What the Hermetica Reveal About Early Christianity

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson 

Well, most of the time on this podcast, we talk about early Christianity; but religions are a bit like families. They develop alongside relatives and neighbors and influences that help shape who they become. Today, we are exploring one of the most important ancient religious traditions connected to the world of early Christianity, Hermetism. So our guest scholar today is David Litwa, who will help us understand what Hermetism was, what the Hermetica are, and why these ancient writings still matter for anyone interested in early Christianity and the religious world that surrounded it. So, Dr. David M. Litwa is a scholar of Gnostic traditions, Naghammadi studies, the New Testament, and early Christian history. He’s the author of many books, including the newest one that we’ll be discussing today, Hermetica 1.

David has also joined me previously on Bible and Beyond for a conversation about Simon Magus in early Christian tradition. And on a more personal note, I recently had the opportunity to join his tour in Egypt, which made these ancient religious worlds feel even more vivid and alive to me. So, today we’re going to talk about an enormously influential collection of ancient writings that may be unfamiliar to many of our listeners. But even for those who already know something about hermetic literature, I think this conversation will open up lots of fascinating questions about spirituality, knowledge, the cosmos, and humanity’s relationship to the divine. So with all that, welcome, David. It’s great to see you again.

Dr. David Litwa 

Thank you, Shirley. It’s great to be here and great to be with your audience again.

Shirley 

Great. So why don’t we begin at the beginning and work our way into some of the most important ideas we can cover in this short conversation. Maybe if you could start us off with just a brief explanation of what the Hermetica are and where they came from. Let’s just start there.

David 

Right, so the Hermetica isn’t only ancient, it’s actually a surviving spiritual tradition that many people today would self-describe as Hermetist or Hermetisist. It’s ancient Egyptian spirituality. It’s a path. I’m not sure if we could call it a religion, but I would definitely call it a spirituality. It’s a pathway that has a variety of texts associated with it, but in this case the hero is not Jesus or Socrates. It is Hermes, the Thrice-Great, who is the way of talking about an ancient Egyptian deity, a god of wisdom, who is incarnate or becomes incarnate at various stages of human history and gives discourses and is himself the one who experiences very interesting mystical experiences. And then he tells us about it and what he tells is a very interesting and fascinating and compelling vision of who we are, where we’re going and why that’s important. It’s, again… everything that’s in the Hermetica is absolutely applicable as it was 2,000 years ago.

Shirley

That’s really fascinating. So could you say his name again? It’s kind of odd.

David

Well, Hermes–people will associate that with a Greek god, but what we’re dealing with here is an Egyptian god and his native Egyptian name is Thoth or Jehudi. And that is sort of hard to pronounce. So the Greeks, they also had some trouble with that one. So they just translated him as Hermes, but specifically the Egyptian Hermes or Hermes the Three-Times-Great or Thrice- Great. Thrice-Great being the native Egyptian way of saying that he is superlatively, magnificently wondrous and unsurpassable.

Shirley

Okay, very good then. So then before we get into the details, could you tell us maybe what kind of connection that Christians would really want to know? Like, why would Christians care about this?

David

It’s because early Christianity grew up in the same environment as the Hermetica, and they share a lot of the same concepts. So, the idea of spiritual rebirth, for instance, usually associated with the Johannine literature, it is–I would argue–originally a Hermetic idea. So you have the rebirth leading to a development of virtues and leading to salvation. That’s a deeply Hermetic idea. The whole scheme or framework of having a deeply spiritual teacher or guide, that itself is a Hermetic idea. So, oftentimes when people read the Hermetica, they get vibes from the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus appears in the guise of a teacher or a sage. And that’s…there has to be some kind of contact there on the structural level.

On the level of ideas as well, Hermetic literature is known as a revelation and Hermes has distinct disciples. They don’t really get called apostles, but they are disciples who spread the news, as it were. His revelations get collected into collections or additions. And that’s somewhat similar to what we see in the New Testament, where you’ve got a collection including an apocalypse or a letter. Sometimes Hermes writes letters. So there’s kind of structural and generic similarities and then there’s also ideational similarities. The idea that you can’t understand God without divine insight or spiritual rebirth is a good example.

Shirley

That’s really helpful to sort of ground us in what we’re looking at, why we’re thinking about this. And we are talking about your new book, which is called Hermetica 1. So, yeah, let me just show this here. So, Hermetica 1 must have a Hermetica 2. Why don’t you tell us what’s in Hermetica 1 and how does that compare with Hermetica 2?

David

Right, well it’s just that I’ve translated all of the Hermetic writings so they can’t all fit into one volume. So there’s a first volume and a second volume. And in the first volume I treat the more, I guess from the perspective of the West, it’s the more standard Hermetica. So the tractates that were first introduced in the Renaissance were 17 tractates that were preserved by Byzantine Christians. So, they came from Constantinople and that was the West’s…well it was the West’s…not the first experience of the Hermetica because the West never lost contact with the Hermetica. But it was the kind of Hermetic revival that got people really thinking on a spiritual level in the Renaissance. So Hermetica 2 then covers what…well, it covers the rest of the Hermetica, which is divided up into some groups. So, there’s a treatise called the Asclepius, which we’ve always had and has been read continuously from antiquity through the Middle Ages. There’s also what’s called the Stobian Hermetica, and this is the Hermetica that was excerpted by a guy in Macedonia named John Stobaeus. And so he gives us a much earlier vision of what you might’ve been reading in the fifth century if you were reading the Hermetica.

And then also in Hermetica 2, I talk about the patristic reception of Hermes. So, Christians were also very interested in Hermes and in the Hermetic writings. So they commented, beginning with Tertullian…well actually much earlier than Tertullian, because the Jews knew of Hermes Thrice- Great even before Christianity. So, I trace that history of reception going from, I think from the second century BCE among Jews in Egypt all the way to the Middle Ages. So, Christian authors who are mentioning Hermes, who are benefiting from Hermes, who are in a sense dependent on Hermes for many of their ideas–they use Hermes to justify Christianity because they view him as a kind of prophet. And that tradition also appears in Islam. So as you know, the Muslims took over Egypt in the 7th century and they began interacting with the Hermetic tradition. So, I’ve got a few Islamic thinkers in that reception history as well.

Shirley

Yeah, what a fascinating history. Thank you for going over that with us. And I will say for people who may be interested in getting into your book, your commentaries that go along with the tractates are outstanding. They really are helpful and I hope that people will appreciate that. You explain things just the way you are right now, which is very, very helpful. So, why don’t we get into some of the major concepts. We can’t cover everything because there’s a lot there, but I want to get into some of the big topics. The first one that I want to ask you about is really the idea of deathlessness. I know that Christians are familiar with the idea from Jesus that obeying his sayings would result in eternal life. Since it appears that everybody dies, how does their hermetic teaching deal with deathlessness? It’s really in there, isn’t it?

David

It’s one of many concepts I think that is important. This is, I think, where the Hermetica is a little bit different than Orthodox Christianity, but it’s quite similar to what we would call Gnostic Christianity. And that’s the insight that death is really an illusion because you are not your flesh. And that means that the kinds of changes you see in your flesh…and all of us see these changes, you know…we develop wrinkles and warts and, you know, our spine begins to curve after a while and we get old. I know that’s terrible, but it happens. But that itself is not a problem because you are not your flesh.

Whatever it is that you are, that is deathless. Now in the Christian tradition, they’ve disputed this idea quite a bit. There is the sense in the Christian tradition, even in Orthodoxy, that all of us have an immortal soul. I think that that could be described as an Orthodox position. But I would say in the Hermetic tradition, there’s much more emphasis on sort of a natural immortality and that salvation is more like what we see in Johannine literature where there’s a moment of realization in rebirth where you recognize what is already true. You don’t need to slay a bull or a goat. You don’t need to do any kind of special ritual. You don’t need to even, I mean, technically you don’t even need to obey a set of laws. Salvation is not by works, it is by gnosis and by realization of your true identity. And that identity, whoever you truly are, is deathless.

Shirley

All right, now you slipped in a little word there that we probably ought to explain. You just said it, you need “gnosis”. Well, so what is gnosis?

David

Well, you could describe gnosis in this context as the special insight that you in your true self are a deathless being. Death does not have power over you. It has power over your flesh. It has power over your brain, but that is not you. And that’s a very difficult message, admittedly, for modern people to understand because, you know, if you are not your brain, if you are not your body, then what are you? Well, that’s where the mystery begins. And the Hermetic authors have a long progression for helping you to understand spiritually who you really are.

Shirley

Okay, so then a related word, and I have to say that these Hermetic writings have a lot of words that are very particular to, I think, Hermetic thinking or teachings. And one of them is a word that we don’t use very often. I understand that they’ve used it in England, but not here in America. I don’t know what they do in Australia, but the word I’m thinking of is the word “nous”, or I’ve heard it pronounced “nows” in England, N-O-U-S. So that’s another important word here. What does that mean?

David

Well, it has a distinctive use in the Hermetica, but it’s one of the most common of all Greek words that appears throughout the New Testament and other areas. We’re just not conscious of it because it’s always translated typically as “understanding” or “mind” or “intellect”. But you’re right that in the Hermetica, it often gains a deeper sense. So that’s why in the book I always translate it as either “higher consciousness” or “divine consciousness”. So it could also be translated “your true self”. That would be quite a bit of a paraphrase, but it is whatever is deathless in you. So your true self is nous. And that means that it’s not anything bodily. It’s not anything empirical. It’s not anything that can be studied. It’s not your brain or your brain waves.

It’s a much deeper kind of consciousness that you share of God, you share with God. It is the consciousness of God, but it is also God’s consciousness in you thinking about God. You know that Aristotle defined God as thought, thinking itself. We are from the Hermetic point of view naturally programmed to think on God. We are constantly…or think about God…and that is God within us trying to think of God. And we are distracted. I know, because we can’t go throughout the day without watching a YouTube video or checking our Facebook messages. So, you know, we’re not actually aware of God 99.9% of the time.

But your true self in the hermetic worldview is trying to break out of the distractions and it’s trying to awaken itself. It’s trying to think God and to see God in reality. And as long as you have enough silence built into your life, that sense of the divine…you know, when you go out and see the vast jeweled array of stars and when you go out into nature and see the sunlight streaming through the trees after a rain or when you’re just silent in a state of deep meditation…then that your nous will become active. Another way of describing the nous is the “eyes of the heart”. So it’s an internal sensation that is beyond your normal senses. You have to put your normal senses to sleep in order to awaken your nous.

Shirley

That’s wonderful to hear about. So I’m gonna pursue that question a little bit more, but first we’re going to take a little break. We’ll be right back and talk about that some more.

Shirley

So I do want to go back to that question a little bit more. You’re getting at one of the most difficult concepts, I think, in any kind of religion, which is how does the human and the divine actually work together or not work? I know it’s a really involved question, but maybe you could give us an overview of the way the hermetist just sees the relationship between the human and divine.

David

Well that’s the great mystery and it’s only available to initiates, but I’ll tell you what I can. And I will encourage your audience to go through the Hermetic writings yourself and go through the progression. The short answer is that for the Hermetic authors it’s not like in Orthodox Christianity where there’s a kind of iron ceiling separating you from the Godhead, where there’s a fundamental creator-creation distinction. That itself is like heresy.

So what the Hermetists are trying to do is to awaken you to the truth that you, your nature, your true nature and the divine nature are not essentially different. They’re not essentially different. So remember it’s divine consciousness in you that is seeking God. It’s God seeking God. And so whatever it is that true self in you that is deathless, that is the God in you. So there can’t be a fundamental difference of nature between you and the divine.

Now I know a lot of orthodox Christians might wet their pants at this kind of concept and immediately want to identify it as heresy, but here we’re dealing with a very deep truth that everyone ought to think very seriously about, that each one of us is like a divine thought that is incarnate. And so we are like the flowers of God’s consciousness opening up into this world of sense and sensation.

And so we don’t need God to come down and become incarnate because that has already happened. If there are seven billion people on earth, I don’t know how many there are, then there are seven billion incarnations of God. And we don’t need a special incarnation because it doesn’t get any more special beyond you and me. So, this would be the difference…that in Orthodox Christianity you would need the blood of a slain deity to get you reconciled to a God who is entirely and fundamentally, in terms of nature, opposed to you. For the Hermetica, you need a spiritual guide who can awaken you to your own nature and your spiritual guide is not fundamentally different in nature than you are. It can even be yourself. I know that sounds celestistic, but ultimately, God is within. That is the message.

Shirley

Yeah, so you raised two more things I want to get at there. One is God and then the self kind of even self baptism, which we’ll get to in a little bit. But let’s go with a God question. You know, in monotheistic religions, the idea of multiple gods just tends to turn us off from even wanting to pay attention to what’s going on like you’re just talking about. But I know it’s more complex than that. We can’t just see that there’s God and not God. Where do we go with these concepts of what God means?

David

Well, there’s a couple books I would recommend here: Eric Hornung, The Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, and Jan Osmond, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. These ancient Egyptian conceptions of God are fundamentally different than Western monotheistic notions, where God is sort of like a person who’s outside of you, who has an immortal nature, who you have to be reconciled with. who might be angry with you or who might be trying to kill you if you disobey him. Those are, I would say from the Hermetic view, those are very debased, patriarchal, kind of Indo-European concepts of God as a kind of sky father who you don’t want to get angry so that he doesn’t burn you eternally. That’s a very Indo-European kind of a concept.

And unfortunately, it’s also the dominant concept in the Abrahamic faiths. The Hermetist is trying to awaken you to a concept of God that was more prevalent in ancient Egypt, which is that the divine is manifest in you and in nature. It is that quiet presence. And there is no fundamental opposition between the world, the God, God and the soul…and the world soul for that matter, but I mean we don’t have to get too complex. And beyond that, you know, this isn’t a matter of something that can be taught. It has to be something that’s experienced. If you’ve experienced the power of the divine in you, whether by speaking prophetically or, I don’t know, automatic writing…or you just had a profound experience looking at the stars at night and you left your body for a minute, or maybe it was drug induced, you know, that can also happen these days. People are taking more and more psychotropic drugs. That is just a kind of reminder that God is in you. And all of that is useful for proving the Hermetic worldview that God is not apart from you.

Shirley 

That’s a fascinating concept. So then there’s something that does seem like it’s apart from you, which would be that word “daemoness” or “daemon”, which sounds like a demon. What is a daemon?

David

Well, this isn’t a huge part of the Hermetica, but the daemon and daemoness, again, a classic New Testament word as well. It’s not uniquely Hermetic. These are intermediary agents, some good, some not so good, and they either help us on our spiritual journey or they harm us. And, so, they’re not universally bad, they’re not universally good. They are their own personalities, but they are part of that stage where we go higher–or we’re ready to go higher–that is, to enter into a newer nature. So Paul spoke of having a pneumatic body or a spirit body (I Corinthians 15:45). And a daemon is a human soul in a body of spirit. It’s a body of fire or a body of light or something like that. And a daemon spends its time in the upper atmosphere. So it’s someone typically who is at a higher stage of progression. And so before we become entirely noetic–that is entirely nous–we go on Jacob’s ladder, as it were, and we ontologically progress up to a state where we are in a higher body than we are now, but have a very similar soul. And that’s what a daemon is.

Shirley 

Okay, and I want to go back..this idea of the self is so central and intriguing in this hermetic way of thinking. You mentioned a little bit ago about the idea of being able to do it yourself, which brings me to the point about baptizing yourself. That’s an interesting idea that baptism can be something that you can do for yourself. How does that happen?

David

Well, it’s a little bit more nuanced than that. You’re never exactly by yourself because your nous or your true self is always in some way deeper than your normal perceived self that has a name and has a body attached to it. So what I mean by self-realization is the self has a capital S. The self is the nous who is your internal spiritual guide.

Now, I’m not making the claim also that, you know, your religion should be done alone in your own bedroom. That’s very, you know…that would be weird, I think. The Hermetic tradition is a community tradition. It’s definitely about being part of a group. So I just want to make that point clear. But on the other hand, there is this sense that whoever your spiritual guide is–and that, you know, if you’re reading the Hermetic text, that would be Hermes–then your own internal Hermes is like your nous. And in the very opening “Tractate of the Poemandris”, Poemandris realizes that he can talk, sorry…Hermes realizes that he can talk to his own nous. And his nous self-identifies as a different character, which is interesting.

In talking about baptism, you’re talking about the “Corpus Hermeticum 4”, which is unique. It says that the way we get saved is that we baptize ourselves into Nous. And this doesn’t seem to have been a formal ritual. And it’s not mentioned anywhere else in the Hermetica. And you don’t necessarily do it alone. But what it is, it appears to be a metaphor for coming to the realization that you are deathless. Immersing yourself in your true self rather than in your false self…that is being baptized into nous. And baptized there, again, is a very common New Testament word, but it just means dunked. So we could just say submerged into nous. That’s what you need to do.

Shirley

So it’s not like joining or being included…it’s a matter of your own purification? Is that more the idea of what that is?

David

Not purification in the kind of moral sense, but purification in that you are stripping away the distractions that lead you to identify with the false self. So, you know, if you find yourself spending $300 on makeup a month, you are beautifying your false self. This sounds terrible, but I hope your commercial is not for makeup.

And don’t want to…you know…I think I should think of some other example that’s more masculine. If you find yourself spending $500 a month on sports equipment, you are in a sense…you are nurturing your false self because of clothing or whatever–it doesn’t really matter–but you are amplifying your identification with your very temporary platform that in the course of 80 years or so, give or take a couple decades, will shut down and we’re going to put you into the ground. And it didn’t matter how much makeup you used and it didn’t matter how many toys you died with, you’re still going to be disintegrated into nothingness. So if you identify with that platform, you’re always gonna lose. If this life is a gamble, it’s guaranteed you’re gonna lose that battle.

Shirley

All right, so we’re gonna find another kind of self here. You know, as I read through your translations and your very interesting commentaries, I kept hearing a message of hope and encouragement for people who want to gain spirituality. If you’re agreeing with the way I’m reading this, would you explain maybe how modern readers could expect to find the spirituality in these writings?

David 

It is spirituality. So what I’ve ordered, I’ve ordered the treatises according to a progression, which is a spiritual progression of initiation, which is how the Hermetica conceives of itself. It conceives of itself as a spiritual progression. So there are four parts. And if you read it in order, you will eventually learn the task or the program or method of self-care. And I don’t mean self-care in terms of you go get an ice cream and sit on the couch. I mean true self-care, right? Not false self-care, right? True self-care is learning how to open the mind of your…open up your inner mind, open up the eyes of your heart, identify with your immortal, deathless self in reality and enter into a state where you are open to new revelations without the use of drugs. You know, like they never mention any kind of drugs. You are naturally…you naturally have a gateway to the Transcendent, which is inside of you. And people never walk through that door because they’re too busy scrolling on Instagram. But the door is always there. It’s open. Well, I mean, you have to have the key to unlock it. And the Hermetica is that key. This isn’t academic knowledge, right? Any more than the New Testament is really academic knowledge. This is a spiritual path.

Shirley

I love it. Well, I want to encourage people to be encouraged by reading your book. I think it’s just very encouraging. And I really thank you for coming to talk to us about it. I think you’ve done an excellent job distilling some very complex kind of ideas, but they’re meaningful and useful. So I really appreciate you being with us today. Thanks so much, David.

David 

And I just, can I just really briefly say that, so this summer, there’s gonna be a seminar which I’m gonna be leading. And I wanna welcome everyone to that seminar. It’s all online. It starts June 8th. And it’s gonna be with like-minded, spiritually-minded people who wanna read the Hermetica in the order that I’ve suggested. So we’ll be reading the book together, almost like a book club, but I’ll be there with you as a guide. And we’ll have also lots of other people there to help us read and truly savor the richness of this literature.

Shirley

Excellent. Thanks for telling us about that and thanks for being with us tonight. I really appreciate it.

David

Definitely. Take care.

Shirley

Thank you.