Hegel’s attitude toward the Hermetic tradition was cautious, but cautiously approving. Hegel saw the Hermetic tradition as a manifestation of unconscious wisdom, of the perennial philosophy, struggling to transcend its purely sensuous form. This explains his strongly positive attitude to Böhme, even though Böhme grossly violates Hegel’s prohibition on “picture-thinking”. Hegel’s claim is that Böhme comes close to the truth, even though he is caught in “the hard, knotty oak of the senses.” What accounts for Böhme’s inspiration? My contention is that Hegel would have to admit that eternal truth simply happens to “well up” in certain special individuals, in the form of certain archetypal forms of expression. Hegel refers to religions as “sprouting up fortuitously, like the flowers and creations of nature, as foreshadowings, images, representations, without [our. – GM] knowing where they come from or where they are going to” (Lectures on the History of Religion. 3 vols., ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson et al. (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 1:196; Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 3 Bde., hrsg.v. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983-87), 1:106). Hegel states that “Religion is a begetting of the divine spirit, not an invention of human beings but an effect of the divine at work, of the divine productive process within humanity” (LPR 1:130; VPR 1:46). Recall the Zusatz to the Encyclopedia Logic quoted earlier: “It should … be mentioned here that the meaning of the speculative is to be understood as being the same as what used in earlier times to be called the ‘mystical.'”*
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), pp. 103-4
* The passage reads more fully as follows: “It should … be mentioned here that the meaning of rhe speculative is to be understood as being the same as what used in earlier times to be called ‘mystical’. … When we speak of the ‘mystical’ nowadays, it is taken to be synonymous with what is mysterious and incomprehensible; and, depending on the ways their culture and mentality vary in other respects, some people treat the mysterious and incomprehensible as what is authentic and genuine, whilst others regard it as belonging to the domain of superstition and deception. About this we must remark first that’the mystical’ is certainly something mysterious, but only for the understanding, and then only because abstract identity is the principle of the understanding. But when it is regarded as synonymous with the speculative, the mystical is the concrete unity of just those determinations that count as true for the understanding only in their separation and opposition. So if those who recognise the mystical as what is genuine say that it is something utterly mysterious, and just leave it at that, they are only declaring that for them, too, thinking has only the significance of an abstract positing of identity, and that in order to attain the truth we must renounce thinking, or, as they frequently put it, that we must ‘take reason captive.’ As we have seen, however, the abstract thinking of the understanding is so far from being something firm and ultimate that it proves itself, on the contrary, to be a constant sublating of itself and an overturning into its opposite, whereas the rational as such is rational precisely because it contains both of the opposites as ideal moments within itself. Thus, everything rational can equally be called ‘mystical’; but this only amounts to saying that it transcends the understanding. It does not at all imply that what is so spoken of must be considered inaccessible to thinking and incomprehensible” (EL §82, Z; The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 133; emphasis added).