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“Nothing stands still - everything is being born, growing, dying - the very instant a thing reaches its height, it begins to decline - the law of rhythm is in constant operations....”
― Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece
The dark and light schools of the hermetic seeker do have modern counterparts, and the two schools also have two facets each.
The seekers who gave emphasis to the forces of light were known as theurgists, and later as priests. Among the light oriented seekers the two facets are the puritans, or those who seek to completely ignore the dark, and the other light oriented seeker could be called a theologian. One who seeks to understand God in totality no matter what face the divine might present.
Theurgy is doing the divine work. Seeking by your behaviour and ritual to work with divine agents to further the divine will which is seen as in the greatest interests of life itself. Theurgy is serving the greater good, or serving ones personal good by sanctified means.
Does this mean both sacred and profane actions? Using both? Actually, just sacred. Hermetic scholarship itself includes an understanding of both, but theurgy seeks only to use the sacred to better the self or the community. On the dark side of hermetic scholarship… The dark oriented seeker was the demonologist, and many priests historically were also demonologists. These individuals studied to understand the nature and behaviour of the dark powers in the world in order to gain influence over them. Either to exclude their presence from ones personal life or their activities from the life of the community. This specific practice being called exorcism. Or to direct the behaviour of these dark powers in the effort to further personal gain as it is seen that the dark powers have influence in the creative process. The facet of the demonologist being the demonolator, one who aligns themselves with the dark powers for any of a variety of reasons. The most common being the belief in the primary authority of this dark entity over the world itself.
To control them for personal benefit or for larger benefit? Potentially either, even both.
Now the line between the two camps is not rigid, and not even deliberately drawn by hermetic seekers themselves.
Are these the people that pissed off the daemons? The Hermetics? Not all of them. Demonolators? Oh no, though some historically have. It’s been a rocky relationship.
That was much earlier? Actually came later. The first breach of trust was between the puritans and the divine powers, those who thought to shun any part of creation.
During the Daemon class, you said they tried to help us, but then some people learned how to control them and started a sort of war between us and the daemons. That’s what I was referring to. That would be the demonologists. The demonolators are those who recognize the authority of the dark powers and make no effort to control them.1
The Occult Connection and the Hermetic Renaissance
Although the Hermetic system has undeniably influenced much of the best of Christian thought, the most abiding impact of Hermeticism on Western culture came about by way of the heterodox mystical, or occult, tradition. Renaissance occultism, with its alchemy, astrology, ceremonial magic, and occult medicine, became saturated with the teachings of the Hermetic books. This content has remained a permanent part of the occult transmissions of the West, and, along with Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, represents the foundation of all the major Western occult currents. Hermetic elements are demonstrably present in the school of Jacob Boehme and in the Rosicrucian and Masonic movements, for example.
It was not long before this tradition, wedded to secret orders of initiates and their arcane truths, gave way to a more public transmission of their teachings. This occurred initially by way of the work of H.P. Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century.
G.R.S. Mead, a young, educated English Theosophist who became a close associate of Mme. Blavatsky in the last years of her life, was the main agent of the revival of Gnostic and Hermetic wisdom among the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century occultists. Mead first became known for his translation of the great Gnostic work Pistis Sophia, which appeared in 1890-91. In 1906 he published the three volumes of Thrice Greatest Hermes, in which he collected all the then-available Hermetic documents while adding insightful commentaries of his own. This volume was followed by other, smaller works of a similar order. Mead's impact on the renewal of interest in Hermeticism and Gnosticism in our century should not be underestimated.
A half-century later, we find another seminal figure who effectively bridged the gap between the occult and the academic. The British scholar Dame Frances A. Yates may be considered the true inaugurator of the modern Hermetic renaissance. Beginning with a work on Giordano Bruno and continuing with a number of others, Yates not only proved the immense influence of Hermeticism on the medieval Renaissance but showed the connections between Hermetic currents and later developments, including the Rosicrucian Enlightenment - itself the title of one of her books.
While some decades ago it might have appeared that the line of transmission extending from Greco-Egyptian wisdom might come to an end, today the picture appears more hopeful. The discovery and translation of the Nag Hammadi Library generated a great interest in matters Gnostic that does not seem to have abated with the passage of time. Because of the close affinity of the Hermetic writings to the Gnostic ones, the present interest in Gnosticism extends to Hermeticism as well. Most collections of Gnostic scriptures published today include some Hermetic material.
Gnosticism and Hermeticism flourished in the same period; they are equally concerned with personal knowledge of God and the soul, and equally emphatic that the soul can only escape from its bondage to material existence if it attains to true ecstatic understanding (gnosis). It was once fashionable to characterize Hermeticism as "optimistic" in contract to Gnostic "pessimism," but such differences are currently being stressed less than they had been. The Nag Hammadi scriptures have brought to light a side of Gnosticism that joins it more closely to Hermeticism than many would have thought possible.
There are apparent contradictions, not only between Hermetic and Gnostic writings, but within the Hermetic materials themselves. Such contradictions loom large when one contemplates these systems from the outside, but they can be much more easily reconciled by one who steps inside the systems and views them from within. One possible key to such paradoxes is the likelihood that the words in these scriptures were the results of transcendental states of consciousness experienced by their writers. Such words were never meant to define supernatural matters, but only to intimate their impact upon experience.
From a contemporary view, the figure of Hermes, both in its Greek and its Egyptian manifestations, stands as an archetype of transformation through reconciliation of the opposites. (Certainly Jung and other archetypally oriented psychologists viewed Hermes in this light.) If we are inclined to this view, we should rejoice over the renewed interest in Hermes and his timeless gnosis. If we conjure up the famed image of the swift god, replete with winged helmet, sandals, and caduceus, we might still be able to ask him to reconcile the divisions and contradictions of this lower realm in the embrace of enlightened consciousness. And since, like all gods, he is immortal, he might be able to fulfill our request as he did for his devotees of old.
1. Travis Saunders https://dragonintuitive.com/two-schools-of-hermeticism/
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