Oldal 19 [19]
INITIATION IN THE HERMETICA
The following questions arise here: Why does Tat say that he is Hermes’ lawful
son? And why does he feel like a “strange” son? The answer is that at that
point of the dialogue, he does not yet understand his father, the mystagogue.
Hence, we can read the entire dialogue as a process of initiation. This means
that at the end Tat understands what it means to be reborn. In the middle
of the text, he witnesses his father’s deification, when the latter loses his
material body, which will prove merely a simple appearance. But when Tat
wholly understands what this transformation means, he praises God and sings
a hymn for Him, and he will be recognized as his father’s real son. In CH XIII,
we again witness the process of an initiation as Tat gradually becomes
Hermes’ spiritual son: the culmination of the dialogue and of the initiation
is a real event, the deification of Hermes. This reminds us of the epopteia,
the culminative empirical event in the mysteries. Therefore, it will be seen
that in the Hermetic texts, this event can be found as well; and if it is true that
epopteia means experiencing the divine, then we can say that we have found
another key feature of the Hermetic initiation, namely mystical experience.
Another convincing example is Poimandres," the first dialogue of
the corpus. If we examine the text as a whole, and not merely parts of it,
a structure similar to the structure of CH XIII is discernible. In the beginning
of Poimandres, the unknown author—who will turn out to be a prophet by
the end of the dialogue—participates in a revelation. Better, he even realizes
step by step that he is facing a divine entity who is, in fact, his spiritual leader
and who initiates him into the mysteries of divine truth. So we are entitled to
say that the whole dialogue is an epopteia where the protagonist experiences
a divine event in its physical reality. The end of the Poimandres shows parallel
structural elements to CH XIII: after the initiate has understood the meaning
of divine revelation at the end of an initiation process (this means here that
he gains special knowledge in the course of the dialogue and that he also
takes part in a revelation), he is vested with the ability to initiate others into
the knowledge of the divine, and he becomes a prophet. On these grounds, we
may assert that the Poimandres can be read as an initiative text par excellence.
In the course of the dialogue, we witness an initiation process as we learn that
the narrator gains his knowledge from the divine mind, so later, he will be able
to play the mystagogue’s role for other people. In one word, first, he will be
the disciple of Hermes, but after that, he will become Hermes himself for his
New Translations of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to
Asclepius, Rochester, Inner Traditions, 2000. For the original texts, I am using the classical
edition Corpus Hermeticum I-IV, texte établi par A. D. Nock et traduit par A.-J. Festugiére,
Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1946-1954. Some useful remarks, textual comments and notes can
be found in the German edition of Carsten Colpe — Jens Holzhausen, Das Corpus Hermeticum
Deutsch, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1997. See also Ilaria Ramelli (ed.), Ermete Trismegisto:
Corpus Hermeticum, con testo greco, latino e copto, Milano, Bompiani, 2005.
Cf. Jorg Biichli, Der Poimandres, ein paganisiertes Evangelium, Tiibingen, Mohr-Siebeck, 1987.
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