Hermetic Writings Research Articles

„Alles ist in Gott“ – Überlegungen zur bestimmenden theologischen Denkform desCorpus Hermeticum

AbstractGiven theCorpus Hermeticum’s history of formation, it has prompted the attempt to separate layers or groups of writings within the collection of treatises. This process of division, which was for the most part undertaken on criteria of content (dualism, pantheism, etc.), has been viewed rather negatively by the more recent research, on grounds of method. Given the discovery of numerous doctrinal contents that remain constant across different treatises, increased efforts are being made to reconstruct theCorpus’s moments of unity. The present paper aims, in this spirit, to provide a more precise identification of the overarching forms of theological thought in the Hermetic writings. The reflections that follow aim to make it plausible that the defining form of theological thought in theCorpus Hermeticumcan be classified as panentheism. In addition, the distinctive form of this influential theological paradigm in the Hermetic writings will be considered.

Astrology—Emblematics—Heraldry: On Comets, Moons and Stars in the Book of Arms by Szymon Okolski

The paper examines the presence of astrology in the heraldic work Orbis Polonus by Szymon Okolski dating from the mid-1600s. While due to a growing fascination with Neoplatonism and hermetic writings, astrology had enjoyed popularity since the Renaissance, in Okolski’s case its influence came mostly through early-modern books of emblems and compendia of symbols. It is, therefore, important not only to track down astrological motifs in the works of Alciatus, Cesare Ripa, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Julius Wilhelm Zincgref, and Diego de Saavedra to compare them with those found in Orbis Polonus, but also to recognise the fact that emblematics had a great impact on how Okolski perceived the import of his heraldic work as such. The novelty of Okolski’s project consisted in treating armorial bearings as universal symbols and interpreting them not only in accordance with the rules of heraldry, but also through a wide range of cultural sources, trends, and traditions. In order to make the symbolic significance hidden in coats of arms more apparent, the author tried to organise the heraldic entries in a new way. Apart from the usual parts describing the coat of arms (delineatio), its origins (origo) and the family that used it (linea familiae), he introduced subchapters dealing with its symbolic meaning. He called them “considerations”, “precautions”, or “omens” depending on which aspect of the symbolic explanation he wanted to emphasise. Especially the third of these dovetails with astrology because the symbolism of the coat of arms, including motifs derived from, or related to, astrology, is presented as the best path that should be taken by a family bearing a particular coat of arms. All the while, however, these auguries are made based on symbols as such and not on careful observation of stars, planets or comets, and Okolski was not concerned with the destiny of individual people but with more general tendencies that affected the virtue of noble families, and virtue is for Okolski the foundation of nobility.

Augustine and Hermes Trismegistus: An Inquiry into the Spirituality of Augustine’s ‘Hidden Years’

ABSTRACTThis paper draws attention to the possible role of Hermetic writings in the spiritual development of Augustine (354–430). It first places his knowledge of Hermetica within the context of both ‘orthodox’ African Christianity (Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, Lactantius) and contemporary Manichaeism. It then focuses on his dealing with Hermetic writings, ideas and expressions in writings such as the Confessions, the (now lost) The Beautiful and the Harmonious, and Against Faustus. In Augustine’s later writing the City of God, one finds a twofold appreciation of Hermes, which had a particular influence in subsequent centuries.

Dualism in the Hermetic Writings

L’article examine la tension qui existe entre tendances monistes et dualistes dans l'ancien hermétisme et propose de considérer que les écrits hermétiques, tout en opérant dans un cadre dualiste pluriforme (ontologique, cosmologique, anthropologique), soutiennent un modele moniste de la réalité issue d’une divinité transcendante et tout‑englobante. L’imposition d’un état d’esprit dualiste est typique pour les premieres étapes de l’initiation hermétique, suivies par un dépassement progressif de toutes les dualités (Aufhebung) et l’acquisition finale d'un point de vue totalisant et noétique du monde.

The Restoration of Christianity: An English Translation of the Christianismi restitutio, 1553 (review)

Reviewed by: The Restoration of Christianity: An English Translation of the Christianismi restitutio, 1553 Richard A. Muller The Restoration of Christianity: An English Translation of the Christianismi restitutio, 1553. By Michael Servetus. Translated by Christopher A. Hoffman and Marian Hillar. Notes by Marian Hillar. With a preface by Alicia McNary Forsey. [Hors Série.] (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. 2007. Pp. xxx, 409. $129.95. ISBN 978-0-773-45520-7.) There has been comparatively little serious encounter with the theology of Michael Servetus and even less among an English-language readership due to the lack of a translation of his major work, the Christianismi restitutio. Christopher Hoffman and Marian Hillar have remedied this problem with a full translation accompanied by copious annotations. The work itself goes far beyond Servetus’s critique of the doctrine of the Trinity: it is a significant source for Servetus’s understandings of substance; the natural order and the elements; and human physiology, including his revolutionary understanding of circulation of the blood in advance of William Harvey. The work also clearly identifies for the modern reader the sources of Servetus’s thought: he examines numerous biblical texts, a significant sampling of the church fathers plus Jewish sources such as the Targums, and select medieval scholastics, all read through the interpretive filter of a Renaissance-era neo-Platonism modified by the Hermetic writings. Servetus was, clearly, widely read—but, contrary to the hyperbolic praise of his grasp of materials found in the prefaces and notes to this volumes, rather deficient in his understanding of the traditions that he [End Page 387] attacked. For example, in his view, the church fathers tritheistically identified God as consisting in “three invisible” or “incorporeal entities,” a reading of the sources that appears not to understand that language of hypostasis, as debated by the fathers, originally synonymous with ousia, that was later specified to serve in contrast to ousia in trinitarian formulae. Servetus’s critique assumes a virtual equation of substance, essence, and person and appears to miss the point of Latin trinitarianism that the three persons or subsistences were one res. The translation is a welcome addition to the literature of early-modern theology and philosophy. We can hope that it leads to further scholarship both on Servetus and to the variant trends in early-modern thought that he represented. Richard A. Muller Calvin Theological Seminary, Michigan Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

Altered States of Knowledge: The Attainment of Gnōsis in the Hermetica

AbstractResearch into the so-called “philosophical” Hermetica has long been dominated by the foundational scholarship of André-Jean Festugière, who strongly emphasized their Greek and philosophical elements. Since the late 1970s, this perspective has given way to a new and more complex one, due to the work of another French scholar, Jean-Pierre Mahé, who could profit from the discovery of new textual sources, and called much more attention to the Egyptian and religious dimensions of the hermetic writings. This article addresses the question of how, on these foundations, we should evaluate and understand the frequent hermetic references to profound but wholly ineffable revelatory and salvational insights received during “ecstatic” states. Festugière dismissed them as “literary fictions”, whereas Mahé took them much more seriously as possibly reflecting ritual practices that took place in hermetic communities. Based upon close reading of three central texts (CH I, CH XIII, NH VI6), and challenging existing translations and interpretations, this article argues that the authors of the hermetic corpus assumed a sequential hierarchy of “levels of knowledge”, in which the highest and most profound knowledge (gnōsis) is attained only during ecstatic or “altered” states of consciousness that transcend rationality. While the hermetic teachings have often been described as unsystematic, inconsistent, incoherent or confused, in fact they are grounded in a precise and carefully formulated doctrine of how the hermetic initiate may move from the domain of mere rational discourse to the attainment of several “trans-rational” stages of direct experiential knowledge, and thereby from the limited and temporal domain of material reality to the unlimited and eternal one of Mind.

The Works of Thomas Traherne: Volume I (review)

Reviewed by: The Works of Thomas Traherne: Volume I Alison Kershaw Traherne, Thomas , The Works of Thomas Traherne: Volume I, ed. Jan Ross , Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2005; hardback; pp. xxiv, 588; 5 b/w illustrations; RRP US$130, £75; ISBN 1843840375. 'Why is this soe long detained in a dark Manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World, and a Universal Blessing?' Over three hundred years after an unknown person penned these words on its flyleaf, this 'dark Manuscript' has at last been printed in its entirety as the first of eight projected volumes collating the work of Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). The publication of this edition is the latest chapter in the saga of the recovery of the poetry and prose of an Anglican priest who spent most of his life in a small parish outside Hereford during the years immediately preceding and following the Restoration. Only two of his works were published (and quickly forgotten) in the seventeenth century, but since 1896 a considerable body of work has come gradually to light as manuscripts have been serendipitously picked up in London street-barrows, rescued from the flames of rubbish tips, and dusted off in Canadian attics. While many of the poems and meditations, and the richly digressive prose of Christian Ethicks, have been published and anthologized over the course of the twentieth [End Page 228] century, much remains unpublished or is out of print – at a time when Traherne is not only the subject of burgeoning scholarly interest, but is being drawn upon more popularly as a source of joyful and profound spiritual insight. Jeremy Maule unearthed Lambeth Palace MS 1360 and identified it as Traherne's in 1997 but, sadly, died shortly after his major discovery. It comprises five separate works: Inducements to Retiredness, A Sober View of Dr Twisse (a polemical piece opposing the notion of predestination), Seeds of Eternity or the Nature of the Soul, a fragment on Love, and, the major work of the volume, The Kingdom of God – a treatise of over 110,000 words concerning the attributes of divinity as imminently manifested in the material world and the human soul. The text is not as monolithic as the first impression of long and dense paragraphs would suggest; it is eclectic and varied in tone and subject – alternating between theological, scientific and cosmological reflections, by turns discursive, speculative, scholastic, argumentative, caustic, contemplative, and ecstatic. A good introductory selection from this and other works can be found in Denise Inge's anthology Thomas Traherne: Poetry and Prose (SPCK, 2002). Traherne is noted for the vitality of his literary catalogues, and there are some especially memorable examples in this manuscript: a catalogue of the workings of Infinite Love which whispers 'in evry Gale of Wind' and 'fanneth our Lungs with Air' and is 'hid in the Labyrinth of our Ears'; a meditation upon a 'Curious and High Stomached' fly, crowned with an 'Imperial Tuff', 'Enthroned upon a Leaf... contemplating all the World'; and an extended reverie upon the imagined observations of a 'Celestial Stranger' who is 'let down of a suddain' from the aether and encounters a 'World of Mysteries' in the earth which had previously seemed to him to be but a pin-prick of light – 'This litle Star so Wide and so full of mysteries! So capacious, and so full of Territories, containing innumerable Repositories of Delight, when we draw neer!' Such passages provide but a glimpse of the 'Repositories of Delight' contained in the first volume of The Works of Thomas Traherne. The completed collection will not include Traherne's Commonplace Book or an early notebook. This omission squares with the fact that, apart from biblical references, a glossary, and the noting of marginalia and textual revisions, Ross has not aimed to provide a comprehensive set of scholarly annotations. Aside from some general observations on Traherne's sources in the introduction, there is no attempt to trace through the text his broad-ranging interest in contemporary science and cosmology, his engagement with theological and political controversy, and his interaction with sources ancient and modern, ranging from the Hermetic writings [End Page 229] and the Church Fathers to Theophilus...

Reading Gertrude Stein in the Light of the Book Artists

Stein's llustrators have provided useful interpretations of her often hermetic writings. Clement Hurd focused on the childlike humor of The World is Round which Andrew Hoyem transformed into a circular artist's book. Susan Weil's etchings duplicate Stein's technique in Tender Buttons. Shirley Sharoff's bookwork captures the movements of "Procession." Matthew Tyson's drawings catch the understated horrors of "War Poems." Aurélie de Nemours' colors evoke the structure of "Early and Late." Responding to Stein's denials of authorship, Irma Blank provides a digest of Everybody's Autobiography, visually reduced to an illegible script. Fahrner's "mise en scéne" of "Parlor" proves that Stein wrote performable plays.

"<i>Inter inextricabiles... difficultatum tenebras</i>": Ficino's <i>Pimander</i> and the Gendering of Cartesian Subjectivity

After reviewing the evidence that Descartes' philosophical itinerary was to a significant degree shaped by a reading of the Hermetic writings translated by Ficino, this article proposes that, in the Cartesian and Hermetic texts alike, the body from which an emergent autonomous subjectivity seeks to separate itself is gendered female. Some of the implications of this argument are explored through a reading of Marvell's poem "The Garden," which is seen here as a parallel response to the Hermetic texts.

The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns

A present-day physician, practicing "modern" scientific medicine, works within a rather specific intellectual framework. He may not realize that many quite different intellectual patterns have, at various times, exerted profound influence on thought and action generally and on medicine in particular. The occult sciences, for example, have shaped men's thoughts into patterns quite at variance with modern science. In the history of ideas, the occult occupies an important place and is not without presentday influence. Professor Shumaker has provided an interesting study of intellectual patterns in the Renaissance, the era when occult sciences were, perhaps, at their peak. With great scholarship he traces the doctrines and conflicts in five specific areas—astrology, witchcraft, white magic, alchemy, and the so-called Hermetic writings. He brings to his task vast learning and extensive reading in the primary sources. In his presentation he takes up the principal authors and many minor ones, and gives summaries,

The Corpus Hermeticum

When presenting to the Literary Faculty of Leyden University my paper on Division of the History of the Egyptian Language, Friday the 5th of October 1945, I could defend, amongst the six required by the Academic Statute, a thesis on the Hermetic literature, running: The Hermetic writings contain, in a presentation comprehensible to the Greek reader, expositions of the system of philosophy and science, developed, or at least professed, by the Egyptian priesthood during the last millennium before the beginning of our era.

A New Edition of the Hermetic Writings

A New Edition of the Hermetic Writings

A New Edition of the Hermetic Writings

A New Edition of the Hermetic Writings

THE HERMETIC WRITINGS

Journal Article THE HERMETIC WRITINGS Get access J. M. CRFED J. M. CRFED Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume os-XV, Issue 60, July 1913, Pages 513–538, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/os-XV.60.513 Published: 01 July 1913