Renaissance Hermetism

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Renaissance Hermetism is the revival, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, of the Greek Hermetic writings and the world-picture they were taken to carry — read, crucially, as the work of an ancient Egyptian sage older than Plato, even older than Moses. It is less a doctrine than a current: a way of placing the human being, magic, and the cosmos that ran through philosophy, art, and natural science for roughly a century and a half.

The pivot is a translation. In 1463 the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino, already at work on the dialogues of Plato for Cosimo de’ Medici, was told to set Plato aside and render a newly arrived Greek manuscript first: the collection now called the Corpus Hermeticum. Cosimo wanted to read it before he died. Ficino’s Latin version circulated widely, and with it a conviction — that here was the prisca theologia, an ancient theology revealed to Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt and passed down a chain of sages that anticipated, and so confirmed, the truths of Christianity. On this reading the wisdom of Egypt and the Gospel were one stream. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola folded the same impulse into a grander synthesis, joining Hermetic and Jewish Kabbalistic material to Christian Platonism; later in the century Giordano Bruno pressed the Egyptian theme to its edge, treating Hermetic religion as a lost and superior faith. Bruno was burned in Rome in 1600, for reasons the sources leave tangled.

What the texts seemed to teach was a cosmos bound together by sympathy — every earthly thing answering to a star, a metal, a plant, a tone — and a human being poised at its center, neither fixed nor lowly but able to ascend toward the divine or sink below the beasts. From that picture came a learned, contemplative magic: drawing down celestial influences through images, music, and talismans, understood by its defenders as natural philosophy rather than commerce with demons. The dignity of the human being and the legitimacy of such magic were the current’s two great themes, and they did not always sit easily with the Church.

The antiquity collapsed under philology. In 1614 the scholar Isaac Casaubon, weighing the Greek and the contents, showed that the Hermetica were not pre-Mosaic Egyptian scripture but the work of the early Christian centuries — late-antique texts steeped in Platonism and Stoicism. The historical claim that had given the revival its authority was gone; the philosophical and imaginative afterlife was not. Modern scholarship, since Frances Yates’s influential and much-disputed account, has debated how far this Hermetic current actually shaped the period — whether it was an engine of the Scientific Revolution, as Yates suggested, or one strand among many. What is not in dispute is that for a long generation, serious minds read these pages as the oldest wisdom in the world, and built on them accordingly.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead, 1906) — I. Poemandres · The Divine Pymander (Everard, 1650)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Prisca Theologia · Neoplatonism · Marsilio Ficino · Giordano Bruno · Magic Square