BLOG Introduction: The hermetic cabinet: 2. Gnosis & Neoplatonism
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Introduction: The hermetic cabinet:
2. Gnosis & Neoplatonism
For the art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), who did pioneering interdisciplinary work in the early years of the 20th century, late classical Alexandria represented the epitome of the dark, superstitious side of man. Here, in the 1rst century A.D., in the former centre of Greek culture on Egyptian soil, with it's highly diverse mixture of people, Greek and Roman colonists, Egyptians and Jews, the threads of all the individual disciplines making up the complex of hermetic philosophy came together: alchemy, astral magic and the Cabala. The complementary syncretic systems that nourished them, hybrids of Hellenic philosophies and oriental religions and mystery cults, are known by the two concepts of Gnosis and Neoplatism. Both are fundamentally animistic, filled with many demonic and angelic creatures, whose power and influence determine human fate.
Gnosis means knowledge, and the Gnostics acquired this in a number of ways. The first and most fundamental form of knowledge is good news, and concerns the divine nature of one's own essence: the soul appears as a divine spark of light. The second is bad news and concerns the "terror of the situation": the spark of light is subject to the influence of external dark forces, in the exile of matter. Imprisoned within the coarse dungeon of the body, it is betrayed by the external senses; the demonic stars sully and bewitch the divine essence of one's nature in order to prevent a return to the divine home.
Under the stimulus of Zoroastrian and Platonic dualism, a painful gulf opened up between the interior and the external, between subjective and objective experience, between spirit and matter. It was cosmologically established by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), with a strict division of the universe into the eternal, ethereal heaven and the transient sublunary sphere. This model, only slightly modified by the Alexandrian Gnostic Claudio Ptolemy (c.A.D. 100-178), suppressed all efforts at a unified explanation of the world for two millennia.
In many Gnostic myths man is given an autonomous task of creation: in order to heal the sick organism of the world, he must lead the divine sparks of light, spiritual gold, through the seven planetery spheres of the Ptolemaic cosmos and back to their heavenly home. To the outermost sphere of Saturn corresponds the "sullied garment of the soul", the grossest material, lead. Passing through this sphere meant physical death and the putrefaction of matter that is necessary prerequisite transformation. The subsequent stages were: Jupiter-tin, Mars-iron, Venus-copper, Mercury-quicksilver, Moon-silver and Sun-gold.
The individual metals were taken to represent various degrees of maturity or illness of the same basic material on its way to perfection, to gold. To ease its passage through the seven gates of the planetary demons, gnosis, the knowledge of astral magic practices, was required.
The Neoplatonists took the various diverging concepts that their master had put forward dialectically in his dialogues and poured them into the tight corset of tiered, pyramid-shaped world orders. Like a descending scale of creation, the universe overflows from the uppermost One, the good, its intervals following the harmonic laws linked with the name of the philosopher Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) and his doctrine of the music of the spheres. The inner discord of the Gnostics was unknown to them. Between the two poles of Plato's philosophy, the static and immortal world of their likenesses on earth, they inserted a series of mediating authorities.
Coressponding to the tripartite division of the small world of man (microcosm) into body, sould and spirit was a cosmic soul which dwelled in the realm of the stars. This cosmic soul reflected the ideas of the higher, transcendental sphere of the divine intellect, and through the influence of the stars these ideas imprinted their eternal "symbols" onto the lower, physical transient sphere.
Man thereby has the possibility of manipulating events in the earthly sphere, using magical practises such as the manufacture of talismans, spells and other such things to affect this middle sphere of the cosmic soul. Contact is established through the fine material of the "sidereal" or "astral body" that invisibly surrounds man. Before the Fall, acoording to the Gnostic-Cabalistic myths, the whole of heaven was a single human being of fine material, the giant, androgynous, primordial Adam, who is now in every human being, in the shrunken form of this invisible body, and who is waiting to be brought back to heaven. Man can communicate with the macrocosm through this sidereal medium, and thus receives premonitions and prophecies in dreams.
The equivalent in man of the demiurgic, world-creating drive of the outer stars is the creative capacity of the imagination, which Paracelcus calls "the inner star". Imagination is not to be confused with fantasy. THe former is seen as a solar, structuring force aimed at the eida, the paradigmatic forms in the "real world", the latter as a lunatic delusion related to the eidola, the shadowy likenesses of the "apparent world".
For the art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), who did pioneering interdisciplinary work in the early years of the 20th century, late classical Alexandria represented the epitome of the dark, superstitious side of man. Here, in the 1rst century A.D., in the former centre of Greek culture on Egyptian soil, with it's highly diverse mixture of people, Greek and Roman colonists, Egyptians and Jews, the threads of all the individual disciplines making up the complex of hermetic philosophy came together: alchemy, astral magic and the Cabala. The complementary syncretic systems that nourished them, hybrids of Hellenic philosophies and oriental religions and mystery cults, are known by the two concepts of Gnosis and Neoplatism. Both are fundamentally animistic, filled with many demonic and angelic creatures, whose power and influence determine human fate.
Gnosis means knowledge, and the Gnostics acquired this in a number of ways. The first and most fundamental form of knowledge is good news, and concerns the divine nature of one's own essence: the soul appears as a divine spark of light. The second is bad news and concerns the "terror of the situation": the spark of light is subject to the influence of external dark forces, in the exile of matter. Imprisoned within the coarse dungeon of the body, it is betrayed by the external senses; the demonic stars sully and bewitch the divine essence of one's nature in order to prevent a return to the divine home.
Under the stimulus of Zoroastrian and Platonic dualism, a painful gulf opened up between the interior and the external, between subjective and objective experience, between spirit and matter. It was cosmologically established by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), with a strict division of the universe into the eternal, ethereal heaven and the transient sublunary sphere. This model, only slightly modified by the Alexandrian Gnostic Claudio Ptolemy (c.A.D. 100-178), suppressed all efforts at a unified explanation of the world for two millennia.
In many Gnostic myths man is given an autonomous task of creation: in order to heal the sick organism of the world, he must lead the divine sparks of light, spiritual gold, through the seven planetery spheres of the Ptolemaic cosmos and back to their heavenly home. To the outermost sphere of Saturn corresponds the "sullied garment of the soul", the grossest material, lead. Passing through this sphere meant physical death and the putrefaction of matter that is necessary prerequisite transformation. The subsequent stages were: Jupiter-tin, Mars-iron, Venus-copper, Mercury-quicksilver, Moon-silver and Sun-gold.
The individual metals were taken to represent various degrees of maturity or illness of the same basic material on its way to perfection, to gold. To ease its passage through the seven gates of the planetary demons, gnosis, the knowledge of astral magic practices, was required.
The Neoplatonists took the various diverging concepts that their master had put forward dialectically in his dialogues and poured them into the tight corset of tiered, pyramid-shaped world orders. Like a descending scale of creation, the universe overflows from the uppermost One, the good, its intervals following the harmonic laws linked with the name of the philosopher Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) and his doctrine of the music of the spheres. The inner discord of the Gnostics was unknown to them. Between the two poles of Plato's philosophy, the static and immortal world of their likenesses on earth, they inserted a series of mediating authorities.
Coressponding to the tripartite division of the small world of man (microcosm) into body, sould and spirit was a cosmic soul which dwelled in the realm of the stars. This cosmic soul reflected the ideas of the higher, transcendental sphere of the divine intellect, and through the influence of the stars these ideas imprinted their eternal "symbols" onto the lower, physical transient sphere.
Man thereby has the possibility of manipulating events in the earthly sphere, using magical practises such as the manufacture of talismans, spells and other such things to affect this middle sphere of the cosmic soul. Contact is established through the fine material of the "sidereal" or "astral body" that invisibly surrounds man. Before the Fall, acoording to the Gnostic-Cabalistic myths, the whole of heaven was a single human being of fine material, the giant, androgynous, primordial Adam, who is now in every human being, in the shrunken form of this invisible body, and who is waiting to be brought back to heaven. Man can communicate with the macrocosm through this sidereal medium, and thus receives premonitions and prophecies in dreams.
The equivalent in man of the demiurgic, world-creating drive of the outer stars is the creative capacity of the imagination, which Paracelcus calls "the inner star". Imagination is not to be confused with fantasy. THe former is seen as a solar, structuring force aimed at the eida, the paradigmatic forms in the "real world", the latter as a lunatic delusion related to the eidola, the shadowy likenesses of the "apparent world".
In the Middle Ages Neoplatonism chiefly found its way into the mysticism of the Eastern Church. Although it was by no means incompatible with the rigidly hierarchical structures of the medieval state and Church, in the West it led a shadowly existenceon the edge of the great scholastic theoretical structure.
But in the Renaissance the flow of Alexandrian tradition forged powerfully ahead: in 1463 Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) translated a collection of fourteen Gnostic and Neoplatonist treatises from the early Christian period. Also attributed to the "Thrice Greatest Hermes", this collection was well-known under the title Corpus Hermeticum. These texts made a profound impression on the humanist intellectual world, for although they were ostensibly ancient pagain writings they still seemed to be imbued with the Christian spirit. Moreover, the idea of ancient Jewish teachings that reached all the way back to Moses - the Cabala - as conveyed by Picino's friend, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) reinforced the suspicion of a prisca sapienta in the Christian spirit. (In fact the Cabala, in its familiar form, was only developed out of its Alexandrian foundations in Spain and Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries.)
The effects of Gnostic consciousness on European intellectual life are so comprehensive and omnipresent that their extent is hard to assess: the man of the Corpus Hermeticum, blessed with divine creative powers, merges with the image of the Renaissance man, who has begun to free himself from the bonds of the tiered, medieval cosmos and thereby moves towards the centre of the universe.
The Gnostic spark of light, which strives for divine knowledge out of the darkness of the world, is reflected in the individual Protestant soul's struggle for salvation.
Only a few alchemists were familiar with the Corpus Hermeticum. For them all, however, Hermes was associated with the figure who had brought them the Emerald Tablet, and with the moist, "mercurial" principle which they called the "beginning and end of the Work". The veneration of this "divine water" reached back to the upper, pneumatic waters of Gnosis which, in Greek writings from the early years of alchemy, in reference to the descent of the Gnostic Christ, flowed down into the darkness of matter to awaken the dead bodies of their metals from their slumber.
However, alchemy, as it reached Christian Europa via Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries, is much richer and more mysterious than the mystical writings of the early Alexandrian alchemists would suggest. To do justice to the "Royal Art", we might use the tripartite seperation much loved by the Hermetics: according to which the part corresponding to the soul was to be found in Egyptian Alexandria. But it owns its corpus, it's great wealth of practical experiences, of technical knowledge, code names, maximas and allegorical images, to its development of the Arabs. And its spirit, finally, lies within the natural philosophy of ancient Greece, where its theoretical foundations were laid in the 5th century B.C.
Source: Roob, A. (2009) The Hermetic Cabinet, Köln: Taschen.
Puzzle pictures & linguistic riddlesConcepts of natural philosophy
"Thrice Greatest Hermes", this collection was well-known under the title Corpus Hermeticum.
In the Middle Ages Neoplatonism chiefly found its way into the mysticism of the Eastern Church. Although it was by no means incompatible with the rigidly hierarchical structures of the medieval state and Church, in the West it led a shadowly existenceon the edge of the great scholastic theoretical structure.
But in the Renaissance the flow of Alexandrian tradition forged powerfully ahead: in 1463 Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) translated a collection of fourteen Gnostic and Neoplatonist treatises from the early Christian period. Also attributed to the "Thrice Greatest Hermes", this collection was well-known under the title Corpus Hermeticum. These texts made a profound impression on the humanist intellectual world, for although they were ostensibly ancient pagain writings they still seemed to be imbued with the Christian spirit. Moreover, the idea of ancient Jewish teachings that reached all the way back to Moses - the Cabala - as conveyed by Picino's friend, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) reinforced the suspicion of a prisca sapienta in the Christian spirit. (In fact the Cabala, in its familiar form, was only developed out of its Alexandrian foundations in Spain and Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries.)
The effects of Gnostic consciousness on European intellectual life are so comprehensive and omnipresent that their extent is hard to assess: the man of the Corpus Hermeticum, blessed with divine creative powers, merges with the image of the Renaissance man, who has begun to free himself from the bonds of the tiered, medieval cosmos and thereby moves towards the centre of the universe.
The Gnostic spark of light, which strives for divine knowledge out of the darkness of the world, is reflected in the individual Protestant soul's struggle for salvation.
Only a few alchemists were familiar with the Corpus Hermeticum. For them all, however, Hermes was associated with the figure who had brought them the Emerald Tablet, and with the moist, "mercurial" principle which they called the "beginning and end of the Work". The veneration of this "divine water" reached back to the upper, pneumatic waters of Gnosis which, in Greek writings from the early years of alchemy, in reference to the descent of the Gnostic Christ, flowed down into the darkness of matter to awaken the dead bodies of their metals from their slumber.
However, alchemy, as it reached Christian Europa via Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries, is much richer and more mysterious than the mystical writings of the early Alexandrian alchemists would suggest. To do justice to the "Royal Art", we might use the tripartite seperation much loved by the Hermetics: according to which the part corresponding to the soul was to be found in Egyptian Alexandria. But it owns its corpus, it's great wealth of practical experiences, of technical knowledge, code names, maximas and allegorical images, to its development of the Arabs. And its spirit, finally, lies within the natural philosophy of ancient Greece, where its theoretical foundations were laid in the 5th century B.C.
Source: Roob, A. (2009) The Hermetic Cabinet, Köln: Taschen.
Puzzle pictures & linguistic riddlesConcepts of natural philosophy