The Hermetic Transmission

The Corpus Hermeticum is the joint through which the tradition passes from late antique philosophy into Latin alchemy, and from Latin alchemy into depth psychology. The transmission runs in three stages.

First: the Hermetica itself, composed in Greek between the first and third centuries, synthesizes Platonic cosmology (the Timaean living universe), Stoic world-soul, and gnostic soteriology into a doctrine of gnosis — the soul’s return through a willed cognition of God (Dihle, Theory of Will). The metaphysical scaffold is Plotinian; Plotinus’s account of the soul’s descent and return in the Enneads gives the shape of what the Hermetica narrates as revelation.

Second: the Latin alchemical tradition, from the twelfth century forward, receives the Hermetica as the philosophical charter of its art. Jung’s Alchemical Studies catalogues the Musaeum Hermeticum with Hermes Trismegistus’s Tractatus aureus de lapide philosophorum at its head. The alchemical Mercurius is Hermes Trismegistus under a metallurgical name; the opus as a whole is the Hermetic ascent rendered as laboratory work.

Third: Jung, reading the alchemists in Mysterium Coniunctionis, restores the psychological content they had kept hidden in chemical language. Corbin, reading the Sufi elaboration of the hermetic imagination in Ibn ʿArabī, names the same territory mundus imaginalis and passes it to Hillman. Hillman’s archetypal psychology — “the psychology of the resurgence of the Gods,” in Corbin’s phrase (Russell, Life and Ideas of James Hillman) — is the contemporary form of the Hermetic transmission.

Sources

• albrecht-dihle: the Hermetica stages salvation as an act of will answered by the Nous
• plotinus: the metaphysics of the soul’s descent and union with the Supreme
• carl-jung: the alchemical tradition as a psychology continuous with the Hermetica
• karl-kerenyi: Hermes Trismegistus as the philosophical voice of the archaic psychopomp
• henry-corbin: the Sufi elaboration of the hermetic imagination as mundus imaginalis
• james-hillman: archetypal psychology as the resurgence of the hermetic gods