Hermeticism, Astrology, Esoterica

Abstract

According to the hermetic sources the cosmos is a living sacred being mixed out of body, soul and spirit.  The human has a special place in it due to the soul’s mediating role and our paradoxical nature.  On the one hand we are able, through reason, to negotiate our way through the material world; on the other, through nous, we have qualities of imagination and intuition and so are able to appreciate love and beauty as intrinsic to the spiritual life of the cosmos.  The qualities of nous can be cultivated via reverence and initiation and enable man to see the world symbolically and so divine the course of best action, in line with God’s will.  The recovery of these ideas in the Renaissance by Marsilio Ficino was central to his spiritual work and astrological practice, which was a daily preoccupation for him. 

In our time there is a tendency to prioritise the material world, manipulated by science and technology, accompanied by the loss of soul or spirit.  These factors contribute to the loss of the presentiment of astrology as described by Geoffrey Cornelius.  In the twenty-first century, Iain McGilchrist argues from material science that we do indeed have two ways of engaging with the world built in to the two hemispheres of our brains.  These two modes show illuminating similarities to the hermetic reason and nous.  From a practical and philosophical perspective McGilchrist sees us as dangerously left-sided, losing touch with soul and spirit and therefore with our moral compass.  McGilchrist shows us that seeing past the immediate facts, to a wider world of life-giving possibilities, is a right hemisphere contribution.  Jake Chapman teaches this wider seeing by way of soft systems thinking, questioning the left hemisphere application of machine metaphors to living systems and opening a path to adaptive responses to problems.  The psychologist C. G. Jung saw the world as full of paradox and reasserted soul as a mediating factor via the study of psyche.  This paper explores the hermetic tradition and Ficino’s astrological hermeticism.  It argues that, in our time, the symbolic seeing and divination of Ficino’s hermetic astrology are tied in to the re-establishment of a hermetic perspective in the world at large, drawing on the work of figures such as McGilchrist, Chapman and Jung.

The aim of this paper is to emphasize some of the main Hermetic astrological writings, famous during the first three centuries B.C. and the first three centuries C.E. in the Mediterranean region. Although they often consist of scattered fragments discovered by chance thanks to their mentioning by the Greek and Latin scholars of the time in their works, the Hermetic astrological writings are usually ascribed to the Egyptian god of knowledge and writing, in his syncretic aspect of Thoth-Hermes-Trismegistos. However, there were also cases when this sort of writings were the apanage of the highest Egyptian priests, like Petosiris, and/or even the kings, such as Nechepso.