I have a slow ongoing project of reading Frances Yates book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, a wonderfully engaging book which dissects the various schools of theology and magic that formed the precursor and motive ideology underlying the Renaissance and coming to full fruition with the rise of science as a methodology so seemly natural to modernity. While the efficacy of mathematics for the manipulation of matter may seem a conclusion had easily, this has proved not indeed the case, instead requiring a labored acceptance only through an array of mystical schools prior, and but nascent acceptance in its own right.

I have yet to finish the book, and should like even to begin again, as the amount of esoteric trivia is astounding. So here is prolegomena to the thesis thus far laid out in the book. I will expand it as I slowly get through the thing.

Strains of mysticism have have been present in all religious experience throughout time and space and Christianity has had no paucity of schools in its own right. The mysticism of which I am to discuss here is the mysticism of the esoteric, not that of the experiential, e.g. that of Pseudo-Dionysius and not that of Saint Anthony. Christian esotericism dates back to the gnostic schools with their myriad mutations, but still all relying upon the fundamental assumption that there is a secret, which if known, will bring a salvation to its knower. Within Christianity, it seems to me that gnosticism is one of the more native forms of the esoteric, after which there were only imports dressed rather shoddily in Christian garb. Gnosticism had its day, but lost out to the other dominant sects, including the Platonist named Paul, and we see Christianity in its essentials come into being.

It was about this time in the second century that there was also coming together a complex of writings derived purportedly from an Egyptian priest. A discourse from Egypt was of some inestimable value, as according to Heraclitus, the Greeks held great reverence for the Egyptians, being a primordial race which had been parent to the wisdom now the purview of Greece and her philosophers and alchemists. There were certainly still though a corpus of the most sacred things which remained hidden, the explanation of Egypt in history and monument and the true nature of the heavens. It was an age which wished to reject the rationalism of philosophy still bound in legacy to Aristotle with his interminable dissections, distinctions, and demystifications. What better then at this time than the deus ex machina of a prophet of the past, old enough to be believed, which would begin again to make magical the world. Thus comes to be Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Great, a syncretic adaption of the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth

Hermes was a nom de plume for a whole host of authors of various and diverse schools, but which all had a penchant for the mystical. The resulting texts, which developed over the better part of two centuries and came to be known as the Hermetica are an attempt at a concord between many schools of thought present in and around Rome of that day, including Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Stoicism, and some Persian and Jewish influences mixed in for good measure. There is everything from stories of the creation which mirror Genesis in ways, to how to call down gods into status, to the upward assent of the soul through the divine spheres of the heavens à la Platonism. There are spells aplenty and many a ritual way to accomplish whatever your desiderata.

Fast forward a century and some change (1433-1499), and one finds Marsilio Ficino hard at work reconstituting a humanism that had been lost to most of the middle ages while working as the head of Plato’s refounded Academy under the auspices of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence. The writing of the pseudonymous Hermes had been swept away with the works of Plato and many another Greek author to a Byzantine library and left only to name and speculation in the West. Cosimo lucked into acquiring a whole host of Greek documents, including the works of Plato, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Plotinus, and of course, a sizable section of the Corpus Hermeticum. These were then given en mass into the happy hands of Ficino, who stared the slow process of translating the works. Of the works in the Hermetica, which would later come to include even portions of the Nag Hammadi library, the tractates available to Ficino for his translation included Asclepius and Pimander, two of the most foundational documents of hermetic thought.

Now these writings, like all texts which wish to gain a credibility amongst the mass of similar scripts all claiming to hold revelation of the highest truths, a requisite antiquity, preferably going back to the first men, is necessary. Hermes was no exception, a needed a place in the beginning. Ficino was happy to obliged, and offering the first of the syncretisms that would be later applied so liberally to the Hermetica, and placed Hermes at a time contemporary with Moses. It was in this way that Hermes became the progenitor of the long and factious schools of philosophy and theology. It was the prisca theologia, the foreshadow of Christ, and the closest one could come to Truth extra biblically. It was taken as axiom that there could be no divergence between the two, as both where revelations of the same God, if different in style and audience. It was to the Corpus Hermeticum that was left the esoterica unrelated in the Torah and Ή Καινή Διαθήκη.