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ENDRE ÁDÁM HAMVAS
My aim in this paper is to prove the following propositions:
1. There are traces of initiation rituals in Hermetic literature.
2. The Hermetic initiation rituals are a special kind of religious practice
which can be called the spiritualization of the ritual. This spiritualization
means a kind of spiritual interpretation of the empirical ritual. The function
of this spiritualization process is to internalize the empirical ritual, which
was considered materialistic and therefore alien to the real nature of God.
3. I will examine some elements of this spiritualized ritual: the baptism
and the drinking of the life-giving potion.
4. I will demonstrate through some early Christian texts that the spiritual
or symbolic interpretation of baptism and the drinking of the life-giving
potion were known not only to the Hermetic authors, and these examples
provide evidence that other religious communities used this method of
spiritual interpretation as well. This will lead us to my main thesis, that the
examples of spiritual rituals are evidence of the Hermetic initiation and that,
hence, the spiritualization of the empirical rituals represented (and should be
understood as) a special kind of religious practice.
2. THE NATURE OF HERMETIC INITIATION
The above statement means that a person who wants to be initiated undergoes
the process of initiation voluntarily, and in the course of this initiation,
the whole of his or her personality gets a new, divine character.®
This is certainly true of the Hermetic mysteries. These dialogues take
place between two or three people (as in the case of the Latin Asclepius),
and in the course of a specific dialogue, it can be seen that the person who
manages the dialogue is the mystagogue, while the others who raise questions
about the nature of the cosmos, God, and mankind are his sons, though not
his biological but rather his spiritual sons. This can be noticed, for instance,
in CH XIII, where Tat—who is probably also the biological son of Hermes—
makes a strange statement, as he does not understand his father’s teaching:
Father, what you tell me is impossible and contrived, and so I want to respond
to it straightforwardly: I have been born a son strange to his father’s lineage.
Do not begrudge me, father; 1 am your lawful son.’
About the meaning of initiation rituals in general, see Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth:
The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture, New York, Harper & Bros., trans.
by Willard R. Trask, 1958.
CH. XIII. 3. For the citation of the Hermetic texts, 1 am using the following edition: Brian
P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (the Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new
English translation, with notes and introduction). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1992. For another reliable English translation, see Clement Salaman (ed.), The Way of Hermes.
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