The Hermetic Tradition and the Foundation of the West.
In various discourses, some ill-informed anti-Left activists on the Right have associated Marxism with the Hermetic Tradition. This absurdity is being propagated by various “classical liberal” and “conservative” influencers, all of whom are mediocre thinkers. In addition, these influencers accuse the Hegelian Dialectic of giving birth to communism and fascism via Marx. This is due to the American Right’s lack of understanding of postmodernism and Critical Theory, along with the philosophy of Hegel and Kant. American academia, since the writings of Jacques Derrida were introduced into our humanities departments, has been in a state of collapse. It seems as though postmodernism and its denial of truth has infected thinking on both sides of the political aisle. This is not helped with the fundamentalist Christians, mostly Calvinists, who infect the modern American Right. Their universities and media ecosystems spread anti-science creationism, church conspiracy theories, and outright misinformation about the Classical world. All of this has contributed to the misunderstanding of Hermeticism, which is the foundation of Western Civilization.
First, we must analyze exactly what the Hegelian Dialectic is. At its most basic, the Dialectic of the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel theorizes the union of opposites: the thesis and the antithesis uniting in a synthesis creating a higher idea. This overcomes the shortcomings, inconsistencies, and other flaws inherent in the previous ideas. We can see this in action in various religious and political ideologies of the Left and the Right. In essence, this philosophical concept of the “absolute idea” is similar to the spiritual concepts of initiation in the mysteries of the Advaita Vedanta Tradition. In Vedanta, the Initiate achieves union of Subject and Object through silence (sleep) in the form of meditation. It is the union of the soul or Higher Self (Atman) with the transcendent divine (Brahma.) It is the Adept’s transcendence of the world of illusion (Maya) through the obliteration of duality.
Hegel’s Dialectic influenced Marx and Engels, but their Dialectical Materialism rejected the idealism of Hegel. Instead of grasping for greater ideas and transcendence through free will and the Greater Idea, Dialectical Materialism looks for changes to be made in society to resolve duality in conflict in the life of the individual, basically inverting the concept of the idea or the Self creating the world, and asserting rather that the individual is the product of social forces. Marx assigns the issues of contradiction to things in society that create conflict in the individual. There is no “spiritual initiation” of the individual in the ascetic striving for union with the Divine with the reconciliation of duality in acts of spiritual personal responsibility, only action taken to change society to suit the individual and resolve the individual’s inner contradiction and duality, with no spiritual or physical effort required of the individual. It is materialistic, spiritually vapid, and Ego-driven. Dialectical Materialism is, in essence, the concept that society creates the consciousness of the individual in a blank slate theory. It uses the state to erase duality or contradiction (suffering) in society.
Hegel influenced thinkers on both the Right and the Left. Hegel takes Immanuel Kant’s criticism of philosophy based on a purely rationalistic model unable to reconcile contradictions, and improves upon it by introducing the possibility of reconciliation through the union of thesis and antithesis by discarding unworkable elements that were impeding the original concepts from finding synthesis.
Hermeticism and Gnosticism, at the basic level of understanding of these spiritual concepts, is that there is a Higher Self, a spiritual self as opposed to the mundane self which lacks awareness and is part of society. Rather than changing society to change the individual, the Gnostic rejects all of society for union with the Divine. There is no need to change society. The society is irrelevant. There is only union with the Divine through the reconciliation of duality with spiritual initiation into the mysteries. It is only resolved for the elite. Hermeticism, is considered the Royal Art, due to its aristocratic nature.
The Hermetic Tablets are the synthesis of the Pagan Traditions in the Hellenistic world at Alexandria. Hermes Trismegistus, or “Hermes the Thrice-Greatest” is a composite of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Hermes-Thoth is the god of magick, learning, philosophy, communication, and alchemy. He also is a patron of the arts, and the godform of the creative act. In the Hellenistic era, Hermes Trismegistus was viewed as the wise Philosopher King of Egypt.
In Hermetic alchemy, the two symbols associated with the Great Work of union with the divine are the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, and the Tree. The Ouroboros serpent represents the endless cycles of creation and destruction and death and rebirth. The Tree is a symbol of initiation into the mysteries, a concept to be found in the esoteric core of all religions. According to Evola, in Hermeticism,
“The symbol of the tree is quite prevalent in the alchemical texts. The tree shelters the “fountain” of Bernard of Treviso, in whose center is the symbol of the dragon Ouroboros, who represents the “All.” It personifies “Mercury,” either as the first principle of the hermetic Opus, equivalent to the divine Water or “Water of Life” that gives resurrection to the dead and illuminates the Sons of Hermes, or else it represents the “Lady of the Philosophers.” But it also represents the Dragon, that is, a dissolving force, a power that kills. The Tree of the Sun and the Tree of the Moon are also hermetic symbols, sometimes producing crowns in the place of fruits. (“The Hermetic Tradition,” Julius Evola, pg. 4.)
Both the Ouroboros and the Tree represent both the destruction and recreation of the psyche and personality of the Initiate. The Ouroboros symbolizes the death resurrection of the lower personality into the Higher Self in magical initiation. The Tree is the symbol of the Caduceus of Hermes, which portrays two snakes entwining around a winged staff. This is an early image of the DNA helix and also a reference to the twin energy currents that move up and down the spine, corresponding to the Fire-Snake of the Tantrics, the serpent power that rises in an intertwined spiral of male and female energies through the Shushumna. The Tree is also found in the Qabalist Tradition in the Ten Sephiroth and 22 Pathways. In the Hebrew Tradition, Enoch corresponds to Hermes. When following the process of attainment on the Tree of Life, the Initiate travels from the lowest sphere on the Tree, Malkuth through the Pathways and Sephiroth to the top sphere, Kether in what is called the Lightning Flash of the Serpent. These concepts mirror the rising of Kundalini in the Tantric Tradition. It also is found in the myth of Odin sacrificing his eye in the Well of Mimir to receive all magickal knowledge, and hanging from the Yggdrassil Tree to be initiated into the mysteries of the runes. Odin or Wotan is the equivalent of Hermes and Thoth in the Nordic-Germanic Mysteries.
The Hermetic Tablets or Corpus Hermeticum are the culmination of several thousand years of spiritual philosophy dating back to the Greeks and Sumerians. It is the synthesis of the Greco-Egyptian magickal Tradition of the Hellenistic era. Hermeticism, along with the Rites of the City of Eleusis, the Eleusinian Mysteries, were some of the initiatory schools in ancient Greece and Egypt. These Mysteries had their culmination around the year 200 BCE and are the foundations of what would become the Gnostic and Christian religions. Some believe the Hermetic texts are forgeries, but this is mostly Christian, and most recently Calvinist propaganda. These Christian propagandists also assign the dates of Gnostic and Hermetic texts to the second century CE as some kind of heresy, when in actuality, these concepts existed long before, back to the religions of ancient Egypt. It was also found in the systems of the Sumerians and the pre-Dynastic North African Kamites. According to Marlene Seven Bremner,
“The ancient Hermetic teachings of Egypt originally spread to Greece by way of the philosophers who made expeditions to Egypt to be initiated into the mysteries, including Orpheus, Democritus, Plato, Pythagoras, and Eudoxus. Among the earliest of these was the mythical and enchanting Orpheus (ca. 725-675 BCE), attributed with writing the Orphic hymns. Diodorus tells us that Orpheus traveled to Egypt, which would have been a great influence on the development of Orphic cosmogony in which Dionysus, an agrarian god of death and rebirth, like the Egyptian Osiris, played a key role. A little later, Pythagoras of Samos (ca 570-495 BCE,) the pre-Socratic philosopher, having traveled in Phoenicia and received initiation into the mysteries of Byblos and Tyre, traveled to Egypt where these sacred rites had their origin, immersing himself in the wisdom of the Egyptian priests. The Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus (ca 242-325 CE), disciple of Porphyry, asserted that the philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras were developed from the “ancient pillars of Hermes.” Plutarch writes that Pythagoras copied the Egyptian symbols and occult teachings, and as a result his teachings reflect the enigmatic hieroglyphic writings. A great portion of his life, twenty-two years according to Iamblichus, was spent amid the temples of Egypt, studying geometry and astronomy and being initiated into the ancient mysteries, after which he spent another twelve years of study in Babylon before returning to Samos. As a testament to Pythagoras’s Hermetic initiation, he is praised as have “a greater gift of God and of Wisdom than was granted to anyone after Hermes,” and described as “a disciple of the disciples by the grace of thrice-great Hermes” in the Turba Philosophorum (the Assembly of the Philosophers), an Arabic treatise of philosophical and alchemical discourse (ca. 900 CE.) (“Hermetic Philosophy and Creative Alchemy,” Maria Seven Bremner, pg. 35.)
As we can see, the Hermetic Tradition of the Greco-Egyptian-Roman civilizations, the Odinic Mysteries of the North, along with the religious forms that emerged out of the Indo-Aryan Vedic culture that moved from central Asia and Eastern Europe into the Indian Subcontinent, all are the foundation of Western Civilization and its religion, philosophy, and art. The modern Christian notion that Hermeticism is “demonic” or a “strange heretical cult” which along with Gnosticism is responsible for the current decline of the West by influencing Marxism is one of the absurdities of the modern American political discourse. It is symptomatic of the Kali Yuga cycle of the greater West. Hermes is the God of the West in his various forms, as he is the great architect of our language, arts, philosophy, medicine, and temples. The cult of the Christos is a foreign installation in the Western consciousness. However, elements of the Hermetic Tradition exist in Judaism and Christianity, and to understand them we must examine what is meant by “Gnosticism,” in the late Hellenistic world.
“Gnosis” or “knowledge” according to Kenneth Grant, is associated with the concept of “Jnana, i.e., Knowledge of the Real as opposed to the unreal. Not the conceptual knowledge of phenomena (appearances), but the apperceptive apprehension of noumenon.” (“Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God,” Kenneth Grant, pg. 196.) Gnosis, in essence is the knowledge of the Kantian Thing in Itself or “noumenon,” the essence of the Subject verses the perception of the Object via the senses. It corresponds with the Samadhi of Yoga, the union of Subject and Object. This, again, is similar to Hegel’s merging of thesis and anti-thesis, but here it is purely spiritual and transcendent in the raising of the individual conscience of the Initiate in mystical union with the godhead. This is a singular spiritual path, requiring ascesis and hierarchical attainment. Gnostic and Hermetic Initiation predicates itself on varying hierarchical grades. There is a master and a student, and the student through his or her spiritual ordeals and meditative processes, reaches a form of Enlightenment or what in Hinduism is called Jnana. Again, confusing Gnosticism with the Dialectic Materialism of Marx is an error in understanding how philosophies inform each other. Marx abandoned the concept of German Idealism, which in Hegel’s conception puts forth the notion that the idea creates the world. This “idea” is the stand-in for the individual Self. The Marxist Dialectical Materialism inverts the Hegelian dialectic, stripping it of any spiritual conceptualizations of the fully realized Self through initiation, and instead puts forth the dialectic of the world or society creating the “idea” or Self.
The ancient Gnostic religion was a form of dualism and polytheism which posits that there are two forms of spiritual consciousness: Gnostikos, meaning “knowledge” and Pistikos, meaning “belief.” In the old Harpocratian and Ophidian cults, the Gnostic is one who leaves behind the material world created by the Demiurge IAO or Ialdabaoth, and finds union with Sophia (Wisdom) through a process of magical initiation. This usually involves communion with one’s Augoeides “Holy Guardian Angel.” It is the Daimon of the Greeks, offering Eudaimonia through the balance of Sophrosyne (temperance.) This initiatory concept is similar to breaking free from Samsara and the world of illusion or Maya and finding unity with the Cosmic Self or Atman in Vedanta. Again, this is not “collectivist.” Perhaps the confusion regarding Gnosticism and falsely associating it with Marx, is that the movement called Theosophy had a faulty, though non-political concept of “mass initiation” for humanity in the coming “new age.” This is a sort of spiritual fallacy and a utopian concept that tries to get rid of the concept of Initiation as secret and hierarchical, with “knowledge” and “gnosis” as for the worthy and elite few. Instead, Theosophy posits in a utopian way, that initiation is for all, regardless of caste or mentality. This is of course progressivist and of the Kali Yuga, but it is not a political program for Marxism. Spiritual enlightenment can only be done on an individual and not collective basis.
Postmodernism and Marxism in general is opposed to all a priori knowledge and is specifically opposed to metaphysics and religion. It posits that all reality is created by language, but not in a metaphysical sense, but in an atheist simulacrum of “power,” and that the proper response to this is through critique of meta-narratives and culture to push a new meta-narrative of a displaced Self controlled by social forces only to be reconciled by the socialist state. This is again the opposite of spirituality and religion, which asserts that a priori knowledge exists in the form of the Divine that is the mystery of the Universe. Postmodernism and Marxism assert that the world can be understood through logic, empiricism, and reason. It contains the irrational in the concept of constant “play,” which is usually seen in the creative artistic output of postmodernism in the merger of high and low in the kitsch art of the contemporary West and the endless language games in its philosophy. This concept of “play” is also seen in the transgender and body modification movements of postmodernism. It is a purely narcissistic “gnosis” of the lower self, done in a collective fashion and not a spiritual attainment of something Higher or Supernatural. Postmodernism is the symptom of collapse and it devoid of any higher spiritual content.
The complete ignorance of the Classical Hellenistic world, the art and religion of the West, and a basic lack of understanding of the history and concepts in philosophy taints the Right’s fight against the Cult of Marxist Intersectionality and the racial anti-European cult. Conservative Christians, psychologists like Jordan Peterson, and atheist conspiracy theorists like James Lindsay, don’t understand alchemy, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, mostly due to bias in the cultural Christianity they were raised in which has always pushed false propaganda against the spiritual initiatory schools of the Pagan world. This is unfortunate. Marxism in its ever-changing forms continues to poison the West and people like James Lindsay assist the Marxists in the destruction of the West by attacking its foundation which is the Hermetic Tradition. It is my wish that the knowledge of the Hermetic Tradition and its initiatory system is restored for the revival of the West.