My niece plays a tabletop game in which the wizards belong to a Hermetic order. They study in Latin, keep laboratories and argue about Plato and Aristotle. Having read some of our pages, she asked me why none of it resembled anything that Hermes wrote. Her wizards do not pray, do not seek the ascent of the soul, and have never heard of the Poimandres. What, she wanted to know, was Hermetic about them?
It was a good question, and the answer is not that the designers made a mistake. The word has been used loosely for four hundred years, and they used it as most people do. But the question deserves a better answer than that, because a word that can mean anything learned and magical ends by meaning nothing.
The word and the seal
Hermetic means, in the first place, belonging to Hermes Trismegistus and the writings attributed to him. English writers of the seventeenth century spoke of the Hermetic philosophers in this sense, meaning those who followed the doctrines of the treatises. But the word had a second life in the laboratory. The alchemists closed their glass vessels by melting the neck shut, so that nothing could escape during the long heating, and they called this the seal of Hermes. From it we have the phrase hermetically sealed, and from that the general sense of hermetic as closed, secret and hard to penetrate.
So the word was divided from the start. One meaning points to a body of teaching, the other to an atmosphere. Most modern uses, in fiction, in games and on the shelves of shops, follow the second. Hermetic has come to mean old, Latin, symbolic and obscure: circles drawn on floors, alembics, tables of correspondence, robes. It is the costume of the Renaissance magus without the person inside it.
Other parents
It is worth noticing how much of what is now called Hermetic magic has other parents. The Kabbalah is Jewish, and was joined to Hermetic philosophy only in the fifteenth century, by Christian scholars who believed both to be fragments of one ancient revelation. The great manual of astral magic, the Picatrix, is an Arabic compilation of the tenth or eleventh century. The handbooks for summoning spirits that circulated under the name of Solomon date from the late Middle Ages and after. The ritual forms that most modern books teach were assembled in the nineteenth century. Hermes wrote none of them, and some of them would have appalled the authors of the treatises.
I do not say this as a complaint. Traditions grow by absorption, and the Hermetic tradition has absorbed more than most because its central idea, that everything corresponds with everything, makes it hospitable. But it does mean that the label, used as a description of content, is mostly inaccurate. If we want the word to mean something, we have to find a different test.
Three marks
I propose that magic is Hermetic, in any sense worth keeping, when it shares the three convictions that run through the philosophical treatises. They are not the only Hermetic ideas, but they are the ones on which the others depend.
- A living cosmos
- The world proceeds from Mind and is held together by it, so that every level of being answers to every other. Magic, on this view, is not the application of force to dead matter from outside. It is participation in a life already shared, the art of moving with the grain of a cosmos that is itself alive.
- A twofold human being
- The human being is mortal in body and immortal in mind, a small world containing the great one, and stands at the hinge of the whole order. The Asclepius calls the human a great miracle for this reason. Magic is therefore something a person does with the whole of their nature, not a technique that could be performed by anyone regardless of what they are.
- An aim that is knowledge
- The purpose of the whole is gnosis: the knowledge that changes the knower, culminating in rebirth and the return of the soul to its source. Every lesser operation is subordinate to that purpose and judged by whether it serves it.
Applying the test
The marks sort the material surprisingly well. Ficino, singing hymns to the Sun in order to tune his own spirit to its life, is Hermetic on all three counts: his cosmos is alive, his work engages his whole person, and his aim is the health and elevation of the soul. So is the alchemist who reads the stages of the furnace as stages of an inner purification. So is the theurgist, whose rites exist only to make the soul fit for union.
A medieval conjuration to force a spirit to reveal buried treasure is not Hermetic, however much Latin it contains and however many seals it draws. Its cosmos is a hierarchy of powers to be commanded, its operator might be anyone who can pronounce the names, and its aim is money. The Kybalion is a mixed case: Hermetic in its picture of a mental universe, very much of its own century in its interest in success and influence. My friend's wizards are Hermetic in name and in their scholarship, which is no small thing, but not in their aims. As fiction they are none the worse for that.
The test also applies to us. The pages on this site describe sigils, talismans and planetary timing, all of which can be used for ends that have nothing to do with the soul. We have tried throughout to place them where the treatises would place them: as exercises within a larger work, and as evidence along the way. Readers can judge how well we have succeeded.
The seal again
I come back to the seal, because I think the second meaning of the word can be redeemed. The alchemist did not seal the vessel to keep anyone out. It was sealed so that the work could happen: so that the heat would act on the matter instead of escaping, and so that what was volatile would rise and return and rise again until it was changed. Secrecy, in this sense, is not exclusivity. It is containment. It is the discipline of keeping the work inside one's life long enough for it to take effect, and of not spending it in conversation.
That gives a fourth mark, perhaps, or a way of holding the other three. Magic is Hermetic not when it is dressed in Latin but when it is pointed toward the return, and kept, like the contents of a sealed flask, at a steady heat for as long as the change requires.