chap2

CHAPTER TWO

The Children of Hermes and the Science of Man

Hermetica and Modern Hermeticism

The Hermetica contain many elements that have been retained in modem Western Hermeticism: a state of mind, a philosophical attitude, a permanent reference to a mythical scenario of fall and regeneration.

This state of mind is, first, characterized by a taste for eclecticism. The Alexandrian Hermetica of the second and third centuries CE, and those of the preceding period, are the result of diverse contributions, of disparate philosophies blended in a melting pot, the theoretical and doctrinal coherence of which is scarcely perceptible. What is apparent in these texts is rather an avid curiosity, ready to feed upon diverse traditions. Similarly, for sixteenth century Hermeticists, * the philosophia perennis continued to be the postulate it was during the preceding eras. This state of mind is also characterized by a preference for will, on a human as well as divine level. In fact, in the Hermetica, the notion frequently arises that God's activity is his will, and that his essence consists in “willing” all things. God has great need of Man, whose proofs of admiration, adoration, praise, reverence, are the delight of heaven and of celestial beings. Similarly, German theosophy emphasizes the primacy of the will in God, and in this respect the influence of Jacob Boehme in German philosophy up to Hegel, Schopenhauer, and even beyond is well known. In pagan gnosis, the will is a necessary attribute of all who would see the light; the would-be philosopher must want to know, and it is his will that he calls upon when he evokes intermediary or heavenly spirits.

The state of mind that is here under discussion is also characterized by an apparent contradiction between two different ways of approaching gnosis. The Hermetica stress equally the importance of two paths that would appear opposites, one optimistic and the other pessimistic. What is called gnostic optimism considers the universe as divine. Since God reveals himself in all things, Man can become godlike; by contemplating and understanding the universe, he can reach the divine, unite with God by absorbing a representation of the universe within his own mens. Gnostic pessimism, on the contrary, rejects the world as evil. Both of these tendencies are represented in modern Hermeticism, the second consisting in strongly emphasizing the consequences of the Fall on the present state of nature. Such an apparent contradiction is rich in dialectical tension, and I would like to emphasize that it is not uncommon to find it in the works of one and the same theosophist, for example Louis–Claude de Saint–Martin. There is nothing astonishing in this, since these attitudes are but complementary ways of seeing the universe, both suggesting that in the final analysis Man possesses divine powers that must be regenerated and utilized. It is thus difficult to determine whether a given theosopher is optimistic or pessimistic. A fundamental pessimism would be that of a theosopher who believes in a power of evil ontologically equal to the power of good, but this is hardly ever the case in modern Hermeticism. In any event, both attitudes should be interpreted as a hermeneutical tension rather than a contradiction within the Corpus.

These reflections on optimistic and pessimistic attitudes make it easier to understand the philosophical premises of the Hermetica and of modern Hermeticism. In these traditions there is no absolute dualism. For example, what is called “moist nature” in the Poimandres, is not presented as an ontological principle; there is deprivation, but not a complete break. This applies equally well, in moder tradition, to Jacob Boehme and other theosophers. There could not be a real dualism, especially as the world below, so complex, is in homological and analogical touch with the worlds above, which are also extremely complex. In the treatise Nous to Hermes, Nous addresses Hermes in order to teach him how to attain Gnostic experience. One gets there, he says, by reflecting the universe in one's own spiriti the adept must lear to seize the divine essence of the material universe and imprint it within his psyche. It is possible to do this because Man possesses a divine intellect. It is thus understandable that there is frequently, though often in a very implicit way, a prolific use of mirror symbolism in Hermetic traditioni this theme was reactualized in the Middle Ages by the famous text of the Tabula Smaragdina (or Emerald Tablet, printed for the first time in 1541). Boehme, then Baader after Navalis, combine these speculations on the speculum with all kinds of considerations on light, the prism, and colors.

The universe, conceived as a system of analogical and dynamic relationships, like a text to be read, decoded, is obviously one of the biggest common denominators within this vast current of thought. An entire aspect of European literature reflects this, but if European romanticisms have done a great deal to accredit this vision of the world, it must be remembered that this vision is often expressed in the Hermetica, numerous texts of which teach the possibility of a knowledge of God through the contemplation of the world. The germ of Paracelsus's thought is already contained in the Kyranides. This tendency affirms:colit quinovit(“he who knows, cherishes”), and this is what the Pansophists will say in the seventeenth century. Of course this tendency is linked in the Hermetica to another apparently opposite, but ultimately complementary tendency, that God, unknowable, reveals himself through prayer and religion (novit qui colit—“he who loves, knows”) In the twilight of the Middle Ages, Pistis and Sophia—belief and knowledge—try to reconcile themselves, each to the otheri Paracelsus tries to reconcile Christian mysticism with Neoplatonic tradition and with a real philosophy of nature, preparing the way for Rosicrucian thought and eighteenth-century Illuminism.

Because the universe is a forest of symbols, it is natural to wish to examine closely all that it contains. Whereas Aristotelianism had a tendency to be interested in the general, the Hermetic showed an extremely pronounced taste for the particular, for the hidden face and form in beings and in objects. Thus the Kyranides reflect the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman interest in the mirabilia, emphasizing especially the relationships among the seven planets, metals, plants. It is this tradition that has been reactivated by the Paracelsianism so ably studied by Allen G. Debus. Thanks to Paracelsianism, one also sees experimental science making real progress, as abstract theories increasingly make way for concrete experimentation. Influenced by this new Hermesian approach, science is no longer disinterested; it looks for practical applications and ceases to neglect the particular in favor of the general. Another manifestation of this major aspect of modem Western Hermeticism is the romantic Naturphilosophie, especially in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Navalis, G. H. von Schubert, H. Steffens, J. W. Ritter, and many others try, through their research and their writings, to understand and reveal the hidden structure of things by a synthetic approach, but always using nature as a point of departure. It happens, for instance with Schelling, that theory precedes experimentation, but one is not conceivable without the other, which constantly revitalizes an active mind and imagination applied to decoding all the given premises of reality. The discoveries of chemistry, physics, and particularly the new experiments dealing with oxygen, galvanism, and electricity, lead to a form of cosmology or cosmosophy that brings to mind, although in a different style, the world harmonies of Renaissance Hermeticism.

Thus one of the main characteristics common to the Hermetica and to the entire modern Hermesian current is this taste for the concrete, tied to a philosophy of incarnation. The nightmare of Illuminism in the eighteenth century is not the thought of Condorcet or Rousseau, but pure abstraction, the disincamate systems of certain representatives of the Enlightenment. The Hermetica teach that “there is nothing invisible, even among the incorporeals,” because the reproduction of matter is “an eternal operation.” The incarnation is “a force in action”; there must necessarily exist bodies that serve as vessels and as instruments of immortal and eternal forces (Tract XI, Asclepius; Fragment IV of Stobaeus).

The third major point of agreement between the Hermetica and modem Hermeticism is a permanent reference, implicit or explicit, to the mythic themes of Fall and reintegration. To retell the myth and draw philosophical and practical consequences from it, to reenact it through a narrative or by an inspired commentary, is the task of theosophy. It is interesting to note that the theme of Man's Fall by the inducement of the tangible—a very common theme in Christian theosophy at least since Boehme—exists in the Poimandres where one sees that the incarceration of Adam in the tangible was due to eros. It is also interesting to remember that this text is the first among all the Hermetica in their traditional presentation; thus the collection starts with this basic mythic narrative, so that one is plunged, from the start, into theosophy. The Fall calls forth a regenerative work, and the characteristic of all Hermesian gnosis is to put the emphasis on human power and will in the climb or reascension. From the Hermetica to the Hermeticism of the twentieth century, each human being is considered to be a potential magus who, by his intellect, can accomplish marvelous actions. One does not talk so much of Man below God, as of Man and God. Remember here Pico, the Monas hieroglyphica of John Dee, and Christian theurgy; the angels that one can evoke are considered to be Man's ancient servants, as Man before the Fall was directly in the presence of God. The Order of the Elect Cohens, of Martinès de Pasqually, is one of the last examples of this kind of theurgic practice.

A few remindersconcerning the word “Hermeticism”in modem times are perhaps necessary at this point. Obviously, the word does not always appear where this state of mind, these doctrines, and these practices are apparent. In 1614, Casaubon demonstrated that the Hermetica are not so ancient as had been thought, and consequently, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word “Hermeticism” had rather a bad connotation. Gradually, “Hermes” and “Hermeticism” came more and more to refer to alchemy or theosophy—or esotericism in the modem sense of the term. The example of Germany is particularly interesting. In general, the Germans had little part in the golden age of European Hermetism, which lasted from Ficino to Kircher. Agrippa wrote before the Reformation and Kircher composed his main works in Rome. During this period humanism made only slight progress in Germanic lands, hampered by the barrier that Lutheranism had erected against it. Alexandrian Hermetism, by its very nature, and as a legacy of ancient Greek literature and thought, remained a subject of study for the humanists. As a consequence, the authors of almost all the great commentaries on the Corpus Hermeticum were French and Italian

What is most remarkable is that Germanic Hermeticism (not Hermetism) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was essentially “barbaric,” in the sense that it did not owe much to the ancient legacy and developed in a more or less autonomous fashion. Hermes Trismegistus was the object of a particular veneration in Valentin Weigel and Cornelius Agrippa, although they made little use of the Hermetica. Paracelsus, J. Boehme, J. G. Gichtel, and most of the representatives of early Naturphilosophie, in other words the whole theosophical current that had chosen Germany as its preserver, owed practically nothing to Hermetism. This remained so, despite similarities of thought, a few publications of extracts from the Hermetica, and occasional references in the works of theosophers and Rosicrucians. One may well wonder if the discovery made by Casaubon did not result—either as a consequence, reaction, or compensation—in the reinforcement of the belief in a hidden Tradition, all the more secret or primordial because one could no longer date it. The Rosicrucian vogue, which appeared at the same time as Casaubon's revelation, can perhaps be partially accounted for by such a reaction, as the historian R. C. Zimmermann has recently suggested.

In the Germanic countries, Hermetism at the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth appears to have been a manifestation of humanism as well as of esotericism. Not until the beginning of the Enlightenment did Humanism really appear there. One interesting presentation of Hermes Trismegistus at the time was a book by Christian Kriegsmann, published in 1684 at Tübingen, Conjectaneorum de Germanicae gentis origine, ac Conditore, Hermete Trismegisto, qui S. Moysi est Chanaan…Liber unus. In it the author endeavored to demonstrate by philological arguments that Hermes was the founder of the Germanic peoples. A large place is also given to Hermes Trismegistus in the works of Johan Heinrich Ursin us (De Zoroastre Bactriano, Hermete Trismegisto, 1661) and Olaus Borrichius (Hermetis Aegyptiorum et chemicorum sapientia, 1674). In the same period, the title of Ehregott Daniel Colberg's work, Das Platonisch Hermetische Christentum (1690-91), was a vague reference to both spiritualists and theosophers, against whom the author took up arms, devoting a few pages to the Corpus Hermeticum. A little later, Gottfried Arnold made almost no mention of Hermetism in his voluminous history of sects and heresies, and Johan Heinrich Zedler's dictionary, which appeared around 1730, gave only a vague definition of it. Nevertheless, 1706 saw the first complete German translation of the Poimandres in Hamburg, with commentaries, by Aletophilus IW. von Mettemich?), under the title Erkenntniisz der Natur und des sich darin offenbahrenden Gottes, while Johann Albrecht Fabricius began to publish his monumental Bibliotheca Graeca (1705-28), one of the first great surveys of Hellenism in Germany, in which Hermes is much discussed. And Johann Jacob Brucker devoted an entire volume of his popular Historia critica philosophiae (1743) to Hermetism—and Hermeticism (theosophy, Rosicrucianism, etc.). Later on, both in Germany and elsewhere one can see a reason for the development of Hermetism and Hermeticism in the second half of the eighteenth century in the following fact: Popular philosophy had spread the idea of reason and of a divine love everywhere apparent (for example, and the work is significant, by Abbé Antoine Noël La Pluche, Spectacle dela nature, 8 vols., 1737-50); however, as of about 1750, the sensualism and materialism that develop more and more make one forget this reason and this divine love, leading by way of reaction or rather as a compensation, to a more marked taste for esotericism.

In the nineteenth century, the word “Hermeticism” reappears, associated with Orphism and Pythagoreanism. This, with preromanticism and romanticism, is the time of its real rebirth. Among the authors less often cited than others, and not to speak of German romanticism, let us mention here La Thréicie of Quintus Aucler, which recalls the most beautiful passages of De Harmonia Mundi of Giorgi; and in the same vein, in 1806, Pierre Jacques Devismes's Pasilogie, where one rediscovers cosmic musical harmonies comparable to those of Giorgi and Fludd.

This is not the place to speak of the different forms of the rebirth of Hermeticism in modern times, especially of the ways in which pagan Hermetic wisdom and cabalistic thought were utilized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to revitalize the Jewish and Christian religions. I will cite only three major transpositions of this type. First, that of Hasidism by Martin Buber; profoundly marked by the Kabbalah; then, the work of Franz von Baader, who took up and refashioned the thought of Boehme and Saint-Martin in an original and creative way, without betraying any of their fundamental theosophical elements. Finally, the transposition, in the domain of modern psychology, of Western Hermeticism by C. G. Jung, who greatly contributed to the awareness in our times of the eminently formative and therapeutic aspects of these doctrines. From all of this there emerges an impression of something that is multiformed, yet sufficiently united in its substance to allow us to examine the forms that, in the midst of these currents, clothe the activity of the god Hermes, this god of exchanges and relationships, this god generous with universal and specific knowledge.

Hermes's Place Today

What then, in the second half of our century, is Hermes's place, or what are the conditions for his return? The Renaissance has done a great deal, especially by the study of the Hermetica, to keep alive the presence of the god with the caduceus, but what is happening today? The beneficial presence of Hermes seems to be perpetually menaced by three dangers. First in the Hermetic literature itself, by partial or nonexistent erudition. Many works are published, but all too often their content constitutes a betrayal of historical reality when reference is made to the texts of the past. Today, historical forgery flourishes, as well as reprints of poorly researched studies, important books badly reprinted or, even when presented in facsimile, not preceded by any introductory notes for the enlightenment of the reader. Second, there is a manipulation of another sort, coming under what one calls Euhemerism, of those malicious writers who, attempting to “disoccultify the occult,” think it fit to reduce mythical premises to “rational” events, such as Erich von Däniken's book Chariots of the Gods, which interprets biblical hierophanies as traces of extraterrestrial visits. In an insightful work (Unfinished Animal, 1977), Theodore Roszak has given a juicy list of such examples that take us further away from a veritable hermeneutics. In hermeneutics there is Hermes, but hermêneuein, “to explain,” is an explicatio quite different from that furnished by the new Hermocopides or Mutilators of the Herms (to pick up on the image furnished by the events in Athens in the year 415 BCE). In the sense in which Hermeticism is also alchemy, one speaks of it as of an empirical manner of obtaining energetic results for purely utilitarian ends. Finally the third danger, like the second, consists of a confusion of goals. It is confusion that reigns in many circles, especially in the United States but also elsewhere, between initiatic symbolism as a means of spiritual knowledge, and the simple—and legitimate—need for psychic integration. There is today a real hunger for initiations, for real fairs of the occult. It is often difficult in the jungle of societies and of diverse groupings of new religious movements that multiply everywhere and especially in California, where some even call themselves Gnostics and refer sometimes explicitly to Hermetism, to distinguish between those that emerge from a real religious consciousness and those that translate into a simple need for individual and collective therapy. Mass media produce a profusion of pseudo-initiatic discourse, and since all of this remains in a state of fragmentation, one is dealing most frequently with forms of discourse or of images that are more often fantastical than psychologically and spiritually formative or structuring.

And yet, this “wild” imagining testifies to the need for escaping from an official imaginary,* that is to say, from a schizomorphic regime of images, the inadequacies of which are ever more apparent. New medicines, new therapies, are oriented toward another imaginary that is better able to respond to the complexity of reality. This fusion of therapy and traditional sciences, such as one sees in the best of cases (for example, in the work and teaching of Carl Gustav Jung), is no doubt one of the positive developments of our times. If a practitioner and thinker like Jung can fecover the heritage of Hermeticism, in the sense of Hermetism as well as of all alchemy in general, it is because he has seen the necessity for the anthropos to live with the myth. The Hermeticists of the Renaissance had understood that the reading of the myth is the key to an understanding of art and poetry as well as of science and technology. They placed it in their field of knowledge. There was, therefore, room among them for Hermes, whereas today it is rather Prometheus who reigns, even without our knowledge or when one does not invoke him by name. The risk that our age must take, if it wishes to see the birth of a hew humanism, consists of relearing the place of myth and mystery in our lives and in our field of knowledge. This task was undertaken by the authors of the Hermetica, who mythologized the cosmos; by those of the Renaissance, an age that corresponded to a powerful remythologization. “Remythologization” does not mean the creation of false myths but the refusal of them; it is not sacrificing to ancient or new idols but refusing to idolize history, that is to say, refusing to succumb to the ideologies and pseudophilosophies of history. If Hermeticism today has a role to play, it is that of demystifying, so as to remythify.

To regain the sense of myth, whether within the framework of a constituted religion or outside it, is also to learn or relearn how to “read.” What a beautiful lesson so many of the thinkers of the Renaissance teach us, those who knew how to read the book of the world, of Man and of theophanies! They had understood that language starts with reading and passes through it—the reading of myths, of anthropos and of the cosmos. Is not the art of memory, so well studied by Frances A. Yates, first of all a means of reading the world so as to interiorize it and, in some sense, to rewrite it within the self? But if it is true that language starts by reading, it must be recognized that, in our age, one no doubt speaks too much of “writing.” Formal linguistics exalts “writing”(“l'écriture”) as a primary premise for decoding, whereas Man is above all homo legens. Writing, Gilbert Durand once remarked, is only the consequence, the “reduced description” (“le résidu signalétique”) of reading. And Hermesian reading is an open, in-depth reading, one that lays bare the metalanguages for us, that is to say, the structures of signs and correspondences that only symbolism and myth make it possible to conserve and transmit. To read, to find the depth of things—by looking in the right place. There is a search for depth in Karl Marx, because of the notion of infrastructure, but one-sidedly applied. And the Freudian distinction between the latent content and an apparent symptom also bears witness to an effort tending toward reductionism. The Hermesian spirit is the one that looks for depth where it is, a living place so poetically indicated in the Emerald Tablet, that breviary of profundity. Baudelaire, in his sonnet of Correspondances, extolled one aspect of this depth:

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent

Like long echoes that blend far-off
In a unity tenebrous and profound
Vast as night and vast as clarity
Perfumes, colors, and sounds co-respond.

A Hermesian reading of the world is necessarily a plural reading. The caduceus of Hermes is plural because it is constituted of a bipolarity whose symbolism reflects back to a ternary. Hermes is the antitotalitarian god par excellence. The currents of thought that interest us here and that go back to him exalt an ethic of completeness rather than one of perfection; an ethic, a philosophy, of plural totality, which signifies a refusal to objectify the problems of the spirit (for example, of evil) into simplistic or abstract concepts that flatten the soul; which also signifies a recognition of the multilayered and hierarchical character of the elements that constitute the human psyche. What psychoanalysis rediscovered, traditional thinkers had always known and repeated that we have within us differentqualitativelevels. It is not only a question of the distinctions among body-soul-spirit, or shadow-persona-anima, but also of what, for example, the psychologist Rafael Lopez Pedraza (Hermes and His Children, 1977) says: that there are several gods in sexuality, in our psyche, and not just one, contrary to a narrow perspective. The caduceus of Hermes is also the tertium datum, the refusal to stay blocked in the logic of identity and in its corollaries of noncontradiction and exclusion of third parties. Hermes, writes William G. Doty, “leads more to questions than to answers: in no single narrative but in a whole patchwork of ways in which the deity was approached in antiquity in literature and the arts, he is uniquely allied with what is frequently named the postmodern condition.” Today, this plurality is made evident by, among other things, the effort of all who contribute to the establishment of a planetary dialogue by deprovincializing ethnology (Mircea Eliade) and by showing what is common and irreducible in the great traditions of the Gnosis and the Sacred (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, 1981). To maintain the dialogue between even the most scientific modern experiment and traditional symbolism is what Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, 1975) and others after him have done. There are those who, following Friedrich Schlegel who revealed the Orient to Europe, today study symbols, myth, archetypes, and make of comparative mythology a spiritual exercise that leads to a form of knowledge (Joseph Campbell). Alchemy opens a new epistemology (Rene Alleau) as well as a reappraisal of modern philosophy (François Bonardel), and C. G. Jung has found a place within the modern psyche for the occult and religious heritage of the world.

Is this a new ratio, opposed to the one that has held sway until now in our Promethean and triumphant civilization? Rather, it is a different but nonetheless complementary ratio, which integrates without excluding, which dynamizes without reducing. The crisis in our human sciences might well be due to the abandonment in anthropology (in the wider sense of the term) of this ratio hermetica (Gilbert Durand) and particularly of the principle of similarity that Hermeticism knew so well how to conserve. German culture was for centuries in our modern culture the best conservator of this principle. This ratio hermetica means saying first of all that nature is pluralistic and that these pluralities are concrete things. The Baroque and Romanticism are in Germanic countries the two great creative and truly original moments of which these people were capable, and it is probably no accident that the one and the other correspond to a considerable recrudescence of Hermesian thought and activity. From German culture, inspired by this Hermesian science, comes in particular the idea, set out at the beginning of our century by Spengler, of the pluralism of cultures and civilizations; next to the idea of growth and progress, there appears that of decline, of fall. And when Spengler links the time of each organism to the “qualities of the species to which it belongs,” one remembers Paracelsus expounding the theory of the Kraftzeit “fixed by God for each species.” If, on the other hand, pure, official, exact science, teaches objective disinterest, secular neutrality, the ratio hermetica teaches a pragmatic interest, a subjectifying interest. Medicine, astrology, magic must “operate” concretely since the Paracelsian type of “High Science” is the knowledge of concrete facts, of mirabilia. There is no question of neglecting the other science, naturally, but of simultaneously using both; of not throwing out, as Kepler said, the baby with the bathwater (that is to say, in his context, not to throw overboard astrological knowledge under the pretext that astronomical knowledge is being verified). The ratio hermetica also adds a principle of similitude, or participation in entity forces, to the causal determination of Aristotle. The mediator Hermes-Mercurius plays here an essential role inasmuch as either with him or by him the complete break between the subject and object disappears. Unification is brought about by the mediation of an energy principle that is seen to assure order in the cosmos and unification of the subject. This is to show how much Hermeticism can today facilitate comprehension of a multiple reality which, far from limiting itself to a project of flat rationality, would associate the flesh and the flame, as these beautiful lines of Charles Péguy suggest:

et le surnaturel est lui-même charnel
Et l'arbre de la Grâce et l'arbre de la Nature
Se sont étreints tous deux comme deux lourdes lianes
Par-dessus les piliers et les temples profanes.
Ils ont articulé leur double ligature.

and the supernatural itself is carnal
And the tree of Grace and the tree of Nature
Have intertwined like two heavy lianas
Above the pillars and temples of the profane.
They have formed their double ligature.

Is this not at the same time a way of evoking the caduceus? Of recognizing in Mercurius the ideal mediator, capable of unlocking antagonistic dualisms that bear witness to a schizomorphic, and thus diminished, imaginary? Hermes mediates between the body and the spirit, sky and earth, God and the World (this is anima mundi), passion and reason, the ego and the id, eros and thanatos, animus and anima, heaviness and grace, spirit and matter. Hermeticists have always looked for the epiphanies of the earth to experience the divine in the world. If they see the body as a magical object, mystically linked to the planets and to the elements of nature, it is because they find sense everywhere in things and transcend the illusion of banality, a supremely poetic task. This path is certainly more poetic than ascetic, but if asceticism is the source of technological progress, it is not necessarily a model to follow to experience totality.

Hermeticists had understood that there is everywhere sense in the concrete. In the twentieth century, Gaston Bachelard, thanks to whom the imaginary established its credentials, has affirmed as a postulate that scientific concepts and explanations derive from the pragmatic and not the other way around. In fact, the fear of or the refusal of sense corresponds today to a convulsive jump by Prometheus, who wants to work for Man's benefit by using a usurped light, a torch that is not nature's. But this refusal leads to the agnosticism of the great abstractions, since saying that sense can only be found in formal relations, in abstract form, in the exchange of empty signs, is to recoil from it. Oriented almost entirely toward formalism, linguistics today leads to a consideration of language as being shut off from the outside, without links outside itself, without heuristics. Solipsism, atomization, incommunicability are the ransom of our episteme since the eighteenth century, whereas Hermes shows the path of otherness, of living diversity, of communication of souls. This otherness, as well as its opposite—shutting out of the outside—are found in our arts and our literature, according to whether Narcissus or Prometheus reigns as absolute master, or whether, on the contrary, Hermes favors and stimulates living relationships within art and literature. Prometheus without Hermes is dangerous, but so are Narcissus and Dionysus. A god, like a child, should not be left alone when he or she plays. The warning thrown out by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872)—namely that a civilization should not cultivate one god–figure only, but at least two (like Apollo and Dionysus in pre–Socratic Greece)—has shown itself to be even more incontrovertibly true than one had thought. This is so because monotheism without counterpart runs the risk of being transformed into a dangerous philosophical abstraction devoid of links with reality—the words “monotheism” and “polytheism” being used here of course without a theological sense; for example, the Christian belief in angels is a form of polytheism. Pagan gods and Judeo-Christian myths can go well together in a healthy soul, in the same way that they got along well together during the Renaissance, that period of abounding health and supreme vitality.

Magia, understood as a search for the unity of Man with nature, teaches us an active manner of being and having, rather than a method of manipulation. What one calls tradition is not a sort of immutable depository, an invariable doctrinal body, but a perpetual rebirth. The tragedy of a culture occurs when everything is perceived in the form of an empty and abstract concept. This could well be our tragedy.

Select Bibliography for Chapter 2

Françoise Bonardel, L ‘Hermétisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).

____, Philosophie de l'Alchimie(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).

William G. Doty, Myths of Masculinity (New York: Crossroad, 1993). Gilbert Durand, Science de l'homme et tradition (Paris: Berg International, 1975).

____, Figures mythiques et visages de l'oeuvre (Paris: Berg International, 1979).

Antoine Faivre, L'Esoterisme au XVIIIème siècle en France et en Allemagne (Paris: Seghers-Laffont, 1974).

____, Accès de l'esoterisme occidental (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

Arthur Darby Nock and Andrè-Jean Festugière, ed. and trans., Corpus Hermeticum, 4 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1954-1960).

Andrè-Jean Festugière, La révélation d‘Hermès Trismegiste, 3 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981; 1st ed., 1949-1954).

Carl Gustav Jung, “The Spirit Mercurius” (see detailed reference in bibliography of Chapter 1).

David Miller, The New Polytheism (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1974).

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany: State University of New York, 1981).

Theodore Roszak, Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

Mirko Sladek, Fragmente der hermetischen Philosophie in der Neuzeit (Bern: Peter Lang, 1984).

Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Avatars of Thrice-Great Hermès: An Approach to Romanticism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1982).

THE CHILDREN OF HermèS AND THE SCIENCE OF MAN 73

Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).

____, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

Rolf Christian Zimmermann, Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe, 2 vols. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969-1979).

^*See note, page 39.

^* In the sense that the term imaginary has acquired in the humanities—mostly in France (l’imaginaire, un imaginaire)—this noun refers to the images, symbols, and myths that underlie and/or permeate a discourse, a conversation, a literary or artistic work, a current of thought, an artistic or political trend, etc., whether consciously or not. In this sense, the word should not be understood to mean “unreal,” nor should it be confused with the term “imagination” which refers to a faculty of the mind. I use the term “imaginary” in the context of esotericism because it comes closest to the notion of a “form of thought,” and esotericism is a form of thought rather than a doctrine. As for the term imagination in its positive esoteric sense, it refers to the “creative imagination” or imaginatio activa (see C. G. Jung), as opposed to the “maftresse d'erreur et de faussete” mocked by Pascal. In theosophies, that imagination is supposed to enable one to have access to the intermediate realms-a mesocosmos between the divine and Nature-that is, to those of the “subtle bodies,” angelic or archetypal entities. Thus understood, it corresponds to what Henry Corbin has called the mundus imaginalis—the “imaginal world,” or simply the “imaginal.” More generally, the creative imagination is the visionary faculty that enables one to grasp the multileveled meanings of reality, i.e. of the Holy Writ and of the Book of Nature.