The Emerald iPad of Hermes
by Gordon • • History, Science • 11 Comments
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Been re-reading a little Hermetica to go with some of the Gnostic history I have been researching. (Just finished a great book on the Gospel of Judas. Great for the content… The writing is absolute rubbish.)
One of the reasons I ended up in Chaos Magic is it is one of the few systems that can incorporate an updated view of the world.
Any witch-flavoured Paganism, pure Thelema, Theosophy… They all have a more or less ‘frozen’ view of the universe and of mankind… One that froze at the end of the nineteenth century.
Take ‘True Will’.
Modern magic emerged during the same era that psychiatry was taking its first baby steps into the world… And there was some substantial cross over in notions about the human mind as well as existence in general. The ‘will’ was believed to be a higher faculty (most developed in white Europeans) that allowed one to discern and make reasoned judgments. It’s no surprise that magicians extended this idea beyond all logical conclusions. It was a very popular medico-political idea at the height of the Empire’s power.
Trouble is… According to the last 30 years of neuroscience it appears mankind doesn’t have any kind of will at all… Free… True… Whatever. We appear to be nothing more than a cluster of pre-wired stimulus response patterns.
This is also why I don’t call elements as part of my rituals and only include them in rare instances of spellcasting as convenient categories. When Paracelsus or whoever spoke about the four/five elements he wasn’t using them as symbolic or psychological concepts… That’s what he literally believed the universe was made of.
If they were supposed to be abstractions or metaphors they would have been described as such. But they’re not. They are laid out as the cutting edge science of their day.
This is my point:
- Medieval magic was based in cutting edge science (of the time).
- Modern magic is based in medieval science.
To me, that feels like we’ve missed a trick somewhere. If we dismiss the truly absurd racism and anti-Semitism of our magical predecessors, why are we clinging to their equally preposterous scientific understanding?
The briefest origin story of Hermetics on the internet
- Hermetic philosophy is based on a collection of different texts, written by different authors, most likely in Alexandria around 50 – 280 AD.
- It quite clearly contains more than a few fragments of Pharaonic religious belief from at least the New Kingdom and possibly earlier.
- It also clearly demonstrates the influence of the Gnostic and Greek philosophical beliefs of the time; principally the rejection of the physical in favour of the spiritual, an obsession with Platonic ‘forms’ as a description for how the universe works and the belief that you can use your mind to come to know God as a direct experience here on earth.
- This makes it a ‘belief soup’ that tastes like Alexandria in Late Antiquity. (Not literally, of course, because it doesn’t taste of goat urine mixed with slaves.)
Science and the Hermetica
The Hermetica uses the four elements to describe the make-up of the universe. It also makes references to the planets running in fixed paths in the sky. Basically, it’s ‘scientific’ view of the world is wrong.
Which is where I had ‘parked’ it for about eight years because the rest of its theories can be found elsewhere (mostly in Plato).
And then I read this translation in a light, breezy -almost intro level- Hermetica book that I purchased on my recent trip to the South West:
Men looked with wonder and questioning,
and, having observed the Maker’s masterpiece,
wanted to create things for themselves.
Their father gave permission,
so the gods who administer the Cosmos
each shared with humanity a part of their power.
…
The Earth is kept in order
by means of humanity’s knowledge
and application of the arts and sciences –
for Atum willed that the universe
should not be complete
until man had played his part.
And I liked it.
I liked it because it sets up the exact relationship I want between science and spirituality.
It is a spiritual precedent to continue learning about and understanding the universe as an act of devotion.
The following chapter goes on to outline a deeply inaccurate vision of the manifest universe; complete with four/five elements, the zodiac, etc… But what should I expect? It was written almost two thousand years ago.
In my head, I like to think that the writers of this chapter -if they were incarnate as themselves today- would gladly update that vision based on recent scientific discoveries.
Whilst I recognise there is something contradictory in wanting an historic precedent -that I have dismissed due to its scientific inaccuracies- to give me permission to incorporate modern science into my magical worldview I’m still glad that it exists.
And I really think the underlying ‘scientific mechanics’ of most magical worldviews need a thorough going over. Maybe I’ll make a start on that. On my new phone.
In the meantime, everyone needs to make sure their New Scientist subscription is up to date.
I don’t really have a problem with the concept of True Will. And about neuroscience, well, perhaps it must be taken with a pinch of salt. Some theories deny conscience itself, making humans flesh robots that “think” that they are conscious (Like the two behaviorists having sex. Afterwards, one of them says, “I can see that it was good for you. Was it was good for me?”). Perhaps True Will can be called the “metaprogramming faculty” – the state of mind from which you recognize an automated behavior pattern and decide to change it. William Lilly certainly had interesting things to say about it; so did William James.
Remember, “cluster of pre-wired stimulus response patterns” is not so different from “being born under an afflicted star” (and dude, trust me; astrology was NEVER disproved – it only got somewhat irrelevant in modern times, but the effort of traditional astrologers like Christopher Warnock and John Frawley is recovering a treasure of precise prediction techniques and magical rituals). Valentin Tomberg, of blessed memory, wrote that the highest purpose of magic is freedom. Science may serve to allow a better understanding of our constraints, but ultimately its worldview tends to deny freedom, because it look for mechanisms everywhere (because mechanisms can be USED).
That aside, the Hermetica is a wonderful source of inspiration. One sentence that really blew my mind when I went deep into it was that “the universe is in God not as an object in a place, but as a thought in a mind” (I’m quoting from memory, can’t say exactly from which book it came).
By the way, I read a lot of your book recommendations recently – The Black Swan, Supernatural, Outliers… very interesting books, specially Supernatural!
Thanks for the great blog.
Good point re. magic following core paradigm of existing science.
Even now, that can get slippery. As more magic took in ideas about the brain from modern science, it got caught up in the prevalent model of the 70′s-80′s, that brains were modelled as being like computers.
Though such mechanistic models are both attractive and useful (setting a sigil as a drive defragger for your mind is a neat trick, for example), they’re out of date. Most modern neurology looks at the brain more as a gland than a computer… the metaphors coming out of this are more… squishy. But I think they’re better suited to a lot of chaos-style work – for example, one aspect of the brain-as-gland model is shown in the phenomenon of ‘neural plasticity’, the ability of brains to reroute around trauma (sometimes spectacularly, such as people with bilateral hemispherectomies – ie, half their entire brain removed – recover things lost in the process (hearing/sight on the side, for example) quite quickly.
In short, if you stay cutting edge in bioscience, you canhave as much grist for your magical mill as with physics. And with quantum processes starting to be linked to bio phenomena such as photosynthesis… well, I read Fortean Times along with New Scientist to hedge my bets!
.-= Cat Vincent´s last blog ..Voting =-.
@Hierax Oh, I don’t have a problem with True Will, either. I just wanted to highlight that it formed as an idea at a time when we new very little about the mind.
I simply think it needs revision in light of what we do know about the brain now. (An your comment would be an example of that.)
My bugbear is people mistaking outdated science for spiritual truth when there is just no need to.
@Cat – Totally on Fortean Times: Learn science and learn science’s limits. Always a good policy.
Who’s got time to conjure 118 Elemental intelligences? Thou potassium, be now here!
It just doesn’t feel right.
Come Sulfur, Come Potassium Nitrate, come Carbon, and destroy now mine enemies with projectiles of Lead!
Hmmm…. actually, this could grow on me.
.-= RO´s last blog ..God, Gods, Angels, Spirits, and … Us =-.
Oh, and I think you’re applying the modern interpretation of science to the ancients, and they didn’t see the world that way at all. they were animists, mostly, and they believed everything had a soul. Like the yokai in Karas. The wall had a consciousness, the floor, the shoe, everything. The elements were a classification system that described the nature of the entities. I think.
.-= RO´s last blog ..God, Gods, Angels, Spirits, and … Us =-.
Funnily enough, I wondered about how you replace calling the four elements… I settled on the idea of creating an ‘uncertainty space’ instead which would allow you to collapse the outcome you want from wave to particle.
Doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I’m with you on the animist thing as a worldview, certainly, but there are plenty of examples of where the elements are used as a Ye Olde Times Chemistry Textbook… Like the kind they’re printing in Texas these days.
I think a false binary between science and magic is being created in this argument – the result of which creates a hierarchical relationship in which “science” naturally is elevated as favoured. Further, medieval science WAS magic!
.-= Balthazar´s last blog ..All Things Under My Feet Oil =-.
Maybe when you can add quantum mechanics seamlessly to today’s physical science is the day Chaos will tie with Modern Magick.
Trouble is… According to the last 30 years of neuroscience it appears mankind doesn’t have any kind of will at all… Free… True… Whatever. We appear to be nothing more than a cluster of pre-wired stimulus response patterns.
You may want to check out Daniel C. Dennett’s Creating Consciousness for another take on this. It’s an excellent book breaking down what consciousness “is” and what it means.
.-= Psyche´s last blog ..New book on tantra by Jan Fries =-.
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