At this time the Hermetic Corpus was seen as being more ancient than both Plato and Pythagoras, though St Augustine thought Hermes lived later than Moses. Whilst Augustine opposed hermeticism, some Renaissance scholars claimed that Hermetic thought was closer to Christianity than those of Ancient Greece.
However the claim that hermeticism embodied the oldest wisdom in the world never recovered from the work of Isaac Causabon published in 1614 which showed that the texts were written sometime between 200 and 300 AD by some "semi-christians". This view was based on careful linguistic analysis.
Hermetic magic underwent a 19th century revival in Western Europe, where it was practiced by people such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aurum Solis and Eliphas Lévi.
From the arcane language associated with these beliefs, comes the second meaning: