The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus

264 Pages·2011·1.7 MB·English

by  Gary Lachman

The Quest for Hermes
Trismegistus
From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World
Gary Lachman
Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Hermetic Quest
Hermetic traces
Hermes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum
In search of ancient wisdom
Hermes revisited

1. The Religion of the Mind
Neither faith nor belief
When Trismegistus speaks
The world according to Hermes
Hermetic Man
The ascent through the spheres
Hermes’ mission
Cosmic consciousness
The nitrous oxide experiments
Talking with angels
Mind at large
Too much information?
Life failure and the Goldilocks effect
Reptile brains

2. Out of Egypt
The writing on the wall
The last Renaissance Man
The language of Adam and Eve
The shamans of Egypt
Body and soul
Practise dying
The Duat
The intelligence of the heart
Simultaneity of opposite states

3. When Thoth Met Hermes
City of sects and gospels
A match made in heaven
The caduceus
Enter Trismegistus
Hermetic prejudices
Egypt’s dark days
Gnosis in the desert
The Hermetic work
Journey beyond the planets
The eighth sphere
Language and silence
Becoming Aion

4. Emerald Tablets
All that glitters
The fifth essence
The Hermetic connection
Love of fate
Alchemy’s decline
Hermetic Harran
The pagans of Baghdad
Jabirish
Holy stones and philosophers’ Grails
Paracelsus: Hermes of the north

5. The Dignity of Man
Perspectival consciousness
Jean Gebser and structures of consciousness
Ficino: born under a bad sign
Plato returns
Escape from the stars
The dignity of Man
What a great miracle is Man
Giordano Bruno — the Nolan
Martyr to the stars
Egyptian memories

6. Hermes in the Underworld
Oh Oh Oh, it’s magic!
Humanist, all too humanist
Mechanical marvels
Dr Dee
Here comes the sun
Monsieur Casaubon
After Casaubon
The great Fludd
The Rosy Cross
Mechanical monsters
Gebser again

7. Hermes Rising
Masonic trials
Hermetic Romanticism
Bees of the invisible
Arts of memory
Becoming Aion, again
The caduceus of the brain
The Hermesian spirit

Endnotes

References and Further Reading

Index
Copyright
Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.

Thabit ibn Qurra (835–901)

To G.R.S. Mead (1863–1933) and Frances Yates (1899–1981)
Hermetic scholars extraordinaire
Acknowledgments

Many people have helped make this book, some perhaps in ways they might not
realize. Special thanks however goes to Joscelyn Godwin, whose conversation
and insight helped inform much of it. James Hamilton was a great aid in research
material, and Robert Boerth and the faculty and staff of Trinity Preparatory
School, Orlando, were a godsend when I was stranded in Florida because of a
volcano in Iceland. Because of their generosity I was able to work on some last
minute changes in comfort. I must also thank Colin Wilson, whose work remains
the central influence on my own. My thanks also goes to the staff of the British
Library and to the library of the Theosophical Society in London, without whom
research for the book would have proved more difficult, and to Christopher
Moore of Floris Books for his enthusiasm about the idea. As always my thanks
goes to my sons, Joshua and Max, and their mother Ruth, for enlivening days
sunk in Hermetic lore with bright moments of sunshine.
Introduction: The Hermetic Quest

In 1463, Marsilio Ficino, scribe to the great Florentine power broker Cosimo de’
Medici, was preparing to translate the complete works of the divine Plato from
his native Greek into Latin, when his patron asked him to put these aside and
turn his attention to something else. That Cosimo should make such a request
was surprising. Only recently the great patron of the arts and learning had asked
Ficino to translate Plato so that he could read the philosopher’s complete works
before he died. Cosimo, a very old man for that time (he was 74) more than
likely knew he didn’t have long to live, yet if it had been his desire to read all of
Plato — a considerable task, even with a lifetime ahead of you — he must have
surely known that taking Ficino off the job would make this impossible. That he
had Plato’s works to be translated at all was sheer luck; it was only through the
uncertain twists of history that they had become available. The threat of the
Turks had led many Christian scholars to abandon Constantinople (modern
Istanbul), capital of the Byzantine empire and the second Rome, and head west.
The city would fall to the Ottomans in 1453, and to escape Islamic intolerance,
the intelligentsia took what they could of their libraries and fled. It was this
exodus that brought Plato to Ficino’s eager hands, but it also brought the work
that took him out of them.
Leonardo de Pistoia, a monk who worked for Cosimo as an agent, purchasing
any interesting scholarly works he came across, had discovered an item in
Macedonia that he was sure his boss would appreciate. It was a near complete
edition of a collection of texts whose existence was suspected, but which had
been lost to the west since late antiquity and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Its
author was a figure of vast renown, one of the great sages of the past, perhaps
the greatest, a magician, philosopher and teacher who many believed had lived
before the Flood, and whose teachings were the foundation of a great tradition of
wisdom through the ages — a wisdom that Plato himself, Cosimo’s favourite,
had partaken of. Cosimo’s hunger for ideas, for philosophy, and for the
intellectual treasures of the past, had sent his agents far and wide, in search of
lost knowledge, and they had returned with many marvels. But de Pistoia must
have known that he had hit the jackpot. Plato and his disciples were nothing to
sneeze at, surely. But what he had here was something else. Cosimo would be
pleased. The work de Pistoia brought back to Florence from the land of
Alexander the Great was the Corpus Hermeticum, and its author was, depending
on your sources, a god, a magician, or something in between: the fabled Hermes
Trismegistus, ‘thrice-great Hermes’.
It was no wonder that Cosimo told Ficino to put Plato aside and to get to work
on this, and no wonder that Ficino immediately agreed. They both knew from
the church fathers, from Lactantius and Augustine, that Hermes Trismegistus
was far, far earlier than Plato, and that hunger for the wisdom of the past, for the
origin and source of things, that characterizes the time we call the Renaissance,
demanded he take precedence. Cosimo and Ficino knew that Hermes
Trismegistus was the initiator of the prisca theologia, that ‘perennial
philosophy’ they both were eager to absorb, and now they had in their hands the
actual words of the Great Teacher. So it made perfect sense that before he read
Plato, Cosimo would read Hermes. He did, and soon after, he died, in 1464.
Only after this did Ficino return to translating Plato.