A History of Thoth, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Rise of Humanism.

Melanie Purcell Department of Philosophy, University of Newcastle.

“He wrote it with his own hands and it will bring a man to the Gods. To read two pages enables you to enchant the heaven, the earth, the abyss, the mountains and the sea; you shall know what the birds of the sky and the crawling things are saying; you shall see the fishes of the dep, for a divine power is there to bring them out of the depth. And when the second page is read, if you are in the realm of ghosts, you will grow again in the shape you were on earth. You will see the sun shining in the sky, with all the gods and the full moon.”

This is how the great “Book of Thoth” is described in the “Story of Ahura”, which continues to tell us that “the book was concealed in the middle of the river at Koptos, in an iron box; with inner enclosing boxes of bronze, sycamore, ivory and ebony, silver and gold, and it was guarded by snakes and scorpions. Where the book was, there was light. When it was taken away, darkness reigned”.[1]

Perhaps the most enigmatic of all spiritual canons, the Book of Thoth has figured throughout the history of the Western world as a catalyst for grand humanitarian contemplations. This collection of texts variously known as “The Divine Pymander”, “The Table Smaragdina”, “The Emerald Tablets”, “The Corpus Hermeticum”, “The Hermetica” are works that have been attributed to the Great Hermes Trismagistus. Hermes the Thrice Great, the Thrice Blessed who has ‘three parts of the wisdom of the whole world’ and access to the three realms of being: the earth, the Underworld and the Heavens. [2]  “The Thrice Great” is thought to be a reference directly to Thoth as an entity three times greater than the Great Hermes himself.

Thoth is the reconciler of Opposites, and through this he stood between the two worlds of life and death and had the power to resurrect the dead and fragmented. He said to have

‘succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens and to have revealed them by inscribing them in sacred books which he then hid here on earth, intending that they should be searched for by future generations but found only by the fully worthy.’[3]

Thoth was revered by the ancient Egyptians as the inventor of mathematics astronomy and engineering and according Wallis Budge 

“It was his will and power that were believed to keep the forces of heaven and earth in equilibrium. It was his great skill in celestial mathematics which made proper use of the laws upon which the foundation and maintenance of the universe rested.”[4]

Thoth is an archetypal Egyptian god. There is, in Egyptian records, a reference to the first month as being the month of Thoth. In the mythology of Egypt we are confronted by a vast multitude of Gods and Goddesses and a confusing genealogy when considered through the perspective of a rational mind of the twenty-first century. We are accustomed to viewing things in hierarchical and linear ways and when confronted with circular and recurrent themes or paradoxical notions, we tend to distance ourselves from the messiness of such a reality and retreat to the ordered and seemingly objective reality that we have created which has until Relativity, subdued any hint of the chaos of the real world.

When addressing the problems that are born out of explorations of myth, the similarities seem recursive and repetitive with relationships between mythic entities being repeated in different times and places sometimes with different relationships and permutations of events.

Much of the confusion has to do with the possible fusion of religions beliefs that

“were developed by peoples of diverse origin  and different habits of life who mingled in Egypt under the influence of a centralized government…(resulting in) …the formulation of a highly complex mythology that was never thoroughly systematized at any period”.[5]

It is necessary  to consider that the belief of reincarnation as a central religious understanding of the Egyptians, may also be accountable for the complex relationships as in the following passage. Certainly the perspective of rebirth across generations, as well as the potential for fragmentation of entities to be involved with a multiplicity of simultaneous earthbound incarnations, is a notion not unfamiliar to many societies and is well documented in Buddhist traditions[6]. As an example of the complexities that are apparent in the Egyptian mythologies, the following passage reveals a highly complex set of relationships that are quite difficult to reconcile,

            “Osiris, the son of Isis and Nepthys on the other hand, became ‘husband of his mother’, or mothers. He was recgnised as the father of Horus, son of Isis, and of Anubis, son of Nepthys. Another myth makes him displace the old earth god Geb, son of Nut. Osiris was also a son of Nut, an earlier form of Isis. So was Geb, who became ‘husband of his mother’. That Geb and Osiris were fused is evident in one of the temple chants, in which Isis, addressing Osiris, says: ‘Your Soul possesses the Earth’ ”.[7]

This notion of reincarnated entities suggests that the eternal spirit undergoes  perpetual cycles of death and rebirth in a process of experience that culminates in the potential for transcendence that would realize the individuals final ascension and unification with godhead. Indeed as we will see these notions underpin the very fabric of the alchemical mindset, that is the purification of the individuated self into a spiritual refined and golden entity. This inherent “loopiness” is particularly evident in many creation myths from around the world, suggesting that the father is born of the son and so on. This may be associated with the complexities of the expression and reconciliation of opposites, and the process of manifestation and generation of the universe, a subject that will be treated in detail later on.

In their book “Ancient Egypt Myth and History”, Geddes and Grosset have this to say about Thoth in the glossery,

“Thoth was an early rival to Ra, the sun-god, as creator of Egypt and hence the world. In the dark before the sun, Thoth summoned the gods who produced the egg from which the sun hatched. These were animal Gods, four frogs and four snakes, known collectively as the Ogdoad. Thoth, depicted as a man with the head of an ibis, or sometimes entirely as an ibis, was the scribe of the gods, the inventor of writing, language and magic. His wife was Seshat, who wrote the details of every human life on the leaves of the Tree of Heaven. There was considerable animosity between the priesthood of Thoth and that of Ra. The center of Thoth’s cult were the cities of Hermeopolis (Greek city of Hermes), one in the delta one in Middle Egypt.”[8]

Thoth was associated to kindred deities and was thought to have been “fused” with Khonsu  who had developed from Ah, the Luna representative of the male principle which was also the fighting principle. He was the God of love, the Egyptian Cupid and the divine physician, he was an explorer and the messenger and hunter of gods. Thoth was a measurer and inspirer of architects, he was a lawyer, checker and scribe, in fact thought to be responsible for the development of Heiroglyphics. He was the measurer of time and it is thought that at one time, like Osiris, Thoth must have been a tree spirit as they too were manifestations of the moon god.[9]

It is interesting to note here that as Graham Hancock reveals in  “Finger prints of the Gods”, Wallis Budge has suggested that the Egyptian and Sumerian people of  Mesopotamia appear to have worshipped the same Luna deities who were both among the oldest in their respective pantheons,

“The similarity between the two gods  is too close to be accidental….It would be wrong to say that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians of the Sumerians from the Egyptians, but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source.”  [10]

This is certainly a provocation thought and has been taken up by many who havr tried to piece together the mysterious puzzles that surround the origins of civilisation.

The Book of The Dead of Ani, an Egyptian Papyrus thought to date from the Second Intermediate period, approximately 1800 to 1500 B.C. contains around 200 spells from the earlier pyramid and coffin texts ostensibly written by Thoth on behalf of Osiris.[11]

            “The book has been described as the ‘Gospel of Osiris’, attempting to convey the esoteric teachings that would enable man to attain eternal life after death. This could be achieved only if the deceased had lived a good and pure life during the period on earth. Souls judged to be good on death would join Osiris in the heavens for everlasting life. Others would meet destruction on death.”[12]

It was in the 4^th century B.C, as a result of Alexander the Great’s conquests of  Egypt that there came to be a great interest in everything Egyptian. That Egyptian knowledge was held in high esteem was certainly understandable, it is difficult to imagine what it would have been like to walk into such an environment without any prior knowledge of it, and understandable that the impression would have caused a great impact in all spheres of life. In Greece there became a trend to erect temples in honour of many of the Egyptian gods, Isis being perhaps the most important.

It is interesting to note that Isis was given over time, the prime position in the rankings of the Egyptian gods, and according to Wallis Budge, in Apuleius of Madaura’s “Golden Ass”, in his Metamorphosis, XI, translated by Butler, Isis is identified by her pious devotees as Selene, Demeter, Ceres, Cecropian Minerva, Venus of Paphos, the Cretans Diana Stygian Proserpine, the Eleusians goddess Ceres, Juno, Bellona, Hecate, Rhamnusian and the Arii of the Ethiopians. She had become the Goddess of a Thousand Names, the Earth Goddess and the Queen of Heaven. Budge also shows that this early writer, unaware of the position that Isis held in early times, had mistakenly ascribed to Isis the attributes of Ned-er tcher, Temu, and Kheperá.  He turned the Almighty God of the Ancient Egyptians into a goddess of two natures, the one human and the other divine.[13] Further, Budge cites two Greek inscriptions from the Island of Ios and the Island of Andros which clearly identify Isis as assuming attributes of more goddess as well as abilities, particularly abilities known to be the expression of the Great Thoth, claiming to be the divider of Heaven and earth and prescribing the course of the sun and of the moon, revealing initiations and governing the star of Kuon the God, or the great Dog star.[14]

The importance of Thoth and his teachings cannot be over exaggerated.  In the many texts that have endeavoured to explore these books and the related subjects of Hermeticism, Alchemy, Magic, the Corpus Hermeticum is most frequently cited as the single most important work of Western descent, having influenced the East and Middle Eastern metaphysics. Contained in these texts are sacred intuitions of what I have come to believe is a central source of all of the great flourishings of humanism revealing a far greater human metaphysics than the relatively pessimistic constructions Western organised religions or for that matter the classical scientific paradigm of the Western mindset.

Peter Marshall has recently written that

“Alchemy clearly had a wide currency throughout the Islamic world. Taken up from Egypt, developed in Iraq, Persia, and Syria, it came to fruition in Spain. For the Muslim natural philosophers, alchemy was a key science since it was thought to open up all the mysteries of creation and to be the foundation of medicine.” [15]

As Thoth seems to be a god that came before many of the great inventions, and prior to the first God Ra, and was a God that interacted with the civilisation of the Egyptians for some thousands of years as a tutor of magic and medicine, we are introduced to the possibility of there having been not only another previous civilisation that suffered a fall, as Budge has previously inferred with his consideration of the similarities between Egyptian and Summerian Mythologies, but also of a revelatory belief system where contemplation and the possibility of communion with light beings from the Pliades (known and revered by the Aboriginals as the seven sisters) or the dog star Sirius A, both of which figure deeply in the mysterious mythologies of the Dogon and many other indigenous tribes. Certainly the importance of these star systems is well documented in the many studies that have been made of the Egyptian pyramids as the architecture has  been inextricably linked to these cosmological configurations.

Peter Marshall has travelled the Eastern, Middle Eastern and Western Worlds in search of an understanding of the origins of  Alchemy. He writes

“For me the most compelling explanation is that alchemy originated in a lost civilisation which sent off envoys to China, India, and Egypt before it collapsed under some catastrophe. There is an element of historical as well as psychological truth in myths and legends and all three countries have stories

that the knowledge of alchemy was brought across the sea by a group of sages, known as the “Sons of reflected light” in China, the Siddhas in southern India and “The Companions of Horus” in Egypt.[16]

These texts in their various manifestations, have been studied and venerated all over the Western, Eastern and Middle Eastern civilizations. Wherever this has occurred, historians have cited a flourishing of thought and an inspirationally philosophical contemplation of life. Particularly after the uprisings and destruction of Alexandria, there was a dissemination of information that sprang forth from the fleeing scholars of the time. Even though the great library was destroyed, it seems that some of the essential teachings have most certainly been preserved and developed.

In fact Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have described this preservation through the fleeing of Pagan scholars and sages to the newly emerging Arab culture, taking their knowledge and the Hermetic writings with them. Two hundred years later, Muslims created an empire whose learning and scientific achievements were unsurpassed. Universities were developed by the beginning of the ninth century, the first being was established in Baghdad, called the ‘House of Wisdom’. These were sanctuaries where many pagan works were translated at a time when the sciences that had reached such heights in Alexandria were significantly developed, and the ancient Pagan spiritual wisdom was covertly  studied and practiced. From its exalted position amongst the sacred scriptures of Egyptian spirituality, the Hermetica became the secret inspiration for an important undercurrent in Islamic philosophy, and the holy book of unorthodox religious sects such as the Sabaeans.

“We would never have heard of the mysterious Sabaeans had they not come into conflict with the religious authorities of their day. Several centuries after the death of its founder Muhammad, Islam was beginning to succumb to the same desire for orthodoxy that had arisen in the Christian West. Heretics were to be rooted out – if necessary with violence. In 830 CE  powerful Caliph was passing through the city of Harran when he noticed the strangely dressed Sabbaeans and questioned their leaders. Asked to produce their sacred texts, they returned with the book of Hermes. The genius philosopher-scientist Thabbit idn Qurra was a Sabaean who in 810 CE a rousing defence of Hermetic paganism ending his prose with the line “Without paganism the world would be empty and miserable”……

“The twelfth century Iranian Sufi philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi made it his life’s work to link what he called the ‘original oriental religion’ with Islam. He claimed that the sages of the ancient world had preached a single doctrine. This had been originally revealed to Hermes, whom Suhrawardi identified with the prophet known as Ídris”in the Koran and the Jewish prophet ‘Enoch’. In the Greek world, he claimed, this philosophy had been transmitted through Pythagorus and Plato, and in the Middle East through Zoroastrian Magi. It had been secretly passed on until it had reached himself through a direct line of enlightened sages including his own master the Sufi mystic Al Hallaj. Not surprisingly both Suhrawardi and Al Hallaj were executed by the religious authorities for heresy- Al Hallaj by cricifixion.” [17]

Flourishings of wisdom are further cited as inspired by these books of Thoth. In 1438, the Byzantine scholar Gemisto Plethon made the entire lost works of Plato available to the Florentines and these and other Pagan texts were translated into Latin for the first time. Out of this event the ruler of Florence Cosimo di Medici established a ‘New Platonic Academy’ run by a group of intellectuals and mystics inspired by the ancient pagan philosophy. This profoundly influenced great names like Leonardo di Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Raphael, all of whom became impassioned by themes that concerned pagan Gods and various occult phenomena.[18]

“Botticelli’s ‘Venus and Mars’…was painted at a precise astrological moment as a ‘talisman of occult radiance’, capable of magically transporting the viewer to an altered state of spiritual awareness”.[19]

In 1460, as a result of Cosimo supporting expeditions to find lost Pagan works, one of his agents came across the lost works of Thrice Great Hermes and brought them to Florence. The Florentines, already reeling from the discovery that there had been a greater civilization than their own that had risen and fallen nearly two thousand years before them believed that with this text, they held the word of the most ancient sage of them all. Cosimo ordered his Greek scholar Marsilio Ficino to stop translating Plato and begin immediately on this new Egyptian text. Ficino’s latin translation which was published in 1471 signaled an end to the Dark Ages and heralded the “rebirth” the Renaissance, [20] an apt name for  at the heart of the Hermetic philosophy is the notion of spiritual rebirth.

With the development of the first printing presses in 1469, the dispersion of this literature was secured and was to influence the work of the mathematician Nicholas of Cusa, Cornelius Agrippa, the Physician Paracelsus, the Architect Brunelleschi and the Astronomer Toscanelli. Even the claim made by Copernicus that the Sun and not the Earth was at the center of the solar system is thought to have been a choice made after Copernicus studied Hermetic and Platonic philosophy in Italy.

“On the first page of ‘On the revolution of Celestial Orbs’, published in 1543, Copernicus quotes the words of the Thrice-Great-Hermes- “The sun is the visible God”[21]

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) a scholar in Florence at the same time as Ficino embarked upon a quest to integrate all human, all human endeavour into an all encompassing synthesis. Whilst being a scholar he too was a practicing magician, and with his project of creating a compendium of nine hundred Hermetically oriented theses or propositions which he had printed in Rome, he announced his preparedness to defend them against all opponents. In doing so he threw down a gauntlet to the whole of Christendom and challenged the world to debate his philosophy with him. What came of this was his debates were prohibited and the theses branded as heretical.

In Alexandria science, art, literature and religion were seen as parts of a unified whole to be studied together, everything being interconnected. Again, in the Renaissance, this unification of all fields gave rise to a flourishing of the arts that opened everything to investigation and as if history repeated itself, the Roman Catholic Church was challenged. In 1492, with the aid of the King of France, they crushed Florence dispersing scholars across Europe. These scholars however were all holding the unsupressible inspiration of these texts, and in the minds of those who were touched by the illumination that had raised them from the darkness that had been instigated by the burning of the great library some 1,000 years earlier, they fled and became known as the “Fifth Essence” underground mystics living in dangerous times.

“For the next quarter of a century, conflict in Italy was to preclude the establishment of additional institutions. After 1525, however, they began to appear again in ever increasing numbers. Many of them adopted characteristics associated with later Freemasonry; they adopted evocative and often mystical appellations for themselves, like those of subsequent Masonic lodges, as well as ornate symbolic devices, emblems and coats of arms. Elaborate ritualistic rules and ceremonies were instituted. Presiding officers were elected and adopted portentous names- “The Elevated Ones”, for example or “The Hidden Ones”.[22]

“By the early eighteenth century there were more than five hundred academies in Italy. Some of them – the Arcadian Academy of Rome, ofr instance, founded in 1690- became famous thoughout Europe, and welcomed distinguished personages from across the continent. Goethe was to become a memder of the Arcadian Academy. For his famous account of his Italian journey, he adopted the motto “Et in Arcadia Ego”.[23]”

Hermetic works had a profound effect on the circle of courtiers that surrounded Elizabeth I. Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, Willian Shakespeare, George Chapman and Francis Bacon were all acquainted with the Egyptian Sage. John Dee, Elizabeth’s personal astrologer was a brilliant mathematician and was considered to have such an amazing library that his home was thought of as the Third University to Oxford and Cambridge. There was a great deal of travelling by scholars throughout Europe many of whom would visit him, and he made frequent journeys to Prague, the capital of Bohemia which was considered an enlightened republic where Jewish Rabbis, Hermetic Scholars, Platonic Philosophers, and scientists of every nation found sanctuary at the court of Rudolph II. Europe at this time was ravaged by the Wars of Religion between the Protestants and Catholics.

Giordarno Bruno was an Evangelist of the new “Egyptian” religion of the Thrice Great Hermes. 

“Bruno interpreted the new sun-centered cosmos proposed by Copernicus in an entirely mystical way, as the rising of a new sun at the dawning of a new Age. He believed that the Egyptian religion of Hermes was the ancestor of the Greek Mystery Schools, the religion of Moses and the Jews, and the birthplace of Christianity. In Bruno’s imagination it was now poised to become the unifying religion in which Jews, all denominations of Christians, Platonic humanists, and even Muslims could meet and resolve their differences. Bruno’s courage and conviction was nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in his decision to return to Italy, where within a short time he was arrested by the Roman Catholic Church. He endured eight years of torture during which he refused to recant, and in 1600 was led out into the ‘Square of Flowers’ in Rome and ceremonially burnt alive.”[24] 

While this vision of a wholly unified universal Hermetic religion faded with such brutal histories, its influence remained strong amongst intellectuals, visionaries and scientists.

Sir Isaac Newton was a passionate alchemist and the astronomer Joseph Kepler published quotes from the Hermetica in his great work, “On the Harmony of The World.”[25]

The demise if Hermeticism seriously began with the scholarship of Casaubon. An active Protestant and defender of the Christian Reformers he considered the Hermetic texts to be dated no earlier than 200 B.C. He suggested that they were completely fabricated and fraudulent notations of this enigmatic scribe and attempted to debase the entire ediface of hermetic and alchemical belief systems. The fact that many of the original ancients texts had been held in the Library of Alexander and copies flourished at that time was not necessarily revealed. It is obvious that the loss of this great library severs the historical reckonings from any real certainty. However it is a fact that the work of Plato is steeped in a reverence of ancient knowledge and the possibility of there existing such texts is most likely. Contained in the hieroglyphic annals of the Egyptians history is an enormous resource of knowledge suggesting that there is a possibility that these ancients texts could be true copies of a far more ancient spiritual source. Although the reformation took its hold over religious thought and profoundly affected the way in which many have perceived the sacred, there are even many aspects of Christianity that are wholly influenced by these ancient texts.

Through the Alexandrian church fathers St Clement and St Origen, the Hermetic concept of “The Word”, that expanding Logos, the primal emanation that gave cause to the origin of origins, became the opening verse of the Gospel of John.. Hermes- Thoth, was known to the ancients as the scribe of the Gods and the master of  ‘The Word’.[26] God utters a Word, “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”[27]

“The word is even called the ‘Son of God’. In Christianity Jesus Christ, who is also called ‘The Son of God’, is identified as an embodiment of the power of the ‘Word’. St Augustine of Hippo, the influential fourth-century theologian who was familiar with the works of Hermes, writes:

That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist, from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.” Saint Augustine, Retractions.[28]

The essence of Hermetic thought has persisted throughout the centuries. The interest in hermetic thought was apparent with the work of Blake in a time when the consolidation of the Age of Reason was identifying rationalism, empiricism and scientific materialism as the vanguard of Western civilisation. And at this time there began an irreconcilable rift between the arts and the sciences, and the “Two Cultures” were born.

The return to unity was in part born out of the interest in the psychology of the human mind which is reason for the creative expression to engage in the mystical associations of mythical symbolism and notions of the power of thought embedded in ritual practice.

During the Eigtheenth Century explorations into the human mind investigated paranormal phenomena which lead eventually to the specific work of Freud and Jung as they formulated the Science of Psychology.

With the deep interest in symbolism that Freud and Jung developed, acknowledging its ability to open up psychological narratives that released neurosis and phobias, the power of the image was re-ignited and fuelled the creativity of the artists and writers of the time. It was particularly the work of Jung that investigated the Hermetic arts to a great extent. At a similar time as Jung was working , there was a deep exploration into the practical arts with members of  the Golden Dawn, of particular interest, William Butler Yeats,[29] and with the formulation of societies such the Theosophical Society based upon the work of Madame Blavatsky and later Alice Bailey and Annie Beassant amongst others. There was also the development of Anthroposophy through the work of Rudolph Steiner, all of whom were devoted to serious study of hermetic science and a human ontology of manifold unity. From a more negative perspective, the symbolic manifestations and dark conjourings and manipulations that consolidated an extremely fascist political control was instigated by Adolf Hitler, a member of the Thule Society who overtly employed pagan symbolism and magic with negative intent in an overwhelmingly powerful manner. [30]

However perhaps the most inspiring of preservers of the Hermetic faith has come through an interest in the “perennial philosophy” and through various anthropological investigations of cultures that have been marginalised by Classical Western supremacist values. These insights have provided a serious and provocative realisation that concerns the universalisation of myth and symbolism, a realisation that in many ways divides theorists. It is true that this wealth of investigations comes through a line of enquiry that reveres the spiritual as opposed to materialist perspective, a perspective that sees thought as generative. It could be argued that the work of the great mythologists like Sir James Fraser, Jung, Elliade and Campbell have consolidated such ideas. It is often that these scholars are considered “popularists” and are trivialised, but what seems to be more apparent is that there exists a grand divide between the established academics and those who advocate a revisionary stance necessitating a rethinking of much of the previously held truths that are progressively being eroded particularly through the power of the new physics and its deep interpretations of reality that are far more aligned with the spiritual truths of indigenous cultures and the metaphysics of the East.

William Irvin Thompson suggests that there is a “civil war raging between the Establisment in the university departments of archaeology and the challengers outside the specialisations.” He cites the work of Glen Daniel, R.J.C. Atkinson. And Aubrey Burl on the side of the establishment, and with the challenges stand Alexander Thom, Keith Critchlow, Micheal Dames, and John Mitchell.[31]  The work of these writers have grown out of the influences of Jungian investigations and the perennial philosophers that have lead to a reappraisal of Platonic texts and an appreciation of Pythagorean understandings. Archaeological investigations that resist the necessity to introduce ideas concerning sacred science and the harmonic perfection of Pythagorean mysticism, all of which is indebted to the survival of Hermetic Literature, denies the belief systems behind the very creation of these ancient architectures. Much of the consternation concerning these problems is due to the inability for the grounding and true understanding of the new physics to be fully realised as the next paradigm of scientific enquiry. It is most likely that the lineage of scientific empirical investigation has hardened its route through a grossely materialistic passage. From this perspective that entire realm of quantum weirdness remains inaccessible and highly problematic.

In the work of Mythologists like Mercea Eliade and Joseph Campbell the overwhelming similarities of mythological relationships and use of symbolism seem profound. Furthermore, the investigations of Carlos Castenada and others who were not content on reading anthropological or archaeological assessments from the heights of Western supremacy, but chose to live outside the constraint of a Western classical paradigm of materailist assumptions, and were able to go within the reality and the cosmology of the peoples studied to reveal a depth of reality that re-issued an amazing reassurance that even through extreme differences of shape and form, of colour and creed, we are all humans, intuiting and perceiving the same planet in a world of dreams and illusions, facts and fantasies that create a wholistic vision that is powerfully fertile.

The abundance of ideas expressed through the Arts has relied heavily upon these studies, as much as these studies have grown out of an appreciation for the contemplative nature of the arts. The dialogues of difference and the interest in tribal peoples, their customs, music and art that were and still are expressions of the heart of their generative philosophy, casts the artist/shaman as the co-creator of the future which has rekindled an exploration into the inner world of literature,  music and the fine arts of the Twentieth Century.

Joseph Beuys particularly identified with the Artist Shaman as he described the transceiving qualities of human ontology. Hermetisicm for him was the creative process itself. He was the ‘healer and wise man of primitive tribes’. [32] For Beuys, the creative process itself was an act of ritual magic and the alchemy of the process was seen in the use of the materials, the significance of their meaning and the meaning generated out of symbolic forms that were in turn, generated by his intentional engagement with them. The consolidation of his thought being concretised in the physical structure, often unseen but effected upon an etheric realm as the spiritual/psychological is mirrored in the physical. He was said to have believed that

            “only art can again reactivate all of man’s senses in the face of the exclusive diktat of rationality. All of Beuys’ artistic actions and provocations were thus directed towards regenerating man’s creativity, submerged beneath constant use of reason. Beuys hoped that the man whose creativity was thus revitalised…. Would then no longer comprehend himself as an individual…. But rather as a creative element within an all-embracing organism…. As a microcosm of a universal macrocosm.[33]

Now with the advent of the New physics, we find some scientists attempting to align this thought with the metaphysics of the East. Certainly through the pioneering work of Fritzrov Capra and Gary Zukov they both found within the sacred texts of the East, corresponding notions of reality that coincided with what has become known now as the Holographic paradigm.[34]

There is a strange irony involved in the twisted nature of Western science revisiting the sacred ideas of Ancient and Eastern philosophical systems. The new physics, in its attempts to understand the nature of reality, has found that the Western lineage that grew out of the Baconian, Cartesian and Newtonian models of reductionism and Empiricism, has little to offer scientists who are engaged with either cosmological studies or Quantum studies. Associated with the re-enchantment found in Eastern philosophy, there was simultaneously an outcry for change as the mechanistic attitude was recognised as a limiting constraint that perceived nature as a static and inhuman environment as opposed to the dynamic process reality that was beginning to be illuminated once again. With this picture of reality, classical science was cast as the destructive force that had the potential to destroy the planet and its inhabitants. Yet ironically within the Western tradition itself, there was a philosophical lineage that passed through the work of  the process philosophers such as Whitehead and Bergson, particularly, who considered the process of reality as a unitary whole to be fundamental. This line of thought has led us back into an original philosophical system based upon dialectics and the reconciliation of opposites, and which has been the centre of all of the great flourishings of  Western Humanitarian Epochs, as it can be traced to the translations and republishings the collection referred to as the Corpus Hermeticum.

The books of Thoth or Hermes Trismagistus, describes a unity and interconnectedness of all things. It identifies relationships between the macrocosmic and microcosmic; as above so below, it sees the reconciliation of opposites as primary and cites an original god as a hermaphroditic demiurge.

“Some of the Demotic sayings, however, go back to much earlier sources in Egypt. Some Hermetic Themes have also been traced to Egypt by Erik Iversen in his book Egyptian and Hermetic Doctrine (Copenhagen 1984), where he shows that the Memphite Theology contains the beginnings of a Nous-Logos doctrine. Other Egyptian elements rightly assigned by him to the Hermetic works are the bisexuality of the demiurge, the concepts of time and eternity, and the correspondences of (1) psyché and ba and of (2) pneuma and ‘the breath of life’. The teaching about death and judgement, especially about the ‘Second Death’, also bears an Egyptian stamp, although the theme of judgement seems to have been taken over by the Greeks from Egypt at a much earlier stage, with Crete probably acting as a mediating instrument. In the case of the Hermetic borrowings one need not assume a direct contact with Egyptian texts; bilingual literati may well have provided the material.”[35]

The process of Alchemy as a transformational art, sought to separate the base substance into its constitutive parts and through various processes of separation, purification, putrifaction and sublimation the substances would have its opposing extremes revealed; all impurities would be removed and the essence remaining, the tincture if you like, would be reconstituted into a pure form. As a magical process the physical practical  work was reflected in the spiritual process of self purification, where the physical embodied the spiritual as a transubstatiational process. 

The primary tenant of Alchemy was the Credo: All is one and one is all, where the essential teaching assumed that the macrocosmic was reflected within the microcosmic and hence man was a reflection of the universe itself.[36] The dynamics of opposition were the fundamental generative processes of manifestation that “became” out of the birfication or chaos of the rising logos.[37] This rising logos, or primary cause was the expression of nothing into everything literally. The original nonspatial non temporal consciousness that was the singularity of God itself, is seen to literally turn inside out and upside down, that is it inverts itself to become its opposite, which is everything as expressed by the infinite expanse that is the rising logos. And in the beginning was the word and the word was God.[38] The tension is realised when this infinite expanse twists upon itself as is seeks out and is attracted to its opposite, that is its origin. Here the two opposed extremes unite in a “Mysterious Coniunction” and out of this union that manifestation of spacetime is generated.[39] 

Many creation myths describe this paradoxical moment where the One original being realises that it was born of a mysterious origin that presents itself as the offspring of this original being and in uniting the mother daughter bride become one with the father son and groom. [40]

This moment of becoming into existence has been symbolised through many traditions both pagan, hermetic and Christian, as a pelican opening its breast to feed its seven young. The mother sustains at the expense of her own life, the multiplicity of her progeny. This symbol is also the same shape as the flask that the alchemists used to prepare much of their work. It too was called a pelican. It was the symbol of the universe, and as Jung understood it, it was the primary symbol of transformation. It was the Mercurius, the universal essence as depicted by the pelican and the Ouroborus, the snake eating its tale. Jung knew the relationship, [41] but was unaware that both of these shapes have a single unifying relationship. The pelican and the ouroborus are actually two postures of the one topological shape, the Klein Bottle.

There are many theorists who have found in ancient philosophy a source of wonder at the origins of arguments that are born out the fundamental perceptions of reality as a paradoxical relationship between opposed perspectives. Douglas Huntington Moore has aligned himself with, what he describes as generic theory, which attempts to reveal the truth of reality while it holistically embraces the perceptions of all cultures seen through a lineage that traces its roots into an eastern past and into the Stoic philosophy and physics of the ancient Greeks. He suggests that-

            “The Stoics offered a form of modern rigour in their renovation of the ancient generic approach, and did so with cost or compromise. In other words, they started the road to a modern all inclusive science tat was compatible with the ancients of their time. Stoic logic and philosophy remained true to the generic. Their post-Socratic renovations remained true to the pre-Socratic schematically, Plato and Aristotle took the road to the West; the Stoics went East. It is time to return to the Eastern road. Thus the story of Generic science goes back to the stoics. In a nutshell, generic science, as conceived in this project is a reverse engineering of ancient Stoic logic and philosophy put into a modern context where it seems to resolve many vexing questions of our time……It involves a return to  the past with a vengeance and the possible opening of a new and fresh start to resolving so many of the problems and apparent paradoxes of the sciences that followed the road started by Aristotle and Plato.”[42]

As Dr Stephen Hoeller suggests in his lectures titled “Hermes: The Thrice Great Heirophant of Gnosis”[43], these conflicting mindsets are between opposed perceptions of reality that he defines as the opposition between process reality and episodic reality. According Hoeller, Thoth, who in hellinistic times was identified as Hermes Trismagistus, that is Hermes is The Thrice Great Heirophant of Gnosis, was the ‘Fascilitator of  the Reconcilliation of Opposites’. He is the governor of process that guides conflict and shepards it to reconciliation..

Certainly the early Stoic Physicists considered reality in terms of a dynamic continuum and they spoke of the universe as a continuum that is bounded yet surrounded by an ether or Pneuma that permeated everything and is considered to be the actual force that has the property of coherence in the twofold sense of being cohesive and making cohesive.[44]

            “We must remember that the pneuma was thought to be an extremely rarefied substance and that its total interpenetration of matter would thus create a case analogous to that of the mixture of a small drop of wine with a large measure of water, i.e. of one component being negligible in bulk as compared with the other. Here again the starting-point for the argument was the organic world. Soul (psyche), the hexis of the living body, was itself corporeal according to the Stoics, who included it in the group of things which are capable of acting and being acted upon. Mutual interpretation of soul and body, of physis and plants, of hexis and inorganic matter, have all one common feature- the total mixture of the very tenuous and rare component, the pneuma, with a much bulkier one. The common denominator in all these cases are the physical qualities or properties which themselves are nothing less than pneumata mixed in definite proportions. And as we have seen, qualities are bodies, like the soul itself, and therefore their mixture with matter- organic and inorganic alike- must be of the nature of a total mixture.”[45]

The idea of the existence of forces continuous in space and time merged in Stoic doctrine with the conception of the ever-present and all-permeating Deity. This notion of the deity as something that is Omniscient and Omnipresent saw the natural force being endowed with divine reason, where the pneuma was thought of as intelligent and sensible.

“one spirit (pneuma) which pervades, like a soul, the whole Universe, and which also makes us one with them.” [46]

The Stoics most certainly had their critics and evidence of arguments that defined strongly opposed perceptions of reality can be traced throughout the development of the western world, and persist today. The nature of these arguments illustrate what seem to be subtle differences that in some cases may be perceived as pedantic word plays. Often the implications of these differences generate extreme perceptions of reality, the implications of which suggest either a bleak nonpurposeful existence as described by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene[47] or the reality that is aligned with the perceptions of the “Sacred Books of the East”[48]that have been explored since the grounding of some of the most influential of the Scientific theories in the area of Quantum Physics, Cosmology and Biology as exemplified in popular science books such as “The Tao Of Physics”[49]and “The Dancing Wu Li Masters.[50]”

The differences between these theories are as follows. One perspective considers that consciousness is determined by the organisation and complexity of an organism, and in this world, humans may well be the only entities with consciousness. The other perspective considers that consciousness is immanent in all things including the aether or pneuma and therefore all particles, and that the complexity of organisms is determined by the organisation of the multiplicity of particles that make up the entity. This latter notion leads into the idea of the organisation of the entity embodying the soul that is greater than the sum of its parts. In this sense the possibility of there being a spirit of an organ or of the whole body or community is possible beyond the spirit of the individual. All of these parts would be considered an aspect of the divine. All animals, plants, minerals would have a soul and the potential for a soul to exist outside of a material body is also highly possible.  Unity and complexity is seen in such a reality where paradox is primary. All is one and one is all, unity and multiplicity where a monism is also pantheistic as with the Hindu Teachings. [51]

The understanding of paradox to the early Stoics was for them, paramount in understanding reality. They saw that it was impossible to state whether a body was a whole entity or a numbers of parts. They saw that it was both and like wise with concepts of time they realised that whilst you could consider a separate moment in time, time was a fluid stream where the present moment was both partially past and partially future. The arguments that developed between those who considered time to be fluid and those who saw it atomistically are interesting to examine as they expose subtle differences that can be seen to be early documentation of these opposed persepectives of reality. Whilst seemingly the difference between the texts is a play of words the Stoic refutation of Xenocrates’ atomic time elements depicts two completely different conceptions whose disparity stems from the difference between the customary static notion of the continuum and the dynamic one of the Stoics. The Xenocratic concept describes time as indivisible atoms of time and the Stoic perspective asserts that the present moment consists of a small stretch of time spread over past and future.[52]

Chrysippos’view on time quoted in Stobaios’ Eclogae illucidates this clearly as follows,

            “He states most clearly that no time is entirely present. For the division of continua goes on indefinitely, and by this distinction time, too, is infinitely divisible; thus no time is strictly present but is defined only loosely.”[53]

Significantly Sambursky points out the remarkable similarity of the Stoic doctrine to the ideas on time of some Modern philosophers, and especially the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead which he quotes from Whitehead’s “Process and Reality” as such

“A moment has no temporal extension, and is in this respect to be contrasted with a duration which has such extension…” “A moment is a  limit to which we approach as we confine attention to durations of minimum extension.”  “There is no such thing [as the instantaneous present] to be found in nature. As an ultimate fact it is a nonentity. What is immediate for sense-awareness is a duration. Now a duration has within itself  a past and a future; and the temporal breadths of the immediate durations of sense-awareness are very indeterminate and dependent on the individual percipient…. The passage of nature leaves nothing between the past and the future. What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation…. The past and the future meet and mingle in the ill-defined present.[54]

Sambursky describes the Stoics cosmos as a divine multiplicity that is the all that is the one thing the immanent God that is in everything.

“The Stoics, although they saw the cosmos embedded in an infinite void, regarded it as a closed system unaffected by the vacuum outside it. In spite of the fact that they used a special term to denote the sum total of the cosmos and the void, calling it The All[55], they did not attribute to the void any corporeal properties whatsoever, and there was therefore no question of looking at the material universe as a partial system of the All. We have to bear this in mind when we discuss now some Stoic fragments concerning the character of the cosmos as a closed system. One of these state that “the cosmos is a perfect body but its parts are not perfect, as the exist only relative to the whole and have no absolute existence”.[56]The term “relative” corresponds here exactly to the forth Stoic category, meaning that every partial system of the cosmos must be regarded as having some relation to the cosmos as a whole, and it is in this sense only that the cosmos in its totality can be denoted as a perfect body. “Of the cosmos alone can it be said that it is self-supporting (autarkes), because it alone contains within itself all that it needs. It is fed and grows out of itself, whereas its parts are in mutual exchange with each other.[57]”

This picture of the cosmos is a divine perfection that within it shows instances of imperfection when seen in isolation. Only Gods knows of the perfection that the entirety of reality is. This fundamental paradox will be seen to be the most recurrent theme that weaves in and out of this thesis. It is the cause of great distress, and misunderstanding. It is also the fundamental aspects of the Eastern perceptions of reality. Its flows in and through everything and the shifts of perspective are what unifies the relativity of the whole and its parts.

Within the Hermetic Texts, there are numerous descriptions of the creation. In the following quote, we see the image of a luminosity that is formed out of the mysterious and hidden feminine. This luminosity traverses the aeons of the indivisible until it comes to the only begotten, the monad, the abode of tranquillity and solitude, where they receive grace from the Christhood of the only begotten and the crown eternal which they then identify as the father of all sparks of light. 

“Hymn of the Powers surrounding the Only Begotten One. “It is through Thee that we are glorified and by thee we see the Father of the Pleroma AAAOOO and the Mother of all blessings; She is hidden within all things and is the thought of all the eons, the Ennoia (Conception of Idea) of all the Gods and all the Lords; She is the knowledge of all the Invisible Ones and her Reflection is the Mother of all the AKHORETOS (Established ones), the Power of the Infinite. It is because of Thy Reflection, Oh, only begotten that we see thee, that we receive the Incorruptible Crown; that which is known by itself. Glory unto thee, Oh, only begotten for ever.” And all of them said “Amen” together; and they became a body luminous, which traversed the Aeons of the Indivisible until they came to the only begotten who is in the Monad, the Abode of Tranquility and Solitude, and they received grace from the only begotten, that is to say from his Christhood, and the Crown Eternal. This is the father of all the Sparks of Light, the Chief of all Immortal Bodies, that which is the cause of the Resurrection of the Body.”[58]

This image is not unlike a singularity or black hole. The Feminine is depicted as a Pleroma, as hidden within all things, the conception of an idea, who has the knowledge of all the Invisible Ones, and whose reflection (inversion or reversal?) is the mother of all the established ones. The body luminous traverses the Aeons of the indivisible. Could this be suggestive of a landscape that has no spatial dimension. A singularity approaches zero proportions in terms of space and infinitely stretched time.

As Einstein suggests that all of space has a negative curvature, is it possible that this temporal extension that reaches the domain of the only begotten (the father of the Pleroma and the Mother of all blessings)  “ It is because of thy reflection (inversion of a non spatial original only begotten one)….that we see and receive the incorruptible crown, that which is known by itself.” The abode of this only begotten one is tranquility and solitude, in the monad. Now the Monad is the primary unit or ultimate indivisible constituent of the universe and a microcosm of it, or in Giordano Bruno’s philosophy, a basic and irreducible metaphysical unit that is spatially and psychically individuated. In a sense it is a single autonomous unity.

It seems that there is a luminous non spatial travelling that returns to an indivisible point which is solitude and tranquil and in the interior of the Monad. Is this where the logos extension seeks out its antithesis and in coupling with this oppositional point which is the coupling of infinity and zero,  fathers all the sparks of light, the chief of all immortal bodies and the cause of the resurrection of the body.?    A loop of time intersecting with itself to create a spacetime continuum.  The resurrection of the body is realised as a process that shifts from the original being of divine unity to the eternal Crown and Christhood  that now resides in this point within the monad, that is now emerging as the expression of infinity, the sparks of all light, the Chief of all immortal bodies, the is the cause of the ressurection as it is an entirely new formulation of what is initially and inversion of a plenum, or infinite potential, to become all that is infinitely identifiable, that then resurrects its multiplicity to a manifold unity.

The Klein bottle that is the predominant symbol of the universe for the Alchemists, certainly is a shape that unifies opposites as it negotiates a continuous surface. The motif that is illustrated in the above analysis, is one that is Klein bottle like in nature as its twisted hierarchy creates a fractalised knotting of space. The motif of a turning in on itself and potential rupture through the membrane of itself, is possibly the only type of topology that will enable a white hole more commonly known as a Big Bang, to be formed as it to expand into the interior unaffected by the tremendous gravity that is prevalent for the formation of a blackhole or singularity.

I believe that we have with the mysterious writings of the hermetics, an attempt to comprehend an ancient knowledge that has been preserved as Peter Marshall and others suggest from an era prior to the present history that we are familiar with.

Contrary to precursing chemistry, it seems obvious that alchemist where interested in the physics of space and time, and the dynamics of oppositional complements, and the tensions that exist when they negotiate such terrains as singularities. The implications of this work suggest a great need to revise our understandings of ancient texts from a perspective that is not persuaded by purely materialist conventions. The potential for a reunification of all the environments that was once the domain of philosophy but have endured through time the separation necessary to generate deeply specialised and detailed investigations, may well lead to a fuller understanding of a truer metaphysics of the real world, as the essence of all of these disciplines overlay to reveal a higher truth of our Ultimate Reality.

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