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Hidden Traditions & Hermetic Thought Prof. Dr. Wouter J. Hanegraaff On Western Esotericism
00:29:44
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- [00:01]
A
You're listening to the Good Question podcast with Richard Jacobs. Our goal is to make each of our guests exclaim, hmm, that's a good question. I don't know the answer. Because when that happens, it means you, the listener, may be inspired to learn more beyond the interview and to ask great questions yourself that lead to new insights. In this podcast, we cover historical and current anthropology, comparative religion and history. Welcome, and let's get started.
- [00:36]
B
Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Good Question podcast. My guest today is Professor Walter Honeygroff. We're going to talk about the history of hermetic philosophy and our related topics. Because a lot of his description is in Dutch, I would probably do a terrible job of saying it. So, Walter, thank you for coming and just tell me about where you're a professor at and a little bit about your background to start.
- [00:57]
C
That's okay. Thank you for having me. My name is Walter Harechraaf and I am professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related currents at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And this is actually another name for a field that I have been developing with a whole group of colleagues over the last 25, 30 years, and to which we refer to as the study of esotericism in Western culture. And su. Yeah, just to make this clear from the outset, we are scholars of religion, historians of religion, and when we talk about esotericism, this is not about necessarily about secret traditions. It is also not, as many people think about new age, etc. Although new age is included. It's really a label that we apply nowadays for a whole series of traditions and ideas and practices and so on from antiquity to the present. So it's a very comprehensive field of historical research that we refer to as esotericism in Western culture. But that's what I'm doing.
- [01:57]
B
What do hermetics or esoteric study? Are you studying God as an interpretation of him as a. I don't know, a divine being? Or like, what. How would you say to a layperson what you're studying?
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D
Right.
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C
No, we're not studying God. We are not theologians. So it's important to distinguish between theology and study of religion. I'm an historian of religion or a scholar of religion. So God is not a topic that we can study. We have no method to determine whether God exists or does not exist, let alone how we could study Him. That is not our field. That's not what we are doing. What we are doing is we are studying text, historical text and other artifacts, historical sources that tell us about religious and Spiritual related kind of traditions that have existed from antiquity to the present. So that's what we do. So we study, we basically do what, what, what other, what, let's say what historians of a philosophy might do who study philosophical text. We are studying religious texts. And so that's the question of whether God exists or not is a question that we cannot answer and we do not even try to.
- [03:01]
B
What faiths do you study most of all? What time period?
- [03:05]
C
Yeah, well, my own field is very broad. I really cover, well, all kinds of currents from antiquity to the present. It' 2000 years. My dissertation originally was about the New Age movement I mentioned earlier. So I began studying contemporary spiritual, alternative kind of religious and spiritual movements. So I was studying New Age literature of the 1980s and the 1990s. So that was my dissertation and I tried to put that, that material into an historical context to understand how it all hanged together, what it was all about, where it came from, how it had developed historically and so on. After that I've broadened my field, you know, quite considerably because I was interested in the backgrounds, the larger historical backgrounds of all this contemporary material. And so, yeah, I've done many different things. Let me focus on one thing in particular that I've been focusing on recently, over the last five, six, seven, eight years. And that is the Hermetic literature, which also comes back in the description of my chair. And the Hermetica is a term that refers to spiritual movements, I would call them, that existed in the late antiquity. So we're talking about the second and the third centuries, more or less of the Common Era. So a long time ago. So these are Greek texts written in Roman Egypt, Egypt under the Roman Empire. Greek texts that talk about spiritual practices. And these practices were really concerned with trying to understand the real nature of divinity, the true, the real nature of the world and the real nature of human beings. And the intention of these texts and these traditions was to, let's say to. How should I say that? To fight, find direct experiential insight into the true nature of reality. So they were using experiential techniques, practices and so on, which are fascinating to study. So I've been studying these, these traditions quite intensely over the last years. I wrote a large book about them. And so what you. So this is an example of what I meant. So studying really these are Greek texts written in Greek, difficult to decipher, to translate, etc. So you're trying to understand these texts and to find out what were these people thinking, what were they doing, how did they look at the world, et cetera, so that we might gain a bigger picture about the culture of that period. So that's what we do. And they tell us all kinds of ideas about what they believed about God. But again, I have no direct access to God. I only have access to the texts that they write about God.
- [05:38]
B
Okay, so what, I mean, what do you learn? Do you feel like you're learning just their interpretation of who they believe God is? Or are you learning, I don't know, new methodologies, new thoughts that you never realized people had, like how much of this is surprising to you versus okay, makes sense, that's that thought, you know.
- [05:57]
C
Well, a lot of it is very surprising. I mean, the whole point why we are studying these things. Well, because this, these traditions that I'm studying, which we cover by the term esotericism. So first of all, let me say that this is a new field of, field of research. It has existed since about 30 years, a little bit longer maybe. And what we're doing, really, we are trying to look at everything that traditional scholarship has not been looking at. So we know a lot about, for instance, the history of the Christian churches, right? There's a lot written about it. We know a little about, we know a lot about Judaism or about Islam or about other major traditions and religion, but we know surprisingly little about all these, let's say, alternative spiritual movements that were often seen as heretical, non acceptable, etc. By the mainstream. So we are studying all the kind of stuff that has been left out by the mainstream. And the agenda is actually not some kind of antiquarian interest in some quaint forgotten things and cetera. It's really, the agenda is much more ambitious because we believe that the mainstream narratives that are present in contemporary society, in modern, contemporary society, about religion and culture, especially about Western religion and culture, we believe that those narratives are extremely one sided and misleading because they have been written basically by, by the mainstream, by the traditions that have been victorious in the battle of ideas.
- [07:25]
B
There will be an example of one that's been really misrepresented now.
- [07:28]
C
Well, the Hermetica themselves are a good example. Well, let me, let me give a very concrete example. Most people have heard about a practice called alchemy, right? And most people think the alchemists were these weird people who were trying to find a philosopher's stone or try to make gold and so on.
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D
And most people think that these were sort of superstitious, irrational ideas by people
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C
who did not understand real science because
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D
you cannot make gold and you Cannot do those things. Right.
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C
That's the.
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D
So there is this kind of typical perspective, this idea about alchemy and this
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C
is what you find in popular literature, et cetera.
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D
And because of this picture of alchemy and because this is an, this is an important tradition of what I'm studying because of this perception of alchemy, people have been extremely surprised and puzzled by the fact that the great scientist Isaac Newton, yeah, perhaps the most foundational figure in modern science, you know, mainstream, for modern science, has actually been practicing alchemy very, very much in his career. So well, Newton has created foundations of modern science. Everybody knows that he has an enormous authority and rightly so. But then when you find out that the great Newton actually has spent enormous amounts of his time studying alchemy and if you find out that he has written alchemy actually than about physics or optics and other scientific fields, then most
- [08:47]
C
people have no idea what to make
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D
of this and how to interpret that and how to explain that. So this has been a big, very puzzling thing, but it is a fact. So what we are doing, we are, and this is just one example. So we look at the historical sources about Newton, his materials, his context, and then you find out that contemporary audiences have a very stereotypical idea about alchemy as pseudoscience. And actually when you look at Newton and his environment and his culture, they find out that alchemy was not pseudoscience, it was a very legitimate part of normal science in this period. And there's nothing strange about the fact that Newton studied such things. That's actually what you could expect. But this example shows that there is a kind of mainstream perspective on science and the history of science which is one sided, which excludes on principle things like alchemy as pseudoscience.
- [09:42]
C
Although actually, historically, factually, alchemy was a normal part of mainstream science in the early modern period when Newton was working. And this is just one example. I could use many other examples. So there has, have been all these traditions, practices, ideas that have been excluded, marginalized from mainstream historiography. Methods are actually extremely important. And so we are trying to redress the balance, basically. Yeah, set a record straight. And this is not, this has nothing to do with, we've tried to defend alchemy or other weird ideas. That's not what we're doing. We are interested in the showing. This was part of the culture, this was an important part of the culture. And we have unfortunately neglected that part of the culture. And so by studying such things, we try to create a more Complex, more correct, you know, historically more convincing overview of, of the development of Western culture. And so, so the real point of my field, and this is really something that it is actually a very ambitious field. The basic point is that there are great parts, very important fundamental parts of Western culture that we have forgotten that you don't know about, or about which we have very one sided, incorrect and distorted views. And we are trying.
- [10:56]
B
Did Newton have any interesting things too that he discovered about alchemy? Did he have anything scientifically useful that he discovered in his pursuit of alchemy?
- [11:05]
C
That's a good question. He was looking for a way to resolve the conflict between God the Creator and the created world. And he believed that alchemy would be able to resolve certain fundamental questions for him. And what we tend to forget is that Newton was not just interested in physical science, he was also a very pious Christian. So he believed in one God.
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D
He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity,
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C
which he thought was heretical.
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D
He was deeply, deeply convinced of the importance of God and theology.
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C
He knew a lot about it and
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D
what he was trying to do. So he was studying physics, he was
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C
studying physical, material science as a scientist. At the same time, he was a
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D
believing Christian who believed in a spiritual reality, God, who had created this material world. Now, how do you bring spirit and matter together?
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C
How can the one even be in
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D
contact with the other? How can they interact?
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C
That was a very difficult question to answer. And for him, alchemy spoke a lot
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D
about alchemical literature, spoke a lot about intermediary realities, a kind of subtle materialities, something that was like matter, but not quite a kind of spiritual form of matter or a kind of material form of spirit, something in between, something that mediated.
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C
And if he would be able to
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D
find his mediating substance between spirit and matter, then that would be, would enable him to, to fill the gap between the Creator and the creature. And that, I think is a major point that he was looking for. But he was also interested generally in the promises of transmut, the idea that you could transmute one material substance into another one by specific laboratory practices, et cetera. And one background to this is that this is a period in which, of course, modern science is being created. But there was still a lot of inference from earlier models of science based partly upon authorities like Aristotle. And for Aristotle, you had the fundamental idea that the world is created from four fundamental substances, or realities, I should say, or elements, actually that's the right term, by the four elements, water, air, fire and earth. And the idea was that everything that exists is based upon the. These four elements. And if you know the secrets of transmutation, then you can know, then you can find out how you can transmute any kind of. Kind of material substance into any other one, including gold. So the idea of making gold was not some kind of superstitious dream. The idea that you might be able to make gold was based upon the Aristotelian principles of an extremely authoritative tradition in natural philosophy that came from Aristotle. So those, those religions were still very much present, even though they were being superseded gradually by what we now see as modern science. And so Newton had very good reasons to explore these things and to find out. And so we spent a lot of time finding out. It is not the case.
- [14:04]
C
And this is why it's a good question that you ask. It's. It's not the case that he made huge discoveries in alchemy or chemistry based upon this, these researches. Certainly not something similar to his revolutionary findings in physics or optics. But if you look at other contemporaries, another great chemist and alchemist at the time was Robert Boyle. That's more or less the kind of chemical counterpart to Newton with a similar status in early chemistry. And there you see something similar. The mainstream idea is that Robert Boyle was a chemist, real scientific chemist in his early periods. He may have been dabbling a little bit on occult stuff like alchemy, but of course he grew over it. And he. The KB will sign. And they left that behind. That's the idea. Now, it turns out, and this is based upon the very authoritative work that has been done by the historian of science, Lawrence Principe at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and other scholars nowadays, it turns out that that's. That picture of Boyle was entirely wrong because actually, Boyle became more of an alchemist as he progressed. It's not that he left alchemy behind. As he progressed as a chemist, he got all the more interested over time in alchem. So that's another example. He, he believed in the dream, what we now see is the dream of making gold and finding the philosopher's stone. He wrote about it.
- [15:27]
B
Who's the philosopher's stone, by the way?
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D
Oh, the philosopher's stone.
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C
That was the mythical, mysterious substance that
- [15:33]
D
alchemists were looking for.
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C
So they believed that it would be
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D
possible to create this substance, the philosopher's stone.
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C
That was the key to transmuting metals
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D
and turning rough metals into gold, basically. Okay, this was the kind of fundamental secret that they were looking for.
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B
Figure you, like, sliced your item on it and it would change it into what you Wanted.
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D
Yeah, that was. That was the philosophers. That's what they were looking for. And of course they were not successful. But here's the point. The point is they were not successful because they were basing themselves on a philosophy of nature coming from Aristotle that in the end turned out not to be sufficient. But at that time when they were working, it was perfectly legitimate, or so it's normal science to use those models. It's only nowadays, later we have come to. Yeah.
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C
To.
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D
To ground our science in different principles than Aristotelian science.
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C
So.
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D
Yeah, but okay, now we've moved very much from.
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C
From religion to science.
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D
Actually, this was just an example to show that there have been important dimensions in Western culture generally that we cover under the term esotericism, which have been neglected. So science is one example, but you can see it in many other places. You can also find it in. In philosophy, you find it in mainstream religion and in many other places, even in art and literature and music, basically in all the disciplines of the humanities. These traditions have been neglected with the results that we misunderstand many things that we think we understand.
- [17:02]
B
Yeah, here's the. Alchemy was like gambling. I don't know, it's just a huge attractant to so many people. Maybe also because it was thought of as dark or cult or obscure, it made these guys want to dabble in it even more.
- [17:15]
D
Yeah, that's a stereotypical picture that has come to be dominant after the 18th century, after the Enlightenment. I've written a large book about that project. Sorry about that process. I meant to say I've written a large book about that process. The process in which intellectual culture in the west has come to reject these types of knowledge as rejected knowledge. And so that it came to be perceived as obscure, obscurantist, occult, dangerous, disreputable, and so on and so forth. So this happened after the 18th century. So the. So the Enlightenment sort of created its own image as. And write as Enlightenment, rational, scientific and so on, by creating this counterpart of everything that was not rational and scientific and so on. And that is exactly this whole field that we are studying. So all the stuff that has been rejected and neglected. And once again, our point is not to say that these rejected forms of knowledge are true. We are not defending anything. What we're saying is that historically, to understand the complexity of Western culture, we have to know about these things, we have to understand them, we have to study them. And that has not happened by and large. It has not happened since the 18th century. And we are trying to to correct it quite successfully. By the way. There's a lot of.
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B
Why do you think alchemy was so attractive to all these people?
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D
Why it was so attractive?
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B
Yeah, I mean these people are men of science. Why you would think that they would be in love with science. But why, why alchemy in particular?
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C
Well, I just explained to you, I mean, I cannot explain it more clearly. It is, it was part of traditional science period. It was part of the way you studied nature. If you wanted to study nature, you had to study these things. That's what it is. It is only after the 18th century that we have come to tell ourselves that it was part of science. But that's in distortion. And from ticket to the early modern period, this was just part of the deal.
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D
This is what you did.
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C
I'll give you a very, very clear example of this. There is one of the kind of monumental works of history of science published by an American, Lynn Thorndike, in the early part of the 20th century called a History of Magic and Experimental Science. And that it's an eight volume masterpiece, encyclopedic masterpiece of research. Very, very impressive eighth volume, large volume, it's called A History of Magic and Experimen Science. And the reason is that Thorndike discovered he wanted to write a history of
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D
science right from antiquity to the early modern period.
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C
But what he found out that it was impossible to write a history of science without writing the history of magic. And magic here means all kind of stuff that we consider as well as magical, but it also included things like alchemy or astrology and so on. So the simple fact was if you want to study early modern.
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D
No, if you want to study ancient
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C
or medieval or early modern science, you
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D
have to study magic, you have to
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C
study alchemy, you have to study astrology,
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D
simply because that is what scientists were using.
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C
It's very simple. So this is why they were interested.
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D
They were not interested in it because
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C
they had weird occult beliefs, but they
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D
were interested in it because this is just simply was an important part of scientific research. It's a simple step, you know, and I know it sounds weird. It's. It might sound strange to wrap your, to wrap your mind around this thing,
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C
but that's the whole point. This has become so unfamiliar and unknown
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D
to us that it takes people like me and my colleagues to explain this again and again. And this is not a fantasy.
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C
This is, I can, no, I would say like one mountain of scholarship.
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B
If I had a piece of, I don't know, silver and I will Say, what can I do with, you know, it's got the hardness, it's got a lot of characteristics I want, but it doesn't have the gold color. Maybe I mixed it with hay, maybe I mix it with some other, you know, pigments or I don't know. And somehow all that property will become attached to it and it'll still be hard, but now it'll be gold colored. Colored or, you know, I know I want something that wants to be soft. And I guess that that would be like, how would you construct an alchemaic formula? Besides gold, were there other targets for alchemy, other substances that people really wanted to make?
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D
Yeah, the perception that alchemists were all about making gold is a bit of
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C
a one sided perception. I mean, there was an obvious reason for it. I mean, alchemists have to make money, they have to live. You are living in a culture where you're based upon patronage by wealthy, by wealthy people, noblemen and so on and so forth. So this r person would like to, would be willing to give you a salary to do, to, to install a laboratory and do research. But why does he, does he do that? Because he hopes that you are going to make gold for him. So there are very simple reasons why making gold was a particularly popular, you know, pursuit for alchemists. Simply the dream of becoming very, very rich. But actually what alchemists were doing, they were not just after making gold, they were after working in the laboratory to find out the secrets of transmutation. And the term transmutation is an alchemical term and that is the secrets of turning one substance into another. How that works, even how experimentally in the laboratory. And so these people were doing hard experimental work and they were making discoveries and sometimes they discovered things that they didn't expect and they, you know what's
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B
weird is that now let's say a drug company is looking for new targets for cancer in the liver and they're using AI to perform alchemy. Try all these combinations and see if you can get one that'll fit and will make this compound. And I mean, really, what's the difference?
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C
Well, I don't know. That's something you would have to ask them. I mean, I'm not talking about that. My point is simply. I mean, my point is not a scientific point. My point is an historical point. I'm talking about the history of science and the history of culture.
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B
All I'm saying is that alchemy is actually alive and well, just in a different form today because of what you
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C
told me it's actually possible nowadays to
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B
make gold particle accelerators stuff.
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C
Yeah, yeah. So it's. So you need, but you need so much technical stuff to do that. So it's not very profitable. But technically it's possible nowadays, I've been told. But this is not my point. That's not the point. It's all about. The point is simply that, that. Well, again, using people like Boyle and Newton as an example, if we want to have an adequate history of the development of science, the historical development of science, then you need to know about alchemy and astrology and so called magical stuff. You need to know about it. If you don't know about it, you'll be missing a large part of the story. That's, that's what we are saying.
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B
Very interesting. Okay. Other, other pursuits, common but well reputed people would never want to be associated with them that you discovered in your research.
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C
I mean, there are many. Okay, let me give another example. One of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment period, Immanuel Kant.
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D
Right.
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C
The German, the greater German philosopher. Immanuel Kant sort of revolutionized science.
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D
And he is of course seen as
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C
a typical rationalist Enlightenment scientist, and rightly so. He created foundations of modern science in a way that you cannot go back,
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D
you know, to, to before Kant. He caused a revolution in philosophy, in rational philosophy. Now, okay, that is well known.
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C
What people do not know so well is that Kant's revolution in philosophy was grounded to a considerable part in his
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D
fascination with a figure who has been forgotten again. And that's.
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C
His name was Emmanuel Swedenborg.
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D
Now Emmanuel Swedenborg was a visionary. He wrote large religious spiritual works in which he describes visions of, of heaven and hell. He claimed that he was able to talk with spirits and with angels and so on and so forth. And he wrote large books about him and those books made him quite famous. So many people were reading that. So Swedenborg became known as this visionary, as this, this religious figure who wrote about heaven and hell and spiritual topics and so on and so forth. That's what he became known for. However, the interesting thing is that if you. Well, okay, let me, let me say this different. Early on, Immanuel Kant wrote a small book about Swedenborg. It called Dreams of a Spirit Seer. And it says it's. If you look at, if you read it superficially, it looks a bit like in satire, a satire of a great philosopher, Kant, who makes fun of a dreamer like Swedenborg with his weird spiritual dreams. That's what it looks like.
- [25:30]
C
If you read his book more Carefully. Then you discover that behind the surface there's something else. This is actually very serious philosophical analysis in which Kant is struggling with the ideas of Swedenborg, which he actually takes very seriously. Why did he take Swedenborg seriously? Well, he did so because Swedenborg was actually not just some visionary, but he began as a very legitimate scientist, a materialist scientist who worked on basis of materialist, rationalist, typical Enlightenment perspectives. Then Swedenborg had an kind of conversion experience and he started to write, write, write religious, his book, but he began as a scientist. And so Kant is reading this book, but is reading Swedenborg, and he discovers that this faker Swedenborg, whom he would see as an opponent of rational scientific thinking, was actually extremely close to his own idea. So he discovered that. That a person that he would like to keep at arm's length was actually saying things that were very, very close to Kant's own philosophy. So. And that was a problem for, for him how to explain that. So he writes a book about this. And, well, the interesting thing is that if you analyze that closely, then you find that some of the essential innovations that are fundamental to Immanuel's mature philosophy, a philosophy that revolutionized philosophical discourse, that some of the most essential ideas that he had, he actually developed based upon his interaction with Swedenborg.
- [27:02]
D
So instead of seeing Swedenborg as this weird, as this weirdo, as this strange visionary, marry this irrational dreamer with weird
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C
occult ideas, it turned out that Swedenborg actually was very, very close to Kant's own ideas and actually gave Kant some of his most fundamental insights.
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D
Now this is another thing, this story.
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C
And once again, this is not a
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D
fantasy on my part.
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C
This is based upon research that's now very, very well established.
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D
But it is not so well known
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C
among the general population because it is
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D
easier to think in simplistic terms about Swedenborg as the irrationalist and Kant as the rationalist. And then when you look more closely,
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C
then you find that those boundaries are
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D
blurred, as actually blurred very seriously. And what looks like an irrationalist is
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C
in many ways a rationalist.
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D
And the other way around as well. Kant the rationalist has an irrational part that he takes on Swedenborg and from other sources that also has been neglected. So by looking at this forgotten figure again, the simplistic pictures that we have in this case about, about a key figure in philosophy, those simplistic ideas turn out to be much more complex. And this simplistic opposition of rationality against irrationality, science against super science, etc.
- [28:16]
C
Turns out to be questionable itself.
- [28:19]
D
And this and the true situation is much more, much more complex.
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C
So that's another way.
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B
Okay, well, very good. It's a very, very complex topic, but very interesting. I've learned a lot so far. Where can people find out more about you work when you go deeper into this?
- [28:31]
D
Oh well, there's quite a lot of research nowadays for my as a kind of introduction. I can refer you to a book that I just published this year. It's called Esotericism in Western Culture, Counternormativity and Rejected Knowledge. It was published by Bloomsbury 2025. So it's, it's available, it's readily available in a paperback. So here I give a kind of a general overview of the field, what it all means. So you find source, reference, etc. It's written for a broader non specialist audience. So I think that's a good way to start.
- [29:03]
B
Very good. Walter, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.
- [29:06]
C
Okay, if you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on itunes.
- [29:15]
A
Thank you for listening to the Good Question podcast. Please email support at the Good Question Podcast if you have any referrals to great guests for us to interview. Visit thegoodquestionpodcast.com to hear more interviews. And please help us spread the word by rating and reviewing us on Apple podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to this podcast.