HERMETICISM, PHILOSOPHICAL. — A restricted spiritual current of the late Hellenistic age (3rd century A.D.) which takes its name from the Greek Hermes, identified with the Egyptian Thoth, god of wisdom, inventor of writing, astrology, and science.
According to the philosophical-religious vision of the time, it admits a division of the cosmos into three regions: the upper, seat of light (and divinity), the lower, inhabited by men, seat of corruption and of the evil inherent in matter, and the intermediate, peopled by spirits (daimones) and souls. The elements of its speculation are not original but drawn from Chaldean astralism, from Aristotle’s physics, from the psychology of Pythagoras and Plato, and from astrology systematized according to the new scientific vision of the world from the speculation of Hellenistic Egypt.
According to Hermeticism, the pure and divine light is in contrast with darkness; but, thanks to a voice that rises from the sphere of light, the matter of the world takes on an arrangement based on the four elements, of which air and fire are placed above and water and earth below. The soul, descending from its original seat of light to dwell on earth, must pass through the seven planetary spheres, acquiring the inclinations and passions proper to the nature of each planet. On rising after death to its original seat, it passes again through the seven planets, shedding in each the evil contracted in the first passage, and can thus present itself, freed, to the eighth sphere where the divine light dwells.
Liberation in Hermeticism is not procured by initiation into the mysteries of a saving God (Hermeticism has neither cult nor mysteries) but by knowledge (gnosis) obtained through revelation and contained in the Hermetic books. Hermeticism therefore did not have wide diffusion and remained the preserve of restricted coteries. NICOLA TURCHI