The Riddle of Hermes
How much do we really understand about ancient Hermeticism? Review of Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s ‘Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination’
Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 400 pp., hardcover, $135.00.
Hermeticism is the ever-elusive philosophy. Since late antiquity, following a jagged and indirect path, the amalgam of Greek-Egyptian thought has promised seekers a whisper of the insights of primeval esotericism. This ideal grew pronounced in the Western mind with the rediscovery of Hermetic texts during the Renaissance.
In the 15th century, many translators, clerics, scholars, and nobles believed that the resurfaced Greek dialogues — translated into Latin as the Corpus Hermeticum — represented the fabled prisca theologia: a theological “holy grail” codifying humanity’s earliest spiritual and cosmological insights. The fragmentary writings suggested a pantheistic view of creation emanating from nous, an infinite mind, which humanity, in its journey to transcendent awareness, could eventually rejoin.
The mysterious tracts, sometimes credited to the mythical psychopomp Hermes Trismegistus, held the promise…
