Hermes, Hermeneutics & the Humanities: Listening to the Sources in Esotericism Research
The following text was presented as a keynote lecture at the conference Science et ésotérisme: Représentations, Interactions, Usages , FRÉSO, Paris (France) on 12 May 2023. It will be published in French translation in a collective volume edited by Léo Bernard and Tom Fischer, whom I want to thank for their permission to make the original English version (with added footnotes) available online. This text has its origin in my personal experiences of deep puzzlement at discovering, a few years ago, how many younger colleagues seemed to consider it self-evident that "listening to the sources" is an impossibility. If this would be true, then why should historians even bother to study primary sources at all (or, for that matter, the secondary sources known as scholarly literature)? Since I spent so many years poring over the primary sources of Hermetic literature, trying as hard as I could to understand what they meant, I felt it was crucial to get to the bottom of what might be g