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own disciples or for his sons.!! This fact may explain why the disciple remains
unnamed: step by step, he takes over the role of the mystagogue, so it is not
his name but his role that is important, as he will become Hermes himself.
I think the experience of the divine in the Hermetica is something like
the tauroboliumofthe Mithraiccultsortheepopteia par excellencein the Eleusian
mysteries, in which the initiate faced a divine presence. To summarize, for
the initiates, the aim of Hermetic initiation is to gain knowledge concerning
the divine, and with the help of this knowledge, their personality changes
radically, even substantially, and the aforementioned examples show that traces
of the empirical experience or epopteia can be found in the texts.”
This is why the definition of mysteries attributed to Aristotle also applies
in the case of the Hermetica. According to a fragment, Aristotle said that the
initiated person does not learn something but suffers something, namely, some
empirical experience: od padetv tt Seiv GAAG nadeív.? How should we interpret
the Greek terms mathein and pathein here? At first glance, Aristotle’s statement
seems paradoxical, because as I have pointed out, the spiritual son has to
learn something about the nature of the divine in the course of the initiation.
So I think the meaning of Aristotle’s definition sheds light on the main aim of
initiation, which is not only to gain knowledge but to get an epopteia, insofar
as this implies some unmediated experience. As I pointed out concerning
CH XIII and Poimandres, this kind of initiation is precisely the subject matter
of the dialogues, i.e. the initiation in the course of which the initiate comes into
an unmediated physical or empirical connection with the divine sphere.
At this point, the question arises whether the initiation depicted in
the Hermetic texts represents an empirical method of a religious community
or, rather, must be interpreted as a transformation or spiritualization of
the empirical ritual practices. According to Van Moorsel’s thesis, the texts
empirically, as it were, pull down the religious experience, while on the other
hand, they pneumatically build it up again. I accept the strengths of this
theory, yet I ask whether there is mystical initiation as such without any
empirical experience or any epopteia? Can initiation be spiritualized at all?
It seems worth making some remarks here.
First, some basic features of the mysteries play a special role in the Hermetica
too, including for instance the spiritual father-son relationship, the command
of silence, and perhaps the allusion to the ritual meal in the Latin Asclepius.
At the very end of the dialogue, after finishing his instructions about
the nature of true knowledge and about God and the universe, Trismegistus
encourages his disciples to partake in a sacred feast: “With such hopes we turn
1 Cf. Kerchove, La Voie d’Hermes, 44.
2 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1985, 277.
Frg. Dialogi, 15. In Valentinus Rose (ed.), Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta,
Lipsiae, Teubner, 1886, 31.
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Daröczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 18 ® 2020. 06.15. 11:04:10