secret history of hermes trismegistus

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Florian Ebeling. The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient toModern Times

Author(s): Christopher I LehrichSource: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 643-645Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1353/ren.0.0074 .

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newcomers. Ebeling begins in Egypt itself, moves steadily through Greco-Roman,medieval, and early modern texts (which last dominate the book), then continues

with a rapid sweep through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a con-cluding nod to Julius Evolas and Umberto Ecos wildly different uses ofHermeticism in the twentieth century. Most of the work consists of summarydiscussions of exemplary texts and thinkers, with some small contextual setup. Asan example, chapter 3, Renaissance, begins by framing the texts in terms oftradition or rediscovery. Ebeling then examines Ficino, Pico, and briefly FrancescoPatrizi, Annibale Rosselli, and Jacques Lefvre dEtaples. Next he presents con-temporary alchemo-Paracelsism, surveying Christoph Balduff, Paracelsushimself, Joachim Tancke, and Benedictus Figulus. Finally, we come to religious

Hermeticism, encountering Sebastian Franck, Philippe de Mornay, and theOcculta Philosophia attributed to Basilius Valentinus. The balance betweencoverage and close reading is perhaps indicated by the fact that the whole chapteris thirty-two pages.

In his forward, the distinguished Egyptologist Jan Assmann helpfullypinpoints the most crucial contribution of this volume: Ebeling demonstrates thatby the early modern period, there were really two different forms of Hermeticism,and that they rarely overlapped in any clear or consistent fashion. Likely best-known to most Renaissance Quarterly readers is the Hermeticism stemming fromFicinos translations. But the alchemical Hermeticism that influenced Paracelsus

was very much an alternative tradition differing in both intellectual content andfoundational texts. Where the Ficinian lineage looked to the Corpus Hermeticum,including both the Greek texts Ficino translated and also the Latin Asclepius, thealchemists traced a genealogy to the Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina) and anumber of so-called practical Hermetic texts, minimally intersecting the CorpusHermeticum. Because modern scholars have rarely recognized that they are dealing

with two different traditions to be fair, most early modern and later occultthinkers have not made the distinction either there has been sharp disagreementabout the nature of Hermeticism as an intellectual movement. Ebeling argues, inessence, that this is because there was no single such movement.

Unfortunately, the book largely omits detailed coverage of historiographicalcontroversies, making it somewhat difficult for the nonspecialist to distinguish newinformation from stock survey. While this absence keeps the volume accessible, itdoes weaken its contribution. Ebeling clearly knows his material extraordinarily

well, and there are glimpses of a clear analytical voice, but on the whole he backsaway from development in favor of coverage. This is rather a pity: the confusionscommon to the field are only partly overcome by reformulating the basis of study.

A strong approach to argumentation would go a long way toward situatingHermeticisms in their several intellectual and cultural contexts. One misses, forexample, a careful analysis of how and why the two main strands of early modernHermeticism did and did not come into contact, given the interest in alchemydisplayed by thinkers directly in the lineage of Ficino and Pico. Ultimately thequestion about Hermeticism is not what it was, or if it was, but rather what

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difference it made and for whom. Ebelings book gives us a new, corrected positionfrom which to start asking such questions, but only hints at possible answers.

All told, the strengths and limits of the book make it of real classroom valuein an upper-level seminar. In any course that might consider Frances Yates, forexample, Ebelings work should admirably correct, clarify, and focus discussion.More importantly, however, no serious scholarship that touches on Hermeticismcan afford to be ignorant of this book, without which we are liable to fall back intoold, ill-informed mysteries.

CHRISTOPHER I. LEHRICHBoston University

REVIEW S 645

secret history of hermes trismegistus

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