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Old texts, read with their dates

Hermeticism, put to work.

Hermeticism is a set of Greek-Egyptian texts written in Roman Egypt in the first centuries AD, and two thousand years of readers who built on them. This site reads them with their dates and sources. It also turns a few of their ideas into exercises you can try this week, each with the reason behind it and where it stops.

Start here See the seven moves →
observed The Emerald Tablet · earliest text: Arabic, 8th–9th c. · source, cited →

Three ways in

Pick by what you came for. The history and the method use the same sources.

How a move is built

From text to move

Each of the seven moves names its source, what to try, and the reason behind it with its limits. Here is one.

  1. the source

    Emerald Tablet, clause 7 · earliest text: Arabic, 8th–9th c.

    You shall separate earth from fire, the subtle from the dense, gently, with great skill.

    try this

    Three lines a day about whatever is nagging you: my state, the facts, what I am adding to them.

    rationale and limits

    The same separation is part of cognitive therapy, whose efficacy as a treatment is well documented. In the laboratory, naming a feeling dampens the response to it. A three-line note is not therapy: the research makes the mechanism plausible. It does not prove this exercise.

All seven moves The studies behind them →

Five dates. One confused word.

People mean five different things by “Hermeticism”, from five different centuries. Every page on this site says which one it is about.

  1. 1st–3rd century

    Hermetism. Greek-Egyptian dialogues from Roman Egypt: God, mind, cosmos, and knowing that changes the knower. The Corpus Hermeticum is here.

  2. 1463

    Renaissance Hermeticism. Ficino translates Hermes for the Medici. Europe reads the texts as older than Moses.

  3. 1614

    The correction. Casaubon dates the texts to the Roman era. The dating collapses; the influence remains.

  4. 1888

    Occult Hermeticism. The Golden Dawn and later orders rebuild it as ritual practice.

  5. 1908

    The Kybalion. New Thought in Hermetic dress. Important as reception, not ancient doctrine. Read with care.

Walk the Path in order More on each layer →

Five questions · yours to take now

Five questions
before you decide

For the moments when how you feel, what happened and what to do next run together, including before you hand a problem to a model. A modern practice built on a Hermetic habit, not a reconstructed ancient ritual.

  1. What is your actual state?
  2. What are the facts, and what are you adding?
  3. What matters in this decision?
  4. What do you think, before asking AI?
  5. What are you unwilling to delegate?

One page, yours to keep. No sign-up needed.

Download the five questions Or get the letter →

  1. IAnonymous authorNo persona to buy into. Judge the pages by what they cite.
  2. IIVisible sourcesEditions and dates named; where scholars disagree, we say so.
  3. IIIOur method, named as oursThe seven moves are our arrangement. Each states its rationale and its limits.
  4. IVOpen to readEvery page is free, with no sign-up.

No prophecy. No guru. No secret laws.

The letter · As Above

One letter for each new step

Each letter carries one source with its edition, one correction to a myth or shortcut, one map of how the piece connects, and one question to take with you. It goes out when a new step of the Path is ready.

The rest of the site is open and needs no sign-up: the Path · the texts · the figures

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