SYNOPSIS.docx

SYNOPSIS



The hermetism is a metaphysical system which incorporates a structured series of magical, astrological, divinatory and alchemical practices. The hermetism dates back to the mythological occult teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, a deity who was the merger of the Greek Hermes, the Egyptian Thoth lunar deity. The configuration of Hermeticism began in the 2nd century BC. Ch. And ended in the 2nd c. AD. The hermetism adapted and transformed multiple ideas streams (Egyptian religion, mystery cults, Hellenistic magic, Platonism, Judaism) into a coherent philosophical system which represented the era. It was a time when the public began to dominate the search for the transcendental, superstition and a magical way of thinking.

Its roots date back Hermeticism in the distant past priestly Pharaonic Egypt hellenized now and compatible with the philosophy and the mystery religions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The effect of hermetic texts on European Renaissance was crucial. At that time it was considered that these texts covered through myths a very old type of wisdom, contemporary of Moses, which could explain the natural world. The philologist Isaac Casaubon in 1614 certainly proved that the texts were enrolled before the Roman era, but had to reach the Enlightenment and modern science to place the hermetism permanently in the field of Religions and occultism.

Frances Yates was the English historian who focused on the study of the Renaissance and wrote a series of extremely fertile books on the esoteric history. In 1941, he worked at the Warburg Institute, and began working on what is called "Warburgian history", emphasizing on a pan-European and interdisciplinary approach to historiography. In 1964 she published her most important work for Jordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition). Through this project, Yates argued that she saw Hermeticism as a typical feature not only for Jordano Bruno but for the overall picture of Renaissance magic in connection with Hermeticism, which she adopted from the historian D.P. Walker.

Through this work Yates emphasized the hermetism through the Renaissance culture. The culture of the Renaissance has always turned its interest in mysticism, magic and Gnosticism of late antiquity as survived from the Middle Ages. According to Yates the role played by magic and philosophy for the early modern science was decisive and the hermetic thought powered the foundations of the modern science. Given these new studies, though not fully conclusive, it now become impossible for historians to ignore the role played by the various forms of magical thinking and practice in the Renaissance understanding of the natural world. This is a change in the attitudes of historians of science and philosophy in relation to the occult. Whether Yates founded a new instance of occultism viewing or made a new grand narrative on this, it is certain that in this paradigm, also known as the ''Yates thesis'', there is an attractive paradox. As a scholar Yates was the first to have argued that the Renaissance hermetism, coupled with Rosicrucianism, constitute an integral part of European culture. This attractive paradox, requires the existence of a unique assimilation process and unique position which does not stand only on a selective reading of the data.

The work of Yates has also been criticized for the use of so-called '' strong historical fiction. '' This work brought forth scenarios that could not be proven using evidence from texts, which many historians considered as a flaw in her methodology.

The state of the spiritual world during the Renaissance resembles largely the state of the spiritual world of the 2nd and 3rd century. A. D. It was a world weary of previous sightings but also because of a multitude of interpretations of the world that were unable to provide answers to the spiritual and existential human searches. This is exactly what happened in the Renaissance, in the world that emerged after the medieval crisis of the 14th century in which the foundations of the medieval edifice based on the Aristotelian view of the world collapsed completely. The renaissance culture is a mixture consisting of a world lost and a world that is trying to be born. Events upgraded the crisis of social, political and economic to cultural crisis. The western culture now hungered for a new view, a new worldview that would give answers to basic existential questions and lead to a new cultural stream which permeated the entire sphere of human science and knowledge.

What was missing was the vehicle. The Renaissance Western civilization was the vehicle and the hermetic movement was the fuel to initiate the vehicle in which the new cultural current was transported in embryonic form. The idea that something so absurd and irrational as the occult tradition has not exerted the slightest influence on the formation of a highly rational applied science apparently is due to simple biases without illuminating the utility, the richness and complexity of the hermetic tradition. Within the irrationality and the multiplicity of new and strange sightings the return to past shows rather rational behavior. The passage from one cultural structure to the other was performed by stepping on the foundations of another and distant world whose scientific - magical practices and philosophical traditions had never been illuminated so much in the past as they were during the Renaissance period.

The disengagement from the distant past took place then and only then when the new cultural building could stand on its new foundations, then and only then when the new vision of the world complemented the gaps that had left behind by the collapse of the Aristotelian worldview and gave the answers to basic and fundamental human questions. Surely even some aspects of the phenomenon of Renaissance Hermeticism remain dark. These aspects await to be studied and researched by the historians of science. The latter will be able to illuminate even more, the characteristics of Renaissance Hermetism that contributed the most to the emergence of the new science of the 17th century.