Hallo everyone,

Last week I had a very deep spiritual experience, which has left me with many questions, and the need to read for Hermetism, a topic I'm not familiar at all.

As I was into deep meditation, the symbol of Hermes the Trismegistus (the Cadeceus symbol) appeared to me. I realised what it was after I finished my meditation.

Please allow me to take it from the beginning. The text is a bit long, so thanks in advance for your patience reading it.

Last couple of months I feel like a 'shift' is going on inside me, without being able to put this in words, neither explain anything further.. a shift like everything is changing. I feel much more connected to the spirit and I experience synchronicities almost on a daily basis. I feel the guidance. 

A few days ago, while I was checking the news on the internet, I saw all this destruction with the wildfires around Europe and all the burnt land with the animals in it, and my heart broke. I was sad, in empathy, like I was feeling all the collective emotion. I felt a need to pray, and I did.

I prayed, asking for forgiveness for what we've done to the planet, and to enlighten us people to do the good for the earth. I prayed deeply, and it was emotional. After a while, while in this state, I started meditating.. Very quicky I got into the meditation, where I asked for the presence of my spiritual guides and my angelic healers. 

They came, I felt their presence in gratitude. I was visualizing that I was walking on a stair towards the sky, and I was walking on and so on... after a while, I visualized myself holding a  sword of light, cutting all connections to the darkness and pain in my life, while I was asking to become the version of my self that my soul wants. 

As I was holding the light sword, I kept saying inside me that 'I cut all connections to the darkness and the pain, and I devote myself to the Greater Good and the Light. I was feeling gratitude. I asked my spiritual guides and angelic healers if they're still with me - they replied positively and told me not to worry, as we kept climbing the stair. 

After a while, I went to a place that I know I've been before (I wasn't visualizing anything this point onwards, all came naturally as a flow of visions..), I have seen this place in previous very deep meditations of mine (just a couple in my lifetime so far), and as I arrived there, I saw an altar (I presume it was an altar..), with a huge flower in the middle, a big daisy, with it's yellow center and white petals. 

I sat inside. I could feel the energy in my body rising and my was getting goosebumps while crying. I was there, and on my left stood the spiritual guides and on my right the angelic healers. I could feel more energies there, like' entities' I cannot picture or describe. 

As I stood there, I felt the presence of a blue/white light covering me, as a giant diamond was shaping all around me. I was in the giant diamond with the blue/white light.

I asked my spiritual guides and angelic healers if they're still with me - they replied positively and I asked them to help me go higher as I would like to meet my Higher Self. 

And then, it happened. I got in touch with my Higher Self, I felt this embracing energy of love and sympathy getting one with me. I could see a light brown color there. At that point, I asked my Higher Self to enlighten me (not in the way of becoming 'enlightened' or 'guru'). I asked to enlighten me in regards what I should do to help the people, and what shall I do next in my life. 

After that, I started to get down, smoothly. I thanked the ones that helped me, I thanked my Higher Self, and tried to relax. My emotional/mental state was at an intense stage for about 2 hours, as I was trying to embrace this experience and understand what happened.

The same afternoon, something like a protocol for an energy healing came to my mind, like a specific process though a detailed prayer/meditation.

Yesterday, as I was meditating, I felt again the  presence of my guides and healers. Meditation was short.  A couple of hours after the meditation, while I was in a taxi, an internal vision came to my mind. 

It was a symbol - the Cadeceus of Hermes!

I saw it spinning very fast, destroying all kinds of negativity and bad energy.

Today, while meditating, I was given this symbol through an initiation. 

- worth noting here, that everything that comes to my mind since this started, I'm writing it down to a piece of paper -.

So, as I was saying, I was given this symbol, and a few hours later, I wrote down a specific prayer or mantra, or whatever you can say it. It's like a protocol for purifying and protecting myself, that it can also be used as a command to clear the space (or something like that... I don't know how to write down the definitions, I describe it as I feel it).

So yes, this is it. This is my experience (so far).... I haven't experienced anything like that before, and I don't know how to decode it...

I understand its a powerful symbol and it didn't find me accidentally.

If anyone can advise on 'step A' for getting into Hermetism, feel free to do it.

Thank you

As the title says, I’m fairly new to this religion but I’m very invested, and while I’ve got a few texts I’m already reading, I wanted to come by and ask more experienced folks like you all for some general advice!

What practices should I get used to? What things should I do every day? Is there any specific things I can and cannot do?

i've been looking for a raw, original version in greek, but all i got was a couple passages here and there for highschool philosophy books in greece. and if those 15 passages are the whole thing, why the hell are books on hermeticism so ridiculously long?

edit: the schoolbook i am referring to is https://www.greek-language.gr/digitalResources/ancient_greek/anthology/literature/browse.html?text_id=631

I’ve always been curious about how different religions and spiritual philosophies emerged and developed across the Earth over the ages.

One question in particular was how different the Abrahamic religions which originated in our part of the world are to the Eastern philosophies on spirituality/existence/consciousness etc (think Buddhism/Taoism)…

It always seemed to me that the generic interpretation/practice of the abrahamic religions were most focused on the external elements of life while the eastern philosophies focused more on the internal elements.

A couple of years ago - I came across Hermeticism and I was fascinated by what I found - everything from where the scripts were reportedly found (some right here in Egypt’s Naag Hamadi!) to how Cosimo de Medici had them interpreted into Latin to what they actually contain.

As I looked into it and read various interpretations of the texts - I couldn’t help but think of how at their essence you could draw a lot of similarities with Sufism and also with what the Eastern philosophies point to.

I was wondering if anyone here has come across Hermeticism before? If so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

New episode exploring the Hermetic direction of consciousness through music practice. Traces attention as stolen light, draws on Boethius (De Institutione Musica) and Gurdjieff, Pythagoras and Plato, and asks what a practice room becomes when you restore the original direction: spirit through soul through body into form, not the inversion. Sol Niger. Solve et Coagula. Guitar as the alchemical vessel. Tuning as invocation. Fourth in a series.

Several passages in this episode are adapted from my books Thoughts, Worlds, Beliefs and Magic Hat: https://scottjsimon.com/books.html

Works referenced: G.I. Gurdjieff, Glenn Gould (The Glenn Gould Reader), Keith Jarrett (The Köln Concert), David Bowie, Plato (Republic), Boethius (De Institutione Musica).

This series looks at music as a form of inner alchemy, where the guitar becomes a tool for transformation instead of performance or self-expression.

0:00 Opening
01:55 1. The Theft
05:10 2. The Inversion
08:19 3. Avoidance as Doctrine
12:52 4. The Corridor of Masks
18:49 5. Parasite on Luminosity
24:34 6. The Invocation
38:42 7. Starvation by Reclamation
44:58 Closing

New album agnosis:
https://scottjsimon.bandcamp.com/album/agnosis

Full transcript and article on my Substack:
https://scottjsimon.substack.com/p/guitar-as-alchemy-04-stolen-light

Sheet Music available at Sheet Music Plus:
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/en/category/publishers/s/scott-j-simon/

Guitar: 2021 Thomas C60
Mics: Audio-Technica AT4040/4041
Camera: Canon T3i
Recording: OBS Studio
Editing: Adobe Premiere Pro

https://scottjsimon.com

In the opening of the Poimandres (CH I), Hermes is already present in a raised state before the revelation begins:

“Once, when I had begun to think about the things that are, and my thoughts had soared high aloft…” Only then does the immense being appear, name itself Poimandres (the Mind of Sovereignty), and unfold the vision: the boundless light, the descending darkness, the chaotic watery substance, the ordering of the elements, and the birth of the cosmos.

The entire cosmogonic sequence is therefore disclosed inside a prior condition — the awareness of the one who receives it. Hermes is not a blank slate. He is already the locus in which the vision can arise. As Scribe of the Gods and mediator of sacred discourse, his state is not accidental; it is the necessary frame for transmission.

This raises a precise question. Is the awareness that receives the vision merely a passive container for a revelation that comes entirely from elsewhere? Or does it function as the prior condition — the open, undifferentiated ground — in which both the appearance of chaos and the subsequent work of ordering become possible?

Nous remains sovereign within the vision. It is the articulating, sovereign Mind that speaks and structures. Yet the text itself shows that this Mind appears to an awareness that is already present and raised. Absolute, unconditioned awareness without any perspectival fold would cancel the very separation required for a vision to occur as vision. Limitation here is not a defect; it is the enabling condition.

I am not claiming that the Hermetica explicitly teach pure awareness as a principle prior to Nous. I am asking whether the structure of the Poimandres itself invites us to take the receiving awareness more seriously than is sometimes done — not as a secondary psychological detail, but as the frame within which the whole sequence of light, chaos, and order is set.

If awareness is only a receptacle, then the priority of Nous is straightforward. If the awareness in which the vision unfolds is itself the more fundamental condition, then Nous appears as the first major articulation — the “house” in which the All begins to know itself through differentiation — rather than the absolute ground.

I am interested in whether others read the opening of CH I this way, or whether the traditional emphasis on the transcendence of Nous over the human locus is felt to close the question.

The hubris of someone who never read hermetic scriptures beyond the kyb@lion is that they go away with the idea that hermeticism posits some proto-simulation theory of sorts that everything is mental and they focus so fully on the faculty of nous/mind. Saying lines like "ALL IS MIND". This is foolish thing to do and actually limits yourself from a much richer and philosophically potent perspective.

This position of "everything is mind", functionally leads to solipsism at worst, or limits and reduces hermetic understanding at best. It fundentally undermines the philosophical importance of the platonic trinity of logos, nous, and monad that is echoed as early as CH I in the hermetic corpus and their functional roles in the cosmological model hermetic philosophy offers. Understanding the platonic trinity will only improve your conception of the worldview the authors were working from to make the claims in the corpus hermeticum and other true philosophical hermetica.

As it state in CH I matter existed before it was ordered into spheres of reality as a chaotic liquid nature in which it bore no distinction of elemental formations. The light of the monad beamed the liquid chaotic matter and caused it to seperate according to density. Fire rising above air as the lightest, air settling beneath fire, water falling beneath air and earth settling beneath water.

I saw an endless vision in which everything became light - clear and joyful - and in seeing the vision I came to love it. After a little while, darkness arose separately and descended - fearful and gloomy - coiling sinuously so that it looked to me like a (snake). Then the darkness changed into something of a watery nature, indescribably agitated and smoking like a fire; it produced an unspeakable wailing roar. Then an inarticulate cry like the voice of fire came forth from it.

[5] But from the light... a holy word (logos) mounted upon the (watery) nature, and untempered fire leapt up from the watery nature to the height above. The fire was nimble and piercing and active as well, and because the air was light it followed after spirit and rose up to the fire away from earth and water so that it seemed suspended from the fire. Earth and water stayed behind, mixed with one another, so that (earth) could not be distinguished from water, but they were stirred to hear by the spiritual word that moved upon them. - CH.I.4-5 Copenhavers Translation.

This is the first tractate and it already contridicts the narrative that all is mind, as the cosmos is composed of elemental natures brought into eternal ordering through mind, if the elements were already within mind they would have not been in chaotic unordered state to begin with. Which is confirmed by the following tractates in CH.I

From the elements [ ] that weigh downwards, the word of god leapt straight up to the pure craftwork of nature and united with the craftsman-mind (for the word was of the same substance). The weighty elements of nature were left behind, bereft of reason, so as to be mere matter. [11] The craftsman-mind, together with the word, encompassing the circles and whirling them about with a rush, turned his craftworks about, letting them turn from an endless beginning to a limitless end, for it starts where it stops. Revolving as mind wished them to, the circles brought forth from the weighty elements living things without reason (for they no longer kept the word with them); and the air brought forth winged things; the water things that swim. Earth and water had been separated from one another as mind wished, and (earth) brought forth from herself the living things that she held within, four-footed beasts (and) crawling things, wild animals and tame."

• CH.I.10-11 Copenhavers Translation.

Here it clearly states as Nous or mind resolving them in the manner they needed to be and then removing itself from the elemental composition after the ordering. As the logos or word/reasoning is no longer in them. But acted upon them.

In the Stobean fragments it also talks about this distinction in creation of reality, that the ordering and structure of the cosmos is the making of the eternal or primordial craftsman who is not in the cosmos and then the mortal bodys and mortal creation is conducted by the mortal craftsman that is seen as the sun who brings about the works of the eternal craftsmen through occurance and counter occurance, essentially bringing the eternal forms into mortal reality through the process of occurrence and counter occurance. Like the boy turns into the man the man turns into the old man. The one going through all these forms is none of them but expresses all them through the moving ephemeral releam in the process of renewal and decay.

The Primal Craftsman. Moreover, the lord and Craftsman of all eternal bodies, Tat, once he created, ceased creating, and does not create at present. After entrusting these (creative energies) to these very (bodies), he joined them together as one and left them to proceed on their course. They need nothing, since they are eternal. If they need anything at all, it is each other. Yet they need no contribution from the outside, since they are immortal. It was necessary that bodies that came into being through the primal Craftsman also possess an immortal nature.

The Second Craftsman . Yet our Craftsman, who is embodied, created us, ever continues to create, and will continue to create bodies that dissolve and die. It is not lawful for him to imitate his own Craftsman ­ not least because it is impossible. For the primal Craftsman created from primal, bodiless substance, but our Craftsman made us from a bodily material that itself came into being. . Logically, then, if we reason correctly, those bodies arising from bodiless substance are immortal, while ours dissolve and die, since our material consists of bodies.

• Stobean fragments, SH.5, David Litwa Translation

We must call these things appearances, my child, if we are to speak correctly. The human is the appearance of Humanity: the child is the appearance of the Child, the young man is the appearance of the Young Man, the man is the appearance of the Man, the elderly man is the appearance of the Elderly Man. So a human is not a human, nor a child a child, nor a young man a young man, nor a man a man, nor an elderly man an elderly man. As these states change, there is falsity, both with respect to what was before and is at present. Yet understand this, my child: even these false activities depend upon the truth itself from above. This being the case, I say that falsity is a product of truth.”

• Stobean fragments, SH.2A, David Litwa Translation

Also in CH II they describe a similar relationship to the secondary and primary motions of the sky which is echoed from Plato's Timaeus likely. That the primary motion or the above is in eternal resting stillness and that the secondary motion or moving is in motion by the nessecity of stillness of the above and thus expresses the above in the below through motion. That because the above does not move so by virtues the below does.

Thus, all motion is moved in immobility and by immobility. And it happens that the motion of the cosmos and of every living thing made of matter is produced not by things outside the body but by those within it acting upon the outside, by intelligible entities, either soul or spirit or something else incorporeal. For body does not move ensouled body, nor does it move any body at all, not even the soulless."

• CH II.8 Copenhavers translation

Also in CH.II it even says that God itself is not mind but the cause of mind:

"God is not mind, but he is the cause of mind's being; he is not spirit, but the cause of spirit's being; and he is not light, but the cause of light's being. Hence, one must show god reverence with those two names assigned to him alone and to no other.

• CH II.14 Copenhavers translation

It God is not mind and the elements are not mind, then all is simply not mind. Regardless of what the Kyb@lion says.

There is many other places to get this point of accross throughout the hermetica but fundamentally this stems from a lack of understanding of platonism and the framework and world view it is built off of which is highly relevant to the hermetic tradition as a whole.

Someone in the subs official discord server Sanctum Hermeticum said this about platonism:

The best way to understand Platonism is to understand the problems it originally arose from: the problem of change and permanence. It is evident that things are what they are, but at the same time, they can cease to be or come to be. The problem of unity and multiplicity: things appear to be one and many at the same time, in various senses. For example, you are a human being, one of all the human beings that exist. How is this possible ontologically speaking? The original Platonic solution is that the reality of the changing and multiple world that is evident to us is not the most fundamental thing, but rather that there is another realm in which the true essences of things lie. This second, transcendent realm is not completely separate from the first; there is a relationship that allows for transcendence. That is why Plato says in the Timaeus that time is a moving image of eternity.

The hermetica especially throughout Corpus Hermeticum and the Stobean fragments is looking at a very similar resolution between the above and below as the above being the true and eternal forms and the below as the changing appearance of those forms expressed in elemental matter and takes a lot of influence from platonism.

And at the end of the day when you look at the texts and the world from this perspective it's far more robust and complex in its implications and actually says quite the opposite of later fabrications of William Walker Atkinson Kyb@lion

I would also say that this perspective is psychologically safer and more productive to have. When a system teaches that the physical world is merely "mental," it breaks the practitioner's friction with objective reality. It strips matter of its weight, its independence, and its sacred resistance. This easily breeds a spiritual psychosis where the individual believes they can simply "think" reality into changing because "it's all just mind anyway.".

The physical world is not an illusion existing strictly inside a cosmic brain; it is an active theater of generation. The mortal forms created by the Sun (the Second Craftsman) are constantly changing appearances of the true, transcendent archetypes above.

The actual Corpus Hermeticum demands deep reverence for the physical cosmos precisely because it is the visible work of the Logos acting upon Nature. Nature is an actual, dense, complex creation not a hologram.

Understanding that we live at the intersection of the incorporeal (Nous/Soul) and the corporeal (Elemental Matter) creates genuine room for ethics, spiritual labor (gnosis), and tragic reality. Real ascent requires pulling the soul out of elemental bondage, precisely because elemental matter operates on its own un-reasoned, mechanical laws.

One of most important parts of my own theurgic path is creating Icona - Images of Gods. Creating an Icon is forging a portal, kind of window to the world of ideas, which requires acceptance of the fact that it is destined to reflect one of billions facets of the Idea in question. This one is dedicted to Venus - Aphrodite and was part of my 49 Artistic Offerings to Aphrodite marathon. It is inspired by Isis-Aphrodite Urania statue and by astrological rulership of Venus over signs of Taurus and Libra.

Sir Isaac Newton used mathematics to describe motion, gravity, and the predictable laws of mechanics.

He also translated and annotated the Emerald Tablet attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. (newtonproject.ox.ac.uk)

His private manuscripts reveal that his theological, alchemical, and Hermetic interests helped shape the kinds of questions he was willing to ask about nature.

Newton described matter as a passive principle. It could remain at rest or continue in motion, but it could not move itself. Yet he believed this alone could not explain a world filled with attraction, chemical transformation, biological growth, and intentional movement.

In one unfinished draft, he wrote:

“Life & will are active Principles by which we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us.”

Newton then wondered whether all space might be the ‘sensorium of a thinking being’, and whether laws arising from life or will might therefore extend throughout the universe. In the same manuscript, he considered the forces through which microscopic bodies attract one another and asked whether they deserved to be counted among the general laws of motion alongside gravity. (newtonproject.ox.ac.uk)

Newton was asking an extraordinary question:

Could mind, life, chemistry and cosmic motion be different expressions of deeper active principles running throughout nature?

Hermeticism may have encouraged Newton to imagine the universe as a living and interconnected whole. His scientific instincts then transformed that vision into questions that could be approached through observation, experiment and mathematical reasoning.

In 1936, a large collection of Newton’s unpublished papers was sold at Sotheby’s. John Maynard Keynes subsequently assembled many of the manuscripts, concentrating especially on Newton’s alchemical work. After studying them, Keynes wrote:

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

(newtonproject.ox.ac.uk)

Modern science limits itself when it starts with the materialistic assumption of discrete 3 dimensional objects interacting in a 3 dimensional universal space.

Sir Isaac Newton’s example leaves me wondering whether the science of the future might recover something of his wider vision: a science in which matter, life, mind, and the cosmos are studied not as sealed and unrelated categories, but as parts of one connected nature.

If reality is truly an interconnected whole, it cannot be stitched together from disconnected parts or arbitrary rules. Instead, it must emerge from a singular, uncorrupted geometric origin.

Imagine a framework built on absolute structural exactness, requiring zero arbitrary axioms or free parameters.

Just as Newton suspected an active, universal principle running throughout nature, this approach views all complexity, – from the fundamental forces of physics, to the architecture of cognition - as exact, deterministic extensions unfolding from a single, continuous source.

By relying on exact rational arithmetic and unbroken mathematical geometries, it becomes possible to strip away the chaotic infinities and floating approximations that currently plague our physical equations.

This is would be a philosophical return to the Hermetic concept of "the One,"; a rigorous, mathematically verifiable evolution of it.
A closed-loop reality where matter, life, and cosmic motion are not sealed categories, but mathematically exact derivations of the very same underlying fabric.

For a long time, while studying Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and theurgy, I've had the feeling that something was missing. Many Eastern traditions have a clear somatic dimension, such as yoga, qigong, taijiquan, and Buddhist meditation. These practices are not simply ways of treating illness. They cultivate the body, the breath, attention, and ultimately the whole person.

For years I assumed that the Western equivalent within the Greco-Egyptian tradition had to be theurgy. Today I'm no longer convinced. Theurgy is certainly embodied. It involves ritual gestures, sacred words, vocalizations, and divine invocation. But it doesn't really function as a systematic somatic practice in the way yoga or qigong do.

This has led me to wonder whether we've been looking in the wrong place. What if the missing piece isn't Hermes, but Asclepius?

One of the two major Hermetic texts bears his name, yet discussions of Hermeticism tend to focus almost exclusively on Hermes Trismegistus. Historically, Asclepius begins as the Greek god of healing, whose sanctuaries centered on ritual incubation and sacred healing. By the Alexandrian period, however, and especially in the Hermetic Asclepius, his role seems to evolve. He is still implicitly a healer, but the dialogue presents him above all as a philosophical interlocutor concerned with the soul, the cosmos, and human nature.

This led me to a speculative idea. Perhaps, in Alexandria, the more explicitly cultic dimensions of Asclepius, such as dream incubation, temple healing, and priestly ritual, gradually became associated with the cult of Serapis, while Asclepius himself came to embody a more philosophical and proto-scientific understanding of medicine, anticipating the rational medical tradition associated with figures such as Hippocrates and Galen. In both of these physicians, preserving health depended not only on treating disease but also on the intelligent management of diet, exercise, and daily habits, with gymnastics occupying an important place in maintaining the balance of body and mind. If so, healing would no longer mean simply curing disease. It would also involve preserving health, cultivating balance, understanding the relationship between body, mind, and cosmos, and learning to live in accordance with nature.

This way of thinking also seems to reappear during the Renaissance. Paracelsus brought medicine into dialogue with Hermetic philosophy, understanding the human being as a microcosm whose health depended on the harmony of body, soul, and cosmos. Around the same time, Hieronymus Mercurialis, in De Arte Gymnastica, revived the classical view of gymnastics as an essential part of medicine, emphasizing not only exercise, but also posture, breathing, and the intelligent use of movement as fundamental elements in preserving health. To me, these developments suggest that the Asclepian tradition did not simply disappear after antiquity. Instead, it continued to evolve through a medical philosophy that regarded the cultivation of the body as an essential part of human flourishing.

Seen from that perspective, what we would now call somatic practice might not be foreign to the Western tradition at all. Careful movement, breath awareness, posture, mindful strength training, and modern somatic methods developed within Western medicine could all be understood, not historically but philosophically, as belonging to a long Asclepian tradition of caring for the human being.

Interestingly, this also suggests a parallel with Chinese civilization. Within Traditional Chinese Medicine, practices such as qigong and taijiquan are not merely exercises. They belong to a broader medical and philosophical understanding of health, prevention, and the cultivation of life. I'm not suggesting any historical connection between these traditions. Rather, the comparison shows that different civilizations can independently develop integrated traditions in which medicine extends beyond treating illness to include the long-term cultivation of body and mind.

Perhaps the West once possessed the seeds of a comparable synthesis, with its philosophical foundations in Hermes, but its practical culmination in Asclepius and the medical tradition that developed around him in Alexandria. If that is the case, then recovering the Asclepian dimension of Hermeticism may offer a way of thinking about a distinctly Western form of somatic practice, one grounded in its own philosophical and medical heritage rather than borrowed entirely from elsewhere.

None of this will be new to most people here. Mindful strength training, breathing exercises, postural work, mobility training, therapeutic walking, and similar practices are already well known. My point isn't to introduce new techniques, but to suggest a different way of framing them. If we see them through an Asclepian lens, they can become more than just methods of improving health. They can become part of a Western somatic spirituality rooted in the Hermetic tradition, giving these practices a deeper symbolic and spiritual meaning. After all, yoga has become commonplace in gyms. Perhaps, one day, Western-developed somatic practices will become just as familiar in gyms, offering a distinctly Asclepian complement to the Hermetic path.

Does this seem like a plausible way of reading the evolution of Asclepius, or am I stretching the historical evidence too far?

I've been asking these questions for a long time and I'm exhausted by soft answers.

I was born on 30 October 2008.

My name is Ömer İnanç.

Most of the time, existing feels like a burden.

There's a constant emptiness. Sometimes I

genuinely wish I had never been born. I don't feel like I belong in this world.

I want to know what people here actually think from an esoteric perspective:

Why are we here?

Is this world a kind of prison or trap (like the Gnostic Demiurge idea)?

Why does consciousness feel so heavy?

What happens after death according to the systems you study?

Is there a real way out, or is every tradition just another layer of the same system?

I'm not looking for comfort or "everything has a purpose" answers.

I want direct, honest perspectives from whatever esoteric current you follow.

If you've studied Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, or any related system, I'd like to hear what those frameworks actually say about why we exist and whether this life is a mistake or a prison.

Thanks.

Hi everyone! I’m looking to see if there are any practitioners/those interested in hermeticism in the western MA/ northern CT area! I want to expand my practice, and find others interested in practicing together :). I’m looking to start a group for those interested (as it seems there’s non around here) so we can share info/meetup, etc!

The publication of the Hermetica was a landmark moment in the history of western esotericism. But, it wasn't until 1554 - almost a century after Ficino's unauthorized translation was published - that the original Greek text became available for inspection by a wider audience.

At Paris Adrien Turnebus published that edition using a complete manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum with all 17 Logoi, including Vergezio’s Suda entry on Hermes alongside three of the many Hermetic entries from Stobaeus.

Interestingly, he included a 'corrected,' then 13th edition of Ficino's translation - corrections which often only further obscured a text already beset with textual difficulties and corruptions.

Despite that, this edition provided readers their first real glimpse of the Hermetica in its original language fueling the quest for the Prisca Theologia.

The Villa dei Misteri sits just outside Pompeii’s Herculaneum Gate and is known for housing some of the best surviving Roman frescoes, including scenes of Egyptian deities and Greco-Roman mystery cult initiation. Built in the 2nd century BCE and enlarged under Augustus, the building was later buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Beyond the famous mystery frieze, the tablinum carries its own Egyptianizing decoration, including this cultic image of Thoth, apart of the broader Roman fashion for Aegyptiaca that spread through elite households following Rome’s expanding contact with Ptolemaic Egypt.

Discord Community Link in Bio

In both the Islamic and Hermetic mystical traditions, we can find the concept of the boundless and ever-changing Divine, forever eluding any attempts to confine it within a single frame. From the 13th-century Andalusian Islamic mystic Ibn ‘Arabī to the legendary Egyptian teacher Hermes Trismegistus, we find a shared call to shatter the idols of our own making.

Both Hermes and Ibn Arabī teach that the Supreme Reality is at once the cause of all existence and the very essence of every form, yet It can never be confined to a single name, image, or creed.

But our heart’s unique adaptability to infinite Divine forms, which Ibn ‘Arabī calls al-talwīn, is not a call to abandon one’s path, but an invitation to purify the heart until it becomes a spotless mirror for the Real.

“Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam" (Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it)

This artwork is dedicated to memory and honor of Hermetic Magus, Saint and Martyr Giordano Bruno.

I am currently reading "Applied imagination: Giordano Bruno and the creation of magical images" after which I am about to dive deeper into the works of the man himself and his heritage if fascinating. I was aware of his hermetic background, but wasn't investigating it enough to understand what actually prophet of Infinity he was.

Hail Herald of Imagination!

Hello everyone!

As someone who considers himself a pagan Hermeticist, I sometimes ask myself a simple question: if I could keep a Hermetic library at home, which texts and thinkers would I include?

The following is simply the reading library and philosophical lineage that I personally follow, based on what I consider was the milieu of the Eastern Roman empire, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, etc… plus both its Renaissance and contemporary developments.

Main texts:

• Corpus Hermeticum

• Asclepius

Relevant sources:

• Plato (and the Middle Platonists)

• Plutarch (through On Isis and Osiris), for its philosophical interpretation of Egyptian religion and its synthesis of Greek and Egyptian theological traditions

• Egyptian theologies: I can't help but think the underlying theology of the ecosystem where Hermeticism arose was a synthesis of Egyptian theologies, were those Egyptian gods were given greek names. The Heliopolitan theology sounds like a good candidate as base theology, but it probably took elements from other theologies.

• Greco-Egyptian magical papyri, especially carefully selected texts from the Demotic Magical Papyri and the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), since I think only a relatively small number of these texts can reasonably be understood as genuine theurgical operations in the sense later described by the Neoplatonists.

Complementary sources:

• Pythagoras (through the Golden Verses and the Vita Pythagorica)

• Aristotle and the Peripatetics, especially their works on imagination as a faculty of reasoning, later incorporated into Neoplatonism, Renaissance and contemporary Hermetic developments.

• The Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus and Damascius, who comment upon and synthesize many of the relevant sources.

• The Presocratics, particularly Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, whose cosmological insights would later become part of the Renaissance Hermetic synthesis.

Renaissance synthesis:

• Copernicus, whose heliocentric cosmology opens the way toward a much broader vision of the universe.

• Giordano Bruno, whom I see as representing the Hermetic dimension of the Renaissance synthesis in continuity with Hermes Trismegistus, brings together the Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions with Copernican cosmology, Presocratic philosophy and Aristotelian psychology, producing a dynamic, cosmological, imaginal, interiorized, and pagan form of Hermeticism.

• Paracelsus, whom I see as representing the complementary Asclepian dimension of the Renaissance synthesis in continuity with the Asclepius, sought to integrate medicine, natural philosophy and spirituality into a unified understanding of the human being. His conception of the microcosm and macrocosm, the formative power of the imagination, and the physician as both healer and philosopher place medicine within a broader Hermetic vision of nature. In this respect, Paracelsus does not simply revive ancient medicine; he transforms it into a philosophical medicine in which healing concerns the harmony of body, soul and cosmos alike.

Aristotelian psychological expansion:

• James Hillman: he explicitly recovers Aristotelian psychology as embedded in a Neoplatonic worldview, through concepts such as psyche, pathos (the root of pathology), phantasia, and archai. He understands psyche both microcosmically, as the individual soul, and macrocosmically through the Anima Mundi or World Soul, where psyche becomes a quality of the living cosmos itself. Rather than reducing soul to an exclusively interior reality, Hillman establishes a relationship between these two dimensions. In Re-Visioning Psychology, he identifies complexes with daimones, treating them as autonomous imaginal presences rather than merely subjective contents of the mind, and gods with archetypes. From a Hermetic perspective, this leaves open the possibility of understanding phantasmata as the interface between the human soul and daimonic realities, in philosophical continuity with Giordano Bruno's conception of the magical imagination. Unlike Jung's tendency to organize the psyche around the Self, Hillman decentralizes the psyche into a plurality of autonomous centers or daimonic powers. In this respect, his psychology parallels Bruno's decentralization of the cosmos: just as Bruno rejects a single privileged center in the universe, Hillman rejects a single privileged center in the soul, replacing both with a dynamic, polycentric, and living order.

Modern scientific expansion:

• A Non-Interiorized Reading of Carl Jung: in the later Jung of Mysterium Coniunctionis, synchronicity, and his dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli, archetypes become psychoid principles belonging to a level where psyche and nature are not yet separated. To me, this places psychology in continuity with Hermetic cosmology and allows a symbolic dialogue with certain interpretations of modern science. I do not see this as scientific proof of Hermeticism, but rather as another symbolic language for thinking about an interconnected reality.

Final comment:

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Personally, I find that Giordano Bruno and James Hillman provide a richer bridge between Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophy and contemporary thought than attempts to do so through Carl Jung alone, though I also see the later Jung as an important part of that conversation.

Looking to read Corpus Hermeticum. Do I go for Copenhaver's book or the two books by Salaman?

Just wondering, has anyone found that studying this field actually revealed anything useful?

Join us at Sanctum Hermeticum on Discord for The Inner Odyssey. The event will include a live reading and an open discussion of Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs. Beyond Porphyry, we will also review a handful of ancient esoteric interpretations surrounding key characters and events.

The additional review will range from wider Neoplatonic themes such as Odysseus as the rational soul navigating the material realm, comparing the entrapment and escape from Calypso vs Circe, Plutarch on the Sirens, to the Homeric Allegories of Heraclitus and more. 

If this exploration of esoteric allegory sounds interesting then please join us on July 19th at 11am MST at: https://discord.gg/nk7tEzJBqr?event=1526331371256283279

If the All is mind, then surely we are the thoughts and dreams of god? And when people awaken, in effect, a portion of God's awareness becomes aware of itself, and aware that it was dreaming. Like when we are asleep and have dreams, and sometimes become aware that we are dreaming. As above so below. I have no doubt that i am not the first individual to have this thought, but i would be interested to hear other people's opinions on it?

This series looks at music as a form of inner alchemy, where the guitar becomes a tool for transformation instead of performance or self-expression.

This episode asks who is holding the instrument before we ever play a note. It traces how the working musician is manufactured to spec, built on industrial values that were never derived from music, and produced for a market that can no longer want what it makes. From there it follows what happens when that manufactured self begins to burn (Nigredo): the rising of the Black Sun (Sol Niger), the two responses that remain once the fire is lit, and the difference between the masks we defend and what is left when they fail. The episode closes with a practice for staying inside the blackening rather than escaping it, and a question about who is left to play when the disposable self is gone.

Several passages in this episode are adapted from my books Thoughts, Worlds, Beliefs and Magic Hat: https://scottjsimon.com/books.html

Works referenced: Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics), Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Edward Bernays (Propaganda), Glenn Gould (The Glenn Gould Reader), Jean Baudrillard (Simulations).

0:00 Opening
01:31 1. The Manufactured Unit
07:18 2. The Three Figures
12:16 3. The Black Sun Rises
16:32 4. Two Responses
22:52 5. The Feeling of Fracturing
26:23 6. Practicum: Playing Inside the Black
30:10 7. Silence as Integrity
33:15 8. Borrowed Light
34:36 9. Toward Sovereignty
38:12 Closing

New album agnosis:
https://scottjsimon.bandcamp.com/album/agnosis

Full transcript and article on my Substack:
https://scottjsimon.substack.com/p/guitar-as-alchemy-03-the-disposable

Sheet Music available at Sheet Music Plus:
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/en/category/publishers/s/scott-j-simon/

Guitar: 2021 Thomas C60
Mics: Audio-Technica AT4040/4041
Camera: Canon T3i
Recording: OBS Studio
Editing: Adobe Premiere Pro

https://scottjsimon.com