Hermetica
Person · Hermetica○
Frances Yates
British historian whose 1960s and 70s books founded the modern academic study of Renaissance magic.
Who they wereHer claim that Hermetic magic directly caused the scientific revolution — the 'Yates thesis' — has been substantially revised by later scholars since the 1980s, though much popular writing on the period still repeats it as though it were settled.
Book · Hermetica · 1st century
The Corpus Hermeticum
Older Than Plato, Until 1614
The soul's ascent through the spheres — on authority a borrowed name supplied, outliving its correction.
SignificanceThe first treatise gives the ascent: at death the soul rises through the seven planetary spheres and surrenders to each the vice that sphere gave it — growth, cunning, desire, arrogance — arriving stripped. Salvation here is subtraction, and the cosmos is the apparatus that performs it.
The FindingCosimo de' Medici had Ficino set Plato aside to translate the Hermetica first, believing them pharaonic; Ficino finished in 1463, and Casaubon showed from the Greek in 1614 that they are Roman.
Book · Hermetica · 2nd century BCE
The Greek Magical Papyri
Handbooks, Not Doctrine
Working spell-books from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt — the fullest record of ritual as it was actually done.
SignificanceTheir characteristic move is identification rather than petition. The practitioner does not ask the god for something; he announces that he is the god — I am you and you are me — and the formula works because the boundary is treated as negotiable.
The FindingThe Greek Magical Papyri is not an ancient book but Preisendanz's 1928–31 numbering, and one of its spells — PGM III.591–611 — carries the same Hermetic prayer that closes the Latin Asclepius and stands in Coptic at Nag Hammadi: the ancients drew lines around these texts, but not the one we draw between magic and philosophy.
- Frances YatesHistory of Esotericism
- Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic TraditionWestern Esotericism
- Hermes TrismegistusEgyptian Sage, Roman TextHermeticism
- The Corpus HermeticumOlder Than Plato, Until 1614Hermeticism
- The Emerald TabletA Tablet Nobody Has SeenHermeticism
- The Greek Magical PapyriHandbooks, Not DoctrineGraeco-Egyptian Magic
- The KybalionNew Thought in Egyptian DressHermeticism
- TheurgyThe Rite Changes the RitualistNeoplatonism