From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme – Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition Ed. Roelof van den Broek & Cis van Heertum. In de Pelikaan, 2000. Hard cover. 431pp. ISBN 90-71608-10-7. Distributed by EJ Brill, Leiden, Netherlands. www.brill.nl Dfl.90

In October 2000, Joost Ritman’s Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam rewarded a lifetime of Gnostic scholarship with a book dedicated to the servant of that life, Prof. Gilles Quispel, a name familiar to students of Gnosis everywhere.
    Quispel himself has contributed six racy essays to this collection of fourteen. I say ‘racy’ because Quispel is so utterly familiar with the original tongues of his sources (Coptic, Greek, English) that he occasionally puts one in his cheek. Thus we hear in ‘Paul and Gnosis’ (my favourite essay) : “Paul describes his Pharisaic education with a strong expression, avoided in all translations : ‘shit’ (Phil. 3,8). This proves how thoroughly he had rejected it.”
    That the patron saint of many a convent school could write so acerbically of his alma mater may come as a surprise to orthodox minds. No wonder Paul (and Quispel) can be so dismissive of a redundant past. The Damascus Road experience was, according to the professor, a gnostic vision. Quispel employs what I think must be his favourite Old Testament passage (so often does he refer to Ezekiel I.26) to say that while Ezekiel saw the kabod or Glory of the Lord as a light whose likeness was ‘as the appearance of a Man’, Paul “must have seen Jesus as the Glory, the manifestation of God.” In a stroke worthy of the Teutonic knight-evangelist Caspar Schwenckfeld, Quispel beheads a hydra of tedious orthodox speculations on the subject of Paul and Gnosis.

The knowledge of Re

Mr Ritman has attracted great guns to his project. Jean Pierre Mahé, the leading scholar of the Coptic Hermetic corpus of the Nag Hammadi Library, extends his empire from the 2nd and 3rd centuries to the Renaissance. The Perseus of Rosicrucian scholarship, Carlos Gilly, writes (in German) on the use of the Hermetic Asclepius in the middle ages, and on the ideas which link the mighty Paracelsus with the no less mighty vision of Jacob Böhme.
    Peter Kingsley contributes two valuable introductions to Hermetic studies, including the fascinating Poimandres : The Etymology of the Name and the origins of the Hermetica. This essay gives the best argument yet to suggest that the traditional title of the revealer of gnosis to Hermes Trismegistus, Poimandres, hides a genuine Egyptian honorific title, P-eime nte re – ‘The knowledge of Re’.
    The essay Religious Practices in the Hermetic ‘Lodge’ : New Light from Nag Hammadi (one of three on Hermetism by Roelof van den Broek) should be of great interest to Freemasons.
    The essay asks whether the Hermetic dialogues in such works as the Discourse on the Ogdoad and the Ennead (discovered near Nag Hammadi in 1945) “point to the existence of Hermetic groups in which the ‘way of Hermes’ was taught and celebrated in a more or less structured way”. In short, were there specific ‘lodges’ of Hermetists in late antique Egypt?
    Lovers of the essence of the festive board may intuit fellowship with those followers of Hermes who (according to Corpus Hermeticum XIII.16) must turn to the south and say an evening prayer in the open air before joining in another prayer and sharing a meal. Those who prefer indoor meetings today should reflect that the earliest masonic catechisms say that the lodge is as high as the heavens.
    Initiation for the Hermetic writers consisted in going to the light beyond the manifest cosmos (seven spheres) to the eighth and ninth. According to van den Broek, to the soul which has entered the Ogdoad (eighth) : “Hermes reveals a hymn of praise, called the hymn of rebirth, which is… song No 4 of the secret or esoteric hymn book.” But the songs that really matter are sung by the angels in silence. The mind does not boggle; according to Hermes, it understands.
    Entering the Ogdoad, guided by Hermes, the pupil exclaims, in what van den Broek considers (from experience?) to be the authentic utterance of ecstasy :

“I see the one who moves not, by a holy ecstasy. Thou dost give me power! I see myself! I want to speak! Fear restrains me. I have found the beginning of the Power that is above all powers, the one that has no beginning. I see a fountain bubbling with life! …I have seen! Language is not able to reveal this.” (58, 6-17)

    Van den Broek concludes that the Nag Hammadi Hermetic texts “show clear evidence of the existence of Hermetic groups, committees or lodges, or whatever one would like to call them, in the ancient world.” Judging from the initiations described, any person who would like to see such places as the spiritual progenitors of Freemasonry might be led to the inescapable questions : ‘Haven’t we lost something?’ – and, ‘How can we get it back?’
    Tobias Churton