Hermetic Tradition Research Articles

Field Theory, Intercorporeality, and the Sámi Underworld

Field theory as a concept entered scientific discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the essential features of a field long predate discoveries about the physical properties and behavior of matter. The paper briefly describes ancient esoteric precursors to scientific field theory, including the Hermetic tradition and archetypal astrology, before turning to twentieth-century sociological field theories and their elemental idea of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Jungian psychology is a field theory, expanding the limits of sociology in important ways. The paper adopts a somatic archetypal perspective to argue that intersubjectivity, the basis of sociological and psychological field theories, is inadequate. Instead, depth psychologists should embrace intercorporeality, the more embodied, holistic field theory originating in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The paper concludes with a discussion of nekyia to illustrate how an intercorporeal field theory can include the underworld in world mythologies. The inverted cosmic geography of one tradition, the Sámi, gives new meaning to numinous encounters with one’s ancestors and spirit guides. Such encounters intertwine the subtle energy bodies of the personal and transpersonal worlds, a meeting one can imagine as soul to sole, not just soul to soul.

A Further Usage of the Word Homousios in Latin: Lexicographical Observations

1 ACTA CLASSICA LXV (2021) 1–10 ISSN 0065–1141 A FURTHER USAGE OF THE WORD HOMOUSIOS IN LATIN: LEXICOGRAPHICAL OBSERVATIONS* Matteo Rajola University of Naples, Federico II Pre-Nicene uses of the term homousios From the fourth century on, the word homousios, meaning ‘consubstantial’, appears to be indissolubly intertwined with Christian doctrinal thinking and the need to define the ontological bonds between God the Father and God the Son.1 The word officially entered the ‘technical’ language of Christianity at the time of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325);2 from then on this term, borrowed from Greek, was widely used in Latin works, as we can see in a number of doctrinal and dogmatic texts. But even before the fourth century, homousios was used to refer to the notion of consubstantiality thanks to the significant contribution of Gnosticism .3 However, Beatrice notes that, in paganism, the use of the word homousios in relation to the speculation about the essence of the divine (consisting in Nous and Logos, that is a god-father and a god-son) is systematically explained only in the Poimandres, the first of the essays contained in the Egyptian Corpus Hermeticum.4 There are also five oracles of the same origin, quoted in the first Book of the Theosophy of an anonymous Monophysite 5 dealing with the same theological matters as the Poimandres, including the term homousios, to define the relationship between NousFather and Logos-Son, with the addition of Pneuma-Spirit to complete the * I would like to thank Alessia Avecone, the editor of Acta Classica, and the journal’s readers for their helpful comments and advice in the preparation of this article. 1 There is a rich bibliography regarding the term homousios and the Trinitarian matters related to it. We will just mention here a few contributions made later than the year 2000: Beatrice 2002; Weinandy 2011; Switala 2014. 2 Beatrice 2002:248. On the Council of Nicaea, see Edwards 2009:84–89; Scheck 2010:22–23; Calhoun 2011:194. 3 Grillmeier 1975; Beatrice 2002:248. 4 Beatrice 2002:257. The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of philosophical-religious works dating to the 2ⁿᵈ or 3ʳᵈ century: Ehmer 2021. 5 A work in four books containing a final world chronicle (beginning of the 6ᵗʰ century). See the critical edition of Beatrice 2001. Rajola 2 picture of the Trinity. Therefore Beatrice concludes that the root of the specifically Christian meaning of the word homousios is to be found in the context of Roman-Hellenistic pagan Egypt and not in that of Gnosticism, where the usage of this word seems to have a looser semantic connection with that found in Christianity to define the ontological bonds between the Father and the Son.6 Homousios may also have been used in a Trinitarian sense before the Council of Nicaea. According to Beatrice, the use of homousios in a strictly Trinitarian sense cannot be inferred from a passage by Clement of Alexandria in which it is stated that the Logos is one with the Father due to sameness of substance:7 Sicut etiam verbum ipsum (hoc est filius), quod secundum aequalitatem substantiae unum cum patre constitit, sempiternum est et infectum (‘So the Word itself (namely the Son), that proved to be one with the Father due to the sameness of their substance, is eternal and without end.’) 8 Beatrice also points out that a passage from Origen of Alexandria’s lost Commentary on Hebrews,9 which survived in a Latin translation made by Rufinus,10 is similar to a passage from the same author’s De principiis, which likewise survived in a Latin translation.11 In both passages homousios is used in an analogical sense rather than as an attempt to define the ontological 6 Ibid. 264–69. Beatrice also devotes a section to the relationship between Emperor Constantine and the pagan and hermetic tradition of Egypt with regard to the Nicene Creed. 7 This passage is part of the Adumbrationes Clementis Alexandrini in epistolas canonicas, a fragment of a Latin translation commissioned by Cassiodorus (5ᵗʰ-6ᵗʰ century, ed. Stählin et al. 1970). Despite the risks of such a statement, this fragment was believed by various...

Deuteros Theos: Constantine’s Christology at Nicaea

Recent inquiries into the Christology of Rome’s first Christian emperor have produced a more or less “orthodox” image. While it is widely acknowledged that Constantine’s Christian doctrine developed throughout his career, his vision of Jesus at the time of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) has been regularly cast as a Trinitarian Christology of co-eternality and ontological unity with God the Father. Recent analysis has not, however, taken into account the range of possible interpretations of the available data. By revisiting this data, including Constantine’s Oration, an important letter from Eusebius, the history of the word homoousios, and the Hermetic philosophical tradition, it is possible to locate within Constantine’s views a subordinationist Christology—a Christology which the Council of Nicaea allegedly condemned.

Robert Duncan, Kabbalah, and “The Dominion of the Poetic Mind”

What leads poets into mystical, hermetic and occult studies? How do these traditions shape their poetic practice, and conversely, how do their poems deepen our understanding of the enduring power of these bodies of thought, belief, and ritual? In response to these questions, this paper focuses on Robert Duncan’s study of Kabbalah, especially Kabbalistic language mysticism, which he reads as “the description of the process of a poem.” For Duncan, the language magic of Kabbalah is an important model of poetic language – which is in itself magical. “By associations, by metaphor, by likeness of the part, by fitting as part of a larger figure, by interlinking of members, by share, by equation, by correspondence, by reason, by opposition, by pun or rhyme, by melodic coherence,” Duncan, as he writes in The H.D. Book, seeks to take us to a place “where the image becomes informed, from above or below, and takes over as an entity in itself, a messenger from a higher real.” Situating Duncan as the heir to nineteenth-century occult organizations and the rethinking of hermetic traditions in groups such as the Order of the Golden Dawn, I then proceed to a brief reading of his poem “Roots and Branches,” in order to demonstrate how Duncan’s kabbalistic vision of the “imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines” awakens “transports of an inner view of things,” and secures the poetic imagination as the supreme vehicle of mystical experience.

Socrates' Deadly Game

This paper discusses three concepts that undergird Socrates as the archetypal wise man: the appearance and reality distinction, “logos”, and the ignorance and pathos of the “fool”. The game Socrates played was deadly because he provoked the powerful while knowing that the ignorant are invested in the prevailing order. The paper touches on the work of Plato, Xenophon, Seneca and Epictetus as well as the hermetic tradition.

Besovi u njemu i besovi van njega - konačna pobeda - književni i psihološki pogledi na lik Svetog Petra Koriškog u "Teodosijevom Žitiju"

The paper will present and analytically-sinthetically analyze Teodosije's hagiography of Peter of Korisha in the light of hermetic tradition. The center of research is the character of Saint Peter of Kornisha in the hermetic tradition of medieval literature, the duality of his nature and importance of struggle he takes on, going towards deification. In order to present the struggle of Saint Peter of Korisha in accordance with the spiritual, literary and psychological foundations, special attention will be paid to the correlation possibilities of reading medieval literature and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. The combination of the miraculous and the realistic, as a feature of Teodosije's poetics, leads to the understanding of the Hagiography of Peter of Korisha outside the given framework of the old Serbian literature.

The Need for the Factor Hermeticism in the Renaissance Thinking

It is well known that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the interest in studying the culture and philosophy of the Renaissance in the post-Soviet area grew even more. This article discusses the controversial aspects of the study of the Renessas era and shows the need for a hermetic tradition in understanding it. This is because humanistic ideas of the Renaissance display many elements of esoteric traditions. With the collapse of the ideological monopoly of the former Soviet Union, a pluralistic principle from the paradigmatic point of view in various fields of science, particularly in the social and humanitarian field, began to dominate. In particular, the study of the Renaissance focused on the influence of various esoteric traditions. Our aim is to identify the causes of the same relationship by analyzing two overlapping views on the tradition of hermeticism in the Renaissance. At the same time, special attention is paid to the peculiarities of hermetic ideas as a paradigm.

AS DROPS IN THEIR SEA: ANGELOLOGY THROUGH ONTOLOGY IN FAḪR AL-DĪN AL-RĀZĪ’S AL-MAṬĀLIB AL-῾ĀLIYA

AbstractIn this article, I examine key passages from the Aš῾arite theologian Faḫr al- Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) final work, Al-Maṭālib al-῾āliya (“ The lofty inquiries ”), in order to theorize Rāzī’s cosmology and angelology. In his attempt to prove the existence of these beings, Rāzī divides reality into material and intelligible realms. Angels, which signify the celestial intellects and spheres, exist as non-space-occupying beings and represent an aspect of the intelligible world. Of these, some are associated with celestial bodies, and others are entirely unassociated with materiality. I then present evidence for the possibility that Rāzī believed that these celestial spiritual beings are pre-eternal with God. These positions indicate a certain degree of conceptual continuity with the falsafa tradition, and reflect al-Ġazālī’s (d. 505/1111) previous integration of the philosophical structure of reality into some of his texts. Additionally, one may look to other philosophical currents that developed in the Islamic world beyond the falāsifa, and connect Rāzī’s cosmology to both the Hermetic tradition and the Epistles of the Iḫwān al-Ṣafā᾿.

The Fascination of André Breton for the Arithmosophic Calculation in <i>Arcane 17</i> (The Number 1713 and Gérard de Nerval)

In surrealist researches and writings, recourse to the occult and the hermetic tradition goes hand in hand with the valorization of a set of esoteric knowledge which gathers at the same time mysticism, alchemy, arithmosophy and fictions which make an important place for mystery and the supernatural. Breton devoted himself from his first works to esoteric orientation and hermetism, consubstantially united with his poetry. We evoke the Breton text –Arcane 17, which has as its theme the arithmosophic calculation on its date of birth and that of Gerard de Nerval and, since no methodology can exhaust the meaning of this text, extremely rich in intertextual references, in images symbolic, mythical, in metalogisms, we propose to approach a methodologically open approach that gives absolute priority to the text. The presence of occultism and arithmosophy in Arcane 17, as indeed in all the other surrealist texts dealing with these domains, refers in fact to their poetic aspects. A set of Breton texts (Arcane 17, Le Surrealisme et la peinture, Perspective cavaliere, Les Entretiens) invite us to examine how this author treats esoteric thought as the possibility of a deployment of reverie and poetic inspiration. This corpus attests, certainly, Breton’s concern for the deep links between numbers, letters and events as signs to be deciphered in his spiritual approach and remains an inspiration to the most innovative sensibilities of modernity. Breton was fascinated by the number 1713 (his initials A. B. constitue, by a precise graphical game, an equivalent by transforming the figures; in the text Du poeme-objet, Breton reflects at length on the historical and scientific events related to this year) and refers explicitly several times to Pythagoreanism and Gerard de Nerval. The aim of this article is to show that the persistent vitality of an esoteric conception on the world and on the human understanding that surrealism has always proposed itself contemplates the possible actuality of some aspects of Breton’s thought, such as evidenced by a recent study by Patrick Lepetit The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secrets Societies (2014).

Attorno all’edizione dell’Ars geomantiae: le fonti esplicite e implicite

Researching for the sources of the Ars geomantiae – the oldest divinatory handbook of Western geomancy, translated from Arabic into Latin by Hugo of Santalla in 12th-century northern Spain – led to a double outcome: on the one hand, it showed the nature of Hugo’s cultural competence, imbued with the texts and scientific knowledge of his time; on the other hand, it revealed a series of historico-philosophical and philological data relating to the appearance of his version. In particular, the analysis of the three explicit sources of the Sayings attributed to Socrates, of the Centiloquium of pseudo-Ptolemy and of the Isagoge ad Techne Galieni of Iohannitius has allowed not only to give a direct insight into the fundamental contribution of Arabic culture in the 12th-century translation of scientific studies, but also to carry out a more certain clarification on the dating of the Ars geomantiae and its placement within the translating activity of the master of Santalla. Finally, the question of the hermeticity of the text, raised by the reference to Enoch, one of the three Hermes of Abu- Ma’šar’s legend, has specified to what extent the Ars geomantiae belongs to the Hermetic tradition.

Readers’ thoughts on science and religion

Readers’ thoughts on science and religion

Geneaologías de la Nueva Era en México

La literatura identifica el inicio del movimiento New Age en México a partir de la influencia de la cultura estadounidense en este país, sobre todo a través del contacto con la cultura hippie y neochamánica. En este artículo se ofrece una genealogía histórica del New Age atendiendo a actores y vectores de diverso origen que, a partir del establecimiento de escuelas esotéricas en nuestro país desde principios del siglo XX, transformaron el imaginario de México como sede de una civilización que guarda en sus vestigios prehispánicos tradiciones iniciáticas, que resultan claves en el advenimiento de la Nueva Era. En una segunda parte, se aborda la hibridación de estas doctrinas con la matriz del nacionalismo cultural promovido desde el Estado y con fuerte influencia en movimientos artísticos y políticos, que incidió en la gestación de una versión mexicanizada del New Age que en el presente es un componente central en la red espiritual global. También se analizan las mediaciones de industrias culturales como la literatura de masas y la televisión y su impacto en la popularización de nociones hoy concebidas como parte del movimiento New Age.

Pictorial Theories by Missionaries in Sixteenth-century New Spain: the Capacities of Hieroglyphs as Media in Transcultural Negotiation

This article discusses image theories of missionaries in sixteenth-century New Spain. It contextualizes the practice of adapting indigenous Mesoamerican iconography by mendicant friars for the purpose of evangelization within contemporaneous European debates about Egyptian hieroglyphs, seen by many authors in the period as akin to the pictographs used in central Mexico. The article argues that the supposed universal legibility of these visual systems prompted friars not only to use images as tools for teaching Church doctrine, but to incorporate select indigenous symbols into Christian devotional art. Such formal similarities between Egyptian, Mexican, and Christian iconography were used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as evidence for the original unity of all religions. The text outlines the connection with Renaissance theories about the special quality of Egyptian hieroglyphs which were—in the Hermetic tradition—said to contain ancient wisdom entrusted to the Egyptians by God. Comparison between Egyptian writing and Mexican pictographic symbols raised a debate on whether the latter had the same dignity as the former. With this debate in mind, the Christian iconographies integrating pre-Hispanic glyphs gained a different status.

La «dignitas hominis». Una tematica al centro degli interessi di Lionello Sozzi, studioso del Rinascimento francese

Lionello Sozzi, scholar of French literature of the xvi century, specialized in some research fields, such as the «dignitas hominis» theme. Sozzi uses this theme as a key through which interpret the Renaissance civilization as a whole. The present essay shows how Sozzi analysed the cultural origins of the theme, especially the link between the Bible-Christian tradition and the hermetic tradition.

Squaregnosis, beateros: Alan Watts and the occultism of Aquarian religion

Alan Watts’ influence on religious discourse is beginning to be mapped by twenty-first-century scholars, but emphasis is mostly placed on his role as an interpreter of Eastern religion for the West. The present article considers Watts as a contributor of Western hermetic and occult tradition to contemporary American Paganism. Drawing on historical perceptions of occultism, Watts’ works and their use by subsequent Pagans, I locate Watts as a source for both gnostic realization and erotic transmutation through cosmic hierogamy. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic theory, I contend that Watts’ commitment to gnostic and erotic themes enframed a ‘historically-effected consciousness’ undergirding the modern Aquarian movement in general and American Paganism in particular.

How Hermetic was Renaissance Hermetism?

Based upon key publications by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1938) and especially Frances A. Yates (1964), it has been widely assumed that an important “Hermetic Tradition” emerged during the Renaissance and that Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (first ed. 1471) was at its origin. This article argues that these assumptions need to be revised. Close study of Ficino’s original translation (on the basis of Maurizio Campanelli’s recent reconstruction and critical edition, published in 2011) makes it questionable whether Ficino understood much of the Hermetic message at all; and the famous (unauthorized) first edition of the Pimander (1471) turns out to be corrupt in many crucial respects, leading to a long series of defective editions that obscured the actual contents of the Corpus Hermeticum for Renaissance readers. Hence we seem to be dealing with a Renaissance discourse about Hermes, but hardly with a Hermetic “tradition” in any meaningful sense of the word.

Surrealism’s Secret Societies

This article examines the complicated ways in which the avant-garde intersects with secret societies in some of the foundational texts of surrealism. Rather than a mere fantasy, the model of the secret society helps articulate a theory and practice of the group, with the manifesto serving as an almost paradoxical vehicle for declaring the renewal of an occult and hermetic tradition. In invoking the political mythology of secret societies to define itself as a revolutionary movement, surrealism simultaneously opens itself up to the critique that it represents an outdated form of aesthetics and politics.

Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the secrets of antiquity

In 1655, after more than two decades of toil, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2-80) published his solution to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, a work that has been called one of the most learned monstrosities of all times. Here Daniel Stolzenberg presents a new interpretation of Kircher's hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages. Situating Kircher in the social world of baroque Rome, with its scholars, artists, patrons, and censors, Stolzenberg shows how Kircher's study of ancient paganism depended on the circulation of texts, artifacts, and people between Christian and Islamic civilizations. Along with other participants in the rise of Oriental studies, Kircher aimed to revolutionize the study of the past by mastering Near Eastern languages and recovering ancient manuscripts hidden away in the legendary libraries of Cairo and Damascus. The spectacular flaws of his scholarship have fostered an image of Kircher as an eccentric anachronism, a throwback to the Renaissance hermetic tradition. Stolzenberg argues against this view, showing how Kircher embodied essential tensions of a pivotal phase in European intellectual history, when pre-Enlightenment scholars pioneered modern empirical methods of studying the past while still working within traditional frameworks, such as biblical history and beliefs about magic and esoteric wisdom.

Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition

Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition

Medicæa Medæa: Art, astres et pouvoir à la Cour de Catherine de Médicis (review)

Reviewed by: Medicæa Medæa: Art, astres et pouvoir à la Cour de Catherine de Médicis Susan Broomhall Capodieci, Luisa, Medicæa Medæa: Art, astres et pouvoir à la Cour de Catherine de Médicis (Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 484), Geneva, Librairie Droz, 2011; pp. 728; 122 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$130.00; ISBN 9782600014045. This is an erudite work that struggles to contain the many varied strains of scholarship that it explores in the service of its central argument. Luisa Capodieci’s aim is to study astrological images, by which she means works with an explicitly talismanic quality and intent to effect, possessing a virtue that come from the stars. Her focus is to examine where these images occur in the figurative arts and to analyse precisely what they were intended to achieve. She makes clear that her focus is la magie savante, not demonology or popular witchcraft. Capodieci studies the epistemological traditions in which the programme of the images (as well as their talismanic effects, if any) is based. Where Frances Yates’s work sought to prove that magical meanings did pervade the culture and arts under the later Valois, Capodieci sets out to isolate specific instances and to determine what their meanings were. If the work of Yates serves as one springboard for the study, so too does that of her supervisor, Philippe Morel. His 2008 Mélissa: magie, astres et démons dans l’art italien de la Renaissance which analysed Italian Renaissance paintings with [End Page 199] magical or talismanic significance offers a contemporary culture to which Capodieci can compare Valois France. Capodieci’s project spans from the arrival of Catherine de Medici in France in 1547, to 1581 with the Balet comique de la Royne, which, she argues, is the final demonstration of Catherine’s power before her death in 1589. A driving question for Capodieci is to determine what role Catherine played in this field. However, readers expecting Catherine to be the heart of the study will be disappointed. Many of the works analysed are not directly related, or attributed, to Catherine, who is the explicit focus of only the book’s first section. Here, Capodieci recaps the long tradition of her reputation of a practitioner of the ‘dark arts’, a discussion that surprisingly does not consider whether Catherine’s gender might be a factor in the negative interpretations of her use of astrology. Other chapters explore items that have only speculative (and typically seventeenth- and eighteenth-century) attributions to Catherine. These include a manuscript merging classical, Greek, and Hebrew ideas about the power of angels, a bracelet combining features of an amulet and talisman, and books held in the Royal Library. Even acknowledging the uncertainty of their connection to Catherine, Capodieci concludes that their purposes were largely acceptable practices, protective rather than malefic, and within mainstream platonic and hermetic traditions. Capodieci then explores the capacity of impresa to be magical objects in the sense that they encapsulated the soul of their subject in word and image, and allowed humans to access divine truths. This leads to an examination of Henri II and Catherine’s choice of symbols (the moon, Juno, candles, butterflies, and Prudence among them). Catherine’s rainbow imagery, for example, may have represented a bridge between divine and terrestrial spheres, but Capodieci suggests again that contemporary functions of such images appear conventional rather than as talismanic. The second section commences with a detailed examination of philosophical and theological principles behind the potentialities of astrological images. Capodieci then studies the decorative programme in the Ulysses Gallery at Fontainebleau. Her highly detailed description of the various components of the ceiling’s design (no longer extant), and of the multiple interpretations of the figure of Ulysses in contemporary texts, leads to the conclusion that it was not a talismanic image. Likewise, analysis of the astrological intent of the ceiling in the Pavilion des Poëles suggests that its significance is largely horoscopic, reflecting expectations about the king’s destiny as a great ruler. This contributes to Capodieci’s building argument that the Valois did not present evidence of any sophisticated use of astral magic that warrants the dark...