Abstract
Ancient Hermetic treatises mainly consists of ideas and arguments borrowed from Greek philosophy. When read from its perspective, however, they appear confused and incoherent.
Clearly, the language of philosophy is used by their authors in a very much non-philosophical way. In this article I build on contemporary anthropological approaches to the study of ritual language and argue that in the Hermetica philosophical language changes its meaning and becomes 'ritualized'.
Their arguments should thus not just be read in terms of what they say but even more in terms of the effect on the audience they want to achieve. The aim of Hermetism was to relate to God in an immediate way, without the help of traditional religious structures.
The language of philosophy seemed helpful due to its universalist ambitions but it needed to be purged of its 'useless' intellectual aspects and turned to its proper religious use (cf. Asclepius 12-14).