Tradycja hermetyczna w Rękopisie znalezionym w Saragossie Jana Potockiego. Rekonesans problematyki
Hermetic Tradition in Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Reconnaissance of the Issues

Summary/Abstract: Traces of the presence of the Hermetic tradition in Father Chairemon’s churching in the 1794 and 1804 versions of JanPotocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa were already noticed more than 100 years ago by Tadeusz Sinko. Sinkoalso noted that the quotations from Poimandres and from De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum are fairly faithful paraphrasesnot of the Greek originals, but of their Latin translation by Marsilio Ficino. However, no further conclusions have yetbeen drawn from this statement. At this stage of the research, the question of the extent to which the decision to citeHermetic texts via the Italian Renaissance tradition was a conscious authorial act and should be interpreted as suchmust remain unanswered. The author situates the references to the Renaissance Hermetic tradition in the context ofa general interpretation of the story of the Eternal Jew (present only in the 1794 and 1804 versions of the novel), towhich he has devoted a separate study, and posits that it is precisely around the speeches of Father Chairemon thatit accrues. They form the real nucleus and give meaning to the narrative. He also makes conjectures about its implicitlinks with the thinking of progressive freemasonry on religio duplex. Under this term was the conviction, most clearlyexpressed by Carl Leonhard Reinhold in his text The Hebrew Mysteries, that the ancient Egyptians concealed underthe guise of polytheism a philosophy of nature heralding modern Spinozism. The reference to renaissance Hermeticthought, and thus to the idea, popular at the turn of the 17th and 18th century, that the religion of ancient Egypt wasthe repository of all later cults, can therefore be interpreted as a creative attempt to confront and update the idea of theperennial philosophy in a spirit of tolerance and enlightened deism. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa would thus beplaced in a row with works such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Natan the Wise or Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s WilhelmMeister’s Journeyman Years.

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