Hermeneuticon and the Hermeneuticon Wiki are some of the original site enhancements I’d planned to develop when I took over the Hermetic Library site. Hermeneuticon and projects hosted there are intended to enhance the content of the main library site by offering a place for the kind of additional information I personally find interesting and useful, and, of course, hope you will also. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons this companion site has lain fallow for far too long …

Recently I’ve renovated the Hermeneuticon site a bit, but also completely converted the Hermeneuticon Wiki to a new wiki engine and also more closely integrated it with the library.

The Hermeneuticon site name is inspired by and a play on the folk etymology of “hermeneutics”, which suggests that the origin comes from Hermes, the messenger of the gods in Greek religion; because of the adianoeta and allegory with Hermes Trismegistus, to whom the terms hermeticism and hermetic are related.

I wanted to have a place where I could develop projects that added value to and encourage engagement with the texts offered by the main library site through sharing metadata, including hermeneutics, cross-indexes, cross-references, annotations and other marginalia; primarily through a wiki where such information could be collectively developed, but also through other projects as well.

There are currently five projects living at Hermeneuticon, four of which are being built on the wiki, including the Hermeneuticon Wiki itself but also Metadata, Concordance and Serapeion project spaces. A fifth project, the Aleister Crowley Reference Desk, is a separate development intended as a resource and generator for useful information, especially concordance tables and tag clouds, but is still in a very early alpha state though it may see itself renovated soon as well to support the rest of the projects, especially the Concordance Project for which it was originally developed.

The primary tool at Hermeneuticon is the wiki.

The Hermeneuticon Wiki root namespace is intended to develop entries on key terms found across the entire main library site, similar to what one might expect from a wiki-based encyclopedia. However, articles in the primary namespace are intended to be unique resources, not copies or duplicates of another encyclopedia. If there are other articles or references, instead of importing them there, as one might on some other wiki, one will simply add them to one of the reference link lists toward the end of the article. However, if the material in another resource is of particular interest, one should consider quoting from those resources in an appropriately fair use citation.

There are some initial examples of articles and you can take a gander at all the pages and namespaces via the sitemap. Mostly there are some stub articles, but there are a few just a little bit more filled out, such as the entry for Florence Farr, to give you an idea.

I especially want to point out to you today the way that the information from the Metadata Project at the wiki is now more fully integrated with the rest of the library. As I mentioned already, the idea of offering a place for metadata is to increase the breadth and depth of engagement with the texts on the site. I think an example will do much to demonstrate what I mean by all of this.

If you head over to the main library site, and for this example I’m looking at Liber Ararita, in the upper right corner of most pages are a few useful links, such as a site search tool (including a convenient way to add the Hermetic Library site search to your browser, by clicking on the ‘+’ mark, if your browser supports such things), a link which opens some helpful bookmarking links, and a ‘Metadata’ link.

Clicking on this Metadata link will open a window which is populated with information directly and dynamically pulled from the matching page on the wiki from the Metadata Project.

I think you can see from this example the potential for adding useful hermeneutics, cross-indexes, cross-references, annotations and other marginalia that are not part of the text itself, but of interest to the student and researcher, to the site. On the whole, there are not many entries available yet, but if you have comments, questions, or suggestions about these things or the site in general, feel free to contact me via the librarian alias.