The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  … the focus of life will become more multidimensional, contemplative, and celebratory as we as individuals come to see ourselves as living embodiments of the-universe-in-search-of-its-own-Being, and as active participants in the ongoing creation of the world.6

  Unsurprisingly, the ancient source of both Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, the wisdom of Heliopolis, also offers a way forward, out of Flatland. Karl Luckert states emphatically:

  Logic is not abandoned when one tries to understand human existence the ancient Egyptian way; namely, from the perspective of divinely radiated energy and life, from within emanations of divine purpose and pleasure, or from sun rays which in turn engender what we, nowadays, regard as being more ‘substantial’ protoplasm and genes … Eternity itself will arbitrate between moribund analytic and disjunctive reasoning, on one hand, and the type of holistic reasoning which was cherished by Heliopolitan priests on the other.7

  Yes, science should undoubtedly be more contemplative, inviting practitioners to utilize every level of their minds without embarrassment or shame. The subconscious mind, usually quiescent under a welter of reason and mundane concerns, has long been acknowledged as the most fertile repository of inspiration and even otherwise hidden knowledge. Take the famous case of the German chemist August Kekulé (1829–1896), who, together with a great many of his scientific peers, had been puzzling for a long time about the structure of benzene, but without success. Falling into a daydream or reverie he saw a snake swallowing its own tail. On coming back to normal consciousness, he realized he had been presented with the answer: six carbon atoms in a ring … This was not his only example of subconscious prodding. On an earlier occasion a reverie had also provided him with crucial information. On the top of a London omnibus an image of dancing molecules floated into his head, giving him the insight into the theory of chemical structure – and securing him a place in scientific history.

  Backed up by arduous study and hard facts, the use of intuition and hunches often provide similar short-cuts – if they are allowed to. Had Kekulé dismissed his insights as ‘just daydreams’ he might never have made his great discoveries.

  As that episode reveals, the subconscious mind deals in symbolism and poetry – hence the distinctive surrealism of dreams – the very language that enables the Hermetic texts to seduce and penetrate all levels of the mind at once. Such symbolism is not moonshine or mumbo jumbo. It is a direct message to the centre of every mind.

  THE NEW SCIENCE

  The history of science portrays the mechanistic revolution as an inevitable coming to our senses, a right and proper intellectual maturation. But the reality is that the move away from the mystical side of science was a historical accident. James I’s paranoid hatred and fear of witches made it expedient for the likes of Francis Bacon to be seen to have no occult connections, so that side of Hermeticism rapidly became not only unwise, but unfashionable. And the Counter Reformation made it equally dangerous for non-Catholics to be occultists (Catholic occultists not being terribly welcome either), while the French Catholics built up Descartes to oppose the despised Rosicrucianism. If events in the seventeenth century had been slightly different, no doubt all our science would have continued to work undisturbed within the Hermetic principles right through to today. After all, with such a distinguished track record it would have been foolish to junk it for no reason.

  And if the Hermetica had remained influential in academia, science is not the only field that would be different, since the understanding of the universe it bestows affects pretty much everything else in our culture.

  When accepting the Liberty Medal on 4 July 1994, Václav Havel, the former dissident playwright who became the first President of the new Czech Republic after the end of the Cold War, lamented the way human rights and freedoms, despite all the big changes that came with the downfall of communism and end of the Cold War, had become ‘mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world’.8 He went on to say that:

  Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once again be found in science. In a science that is new – let us say post-modern – a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits.9

  Havel cited as examples of this ‘post-modern science’ both the anthropic cosmological principle and the Gaia hypothesis. Of the anthropic principle he said:

  This is not yet proof that the aim of the universe has always been that in a certain sense it should one day see itself through our eyes. But how else can this matter be explained?10

  In his view the anthropic principle shows that ‘we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe; we are mirrored in it just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us’.11

  If science had been uninterruptedly Hermetic, would the environment be in the same terrifying condition we find it in today? Almost certainly not. Without over-sentimentalizing, the Earth itself would have been cherished as a living being. There would be no question of having to fight for human rights or the right of animals to be treated gently and with respect. If every human and every beast is an integral part of all creation, then they are all part of us in a very real way. Hurting them would be hurting ourselves. The Hermetic system adds amoral centre to science, which is largely lacking in its amoral mechanistic manifestations and depends almost entirely on the ethics and integrity of individual practitioners.

  We began this book by arguing that the magical worldview is essentially hardwired into humanity. Now we can see this is because human beings are aware, at some deep level, of the true nature of the universe and our astonishingly significant role in it. We are indeed hardwired to feel the hollowness of the God-shaped hole deep inside, as the Hermetica acknowledges: ‘Praising god is in our nature as humans because we happen to be in some sense his descendants …’12

  The evidence that science itself has produced supports the essential ideas that underpin the sense of Otherness innate to human beings. Inconvenient though it may be for the Dawkins’ school, there is no doubt that cosmology, physics and many other disciplines, including even biology, present evidence that the universe is non-random, meaningful and designed for life. Science has even felt compelled to rewrite its own rules when it comes across evidence of purpose and design, as is evidenced by the overzealous embracing of the multiverse. It is as if the scientific world is terrified that admitting anything non-random will let all the religious ‘nonsense’ back in.

  As with any philosophy worth contemplating, it is the implications that really matter. The path of Hermes Trismegistus illuminated the radiant Renaissance spirit, which burst forth from Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, which with its high praise for ‘miraculous man’ cleared with one bound the bigot-built walls that imprisoned human ignorance. Human beings are brilliant because we are all potentially gods and creators. Not born in sin and dirt but in joy and brightness, entering the world not as devil-filled infants but in William Wordsworth’s famous words ‘trailing clouds of glory’. The implications of being godlike humans are enormous. Nothing is beyond us. We can literally reach for the stars. As the Hermetica emphasizes:

  For the human is a godlike living thing, not comparable to the other living things of the earth but to those in heaven above, who are called gods. Or better – if one dare tell the truth – the one who is really human is above these gods as well, or at least they are wholly equal in power to one another.13

  Likewise, Plotinus wrote of ‘finding the strength to see divinity within’.14

  However, the Hermetic impetus to find new worlds to conquer carries with it a sense of responsibility. True Hermeticists can never be dictators nor seek to crush the weak and the vulnerable. For if they themselves, as they believe, are also the universe and even God, how can they damage a fellow god in need of their help? As the Corpus Hermeticum states profoundly: ‘There is but one religion of god, and that is not to be evil.’15

  I
n the 1970s there was a vogue for books linking the discoveries of physics with Eastern mysticism, such as the works of Fritjof Capra, which provided many seekers with some degree of nourishment to assuage their spiritual hunger. But we should acknowledge that the West has its own, forgotten tradition – Hermeticism – just waiting to provide comfort, knowledge, excitement and freedom.

  Like any idea that can turn the world around, the Hermetic universe has been forbidden by the powers of intellectual darkness. The Church demonized it, fearing its potential for firing up generations of men and women to think for themselves about any subjects that seized their hearts and minds. And after science disowned and disinherited it, originally out of expediency, it became an ingrained prejudice. But the Hermetic flame never died and now, thanks to science itself, the fire – in all but name – seems ready to erupt into the world.

  If any one individual symbolizes the tormented history of the Hermetic tradition it is Giordano Bruno. Although a rather sinister statue now stands in Rome at the site of his execution, providing a focus for crowds of pilgrims, few of them seem to realize exactly what he died for. Poor Bruno is either completely ignored or totally misunderstood – if he is remembered at all. He is ultimately portrayed as condemned by the Church either for preaching the existence of the infinite universe or for his support for Copernicus. In a 2010 Reith Lecture, Lord Rees said: ‘The Italian monk and scholar Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake in 1600, conjectured that the stars were other “suns”, each with their retinue of planets.’16 The implication is that he died for science in the modern sense. But Bruno was, in reality, a martyr for the Hermetic tradition.

  In Europe, the Church told their flock that they were individually weak, miserable sinners, but then the Hermetic Renaissance declared they were quite the opposite, lighting the way to the scientific revolution. In the beginning all science was Hermetic science. But something went badly wrong. When it junked the Hermetic philosophy, science began to preach that we owe our existence to a long series of accidents and that ultimately our lives have no meaning. The sense of unlimited horizons and the joy of being alive were eroded.

  When the scientific wisdom was plucked from Hermeticism to fuel the engines of progress for today’s world and the underlying transcendentalism rejected, the whole tradition lost its soul – specifically the feminine aspect of its soul. When science set its stern face towards the test tube and the slide rule it was in effect turning its back on Sophia, the female aspect of the Hermetic knowledge, literally God’s other half. And in the ironic replay of the excision of the sacred feminine from Christianity, here science lost not only its soul but also its heart.

  Although the names of the great Hermeticists that have come down to us are resolutely male, practitioners such as Bruno took pains to emphasise the rightful place of the feminine, of Isis and Sophia, in the great scheme of things. We suggest that this was not merely some poetic turn of phrase, but a profound acknowledgement of the necessity to embrace the female side of learning and understanding. Whereas men tend to be literal and logical, women tend to think in much more holistic and symbolic ways. To most women who understand the divine, it can be understood immediately, as a whole. It is not necessary to spell things out or limit their participation in the cosmic dance with hard dogma and punishment. That is what terrified the Inquisitors, and what continues to disturb the Church authorities today.

  To be a Hermeticist, no matter what one’s gender, is to accept and utilise both male and female mindsets, embodied in the ancient Hermetic and alchemical symbol of the hermaphrodite. Only by becoming whole oneself can the universe be finally understood and totally participated in.

  But science, like the Judeo-Christian religions, severed its ties with Sophia, with its other half. And although it can weigh, measure, calculate and send men to play golf on the moon, the real awe and glory of the universe lies in the human heart and soul. If it is allowed to be whole. This was Bruno’s message. This was the ancient wisdom. And simple though it may seem, it is in itself one of the profoundest secrets of all.

  The moment to restore the sense of wonder is long overdue. There has never been a better time to let the ‘miracle of man’ back in.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1 Richard S. Westfall, ‘Newton and the Hermetic Tradition’, in Debus (ed.), Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, p. 195.

  2 John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Beyond the End of Time’, in Leslie (ed.), p. 212.

  3 Richard S. Westfall, ‘Newton and the Hermetic Tradition’, in Debus (ed.), Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, p. 185.

  4 David Fideler, ‘Neoplatonism and the Cosmological Revolution: Holism, Fractal Geometry, and Mind-in-Nature’, in Harris (ed.), vol. I, p. 104.

  5 Ibid., p. 106.

  6 Ibid., p. 117.

  7 Luckert, p. 61.

  8 National Constitution Centre website: www.constitutioncenter.org/libertymedal/recipient_1994_speech.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Copenhaver, p. 65. (Treatise XVIII)

  13 Ibid., p. 36. (Treatise X)

  14 Quoted in Fideler, ‘Neoplatonism and the Cosmological Revolution: Holism, Fractal Geometry, and Mind-in-Nature’, in Harris (ed.), vol. I, p. 116.

  15 Copenhaver, p. 48 (Treatise XI).

  16 ‘What We’ll Never Know’, Rees’ third Reith lecture, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 16 June 2010. A transcript is available at: downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/20100615–reith.rtf.

  APPENDIX

  HERMES AND THE FIRST HERETIC

  Sometimes research turns up exciting connections that frustratingly don’t belong to the main argument of a book. As some of the information we uncovered on the origins of the Hermetica isn’t directly relevant to The Forbidden Universe but relates to unfinished business in our previous book, The Masks of Christ, we have included it in this appendix.

  The inclusion of Hermetic texts such as a Coptic copy of Asclepius in the famous collection of books discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 (often referred to as the Gnostic Gospels) revealed the close connection between Gnosticism and Hermeticism. Brian P. Copenhaver explains its significance (his emphases):

  The impact of the Nag Hammadi discoveries on our understanding of the Hermetica has been enormous. To find theoretical Hermetic writings in Egypt, in Coptic and alongside the wildest efflorescences of the Gnostic imagination was a stunning challenge to the older view … that the Hermetica could be entirely understood in a post-Platonic Greek context.1

  Other Nag Hammadi books may be largely innocent of the ‘wildest efflorescences’ but they do have ‘doctrinal parallels’2 with the Hermetica. Although this shows that the writers came from a similar school, they often extrapolated their ideas very differently, sometimes in strangely incompatible ways. (Plotinus wrote a tract called Against the Gnostics, accusing them of developing their ideas erroneously.)

  The discovery had a major impact, and went so far as inspiring the classic The Gnostic Religion (1958), by the German-American philosopher Hans Jonas, to discuss Hermeticism alongside the more familiar Gnostic systems.3

  Thanks to Dan Brown’s blockbusters, millions of people worldwide now know about Gnosticism, the version of Christianity that was eventually anathematized by the emergent Catholic Church and which is associated most with what the Church would have concealed from us. (One of the main revelations of the Nag Hammadi books was the importance of Mary Magdalene and her apparently intimate relationship with Jesus.)

  The precise origins of Gnosticism are uncertain and controversial. In a religious sense the term first surfaces towards the end of the second century CE in a Christian context, referring to a sect deemed heretical by the early Church because of its different view of God, Jesus and the path to salvation. The word itself derives from the Greek gnostikos, which simply means the ability to acquire knowledge. These heretics called themselves gnostikoi – ‘knowers’ – but the term was also applied to
many similar Christian sects, each with its very different views.

  The essential difference – what really set them beyond the pale to their detractors – was that these sects believed an understanding of God and individual salvation could be won through direct personal experience. Furthermore there was no need for a Church or priesthood as intermediaries – which posed an obvious challenge to the power of the Vatican, with its emphasis on faith rather than understanding, and on collective experience.

  Until the last century or so, the earliest known accounts of Gnosticism were found in hostile Christian writings, which stated it grew out of Christianity and therefore post-dated Jesus and Paul. However, more recent research has revealed that Gnostic beliefs were not confined to Christianity, and that the Christian Gnostics had drawn their worldview from earlier pagan sources, adapting them to the teachings of Jesus.

  As a result, the question of the origins of Gnosticism has been hotly debated ever since, but without reaching any conclusive answer. What is known is that it first appeared in the Middle East, particularly Egypt. Different historians champion a Greek, Jewish or Iranian background, or a fusion of all three in Hellenic Alexandria. But once again it is Egypt that beckons.

  The fundamental problem in attempting to trace Gnosticism to its source is that there is no agreed definition of ‘Gnostic’. To non-specialists (and New Agers) it simply refers to the attitude that salvation or enlightenment is in one’s own hands, and requires personal communion with the divine. For academics it describes a specific set of beliefs about the nature of the material world. But there is no consensus about what they are. Even the accepted definition varies between different countries.4 That being said, they do agree on certain basic facts.

  Gnostics see the material world as inherently flawed, separated from its creator, and believe that the divine and material are mutually antithetical, a belief known as dualism. For Gnostics, salvation is escaping from the prison of the material world, although different Gnostic sects came up with wildly different ways of doing so. For the Christian Gnostics, this meant devising a radically different interpretation of the nature and role of Jesus from the one held by the early Church – another reason why it hated them. (Whether the Church was wrong and the Gnostics right is sadly outside the scope of this book.) Another defining characteristic of Gnosticism is a belief that the god of this world isn’t the real God. A Kafkaesque, and even Matrix-like sense of illusion permeates much of Gnostic thinking. This is hardly a coincidence: The Matrix movies unashamedly draw on Gnostic ideas.