Continued from: A Different Da Vinci Code
Q: He's pointing to the sky. But what's so special about the Roman god Mercury?
A: Mercury to the Romans was the same god as Hermes in the older Greek mythology. This figure is often depicted pointing up (cf. Botticelli's Primavera). With so much evidence at hand, perhaps you would agree that what is frequently referred to as the “John gesture” is in fact the Hermes gesture!… Hermeticism is a vast topic and can't be summarized in just a few words, but its effects on world culture from early times until today are well documented and deserve more attention than they get. One practical outcome is the modern science of chemistry following the work of generations of alchemists. Culturally, they enriched several languages with Arabic word-forms such as alkali, alcohol, and even alchemy itself. Their distinctive red, white, and blue color scheme symbolized stages in the death and rebirth mystery that they read into the “chemical marriage” of various elements such as mercury and sulfur into a succession of compounds with predictable colors.
Q: Chemistry…okay, but how do we get into da Vinci's art?
A: During the darkest part of the medieval period, Arab scholars were preserving and elaborating upon ancient classical texts of all kinds. Science reentered Christendom as philosophia… literally, the love of wisdom, and as you can see from the chemistry example, it was very different from the mechanistic science of today. From the Middle Ages until the French Revolution, all who dabbled in science dabbled perforce in Hermetic mysticism as well. Hence, it is easy to include the great early scientists among the brotherhood, regardless of their true beliefs. Hermeticism as an intellectual movement hit the Renaissance early on and like a ton of bricks. In poetic terms, I suppose Hermes was the angel of the rebirth of classicism and the dawn of science. However, this updated Hermes was an enhanced version of the familiar messenger of the gods… He had morphed into the occult superstar, Hermes Trismegistus (or the thrice greatest, since he knew the magic of numbers…of the stars…and of medicine). He was a fusion of the old Greek Hermes with his ancient Egyptian counterpart Toth. He had also gained an adversarial relationship with the God of the Bible through the influence of Gnosticism, an early Christian heresy with—guess what?—“secret knowledge”…and his cult had absorbed the mysticism and numerology of the Jewish Kabbalah. Among Renaissance occultists, Hermes Trismegistus was believed to have been a contemporary of Moses…. So you see, Hermes 3 was truly a god for all seasons, and now in the Christian era, his relationship with Jehovah resembled that of the Titan Prometheus with the Olympian Zeus… You will recall that Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to give to man… Melville's Captain Ahab is an archetypal Hermetic protagonist with significant Zoroastrian symbolism cleverly woven throughout the story. Ahab, named for a wicked and idolatrous king of Israel, is consumed with resentment for the unstoppable majesty of his lofty adversary, Moby Dick, the great white whale…. and Melville knew exactly what he was trying to say…. You heard some of Ahab's shrillest lines in Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn.
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