As the 2016 presidential campaign heats up, so do the attacks.
Campaigning for his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, days before the New Hampshire primaries, Bill Clinton characterized her opponent, Bernie Sanders, as so cut off from reality that it’s as if he’s living in a “hermetically sealed box.”
Talk about feeling the Bern.
Such a box is “airtight,” as we know. But why do we call such a seal a hermetic seal? It turns out the former president drew his fire – er, etymological fire– from alchemy.
Hermetic
Neoplatonists and other early mystics identified the Egyptian god, Thoth, with the Greek god, Hermes, and called him Hermes Trismegistus, a god of science and art. They also believed Hermes Trismegistus authored the esoteric Corpus Hermeticum, among other names. This was a body of writings on philosophical and theosophical topics, including such magical ones as bringing statues to life. His name means “Hermes Thrice-Great.”
The Corpus Hermeticum essentially founded Western alchemy, whose metal-melting distillations required completely sealing off glass tubes. The invention of this process – and its name – alchemists credited to Hermes Trismegistus, who knew the secrets of their occult art. In Medieval Latin, Hermes was rendered into an adjective hermeticus, yielding English’s hermetical and hermetic.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) finds records of various hermetic terminology in the 17th century. Both Hermes’ seal and hermetically are dated to English clergyman Thomas Tymme’s 1605 translation of 16th-century French physician Joseph du Chesne’s The Practice of Chymicall and Hermeticall Physicke.
For Hermes’ seal, Tymme writes: “Hermes seale…take the red hote tonges, and therewith wring or nippe the toppe close together; whereby it shall be closed as if it had no vent before.” Tymme uses the adverbial form in a different passage: “A smal cappe or cover, with his receiver, strongly and well luted, hermetically closed rounde about.” Such seals were usually achieved through soldering, welding, or fusion. “Hermetic seal” and “hermetically sealed” as such the OED dates later in the 1600s.
Tymme’s work, it’s worth noting, also provides the OED’s earliest evidence for the word chemistry. And alchemy, so much the precursor to modern chemistry, was once known as the hermetic science.
Now, the ultimate origin of the Greek Hermes is sealed off to us, so to speak. The god’s name, though, also lives on in another English words: hermaphrodite. In Greek mythology, Hermes and Aphrodite had a son, the handsome Hermaphroditos. The water nymph Salmacis fell so deeply in love with him, according to one version of the myth, that she wished the two joined into one. The gods granted her wish, hence this word variously applied to something or someone with both male and female parts.
Folk etymology erroneously connects the Hermes to hermeneutic, I’ll add while we’re on the topic. That word derives from the Greek for “interpreter.”
So, the phrase hermetically sealed looks to alchemy for its origin – so, too, I suspect, will some of the presidential candidates as they try to push on for the nomination after the New Hampshire results come in.
Mashed Radish 
Nice back story, Johannes. It makes me think of one time I was in Naples, trying to chase down some books by Giambattista Della Porta, someone who could have told me all about the Thrice-Great Hermes. This was in the old town, in an area that was a curious mix of modernity and ancient secrets.
I was chased out of the bookstores with the vilest imprecations and denunciations, not to mention threats and the sight of some holstered Glocks. Yet when I stopped off in a lottery office to consult the Smorfia and buy a ticket, a one-eyed beggar came up to me and offered me a Book of Shadows etched into a scroll made of a curiously soft hide whose very touch made me feel cold, even though it was a summer day. She spoke of Della Porta in a lisping and strangely erotic mixture of Neapolitan, English, and Dutch.
There is a point to this story, yet it eludes me at this moment. May you corral it, and benefit from it, unto the seventh generation.
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Never thought about what it actually meant, “hermetically sealed.” Since we can’t use waterboarding on some of our more obnoxious candidates, perhaps we could encourage them to have their mouths hermetically sealed. It appeares that their brains have already undergone the process.
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