Hegel believes that through the “purificatory initiation” of the Phenomenology, he has, in effect, put himself in an altered state of consciousness, beyond thhe distinction between subject and object, whereupon the dialectic of the Logic simply flows from nothing. […] [T]he philosopher is a vehicle of the muses: an oracle through which Spirit expresses itself, an automatic writer who passively watches the play of the dialectic as it develops on his page.
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p. 154