Another parallel between Hermeticism and Hegel concerns the initiation process through which the intuitive portion of the intellect is trained to see the Reason inherent in the world. As Fowden notes, Hermetic initiation seems to fall into two parts, one dealing with self-knowledge, the other with knowledge of God*. It can easily be shown, simply on a theoretical level, that these two are intimately wedded. To really know one’s self is to be able to give a complete speech about the conditions of one’s being, and this involves speaking about God and His entire cosmos. As Pico della Mirandola puts it, “he who knows himself knows all things in himself.” Also, in the Near East it was typical to portray God as hovering strangely between transcendence and immanence. The attainment of enlightenment involved somehow seeing the divine in oneself, indeed becoming divine.
[…]
In the Corpus Hermeticum we find a kind of “bridge position” between Egyptian occultism and the modern Hermeticism of Hegel and others. Instead of conceiving words as carrying literal occult power, words come to be seen as carrying a kind of existential empowerment. The ideal of Hermetic theosophy becomes the formulation of a “complete speech” (teleeis logos, “perfect discourse” or perhaps “Encyclopedic discourse,” which means, of course, “circular” discourse). When acquired, the complete speech, which concerns the whole of reality, will radically transform and empower the life of the enlightened one. So Hegel writes in a fragment preserved by Rosenkranz,Every individual is a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity, along which the world develops. Every individual can raise himself to domination over a great length of this chain only if he realizes the goal of this great necessity and, by virtue of this knowledge, learns to speak the magic words which evoke its shape. The knowledge of how to simultaneously absorb and elevate oneself beyond the total energy of suffering and antithesis that has dominated the world and all forms of its development for thousands of years — this knowledge can be gathered from philosophy alone.**
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), pp. 11-2
* Fowden, Garth. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 106
** Karl Rosencranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 141. The fragment is referred to by Harris and Knox as “The Supposed Conclusion of the System of Ethical Life.” See H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 178.
Cf. W.R. Bion’s ‘language of achievement’.