Kristine Hannak

My project studies the transformation of Hermetic and (radical-) Pietist ideas in the works of Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734), known as a free thinker and alchemist in the early Enlightenment. I focus on the aspect of the individual's religious autonomy, which I trace back to its roots in Hermetic and mystical discourses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus the project intends to show that these esoteric discourses did not contradict enlightened streams of thought, but that they sometimes even helped to inspire well-known Enlightenment ideas – without being triggered by the Enlightenment discourse itself. Methodologically I proceed in two steps: First, I reconstruct the main arguments of the conflict between Lutheran Orthodoxy and esoteric discourses, notably Hermetic, mystical and theosophical authors. The second step will be an analysis of Dippel's major works, investigating how he picked up Hermetic, mystical and theosophical arguments and read them "in the light of reason." This secularized Hermeticism plays a major role for Dippel in the debates of the first decades of the eighteenth century in which he participated as an outspoken freethinker.

The project thus reflects on the historical complexity behind the question of a supposed antagonism between enlightened and Hermetic discourses. Not only does the study of long-neglected sources show that the texts of Hermes or Jakob Böhme were not generally considered superstitious in the eighteenth century, but their prolific reception and reinterpretation also indicates that they play a major role in developing key eighteenth-century concepts such as the notion of religious individuality or tolerance. This connect between Hermetic discourses and central Enlightenment concepts has long been obscured by the traditional understanding of the Enlightenment as the 'Age of Reason'.