Hermits and Hermeticism

 Hermit comes from a word for the desert, and the older Greek form is eremites. Hermits were inspired, I suppose, by the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert, John the Baptist living in the desert, and Christ fasting for forty days in the desert. They tried to become closer to God by removing themselves from society and material possessions.

Hermetic comes from Hermes Trimegistus, who is a conflation of Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth and is the pseudepigraphal author of many magical texts. (Trimegistus, thrice-greatest, was at some point associated with three forms of magic: alchemy, astrology, and spiritual magic). By at least the third century, Gnostics in Egypt were making these connections with Greek philosophy and giving them the aura of Egyptian antiquity (as you can see by the inclusion of Hermetic texts in the Nag Hammadi library). A hermetic seal is one used by alchemists, who needed to prevent contamination of their chemicals by air or water.

So etymologically, the two have nothing to do with each other. I think, though, that the two concepts got a little blurred by the time of the Renaissance. Here are some quotes from the Wikipedia article about Hermeticism that sound like a hermit:

"Rebirth appears central to the practice of hermetic philosophy. The process would begin with a candidate separating themselves from the world before they rid themselves of material vices; they are then reborn as someone completely different from who they were before."

"A focus upon the material life is said to be the only thing that offends God: As processions passing in the road cannot achieve anything themselves yet still obstruct others, so these men merely process through the universe, led by the pleasures of the body." 

There is also this paper by Anna Korndorf: "Hermit vs Hermetism. Hermits and the Hermetic Tradition in European Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." She argues that the hermit of Renaissance garden hermitages was as much a magician as a monk-- a solitary wizard living with his books and natural magic experiments.

Look at these two images. The one on the left resembles Merlin and Odin and Vainamoinen-- old and bearded, carrying a staff, wearing a robe, wandering alone. But the one on the right is the magician, demonstrating that "as above, so below." I think at some point around the birth of the scientific method, our picture of the wizard got mixed with our picture of the hermit.