The Forbidden Universe (24 page)

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:

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:

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:

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?

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.