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lectures_on_alchemy [2007-10-26 09:06] – created 192.168.1.44lectures_on_alchemy [2013-03-12 19:01] (current) – nik
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 ====Lectures on Alchemy==== ====Lectures on Alchemy====
-by [[Terrence McKenna]] as transcribed by David Ulansey+by [[Terence McKenna]] as transcribed by David Ulansey
  
  
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-What the Hermetic Corpus is is the most poetic and cleanly expressed outpouring of ancient knowledge that we possess. But it was reworked in the hands of these late Hellenistic peoples and it is essentially a religion of the redemption of the earth through magic. It has great debt to a tradition called Sevillian which means to mean Mandeanism and Mandeanism was a kind of proto-Hellenistic gnosis that laid great stress on the power of life, Zoa, Bios, and in that sense it has a tremendously contemporary ring to it.+What the [[Corpus Hermeticum|Hermetic Corpus]] is is the most poetic and cleanly expressed outpouring of ancient knowledge that we possess. But it was reworked in the hands of these late Hellenistic peoples and it is essentially a religion of the redemption of the earth through magic. It has great debt to a tradition called Sevillian which means to mean Mandeanism and Mandeanism was a kind of proto-Hellenistic gnosis that laid great stress on the power of life, Zoa, Bios, and in that sense it has a tremendously contemporary ring to it.
  
    
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 I'll show you some books and this is by no means exhaustive. The literature on hermeticism and alchemy is vast and I could have brought 5 or 6 boxes of this size from my own library. This a smattering. It doesn't mean that what I show you is the best. It simply tries to spread over a large area. Oh, someone put this here. This is a new novel that's just been published by Lindsay Clark called The Chemical Wedding and I see last week it was number 10 on the New York Time's best sellers list which is astonishing for such an obscure subject. It's a retelling of a famous incident in alchemy in the 19th century when a woman named Mary Alice Datwood, who had a very, very close relationship to her father, Dr. South, and the two of them worked together, she on a text, he on a long poem and to make a long story short, eventually they decided to destroy both the poem and the book feeling that they had said too much and given the secret away-at least that's one version. So this is fictionalized retelling of that incident intercut with a modern cast of characters very clearly modelled on the poet Robert Graves. So if you like to absorb your information in a fictionalized form, this is a wonderful book. John Borman the movie director recently optioned this book-the guy who made "The Emereld Forest" and "Excalibur" so we may have an alchemical movie downstream, a year or two. I'll show you some books and this is by no means exhaustive. The literature on hermeticism and alchemy is vast and I could have brought 5 or 6 boxes of this size from my own library. This a smattering. It doesn't mean that what I show you is the best. It simply tries to spread over a large area. Oh, someone put this here. This is a new novel that's just been published by Lindsay Clark called The Chemical Wedding and I see last week it was number 10 on the New York Time's best sellers list which is astonishing for such an obscure subject. It's a retelling of a famous incident in alchemy in the 19th century when a woman named Mary Alice Datwood, who had a very, very close relationship to her father, Dr. South, and the two of them worked together, she on a text, he on a long poem and to make a long story short, eventually they decided to destroy both the poem and the book feeling that they had said too much and given the secret away-at least that's one version. So this is fictionalized retelling of that incident intercut with a modern cast of characters very clearly modelled on the poet Robert Graves. So if you like to absorb your information in a fictionalized form, this is a wonderful book. John Borman the movie director recently optioned this book-the guy who made "The Emereld Forest" and "Excalibur" so we may have an alchemical movie downstream, a year or two.
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 A number of compendiums of alchemical texts have been published over the centuries and if you wish to study alchemy you have to obtain these. If you're fortunate enough to read French you should read Vespugiare and Berthelo. They collected alchemical texts into encyclopedic-sized volumes but unfortunately these have never really come into English. One that did come into English is the Museum Hermeticum Amplificarum et Theatrum, I think, which A.E. Waite, who some of you may know for his role in the Golden Dawn, collected. There are about 40 alchemical texts and all the greats are in here: Lull, Vilanova, Michael Maier, Basil Valentine, Kramer, Edward Kelly and so on and so forth. A number of compendiums of alchemical texts have been published over the centuries and if you wish to study alchemy you have to obtain these. If you're fortunate enough to read French you should read Vespugiare and Berthelo. They collected alchemical texts into encyclopedic-sized volumes but unfortunately these have never really come into English. One that did come into English is the Museum Hermeticum Amplificarum et Theatrum, I think, which A.E. Waite, who some of you may know for his role in the Golden Dawn, collected. There are about 40 alchemical texts and all the greats are in here: Lull, Vilanova, Michael Maier, Basil Valentine, Kramer, Edward Kelly and so on and so forth.
  
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 ==== part 2 ==== ==== part 2 ====
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 The place to begin, I think, is obviously with the question "Who is Hermes Trismegistus?" What are we talking about here? I mean, this sounds so incredibly exotic to people. The Renaissance had the concept of what it called the Presqui Poaloque (sp?) and if my Latin and Greek irritates you, you have to understand you're dealing with a boy from a coal mining town in Colorado, so I do mangle these things. The Presqui Paoloque were Orpheus, Moses, and primarily Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes Trismegistus was the primary source, from the point of view of the Renaissance, of this whole mysterious tradition and, you recall from last night's lecture, this is based on a misunderstanding. The Renaissance believed that Hermes Trismegistus was older than Moses. We know now, thanks to Issac and Marik Casaubon, two philologists of the early 17th century, that definitely the Hermetic corpus was composed between the first and second centuries after Christ. The method of the Casaubons was to examine the philosophical language of the Corpus Hermeticum and show that there were words and phrases there that were post-Platonic and derivative of philosophers whose dates we have fully in hand. The place to begin, I think, is obviously with the question "Who is Hermes Trismegistus?" What are we talking about here? I mean, this sounds so incredibly exotic to people. The Renaissance had the concept of what it called the Presqui Poaloque (sp?) and if my Latin and Greek irritates you, you have to understand you're dealing with a boy from a coal mining town in Colorado, so I do mangle these things. The Presqui Paoloque were Orpheus, Moses, and primarily Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes Trismegistus was the primary source, from the point of view of the Renaissance, of this whole mysterious tradition and, you recall from last night's lecture, this is based on a misunderstanding. The Renaissance believed that Hermes Trismegistus was older than Moses. We know now, thanks to Issac and Marik Casaubon, two philologists of the early 17th century, that definitely the Hermetic corpus was composed between the first and second centuries after Christ. The method of the Casaubons was to examine the philosophical language of the Corpus Hermeticum and show that there were words and phrases there that were post-Platonic and derivative of philosophers whose dates we have fully in hand.
  
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 Now, if you go to an occult bookstore you will find that, to this date, this error persists. There are people who still want to claim that this stuff is older than dyanstic Egypt. There are even books, I was in Shambala weeks ago, claiming to teach you how to change lead into gold. Well, from my point of view this just evokes a small smile. The old errors persist. The Puffers are still at it. But what Hermes Trismegistus is is a character who appears in many guises in these hermetic dialogs. The hermetic hymns are usually couched in the form of dialogs between Hermes and his son Thoth and Thoth takes the position of the uninitiated ingenue who is sitting at the feet of the master. Thoth asks questions: what is the true nature of the world, what is the true nature of man, and Hermes answers and the general form of these texts, with exceptions, because there are 20 of them, is an intellectual dialog which builds to an ecstatic revelation and then in the wake of the ecstatic revelation there is a hymn of praise to Hermes Trismegistus. Trismegistus means thrice-blessed and is sometimes called Hermes Triplex to distinguish this Hermes from all the other Hermes of early, middle and late Greek thinking. Hermes is of course the messenger god, the god of scribes. The reason this Ibis-headed being holding a staff is embossed on the cover of each of these books is because this is how Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth Hermes was imagined. He was associated with the scribe god of the Egyptian pantheon. Now, if you go to an occult bookstore you will find that, to this date, this error persists. There are people who still want to claim that this stuff is older than dyanstic Egypt. There are even books, I was in Shambala weeks ago, claiming to teach you how to change lead into gold. Well, from my point of view this just evokes a small smile. The old errors persist. The Puffers are still at it. But what Hermes Trismegistus is is a character who appears in many guises in these hermetic dialogs. The hermetic hymns are usually couched in the form of dialogs between Hermes and his son Thoth and Thoth takes the position of the uninitiated ingenue who is sitting at the feet of the master. Thoth asks questions: what is the true nature of the world, what is the true nature of man, and Hermes answers and the general form of these texts, with exceptions, because there are 20 of them, is an intellectual dialog which builds to an ecstatic revelation and then in the wake of the ecstatic revelation there is a hymn of praise to Hermes Trismegistus. Trismegistus means thrice-blessed and is sometimes called Hermes Triplex to distinguish this Hermes from all the other Hermes of early, middle and late Greek thinking. Hermes is of course the messenger god, the god of scribes. The reason this Ibis-headed being holding a staff is embossed on the cover of each of these books is because this is how Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth Hermes was imagined. He was associated with the scribe god of the Egyptian pantheon.
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 So now we move in this realm, these were the companions of princes and there was in that 120 years, from about 1500 to the beginning of the 30 year's war, a constant effort in various parts of Europe to try and turn parts of European society toward a kind of magical revolution. The Europe of the 11th and 12th century was entirely ruled by scholastic rationalism. Witchcraft was virtually unknown and very curious. It's the 15th and 16th centuries where you get this tremendous proliferation of magical systems, magical ideas and social hysterias related to witchcraft, alchemy, conjuring and magic. Those are the centuries when these things really broke out into the open. And alchemy in that period is basically a story of personalities, wonderful personalities, too many for us to really talk about in detail. We have Nicholas and Pernelle Flamel who sought and found the philosopher's stone, according to legend and according to legend are living to this day somewhere in central Asia in perfect happiness having achieved not only the chemical wedding but the water stone of the wise. And then we have Basil Valentine who refined red wine and distilled it in distillation apparati until he got essentially pure alcohol and upon drinking this was so sure that he had found the philosopher's stone that he announced the eminent approach of the end of the world based on his discovery and he was not secretive at all. He propagated his recipes and in fact sampled the distillates of some of his brother alchemists and popularized this very widely. To this day the reason certain cognacs are in the hands of monastic orders and no one else can make these things is because they were originally alchemical secrets and many of these early alchemists were men of the cloth, quite a number of them. So now we move in this realm, these were the companions of princes and there was in that 120 years, from about 1500 to the beginning of the 30 year's war, a constant effort in various parts of Europe to try and turn parts of European society toward a kind of magical revolution. The Europe of the 11th and 12th century was entirely ruled by scholastic rationalism. Witchcraft was virtually unknown and very curious. It's the 15th and 16th centuries where you get this tremendous proliferation of magical systems, magical ideas and social hysterias related to witchcraft, alchemy, conjuring and magic. Those are the centuries when these things really broke out into the open. And alchemy in that period is basically a story of personalities, wonderful personalities, too many for us to really talk about in detail. We have Nicholas and Pernelle Flamel who sought and found the philosopher's stone, according to legend and according to legend are living to this day somewhere in central Asia in perfect happiness having achieved not only the chemical wedding but the water stone of the wise. And then we have Basil Valentine who refined red wine and distilled it in distillation apparati until he got essentially pure alcohol and upon drinking this was so sure that he had found the philosopher's stone that he announced the eminent approach of the end of the world based on his discovery and he was not secretive at all. He propagated his recipes and in fact sampled the distillates of some of his brother alchemists and popularized this very widely. To this day the reason certain cognacs are in the hands of monastic orders and no one else can make these things is because they were originally alchemical secrets and many of these early alchemists were men of the cloth, quite a number of them.
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 ==== part 5 ==== ==== part 5 ====
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  So what I thought I would do is, in a highly chaotic fashion, read you some of this alchemical literature. The big bring down about alchemical literature is that apparently the muse didn't always smile on the alchemist and some of this poetry is pretty tormented stuff. Why this is, who can say, but let's try one here and see if you can bear with it. Also, my Middle English is not as good as it might be. This is a short one, and typical, and you will see why the alchemists were charged with unbearable obscurity and prolex prose. This poem is called "A Description of the Stone:"  So what I thought I would do is, in a highly chaotic fashion, read you some of this alchemical literature. The big bring down about alchemical literature is that apparently the muse didn't always smile on the alchemist and some of this poetry is pretty tormented stuff. Why this is, who can say, but let's try one here and see if you can bear with it. Also, my Middle English is not as good as it might be. This is a short one, and typical, and you will see why the alchemists were charged with unbearable obscurity and prolex prose. This poem is called "A Description of the Stone:"
  
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 Though Daphne fly from Phobeus bright yet shall they both be one Though Daphne fly from Phobeus bright yet shall they both be one
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 +All magical codes, if you know the Trithemian method, within a few hours you can get plain text. The Voynitch manuscript did not yield at all to this method and the CIA formed a working group that for over ten years would invite scholars in to have a look at this and if you're interested in this, Marie D'Amperio, who was a great Renaissance scholar, wrote a book called The Voynitch Manuscript, an Elegant Enigma in which she traces the efforts of the CIA to figure this thing out and to figure out what it could be.
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 +There the matter rested until about three years ago when, I think his name is Leo Levertov, some kind of military historian, one of these peculiar people who live for this stuff, he got a hold of it and he said, and deimlperia(?) goes through all the decipherment and there were many efforts at decipherment, there was a scholar at Yale in the twenties named Brumbra who was a very respected man who ruined himself by claiming a complete decipherment of the Voynitch manuscript and, the way the game is played is that you say what your rules for the decipherment were, you give the rules to a colleague and you give your colleague a page of text. If he can't translate it with your rules then you are viewed as a deluded and misguided person and your career goes up in flames. Well, the Brumbraian method for deciphering the manuscript had to do with confined pools of letters where, it would get you to a pool of five or six letters but then you could freely choose which one you used and critics of Brumbra demonstrated that you could make this thing say anything you wanted it to. Brumbra supported Dee's claim, he claimed that it deciphered out into a Roger Bacon manuscript that described a series of riots between the students and the black friars in 1385 at Oxford. But nobody else could make it say that or make it say anything so Brumbra disgraced himself and ruined his career.
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 +Then there were other efforts at decipherment which I won't bore you with but along comes Leo Levatov just four years ago and he wrote a book called The Voynitch Manuscript: A Liturgical Manual for the Catherites and his great breakthrough, if you accept his translation, and I do, I know people who don't but they don't seem to have read him as carefully as I have, I think the dude pretty well has it nailed to the barn door. His great breakthrough was to realize that it's not in code. It is not an encrypted manuscript at all. What it is is it's a synthetic alphabet, yes, it's an alphabet that, and one of the things that baffled the CIA is was they looted the libraries of Europe and they could never find another example of what is called Voynitch script and this is just baffling. How could there be no other example of this script. It appears that what happened was someone created a synthetic alphabet and then in a mixture of Medieval, polyglot Flemish with a huge number of loan words from Old French, Middle High German, and Swedish, wrote down a sacramental manual for the dying in the Catherite sect.
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 +Now, what is the Catherite sect? You're probably familiar with something called the Albajensian(?) crusade. This was not a crusade carried on against the infidel for the recovery of Jerusalem but rather a series of military actions carried out by the pope against communities in Southern France in the early 1200s. These people were Catherites. As far as we can tell, and we can't tell much because we only have descriptions of Catherites by people who were burning them at the stake, in other words no original Catherite documents survive, we just have what they screamed out on the rack as they were being put to death by the bishops of the church and this was a horrific incident in European history. To give you the flavor of it, the second Albajensian crusade was prosecuted by a general of the pope named Simone De Monforte and his lieutenants came to him, at a point, and some of you might have visited the city of Carceson in Southern France which is a walled Medieval city in Southern France, very beautiful, Simone De Monforte's lieutenants came to him and they said "We have cornered the Catherites at Carceson but the problem is is that there are 6,000 Catholics within the city walls." And he said "kill everybody, God will recognize his own." So that was the spirit in which this thing went forth, and they did, they did.
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 +So, what we do know about the Catherites is that they had a sacrament, the holiest my...well, first let me tell you a little bit more about them. At first it was thought that they were pretty much heterodox Christians. They were into nudity and vegetarianism and they sound like early hippies, as far as we can tell. They got together men and women, they took off their clothes, they bathed, whether there were orgies or not we don't know, they were vegetarians, and the one thing that we do know is that they had a sacrament called the consolamentum and the consolamentum was ritualized vivisection, no, that's not the word, the term escapes me, but anyway, when you were dying, a fellow Cather would cut your wrists and open your veins in a warm bath of water and you would die in that state, you did not die a natural death. This was called the consolamentum. What Leo Levatov is claiming is that the Voynitch manuscript is a description, a manual, for the prefecti of the Catherite sect telling how to properly carry out the consolamentum. I see no reason to challenge it. Even with my limited knowledge of German, once you get the vowel and letter assignments right into this weird manuscript into this weird language and change it into English alphabetic text you can see that there's enough German there and then these lone words in Flemish and so forth, it looks to be true.
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 +And what emerges from this, if we accept the Voynitch manuscript as the only primary document on the Catherite faith, is that this was not a form of heterodox Christianity at all, it is much more radical then that and this may explain the church's fury with this group of people. It was a cult of Isis. It can be traced straight back into the mystery religions of Eo(?) Isis in Egypt and I have not seen any critical commentary on Levatov's book. His book was published by this weird press in Rodondo Beach that specializes only in books on military encryption. Their catalog is a revelation to see, it's amazing, and the book on the Voynitch manuscript stands out like a sore thumb because most of it is like dictionaries of three letter words in Swahili and their numerical transforms and stuff like that. So that's the history to date of the Voynitch manuscript and it's not that askew of our subject because all of this heterodoxy in Europe blends together.
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 +The presence of Theodore DeBrie as an alchemical printer in Heidleberg may be a clue because there were survivals of this Catherite faith in the form of a heresy called the brotherhood of the free spirit. If any of you are familiar with the altarpiece called "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch, it's thought that this was created by commission for a brotherhood, a congregation of the brotherhood of the free spirit and the brotherhood of the free spirit was always associated with some reason, we don't know why, with printers. Printers seem to be the profession that the brotherhood favored and, like the Catherites, they practiced vegetarianism, nudism and gathering together in a ritual bath. So, there is much still to be learned and to be teased apart in the art history and the history of heterodox thinking in Europe of which alchemy is seen to be one facet of a faceted gem that includes the brotherhood of the free spirit, early Freemasonry, Catherites, survivals of Manicheism, Voagamils(sp?) in Yugoslavia, there are Vogamils Vostrian(?) graves on the Southern coast of Thessolonica and just a whole zoo of intellectual systems that have been forgotten and overlooked. This what I meant when I said we will explore the statigraphy of lost thought systems. In some cases we possess quite complete skeletons, in the case of alchemy, what we possess in the cases of the Vogamils and the Catherites is almost a foot bone or a tooth or a footprint but someday, with luck, new textual material will emerge and a new understanding of the role of heterodoxy in the formation of modern thought will emerge. Questions?
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 +The Borne and Clark(?) book on Freemasonry that's just recently been published..I've just about finished it and this person is a Medieval English historian from Kentucky and I think he's finally solved...the Freemason history which is a very interesting history because the Masonic historians themselves have been arguing for a couple hundred years so it's strange that this Voynitch manuscript should be all of the sudden in the last couple of years resolved because it seems that this Freemason thing is also resolved
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 +Yes, you make an interesting point. John Glavis brought me an article yesterday. We're all tied up now in this Pluto return. I'm not an astrologer but John brought me an article that's talking about how, I don't know if it's the last time or the time before last, that the Pluto return occurred is precisely the 1490s, the period that we're talking about when the Corpus Hermeticum was translated and we are now in a period that is astrologically exactly equivalent to that period and the Voynitch manuscript appears to have been accepted, I mean I'm willing to accept it, you mentioned this revelation about the true nature of Freemasonry, and of course what is going on at the moment that is askew of our subject but tremendously exciting and relevant to the idea of lost knowledge coming to light, is that this is the golden moment in Mayan studies.
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 +It is happening right now, day by day, minute by minute, the log jam has been broken. The Mayan glyphs are being deciphered, no shit, and it has to do with an entirely new approach that some Russian linguists have taken and if any of you are interested, it will never happen again so far as I know, there are now, with the Mayan decipherment, no real undeciphered languages left. The Harapan(sp?) was deciphered a few years ago but really it wasn't that interesting because we only possess about 6,000 characters in Harapan. But the literature of the Mayan, when you take not only the hieroglyphic, the stone texts, but when you add in the ceramic texts, why we have a lot of Mayan material and it is being deciphered at a furious rate. If you're interested in this, Linda Sheil has written a book called A Forest of Kings and how I do envy this woman because what she is doing is writing the first history of the Maya in a thousand years. We're not now dealing in the realm of gods and myths, we're dealing with stuff like "on the 14th of May, 642, an army from El Charico met an army from Tikal and triumphed and deposed three flint and placed on the throne..."it's this kind of stuff, real history. The conceits of Mayan religion and Mayan courtly life are all coming into focus and it's very exciting. All the people who have tried to make the Maya into some kind of Atlantean civilization should be running for cover at this point, because the picture that emerges is not as pretty as we might wish, but, hey, know the truth and the truth will set you free, I would choose truth over illusion anytime, no matter how damaging it might be to somebody's conceptions of these things.
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 +And if any of you are interested in these subjects, another area where this has occurred is, some of you may know the book by Michael Chadwick called The Decipherment of Linear Be, Linear Be is a proto-Minoan language and a linguist at Cambridge named Michael Ventris, a genius, in the fifties took this language, there was no Rosetta Stone, this is the amazing thing. You know what I mean by a Rosetta Stone? You see, in the 19th century the great mystery was how to read the Egyptian hieroglyphs and before they were deciphered the Egyptians were treated like the Maya and people thought that the secrets of the universe were chiseled on those obelisks and tombs. Well then a scholar in the grand army of Napoleon Champion, a soldier found a tablet which had a column of Demotic Greek, a column of another language, I forget which one, and a column of Egyptian hieroglyphs and they were able to realize that it was saying the same thing three times and that opened it up for them. But that's like a crib sheet, it's easy if you have the same text in a known language. But in the case of the Maya and in the case of Linear Be and in the case of Haropan, there was no Rosetta Stone, well then you talk about an excruciatingly difficult problem to solve and I'll explain how it was done with the Maya because it's so neat.
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 +It turns out that Mayan is a rebus language, what does this mean? Do you remember when we were kids and in comic books there would be these things where it would show a picture of an eye and then it would show a picture of a saw going through a piece of wood and then it would show a picture of an ant and then it would show a picture of a red rose. This is a sentence which says "I saw aunt Rose." But now notice what's going on here. It all depends on puns that depend on a knowledge of the spoken language. If you lose the sounds of the spoken language how the hell could you ever tell that a picture of an eye, a saw, an insect and a rose says "I saw my maternal relative on my mother's side." I mean, it just is impossible, it's absolutely impossible in that situation to reconstruct meaning unless you have sounds. Well, how do you recover the sounds of a language dead a thousand years. Well, these Soviet linguists had the good sense to go and look at living Mayan languages, of which there are 15, living Mayan languages in the Americas and they discovered one of these dialects where, when you set Mayan hieroglyphs in front of these people and they named what they saw, meaning came out of their mouths and that broke the log jam and then you just rev up your computers and use all the standard tools of modern linguistics and philology and the stuff begins to just pour out, clear as day, no problem.
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 +So they asked the Mayans?
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 +Yes, they had to go to a Mayan, you're right, good point, it had never occurred to them. Because always before when showing it to Mayans they would say "what does it mean?" instead of "what do you see here?" and then what they said what they saw there meaning came out of their mouths. It was very, very neat. It shows once again the hubris of modern scientific methods, we tend to dismiss the aboriginal and the primitive. To turn it toward my own favorite subject, this was the state of modern medicine, nobody would ask the native in the Amazon basin "what plants do you use for malaria, brain tumors, shrinkage and so on and so forth, because they were just dismissed as superstitious primitives. It was thought that the doctrine of signatures was operating. They didn't realize how subtle and how complete human knowledge systems grow under the care of those to whom it really matters. Is there anything that needs to be said about this?
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 +The project of the redemption of spirit from matter turned into the project of redeeming the general society of the time toward a utopian vision. This is working right up to the present. Millenarianism is still with us, Marxism is the last great Millenarian faith, the belief in the worker's state. It occupies the same relationship to these alchemical utopias as Heidegarrean existentialism has to second century Gnosticism. The poetry has gone, the baroque imagery has been stripped away, but the impulse is still toward a perfect society where each from his ability according to his needs and means. It lives on. Democracy is also an effort, let us not forget, an attempt to recapture the style of 5th century Athens and we forget that this was a citystate half of whose inhabitants were slaves and yet we are so under the spell of the utopian dream that we continue, and not without important reason, I think, to try to labor toward a just and decent world where the lion lies down with the lamb and that was, and it remains, the alchemical dream.
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 +...flashbacks of my life...I majored in history in college and the first history teacher that I had was a wonderful old man who really, now that I look back on it, taught the history of ideas. My major was involved with politics and all of this kind of thing and it's such a wonderful experience to suddenly get back to what turned me on to history, it gets me turned on and opens my mind again, looking at some of these thoughts that I'd just forgotten or suppressed, put down and said that's bullshit as a traditionally trained scientist and so on...opened my eyes to the fact that we can learn from what's gone on before, the ideas are out there, we just have to grasp them...and apply them and I, too, am interested in how we make this more meaningful for the future.
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 +One thing that occurs to me to say, I once, in one of these revelatory dialogs with the logos, asked the question, "why me, why are you telling me this?" because my, I mean, I was a poor hippie, I was penniless, I was a traveler, and the answer was instantaneous and it was, "because you don't believe in anything, because you don't believe in anything" and I think that that's a very pure position to hold. We're not trying to ensnare you to abandon your Jewishness or your Presbyterianism or belief, if you believe in something then you have procluded the possibility of believing in its opposite and you have hence limited your freedom. Everything is to be judged by its efficacy, by its effectiveness in the real world and I think that I have a horror in all belief systems, I just don't like them. If somebody tells you he has the answer, flee from this person, they are obviously some sort of low being who has not recognized the true size and dimension of the cosmos that we're living in and if you can keep yourself free of encumbering beliefs then your dialog with the logos can go forward unhindered.
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 +Sometimes when I'm in the trance of psilocybin I will say to the entity, "begin to show me yourself as you are for yourself, don't give me the scaled down, humanized version, show me your true nature" and after a few moments of this then I have to raise my hand and say enough, I can't handle more than that. This goes back to the statement made yesterday or the day before about that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose. Therefore, we are given tremendous latitude in what we can think and what we conceive but if you begin to believe in something then you are pulled down because everything that you believe has consequences. A perfect example, as some of you may know, when Mohammed ascended into heaven from the site of what was to become the Mosque of Omar, from the site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, he happened to be on horseback. Now if you believe that Mohammed ascended to heaven, imagine the theological and hermenutic problems posed by the horse he was riding. Because it went with him. This is a perfect example of how intellectual baggage drags us down because belief always contains absurdity. The ontological status of this horse has troubled Islamic theologians for centuries...
 +
 +
 +====part 8====
 +
 +If they would just let go of the whole idea complex they would be liberated from this kind of minutia. Belief kills the spirit, spirit transcends belief. I wanted to say that.
 +
 +Then somebody mentioned Bruno and Dee. Since I suggested that you read Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition it's ironic that so little time was spent on Bruno, on the other hand, I recommended that you read the book so you should be well informed about Bruno. For me, Bruno, we just didn't get into that particular historical episode because I wanted to tell you about the Rosicrucian enlightenment, but the thing to remember about Bruno was his discovery about the infinitude of the cosmos and that by an act of unencumbered observation, I mean how many people had looked at the night sky before Bruno and they had not seen what he saw, which was infinite space and suns hung like lamps unto the uttermost extremes of infinity. By an act of pure cognition, he was able to destroy an entire cosmological vision that had limited and confined the human soul for millennia. That's half of his story. The other half is that he was burned at the stake for refusing to back down from this. It's a model for us all: trust your perceptions trust your intuition and then accept the consequences because this is what existential validity must be.
 +
 + 
 +
 +As far as the relationship between Dee and Bruno, the relationship is that they were both derivative of the school of magic that can be traced back to Henry Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettleshine who was another model for Faust. Agrippa wrote De Libro Quatro De Occulta Philosophia, four books of occult philosophy, and that was the core work for European magic. All European magic can be traced back to the Agrippan system and Agrippa was the direct student of the Abbot Trithemius of Spawnheim that we mentioned yesterday as the source of all the magical codes of the middle ages. If you're interested in a brilliant but fictional treatment of John Dee and Giordano Bruno, I'd like to recommend a novel to you. It's called Aegypt, it's by John Crowley, the same gentleman who wrote Little Big which is a wonderful novel about the magical interface between two worlds. But his book Aegypt, fully half of the book is given over to a wonderfully rich retelling of the relationship between Bruno and Dee. Some people have wanted to say that Dee and Bruno actually crossed physical paths in London but I've looked into it and they missed each other by about two weeks. Bruno was setting sail for England as Dee was setting sail for France and the Rosacrucian enlightenment episode that I talked about.
 +
 + 
 +
 +Then someone asked about tantra and the contrast between the imaginative internalized invocation of the anima or the animus, depending on your own sexuality, and that contrasted with something that actually happens between two people. We didn't talk that much about the concept of the alchemical wedding, or the chemical marriage is another way of putting it, but this is the Western resonance to the Eastern idea of tantra and it is the idea that sexual energy, being the rawest and most accessible energy to the organism, can be channeled into a higher spirituality. It's entirely so, the problem is that of all paths this is probably fraught with the greatest difficulty because sexuality is such a debased coinage in the modern world. In other words, you have to make your way with great care and great purity of intent into this. In Eastern tantra that is actually practiced in this physical manner there is usually the admonition is that you should have no attachment to your tantrica, that the relationship should be entirely given over to the technical details of this union and of course it has to do with the forestalling of orgasm and the raising of energy within the organism.
 +
 + 
 +
 +In the chemical marriage, in the alchemical marriage, due honor is given to the importance and uniqueness of the other person, in other words it isn't the idea of the temple prostitute who serves as the vessel for this process but there's actually an effort to keep individual indentities and individual dignity, in some sense, together and this is, the higher up the mountain you go, the steeper it becomes and when you begin to scale the heights of alchemical or tantric sexuality the fall back into the nigredo can be shocking indeed so that's just an admonition, it's not designed to scare you off, it's just to say that in an age as sexually obsessed as our own, you have to do as the I Ching says, "inquire of the oracle once again if you have purity of intent."
 +
 + 
 +
 +Isn't there also a healing between the two?
 +
 + 
 +
 +Yes, it's a complete alchemical system and the energy is passed between. This is probably the highest completion that is possible. The ideal of romantic love, and I don't want to digress too much into this, but the ideal of romantic love was introduced into Europe in the 1400s and earlier at the Anjovan(sp?) court of Eleanor of Aquatain by troubadours and this troubadour tradition can, scholarship now reveals pretty convincingly that this is an esoteric Sufi system. It also occurs in Indian teachers such as Chitania(sp?), who is the guy that the Hare Krishnas go back to. The radical teaching of Chitania was that you could achieve ecstasy not by sitting in yoga, but by dancing and singing on street corners. It's now pretty clearly shown that Sufi, the penetration of Sufi ideas into Bengal was happening at the same time that these Sufi ideas were coming across from North Africa and into Spain and Southern France. So, it's a tremendously old and vital tradition but you have to be careful - the romantic impulse is a real double-edged sword. It has been ever since the early 19th century because, you know, the rise of romanticism, as that term is normally understood, meaning those movements in art and literature of the early 19th century, the rise of romanticism was a response to the dehumanization that was going on at that time. The rise of industrialism and the retreat into cities more massive than any that had ever been built, did you want to say something?
 +
 + 
 +
 +I wanted to add, the question was about healing, and I think there's a tremendous difference between Indian and Tibetan tantric systems. You ought to practice in Taoism in terms of single copulation and dual copulation, in the Taoist system self-healing is of paramount importance before you can even consider dual copulation. Dual copulation is then begun, then again other considerations come in, but the Tibetan and Indian systems where Dakinis and various deities are invoked in the process of their alchemical union, it's really quite different from the Taoist system which is devoid of beliefs in gods.
 +
 + 
 +
 +That's a good point. You know, yesterday I talked about the alchemical stages. When you have reached the albedo, the final whitening of these processes, that final whitening is, from a higher prospective, a new nigredo and you must always build and build again. So you have to be fairly confident that you have already realized a certain portion of yourself before you embark upon these tantric double experiments. Because a lot of tantric text reads very vampiratical, I mean, it's all about expelling the semen and then sucking it back in and it's like an energy war. It turns into black magic. The losing partners in this deal are just left a withered husk and this is not a higher completion to be sought for.
 +
 + 
 +
 +You're correct, there are supposedly, whether they're myths or documented stories, about a Chinese Empress who caused the deaths of more than a thousand men because of her vampirism.
 +
 + 
 +
 +And it was sexual in nature?
 +
 + 
 +
 +It was sexual in nature.
 +
 + 
 +
 +Just a couple of other points here. The gentleman here who had nothing to comment or wanted to sit it out reminded me, since we were talking about the Valentinian system this morning, my favorite archon, besides Sophia who's so interesting because of the little story about how she made the universe, but the 12th archon in the Gnostic system is a unique entity, I don't know of another religious system that has this notion. The 12th archon in the Valentinian system is called The Watcher. That's all he does. He does not put into the system at all but is the witness and somehow this creates a validating dimension that is very important. I just want to affirm that the watcher is a very strong platform on which to stand. I mean, would that I could learn to keep my mouth shut. Would that we all could. So, the watcher is a good archon to keep active on your inner altar.
 +
 + 
 +
 +So, then, the future occurs three times on the list. We don't have a lot of time, but what I would like to say about it this morning is, if you extrapolate all that has been said here then you should see that, remember how I said that one view of alchemy is that the alchemist intervened in natural process in the role of a catalyst. For those of you who aren't chemists, a catalyst is something that causes a chemical reaction that is going on anyway to precede at a faster rate but the catalyst is not consumed in this process, it simply accelerates it. And if we think of nature as a great alchemical furnace that continuously reproduces and brings forth wonders, then must it not be that humanity is the yeast of the gain alchemical rarefaction and that human history is the process of catalyzing the alchemical condensation. If we look back into nature, before the advent of speaking and writing human beings in the last 15,000 years, what we see are very leisurely processes. The speciation of a single plant from another can occupy 50 or 60 thousand years, it never happens more quickly than that. And the grinding down of glaciers from the poles, these are processes that take hundreds and thousands of years.
 +
 + 
 +
 +With the advent of human beings, an entirely new ontos of being, an entirely new category of becoming is introduced into the entire cosmos, as far as we know, because we cannot verify that there are other self-reflecting beings in the universe and this new ontos of becoming is what I call epigenetic, as opposed to genetic. All other change in the living world, in the world of bios, of zoa, occurs through genetic change, random modification of the genome which is then subject to random selection. But with the advent of speech and writing, epigenetic, means outside of genetics, epigenetic processes become possible and time accelerates. One way of thinking about what is happening in this cosmos is that it is a gradual conquest of dimensionality by becoming, or process, we hardly have a word inclusive enough.
 +
 + 
 +
 +The earliest forms of life were probably slimes on certain kinds of clays, self-replicating molecular systems and then certain portions of this chemistry became light sensitive and then there was the sense of the division of light and darkness which generated the notion of here and there on some tremendously basic level within these early organisms. Once you have the concept of here and there, motility, the ability to move, the cilia that dot the surface of protozans and stuff like this are elaborated and a new dimension enters the picture, the dimension of time, because notice that a journey from here to there is a journey from now to then. And then, as more refined perceptual apparatus arose, and more refined systems of moving animal bodies arose, a steady conquest of dimensionality occurred. The movement of animals onto the land and so forth.
 +
 + 
 +
 +Well then, at the advent of memory, and memory must be mediated by language except at a very crude, instinctual level, memory is a time binding function. It's a way of somehow taking the past and calling up it's essential properties so that they are co-present with the given moment of experience. It's one thing at the level of the song and dance of pre-literate peoples but once you begin to chisel stone and write books then you're into the epigenetic domain in a big way. And once you cross the threshold into the world of electronic media and that sort of thing, once you achieve powered flight, once you can hurl instruments outside of the solar system, these are time binding functions and the alchemical intent, recall, was to accelerate nature's intent toward perfection and the alchemists all believed that nature was growing toward a state of unity and perfection, that given millions and millions of years, everything would turn to gold, everything would find its way toward the Platonian one.
 +
 + 
 +
 +So, now we live in a world that appears to be on the brink of its own death or extinction and the reason we make that assumption is that our bridges are burning behind us. We see no way back to the world of the hunting and gathering pastoralists of the high Paleolithic of the Saharan grasslands. We see no way back to the Gothic piety of Europe with over 30 million people in it. Our bridges are burning and our religions, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, the major Western religions persistently insist that we are caught in a tightening spiral of ever increasing speed that is carrying us toward an unimaginable confrontation with something which they call God, the second coming, the messiah, you name it. As cool-headed a rationalist as Albert Toynbee, when he sat down to write a study of history, he finally had to face the question, "what is history for?" And the best he could come up with is "history must be about the entry of God into the domain of three-dimensional space."
 +
 + 
 +
 +Well, we don't know what God is, let's not call it God, let's call it the philosopher's stone, let's call it the Sophic Hydrolith, and I believe that the chaos of our world, the apocalyptic intuition that informs our religions and our dreams is because ahead of us in time, and now not that far ahead of us in time, is something, taking a page from the mathematical concern called dynamics, we can call an attractor. The attractor lies ahead of us in time. The universal process is not driven by a downward cascade of Cartesian causuistry(?) that's the scientific notion and it leads to a universe of entropy and heat death millions of years in the future but what we see around us is a continuing and accelerating complexification as human beings, machines, eco systems, the solar system itself is beginning to knit itself into a tighter and tighter organization. I believe that alchemy provides the best metaphors for understanding this. Nature is the great alchemist par excellence and we, as its minions through history, are accelerating the condensation of being toward the unimaginable so that in my system, my way of thinking, there's ultimately a semitary(?) break with ordinary history and I call it all kinds of different things, but here this morning, the transcendent other.
 +
 + 
 +
 +The transcendent other casts an enormous shadow across the lower dimensional landscape of time. The stirring of the earliest life forms in the Devonian seas caught the call and every step that has been taken since then has been ever quicker, ever quicker toward the transcendental other, it beckons us and history is haunted by this thing. History is the shock wave of eschatology. History is a process that lasts, let's be generous, 25,000 years, the wink of an eye in geological time, and in that 25,000 years religious rise and fall, governmental systems, teachers come and go and there is a sense of being caught in a whirlpool that is spinning us toward fusion with the unimaginable. This is why the skies of Earth are haunted by flying saucers, they aren't coming from other solar systems, they are sintillas, remember this alchemical term - sparks - they are sintillas being thrown off the alchemical quintessence which lies like a great attractor at the end of time and the purpose of science and techni and electronic media and information transfer and all of this stuff is to knit us together, to dissolve our boundaries and to bring us to a point of singularity where language fails, where we lean over meanings' edge and feel the dizziness of things unsaid.
 +
 + 
 +
 +And this lies now, I believe, within our lifetimes, within the lifetimes of most of us, this is actually going to break through. I'm like one of those people carrying a sign that says "repent for the end is near." It's as nutty a position as you can possibly hold. That's why I suspect it has a reasonable chance of being dead on. So, that is the point of talking about alchemy and this melding, the production of the quintessent and all that. It is because we are a gnat's eyelash away from a full confrontation with the transcendent other. Our dreams are haunted by it, our reveries are filled with it. If we take a psychedelic drug, it's revealed before us in all its splendor. This is the force that is pulling us inexorably toward completion.
 +
 + 
 +
 +I remember once in a psilocybin trance I expressed concern about the state of the world and the nous spoke, the logos spoke, and it said "no big deal, this is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars." This is the, we are in the birth canal of a planetary birthing. And as you know, if you come upon a birth in progress, you would never dream that this is the culmination of a natural process. It looks like a catastrophe of some sort. There is moaning and groaning and screaming and thrashing and blood is being shed and there is a feeling that the walls are closing in and yet it is inscripted into each of us as a microcosmic reflection of the completion of human history. And not only human history, because we are simply the hands and eyes of all life, all process on this planet.
  
  
 +The Gnostics believe that the Earth is like an egg and that a moment will come in which the egg must be split asunder. I love to quote the Grateful Dead, "you can't go back and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will." That is what we are being funnelled toward, that is the message of alchemy. That is the quintessence of the human enterprise, the biological enterprise. I like to recall the Irish toast "may you be alive at the end of the world." And we have a real crack at it. It's not a pessimistic vision. It's the most optimistic vision that one can suppose and I think that's where I'd like to leave it this morning.
  
 +[[lecture_notes]]
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