The Forbidden Universe (29 page)

The idea that mankind was of limitless potential and could do just about anything given the desire – the very
spirit
of science – also came from the teaching of Hermes. When the likes of Richard Dawkins declare that our achievements make him proud to be human, he is (presumably) unknowingly, speaking like an ancient occultist.
Magnum miraculum est homo
! The cosmic joke is not lost on Glenn Alexander Magee, who writes:

So why isn’t the Hermetic tradition given due credit? Why is it the case, as Piyo Rattansi notes, that ‘to grant Hermeticism any prominence in the history of
sixteenth-and
seventeenth-century science is tantamount, apparently, to challenging the rationality of science’?
³

A major reason for today’s neglect is the well-established cultural bias that favours the classical world. Another is the lack of recognition, until recently, of the important
contribution
of Egypt’s intellectual and philosophical traditions. However, this bias does not appear to be a cause but an
effect
of the neglect of the Hermetica. Until Isaac Casaubon’s damning critique, even Hermes’ enemies had accepted his works as the product of the most venerable period of the Egyptian civilization. Pouring cold water on the alleged wisdom texts, Casaubon tempted scholars in the opposite
direction with his message that Egypt had nothing to teach us compared to the Greeks. Had Casaubon never put quill to paper, Egypt might well have remained a focus of scholarly respect, an equal of classical Greece and Rome. Had this been the case, twentieth-century academics such as Garth Fowden and Karl Luckert would never have faced such an uphill struggle to persuade their colleagues that all of the extraordinarily powerful and inviting subjects that we have seen thus far had Egyptian rather than Greek roots. Casaubon was wrong anyway. As believed by Hermeticists all along, the Hermetica authentically preserved and transmitted the cosmology and philosophy of Egypt’s pyramid age, which we believe has much to teach us – even in the digital age.

Another reason for the engrained prejudice against Hermeticism is that the study of the texts was essentially forbidden after the tradition’s ambitions for religious and social reform suffered serious reversals during the
seventeenth
century. This came about because of a paradoxical collusion between the forces of science and religion. The Catholic Church condemned Hermeticism as demonic, both because it employed magic and its perceived political threat. For their part, Protestant intellectuals backed off from the subject largely because Catholics had made it such a point of contention. One of the consequences of the power politics of the day was that it became expedient to be seen as an occult-denier, especially when the opposite could get you burnt at the stake. But the practical necessity to play it safe effectively sucked the lifeblood from the Hermetic tradition. Men of science were thus no longer men of God – or of the spirit – and soon it seemed that the two were mutually exclusive. Scientists not only denied the very existence of their predecessors’ inspiration, but also had no choice but to denigrate its source.

We saw in the story of the origins of the Royal Society the
struggle between the Rosicrucian attitude and the new impersonal mechanistic experimental philosophy. There were good reasons for minimizing the influence of magic, even in Restoration England. A campaign to lose the esoteric gained favour in English academic circles, and this led those of an overt Rosicrucian or Hermetic bent to be branded sinister – and possibly satanic. In 1659 a work based on a hostile editing of John Dee’s diaries,
A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr John Dee … and Some Spirits
, was published. Written by Méric Casaubon – Isaac’s son, so keeping up the family tradition – it uncompromisingly painted Dee as a necromancer in league with the Devil. While it is true that with a dodgy clairvoyant named Edward Kelley, Dee had experimented over a number of years with communications with discarnate entities, they were allegedly angels rather than demons or spirits of the dead. But Casaubon Junior’s book effectively trashed Dee’s reputation for centuries and also cast suspicion on those who respected and worse,
used
, the good doctor’s mathematical works. This was
particularly
unfortunate as, whatever one might think of Dee’s esoteric studies, his was one of the greatest mathematical minds of all time.

The move from the Hermetic studies of the Renaissance to what we recognize today as science, the great intellectual flagship for rationalism and mechanism and all other resolutely non-magicalisms, was the result of the occult philosophy splitting into two parts: the magical view of the universe and its application to the phenomena of nature. Basically the theory was junked in favour of the practice.

It is often assumed that science emerged when thinking people began to question religion. This is not so: it was a specific reaction against Hermeticism – one that was actively encouraged by those members of the Catholic Church who backed Descartes’ new method. What is
perhaps odd given such a momentous schism, is that it was largely an accident of history that science diverged from the ancient and much loved philosophy that inspired it.

Hermeticism as a system of thought survived the Enlightenment. But just as it diverged from science, the philosophy itself became firmly the province of the occult underground and the world of secret initiatory societies. Study of the
Corpus Hermeticum
as anything other than a historical curiosity came to be reserved for students of the esoteric and magic.

The first Rosicrucian secret societies proper, formed in emulation of the brotherhood described in the
Fama Fraternitatis
and
Confessio Fraternitatis R.C.
, appeared in Germany in the first decades of the eighteenth century, part of the burgeoning interest in Freemasonry and Masonic-style organizations. However, despite claiming to be inspired by the Rosicrucian ideal, these societies were actually the opposite, exploiting the mystique around the original invisible society to add an elitist gloss to their own image while keeping their secrets, real or imagined, to themselves.

In Britain, these underground currents that flowed through Europe resulted in the influential esoteric society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Founded in the 1880s, it not only attracted the usual suspects – famous occultists such as Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune – but also the likes of Irish poet and patriot W.B. Yeats and, according to rumour, the originator of Dracula, Bram Stoker. To these and many others who dealt in the symbolic keys and the secret initiations that would open up both their psyches and their minds, Hermes was a god like no other, for to follow him was to become divine oneself. He has proven himself to be equally present in the lilt and lift of language and in the fire of the cosmos.

Hermeticism survived in other, less expected ways. For example, Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and
John Keats breathed Hermetic fire into their works as well as into their remarkably colourful and short lives. And the influential philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) – whose thinking inspired Karl Marx among others – was an unashamed Hermeticist. His writings, both published and unpublished, are packed with references to masters such as Bruno – whose brilliance was the subject of Hegel’s lectures – and his library included books by Hermeticists and esotericists, including Agrippa and Paracelsus. Yet it took until 2001 for a study to acknowledge his Hermetic passion. Even then Glenn Alexander Magee’s
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition
was regarded as a radical new view.

Many might think that although it a shame that the old Hermetic influence on certain important historic names is neither properly nor widely recognized, surely the big split between magic and science turned out to be a good thing. After all, it allowed science to develop without the constraints of a metaphysical framework, leading to the explosion of discoveries and world-changing technologies such as steam trains, spinning jennys and telegraphy. Indeed, one could argue that Hermeticism was not necessary to make sense of this kind of scientific progress.

Up to the first half of the twentieth century, that argument might have worked. But since then science has shifted into a completely new phase, a considerably less certain world than that of Victorian nuts and bolts. And, we argue, Hermeticism is once again relevant, this time to the realm of quarks, M-theory and DNA.

As science itself becomes more magical, Hermeticism’s time has truly come.

The most fundamental element of the Hermetic worldview is, as we have seen, that the cosmos is not meaningless, inert or random, but is in its tiniest manifestation not only alive but also purposeful.

Unlike believers in the biblical version of creation, where God merely creates life and the universe on what appears to be a whim, to the Hermeticists as well as their ancient predecessors, the priests of Heliopolis, the material universe is nothing less than an emanation of God. In some majestically transcendent but also ultimately practical manner, the cosmos also represents his thought.

Obviously this isn’t the way that the vast majority of modern scientists – as exemplified by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking – see it. But we argue that it should be. Scientific cosmology has amassed a great deal of evidence about the nature of the universe that has seriously jolted the complacency of determined rationalists. The new data reveals a universe that is not merely the result of the blind workings of the immutable laws of physics. This universe emerges as being deliberately designed for a purpose in which intelligent life plays a crucial, if not
the
crucial, role.

The road to this point began back in the late 1970s when a paper appeared in the respected journal
Nature
, sending strong ripples through the scientific community worldwide.
This was entitled ‘The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World’ and was written by British physicists Bernard Carr and Martin Rees. Based on the evidence of seven decades, the authors reflected on an unsettling pattern that was emerging from the accumulated discoveries of science: to an uncanny degree, the laws of physics seem to have been ‘fine tuned’ to allow the development of intelligent life.

Carr is now Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of London and, unusually for today, a member – and former president – of the Society for Psychical Research. Rees is the Astronomer Royal, Baron Lees of Ludlow, and since 2005, President of the Royal Society. The passage of time has done nothing to sway the authors of the paper from their original conclusions. Carr was still saying in 2008 that judging by the fine tuning, ‘the universe is designed for intelligence’.
¹
He is not alone. Leading cosmologists John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler similarly declared that:

Carr and Rees adopted British cosmologist Brandon Carter’s term, first used in the 1960s of ‘anthropic [man-centred] principle’ to define the situation their paper examines. Carter mused about what the universe would be like if the laws of physics were different, and realized that for almost every variation, the universe they produced would be
incapable
of supporting life. But he later regretted ‘anthropic’, which refers only to humans; he had meant that the universe seems fine-tuned for intelligent life in general.

Of course, the notion that the universe was ‘designed’ for anything, let alone us, is unconscionable to the vast majority of scientists, since it contradicts the very basis of their discipline. Not only does it reintroduce the notion of a creator god but also the idea that the human species has some special relationship with Him/Her/It. As leading theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind remarked: