This study examines the foundations of the European modernity in relation to the Hermetic tradition and its cosmological approach to life and knowledge. The symmetry of Dante, medicine of Paracelsus and science of Goethe form the background for this investigation of the modernist regime - its truth and method, pure and applied, its science of vivisection and technology of obsolescence. The leading hypothesis is that the self, the world and the other can have better relations in the future than they have had in the modern past from the new Eucharist to the bomb.