The Golden Builders Read online

  Here is an almost Edenic Man in all the fiery finery of his potential energy : airy, wise, loving, and free. The passage reads, and has been read, as a prophecy of a time when human-beings will throw off the shackle of their shadow and fear and take their place as bridges between the two worlds, seen and unseen. For the Hermetist, an intellectual appraisal of this vision of man is insufficient. One must see it for oneself; one must be reborn. The process involved here (palingenesia) purports to come from recognising, through an inner ascent experience, how far the passions of the world envelop the soul, like heavy coats of dull and dense material which hold the vision in darkness. These ‘coats’ or ‘passions’ are called “the irrational torments of matter”. The passions keep man from gnosis of his true identity.

  The twelve causes of “ignorance” (agnosis) are listed as follows : ignorance itself; grief; incontinence (obsession with sex); desire; injustice; covetousness; deceitfulness; envy; fraud; anger; rashness; malice. (Libellus XIII. 7bff.) Having risen above these in the nous, the pupil comes to a vision of the “Eighth and Ninth”, beyond the control of the seven planetary spheres (which exist both within and without), and as the reborn Man - sharing in the vision of the original Anthropos (Humanity as pristine archetypal principle), who, according to Libellus I's account of the Fall into irrational Nature, fell into his reflection in the waters of the earth - the reborn one perceives “not with bodily eyesight, but by the energy of nous”.

  HERMES : Even so it is, my son, when a man is born again; it is no longer body of three dimensions that he perceives, but the incorporeal. TAT : Father, now that I see in mind, I see myself to be the All. I am in heaven and in earth, in water and in air; I am in beasts and plants; I am a babe in the womb, and one that is not yet conceived, and one that has been born; I am present everywhere. (Libellus XIII. Treatise on Rebirth)

  It should be understood that while this Hermetic vision of spiritual life combined with abundant nature was intended to have universal applications - and indeed has achieved this historically - there is a serious strain in the philosophical Hermetica of rooting the vision within the magical and devout land of Egypt herself. Egypt had a mystique to western antiquity which while undoubtedly dimming to the vaguest flicker of antique fire at the end of the Roman Empire, (when she was repeatedly invaded by hostile forces from the east), nonetheless returned with great vigour in the fifteenth century Renaissance and has never since left the European scene. In fact, the rebirth of the Egyptian mystique during the Renaissance was precisely due to the re-appearance in the west of once-lost Hermetic writings -the bulk of the Corpus Hermeticum - which were then joined to extant Latin translations such as this powerful lament for a disappearing world, composed between c.260 and 310 AD:

  Or are you ignorant, O Asklepios, that Egypt is the image of heaven? Moreover it is the dwelling place of heaven and all the forces that are in heaven. If it is proper for us to speak the truth, our land is the temple of the world. And it is proper for you not to be ignorant that a time will come when Egyptians will seem to have served the divinity in vain, and all their activity in their religion will be despised. For all divinity will leave Egypt and will flee upward to heaven. And Egypt will be widowed; it will be abandoned by the gods. For foreigners will come into Egypt and they will rule it. Egypt! Moreover, Egyptians will be prohibited from worshipping God. Furthermore, they will come into the ultimate punishment, especially whoever among them is found worshipping and honouring God. And in that day the country that was more pious than all countries will become impious. No longer will it be full of temples, but it will be full of tombs. Neither will it be full of gods, but it will be full of corpses. O Egypt! …And the barbarian will be better than you, O Egyptian, in his religion, whether he is a Scythian, or the Hindus, or some other of this sort. …And Egypt will be made a desert by the gods and the Egyptians. And as for you, O River, there will be a day when you will flow with blood more than water. And dead bodies will be stacked higher than the dams. And he who is dead will not be mourned as much as he who is alive. …And in that day the world will not be marvelled at… it will be despised - the beautiful world of God, the incomparable work, the energy which possesses goodness, the many-formed vision, the abundance that does not envy, that is full of every vision. Darkness will be preferred to light and death will be preferred to life. No one will gaze into heaven. And the pious man will be counted as insane, and the impious man will be honoured as wise. The man who is afraid will be considered as strong. And the good man will be punished like a criminal.

  This speech motivated at least one Renaissance philosopher (Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600) to attempt to rebuild the vision of the imaginary Egypt described in the text. He hoped (mistakenly) to revive the essence of (Egyptian) magical religion within the Catholic Church: an eirenic exercise which he hoped would lead to the reuniting of Christendom about the principle of the Hermetic One. His beliefs would find a following in the Age of Reason - which, for a number of its (frequently masonic) exponents, was hoped to mean an Age of Nous.

  The precise provenance of the philosophical Hermetica remains to a large extent a mystery. Certainly a number of disparate authors between the late first and third centuries were involved in the production of the texts, not all by any means of identical philosophic leanings; contradictions abound. The passage above seems to have been written by somebody with a deep reverence for Egypt as a place where pure philosophy had been taught and right worship had been offered to the gods since the beginnings of mankind, and is full of that hearty disdain for foreign cultures familiar to all those who had invaded Egypt in the past. However, the language of the texts is Greek (with no obvious intrinsic signs of having been a translation) and it may be wondered why a devout follower of Thoth-Hermes in Egypt should want non-Egyptians to know the philosophical lore of his country, if they were so unworthy of it. Furthermore, it is to be doubted whether the reader is in fact receiving such philosophic lore. The cosmic picture of the philosophical Hermetica conforms in the main to a number of doctrines familiar to students of Plato, the neo-Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Septuagint and the Middle Platonists, while the underlying bid of the texts may be to the effect that the Greeks derived (imperfectly) their doctrines from the Egyptians in the first place. There is a want of technical Egyptian mythological, liturgical and sacerdotal knowledge in the texts. We really learn nothing about Egyptian religion, except in the most general terms, terms which would not stretch the vocabulary gained by the average reader of a tourist-guide to ancient Egypt today. In many ways we can see the philosophical Hermetica as having been ‘made in Egypt for export’ - and made almost certainly by highly Hellenized, but nonetheless rather peculiar Egyptians whose intellectual home was the great city of Alexandria.

  However, there are characteristics within the philosophical Hermetica which are, at least in their combination, unique to the corpus. The first factor which strikes the modern reader is the imaginative power of many of the texts. We have an attractive array of similes, stories, and passages of poetic and rhetorical strength, whose inner consistency suggests the presence of clear and brilliantly communicative minds operating behind them. Particularly memorable are the opening of Hermes' mind to the “authentic nous” and subsequent vision in libellus I, the story of the herald and the krater (bowl) of nous in libellus IV, the discourse on rebirth in libellus XIII, the treatise on ‘Man the Marvel’ in Asclepius I, and the lament for a lost Egypt in Asclepius III. These passages, among others, have stimulated scholars, poets and religious teachers for nearly two millennia and cannot simply be written off as hodge-podges of contemporary philosophical commonplaces. Dr. Fowden4 maintains that there was a distinct spiritual path taught in Roman Egypt which one could describe as a ‘Way of Hermes’, which might be undertaken either exclusively or as part of a broader religious and philosophical study. One might be able to talk of a culture of ‘Hermetists’, possibly pursuing their pagan (if philosophically, but not mythologically, monotheist) light in se
cret after the domination of Christianity in Egypt and the closure of pagan temples in the late fourth century. There can be little doubt that the texts could have been employed as part of a polemic to the effect of saying that the pagan intellectual had nothing serious to learn from Christian ideas of the goodness of God or his creative and redemptive power.5 Certainly the texts survived in the few places where pagan philosophy survived after the fall of the western Roman Empire and even after the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 630's, as we shall see. And here we come to another peculiarity of the Hermetic philosophical texts.

  I have alluded earlier to the ‘universal’ quality of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Hermetica have been used by both Christian and Muslim scholars to support their contentions. Hermes has even been seen as a prophet of Christianity (for example, by the theologian Lactantius6) since Hermes' writings refer to God having a Son, and because Hermes was thought to have lived before Moses. The Hermetica are full of injunctions to be pious towards God, who is called the “Father” and the “Good” and other soubriquets consistent with the Christian revelation. God is incorporeal and contains all things within himself : “it is as thoughts which God thinks, that all things are contained in him.” (libellus Xiii.20a). God is One : the maker and sustainer of all. The sin of mankind is that they fail to see things as they are, and are thus brought to stumbling, because they do not see what is around them. God gave the nous to man to enlighten him, but many forego its light because they prefer the things of the body of sense to the subtle world of the unseen. This doctrine would not be out of place in the Prologue to S. John's Gospel wherein we are told that the divine logos made the world, was in the world, but the world knew him not. The Hermetic writings set a very high store on the idea of knowledge, of gnosis. They are, after all, books of knowledge. The important thing is to know God, then all good and loving insights will follow and man will see himself as he really is, and how close to the source of All (Pan) he is. It is at this point perhaps that the Hermetic writings would suggest impiety to some orthodox, and especially unlearned, Christians.

  The milieu of the Hermetic philosophical tractates is undoubtedly one informed by the intellectual (and in some cases anti-intellectual) revolution known (in Christian theology) as Gnosticism, which in various forms began to be accreted to the Church almost as soon as the Gospel left Palestine, and which was to proceed in the second century to flourish and luxuriate in the wildest imaginable forms of syncretistic magic. But the gnosis of the Hermetic writings is both pious and simple, devoid of the panoply of mythological baggage which haunted some of the numerous coteries of Christian Gnostics in the second century. The gnosis of the Hermetica is rooted in the most optimistic picture possible of human potential. One can almost describe its flavour as innocent, coming, as was believed, from a pristine past of unspoilt people :

  If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal [ie : use your imagination], and make yourself grow to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time, and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and every science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights, and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God. But if you shut up your soul in your body [or fail to use your imagination], and abase yourself, and say ‘I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be’, then, what have you to do with God? Your thought can grasp nothing beautiful and good, if you cleave to the body, and are evil.

  For it is the height of evil not to know God; but to be capable of knowing God, and to wish and hope to know him, is the road which leads straight to the Good; and it is an easy road to travel. Everywhere God will come to meet you, everywhere he will appear to you, at places and times at which you look not for it, in your waking hours and in your sleep, when you are journeying by water and by land, in the night-time and in the day-time, when you are speaking and when you are silent; for there is nothing in which God is not. And do you say ‘God is invisible’? Speak not so. Who is more manifest than God? For this very purpose has he made all things, that through all things you may see him. This is God's goodness, that he manifests himself through all things. Nothing is invisible, not even an incorporeal thing; nous is seen in its thinking, and God in his working.

  So far, thrice greatest one, [says Nous], I have shown you the truth. Think out all else in like manner for yourself, and you will not be misled. (Libellus XIii. 20b-22b. A discourse of Mind [Nous] to Hermes).

  It is still unclear as to what part, if any, Hermetic ideas played in the development of Christian Gnosticism, and such Christian philosophy as existed in Alexandria in the second and third centuries (though the works of Clement of Alexandria show some interpenetration of idea). It is also unknown as to what, if any, part was played by Christian doctrines in the formation of the philosophical Hermetica. While there are similarities of idea - especially as regards an aesthetic pantheism (see especially the Gospel of Thomas) and the need for gnosis of God - between the Corpus Hermeticum and the largely Christian Gnostic material of the Nag Hammadi Library, there is, overall, a marked difference in both tone and pitch. The libelli of Hermes Trismegistos are marked by a tranquil, genial tone of gravitas and contemplative ease, quite in contrast to the often hurried, intense, obscure, riddle-drenched barrage of pedantic and hieratic restlessness characteristic of some of the Christian Gnostic literary material. Eclectic Valentinian works such as the Gospel of Philip, for example, may appear to the unsympathetic as a parable gone mad. The Hermetic world, by contrast, is a good deal simpler, giving the impression of a time “when the world was a little younger.” It is a charmed world. In retrospect, it is just as well that Hermetists and Christian Gnostics seem to have kept their distance. Had Christian Gnosticism entered into the Hermetic corpus, the chances are that we should have heard no more of its unique timbre after the fourth century AD. As it was, the words of Hermes - rare as they were - were destined to traverse the thoughts of scholars in both east and west for centuries to come, and though divorced from their original sitz in leben, continued to evoke an eternal fantasy-land of cool philosophy and spiritual awakening forever basking in the shadow of the inscrutable sphinx while the evergreen adept's feet dangled gently in an imaginary Nile.

  Neoplatonism and the Hermetic tradition

  It was the fate of the Hermetic philosophical writings to be regarded as ancient authorities : a kind of litmus-test to what was authentic (ie : ancient - and pristine) in philosophy. This usage of Hermes can first be glimpsed among certain writings emanating from the Neoplatonists. Schools of Neoplatonic thought flourished during and after the lifetime of the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (b.204), and since Plotinus' followers took the Hermetic corpus to be of very ancient provenance, these writings would themselves add to Hermes' tremendous reputation among scholars in the Middle Ages, for a significant portion of the ancient philosophy available to the Middle Ages was in fact Neoplatonic - though sometimes attributed (incorrectly) to Aristotle or Plato. This situation came about largely because the origin of much of the western philosophical tradition (after the 9th century) was to be located in translation-houses based in Harran and Baghdad, preoccupied with scientific and (inseparably) magical knowledge; Neoplatonic philosophy provided the rational basis for much magical practice. And where there was
magic, the enchanting reputation of Hermes was never far away.

  While Plotinus, the chief progenitor of Neoplatonic philosophy, was critical of the value of magic in purifying the soul, we nevertheless read in Plotinus' pupil Porphyry's life of his master, an account of how the great man was subjected to a magical bewitchment at the hands of one Olympius. Olympius was, like both Plotinus and the great Christian theologian Origen, a pupil of the Alexandrian master Ammonius Saccas; he was not a vulgar sorcerer, and even though Porphyry's opinion of Olympius was low, the event testifies pointedly to the mélange of ideas and practices which surrounded the Neoplatonic schools. We know that works found in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library were almost certainly read by associates of Plotinus, and doubtless with approval7, an approval which led Plotinus to condemn the radical Gnostic notion of a violent rift between the natural and spiritual worlds. While Plotinus made it his business to ‘cleanse’ his philosophy of unharmonious elements, the attitude of Neoplatonists to magic was in truth ambivalent. Magic, Neoplatonic mysticism and gnosis were inextricably linked - though not at all points. The works of Plotinus' followers Porphyry, Iamblichus (c.250-335) and Proclus (410-485) show this mutual interpenetration of ideas very clearly.

  In the very first line of Iamblichus' de mysteriis, the primacy of Hermetic wisdom is asserted directly :

  Hermes, the god who presides over learning, has for long been rightly regarded as common to all priests : he who presides over true knowledge [gnosis] about the gods is one and the same, whatever the circumstances. It was to him too that our ancestors dedicated the fruits of their wisdom, by placing all their own writings under his name.