There are references throughout Hegel’s published and unpublished writings to many of the leading figures and movements of the Hermetic tradition. These references are in large measure approving. This is particularly the case with Hegel’s treatment of Eckhart, Bruno, Paracelsus, and Böhme. Böhme is the most striking case. Hegel accords him considerable space in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy — more space, in fact, than he devotes to many significant mainstream thinkers in the philosophic tradition.
There are, furthermore, numerous Hermetic elements in Hegel’s writings. These include, in broad strokes, a Masonic subtext of “initiation mysticism” in the Phenomenology of Spirit; a Böhmean subtext to the Phenomenology’s famous preface; a Kabbalistic-Böhmean-Lullian influence on the Logic; alchemical-Paracelsian elements in the Philosophy of Nature; an influence of Kabbalistic and Joachimite millennialism on Hegel’s doctrine of Objective Spirit and theory of world history; alchemical and Rosicrucian images in the Philosophy of Right; an influence of the Hermetic tradition of pansophia on the system as a whole; an endorsement of the Hermetic belief in philosophia perennis; and the use of perennial Hermetic symbolic forms (such as the triangle, the circle, and the square) as structural, architectonic devices.
Hegel’s library included Hermetic writings by Agrippa, Böhme, Bruno, and Paracelsus. He read widely on Mesmerism, psychic phenomenal dowsing, precognition, and sorcery. He publicly associated himself with known occultists, like Franz von Baader. He structured his philosophy in a manner identical to the Hermetic use of ‘Correspondences!’ He relied on histories of thought that discussed Hermes Trismegistus, Pico della Mirandola, Robert Fludd, and Knorr von Rosenroth alongside Plato, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. He stated in his lectures more than once that the term “speculative” means the same thing as “mystical.” He believed in an “Earth Spirit” and corresponded with colleagues about the nature of magic. He aligned himself, informally, with “Hermetic” societies such as the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. Even Hegel’s doodles were Hermetic, as we shall see in chapter 3 when I discuss the mysterious “triangle diagram”.
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p. 2