┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
───╢※╟───
Every so often, I'll see someone make a claim like:
the Hermetic texts like the Corpus Hermeticum are encrypted and the secret key has been passed down through such-and-such a lineage!!
Or:
the Hermetic texts are so hard to read because they're written in a code and here's a numerological way to understand them
No, they're not. Anyone who says things like this is trying to cover for their own lack of ability to actually read the texts, or trying to mask their own ignorance and lack of experience with cliché esoteric paranoia. These texts are hard to read, to be sure! But they're dense and difficult to read because their subject matter itself is dense and difficult to understand, much less communicate. We're dealing with the highest and most subtle mysteries of the Creator and the Creation, after all! They're also written in a pretty common literary style found in a lot of Hellenistic philosophical and mystical writings of its time. In that, they're nothing special, but that very same style can be jarring for a lot of people nowadays to approach without getting used to it. This is made all the more more complicated, sure, by longstanding textual traditions that do expect to see hidden layers of meaning in texts like the Qur'ān or the Bible beyond what is written, but beyond the philogical evidence to show that that was generally never the case, methods to uncover such hidden levels of meaning are often dependent entirely on a number of hermeneutic approaches that border on the culturally-specific if not entirely arbitrary; none of these methods are really appropriate for the Hermetic texts, not least because we shouldn't even consider them as anything close to some sort of divinely-immutable eternally-perfect gospel to begin with.
All you need to read and understand the classical Hermetic texts is time and dedication. Rather than treating them like fast food, where you just wolf them down for a momentary experience of satisfaction, the Hermetica are more like fine dining, so treat them right by sitting down with them, chewing on them slowly and thoughtfully, appreciating them, involving and indulging yourself in them, and letting yourself actually digest them bit by bit. It takes time and patience, but each and every morsel is so very worth it.
Like, for myself? I've been reading and rereading these texts for years now, even more than a decade for some of them. None of them are particularly long, but they take time, and they show me more and more the more I go over them and dig into them.