focused upon this Corpus, which some have felt contains lofty ideals and noble speculations.

Parmenides - Platon - Hermes Trismegistus

Abstract Heidegger's many observations about the philosophical thought of the Middle Ages, while often controversial, are deserving of attention. One of the lesser-known of these observations reflects his interest in hermetic philosophy, as found in his posthumously published treatise Die Negativität (1938/39), a critical engagement with Hegel with regard to the nature and ontological status of negation. Therein, Heidegger associates the acpoupa of Parmenides with the sphaera intelligibi-lis of Hermes Trismegistus and the absolute Idee of Hegel and therewith Plato's doctrine of the ideas in its absolute-idealist modification. Heidegger weaves these various strands of the tradition into a web of manifold significations representative of different yet related philosophical intentions.

The Golden Wand of Medicine: A History of the Caduceus Symbol in Medicine

This is the most thorough discussion of the relationship between the caduceus and medicine that has been written. Friedlander, a Professor Emeritus of Medical Humanities at the University of Nebraska, provides an in-depth analysis of how the caduceus, the wand of the Greek god Hermes (the Roman Mercury), has come to be inappropriately used by some as the symbol of medicine. The Golden Wand of Medicine is an excellent historical analysis with good documentation of the facts and sources, but it is relatively dull reading. Take, for example, the two chapters about Hermes. The author describes in detail the various Greek Hermes—the pre-Homeric Hermes, the archaic Hermes, and the traditional Hermes—then devotes another chapter to the Egyptian Hermes—Hermes-Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus, and Pseudo Hermes Trismegistus—more than you ever wanted to know about Hermes. The evolution of the caduceus is traced from its first appearance in the seventh century BCE to its

Hermes Trismegistus, Rome, and the Myth of Europa: An Unknown Text of Giles of Viterbo

Trismegistus, Rome, and the Myth of Europa: An Unknown Text of Giles of Viterbo. The article discusses and publishes from MS V F 14 of the Biblioteca nazionale in Naples an autograph fragment of what may be Giles's lost Liber Dialogorum. The fragment consists of a fictive dialogue between the Archangel Michael and Saint Lorenzo Maiorano of Siponto. The fragment seems to be an attempt to rework the story of the apparition of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano in the sixth century into something of a Christian Pimander, where the angel reveals divine arcana from the perspective of a Christian neoplatonist and moral reformer. A central part of these revelations is the explanation of the myth of Europa as an allegory about Italy and her corruption. Giles also develops a five stage scheme on the destiny of Rome and, in passing, has some harsh words to say about Hermes Trismegistus. Whether or not the fragment is from the Liber Dialogorum, it is certainly one of Giles's earliest writings and probab...

Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism (review)

106Philosophy and Literature Ifwe accept that the essays are, albeit loosely, centered around one main idea, we might proceed to read the book conscientiously from beginning to end. As the reviewer, I felt compelled to do just that, but too frequently for comfort found myselfbogged down in sentences like the following, chosen almost at random : "And the subject is pure not only in its manipulatory detachment from the object but also in its distance from the realm of togetherness with other subjects, which (bereft of an epistemological status of its own) has itself become 'objectified '" (p. 23). Interestingly enough, the three essays in the volume translated from Holdheim's original German text by one of his students read rather more lucidly than the others, although they too are by no means smooth and easy reading. Thus, while some pages and sections were stimulating (notably the "chapters" on Dostoyevsky, Gide, and "Poetic estrangement"), others had me painfully entangled in the coils of serpentine sentences and paragraphs, struggling in vain to cling to die main thread of argument. "The essay," we are told (p. 30), "is the hermeneutic genre par excellence." Agreed. And the word "hermeneutic" derives from the name of the god Hermes, whose principal task was to deliver messages. It is surely the hermeneutist's responsibility to ensure that his particular message is clear and that his critical comments on this or that writer, work or literary topic shed new light, not cast deeper darkness. In my more cynical moments I sometimes wonder if aposdes of "the hermeneutic mode" might be involuntary (or perhaps voluntary?) worshippers of another Hermes: Hermes Trismegistos, the thrice-greatest, the Greek version of the Egyptian deity Thoth, god of magic or alchemy, from which comes the word "hermetic." Professor Hondheim struck me as being radier more preoccupied widi the task of bewitching and enchanting his reader with verbal alchemy, blinding him with science, real or pseudo, dian widi mat of helping him clarify his own ideas on a literary text by writing in a lively, clear, and stimulating way. Thus die ideas in his book too often seem more hermetically sealed than hermeneutically revealed. University of Canterbury, New ZealandJohn Goodliffe Heidegger and the Question ofRenaissance Humanism, by Ernesto Grassi; 103 pp. Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983, $12.00. Students of Heidegger and of Italian Renaissance humanism should not be put offby the apparently strangejuxtaposition of themes indicated by this book's title. Ernesto Grassi has been a creative and productive scholar regarding both Heidegger (with whom he studied at Freiburg) and of humanism, although because of die vagaries of translation and transatlantic reception he is probably Reviews107 best known to those who read only in English as an important commentator on Vico. The present book is a brief and clear version of theses that Grassi has developed in more detail in his many German publications. He challenges Heidegger's ambitious story ofthe history ofphilosophy, thinking part ofwhat is unthought in that brilliant but overly schematic account of the metaphysics of presence from Plato to NATO ("The Question Concerning Technology," and "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking"). Heidegger had attacked humanism and Sartrean existentialism in his 1946/47 "Letter on Humanism" (published, incidentally, by Grassi). Yet while identifying humanism — as exemplified by Hegel, Sartre, and the implicit voluntaristic metaphysics of die technological worldview — as the destiny and denouement of Western philosophy , Heidegger never mentioned Renaissance humanism. (As Grassi notes, Heidegger's view of Latin as a coarser, less profound language than Greek — or German— tells us much about the reasons for Heidegger's ignorance here.) Grassi argues two interrelated claims: (1) In Renaissance humanism's concept of poetry and metaphor as productive of the truth, one finds a significant movement of thought that does not fit Heidegger's version of philosophy's history as a continual rationalization and narrowing ofthe concept of the world; (2) Renaissance humanism suggests the possibility of a thought that is both informed by an attempt to draw on the poetic resources of language for philosophical illumination and sensitive to the radically historical character of human existence, while yet (in contrast to Heidegger...

Le Langage Secret De Marc Papillon

Justly can we apply the definition of hermetic poetry to the works of Marc Papillon de Lasphrise, both as they mirror a world deeply influenced by the esoteric doctrine of Hermes Trismegistus and because the poet resorts to metabolic devices whose aim is to complicate the message and make communication difficult. In this study we examine a few examples of these metabolic expressions such as specular writing — where the decrypting mechanism can be easily identified — but also devices much more difficult to decipher. In the "Sonnet en langue inconnue" (S. LXXXI in Diverses Poésies) the process involved in the message alteration suggests a double or triple metaplastic encoding similar to the one applied in the loucherbem language. The reason underlying this linguistic experimen-talism is ultimately philosophic as it attempts to go beyond the limits imposed on man and writer.

The Avatars of Thrice Great Hermes. An Approach to Romanticism

This detailed work studies the ancient philosopher-astrologist Hermes Trismegistus. Tuveson explores Trismegistus's doctrine that was, in essence, a new conception of the nature of God, the universe, and man, which differend radically from the central Christian view. Illustrated.

Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (review)

392 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY fact constructed entirely by their Catholic adversaries" (2:3 ~l). Thus, both the concept of the State as an impersonal power to which citizens owed their allegiance and a populist theory of revolutionary action designed to reconstruct or capture this power formed part of the legacy bequeathed by sixteenth-century political theorists to their seventeenth-century progeny. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought represents a remarkable advancement in the genre of histories of political theory. Some critics (and reviewers) have complained that Skinner's approach does not adequately explain or take into account the "originality" of thinkers such as Machiavelli, Bodin, or Luther. When this objection is taken to mean more than the tautological affirmation of originality by definitiorv-which characterizes the traditional approach--it can only refer to the interpreter's placing of emphasis upon some ideas rather than upon others drawn from the total corpus of the theorist's writings. This problem, as Skinner maintains throughout Founda//om, can only be "solved"--there are always several plausible "solutions"--by establishing the context in which such choices have a meaning (for the theorist, for his audience, and for us). Skinner's work, in short, makes it possible not only for arguments about the interpretation of previous political theory to claim "historical" evidence on their behalf, but the engagement in such arguments may prove to be enlightening in a self-critical way in bringing to consciousness our intentions as contemporary political theorists writing for an audience which is as much shaped by the constraints of particular intellectual traditions and the contours of specific political conflicts as any discussed in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. RICHARD ASHCRAFT University of California, Los Angeles Robert S. Westman and J. E. McGuire. Hermeticisraand the Scientific Revolution. Los Angeles: University of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977. Pp. iv + 15o. "Hermes Trismegistus names him the visible God.... So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne ruling his children, the planets who circle round him." Thus Copernicus in De revolutionibus (1543). His citation from the Corpus Hermeticus is an indication of the importance Renaissance Platonists had given those writings. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon proved them to be late-antique forgeries. But late in that century, the "Lament of Asclepius," copied in Newton's neat handwriting, together with a number of copies of the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, is to be found among Newton's manuscript remains. What was the significance of the Hermetic revival for the revolution in scientific ideas? In the first of two Clark Library Seminar papers printed in this volume, Robert S. Westman painstakingly establishes that there was no necessary link between Hermetic sun-worship and acceptance of the heliostatic cosmology. It required a central orbit for the Sun among the planets but did not demand that it be placed at the geometric center of the universe. Nor did the Hermetic assumption of universal animation lead BOOK REVIEWS 393 inevitably to the idea of a moving earth. Such alleged Hermeticists as Dee, Patrizzi, Foix de Candale, and Fludd did not accept the Copernican system. Hermeticist interpretations of the Copernican innovation followed the conventional line. At first they took him to have suggested a convenient calculating device. Only later did they recognize him as having put forward an alternative cosmology. Giordano Bruno added to it an insistence that a Copernican universe must be an infinite one. But his infinitist ideas could not have been directly influenced by the Asclepius text since (as Edward Grant showed some years ago) that text had already served to inspire latemedieval speculations in which a finite and unique cosmos was surrounded by an infinite spiritual receptacle. In the other paper J. E. McGuire restates the thesis, already well known from the works of E. A. Burtt and Alexandre Koyr~, that Isaac Newton's philosophy of nature bears the deep impress of the Cambridge Piatonist thinkers. That is particularly evident in Newton's views of space and time, of nature as an active and passive agent, and of God as substantially omnipresent in the world. Whatever the significance of Newton's alchemical studies, it would therefore be misleading to ascribe primary importance to...

Poetry as Reality: The Orpheus Myth and its Modern Counterparts

In this paper I want to consider, from an historical point of view, the idea that poetry is not simply a form of signification but an activity which, by providing man with a world, makes signification possible. This activity, as Albert Hofstadter describes it in connection with Croce, is genuinely creative, for in it man's world and self are originated and maintained, not found already finished.' For the origin of this idea we may look to the Orpheus myth, and specifically to the power of Orpheus to summon things into being. In Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, we read: A hill there was, and on the hill a wideextending plain, green with luxuriant grass; but the place was devoid of shade. When here the heaven-descended bard sat down and smote his sounding lyre, shade came to the place. There came the Chaonian oak, the grove of the Heliades, the oak with its deep foliage, the soft linden, the beech . 2and so on, until each tree in the traditional catalogue has made its appearance. This power of Orpheus over nature prompted Bacon to adopt him as a model for the scientist; before Bacon, the alchemists had placed Orpheus among their patrons, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Linus, and Musaeus.3 It is hard to tell who had the

Local heroes – memory in action in the late renaissance garden

Hero of Alexandria was a prolific inventor who lived in the 1st century CE and whose writings enjoyed a marked resurgence of popularity in Renaissance Europe. The Greek original of Hero’s most influential text, the Mechanics, was lost early, and was only transmitted to the West in Arabic. The Greek text of his less important – and possibly unfinished – work on Pneumatics, however, found its way to Europe after the fall of Constantinople, where it had been preserved in what Will Noel calls ‘the Ark for ancient literature’. Texts often precede performance, but are equally often the consequence of a tradi- tion of ‘situated’ or maker’s knowledge. This paper looks at the ways in which knowledge became ‘resituated’ in the practice of Renaissance engineers, artists and garden architects through the rediscovery and diffusion of Hero’s Pneumatics. It explores why Hero’s Pneumatics enjoyed such new-found popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, how Hero’s texts were transmitted and interpreted, and to whom. The paper will argue that this revival in interest was due in part to the near-contemporary recovery of other classical texts, such as those by Archimedes, Vitruvius and Hermes Trismegistus. Finally, the paper will argue that the Renaissance memory of Hero’s Pneumatics is best understood through built works rather than texts, and that these works played an important cultural and ideological role in the revival of neo-Platonism and neo-Pythagorean thought in post-Reformation Europe, losing their potency only with the end of the Thirty Years War.

Thomas Traherne and Hermes Trismegistus

Among Renaissance Platonists, the texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus provoked both adulation and controversy. Scholars variously considered the texts precious repositories of ancient wisdom; labeled them frauds; or, more cautiously, suggested they were partly corrupt, partly wise. The first step towards enlightenment came in 1614, when Isaac Casaubon challenged the authenticity of the hermetic texts. Except by ignoring Casaubon, no one thereafter could believe (as William Baldwin could in 1555) that ‘of all the Philosophers’ Hermes was ‘not onely the most excellent, but also the most auncient.’No longer coeval with Moses, no longer indeed assured of personal existence, Hermes came in the seventeenth century to occupy an equivocal position. On the one hand, Casaubon's argument was far too convincing to be denied; on the other, the traditional reputation of Hermes, in Marsilio Ficino's influential words, ‘Primus… Theologiae Autor,’ was far too popular to die a swift and decisive death.

Medicine and Philosophy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Problem of Elements

MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES: THE PROBLEM OF ELEMENTS T HE cultivation of the liberal arts and the sciences during the twelfth century developed new methods and investigated new subject-matters. What was achieved in theory and interpretation is obscured by the further transformation of problems and enlargement of data during the succeeding period, the hundred years between the middle of the twelfth and the middle of the thirteenth centuries, when the scientific and philosophical works of Aristotle and a vast body of accompanying commentary, elaboration, and speculation were translated for the first time. The problem of universals and the problem of elements are two highly ambiguous signs of the intellectual activity of a period of distinguished cultural and scientific renaissance. The grammarian, rhetorician, and dialectician of the early twelfth century studied texts that had long been available more constructively and imaginatively-Latin grammars and rhetorics, translations of Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation , Porphyry's Introduction, and Boethius' logical treatises and commentaries-and the twelfth century Book of Six Principles attributed to Gilbert de la Porree was assimilated with Porphyry's Introduction to the canon of Aristotle's Organon . Even the problem of universals was familiar in the widely known three questions of Porphyry. After the translation of the last four books of Aristotle's Organon the work of twelfth century logicians like Abailard had little pertinence to the continuing problems; and, in general, the liberal arts of the trivium were turned from interpretative applications and constructive theories to demonstrative and speculative systematizations. ~11 212 RICHARD MCKEON The encyclopaedist and the cosmologist of the twelfth century likewise worked on texts long available but neglectedChalcidius ' translation of Plato's Timaeus and his commentary on it, the works of the Platonists Apuleius and Macrobius or of Martianus Cappella who furnished bits of the theories of Hermes Trismegistus, and finally the eleventh century translations of works on medicine or on the nature of man, like those of Constantine the African or Alfanus of Salerno in which the problem of elements is stated. Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abailard, William of Conches (one of whose works is sometimes called On the Elements of Philosophy), and their critic William of St. Thierry as well as many other philosophers of the early twelfth century used the elements as beginning points and ordering principles in their expositions of composites as man, the universe, and the sciences; and elements were continued in that function in the encyclopaedias of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, such as Alexander Neckham 's On the Natures of Th{ngs, Thomas of Cantimpre's On the Nature of Things, and Bartholomew of Glanville's On the Properties of Things. After the translation of Aristotle's scientific work and of commentaries which put varying interpretations on his conception of things, neither the data nor the theories of these organizations of knowledge were useful in the continuing investigations; and, in general, encyclopaedic organizations of the sciences were turned from the classification of the nature and properties of things to the ordering of motions and functions according to principles. The problem of elements is the counterpart of the problem of universals. (1) Science is of the universal; (2) .it is derived from and applied to particulars; (3) examination of universal predicates is therefore involved in questions of existence and being, of experience and reason. Conversely, (I) wholes or complexes are composed of parts and ultimately parts are composed of simple parts; (2) the nature of parts depends on how the whole is conceived; (3) determination of simples is therefore involved in a complex of related questions concerning MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY-11TH AND 12TH CENTURIES 213 the indivisibility of the element, such as, whether the compound is divided actually or intellectually; whether the elements so produced are corporeal or incorporeal; whether they are individuals or classes; and whether they are infinite or finite; whether they are characterized only by properties like size, shape, weight, and motion or also by other qualities. Questions about universals arise from the opposition of different conceptions of logical and scientific method. Questions about elements arise in the opposition of different interpretations of data. The problem of universals...

Possible Sources of Some of Whitman's Ideas and Symbols in Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus and Other Works

Possible Sources of Some of Whitman's Ideas and Symbols in <i>Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus</i> and Other Works