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 in the New Testament. The authors are not attempting to state that Jesus was erroneous or insincere in his teachings or practices, simply that a lineage of these traditions existed long before Jesus’ existence. The most overt similarities between the healing methods of Jesus and the Hermeticists can be found with Asclepius, a student of Hermes Trismegistus, as suggested by the existence of the Corpus Hermeticum writing, “The Asclepiad.” The cult of the Asclepians was popular around 300 BC, the same time that Alexandria began to flourish, when Asclepius was adapted by the Greeks and came to be known as the Greek god of healing. Like Christ, Asclepius died and descended to the underworld before being resurrected. Both Asclepius and Christ were the sons of a mortal woman and a god, Asclepius being born to Apollo and Christ being born to Jehova.
Asclepius, like Jesus, used no small amount of faith when healing the sick in his temples:
Tales of the marvelous cures effected at the healing temples spread the fame of the healing deity, Asklepios, throughout Greece. It was such common knowledge that the sick, in going to these sanctuaries for relief, were probably already imbued with a certain religious fervor, while their imagination was excited by the hope that they also might be the recipient of the divine grace.48
In the Iamata, Asclepius is recorded as healing such illnesses as paralysis and blindness, some of Jesus’ most famous accomplishments. The early Christian church Fathers were not ignorant of these similarities, and went about replacing the Asclepian temples with Christian churches whenever possible. In the Byzantine empire, for example, where the popularity of Asclepius was rampant, the Christian church made quick work of pronouncing him an agent of the Devil, and then converted or killed all of his followers:
Despite the institutionalization of Christianity as the state religion of the Byzantine Empire, the popularity of the pagan cult of Asclepius was unshaken. Christianity’s inability to triumph provoked resentment on the part of the Church Fathers, which they released in demonizing Asclepius who, according to Lactantius and the Acta Pilati, cast out devils in the name of the Devil, and in ostracizing Asclepius’ medical disciples—the doctors. The vindictiveness unleashed in the destruction by Christians of Asclepius’ shrines, notably at Dor, was the popular expression and outlet of the same frustration. As Asclepius persisted in attracting followers, the Church changed its tactics. It absorbed physically
