THE PRINCIPLE OF THE MIND

Charles Stein, The Light of Hermes Trismegistus: New Translations of Seven Essential Hermetic Texts. Inner Traditions, 2022.

As a fan of the Hermetica – those extraordinary cosmological, philosophical and magical works attributed to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, which had an immense but shamefully ignored impact on Western culture – it’s always good to see a new work on the subject. 

🔽

And this one, part of Inner Traditions’ Sacred Planet collection, held some surprises, offering some new perspectives even for an aficionado like me.

While an independent scholar who clearly has a deep knowledge of many subjects, Charles Stein is first and foremost a poet, and the novelty in The Light of Hermes Trismegistus comes from his addressing not just the texts, but the whole subject of Hermeticism, with a poet’s sensibilities. As he puts it, he considers the seven translations as "more part of my work as a poet than as performances of scholarly control over the literary material".

Stein describes his book as "an imaginative speculation on the possible present and future being of the God Hermes and his epiphany as the culture hero and initiating deity, Hermes Trismegistus." For many, especially those coming from an academic perspective, ‘imaginative’ and ‘speculation’ will be immediate turn-offs, but what Stein gives us is an important new slant on both Thrice-Great Hermes and the meaning of Hermeticism that offers more than a few surprises.

For a start, the ‘seven essential texts’ include some not normally considered part of the Hermetic canon. Indeed, some don’t even mention Hermes in any of his forms; rather, for Stein, they ‘manifest his spirit’. Only one, the Poimandres, comes from the Corpus Hermeticum, the Hermetica’s ‘bible’.

Equally unexpectedly, Stein treats the Greek god Hermes as part of that spirit, which is why he begins with classical texts about him. The standard line – which is how I’ve tended to see it – views Hermes Trismegistus as a fusion between two independent deities, Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth, to create a completely new entity who was, if anything, closer to Thoth.

Not that Stein’s emphasis on Hermes is intended to downplay the significance of Egypt. He sees the Egyptian civilisation’s ‘Divine Background’ as not just preceding that of Greece chronologically, but as profoundly influencing it, including its Olympian theology. So, for Stein Hermes Trismegistus wasn’t a fusion but a reunion of the Greek and Egyptian gods, which came about during the Hellenistic hegemony that followed Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt. Hermes had been Thoth from the very beginning. Another surprise.

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus therefore presents a very personal vision of Hermeticism, in which the spirit of Hermes is bigger than just the works and philosophy attributed to the Thrice-Great one, hence the unexpected choice of texts. It’s up to the reader to decide whether they share that vision, or go for the more traditional historical and esoteric reading – and for me that’s way too big a question to answer from a single reading. But it gives a lot to muse upon, and that’s what gives the book its value. It’s a stimulating read.

The other energising aspect (with which I’m in total agreement) is that Stein doesn’t approach his seven texts as the embodiment of archaic ideas from an ancient past; as in the earlier quote, his main concern is Hermes’ ‘possible present and future being’. For him, the spirit of Hermes is alive and relevant today.

The book opens with a general introduction, some of which Stein acknowledges may ‘seem a bit abstruse’. He’s right, it does – but that’s inevitable given the complexity of the ideas and concepts he’s dealing with, such as the nature of Being. It’s well worth the effort, though.

The translations themselves are divided between texts from the classical and Hellenistic-Roman periods – i.e. before and after Hermes and Thoth were reunited – separated by a chapter on the vital importance of Egypt in this story through the ‘presence or pressure’ of its Divine Background on ancient Greece. Stein also emphasises the sheer alienness of ancient Egypt to us, in terms of its conceptions of nature, cosmos and time; today’s Western world is, for him, a ‘counter Egypt’, the very opposite of that ancient civilisation.

The seven texts are Hesiod’s Theogony on the origins of the gods of Olympus; the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in which the god ‘is a thief and a con man, a cunning little devil, but at the same time he shows a range of abilities that makes him a figure for the human intellect entire’; the ‘Poem of Parmenides’, a particularly key work for Stein; the Poimandres; the Chaldean Oracles – Stein has assembled his own, single poem from the surviving fragments, omitting those that he sees as having Christian interpolations; ‘The Vision of Isis’ from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (AKA The Golden Ass), the only one translated from Latin rather than Greek; and the alchemical ‘On Divine Virtue’ by Zosimos of Panopolis, Stein’s commentary on which gives an excellent discussion of the spiritual aspects of alchemy that forms part of this earliest work on the art.

Each has a short preface and is followed by a lengthier commentary. The translations weren’t made specially for this collection, but by Stein for himself over the last fifty years. He emphasises that they’re not intended to correct or replace previous translations, and that it’s not simply a matter of rendering the texts from one language to another: "Every translation is an interpretation, and conversely, every act of interpretation translates . . . the sense of the text into a new situation."

So, for Stein, who – or what – is Hermes? As he puts it right at the start, "Hermes is the very principle of the mind in all its possibilities". And he summarises the range of those possibilities: "Hermes sponsors scientific disciplines but also negotiates with magical agencies and Wiccan theurgy. He whispers in the minds of CEOs, demagogues, pundits, visionaries, curious children, careful craftsmen, secret sages, and underworld dons."

Stein stresses Hermes’ trickster side, and there’s some captivating writing on the paradoxes this gives rise to:

"...Hermes as sponsor of intellectual penetration gives us modern mathematics, modern physics, modern technology, information theory, modern finance, and so on. Yet Hermes as a trickster knows that these clever deployments of intelligence and practical resourcefulness cannot penetrate to the truth of Being or effect a commodious alignment upon or with it. In mathematics he sees paradoxes; in fundamental physical theories, irreconcilable theoretical differences; in the technologies that seek mastery rather than harmony, environmental and military catastrophes; in the virtual back rooms of finance, the spawning of clever objects of investment that put at hazard the entirety of our financial arrangements."

Ultimately, though, for Stein the point isn’t what Hermes was, but what he is – and will be. Each of the commentaries focuses on the relevance for the text for us today and for the future. In Stein’s own words, they are "working out in various ways how I construe these works to embody, express, reveal, and project for the present and oncoming times what I will call the Hermetic Genius or spirit."

The big message – the reason for producing the book – is the potential the spirit of Hermes has for changing the future: "Recovering a Hermetic perspective – not in the sense of going back to a condition prior to the advent of science but in moving ahead to one that incorporates and integrates science as among its possibilities – would seem to be imperative."

It’s a message that fits perfectly with the conclusions that Lynn Picknett and I came to in The Forbidden Universe, that Hermeticism not only had a profound impact on the scientific revolution, essentially creating science, but that science’s latest discoveries are increasingly validating the Hermetic cosmology. Stein, though, takes it further than just science, arguing that an understanding of the spirit of Hermes offers ‘the renewal of the world’.

The Hermetica, of course, form a core part of Western Esoteric Tradition, and Stein sees that, too, as still evolving. So The Light of Hermes Trismegistus has a lot for esotericists too, for example in his discussion of magic based on the Greek Magical Papyri.

In short, in this book Charles Stein widens the picture and gives us a lot to think deeply about. Time for a second reading...

• Clive Prince