In the American
beginning was the Oversoul. 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson announced the
Transcendental message: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being
is descending into us from we know not whence. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The
Over-Soul," in Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, vol. 2, Essays.- First Series, ed. Joseph Slater et al. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1979), 159, 162, 171, 174-175.
He told readers that
the soul circumscribed all things and that it abolished time and space. An
energy, he said, descended into "individual life" only on condition
of "entire possession," and in a visionary declaration he proclaimed
infinite human possibility. "The soul gives itself alone, original, and
pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who on that condition, gladly inhabits,
leads, and speaks through it.... Behold, it saith, I am born into the great,
the universal mind.... More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter
into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to
live in thoughts, and act with energies which are immortal." The person so
lived by the Oversoul would "cease from what is base and frivolous in his
life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render."
As Frederic Ives Carpenter long ago showed, it originated not in Asian sources
as some presumed, but in Western Neoplatonism with its idea of a World Soul in
which all discrete and individual souls are joined. (Carpenter, Emerson and
Asia, Harvard University Press, 1930, esp. 75-78.)
The Greek word
"gnosis," as widely used in the context of late antiquity, meant
knowledge, but this knowledge was of a special kind. Not to be confused with
the rational type of knowledge better referred to as "episteme," it
meant to refer to a suprarational and experiential insight into the true nature
of the Self. Necessarily, any appeal to "gnosis" in this sense must
rest on the assumption that our normal everyday consciousness is somehow
limited and falls short of unfolding its full potential. If an experience of
gnosis gives us access to our "true" and "higher" Self, it
follows that as long as we are cut off and alienated from it, we find ourselves
imprisoned by a "false" or "lower" kind of consciousness.
It has rightly been
noted that the hermetists of late antiquity-the name
derives from their mythical founding father Hermes Trismegistus, the Hellenized
form of the Egyptian god Thoth-were far more positive about the material cosmos
as such. While the Gnostics saw the cosmos as entirely opposed to God, in the
hermetic writings we find a panentheist perspective.
The eleventh tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum
contains a particularly impressive example: it describes what in contemporary
language might be referred to as a transpersonal experience of unity with the
cosmos and illustrates how the full unfolding of human potential implies a
realization that the self is divine:
You must think of God
in this way, as having everything-the cosmos, himself, [the] universe-like
thought within himself. Thus, unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot
understand God; like is understood by like. Make yourself grow to immeasurable
immensity, outleap all body, outstrip all time, become eternity and you will
understand God. Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider
yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the
temper of every living thing. Go higher than every height and lower than every
depth. Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire
and water, dry and wet; be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven;
be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when
you have understood all these at once-times, places, things, qualities, quantitiesthen you can understand God. But if you shut
your soul up in the body and abase it and say "I understand nothing, I can
do nothing; I fear the sea, I cannot go up to heaven; I do not know what I was,
I do not know what I will be," then what have you to do with God? (Corpus Hermeticum XI, 20-21. Translation in Brian P Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum
and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation with Notes and
Introduction, 1992, 41-42.)
The literature
contains several descriptions of how hermetists
actually reached the goal: in the thirteenth tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum, the initiated pupil exclaims "I am in
heaven, in earth, in water, in air; I am in animals, in plants, in the womb,
before the womb, after the womb, everywhere."7
In the Discourse on
the Eighth and the Ninth tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum,
the initiator exclaims:
I see! I see indescribable
depths. How shall I tell you.... How shall I describe the universe? I [am Mind
and] I see another Mind, the one that [moves] the soul! I see the one that
moves me from pure forgetfulness. You give me power. I see myself! ... I have
found the beginning of the power that is above all powers, the one that has no
beginning. I see a fountain bubbling with life. I have said, my son, that I am
Mind. I have seen! Language is not able to reveal this.'
In spite of their
more positive view of the material cosmos, the hermetists
agreed with the Gnostics (as well as with most of their contemporaries, whether
Platonists, Stoics, or Church Fathers) in seeing the body and the senses in a
negative light. In the seventh tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum,
the body ("the tunic that you wear") is even described in extreme
terms as "the garment of ignorance, the foundation of vice, the bonds of
corruption, the dark cage, the living death, the sentient corpse, the portable
tomb." (Corpus Hermeticum VII, 2; in Brian P
Copenhaver, Hermtica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English
Translation with Notes and Introductio, Cambridge
University Press, 1992, p. 24)
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola has left us a
famous oration on the dignity of man, which has often been seen as the
programmatic statement par excellence of the new positive view of man and his
unlimited potential. Pico begins by quoting the hermetic Asclepius, which calls
man "a great miracle": alone of all created beings, man has potentially
unlimited freedom to shape his own destiny. (Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola, Oratio "De
hominis dignitatis," Translated in Ernst
Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman
Randall, eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, 1948, 224-225.)
This can be seen as
another dimension of what in the 1950’s would be termed ‘human potential’. Man
has the potential of developing into whatever direction he chooses: he can sink
to the state of an animal and become subhuman, but he can also attain a
superhuman divine status. Obviously, it is in the latter direction that his
true destiny lies. The ideal of the divinization of man was potentially
heretical, and to proclaim it could be dangerous, particularly in
combination-as was often the case in the context of Renaissance
hermeticism-with references to magic.
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