The Rosicrucians provided a template (and much written material) for the New Thought writers, who further extrapolated and developed the concepts formed by the unification of the Christian and Hermetic philosophies. But how was it that the Rosicrucians came upon this information to begin with? What exactly are the Hermetic teachings and where do they come from?
The Hermetic Origins of the Mind Cure
Mind leads phenomena
Mind is the main factor and forerunner of all actions
If one speaks or acts with a cruel mind,
Misery follows, as the cart follows the horse.
Phenomena are led by the mind.
Mind is the main factor and forerunner of all actions.
If one speaks or acts with pure mind,
Happiness follows, as a shadow follows its source.
—Dharmapada
The idea that the body can be healed by a suggestion of the mind, either one’s own or that of another, is an ancient one indeed. In Pharoahnic Egypt, where many place the origins of medicine,42 the soul and the mind act directly on the state of the body’s health. The Aesculapian temples of Alexandria utilized the same healing methodologies of the Mesmerists and even Jesus, predating them by some hundreds of years.
Old temple disciplines included purification, temple-sleep, and various hypnotic rest states. Bodily processes were aroused and focused through intensities of suggestion, through touching the patient, along with lifting the faith of one who was ill.43
Such recommendations and cures have been found on Egyptian papyri dating as far back as 2000 BC. And they always speak of Thoth and Hermes.
Eventually all the great medical centers were located at the chief capitals along the Nile. These shrines were depositories of medical lore, and the ancient traditions are confirmed by the lists of diseases and their cures. Clement refers to forty-two Hermetic books at the temple of Hermopolis, of which six were medical texts giving formulas and remedies. On the walls of sanctuaries were inscriptions and tablets in commemoration of miraculous cures with statues and steles erected by former patients in grateful recognition of cures effected by the divinity.44
The power of the mind as it relates to the higher mind of God is tantamount to Hermetic thought. And this is echoed in the teachings of Phineas Quimby: “Mind is matter in solution and matter is mind in form.” From The Quimby Manuscripts:
1. Mind is changeable “spiritual matter,” a receptive, moldable something, susceptible to numerous subtle influences, often erroneous opinions (operating even when one is not consciously thinking about them).
2. Man is spiritual and has spiritual senses.
3. “Spiritual man can become open to and use spiritual power.” That means that man is not to follow his own inclinations, but to pursue Wisdom’s way.
All matter is contained in the spiritual mind. The Hermetic God is a mind that is immanent throughout the cosmos. This is stated repeatedly throughout the Corpus Hermeticum. In the Corpus Hermeticum V we see this concept expressed even in its title, “That God is invisible and entirely visible.”
I [am Mind and] I see another Mind, the one that [moves] the soul! I see the one that moves me from pure forgetfulness. You give me power! I see myself! I want to speak! Fear restrains me. I have found the beginning of the power that is above all powers, the one that has no beginning. I see a fountain bubbling with life. I have said, my son, that I am Mind. I have seen! Language is not able to reveal this. For the entire eighth, my son, and the souls that are in it, and the angels, sing a hymn in silence. And I, Mind, understand.45
The mind is a place of its own. It can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.
—John Milton
The healing methodologies of the New Testament Christ and those of the Hermetic Egyptians are strikingly similar. Faith healings were carried out long before Yesu arrived on the scene. Belief was used by the ancients to activate the healing powers within the patient. A perfect example of faith healing can be found in the caduceus story of Moses. Moses uses the serpent on the staff to heal his people in the wilderness, and this gesture is more tied to the mind cure than one might think.
The significance of looking on the bronze serpent and living is that the healing is based on faith, not on the copper serpent itself; this was emphasized later in John 3:14 and 3:15, when Jesus refers to this incident to say that the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that all who believe on Him will have eternal life. The bronze serpent illustrates that the “instrument of judgment becomes the means of deliverance.” In this episode, the symbol of pain and death becomes a symbol of healing.46
In exorcisms of demons and the devil, Jesus cured a variety of physical ailments that were regarded as demonic possession, including blindness (John 9:2), dumbness (Matt 9:32, Luke 11:14), blindness and dumbness (Matt 12:22), the gout (Luke 13:11), dropsy (Luke 14:2), leprosy (Luke 17:12), palsy (Mark 2:5), fever (Luke 4:38) and dystrophy or paralysis (Mark 3:5). In one instance, not only is the victim not a follower of Jesus, but he rebukes him entirely:
And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him. And when the unclean spirit had torn him, and cried with a loud voice, he came out of him. (Mark 1:23)
The majority of the healings were actuated by the faith of the sick, not the actions of Christ himself. He stated, “Your faith has made you well.” This, importantly, places the power of healing in the hands of the sick, rather than it being a supernatural act.
Faith healing has been taken to the extreme by some Pentecostal churches in America, and has come to resemble assembly lines rather than personal, individual healing sessions. Though they wouldn’t admit this, the churches’ faith healing owes a stylistic debt to the New Thought movement, and therefore the Hermetic ideals:
It is important to note at the outset that the bulk of [the Faith movement’s] theology can be traced directly to the cultic teachings of New Thought metaphysics. Thus, much of the theology of the Faith movement can also be found in such clearly pseudo-Christian cults as Religious Science, Christian Science, and the Unity School of Christianity. Although proponents of Faith theology have attempted to sanitize the metaphysical concept of the “power of mind” by substituting in its stead the “force of faith,” for all practical purposes they have made a distinction without a difference. New Thought writer Warren Felt Evans, for example, wrote that “faith is the most intense form of mental action.”47
The Catholic church has disparaged the Evangelical movement as “prosperity gospel,” not viewing it as Christian at all. Many Christian leaders condemn the idea that God will reward the faithful with health and wealth. We might remember the scandals of popular televangelists of the 1980s who used people’s donations to support their lavish lifestyles. These televangelists—such as Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Paul Crouch and Kenneth Copeland—encouraged their followers to “sow a seed” of faith by donating to their ministries in order to recoup prosperity in the future.
Whether Egyptians, Greeks, or another ancient civilization had a hand in it, the importance of stimulating the patients’ own healing energies was understood to be the cause for the miraculous cures which did take place, miracles equal to, and sometimes greater than, those performed by Jesus Christ, as described