Page 20 [20]
OCR
ENDRE ÁDÁM HAMVAS 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. +18 + Daröczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 18 ® 2020. 06.15. 11:04:10
