Discussion on Frances Yates' "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition"

[High Yogi]

Okay so I basically fell in love with this paragraph taken from the book "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition". It basically says it all. Let me know what you think and please share any insights or anything else you may like to add.

a passage from Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition:

"There will come a time when it will be seen that in vain have the Egyptians honored the divinity with a pious mind and with assiduous service. All their holy worship will become inefficacious. The gods, leaving the earth, will go back to heaven; they will abandon Egypt; this land, once the home of religion, will bewidowed of its gods and left destitute. Strangers will fill this country, and not only will there no longer be care for religious observances, but, a yet more painful thing, it will be laid down under so-called laws, under pain of punishments, that all must abstain from acts of piety or cult towards the gods. Then this most holy land, the home of sanctuaries and temples, will be covered with tombs and the dead. O Egypt, Egypt, there will remain of thy religion only fables, and thy children in later times will not believe them; nothing will survive save words engraved on stones to tell of thy pious deeds. The Scythian or the Indian, or some other such barbarous neighbour will establish himself in Egypt. For behold the divinity goes back up to heaven; and men, abandoned, all die, and then, without either god or man, Egypt will be nothing but a desert. . ..Why weep, O Asclepius ? Egypt will be carried away to worse things than this; she will be polluted with yet graver crimes. She, hitherto most holy, who so much loved the gods, only country of the earth where the gods made their home in return for her devotion, she who taught men holiness and piety, will give example of the most atrocious cruelty. In that hour, weary of life, men will no longer regard the world as worthy object of their admiration and reverence. This All, which is a good thing, the best that can be seen in the past, the present and the future, will be in danger of perishing; men will esteem it a burden; and thenceforward they will despise and no longer cherish this whole of the universe, incomparable work of God, glorious construction, good creation made up of an infinite diversity of forms, instrument of the will of God who, without envy, pours forth his favor on all his work, in which is assembled in one whole, in a harmonious diversity, all that can be seen that is worthy of reverence, praise and love. For darkness will be preferred to light; it will be thought better to die than to live; none will raise his eyes towards heaven; the pious man will be thought mad, the impious, wise; the frenzied will be thought brave, the worst criminal a good man. The soul and all the beliefs attached to it, according to which the soul is immortal by nature or foresees that it can obtain immortality as I have taught you—this will be laughed at and thought nonsense. And believe me, it will be considered a capital crime under the law to give oneself to the religion of the mind. A new justice will be created and new laws. Nothing holy, nothing pious, nothing worthy of heaven and of the gods who dwell there, will be anymore spoken of nor will find credence in the soul. The gods will separate themselves from men, deplorable divorce. Only the evil angels will remain who will mingle with men, and constrain them by violence—miserable creatures—to all the excesses of criminal audacity, engaging them in wars, brigandage, frauds, and in everything which is contrary to the nature of the soul. Then the earth will lose its equilibrium, the sea will no longer be navigable, the heaven will no longer be full of stars, the stars will stop their courses in the heaven. Every divine voice will be silenced, and will be silent. The fruits of the earth will moulder, the soil will be no longer fertile, the air itself will grow thick with a lugubrious torpor. Such will be the old age of the world, irreligion, disorder, confusion of all goods. When all these things have come to pass, O Asclepius, then the Lord and Father, the god first in power and the demiurge of the One God, having considered these customs and voluntary crimes, endeavoring by his will, which is the divine will, to bar the way to vices and universal corruption and to correct errors, he will annihilate all malice, either by effacing it in a deluge or by consuming it by fire, or destroying it by pestilential maladies diffused in many places. Then he will bring back the world to its first beauty, so that this world may again be worthy of reverence and admiration, and that God also creator and restorer of so great a work, may be glorified by the men who shall live then in continual hymns of praise and benedictions. That's what the rebirth of the world will be; a renewal of all good things, a holy and most solemn restoration of Nature herself, imposed by force in the course of time . . . by the will of God"

 

[panic in paradise]

IDK what to say about that, but would like to add to that i see why you basically fell in love with this paragraph(wow) -


all she wants, are the flowers brought to her... and when they are, and she laces with them - our hearts will drop and poor and shower - our own light for our own day , in her thirteenth hour.
her weeping is all that has remained - her tears have feed the forests glacers and plains
her every sob is with out vein - for if they were there would be no rain

... only there can she never answer - for her only reply is the same -
"if all is mine, then what am I - if all is mine, then whos am I?"


let go - let love be free.

 

[Pythagoras]

Thanks for this High Yogi. In future it might be preferable to link to the material rather than cut/paste chunks of text, and also explain why you 'fell in love' with this passage.

Yates' writings can be abstruse and arcane at the best of times and one needs a fairly solid grounding in the Western Esoteric Tradition to fully appreciate the work (ie - the Hermetica, Bruno's work and Ficino and Pico's Platonism).

The book "The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction" by my former tutor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is an excellent intoduction, and places Yates' writings in their proper Historical context.

It's great to see people reading esoterica, so please spread the word.

 

[High Yogi]

Thanks for this High Yogi. In future it might be preferable to link to the material rather than cut/paste chunks of text, and also explain why you 'fell in love' with this passage.

Yates' writings can be abstruse and arcane at the best of times and one needs a fairly solid grounding in the Western Esoteric Tradition to fully appreciate the work (ie - the Hermetica, Bruno's work and Ficino and Pico's Platonism).

The book "The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction" by my former tutor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is an excellent intoduction, and places Yates' writings in their proper Historical context.

It's great to see people reading esoterica, so please spread the word.

Yes, you are right. The reason I fell in love with it is because it seems to be so relevant and true today. This was written in ancient Egypt i believe, and it talks about whats going on in the world in this day and age. Not only does it tell us, but it details it all pretty well.
Yes it can be hard to read, but the more you read it, the more obvious it becomes and the deeper insights reveal themselves.

and also thank you for posting your insights and links. I will definitely check that out.

 

[ninjadanslarbretabar]

ive encountered this text not so long ago and im trying to find it back, i mean find who was talking about it, i think it might have being mckenna in his hermetiscism and alchemy lecture
or else it was someone else, maybe one of those egypt documentary...

but i do find it pretty interesting

 

[Pindar]

I know this may be loosely related, but its been theorized that philosophers as famous as Hegel may have been beholden to the Hermetic tradition.

Hegel’s claim to have attained wisdom is completely contrary to the original Greek conception of philosophy as the love of wisdom, that is, the ongoing pursuit rather than the final possession of wisdom. His claim is, however, fully consistent with the ambitions of the Hermetic tradition, a current of thought that derives its name from the so-called Hermetica (or Corpus Hermeticum), a collection of Greek and Latin treatises and dialogues written in the first or second centuries A.D. and probably containing ideas that are far older. The legendary author of these works is Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Greatest Hermes”). “Hermeticism” denotes a broad tradition of thought that grew out of the “writings of Hermes” and was expanded and developed through the infusion of various other traditions. Thus, alchemy, Kabbalism, Lullism, and the mysticism of Eckhart and Cusa — to name just a few examples — became intertwined with the Hermetic doctrines. (Indeed, Hermeticism is used by some authors simply to mean alchemy.) Hermeticism is also sometimes called theosophy, or esotericism; less precisely, it is often characterized as mysticism, or occultism.

It is the thesis of this book that Hegel is a Hermetic thinker. I shall show that there are striking correspondences between Hegelian philosophy and Hermetic theosophy, and that these correspondences are not accidental. Hegel was actively interested in Hermeticism, he was influenced by its exponents from boyhood on, and he allied himself with Hermetic movements and thinkers throughout his life. I do not argue merely that we can understand Hegel as a Hermetic thinker, just as we can understand him as a German or a Swabian or an idealist thinker. Instead, I argue that we must understand Hegel as a Hermetic thinker, if we are to truly understand him at all.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/magee.htm