Ancient Wisdom and Pagan Spirituality

The whole point of hermetic magic was that it was magical wisdom passed on from ancient times in the tome "Corpus Hermeticum", which was supposedly millenia old. The age of that tome was the only reason why people believed it to be true.

In 1614, Isaac Casaubon proved from its vocabulary and grammar that this text could not have been written several millenia ago. The Corpus Hermeticum was written around 200 AD, by greek Christians.

With this, Hermeticism quickly lost its reputation among scholars and it wouldn't be long until it would be regarded as a hoax and embarassing mistake.



Except... you know. Some people wanted to believe so hard in hermetic magic that they continued to believe it even after their magical tome turned out to actually be a religious scripture attempting to create a new syncretic religion from jewish, christian and hellenistic elements.

And what killed Renaissance-magic for good were the mathematical discoveries by Newton, Descartes, Mersenne... This new math was the midwife of the scientific method and modern science. By the end of the 17th century, science was still young, but it was already slowly and steadily winning the fight against magic.