Hermeneuticon is a place for encyclopedic entries, index, cross-index, annotation, and curated information about topics (people, things, places, events, and ideas) mentioned in the materials at the library site. Hermeneutics is, broadly, the interpretation of literary texts, and this Hermeneuticon can be a place for work that helps interpret the material of the library. Specifically, where Metadata and Concordance projects might be primarily an exegesis of the words and grammar deeper into material, Hermeneuticon might be seen as primarily a kind of positive, un-biased, eisegesis that draws larger meaning and connections from that same material. But, all of these are in the context of the overall subject matter of the library and the overall sphere of knowledge.

Originally, Hermeneuticon was an entire supplemental site, from which parts were transcluded into popups on the main library site. Hermeneuticon was for projects which required interaction and versioning of documents, to enhance the overall mission of Hermetic Library by providing a place where special projects ideal to a wiki implementation could be pursued.

When I moved the main site into a wiki engine, I also migrated all the wiki content from the Hermeneuticon site so they are now all together. The wiki content of the old site was Hermeneuticon wiki itself, Metadata, Concordance, and The Serapeion Project.

There was one other public project, an alpha version tool Aleister Crowley Reference Desk, aka Aleister Crowley Database (ACDB), or LibriDB, which I had started to develop to help programmatically create concordance information; though that has not, yet, been re-implemented. Want to work on that? Offer to help!

The 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 hermeticism and Hermetic Library are related.