| The
Hermetic tradition derives its name from Hermes, no less-the Greek god,
the Roman Mercury-and especially from mythic Hermes Trismegistos, all of
these being instructors and educators of human beings, messengers of the
gods, a personage who appears in nearly all traditions under various forms,
as emissary or intermediary between heaven and earth, always connected
with that which flies, so that he is customarily represented with as endowed
with wings. He is also related to the hearing of things, with the reception
and transmission of messages. That is, he is related to doctrine,1
to science, wisdom, and revelation. The word "tradition," in a way, signifies
the same as the preceding,2
so that the expression, "Hermetic tradition," could seem a redundancy,
unless one wished to emphasize, by the addition of the second word, an
explicitly revealed origin as well as to indicate a historico-cultural
circumstance referred specifically to the West and to the origins of its
civilization. On the other hand, the term with which we are concerned is
also clear in that it indicates a determinate course of cognition, related
to the lesser mysteries, which are also called intermediate world or level,
on the initiatory route, expressing, further, the idea of the darkness
and silence inherent in this path, likewise referring to its mysterious
nature.
The Hermetic tradition, then, is a form of unanimous,
universal, and primordial tradition-adequate to the historical accouterments
and mentality of certain peoples and certain persons-manifested here and
there, shaping and organizing culture and civilization. The God Hermes
enjoys a solidarity with the Egyptian Toth,3
since, like him, he represents wisdom and hermeneutic interpretation, and
virtues of prophecy, also attributed to Henoch and to Elijah the artist-patron
of alchemy-both rapt to heaven in fiery chariots (a frankly solar vehicle),
and said to be not dead, but alive, like other, analogous, personages of
different traditions, whose second apparition is awaited for the end of
time, just as Christians expect the parousia of their master Jesus,
king of the Jews, Christ the King, who becomes incarnate in human form
in order to reveal to us the true life: a transmission that converts him
into savior and redeemer.
Historically, it is not too difficult to notice that the
Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Christian, Arab, and Mediterranean in general,
myths and esoteric symbols shape a whole that can be directly related to
the Western peoples; and that this spiritual influence, even where it does
not take religious forms, is indisputably valid by the purity of its origin,
and by the concatenated development of transmission, protagonized by sages,
prophets, warriors, and "artists." This does not preclude that the body
of teachings to which we refer be in perfect solidarity with others, of
different eras and climes, and even identical with them, apart from their
formal disguises. In the particular case concerning us-that of the divine
emissary who joins within himself the unified potential of the creeping
and the flying, of earth and the air, who have had to be separated in order
to be adequately complemented through passion and love-this fact is clear,
and is evidence of the archetypal unity of all traditions, inasmuch as
this opposition/conjunction is found to be manifested everywhere. What
is of interest to us now is to emphasize that the sciences and arts present
in the so-called Hermetic tradition have a common origin, manifested historically
throughout Western life, and is expressed through the intermediary of a
series of disciplines and labors, myths and symbols, which constitute a
cohesive code, open to being transposed to all traditional codes and systems,
since all actually express and propose themselves the same thing: the revelation
of an occult knowledge. This permits the conquest of the true human state,
original being, which every person has lost by the fall, and which places
him and her in an infrahuman situation with respect to themselves, the
motive by which they must restore their true "I," which is hidden within
them, only alive in potential form, and which must be actualized, by memory
of themselves, and the recall of the original archetype, with faith and
love, thanks to traditional doctrine, known in this case under the name
of Hermetism. Which permits them to be reborn4
to the authentically human state, in comparison with which the inferior
states5
appear as dreams, or attempts, or illusory projects, or mere idiocy, not
to say stupid vanity.
These disciplines, or vehicles, lift up the apprentice-through
the intermediate world-and place him before the tabernacle, in the heart
of the temple, at the axis, which likewise communicates with the crypt
or cave, the underground country of the dead, or better, in the interior
of the sacrarium, whence he will be able to initiate his vertical ascent,
to the cupola or summit, which symbolize emergence from the temple or the
body, the supracosmic or superhuman. Indeed, he has been delivered from
the trials of the labyrinth of the formations. Converted, now, by the solar
communion, into the King of the World, the aspirant will be able now to
be entirely absorbed in the sacerdotal function, and to escape the cosmogony,
which has been revealed to him, by using his identification with it as
a living support of ineffable transmutation. This is the duty of warriors
and equestrians, as well as that of sages and artists, that is, of astrologers
and alchemists, and includes proficiency in knowledge. This knowledge is
no small thing, in the case of astrology and alchemy, disciplines that
shape Hermetism or the Hermetic condition-the minor mysteries of antiquity-since
they refer respectively to the knowledge of heaven and of earth, constituting
both of them the knowledge of the complete cosmogony, the science of the
cycles, and the science of the transmutations: "architecture" experienced
directly.6
Historically, in numerous points of Western culture, the
appearance of Hermetic currents of ideas, beliefs, systems, and viewpoints
can be detected-that is, esoteric currents of ideas, beliefs, and so on,
within the exoterism of such and such a determinate period. To restrict
our considerations to the Christian chronology, these ideological events
appear not only at determinate historical moments-shaping entire periods,
as in the European Middle Ages-but also constitute the antecedents of certain
scientific, philosophical, historical, and literary personages and events,
and even the origin of an entire code, as in the case of astronomy and
mathematics. It will thus be in order to situate ourselves in some more
or less clear and computed segment of temporal becoming, and to evaluate
a set of samples of events of cultural history, in order to illustrate
this exposition, which does not pretend to be a historical or sociological
study.
We can take our position, then, in the Alexandria of the
third century of our era, and observe the multitude of ideas, conceptions
and personages, traditions and cultures-including the Hindu and the Buddhist-whose
currents merge there, constituting a true crossroads, a point of concentration
of a series of analogous energies, come from various and differing directions,
which are later to shape the diverse facets of our culture. In that time
and place, we can encounter the Christianity of the first Fathers, in their
coexistence with gnosticism, both of Eastern origin. We can find Greek
thought, especially neo-Platonism-which will appear as a constant throughout
the history of the West-mingled with the Hebrew tradition, and with the
fragments of civilizations like the Chaldean, the Egyptian, those of Iran,
and others, some of them lost or forgotten by us. Nor shall we attempt
in this essay to give a more or less clear vision of these events and facts,
let alone offer a panorama. We refer the reader to the extensive bibliography
in this area, the work of authentic specialists. From our viewpoint, we
emphasize these spatio-temporal coordinates, as a locus of reunion and
later expansion of the ideas of the unanimous tradition, of the philosophia
perennis et universalis, of doctrine, which have come down to us under
the name of the Hermetic tradition. It is also very interesting to emphasize
that these ideas, through the centuries, have stayed alive to our very
day. And they have not merely survived--they have always constituted the
invisible framework of certain revivifying events in the history of the
Western human being, without which framework this history, and this human
being, would long since have disappeared.
The scaffolding of ideas to which we are referring will
remain more or less intact, and will be considered as that wisdom, ever
hidden and evasive, that is nonetheless present in the public life of the
city and the people-as an imperishable cultural legacy-until approximately
the seventeenth century. And it will continue to constitute Europe's cultural
marrow. But from then on the deepest values, entering into crisis at the
hands of what is misnamed "humanism," will be degraded, to the very negation
of any possibility of tradition and doctrine, innocence of any esotericism,
and total ignorance with respect to what is meant by initiation.7
The transition has then been made to the profanation of the sacred and
the desacralization of life and reality, by which all begins to be empirical
and nonsignifying.8
Not that this has not previously occurred-or, inversely,
not that there is no light in the current darkness-but we are now referring
to the particular tone of a determinate cycle. This cycle with which we
are dealing is, in general terms, that of the culture called Western. And
like any cycle, it is linked to another, which is linked to a third, and
so on in succession. But there is more: each cycle is a fragment of another,
greater one, and each of its parts can be a complete cycle in itself, with
its systems of subcycles, and so on limitlessly. All is cycles within cycles,
and history-sometimes alarmingly-exemplifies this complexity that is as
subtle as it is tangled. But doctrine appears in each of them, in one way
or another, at some moments intensely bright, at others growing dim, or
hidden in darkness, in the hearts of a few persons. The Hermetic tradition
has been present in the West since its historical and ideological origins,
manifesting itself through distinct groups, persons, or institutions. We
are not referring exclusively to Greek philosophy, Pythagoras and Plato,9
Plotinus and Porphyry, Proclus, or to the soteriology of the Romans (Virgil,
Apuleius), or to the true gnostics, or to the first Fathers of the Church-rather
we wish to bring out the enormous accumulation of Western Christian Hermetists
and Jewish and Islamic esoterists, who had such great influence over the
builders of the Middle Ages, and among alchemists, Rosacrucians, and certain
knightly orders of various types, from which Masonry derives, an initiatic
order born historically in the eighteenth century, although of much more
ancient origins-even mythic-which, happily, endures to our own day. Unfortunately,
it is almost unknown, even to the actual members of its ranks, by reason
of the cyclical cultural degradation occurring in all orders and places,
that grows ever more speedy, and that has made the truth all the more mysterious
and secret as if it had actually withdrawn to the depths of itself and
had to be searched for, or as if we had to remove from ourselves the psychological
veils that hide us from ourselves. Nevertheless, Masonry continues to bestow
initiation in its lodges, and this initiation is perfectly valid, given
that it is a matter of the regular transmission of a spiritual influences.
Many are the lodges that, in Europe and America, are laboring very seriously,
and there are a sufficient number of adepts who are revitalizing original
values.
With respect to the modern West, we can acknowledge that
the religious traditions that currently shape it and are present in a greater
degree in its culture, are the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic,
or those denominated "of the Book." Judaism has in its religion its own
tradition, and certain rabbis devote themselves to the Cabala, to the relations
between letters, words, and numbers, to study, rite, and meditation. As
for Islam, its exoteric part and its esoterism are very little differentiated.
A religion of the desert, it is experienced individually, and its practices,
wholly interior, have no need of arrays of images or complicated rites.
Sufism, we know, is the expression of Islamic esoterism. As for Christianity,
and more specifically Catholicism, we shall say that many of its members
have belonged in different eras to Hermetic orders of Christian esoterism.
Popes, archbishops, bishops, cardinals, simple abbots, or pastors, or humble
monks, have incarnated this knowledge-and not only among the doctors and
sages of the Church, but also among its saints and its martyrs, commencing
with the Apostles. It will suffice to mention a few names, within Christian
esoterism, in order to prove the continuity and the importance of the latter,
not only with respect to the church as an institution and Catholicism as
a religion, but inasmuch as it represents historically the very roots of
Western thought. Thus, for example, we should have to begin with Origen
and the first fathers of the Church, to continue with the orthodox Chtistianity
of the East;10
we should have to speak of monasticism in Ireland, of Saint Benedict and
the construction of the various orders of religious monks, and come to
Saint Bernard, the Cistercians and the knightly orders, and mention no
less than Denis the Areopagite, in the fifth century, as well as Saint
Augustine, to come to Albertus Magnus, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Meister
Eckhart. On this point, an important element is the appearance of an initiatory
ambience, that of the mystics of Munich, which for Eckhart was the same
as the order of the Fedeli d'Amore for Dante. Just so, we should have to
recall the medieval artists (Nicholas Flamel, Basil Valentino, Bernard
of Trèves) and Christian cabalistic Hermetism: Raymond Lull, Nicholas
of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico de la Mirandola. Also Jacob Boehme,
Cornelius Agrippa, Francis Zorzi; and the Isabelline magicians, Robert
Fludd and the Rosacrucians we have mentioned.
In this fashion we could traverse the cycles of the particular
histories-inscribed within other, broader ones-and establish the legitimate
connections and unsuspected relations of every type, among various events
without apparent connection, which would show us and teaches us another
history. And that is the value that the history of personages and peoples
really has, that of being taken as a code of significative or signifying
signals, as a discourse sprinkled here and there with revelatory details:
a cryptographic language, which could afford us a kind of spectrum, or
panarama-framed in time-in which we should read, as in an open book, the
book of life, whose reading would take us to immortality through knowledge
of the universal cycles, analogous to the cycles of human beings.
The knowledge of "another time" is actually included in
the Hermetic ordination or initiation, which supposes the direct experience
of a cosmogony, and initiation into its mysteries. And our only concern
here has been to show the spiritual influence of the Hermetic tradiction,
under various forms, to our own day, in the West. Even Christianity offers
a virtual initiation by the intermediary of the sacrament of baptism, or
regeneration by waters, a reason for which persons interested in this type
of theme to which we are referring have no need to have recourse to traditions
foreign to their own, although in no way ought they to underrate the latter,
despite the difficulty that at times is had of identifying with them.11
Alchemist and astrologer work alone. One can see this
in numerous reproductions of Hermetic iconography. Or else by studying,
meditating or praying, when not absorbed in the contemplation of their
discoveries.12
The Hermetic work is produced in the interiority of the athanor
(analogically, the interiority of the temple of the human being). What
is certain is that this tradition proposes cognition by way of the study
of the cosmogony. The study of the cosmogonic laws does not require a literary
erudition, or the computation of banal details, which for these disciplines
are secondary things, if not at times actually obstructing. Knowing the
cosmogony supposes being one with it: to be alive, or to have been born
to the true human state. This astounding fact includes a loss and a finding
of identity, a death and a resurrection, realized numberless times in various
years, in the athanor of the alchemist, his interiority. And it
also gives him the material with which to continue working in this alchemical
process, also called that of initiation into the path of knowledge and
of real life.
To know a cosmogony means to live the three-dimensional
mandala of the cosmos. It means understanding the revelation of
a universe and its laws, a universe absolutely different from the one that
we have been taught: a universe in which values are so different that they
can only be perceived by means of a total psychological conversion. This
process has need of an order and a labor. Not only does it hold enormous
risks of deviation, of all types (which, generally, are part of the process),
but it can be almost impossible to realize, for a limitless number of reasons.
It is said that it is difficult, but not impossible. There can be lost,
on the road, among other things, health, fame and honor-all security. But
the reward is identity, knowledge, being. The alchemist's apprentice is
ready for spiritual realization, which includes the living knowledge of
the laws of the cosmos-in short, knowledge of himself, and of reality,
order, life. He will receive, then, what he has desired, provided his work
be patient and sacrificial,13
and provided he undergo the trials of the mythologic heroes. He must carry
his Hermetic work into every level of his life and his everyday, for it
is a matter of recovery of the light-lucidity-using the emotional fire
of blood. The study of the Hermetic disciplines of the magical texts will
alternate with constant meditation, and interior, sacred labor, and he
will then be surprised to see himself more and more a stranger in the world
of causes and effects.14
That internal space can be host to the structures with which to construct
a new cosmos, or better, the apprentice will discover them within himself,
manifested everywhere. He will then be able to live, from morning to night-and
in his very hours of rest-a new world, ever more astonishing, whose characteristic
is wealth and splendor alike. As this is nothing but what he holds in his
hands, he must therefore have become aware of his responsibility in his
own regard, and notice that it has not been by his merit, nor a discovery
of his own, that which he will have obtained, but simply is what it is,
and furthermore, does not belong to him. There is more: he will recognize
that his personhood, such as he has imagined it, does not exist. He must
then strive to deal with the strategies peculiar to the martial arts, and
constantly to balance the trajectory of his path, the management of his
vehicle. This art requires a delicate manipulation, and it is probable
that it will be learned by stages; at all events, it is a matter of a science
of powerful contrasts. But, persevering to the end, he will gain life in
a living mandala, a reflection of the cosmos, where all things have
meaning, in the tensions and hues proper to the harmony and order of creation,
and proper to its invisible, archetypal support. He will have known the
cosmogony, and place of the lunar baptism of John, of water (of the science
of the square), and have received the solar baptism of Jesus, of fire (of
the science of the compass), and when he has completed this last process,
then it can be said that he has understood the essence of earth and sky,
which is simultaneous with his arrival at the center, and is tantamount
to being now ready to begin his vertical ascent, for he has finished dealing
with the minor mysteries.
It is a matter, then, of a magical path, where the vehicles
themselves are revelatory.15
And when we use the term "magical," it goes without saying that we are
not speaking of anything of a minor tone, in which personal interests,
always niggardly, are at stake, and mere phenomenonic individualization
is valorized in accord with modern, materialized patterns. We refer to
something much more subtle and powerful: the invisible, authentic structure
of space and time, intuited directly, which is no longer anything exterior,
or alien from oneself and the whole. Among other reasons, it is said that
analogical thought is magical, because the associations and correspondences
it provokes teach us to think, give us to know what is at hand with the
obscure recall of cognition. And it transforms us into true intelligent
beings, in making us sharers in the nature of our identity. This psychological
transformation, and the phenomenology which corresponds to it, is magical-theurgic.
On the other hand, there are initiatory systems especially designed to
transmit these truths of analogical thought. These methods are charged
with the spiritual influence of those who have brought them to light, and
with the energy of all those who have meditated on them. This is what they
have been constructed for-just as any revelatory or sacred text, which
without this end would not have been written-and trust is had in their
symbolical, synthetic power, which manifests the cosmogony through a mandala
(or play of structures) in order to make us sharers in it, through the
use of codes and symbols like the sephirotic tree of life or the
play of the Tarot.
In this way, the spiritual energy of the revelation is
transmitted, and the person who is in a condition to understand will be
able to hear the voices and the call of Tradition, and to accomplish her
initiation, that is, set off down the road of knowledge. For this moment,
the majority of candidates have surely known the world around them sufficiently
well, and in one way or another have become disilllusioned with it: they
have "hit bottom" with respect to what current society can offer them as
attractive, especially as to the plane of the realization of authentic
being. That is, they have effected a labor of purification and selection
with respect to themselves, and that quest has brought them to the themes
of the Hermetic tradition, which almost never are found in a casual manner.
From a determinate moment onward-for the one who must be prepared internally-the
effective beginning of the process of knowledge is produced. The initiatory
trials come afterwards, and resemble passage through a labyrinth. The difficulties
that each aspirant may have encountered up to the moment of initiation
must be taken only as preparatory circumstance, however serious or significant
they may have been.
From this point forward, a process is articulated that,
transposed to the plane of the temporal, must necessarily be seen as successive
and gradual. It comprises the knowledge of seven, nine, or more, stages,16
depending on which tradition is in question--stages symbolized in the form
of a pyramid in space, or else, in the plane, within the spiral-or double
spiral-or with a play of concentric circles (the ones within the others),
which can be synthesized in three great circles or levels, corresponding
to the degrees of apprentice, companion, and master and any subdegrees
that there may be between one of these stages and another.
These things are quite simple to understand, although
not so much to experience honestly, for which reason vast numbers of persons
have only been confused and have caused confusion in the matter, having
recourse to the ignorance of the rest, and coming to constitute genuine
obstacles to the initiation of the pure.17
In this way, they become the accomplices of very dark forces, which we
do not dare to qualify, but which can form part of this process and even
definitively demolish it. We refer expressly to those who deny the possibility
of the incarnation of knowledge, through a development, and who thus repudiate
the divinity of the internal Christ, according to the unanimous opinion
of the traditions. It is those same persons who, not feeling qualified
for this enterprise, permit themselves to judge the others, in conformity
with the tawdriness and mediocrity of their patterns, for which reason
they condemn themselves to their own limitations, without, therefore, their
desire to harm and do evil being less manifest. A curious thing-this type
of persons are moralists, and at certain times pretend to know something
of the initiatory process. They are enemies both disguised and puerile,
who think that initiation is a physical ceremony, in which an extraterrestrial
being imposes hands on a poor, ignorant person and the latter is immediately
transformed into a superman. Initiation, for these persons, would be a
diploma, duly certified and guaranteed by a religion of officialism-a prize
for good conduct and punctuality, a "tip" granted to merit. Let us be very
cautious with those who "know" about doctrine, mystery, and initiation-false
doctors of the law who condemn the process of love and Christian passion.
These folk tend to be the same as those other dark sacristans by vocation
who pretend to be "good" and "pious," indeed, goodness and piety itself,18
holding genuine contests in order to determine who is the best and greatest
among them, all filling themselves with a prideful, moist, greasy satisfaction.
These personages, insignificant in themselves, can do serious harm, let
us repeat, legitimizing themselves by way of a fraudulent orthodoxy and
false positions and knowledge. And the aspirant must know that they are
enemies of her spiritual evolution, and she must necessarily defeat them,
on the plane of ideas, because it is probable that they are part of the
tests of her course, and not merely innocent persons making a mistake.
Just so, there is another kind that can be met with in
the course of the process, which, joined with the former, constitutes a
very pronounced bloc, sharing its simulation, although the apprentice must
know that innumberable dangers await her in the form of many personages,
who are only the external and social projection of their egos. In this
case, it is a matter of those who think that dominating the passions is
concealing them.19
Furthermore, they do so with a "second intention," intimately associated
with power. And they refuse to allow themselves the least demonstration
of their emotions, proceeding with a "poker face," persons with "courage,"
who act in "cold blood."20
With many concepts, the same thing occurs as with these
personages, or egos, and they are authentic dangers-without going further,
with all of the terminology currently in use, which corresponds to a literal,
materialized reading of the words and terms with respect to the meaning
with which they have been conceived. This confusion, this obstacle, is
not an isolated fact. On the contrary, it constitutes a sample of the general
cultural degradation of modern society, whose head, we must specify, is
the prince of this world, who, as has been so well said, is not a monster
of evil and falsehood, but, above all, is a genuine dunce, and a liar.
He is a personage whom we all of us bear within, and who has us constantly
sell ourselves for a mess of pottage.
Accordingly, there is nothing irregular in an initiatory
process realized by means of the teachings, instructors, and masters of
the Hermetic tradition-as neither is another, effectuated by the Jewish,
Christian, or Islamic traditions-and developing in normal form, despite
difficulties, anxieties, and paradoxes of every kind, proper to this magical-theurgical
path-on which work is done nearly always in solitary fashion-however much
its realization be produced in a medium as irregular as the modern world.
And we must warn persons who begin to experience certain phenomena referring
to the opening of their awareness and who begin to share them, that they
should take care, because these things are dangerous. But they may also
feel sufficiently secure to live with others, or with another, among whom
will be found the Spirit, as is said in the gospels. Likewise, it is declared:
"Seek and you shall find," and likewise, a Hermetic adage assures us that
"when there is a disciple, the master appears." The latter, if the attitude
is adequate, will appear at all events.
It will be appropriate to explain, on the one hand, that
no one can add a single cubit to his stature, for which reason one must
arrive where one can and should, in the trajectory of life, and in knowledge.
On the other hand, we must consider that, despite his manifold merits,
the aspirant has been or will be taught everything. No person can or will
be able to know these secrets, nor discover them by herself, except by
revelation, and her participation in an initiatory chain, into which she
will have inserted herself. The life proposed here is the symbolics of
the Hermetic tradition, and its relation with universal symbolics and mythology.
Where a symbol or myth is not clear in one or other context, the corresponding
analogy is sought in one tradition or another. The transpositions and relations
effected with the symbols constitute a great part of the Hermetic effort.
A Chinese, or pre-Columbian, symbol may immediately illuminate a European
symbol, and in this fashion be constituted an integral part of a play of
relations, of ideas, which, except for its participation, could not have
been constituted. Let us recall, once more, the energy-force attributed
to symbols in general and to those of the Hermetic tradition-in this particular
case-and to its magico-theurgical radiation. Full attention must also be
paid to the texts of the sages, hierophants, and magicians, who act in
a special manner, among those who are capable of receiving them, and escort
them to the garden of Paradise, or Adamic state, restoring them to the
original androgyny.
In any case, we should indicate, in conclusion, that it
is surely very beneficial to move specifically along the path of a determinate
religious tradition, and to practice the corresponding exoteric rite. But
in no wise is it indispensable, since the mysteries of the Hermetic tradition-which
is not religious-and initiation into the same, not only constitute the
living legacy of the West, but also, as it happens, its raison d'être,
as a gesture, or a color, in the spectrum of human history. |
