The Asclepius calls the cosmos a second god and describes it as a living being, made good by its maker and holding all things within it. Hermetic writing is capable of harsh statements about the body and about matter, and a few treatises come close to the Gnostic view of the world as a trap, which is one reason the two are so often run together. But the corpus as a whole does not take that road. Its characteristic move is to say that the world is beautiful, and that a person who cannot see this is blinded rather than clear-sighted, so the piety it recommends is one of gratitude and contemplation rather than of escape. The distinction matters for reading the tradition's later history. It is precisely because Hermeticism praised the cosmos, and the human capacity to know it, that Renaissance readers found it compatible with the study of nature, and it fed directly into the natural philosophy and the natural magic of that period.
Facts
Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteThe distinction from the Gnostic view of the world as a trap matters for reading the later history of the tradition. It is precisely because Hermeticism praised the cosmos, and the human capacity to know it, that Renaissance readers found it compatible with the study of nature. 2 Doctrinal category (class) Belief
SubjectThe cosmos and creation 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionDefined and binding within this tradition 1 Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 1 Doctrinal CategoryCosmology and World-Structure 1 Position Profile
Key TextThe Asclepius, which calls the cosmos a second god and describes it as a living being, made good by its maker and holding all things within it. 1 Learn More
From a Living Cosmos to an Infinite One, Bruno's Debt and His Trial
Yates traces a direct line from the Asclepius's praise of the cosmos as a living, divine second god to Giordano Bruno's cosmology two centuries later, and the connection was not merely thematic. Bruno read the Hermetica as genuinely ancient Egyptian wisdom, prior to and superior to Greek philosophy, an assumption the whole Renaissance shared before Casaubon's philological dating overturned it, and he treated the Hermetic vision of a cosmos worthy of religious reverence as license to press the idea further than the Hermetica itself had gone. Where the Asclepius calls the world a beautiful, living second god within a bounded cosmos, Bruno argued for an infinite universe filled with innumerable worlds, each one, on his reading, entitled to the same reverence the Hermetic texts had extended to the cosmos as a whole.
Yates reads Bruno's 1600 execution in Rome as bound up with this Hermetic inflected cosmology and its religious implications for orthodox doctrine, not simply with the astronomy in isolation, since an infinite universe of innumerable worlds sat awkwardly beside a unique incarnation and a unique creation. Her account has been challenged by later historians who weight other elements of Bruno's trial more heavily, but the underlying textual debt is not contested, Bruno's own writing draws explicitly and repeatedly on Hermetic cosmology, giving the Asclepius's second god its most consequential and most dangerous afterlife.
Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Source Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin AsclepiusBrian P. Copenhaver
Sources
1. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
2. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind
Garth Fowden, Cambridge University Press, 1986
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
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