Introduction

Dr Angela Puca: AP: If you’re interested in Hermetic philosophy, and spirituality, stay tuned because you’re going to find out a lot of things about Hermetic Spirituality, Gnosis, Nous, and many foundational concepts in Western Esotericism with the most special guest Professor Wouter Hanegraaff.

Hello everyone I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium, as you know I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Esotericism, Shamanism, Paganism, and all things occult. Today I have a very special guest. I’m very excited to be talking to Professor Wouter Hanegraaff, he’s a pioneer in the study of Western Esotericism and an absolute authority and I’m pretty sure that you have heard his name being mentioned here on the YouTube channel because I have referenced his work quite a lot.

So help me in welcoming Professor Hanegraaff and welcome to the channel, Woulter.

Prof Wouter Hanegraaff WH: Thank you very much for the invitation, Angela. Nice to be here.

AP: Thank you for accepting to be on my show and I’m very excited because there’s a new book from you that seems extremely exciting. This is the book, and you will find it in the link in the infobox as well. “Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity.”

Overview of Hermetic Philosophy & Spirituality

So I’d first like to read a passage from this book that is quite captivating it is at the very beginning of the prologue of the book and it says,

“This book is about the search for knowledge, the human experience of being in touch with how things really are. I will be analysing a collection of ancient texts that claim to reveal the true nature of reality and describe a way towards liberation from mental delusion. Their anonymous authors refer to such knowledge as Gnosis and described it as ultimately inexpressible in human language and yet they were using language to make such claims and in writing a book about them I have been doing the same. Can scholars tell the truth about the truths beyond scholarship or can truth not be told by only experience? If what we call knowledge is a function of our state of mind then could there be other ways of knowing than those of reason and the senses.”

I am so intrigued now. So I want you to tell me more about what is this book about.

WH: Right, well it is indeed about the search for a Gnosis, about the search for knowledge. It poses all kinds of questions about what knowledge is. We have scientific and rational knowledge but we also have these claims. There is literature about higher forms of knowledge, direct knowledge, spiritual knowledge, etc., and one of the terms that are being used is Gnosis the Greek word for knowledge. So yeah, the book, in a way, explores what knowledge is but it’s also more specifically about a couple of other things. And maybe it’s useful to say something about the title because I try to capture most of the content in the title of the book.

So Hermetic Spirituality, that’s the first topic and I could tell a few things about what that is. But this is really about a movement that flourished in the first centuries of the common era in Roman Egypt and which has left us writings, the Hermetic literature, and the word Hermetic refers to the kind of legendary author, the kind of authority of the Hermetic movements, Hermes Trismegistus – the thrice greatest Hermes. So that’s the wisdom teacher that you find in this literature. So that’s the first topic there, Hermetic literature from this period, and the second topic because the second part of the title says, “and the Historical Imagination” and so what I’m very much concerned with, in this book is, to think about how do we imagine this Hermetic movement and I have a lot of polemics, you know, against standards ways of historical and scholarly interpretation of the Hermetic literature because scholars have been imagining the Hermetic movement as engaged mostly with philosophy. And so you read these texts and they saw only philosophical texts there and maybe theological texts which talk about God and the human being and the nature of the world and so on. And I challenge that and I think no, that isn’t it. If you imagine these people to be only involved in philosophy, as we understand it nowadays, then you’re missing the essence of what this movement was all about because it was really not Hermetic philosophy it was Hermetic Spirituality. And so I’m trying to argue, to show, that these people, who wrote these texts, were actually engaged in a spiritual path and they were trying to transform their consciousness. So I put all the emphasis on spiritual practice or experiential practice. These people are describing very powerful visionary and other kinds of spiritual experiences and that is really what it was all about through transforming your mind and transforming your consciousness you could find higher knowledge and reach Gnosis. So that also is what’s alluded to in the subtitle of the book.

So it’s called “Hermetic Spirituality and Historical Imagination.” So the imagination of how we imagine this field has to be changed and I want to change it. I try to change the narrative but the subtitle is “Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity” and so what I’m arguing in the book is that the Hermetic practitioners were actually engaged in very powerful transformative techniques for changing your consciousness, altered states of consciousness. But our knowledge and now we come to the question of Gnosis, you know, whatever we know and what we can know depends on our state of consciousness, right? If you are in kind of a sober, rational kind of consciousness there are certain kinds of things that you can know in that state but what they were arguing is that, if you are striving for this salvation or this transformative, higher type of knowledge, Gnosis then this requires an altered state of consciousness, an alteration of consciousness and only in that state can you actually have direct knowledge of what reality is all about. So altered states of consciousness imply altered states of knowledge and altered states of knowledge depend on altered states of consciousness. So that’s the reason for the title and there’s a fourth element, maybe. So Hermetic Spirituality, historical imagination, altered state of knowledge, and the fourth element has to do with language because these people were arguing that they were describing, actually, very powerful experiences that they have visions of other realities traveling to really beyond the cosmos to the highest spiritual spheres and so on and you really find this in all the texts. But then they always emphasize that this Gnosis, this knowledge is inexpressible.

In the ninth chapter, I have a whole analysis of how Hermes Trismegistus leads his pupil, Thoth the pupil, into an altered state in which he travels out of his mind through all the seven planetary spheres. He leaves the cosmos, he enters the sphere, the so-called eighth sphere the Ogdoad which is the sphere of souls and then they move on to the ninth sphere, the Ennead which is a sphere of powers, of spiritual powers and they even get a glimpse of the source, the pegé in Greek and that is the source of all reality, this is a kind of total mystery. So what Hermetic authors are saying is that the whole of reality comes from this mysterious unknowable source, the pegé, from which emanate light and life, and out of light and life emerge the cosmos. And so the moment that Thoth and his Master, his spiritual Master, Hermes Trismegistus attained this highest state they even had a glimpse of the pegé, of the source, and then Thoth says well I have seen this and it is impossible to put this in words and they keep saying there’s no way of using words to explain what this is all about.

So this is direct knowledge, this is direct Gnosis that is so they attain the direct ultimate Gnosis and but that leads me then in the final chapter of the book to the question, okay, but if that is true and the ultimate knowledge cannot be expressed in words then what are we doing, what are they doing? I’m writing a book but whatever is really most important for that cannot be written down in words. So am I wasting my time writing a book about this? And what about them? They’re writing text in Greek and in Coptic and to talk about these experiences and at the same time they say, you know, whatever it’s really all about I cannot write in words, I cannot write it down. So this leads me to the two very fundamental questions about language and Gnosis, is it possible to put Gnosis in words or not? And if it cannot be put in words then what is the purpose of these writings? And what do you lose, when you start speaking about something that cannot be spoken, and what do you lose by actually putting that language in words, in written words by writing? Yeah, because in the end, we’re dealing with texts that are very old, they come from the second and the third centuries of the common era. They have been transmitted through the centuries and all kinds of stuff have happened with them. I talk about how they have been rewritten by Christian scribes who copied those texts but maybe, probably changed the meaning to make it more congenial to their own Christian theological beliefs. So we cannot always even trust trusted sources. So you have a long process of transmission and now here in the 21st century, we’re reading this text and that’s all that remains of an experience that could not be put into words. So there is this kind like, you try to work your way back towards something that happened a long time ago, experiences of people who are long dead, who experienced something transformative and now you have to try to somehow reconstruct that knowledge and write about it in words – which they say is not possible. So there’s the paradox, how do you use language to talk about what goes beyond language? So I grapple with that in all kinds of ways. So in a nutshell what the whole book is all about?

AP: Yeah, I find it extremely interesting but yeah, that makes me think how would you define Gnosis? Because you’re saying that Gnosis is something that cannot be put into words but I understand from this that the experience of Gnosis is something that you cannot put into words but when we are trying, as scholars, to define what people mean by well what, you know, what you mean in these specific contexts by Gnosis what would be the definition that you would give?

WH: The question is whether it can be defined at all, that’s the question. I think one thing I’d like to say about this is I think, actually, is very important. It has to do with the English language and the limits of the English language we talk about Gnosis and we talk about knowledge. Now it comes from an Indo-European root gnō which goes very, very far back and there…

AP: Yeah, it is also in Sanskrit.

WH: There are actually two words for knowledge, in most languages, in most European languages like French or German, no doubt Italian as well, I do not know about Italian but German, and French. So in French, for instance, you can say connaître which means knowing and so if I say that I know Angela then I say that I use that word. But there’s also the word savoir which is another word which is about propositional knowledge, like I know about mathematics, for instance, I’ve studied that and I know about it so there’s a difference between knowledge by direct acquaintance and I know that person, I know my cats or whatever. You know about by direct acquaintance and there is knowledge in the sense of knowing things about which is not the same thing. You can that you have that difference also in German, Kennen and Wissen, same thing and another, and in English, you cannot make that distinction, you have the same word.

Now Gnosis was about knowledge by direct acquaintance. So it’s the first time it is, so sorry, it’s the first type. So Gnosis is not propositional knowledge, it’s not comparable to science or rational philosophies, etc. When they talk about Gnosis then they say that I have had direct experience in the sense of connaître or Kennen in German – I’ve been there, I’ve seen, I’ve experienced directly what it is. So that immediacy is very important and if you think about this then you realize that actually, the inexpressibility of the Gnosis is not so very strange because actually, it’s something we experience all the time. So I meet a certain person, I know, that person can I put my experience of knowing that person in words? Probably not. I can say, well I mean, he looks like he has brown hair and has blue eyes or brown eyes or whatever and he has a beard or not and so I can give a description and that is all savoir, that is all Wissen. So that is the kind of propositional knowledge, knowledge about, that’s the actual experience of knowing somebody in some directions, I know that person – that is something else and that kind of people to words. I mean how do you express your personal knowledge of somebody, of having been in a certain place, or simply the knowledge of looking at a painting or listening to a piece of music, etc.? It all gives you knowledge but most of it cannot be expressed in words, only indirectly, and in that sense, the inexpressibility of the Gnosis is not actually so strange, it is something very common. In most things, most experiential dimensions of our lives cannot really be put into words and so, in that sense, maybe Gnosis is not so extraordinary. But they, of course, the Practitioners here, argued that, yes, they entered an altered state of consciousness, a radically altered state. So they saw the universal light that everything consisted of and they saw it directly and they say I know because I’ve seen, I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, I cannot talk about it but I know it from direct experience and maybe that leads me also, maybe, to something else from what Gnosis is all about and it’s very interesting.

I found it fascinating to discover when you read the scholarship about the Hermetic literature and as I said, I’m very critical of the way that Hermeticism has been imagined by many many scholars, not all of them, some of them have got it very, very well but I’m critical of quite some scholars. Very often it has been seen as Gnostic now and here’s a distinction, you have Gnosis as direct knowledge and they have Gnosticism, right? People talk about Gnosticism and Gnosticism has usually been described as this dualistic worldview. So you have to have a material world and you have a spiritual world and then the spark of the human soul has fallen into matter and has gotten imprisoned in matter. So we’ve lost the way, we are imprisoned in a material world and we try to escape from it again to another spiritual, to the spiritual world where we came from. That’s the gnostic kind of idea, dualistic, spirit against the matter. Now what is very interesting about Hermetica is that is not how they think. They are not Gnostics, they believe in Gnosis but they are not Gnostics because they believe in radical, what I call, non-duality. There is no dualism, there is only one reality for them and it is light, there is nothing but light. The only true reality is light, spiritual light and everything that we experience in our world right now, you know, you’re looking at this movie and you are seeing us and you see me here and all of that is an illusion for them. Those are all the effects of a lower type of consciousness. So what they say, it is very radical, is that the human soul comes from the perfect unity of universal light. We are light, we are nothing else but light, that’s the only true reality. But then the soul descends into a reality that we experience as material and we think we have a body and we experience all that but actually, none of that is really, really true.

So we fall into a delusion and that is necessary in order to live our life in the world which means that actually our whole life, the present reality as we experience it, is an altered state of consciousness. We are constantly in an altered state of consciousness, we do not experience the world as it really is and Gnosis means not actually getting into its strange weird altered states that take you away from normal consciousness, it’s actually the other way around. You regain knowledge of who you really are and where you really come from because all is light and we are light and there’s nothing else but light that’s what they say and everything that looks like darkness and that looks like duality or like fragmentation and all the kinds of everything that is not light is ultimately a delusion. And so the whole path of Gnosis is really a path of overcoming our dualistic consciousness and opening our eyes to the true nature of reality which is light and this is very radical. So everything we take to be real is not actually real and the only true reality is so completely utterly non-dualistic that it is very hard, if not impossible, for us to even try to imagine it. So it’s a very radical world view but it’s totally not gnostic, it is not dualistic it is monistic or non-dualistic and then there’s another element. If I just may just continue, if that’s okay?

AP: Yeah.

WH: Now that I’m getting a bit warmed up, let me continue this. Also, there are two main points that I make about Hermetic literature; one is that it’s radical non-dualistic, there’s nothing but light, that’s it and Gnosis means seeing the light, that you are and realizing that the light that you are, yourself is ultimately not different from the light of gods – it’s one and the same. So you’re seeing the light of divinity which is actually your own essence, there’s no difference. Okay, it’s very radical but then you do get embodied and you do experience a life in the body, right? And like we all do. Now, this does not mean that you enter into a kind of prison of matter like the traditional, stereotypical Gnostics would say. No, actually what it means is that your perfect pure consciousness of light gets altered and you sink into a state of delusion. And that’s the world that we are living in now then you might say that is wrong and that’s a pity. So we should not get embodied and so the Gnostics would say, the kind of stereotypical Gnostics would say, we should never have gotten into a body, the matter is bad and we have to escape from matter. That’s not what our Hermetic authors are saying, very interestingly they are very positive about the embodiment. So even though embodiment means that you lose your awareness of the true light of reality, it doesn’t mean that we should not get embodied, we actually should get a body, and they are very positive about it. Why? Well, embodiment means that we, from purely spiritual beings, become double beings, we become double humans who are partly spiritual and partly material or experience ourselves as partly material. And this doubleness of human beings, the fact that we are both material, bodily, and spiritual at the same time means that we can do something unique that the divine beings cannot do, they are totally spiritual. We have this unique ability to bring spiritual realities into matter and into the body and the goal is not to escape from matter and from the body to a spiritual world, it’s exactly the other way around. What they’re saying, our goal and our task and our, you know, our task as human beings is to bring spiritual realities into the world, to embodiment, to embody them in the world.

I mean there is this famous story by Plato about the cave, everybody knows it. So the notion that human beings are living their lives in the cave of ignorance and we are looking at shadows at a wall but it’s not a true reality, we have to escape from the cave and then we will see reality as it really is. Now interestingly, Hermetic literature is based upon a very different kind of Platonic story, which is taught by a woman. So there’s a very strong feminine element here that has been overlooked, I think. It is not about escaping from the cave. No, it’s about embodying spiritual forces into the matter, by giving birth to them and so there is really, this very feminine language of giving birth to spiritual realities in matter and that is what we have to do, that is the task, according to Hermetic literature, to spiritualise matter, to bring the good and the beautiful and the true the ultimate realities of good and beauty and truth, to bring them into matter and to make the world better and to make it look as much as possible, to make it to transform it so that it will resemble the ultimate beauty of the spiritual. So it’s world-affirming, it is positive about matter, it’s positive about the body, it doesn’t teach you to escape from matter to another world. No, it tells you exactly the opposite – to embody spiritual realities into the world. So those two elements, non-duality and embodiment are, I think, the most essential elements of what Hermetic Spirituality is all about. It was a long story but I hope it was…

AP: Yeah, yeah, I loved it and I think that you gave the most brilliant explanation of what Gnosis is that I’ve ever heard in my life. I think I will use the difference between propositional knowledge in the future. I really liked the distinction between, you know, the direct acquaintance and the propositional knowledge. I think it’s a brilliant distinction. And so according to the Hermetic writers, they are very positive about the body which makes sense since it is a monistic worldview which means that everything is God including us.

WH: Exactly.

AP: So it makes sense in a monistic worldview that the body is not a prison but rather part of the divine. So how is it possible to spiritualise matter to, sort of, get acquainted, reacquainted with that light?

WH: Yeah, that is what the practice was all about. I think maybe the strongest example… yeah, maybe maybe I can answer this by adding something to it. What I try to explain in the book, there are three stages that I highlight, that you find in the Hermetic literature, which is really transformative and the second of them comes closer to what you’re asking here. So in one of the texts the so-called Poimandres, the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, you have Hermes Trismegistus who is in a kind of a trance state, in an altered state kind of ecstatic state and then suddenly his eyes are open and he sees this gigantic human, not a human being, this gigantic being who calls himself Poimandres and offers to answer all these questions. And it’s a long story and I won’t go into all the details but there comes a moment where Poimandres says, okay, I will tell you, I will show you, not tell you, I will show you the true nature of reality and he basically says, look into my eyes and then Hermes is looking into the eyes of Poimandres, this gigantic spiritual being and then he realises, that’s a very important moment, that he’s looking at light because Poimandres is universal light. But who is looking at light? Am I not light? No, I’m light as well, so I’m looking into my own eyes and I’m seeing myself and there is no distinction between Poimandres and myself. So that is the first kind of ground-breaking kind of experience of total unity, of total non-humanity and then there’s a whole later story in the Poimandres that I will skip now. And then there’s a second very important text and that goes to your question – Corpus Hermeticum 13, one of the most important texts in this literature and this is a bit, actually, what the cover of the book is all about.

So you see on the cover, you see a picture. This is actually William Blake and officially this is God creating Adam, you know, the biblical story of how God creates Adam but I put it on the cover because I would like us to imagine that this is not God and Adam, this is actually Hermes Trismegistus and this is his pupil Thoth. And what you see here is a key scene in what happens in Corpus Hermeticum 13 and this is the experience of rebirth, palingenesis, rebirth and that’s central because what happens is that Thoth, the pupil, comes to Hermes and he says, Hermes, I have been meditating, I’ve been doing all the kinds of things that I should do to prepare myself for Gnosis and now I’m ready and please give me Gnosis. And then Hermes says, yes, well he gives some evasive, rather enigmatic answers and Thoth gets rather upset. He says you’re not answering my questions clearly, why don’t you give me what I’m asking for? And then it’s a rather tense conversation actually. At one point Hermes says my son because that’s the language they use so, my son I don’t know what to tell you because I got transformed I gained Gnosis and I was born into a different body. I was born into a different body and I am no longer the person that you are used to, and that my true reality, my true spiritual body is invisible to you and I cannot, I do not know what to say about this. This has to happen to you and as long as it hasn’t happened to you, you will not understand what I’m talking about. And that is rather frustrating for Thoth. It’s a wonderful dialogue Thoth got really angry and disappointed he says looking at your material body, this spiritual body I cannot see it. But then at one point, he gets into a strange altered state, he gets into a state of mania, is the Greek word, it’s what’s at the bottom of words like manic etc. So he starts to feel very strange and then Hermes tells him, well okay, apparently something is happening to you, you’re getting into an altered state. Maybe you’re experiencing the first stages of rebirth, of the spiritual rebirth, maybe. But Thoth still does not see Hermes’ body, his spiritual body and he gets more and more frustrated and then there comes a moment when Hermes Trismegistus says okay, you’re ready for the rebirth and let me do what needs to be done.

Thoth enters into a kind of trance-like state and that’s what I see here. So he’s lying unconscious or semi-conscious here on the ground and he’s in a trance-like state and then Hermes starts to invoke 10 powers, powers of light which are invoked one by one into the body of Thoth and these 10 powers expel or exercise or, you know, drive out the 12 powers of darkness that are present in Thot’s body. And so Thoth is really surprised to hear that there are demonic powers in his body but that’s the case. So what is the story? You have the signs of the zodiac, 12 signs, those signs of the zodiac correspond to 12 demonic powers that take possession of everybody’s body at the moment we are born. So this happens to all of us, you know, according to the Hermetic authors the moment we are born, we are born at a specific time and a specific place that is presided over by all kinds of demonic or daemonic entities that are linked to the zodiac and so you’re born in a specific time and place and then those specific powers enter your body and your soul and did take possession of your body and they stay there for the duration of your life.

So all of us, so you Angela, and me, whether we like it or not, we are inhabited by daemonic powers according to that.

AP: I always knew it.

WH: Yeah and these daemonic powers, they are responsible for the fact that we do not see reality as it really is. They keep us chained to the senses and so on and so forth and in order to receive Gnosis they have to be expelled and that happens in Corpus Hermeticum 13. So these 12 powers and actually there are more, there are many more he says but it’s mostly 12. They are linked to negative qualities, like very negative passions like anger and lust and sadness and depression and all these kinds of things, they weigh us down, and they influence us. They have to be expelled and that happens in Corpus Hermeticum 13 by the 10 powers of light that are being invoked. And in the Hermetic cosmos, there are really 10 levels, so you have 12 times out of the zodiac and 10 powers of light and well, seven of them are linked to the seven planetary spheres and then there are three more which are linked to the highest levels beyond the cosmos, the Ogdoad which is the realm of life of universal life, the Ennead which is the realm of universal light and then the pegé itself, the source, the ultimate mysterious source of being. Now all those powers of light are invoked by Hermes into Thoth’s body and they just drive out the demonic powers and these demonic… I should not say demonic that’s really daemonic, that’s the Greek word daemon and they drive out these daemonic powers and they leave with a rushing of wings, as the Greek text says. So they really like you feel like these daemonic entities are flying away, you know, driven away by the powers of light, and after that, when that happens, Tot gets totally transformed because these 10 powers of light weave themselves into a body of light which takes the place of the daemonic beings and now resides in his physical body. So he’s no longer inhabited by daemonic powers of darkness but by noetic powers of light.

And that is that’s what happens and the moment that this happens and this very dramatic key moment in the Hermetic process, the consciousness of Tot changes completely. And so when you get born your consciousness gets constricted in terms of time and space at the moment that you get reborn the universal boundless light takes possession of your body and this light is beyond time and space. And this means that Tot suddenly gets access to the universal consciousness of divinity itself and he says that I’m everywhere I am in clouds and in mountains and in the earth and in the sea. And there are no boundaries to his consciousness anymore. He gains what is known as cosmic consciousness and it’s very dramatic. He describes this, I’m everywhere, I see everything, there are no limitations to my knowledge anymore. So that is the experience of rebirth.

So the interesting thing is that according to the Hermetic literature then it is possible to gain salvational knowledge, Gnosis while still being in the body you don’t have to leave the body and the cosmos to find it you can get it here. So you can get reborn and then you can still walk around like everybody, you can still interact with people but your true body is no longer daemonic, it is a body of light and you can be active in the world, you can try to make the world a better place because that is what the process is all about, to improve the world, to bring goodness, beauty, and truth into the world. And now that Tot is reborn he is capable of doing it, and now he can do it and so that’s the second phase.

And then there’s a third phase. So okay, now Tot has gained cosmic consciousness his mind is everywhere, his mind is limitless but then he’s still in the cosmos. It’s cosmic consciousness, he’s not beyond the cosmos. And then there is a third key text known as the Ogdoad, Ennead, or the 8th and the 9th that’s just a text in Coptic that was discovered, very recently in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, which is really new. So it has revolutionized our understanding of the Hermetica. Now in this text, you see that the reborn Tot and his master Hermes do a ritual that happens in the context of the brethren, of the brotherhood. Because you must imagine some kind of brother and sisterhood. I think it is really it’s male-female, the Hermetic literature was open to men and women. And so they are sitting there, probably in a circle, you have to imagine and then Hermes leads Tot into an altered state again which allows him to actually leave the cosmos and go beyond cosmic consciousness. He leaves the body and then he actually leaves the body and he comes to the Ogdoad of life, to the Ennead of lights and then he glimpses the pegé. So that is what I refer to at the beginning, so that is the highest experience. And one thing that I discovered and which I have to say I’m a bit proud of that I discovered it because nobody else has seen it, is that there is a formula during this moment of ascent to the highest spheres and you see in the Greek or in the Coptic actually you see the Greek vowels.

The vowels of the Greek alphabet, are being pronounced according to a certain order and it turns out that these vowels were linked to the planets. So each of the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet is linked to one of the seven planets but they were also linked to the seven tones of the musical scale, so you can actually sing them. So these vowels were not just pronounced like ah, oh, etc. No, they were actually sung and you can link them to musical notes or musical scales that are known in antiquity and you can sing them. So I have a piece of music in the book where I show what they were doing and I’m convinced that what happened is that Tot and Hermes are standing there in the circle, they enter into a deep meditative state, they probably hold each other by the shoulders. That is what I think is happening, they both have their eyes closed and then they start singing these vowels and the brethren answer. So you sing an alpha the first notes are ah and then the referencing they sing the omega, the last of the seven vowels and they respond, and they use the next letter and you get a response and it gets more intense and stronger and longer and every with every vowel the consciousness of these two people rises up through the planetary sphere until they’re at the top in the highest level and then they go beyond it and they experience the eighth and the ninth and the source. So it’s a very dramatic description of a radically altered state of consciousness, a radical visionary state which leads finally to a unitary experience of non-duality, direct Gnosis which cannot be put in words.

Yes but isn’t that strange you have had an experience that cannot be expressed and I say write it down, it can be written down – that’s the whole point. So what are you going to write down, only everything that’s not essential? Now okay, this leads me down to a long dense chapter about the relation between ultimate Gnosis and language. Is language able at all to say something about these things? I used Jacques Derrida, the famous French deconstructionist philosopher and I used the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, the great hermeneutic philosopher I confronted those two with one another and I tried to say something about what to say about the unsayable, how to write about what cannot be written down.

AP: And what’s your conclusion? How can you write about or talk about what cannot be….?

WH: Well, what I’m actually saying, in the end, is that there is something peculiar about texts. Texts can speak, and texts can have agency. The texts are not just kinds of passive transmitters of knowledge. So I’ve had an experience, I write it down and then you decode my text and they understand what I mean. Texts themselves can have a power of themselves, which goes beyond what the author was planning, planning to write. And I think there is, yeah, this would go a bit far, I haven’t, I’m not even sure whether I can explain this in, you know, words because it’s a rather complicated argument – you have to read the book. But I’m referring to a very famous passage by Plato in the Phaedrus, one of the most important dialogues by Plato about love and where Thoth is talking with Ammon. Now Thoth is the Egyptian name for Hermes, let’s say, so Hermes and Thoth. So the Greeks would talk about Hermes, and the Egyptians would call him Thoth. Now, this god Thoth is the inventor of writing and he’s talking with the supreme god Ammon who is like the supreme source, the ultimate god and he is saying to Ammon I have made a fantastic invention, writing. And now we people will be able not to forget what they have experienced but we will be able to transmit knowledge over time through writing and isn’t that fantastic. And then Ammon, the supreme God is not so impressed. He says well so you call this a drug of reminding and the word drug is being used and the pharmacon. So writing is a drug, actually, which has an effect on your mind and he says this drug of reminding is actually not a medicine, drug in the sound of medicine; it’s actually a poison. Because people will forget the direct experience and will only be looking at written words which take the place of the true experience. So people will be reading all these texts and all these words and they will think that they have access to truth and to knowledge but it’s a delusion because what can be written down will never be the true knowledge and the true truth. So it’s a drug of delusion that you have invented.

So Ammon is very critical about writing and Thoth is the inventor of writing and he tried to promote it. Well, so I talk about this and I, at the very end of my dense chapter, it’s called Thoth’s secrets and I say Thoth, the inventor of writing did have a trick and a kind of and even the supreme god didn’t understand this and that secret is the fact that writing itself can have kind of an almost magical effect on consciousness and can transmit messages that were not consciously intended by the author and actually can do something. So I end up on the side of Thoth and I say that even though language cannot express the inexpressible it can have an effect on the human mind which helps people find their way, yeah, towards the kind of the ultimate inexpressible experience of Gnosis.

AP: Yeah, I think this is brilliant because it’s not perhaps it’s not about language explaining things it’s more about language triggering an effect, yes, creating a resonance.

WH: Exactly, exactly.

AP: It creates a resonance within you and it becomes transformative and then you can access that Gnosis. Not because of the information but because of that trigger, that sequence of words has sort of created within you.

WH: Well thank you very much for formulating it like that because that’s exactly the point. You’ve got exactly the point. So apparently I was clear in the way I explained it because that’s exactly the point. I have, yeah, I have also a whole section about logos and so the word Greek word logos is, of course, at the origin of terms like logic and it’s about, you know, speaking, speech and reason, etc. and that’s exactly the point. So for Plato and also for the Hermetic author logos is speech, the spoken words, not written words – the spoken words. The suggestion is that logos, speech, the human speech do not just consist of signifiers, that’s semiotic signifiers but it’s actually it’s an active force. It does something it is an energy and that’s the way that you have to understand Hermetic literature, also. It’s about noetic energies that have a direct physical mental and soul effect on the hearer. So when I’m talking, when I would be a Hermetic teacher, which I’m not, then I would not just be giving information by speaking I would actually have a direct spiritual effect on you by my words, which have energy, which is loaded with energy – that’s the idea. Yeah and now that I mentioned that maybe that’s another element. So you have logos, speech which is powerful which is real direct energetic power and it can convey nous and that’s a term that we should be talking about, we haven’t touched upon yet and maybe that’s the last thing I’ll show you.

AP: Yeah, that’s a good segue yeah, because we mentioned that we wanted to talk about nous.

WH: Yeah, nous, so you have Gnosis, you have logos and you have Nous and what is Nous? My book, in a way, is one big analysis of nous. Now, what is nous? It’s a Greek word at the origin of words like noetic, as a kind of knowledge, now what is nous? The problem is if you read the Hermetic literature in the normal English translations then almost always nous gets translated as intellect or mind. Well, we know what the mind is, we know what the intellect is, we think it resides in our brain, it has to do with thinking and so with mental activity with intellectual work, etc. And we think, yeah, we know what that is and then you read the Hermetic literature, and everywhere where you see the word nous you read intellect or mind, and that makes the whole literature look very philosophical in a modern sense and very rational and very intellectual. But it’s a mistranslation, that is what I am arguing.

Nous does not mean what we understand by intellect and mind and it’s very important, so I leave it untranslated. I think we have to learn new words, we have to learn to use new words that are not yet part of our language. What is it? It is a kind of unknown. It is basically the instrument that allows us to have Gnosis. So we have an ability in our mind to use the word mind again, we have a kind of ability and inherent ability to have direct knowledge of the universal light. That’s what they say, that is the foundation of Gnosis and that ability is not thinking, it is not intellectualizing, etc. but it is a mode of direct knowing, you might call it spiritual knowledge, spiritual knowing but it’s not intellect, it’s not logical, it can’t be put in words but it is a direct intellectual no, it’s a direct well, noetic perception.

AP: Would you say that it is the human skill of grasping that light? What the Hermetic writers were talking about?

WH: Yes, that is what it is. It is our ability to grasp that light and that is, yeah, because what is that light it is nous so the nous is the universal light.

AP: So nous is the skill within us that allows us to grasp the source.

WH: That’s it, that’s it and that is what it is and why it is both in philosophical terms both ontological and epistemological at the same time it is, in reality, universal light and it is an ability, our ability to actually, well, know the light and it’s both at the same time and yeah, so the whole book in a way, you might say, that nous is the hero of the book that I’ve written. It’s really from the first pages I talk about nous, what does it mean? If you understand nous a little bit then you can begin to understand what Gnosis is all about. Okay, and that leads me back also to my polemics against the historical imagination of Hermitists because so many of these texts have been interpreted as philosophical texts partly by translating nous as intellect and mind. It looks all very familiar to us and this radical spiritual text about alterations of consciousness gets reduced by means of translation to kinds of nice philosophical treatises of the kind that look familiar to us. That’s not what they are, they are something very different.

AP: Yeah, that was fantastic I think it was a great explanation and I think that this book is really something that goes beyond the, you know, the normal academic books, normal academic books, well you know what I mean.

WH: Well I very much hope so. Why would I spend hours, years, and years writing a normal academic book? There are so many of them. So I’ve done my best.

AP: Yeah so I definitely encourage everybody to get a hold of this book because I think it is a fantastic read and it is also quite engaging in, you know, in the writing. I really like your writing style and it’s quite simple even though it is still an academic book. It is, I’d say, accessible to the general public. Or so I hope, you guys tell me if you read it.

WH: Well thank you very much. It’s true this is also a little part of what I’m saying in the book is that writing is a form of enchantment and that’s the point I make again and again; when you write you try to influence the minds of your listeners, you try to put a spell on your listeners and that’s what I’m trying to do. I try to write well, as well as I can. Yeah because I try to have an impact and I want to catch your attention and so yeah, so I think that’s part of what the art of writing is all about.

AP: You write amazingly and you speak amazingly. So I think it was a very clear explanation. I honestly think that the way you explained Gnosis and Nous is the best way I’ve ever heard it, you know, explained.

WH: Thank you very much. You humbled me but thank you very much. I’ve done my best.

AP: Thank you very much Woulter, it was really fascinating and I’m sure that my audience will love this conversation and your book. So I really recommend you guys to get this book and of course, let me know in the comment sections what you thought about what we said, and thank you again, Woulter, and yeah, it was really amazing conversation.

WH: Well thank you very, well very much for the opportunity. It was great to be on your interview series. So thank you.

AP: Bye guys and stay tuned for all the academic fun.

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FIND THE BOOK HERE: Hanegraaff, W.J. (2022) Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. New edition. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

First uploaded 30 Jul 2022