Hellenistic and Hermetic

The Corpus Hermeticum, Chaldean Oracles, late-antique Neoplatonism, theurgy. The shared substrate behind the medieval esoteric traditions.

The Hellenistic and Hermetic literature names the late-antique Greco-Egyptian milieu in which Platonic philosophy, Egyptian priestly tradition, Stoic cosmology, and emergent Christian and Jewish mystical thought all interpenetrate. It is the shared substrate behind nearly every medieval and early-modern esoteric tradition the site covers.

The Corpus Hermeticum

The Corpus Hermeticum is a heterogeneous collection of seventeen Greek treatises, together with the Latin Asclepius, attributed to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. The texts likely date from the second through fourth centuries CE. They combine Platonic metaphysics, gnostic-tinged anthropology, and ritual instruction into a body of writing that, when recovered in fifteenth-century Florence, would set off the Renaissance Hermetic revival.

Theurgic Neoplatonism

Where Plotinus (d. 270 CE) constructs a contemplative ascent from the material world through Soul, Intellect, and the One, his successor Iamblichus (d. c. 325) reorients Neoplatonism around theurgy — the ritual cooperation of the soul with divine causes that cannot be reached by intellect alone. Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis and Proclus’s Platonic Theology and Elements of Theology furnish the operative cosmology that Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Neoplatonists each adapt for their own traditions.

The Chaldean Oracles

The Chaldean Oracles, surviving only as fragments quoted by later Neoplatonic commentators, are second-century CE Greek hexameter verses presented as revealed wisdom of Chaldean origin. They become the scriptural touchstone for the theurgic strand of late Platonism.

Region

Egypt, Greek Mediterranean, Syria

Period

c. 100 BCE -- 600 CE (with substantial later reception)

Languages

Greek, Coptic, Latin

Key figures

Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, pseudo-Hermes Trismegistus