On Béla Hamvas and astrology

A chapter in a new book provides another look at the Hungarian Traditionalist Béla Hamvas (1897-1968). It is “Astral and Hermetic Symbolism in Béla Hamvas’ Tabula Smaragdina” by Péter Kecskés, pp. 169-182 in Astrology and Western Society from the First World War to Covid-19, ed. William Burns (Cham; Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). And it is available online here.

Kecskés considers Hamvas’s Tabula Smaragdina, written between 1947 and 1950, “the most concrete example in all of his writings of a systematic exposure of a divinatory system” (180). It also covers alchemical symbolism. It is not, however, particularly Traditionalist, save in the very broad sense that Traditionalists have always been interested in alchemy and astrology as ways in which traditional cosmology can be restored, as Kecskés correctly notes.