HERMETICISM, PHILOSOPHICAL. - A narrow spiritual current of the late Hellenistic era (3rd century AD) that takes its name from the Greek Hermes, inasmuch as he was assimilated to the Egyptian Thoth, god of wisdom, inventor of writing, of astrology and of science.
According to the philosophical-religious worldview of the time, it admits the division of the cosmos into three sections: the upper seat of light (and of divinity), the lower inhabited by men, the seat of corruption and of the evil inherent in matter, and the intermediate one populated by spirits (daimones) and by souls. The elements of its speculation are not original but taken from Chaldean astralism, from the physics of Aristotle, from the psychology of Pythagoras and of Plato, from astrology organized according to the new scientific vision of the world by the speculation of Hellenistic Egypt.
According to Hermeticism, the initial pure and divine light comes into conflict with the darkness: but, thanks to a voice that rises from the sphere of light, the matter of the world takes on an arrangement on the basis of 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 inhabit the earth, must pass through the seven planetary spheres, loading itself with the inclinations and the passions proper to the nature of each planet. Rising again after death to its original seat, it passes once more through the seven planets, depositing in each the evil contracted in the first passage, and can thus present itself, liberated, at the eighth sphere where the divine light resides.
Liberation in Hermeticism is not brought about by initiation into the mysteries of a savior God (Hermeticism has neither cult nor mysteries) but by the knowledge (gnosis) obtained through revelation and contained in the Hermetic books. Hermeticism did not spread widely and remained the preserve of narrow conventicles. Nicola Turchi