Hermeticism: definition

Hermeticism is the set of esoteric and philosophical traditions that claim descent from Hermes Trismegistus and that influenced certain symbolic readings of tarot.

It played a major role in several modern re-readings of tarot, through occultist currents that sought to link the arcana to a hidden, initiatory or cosmological wisdom.

Its principles —the correspondences between the above and the below, the microcosm and the macrocosm— offered a frame for reading the cards as a ciphered compendium of the order of the world.

This influence is not part of the historical origin of tarot as a game, but it deeply marked its modern reception in the European esoteric circles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In an encyclopaedic glossary, hermeticism should be presented as an important interpretive frame for certain traditions of tarot, without confusing it with the first history of the Marseille Tarot.

Knowing it helps understand many discourses about esoteric tarot and read them with perspective, distinguishing the rich hermetic tradition from its late application to the cards.

Knowing hermeticism therefore helps read with discernment much of the esoteric discourse about tarot: to appreciate its symbolic richness without taking its correspondences for historical truths of cards that, in their origin, were a game.

Held in its proper place, hermeticism enriches the study of tarot's reception without distorting the more modest, documented history of the cards themselves.