What Is Hermeticism?

You have probably met the word Hermeticism in several incompatible disguises.

To one person it means a vague spiritual mood, candles and old symbols and talk of energy. To another it means a specific little book of seven laws promising to make life obey your thoughts. To a third it suggests robed magicians and secret societies. To a fourth, simply something ancient, Egyptian, and mysterious.

These pictures are not all wrong, but none of them is the thing itself, and the confusion is worth clearing before we go a step further. This first chapter answers the plainest question, what is Hermeticism actually, and it does so honestly, which means setting aside both the marketing and the mystique.

Defining a living tradition

Hermeticism is a tradition of texts, ideas, and practices concerned with three great questions: the nature of the divine, the nature of the cosmos, and the nature and possible transformation of the human being. It took shape in the Greek-speaking world of Roman Egypt, gathered under the name of a legendary sage, and it has been read, argued over, and practiced ever since.

Notice the word tradition, rather than religion or doctrine. Hermeticism has no church, no creed you must recite, no central authority deciding who is in and who is out. It is closer to a long conversation than to a set of commandments, a current of inquiry that has flowed for some two thousand years, picked up and reinterpreted by each age that received it.

This is why it is fair to call it a living tradition. It is not a sealed relic in a museum. People practice it now, adapt it now, argue about it now. You are, in reading this, joining a conversation still very much underway.

Philosophy, spiritual practice, or magic?

People often ask which of these Hermeticism really is. The honest answer is that, historically, it has been all three at once, and the three have always been braided together.

There is a philosophical strand: a way of understanding reality, the contemplative texts that ask what the cosmos is and where the human fits within it. There is a devotional strand: a spiritual practice of turning toward the divine through contemplation and prayer. And there is a practical, technical strand: the arts of alchemy, astrology, and ritual, aimed at working with the patterns of the world.

You can enter the tradition through any of these doors. Some readers come as philosophers, drawn to its vision of a meaningful, intelligible universe. Some come as contemplatives. Some come curious about the arts. None of these is the wrong way in, and in practice they feed one another; the philosophy grounds the practice, and the practice tests the philosophy.

What Hermeticism is not

Clearing away a few common misconceptions will save you a great deal of confusion later.

It is not a religion you must convert to, and it is not hostile to religion either. Hermetic ideas have lived peacefully alongside Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and older faiths, and you can explore them whether you hold a religion, none, or are simply unsure.

It is not the same as the little book of seven principles that many people first encounter. That book, as we will see, is a modern work, valuable in its way, but not the ancient tradition itself. It is not a system for getting what you want, not a method for commanding wealth, love, or luck through the right mental trick. Anyone selling it that way has mistaken its purpose entirely.

And it is not, despite the romance, a body of secret Egyptian wisdom older than recorded history. The texts are profound, but they are not as ancient as legend long claimed, and they never needed to be. Their worth was never their supposed age. Finally, it does not require you to believe in the supernatural to benefit from it. Much of its value, the clarity, the discipline, the contemplative depth, is available to a thoughtful skeptic and a devout believer alike.