hermetic
/həːˈmɛtɪk
/adjective
1(Of a seal or closure) complete and airtight: a hermetic seal that ensures perfect waterproofing...
- It is also likely, as period accounts proposed, that the unusually tight hermetic seal of the four coffins and outer masonry helped to preserve the remains.
- Electroforms have been used as flexible joints, hermetic seals, electromagnetic shields, and other special functions, and have long provided designers with unusual shapes.
- The pack's hermetic seal prevents further contamination.
Synonyms
airtight, tight, sealed, shut;
watertight, waterproof
1.1Insulated or protected from outside influences: a hermetic society...
- Content plays a major role in Irving's music, elements drawn from outside the hermetic confines of the electronica genre.
- Outside of a fairly hermetic subculture, comic books used to be dismissed as children's fare.
- Inscrutable and hermetic on the outside, with its rugged, cork-clad walls, the Spanish pavilion conceals a luminous public plaza at its heart.
2 (also Hermetic) Relating to an ancient occult tradition encompassing alchemy, astrology, and theosophy: some saw in the Hermetic texts an anticipation of Christianity...
- After she resurrects him Isis performs a sexual act, impregnating herself with new life, their hawk headed son Horus, who in alchemy and Hermetic tradition appears to be identified as a Christ-anointed one.
- The Hermetic tradition, for example, frequently mixes and matches deities from different pantheons, but it does so with a deep understanding of what it's affecting and why.
- Also, the information was skewed rather heavily towards those those who're from a Hermetic background, or delved into the Western magical traditions.
2.1Difficult to understand because intended for a small number of people with specialized knowledge: obscure and hermetic poems...
- For the mystic, knowledge is hermetic; it is a secret revealed to only those few who have what it takes.
- The sense of heritage, of important but often barely visible poetic traditions, becomes almost theological in the depth of assumed knowledges, and hermetic in its collectivity.
- Fourteen years after his death, the followers of hermetic knowledge received a blow more devastating than anything the Inquisition could deliver to their cause.
Derivatives
hermeticism
- Palmer's obliquity should not be misconstrued as cold blood, his hiddenness as hermeticism.
- This might be understood as a defeatist response to the ideology of ‘difficulty’ and ‘unreadability’, air-brushed by the oxygen of privacy and the pleasing ether of hermeticism.
- Hair, dirt, footprints and pawprints, trapped in the layer of wax, are testaments to the artist's process - counteracting the elegance and hermeticism that might otherwise dominate.
Origin
Mid 17th century (in sense 2): from modern Latin hermeticus, from Hermes, identified with Thoth, regarded as the founder of alchemy and astrology.