‘Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination’ by Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Review: Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY; Cambridge University Press, 2022, ISBN: 9781009123068
“Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutik I, p. 478 (“Being that can be understood is language.”)
The above is the opening quote from our text by leading scholar and academic Wouter J. Hanegraaff. It’s an extraordinarily important quote in the context of the whole, which is why this reviewer has chosen to open with it for this piece, and yet it is not alone in its importance.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination. BUY HERE
It has siblings, which we will meet in due time.
This is a review of an academic text by a non-academic, albeit one with an academic background in studying what is usually called the discipline of Philosophy. Presencing this is important, not to establish bona fides, but because this review, being written on the text, can only talk about the text. It cannot give you the experience of reading it, taking it into yourself and letting it work. This may seem obvious to the reader, but this reviewer wishes to make it explicit. Such explicitness is required because, quite frankly, thanks to the academic publishing market, the book is priced at heady levels which would perhaps be best to access via a library if one has only a passing interest. From an occult practitioner viewpoint, this book is not a necessity.
Unless, of course, that is, one has a deep interest in spells, language, and the things usually seen as beyond them.
Specifically, the kind of spells that can lead perceptions to sources of illumination (or endarkenment, if you prefer). Spells that take dry historic texts, or even seemingly familiar esoterica and direct perceptions beyond the intellectual. Because that is what Hanegraaff does – and does it by challenging our frameworks of meaning and meditating on the meanings that might have been experienced by the Hermetic community in Late Antiquity. He does this very simply by challenging our modern ideas of the imagination, hence the title and subtitle of the book.
The author does this in ten chapters, plus an Epilogue and Prologue, along with Indices of Texts and Persons mentioned. A thorough bibliography and copious footnotes lie throughout. These are things which make this book a text to return to; with references to mine, diagrams to consider, and sounds to play. Yet, it is the skilful weaving of the spell which is, to this reviewer, most admirable.
Each chapter begins with historic context, linking the past with the material involved. This begins in the Acknowledgements, where we’re given an overview of the author’s interest in, and development of, the study of Western Esotericism on an academic level at the University of Amsterdam, and this technique continues through the whole text. Constantly connecting the material to people, place, and time rather than giving solely the abstract, the academic, and the transcendent. This keeps things alive and vital for the reader. The Roman Egypt of the early Hermetic community is evoked in almost every chapter.
The altered states of knowledge spoken of in the subtitle are the knowings-of-people, intimate in their strangeness compared to our ideas of knowledge, reason, and rationality. The phantasmata which the author explores are the “unruly stream of mental imagery charged with emotion that fills much of our conscious and unconscious life on a daily basis” (p. 2).
Right at the beginning, distinctions are drawn between propositional knowledge and knowledge by immediate acquaintance, and Hanegraaff suggests that English lacks the subtlety of other languages which have separate words for each – using knowledge as an all-encompassing term for all kinds.
Having said that, this reviewer is aware of survivals in Scots and other dialects where ken still survives, serving similar purposes as the German kennen. Also, its idiomatic usage in the otherwise seemingly archaic (but still used in speech) beyond our ken suggests English still preserves some subtleties, albeit half-forgotten.
It is this acquaintance, this intimacy if you like, which permeates the book’s whole world, spreading emblematically from the teacher-student relationship of Hermes Trismegistus and his student Tat, and suffusing the whole of the Hermetic movement, as the author describes it. A movement which, Hanegraaff contends, was formed by small groups experiencing altered states of knowledge together – the texts we refer to as Hermetic were, it seems, not manuals or instructions per se, but were recordings and experiential shared illustrations.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Hanegraaff seeks to change the narrative about the Hermetic community in Late Antiquity by adopting a stance of what he calls “radical methodological agnosticism”. Eschewing truth-claims about the validity (or lack) of the experiential accounts, he seeks to understand the meanings for the people within the historical context as much as possible.
How is this possible, what does it mean to take these experiences as meaningful in context, and how does this affect interpretations of these texts? These questions are the core of the book.
So, in pursuit of such understanding, Hanegraaff attempts to make as few traditional scholarly assumptions as possible about such concepts as nous, gnōsis et al. Indeed, he wishes to “defamiliarize the scholarly knowledge that we tend to take for granted […]. If knowledge is the experience of being in touch with how things are, procedures of questioning and destabilizing our certainties in this regard may lead to altered states of knowledge.” (p. 9)
It is in this strange-yet-intimately-familiar spirit (pun intended) that the author describes this study of what he terms Hermetic spirituality in distinction to so-called Hermetic Tradition or Hermetic Literature. The latter two are familiar constructs with familiar contours and assumptions. Hermetic spirituality exceeds the boundaries of the texts themselves, or even the descriptions therein.
Nothing less is at stake than the paradox of translation across the threshold of language itself. (p. 12)
“Noetic perception” as understood by the Hermetica […] are not the normal “intellectual” or ”mental” activities but are claimed precisely to go beyond them. They have absolutely nothing to do with thinking, let alone sensory perception. (p. 15)
This, then, is also why Hanegraaff suggests that the experiential quality of gnōsis is not intellectual, because this beyondness is a kind of becoming-lost to one’s habitual perceptions. That is, the eyes of the heart are not seeing with ordinary vision. Indeed, to perceive that way is to cease seeing with our ocular perceptual apparatus. We cease thinking too, because the phantasma, the appearances, are in actuality, capable of being revealed as unconditioned imaginal apparitions. Apparitions which contain and are potencies which enable us to heal the body and soul. The defamiliarization process is not one which is anthropocentric – it requires re-cognition of the gods, presences, and powers with the eyes of the heart. It needs the more-than-human.
The nous then, is not the intellect, nor is it the-thing-that thinks. It is the principle which re-cognises the world as it truly is and reveals itself-as-within-and-integral-to-the world, yet also beyond the boundaries of the same.
Ontologically, it is an ultimate reality, while epistemologically it is the capacity to access or comprehend that very same reality. (p. 163)
We will return to these ideas of beyondness and strangeness later – and Hanegraaff does spend some time explaining why his views on gnōsis are different to and distinct from the great scholar Hans Jonas. Suffice to say, for this reviewer, the focus on intimacy does not automatically cancel out notions of strangeness, distance and alienness perceived by many in their reading of Jonas and those who came in his wake.
Hanegraaff highlights that Hellenophilia has played a role in some scholars’ treatment of Hermetic material and its community – in casting this in terms of Hermetic Philosophy, some have attempted to rationalise and sanitise the Hermetica as an essential part of “progression towards” Enlightenment-rooted liberal neohumanist values. Early scholarship privileged the rational Greeks against the superstitions of the Egyptians. Equally, philosophy itself has been deployed as a normative boundary against Hermetic practice.
To become wise is to become rational, as opposed to superstitious practice. Fortunately, the Hellenophilia present in analyses began to decay somewhat with the numerous texts discovered in Coptic contexts, and thus attention has expanded to exceed beyond those previous boundaries.
It must also be noted that while modern perception of philosophy has been deployed as a boundary marker of rationality, the philosophy of Socrates – and, per Kingsley, the Pre-Socratics (see also Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) – seems very different:
Socrates “love of wisdom” as described by Plato, was likewise focused on an ultimate view of reality – the eternal forms or ideas – could only be beheld directly in a trans-rational state of mania, divine madness […] Philosophers are those that have recognized their own ignorance and desire to become wise; therefore Plato’s ideal philosopher, Socrates is precisely not the man of wisdom. (p. 15, footnote 16)
So then, the idea of philosophy as defence against the irrationality of spirituality seems to be a bastion full of holes; a fortress built atop writhing dragons which constantly undermine its foundations, requiring a Merlinesque vatic view to recognise the truth.
Or perhaps the nous of Ariadne, which guided an ungrateful hero through the Labyrinth, is now further tempered and enriched by her marriage and intercourse with Dionysos? In ekstasis, in mania we are beyond the boundaries of our ordinary selves – we are beside ourselves, enthused. Engodded.
Hanegraaff points this out.
The key to luminous epiphanies, according to Iamblichus, lies in our faculty of imagination (phantasia). What happens is that the external light has an effect on the luminous vehicle of our own soul (ochēma), and this allows the gods, acting with their own volition, to “take possession of the imaginative power in us”. In other words, the human imagination was considered not as an agent of illusion, but as a faculty of perception that made it possible to perceive the gods. The priests were merely facilitating their appearance, by using procedures and techniques of proven effectiveness. (p. 35)
Without the gods, the whole process comes to nothing. Without the faculty of imagination – the ability to receive, perceive and participate with something beyond our sense of self – we remain at the mercy of those daimons which enter the body-mind at birth and draw us away from the nous. Though we are already “luminous beings”, the sheer rush of input we are exposed to renders us unable to process it correctly relationally as those beings might.
We need help to do it, and it is the gods who can do that via theurgy (literally “divine work”). By taking possession of our imagination, they are said to aid in the healing of the soul and body – that is, by the regulation and enhancement of the imagination which allows right-relationality with the world; this having the effect of allowing generative and creative participation instead of mere reactivity.
The metaphor that comes to mind is of agents calming a stampeding herd of animals which have been driven to extremes of distraction and fear by the bright lights and noises of a human city, which have been harming themselves and others in their confusion.
Or perhaps, breaking someone of habits they were forced into by survival in extremis, which were completely understandable in a particular time and place, but which no longer serve. It requires us to defamiliarize ourselves from ourselves because we are not what we think we are.
In this sense, perhaps the estrangement and alienness traditionally associated with so-called Gnosticism and gnōsisbegin to make sense. In becoming intimately acquainted with the gods and their divinity noetically we are in fact becoming lost – lost to the world as we thought we knew it. Because gnōsis has nothing to do with thought!
Here then, we find the second sibling of the three quotes Hanegraaff uses, which this reviewer wishes to highlight:
“Au risque toujours et par essence de se perdre ainsi définitivement. Qui saura jamais telle disparition?” Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (“La pharmacie de Platon”, 1972)
(“At risk, always and essentially, of getting lost forever. Who will ever know of such disappearances?”)
Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon is influential. As a drug itself, which is simultaneously poison and remedy, it is writing which acts on the senses of those involved, changing their perceptions, their calls, and responses – how we make meaning, gain it (and also may lose it). Writing then is the drug, the consciousness-altering manipulation of perception and responses to those perceptions. Yet Hanegraaff cautions us against thinking of the authors of the Hermetic texts as writers. Their words were not representations of experience – the descriptions were not, as we have said, manuals in the sense of producing results.
For this was not about magicians “gaining power” in conventional modern senses, but ritual specialists (priests) creating conditions for those involved to be able to apprehend the gods, and in that apprehension, be “lifted” from the contouring and structures of ordinary existence. Nor should it be assumed that the “lifting” necessarily implies a spatial hierarchy as perhaps our modern language might suggest. It is quite simply then, creating “set and setting” for the gods to engage. That kyphi or the respective incense might have acted in concert with the nervous system to enhance the experience is not some sort of gotcha to suggest everyone was high and therefore the experience was merelychemically induced. Quite to the contrary, because, as Hanegraaff suggests, “Alterations of consciousness result in altered states of knowledge.” (p.3) To meet and have congress with the gods was the point – and in doing so be acted-upon. Thus, it is about acquaintance, understanding, rather than description.
So how are we to understand what those involved experienced? Hanegraaff suggests that we do so by considering that the gods reveal themselves to those involved, and it is by that divine appearance, by presence, that the body and soul are revealed themselves, and reconstituted and purified. It is not that the body, or the matter itself is corrupt or evil per se, rather that it has to be treated-with/by-divinity, which comes through the re-cognition of the faculty of imagination.
The faculty of imagination, as related to nous, is fundamental to the actuality of existence. It is not some poor, deluded, dreamy mooncalf of a distant cousin, but the faculty and power of the gods themselves.
On that, Hanegraaff shows us Hermes explaining to Asclepius that humans make statues and treat them to allow gods to come into them. The statues are gods, made by humans, to allow them to appear-as-gods to the humans, to provide theophany. This is why the statues must be maintained, dressed, fed and given incense – they are alive, luminous beings suffusing matter. The purification of, and ritual treatment of statues by priests mimics what the gods do to the humans in theurgia – allowing appearance, the presence of the reality of the kosmos to shine through.
Again, it is not that matter and materia are evil or fallen, simply that without the re-cognition, the alteration of perception and consciousness – all is confusion. To repeat: alterations of consciousness result in altered states of knowledge. To know matter, and to allow matter to re-cognise itself as suffused-with, immersed in and encompassed by divine presence, and to do so intimately – this is the goal.
It is one thing to convince your colleagues that theurgy has “rationality of its own”, having to tell them it involved drugs is another thing entirely […] What happens if we really stop imagining Roman Egypt as a primitive “heart of darkness”, full of murky magic, superstition, and irrational delusions? (p. 44-45)
In a way then, this book, with its attempt to rewrite the narrative, to cast the new spell where “Hermetic spirituality” is a pair of “look[ed] for words that help us” – they are an attempt at re-cognition also. The locative presencing of Roman Egypt as “the heartland” is deeply important, not out of some nostalgia, or nationalism necessarily, but, as Hanegraaff makes clear:
This “heartland” is of vital importance in the most literal sense, for the world (not just the earth, but the cosmos as a whole) is itself the body of a great and living Being, a “second god” that can be apprehended by the senses and has been created or born from the ultimate divine Source. (p. 54)
That is, Egypt, and its priests (who were forced by Rome to change their existences and spread beyond its borders) was seen as a place where the praxes which enabled gnōsis welled up as a kind of emergent property of its relationality with the gods. The gods in their temples were as “compared to the pulsating energy at the core of nuclear reactors.” (p. 73)
Yet, as the Egyptian diaspora continued, we also see that the Hermetica speaks of realms beyond location, space, and time. However, we do not perceive this, because according to the Hermetica it is the entities entering the body at incarnation, and their binding of it in a cosmic grid of astrological and planetary forces which keep us enchained. We become creatures of metric and data – measurable and finite. We may think that we are in control, but “in truth we are possessed by invisible forces that limit our freedom and control us from within.” (p. 91)
Some authors of Hermetic texts speak in a more paranoid style of this, such as Zosimus, who sees a dark conspiracy of planetary entities, while others are less focused on the paranoid style. Hanegraaff mentions this may have been a generational conflict in Egypt, but for the purposes of this review it is enough to note that he makes quite clear that even this paranoid style is not anti-cosmic or what might be seen more generally as world-hating.
It is here that we must dip into notions of the transcendental, or rather, the actuality found in the texts as Hanegraaff reads them. Over and over, he emphasises the incommunicability of the full nature of intra-and-intercourse with unconditioned, liberated noetic relationality – with the All as it “truly” is.
This is why the Derrida quote is so important, because the poison of the pharmakon of writing is one of loss – the noetic can never be communicated by writing, writing destroys and loses experience, replacing it with something else.
In this sense, we must conceive of the notion of transcendence-as-fugitive excess. A more-than-ness, which also includes that which it is supposedly more-than, inextricably imbricated with it. To speak of the transcendent as beyond, as distant, as not-here-and-now is to engage in a dualism which Hanegraaff suggests, obscures the radical non-duality at the heart of Hermetic spirituality.
How else are we to reconcile the notion of a constant profusion of divine appearances, theophanies and that the kosmos itself is a living being, constantly performing Beingness in all its totality and vitality? How are we to take the notion that the generative Divine Source is simultaneously generating the fluxing All-That-Is via its faculty of Imagination, and yet exists immobile, eternal, unchanging?
Hanegraaff suggests that the seeming contradiction is nothing of the sort – that it is via the alteration in consciousness that we attain the altered knowledge. The intimate, non-reason-based, non-intellectual knowledge, that there is no contradiction at all.
Exceeding writing, language, the experiential noetic experience enlivens the nous and allows body and soul to have their relationality liberated along with the kosmos. This is the paradox of understanding which cannot be conveyed in language. This is the breaking of subject and object, where the cosmic grid is unbound and the spiritual GPS coordinates of identity are revealed as maps which could never contain the all-ness of everything that is. It is in the shattering of the I, the sacrifice of self to Self, or whichever metaphor you might prefer.
The paradox of intimate acquaintance, of the eros in, between, and through all things is why Diotima is said to have taught Plato about love. The metaphors of pregnancy and birthing put the practitioner in a different kind of vulnerability. No longer are they subject to the vicissitudes of invaders but are instead transmuted into being vulnerable to the All, and in doing so, they are inseminated by the kosmos through the logos and participate in its birthing via their own bodies and souls.
As someone interested in the unique potencies of place and landscape, it is obvious that what Hanegraaff highlights is that Hermetic spirituality is universal and particular. The heartland, the specific herbs, rituals, and preparations – their uniqueness-as-materia – is essential, because it is their quality (what some occultists might call their particular virtue)which acts upon and with me in a particular way. The intimate relationality is key – I might know twenty friends over six feet tall, but they are not universally fungible or interchangeable. The noetic relation is different and unique for each.
Rather than escaping or moving beyond the body when we are liberated and thus unbound by place, Hanegraaff highlights that what is going on is actually “deep embodiment” (p. 99). After being reborn, the practitioner is freed from restraint:
The radical liberty of the spirit’s new body comes from the fact that it is beyond the restrictions of any time and space, so that no astral power linked to any specific moment and location can possibly affect it. (p. 99)
Notice here, that the emphasis is on being free from restraint. This appears to suggest that the “new body” of the spirit is unconditioned by the astral forces which “invaded” on incarnation. That is, the power relationship has shifted – no longer are the faculties of imagination, perception, and their responses conditioned, restrained, and shaped by outside forces. The new body does not destroy them, rather it is capable of liberating itself from them and refuting their ability to compel it.
In essence the daimones of times and places no longer automatically have hold of them. They are free to forge their own relationality within the context of a wider living kosmos rather than being compelled to relate in a particular way.
Now, we go deeper into the heart of the matter at hand, as the author evokes Iamblichus:
For Iamblichus this work is not about lifting the soul beyond the realm of suffering, but alleviating suffering itself, by working creatively on improving – and ultimately perfecting – the world. (p. 108)
The suffering is essentially rooted in the notion of separation from the Divine Source, or rather a non-noetic misperception of the same, brought on by the localising and conditioning of perception. This is not to say everything is perfect or All is One, etc. Indeed, that is the peril because these phrases, well intentioned as they may be, are ultimately destructive because they are not the noetic perception and thus may bring suffering without it. They conditionalise the experience with their propositional linguistic status and say nothing about the quality of so-called ultimate reality – they conjure their own meanings and responses in and with us.
Here then, we approach Hanegraaff’s perhaps most interesting point for this reviewer – the implications of so-called barbarous names, seemingly nonsensical strings of syllables and godnames which appear to make no meaningful sense, save as perhaps so-called “words of power”.
In discussing this, Hanegraaff firms up the importance of orality – and in a world without telephones, the importance of physical presence:
What this really means is that such words need no translation, and in fact cannot be translated. They can only be spoken. In a world without telephones or recording devices, this meant that one had to be physically present to hear them and to experience their effect. (p.114)
This presence lies at the heart of the vision of the Hermetic community meeting in small groups in their houses. Furthermore, distinctions are made by Plato, and others, between writing and the living and ensouled word of “one who has seen.” What Hanegraaff is suggesting is that the barbarous names and indeed, much of the ritual process were not linguistic signifiers – at least as we might call them.
They were meant to be experienced directly – and in that experience, their meaning would appear and be transmitted. They are not of the uninitiated’s referential index, conceivable by ordinary relationship to words which could be written down. In short then, as Hanegraaff suggests, we are dealing not with words as we might think of them, but powerful sounds.
The necessity of presence comes up in the descriptions of Hermes and his student Tat – there is a physicality not unlike that of other initiatory traditions, where it is not the words-as-signifiers which are initiatory, but what the initiator “brings through”, transmitting their altered consciousness and hence altered knowledge to the student.
It is therefore, in this reviewer’s view, important to consider that as Hermes Trismegistus was to Tat, so Poimandres was to Hermes – that is, a living embodiment of ultimate reality – nous itself. In the narrative of Hermes and Tat, we find the teacher exceeding the bounds of his individual personhood – he is no longer Hermes-the-Teacher, but Hermes-as-nous guiding his pupil through a set of experiences, correcting misapprehensions, and allowing Tat’s true nature to reveal itself.
This intimate teacher-pupil dynamic seems integral in many other spiritual traditions, and perhaps to modern eyes is fraught with the possibility of abuse. And yet, we find ourselves within the framework of intimacy where we begin to realise that it is not about the-teacher-as-person, but as ultimate reality expressing itself when perceiving noetically. No teacher is perfect, but it is the nous which transmits itself through one who has seen – the teacher is as the temple statute, in a sense. The teacher sets the conditions, but the nous in them and the student’s own nous is what does the work, just as the gods work to heal body and soul in their appearances.
To restate what was said earlier, and to borrow a phrase from Hanegraaff – we need help, and that help comes from the “Weirdness at the Center” (p. 138)
Such weirdness may originate from Fayum in Egypt – the author hypothesises that the name Poimandres may have developed from the throne name of Pharaoh Amenemhet III, called Porramanres, and he further hypothesises that the Hermetic community may have emerged from cult worship of the same. This reviewer has no idea of the accuracy of such a hypothesis but finds it interesting in terms of person-to-person transmission.
What is equally fascinating, as mentioned above, is that the power residing in Hermes is said to be grammatically feminine. The metaphors of that power giving birth, and Tat receiving suggests a principle in which the humans are not the “transmitters” in an active “top down” or even “bottom up” fashion, but rather receptivity is essential to noetic perception, so once again dualisms cannot describe the reality of the situation, and all the tricks of linguistic spatiality are rendered difficult to justify.
Applying this non-dualist frame to the Hermetica renders arguments about ascent and escape somewhat moot. Movement through the spheres is not, it seems, movement at all, but alteration of consciousness, and thus altering of knowledge. Through praxis the practitioner gains more and more of an intimate relationship with the ultimate reality via gnōsis, but as Hanegraaff says in his discussion of the dialogue between Ammon and Thoth in Chapter 10:
What is really at stake in the confrontation between Ammon and Thoth then, is a fundamental conflict between two mutually incompatible orders of “knowledge”. There is literally no place for noēsis in textual discourse, I want to emphasize the radicality of that conclusion, which means nothing less than even the sentence you just read is questionable at best, as the word noēsis implies a presence where in fact there is an absence. (p. 315)
That is to say, just like this review can tell you nothing of the book, and yet talks about the book, it should not, as per Derrida, be read with without possibility of suspicion. This reviewer is firmly convinced of the ambivalent middle-in-betweenness of Thoth and the pharmakon regarding writing and language as a form of bewitchment. Of course, as a practitioner, this is not a pejorative thing. Yet, just as Ammon is the Hidden One, apparently hermetically sealed from such trickery, and appearing while invisible, unheard, unseen, unfelt, so one may also extend a Gadamerian hermeneutics of trust to such a tricky character.
Thoth, this apparent usurper of Ammon’s role as initiator, this thief and replacer of noetic presence with an ersatz-mask covering-over absence, is ever himself. Thoth is trustable to be Thoth. No more, no less.
Likewise, as Hanegraaff discusses the twelfth century Sufi alchemist Suhawardi, he says:
Suhawardi defined true illumination as knowledge by presence […]. Again, what he called the “light of lights” cannot be understood in modern linguistic terms as a transcendental Signified (the essentially passive object of signification). On the contrary, it would have to be conceived of as the only active Signifier immanent in reality. (p. 341)
So, now we return to the final of the three-sibling quotes used in the text:
“Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen; Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt!” Goethe, Faust I (“The world of the spirits is not closed; it’s your sense that’s shut, it’s your heart that’s dead!”)
Once again, we return to the principle of abundant, fugitive excess. This is, to some extent, a refusal of thresholds as barriers and conventional notions of closure. In a non-dualist framework, it is not that there is nothing to transcend, but that transcendence and the transcendental is somewhere that can never be arrived at. There is no point at which one can say I have transcended because it is inherently the case that there is neither a proposition of I or destination of moving-towards anything which has the quality of transcendence.
Thoth’s mocking laughter here is full of Ammon’s luminous black darkness, thick and fecund as the Black Land itself. Thoth leads a merry dance to the edge of a vertiginous precipice and gives us a none-too-subtle shove over the edge.
It is in that fall like no other that we find ourselves on the upward-downward path so much beloved by Heraclitus as we follow the logos to its limit. There in that darkness, we begin to perceive the light that is unseen, the sound that is unheard – our senses are exhausted by its vastness, and the confining cell of incarnation reveals its infinite spaciousness. We perceive neither the eternal immobility, nor the constancy of eternal flux because all of this difference has no meaning outside of itself.
This is to say that the above paragraphs contain no ultimate reality, and yet, the pharmakon, that most terrible of poisons, reveals itself as the intimate remedy – the elixir that may bring us to meet the nous.
It can go no further on its own, for the others, the gods, the nous now appears to do their work upon us. They were always there, say the Hermetica, and there they remain. Even their appearance is a function of our forgetting their presence – they dwell as amongst and as the so-called “third kind”, of which Hanegraaff says:
[I]t is generally agreed that by introducing this “third kind”, Plato utterly deconstructs the dualism of eternal Being versus ever-changing Becoming. While [it] is everlasting like Being, yet it functions like a necessary, indispensable substrate or receptacle of everything pertaining to the realm of Becoming; it is imperceptible to the senses and cannot be grasped by proper or legitimate reason; and since it neither is or becomes one can only refer to it as “nothing”. Therefore, is it or is it not? Somehow it must be neither or both. While [it] lacks any formal qualities, it both receives and reveals them; while it never appears itself; yet it makes everything apparent. (p. 211)
This to say that in the dualism of Thoth vs Ammon, it becomes quite clear that the masked bird god is not concealing absence. The mask, to concur with Hanegraaff, is his face. Thoth is Hermes, just as Odin is called masked or hooded, not in terms of concealment, but in the quality of his theophany which is a fundamental expression of these ambivalently middled, seemingly untrustworthy gods of magic, ritual and language. They are speakers of songs, makers of powerful sounds, inscribers in wood or stone.
Here then is the secret that Goethe spoke of: if we learn to see with the heart, we perceive the vitality which suffuses the kosmos – where death is but the stroke of a pen that alters and manipulates our meanings, altering our knowledge with stunning ferocity to bring us to richer possibilities of incarnation, for death is solely meaning in a non-dual sense. We begin to realise the agential qualities of all things.
Texts then, cannot have a place for noēsis, but as Hanegraaff says:
Thoth did have a powerful trick up his sleeve – very much like Hermes the trickster, the master of liminality who effortlessly crosses boundaries that we think can never be crossed. The beneficial secret he knew is that texts can be profoundly meaningful as texts. We overlook something essential if we see nothing in them but intermediaries that can be dismissed after their messages have been received. Thoth’s secret is that texts, in addition to their function as media for communication, can also be potent signifiers in their own right. They do not just speak on behalf of an other but possess agency of their own. (p. 349)
So it is with this book, and, to a greater or lesser extent, this review. In this reviewer’s opinion, Hanegraaff's voice is not the only voice present in his text. As an attempt to produce a new narrative, I am not qualified to judge its effectiveness, but perhaps as a spell, I would hazard that it is more successful than not, for it leads to contemplation, and from there, perhaps the logos may lead the reader to that seeming boundary-cum-precipice where the curved-beak smile and tip of the hat may be taken as an opportunity to do the work.
It is this reviewer’s opinion that there is something there in those pages, but I couldn’t tell you what it is. You’ll have to find that out for yourself if you let the spell do its work.
