The Song of Hermes

The seven notes of the World Song

In November I did a livestream on the seven main “notes” of Hermeticism. These are energetic “tones” you can learn to hear & feel in order to dance with the fractal cosmos on Hermetic time (what’s normally called the Anima Mundi).

If you want a more visual metaphor, you can think of these seven as a kind of color palate. Everything has color, but all color is a mix of the seven rainbow colors. Learning to “see” these seven Hermetic “colors” lets you play with painting reality in a kind of direct and magical way.

I described a little more in the announcement for November’s talk. This post is sharing the replay of that talk with some commentary and resources. The point of this talk is to give you an embodied taste of each of the seven “notes” so you have a clear sense of what to tune into.

Here’s the initial overview at the start to give some context:

The rest of the talk goes through the seven “notes”, grounding in a kind of hidden eighth “note”. They’re meant to be practices more than explanations. “Energetic transmissions” if you like.

In case it makes navigating the practices easier, I want to offer a kind of overview of those seven Hermetic energies. Here’s how they show up in four domains I often reference:

There are lots of other relevant domains, like psychology and herbalism. But if you can start to feel the “pure tone” of each of these, you’ll be able to notice how these “notes” show up in whatever domain you’re paying attention to.

You might notice, by the way, that there are eight things here. The “why” behind that is clearest in the column for music: Saturn is the higher octave of Earth (represented in astrology by the ascendant). Octaves are the same note played at a higher energy. The “music of the spheres” here hints at an equivalence between Earth and Saturn that shows up throughout Hermeticism.

(As one other example: The Great Work of alchemy is about transforming Earthly consciousness (Ascendant/Malkuth) into Solar consciousness (Sun/Tiphareth), which most people summarize as turning lead into gold. Gold is indeed the metal of the Sun, but lead is the metal of Saturn.)

So with that, let’s get into the meat of it!