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I once did a podcast with Balaji comparing alchemy to crypto, in which both are international systems for kings, rogues and travelers to create an order distinct from governments. Both give you rewards for passing certain difficult tests, have multiple tiers in an encrypted internal system, and have power if you know how to use them. They have their own worldview and are tools to resist centralized power. To speak to that theme, zcash is unstoppable private money. It's like Bitcoin, but encrypted, giving you the freedom to transact without surveillance, without debasement and without permission. An issue with the dominant crypto is that the state can monitor it, which is a real issue, and zcash fights back against that. And it's money that lets builders build and dreamers dream even when states decay. If you want a future of infinite frontiers, and if your soul craves freedom, you need money that resists control because seen wealth is seizable wealth. You need Zcash. Some are saying privacy might be the last 1000x in crypto. The best way to get started with Zcash is by buying and storing unstoppable private money using Zashi Wallet. Download Zashi on your mobile phone today Today. Part one A paradox I think once humanity's power grew great enough and we were no longer dependent on nature, very strange things started to happen. Wait, I don't think that I know it to be true. The modern world shows such staggering intensity between a society which grew so wealthy it committed suicide. Progressives who in their drive for progress collapsed their societies. The atom bomb which both ended war while causing the potential for the end of civilization in a bad morning, the Japanese empire rising to conquer Everything from Alaska to New guinea overnight. Or Hitler emerging from being an unemployed vagrant to Germany's Fuhrer conquering an empire stretching from the Atlantic to Kazakhstan, which lasted a very mythic 12 years. You wouldn't think the world today was real if we didn't have to live in it. There's some both beautiful and horrible things in it. It's crazy that modern populations see the most remarkable things, but their humanity has been so crushed that they can't appreciate its intensity. There's another paradox there. Life today is so insane by historic standards, but nothing ever happens and the end of history has already been reached. So we have a worldview that says that the world can't change, which is not going to work. I think the reason that paradox is so built into modernity is that broken people are the most paradoxical. I don't really agree with this, but Tolstoy said all happy families are similar and that unhappy people are different. It speaks to a point that broken people have lots of disintegrated stuff which jostles against others. Healthy people have come to terms with their own complexity. Modern society is incredibly immature, since it's the first time that humanity has gotten enough power to not be totally reliant on the Earth's bounty. For almost all of our ancestors, they were farmers, herders, hunter gatherers or whatever. And those who weren't were people like lords or church or bourgeoisie who were a small minority, totally dependent on the people who were getting food from the land. With the Industrial Revolution, we unlocked enormous power that we had no experience with. It's like giving a child a power tool with no training. It's frankly painful to watch if you're the sort of person who knows where this is going to end. The other thing is that we became so wealthy so fast that people became insulated from the costs of their decisions. People could believe utterly insane things like that reality didn't exist, or that everyone was equal, since they bore no costs for saying crazy stuff. This is a highly dangerous situation, and the general public is far too comfortable to deal with it in a responsible way. The sheer degree of denial I see in the world today is something I could not have predicted in advance. But I don't blame myself, since this is just utter madness. Faced with enormous intractable issues, whether the new technologies we do not yet understand, such as genetic engineering, AI space, or even older stuff like nuclear weapons or shoving chemicals, chemicals into everything, we have a public that has zero interest in even thinking about the consequences. Throw on top of this A complete societal and cultural collapse paralleled either by the earlier fall of civilizations like Rome, Persia or Greece, or with the horrifying mouse utopia experiments, which again, the public ignores all of this. This is just the tip of a spear between the culture or innovation grinding to an utter halt. The rise of external power like China, an utterly collapsing birth rate, political polarization, the average person sliding into degrading poverty, and the west being controlled by a death cult bent on the destruction of its own civilization. I'm not even giving everything that deserves credit here, like haha credit. The world is going on the most insane financial money printing event ever in human history, or potential climactic issues. As I like to say, this all sounds quite intimidating because it is. However, life is a shit test and you have nothing better to do than to deal with it. I know none of you have lives that are more interesting or compelling than fixing this. A lot of you are normies, have financial liabilities or families, but a lot of you don't either. We're going to have to solve this, and if we don't, we will lose absolutely everything. People are too coddled today to realize how bad life can get and how stopping that requires effort, courage. One of my good friends used to work for an agriculture company in India and Thailand and Indonesia, and he said in those countries there is levels of poverty which we would only see in post apocalyptic movies. We are going to fix this so that our children can live in a better country, because that is the only acceptable outcome we should choose to live with. What I did not expect was that the whole world's reaction to this would just be denial. I didn't think lying to yourself for this long was even in the phone book of options. I assumed over time that the nagging worries would become too intrusive, that the streets would get too dirty and people would get too poor. But psych? No. Welcome to governance by the baby boomers. Where issues are not solved and we all collectively agree to pretend it's still the 20th century while having none of the positives of that society, you'd think people would realize after a certain point that it's inside their self interest to defect from the system. But I think a combination of economic misery, being so isolated, beaten down by the left, psychological warfare and the collective slide into madness that people don't have the life force to stand upright. However, this will change, and it's a matter of when, not if. Since situations like this are innately deeply unstable, we see a sort of stable equilibrium now since it looks like the world we thought we knew. However, the current world around us is an illusion kept together by too many people being utterly terrified of losing their worldly things. They don't seem to realize that they're going to lose their things anyway if they don't stand up. I partly blame aging since we are the first old society ever in human history, with America being one of the younger countries in the industrial world, but our average age is still 40. Modernity is weird for both, keeping a lot of consistency with earlier eras of history, but also having its own weird new stuff you can't call which will be which. In advanced, this world will come crashing down. In fact, it already has in nearly every conceivable way. However, we're too set on maintaining the illusion of the old world. No matter how hard we try, we are not strong enough to stop this. Since elites do not in fact control the world. The world has its own plans, and history shows that elites who don't keep up with them get crushed. The current order has nothing holding it together except entropy. No one believes in the current order, even the elites. No one wants this to be our world. Both the right and the left hate modernity, and the current regime is incapable of generating anything. Regimes that don't generate things die and get crushed by those who do as part of a natural Darwinistic process. Modernity is so fast that trends which may have taken centuries 2000 years ago can occur in decades. The reason you haven't realized that the old world is dead is that there has been an active conspiracy on the part of the entire world's social authorities to not show it. This sounds like a centrally orchestrated thing, but rather it's just from the individual self interest of various world leaders and elites who don't understand the new world or how to deal with it and so can't make new stories about the current society that don't end up invalidating their own rule. It's a tale as old as time. Corrupt elites trying to hold on to power at all costs. We try to maintain the outward forms of the comfortable and stable John Hughes Simpsons America of the last century, while for most younger people, their lives have practically nothing in common with it. As I've read more books from the 20th century, it's really struck me how much we've changed since then in so many ways. Even with authors in the 1990s, this is a lot for someone my age to hold on their plate. It would be a lie to say that knowing this hasn't eaten at me a little. My Eyes are already open and I couldn't close them even if I wanted to. There's not enough space to live in the older version of me who believed these lies as a child for me to grow today. As of now, I just have to watch my world fall apart before my own eyes. And the vast majority of people are too medicated, depressed and or are in denial to acknowledge it. I guess this is my fate. There are worse things in the big picture and I'll make sure it works. I have plenty of good stuff. I am from a culture where people speak bluntly, where I'm an Irish guy from Philly, where people don't really have filters back home. So don't read between the lines too much at what I'm saying here. I started to intuit all of these things as a teenager. As I said before, I'm from Philly, which is probably the most downwardly mobile city in America over the last century. So a lot of these conclusions were utterly unavoidable. However, I was intimidated by these things. I'm not anymore. The reason is that as a teen, I could tell adults didn't know what they were really saying about the world. The things they said felt empty and banal, like Styrofoam. Real things are messy and living. Nihilism is killing us. Growing up, my father would tell me about how the most core causal variable for the issues I saw in the world around me was the death of God. My father said that without a shared sense of God or meaning, that people did not have the reason to live. He said that Marxism was the envious who were trying to tear down the world to take revenge for the loss of heaven or an afterlife. That the reason the west was too weak to either have an effective foreign policy or let children play outside is that without God there was no reason to face suffering or believe in yourself. He said that the story of the 20th century was when our human sciences did not progress as fast as our technological sciences, which created evil regimes based off pseudoscience. That the human sciences of the 20th century were just stuff we made up, and instead we would have to pull on religion or premodern social ideas to make a correct system. This is where I started intellectually. I spent years trying to figure out how the world really worked. I compared the different philosophies of the world from both the premodern and modern eras. I then did my own reading and studied the scientific or intellectual work we have now to run a sort of reality filter on which philosophies and worldviews aligned with both reality and the functionality of a human society the most. I continually found that Marxists were the most obnoxious liars and our society had been way too soft on them. Secondly, that pre modern societies often understood highly complex and deep things, but explained them in a format that was totally unrelatable to modern people or with religions and myths which left out very important sort of tools for modern people to understand them or things we know now. However, I found something that could work. I found a corpus of ideas which can resolve all of the major issues with what I've articulated here. Let me show them to you. Part 2 which worldview is Accurate? The video I most recently made was about how the vast majority of our worldview today is inaccurate. That on some level every academic discipline had been colored by incorrect framings to a degree in which you can't trust our entire worldview. That's a very deep and heavy topic which I won't get as much into this video. However, that's a framework you are going to need to understand this video. It also plays into what I just said that the current mental and worldview framework we have for the world is not able to deal with the dangerous realities of life today. There's a sort of disjoint here in trying to cross reference which theories of the world can explain the world today. Modernist thinkers have a tendency to be really bad at understanding systems, thinking, human nature or the big picture. This is a way bigger issue than a lot of you probably realize since those things inform every element of how you perceive the world. For example, Communism was seen as a moral evil for the vast majority of human history since they had a better comprehension of human nature that humans have souls pointed towards heaven and their own animal motivations. This makes Marxism slavery to the state, not seen as empowering. A world without conflict or poverty, which it does not actually achieve, but rather the crushing of human soul and character. Alternately, pre modern thinkers would see stuff like cold rationalism or social engineering as evil since neither respected the interconnected and divine nature of reality itself. Where you can't just rip reality up without thinking you're going to generate more issues than you solve. This is what pre modern thinkers were really good at and moderns are terrible at. Modern people are way better at knowing the how and very bad at knowing the why or should. Just look at wokeness where the left so blindly pushed for racial stats for various industries to match their quotas. This leaves out very important details like how cultures and genetics are actually quite different. Where you'll see on top of that, a radical neutering of innovation, which is largely done by white men. That using national racial stats over America is just utter madness, given how much America's racial demographics fluctuate by region. And that's leaving out a dozen other very important variables they did not in fact consider. This is just one example of one of modernity's logical fallacies, but there are very many. However, at the same time, there's a sort of unbridgeable gulf between ancient wisdom and modern science. For a brief example, which will make the rest of the video more comprehensible, alchemy has a very distinct grammar for how the world works. If you don't know the grammar, alchemy comes across as gibberish. However, if you do, it's absolutely brilliant. For example, in alchemy there are four albedo, rubedo, nigredo, or citrinitis for examples. In history, albedo is a period of high intellectual depth and cultivation. Examples would include classical Athens, 18th century France, or the Italian Renaissance. The white or albedo must come out of chaos and disorder, though, which all of these historic periods did, and it must evolve into yellow or citrinitus. This is when a sort of idea of a society evolves into material form, or how those intellectual principles from those breakthroughs were applied across the whole world. This is a stage of decadence, where these ideas mix with the world and get watered down. That would be the Hellenistic period modernity or Baroque decadence, which followed all of those time periods. However, decadence is necessary to this process since it burns away the unnecessary parts of the older society and allows these ideas to sink in with the society. Nigredo, get your laughs out now, guys. This isn't about black people is a term for the raw darkness and horror of your worst points. In alchemy, suffering is required to burn away weakness. You can see this is totally true in that Darwinism is built off survival of the fittest. Ancient historians like Herodotus or Ibn Khaldun agreed that weakness destroyed nations and science. Rule of law, capitalism or democracy are so valuable since they create internal rules to mediate productive competition. Negredo is the least favorite, but it's also necessary to keep things real. And good things only come out of how suffering makes people stronger. Think of how the vast majority of scientific innovations are from war. This is a principle that people in modernity really have a hard time stomaching. Since we live in such comfortable times, we don't want to believe that suffering is necessary to growth. Finally, is rubedo, which is the lion's roar of red. This is the period when history just explodes. Like how Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan broke entire continents under their will. The French Revolution exploding across Europe, or the Spanish bloodily taking down two continents. This is necessary. But again, modernity doesn't like this, since genuine innovation is always disrupted. It's so spoiled and immature of us to hate on the age of European exploration, industrialization and colonialism, since we all live in the world they made. The only reason we have the science, hygiene, food, technology, or often countries or continents that we do is because of the rubedo of that era. We're now sliding into yellow or black so that we can have another era of white or red. Finally, you have the blue, which I haven't studied as much, but I believe is the creative font of new innovation that comes from the shadows or the night. Think of how the European Dark Ages after the fall of Rome set the foundations for the most successful civilization in history. Or how colonial America did the same for our nation. How the forests and myths of ancient Greece set the foundations for the albedo of their classical civilization and the rubedo of Alexander. The thing is that I applied this framework to history, since that's my area of study. But you could do this for any other discipline. Keep in mind, alchemy was in a lot of ways the origin of science, as we'll talk about later in this video, where every major thinker in the foundation of modern science had some background in alchemy. Alchemy exists in parallel to science in that it's a set of way to look at symptoms which mirror across realms of existence. So you could use these colors to look at human nature, psychology, smelting in a smithy, which is where alchemy started for spirituality, history, evolution or other disciplines. An interesting element of the psychology of alchemy is when you're talking about these colors, you're breaking out of the idea that this trauma is caused by your parents or this is caused by your employer. You're just saying you are in nigredo and you are suffering. You should deal with it. And I see these as useful tools which you can apply to a wide variety of disciplines as a certain type of lens, but not the sole lens you should use. I see this video as a challenge. If it kind of comes off strange, you don't like it. The reason is I'm trying to get to the edges of what I can do with my current skill level to see if it works. One of the tests Here is can I get a modernist audience to respect something which their neurology will absolutely not like? We don't think about this, but the way modern societies wire their neurology is in fact not rational or scientific. Science is just a testing method and you don't need the machine like aesthetic or to apply science as the sole ruling principle of your society. We agreed to that since it fit a certain vibe, not because it actually made rational sense, since no major philosopher ever argued for this. As I explain in this text wall, if I fail this test, oh well, things happen sometimes. The way I think and I believe this is valuable to articulate since it's alien to a lot of people, is that I say things as a way to think out the implications of it. In a process of curiosity with my audience, I put on various perspectives or intellectual masks, try them on and if they stick, I keep them. This is how I see stuff like this. The reason I state this is that people seem to get very worked up about intellectual or social ideas as they form their identity. But this totally removes thinking about them critically and sort of fossilizes people's worldviews. Once you fossilize a worldview, it's going to end up being wrong because it won't be able to adjust to the world. I try to keep a core set of moral values I hold true to and then adapt my worldview by context or whatever new data I pull and tells me I am frequently wrong and will happily admit when I am. That being said, I think there's something profoundly valuable in the pre industrial world's perception. I think not even being interested in studying any of the elements for how people in earlier societies understood the world is insanely arrogant and deranged for modernity even to try this. It's pretty insane that we have total confidence on a 200 year trajectory since the French Revolution which has been marred by constant wars and disturbances. One where the scientific consensus on a variety of topics changes every generation and where social authorities are totally unwilling to admit fault at the same time, where they push ideas which are overtly wrong, like that men and women are the same or that you can print infinite money with no consequences and having a coherent functioning society is racism. Looking to the past to figure out principles is just common sense and the question is which principles from the past fit with our current context and appear to match up with the trustworthy scientific data we have now. I need you to watch this video until the end, although I know it's long before you judge, since I think there will Be an immediate knee jerk jerk, no reaction. But I've spent years trying to translate alchemical principles into modern scientific terminology and it does actually work. Surprising. If you actually understand what alchemy is trying to convey behind all the obtuse symbols in weird language, you'll find it has a pre established moral code in worldview which already knows how to handle the enormous power of modern technology that we have now, as well as how to cultivate a society which is responsible enough to handle it. The good news is that all of these questions we worry about now have already been thought through for thousands of years. I have lots of friends in the tech industry and it's funny, they'll mention some problem and so often the alchemists already wrote on that and I can just immediately tell them what the alchemical teaching is. I've checked this for a while and it's consistently held up that since the philosophy of alchemy is a question of how to attain greater and greater amounts of power without growing corrupted, this was an issue philosophers have been aware of for millennia. You know, man, sometimes the sorcery is just too strong and you gotta roll with that. Another very valuable thing is that the alchemical worldview is not in contradiction with Christianity at all. Every major Christian church has endorsed it and funded it at one point or another. The Catholic Church funded research on the topic, and in the 16th century every major royal court in Europe hired alchemists. The philosophy of alchemy influenced the early church, with the fathers of the church like St. Augustine or Origen not being totally opposed seeing the founder of this tradition, Hermes Trismegistus, as a precursor to Christ and a pagan figure in the Christian tradition like Seneca, Plato or Aristotle. Hermeticism, or another name for the philosophy of alchemy has already had an enormous impact on Western history. Between the Italian Renaissance, which it heavily inspired, the founding fathers that were deeply steeped in it, as were almost all of the founders of science. We're going to talk about this more so at the end of the video. The reason we don't hear about it is since this stuff is coded in a certain way that it's not generally accessible, and it was heavily concentrated among the upper classes or intellectuals who were the people making leadership decisions, but didn't percolate through the general public, so it didn't transfer to democracy very easily, I will say that this tradition is deeply complex. I've kind of stumbled into it and after reading like 50 books on mysticism, I still don't consider myself a Master, I learn something new every time I open a book on this topic, and my skills here aren't anywhere as good as what they are in history or anthropology. However, I know practically no one else knows anything on these topics, so I'm going to go ahead. Another element is that alchemy deals with how to advance on a consciousness level as your material conditions improve, which means they are writing for people at different tiers of consciousness at once. If you're not aware enough to understand something in alchemy, that's on purpose, since that information is only meant to be known by someone who is aware enough to take it, it's overly complex and weird on purpose. For that reason, if you don't like it, that's fine. It's not made for most people. It's designed to be the exact opposite of convenient or comprehensible, which makes it utterly incomprehensible to the modern mind. Part 3 the Hermetic Worldview the reason I think that alchemy, alternately called the Hermetica, can explain the scientific world very well is it allows you to switch your framing on how the world works by perceiving the material realities of science through a different worldview where they actually make sense inside a bigger frame. There's two ways that I would recommend people who are trying to get into the Hermetica star. One is with the Kybalion, or a guide written on the underlying implicit principles of hermeticism. Alongside, there's a lot of good secondary sources on the topic which do a much better job of explaining how the general worldview works, which is what I've found the most valuable. The top five I'd recommend are the Secret History of the World, Forbidden Universe, the Hermetic Link, the Hermetica and Creative Alchemy alongside Eliade's book on alchemy. If you want to understand how these fit into a broader modern worldview, read Ken Wilber's book Sex, Ecology and Spirituality alongside Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning. Then there's the Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius and the Emerald Tablet, which are other really useful primary sources on this topic. All of those primary sources are less than like 400 pages total, so it's not a big deal to read. All A point Eliade makes is that the Hermetica, or all forms of alchemy which you also have in China or India, come from smelting in furnaces and ironworking. These were ideas that were first developed with blacksmiths trying to understand the miracle of metalworking. A lot of this mutated into cooking or chemistry. Where the Hermetica loves symbolism of let him cook or front and back burner. The hammer is the masculine element, the iron is the feminine. The final produced good is the synthesis. The way hermetics frame this is by working through metals to reach gold. These were symbolic understandings of the gold, so gold was spiritual enlightenment. However, this is also so philosophically complicated and incestuous that you should read this text well to understand it better. The philosopher's stone was a symbol for something in the far future that was powerful enough to understand all things and transmute one materia to another. By being so advanced, the stone was not actually a stone, but more so a waxy tablet that you should see as some advanced piece of technology in the far future that they were aiming towards over the course of centuries. This is the weirdest intro into hermeticism and I promise I can explain why this framework exists in a sane way going forward. This is a funny way of phrasing it, but a way to see the Hermetica is much like communism or some insane anime fandom. For example, I've never watched the One Piece show since I see the thousand episodes or whatever and I think, Jesus, I don't have enough free time for this. Keep in mind that nerds in the pre modern world needed hobbies too. The Hermetica is designed to be coded only for the types of people who are mature enough for it, and there are multiple entry points you can choose. There is a truly huge amount of Hermetic lore and you can start in a variety of ways. When you encounter another person who has studied the Hermetica, you'll almost always find that their study of the topic is coded for their own personal experience and so you'll share your journey. This is a structured part of the hermetic process where it's supposed to be tailored to you as an individual. It's an open source toolkit which you can use for a variety of things. It builds your identity around you as you use these tools to further your life journey to reach your destiny. It's less valuable to see it as a religion like the Abrahamics than it is a philosophy with lots of tools you can use to understand the world. You can pick or choose tools by context. However, this is also why I never think the Hermetica can or should be a society's majority religion, since it isn't made to serve the needs of ordinary people or a society. You see, most religions operate like a sort of psychic force field for A society, Christianity, Hinduism or Islam creates psychological worlds which create create space for entire civilizations to develop. These create worldviews which can't really interface with others and thus have rules which often end up collapsing into totalitarianism, since their rules can't update in all contexts. What the Hermetica is designed to be is a toolkit for those who wander outside those religious force fields. That's why it's called the belief system of travelers, rogues, and in kings it's for the self employed, or those who exist outside normal structures. Since either the king must deal above his nation in order to fight others and deal with international diplomacy, or the traveler who must wander between worlds. You can see why I'm sort of comparing it to communism as a vaguely secular ideology which you can use as a mental framework to understand the world world, but doesn't operate as a traditional religion. This provides a very valuable service in a globalized economy where the old civilizations can't fully adapt to a new world. In the same way that at the time of Herodotus, religion declined since the Greeks could see the gods of many other nations, which made it hard to believe in their own religions or cultures. Today are forced to cooperate against both the globalized world and the changes with new science and technology. However, religion is a society's worldview or operating system, and so it must exist and not doing so will kill a society. What the Hermetica and other forms of alchemy, like the Indian or Taoist, do is make a list of tools which can allow the cross section of science and religion so you can take off certain moral values based on context or good sense. The Hermetica is difficult to categorize since it was made before modern people established clear principles on what constituted certain academic disciplines. Hermeticism is a way of looking at the world holistically and then seeing patterns across disciplines. There were hermetic styles of magic, astrology, physics, biology, art, politics, religion, philosophy and so many other things. Given the Hermetica as a system, it's not a given thing. This makes it difficult for modern people, but it also makes it very useful in classic fashion, where often the thing you don't want is what you actually need. Modern people need logical systems like the Hermetica so that we can logic our way out of our own civilizational autism, schizophrenia or mental illness back into having a meaningful, profound worldview like our ancestors did. The Hermetica is how you explain religion to smart intellectual people. The Hermetica isn't like other girls or other religions in that it's not a list of dogma, but rather a framework for how to evolve as a person or a thing and build your own morality based on context. The way to see it is literally less than competing with Christianity or other world religions, rather worldviews like Marxism, the Hermetica is the direct inverse of Marxism in which both are worldviews about how things should evolve over the course of time. Where Marx's idea of the historic dialectic actually stems from the Hermetica, for reasons explained in this text, wall through Hegel, the Hermetica establishes a framework for how to find chaos, subdue or master it, and then turn it into your property and in the process grow as a person. When communism values slavery, immaturity and machine like thinking, the Hermetica values freedom, maturity, human consciousness and manhood. In our current worldview, Marxism has de facto filled the frame of our global worldview in the that the first reaction to a globalized world of many religions was to negate all of them in default onto the lowest trust and most cynical worldview possible as a way to not have to maintain the global commons, which would be quite difficult. What this means is that Christians today, without even realizing it, have been operating within a Marxist frame since they've made the decision that pushing social justice, justice, killing the west and Marxist oppression narratives trumps actually following the Bible for lots of Western churches. People really underestimate how Marxism has colored our entire worldview and it goes through academia, value systems, sexual relations, human nature and a variety of things. What I'm recommending here is using the Hermetica to replace the faith things Marxism does in our current society, which would then allow the major world religions to flower. Keep in mind that Marxism teaches that the spiritual simply does not exist, that the divine spark does not exist in humans, that humans don't have a soul, that the chaos God uses to test humanity should be destroyed. The major world religions cannot survive in a Marxist frame, which is a big reason why global religiosity is collapsing so precipitously. However, in the Hermetica you have an open source toolkit which creates a framework for different world religions to interface with the divine. So you've suddenly opened up global cultures to be able to talk to God again. Hermeticism allows everyone to access the tree of human life and consciousness. I can't overstate how easy and how important a historic shift this would be. We would just have to do it to return to topic as a way to sort of go through the Hermetic principles. Let's go through the Kybalion's principles to understand the topic more deeply. You have mentalism, or that the universe is a dream by God correspondence, or as above, so below vibration that nothing stays the same polarity, or that everything which exists also has its opposite rhythm, or that everything flows in cycles. Cause and effect, which is every cause has an effect. And gender, which is that everything has masculine or feminine principles. These are fairly bare bones, but these are all very necessary things you need to understand the world, which modernity does not have. They provide frameworks for things we don't think about today, but we need to know about. Another really interesting hermetic principle which I find quite valuable is microcosmos equals macrocosmos. And what that means is that large, very complex things have small symbolic forms which guide the larger thing. As an example I've spoken about in previous videos how society's family structures dictate their political structures through creating intuitive notions on how power should be used. So if you change a society's family structure, you're also going to change their political structure. Similarly, nations or religions use certain symbols like capitals or religious symbolism, where if you attack the Vatican, you're attacking the entire global Catholic Church. Washington D.C. is a microcosmos of America, where these leaders in rooms are making decisions which impact the entirety of humanity. So the course of human history exists in a microcosmic form being determined in negotiating rooms by world leadership. Microcosmos versus macrocosmos also explains a lot of religious symbolism, where you have to think to yourself how come a cross is symbolic for an entire religion or a half moon for another religion. Another example of hermetic principles that are highly useful is the polarity of the masculine and feminine, which is very real to society, but is something that people just ignore. Men and women need different things out of life, but we can't admit that. The reason social engineering doesn't work is that the world is constantly moving and operating in rhythms, which means that overly rigid structures can't accurately model reality. If you look enough at physics or just human life in general, you find that they do generally follow principles like this. For example, over history people tend to not operate rationally, but do the opposite of the recent trend. The enormous wealth and growth of the Industrial revolution created populations which had suicidal misery since all that wealth needed psychic balance. The French Revolution was a reaction to the failings of the aristocratic revolution, Romanticism to the over rigidity of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, in Britain, where the elites were less repressive than France, there was no equivalent reaction like The French Revolution. Once you create a very stark polarity, like the Roman or Chinese empires, you also create barbarians like the Germans or Mongols, who become strong enough to destroy them. You see anti civilization develop in polarity to civilization. The core idea which modern people will have the hardest time comprehending here is the concept that the whole world is mental. Explaining all of this would be a distinct video in its own right, which would take a while as a rabbit hole. But there is physics evidence which has become stronger over time, that reality does indeed not exist without consciousness. The big physics journals say that reality is not locally real or it does not exist, distinct from our perception of of it, which is really trippy for modern people. Alternately, the research that our perception of particles colors their actual composition. Some people say that this means we're in a simulation, others that God runs the universe, but both are functionally the same once you take away the labels. Beyond this, the research we found pretty consistently that plants know what you're thinking about, and their vital statistics change around the thoughts of the humans around them. Another element the Hermetica does really well here is its ability to balance how bad modern people are at understanding chaos or the unknown. Modernity likes to say that anything we can't measure scientifically doesn't exist. However, the universe is infinitely large, and so that opens you up to a very dangerous place where you just use things that you can measure as a way to live in denial about things you don't want to know about. This is how our elite backs insane stuff. And realistically, we just need to have another filter for common sense and things we've known for thousands of years to balance simply science as our society's dominant moral code. The Hermetica operates by archetypes like the masculine and the feminine, Chaos and order, or higher and lower forms terms. Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning was super groundbreaking in that he used a holistic look at the human condition between neurology, history, mythology, art or anthropology. To say that these archetypes do in fact totally exist. And just because we can't see them in the lab doesn't mean they're not valid. Humans very much do process chaos and build our lives to avoid it. Chaos is real. Evil is real if you've had to live through it. Saying otherwise is just childishly keeping your fingers in your ears and going la la la. If evil and chaos must exist by definition, so must good and order. Once you acknowledge that these archetypes can manifest over reality, you are quite close to saying that God exists for an Example of hermetic archetypes, types we've spoken before about the masculine and the feminine. The masculine is doing and the feminine is being. For a great example of this, let's look at the US currency and state buildings which were built by Hermetics during the American Revolution. In the National Mall you have the obelisk, which was taken from an Egyptian concept for the earth penis impregnating the sky. The Hermetica is from Egypt. Then you have the National Mall or the feminine. On the $1 bill is the pyramid. In the circle, which is upward or masculine spiritual momentum, and the circle or feminine downward spiritual momentum. This is the yin and yang concept which exists in all cultures. Men are attractive for their ability to do and their energy, women for their being and calmness. When you screw this up, people just stop mating. As you can see in our current society, without following these hermetic principles intuitively, a society cannot procreate. However, inside the Hermetica is a very useful concept that we are all building reality together. This doesn't make sense to modernity, but it's obviously true. It's most obvious with the greatest historic figures like Christ or Napoleon, but they did very much write the world around them. Everything that humans built around us is something that came out of someone's mind and then became a material reality. The ideal is trying to use the material to reach its own aims, which is often why certain religions like communism or Islam can possess a certain nation, drive them crazy and then attack their neighbors. On the smaller level, people will create the future by procreating and building their own households or families. On the greater scale, national leaders or prophets build entire civilizations. In the Hermetica, your social status should be dictated by how much of reality you're responsible for writing. This is why kings make more than peasants, since the king needs to mentally model the entire nation in geopolitics, and if he doesn't, he suffers for it. Inequality is a built in part of the Hermetic. Since the purpose of life is to face suffering and grow to evolve to a higher level, inequality is needed to motivate men to face chaos. The more chaos a man conquers and integrates, the more he is rewarded. The core values of the Hermetica are courage, discipline and imagination. For an example in physics about why it's impossible to measure particle to particle interactions is that the future is actively being weaved and carved out out by billions of people in real time. The reason modernity is so rich but is so miserable is partly that it gives humans so little agency, which is a core part of being human. In the Hermetic philosophy, it's often as if a particle in physics is making a choice in real time, given the future has not yet been determined. In the Hermetica, there are variables outside our control. You should accept. But you have to choose between different timelines and use the force of will or imagination to hold onto the future you want as much as possible. We're all radio towers competing with one another to have the strongest mental waves so that our light can grow. This is so obvious in the Internet today. People rub off their essence or vibration, which is an actual hermetic concept in which you gradually take on the character of the people and the places you've been. If you want to help the world, you should behave correctly. And according to this philosophy, what you do to others is what you become. Your intentions as you deal with the world, rub off on the things you do. As you can see with great leaders, where as their hubris grows, their empire collapses, we see these trends in that high trust governments become radically wealthier than low trust ones. As you can see with the Spanish versus the British, North America is showing the hermetic principle that intentions do in fact ripple across very long periods of time. The reasons that the left's fantasies about using bureaucracy to replace leadership are always utter failures is that a group needs to have the mental humanizing element in order to function as a unique whole. In that humanizing something is an active process in the Hermetica, dependent on projecting higher quality consciousness into the unconscious. It is against nature for those with lower levels of consciousness to rule those higher. And these societies collapse into barbarism or decadence. With a scientific discovery, the scientist is shining the conscious mind into something they didn't know before to master it. The first step to gaining power over something is to see that it's there, often through intuition. Then gain knowledge of it, figure out how it works, take control of it and integrate it into your worldview. It's no wonder that practically all of the founders of early science were familiar with the Hermetica, since this is just a scientific method. The reason Bruno followed by Galileo thought that the Earth circled the sun wasn't since science told them so, since telescopes weren't advanced enough at that time for that. It's since the Hermetica said that this sun was just one of nearly infinite worlds circling their own sun. In the vastness of space, life stemmed from the energy of the sun crushing matter and the Earth was nearly infinitely old, while the universe was even older to go through other hermetic doctrines that are thousands of years old. Another is evolution. Evolution is called the transmutation of forms. This is how one form progresses to another, like how Homo erectus evolved into modern humans. In each case, you use suffering to burn away weakness and then as you calcify to your core, which allows you to transmute to a higher level. This is almost identical to Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, in which the struggle for survival promotes good genes. I don't have evidence Darwin was influenced by the Hermetica, but these sort of ideas were in wide circulation in 19th century Europe, so it's not unimaginable. However, hermeticism does have an element missing in current evolutionary theory. There have been doubts among many authors for centuries how in Darwin's worldview there is is space for the selecting of genes, but not how the mutations themselves are generated. Furthermore, how life seems to have very clear archetypal patterns where societies on the other side of the world have so many cultural similarities. How crabs have evolved from convergent evolution many times over, or how insects, mammals, reptiles and birds have all independently evolved to fly. Furthermore, how anyone evolves to fly seems pretty difficult. Just by chance, modern science cannot deal with how staggeringly improbable life in the universe itself is. How all the coincidences line up for the earth having the exact right amount of oxygen or temperature or gravity, where the slightest deviation in any of these would mean life never evolved. But it did in we humans are here. Why does the universe even exist at all? At its core, the Hermetica is a way to integrate the evolutionary process into the divine. In it, it's our moral duty to learn and grow in order to be able to become more like God. The Hermetica is focused on increasing life charge or the power of evolution. And it needs another religion to counterbalance it in other elements like social life or moral values. Those who don't grow get crushed by those who do. Since life itself is trying to grow. Life uses consciousness to expedite the speed of its growth faster than would occur otherwise. Thus the growth of consciousness will prioritize your position in evolution, which is why high consciousness peoples like humans, can beat other apes or mammals. Alternately, how the Europeans conquered the world with science and Christianity. In the Hermetica, the Earth is a living, breathing organism called the anama mundi, which is the collective unconscious of life. What the anima mundi does is its ultimate goal is growth. But in order to do that, it has to burn away weakness. So it creates competition. And life is a game where the goal is to grow and evolve. And we know this to be true because the level of complexity for life has been predicated upon the level of evolutionary advancement. So when we were at cellular life forms, we were competing against other cellular life forms, then we were competing reptiles against other reptiles, then mammals. And now when we see the breakthrough of the last thousand years, every time humanity gets more advanced, you find that the game gets more complicated. And what the Hermetics believe is that the spirit world is fundamentally boring. And life is a place where souls go to get challenged and to suffer to have life with real stakes, because life does not have value unless the end points are difficult enough to give you emotional value in them. And with the Hermetica, you're seeing that as life gets more advanced, the stage literally gets bigger. So millions of years ago, there was a point when life's biggest challenge was moving from the sea into the land as amphibians. And it's just gotten crazier ever since. In the Hermetica, there's both upwards and downwards evolution, in that you can either evolve to higher levels by dealing with dark things like war or chaos or competition to burn away suffering. At the time, same, same time, people have also been able to reach above to the divine, where you can see with figures like Socrates, Buddha or Martin Luther, the divine means the pure and transcendent. So I don't mean this in a purely religious level, although other societies in history would interpret it this way. An example of the transcendent could be the technological advancement of modernity, as compared to the earlier society, where we brought something new into the world that did not exist before. In the Hermetica, there is no barrier between science, religion and mysticism. This was the culture that early science was developed in. All of whose founders were religious and steeped in the occult. Back then they had a concept called natural science, in which you would use physical science in the study of the outside world to level up your consciousness towards God. Natural science was a hermetic concept that died in the 17th century rate, and the division between science and religion that occurred since has become a civilizational disaster. What this means is that downwards evolution is survival of the fittest, upwards is a nation having a genius which causes a breakthrough. Then their people, if sufficiently respectful, try to follow their teachings, which then degenerate over time. This is why empires are their strongest on their rise. Or religions degenerate centuries after their original prophet, requiring future reformations to stay vigorous. The Hermetica is the manliest philosophy in this regard since morality requires constant struggle and overcoming of chaos. Let's look more at the Hermetic evolutionary process since I think inside it is something very important. Part 4 Follow the process I know this video is already too long, but I think it's worthwhile given the complexity and depth of the talk topic. A crazy element is I'm not even doing the Hermetica justice here. I'm not talking about the seven planetary gods which we can still see in our days of the week now stemming from the Norse pagan versions of the Hermetica, since Odin is another name for Hermes Trismegistus. To go through the week you have Sunday or the sun, Monday or the moon Tuesday for Tyr, the Norse version of Mars, the God of war, followed by Wednesday for Woldon, also known by Odin, king of the gods, who was a form of Mercury. Then Thursday for Thor, the thunder God, Friday for Freya, the Norse Isis or fertility goddess, and then Saturday for Saturn, the God of entropy and boundaries for a Hermetic. These all have symbolic meanings as underlying principles which operate across reality. The reason that our days of the week are named after them is they were seen as a very fundamental part of the world and culture by our ancestors. Another thing to keep in mind is that Germans under Odin and the Celts who were ruled by a variation of the same God named Lug, are the only peoples on earth which made Hermes Trismegistus their king, since that archetype also combines warrior or king roles with Hermes sage elements. This was also in pagan times, before real contact with classical civilization, which suggests something archetypal to the Hermetica behind this inhuman nature. Is it any wonder as well that the peoples who made their chief God the one of consciousness and evolution, were the ones who launched the industrial or scientific revolutions? Keep in mind over the course of thousands of years years culture and genetics mix, as Harvard anthropology professor Joseph Heinrich has spoken of very this Northwest European creativity and openness are traits they have cultivated for thousands of years. You also have three sorts of archetypes of Hermeticism, which I split into Catholic, shamanic and Gnostic. Catholic is the form of Hermeticism, which has totally integrated with Christianity, which has been dominant over Western history. This values modesty and love more than other sects for these different categories. The second would be the shamanic, which is more so the kind of stuff Odin would do with facing overt chaos or savagery to use horror to grow. Like how Odin nearly killed himself multiple times to Attain wisdom. Finally, the Gnostic element that got pretty big at certain segments, fragments. And there's a confusion that Gnostic hermetics wrote one of the most important hermetic primary sources, the corpus hermeticum, for a frame of reference. And this is its own rabbit hole. Gnostics were a religion from the Middle east in the same era which penetrated other religions like the Christians, Jews or classical civilization. Their deal is they flip the devil. In the Old Testament, God, the earth is bad, the serpent in the garden was the good guy who was trying to liberate us. And Jesus followed the serpent. You can see how there's an insidious element here. The way to spot the difference is that normal hermetics don't dislike the physical body and see it as something to love, while Gnostic hermetics see the physical body as disgusting. In the Hermetica, you have to maintain balance between mind, body and soul. This is why in the Renaissance, probably the single historic event most colored by the Hermetica, the Renaissance man was a savant in many disciplines that since in the Hermetica, if you're too stuck in your head, you should lift more to create balance, and if your soul is degenerate, you should use your mind to try to become more holy. If you have an issue, find a balance for it. This is also why the nude was so common in Renaissance art, since the ability to to strip something to a nude form showed things at their very core. The Hermetica radically prizes authenticity and rejects a life without it. Since authenticity is a way to connect with God in most cases, the Hermetica is not an anti sex religion, which I think is necessary in a society where the birth rate is crashing to zero, but traditional religious authorities are unable to deal with that. At the same time, keep in mind the Hermetica balances sex or authenticity with responsibility. You should only have sex if you're mature enough for the consequences. And you should have as much power to be authentic as you can responsibly manage. In the Hermetica, it's a moral duty to try to pair up your sort of masculine or feminine energy with the best possible combination to make the best possible child. And so part of the sexual duality is seen as this divine process of evolution towards higher forms. Then you have the four elements of earth, fire, wind and air alongside so much other stuff I'm not going to get into. You also have minerals and there's an entire hermetic theory of history that you can read with the good book, A Secret History of The world. And I leave my sources in the description here, as always. Ways. However, the core theme, which I think the Hermetica does really well, is the evolutionary process which was ported into modern science and the West's institutions like democracy, capitalism or science were created, since upper class Europeans in the early modern period were very familiar with the Hermetica. For example, for all of these institutions, you see two opposing forces, like masculine and feminine, competing through this process. One subjugates the other, takes their best elements and then makes a child. This also relates to Hegel, who we know was very influenced by the Hermetica with the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For science, this is the iron law of empirical testing between two hypotheses. For democracy, the two party system and capitalism, it's the competition of the free mind market. As I like to say, follow the dao to wealth and wisdom. A great irony is that we live in a world made by the Hermetica, in which, before the Hermetica went out of fashion with the rise of modernity, institutions were already set up which followed these principles. The Hermetica teaches that when you set up these triangles, you will get an exponential result like the sheer rapid growth of the modern world world. The reason for this is that these hermetically derived testing methods is what catapulted Europe to global predominance. The transcendent is that which exists beyond the earlier stage of development, and modernity transcended the older order. The reason Europe conquered the world is because it established institutions based off structured competition, which allowed Europe to advance faster than other civilization civilizations. In the Hermetica, you're always going to have problems in your life, since that's just how the world tests you. So you can keep growing, but at least you can choose whether you want to have interesting or uninteresting problems. A very serious concern is that these hermetic processes are in place without the religious wisdom which would allow us to spot them, or their effects, which creates a enormously powerful soulless Frankenstein which is taking over society. In fact, it already took it over. We need to integrate wisdom into science just to survive at this point as an existential threat, even as science will grow more powerful in the future. In the Hermetica, if you do not take responsibility for the things you bring into the world, the natural order will punish you for your arrogance and foolishness. Think of Victor Frankenstein himself, who was an alchemist who was incapable of controlling his creation. This is why I think this is a valuable concept for the philosophy of science going forward. With the godlike technology we have now. Since it forces responsibility and wisdom while also offering space for struggle and growth, or reward for courage and innovation. It's a philosophy of chaos and order. You can't put the genie back in the bottle with these modern technologies, but you can rise to the occasion to master it. At its core, the hermetic worldview is that of accepting reality. It's your moral duty to find the unpleasant things you want to ignore or the shadow and then grab it by its tongue. There's a sort of organic unity in the Hermetica which forces you to see the big picture. In a lot of ways, it's more useful to see the Hermetica as an aid to your own imagination or thought process through using these symbols. For example, if you've already experienced true horror, that just seems too wrong. The balance is that it will harden you exponentially, more than you ever thought possible, allowing you to transcend to a wonderful life. If a situation doesn't feel right to you intuitively, the Hermetica would encourage you to zoom out, to find a way that it does reach back to balance. All things do have balance. You just need to know where to look. As an example, the orderly Germans can only exist well balanced with their warrior insanity. Snoop Dogg cannot exist without the duality of weed. I'm sorry, but I had to. I have developed my own hermetic theory that a worldview is sort of a stage. And that stage is a self circulating system where you can look out upon it to sort of understand how your life is and you can walk around. What you do is you go to the back door or the factual elements that don't make sense in your current paradigm, where for the theory of evolution, it was developed because the fossils didn't make sense in the old idea that God made the earth 6,000 years ago. So you go to the back door, or the things that don't make sense in your worldview, or the shadow, you climb up and down the hermetic double helix, and then you can pull the back door to gradually shuttle up and down to change the stage itself. And this is how worldviews alternate over the course of history. This would be an important time to talk about spiral dynamics. The system that Homath loves and which I will make a video soon about, pulls enormously from hermetic roots. The idea that you follow a double helix, one of the most important hermetics, hermetic symbols, in order to transcend to a new tier of consciousness, can only come from the hermetica if you're interested, check it out and try to guess what tier of consciousness you're on. Keep in mind lower tiers cannot understand higher tiers by design. I've heard some people questioning spiral dynamics, but as an anthropologist, they 100% do exist. You could move around or argue about the definitions for each tier, but the world does not make sense without spiral dynamics. And it explains why you see so many issues between conservatives and progressives or immigrants trying to move into more advanced Western countries. To see this sort of evolutionary process, let's look at the US dollar. The eye of perception is the first step, which comes from intuition and facing things you don't understand. For me, it was the realization that the things the regime said said did not match up with the reality I saw before me or the things I read in books. Alternately, an explorer noticing that there must be a land to the west due to seeing so many logs or birds in the open ocean. This person then decides to enter into chaos and try to understand the thing he doesn't. This is the point where Peterson got really influenced by the Hermetica, which he definitely did, where he was the person who actually introduced me to the Hermetica to clean your room. Being a very tamed down version of this ethic. Scientific innovations and cultural breakthroughs are almost always generated by a flash of intuition that occurs in a second after exploring some new topic or drawing connections you didn't notice before. It doesn't occur through sort of rationally trying to figure something out to force yourself to be creative. Where creativity comes, when you slow down and allow the sort of muses, as the Greeks said, to flow through you, it's pulling from higher levels of consciousness than you are now. And very few people in a given society are operating at the edges of consciousness in a useful way. Where the deeper you go into human nature, the greater the degree of profundity. Where only a handful of people in a society are capable of developing things that can relate to the entire human or living condition. Some people can make art or culture that reflects a nation, others just people in their vicinity. And you need to go to the edges of human consciousness to find this stuff. And that can come through physical suffering, through heightened spiritual state states, through understanding philosophy, whatever. We all have our ways to reach the divine or the font of creativity. After this you have downwards momentum or the circle. This is the Jungian shadow or the major issues you have to fix to improve. People's shadows vary by context. And an incredibly important thing with the Hermetica is that it's very context driven. Unlike modern ideologies which try to impose a frame like race or classic glass onto everything else. In the Hermetica you have to figure out the context of a situation yourself and fix it. Your shadow is the thing you're hiding from and you don't want to fix. For example, if you're scared of talking to girls or your country has a huge national debt. Jungian psychology is dependent on grabbing your shadow, coming to comfort with your repressed side, mastering it and then then allowing that to transcend, to grow. I have done this many times in my life and I can personally attest that it really works. Of course, Jung was very heavily influenced by the Hermetica, with it probably being the biggest source for his psychological system. Upwards momentum is using spirituality or intellectual ideas to reach levels of development above what you have now. Think of historic visionary which can see centuries ahead of everyone else in their society. Similarly to how you need to balance chaos and order, or mind, body and soul, you also have upwards and downwards spiritual momentum which are tied together with the masculine and the feminine. This is why I say the Hermetica is an open source toolkit more than a straight up religion. You have have to be smart or wise enough or use the eye of perception to figure out which of these tools to toggle at any given time. Also, as you transcend and learn your own life, the quality of your toolkit and stats increase over time. Your worldview in general should totally change. So to summarize the process, step one, spot a pattern. Then study the things you don't know afterwards, figure them out, then fix the problems, set up two opposing systems to check if you're right and then watch the system work. Now isn't that simple? This is what Peterson talks about when he says slay the dragon of chaos. Since you will be rewarded by how much chaos you conquer. This is why industrial tycoons are so rich, since they've single handedly brought out economic revolutions that changed the world. Everyone complains at how rich Steve Jobs is, but they don't think about how much Microsoft has added to the world's global gdp. The myths of the Dragon slayer have profound hermetic symbolism where these exist across cultures. Between Marduk slaying Tiamat in Mesopotamian mythology, Saint George and the Dragon in Christian Europe, Thor and Jormungandr in the Norse tradition, Apollo with Python in the Greek, Theseus with the dragon of Colchis among so many others. And the symbolism is that the masculine goes out into the world, conquers Nature or Mother Nature, which is feminine in the Hermetica, with Mother Nature's greatest monster being the dragon. And then after he slays the dragon, he earns the ability to the princess and pass on his line. This means you go out into nature, kill the dragon, win, bring it back, reap the reward in your genes, survive. In the Hermetica, innovation occurs in small circles or by individuals informed by certain contexts and then dependent on how applicable it is across human nature. You can vault it across the world through Rubedo. Freedom and individualism are core values of the Hermetic, given it's made by hermits, which is where the name is from, who want to be left alone. Freedom allows diversity and thus innovation. Try to find the deepest thing you can, for the further you go down, the further you may also go up, as above, so below. In the Hermetica, the prima materia is the first material thing that you start working with towards reaching the higher form. The prima materia for a human is a child and for a land it's the geography. And Spengler was a very hardcore Hermetic, or his worldview only makes sense through the perspective of Hermeticism. And so what he was talking about is how the soul of civilizations stemmed from their prima materia or their geography, which they then had to work from. Part five, as it always was. There's this meme with two spacemen where one says blank thing is blank. And then the other spaceman with a gun behind him says, as it always was. I'm gonna get that wrong, but it doesn't matter. I'm going to show you how this arcane philosophy you've never heard of has always been an undercurrent to Western history, often to an enormous degree. You'll possibly be surprised, and it really should shows how often we miss the true character or nature of the past as we try to study it. The origins of the Hermetica initially lie in Egypt. This was part of the reason for the enormous interest In Egyptology in 19th century Europe, as European intellectuals were trying to find more Hermetic documents. The Hermetica was built around the Egyptian God Thoth, who was the Egyptian version of the Greek God Hermes. Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetica match older Egyptian belief structures more than they do anything the Greeks had beforehand. So all the evidence points to this being a very ancient worldview, one stemming back to perhaps the pyramids. Pharaonic Egyptian art is covered in Hermetic symbolism, as this book talks about what happened after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt was that the Greeks tried to rationally integrate lots of Oriental traditions a lot older or deeper than what the Greeks themselves had a few centuries earlier. A lot of Plato's philosophy, as he himself said, came from the Egyptian royal teachings or a predecessor to the Hermetica, which he got when he visited Egypt. The Greeks tried to explain the Egyptian religious teachings in a rational manner. This was a period of a lot of religious diversity and syncretism, with the Hermetica just being one thread of many, which included Christianity, another oriental Greek mix alongside Platonism, Mithraism, Isis, Cybele, Gnosticism or so many others. This is why the Hermetica has so many similarities with other beliefs in that area or that time. I've found there's a very palpable East Mediterranean religious vibe that they all share in this Hellenistic stew of many different worldviews and religions clashing. The Hermetica mixed a lot with early Christianity as it took over the Roman Empire. Lots of elements of the Christian cosmology have Hermetic origins in the majority of the fathers of the early church. People far more Christian than anyone today, saw the Hermetica as a valid intellectual tradition, much like the rest of Greco Roman classical civilization. They onboarded into early Christianity like Plato and Aristotle. An important thing to keep in mind is that these people saw Christianity as a spiritual path to reach the kingdom of heaven, which is how I see it too. One of the side effects of modernity was Christianity removing God or the mystic from its religion and then making Christianity a social or ethical code. The thing is, that wasn't the intention and is why Christian regimes in the past didn't love thy neighbor to their geopolitical rivals. Or why equality before God did not extend to a world where kings and nobility ruled the peasantry. For Christian thinkers of this era, the Hermetica didn't contradict Christ since they had different goals. Christianity was to reach the kingdom of heaven through the cross, and the Hermetica was for those weirdos at the edge of consciousness. The problem now is that due to science, that consciousness evolution has become part of the society's operating system to deal with the sheer speed of social change, which was not necessary a thousand years ago. The Dark Ages saw a decrease in interest of the Hermetica since education got worse enough across the board in Europe that there wasn't as much interest in consciousness development. However, the period of world history where the Hermetica was most influential was the Islamic Golden Ages, which ended around the time of the Crusades. Alchemy is an Arabic word. And Europe reintegrated these teachings from the Arabs or Byzantines during the Crusades. Much like lots of other exotic religious ideas or classical authors went back to Europe. Europe. Several cities in Iraq and Syria declared hermeticism as their official religion during the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate around a thousand years ago. Hermeticism then started to ramp up over the high Middle Ages and reached a new peak of popularity in Western civilization during the Renaissance and 16th century. As said before, the Renaissance is the single era of history most colored by hermeticism. Where I might even argue hermeticism was the biggest component in the Renaissance. It explains the emphasis on humanism, a hermetic ideal, the nude, the beauty of art which hermetics use to spot spiritual intuitions, studying the classics to gain wisdom and promoting the chaotic beauty of the Renaissance. If there's any given society where lots of people used their will to power to try to transcend through constant bloody competition, it's the Italian Renaissance. Artistic beauty in the Hermetica is an external sign of integration on a variety of levels, either for people, art or a species. Cosimo de Medici, one of the most important Renaissance men, was absolutely obsessed with the Hermetica, as was Leonardo da Vinci. The Vitruvian man by da Vinci is one of the most overtly hermetic things you will ever see. We've spoken before at how almost all of the thinkers in early science were Hermetics. Between Isaac Newton, who drew most of the laws of physics from the Hermetica and one third of his library was on the topic. Galileo, Copernicus and especially Bruno all developed their theories from hermetic concepts. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's top advisor for periods of her reign, was obsessed with the Hermetica. He made the Enochian language to commune with angels, predicted that the core of Anglo Saxon culture would end up in North America, formed the British Secret police and the idea of the British Empire alongside being one of the pioneers of science. The loss of the Renaissance man to the world world has been a true tragedy. By the 16th century, every major royal court in Europe had hired a department and hermetic experts. These were ideas that were widely entrenched among the upper classes in sort of wandering philosopher types which the general public wasn't aware of. The papacy even funded wide scale research of the Hermetica and it was canon in the Catholic Church Church that Hermes Trismegistus was a progenitor of Jesus while being widely used in papal art. However, something happened in the 17th century that killed the Hermetica as a powerful cultural current in Western civilization. The west went through an enormous intellectual shift in the mid to late 17th century, which took a few hundred years to really set in among the general public. But when it did, it amounted to a new civilization, that being modernity. Tarnas has called this the Galileo Spinoza Descartes axis. What these thinkers did was separate the scientific from the divine. Before this, science fit into being part of a religious worldview, where the search for science was part of understanding God. God's plan that as you discovered the world, you discovered yourself and God, which is a very hermetic concept. In the hermetic worldview, Nature is a book that we must learn to read from. This deserves to be a video in its own right. But what happened in the 17th century was that science and religion were totally divorced, as obviously seen in the Descartes mind body distinction, which doesn't fit in with any of the science now, which is closer to the older Hermetic mind, body, soul, holistic relationship. Descartes said that God and spirituality existed purely in our minds and the only way to understand the outside world was through material science. This became the dominant philosophic school ever since in Western civilization. Since the governments of that era were tired of waging centuries of religious religious wars and so made a deal with the churches to shut off mysticism in order to maintain control. The death of the mystic in the long term poisoned both religion and science. Without an appeal to genuine in person connection with God, under which both Protestantism and Catholicism were founded. Religion just became a series of rules, not a living, breathing connection to the divine. The removal of the hermetic framework also turned off the very intelligent from religion, since it felt like they were being condescended to, told to just believe it, because that's the rules. Over time this added up as most of the geniuses were doubting of Christianity. For several centuries. However, you saw a parallel dynamic where science became totally divorced from humanity, turning into a soulless Frankenstein monster with no ability to interface with values, the divine or humanity. This is what created the soulless, dehumanizing, sterile world we live in now. Hermeticism did survive after this point, but by retreating into secret associations, the elites knew these concepts and kept to themselves. But you can still see these principles apply. The Rosicrucians in Germany were overt hermetics, as were the Freemasons, which is how these ideas were spread around the time of the American Revolution. As we talked about Before I think the founding fathers put up these monuments or symbols in our currency as a wink and nod to future generations to check these ideas out when things got bad. Alternately, look at the popularity of obelisks or Egyptologists in Napoleonic Europe alongside Napoleon and Josephine being called Mars and Isis, which was just common parlance at the time, but also part of the Hermetic lore. There's a whole trajectory of crypto hermetic philosophers over this time period. Hermetics often speak in code, which I didn't do for this video, but you can see it in a bunch of other Hermetic Hegel, Schilling, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Gustave Le Bon, Henri Bergson and later Evola or Peterson were all philosophers who manifested worldviews that had to be based off the Hermetica. Read this text well for more info. They knew these ideas had value. Just look at Nietzsche for example, who talks about life affirmation overcoming higher and lower forms. Magi, building your own value system rather than relying on others. And so many things that only make sense in the hermetic paradigm. When he talks about the Ubermensch and the transmutation of morality, he's literally using a German word from the Hermetica for the transmutation of forms, he's recommending using the hermetic framework of developing your own moral code. Once this clicked, I couldn't unsee it it with all of this being said, the rise of the industrial revolution and with democracy, the Hermetica just didn't make it in the 20th century. The mass society of consumerism and doing what was popular to the average voter simply had no place for the Hermetica. It was too complicated, hard and not directly scientific in the way they understood that word. Only a few utter schism like Avola or Bergson kept the torch going. Carl Jung was the singular figure most responsible for keeping the Hermetica alive in recent times. Through framing it brilliantly so through psychological terms, Peterson got it from Jung and repopularized it to a certain degree today. That's why I know about it. However, at the very same time we constructed a society which needed the Hermetica more than ever. With the title of this video, will the Hermetica become the next ideology in the West? The short answer is I don't know. Probably not at the current trajectory in that this is as of now, a dead nerd religion, totally unpalatable to moderns. That being said, we do have genuine agency here. The reason I gave this video the click clickbait title is that I think this could work. I started my journey looking for ideas that could give us the will to live. The Hermetica puts growth and progress as a moral good, but does so through responsibility in humanity. The Hermetica has a framework to get people to make babies again without being cruel by increasing masculine charge. The Hermetica also has a framework on how how to deal with the godlike technology we're developing, like AI, genetic engineering, the blockchain, the Internet and so many others. The Hermetica has also been integral to Western civilization already for thousands of years and is approved of by Christianity. If we just removed the elements in our worldview that are Marxist now and replace them with the Hermetica, we could keep the rest of our culture. In fact, we would become more Western. The reason we're dying is that we're doing the exact opposite type of things the Hermetica would say, in that we don't discover new things, we don't challenge ourselves, we don't take responsibility or think outside the box. Maybe this is very weird, but our situation itself is very weird. We're going to have to think outside the box to survive. And I don't think you guys will get how bad things will be. Well, when everything's said and done, I'm just here. Peace. Follow your dreams. Bye.