The Hermetic Tradition as the Forbidden "Other"

"Western hermeticism is the Academy's dustbin of rejected knowledge" - Wouter Hanegraff

I thought I would make a late-inning pitch for my upcoming seminar, Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions, on the Western hermetic and occult tradition, which starts this coming Sunday. Over the last months, I have gone down the rabbit hole of research to find myself in an ecstatic trance of scholarly overwhelm — perhaps my favorite, non-psychedelic-induced altered state!

These are slides for the upcoming presentation. I had assumed Agrippa would be a tedious, foreboding character. In fact, I am finding his work brilliant, incisive, and cool.

I realize my seminar will consume a precious portion of Sunday afternoons in Spring. I know these are valuable resting, gardening, child-playing, or museum-meandering opportunities, especially for people with regular jobs. The first half of each session will feature my presentation. Assuming there is sufficient interest, I will host a rebroadcast of my talk during the week (perhaps on Wednesday afternoons), followed by another group discussion. There is a great deal to cover and explore. With 120 people signed up so far, I want to make sure people have sufficient opportunities to connect. I will also open a discussion forum where people can continue conversations with each other and share resources 

Among the books I have been reading or reviewing in preparation, favorites so far include Wouter Hanegraaf’s Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed; Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances Yates; Mark Stavish’s Egregores: The Occult Entities that Watch Over Human Destiny; The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth; Solomon’s Secret Arts by Paul Kléber Monod; Applied Magic by Dion Fortune; Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa; Theurgy and the Soul by Gregory Shaw; The Corpus Hermeticum, attributed to Hermes Trismesgistus; Oriental Magic by Idries Shah; Introduction to Magic by Julius Evola and the UR Group; Plato’s Timaeus; and more.

“Western esotericism is the academy’s dustbin of rejected knowledge,” Hanegraaf writes. This is undoubtedly true. According to Yates: “Mechanism divested of magic became the philosophy which was to oust Renaissance animism and to replace the ‘conjuror’ by the mechanical philosopher.” The failure of the Rosicrucian movement in Germany and Bohemia before 1620, “its suppression by force and by savagely adverse propaganda, affected the tone of thought in the early seventeenth century,” and up until the present day. In the modern era, the secular orthodoxies of materialist science displaced the religious orthodoxies of Christianity as the main force of repression exerted on the magical, animist worldview. 

I agree with John Lamb Lash that Gnosticism was the continuation of Mystery School wisdom, rather than a heretical sect of Christianity. Christ himself may have been a Gnostic.

The hermetic, occult or magical worldview has been the suppressed “other” of Anglo-European, or “Western," civilization for 1,700 years, give or take. Ever since Emperor Constantine initiated the Christian Empire, with his descendants stomping out the Gnostics and breaking the lineage of Mystery School wisdom. One reason I am so excited about Secret Histories is that, increasingly, I believe it can help us satisfy a crucial need: We are missing crucial puzzle pieces needed to make sense of our own history, our heritage. I believe we need to look at this lineage from a new, different, post-materialist angle. 

I feel this deeply due to a number of past, personal adventures. While I researched my first books and explored entheogenic shamanism, I had many powerful, sometimes revelatory, sometimes bizarre and deeply destabilizing occult, psychic, and initiatory experiences. As a postmodern skeptic, I never even imagined such things to be possible — until they happened to me. I wrote about many of these occult and paranormal experiences in Breaking Open the Head and Quetzalcoatl Returns.

Therefore, when I read about John Dee’s quixotic encounters with the Enochians, or read (as I am doing now) Agrippa’s amazing classics on magic — or learn about the practices of theurgy, as described by the 3rd Century AD Neoplatonist philosopher Iambluchus, I don’t find this to be ridiculous nonsense we should consign to “the dustbin of rejected knowledge.” I feel these mystics and magi are describing vital, relevant phenomena that you can directly experience today, if you have the inclination and courage. 

As an occultist and analytic idealist, I often wonder if I am mildly insane — or perhaps one of the only sane, reasonable people. My life seems to exist on this liminal knife-edge of isolation and strangeness, which I accept at this point. I suspect it is the curse of the pioneer, the one who pushes forward into unknown, potentially dangerous territory. During my shamanic quest, I inadvertently, accidentally, performed something like a theurgic ritual (without knowing what it was until now). I also managed, I suspect, a type of daemonic summoning, as confirmed by various ancient texts.

I am fascinated by the 3rd Century Neoplatonist Iamblichus, who wrote about theurgy.

Theurgy consisted of “ineffable” practices used to come into direct contact with a god or gods. As I wrote in Quetzalcoatl Returns, back in 2003, the voice of the MesoAmerican “feathered serpent” creator-diety Quetzalcoatl spoke in my head for a week, while I was drinking plant medicine with the Santo Daime, deep in the Brazilian rainforest. This was during an intense period of study on Mayan cosmology and prophetic ideas from Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and many others.. This internal voice dictated the prophetic text which I included in that book. It said, in part:

You are, right now, living at the time of revelation, Apocalypse, and the fulfillment of prophecy. Let there be no doubt. You stand at the edge of the Abyss. What are those shadows that crowd around you? They are the unintegrated aspects of your own psyche, projected into material form. The word “Apocalypse” means “uncovering”—and in these last clock ticks of this world age, all must be revealed, uncovered, so that all can be known.

While many religious and mystical texts speak about the experience of prophets and visionaries receiving transmissions from the voice of a deity or an angel, I had never believed such a thing was possible — certainly I never believed or even imagined anything like this was possible for me, until it happened. The psychological effect was both massively aggrandizing and totally humbling, even humiliating.

A few years before that, I had experimented with a little-known psychedelic, Dipropyltryptamine (DPT), with a friend in New York. DPT is chemically very similar to DMT, substituting a propyl for a methyl molecule. Unlike DMT, DPT does not appear in nature or in our innate neurochemistry. In fact, for a while in the 1970s there was an underground occult church in New York’s Lowest East Side that used DPT as a sacrament. Many of the accounts of taking DPT on Erowid describe difficult experiences, sometimes similar to what I encountered.

That afternoon, my friend and I both felt we were surrounded by presences that we could see, sense, and feel in the air around us. These presences felt haughty, arrogant, highly sophisticated, and somewhat dark. One of these beings — I think of it as a Luciferic entity (as Rudolf Steiner defined them) or as a Daemon — stayed with me after the trip ended. When I closed my eyes, I would see different worlds and dimensions, astonishingly detailed. Every night for the next week, I dreamt of a black-bearded man in a velvet suit following me around cities and jungles. I also seemed to experience strange psychophysical effects — one night, a mirror fell off the wall; a large centipede appeared in the silverware drawer. Other synchronicities happened in quick succession. I don’t know, of course, if any of these episodes were actually connected to my initiatory jolt. I felt, intuitively, that they were. I felt I was in a highly charged psychic field, crossing back and force between dimensions. My friend and I did a banishment ritual to get rid of this energetic attachment. This seemed to help.

One of the many surprising aspects of this experience was that the beings who surrounded us that night somehow had a Victorian or Edwardian vibe to them. They were similar to the occult figures that Aubrey Beardsley used to draw, or that Alesteir Crowley might evoke. They had a kind of cultural-specific or perhaps genetic familiarity. This aspect of the experience left me with a lingering curiosity about the Western, or Anglo-European, esoteric tradition, as opposed to indigenous or Eastern approaches to the “other realities.”

As a writer, my medium is language, which, for hermetic philosophers like Agrippa or John Dee, was the key to magical operations. According to Agrippa’s occult philosophy, the power of language in magic is more than just communication; it is a metaphysical bridge between different levels of reality that can be manipulated by the will of the magician. Because the human being is the intersection of three registers of reality (terrestrial, celestial, and super celestial), the magus has the ability to manipulate the terrestrial world through language and other magical practices.

In his wonderful Esoterica YouTube series, Dr Justin Sledge notes that, according to Aggripa, “By knowing the proper name of a thing one can manipulate that thing, through the use of language as connected via the will of the magus.” The most important tools for the magician to perform a successful magical act is intention and belief: “Intention and belief are required for the flow of power through the magus to be effective. It's as if disbelief acts as a kind of blockage for the flow of the magical power. Thus, intention, will, faith, and sincere belief in the operation are keys for a success. For power to flow from the super celestial or celestial realms through the magus, you have to believe.”

I found this fascinating, when I considered my experiences from twenty years ago. When I had those initiatory encounters (or perhaps temporary insanity), I don’t know if I believed exactly — but certainly my disbelief, my knee-jerk skepticism, was suspended, back then. I had already seen enough — experienced enough psychic and supernatural phenomena — to know that I did not know. Deep down, I was entirely earnest in my quest for knowledge: I yearned to help humanity overcome the trap of mechanistic thought and address the crisis of nihilism which has led to today’s ecological cataclysm.

What we are seeing with Artificial Intelligence may turn out to be something incredibly significant — an event in humanity’s spiritual history, announcing, perhaps, the end of one “world” and the movement into another. The quest for AGI seems to me like another kind of occult summoning or theurgic ritual, linked to the hermetic tradition from the ancient world to the Renaissance, Modernity and Postmodernity. Particularly, it calls to mind alchemy and its quest for the Philosopher’s Stone and the transmutation of metals. Silicon — a hard crystalline solid — is considered a “metaloid,” with properties of metal and nonmetal. It might be that alchemy was a presentiment of our current technological evolution, in some sense.

While I see the very dangerous threats of AI, I also take seriously its potential to exponentially accelerate human knowledge and technical capacity. Apparently Google director Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, now thinks we will achieve “biological immortality” in seven years. Super-intelligence AI will work with nanotechnology and biotechnology to increase our lifespans indefinitely. (YouTuber David Shapiro explores this prospect here). I find this rationally plausible. But from my perspective, it only intensifies the necessity for reintegrating the particular hermetic and occult tradition of the West.

Queen Elizabeth I’s “Arch Conjuror,” John Dee was a fascinating character! He advised Elizabeth to challenge Spain for control of the New World, calling North America, the “New Atlantis.” He created the Monas Hieroglyphica, a geometrical symbol that he believed represented the unity of all things in the Universe. With the scryer Edward Kelly, he contacted many “angels” and spirits and uncovered the Enochian language, with its own alphabet and syntax. We will explore his legacy in the course.

Back in the 1920s, Walter Benjamin wrote in an unpublished fragment that he saw Capitalism as a “religion of destruction.” The esoteric goal of Capitalism was to push the world to the brink of annihilation to see if that would bring back the absent, banished Divinity. I find this prescient, quite prophetic of our current moment:

Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence. This passage of the planet “Human” through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his trajectory is the ethos that Nietzsche defined. This man is the superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment. Its fourth feature is that its God must be hidden from it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith. The cult is celebrated before an unmatured deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity.

Our materialist engineers are seeking to invoke the banished god as an alien super intelligence, the Being of technology. Where there are initiatives to slow down the development of AI, it will be extremely difficult to control its dissemination at this point.

There are things that, deep down, we know to be true. We certainly knew it when we were children, but forgot it as “adults.” Sometimes we recall it again on psychedelic journeys or in other lucky moments: That the world we find ourselves temporarily immersed in is a magical show, a game within a game within a game. That the manifest world is a holographic fractal of some unitary perfection that must remain mysterious, hidden from us, in order to maintain the illusion. If we are moving inexorably toward the next turn of the spiral, we need to regard the lost knowledge and, with it, access to those other forms of consciousness that might help us make a leap into another “world” or condition of being.

If any of this interests you, please join me for the course!