After a minute or two, while [the two men] stood watching Lombard’s progress [climbing down the cliff on a rope], Blore said:
“Climbs like a cat, doesn’t he?”
There was something odd in his voice.
Dr. Armstrong said:
“I should think he must have done some mountaineering in his time.”
“Maybe.”
There was a silence and then the ex-Inspector said:
“Funny sort of cove altogether. D’you know what I think?”
“What?”
“He’s a wrong ‘un!”
Armstrong said doubtfully:
“In what way?”
Blore grunted. Then he said:
“I don’t know — exactly. But I wouldn’t trust him a yard.”
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, pp. 107 – 108
This is a very tense book. I was planning to dedicate an entire Friday post to it, but being short on time, I’m just using this quote from it on Quote Wednesday.
This bit of dialogue really shows the atmosphere of the book, and how the atmosphere is coming from the theme. In most Christie murder mysteries, there is one murderer among a group of people who are not murderers (even if they are not innocent in other ways). In this book, ten people are trapped together on a small island. None of them knows the others very well, and so they don’t trust each other either. As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that this lack of trust is well founded. Every single guest on the island has committed a murder in the past. They are all capable of killing. As Christie says in her other books, once a murderer has killed, they will do it again. So, any one of them could be “the murderer” who is picking off the guests one by one. In a sense, they are all “the murderer.” They are all a “wrong ‘un.”
I didn’t much enjoy this book the first time I read it, because it so disorienting (one point of the book was to create “an impossible puzzle”). The second time through, I was of course less confused, but I also didn’t enjoy it much because there is no character we can sympathize with. The one who comes closest, Vera, turns out to have been responsible for the death of a child. She, too, is a wrong ‘un.
The third time, this summer, I appreciate that this book is a sort of exaggerated picture of our predicament as human beings. We are trapped in this world (the island) surrounded by people, including ourselves, who are all totally depraved, who are all “wrong ‘uns.”
A long review, but with no spoilers! That’s how much is going on in this book!
This is about my third time to read this book. The first instance was many, many years ago, when I knew very little about life or about postwar England. At that time, the characters, their life circumstances, their personalities didn’t give me clues about the mystery, but rather were just another part of the exotic setting through which I stumbled, gaping and blinking.
I remember that I reread the book at least once in the interim, but I can’t remember the occasion. Probably I was so busy immersing myself to escape the stresses of everyday life that I didn’t absorb much except “how fun to read an Agatha Christie book.”
And then there’s this trip round. Third time’s the charm?
Lock Up Your Daughters Christies!
I bought this book in response to the news that Christie’s books are now going to be edited before they are published. New editions will remove language that could be hurtful, such as references to class, race, nationality, or people’s personal appearance. In other words, all the distinctive parts of the British world-view in the 30s through 60s that make the books interesting period pieces, that Christie often conveys subtly and sympathetically, and that often figure as important factors in the psychology of the murder mysteries. When I heard this news, my immediate thought was that I’d better build up my own library of older editions of Christie. Her whole corpus has always been widely and cheaply available in libraries and bookstores, but precisely because of this availability, it never occurred to me to build up a collection. I purchased A Murder Is Announced and then at once had occasion to lend it to a young person who had never heard about Christie, so that was my good deed for the month I guess. She finished it in a night or two, and when I got it back I of course re-read it.
It’s not hard to see, in this book, what parts would go on the sensitivity editor’s chopping-block.
Through the door surged a tempestuous young woman with a well-developed bosom heaving under a tight jersey. She had on a dirdl skirt of a bright colour and had greasy dark plaits wound round and round her head. Her eyes were dark and flashing.
She said gustily:
“I can speak to you, yes, please, no?”
Miss Blacklock sighed.
“Of course, Mitzi, what is it?” Sometimes she thought it would be preferable to do the entire work of the house as well as the cooking rather than be bothered with the eternal nerve storms of her refugee “lady help.”
ibid, p. 21
Wow! Just look at that English stereotype of a foreigner. Mitzi wears bright colors, her hair is “greasy,” she is too curvy (body shaming!), and she is subject to “nerve storms.” Later in the story, we learn that Mitzi is dramatic, boastful, and “a liar.” What could be worse? Surely the sensitivity editor should get rid of this entire character. Unfortunately, Mitzi is rather important to the plot. She also embodies one of the themes in this book: the new conditions of life in the British countryside immediately after WWII.
Post-War Britain
“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.
She went on:
“Because that’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it? And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St. Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. … They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new–really new–really a stranger–came, well, they stuck out–everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.”
She nodded her head gently.
“But it’s not like that anymore. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come–and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France and Italy in cheap little places and odd islands. And people who’ve made a little money and can afford to retire. But nobody knows any more who anyone is. People take you at your own valuation. They don’t wait to call until they’ve had a letter from a friend saying that So-and-So’s are delightful people and she’s known them all their lives.”
And that, thought Craddock, was exactly what was oppressing him. He didn’t know. They were just faces and personalities and they were backed up by ration books and identity cards–nice neat identity cards with numbers on them, without photographs or fingerprints. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card–and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a town nobody expected to know his neighbor. In the country now nobody knew his neighbor either, though possibly he still thought he did …
ibid, pp. 126 – 127
The postwar conditions that Miss Marple is describing are pretty much what it’s like everywhere in America … at least, everywhere that I have lived. The idea that you might not visit someone, or get to know them, until you’ve had a letter of introduction from someone you do know, strikes an American as stifling. (In Indonesia, by the way, when you come to visit a new place you need a letter of introduction not from a mutual friend but from some kind of bureaucrat.)
Many of these “people” from overseas that Miss Marple describes would have been Englishmen and Englishwomen who had been living abroad before the war. One such person is Miss Blacklock, a main character in this mystery, who came to Chipping Cleghorn only two years ago. Her friend, Dora, and her niece and nephew, Julia and Patrick, who live with her, also came recently. But many others would have been not English but foreigners. Apparently, England had to digest a large influx of postwar refugees and this fact forms the background to many of Christie’s stories, this one in particular. Besides Mitzi, another character is a young Swiss man who works at a nearby hotel and who might not be entirely honest with money.
Christie is not entirely unsympathetic to foreigners. One of her sleuths, Hercule Poirot, is Belgian. English people tend not to take him seriously because he is a “dapper little man with an egg-shaped head” and a French accent, and this tendency to underestimate him often works in Poirot’s favor, just as the fact of her being an unprepossessing old maid works in Miss Marple’s. For example, here is a passage from another of Christie’s books:
Fortunately this queer little foreigner did not seem to know much English. Quite often he did not understand what you said to him, and when everyone was speaking more or less at once he seemed completely at sea. He appeared interested only in refugees and post war conditions, and his vocabulary only included those subjects. Ordinary chitchat appeared to bewilder him. More or less forgotten by all, Hercule Poirot leant back in his chair, sipped his coffee and observed, as a cat may observe, the twitterings, and comings and goings of a flock of birds. The cat is not yet ready to make its spring.
Funerals Are Fatal, pp. 167 – 168
In A Murder Is Announced, English characters make frequent references to the possibility that they themselves, or others, might be unjustly prejudiced against foreigners. And we get passages like this one:
“Please don’t be too prejudiced against the poor thing because she’s a liar. I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies. I think that though, to take an instance, her atrocity stories have grown and grown until every kind of unpleasant story that has ever appeared in print has happened to her or her relations personally, she did have a bad shock initially and did see one, at least, of her relations killed. I think a lot of these displaced persons feel, perhaps justly, that their claim to our notice and sympathy lies in their atrocity value and so they exaggerate and invent.”
She added, “Quite frankly, Mitzi a maddening person. She exasperates and infuriates us all, she is suspicious and sulky, is perpetually having ‘feelings’ and thinking herself insulted. But in spite of it all, I really am sorry for her.” She smiled. “And also, when she wants to, she can cook very nicely.”
ibid, pp. 59 – 60
This is a really interesting speech. One the hand, it represents Miss Blacklock (and, presumably, Agatha Christie) trying to be fair to Mitzi. On the other hand, from my perspective it still doesn’t give Mitzi enough credit. Any European refugee from WWII was quite likely to have actually lost their entire family, and to have seen and suffered many real atrocities which would sound unbelievable if they were not documented. It was one of the most harrowing periods in modern history. Such people were likely to have severe PTSD which would, in fact, make them “suspicious” and jumpy. For example, when Mitzi is being interviewed by the police in the wake of the murder, she predicts that they will torture her and take her away to a concentration camp. There is no reason to think this is melodrama.
Other parts of Mitzi’s character, such as her boastfulness, emotionalism and tendency to get insulted, may be cultural differences that have nothing to do with the war. Nearly every culture is boastful and demonstrative compared to the Brits, and people tend to get insulted and sulky in shame-based cultures such as we find in Asia (and perhaps some parts of Eastern Europe).
Another aspect of postwar Britain is the increase in bureaucracy. Identity cards have already been mentioned–a sort of top-down attempt to keep track of people bureaucratically now that the older system of everybody knowing everybody has disintegrated–but there is also bureaucratic control of all aspects of the economy, even down to whether people barter:
Craddock said, “He was quite straightforward about being there, though. Not like Miss Hinchcliffe.”
Miss Marple coughed gently. “You must make allowances for the times we live in, Inspector,” she said.
Craddock looked at her, uncomprehendingly.
“After all,” said Miss Marple, “you are the Police, aren’t you? People can’t say everything they’d like to say to the Police, can they?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Craddock. “Unless they’ve got some criminal matter to conceal.”
“She means butter,” said Bunch. “Thursday is the day one of the farms round here makes butter. They let anybody they like have a bit. It’s usually Miss Hinchcliffe who collects it. But it’s all a bit hush hush, you know, a kind of local scheme of barter. One person gets butter, and sends along cucumbers, or something like that–and a little something when a pig’s killed. And now and then an animal has an accident and has to be destroyed. Oh, you know the sort of thing. Only one can’t, very well, say it right out to the Police. Because I suppose quite a lot of this barter is illegal–only nobody really knows because it’s all so complicated.”
ibid, pp. 214 – 215
I didn’t even notice this aspect of the book during the previous times I read it. This time, it jumped out at me, because somewhere I had seen an essay about how in the postwar years, England continued rationing as a sort of experiment in socialism and this kept people poor for longer than they otherwise would have been. C.S. Lewis, for example, like many in England, relied on care packages from friends in America for such things as ham. Having been sensitized to this aspect of it, on this go-round I realized how much this Christie book really is a time capsule.
And … “nobody really knows because it’s all so complicated” is truly the essence of bureaucracy!
The Fun of Being a Woman
But the Christie goodness doesn’t stop there. (Really, there is so much going on in this book!) There is the delightful Mrs. Goedler. She is actually a very minor character … the widow of Miss Blacklock’s financier employer. Miss Blacklock stands to inherit if Mrs. Goedler predeceases her, which is very likely to happen because Mrs. Goedler has had poor health for years and is now likely to die within a few weeks. Inspector Craddock visits her, and Mrs. Goedler has this to say:
“Why, exactly, did your husband leave his money the way he did?”
“You mean, why did he leave it to Blackie? Not for the reason you’ve probably been thinking.” Her roguish twinkle was very apparent. “What minds you policemen have! Randall was never in the least in love with her and she wasn’t with him. Letitia, you know, has really got a man’s mind. She hasn’t any feminine feelings or weaknesses. I don’t believe she was ever in love with any man. She was never particularly pretty and she didn’t care for clothes. She used a little makeup in deference to prevailing custom, but not to make herself look prettier.” There was pity in the old voice as she went on: “She never knew any of the fun of being a woman.”
Craddock looked at the frail little figure in the big bed with interest. Belle Goedler, he realized, had enjoyed–still enjoyed–being a woman. She twinkled at him.
“I’ve always thought,” she said, “it must be terribly dull to be a man.”
ibid, p. 169
Now, that’s awfully inspiring to a gal like me. But Belle Goedler is not finished giving us advice on how to live:
She nodded her head at him.
“I know what you’re thinking. But I’ve had all the things that make life worth while–they may have been taken from me–but I have had them. I was pretty and gay as a girl, I married the man I loved, and he never stopped loving me … My child died, but I had him for two precious years … I’ve had a lot of physical pain–but if you have pain, you know how to enjoy the exquisite pleasure of the times when pain stops. And everyone’s been kind to me, always … I’m a lucky woman, really.”
I just read John 18:1 – 19:16. It’s really pathetic, in these chapters, to watch Pilate try to avoid crucifying Jesus but still placate the Jewish officials.
He says to Jesus, “Don’t you realize that I have the power either to free you or to crucify you?” (John 19:10), but in fact, Pilate doesn’t have any power at all.
The book Who Moved the Stone?makes a strong case, from hints in the text and other historical evidence, that Pilate had received an emergency visit from someone, perhaps the High Priest himself, the night before. The priests had just arrested Jesus, and the meeting went something like this: “We have this criminal whom we really need condemned. If we bring him to you tomorrow morning, before Passover, will you just quickly condemn him for us so we can get that out of the way? In exchange, of course, for our ongoing support.”
Pilate had agreed to this reasonable request. But the next morning, things started to go off. Pilate’s wife, who perhaps was there for the 11 p.m. meeting, had a nightmare about Jesus which she took as prophetic, and sent her husband a note saying, “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man.” (Matt. 27:19) Also, the Jews hadn’t brought any clear charge against Jesus for which Pilate could execute him.
Pilate tried to get rid of the problem by sending Jesus to Herod (Luke 23:5 – 12), but to his dismay, the problem came right back to him. He then tried to placate the council by having Jesus flogged. He kept arguing with them, saying, “I find him not guilty.” They were shocked and dismayed that he was going back on his word of the night before (John 18:29 – 31). They started threatening that if Pilate did not condemn Jesus to death, they would turn him in as being in rebellion against Caesar (John 19:12). Things had not been going great politically for Pilate. If there were a riot, or if he were accused of being anti-Caesar, it would be the end for him. Best case scenario, he would lose his job, but more probably he would lose his life.
In short, Pilate could not avoid crucifying Jesus without losing everything. He was trapped.
Jesus, of course, was trapped too, but the difference was that He had walked into the trap. More accurately, Jesus was not trapped. He could have summoned twelve legions of angels (Matt. 26:53) at any moment to vindicate and free Him. He was going to His death freely. He was not trapped by His own fears and desires. Pilate, on the other hand, was trapped by his own fears and desires. His options were extremely limited because he was not willing to lose everything.
Consider, then these two men, as they stand in the palace looking at each other. One is a governor, wearing the robe of a governor, standing in his own palace, making what should be a routine decision about what to do with a prisoner. “Don’t you realize that I have the power?” he says, but in fact this man has no power or agency in this situation. This man is terrified.
The other has been up all night. He has been interrogated at least three times. He has already been beaten once by the high priest’s guards, again by Herod’s guards, and he has just been flogged by Pilate’s guards. His back is flayed. His nose may be broken. When he speaks, he cannot manage very long sentences. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he says. “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” This is the man who is actually in charge of the situation. Despite appearances, this man is truly free.
In Luke 9:23 – 24, Jesus said, “If anyone wants to be my disciple, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” This sounds like a hard saying – and it is—but what Jesus was giving us here was the secret of how to be free. If Pilate had been willing to lose everything, he would have had more options. Jesus was willing to lose everything, which allowed him to do exactly what, on a deeper level, he wanted to do, which was to work the Father’s plan.
This post might be a little … rambling. A poorly thought-out combination of recent events in my life, vague political implications, and nostalgic revisiting of old favorite fantasy novels. You know, the way blogs used to be back in the day. Because I am just so dedicated to bringing you, my faithful Internet friends, content, even if it is crummy content.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve done a couple of knitting marathons (about which, more in the near future). I like having something to watch while knitting, and the least repellant thing on Netflix was The Lord of the Rings, so I have recently watched through all three movies. I enjoyed the movies mostly because they reminded me of the books, which I haven’t read in a long time. Yeah, I’m a purist. I couldn’t believe they left out Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil, the Barrow Wights, and they completely messed up the scene in Bree, and they Hollywooded up Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman and with Theoden, and they destroyed Faramir … but even so, even so, they kept enough of the original plot that watching the movies was edifying.
The theme that jumped out to me this time — well, there were a couple. One was the way that every single member of the party pays a high cost in the service of the quest. Even people with fairly minor roles, such as Merry and Pippin, suffer greatly – Merry from stabbing the Witch King, and Pippin has to deal with Denethor’s madness. Multiple people had to be willing to pour out their lives. Not just Gandalf, and not just Frodo. This rings true to me. Whether we are fighting the good fight by building a family, a school, or a local church, everyone feels like they are giving 110%, and then the job just barely gets done.
The other theme that I noticed this time was that of despair. Denethor succumbs to despair, kills himself, and nearly kills Faramir. Well before that, he essentially abandoned his duty to the people of Minas Tirith because he believed the cause was lost. And it turns out, this was a stratagem of the enemy, who had been showing him misleading things in the Palantir.
Meanwhile, over in Rohan, Wormtongue has gotten Theoden to abandon his duties to his people by convincing him that he’s old and tired and the heroic age has ended. Wormtongue gets inside Eowyn’s head, getting her to see Edoras, the glorious hall of her ancestors, as a stupid redneck hovel, and her own role in it as boring and stultifying. She ends up, essentially, suicidal, but luckily the presence of Aragorn has turned her suicidal impulses in the direction of brave self-sacrifice, rather than foolish action like Denethor’s. But this is another case where despair doesn’t just happen, it is a direct, intentional action of the enemy.
Other characters suffer feelings of, or temptations to, despair, pretty much in direct proportion as they come in contact with the enemy. Physical contact with the Ringwraiths pulls a personal partially into their world, as happens to Frodo at Weathertop, and the Eowyn and to Merry, who says to Pippin, “Are you going to bury me?” Victims don’t just despair of victory, but they doubt their own judgment, their own senses, even their own existence. It’s at times like these that we need the shoulder of a friend.
James Lindsay has posted recently about how modern-day deceivers will try to induce despair by robbing us of epistemic authority (“you don’t know what you are talking about.” “Do you have a degree?”), psychological authority (“you are crazy/phobic”), and moral authority (“you are a bigot/oppressor” “It’s so heartless/insensitive to say that”). The goal is to get their interlocutor to stop trusting their own mind and conscience, and just accept the new system of thought they are being offered. Perhaps this podcast of his was the thing that caused me to notice this dynamic happening in Middle Earth.
Anyway, you can make your own applications. Don’t despair. Your mind is probably working OK. You are probably not a crazy bigot oppressor who doesn’t have a working conscience. You are not the only one who has questions. There are friendly shoulders to lean on.
I was going to call this post “Don’t Despair,” but I thought that would sound too cliched and I wasn’t sure I could follow through on the promise of such a title.
Here’s an extended simile of what my experience was like in doing a deep dive on this word.
Imagine that your drain keeps backing up. You take a look, and discover a root. You have to find at what point the roots are coming into the pipe, so you do the roto-rooter thing. It turns out that the roots are running through the pipe all the way down to the street and across the street and into the vacant lot, where there is a huge tree.
And oh, look, it’s already pulled down the neighbor’s house!
That’s what it was like. (Oh, no! It’s in my George MacDonald pipe too!)
What Methought I Knew
I’ve listened to a number of James Lindsay podcasts, and he talks a lot about Hegel. In discussing what exactly went wrong with the train wreck that is modern education and politics, James has to dive deep into quite a few unpleasant philosophers, among them Herbert Marcuse, Jaques Derrida, Paolo Friere, and the postmodernists. And Hegel.
I had heard James describe before how Hegel saw the world. Hegel had this idea that progress is reached by opposite things colliding and out of them comes a new synthesis, and then that synthesis has to collide with its opposite and so on until perfection is reached. This process is called the dialectic. Marx took these ideas and applied them to society, where there has to be conflict and revolution, but then the new society that emerges isn’t perfect yet and so there has to be another revolution and so on until everything is perfect and/or everyone is dead.
Obviously I am simplifying a lot. James can talk about this stuff for an hour and he is simplifying too, not because these ideas are themselves complicated but because Hegel produced a huge dump of words, and he came up with terminology that tried to combine his ideas with Christian concepts so that they would be accepted in his era. Anyway, the word dialectic is still used by postmodern writers like Kimberle Crenshaw, and it is a clue that they think constant revolution is the way to bring about utopia.
So, I was familiar with Hegel through the podcasts of Lindsay, and I was also familiar enough with Gnostic thought to at least recognize it when it goes by, as it so often does. For one thing, you kind of have to learn a little bit about Gnosticism if you are a serious Christian, because gnostic (or at least pre-gnostic: Platonic, mystery religion) ideas were very much in the air in New Testament times, and many of the letters of the New Testament were written to refute these ideas. Also, Gnosticism, particularly the mind/body duality, has had such an influence on our culture that it’s hard to miss. It’s present in New Age and neopagan thought, and it’s called out in Nancy Pearcey’s book Love Thy Bodyfor the bad effects it has had on the way we conceive of personhood.
So that’s the background.
Several months ago, I was listening to Lindsay give a talk summarizing his recent research to a church group. He was talking about theologies: systems of thought that make metaphysical and cosmological claims, and come with moral imperatives. And he dashed off this summary, something like the following:
“You could have a theology where at first all that exists is God, but He doesn’t know Himself as God, so in order to know Himself he creates all these other beings, and they are all like pieces of God but they don’t know it, and their task is to become enlightened and realize that they, too, are God, and when they realize this, eventually they will all come back together, but now God is self-conscious because of the process of breaking He’s been through.”
And I’m thinking, Sounds like Pantheism, or maybe Gnosticism.
And James says, “That’s the Hermetic theology.”
And I’ve got a new word to research.
Kind of a Weird Name
So, why is it called Hermeticism? Does it have to do with hermits?
My first foray into Internet Hermeticism immediately showed that the school of thought was named for a guy named Hermes, as in this paragraph from wiki:
Hermeticism, or Hermetism, is a label used to designate a philosophical system that is primarily based on the purported teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (a legendary Hellenistic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth).[1] These teachings are contained in the various writings attributed to Hermes (the Hermetica), which were produced over a period spanning many centuries (c. 300 BCE – 1200 CE), and may be very different in content and scope.[2]
One of my search hits, I can’t remember which one, said that Hermeticism is “often confused with Gnosticism.” O.K., so if it’s not Gnosticism, that means I know less than I thought and it’s all the more reason to research.
I also found avowedly Hermetic web sites like Hermetic World, whose “summary” is actually more of an attempt to draw you into their movement:
Hermeticism – The secret knowledge
Hermeticism is an ancient secret doctrine that dates back to early Egypt and its innermost knowledge has always been passed on only orally. In each generation there have been some faithful souls in different countries of the world who received the light, carefully cultivated it and did not allow it to be extinguished. Thanks to these strong hearts, these fearless spirits, truth has not been lost. It was always passed on from master to disciple, from adept to neophyte from mouth to ear. The terms “hermetically sealed”, “hermetically locked”, and so on, derive from this tradition and indicate that the general public does not have access to these teachings.
Hermeticism is a key that gives people the possibility to achieve everything they desire deep in their hearts, to develop a profound understanding of life, to become capable of decision making and responsibility; and to answer the question of meaning. Hermeticism offers a hidden key to unfolding.
Nobody can teach this knowledge to himself. Even in competent books like Kybalion, the teaching is only passed on in a veiled way. It always requires a master to pass on the wisdom to the able student. Today, as in the past, authentic mystery schools are a way to acquire this knowledge. The Hermetic Academy is one of these authentic schools.
This is certainly the genuine article, but it is perhaps not the first place to go. I wanted to learn about the basic doctrines from a neutral source, simply and clearly described. I didn’t want to have to wade through a bunch of hand-waving to get there, at least not at first. Still, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Hermetic World tries to cast a mysterious, esoteric, yet somewhat self-help-y atmosphere on their first page. After all, it is a mystery religion.
Well, at least now I know why it’s called Hermeticism. It’s basically an accident of history, due to the name of the guy to whom the founding writings were attributed.
Time to move on to a book.
Moving On to a Book
I am fortunate to be descended from a scholar who has a large personal library, heavy on the theology.
I asked my dad.
Serendipitiously, he had just finished reading Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume history of Christian universalism (the doctrine that everyone is going to heaven), and he remembered that Hermeticism entered into the discussion. He was happy to lend it to me. You can see all the places I’ve marked with tabs. Those are just the ones where Hermeticism is directly mentioned. I hope you now understand my dilemma.
In McClymond’s Appendix A: Gnosis and Western Esotericism: Definitions and Lineages, I found at last the succinct, neutral summary I was looking for:
[“Hermetism”] as used by academics refers to persons, texts, ideas, and practices that are directly linked to the Corpus Hermeticum, a relatively small body of texts that appeared most likely in Egypt during the second or third centuries CE. … “Hermeticism” is often used in a wider way to refer to the general style of thinking that one finds in the Corpus Hermeticum and other works of ancient gnosis, alchemy, Kabbalah, and so forth. “Hermeticism” sometimes functions as a synonym for “esotericism.” The adjective “Hermetic” is ambiguous, since it can refer either to “Hermetism” or “Hermeticism.”
McClymond, p. 1072
O.K.
So it isn’t that different from Gnosticism after all.
“Esoteric,” by the way, means an emphasis on hidden or mystical knowledge that is not available to everyone and/or cannot be reduced to words and propositions. “Exoteric” refers to the style of theology that puts emphasis on knowledge that is public in the sense that it is written down somewhere, asserts something concrete, can be debated, etc.
Even though I have literally just found an actual definition of the word that is clear enough to put into a blog post, in the time it took me to find this definition I feel that I have already gotten a pretty good sense of what this philosophy is like. Perhaps it helps that it has pervaded many, many aspects of our culture, so I have encountered it many times before, as no doubt have you.
I began to peruse the tabs in the volumes above and read the sections there, in all their awful glory.
Yep, James Lindsay in fact did a pretty good job of explaining the core metaphysic of Hermeticism. Of course, this philosophy brings a lot of things with it that he didn’t get into. If we and all beings in the universe are all made of the same spiritual stuff as God Himself, it follows that alchemy should work (getting spiritual results with physical processes and the other way round). It follows that astrology should work (everything is connected, and the stars and men and the gods not only all influence each other, but when you get down to it are actually the same thing). It follows that reincarnation should be a thing (the body is just a shell or an illusion that is occupied by the spirit, the spark of God). It follows that there are many paths to God, since we are all manifestations of God and will all eventually return to Him/It. It follows that the body is not that important (in some versions of this philosophy, matter is actually evil). Therefore we should be able to physically heal ourselves with our minds. Our personhood should be unconnected to (some might say unfettered by) our body, such that we can be born in the wrong body, or we can change our sex or our species if we want to. There might also be bodies that don’t have souls yet (such as unborn babies), and so it would be no wrong to destroy them. Also, since matter is not really a real thing, it follows that Jesus was not really incarnated in a real human body and that He only appeared to do things like sleep, eat, suffer, and die. Also, since we are all parts of God like He is, He is not really one with God in any sense that is unique, but just more of an example of a really enlightened person who realized just how one with God He was.
I imagine that about twenty pop culture bells have gone off in your mind as you read that preceding paragraph. You might also have been reminded of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, which teaches that we were all pre-existent souls literally fathered by God out of some sort of spiritual matter before we came to earth to be born.
So, What the Heck Is It?
Hermeticism is not just one thing. It’s a whole human tradition of thought. It had a lot of streams flowing into it, like Plato, first-century mystery religions, Gnosticism, and early attempts to reconcile Christianity with these things. It has a lot of streams flowing out of it, like many Christian mystics of varying degrees of Christian-ness; Origen; Bohme; Hegel; medieval and Renaissance alchemy; the Romantic literary movement; Mormonism; New Age thinking; identity politics; transhumanism; Shirley McLaine; The Secret, and the movie Phenomenon.
Not all of these thinkers hold to the exact same set of doctrines. In a big philosophical movement like this, almost every serious thinker is going to have his or her own specific formulation that differs from everyone else’s in ways that seem really important to people on the inside of the system. So anyone who is an insider or who has made it their life’s work to research any of the things I mention above (and many others besides) could come along and point out errors or overgeneralizations in this article and make me look like I don’t know anything. That’s partly because it’s a huge historical phenomenon and I actually don’t know much of all there is to know. It’s also partly because these mystery religions delight in making things complicated. They love to add rituals and symbols and secret names and to discover new additional deities that are personifications of abstract ideas like Wisdom. It’s supposed to be esoteric. That’s part of the fun.
Another reason it’s difficult to describe Hermeticism accurately is that when all is one, it is really difficult to talk about anything. In this view of the world, when you get right down to it there is no distinction between spirit and matter, creator and creature, man and woman, conscious and inanimate, and the list goes on. I called it Hermeticism at the beginning of this paragraph, but I was tempted to write Hermeticism/Gnosticism, or perhaps Hermeticism/Gnosticism/alchemy/mystery religions/the New Age/Pantheism/postmodernism. If you’ve ever read any New Age writers, you’ll notice that they tend to write important terms with slashes like that (“Sophia/the divine feminine”). That’s because it’s all one. They don’t want you to forget that. They don’t want to forget it. Even if these ideas do not go very well with the human mind, and they tend to break it if you keep trying to think them.
In a sense, Hermeticism and all these other related movements are very diverse and not the same at all. In another sense, it’s all … the same … crap.
Drug use, at least in its early stages, feels spiritual — there is a sense of getting to the heart of things, of transcending the petty and mundane irritations of ordinary life, of entering something large and beautiful and peaceful. There is a sense of being insiders in a world to which square, conventional people are excluded. Drugs heighten interior perceptions, open windows and doors to what seems like transcendence.
And so the first thing that parents must understand about drugs is that there is almost always a spiritual element in adolescent drug-taking. We can never comprehend it if we view it simply as a matter of … rebelling against parental or societal standards. …
Only by firmly establishing this appreciation and understanding of spirituality as a context is it credible to then assert that drugs are fraudulent spirituality. Initially, they provide the illusion that matters of soul, meaning, love, destiny, beauty, and cosmic connections are being dealt with, but they always, sometimes soon and sometimes late but always, turn out to be the cruelest of illusions.
Like Dew Your Youth: Growing Up with Your Teenager, by Eugene H. Peterson, pp. 92, 94
Out of Babel Books 