The purportedly Egyptian writings of Hermes Trismegistus, understood as an obscure historical figure in the time of Moses, played a crucial role in the Renaissance. Collected together in the Corpus Hermeticum, it was published in 1463 in a translation by Marsilio Ficino and reprinted 22 times over the following century and a half. In the work of Renaissance thinkers, it combined with neo-Platonic influences from Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus. Frances Yates, the most prominent historian of Renaissance Hermeticism, claims that it had an influence on “virtually every aspect of sixteenth-century thought.”

One encyclopedia article says that “The Hermetic manuscripts offered Renaissance intellectuals a new view of humankind. They believed that humans had been created as divine beings endowed with divine created power but had freely chosen to enter the material world (nature). Humans could recover their divinity, however, however, thought a regenerative experience or purification of the soul. Thus regenerated, they became true sages or magi, as the Renaissance called them, who had knowledge of God and of truth. In regaining their original divinity, they reacquired an intimate knowledge of nature and the ability to employ the powers of nature for beneficial purposes.” We hear echoes of Hermeticism in Pico’s programmatic renaissance Oration: “To [man] is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.”

Lewis wrote famously about Renaissance magic, which was often dismissed as a “medieval survival” into the very modern Renaissance. Lewis disputed this notion: “A vigorous efflorescence of forbidden or phantasmal arts is not an anomaly in that period, but one of its characteristic traits; quite as characteristic as exploration, Ciceronianism, or the birth of secular drama.” This was not merely a prolongation of medieval interest in magic, but something that enjoyed a renaissance of its own. As he goes on, “Only an obstinate prejudice about this period could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. In medieval story there is, in one sense, plenty of ‘magic.’ Merlin does this or that ‘by his subtilty,’ Bercilak resumes his severed head. But all these passages have unmistakably the note of “faerie” about them. But in Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare the subject is treated quite differently. ‘He to his studie goes’; books are opened, terrible words pronounced, souls imperilled. The medieval author seems to write for a public to whom magic, like knight-errantry, is part of the furniture of romance: the Elizabethan, for a public who feel that it might be going on in the next street.”

The authority of the Corpus Hermeticum rested in part on its presumed antiquity. Here was a philosophy and religion that went back to the roots of human history, before religion got split into specific practices and dogmas. Ficino and Pico were both fascinated by the possibility of a “prisca theologia,” an original theology according to which they might reform the Catholicism of their day. And they saw the Hermetic writings as an opening to get back to this. This notion that there is an original, natural form of religion that is corrupted by the various “ecclesiastical” religions persisted even after it was detached from the Hermetic tradition (cf. Kant).

1614 marked a major turning point in the fortunes of Hermeticism and the influence of Egypt on the modern European imagination. In that year, Isaac Casaubon published his findings concerning the date and provenance of the Corpus, and concluded convincingly that the collected was from late antiquity and that it was probably a Christian forgery. What many readers had understood as anticipations of Christianity actually came from a Christian hand. Yates says that 1614 was “a watershed separating the Renaissance world from the modern world” and that Casaubon’s late dating “shattered the basis of all attempts to build a natural theology in Hermeticism.”

Not so fast, says Jan Assmann. At Cambridge, the Hebraist Ralph Cudworth was working on a treatise called the True Intellectual System of the Universe, which was published in 1678. It was a continuing quest for the prisca theologia, in which Cudworth was attempting to show that everyone – atheists and theists, ancient and modern, polytheist and monotheist – shared a common notion of God as “a Perfect Conscious Understanding Being [or Mind] Existing of it self from Eternity, and the Cause of all other things.”

Cudworth wanted to bring the Hermetical writings into play in this project, but he had, necessarily, to take Casaubon’s findings into account. Cudworth argued that Casaubon was not discriminating enough in his dating. Parts of the Corpus were indeed late and Christian, but not all, and the earlier sections described the early, arcane theology of ancient Egypt, which taught “besides their Many Gods, One Supreme and All-comprehending Deity” hidden behind a veil. He supported Plutarch’s claim that for the Egyptians “the first god” was “an Obscure and Hidden Deity.”

-From various pieces of evidence, he concluded that “Hammon amongst the Egyptians, was not only the name of the Supreme Deity, but also of such a one as was Hidden, Invisible, and Incorporeal.” This first god is somehow both identified with the world, and yet before, outside, and independent of the world. “To hen,” the first or the one, is also “to pan or the Universe”; these are “Synonymous expressions” because “the First Supreme Deity, is that which contains All Things, and diffuses itself through All Things.” Belief in Hen kai pan, the “One and All,” was the original Arcane theology of Egypt.

Cudworth is not a household name, but his book and arguments had lasting influence. It dovetailed with Spinoza’s view of “Deus sive natura,” and Spinoza was the apostle of the “underground Enlightenment” that has recently been given massive treatment in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment. Assmann notes that in a famous conversation with Jacobi that sparked the pantheism controversy, Lessing expressed his Spinozism not with Spinoza’s formula but with Cudworth’s Hen kai pan. Cudworth’s phrase is found in Herder, Hamann, Holderlin, Goethe, Schelling, and made its way into Masonic writing. That is, it was a threat leading from the German Enlightenment into German Romanticism, thence to Hegel, thence far beyond, though by Hegel’s time the Egyptian inspiration had been forgotten.

As Assmann says, “The ‘cosmotheism’ of early German Romanticism is a return of repressed paganism, the worship of the divinely animated cosmos. In a way, it is a return to Ancient Egypt.” Nature was personified as Isis: “Deus sive natura sive Isis: this is the way that Egypt returned in the religious climate of pre-Romantic Spinozism.” And he points out that “In these years, European Egyptomania reached its climax. It is certainly not mere coincidence that in these same years Napoleon embarked on his Egyptian expedition.” Eventually, he notes, the mystification of Egypt produced a de-mystification, as Egyptology undermined the mythical visions of Cudworth and those whom he influenced.