What This Is

The Hermetic School is a YouTube channel and this website, run from Brazil and written in English. It studies the Western esoteric tradition, above all alchemy and Hermeticism, and the way twentieth-century depth psychology, principally C.G. Jung, came to read it. The centre of the work is THE GREAT WORK, a twenty-four part series that follows the operations of the alchemical opus in order, with an essay on this site for every episode and a free guided path through them.

How We Read the Sources

What the text says comes before what it is for

Every essay tries to keep two things apart: what a historical text actually says, and what later readers made of it. The alchemists did not write psychology; Jung read them psychologically, and said so. The Kybalion is a book of 1908, not an ancient text. The Emerald Tablet is an alchemical text first attested in Arabic, not part of the Corpus Hermeticum. When a teaching has no older source, we say that too. The seven principles page shows this method at work: each principle stands beside the older passage it draws on, or beside a note that there is none.

Primary sources, named

Essays are written from primary sources and the major scholarship on them, and each one lists them: Jung's Collected Works, Marie-Louise von Franz, Edward Edinger, the Rosarium Philosophorum, the Corpus Hermeticum and others. Where we cite a finding from modern research, we name the study and do not stretch it beyond what it found.

Quotations are checked

Quotations are checked against the source before they are published, and long passages are quoted from public-domain translations: G.R.S. Mead's Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906) for the Corpus Hermeticum, and Isaac Newton's translation of the Emerald Tablet. We point readers to modern scholarly translations, such as Brian Copenhaver's Hermetica (1992), for serious study. Lines that circulate online under famous names but cannot be traced to a source are not used.

Where the Limits Are

This material describes how traditions have interpreted human experience. It is educational and historical. It is not therapy, it is not a diagnosis, and it has no authority over a medical condition. The alchemical stages can resemble depression, dissociation, burnout and grief from the inside, and being wrong about which one you are in is costly. Every essay on these stages names the conditions that imitate them and says plainly when something needs a clinician rather than a framework.

If you are struggling, please contact a licensed professional or a crisis line in your country (findahelpline.com).

Corrections

If you find a misquotation, a wrong attribution or a factual error, write to contact@thehermeticschool.org with the page and the source. We correct errors in the text and, for substantive ones, add a note saying what changed and when.

How This Is Funded

The research behind the series and this site is funded by the written work: eight ebooks sold through Gumroad. There is no advertising on this site and no advertising trackers. Analytics load only if you accept them, and the stage finder, the practice tools and the guided path store nothing about you on our side. The details are in the privacy notice.