cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/8753

On the Hermetic Afterlife (October — November 2022) A simple question on Discord prompted me to get to thinking: “when we die, do we become wandering souls until we incarnate again?” Like with many such questions, the answer is surprisingly complex, partially due to the incomplete picture we have from the classical Hermetic texts regarding its model of the afterlife and how reincarnation and a final ascent comes into the picture, but also due to all the nuances that arise from what we do see. This is a topic I had given some thought to before, but this was the first time anyone had prompted me for my thoughts, and while I was able to give a quick outline of what my thoughts looked like in Discord, it was hardly satisfying, even for me. To that end, I decided to do a deeper dive into what we can find and what we might piece together through reason and extrapolation for a Hermetic view of death, the dead, and how we can relate to them while alive.