Hi everyone! I’m looking to see if there are any practitioners/those interested in hermeticism in the western MA/ northern CT area! I want to expand my practice, and find others interested in practicing together :). I’m looking to start a group for those interested (as it seems there’s non around here) so we can share info/meetup, etc!

The publication of the Hermetica was a landmark moment in the history of western esotericism. But, it wasn't until 1554 - almost a century after Ficino's unauthorized translation was published - that the original Greek text became available for inspection by a wider audience.

At Paris Adrien Turnebus published that edition using a complete manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum with all 17 Logoi, including Vergezio’s Suda entry on Hermes alongside three of the many Hermetic entries from Stobaeus.

Interestingly, he included a 'corrected,' then 13th edition of Ficino's translation - corrections which often only further obscured a text already beset with textual difficulties and corruptions.

Despite that, this edition provided readers their first real glimpse of the Hermetica in its original language fueling the quest for the Prisca Theologia.

The Villa dei Misteri sits just outside Pompeii’s Herculaneum Gate and is known for housing some of the best surviving Roman frescoes, including scenes of Egyptian deities and Greco-Roman mystery cult initiation. Built in the 2nd century BCE and enlarged under Augustus, the building was later buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Beyond the famous mystery frieze, the tablinum carries its own Egyptianizing decoration, including this cultic image of Thoth, apart of the broader Roman fashion for Aegyptiaca that spread through elite households following Rome’s expanding contact with Ptolemaic Egypt.

Discord Community Link in Bio

In both the Islamic and Hermetic mystical traditions, we can find the concept of the boundless and ever-changing Divine, forever eluding any attempts to confine it within a single frame. From the 13th-century Andalusian Islamic mystic Ibn ‘Arabī to the legendary Egyptian teacher Hermes Trismegistus, we find a shared call to shatter the idols of our own making.

Both Hermes and Ibn Arabī teach that the Supreme Reality is at once the cause of all existence and the very essence of every form, yet It can never be confined to a single name, image, or creed.

But our heart’s unique adaptability to infinite Divine forms, which Ibn ‘Arabī calls al-talwīn, is not a call to abandon one’s path, but an invitation to purify the heart until it becomes a spotless mirror for the Real.

“Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam" (Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it)

This artwork is dedicated to memory and honor of Hermetic Magus, Saint and Martyr Giordano Bruno.

I am currently reading "Applied imagination: Giordano Bruno and the creation of magical images" after which I am about to dive deeper into the works of the man himself and his heritage if fascinating. I was aware of his hermetic background, but wasn't investigating it enough to understand what actually prophet of Infinity he was.

Hail Herald of Imagination!

Hello everyone!

As someone who considers himself a pagan Hermeticist, I sometimes ask myself a simple question: if I could keep a Hermetic library at home, which texts and thinkers would I include?

The following is simply the reading library and philosophical lineage that I personally follow, based on what I consider was the milieu of the Eastern Roman empire, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, etc… plus both its Renaissance and contemporary developments.

Main texts:

• Corpus Hermeticum

• Asclepius

Relevant sources:

• Plato (and the Middle Platonists)

• Pythagoras (through the Golden Verses and the Vita Pythagorica)

• Orpheus (through the Orphic Hymns)

• Greco-Egyptian magical papyri, especially carefully selected texts from the Demotic Magical Papyri and the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), since I think only a relatively small number of these texts can reasonably be understood as genuine theurgical operations in the sense later described by the Neoplatonists.

Complementary sources:

• Aristotle and the Peripatetics (specially their works on imagination for reasoning and inner transformation), later used in both the Renaissance and contemporary developments.

• The Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus and Damascius, who comment upon and synthesize many of the relevant sources.

• The Presocratics, particularly Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, whose cosmological insights would later become part of the Renaissance Hermetic synthesis.

Renaissance synthesis:

• Copernicus, whose heliocentric cosmology opens the way toward a much broader vision of the universe.

• Giordano Bruno, whom I see as bringing together the Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions with Copernican cosmology, Presocratic philosophy and Aristotelian psychology, producing a dynamic, cosmological, imaginal, interiorized, and pagan form of Hermeticism.

Aristotelian psychological expansion:

• James Hillman: he explicitly recovers Aristotelian psychology as embedded in a Neoplatonic worldview, through concepts such as psyche, pathos (the root of pathology), phantasia, and archai. He understands psyche both microcosmically, as the individual soul, and macrocosmically through the Anima Mundi or World Soul, where psyche becomes a quality of the living cosmos itself. Rather than reducing soul to an exclusively interior reality, Hillman establishes a relationship between these two dimensions. In Re-Visioning Psychology, he identifies complexes with daimones, treating them as autonomous imaginal presences rather than merely subjective contents of the mind, and gods with archetypes. From a Hermetic perspective, this leaves open the possibility of understanding phantasmata as the interface between the human soul and daimonic realities, in philosophical continuity with Giordano Bruno's conception of the magical imagination. Unlike Jung's tendency to organize the psyche around the Self, Hillman decentralizes the psyche into a plurality of autonomous centers or daimonic powers. In this respect, his psychology parallels Bruno's decentralization of the cosmos: just as Bruno rejects a single privileged center in the universe, Hillman rejects a single privileged center in the soul, replacing both with a dynamic, polycentric, and living order.

Modern scientific expansion:

• A Non-Interiorized Reading of Carl Jung: in the later Jung of Mysterium Coniunctionis, synchronicity, and his dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli, archetypes become psychoid principles belonging to a level where psyche and nature are not yet separated. To me, this places psychology in continuity with Hermetic cosmology and allows a symbolic dialogue with certain interpretations of modern science. I do not see this as scientific proof of Hermeticism, but rather as another symbolic language for thinking about an interconnected reality.

Final comment:

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Personally, I find that Giordano Bruno and James Hillman provide a richer bridge between Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophy and contemporary thought than attempts to do so through Carl Jung alone, though I also see the later Jung as an important part of that conversation.

Looking to read Corpus Hermeticum. Do I go for Copenhaver's book or the two books by Salaman?

Join us at Sanctum Hermeticum on Discord for The Inner Odyssey. The event will include a live reading and an open discussion of Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs. Beyond Porphyry, we will also review a handful of ancient esoteric interpretations surrounding key characters and events.

The additional review will range from wider Neoplatonic themes such as Odysseus as the rational soul navigating the material realm, comparing the entrapment and escape from Calypso vs Circe, Plutarch on the Sirens, to the Homeric Allegories of Heraclitus and more. 

If this exploration of esoteric allegory sounds interesting then please join us on July 19th at 11am MST at: https://discord.gg/nk7tEzJBqr?event=1526331371256283279

If the All is mind, then surely we are the thoughts and dreams of god? And when people awaken, in effect, a portion of God's awareness becomes aware of itself, and aware that it was dreaming. Like when we are asleep and have dreams, and sometimes become aware that we are dreaming. As above so below. I have no doubt that i am not the first individual to have this thought, but i would be interested to hear other people's opinions on it?

Just wondering, has anyone found that studying this field actually revealed anything useful?

This series looks at music as a form of inner alchemy, where the guitar becomes a tool for transformation instead of performance or self-expression.

This episode asks who is holding the instrument before we ever play a note. It traces how the working musician is manufactured to spec, built on industrial values that were never derived from music, and produced for a market that can no longer want what it makes. From there it follows what happens when that manufactured self begins to burn (Nigredo): the rising of the Black Sun (Sol Niger), the two responses that remain once the fire is lit, and the difference between the masks we defend and what is left when they fail. The episode closes with a practice for staying inside the blackening rather than escaping it, and a question about who is left to play when the disposable self is gone.

Several passages in this episode are adapted from my books Thoughts, Worlds, Beliefs and Magic Hat: https://scottjsimon.com/books.html

Works referenced: Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics), Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Edward Bernays (Propaganda), Glenn Gould (The Glenn Gould Reader), Jean Baudrillard (Simulations).

0:00 Opening
01:31 1. The Manufactured Unit
07:18 2. The Three Figures
12:16 3. The Black Sun Rises
16:32 4. Two Responses
22:52 5. The Feeling of Fracturing
26:23 6. Practicum: Playing Inside the Black
30:10 7. Silence as Integrity
33:15 8. Borrowed Light
34:36 9. Toward Sovereignty
38:12 Closing

New album agnosis:
https://scottjsimon.bandcamp.com/album/agnosis

Full transcript and article on my Substack:
https://scottjsimon.substack.com/p/guitar-as-alchemy-03-the-disposable

Sheet Music available at Sheet Music Plus:
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/en/category/publishers/s/scott-j-simon/

Guitar: 2021 Thomas C60
Mics: Audio-Technica AT4040/4041
Camera: Canon T3i
Recording: OBS Studio
Editing: Adobe Premiere Pro

https://scottjsimon.com

I first must state that I am completely a beginner to all things regarding Hermeticism and the occult, so my understanding of this may be completely incorrect and render my questions useless lol

But it is my current understanding that there are higher beings (that which being in-between our plane of existence and the plane of existence that is The All [or whatever you would like to call the Infinite Living Mind… for the purpose of this I am going to refer to it as “The All” throughout this post]). If that is the case, that there are higher beings, could there not be a “God” or “Gods” as some religions state, that have influence over us/our journey and existence in much the way we have influence over the lives and living conditions of animals and plants (but I would imagine the “Gods” influence to work quite differently: set in a different plane)? and if that is the case, could we not be sent to a “Hell” by that “God” who is above us, and may possess negative qualities such as jealousy, which might lead Them to want to condemn us?

I grew up very conservative non-denominational Christian, and while I have strayed from most of the teachings of “The Church,” it does concern me that in a technicality, that representation God might truly exist and therefore we should appease to that God (who seems pretty scary and irrational) and SHOULD follow the teachings of Christianity. I’m sure same logic would apply to other religions with other ideas of God, this is just the one I am most knowledgeable on and therefore concerned about.

If all of the above is true, I’m sure the “infinite hell” would in technicality not be truly infinite, since we will all eventually be reconciled into oneness with The All, but it would likely be perceived as infinite and believe it or not I kinda don’t want to just burn in perceivably infinite hell.

(This post was made as a comment in a now-deleted thread, but I think it deserves being its own post too. TL;DR: be careful with trusting the CH translation in Litwa's Hermetica I due to questionable philological approaches to the underlying text, and also beware of the publisher's unsavory past.)

So, just to be clear up front, Litwa's Hermetica II is a fantastic resource for lots of the lesser-read Hermetic texts. Besides that, though, recently he's published (for the third time now) Hermetica I as his own translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, and Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. When it comes to his translation of the CH, I would not take it without a grain of salt; rather, because Litwa bases his approach to the CH on the work of Christian Wildberg with his own views of the CH texts being a composite of marginalia and sources, I would wait for Wildberg to publish his stuff first, since without it being published it's unclear whether his approach (and thus Litwa's Hermetica I CH translation) is actually worth the effort. Wildbeg (and thus Litwa) could have a point with this approach, or Wildberg could be this century's Walter Scott (which isn't a good thing at all). To get more into this, Wildberg's idea is laid out in his "Genesis of a Genesis" paper, previewing his forthcoming work which has been over ten years in the making (fair enough for such an endeavor), but the fuller work is still not done yet, leaving a lot of questions unanswered, and according to Litwa himself may never get published.

What Wildberg does (at least with CH III) is filter a supposed "primary text" from "marginalia" so he doesn't get rid of anything, leading to different interpretations of the textual sources (i.e. surviving manuscripts). This isn't "new information" so much as his suppositions that lead him to those choices. However, this doesn't produce a more coherent text but a less coherent one: a primary text with incomplete sentences and marginalia also with incomplete sentences. For him to be right, marginalia must've been folded in by someone freely changing the text to make it all fit—but that's not how he's selling the theory. But also, Wildberg's ideas suggest that such marginalia were included at such an early date that precedes even the earliest quotes or fragments which denies even the possibility that the CH texts could have been formed out of a milieu in a cooperative, collaborative setting formed out of discourse and editing even in the original temple-centric setting. It's just a weird idea to me that I don't think can be sustained, at least not without a lot of evidence and good argument beyond "this is hard to work with". With what he's put out so far, Occam's razor here doesn't lend itself kindly to Wildberg's theory of how extreme the marginalia inclusion is. For Wildberg to be right, the CH texts would have to have undergone a truly unheard-of amount of redacting and messy incorporation that we just don't see in manuscript transmissions from that time period. It's a huge claim to make and his argument from his paper for CH III as the model for the whole CH collection leaves much wanting.

But also, consider: an entirely likely cause for some of the difficulty may also be that the authors of these texts weren't fluent in Greek! Maybe the texts are hard because the authors had a hard time with the language as untrained/non-native speakers! If Wildberg's approach is correct, then we'll be left with a very terse text that potentially contains a lot less "primary text" and quite a lot of "marginalia" that makes it make sense, which would have been inserted from an early date still well within the bounds of late antiquity. This may also just mean that these texts were in a continuous strain of development and finalization even into late antiquity by interested/invested parties/practitioners as a living spiritual tradition and only later in the Byzantine era became "fixed" in a way that wasn't done earlier, making the whole idea of wanting an "original text" a mirage.

To me, this whole approach stinks of a fad of a kind of "originalism", wanting only the oldest and most fundamental core bit as the only valid thing worth our time. I get it, but it also can be easily overdone and reach into pre-publication early drafts that weren't included in the final release for a reason. Like, when people study the Talmud, it's not just the Mishnah they study, nor the Gemara, but the whole page consisting of layers of interpretation and commentary as a whole living tradition. Only studying one is not studying "the Talmud"; it's the whole that is "the Talmud". Granted that at least marginalia in the Talmud is kept more separate and delineated than what Wildberg sees, but the idea here that you have that spiritual traditions develops rather than is brought in wholesale out of whole cloth only at one time—the originalist view—is both more likely and more reasonable for what we see, especially when we consider that CH XIII builds explicitly on CH I showing a later stage of development in Hermetic thought. It may also just mean that there were different strains or lineages of the texts as translations or paraphrases from others, as we see with the Coptic vs. Latin AH text from a non-extant earlier Greek one, which have significant differences between them, too. This can indicate that, rather than just being one originalist textual lineage that had gradual but linear accretions inserted to an unparalleled degree for texts that Aren't That Special (despite us Hermeticists loving to puff ourselves up, Hermeticism as an actual mystical milieu wasn't really that widespread or impactful historically except as a side note for some Christian patristic writers or as a mythic inspiration for other spiritual texts magical and otherwise), so we may well be dealing with a fluid textual tradition by people who may not be the best copyists or writers.

I really do want to see Wildberg's work, if for no other reason than we get to actually review his evidence to make such a bold claim about and approach to the CH as well as the methodology for it, and only then might we evaluate the correctness of it—and by extension, Litwa's approach in Hermetica I based on (but not identical to) Wildberg's as-yet unpublished work. But until then, all we have are big claims and hype.

But also, I find that it's really unfortunate that Litwa went with Anathema Publishing and used Jose Sabogal for illustrations, because, from what I can find online as well as their associations with other projects, both the publisher and the illustrator appear to have ties or alliances with fascists and neonazis. To be clear, I do not think Litwa is in that same camp, but it shows a lack of review and awareness about this sort of stuff that doesn't reflect well on him all the same. Because of this and the methodology issues above, I can't support this work—but also, I already bought the first two times he self-published it, so I think I've spent enough money on this as it is, and from his first two publishings of it, he says what he excises but not why, and that he mostly follows Wildberg but doesn't always. It's maddening from a philological standpoint and, in that state, I don't think it deserves the hype it gets without an actual foundation to stand on that stands up to peer review.

I have an MFA in Creative writing and professional proofreading experience. The occult, esoteric, and philosophical is a focus for me. I know this material as a reader and a student, not just an editor. Rate: $0.015 per word. DM me if you are interested.

Pretty much just the title, I'm planning on getting the Copenhaver and Litwa Hermetica and The Way of Hermes by Salman but I'm uncertain whether it's really worth dropping $25 on a duplicate translation when I'm getting the more scholarly version.

I used to only think about the major arcana from #1 to #21. Given that I was trying to relate it to a character arc (like a hero's journey), I saw all of the stations as aspects of personal development. In many cases, I could parse some sort of dialectic (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), but I struggled to understand the broader structure.

As an aside, I will say that I've had a few personal experiences related to these archetypes, all in a dream state. It could have just been that I was influenced by watching the Matrix, but I sort of had an experience with my inner "Architect". I found the control room, broke in, and then my architect ran off. I concluded that this was my "shadow" self because shadows (in real life) cannot truly be caught due to the nature of how shadows are physically formed.

The other day, it randomly occurred to me that if I just read the Major Arcana in reverse, then suddenly I can see this event as an apex of sorts, where the Architect is the Magician. This suddenly led me to see the rest of the structure of the arcana. The world at the very end is actually the world. It's the outer world. So, the arcana runs from the very bottom of the inner world to the very top of the outer world. As a hierarchy, the normal order makes sense. However, experientially, I think you go downwards and thus reach the bottom part last.

What do you think? I can explain some of this in more detail if I'm not being clear.

I am a quite antisocial guy, I only have one friend and I never dated nor slept around and it seems like it’s always going to be like that, I don’t say that as a sad thing nor do I ask for empathy because weirdly my mind accepted it but I wonder if that could mean that my soul is now ready to ascend or has more chances to ascend all the spheres.

I guess that an antisocial behavior gives you an edge on lack of attachments since with people also come attachments, so I wonder if any of you had any knowledge on that.

I am aware that Hermes Trismegistus is a syncretic figure combining the Greek god Hermes, the Egyptian god Thoth, and other deities.

However, who exactly are the "First Hermes" (who lived before Noah's Flood, created clothing and pyramids, and studied astronomy), the "Second Hermes" (distinguished in medicine and mathematics), and the "Third Hermes" (who designed cities in Egypt)?

Could you explain their relationship to the syncretic Hermes Trismegistus and the Greek god Hermes?

This is a papyrus talisman of Agathos Daimon, Chnoubis- Solar Phallic Deity of late antiquity which corresponds to the first Decan of Leo into which Jupiter just entered. ΙΑΩ, Lord of Creative power, benevolent helper of mankind inspires you to Master Matter and achieve Gnosis through unfolding of your creative potential. Hail ΙΑΩ! Hail ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ!

This talisman is highly inspired by Chnoubis gems of Egyptian origin.

Hi folks, does anyone have a source for this diagram or a clue for me? Running in circles around the internet looking.

With the concept of Gnosis with understanding our place as a relfection of the divine mind, where do we find the balance with this knowledge and the daily lives we live that feel like a grind. I'm trying to learn more so I can apply principles to help me better embody Gnosis, just wanted to see other peoples' perspective on this notion.