Thoughts on Van Gogh and Occult Knowledge

This is an unorganized post that attempts to sort some of my ideas about Van Gogh and what I’ve learned about “Occult Knowledge”. Some of the things I say might not be true, but I’ll leave them for now because I don’t think they affect the larger ideas I want to focus on.

Van Gogh

Van Gogh was a part of the Dutch Calvinist branch of Christianity. When he was 22 he became an assistant to a methodist minister and at 23 he applied to theology school. He didn’t make it into the school but he was assigned as a missionary to the poor community of Borinage in the Netherlands. It’s clear to me reading about this chapter in Van Gogh’s life that he wasn’t just going through the motions. He practiced his beliefs with a great intensity, and during this time he adopted what some would call “radical asceticism.”

I need to find the source material, but apparently, “He gave away his clothes” and slept on straw instead of a traditional bed. I’d like to find more examples. But generally speaking, I interpret this as learning that Van Gogh didn’t accept the rules as they were presented. He was willing to question the rules and define his own. I can imagine him explaining his reasoning and how he was walking in the steps of Jesus and renouncing a life of ease and pursuing a spiritual path. Because of this, the church dismissed him and Van Gogh moved on to a pursuit of art. But he still kept his spiritual roots.

I think it’s clear to me that Van Gogh lived in poverty at this point in his life, and into the time period when he was painting. I mean that in this way: He didn’t have his own source of money. At 23, he relied on the church for what he had. Later when he relied on money from his brother Theo who was an art dealer. From what I read, Van Gogh came from a family labeled as a “dynasty of art dealers” but also a family that was religious. This was a productive family, embedded into society, and Van Gogh had his family as a safety net. He might not have acknowledged it or taken full advantage of it, but I think it was there, and in some part this allowed him to pursue his art.

It’s clear to me that Van Gogh embodied the essence of creative and expressive energy. Perhaps not in a balanced, well rounded way, but in a sharp, explosive, and focused way throughout his whole life.

Allow me to speculate. Van Gogh is working as art dealer (this is before he tried to go into the ministry). Apparently he had disagreements with his employer and the customers. I can imagine the clash of opinions or the how Van Gogh’s may have overemphasized facts or chosen to ignore some facts. His expressive energy was so extensive that business and customers viewed it as threatening, distasteful, disobedient, rude, etc. Was his ego bigger than his place in life? You might say that.

Occult Knowledge

How does Van Gogh related to occult knowledge? Let me talk a bit about what else I’ve learned about the so called “Occult”.

Factually speaking, the Greeks had a god named Hermes and he was embedded in various parts of the culture. Similar to religion today, some people probably took Hermes to be a literal entity and others took him to be a more figurative, symbolic idea.

The Egyptions had a god named Thoth who was embedded in their culture.

When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt around 3rd century BCE, you start to have the merging of cultures and eventually Hermes and Thoth are identified as the same entity. This was something the Greeks called Interpretatio_graeca. It was a conqueror redefining the culture sort of thing. But as is often the case, the conquered often accepted the ideas of the conquerors, so Egyptians eventually accept this as truth as well. Eventually a sizable number of people identified both as the same god, and they rebranded this entity “Hermes Trismegistus”. The Greeks renamed the Egyptian city of Khmun (the cult center for Thoth) to “Hermopolis” (City of Hermes).

All of that is true. Where we get into speculation and degrees of truth is this: Apparently this new cult center was a central library of wisdom, writing, and priests and scribes who managed all the knowledge. Some of this knowledge was kept, passed down, reinterpreted, and reorganized into a larger category of work called the Hermetica. The works in the Hermetica can be categorized as “technical” Hermetica or “religio-philosophical” Hermetica.

Since that time, all the way up to modern times, there have been many translations and compilation of the Hermetica texts. The ideas that come out of this are often labeled “occult” (or secret) knowledge. It seems that this branding was probably the result of persecution from various organized religions that weren’t happy with alternative belief system. I speculate the name just stuck, and for authors, the name invokes a sort of magnetic mystique that’s great for enticing people to read your books. Humans naturally want to know secret or forbidden knowledge.

Around 1900, a guy named William Walker Atkinson wrote a book called The Kybalion which is a sort of summary of the principles found in the Hermetica texts. The name was made up by William probably for marketing purposes. From what I understand, this book is a synthesis of both the ideas in the Hermetica and the ideas of figures associated with Occultism around 1900s.

The Connection

I’ve returned to this writing after about a month. I’m not sure where I was going with this, but I’ll close with this.

The common theme between the Hermetic writings, The Kybalion, and the Occult ideas of the 1900s (which appear to be very much rooted in the Kabbalah), is that “all is mind.” It’s the idea that there is an unknowable thing that causes other things to come into some form of existence. That unknowable thing, for lack of a better word, is “the mind of God.” And somehow, humans and the world around us are emanation of that mind. And within us, our own minds are somewhat akin to the mind of God - we have the ability to think, act, and cause things to happen around us (“as above so below”).

So when I also learned about Van Gogh’s extensive creative work, I couldn’t help but think about these ideas. It’s clear to me that Van Gogh had a strong conception of god in his life, and that was one of the factors in his creative expressive energy.