An Armenian Hermetist in Costa Mesa
How the Hellenic and Egyptian high magic tradition of Hermeticism may be the basis of the beliefs held by the ancient paganic Armenians.
Note: This post is not associated with the 20th-century Armenian nativist movement called Hetanism. Though I'm addressing paganism in Armenia and contending that pre-Christian Armenians were sophisticated proto-scientists and magi themselves, unlike the Hetanist movement, I am not purporting Armenian supremacy.
My working theory is that the paganic (pre-Christianized) proto-Armenians integrated the ancient tradition known as Hermeticism into their older practices such as…
Sun worship—the worship of the Great Spirit Ar which was considered to be embodied in the sun (known in Armenian as Arev)
The worship of Anahit, Aramzad, and Mihr (the trinity of the ancient Armenian mythical pantheon)
Loose adherence to the teachings of Zoroaster, Vedavyasa, and Mani
Further, I contend that Hermeticism was the primary pre-Christian philosophical underpinning and ethical way of the ancient Armenians. But, although the nascent rise of Christianity was reviled and persecuted by the early Armenian Kings1, such as Axidares, Khosrov I, and Tiridates III, the Apostolic Church drove the Hermetic and other proto-Armenian traditions underground by way of a devastating heatheization campaign akin to the Dioclentianic Persecution (lions eating Christians in Rome) or the Medieval Inquisition (the torture of any NON-Christians).
Because the old ways were all considered heretical by the first and second century Christian “Apostolic Fathers”2, the later “Great Fathers”3 of fourth through fifth century Christianity considered anyone who diverged from what was shaping up to be Christian doctrine to be an apostate. Thereby, the way of Hermes, the mythical pantheon of Armenian gods4, reverence for anything natural under the sun (including the sun), and the teachings of great messengers such as Zoraster, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, and other magi, were considered seditious and immoral.
The academic literature will attest that the ancient Armenians were nature worshippers and polytheistic. Armenians had their own pantheon of gods, customs, and rituals. Sun worship was their most crucial totem. Their traditions, dances, and chants (many of which I learned as a young Armenian boy) were dedicated to the sun. Their folkloric dances depict the battle between the sun and the moon with left and right steps and movements as tribute to the sun (bows and lifts to the sky). Many rituals and religious symbols were transferred to Christianity, mainly because educated pre-Christian Armenian literates became Christian priests and adjusted pagan practices and customs to Christianity (starting as early as the first century A.D. but mainly by the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.).
For instance, here is evidence left behind by the ancient pagan literates turned Christian priest—almost like a clue that unravels the true beliefs of the Armenian people before Christianity spread across the land like a virus5. Notice the symbol above the altar of the Armenian Church of the Forty Martyrs in Aleppo, Syria…
Strange, no? The altar is a typical orthodox Armenian church altar. What's with that symbol?
You'll find this symbol in many Armenian Apostolic churches, sometimes tucked away. This is one of the most glaring pieces of evidence that the ancient Armenians were Hermetists. Է is the old Armenian symbol for the divine. It was incorporated into the Armenian language sometime in very early 5th century A.D. (when Armenian became a written language, not just an oral one). It's the seventh letter (grapheme) of the language and its phoneme (sound) is "eh." But in Armenian, Է is also a word. It literally means "is" or "it is" ("I am"). It smacks of the older Jewish tradition of Moses meeting the Jewish god and being told that "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First, and the Last, the Eternal." the "I am" in Armenian is Է.
Moreover, Է, when pronounced, makes the sound of a breath. The idea of god as the "breath of life" is attached to this grapheme. In fact, the modern Armenian word for "Bible" (Աստվածաշունչը, or Astvats-a-shunch) means "Lord's breath ." In Armenian, "Astvats" means god, and "shunch" means breath.
Breath plays a foundational role in the Hermetic way (not to mention MANY other traditions). The ancient Hermetists recognized that the breathing process, an interplay between our corporeal self and the immediate creation we exist within, was a holy one6 inasmuch it was the breath that allowed for the generation of human sound and, since sound was a foundational principle of creation/god7, it was resolved that humans were akin to god.
As modern scholarship in Hermeticism and Armenian history caught on, many Armenian churches amended their alters to read Աստծո սերն է—Astvats sern eh, or "God(,)love is." You see what they did there? #clevergirl. They simply added an antecedent, thereby possibly destroying a nearly five thousand-year tradition of the ethnic Armenian peoples.
Hermes (No, not that one…)
The propositions I stated above first fell into interest when I learned that the oldest, confirmed text of the Hermetic wisdom tradition was mainly preserved in an Armenian translation. It was a glossary of terms/concepts entitled Հերմես Տրիսմեգիստի սահմանումները Ասկլեպիոսին (The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius), the central core content of which most likely dates to the FIRST century A.D.!
I know, I know. "What the hell is he on about?" Let me lay out the scene by first discussing Hermeticism.
In the mid-15th century, Cosimo de Medici (the infamous Italian banker and politician who established the Medici family, effectively ruling Florence during much of the Italian Renaissance) engaged in philanthropy and collecting ancient texts. The Renaissance Europeans were sick of the dark ages and looked back to a time they considered a golden age as a model for how they wanted their new world to be. They settled on old Roman8 and Greek cultures. By looking to the Greek philosophers, and the olden ways, Europe slowly pulled out of its medieval period.
Cosimo had brought on multiple agents to scour Europe's monasteries for forgotten writings of the ancients. For example, an old version of the complete dialogues of the divine Plato was acquired by one of these agents, Georgios Gemistos Plethon (a Greek scholar). He delivered it to Cosimo and feverishly encouraged the translation from ancient Greek to Italian. You see, Plethon rejected Christianity.
Like the previously mentioned Armenian kings, Plethon and many of the royal families and the intelligentsia of Europe were more in favor of a return to the worship of the classical Hellenic Gods mixed with ancient wisdom based on the teaching of Zoroaster and the Persian Magi. A concerted effort was being made to revive Greek philosophy in Europe, perhaps as a revolt against the Spanish Inquisition and the death grip the Catholic church had on so much of Europe.
Cosimo de Medici and a handful of Europe's intelligentsia contracted the then-famous Catholic priest, humanist, and philosopher Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato's works so that all of Europe could access them. Their idea was that the cosmological authority held by the Christian bishops would be usurped from the churches once they could point to Plato's dialectics and hold THEM as the new metaphysic, allowing European societies to advance scientifically at a much faster rate.
But, in 1460, another of Cosimo's agents, a monk named Leonardo of Pistoia, brought to him a codex containing 17 treatises attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient Egyptian sage. This was the discovery of the millennium, as far as the Renaissance Europeans were concerned. The legendary Hermes Trismegistus was considered the Hellenic incarnation of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth. To Cosimo and Renaissance Europe, Leonardo had discovered works that were older than Plato—as old as the time of Moses! Ficino was immediately ordered to halt the translation of Plato's works and begin translating the Hermetic codex, tout suite. These 17 treatises were tracts that would become the essential writings of the Renaissance, known today as the Hermetica.
A few hundred years later, in 1614, a Swiss Calvinist from Geneva named Isaac Casaubon used the then-newly developing social science of Philology to show that Ficino's translation was inaccurately dated. The discovered texts weren't as old as Moses or Abraham, and, in fact, they dated AFTER the beginning of the Christian era. This finding drastically diminished the value of the ancient wisdom expressed in those texts, which were purported to be writings of or about the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, a.k.a. the Egyptian Ibis god, Thoth.
But Casaubon's contradiction didn't wholly destroy Hermeticism. The occultists of the 17th century (e.g., the Freemasons and Rosicrucians) maintained that the Corpus Hermeticum's value was of even greater importance, thanks to Causabbon's conclusions. They contended that it didn't matter whether or not the actual writings dated back to the time of Moses (another fictional character, by the way). The wisdom tradition they conveyed was important: humans are not the children of a god, but its sibling. Therefore, the Corpus Hermeticum that Ficino translated in the middle of the 15th century established the historical tenets of the rejection of god as other and the adoption of man as the ultimate measure of all things. THAT was what mattered. Not whether or not the texts were composed a thousand years earlier or not.
In 1678, these flaws in Casaubon's dating were discerned by Ralph Cudworth. He argued that Casaubon's allegation of forgery could only be applied to three of the seventeen treatises contained within the Corpus Hermeticum. Moreover, Cudworth noted Casaubon's failure to acknowledge the codification of these treatises as a late formulation of a pre-existing oral tradition. According to Cudworth, the texts must be viewed as a terminus ad quem and not a terminus a quo. Lost Greek texts, and many surviving vulgate books, contained discussions of alchemy clothed in philosophical metaphor. Therefore, Casaubon's application of philological techniques was evidently flawed.
The philological criticism that Casaubon and his son cast on the Hermetic writings petered out. The intense study by particular academics and historians claimed that even if the Corpus Hermeticum was written down in the late third or early fourth century A.D., the concepts conveyed are ancient and VERY Egyptian. In fact, one of the foundational notions expressed in the writings, that of emanation, or how the world is an overflow of god, and humans a ray of sunlight ("All is one, all is from the One"), are pretty typically ancient Egyptian.
The Hermetica Gets It’s MoJo Back
The Hermetica included the early pre-science disciplines and pre-Abrahamic and pre-Socratic philosophies of the ancient peoples of the Old World. The tradition, as it originally developed throughout the Hellenic, Arabic, Armenian, and Mediterranean worlds, centered on the disciplines of alchemy, astrology, and Theurgy.
To the ancients, Alchemy was not merely the changing of lead into gold (actually called Chrysopoeia). It investigated the spiritual constitution, or life, of matter and material existence by applying the mysteries of birth, death, and resurrection. The various stages of chemical distillation and fermentation, among other processes, are aspects of these mysteries that, when applied, quicken nature's methods to bring a natural body to perfection.
In older Hermetic thought, the movements of the planets were believed to have meaning beyond the laws of physics and actually held value as symbols in the mind of the All, or god, which have an influence upon the Earth but do not dictate our actions. The idea was that wisdom could be gained when they knew these influences and how to deal with them. This wisdom is Astrology or the operation of the stars. The discovery of astrology is attributed to Zoroaster, who is said to have discovered this part of the wisdom of the whole universe and taught it to man..
Theurgy, or the operation of the gods, is one of the two different types of magic discussed in Hermetic texts:
Goëtia (Greek: γοητεια) is black magic reliant on an alliance with evil spirits like demons.
Theurgy, divine magic reliant on an alliance with holy spirits like angels, archangels, and gods. "Theurgy" translates to the "science or art of divine works" and is the practical aspect of the Hermetic art of alchemy.
Alchemy is seen as the "key" to Theurgy, the ultimate goal of which is to become united with higher counterparts, leading to the attainment of divine consciousness..
Exciting stuff for Rennaisance Europe! These ancient tracts endorsed a worldview that allowed for the manipulation of nature and the transmogrification of things by humans for the benefit of humans. This was sacrilegious at the time and, by some accounts, still is today. It's not man's place to manipulate nature, is it? That's god's work! How DARE a mere mortal suggest that, by careful and methodical processes, humans can use nature to their benefit?
In a genuine sense, much of the BIRTHING of the European Renaissance may've been the result of the intelligentsia, the aristocracies, and the royal houses of Europe, seeing how powerful the Catholic church and the Orthodox churches were. So they attempted to move what was known to them already (i.e., god is a human construct which means we are reflections of god ourselves--not children, but siblings) into the mainstream. They wanted to show that the bishops and priests of Europe, who were becoming more and more powerful, were full of crap and that humans were, in fact, in control of their fates via reason. They were also sick of losing more and more of their power to the bishops and priests of the land.
But their efforts were defeated. Christianity became the way of Europe (and, thereby, America, later). The educated were too late. They allowed the Christian Bishops to handle the majority of the people. As such, the Bishops became all-powerful. I give you the Pope, for instance, or Ignatius of Antioch, the monarchical bishop.
As noted earlier, Isaac Casaubon, the philologist that employed the known histories of various languages and their use to effectively render the Corpus Hermeticum as fake news, was a Calvinist (French Christian Protestant). His father was a minister of a Huguenot congregation. Until he was 19, he had no education besides what his dad taught him. Like most other people of the 16th century, he was a devout Christian. Later in life, he was known as a Hebrew scholar too. He wasn't charged by anyone to analyze Ficino's translation. He did it, with the aid of his son—on his own. Why?
Why would a devout Christian scholar want to analyze the translation process of a pre-Christian wisdom tradition undertaken by one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Renaissance, Ficino—an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism and the founder of the Florentine Academy? Was it an Apologetic hit job? Mua ha ha ha ha! ;^0)
Nag Hammadi
Fast forward to 1945. The Chenoboskion Manuscripts were discovered in the upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. These manuscripts, which became better known as the Nag Hammadi library, were found to be an early collection of Christian and Gnostic texts. Thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices were found in a sealed jar by a local farmer named Muhammad al-Samman. The codices' content comprised 52 treatises of the Gnostic tradition and three works belonging to...the Corpus Hermeticum9, first discovered and translated from Greek by Ficino almost 500 years back!
Check out this short documentary on the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, one of the treatises found in the Nag Hammadi library. It has footage of Muhammad al-Samman and a play-by-play by the people who discovered the world-changing documents…
The treatises that made up the Nag Hammadi library were written in Coptic—a language family of closely related dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Egyptian language, starting from the third-century A.D. in Roman Egypt. They contained a better version of parts of the Hermetic text Asclepius which were preserved among the works of Apuleius (a first-century Roman philosopher). They also held what was later learned to be a critical text of unknown writing—On the Ogdoad and Ennead.
It was this text that sparked the interest of occultists all over the world in the mid-1950s. Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, the Orphic Hymns, the Chaldean Oracles…everything was right back on the table. The Ogdoad and Ennead showed without a doubt that in the Hermetic wisdom tradition of the Hellenic era, a believer was initiated into several grades before transcending the sphere of the seven planets and the heaven of fixed stars (aka, the Ogdoad). Then, the initiate would behold the god beyond and experience Himself! This line of thinking would have you flayed in medieval Europe or Arabia.
As the scholarship grew, those studying esoteric Judaism noticed an echo of one of Jewish mysticism's main themes with the reignited study of Hermeticism. For example, the Kabbalah's Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, is a near analog of Anthropos—the first human being as written in the Hermetic text Poimandres.
Bang! Thanks to On the Ogdoad and Ennead, it was then blatantly obvious to historians that a secret society existed both before and after the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria, much like the Masonic Lodge. They referred to themselves as "the brethren" and were initiated through a baptismal ritual. They greeted each other with a sacred kiss, celebrated a sacred meal, and read the Hermetic writings as edifying treatises for their spiritual progress.
The Message of the Hermetists
After reading English translations of these various texts, visiting various libraries to study the actual manuscripts (e.g., at the Getty Museum, the Manly P. Hall Library in Los Angeles, on different online academic repositories, etc.), what I've come to pin Hermeticism down to is that it's a revolutionary worldview exclaiming the individual human as fundamentally no different from the divine. This is the gnosis in Gnosticism, the secret, spiritual knowledge that the initiate learns at the end of the line.
The Hermetists (unknown authors of the various Hermetic texts attributing their work to the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus), whom I've learned to differentiate from Hermeticists (those that support the Hermetic traditions gleaned from the Hermetic dialogues) intentionally used the magic of dialogue, which psychologically causes the reader to assume not only the role of the character(s) but the actual ideas they convey, to assist their readers/listeners in breaking free from the bondage of the I/Thou worldview. These works weren't intended to convince the initiate of the value of the wisdom. They were designed as implements to convey gnosis. They are more a technology than a library.
The Hunt Begins
As I exerted my considerable academic research skills using various databases, I came across a French text entitled Extraits Hermetiques by Jean-Pierre Mahe and J. Paramelle (1991). It is a study of a manuscript tome found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, dating back to the 13th century. It is an anthology of sorts, with a generally Sacro-profane theme. The contents include:
Two exegetical texts on the Old Testament
Hermetic anthology divided into three parts— 1)extracts from the Corpus Hermeticum already known in Greek but offering interesting variants, 2) entirely new excerpts essentially concerning the functioning of the soul and the senses as well as the formation of the embryo, and 3) excerpts from Hermetic Definitions hitherto known only in Armenian.
Hold the phone. What? "Hermetic definitions known only in…Armenian"??!
What the hell does my heritage have to do with this stuff? Were Armenians into Hermeticism? Were they Hermetists themselves?? Could my decades-long fascination with the Hermetic tradition be part of my DNA?!! ;^0).
The Armenian Connection
The Hermetica, the actual texts attributed to the legendary hierophant Hermes Trismegistus are divided into two main categories—the technical and the religio-philosophical.
The technical Hermetica deals with astrology, medicine, pharmacology, alchemy, and magic (rituals). The religio-philosophical Hermetica is focused on the relationship between people, the cosmos, and god (i.e., anthropology, cosmology, and theology). The earliest technical texts of the Hermetica were written in Greek (a handful of which were actually written originally in Arabic) as far back as the second century BC10. Though they were all translated into Arabic soon after being written.
The religio-philosophical Hermetica was probably also initially written in Greek. But the earliest of them, The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius, which perhaps goes back to the first century AD., was preserved in Armenian only. The Matendaran in Armenia, a museum of ancient manuscripts, holds the only extant version of the Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius. It's primarily believed to be a translation of a now lost but earlier Greek text.
The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius (hitherto referred to as D.H.) is comprised of several components. The first included the fifth-century Armenian historian Elise Vardapet's11 quotations of other, older works that included the sacred definitions of the Hermetic wisdom tradition, including an Armenian book named Yacaxapatum Cark (Armenian for "Oft-Repeated Discourses"), written sometime between the fifth and seventh century A.D., on the topic of Armenian morals and esthetics. The D.H. is also comprised of the peripheral works of Ananias of Shirak (Armenian polymath and philosopher of the same era), such as recorded lectures/sermons given, presumably based on an older unknown set of texts. Lastly, the Armenian translation of the D.H. is based on a collection of sermons whose date isn't precisely known (but is most likely from the sixth century A.D.).
The D.H. is a collection of aphorisms preserved in Armenian. The aphorisms (tersely yet briefly phrased adages of a truth or opinion) aim to develop the mental faculties of the subject reading them. Hermeticism is often considered by modern scholars and supporters as a philosophical system. But most translators of the texts will write in their introductions that, after staying with the original Coptic, Greek, Arabic, or Armenian versions for lengthy periods, they emanate more a spiritual way.
So what are these definitions? For some reason, these aphorisms are ONLY preserved in Armenian, which provides scholars with the most straightforward understanding of the terminology and meanings in the religio-philosophical edicts of the Hermetists. Could it be that, through a natural knowledge diffusion process, the arcane practices of the Hermeticsts were deeply integrated into the pre-Christian way of Armenian culture? And what ARE these aphorisms?
Stay tuned…
…and presumably, its people.
e.g., Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smryna, or Papias of Heirapolis
e.g. Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Pope Greogry I, Athanasisus of Alexandria, etc.
Most likely renditions themselves of the older, yet unknown Indo-European, Indo -Iranic, Mesopotamian, and potentially Vedic gods.
A primary tenet of the Hermetic tradition is secrecy and coded communication.
Sadly referred to today as "scientific."
Roman culture herein may also refer to the practice of Mithraism, the religion of the then Romans, which riffed loosely on the much older Iranian religion of Mithraism.
The treatises specific to Hermeticism found in the Nag Hammadi library were The Discourse on the Eight and Ninth, The Prayer of Thanksgiving, and Asclepius. The Discourse…is a dialogue in which the teacher ("father") Hermes Trismegistus leads his disciple ("son") through the "eight" and "ninth" realms of heaven. The Prayer… is a Hermetic prayer previously known from both the Ficino translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and the original Greek version discovered by Leonardo of Pistoia. Asclepius is a dialogue between Hermes with his disciple Asclepius. Chapters 21-29 of the lost Greek Hermetic treatise are known from the complete Latin translation.
The oldest texts attributed to Hermes are astrological texts (belonging to the 'technical' Hermetica) which may go back as far as to the second or third century BCE; see Copenhaver 1992, p. xxxiii; Bull 2018, pp. 2–3. Garth Fowden is somewhat more cautious, noting that our earliest testimonies date to the first century BCE (see Fowden 1986, p. 3, note 11). On the other end of the chronological spectrum, the Kitāb fi zajr al-nafs ("The Book of the Rebuke of the Soul") is commonly thought to date from the twelfth century; see Van Bladel 2009, p. 226.
aka Yegishe