https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2025.35.14
Traces of the presence of the Hermetic tradition in Father Chairemon’s churching in the 1794 and 1804 versions of Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa were already noticed more than 100 years ago by Tadeusz Sinko. Sinko also noted that the quotations from Poimandres and from De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum are fairly faithful paraphrases not of the Greek originals, but of their Latin translation by Marsilio Ficino. However, no further conclusions have yet been drawn from this statement. At this stage of the research, the question of the extent to which the decision to cite Hermetic texts via the Italian Renaissance tradition was a conscious authorial act and should be interpreted as such must remain unanswered. The author situates the references to the Renaissance Hermetic tradition in the context of a general interpretation of the story of the Eternal Jew (present only in the 1794 and 1804 versions of the novel), to which he has devoted a separate study, and posits that it is precisely around the speeches of Father Chairemon that it accrues. They form the real nucleus and give meaning to the narrative. He also makes conjectures about its implicit links with the thinking of progressive freemasonry on religio duplex. Under this term was the conviction, most clearly expressed by Carl Leonhard Reinhold in his text The Hebrew Mysteries, that the ancient Egyptians concealed under the guise of polytheism a philosophy of nature heralding modern Spinozism. The reference to renaissance Hermetic thought, and thus to the idea, popular at the turn of the 17th and 18th century, that the religion of ancient Egypt was the repository of all later cults, can therefore be interpreted as a creative attempt to confront and update the idea of the perennial philosophy in a spirit of tolerance and enlightened deism. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa would thus be placed in a row with works such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Natan the Wise or Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years.
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2025
Published: 2025-05-26
10.31261/PS_P
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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