A Catholic pedigree for magic and Hermeticism? (excerpt from our recent essay)

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 22, 2025

Last week, Catholic Culture published an essay co-authored by Matthew Minerd, Matthew Scarince, and myself: “Hermetic Tradition or Catholic Tradition? A Critique of Sebastian Morello.” At 33 pages, this was much longer than what we usually publish in our commentary section. For the interest of our readers who lack time to read the whole essay, I am publishing here a condensed version of the section in which we criticize claims of a Catholic pedigree for the language and traditions of magic and Hermeticism.

A quick note of context:

Morello’s appeal to the idea of magic is integrally related to his wider narrative about what is wrong with the Church and the West, a theory which we critique in our essay as essentially counter-revolutionary rather than traditional in the Catholic sense.

More broadly, it is connected to certain increasingly prevalent account of modernity that critiques so-called “rationalism” in favor of “re-enchantment”—a movement which includes various popular thinkers outside the scope of our essay, such as Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke, Rod Dreher, and Jonathan Pageau. While our essay is not a critique of re-enchantment, especially given the variety of meanings and valid aspirations which can be assigned to that word, it does significantly relate to this wider question insofar some of its proponents fall into the errors we critique.

For a brief overview of a broader occult movement within the Church, of which Morello’s writing is just one example, see my earlier article, “Occult subversion of traditional Catholicism.”

A much longer version of the section below, with ample citations and footnotes, can of course be found in the full essay.

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Hermeticism and magic

As part of the antidote to the spiritual ailments of the Church and the West, Morello proposes a return to the Hermetic and Neoplatonic way, which would enable Catholics to shake off rationalism and return to Christ after reclaiming a supernatural vision of the world. We are told that Hermeticism is simply a “set of practices and disciplines of mind, will, and imagination that habituate the practitioner to a vision of the world that acknowledges it as God’s Icon.” At face value, perhaps it is nothing more than a bit of poetic Neoplatonic philosophical therapy giving rise to a traditional liturgical life that reenchants one’s vision.

Specifics are wanting, however, so we find ourselves left wondering: What are such practices, historically? How do they relate to the counsels of the saints, mystics, ascetics, and theologians who think from within the bosom of the Church and her various liturgical traditions, rather than from within the school of Iamblichus and Hermes Trismegistus?

Likewise, we will need to examine Morello’s language about “magic.” Morello puts the Mass and other Christian practices within this category, calling them “sacred magic” or “baptized theurgy”:

The Western world has always believed in magic. It has always held that curses exist and that they can be placed on people, animals, fungi, and inanimate objects. And the Western world has always held that such curses can be banished by special words, special objects, and special concentration, which in that order it has been content to call “blessings,” “sacramentals,” and “prayer.” In short, even the most orthodox in the West have always believed what the Hermeticist calls the opposing forces of “goetia,” or black magic, and “theurgy,” or sacred magic—though they generally would not put it in such terms.

Here we will examine the reception (or non-reception) of Hermeticism (as well as “magic” and “theurgy”) within the Church, as well as some of the figures Morello claims as part of this tradition. Some of these are saints, Fathers or Doctors of the Church who are alleged to have made their own a Hermetic-magical view of the world, despite the fact that none of their mainstream spiritual sons or daughters have taken this path. Others are non-canonized Catholic Hermeticists of the past, whom we are supposed to take for granted are safe models to imitate.

“Hermeticism” is a tradition of thought supposedly passed down from a mysterious sage named Hermes Trismegistus, originally believed to be the Greek god Hermes who transmitted his wisdom under the form of the Egyptian god Thoth. Early Christian writers believed that this Hermes had instead been an ancient Egyptian priest, perhaps a contemporary of Moses, who was deified by the pagans. They accorded him a certain respect as a famed philosopher who had a capacity for natural prediction based on an understanding of the hidden causes in nature.

Contrary to Morello, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church did not embrace Hermes to the point of being on the “Hermetic path” themselves, in either philosophical or magical terms. The surviving corpus of Hermetic writings is embedded in a deeply gnostic and dualistic worldview. This can be most clearly seen in the text entitled The Secret Dialogue of Hermes to his son Tat, in which the author speaks of a “material god” opposed to an “incorporeal god,” a “god” which is “beautiful but not good.” This anti-material mindset is carried over into the more famous Hermetic texts, including The Emerald Tablet and The Perfect Discourse with Asclepius.

Morello claims St. Albert the Great as a “dedicated Hermeticist and astrologer” based on his familiarity with the latter two Hermetic texts and his writings on the stars. But like Clement of Alexandria before him, Albert appreciated and used the writings on the natural properties of creatures while rejecting and correcting the false philosophical underpinnings.

Albert followed the distinction laid out by his contemporary William of Auvergne, who distinguished between “natural magic” or the knowledge of the hidden properties of nature through experimentation and observation, and the “ritual magic” or necromancy that had always been condemned by the Church. Likewise, further investigation shows that Albert’s “astrology” was based on scientific theories about the physical effects of the heavenly bodies on the four humors affecting human dispositions. That Albert’s “natural magic” was an early version of science is seen in his comments on the Biblical Magi:

For the Magi indeed are neither astrologers, nor enchanters, nor malefactors, nor necromancers, nor fortunetellers, nor haruspices, nor diviners. But the Magi, properly called, are great men who having knowledge of all necessary things and conjecturing from effects of nature sometimes predict and sometimes bring about the marvels of nature.... None of the Magi were devoted to magic, save in the way that has been described here, and this laudably (St. Albert the Great, Commentaries on the Gospel of St. Matthew, II).

In his Speculum Astronomiae, Albert warns against several books attributed to Hermes:

In fact, my spirit was never tranquil when dealing with these; all the same, I wanted to observe them well whilst passing over them so that, at least, I might not be ignorant of how to ridicule their wretched believers, and I might have taken something from their own work with which I might repel their excuses, and—what was most important—so that I would not be tempted concerning similar things from another when I had judged that the necromancer’s invalid arguments should not be accepted.

Albert’s works represent a pioneering effort into the systematic scientia that would come into full blossom in the Early Modern era under the Jesuits, and his argumentation often leads to surprisingly modern conclusions. This is a far cry from the Hermetic mystagogy attributed to him in Morello’s writings. Unlike Morello, St. Albert never uses “magic” as a framework to explain Catholic spirituality, sacraments, and holy objects.

The true legacy of holy theologians such as Albert the Great is be found in the flourishing of the sciences, material and spiritual, that followed upon their work, and the true unfolding of the beauty of God’s creation to the human mind. This is the crucial point that the promoters of “re-enchantment” fail to grasp, that our connection to the Divine Creator is fulfilled, not stunted, by true and experiential knowledge of His works, undertaken through the rational faculties with which He has so wondrously gifted us.

The legacy of Hermeticism, by contrast, is a sordid one. Among its most prominent modern practitioners are to be found the likes of the Satanist Aleister Crowley, the Theosophist/spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, the “Super-Fascist” anti-Catholic writer Julius Evola, and indeed countless secret organizations and societies that trade in false mysticism as a counterfeit currency to the Faith, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (which is praised effusively in what Morello cites as a “remarkable essay” by Charles Coulombe).

Neoplatonism and theurgy

In Morello’s thought, Hermeticism is closely accompanied by and even conflated with Neoplatonist philosophy, the latter being related to the former as theory is to practice. Neoplatonism is no doubt an important factor in the development of Christian theology, but Morello, like modern scholars more generally, tends to overstate it as a fundamental framework of Patristic theology.

Still, nothing would be amiss if we were to find that certain phrases and philosophical expressions had been borrowed from the Neoplatonists by the early Church, just as many of Aristotle’s expressions are still used by Christian metaphysicians today. The problem arises in the borrowing of specific concepts condemned by Patristic witness and Church teaching, such as “theurgy,” emanationism (the theory that creation is a necessary outflow from God’s essence), apokatastasis (the eventual inevitably redemption of all creatures, even the demons), and the pre-existence of souls.

Throughout history, Christians who take on too much Neoplatonic influence have fallen into these errors. Origen, for instance, was condemned as a heretic by the 2^nd Council of Constantinople precisely for those aspects of his thought which most resembled Neoplatonism. The Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola, whom Morello cites as an inspiration, had a number of his views formally condemned by Pope Innocent VIII as heretical, scandalous, and reviving pagan errors.

Just as the early Church condemned magic, the Fathers rejected theurgy, the attempt by pagan Neoplatonists to summon spirits in order to gain wisdom (this despite St. Dionysius’s use of the term in a different sense of the term to denote the Christian liturgy). St. Augustine in The City of God remarked on the delusion of the theurgists in claiming a distinction between their rituals and those of magicians or necromancers. In either case, the saint said, “both classes are the slaves of the deceitful rites of the demons whom they invoke under the names of angels.”

Morello nonetheless attempts to make this distinction, praising the “practical angelology of incubatory spellcasting” practiced by the 15^th-century abbot Johannes Trithemius (a key figure in the development of modern occultism). Consulting Trithemius’s works, one finds rituals to get one’s personal angel to appear visibly or to reveal hidden knowledge in dreams, and techniques to discover the true name of one’s angel, which will enable one to gain power and knowledge. Morello derides Catholics who would condemn such things as practicing a “modern, rationalistic Christianity”, when in fact it is because we know such practices are spiritually arrogant and ripe for demonic deception.

Morello praises two Renaissance figures who likewise made the distinction rejected by St. Augustine. Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino both exploited the short-lived medieval terminology of “natural magic” to include practices that are really “ritual magic.” Among Pico’s theses condemned by Pope Innocent VIII were “not a few propositions which, under a certain disguise of natural philosophy, strive to lend respectability to certain arts that are hostile to the Catholic Faith and injurious to the human race—arts most sharply condemned by their own canons and by the doctrines of the Catholic doctors.”

Ficino practiced the invocation of celestial souls and spirits, and wrote about Hermetic-inspired practices like statue animation, the making of “living gods through human intervention in the cosmos.” He insisted these practices were not the same as demonic magic. One thinks of Blessed Bartolo Longo, the former spiritualist who before his conversion was convinced he was receiving wisdom from an angel of light.

In the end, the philosophy of the Neoplatonists ought not to be conflated with that of Hermeticism. While the two traditions share common roots in pagan ritual practices, they are clearly distinguishable in both philosophy and practice. But neither ought to be taken up uncritically by modern Catholics.

Language and scandal

Defending his book against the first wave of criticism, Morello explained that he was using the word “magic” in an analogical sense. However, even if we could understand his terms in a purely orthodox sense (which is difficult given the many problematic traditions and individuals he offers to illustrate his ideas), the word “magic” has never in the mainstream Catholic tradition been used in a positive way to describe supernatural or religious realities. That alone should convince us not to start using it that way now.

And the question of scandal remains. Morello dismisses this by saying that if we understand his terms rightly, “the objection falls away—at least among literate and thoughtful people.” But one cannot avoid the problem of scandal by asserting that one’s words won’t scandalize the right people. The whole point about the evil of scandal is that it is precisely the weaker brethren who are in danger of being scandalized.

Furthermore, the individuals Morello cites as “literate and thoughtful” readers of his book do not instill confidence in the soundness of Morello’s judgment. These include John Vervaeke, a non-Christian cognitive scientist who claims to have regular conversations with the Greek god Hermes, and Roger Buck, a Catholic esotericist who told Morello that Valentin Tomberg (the occultist-turned-heterodox-Catholic author of Meditations on the Tarot) had after death become a daemon “in the Hellenistic sense,” and is guiding Morello from the celestial spheres.

Morello invites his readers to wander after him into what is evidently an intellectual and spiritual minefield, in which he struts about, blissfully unaware that several of his companions have already had their legs blown off.