Whose Afraid of Hermetic Philosophy?

And why is "occultism" still seen as a tawdry phenomenon, today?

Hi folks,

Early this morning, I recorded this podcast interview with Li-Brooke Tyler. I was happy with it because I felt I was able to give a cogent explanation as to why I think it is so important, valuable, and even healing for our (Anglo-European) culture to rediscover the Western esoteric and occult tradition. Perhaps because I was still groggy, I think I was also strangely lucid. You might enjoy listening to it if you get a chance.

A part of our interview is transcribed below:

LI: I saw your article a few weeks ago and it really piqued my interest. think the whole topic that we're talking about here of Secret Histories is fascinating. A couple of things really captured my attention. One was the comparison made between, I guess you could say sort of spiritual experiences, ways of talking about experiences and consciousness, this comparison with music, really captured my attention. I know that you're quoting William Irwin Thompson and then also something you said about I think I may have captured the actual line. You said something about myth: Myth is something that is really close to my heart. You said myth can reawaken our imaginative and intuitive faculties. If we define a proper relationship to it.

For those reasons, I felt like it was really wonderful thing for us to be able to dive in and have another conversation. In the last conversation, we went really deep into into psychedelic phenomena. This feels, again, like a really juicy conversation to enter into. Based on that wide array of topics, I'm wondering where to start and I'm wondering if you could define what you mean by Secret Histories?

DANIEL: I've been thinking about this course for a couple of years now actually. Generally, there's been a huge amount of focus over the last 10 or 20 years in psychedelics, then indigenous cultures, and shamanism, ayahuasca shamanism. A big interest for decades in Eastern mysticism, yoga, meditation, Buddhism. But much less interest from the “new consciousness” crowd into studying our own hermetic and esoteric tradition. I think there are  number of reasons for that.

We're still in that hangover of that tradition having been stomped on so brutally over so many centuries.  There was a number of times when there were efforts to bring back, restore, an initiatory, esoteric knowledge to the West, or to perpetuate what was known from the ancient past. But as Christianity took hold, and later, as science took hold, those efforts were stomped out. Going back to the 3rd, 4th century, you had the Gnostics. Early Christianity was this ferment of different ideas around what Christ meant.

If you read the Nag Hammadi Gospels, which we found in a cave in Saudi Arabia in 1945, they reveal this incredible openness back then. There wasn't a set cannon that said this is the only thing you can believe. It was very mystical with a major influence of Classical philosophy. The focus was on inner experience, self-knowledge, realization. “Opening the door for yourself,” as Christ says in the Gospel of Thomas. And then as the church took over, they violently suppressed Gnosticism.

You had this stomping out of the Gnostics in the fourth century AD with the famous murder of Hypatia in Alexandria. She was the leader of the Gnostics, a mathematician and philosopher. And the Christian monks stoned her to death. Before the Early Renaissance, during the Dark Ages, we lost a lot of the knowledge and it actually was preserved in the Arab world.

Then as that Arab world began to collapse, scholars began to bring hermetic books back to the West. And those were translated in the Renaissance. And that led to the sort of hermetic cabalistic renaissance led by people like Ficcino and and particularly Pico De Mirandola. But they also  encountered resistance. Then there was te Rosicrucian movement in the early sixteenth century. They issued these three manifestos in the beginning of the 17th century and that was seen as a threat to the establishment and the church. That was forced underground some of the energy resurfaced in secret societies like Freemasonry and so on.

There was this ongoing, interrupted effort to restore initiatory esoteric knowledge, going back to  ancient Greece and Egyptian practices. Somebody who I have just been discovering is Cornelius Agrippa, who wrote three books of occult philosophy in the sixteenth century. They’re amazing. But he was sort of considered a black magician. I just thought he was going to be an old fuddy-duddy, but it turns out that he was incredibly advanced. He was very much for the rights of women. He believed that women were completely equal to men, and his writing is just brilliant and extraordinary.

I love when that happens. When you have an idea about someone in the past but when you actually discover their work, you realize they were just very alive and vital and and that that's why they've they've maintained relevance in a way.

Discount and scholarship passes available - message me for info.

LI: A couple of things are occurring to me and you touched on this. Why do you feel there has been this real focus on us moving to understand other cultures   forms of spirituality and magic but much less so the secret history of this part of the world. A follow-up question is why do you feel that now is the time for us to be talking about this, to focus on this?

DANIEL: I think there are just many historical factors. In Wouter Hanegraaf’s The Hermetric Tradition: A Guide for the Perplexed, he talks about how Western esotericism is the rejected dustbin of the academy in the west. So, all of that knowledge was totally cast away, considered ridicule. It was like the forbidden “other.”

I experienced the same things with psychedelics. 25 years ago when I wrote my first book, Breaking Up in the Head.  At that point, if you tried to talk about psychedelics with people in polite company, they would laugh at you or mock you. I felt fear when the book came out, I was going to be tracked by the the police or something. That suppressed energy of the psychedelic gnosis, is moving through the culture in many different ways now.

I feel like there was that leftover sense of something tawdry about the western occult tradition. If you look at Crowley, it just seems very imbalanced. It's fun if you're a death metal or heavy metal band, Led Zeppelin or something, but it doesn’t seem like something serious for serious people. It has this weird hangover. And then it's true, a lot of people who do get involved in sort of magical circles, it's often very hippie. It often feels very ungrounded and not serious.

LI: You're quite right. “Tawdry” is a really good word for it, but also that kind of sense of like, it just being nonsense. Even though back in day this was actually seen as the most important philosophy.  I had William Whitecloud on my show, talking about this recently. It's like that was actually the height of academia, the height of intellectual thought in that time. And it’s become now like this complete nonsense, like if you had a brain cell why on earth would you even be interested in this?

DANIEL: Somehow, there's a kind of mushiness in how the new age glommed onto it. The books that are published. A lot of them, it's like people who’ve flipped over. Instead of accepting nothing but strong material and rational evidence, they have decided to accept everything. If you look at the occult sections of bookstores, there's a kind of mushiness to a lot of it. I believe we need a rigorous, and rational approach to our own esoteric traditions. This would be extremely healing for our society. The more I'm looking into it, the more I think it is necessary.

Even though I'm doing the course, I'm still catching up. I still have a lot to learn. It's just a brilliant, long philosophical tradition. Whether you're going to look at the Corpus Hermaticum or Neoplatonists like Plotinus or Iamblichus, and then Agrippa, John Dee. Even their errors are kind of wonderful in a weird way. And then Rudolph Steiner,  Gurdjieff and even Julius Evola who was an Italian Traditionalist. The Traditionalist movement in the 20th century. A lot of them were very Right Wing.  but they were brilliant intellectuals also.

For many, many years, I have this memory of going to Dharmsala, which is the Tibetan Buddhist headquarters in India, in the mountains of the Himalayas. One of the things that goes on there is the monks are in the courtyard, very kind of, vibrantly debating the Dharma, and different fine points of Nisargadatta or whatever text. And they'll make a point, then they'll go like, Ha!, and the other one will make another point and he'll go like, Ha! What we don't realize is that Indo-Tibetan Buddhism is not a religion, it is a rigorous, dialectical system of thought taken to a very profound level.

But as much as I love Tibetan Buddhism, I don't find it completely appropriate for us. I mean, people can go there, of course.  But I think that we have our own dharma and karma as anglo-Europeans that we need to wrestle with. Just to kind of abandon that tradition and go into Eastern mysticism, I don't feel it is quite right.

As Westerners, we have more interest in the material world, the material universe, and the transformation of matter and the Earth. We have more interest in the evolutionary process that happens not just in the physical plane but even on the esoteric, cosmological planes.  This is not so much a consideration for Buddhism or for Hinduism.  They see these endless cycles or they see the goal of spiritual quest as nirvana.  Enlightenment is the annihilation of the illusory self. It seems the Western idea is more about an exaltation of self - to become united, in a way, with God or the Absolute.

The Corpus Hermeticum talks about how, if you want to know God you have to think like God. You have to understand how God understands. You have to identify with everything and and see yourself as everything. Tibetan Buddhism doesn't even have this idea of the “All” or the “One” or the sort of single principle or what we call God.

We're at a crucial point, Talking to you about it, I get more excited about it, We we have to step up our game and  use our intellectual and rational faculties, our intelligence, our Nous — divine Nous, that was like a big concept of the gnostics — to grapple with our own history and our own tradition. One reason we have to do that, I think that was part of your initial question, is we are part of this culture that's run rampant over the world. We’ve created this industrial monocultural technoculture that's now everywhere. We’ve created the systems that have basically blown apart the balance with the ecosystems to the point where we're facing potential extinction and at the same time our technologies actually pursuing rapidly those very goals of the alchemists. And actually coming close to achieving them.

I wrote in my book Quetzalcoatl Returns about Ray Kurzweil who's a Google engineer, author of The Singularity Is Near.  He argued that in the future not only would we have kind of AI connected to our brains so that we would be able to think at that level, but that also, we would have achieved physical immortality, like our bodies will basically not age.  Kurweil is now saying that that is going to be the case by 2030: As the AI becomes super intelligent, it's going to, meld with like, nanotechnology and biotechnology, and protein science, and they will basically be able to stop aging. Reverse it to a certain extent.

The quest for the Philosopher's Stone was partially the quest for the elixir of immortality. Silicon is —  I just looked it up yesterday — It's like in between a metal and a stone, a “metalloid.”  In a sense, this is the continuation of the quest for the philosopher’s stone. And now, they created this kind of homunculi out of technology. We can now speak to our projection of the internet and have it speak back to us through these chatbots. I I feel we're engaged in a process of alchemical transmutation. It is actually happening, and we need to not just have a rational lens on it, but also have an esoteric lens on it.