Book Reviews

by Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 400 pp., hardcover, $135.

Hermeticism is the ever-elusive philosophy. Since late antiquity, following a jagged and indirect path, the amalgam of Greek-Egyptian thought has promised seekers a whisper of the insights of primeval esotericism. This ideal grew pronounced in the Western mind with the rediscovery of Hermetic texts during the Renaissance.             

In the fifteenth century, many translators, clerics, scholars, and nobles believed that the resurfaced Greek dialogues—translated into Latin as the Corpus Hermeticum—represented the fabled prisca theologia: a theological “holy grail” codifying humanity’s earliest spiritual and cosmological insights. The fragmentary writings suggested a pantheistic view of creation emanating from nous, an infinite mind, which humanity, in its journey to transcendent awareness, could eventually rejoin.

The mysterious tracts, sometimes credited to the mythical psychopomp Hermes Trismegistus, held the promise of individual greatness: “See what power you have, what quickness! If you can do these things, can god not do them? So you must think of god in this way, as having everything—the cosmos, himself, (the) universe—like thoughts within himself. Thus, unless you make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god; like is understood by like.”

These hopes were largely dashed in 1614 when linguist Isaac Casaubon demonstrated that the magico-cosmic works were written in the centuries immediately following the death of Christ and not the mists of deep antiquity. Its ancient vintage dispelled, the Corpus Hermeticum retained the devotion of a few stalwarts, including natural philosopher Sir Thomas Browne, who wrote in his 1643 Religio Medici: “The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible World is but a Picture of the invisible wherein.”

Following Casaubon’s exposure, few translations were ventured. Hermeticism was not widely heard of again until the late nineteenth-century occult revival instigated by H.P. Blavatsky. Her secretary G.R.S. Mead produced a pioneering English translation in his 1906 Thrice-Greatest Hermes. Still, most classicists continued to regard the Hermetica as little more than a late ancient retread of Neoplatonism with a conceit of Egyptian origin.

This viewpoint shifted in the 1970s as mounting evidence and discovery of earlier texts reestablished Hermeticism’s authentic, if syncretic, Egyptian roots. The rehabilitation culminated in 1986 with the publication of historian Garth Fowden’s work The Egyptian Hermes. New translations followed, including philosopher Brian P. Copenhaver’s 1992 Hermetica.

Into the byways and debates surrounding Hermeticism now steps a vital and perspective-shaping study by historian of esotericism Wouter J. Hanegraaff. “I could never shake off the uncomfortable feeling that somehow, something remained less than fully convincing about how these texts were being discussed in the scholarly literature or translated into modern languages,” Hanegraaff writes. “What, if anything, was missing?” He announces as his guiding principle the Latin maxim ad fontes—“to the sources.”

Through intensive study of the ancient Greek originals, Hanegraaff illuminates a truth that many scholars and interpreters overlook. What we call the Hermetica are, in fact, a disordered, reassembled, recopied, and sometimes tendentiously translated body of work tracing a messy arc from late ancient Alexandria (the originals are lost) to medieval and Renaissance-era copies whose insights were muddied and reworded along the way.

Hanegraaff issues an important caution to interpreters of the Hermetica, especially seeker-historians like me: “This means that precisely those elements in the Hermetica that strike us as familiar (those that make us feel comfortably ‘at home’ in our own mental world, surrounded by concepts and ideas that we readily know and understand) are most likely to lead us astray.” Material that may appear “familiar” or, I would venture, parallel to modern concepts, may seem so because ancient scribes adapted the Hermetic sources to which they had access to reflect rising norms, conceptions, and speech patterns of the day, which also populate the dominant classical and religious literature to which we’re accustomed. (There is the further issue of transcribers’ own prejudices and preferences.) Hanegraaff notes: “We tend to use interpretation so as to make these texts fit our own agendas rather than allowing those agendas to be challenged by the texts.”

For this reason, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination is probably the most important analysis of the Hermetica since Fowden’s efforts restored the locus of Hermetic spirituality to late ancient Egypt. But Hanegraaff goes further than a critique. He probes the probable meaning of Hermetic literature to ancient acolytes.

Hanegraaff reasons that “the Way of Hermes was practiced in very small gatherings, probably not much larger than what we find in the texts themselves: one teacher and one to three pupils—hardly more.” A key part of Hermetic practice, he writes, entailed using the philosophical insights of the dialogues to attempt a “careful and attentive mental praxis, a way of training the mind.” He continues, “Our text holds out the promise that all those who choose to follow the Way of Hermes and persist to its very end will be able to immerse themselves wholly in the vessel of nous, thereby achieving gnōsis and human perfection.” For this, ancient seekers approached nous with reverence and petition for help.

Unlike some Gnostic sects, he suggests, the Hermeticists did not despise the body or materiality—in fact, sexuality was considered a transcendent gateway—but rather understood both selves, physical and ethereal, as core to human existence.

Hanegraaff’s perspective on this ancient therapeia hardly settles all questions. The extant texts harbor too many riddles, including the role of “cyclical recurrence,” an ambiguous concept—perhaps referencing reincarnation—which my correspondence with Hanegraaff leaves unresolved.

Ultimately, Hanegraaff endorses a reconciling point of view:

The core metaphysics of Hermetic spirituality, or so I have argued, should be understood in terms of radical nonduality. This means that the experiential world of multiple phenomena in which we find ourselves is not ultimately real, in the sense that how things appear to our dualistic consciousness is not how things really are. The human quest for enlightenment or gnōsis could be described as the individual soul’s hypnerotomachia, a dreamlike quest or strife for felicity driven by the power of erōs. And yet it was precisely by pursuing their passionate desires all the way through this worldly labyrinth of merely phenomenal experiences that souls could finally discover the ultimate oneness of true being—the secret that nothing unreal exists.

In this last phrase (italicized in the original), some readers may detect the wording of a core maxim from the modern channeled text A Course in Miracles. I regard this echo as unintentional but worth pausing over when considering parallel insights between old and new spiritualities. Hanegraaff is, in my reading, uncomfortable with such analogies. When pondering correspondences between the Hermetic concept of “cosmic consciousness” and Richard Maurice Bucke’s popular 1901 book of the same name, the historian notes both defensively and affirmingly:

This comparison is not meant to imply any quasi-perennialist claim about ancient Hermetic practitioners and modern transcendentalists dipping into “the same universal mystical experience,” an assumption for which we have no data. It indicates simply that descriptions as found in CH XI and XIII [of the Corpus Hermeticum] do not need to be dismissed as “narrative fictions” based on nothing but theory. We know that people can have intense visionary experiences; we know that these can involve a vivid sensation of boundless perception unrestricted by time and space; we know that these experiences can be strongly enhanced by alterations of consciousness; and we know that this can happen either spontaneously or be induced artificially by specific spiritual techniques.

gainst binary interpretations can, I believe, leaven his occasional archness about comparing ancient and modern thought systems. Even within the folds of his predilections, Hanegraaff opens new doorways—and slams shut none.  Indeed, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination heralds a new phase of Hermetic studies with an intellectual demand to which scholars and seekers alike should rise.

Mitch Horowitz

 

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian, writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library and TSA member whose latest book is Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences (Inner Traditions).

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The Kabbalistic Tree

J.H. Chajes
University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 2022. xiv + 440 pp., hardcover, $99.95.

Most students of esotericism are familiar with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This esoteric diagram dates at least as far back as the Middle Ages, when Jewish mystics began to create many versions of it in various shapes and media. Most of these have been almost completely unknown.

J.H. Chajes surveys the array of these diagrams—which he calls ilanot (singular ilan) or “trees”—in this lavishly illustrated and beautifully executed work. Chajes’ account goes back to the thirteenth century AD, when classic Kabbalistic works such as the Zohar and Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Light were written, inspiring the creation of the ilanot.

In their simplest form, the ilanot comprise ten spheres or sefirot—arranged in a treelike formation. But Kabbalists created many far more elaborate versions. These attempt to integrate two basic concepts: the ten sefirot (which can be translated roughly as “principles”) and the Four Worlds: Atzilut (the divine), Briah (the spirit), Yetzirah (the psyche), and Assiyah (the physical). The interrelation of these two concepts—never definitively explicated in the Kabbalistic texts—inspired the variety of ilanot, which range from simple circles and lines in a notebook to elaborate productions such as The Magnificent Parchment, produced in Italy around 1600. This elaborate chart, which Chajes reproduces in a full-color foldout, “is filled with hundreds of discrete visual elements, diagrammatic schemata, symbolic forms, and decorative embellishments” surrounded by an astounding 33,000 words of Hebrew text.

Visually, The Kabbalistic Tree is a superb accomplishment: even amassing this array of obscure, half-lost images is impressive, and the visual reproductions are of the highest quality. Chajes’ accompanying text is less satisfying. He provides the history and background of the images, along with profiles of the distinctive (and often peculiar) men behind them. But his discussion focuses on technical details in the ilanot: one has the impression that the author is more fascinated by them as artifacts than as illustrations of a theosophical system per se. His text as a result sometimes reads as if he is writing for Art News.

Even so, The Kabbalistic Tree suggests an entirely new perspective on these images. In the first place, they are idiosyncratic in the extreme: one ilan, for example, portrays Adam Kadmon, the primordial human, as the seventeenth-century Holy Roman emperor Leopold I. No two ilanot portray exactly the same system. Indeed no two Kabbalists appear to have had exactly the same system—ever.

In the second place, practically none of these glyphs were intended to have a wide circulation—or perhaps any. As intricate as some of them are, no doubt exacting hundreds or thousands of hours of work, they were not for publication; many of them may never have been seen by anyone else in their creators’ lifetimes.

Consequently, we have to ask what these images were for. Not for publication, not for reproduction, not even, one suspects, for the education of some small set of disciples. One conclusion is left: the creation of the ilanot was itself a spiritual practice—possibly the central practice of these Kabbalists. Drawing and illustrating these images was their means of imprinting the principles behind them upon the practitioner’s mind and soul.

The diversity of these ilanot also suggests that the basic system of the ten sefirot and the Four Worlds is a framework only. It is not complete in itself, and it is up to the Kabbalist to internalize these principles (for example by drawing them for himself) and elaborate on them according to his own understanding. The point is not to get the right answer, but to integrate these images into one’s own being to the extent that one can operate with them creatively.

Such a perspective casts a light on the secrecy with which these documents were created and preserved. No doubt it was partly to avoid the unwholesome interest of both the meddlesome church and those of low understanding. But it may also have arisen from understanding that one’s own elaboration upon the Kabbalistic system is at its core an individual one. The ultimate product is not only a diagram drawn on parchment but internalizing these sacred principles in the soul.

Chajes’ account takes the ilanot into the twentieth century, where it peters out, although incorporating a few perfunctory examples. Perhaps this reflects a longstanding academic prejudice that the Kabbalah must always be somehow other—somewhere in the past, in thirteenth-century Spain or sixteenth-century Palestine, never in the here and now.

One exception is the work of the contemporary Israeli artist David Friedman, whose magnificent Sefer Yetzirah Motherboard (referring to the primordial Kabbalistic text) is reproduced in Chajes’ book. (Two other examples of Friedman’s work appear on the front and back covers of this issue.)

In any event, this beautiful and impressive book not only provides a great deal of material for contemplation and enjoyment but illustrates a principle sometimes enjoined by Kabbalistic teachers: to understand the ideas in these diagrams, you have to draw them out yourself.

Richard Smoley

[For contents page]

The Kabbalistic Tree

by J.H. Chajes, reviewed by Richard Smoley

           

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The Land of the Gods: The Long-Hidden Story of Visiting the Masters of Wisdom in Shambhala

[H.P. Blavatsky; Franz Hartmann]
New York: Radiant Books, 2022. 139 pp., hardcover, $29.99; paper $9.97.

The recent publication of a book titled The Land of the Gods has raised some queries among TS members as to its authorship, which the publisher attributes to H.P. Blavatsky. Did Blavatsky write this fictional story about a seeker traversing the Alpine mountains in southern Bavaria who falls into a dream state and visits the Rosicrucian adepts in Shambhala?

The book is subtitled The Long-Hidden Story of Visiting the Masters of Wisdom in Shambhala. The publisher claims on the back cover that the book represents “a secret story hidden in plain sight for 135 years.” Like other TS members, I had doubts about it being from the pen of HPB, so I began researching.

The original book’s title was An Adventure among the Rosicrucians, and it was written in 1887 by HPB’s associate Franz Hartmann. That book continues to be available online from various sellers. Reading the first ten or so pages from the sample revealed that the story in Hartmann’s book is the same as the one in The Land of the Gods.

Indeed Blavatsky reviewed the original Adventure among the Rosicrucians in her publication Lucifer in October 1887. She notes that the author of the book is “a Student of Occultism,” with a footnote identifying him as “Dr. Franz Hartmann, a remarkable German physician, philosopher and mystic . . . and a personal friend of H.P.B.”

It makes sense that Hartmann would have written this story. Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer, an Austrian-born scholar who has translated Hartmann’s texts from German to English, noted in her winter 2022 Quest article that after Hartmann left India with HPB in April 1885, he moved to Kempten in southern Bavaria—the place the seeker was visiting when he entered the mystical Shambhala. Hartmann stayed longer than he’d planned “because he met the leader of a small group of Rosicrucians and soon identified himself with this group.”

In her review of Hartmann’s book, HPB writes, “Scattered hither and thither, through this little volume are pearls of wisdom. For that which is rendered in the shape of dialogue and monologue is the fruit gathered by the author during a long research in old forgotten and mouldy MSS of the Rosicrucians, or mediaeval alchemists, and in the worm-eaten infolio of unrecognized, yet great adepts of every age.”

Thus when the narrator approaches the subject of esoteric retreats or communities—a dream cherished by many a Theosophist—he is answered by the “Adept” that “the true ascetic is he who lives in the world, surrounded by its temptations; he in whose soul the animal elements are still active, craving for the gratification of their desires and possessing the means for such gratification, but who by the superior power of his will conquers his animal self. . . . He desires no other good but to create good for the world.’ . . . Saith the Adept.”

To be clear, it is not the actual content of The Land of the Gods with which this reviewer has a problem—simply that it is attributed to HPB when it was clearly written by Hartmann. The content of the book is Rosicrucian theosophy, and much of it sounds familiar to any Theosophist or student of the Ageless Wisdom. There are even some words and phrases that could be from the mouth of HPB, such as calling the Christian Gospel a “dead letter” and referring to the scientific and theological misconceptions and superstitions accumulated through the ages as “rubbish.”

Blavatsky’s influence on Hartmann comes through his story of this adventure to find the truth in the “monastery” of Rosicrucianism. “Knowing the different opinions of the higher accepted authorities and not being bound by an orthodox scientific creed having at their service all the results of the investigations of the learned, but not being bound to their system by a belief in their infallibility, such people would be at liberty to think freely,” explains the Rosicrucian adept in the book.

As the adept tells the seeker, “Your religion isn’t the religion of the living God who still lives and executes His own will; it is the religion of a dead, impotent god who died long ago and left an army of clergy to rule in His stead.” That certainly sounds similar to statements made by Blavatsky about the modern Christian church.

If you are inclined to read this edition of Hartmann’s book, I also recommend reading Blavatsky’s writing on Shambhala, in which she speaks of this as that “certain Sacred Island in Central Asia” and the “sacred Island (now the ‘fabled’ Shambhala, in the Gobi Desert)” (Secret Doctrine, 2:319).

I will conclude this review by quoting HPB’s strong recommendation of Hartmann’s book at the end of her own review: “The ‘adventure’ is more than worth perusal.”

Clare Goldsberry

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being, was reviewed in the spring 2022 issue of Quest.

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Making the Ordinary Extraordinary: My Seven Years in Occult Los Angeles with Manly Palmer Hall

Tamra Lucid
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2021. 160 pp., paper, $13.93.

I’ve always been fascinated by Manly P. Hall, the masterful writer and lecturer on esoterica and one of the most important occult historians of our day. Although his presence remains alive and well in lecture halls and occult circles, he always seemed far away to me, of a long-distant era.

When I found out that Tamra Lucid, the feminist punk rock singer of the band Lucid Nation, not only knew Hall but also worked with him and wrote this memoir, I had to read it. Tamra doesn’t disappoint. Her up-close and personal stories of working for Hall at his Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles—by way of a delightful fly-on-the-wall narrative—is like listening to a girlfriend describe an improbable mystical encounter that mysteriously dropped into her life and rocked her world. I flew through the chapters, short and sweet vignettes, beautifully written, flowing with personal insights, compassion, and humor.

Tamra begins by stating, “This book is not a biography of Manly Hall. This is the story of seven years of friendship between a wise old man and the girl whose name he could never get quite right. Some of his history will be told along the way, but I’m no historian. I just wanted to capture the details of a friendship I treasured.”

In his foreword, Danny Goldberg states, “This memoir is Tamra’s own Cliff Notes version of Hall’s life and the metaphysical concepts he explored, rendered in the twenty-first-century language of an artist as influenced by punk as by ancient esoterica.”

In the early eighties, Tamra and her musician boyfriend, Ronnie Pontiac, discovered Mr. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in Los Angeles and were instantly awakened to his esoteric and occult teachings. They needed to know more and were surprised to discover that Mr. Hall was alive and well and living in LA and gave lectures every Sunday at the PRS. After attending their first Sunday lecture there, Tamra and Ronnie started volunteering. Hall then opened a door marked “private” and ignited an unlikely intimate seven-year friendship between two twenty-something punk rockers and an eighty-year-old metaphysical scholar.

Mr. Hall could never remember Tamra’s name; he would call her “Tanya,” but according to her account, she eventually became Hall’s designated screener of anyone who wanted to meet him. She offers, “I met many casualties of spirituality gone wrong. The seekers of wisdom who were actually seeking dominion. The ceremonial magicians who opened portals they could not close into realms they could not understand. The humble Christians obsessed with self-aggrandizing missions. The white men convinced they were gurus of Eastern lineages. The hucksters repackaging metaphysical teachings as personality cults. What a world of cliques, competition and manipulation was revealed!”

 —At Ronnie’s first encounter with Hall, he was greeted with “Sit down and make yourself miserable” in a voice Tamra describes “as a cross between FDR and W.C. Fields.” Ronnie was dubbed “The Boy.” This name followed him throughout their relationship, which culminated in a remarkable honor: the Boy was to be one of Mr. Hall’s designated substitute lecturers. He was booked to deliver a series of weekly lectures in the room upstairs off the library, where a portrait of H.P. Blavatsky would peer down behind him. Mr. Hall eventually married Tamra and Ronnie in his backyard under a double tree, so that they joined the ranks of Bela Lugosi and his fifth and final wife, Hope.

At one point, Tamra begged Hall to banish a certain man, who repelled her, from the PRS. When the same man (alleged by Hall’s wife, Marie, to be his murderer), later inherited Hall’s estate, Tamra and Ronnie were the ones forever banished.

Tamra draws verbal portraits of the strong, often overlooked women who were the backbone of the PRS. The chapter on “Mad Marie,” Hall’s wife, is wildly entertaining. One suspects volumes could be written on Marie’s own cosmologies.  A delightful treat is found at the end of the book, a favorite of Hall’s: “Mad Marie’s Zucchini Pancake Recipe.”

Tamra lets us in on Hall’s visits with J. Krishnamurti in Ojai. Did they discuss the secrets of enlightenment? Hardly. Hall said they shared jokes, talked about sports and current events, swapped stories, and compared notes. Above all, I treasured the little glimpses into Hall’s everyday life. The man could be sneaky, moving with surprising speed when cookies were involved. He had a wicked and fast sense of humor:

Over dinner one night Mr. Hall told us a joke. At a meeting of a chapter of the Theosophical Society, at a table of old-time theosophists, a lady stood up proclaiming, after great study and much reflection, that she was the reincarnation of Hypatia of Alexandria. The Masters had confirmed this. Another leapt to her feet. “That is impossible,” she shouted, “I was Hypatia!” Soon every woman at the table was shouting, “I was Hypatia!”

 

Tamra’s memoir of this improbable but rewarding friendship reveals Hall not only as an inspiring esoteric thinker but also as a genuinely kind human being who wanted to share his quest for inner meaning and rare wisdom with the world.

Nancy Bragin

An award-winning documentary and podcast producer, Nancy Bragin is a member of the TSA currently managing Abraxas Lodge.

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