Keeping the Hermeticist Honest

Maybe I’d better start by explaining what a hermeticist is. My dictionary defines “hermeticism” as a synonym for alchemy. During the Middle Ages this was true, and perhaps it will one day be true again. At present, most people who call themselves hermeticists would not call themselves alchemists.

The many esoteric traditions that contributed to western alchemy have a common ancestor in a small body of writings that survived the destruction of the great library of Alexandria. Known as the Hermetica, they were attributed to someone called Hermes Trismegistus or “thrice-great Hermes.” This was probably a brand name applied to the works of a number of different writers over several centuries, rather than the name of a particular person.

The story usually goes that the texts were written by ancient Egyptians and discovered later by the Greeks, but some scholars believe it was the other way around. Conventional historians have trouble figuring this out because they assume that the author’s namesake—the Greek god Hermes (known as Thoth to the Egyptians)—exists only in mythology. If you accept the premise that Hermes is an actual being whose job is to impart messages from the spiritual world to humans, it is much easier to understand how not only Greeks and ancient Egyptians but Jewish Cabbalists, Muslim Sufis, Gnostic Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Chinese Taoists kept coming up with variations on same ideas. The Greeks and/or Egyptians applied his name to their alchemical texts because he was the actual source of them.

Hermeticists are the human recipients of messages from the world of spirits. Their enterprise is to understand the mundane world in light of the spiritual world. Alchemy is the practical application of that understanding. To do something useful with spiritual knowledge was, for ancient and medieval hermeticists, the point of acquiring it. During the Renaissance, this pragmatic impulse shifted to the natural sciences. Hermeticists, by and large, stopped expecting their studies to bear practical fruit. They stopped trying to do magic. Some even ceased to believe that magic was possible. It was at this point that honesty began to become an issue.

Scientific knowledge is very democratic. It is discovered through use of the physical senses, and we’ve all got them. The claims of any one scientist can be verified or refuted by repeating the experiment on which they are based. Hermetic knowledge, on the other hand, comes to us through faculties that are not equally developed in all humans. Some of us can hear what spiritual beings are saying, and some of us can’t. If you yourself don’t have access to the source of a hermeticist’s claims, you have no way to verify them on your own.

Many sensible people think this an excellent reason for ignoring such claims. Others, though, are tempted to listen, because what hermeticists have to say is so interesting. Not only are we intensely curious about how human life appears to other spiritual beings, but we hope this knowledge might shed light on the meaning of human existence in general, and our own lives in particular. So it often happens that the hermeticist comes to be treated as a prophet. His or her (usually his) pronouncements are taken on faith alone.

The situation is exacerbated by the hermetic tradition of secrecy. Getting to hear the pronouncements in the first place is often treated as a privilege for which one must qualify through a series of intiations. The information is paid for in advance, through long years of spiritual practice, study and, quite often, being generally jerked around by the higher initiate. By the time it is finally received, students have invested heavily in the belief that the initiate is in regular communication with the gods. They have been drawn gradually into an esoteric community whose jargon is so incomprehensible to most people that even non-secret information is rarely shared with those outside of it. This social isolation increases their investment in believing what they are told.

Even if we were to assume that none of these hermetic teachers was an outright charlatan (probably not a safe assumption), the fact is that honest hermeticts are sometimes very right, sometimes sort of right, and sometimes dead wrong. Perceiving and interpreting dispatches from the spiritual worlds is an inexact science. In fact, to the extent that knowledge can’t be independently verified, it is not science at all. As new “findings” get built upon assumptions that were shaky to begin with, the body of hermetic knowledge threatens to become a house of cards that the faintest gust of common sense could topple altogether. It tends to morph into a pseudo-religion lacking in religious devotion, and a pseudo-science lacking in scientific rigor.

That’s why alchemy is important. Alchemy is the practical application of what hermeticists know—or think they know—in theory. Its premise is that insights derived from the spiritual world can be regarded as provisionally true if you can act on them with good result in the material world.

Here's how Mark Stavish, author of The Path of Alchemy, explains it:

"It was not always clear to me why so many others and I struggled to understand
alchemy, particularly when we were working in the dark on our own with only
hints and suggestions to guide us. Jean Dubuis, chief author and founder of
The Philosophers of Nature, stated that alchemy, unlike many occult arts and
sciences, is one of the few that does not allow for personal illusions. Matter does
not lie; the material world does not lie; alchemy is a perfect mirror of our inner
state. Paraphrasing Paracelsus, Dubuis said that if we can transmute something
in the material world, it is only because we have already transmuted the same
energies and matter within ourselves.

That was it! With that simple explanation I understood why alchemy had
become so important to me and to so many others. For too long we had met
students and adepts of one form or another who in truth were fooling
themselves about their own inner attainment. Alchemy offered a means of
knowing unequivocally if we were going in the right direction or simply fooling
ourselves. The Hermetic Axiom 'As above, so below; as below, so above' is not
only a guiding principle but can be tested, just as any other Law of Nature."

Like a scientific experiment, magic either works or it doesn’t. That's why hermeticism needs alchemy to keep it honest.