Seeing the light of the ancient wisdom

Ibis-headed Thoth, Hathor, goddess of love and beauty, and a Ptolemaic pharaoh depicted in the temple of Kom Ombo, built 180-47 BCE, in Upper Egypt.

The Hermetica is a mystical philosophy first made a written text in the first centuries CE, representing the magico-religious mystery teachings of a wisdom handed down through ancient Egyptian and Hellenic cultures.

What attracts me to it, as an esoteric body of works in which the roots of the western world lie, is the central idea of a ‘Big Mind’, a oneness which unites everything, the notion that all things that exist are ‘thoughts in the mind of God’.

This sits well with the idea of a universal consciousness which is primary, fundamental and causal, the very ground of being in which human minds participate, and suggests that the post-materialist visionary science of today is in the process of rediscovering this lost wisdom.

A revelatory new book, The Light of Hermes Trismegistus: New translations of seven essential Hermetic texts, by Charles Stein (Inner Traditions, November, 2022), confirms Hermes as the essence of mind in all its potentials, the author showing how his chosen texts, never before published together, are integral to a Western tradition which continues to evolve and where the principle of spiritual awakening is linked to the creative.