Thoth-hermes Podcast

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