Luc Olivier Merson, French, 1846–1920
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
When the Johannite Church, then called the “Primitive Catholic Christians” literally came out of the ecclesiastical closet over 200 years ago under the leadership of +Bernard-Raymond Fabré Palaprat in 1804 (1), one of the definitive statements of its tradition was quite simple and remains in our Liturgy: “The Son of God afterwards appeared on the scene of the world. Imbued with a spirit wholly divine, endowed with the most astounding qualities, he was able to reach all the degrees of Egyptian initiation.”(2) And with that rather matter-of-fact sentence, 2,000 years of Johannite secrecy was blown wide open in the spirit of the French egalitarianism which swept the continent.
But the link between Christianity and Egyptian religion was not news in those days; far from it. It is generally accepted that the re-introduction of Hermetic ideas into the European context took place as a result of the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin from Greek by Fr. Marcilio Ficino for Cosimo de Medici. The Corpus itself is a collection of a far greater volume of work patched together most notably by Ficino. There were eight editions of the Corpus before 1500.(3) I have had the good fortune of seeing one fine example of the Corpus published by Lucas Dominici, Venice (1481), in the Special Collections at Brandeis University here in the Boston area. The provenance of the rare edition that I have seen indicates that it was owned by a Jewish physician by the name of Georgius Kloss. Although the work of Ficino, a gay, Roman Catholic priest was important, it should be noted that the last three tractates of the Corpus as it appears now were not in his translation. These include: (XVI.) The Definitions of Asclepius unto King Ammon; (XVII.) Of Asclepius to the King, and (XVIII.) The Encomium of Kings.
A portion of the Corpus, The Divine Pymander in XVII books (London 1650) was translated by John Everard into English for the first time from the Ficino Latin translation. You can access this edition at my friend Adam McClean’s excellent Alchemy Web Site. The best source of historical information in the world on Hermeticism is doubtless housed in the 20,000-volume Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, in Amsterdam.
Hermeticism’s very close relationship with Christianity can be seen in many historical records, not the least of which is Augustine of Hippo’s criticism of it in his City of God vii.23–26. Giordano Bruno’s De Umbris Idearum (1548) is a reiteration of Hermetic, and therefore Egyptian, memory magic (ars memoria), which is nothing less than the art of maintaining one’s identity after death – in Christian terms, salvation and eternal life. (4)
The compatibility of Christian and traditional Egyptian beliefs was noted in a regrettably degrading way by British Museum archeologist Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge in his introduction to the 1895 translation of the Book of the Dead.
We can gently forgive Sir Ernest’s ticklish terminology and find much that is useful in his analysis that throughout the centuries there is a noticeable coherence between the two religions.
The chief features of the Egyptian religion remained unchanged from the Vth and VIth dynasties down to the period when the Egyptians embraced Christianity, after the preaching of St. Mark the Apostle in Alexandria, A.D. 69, so firmly had the early beliefs taken possession of the Egyptian mind; and the Christians in Egypt, or Copts as they are commonly called, the racial descendants of the ancient Egyptians, seem never to have succeeded in divesting themselves of the superstitious and weird mythological conceptions which they inherited from their heathen ancestors.St. John the Baptist and St. John the Beloved, Evangelist and Apostle, are the namesakes of the Johannite Church. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Hermetic knowledge of the “all the degrees of Egyptian initiation” is well represented by the tradition of the two Saints John. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “…on 27 May, 395 A.D., the relics of St. John the Baptist were laid in the gorgeous basilica just dedicated to the Precursor on the site of the once famous temple of Serapis.” (5)
The cult of Serapis is of course the foundation of Hermeticism and the Egyptian religion. This is not to say that the followers of the Christ have been these two millennia duped, but that the dogma and doctrine of Christianity incubated in not only the beliefs of the Hebrews, but in the mysteries of what has been called Hermeticism - the religion of Egypt. We need only to look at the etymology of that word to understand its meaning:
Hermetic: 1605 (implied in hermetically), "completely sealed," also (1637) "dealing with occult science or alchemy," from L. hermeticus, from Gk. Hermes, god of science and art, among other things, identified by Neoplatonists, mystics, and alchemists with the Egyptian god Thoth as Hermes Trismegistos "Thrice-Great Hermes," who supposedly invented the process of making a glass tube airtight (a process in alchemy) using a secret seal. (6)The parallels between the Gospel of John and Hermeticism are, in a word, astounding. But that must be left for another post.
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(1) The Freemason's Monthly Magazine, Volume 1 edited by Charles Whitlock Moore, London, 1848, p. 170
(2) The Johannite Liturgy: The Graal of Undefiled Wisdom, Calgary, revised 2008
(3) Noted by George Sarton, the historian of science, in reviewing Walter Scott, Hermetica, in Isis 8.2 (May 1926:343-346) p. 345
(4) Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Alexander Magee
(5) Souvay, Charles. "St. John the Baptist." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. 22 Oct. 2009 . Nihil Obstat. October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.
(6) Online Etymology Dictionary, November 2001 Douglas Harper






