Hermeticism, God, and the Gods: Expecting (and Finding) Polytheism

March 15, 2023 By polyphanes in hermetica, philosophy Tags: asclepius, Corpus Hermeticum, god, gods, hermeticism, monism, monotheism, polytheism, stobaean fragments 1 Comment

This post has been one I’ve been struggling to write for a while now. Normally, when I get the feeling to write a post, it either comes out in the moment and I set it up to be posted on my blog, or it doesn’t come out and I just let it sit in my drafts folder as a post idea until it’s time to actually write it; I let the thing mature inside, as it were, until it’s good enough to come out on its own. However, this topic is one that I’ve seen crop up time and time again on the /r/Hermeticism subreddit or on the Hermetic House of Life Discord server for literal months now, and every time it does, I remind myself again that I should get to this post. It’s not for lack of trying that it hasn’t been written yet, and it’s not like I don’t have statements or opinions about the subject (they’re all actually fairly straightforward), it’s just…been difficult to actually put all that together in a post. Maybe my approach to it has been wrong, and maybe my more natural writing style prefers to take a different approach. Either way, this post is one that’s been a long time coming.

Let’s start with a question, then: what’s with all the talk of “God” (singular) in the classical Hermetic texts? When a lot of people come to the Hermetic texts for the first time (whether as a scholarly student or a spiritual one), the way a lot of Hermetic texts read makes it sound like some sort of weird Christian knockoff (or, as some patristic Christian authors wrote, some sort of weird pagan prophetical anticipation of Christianity). For some people, this isn’t so much a problem, especially in our largely monotheistic culture in the West or who are used to monotheistic approaches in the modern occult scene, but for many people nowadays who are looking for something more classical, pagan, or otherwise non-Abrahamic and polytheist, the language used in the classical Hermetic texts can be off-putting or outright disorienting. This is especially confusing when there is talk of gods or temple worship in the Hermetica, but it’s not always clear for some about how to correlate all this with each other.

In part III of my Hermeticism FAQ, I opened up with an answer about whether Hermeticism is monotheistic or polytheistic:

Either or both, depending on your perspective. It is true that the bulk of the Hermetic texts, especially the “philosophical Hermetica”, focus on a singular God as the One and the Good for the purposes of both cosmological structure as well as theosophical devotion, but it’s also true that the same Hermetic texts discuss the ensoulment of statues by the gods and encourage the worship of such corporeal gods as well as the many gods in heaven. Whether one wants to consider there to be just one God and all other entities as angels subservient to this one God, or whether one wants to consider the One to be on an ontological level beyond the gods and the gods to have their own reality, Hermeticism may admit both or either perspective. It is also helpful to consider the One to be a “god whom the gods themselves worship” or a “god beyond the gods”, a perspective that is evinced in magical texts from the same time period.

Now, I admit, when I was writing the FAQ, I was hedging on this point. It is true that Hermeticism has been contextualized (if not practiced) for a good few centuries within monotheistic cultures, specifically Christian ones in Europe and Islamic ones in north Africa and the near or middle East. In that time, our extant Hermetic texts from the classical period (and a good many others besides) have been preserved and transmitted through generations of copyists and redactors, also of a similarly monotheistic bent, and have likewise been picked up, read, and made use of by plenty of magicians, mystics, scholars, and detractors who also operate more-or-less from a monotheistic perspective. The language of the Hermetic corpora, after all, does focus hugely on God, the One, however you want to call it. As a result, this question gets asked frequently enough to start open that FAQ segment on doctrine to clear the airs.

All that said, make no mistake: Hermeticism, properly speaking, is a polytheistic form of mysticism. It was produced by polytheists within a polytheistic culture, and does not just admit the existence of multiple gods, but actively encourages their worship. It’s not just a matter of “you can worship the gods”, but “you should worship the gods”. It’s just that the emphasis on Hermeticism as a specific kind of mysticism within a broader religious context (specifically a Greco-Egyptian polytheistic one) isn’t on the gods, but on God which, notably, is not a god itself and the notion of which does not diminish the divinity or godhood of the gods. This last part is, admittedly, a little confusing, and the distinctions between monism and monotheism can get blurred depending on one’s preexisting notion of “God”, especially within an otherwise monotheistic context or coming from an otherwise monotheistic background.

So, yes, the gods. The classical Hermetic texts make abundant notes that gods (plural) exist: throughout CH III, CH II.14—16, CH V.3, CH X.7 and CH X.22—25, CH XII.1 and CH XII.12 and CH XII.21, CH XIII.17, CH XIV.8, CH XVI.10—18, throughout the Asclepius (§4—7, 18—19, 22—23, 25, 27, 32, 37, 39), SH 11, SH 14, SH 21, and on and on. And that’s just looking for the word “gods” (theoi in Greek), setting aside any oblique or opaque references to them, like “governors”, “powers”, or even “statues” (in reference to the divine idols or cult images as worshipped in temples). The Hermetic texts don’t make much of a big deal about there being multiple gods because they fundamentally assume their existence, declaring them in passing almost as if the authors of the Hermetic texts took their existence for granted. And why shouldn’t they? These texts were written in Hellenistic Egypt during the early Roman Empire, by a polytheistic people in a polytheistic culture. Given Walter Scott’s tentative dating of most of the Hermetic texts being written between the first and fourth centuries CE (most of them between the second and third), this was all largely before the persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire began, and written in an ancient bastion of civilization filled to the brim with temples that formed the institutional backbone supporting Egypt for literal millennia. Although there was plenty of cultural and religious change starting with Alexander the Great’s colonization of Egypt, taking the Ptolemaic period into the Roman period, the underlying culture and civilization of Egypt was much as it ever was. And all of this forms the backdrop for what is now the current scholarly consensus, established by the work of academic researchers Garth Fowden or Christian Bull or Wouter Hanegraaff, that the Hermetic texts (and classical Hermeticism more broadly) were produced in a quasi-priestly milieu, the texts either being written by Egyptian priests for a Greek-speaking audience or by their students in a more-or-less Hellenistic context, situating Egyptian religiosity amidst Greek philosophical inclinations.

And yet, when we read the Hermetic texts, all the above seems to be such a miniscule part of it all—because it is! The vast majority, rather, is given to discussion about God (ho theos) in the singular, sometimes referred to as the Maker, the Father, the Good, the One, or so on; prayers of thanksgiving and praise pepper the Hermetic texts, as well as injunctions to show reverence and devotion to God. Put beside each other, the polytheistic admissions above contrasted with this is enough to give someone whiplash, so what gives? It’s not like the Hermetic texts are pulling a fast one on their readers, trying to get them to softly convert to some sort of monotheism, far from it. There’s something a little more subtle happening here that requires a bit of extra historical and spiritual context, as well as a reminder of what “monotheism” actually is and how “monotheism” could be expressed in the cultural and temporal environment of the Hermetica. And no, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that the Hermetic texts referring to ho theos is in reference to any specific god like Zeus or Amun, either, and how that might lead to any notion of henotheism, megatheism, or whatever. There’s something else going on here, because (as I read it) God itself is something Else than what we might expect.

One of the issues that a lot of modern people wrestle with (and, let’s be honest, it’s a fair enough question) is what a “god” actually is. We could talk all day about spirits generally, different kinds of spirits, how we might relate to entities on different levels of reality, and so on until the cows come home—but I wouldn’t try to define the term “god”, because the Hermetic texts don’t, either. There is certainly talk of God and the gods, but there is never any strict discussion of what constitutes a god or what sets apart the gods from other kinds of spirits. The notion of a god is something that is something assumed and otherwise implicit in the Hermetic texts, and to my understanding, it refers broadly to any powerful spiritual entity of a more refined or elevated nature than oneself that can or should receive worship and reverence and sacrifice, whether or not it is embodied. In this light, the term “god” can be inclusive of the Cosmos itself, the planets and stars, heroes or deified teachers, divinized kings, the presiding entity of rivers or mountains, ensouled statues containing the presence of any of the above, and so on. This is all still a rough definition, of course, but trying to get into the specifics of what is or isn’t a god isn’t the point of this post; at the end of the day, if you worship it, it’s a god.

And on that point, we can point to where the Hermetic texts instruct us or encourage us as to the worship of the gods, as in CH XVII, a dialogue between Tat and an unnamed king (though presumably Ammōn):

“…if you think about it, O king, incorporeals also exist among the corporeals.”

“What kind?” asked the king.

“Bodies that appear to be in mirrors seem incorporeal to you, do they not?”

“Yes, Tat, they do; your understanding is godlike,” said the king.

“But there are also other incorporeals: doesn’t it seem to you, for example, that there are forms that appear in body even though they are incorporeal, in the bodies not only of ensouled beings but of the soulless also?”

“You put it well, Tat.”

“Thus, there are reflections of the incorporeals in corporeals and of corporeals in incorporeals—from the sensible to the intelligible cosmos, that is, and from the intelligible to the sensible. Therefore, my king, adore the statues, because they, too, possess forms from the intelligible cosmos.”

CH XVII is a short fragment of a larger text that does not seem to be extant in its entirety anymore, although it does appear to be under the overall heading of Hermetic theology, i.e. discussions about God and the gods. In this fragment, we see a bit of a logical argument that basically claims that statues of the gods are images of the gods, like the incorporeal reflection of a thing in a corporeal mirror, and so we should worship the statues of the gods—but why? Because the gods themselves are to be worshipped. The specific word used here is proskunei, which Copenhaver renders as “adore” but which is used more generally as “make obeisance to the gods”, “fall down and worship”, “prostrating oneself in reverence”, “do reverence towards”, and so forth; although one might try to split hairs and suggest a Christian-esque latria/dulia distinction, that’s not really seen much here using this word, especially when we have related words like proskunēia “act of worship” or proskunētēs “worshipper”. What Tat (called a “prophet” in CH XVII, which itself is not just a general term but a title of a particular kind of ritual official in Egyptian priesthoods) is doing here is explicitly encouraging worship of the gods, not just generally but specifically towards cult images of the gods like the statues enshrined in temples.

Then there’s the Asclepius, which is abundant in its talk of the gods, and which was considered scandalous by patristic Christian writers (especially Augustine of Hippo in his City of God) for its explicit talk of how statues are ensouled and consecrated. There are plenty of references towards worshipping the gods, like in AH 5 (“one who has joined himself to the gods in divine reverence, using the mind that joins him to the gods, almost attains divinity”) or AH 22 (“since he is conjoined to them in kinship, mankind honors the gods with reverent and holy mind; the gods also show concern for all things human and watch over them in faithful affection”), and the famous “Prophecy of Hermēs” from AH 24—29 talks at length about the horrible fate that will befall Egypt (and eventually the whole world) when humanity stops worshipping the gods. However, when it comes to in-depth discussions of the gods, there are four main sections we can point out:

AH 19: a discussion of sensible gods (aisthētoi theoi) vs. intelligible gods (noētoi theoi), with the latter being heads-of-essences (ousiarchai) that produce all things throughout the cosmos
AH 23—24: just as God makes heavenly gods, humanity makes “temple gods who are content to be near humans”, i.e. the sacred statues that serve as cult images of the gods to which worship and sacrifice is directed so as to glorify, revere, and commune with the gods themselves
AH 27: a description of the functions of Jupiter and Jupiter Plutonius (Zeus, Zeus Ploutonios, and Korē in the Coptic AH from NHC VI,8) in creating and sustaining life in the world (which to me reads like interpretatio romana/graeca of Amun, Osiris, and Isis)
AH 37—39: how humanity came to learn of the hieratic art of ensouling statues with the presences of gods, the differences between heavenly gods (i.e. gods in their own domain which rule over universals) and earthly gods (i.e. the presences of the gods worshipped in temples via their cult images which rule over particulars)

The tone of the Asclepius here is nothing short of devoutly prescriptive: more than just raising the fact that the gods are worshipped, this text outright tells us that the gods are supposed to be worshipped, along with how and why we should do so. In similar terms, though less prescriptive than descriptive, do we find Isis teaching Hōros in the Kore Kosmou (SH 23.65—68) about her role as a culture hero with Osiris to tame the savagery of the first humans on Earth by introducing, among other things, consecrated precincts and sacrifices for the ancestral gods, teachings regarding the gods, and a “perfect remedy in all of their prophets [so that] no future prophet who raised his hands to the gods would ever be ignorant” of divine truths and blessings to preserve good life on Earth. Beyond even this, we also get Hermēs saying in SH 2A.14 that he “venerates and worships” (sebomai kaì proskunō—and note the use of that last word here!) the Sun (or, specifically, its truth/reality/existence). While I could keep coming up with references like this, I’ve made my point: the classical Hermetic texts not only readily admit and recognize the existence of multiple gods (and, in some cases, elaborately detail and document them), but also explicitly encourage our worship of them. The funny thing is with all this, though, is that the tone that these same Hermetic texts take, even in the above sections, seems to be an almost dismissive “of course you should do this, you fool, you absolute moron”. Giving worship to the gods, after all, was something necessary for us to live happy and fruitful lives “down here”; as Hermēs says in AH 38:

And this is why those gods are entertained with constant sacrifices, with hymns, praises and sweet sounds in tune with heaven’s harmony: so that the heavenly ingredient enticed into the idol by constant communication with heaven may gladly endure its long stay among humankind.

Do not suppose that these earthly gods act aimlessly, Asclepius. Heavenly gods inhabit heaven’s heights, each one heading up the order assigned to him and watching over it. But here below our gods render aid to humans as if through loving kinship, looking after some things individually, foretelling some things through lots and divination, and planning ahead to give help by other means, each in his own way.

Through reverence, worship, sacrifice, hymning, and all the like, humanity is able to join with the gods in a way that is harmonious for the overall cosmos. It allows us to be provided and cared for by the gods, it allows the gods to better abide with us and work with us in the world, and it allows both humanity and the gods to collaboratively maintain the right order of the whole cosmos that we are enjoined to perfecting. To worship the gods is to maintain a right relationship with them as much as it is the whole of creation. Likewise, earlier on in AH 9:

But I notice, Asclepius, that mind’s quick desire hastens you to learn how mankind can cherish heaven (or the things in it) and tend to its honor. Listen, then, Asclepius. Cherishing the god of heaven and all that heaven contains means but one thing: constant assiduous service. Except for mankind alone, no living thing, neither divine nor <mortal>, has done this service. Heaven and heavenly beings take delight in wonderment, worship, praise and service from humans. Rightly the supreme divinity sent the chorus of Muses down to meet mankind lest the earthly world lack sweet melody and seem thereby less civilized; instead, with songs set to music, humans praised and glorified him who alone is all and is father of all, and thus, owing to their praise of heaven, earth has not been devoid of the charms of harmony.

This bit of AH 9 comes immediately after Hermēs talking about all the other sciences and activities humans get up to in the world, including “agriculture, pasturage, building, harbors, navigation, social intercourse, reciprocal exchange”. All of these things are what “preserves this earthly part of the world”, and that the world would be “incomplete” (and thus imperfected) without us engaging in these things. Just as humanity is to tend to the world below through these mundane arts and sciences, so too are we to tend to the world above through more spiritual and religious ones. Despite the importance (if not outright fervent glorification) Hermēs gives to all of this, he only really covers this in a surprisingly summary way before immediately moving onto other topics.

The overall feel of how the Hermetic texts talk about the gods and our worship of them is like it’s all a reminder rather than something revelatory—because, in the original context of Hermeticism, the reader would already be worshipping the gods (plural), and the actual revelation would be learning about God (singular). That’s why the Hermetic texts spend so much time on God: as opposed to the gods more generally which everyone was already engaged with, the mystic (and monist) focus on Hermeticism is with this other thing that people aren’t so familiar with. Being a good polytheist with an awareness of and reverence for the gods, in other words, is essentially a prerequisite for engaging with this new thing that all these texts attributed to Hermēs Trismegistos are trying to teach.

Let’s consider again the original context of the Hermetic texts. As I mentioned before, Hermeticism arose in a polytheistic culture, specifically that of Hellenistic Egypt during the Roman Empire, but more specifically, based on the most recent academic analyses of the milieu in which these texts arose, it was in small, close-knit “communities” (such as they were) headed by a teacher with some number of students. Unlike the centralized network of Egyptian temples (an ancient set of institutions in their own right), these groups were far more decentralized, even to the point of informality, likely within the home of the teacher or within an empty corner or room of local temples. The teacher would likely have been either a career Egyptian priest interested in mysticism and skilled in particular hieratic arts, or otherwise one taught by them, blending Hellenistic philosophy with Egyptian religiosity in a way befitting the life and times of a post-Ptolemaic-now-Roman context. In its original Greco-Egyptian environment, devotions and sacrifices to the gods would have been understood and performed as a given and would have provided the necessary religious and spiritual foundation for what would essentially be an “extracurricular activity”: the gods were already well-known, but having already approached them and having already understood their role in the lives of people in the world, those who would want “something more” would then seek out a teacher who could go beyond the exoteric into the esoteric.

Let’s get more into that stuff next time.

Ordering an Approach to the Classical Hermetic Texts

February 8, 2023 By polyphanes in hermetica Tags: asclepius, Corpus Hermeticum, curriculum, definitions of hermes trismegistus to asclepius, hermetic house of life, hermetic spirituality and the historical imagination, order, reading, stobaean fragments, syllabus, texts, wouter hanegraaff Leave a comment

Those who’ve gone through a number of my Hermeticism-related posts know that I like to cite a bunch of the classical Hermetic texts, which can be dizzying at points for those who aren’t used to a lot of the abbreviations. For the sake of my friends and colleagues over on the Hermetic House of Life (HHoL) Discord server, I put together a Google Sheets-based index of Hermetic texts and references which contains a breakdown of all the texts, their sectioning, and whatever possible citations or sources I can find for them in the classical Hermetic corpora, but for those who just want an easier cheat-sheet of abbreviations I tend to use:

CH — Corpus Hermeticum
AH — Latin Asclepius, or the Perfect Sermon
DH — Armenian Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius
OH — Oxford Hermetic Fragments
VH — Vienna Hermetic Fragments
SH — Stobaean Hermetic Fragments (i.e. Hermetic fragments from John of Stobi’s Anthology)
NH —Hermetica within the Nag Hammadi Library
FH — Miscellaneous Hermetic Fragments (from Litwa’s Hermetica II)
TH — Miscellaneous Hermetic Testimonia (from Litwa’s Hermetica II)

Besides the above, there are also a few other useful abbreviations to describe a few other texts, whether some of the above texts by other terms or secondary literature about the above:

KK — Korē Kosmou, or Virgin/Pupil of the World (SH 23—26)
NHC — Nag Hammadi Codices (of which NH are NHC VI,6—8)
D89 — Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth (or The Ogdoad Reveals the Ennead, i.e. NHC VI,6)
PGM — Greek Magical Papyri
PDM — Demotic Magical Papyri
PCM — Coptic Magical Papyri
HSHI — Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination (by Wouter Hanegraaff)
THT — The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus (by Christian Bull)

Going by the primary list of abbreviations above (CH, AH, DH, etc.), as recorded on that index of Hermetic texts I linked to above but excluding the miscellaneous Hermetic fragments and testimonia (FH and TH), there are 73 Hermetic texts that fall under the banner of “classical Hermetic corpora” (not including, of course, a variety of “practical/technical” texts like what we might find in the PGM). Although some of these texts are certainly far more known—or at least more accessible and easily found—than others are (like how CH is compared to OH), I consider the whole collection of these texts to compose the “beating heart” of Hermeticism, and so are crucial to its study. I don’t like thinking of these all as some sort of “bible”, though, even if some might find the use of such a term as a helpful parallel to gauge exactly how important this collection of texts might be.

But that’s just it: it’s a collection of texts, and an often disparate one at that that’s based only on what’s extant to us nowadays. We only have what survives the knife of time and the redactor’s pen, to be sure, but even then, some of these texts were only recovered in the past few decades (like DH was in the 1980s or OH were in the 1990s, to say nothing of the Nag Hammadi stuff in 1945). With an increasing quality of scholarship and more accessibility to otherwise-forgotten libraries, there’s always the possibility for further classical Hermetic texts to be discovered (or, perhaps more appropriately, recovered), and I’m always hopeful that we might indeed find something more along these lines to continue to shake up or further develop our understanding of classical Hermeticism and how it influenced everything that came after it. Still, we only have what we have, and even that can be a mess at times. Even texts like the CH, which appear to us nowadays as being a “single text”, aren’t really anything of the sort, but are rather a collection of disparate texts that were compiled together at one point (the fact of which goes a long way to explain a number of inconsistencies or disparate views between the different books contained therein).

This raises the question: how, exactly, should one go about trying to really approach reading the classical Hermetic texts at all? Is there some ideal order that we might read them in? Should we go by collection, theme, or some other scheme? Do we want to impose a classification on them (like monist, dualist, or a middle-ground between them), or some sort of “distance from a center” like what Hanegraaff does in his HSHI (pp. 138—144) with “more central” texts being the more experiential and spiritual and “more distant” texts being the more theoretical and contextual? Should we just go in order of how they appear in some collections, and if so, which specific collections’ orders (because with the SH specifically, there’s how they appear in Scott and preserved by later scholars like Nock/Festugière or Litwa, and how they appear in Stobaeus’ own Anthology)? There are a lot of considerations one might take to answering a question like this, and there’s no real wrong approach here; after all, the goal for those who study the Hermetic texts is to eventually study all of them and to get acquainted enough with their ideas and themes so that we know what they talk about and how they relate to the rest of the Hermetic corpora. Still, having some sort of curriculum or syllabus might well be helpful for those who want to take a more thoughtful approach.

While I like taking my time and going through the texts repeatedly as I find convenient whenever I feel like picking up my copies of Copenhaver, Litwa, or Salaman, this same question is one that I’ve personally wrestled with because it has a practical impact on me. One of the things I do on HHoL (and before on the now-defunct “Hermetic Agora” server) is lead a “Weekly Hermetica” study group, where we go through particular texts, read them, and discuss them on a weekly basis. In addition to covering texts like the Picatrix, a number of entries in the PGM, or (as is currently ongoing) the Sentences of Sextus (which I wrote about not too long ago on my blog), I’ve also covered the classical Hermetic texts before, and I plan to do so again (on a schedule that starts this April 2023 and continues through June 2024). While there are certainly arguments for handling this in one way or another, the schedule and approach I’ve settled on for doing this to give people a decent run-through of the classical Hermetic texts on a week-by-week basis runs like this:

CH III
CH VII, CH I
CH IV
CH XI
CH XIII
CH V
CH XIV
CH VIII
CH IX
CH XII
CH VI
CH XVII
CH II
CH XVI
CH XVIII
CH X
NHC VI,6 (D89)
AH 1—3
AH 4—6
AH 7—9
AH 10—13
AH 14—17
AH 18—21 (including the equivalent of NHC VI,8)
AH 22—26 (equivalent of NHC VI,8)
AH 26—30 (including the equivalent of NHC VI,8)
AH 31—34
AH 35—38
AH 39—41 (including the equivalent of NHC VI,7)
SH 1, 2A, 2B
SH 28, 21, 9
SH 15, 22
SH 5, 29
SH 6
SH 8, 12, 13, 14, 7
SH 11
SH 20, 17
SH 3, 19
SH 18, 16, 10
SH 27, 23.1-23 (KK part 1, first third, starting with a single line from another excerpt)
SH 23.24-49 (KK part 1, second third)
SH 23.50-70 (KK part 1, last third)
SH 24 (KK part 2)
SH 25 (KK part 3)
SH 26 (KK part 4)
DH 1
DH 2
DH 3
DH 4
DH 5
DH 6
DH 7
DH 8
DH 9
DH 10
DH 11
OH 1—5
VH 1—4

In general, I break up texts primarily by collection, starting with the most well-known or profuse and going to the lesser-known, shorter, or otherwise more recently-found texts. In the case of AH, DH, OH, and VH, we just straightforwardly go through each text in a linear sequence without skipping around. AH, since it’s all technically just one big text, gets broken up into a series of chunks of sections. NH gets split up, with NH 1 (NHC VI,6 aka D89) on its own and NH 2 (NHC VI,7) and NH 3 (NHC VI,8) being discussed alongside the AH, because these are equivalent texts preserved in different languages and textual lineages (NH in Coptic, AH in Latin). CH and (most of) SH, however, pose much more interesting difficulties, because these are properly collections of texts that appear in different formats at times (some are discourses, some are letters, some are just decontextualized musings, etc.) and there’s no clear theme or development that suggests a particular “original order” or another.

For the CH, I generally stick to one book at a time, and otherwise I generally follow Hanegraaff’s “theoretical distance from the experiential center”. He gives his reasoning for how he considers the various books of CH (as well as NH, DH, and SH texts) to be more or less “weird” in HSHI (pp. 138—144), and I think his analysis here is really insightful, even if he makes clear that it’s all conditional and hypothetical along his own framework of interpretation and understanding.

The way I like to think of my approach to the CH is a journey of sorts:

We open with CH III, which even though Hanegraaff places outside his circle entirely (“its relevance to Hermetic spirituality is limited to some vague similarities with the account of creation in CH I”), I find to be a wonderful summary of the Hermetic worldview and helps frame someone’s approach in a sensible way. (Admittedly, I admit my own bias here, given my love for CH III as a sort of “Heart Sutra” for Hermeticism and having done my own analysis and translation of it, but I think it’s still easy and short enough to knock out first.)
Although I prefer to give each CH text its own “study session”, I combine CH VII and CH I together since the fire-and-brimstone harangue of CH VII is a straightforward expansion/continuation of the initial streetside preaching of Hermēs in CH I.27—29. However, CH I is the real star of this pair, and is otherwise the very foundation of all the other classical Hermetic texts. After opening up with a gentle CH III and harsh CH VII, CH I is really where we dig into the actual meat of these texts.
Although Hanegraaff puts CH IV just outside the “weird center” before the next two texts, I think it should be read first as part of it, because it describes its own calling of the way, an explanation of not only the Goodness of God but also gives us an introduction to the impetus of Hermetic salvation, why we should strive for it, and how it’s effected through nous (divine Mind).
CH XI and CH XIII come next as part of Hanegraaff’s “weird center”, CH XI discussing “the perception of the cosmos through noetic vision following [spiritual] rebirth”, and CH XIII itself being a description of such spiritual rebirth by which such noetic vision is activated.
CH V, CH XIV, and CH VIII are all monistic theological treatises on the unity of the cosmos and how it is all generally created by God (regardless of other notions of a demiurge being involved at other stages of specific creation), and thus how we should consider our relation to the cosmos and to God in such a light.
CH IX and CH XII go together for me in discussing the roles of nous and logos coupled with perception and psychology.
CH VI, in stark contrast to texts like CH V, is one of the ones considered more “gnostic” due to how dualist it seems—but this is just a matter of “seeming” rather than actually being dualist, since there is a fundamental unity at play that still gets obscured through incarnate existence. Coupled with the short fragment that is CH XVII, we get a notion of how incorporeal things and corporeal things properly relate to each other.
CH II is a very theoretical text that uses some physics metaphors to describe a few matters of theology. It brings back into focus the underlying unity of the creation of God with God, but (with further contextualization provided by CH VI) emphasizes how utterly foreign and different God is to anything we might consider, emphasizing the role of gnōsis to truly achieve a full understanding of how things are.
CH XVI finalizes the above journey, so to speak, with a encosmic view of how things come to be in a spiritually-active worldview, noting how, even though this is a monist theology we engage with, there’s much in the way between us and God that can be effected through the forces of fate, which we can surmount through divine salvation facilitated through particular channels.
CH XVIII is a hard text to place, since it’s arguably the only “really” non-Hermetic text in the collection; like CH I and CH III, neither Hermēs nor his students are named, and there’s not a whole lot that connects it theologically or philosophically to the Hermetica beyond a praise of God and kings with some solar imagery (which is why Salaman declines to include it in his translation in the CH). However, as a bit of mystic and religious writing, I think it should be included all the same, and the solar imagery involved here is a nice add-on to the solar discussion in CH XVI.
CH X is, in Hanegraaff’s words, “our most comprehensive overview of Hermetic theory”. Much how AH is a text that covers lots of topics, CH X is its own sort of encyclopedia that covers much and is one of the longest and most intricate (but also most troubling to understand and correlate at points) texts in the CH. Understanding it as a summary, reading CH X at the end of a tour of the CH gives us a fitting end to this collection of texts in my mind.

For the SH texts, I reserve for the end SH 23—27, which collectively compose KK, proceeding with these texts specifically more-or-less in order (though starting with SH 27, which is just a single line and makes a nice terse intro to the rest of the KK). Although a lot of people like reading the KK, and even though I find a good amount useful in it generally for the understanding of Greco-Egyptian spirituality, I am otherwise in agreement with Hanegraaff that it really shouldn’t be understood as a Hermetic text:

Contrary to common usage, I do not include these treatises under the spiritual Hermetica because they are sharply different from the rest of our treatises in terms of their alleged authors, contents, worldview, and literary style. Hermes does not appear either as a teacher or as a pupil; instead, we read conversations between Isis and Horus in which “all-knowing Hermes” is presented as their remote divine ancestor. The mythological narrative describes God as an anthropomorphic and authoritarian Craftsman who punishes the souls he has created for transgressing his commands. The great beauty of the higher world does not inspire love and admiration but fear; and when the souls are disobedient, they are punished for their sins by imprisonment in the “dishonorable and lowly tents” or “shells” of material bodies. Throughout, the emphasis is on God’s despotic power and his creatures’ fear of him. Because I see all of this as incompatible with what we find in the rest of our corpus, I assume that these Isis-Horus treatises represent a separate tradition.

While we might consider the KK to be a kind of “Isiaca” as opposed to “Hermetica”, and while I think there’s plenty of worth in it to read (indeed, a good chunk of my recent “On the Hermetic Afterlife” post series used the stuff in the KK to give a foundation for a model of Hermetic reincarnation), I don’t think these texts are in line enough with the rest of the Hermetic texts we have available to us to comfortably inform us. That’s why I keep them at the end of my planned tour through the SH: even if they’re important on their own or even to better understand the general context of Hermeticism (which is why I include them in my reading list above), I don’t think they’re all that important for understanding and implementing Hermeticism itself.

The rest of the SH, however, isn’t so bound by the above as the KK is, which is why I like giving it its due. The order in which I plan to cover them, however, might seem super shuffled and jumbled. Hanegraaff considers them as a whole to discuss a wide variety of topics, and so are closer in spirit to DH or CH X. My order for them, however, is more-or-less themed according to how I understand them:

SH 1, 2A, 2B: truth and devotion (a good opening intro to the SH, not unlike how CH III/VII/I together were for the CH)
SH 28, 21, 9: God, the chain of being, and how things come to be
SH 15, 22: procreation, birth, and premodern understandings of family resemblance as a matter of incarnation of the soul in a world of elements
SH 5, 29: the different levels of creation, the sustaining and maintaining of the body, and a short poem on the powers of the planets
SH 6: decans, astrological and meteorological phenomena, and how this all relates to the vision of God
SH 8, 12, 13, 14, 7: providence, necessity, fate, and justice as guiding principles of the world, its functioning, and our right-relationship to it and to God
SH 11: a collection of summary-statements (κεφαλαία kephalaía) that collectively frame a Hermetic understanding of fate
SH 20, 17: virtues and powers of the soul and how it relates to body
SH 3, 19: different kinds of souls, how souls might be considered, and how it gives form to life and living
SH 18, 16, 10: relationship between soul and body, and how time flows and is perceived

Now, of course, this is all just my plan to go through the texts for the sake of my “curriculum” for HHoL’s Weekly Hermetica study group, based on my own understanding of the texts and informed by modern scholarship about them. I want to be clear here that I’m not suggesting that this is the only way or the best way to approach these texts, but is more of a matter of “thematic convenience” based on how I consider them that would lead (hopefully) to fruitful discussion and consideration among the people participating in these weekly chats.

To further illustrate that there might well be other sensible orders to consider some of these texts in, lemme share a small side-project I was asked to consider once upon a time. Although I don’t like thinking of the Hermetic texts as a “bible” of sorts (I’m not a fan of bibliolatry or seeing these as somehow divinely-guided or divinely-inspired texts, even if they are revelatory at points and talk about holy matters), it’s far from uncommon for some people to treat some of these texts with a similar reverence for particular religious activities, like swearing oaths upon or having as a presence of its own on a Hermetic altar. At one point, someone asked me to consider a set of Hermetic readings from the CH, like one might do for matins or vespers services in a Christian context, as an adjunct for one’s prayers or to offer a schedule for lectio divina. To that end, I came up with a four-week set of 56 readings, two readings per day across 28 days, that takes one through the CH in its own thematic way focused more on daily devotions to divinity rather than on experiential “weirdness” as used in my weekly discussions schedule above:

Week	Day	Time	Text	Theme	Subtheme
1	1	Matins	VII	Call to the Way
1	1	Vespers	III	The Creation and Purpose
1	2	Matins	XVIII.1—3	Praise for the Almighty	The Nature of Music and the Musician
1	2	Vespers	XVIII.4—6	Praise for the Almighty	The Faults and Help of the Musician
1	3	Matins	XVIII.9—10	Praise for the Almighty	Approaching the Supreme King
1	3	Vespers	XVIII.11—14	Praise for the Almighty	The Rays of the Supreme King
1	4	Matins	IX.3—4	The Good	The Conceptions and Gifts of God
1	4	Vespers	VI.1—2	The Good	On the Qualities of the Good
1	5	Matins	VI.3—4	The Good	Good in the World
1	5	Vespers	VI.5—6	The Good	The Good and the Beautiful
1	6	Matins	IX.1—2	Understanding	On Sensation
1	6	Vespers	IX.5—6	Understanding	Sensation and Understanding
1	7	Matins	IX.7—8	Understanding	God the Father, Cosmos the Father
1	7	Vespers	IX.9—10	Understanding	God and the Cosmos
2	8	Matins	IV.1—2	Mind	How God Made the Cosmos
2	8	Vespers	IV.3—5	Mind	God Establish Mind for All to Take
2	9	Matins	IV.6—7	Mind	How to Learn about Mind
2	9	Vespers	IV.8—9	Mind	Knowledge through Mind to the Good
2	10	Matins	II.12—13	Motion, Mind, Good	Mind and God
2	10	Vespers	II.14—15	Motion, Mind, Good	God is Not Mind, but Good
2	11	Matins	II.16	Motion, Mind, Good	Good is Misunderstood
2	11	Vespers	IV.11	Motion, Mind, Good	Goodness and God
2	12	Matins	XI.2—3	The Process of the Whole	God, Eternity, Cosmos, Time, Becoming
2	12	Vespers	XI.4	The Process of the Whole	God, Mind, Soul, Matter
2	13	Matins	XI.5—6	The Process of the Whole	Nothing is Like the Unlike
2	13	Vespers	XI.7—8	The Process of the Whole	All Things are Full of Soul and Motion
2	14	Matins	XIV.2—3	Health of Mind	Things Begotten Come to Be by the Agency of Another
2	14	Vespers	XIV.4—5	Health of Mind	God, Maker, Father
3	15	Matins	XIV.7—8	Health of Mind	The Wholeness of the Whole
3	15	Vespers	XIV.9—10	Health of Mind	God the Sower of the Things that are Good
3	16	Matins	X.7—8	The Soul	Deification Prevented by Vice
3	16	Vespers	X.9—10	The Soul	Deification Aided by Virtue
3	17	Matins	VIII.1	On Death	Death is but a Word
3	17	Vespers	VIII.2	On Death	The Reality of God
3	18	Matins	VIII.3—4	On Death	The Immortal Nature of Matter
3	18	Vespers	VIII.5	On Death	Understand What God Is
3	19	Matins	XII.16	On Death	Dissolution is Not Death
3	19	Vespers	XII.17—18	On Death	The Earth is Full of Life
3	20	Matins	XIII.1—2	On Rebirth	The Spiritual Birth of Mankind
3	20	Vespers	XIII.3—6	On Rebirth	The Way to be Born Again
3	21	Matins	XIII.7—10	On Rebirth	The Tormentors and the Powers
3	21	Vespers	XIII.11—14	On Rebirth	The Way of the Way of Rebirth
4	22	Matins	V.1	Praise for the Maker	Invisible Yet Entirely Visible
4	22	Vespers	V.2—5	Praise for the Maker	Seeing the Glory of the Creator in Creation
4	23	Matins	V.6—8	Praise for the Maker	The Glory of the Maker of Mankind
4	23	Vespers	V.10—11	Praise for the Maker	How Can I Sing Praise?
4	24	Matins	I.1—5	The First Revelation	The Opening of the Eyes
4	24	Vespers	I.6—9	The First Revelation	Understanding the First Vision
4	25	Matins	I.10—11	The First Revelation	The Creation of the World
4	25	Vespers	I.12—13	The First Revelation	The Creation of Humanity
4	26	Matins	I.14—16	The First Revelation	The Descent of Humanity
4	26	Vespers	I.17—19	The First Revelation	The Mystery of Humanity
4	27	Matins	I.20—23	The First Revelation	The Trial of Humanity
4	27	Vespers	I.24—26	The First Revelation	The Ascent of Humanity
4	28	Matins	I.27—29	The First Revelation	The Commission of Hermēs
4	28	Vespers	I.30—32	The First Revelation	The Final Praise

I’m sure one could continue the above with readings from the AH, SH, DH, and the like, and I might expand on that at some point to cover such a thing to make a whole “liturgical year” of readings from the classical Hermetic corpora as a whole as opposed to just the CH, but let’s face it, the CH is by far the most well-known classical Hermetic collection of texts. Even if I personally find some of the SH texts equally as fascinating and informative (if not more so) for arranging a sort of Hermetic spirituality at points, the CH itself is full of theoretical and technical treasures that have captured people’s imaginations for many centuries, earning it a right to special consideration for many Hermeticists today.

I myself haven’t stepped through such a twice-a-day reading schedule as the above, but thinking of or treating a text like the CH in a way that deserves such attention isn’t a bad exercise on its own by far. It also goes to show that there are, indeed, different ways to consider the Hermetic corpora in general for how we want to approach them, and that there’s no one right way to do so. I’m certainly looking forward to this next round of weekly discussions on the classical Hermetic texts in HHoL (and you should totally join us in the server if you want in on them, or to read up on them after the fact!), but I note that this is just my preferred way to step through the texts for the sake of education and building up familiarity with the texts. Other orderings, such as those along different thematic schemas or for more devotional needs than pedagogical, are also totally legit. Besides, all of the foregoing is based on what we just have extant to us nowadays; I look forward to the opportunity of diving into as-yet undiscovered texts and seeing where they fit in amongst all the others, should I be lucky to live long enough to do so!

There are lots of paths one might take in this garden, after all. Just be sure to stop by all the flowers at some point or another as you stroll through it!

On the Hermetic Afterlife: A Cause for Theurgy

November 5, 2022 By polyphanes in hermetica Tags: afterlife, ascent, christian bull, Corpus Hermeticum, death, discourse on the eighth and the ninth, incarnation, mysteries, mysticism, nag hammadi scriptures, rebirth, reincarnation, salvation, soul, theurgy, wouter hanegraaff 1 Comment

Where were we? We’re in the middle of talking about what a “Hermetic afterlife” actually looks like and consists of, in terms of what the classical Hermetic texts have as teachings regarding what happens to us after we die beyond some vague notion of reincarnation or ascent. There’s only a handful of texts that actually talk about this in any way, and what they have don’t always match up well between each other. Last time, we talked about what this Hermetic model of the afterlife means for various kinds of necromantic works. If you need a refresher on what we talked about last time, go read the last post!

Honestly, those past two posts along with this present one were originally just going to be all one post, alliteratively entitled “Ramifications and Repercussions” to talk about what the Hermetic model of the afterlife we’ve been discussing has to say so as to inform and explain various works, but it turns out that there’s just more out there than I anticipated. (Which is also why this now six-post series is so many posts, instead of just one as I originally envisioned; c’est la vie.) This last topic I want to address was also going to fit into the same idea as before, but considering how different it is from the religious rituals of funerals and ancestor veneration/elevation or from the magical rituals of various forms of necromancy, but—in addition to the last two posts reaching about 4000 words each—this topic really deserves a post of its own, which I think will act as a nice conclusion to the whole series.

So: why should the Hermeticist do theurgy?

“Theurgy” is a complicated term, and can easily be misunderstood. I recall one time when I sent a mod message to the moderators of /r/Ptolemaicism, asking to share news about my Preces Templi ebook on their subreddit since I felt it was fairly appropriate for “a community of Greco-Egyptian polytheists interested in conversing about philosophy and their beliefs/practices” (according to their sidebar). I introduced myself as “magician and researcher of the occult, especially in the fields of classical Hermeticism and Greco-Egyptian magical and ritual practices”, which…well, apparently was not received too well, since I got this reply back from the mods:

The use of the occult and Theurgical magic implies bending the gods to your whim for your aims, which is both Goetia and hubris.

Perhaps needless to say, I think their understanding of theurgy (and magic generally) is ridiculously off-base and shows a lack of historical awareness that’s as grievous as it is hilarious. However, given the difficulty and wide range of understandings of what “theurgy” means to different people, whether from a scholarly perspective or not, I suppose I can’t blame them too much.

On this topic, I’ll follow the explanation of the excellent Martiana (of SARTRIX, both her WordPress archive and her newer Miraheze wiki) on this topic, given her own article on it:

Theurgy (gr. θεουργία theourgía, lat. theurgia), also called the theurgical art (gr. θεουργική τέχνη theourgikḗ tekhnē, lat. theurgica ars or discīplīna), is a term of ambiguous meaning, further obscured by frankly obscurantist scholarship. The two main senses are the following:

A specific tradition of ritual practices, apparently originating with a group called the theurges or Chaldaeans (most famous for the Chaldaic Oracles), and later adopted by the Neoplatonists.

Ritual in general, as theorized by the Neoplatonists, and especially Iamblichus. Later Neoplatonists largely use the term ‘hieratic (priestly) art’ for this, restricting ‘theurgy’ to the first meaning.

Through systematic mistranslation of ‘hieratic’ as ‘theurgy’, and pervasive conflation of both senses in the secondary literature, the subject has become extremely confused in modern times, although it is fairly transparent in the primary sources.

[…] It is, in fact, probably its nonspecificity on an etymological level that made Iamblichus adopt the term in the second, generic meaning, as a counterpart to theology: ‘practice relating to the gods’ as opposed to ‘discourse relating to the gods’.

So what would “theurgy” mean within the context of Hermeticism? Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I’ll quote both Christian Bull’s Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus:

We should first take notice that there is nothing called the “way of Hermes” in our sources; this is an abstraction created in scholarly literature, and the closest we come is when Iamblichus states that Hermes has led the way on the path of theurgy. The goal of theurgy is ascent and indeed we find in the Hermetica mention of a “way leading upwards,” which the souls must follow in order to reach God, the good, the beautiful or truth. The diversity of terms used makes it unlikely that the “way” here is a technical term; rather, it is a metaphor like “way of life”: if life is a journey, then sticking to one specific path implies determination and the promise of a safe arrival at the desired destination. (§4.1)

And another pair of quotes from Wouter Hanegraaff’s Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination:

Salvation required ceremonial practice, ritual theurgy or “the work of the gods,” as cultivated by Egyptian priests in the tradition of Hermes Trismegistus. (ch. 4)

In sum, theurgy was an integral practice of healing both body and soul. It worked through the ritual induction of altered states that made it possible for the gods to enter practitioners’ bodies and purify their souls, so that they might be as effective as possible in the task of channeling spiritual energies into the material world. The function of philosophy was to provide theoretical justification for this practice. (ch. 4)

Within a Hermetic context as I consider it, while there are many aspects of practice that feed into it, “theurgy” refers as a whole to the ritual practice of attaining “the way up” while alive. That last qualification there is important, because while CH I suggests that “the way up” happens after we die and our souls make an ascent for the final time, we should bear in mind that CH I is only one of the three “beating hearts” that illustrate the mystic purpose and guidance of Hermeticism, the other two being CH XIII and Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth (NHC VII.6). If I were to summarize these three texts and why they’re so important to Hermeticism:

CH I (together with CH VII as an expansion of CH I.27—28) lays the mythic foundation for Hermeticism, the establishment of the proper human ēthos (remember that discussion?) as being one of reverence, the establishment of Mind/nous as something divine that affords salvation, the cosmology of the planetary spheres with the eighth and ninth spheres beyond fate, and “the way up” describing the ascent of the soul from within the bounds of fate to beyond it
CH XIII describes a process of spiritual rebirth, a hylic exorcism and reformation of a person from a mere body of matter and torment to a divine body of holy powers that affords one Mind and divine awareness
NHC VII.6 describes a process of spiritual elevation whereby one ascends into the eighth and ninth spheres of the cosmos (those above the planets and, thus, above fate) while still in the body.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, all of these texts revolves around the same core idea, but each of them have things that the others don’t, and together reveal something fascinating: that we are not limited to making such an ascent to “the way up” after death, but can do so while alive.

For most people, living a life of reverence and respect for the Creator and the Creation is sufficient to just have a good live and to make such spiritual progress to attempt “the way up”, whether or not one does so in this life or over a series of lives, each time rising to a higher and higher soul-stratum until one graduates out of the dwelling-place of souls entirely. However, by now after having fleshed out the Hermetic model of the afterlife so much, I think the risks of this should be apparent: this process is not guaranteed, because anything can happen from one life to the next. Being human, we are all susceptible to the irrational tormentors of matter and/or the planetary energies that not only allow for us to be incarnate but which also set the stage for us to suffer while incarnate, which can easily mislead and waylay us while we’re alive, which means that, no matter how well we do from life to life, there’s always a chance that we might get “stuck” as we try to live our lives in a way that leads to an elevation to higher soul-strata or ascension beyond them. On top of that, there’s also still the possibility that we haven’t ruled out of us attempting “the way up” when we’re not ready, which could yield disastrous consequences if we’re unable to give up something we otherwise need to in order to keep rising. Worse, every time we go through the process of reincarnation, we basically have to start over, and even if we’re blessed to live a privileged, cushy life, without the proper spiritual instruction (or without an extreme gift of metempsychotic memory), our souls may end up trying so hard or getting so far without it really mattering anyway; we might end up just living a good life one time just to live sloppily and fall back down to a worse life the next. Without spiritual instruction and repeated lives of dedication and discipline and devotion, a soul being able to mature itself enough to make “the way up” on its own is extremely unlikely and difficult to attain, taking place only over the course of potentially endless lifetimes (if at all, otherwise caught up in an endless cycle of reincarnation).

This is why we have the instructions and teachings of Hermēs Trismegistos, passed on from Poimandrēs and through Tat, Asklēpios, and Ammōn so that, through Hermēs & co., “the human race might be saved by God”. It is all for this goal, to “leave corruption behind and take a share in immortality”, that Hermēs began teaching the world the way of salvation and proper, right, righteous life so that we might enjoy true Life; it is these teachings that are the “words of wisdom” that his students “were nourished from the ambrosial water”. Having access to these teachings and learning about what all this means for us helps us dramatically, even for those who are completely uninterested in ritual or religion and just want to live a simple, quiet life of contemplation and reverence for God; for them, attaining “the way up” is much easier, since they can transform their life from one without reverence (and thus with no chance of Mind) to one with reverence (and thus at least a good chance of Mind, if not the assurance of it). However, even still, as evidenced by how many times Hermēs’ students got things wrong or even were mislead by their own enlightened perspectives, it’s clear that we can still screw things up for ourselves, which means that, while living a proper life is a good method to achieve “the way up”, it is not a foolproof method of doing so; there is still an error rate that risks so much.

This is where theurgy comes into the question, because it essentially guarantees “the way up” after death by attaining it before death. In a way, this is the Hermetic approach to Eckhart Tolle’s quote about “the secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ —and find that there is no death”. After all, consider CH XIII, which contains an account of the spiritual rebirth of Tat: in order to be reborn, you first must die. In CH XIII’s case, the “death” of Tat consists first of his utter bewilderment that ends up closing off his senses in a state of delirium (CH XIII.6) and the chasing-out of the irrational tormentors of matter (CH XIII.8—9), which only then culminates in a rebirth of the body composed of the divine mercies of God which chased out the tormentors (CH XIII.8—9) and revealed a vision of the divine that fills Tat’s newborn perceptions (CH XIII.11—13). In NHC VII.6, we read that Hermēs and Tat (we presume) are progressing to the eighth and ninth spheres because they have already “advanced to the seventh, since we are faithful and abide in your law”, meaning that they have already done the work of giving up to the planets the things appropriate to them so that they might ascend past them, which is what enables them to reach higher and to experience—while still possessing mortal, corporeal bodies—the same sights and visions and experience as any other soul that has attained and abides within those hyperplanetary spheres.

By engaging in works like this while alive, not only do we gain more insight as to how to live a good life all the more perfectly to the utmost degree, we also basically do the equivalent of a TSA PreCheck: instead of having to clear every single checkpoint on “the way up”, we can basically bypass them all entirely because we’ve already cleared them ahead of time. While a soul making “the way up” after death for the first time has to do the work after death to get past each gate, a soul that is already familiar with “the way up” simply zips along it without any traffic or toll stops, having prepaid everything earlier. It takes out the whole guesswork not only of figuring out which is the proper way to live, but also takes out all the doubt of attaining the salvific end described by Poimandrēs. It keeps us from having to worry about whatever might come after death, and shows us the risk we take in not taking that path—and even should we choose further reincarnation, it would be far better to do so with the keys to the kingdom already in our pocket and the road to it still fresh in our memory.

In this, we get to see Hermeticism as not only a kind of mysticism, but also a kind of mystery religion alongside the likes of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Orphic Mysteries, the Isaic Mysteries, or the like, all of which promised some sort of guaranteed blessed afterlife free from the sorrows or sighs of the gloom and shade that those who were not initiated into were (most likely) bound for. This is exactly the same sort of promise that Hermetic theurgy promises: rather than risk a potentially-endless cycle of suffering that comes part and parcel with incarnation, we can instead be guaranteed a way to resolve it and achieve an existence higher, nobler, more beautiful, and more divine beyond anything else that exists or might exist. Hermeticism, after all, isn’t just a mystic movement to rejoice rightly, rightfully, and righteously with Creation as a Creature of the Creator, but also a mystery path of salvation that grants us access to the highest heights of divinity itself. In that light, having a model of death, dying, the afterlife, reincarnation, and all the rest that we’ve been talking about helps inform us as to why we should care at all about this mystery side of Hermeticism as opposed to just the mystical; it gives us a cause to engage in the theurgy of Hermeticism, these hieratic practices that enable us to be truly holy instead of just living a holy life.

About this time last year (funny how this focus on death and the dead comes around come Scorpio season!), I made a post detailing the overall attitude towards death and dying in the Hermetic texts, even reaching into later medieval-period words. The overall focus in the Hermetic texts isn’t that we should fear death, which is no more than the dissolution of the body, because we are emphatically not our bodies; we are immortal souls that merely wear bodies for a time before moving on. As a result, we should not fear death, and instead rejoice in life while taking care to live our lives properly. What is more scant and scarce in the Hermetic texts, however, yet present in quiet whispers and overlooked traces like from AH 28 or SH 25—26, is what we should be fearful about concerning what is after death and what the risks are that we take in living our lives carelessly. To be sure, there is no eternal punishment, no forsaking of the soul, no permanent loss of one’s way or self at all in Hermeticism as one might find in other spiritual traditions; as such, there’s no need to fear some sort of permadeath hell or whatever, and that’s not a point that the Hermetic texts try to make. (At least, outside the context of AH 28; within that context, the bit about being tormented forever in a hell of the winds may itself not be truly forever, as when the whole cosmos is remade and “reset”, it may also be that such souls are also returned to a new cosmos for a new attempt.) Rather, we have as many chances as we might need to do what we need to do, go where we need to go, know what we need to know, and become what we must be—but we have something of a fire under our feet to do so as effectively and efficiently, as quickly and speedily as possible.

To close, I’ll leave us with Hermēs Trismegistos’ own initial proclamation, his kerygma wherein he announced to the world for the first time:

People, earthborn men, you who have surrendered yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of god, make yourselves sober and end your drunken sickness, for you are bewitched in unreasoning sleep.

Why have you surrendered yourselves to death, earthborn men, since you have the right to share in immortality? You who have journeyed with error, who have partnered with ignorance, think again: escape the shadowy light; leave corruption behind and take a share in immortality.

With that, this little exploration of what I can figure out and piece together regarding the model of the afterlife and reincarnation, the questions that it raises and which I cannot yet answer on my own, and how it impacts, informs, instructs, and inspires us towards our other spiritual practices that can and should go hand-in-hand with Hermeticism can now come to a close. As I was joking about with my friends, as usual what was originally supposed to be just one post ballooned into quite a bit more, but I hope that this has been at least somewhat helpful for those interested in this otherwise gap-filled territory of Hermetic spirituality. I’m sure there’s plenty more that could be improved upon with this sort of exploration; in addition to the unanswered questions I’ve left out in the open for others to tackle, there’s also plenty that we might be able to draw on from Hellenistic Egyptian or other eastern Mediterranean texts and traditions that might shed further light on what we have yet in the dark recesses of Hermetic textual lacunae. Perhaps, with time, we might bring some of those as-yet hidden bits of knowledge into the light once more—resurrecting them or reincarnating them, one might even say.

And yes, this series of posts has its index already up in my Hermeticism Posts index page, along with all the other posts I’ve made about classical Hermeticism and the Hermetic texts, so feel free to check these posts (or any of my others) out later on if you want at your convenience.

On the Hermetic Afterlife: Evidence from the Texts

October 26, 2022 By polyphanes in hermetica Tags: afterlife, asclepius, avenging daimon, Corpus Hermeticum, death, incarnation, judging daimon, justice, nag hammadi scriptures, reincarnation, soul, stobaean fragments, walter scott 3 Comments

While I suppose the timing of this post (around the end of Libra and start of Scorpio) is appropriate, I admit that I’ve wanted to write a post about this for some time. The issue with such a topic, though, is that it requires so much either cleared out ahead of time and laid down as foundations, or otherwise merely assumed, and…well, even then, it can get complicated. Not too long ago, someone in the Hermetic House of Life Discord server asked a fairly straightforward question in the Hermeticism channel: what happens when we die? Specifically, the question was, in the context of classical Hermeticism: “when we die, do we become wandering souls until we incarnate again?” And while such a question seems fairly straightforward, answering it is anything but.

(Also, before we get into it, fun fact: what you’re reading now is the 900th published post on my blog, going all the way back to my first post back in my Blogspot days from February 2010! I figured a little research-and-writing project like this would be a nice celebration of that milestone, so I hope y’all enjoy.)

So, to start off with, we take for granted in Hermeticism the existence of a soul. Forming a complete theory or model of what soul is, how it comes to be, how it behaves, and the like is a daunting project (and one that eventually I want to take on), and one that is made all the more difficult by the fact that there’s enough inconsistencies and differences between different Hermetic texts to make getting a single model set up a major challenge. Still, on the grounds of CH I and many other Hermetic texts, we can take the existence of the soul for granted, and moreover, that the soul is effectively the self, who and what we “really are”. The body is merely a vessel for the soul, the mind is a divinely-granted faculty of divine awareness that may not be present or activated within every soul, and the spirit is the life-conferring substance that enlivens all things in the cosmos, but the soul is what we truly are, the thing that truly “lives”. If humanity is an image of God, and if God is understood as Light and Life, then we can consider soul to be the image of the divine Life of God itself. (I’m really eliding a lot here in this single paragraph, to be fair, but this is a necessary assumption to make as a foundation for the rest of this post.)

Now, much of the classical Hermetic texts all fundamentally describe one thing, or work towards explaining one thing: how to live our lives well so as to solve the problem of suffering in our lives. Ultimately, the answer is to live mindfully: as noted above, “mind” is the crucial key that allows us to unlock an awareness of divinity, of truth, of God in our lives, and not all people have mind, whether at all or activated/awakened. However, in having mind (or having mind activated), we are then able to experience states of gnōsis, which are essentially us experiencing God, which helps reveal to us how things “really are”, both within and without the cosmos, and which helps orient us towards living our lives properly. Even without such experiences of gnōsis, however, it would still be possible for someone to live respectfully, reverently, and devotedly enough in such a way that would allow them to recognize the body for what it is, realize a proper relationship between soul and body, and to better enable themselves to abide with God and to return to God once this current sojourn in the world has come to an end.

The quintessential afterlife vision is given by Poimandrēs to Hermēs in CH I.24—26 (Copenhaver translation):

“You have taught me all things well, o mind, just as I wanted. But tell me again <about> the way up; tell me how it happens.”

To this Poimandrēs said: “First, in releasing the material body you give the body itself over to alteration, and the form that you used to have vanishes. To the demon you give over your temperament, now inactive. The body’s senses rise up and flow back to their particular sources, becoming separate parts and mingling again with the energies. And feeling and longing go on toward irrational nature.

“Thence the human being rushes up through the cosmic framework, at the first zone surrendering the energy of increase and decrease; at the second evil machination, a device now inactive; at the third the illusion of longing, now inactive; at the fourth the ruler’s arrogance, now freed of excess; at the fifth unholy presumption and daring recklessness; at the sixth the evil impulses that come from wealth, now inactive; and at the seventh zone the deceit that lies in ambush.

“And then, stripped of the effects of the cosmic framework, the human enters the region of the ogdoad; he has his own proper power, and along with the blessed he hymns the father. Those present there rejoice together in his presence, and, having become like his companions, he also hears certain powers that exist beyond the ogdoadic region and hymn god with sweet voice. They rise up to the father in order and surrender themselves to the powers, and, having become powers, they enter into god. This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god.”

What we have here is a process of dissolution and ascension of the soul:

The soul first gives up the body itself, allowing it to decompose. (This is “death” itself, in the sense of the soul departing the body.)
1. As the soul gives up the body, so too does the body give up its senses, its drive/feeling (thumos), and its desire/longing (epithumia). These are all things of the body and not the soul, so the soul isn’t the one technically giving up these things except as a result of giving up the body as a whole, and these could be seen just be a specification of what gets dissolved and decomposed with the body.
The soul then gives over to “the demon” (more on that later) their temperament.
The soul then gives up each of the planetary energies conferred to it by the seven planets back to their respective spheres, rising up through and past each sphere as it does so.
1. “Increase and decrease” to the Moon
2. “Evil machination” to Mercury
3. “Illusion of longing” to Venus
4. “Arrogance of rulers” to the Sun
5. “Unholy presumption and daring recklessness” to Mars
6. “Evil impulses that come from wealth” to Jupiter
7. “Deceit that lies in ambush” to Saturn
After giving all these things up and rising past the sphere of Saturn, the soul then enters into the eighth (“ogdoadic”) sphere of the fixed stars, beyond the reach of fate
After some indeterminate time, the soul then rises up from the eighth sphere into even higher spheres with even higher powers, eventually entering into and becoming God

The model here is basically that the soul is “weighed down” or “cloaked” by all sorts of trappings that allow it to be incarnate in the first place; in order to free ourselves from incarnation, we have to free ourselves of each of the components that allow for it, returning each trapping to its proper source. Once we have stripped ourselves of such things, we are then truly free to just be a soul, and are therefore placed beyond the reach of fate (which is identified with the revolutions and alignments of the seven planets in CH I); it’s that eighth sphere of the fixed stars past the sphere of Saturn that we can say is the first “heaven” in the sense of being a resting-place, as it were, a place that is beyond suffering and beyond the bindings of fate. Attaining access to that eighth sphere might just be the first part of a much larger, hypercosmic journey, but it’s where our journey as encosmic entities comes to a true conclusion. Upon attaining the eighth sphere, one can be said to be “done” with incarnate reality.

But that’s assuming that a soul actually attains the eighth sphere, and that’s a really big assumption to make. In fact, there are several big assumptions here that each need to be questioned:

What happens if a soul is not able to give up a trapping of incarnation (its temperament, a planetary energy)?
What happens if a soul is not able to rise up past a particular sphere?
Is the process of ascension instant, or does it take place over an interval of time?

The description of the ascent from CH I.24—26 is not clear as to whether it happens to all souls regardless of how they lived, or whether it’s just the whole complete process described in ideal circumstances for those particular souls able to make the ascent. After all, shortly after this part, Hermēs begins his mission of going forth into the world to teaching those who can be taught and saving those who can be saved; not everyone chooses to be taught or saved, however, so it raises the question as to what happens to them. After all, if such a process of ascent were automatic and assured for all people equally, then the focus of Hermēs and Poimandrēs would be more about how to tackle suffering in this life as opposed to what happens afterward, and that doesn’t appear to be the case. I don’t think what Poimandrēs describes here is applicable to all souls after their death, but is the eventual, ideal case for a soul that is sufficiently refined and prepared for such a journey upward, capable of actually giving up the trappings of incarnation.

Let’s set aside the account of CH I.24—26 for a moment. Are there any other texts that talk about an afterlife in any notable detail? Truth be told, there’s really not a lot out there. While many of the extant Hermetic texts seem to accept reincarnation/metempsychosis as just what happens, there’s very little that describes the actual process of it or what happens between incarnations. The closest we get to is AH 28 and a few bits from SH 25 and SH 26, and both of these are problematic in their own ways. Still, it’s worth checking out what they have to say about the subject.

We’re benefitted by AH 28 by it being preserved in slightly different versions, one in Latin (Copenhaver translation):

When soul withdraws from the body, it passes to the jurisdiction of the chief demon who weighs and judges its merit, and if he finds it faithful and upright, he lets it stay in places suitable to it. But if he sees the soul smeared with the stains of wrongdoing and dirtied with vice, he sends it tumbling down from on high to the depths below and consigns it to the storms and whirlpools of air, fire and water in their ceaseless clashing—its endless punishment to be swept back and forth between heaven and earth in the streams of matter. Then the soul’s bane is its own eternity, for an undying sentence oppresses it with eternal torment.

And again in Coptic from NHC VI.8 (Meyer translation):

There is a great demon that the supreme God has appointed as overseer or judge of human souls. God has placed him in the middle of the air between earth and heaven. When a soul comes from a body, it must meet this demon. At once the demon will turn this person around and examine him with regard to the character he developed during his lifetime. If the demon finds that the person accomplished all his deeds in a godly manner, deeds for which he came into the world, the demon will let him…turn him. … But [if the demon observes and becomes angry] at a person [who] spent his life doing [evil] deeds, he grabs him on his way up and throws him back down so that he is suspended between heaven and earth and punished severely. There will be no hope for such a soul, and it will be in great pain. That soul does not have a place on earth or in heaven, but it has come to be in the open air of the universe, where there is blazing fire, freezing water, streams of fire, and massive turbulence. The bodies are tormented in various ways. Sometimes they are cast into raging water; at other times they are thrown down into fire in order that the fire may destroy them. I am not saying that this is the death of the soul, for the soul has been delivered from evil. Nonetheless, it is a death sentence.

Admittedly, this is a lot, and in context, it takes place when talking about the denigration of the world and what happens when people die. Hermēs is fairly blunt about death itself in the immediately-preceding AH 27 (Copenhaver’s Latin translation below, basically the same as in Meyer’s Coptic translation):

We must talk now about the immortal and the mortal, for anticipation and fear of death torture the many who do not know the true account of it. Death results from the disintegration of a body worn out with work, after the time has passed when the body’s members fit into a single mechanism with vital functions. The body dies, in fact, when it can no longer support a person’s vital processes. This is death, then: the body’s disintegration and the extinction of bodily consciousness. Worrying about it is pointless. But there is another problem worth worrying about, though people disregard it out of ignorance or disbelief.

Hermēs is clear here: what matters isn’t so much the physical death of the body, but what happens to the soul after it leaves from the body. Unlike most other Hermetic texts, the doctrine of AH 28 doesn’t clearly seem to support a notion of reincarnation, but rather one of post-life judgment, and the focus here is really on what happens to particular souls that have been judged as being so terrible as to be subject to eternal punishment. But note where they go: they’re sent to this intermediate zone between Earth and Heaven (in other words, in a region of the sublunar atmosphere) where the air is turbulent. Bear that specific bit in mind in a bit.

Let’s skip ahead to SH 25 and SH 26, which are the formal designations for the later sections of the Korē Kosmou, respectively. This text is…questionably Hermetic at best, since it presents a dialogue not of Hermēs to his student(s) but from Isis to Hōros (even if the ultimate teaching passed on was originating from Hermēs through Kamēphis the forebear of Isis), and presents a radically different worldview, theology, and cosmology from the rest of the extant classical Hermetica. In many ways, it presents something closer to a Hellenized Egyptian myth, almost like a folktale written for philosophers as it were, and it has a lot of information in general. While SH 23 talks about the creation of the world and of the relationship between God and humanity (which is rather different from anything in the CH, AH, or even most of the rest of the SH) and SH 24 talks about royal souls specifically, SH 25 and SH 26 talk about souls in general. I won’t quote excerpts, but I can point out a few of the key doctrines that can inform our discussion here:

SH 25.1: souls after death do not simply wander aimlessly nor combine with each other, but proceed to a particular realm appropriate to it
SH 25.9—13:
- Souls, when not incarnate in bodies, dwell in the atmosphere between the Earth and the Moon
- The sublunar atmosphere is split into four divisions with some number of strata:
  - The first (lowest) division: 4 strata
  - The second division: 8 strata
  - The third division: 16 strata
  - The fourth (highest) division: 32 strata
- Different strata have different qualities of air based on how high and rarefied they are
- The higher the stratum, the more rarefied the air, the more noble/royal/dignified the soul
- There are thus 60 different grades of soul
SH 26.2:
- Souls are sent down to become incarnate according to their purpose, and return to a region in the atmosphere appropriate to it
- Souls either return to the stratum it came from, ascend past it, or sink below it according to its behavior (“according to the degree of their errors”) while incarnate
- Souls are judged according to Providence
SH 26.3:
- Souls are handled according to two ministers: the Steward and the Escort
- The Steward of Souls watches over unembodied souls
- The Escort of Souls sends souls to be incarnate into bodies appropriate for their purpose according to Providence

What we get when we look at the Korē Kosmou, and SH 25 in particular, is the notion of a dwelling-place (perhaps even “storehouse”) of souls, with a neat diagram-friendly arrangement of where certain souls go to after death. Walter Scott has such a diagram ready to go on page 595 of volume 3 of his Hermetica series when offering his commentary on SH 25:

The account given in SH 25 and 26 is annoyingly unclear at points about what these specific grades are of soul, even though we have a reasonable understanding about the strata of the atmosphere they were supposed to retire to between incarnations. Presumably, animal souls would be in the first division (fish, lizards, birds, and beasts from bottom to top) with human souls of various kinds above that, culminating in the most royal of souls destined to be kings and emperors over the world in the highest stratum of the uppermost fourth division. Beyond that, we don’t have a lot of information about the specifics of these grades, the process of a soul traveling from a body to its proper stratum, the process of being sent down by the Escort of Souls, or the like.

What I find appealing here is that we can tie this division of the atmosphere in SH 25 to the realm of punishment from AH 28. Bear in mind that such a realm of punishment is marked by storms, turbulence, and the like, and how they’re described to be “in the open air” neither on Earth or in Heaven but somewhere in-between. In SH 25, we see that the lower grades of air are reserved for baser, ignoble souls, including those destined for animal incarnation (whether because they are already animal souls as they are, or whether they are human souls to be punished via animal incarnation, as is suggested in SH 23.41—42). The major difference between these texts is that, for the author of the Korē Kosmou, incarnation itself is punishment, while for the Asclepius, there is a separate punishment after incarnation. As a result, when SH 25.10 says that “in no way is this recycled air [of the lower divisions] a hindrance to souls”, it has a completely different role in mind for such a region of the atmosphere than what AH 28 has in mind. Notably, AH 28 does not have a doctrine of reincarnation detectable to my eyes: if it permits for it, it doesn’t say so explicitly, but if it does, then such an everlasting punishment by being tossed into some turbulent zone of the atmosphere is the cosmos’ way of taking a particularly naughty soul, indelibly stained with its sins as it is, “out of circulation”, while allowing other souls to incarnate as appropriate to them. It’s another perspective, I suppose, but the similarities in the models here are important, even if their intents and descriptions differ in the details.

There’s one last thing I want to mention before we begin the process of tying all this together: SH 7 is another separate Hermetic text, and a short excerpt provided by Stobaeus from a treatise of Hermēs related to Justice. Here, we have a description of Dikē, the goddess of Justice (Litwa translation):

The greatest female daimon who wheels round the center of the universe has been appointed, my child, to observe everything that happens on earth at the hands of human beings. Just as Providence and Necessity are appointed over the divine order, in the same way, Justice has been appointed over human beings–and she performs the same activity as Providence and Necessity do. For she controls the order of existing beings inasmuch as they are divine, do not wish to err, and cannot. Indeed, it is impossible for the divine to go astray—hence its infallibility.

Now Justice is appointed to be punisher of human beings who err upon the earth. Humanity is an <errant> race, inasmuch as it is mortal and composed from base matter. They are especially prone to slip since they do not possess the power of seeing the divine. Justice especially holds sway over these people.

Humans are subject to Fate due to the energies operative in their nativity; and they are subject to Justice due to their mistakes during this life.

I note that the role of Justice here in SH 7 is strikingly similar to the “avenging daimōn” of CH I.23, to the judging demon of AH 28, and to the role of Providence (and arguably also the Steward and/or Escort of Souls) in SH 26. Further, while not explicitly handled by some sort of external entity, there are bits like CH X.16 that talk about “leaving the soul to judgment and the justice it deserves” after it departs from a body. We don’t see a lot of this sort of divine intermediation or interference in the Hermetic texts, and to an extent I don’t much care for the notion of it (I’ll share why later on), but it’s common enough that we should at least bear it in mind and consider it.

But for now, let’s cut this here. Now that we have an understanding of what the relevant Hermetic texts have to offer about notions of the afterlife, we can let that sink in for a bit, and we’ll pick up with actually fitting them together next time.

The Digital Ambler

Always Forward Between Heaven and Earth

Tag Archives: Corpus Hermeticum

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On the Hermetic Afterlife: Evidence from the Texts