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Geographical Points of Interest for Hermeticism (and not the one you probably thought of first)

March 8, 2023 By in hermetica Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Ah, beautiful and majestic Alexandria in Egypt.  Perhaps foremost of all the cities that Alexander the Great named after himself during his conquests in the fourth century CE, this famous coastal port town was always a sort of East-meets-West of the ancient world, a Greek city on Egyptian soil, and to this day remains the largest city on the whole of the Mediterranean coastline in any county.  After the Pyramids or the Sphinx, Alexandria’s ancient Lighthouse or its Library might spring to mind when we think of ancient or classical Egypt, especially of the Ptolemaic or Roman periods.  And why not?  Between the Great Library and the Mouseion of Alexandria, we get such luminaries as Euclid, Hipparchus, Eratosthenes, Hypatia, and no few other scholars, mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers.  Countless books from across the world were housed in the Library’s archives, and even after its burning during the Julius Caesar’s civil war, it still functioned admirably for centuries.  Even then (and potentially aiding such scholarship and library needs), the mere fact of Alexandria’s location at the westernmost edge of the Nile delta gave it a uniquely powerful position in terms of trade, making it a true melting pot of language, culture, science, education, religion, and so much else.

But for any meaningful relationship to Hermeticism, as a cite of its origination?  We should look elsewhere; Alexandria, as it turns out, ain’t it.

Now, to be fair, a lot of people like talking about Hermeticism in an Alexandrian context, and given how important Alexandria was in general to the classical world and to various surviving philosophical and spiritual traditions coming from it, why not?  Alexandria was one of the busiest places in all of classical Egypt, and the presence of its Library and schools were huge claims to its fame.  As a result, we see the following in Gilles Quispel’s preface to Salaman’s Way of Hermes:

The texts of the Corpus are preserved in Greek, and appear to have been produced between the first and third centuries AD in Alexandria, Egypt.  […]

It is now completely certain that there existed before and after the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria a secret society, akin to a Masonic lodge. The members of this group called themselves ‘brethren,’ were initiated through a baptism of the Spirit, greeted each other with a sacred kiss, celebrated a sacred meal and read the Hermetic writings as edifying treatises for their spiritual progress.

Or in the text’s afterword:

It is now generally agreed that the language of these texts points to production between the first and third centuries AD in Alexandria, a city then ruled by Rome, but culturally a cosmopolitan mix of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and other traditions. As Gilles Quispel points out in the Preface, these texts were central to the spiritual practice of Hermetic circles in late antique Alexandria.

Or, for a more extreme example, repeated mentions of Alexandria in stuff like from Freke and Gandy’s introduction to their The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs:

The early origins of the Hermetica are shrouded in mystery, but the evidence suggests it is a direct descendant of the ancient philosophy of the Egyptians. However, the handful of surviving works attributed to Hermes are not written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but in Greek, Latin and Coptic. They were collated in the city of Alexandria in Egypt during the second and third centuries CE. Here the Hermetic philosophy helped inspire some of the greatest intellectual achievements of the ancient world. Alexandria was a great centre of learning, surpassing even Athens. […]

In 1614 a scholar called Isaac Casaubon published a textual analysis of the Hermetica, which showed, quite correctly, that the grammar,
vocabulary, form and content of the Greek versions of these works dated them to no earlier than the second and third centuries CE. They were not written by an ancient Egyptian sage, he claimed, but by scholars in the city of Alexandria. Their philosophy was nothing more than an exotic blend of Greek, Christian and Jewish philosophy, mixed up with astrology and magic. […]

This suggests that the Hermetica may indeed contain the wisdom of the pharaohs, which scholars in second-century Alexandria reworked for a contemporary readership. […]

The Hermetica was undoubtedly written by Alexandrian scholars for a Greek-speaking readership. […]

In this new version, therefore, we have selected key extracts and combined them to bring out the essential wisdom and inherent poetry that they contain. In this endeavour we feel we are following in the footsteps of the scholars of Alexandria who collated these books from the ancient material that was then available, making them accessible to a contemporary readership. …

While Freke and Gandy make much of an Alexandrian origin (excluding the many other cities that existed in Egypt with their own centers of learning or spirituality), they’re far from alone in it.  A.-J. Festugière (in Hermétisme et mystique païenne) calls Alexandria the “fatherland of Hermetism”, and Garth Fowden (in The Egyptian Hermes) likewise speaks of “that same Alexandrian philosophical milieu in which the Hermetists were home” and that “nearly all our best evidence for cultic syncretism, of whatever sort, comes from the more heavily Hellenized parts of Egypt, such as Alexandria and the Fayyum”.

However, Alexandria (which was even called “Alexandria-upon-Egypt” by the Romans) wasn’t even one of the larger properly-Egyptian cultural or religious centers, especially when we remember that basically all of Egypt all up and down the Nile was heavily urbanized.  Alexandria was always first and foremost a Greek colony populated by Greeks for Greeks, after all; although it was founded on an ancient Egyptian fishing village (Rhakotis) and although it relied on a rich and diverse population of Greeks and Jews and Egyptians, Alexandria itself was not Egyptian in any sense except geographical.  This led to some rather unflattering views of Egypt due to its insistence to exist anyway to some non-Egyptian minds, such as Dio Chrysostom who (according to Fowden) “regarded the whole of Egypt as a mere ‘appendage’ (προσθήκη) of the Greek metropolis, Alexandria”.  To use a modern metaphor of my own country, it’d be like thinking that New York City is the only US city noteworthy on the East Coast, and may well be the crown jewel of the Northeastern Megalopolis, but Washington, DC is also there as is Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore with distinct cultures, dialects, universities, religious populations, and so on, along with the whole rest of the US besides, on top of all the Native American territories that existed here long before any such cities existed due to colonialism.

In his Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination (HSHI), Wouter Hanegraaff opens up his chapter 2 (“Heart of Darkness”) with a little vignette describing what Roman Imperial Egypt was like, and criticizes the view specifically that Hermeticism (or much of anything meaningfully Egyptian) arose from Alexandria, eventually making his way to Thebes to call that city instead the “ancient heartland of Egyptian religion”, and starting his historical inquiry into Hermeticism there.  Later on, in sharply criticizing the notion of “Alexandrian Hermetic lodges” (specifically that of Quispel as noted earlier), he cites a paper by Christian Bull,  Ancient Hermeticism and Esotericism, in which he highlights the primacy of Thebes (p. 116):

[…] This latter notion is in fact deeply problematic, since it is uncertain that Alexandria played any crucial role in ancient Hermetism. The fact is that we do not know the precise origins of Hermetism, other than that it was Egyptian, to judge from references both internal and external to the texts. Alexandria was of course a melting-pot of Greek and Egyptian culture, but by the time the Hermetica appeared (at least in the first half of the second century CE), the entirety of Egypt was to some degree Hellenized. In fact, the few geographical references in the Hermetica are to Hermopolis and Thebes, both in Upper Egypt. Moreover, papyrus Mimaut (PGM III) which contains the Hermetic Prayer of Thanksgiving, was likely found in Thebes, together with several other magical papyri with clear relations to the Hermetica—the so-called “Thebes-cache”. We can therefore be fairly confident that Hermetica were read in this area, and quite possibly composed there. After all, Strabo informs us that the priests of Thebes were wont to attribute their astronomical and philosophical teachings to Hermes. Hermopolis was the second largest city in Egypt, after Alexandria, and we have papyri showing that the city council there made oaths to Hermes Trismegistus, possibly alluding to the Poimandres at one point. Also, a high priest of Thoth in Hermopolis, corresponding in the early fourth century CE with someone who is ‘all wise in the wisdom of the Greeks’, refers to his god as Hermes Trismegistus. Thus, other than the fact that Alexandrians like Didymus the Blind, Cyril of Alexandria, Asclepiades and Heraiscus had read Hermetica, there is nothing that militates for Alexandria as the point of origin for Hermetism, whereas several factors point toward Upper Egypt.

Likewise, as Bull says in his The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, p. 454:

Hermetic groups could potentially have been found in larger centers of priestly learning, especially Hermopolis Magna of course, which was moreover one of the largest cities in Egypt after Alexandria in the Roman period. Thebes is invoked in the Hermetica and was likely a center for Hermetic ritual activity, as evidenced by the Thebes-cache. Alexandria could potentially accommodate several Hermetic groups, although there is no reason to identify the city as the birthplace of a “Hermetic lodge” as several scholars have done. There is neither internal nor external evidence for such an Alexandrian “lodge,” a designation that is alien to the ancient world and carries Masonic connotations. It is of course entirely possible, even likely, that associations of the type we have described existed there, but there is no reason to assume that Alexandria was the birth-place of Hermetism.

To my mind, situating Thebes as the focal point of Hermeticism’s historical development makes much more sense, at least given all the evidence and extant texts we have (including from the rich caches of the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri), than just assuming Alexandria.  In a way, asserting that Hermeticism arose from Alexandria is tantamount to perpetuating colonialist attitudes, because Alexandria was (properly considered) a Greek colony on Egyptian soil, and so was culturally and geopolitically Greek more than anything else.  Thebes, on the other hand, in the words of Hanegraaff’s HSHI:

Finally, after turning another great bend in the river and heading south again, our traveler would reach Thebes, the extremely ancient Egyptian city Waset, referred to as Diospolis Magna by the Greeks and Romans but known as Luxor today. More than 3,000 years old at that time, the residence of the Pharaohs during the period of the New Kingdom (sixteenth-eleventh centuries bce) when Egypt was at the peak of its power, this city of the god Amun could be considered the heart of ancient Egypt. It is not surprising that in the centuries after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander, Thebes had emerged as a center of resistance against Greek and Roman rule. Having arrived in Thebes, our traveler could still sail farther south along the Nile, but in a real sense he could not get more distant from Alexandria, the cosmopolitical center of Greek Hellenism. This was the ancient heartland of Egyptian religion, and it is here that we begin our search for the Hermetic tradition.

This isn’t to say that Alexandria wasn’t ever important for Hermeticism; after all, it was a major intellectual center, albeit a Greek one, and there were many people who studied or worked or traveled across Egypt who yet still lived in Alexandria from time to time.  When we see reference to Hermetic groups from people like Clement of Alexandria or Cyril of Alexandria, we should take their word that there may well have been Hermeticists dwelling in their neighborhood, but not necessarily that they got started there; likewise, although Clement or Cyril may have read Hermetic texts in Alexandria, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were composed there (given how many texts from across the world were stored in or copies given to Alexandria’s libraries and schools).  That said, while I’m at it, I should also make a note about two other cities important for the history of Hemeticism besides Thebes or Alexandria:

  • Faiyum, a place in Middle Egypt known for the worship of Hermouthis, Sobek, Isis, and others.  It’s here we find the famous Hymns of Isidoros, a series of Greek praises inscribed on the gates of a temple complex in the first century BCE.  Among these hymns we see one dedicated to “Porromanrēs”, i.e. the Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh Amenemhat III, who was famous not just for building such a temple but also for his various military campaigns, mining and trade expeditions, and various landscaping and engineering projects for the Faiyummic basin; as such, he was deified after his death and had a long-standing cult given to his veneration.  Although there are other linguistic possibilities, Howard Jackson in his paper A New Proposal for the Origin of the Hermetic God Poimandres suggsests that “Porromanrēs” was the ultimate origin for the Poimandrēs of CH I and CH XIII—a possibility that Hanegraaff in HSHI reiterates and enforces as a likely origination point for Hermetic spirituality (though reserving Thebes for its eventual development and strengthening).
  • Akhmim, also known as Panopolis.  This is the place from which the famous 3rd/4th century CE alchemist-gnostic Zosimos hailed, who gives us some rather interesting and detailed accounts not only of alchemical and magical practices of his day but also of particular teachings and texts of Hermēs Trismegistos that are otherwise no longer extant.  What’s particularly interesting about Akhmim, beyond just a single but noteworthy alchemist coming from this place, is that “one of the most influential teachers in the formative period of Sufism and one of the first to discuss the concept of ma`rifa, usually translated as gnōsis” also came from here some centuries later: the 9th century CE Ḏū-l-Nūn al-Miṣrī.  He was also considered an alchemist in his day, educated in ancient Egyptian language and pagan ritual, and even thought by some to be a heretical magician for some of the work he was thought to make possible.  Between Zosimos and Ḏū-l-Nūn, there appears to have been some longstanding alchemy-centric Hermetic group(s) in Akhmim that survived from the classical period into at least the early Islamic period, potentially making for an influence in some Sufi lineages that survive today (at least that of Suhrawardiyya, founded by the 12th century CE Iranian mystic Šihāb al-Dīn Yahya ibn Ḥabaš al-Suhrawardī and who counts Ḏū-l-Nūn as one of his forebears).

Despite how highly-regarded Alexandria was at the far edge of (northern) Lower Egypt, Thebes and Faiyum and Akhmim are all much further south, including (of course) the ancient Hermopolis Magna, modern el-Ashmunein, itself an Egyptian center for the worship of Thōth.  It shouldn’t be so strange to point out that there’s more than one city or cultural center in Egypt, and that many of them were somehow important in one way or another throughout the many millennia of Egypt’s existence that grew up from Egypt’s own native soil, native people, and native spiritualities.  Yes, the metropolitan and cosmopolitan nature of Alexandria was  naturally a melting-pot for much of the classical Mediterranean world—and I know that I myself have described Hermeticism in such a context before, following a popular consensus that doesn’t add up when all the evidence is factored in—but Hermeticism, as syncretic as it is as a Greco-Egyptian form of mysticism, just doesn’t seem to arise from that specific melting-pot.  The most that we might be able to reasonably say regarding Alexandria in relation to Hermeticism is that plenty about Hermeticism was written there and disseminated by particularly noteworthy writers to the rest of the classical world, but that still doesn’t mean that the actual texts of Hermeticism were themselves written there.  To that end, when we talk about the historical origins of Hermeticism, we really should stop referring only to Alexandria as if it were the only place in Egypt that mattered.

The “mere appendage to Alexandria”, it turns out, has much of its own to contribute that deserves much more credit and respect than many scholars have afforded it, even in our modern day.  Even if we don’t know with precise specificity where Hermeticism might have first arisen or where some if its founders taught and studied, we have at least some decent notion of where it certainly grew up or grew big—and Alexandria ain’t it.

Ordering an Approach to the Classical Hermetic Texts

February 8, 2023 By in hermetica Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 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:

  1. CH III
  2. CH VII, CH I
  3. CH IV
  4. CH XI
  5. CH XIII
  6. CH V
  7. CH XIV
  8. CH VIII
  9. CH IX
  10. CH XII
  11. CH VI
  12. CH XVII
  13. CH II
  14. CH XVI
  15. CH XVIII
  16. CH X
  17. NHC VI,6 (D89)
  18. AH 1—3
  19. AH 4—6
  20. AH 7—9
  21. AH 10—13
  22. AH 14—17
  23. AH 18—21 (including the equivalent of NHC VI,8)
  24. AH 22—26 (equivalent of NHC VI,8)
  25. AH 26—30 (including the equivalent of NHC VI,8)
  26. AH 31—34
  27. AH 35—38
  28. AH 39—41 (including the equivalent of NHC VI,7)
  29. SH 1, 2A, 2B
  30. SH 28, 21, 9
  31. SH 15, 22
  32. SH 5, 29
  33. SH 6
  34. SH 8, 12, 13, 14, 7
  35. SH 11
  36. SH 20, 17
  37. SH 3, 19
  38. SH 18, 16, 10
  39. SH 27, 23.1-23 (KK part 1, first third, starting with a single line from another excerpt)
  40. SH 23.24-49 (KK part 1, second third)
  41. SH 23.50-70 (KK part 1, last third)
  42. SH 24 (KK part 2)
  43. SH 25 (KK part 3)
  44. SH 26 (KK part 4)
  45. DH 1
  46. DH 2
  47. DH 3
  48. DH 4
  49. DH 5
  50. DH 6
  51. DH 7
  52. DH 8
  53. DH 9
  54. DH 10
  55. DH 11
  56. OH 1—5
  57. 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:

  1. 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.)
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. CH IX and CH XII go together for me in discussing the roles of nous and logos coupled with perception and psychology.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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:

  1. 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)
  2. SH 28, 21, 9: God, the chain of being, and how things come to be
  3. SH 15, 22: procreation, birth, and premodern understandings of family resemblance as a matter of incarnation of the soul in a world of elements
  4. 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
  5. SH 6: decans, astrological and meteorological phenomena, and how this all relates to the vision of God
  6. 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
  7. SH 11: a collection of summary-statements (κεφαλαία kephalaía) that collectively frame a Hermetic understanding of fate
  8. SH 20, 17: virtues and powers of the soul and how it relates to body
  9. SH 3, 19: different kinds of souls, how souls might be considered, and how it gives form to life and living
  10. 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 in hermetica Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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: Initial Impressions, Questions, and the Role of a Daimōn

October 28, 2022 By in hermetica Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

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 brought up what those texts are and what the relevant excerpts are as evidence for such beliefs.  If you need a refresher on what we talked about last time, go read the last post!

So, with all that laid out, where does that leave us?  Besides the obvious answer of “with a mess”, we get a notion that reincarnation with some sort of promotion/demotion in terms of the soul’s “dignity” is what we seem to have, which is almost certainly not something unique to Hermeticism but rather a belief in reincarnation-friendly spiritual beliefs in a Hellenistic Egyptian (or otherwise eastern Mediterranean) context in the early Roman Imperial period—and that’s a whole research topic that I haven’t yet had the time, energy, or means to dive into.  While I’d like to do so at some point, or at least begin an investigation into whatever academic/scholarly literature as might exist on such a topic, if we limit ourselves to just what we can find in the Hermetic texts, then we end up with something like the following as a very broad synthesis:

  1. Between incarnations, there is a dwelling-place of souls in the realm of the atmosphere between the Earth and the sphere of the Moon.  There are different strata in such a realm, where more dignified souls abide in calmer and clearer airs higher up closer to the Moon and more ignoble souls abide in the darker, more turbulent airs lower down closer to the Earth.  The higher a stratum, the more peaceful and pleasant it is (or thought to be) to dwell within; the lower, the more painful and suffering it is (or thought to be).
  2. Because the dwelling-place of souls is in the cosmos and is (strictly speaking) lower than the Moon, it is subject to Fate as much as anything else on Earth (given how the planets are the “government called fate” in CH I.9 and how the planets are said to serve/effect fate in SH 12).  Thus, the souls that dwell here are subject to fate, although being incorporeal are not subject to fate in the way corporeal bodies are.  Rather, souls are subject to fate in becoming incarnate, where a soul is sent down from its dwelling-place into a body on Earth.
  3. When a soul is sent into a body from the dwelling-place of souls, it is given a body to inhabit according to two factors: the rank of its stratum that it was in, and the role that fate requires it to play.  Higher strata correspond to higher forms and manners of life, with lower strata corresponding to lower forms; the lowest strata of souls end up becoming incarnate into non-human animal bodies (whether or not those souls are necessarily of animals to begin with), and the highest strata into kings, rulers, and the like.  We might say that a soul’s stratum indicates what kind of body it will inhabit next according to its nature/dignity, while fate determines which specific body within that kind it will inhabit according to its role.
  4. When an ensouled body dies on Earth (which is as much a matter of fate as anything else), its soul generally travels back to the dwelling-place of souls, specifically to a stratum appropriate for it.  Depending on how it lived, it may return to the same stratum it had before incarnation (if it behaved in accordance with its own nature without regard for God or the Good), a higher one (if it excelled and behaved nobly in accordance with God more than its nature), or a lower one (if it behaved in abhorrent, awful ways worse than what its nature would normally indicate).
  5. However, some souls are able to reach beyond the dwelling-place and ascend even higher into the planetary spheres and thence higher into the stellar spheres beyond the reach of fate, and thence higher into the pure spheres of the divine.  Souls that do so are no longer bound to fate, and thus are not bound to incarnate again.
  6. The thing that directs a soul to a higher or lower place after death is reckoned as an avenging, tormenting, or judging daimōn, some sort of god that judges the dignity, nobility, and mindfulness of a given soul and how they behave in response to and in accordance with fate while incarnate.  The post-incarnate destiny of a soul depends directly upon the decision of this daimōn.

This is at best a vague outline, and it doesn’t answer a whole lot of questions we might have that would arise from the more centrally salvific Hermetic texts like CH I, CH XIII, or Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth.  Some of the biggest ones that arise to my mind are:

  1. At what point does a soul get to go the route of ascent through the spheres as opposed to being sent to a stratum in the dwelling-place of souls with all the rest of the souls?  Does this happen before a soul ever needs to head to its own stratum, or while the soul is already in its own stratum?
  2. In the ascent process of CH I, what happens if a soul is not able to give up a particular thing to a particular “gate”, i.e. the energy of the Moon to the sphere of the Moon?  Does it “tumble back down” into the dwelling-place of souls and re-enter the cycle of incarnation?  Does it get “stuck” in a particular sphere/at a particular gate until it is finally able to give up what needs giving up?
  3. Likewise, in the ascent process of CH I, what happens if a soul is not even able to give up its own temperament to the avenging daimōn?  Is this a prerequisite for giving up any of the planetary energies?  Does it not even get to a point of judgment, but immediately returns to a new body?
  4. How long do these transitions take between “states” of the soul?  What is the exact process by which a soul leaves the body and enters into its dwelling place?  What is the duration of time it takes for a soul to ascend through the spheres?
  5. Given the huge emphasis on obtaining nous and experiencing gnōsis throughout the Hermetic texts, how does that impact this process of reincarnation and facilitate our post-incarnate ascent?  We know what it’s like to achieve spiritual rebirth (from CH XIII) and how to access higher realms while incarnate (in Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth), but what about the “final ascent” (from CH I) itself?

Before touching on any of these questions, I want to address my biggest gripe first, one that I had mentioned earlier: that of a daimōn of judgment.  I admit that this is definitely my own interpretation of Hermeticism (not just the texts, but the whole system itself as we might glean from it) that’s speaking here, but I find the notion of some lower deity whose specific task is to judge us as humans to be…disagreeable (my more honest wording would be “odiously offensive”).  Like, I get it: lots of religions and spiritual traditions across the whole world posit some sort of entity that tackles this responsibility, and not least in Hellenistic or Mediterranean beliefs like Anubis in the Weighing of the Heart in Egyptian stuff or the guards before the spring of Memory in the Orphic ritual tablets or the like.  It’s not surprising in the least that we’d find a similar entity present in the beliefs described in the Hermetic texts, then, even if it’s only just a nod to the external, exoteric religiosity that formed the spiritual bedrock of such a system of mysticism as Hermeticism.  However, in general, I find the presence of such an entity in this belief to be fundamentally unnecessary, and instead acts as little more than a patronizing intrusion of moral enforcement.  Based on my overall understanding of Hermeticism, I don’t think there needs to be any external entity that has the job (or even the power) of determining our afterlife destiny; rather, we’re more than capable of doing that ourselves, for our own weal or our own woe.

Consider CH VII.  This is a short, fire-and-brimstone harangue of a street preacher, which is fundamentally an expansion of the initial call that Hermēs makes on the corner to passers-by in CH I.27—28, and calls out the “tunic” of incarnate ignorance and ignorant incarnation as being the source of our suffering (Copenhaver translation):

Such is the odious tunic you have put on. It strangles you and drags you down with it so that you will not hate its viciousness, not look up and see the fair vision of truth and the good that lies within, not understand the plot that it has plotted against you when it made insensible the organs of sense, made them inapparent and unrecognized for what they are, blocked up with a great load of matter and jammed full of loathsome pleasure, so that you do not hear what you must hear nor observe what you must observe.

CH VII doesn’t talk much about doctrine, theology, cosmology, or much at all: it just simply calls out the root of our problems (an addiction to corporeal “loathsome pleasure”) as it is.  We can contrast this with what Poimandrēs tells Hermēs about who lives good lives versus those who live bad ones in CH I.22—23 (Copenhaver translation):

I myself, the mind, am present to the blessed and good and pure and merciful—to the reverent—and my presence becomes a help; they quickly recognize everything, and they propitiate the father lovingly and give thanks, praising and singing hymns affectionately and in the order appropriate to him. Before giving up the body to its proper death, they loathe the senses for they see their effects. Or rather I, the mind, will not permit the effects of the body to strike and work their results on them. As gatekeeper, I will refuse entry to the evil and shameful effects, cutting off the anxieties that come from them.

But from these I remain distant—the thoughtless and evil and wicked and envious and greedy and violent and irreverent—giving way to the avenging demon who {wounds the evil person}, assailing him sensibly with the piercing fire and thus arming him the better for lawless deeds so that greater vengeance may befall him. Such a person does not cease longing after insatiable appetites, struggling in the darkness without satisfaction. {This} tortures him and makes the fire grow upon him all the more.

Note here that Copenhaver has “thoughtless”, but as Wouter Hanegraaff points out in his Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination, the literal phrase here is “those without mind” (tois de anoētois).  Poimandrēs establishes himself as Mind, and is with those who express a desire for the Good and act in accordance with such reverence; to those without reverence, Poimandrēs is absent.  Hanegraff notes that “all standard translations obscure the centrality of nous, again by tacitly reducing it to standard cognitive facilities such as sense”.  It is nous itself that saves a person, but what is this “avenging daimōn” that Poimandrēs references?  There’s no mention of it earlier in CH I, and the only other instance we seem to have of it in CH I is that this is the entity to whom one gives up their temperament (in the section immediately following this one).  I mentioned before that the Greek word for “avenging” here is timōros, which is fundamentally the same word as “torturer” (timōria) used in CH XIII.7 to describe the twelve irrational tormentors of the body, which are more like passions that arise from incarnation rather than being some affliction from an external entity.

Given the ultimate goodness of God and all, I’m not inclined to believe that God would make a cosmos with entities in it expressly for the purpose of torment and punishment.  As such, and noting the terminological similarity with the irrational tormentors of matter from CH XIII.7, my personal interpretation of the “avenging daimōn” in CH I.23 isn’t so much that this is some sort of personal Satan or anything but that it’s a personification/deification of the passions that drive us further into irrational suffering, the same thing as the “odious tunic” that strangles, drags, and drowns us.  It’s like getting stuck in a Chinese finger-trap: the more you pull, the tighter it squeezes, but the only way to be released from it is to just let it be and leave it alone instead of struggling to make a bad situation worse.  To that end, I’m not inclined to think that the “avenging daimōn” here is an actual entity to be feared, but is just a metaphor to describe us as our own bugbears, where we in our nous-lessness become our own worst punisher.

If we extend and broaden the logic above for reinterpreting the “avenging daimōn” as being the result of our own ignorance crashing down upon our heads, we can use this as a means to similarly reinterpret the “judging daimōn” of SH 7, AH 28, and (maybe, depending on your understanding of the Steward of Souls) SH 26.3.  While it would be more traditional and common to rely on the notion of an external entity to judge our souls, I claim that we can rely on a simpler model of the cosmos and our post-incarnate destinies that relies on the soul alone, something more in common with a Buddhist notion of karma, where effect follows cause.  In other words, consider CH VII’s metaphor of the “odious tunic” again: it “drags [us] down with it”, but to save ourselves, we have to rip it off.  If we combine this image with the notion of buoyancy and lightness—which fits with the description of the dwelling-place of souls being a series of strata in the atmosphere ranging from subtle at the top to dense at the bottom—then we can consider our indulgences in these tormentors to be as “weighty baggage” that literally weighs our souls down with the taint of corporeality.  Rather than some “judging daimōn” being presented with an account of our (mis)deeds and being directed to a particular soul-stratum in accordance with that, we can instead just say that the soul naturally rises to an appropriate stratum based on its “weight” from leaving the body.  Those souls that have more “weight” from their attachments and addictions to “loathsome pleasure” end up not being able to rise as high, and the more they indulge in them, the lower they end up rising, which makes them all the more liable to fall down even further.  On the other hand, souls that have less “weight” rise much higher, coming to rest at a much loftier soul-stratum, and when they are sent back down into a body, they don’t sink as far, either.

I think that this is a more natural explanation for how certain souls go higher or lower between incarnations without having to rely on some moralizing deity of judgment that exacts a toll from us, personally.  Like, I get it: having the presence of such a judging daimōn makes sense, because some notion of post-incarnation judgment as part of an afterlife transition process is a really common aspect of a lot of the spiritual traditions and religious beliefs that fed into Hermeticism or which influenced its development.  As far as I can tell, Hermeticism was never meant to supplant or replace such beliefs, but build upon them and accommodate them into a form of mysticism that yet went beyond them; as such, the existence of such entities in the Hermetic approach to mysticism and theurgy is probably just a given.  And yet, I feel like their presence is made redundant and seems like a moralistic holdover, with the fundamental process being easily explainable given the natures of the soul and body on their own—but, despite how I feel about it, and knowing that the philosophical language and concepts existed to have described such a system, the fact remains that the Hermetic texts don’t have such a system that relies on the “weight” of the soul itself, and instead rely on some sort of daimōn we encounter after life that keeps us in line in accordance with our actions as opposed to the effects of our actions themselves coming to fruition.  It’s not that I don’t think the various gods can’t inflict some sort of punishment or exact some sort of payment from the soul in general—we do that all the time in our dealings with them generally, after all.  Rather, it’s that I don’t think there’s some specific god whose sole purpose is to hold us to account when our actions—our addictions and our attachments—already do that.

Oh well.  This is, admittedly, my own personal gripe with the doctrines as put forth by the Hermetic texts, and I have to accept that they say what they say.  While my own personal interpretation renders the existence of such an avenging/judging daimōn as no more than a moralistic metaphor, I can’t speak for the interpretations of the authors of these texts or their contemporary audiences, who may well have understood these entities as being real unto themselves as described.  However, regardless of whether we take the existence of an avenging/judging daimōn as a given or as a metaphor, given how the underlying mechanism is effectively the same between the two options, what we’ve learned about the soul and how its actions in incarnate life affect itself after incarnation sheds a little bit of light on some of those questions I raised earlier.  With that fifth question (what is the role of nous and gnōsis in determining what happens to us after incarnation?), I think the answer is most readily clear: having nous and being able to experience gnōsis is either the reward of living virtuously or the result of it, but in either case, it is what sets someone on the path to nobility, dignity, and salvation.  If one lives in such a reverent and devoted way as to have nous, then they either attain salvation and release from fate and suffering, or they end up well-disposed as a soul (either in the dwelling-place itself or in one’s next incarnation) to continue living in such a reverent, devoted way and to make further progress towards such a goal.

At this point, in addition to airing my own grievances and griping about the presence and role of an avenging/judging daimōn, we’ve laid the groundwork for actually piecing together a coherent picture.  We’ll handle further exploration and explanation of some of those questions so-far unanswered next time.