Wouter J. Hanegraaff

The Hermetic treatises were written in Roman Egypt during the first centuries of the Common Era. They tell us about powerful experiential practices through which the followers of Hermes Trismegistus and his mysterious teacher Agathos Daimon were trying to liberate their bodies and souls from the harmful daimonic energies of the cosmos. The Path of Hermes was grounded in a subtle metaphysics of nonduality and spiritual embodiment, a noetic psychology that worked with radical techniques for altering consciousness, and a world-affirming ethics centered on the core virtue of eusebeia, reverence for all that is. From late antiquity to the present, the Hermetic literature has been reinterpreted in many new ways, mostly by authors who misunderstood the true nature of these spiritual practices. Christians and modern scholars projected their own theological or philosophical doctrines onto the Hermetica, often by means of faulty translations that obscure the meaning of its central vocabulary. Yet it remains possible to recover much of what the anonymous authors of these treatises were trying to tell their readers. In this lecture I will try to explain what Hermetic spirituality was all about while demonstrating its remarkable relevance to the “meaning crisis” of contemporary society.

Wouter J. Hanegraaff (1961) is professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is the author of New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill 1996/SUNY Press 1998); Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press 2012); Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press 2022) and most recently Esotericism in Western Culture: Counter-Normativity and Rejected Knowledge (Bloomsbury 2025).

Email: w.j.hanegraaff@uva.nl

Website: www.wouterjhanegraaff.net