RR Pod E26 Prof.Dr. Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Hermetic Embodiment, Interpretation, & Imagination

It was my pleasure to speak with Prof. Dr. Wouter Hanegraaff about his new book, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. As Wouter preferred not to give a general summary, I chose four very important themes of the book to discuss: what the Hermetica is really all about; the notion of embodiment in the Hermetic texts; the difficult but extremely important task of interpreting the ancient texts; and the importance of the faculty of the imagination - not only within the Hermetica, but also for the scholar trying to understand what the texts are actually saying. Wouter does an excellent job of explaining the terms gnosis and nous (that Wouter calls the "hero of the book") and how they are used within the Hermetic texts; these terms are crucial for the rest of the discussion. Following the four themes, Wouter discusses in more detail how Platonism influenced the Hermetica, how Gadamer's concept of hermeneutics plays a role in the process of understanding these texts, the paradox of how we think about the term imagination, and how Wouter tries to 'systematically privilege weirdness' when studying the Hermetic texts.