The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  One of the first papers to recognize the importance of Newton’s Hermeticism was by J. Edward McGuire and Piyo M. Rattansi, both lecturers in the history and philosophy of science at Leeds University. Published in the Notes and Records of the Royal Society in December 1966, the paper, ‘Newton and the “Pipes of Pan”’, was based on a study of Newton’s draft of rewritten sections of the Principia, which he wrote in the 1690s for a proposed new edition that was to have included more on the esoteric. McGuire and Rattansi explore the influence of the Cambridge Platonists on Newton’s thinking, concluding that:

  In re-examining Newton’s relation to the Cambridge Platonists, we shall see that he did not merely borrow ideas from them, but was engaged in a private dialogue whose terms were set by a certain intellectual tradition.36

  But which ‘certain intellectual tradition’? They go on to identify it as the ‘most elaborately developed Renaissance prisca doctrine’ found in the works of Ficino and Pico, which were derived from the Corpus Hermeticum.37 McGuire and Rattansi add that ‘Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists, saw their task as the unification and restoration of this philosophy.’38 In the words of Richard Westfall, as a result of Newton’s association with the Cambridge Platonists, ‘the Hermetic influence bade fair to dominate his picture of nature at the expense of the mechanical.’39

  Newton frequently cited Hermes Trismegistus in his alchemical and esoteric private writings and wrote a detailed commentary on the Emerald Tablet (which was considerably longer than the original). An American historian who specialized in Newton’s alchemy, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, comments on the extent of Newton’s passion for Hermes explaining that ‘Newton’s study of Hermes Trismegistus extended over a period of at least twenty years, possibly longer.’40

  Newton’s Hermeticism transformed his thought in precisely the opposite direction to that which we have come to expect in the twenty-first century. The modern perspective is that people started with vague and supernatural explanations for how things work, but eventually came to understand them in purely mechanical and logical terms. But Newton moved from mechanics to magic. As Westfall writes:

  In Newton, peculiarly Hermetic notions fostered the crucial development of his scientific thought, and in the concept of force became a central element both in the enduring science of mechanics and the accepted ideas of nature. The fundamental question for Newtonian scholarship, as it appears to me, is not the presence of Hermetic elements in his philosophy of nature; their presence has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. The fundamental question is the mutual interaction of the two traditions in the development of Newton’s scientific thought.41

  It is now recognized that it was not an apple falling on Newton’s head – or even less dramatically simply plumping to the ground in front of him – which gave him his eureka moment, but delving into the pages of the Hermetica. And it bestowed on him nothing less than the key to unlock the mysteries of nature.

  It is not simply a matter of Newton hitting on the physical laws of nature by drawing analogies with the Hermetic principles. He applied those principles to physical systems. For example, the big resistance to his explanation of gravity was that many considered it to be too ‘occult’. His notion of gravity as a force that acts across space, at a distance, and does so in the way it does purely as a consequence of the nature of the universe, was drawn straight from the magical laws of sympathy and attraction as expounded in the Hermetica. (Newton put it more succinctly, declaring ‘Gravity is God’.) The law of gravity invokes principles relating to forces that act between the Earth and heavenly bodies that feature – in very different language, of course – in Asclepius, the same work that inspired Copernicus.

  And Newton’s certainty that the heliocentric model was correct also seems primarily to have been drawn from his knowledge of the Hermetica, rather than from the works of Copernicus or Kepler. In a discussion of the mysteries of ancient Egypt he wrote:

  It was the most ancient opinion that the planets revolved about the sun, that the earth, as one of the planets, described an annual course about the sun, while by a diurnal motion it turned on its axis, and that the sun remained at rest.42

  Of course, the obvious source for this understanding of the Egyptians is, once again, Asclepius and the other Hermetic texts.

  While most scholars recognized Newton’s Principia as a work of genius, a sizeable number immediately dismissed it as a farrago of occultism. Richard S. Westfall comments:

  The cry of occult qualities greeted the publication of the Principia. In more than one sense, the mechanists who raised the cry were justified. Not only did the concept of attraction violate their sense of philosophic propriety, but the origin of the concept was the very Hermetic tradition they suspected … The champions of mechanical orthodoxy failed to realise what benefit the Hermetic idea could bestow on the mechanical philosophy of nature.43

  Of course nobody today would dare side with Newton’s contemporary detractors. Newton’s genius is now universally recognized. And yet there are still those who can’t see the significance of the esoteric facet of his life and work. If nothing else, his modern critics show themselves on this major point to be giants of condescension and pygmies of understanding.

  In his God is Not Great (2007), Christopher Hitchens unhesitatingly describes Newton as ‘a spiritualist and alchemist of a particularly laughable kind’.44 Apparently in today’s era of education and enlightenment even your average journalist and literary critic possesses a greater intellect than poor befuddled old Isaac Newton. But the reality is simple: if Newton had never had become privy to the Hermetic philosophy, he would never have achieved his work and the world would be – literally – much the poorer for it. It is universally acknowledged that if the Principia had never been written, our modern technological world would not exist. But without the Her metica, Newton would never have written the Principia. Emphatically Newton did not make his great scientific discoveries despite his esoteric beliefs, but because of them.

  The same is true of Copernicus, Kepler, Gilbert, Galileo, Kircher and Leibniz. All of these great scientific minds either drew their inspiration directly from the Hermetica or indirectly from the works of other Hermetic masters – usually Bruno. Without that extraordinary philosophy and its accompanying curiosity, they would never have realized that mere men could be giants, gods of thought to whom anything was possible and that freedom from the tyranny and poverty of intellect that marked the reign of the Church of Rome was, indeed, possible.

  This raises some other important questions: If the Hermetica was this wondrous intellectual instrument, where did it originate? How did its authors come to know such secrets? Who were they? And was Newton right? Did the Hermetic texts embody the greatest wisdom of ancient Egypt?

  Chapter Six

  1 Quoted in Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 186.

  2 Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, online: plato.stanford.edu/entries/cambridge-platonists.

  3 Quoted in Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p. 115.

  4 P. M. Rattansi, ‘Some Evaluations of Reason in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy’, in Teich and Young (eds.), p. 151.

  5 Quoted in Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 424.

  6 Purver, p. 217.

  7 Quoted in ibid., pp. 221–2.

  8 Quoted in ibid., p. 219.

  9 Quoted in ibid., p. 198.

  10 Quoted in ibid., p. 199.

  11 Bacon, p. 67.

  12 Rossi, pp. 13–14.

  13 Tuveson, p. 52.

  14 Bacon, p. ix.

  15 J. R. Ravetz, ‘Francis Bacon and the Reform of Philosophy’, in Debus (ed.), Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, vol. II, p. 101.

  16 Bacon, p. 1.

  17 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

  18 Ibid., p. 3.

  19 E.g. Tuveson, pp. 170–9, Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, chapter XV.

  20 Lomas, p. 320.

  21 From
Lomas’ lecture ‘Sir Robert Moray – Soldier, Scientists, Spy, Freemason and Founder of the Royal Society’, given at Gresham College, 4 April 2007. A transcript is available on the Gresham College website: www.gresham.ac.uk/event.aspPageId=45&EventId=589.

  22 Quoted in Purver, p. 221.

  23 Quoted in ibid., pp. 221–2.

  24 Quoted in ibid., p. 232.

  25 Quoted in ibid.

  26 Quoted in Bluhm, p. 185.

  27 Ibid., pp. 183–6.

  28 Gribbin, p. 229.

  29 Lord Rees, today’s President of the Royal Society, quoted in Bragg, p. 22.

  30 Gribbin, pp. 238–9.

  31 Hollis, p. 262.

  32 Richard S. Westfall, ‘Newton and the Hermetic Tradition’, in Debus (ed.), Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, vol. II, pp. 185–6.

  33 ‘Newton, the Man’ in Keynes, p. 363.

  34 Ibid., p. 366.

  35 Quoted in Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 200.

  36 McGuire and Rattansi, p. 109.

  37 Ibid., p. 127.

  38 Ibid., p. 124.

  39 Westfall, ‘Newton and the Hermetic Tradition’, in Debus (ed.), Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, vol. II, p. 193.

  40 Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius, p. 68.

  41 Ibid., pp. 185–6.

  42 Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 434.

  43 Westfall, ‘Newton and the Hermetic Tradition’, in Debus (ed.), vol. II, pp. 194–5.

  44 Hitchens, p. 65.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EGYPT’S TRUE LEGACY

  The mysterious collection of works known as the Hermetica may have illuminated the path for many of the world’s greatest scientists and philosophers, who believed it to be the authentic repository of ancient Egyptian wisdom, but in 1614 Isaac Casaubon threatened to completely undermine their position, declaring authoritatively that the books were ‘only’ about a millennium and a half old, dating from the early centuries CE. Modern historians agree that Casaubon, who employed philological techniques (the analysis of language and literary style), reached roughly the right conclusions, even if for the wrong reasons, at least as far as the actual composition of the Hermetica is concerned. Its sources, however, are quite another story.

  As we have seen, Casaubon demonstrated that the Greek of the Hermetica does not belong to the classical period but is a later style altogether, which dates from the late centuries BCE and early centuries CE. This timeframe makes sense, as this was when Egypt was ruled successively by the Greeks and the Romans, a period beginning in the 330s BCE during Alexander the Great’s most feverish bout of empire building.

  After Alexander’s death his general Ptolemy declared himself pharaoh, establishing the Ptolemaic dynasty that lasted for three centuries until the death of Cleopatra. During this time Hellenic customs, lifestyle and language took hold, at least among the top strata of Egyptian society. In 30 BCE, after the second most famous snake in history (after the chatty tempter that appears in Genesis) had done its worst to the Queen of the Nile, the Romans took over, although Egyptian-born Greeks continued to be overrepresented among officialdom. Greek, rather than Latin, remained the lingua franca of the eastern half of the Roman Empire.

  This means that the Hermetic texts were composed at some point between the beginning of the Greek domination and their first mention in Christian works in the third century CE, a period that lasted around 500 years. This may not pinpoint the precise historical moment of the Hermetica, but it still places them well after the golden age of the Egyptian civilization. So how could they contain the secrets of the pyramid builders?

  This question highlights a flaw in Casaubon’s argument. Establishing that the Hermetic books dated from the period of Greek and Roman domination was hardly earth-shattering. If they had been composed any earlier they wouldn’t have been written in Greek of any style, but in Egyptian. And of course the fact that they were composed in Greek does not necessarily mean that the ideas they expressed were conceived at that time. They could, for example, have been written to explain an Egyptian belief system to Greek-speakers, or just as easily have comprised a translation of Egyptian wisdom texts. These fairly obvious objections didn’t escape the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, who used similar arguments against Casaubon.

  That is why the second part of Casaubon’s case, which he based on the content of the Hermetica rather than the style, was important. By demonstrating that certain sections had been influenced by concepts from Plato and the New Testament – particularly John’s Gospel and some of Paul’s letters – Casaubon believed he had proved that the texts were composed from scratch after the time of Christ.

  Modern historians have roundly rejected this part of Casaubon’s argument, seeing no direct connection at all between the New Testament and the Hermetica. Any potential link is indirect, as both texts derive from the same blend of theological and philosophical speculation, drawn from various cultures including the Hellenic, Iranian, Judaic – and, of course, the Egyptian – which were being explored at that time.

  As we have seen, what really excited Renaissance Hermeticists was the parallel between the description of God’s Word in the Pimander and the Word/Logos passage that opens John’s Gospel. However, the unknown writer of this gospel took the concept from the work of Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BCE–c.50 CE), a Hellenized Jew who blended Jewish theology with ideas from the great intellectual melting pot that was his own city. The Hermetica also drew from the same pool of ideas, so any connection between the Word in Pimander and the Gospel of John is indirect. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that the Hermetica came after Philo, since the ideas he drew on had been in the philosophical mix for some time. And – as we are about to see – part of this included home-grown Egyptian traditions, which almost certainly provided the inspiration for the Hermetic description of God’s Word. Although it is only too easy to pity Casaubon, there was simply not enough information available in his day to make a proper analysis.

  So now we’re back where we started. As was believed before Casaubon put the feline among the feathered creatures, the Hermetic books may have contained traditions, not to say secrets, from the old Egypt, the Egypt untainted by the trendy Hellenic glamour of its occupiers. So is it possible to deduce when the Hermetica were written, and by whom? And, more importantly, what were their sources? Was Hermeticism invented in Greek or Roman Egypt, or did it draw on older traditions?

  THE ORIGINAL TIME LORD

  During the eras of Greek and Roman rule, Egypt – and particularly Alexandria with its famous library – was the crucible where the intellect’s gems of the known world came together. As well as native Egyptians, those of Greek descent and peoples from all over the Empire, the great seaport also boasted large Jewish and Samaritan communities. Trade routes brought Iranians, Arabs and even Indians to the city, carrying their traditions with them.

  Even so, and despite the flaws in Casaubon’s work, for a long time historians still assumed that the philosophy and cosmology found in the Hermetica were derived from Greece. It just had to be Greece – after all, weren’t the best things always Hellenic? Positively pickled in the classics, the academic world refused to dip a toe into any other culture. But over the years this became increasingly untenable, and with scholarly huffing and puffing, beard stroking and dragging of feet, it was gradually acknowledged that native Egyptian thought must have had at least a supporting role in shaping the Hermetic books.

  Doubts about the purely Greek origin of the Hermetica began to surface in the early twentieth century, when university men and women realized key elements of its philosophy and cosmology could not be attributed to any identifiable Greek source. But there was controversy about where they did come from, the main candidates being native Egyptian, Judaic and Iranian traditions.

  Perhaps understandably, at first it was mostly Egyptologists who held out for a home-grown influence. Then in 1904 Richard Reitzenstein, the eminent German scholar of
Gnosticism and the Hellenic religions, made the groundbreaking suggestion that the Hermetica was the product of a religious community in Egypt. (He did, however, later change his mind, looking towards Iran instead.) From the mid-twentieth century many scholars – particularly in France – joined the pro-Egypt camp. It gradually became a question of not if there was an Egyptian influence, but of its true extent. A consensus also emerged that at least the core parts of the Hermetica dated from the early years of Greek domination, rather than towards the end of the era, as Casaubon came to believe.

  Key scholars in this process were the French historian Jean-Pierre Mahé and, more recently, Garth Fowden, the British professor of antiquity who is currently Research Director at the Institute for Greek and Roman Antiquity in Athens. As the title of his 1986 book The Egyptian Hermes suggests, he amassed the considerable evidence of a strong home-grown, Egyptian, influence on the Hermetica.

  Although presented as a characteristic Greek dialogue, the Hermetic texts don’t quite fit that genre. Instead of presenting a discussion between philosophers, as in the Greek tradition, the texts present a question-and-answer session between master and pupil – which is more in keeping with the traditional Egyptian wisdom literature.1 The Hermetic texts are therefore a kind of stylistic hybrid of the Egyptian and Hellenic forms. Maybe the writers were consciously striving to make their work more Greek-friendly.

  The books are obviously the product of different writers – which accounts for their inconsistencies – although they belonged to the same school or cult. All the authors here are anonymous, simply attributing their works to Hermes, a typically Egyptian practice.2 This was quite different from the Greeks or Romans, who routinely hyped up their celebrity philosophers without making any claims of divine authorship. This is another important indication that, while written in Greek, the mindset behind the Hermetica was authentically Egyptian.