Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you're listening to the Astrology podcast in this episode

I'm maybe talking with Sam Block about ancient Hermeticism and we're going to be talking about that as a spiritual and

Philosophical and religious tradition from the ancient world. So hey Sam welcome to the show. Hey, it's good to be here

Yeah, so you are the author of last year you wrote a series of

Posts on your website on your blog, which is titled the digital Ambler on

Hermeticism and frequently asked questions about ancient Hermeticism that I thought was a really great treatment and really good introduction to that topic and

So I've been meaning to talk to somebody about this for a while because it's such a complicated issue

But it was such an important philosophy that interacted with ancient Hellenistic astrology and very important in interesting ways

So I was hoping we could give kind of like an overview for those that don't have any background on what ancient

Hermeticism is today and some of the different philosophical and religious concepts associated with it

So in terms of the starting point for that

What do we know about what survives of ancient Hermeticism today from the classical world?

Plenty it is how it got here kind of is a messy story into itself

So we have a whole bunch of texts that survive from the ancient world

And when I say ancient specifically, I mean the period from about

First 4th century CE first to the 4th century CE. Yeah, roughly speaking. Okay from specifically row and empire period Egypt

So this is kind of still in Hellenistic Egypt just

Post tolemic period so especially like like Alexandria Egypt

Alexandria I personally favor more of a febes sintering but yeah all the Nile was heavily urbanized up and down

So yeah, so this is after that the Hellenistic period after Alexander the Alexander the great

From the Greeks and Macedonians came in and conquered

Egypt and Mesopotamian parts of the Mediterranean world and then all of a sudden

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