P. Bonnard "Le jardin" 1936 The sources of the imaginal knowledge spring from the great basin of the hermetic culture and through many streams re-flow in it. From the ancient classic age till today, the hermetic culture has considered the cosmos as an unique organism “…In the maelstrom's eye In the core of the brimming heaven-blossom Under the tightening whorl of plumes, a mote Scalds in dews A leaf of the earth Applies to it, a cooling health. A coffin spins in the torque. Wounds flush with sap, heedful of pollen, Wet with nectar The dead one stirs A mummy grain is cracking its smile In the cauldron of tongues. The ship of flowers Nudges the wharf of skin. The egg-stone Bursts among broody petals- And a staggering thing Fired with rainbows, raw with cringing heat, Blinks at the source.”      T. Hughes,      The Owl Flower (en to pan), in which all the elements are connected inside a common (material and spiritual) nature that is the Anima Mundi according to a thick texture of correnspondences or hierarchically organised affinities- discordances. From that common principle, and according to many   different interpretations scattered in time, from the Presocratic philosophy and from the Egyptian culture, through the Stoic schools, the Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, where East and West meet, till the philosophy of Nature in the Renaissance, till the Romanticism and the persistent “ nostalgia of bond ” in the modern and contemporary art, and in the esoteric and mystic culture, hermetism is the thought of the “ un - duality ” inspired to Hermes and devoted to reconnect body and spirit, heaven and earth, inner and outer, male and female, salvation of nature and humans. Its practical expressions are the alchemic “ Great Opera ” as discipline of transformation of the Substance with deep spiritual and interior implications, and the magic as praxis of recognition and manipulation of the hidden influences existing in an animated by irreducible connections cosmos.     Copyright & Credits