The Master Game
Page 28
The scholarly dissection of the Hermetica began with Isaac Casaubon (1559 – 1614) who late in his life argued, successfully, that none of the texts could possibly have been written by an ancient Egyptian named Hermes Trismegistus – as had been widely believed since their rediscovery in 1460. By skilful textual analysis he rightly attributed them to the early Christian period in the first three centuries AD and thus, it seemed, ‘debunked’ the notion that they were as old or older than Moses. Casaubon's findings took many years to be fully accepted, but wherever they were accepted they removed from the texts the aura of prestige that their false antiquity had given them. The inevitable result, over the next century and a half, was that: … the Hermetic writings lost their hold on men's interest, and sank into comparative neglect.5
A renewal of academic interest in the Hermetica was brought about almost single-handedly in the 1960s by Dame Frances Yates, whose works we cite frequently in this book. By ‘making Hermes a major figure in the preliminaries to the scientific revolution’ and a vital catalyst of the Renaissance she has ensured that the Hermetic writings are now once again ‘required reading for many students of early modern thought and letters.’6
In Yates’ view Casaubon's debunking exercise in the 17th century had thrown out the baby with the bathwater. To be sure, the texts were not ancient Egyptian in origin – Casaubon was right about that. Nevertheless the ‘Egyptian illusion’, which misled the scholars of the Medici Academy and their successors all over Europe for the best part of two centuries, gave the Hermetic texts the power and leverage – and enough time – to effect profound changes in the way that people thought about the world and understood the human predicament.7
Preserving the essence
This argument for pragmatic study of the effects of the Hermetic writings, regardless of any debate about their antiquity, has made the subject academically respectable again but has done nothing to advance our understanding of their origins. We are left to believe that these astoundingly sophisticated texts arose fully-formed out of nowhere in the first three centuries AD, with no background or evolution, and are asked to accept that: The precise provenance of the philosophical Hermetica remains to a large extent a mystery.8
The one certainty, all the experts agree, is that there must have been a close connection between the philosophers and religious thinkers who composed the Hermetica in Alexandria in the first three centuries AD and the philosophers and religious thinkers who composed the Gnostic texts in Alexandria in exactly the same period. It is not simply that certain texts of the Hermetica (including the Asclepius) were part of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic library9 – although this is strongly indicative of overlapping interests in the Hermetic and Gnostic communities of that period. Much more significant are the deep structural connections at the level of ideas that can be demonstrated between the two collections of texts.
The painstaking work that has revealed these connections, and begun to get to grips with the amazing philosophical and religious undercurrents of late antiquity, has all been done by orthodox, ‘mainstream’ scholars. Since Casaubon, however, (with a few remarkable exceptions who we'll meet in later chapters) it has been tantamount to academic suicide to reinvestigate the supposedly settled question of any possible ancient Egyptian origin for the Hermetic texts.
Our primary objective in this book is to follow the traces of what we suspect may be a ‘conspiracy’, or something very like one, based on Hermetic and Gnostic ideas and originally formulated about 2,000 years ago. In complete contradiction to the scholarly consensus it is our proposal that the Hermetic texts are closely connected to the much older ancient Egyptian religion. They may have been deliberately designed to preserve its essence while dispensing with its substance. To take a metaphor from Gnostic and Hermetic teachings of reincarnation, the intention may have been to transfer the soul of the Egyptian system, at the point of its death under the Roman Empire, into an entirely new and different ‘body’ better adapted to the times.
Building the City of the God
There is a consistent emphasis on cities throughout the Hermetic literature.
At the end of Chapter Eight we drew particular attention to the magical ‘cosmic city’ of Adocentyn, said in the Picatrix to have been built in the remote past by Hermes Trismegistus and so designed that it brought benevolent celestial influences streaming down on its inhabitants. We also pointed out that a similar magical city built by the gods is described in the Asclepius, probably the best-known of all the Hermetic texts. There it is intriguingly portrayed not as a city of the past but as a prophesied city – a city of the future: … which will be founded towards the setting sun, and into which will hasten, by land and sea, the whole race of mortal men …10
If there is no genetic connection between the ancient Egyptian and the Hermetic texts, as scholars tell us, then it is presumably a coincidence that Chapter 183 of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead dated to about 1200 BC, contains this curious passage: I come from the city of the god, the primeval region; soul, ka and spirit are what is in this land. Such is its god, namely the Lord of Truth possessor of provisions, he to whom every land is drawn …11
Soul, ka and spirit are the names given to different elements of the person all believed by the ancient Egyptians to survive death, while ‘Lord of Truth’ is a frequently used epithet for the wisdom god Thoth-Hermes. So here in the Book of the Dead we have a ‘city of the god’ (indeed a city of the god who would become Hermes) towards which ‘every land is drawn’. Isn't that essentially the same concept that crops up more than 1400 years later in the supposedly unconnected Asclepius (circa AD 268 – 273) where ‘the whole race of mortal men’ hasten towards a city built by the gods?
Going further back in time we come to the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, the world's oldest scriptures, dated to around 2300 BC. Here too we find references to the sacred functions of cities that are echoed in the much later and supposedly unconnected Hermetica. Of particular interest is Utterance 319 in which we learn that it is the responsibility of the king, during his reign, to build the city of the god: The King has united the heavens, the King has power over the southern and northern lands, and the gods who were aforetime, the King has built the city of the god in accordance with its proper due.12
This idea that it is the sacred duty of the king to build a city that will harmoniously unite earth and heaven for the benefit of its inhabitants would be taken up some 4,000 years later by the great Hermetic philosopher Tommaso Campanella. Based entirely on his studies of the Hermetica, Campanella claimed in the early 17th century that he could ‘make a city in such a wonderful way that only by looking at it all the sciences may be learned.’13 He would go on, as we will see in Chapter Twelve, to prophesy that King Louis XIV of France would be the one who would actually build this magical ‘City of the Sun.’
We recall the words of Frances Yates, reported in Chapter Eight, to the effect that Adocentyn, the magical city of the Picatrix, kept its citizens healthy and wise through the ‘powerful manipulation of astral magic’ which ensured that only ‘good celestial influences’ could reach them. How different is this from Campanella's claim to be able to make a city from which its inhabitants could learn and benefit merely by looking at it? Or from this passage in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts where the king says: I build you, O city of mine; You shall do for me every good thing which I desire; You shall act on my behalf wherever I go …14
Sky and ground
We suggest that key shared concepts underlie this shared interest in the cosmic ‘City of the God’ and/or ‘City of the Sun’ that is found in both the ancient Egyptian and the Hermetic texts. The most important of these concepts is, indeed, the unifying theme of the entire corpus of Hermetic writings: That which is below corresponds with that which is above, and that which is above corresponds with that which is below, in the accomplishment of the miracle of the one thing …15
The passage quoted is from The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus
, not part of the so-called philosophical Hermetica but one of a large number of alchemical Hermetic tracts from various periods that fall largely outside the scope of this discussion. Nonetheless in both the alchemical and the philosophical Hermetica, as throughout the much older ancient Egyptian texts, we encounter the consistent deployment of a distinctive metaphor in which ‘sky’, ‘heaven’, ‘above’ and other related terms represent the spiritual, immaterial realms to which the soul properly aspires, while ‘ground’, ‘earth’ and ‘below’ represent the world of gross matter in which the soul is imprisoned. Implicit – and often explicit – in the relevant texts is the understanding that perfection belongs exclusively to the ‘above’ world, while the world of ‘earth’ and ‘below’ is corrupt and eternally imperfect.
Let's look first at a few examples from the ancient Egyptian texts, all of which in different ways explore, describe and prepare the initiate for life after death as it was conceived in the religion of the pharaohs: Your soul is bound for the sky, your corpse is beneath the ground … You shall go up to the sky … You shall ascend to those who are above the earth …16 (Book of the Dead)
You shall ascend to the sky, you shall traverse the firmament, you shall associate with the stars …17 (Book of the Dead)
This King is Osiris in a dust-devil; earth is this King's detestation … This King is bound for the sky …18 (Pyramid Texts)
Arise, remove your earth, shake off your dust, raise yourself, that you may travel in company with the spirits, for your wings are those of a falcon, your gleam is that of a star…19 (Pyramid Texts)
‘How lovely to see you, how pleasing to behold!’ says Isis, ‘when you ascend to the sky, your power about you, your terror about you, your magic at your feet … The doors of the sky are opened for you, the doors of the starry firmament are thrown open for you …’20 (Pyramid Texts)
A particularly clear example of what we might call ancient Egyptian ‘matter-spirit dualism,’ is found in the Coffin Texts, circa 1900 BC: The King is pure on that great tomb-plateau; the King has got rid of his evil; the King has discarded his wrongdoing; the King has cast down to earth the evils which were on his flesh …21
This passage contains the by now familiar equivalences (matter = evil; spirit = good) that we've encountered repeatedly in Part I of this book amongst the Gnostics of the early Christian era and their dualist successors the Bogomils and the Cathars. Yet it was composed 2,000 years before any of the surviving Gnostic texts and 3,000 years before the upsurge of the Cathar phenomenon in Western Europe in the 12th century AD.
In our view it is not a coincidence that the Hermetic texts are redolent of exactly the same system of ideas. A few extracts are sufficient to make the point: Evil, as I have told you before, must needs dwell here on earth, where it is at home; for the home of evil is the earth.22 (Hermetica, Libellus IX)
It came to pass that evils inherent in matter were intermingled with the human body.23 (Hermetica, Asclepius III)
The soul of a child … is still hardly detached from the soul of the Kosmos. But when the body has increased in bulk, and has drawn the soul down into its material mass, it generates oblivion; and so the soul separates itself from the Beautiful and Good, and no longer partakes of that; and through this oblivion the soul becomes evil.24 (Hermetica, Libellus X)
I see that by god's mercy there has come to be in me a form which is not fashioned out of matter, and I have passed forth out of myself and entered into an immortal bod y.25 (Hermetica, Libellus XIII)
You are purified, now that you have put away the earthly tabernacle.26 (Hermetica, Libellus XIII)
The last quoted remark, although from the Hermetica, could equally well sum up the state of the Cathar perfectus in receipt of the consolamentum – who thereafter severed all connections with the world of matter. Meanwhile in the Pyramid Texts of the ancient Egyptians the formula ‘remove your earth, shake off your dust’27 was used in exactly the same way and to exactly the same purpose.
The divided creature
Scholars do not dispute the existence of a strong genetic link between Gnostic and Hermetic beliefs. On the contrary such a link is fully accepted. As we've seen, however, the notion of a similarly close link between the Hermetic religion and the ancient Egyptian religion is outright rejected. It's provocative then that all three systems appear to be in complete agreement in their analysis of the fundamental dilemma of the human being as an ambiguous or ‘dual’ creature composed both of matter and of spirit.
The doctrine of the Gnostics, Bogomils and Cathars on this subject has been explored extensively in Part I. The reader will recall the vivid picture painted in their teachings and myths of the souls of fallen angels trapped in the ‘alien’ material world within the gross physical bodies of men and women. The view that emerges of the human condition is undeniably that of a creature made of ‘mud’ and corruption that is paradoxically illuminated by a divine and deathless spark – a creature in large part of ‘earth’ that also contains a fragment of ‘heaven’.
Could this permanent state of duality be what the composers of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead were hinting at with an enigmatic formula found in Chapter 156 that reads ‘His one arm is toward the sky, his other arm is toward the earth’?28 It is certainly what the Hermetic sages had in mind in the Pimander when they wrote: Man, unlike all other living creatures upon earth, is twofold. He is mortal by reason of his body; he is immortal by reason of the man of eternal substance … He is exalted above the structure of the heavens … yet he is mastered by carnal desire and by oblivion.29
In the Hermetic text that bears his name, the student Asclepius asks Hermes the obvious question about this arrangement: But what need was there, Trismegistus, that man should be placed in the material world? Why might he not have dwelt in the region where God is, and there enjoyed perfect happiness?30
In reply Hermes explains that God first created man as an ‘incorporeal and eternal being’ – the reference here is to the spiritual man, the immortal soul, the ‘divine spark’. Then, however: Perceiving that the man whom he had made could not tend all things on earth unless he enclosed him in a material envelope, God gave him the shelter of a body to dwell in, and ordained that all men should be formed in like manner.31
While we recognise that the Hermetic script at this point diverges sharply from the Gnostic/Cathar script (in which the soul of man is made by the God of Good and the body of man is made by the God of Evil) the general scenario of incorporeal souls immersed in matter nevertheless remains almost identical in the two religions. One profound difference must however be acknowledged concerning their attitudes towards matter – for while the Gnostics and Cathars deduced from their beliefs that matter should be hated, the Hermeticists reached a much more positive conclusion about the creation and about man's place in the scheme of things: Thus he [God] fashioned man of the substance of the mind, and the substance of body – of that which is eternal and that which is mortal – blending and mingling together portions of either substance in adequate measure, to the end that the creature so fashioned might be able to fulfil the demands of both sources of his being, that is to say, to venerate and worship the things of heaven, and at the same time to tend and administer the things of earth.32
Knowledge, reason, intelligence …
Later in the same Hermetic text – the Asclepius – the argument verges back into close proximity to Gnostic ideas when it reminds us that it is the ultimate destiny of the human soul to end its sojourn on earth and return to the heavens where it belongs: God saw that of all living creatures men alone had need of reason and knowledge, whereby they might repel and put away from them the evil passions inherent in their bodies; and for this cause he imparted to them the gift of reason; and at the same time … he held out to them the hope of immortality, and gave them power to strive toward it.33
In the case of the Gnostic religion the reader will recall from Part I that the return to the heavenly realm could not be achieved by blind
faith but was to be striven for through gnosis – ‘revealed knowledge of the reality of things’. In the case of the Hermetic religion we see this same emphasis on knowledge, now also combined with the ‘gift of reason’. Indeed the Asclepius goes so far as to state that the ‘divine part’ of man consists of ‘mind, intellect, spirit, and reason,’ and to assert that it is on account of these ‘higher elements’ that he is ‘found capable of rising to heaven’.34
This goal of the return to heaven, the Pimander asserts explicitly, is the ‘consummation for those who have got gnosis.’35 And in one of the Discourses of Hermes a helpful definition is even offered of the precise kind of knowledge involved in gnosis. It seems that it ‘cannot be taught by speech, nor learnt by hearing’: Knowledge differs greatly from sense-perception … Knowledge is incorporeal; the organ which it uses is the mind itself; and the mind is contrary to the body.36
The individual's quest for gnosis, in both its Hermetic and purely Gnostic forms, involved putting off the material world and its illusions. The reader will recall from Part I the asceticism of the Gnostic sages of Alexandria and of their successors the Cathar and Bogomil perfecti. The writers of the Hermetic texts would have approved: ‘If a man understands the design of god,’ says the Asclepius, ‘he will despise all material things.’37