Guest
In this lecture Wouter Hanegraaf (University of Amsterdam) discusses the famous (or notorious) passages about animated statues in the Asclepius, an important Hermetic treatise in Latin that is based on a lost Greek original known as the Logos Teleios. It is well known that Augustine condemned Hermes Trismegistus’ praise of what Christians were bound to see as idolatry; and the Hermetic practice of statue animation came to be seen as a model of talismanic magic since William of Auvergne. First of all, he places Hermes’ discussion with his pupil Asclepius about statues in the social and political context of third-century Roman Egypt; secondly, he argues that it is most plausibly interpreted in the context of Iamblichean theurgy; thirdly, he tries to answer the question of how we may explain the conviction of practitioners that statues could actually come alive; and finally, he discusses the connection of these “god-making passages” to the other famous part of the Asclepius, Hermes’ lament about the imminent decline of Egypt.
