S9-E9 - Scholarship for Hermes-Wouter Hanegraaff

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06:12 MUSIC "Brahms Ballad 4"
14:15 INTRO Interview
16:52 INTERVIEW Part 1
50:24 MUSIC "Sinfonia"
56:29 INTERVIEW Part 2
1:44:37 MUSIC "Piercing the Psychic Heart"
1:48:33 OUTRO TALK

This week’s interview is with the definitively pre-eminent hermetic scholar, Wouter J. Hanegraaff. Wouter outlines his pioneering path to Department Chair of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. The interview explores the 1990s milestones towards academic recognition of esoteric history and practice. While not personally a practitioner, sub rosa or otherwise, Hanegraaff warmly engages on the questions surrounding practitioner-as-scholar status.

This interview is replete with the naming of Rejected Knowledge. A Calvinist minister’s son, Wouter both respectfully and assertively notes areas of understudied “history” within Hermeticism and the Early Church. Wouter notes the unnamed role of Egyptian, Persian and North African Hermetic thinkers, and calls out the difficulty of philhellenism. He describes the “narrow bottleneck of transmission” within early conversion of hermetic texts into Christo-centered language and analogy, followed by a “millenia” of basic silence before snippets of manuscripts re-emerged in the 14th Century.

Wouter denotes several basic truths of Hermetic spirituality (not solely “philosophy”). The first theme is of “reverence” and gratitude for basic reality of Life granted to us. Another is the necessity of our self-liberation from worldly sources of addictive illusion; ignorance, not “sin”, being our behavioral obstacle to growth. Wouter describes the challenge of return to our clear, full consciousness as spiritual beings. He invites the possibility of conceptually unlearning vestigial Christocenteric dogma, into receptivity of the Source, the unknowable, and engagement with the Nous: “the total Mystery at the heart of reality”.

How does a non-practitioner find such respect for these concepts? Perhaps some hint is found in his blog essay, Esotericism and Democracy, in which he writes: “never forget that in studying esotericism, we are ultimately studying people”.

Wouter’s essay, Imagining the future study of religion and spirituality (2020)
https://www.academia.edu/41320565/Ima...

Wouter’s blogs may be found at:
http://westernculturecounterculture.b...