Two Hermeticisms

It is often thought that Hermeticism faded during the Christian Middle Ages, to be revived in the 15th century with Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum . One of the central claims of Florian Ebeling’s The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus (Cornell, 2007) is that this is misleading.

There was a revival of a certain kind of Hermeticism in Renaissance Italy, but there was also a Northern European tradition of Hermeticism based on different Hermetic texts and developing different Hermetic themes. (For Ebeling, the complicated term “Hermetic” simply refers to texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and to the ideas contained in those texts.)

Ebeling summarizes the differences between Northern and Southern Hermeticism this way: “The Italian Renaissance philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola belonged to a tradition that was influenced by the Church Fathers and their interpretation of Hermeticism, and they concerned themselves with the Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius . The situation was otherwise with the alchemo-Paracelsists, who, from the sixteenth century on, were grouped in norther Europe under the name of Hermes. Few of them were familiar with the Corpus Hermeticum . For the most part, they referenced the Tabula Smaragdina and other Hermetica with alchemical content, of which the learned men of the Renaissance were largely ignorant. In the seventeenth century Michael Maier and Athanasius Kircher used both hermetic traditions, but they, along with a few others, were exceptions.”

Of the northern Hermeticists, Ebeling writes, “In the framework of the legitimation legents, Hermeticism was considered the only legitimate heir of the Adamic primeval knowledge and of Christian piety, and it was Paracelsus who revived it. The adherents of the northern tradition passionately battled Aristotelian philosophy in the name of Hermes Trismegistus; they saw it as un-Christian, as inspired by the Devil, and therefore unsuited to an understanding of nature, for it took the superficial to be absolute and thus did not discern the hidden essence of things. Hermeticism was viewed as a symbolic doctrine capable of penetrating into the true heart of things and perceiving the mystery of nature.”