Carl Jung’s Hermeticism and Alchemical Psychology Explained by Terence McKenna

Well, it is a small group and this was my intent. Uh, by focusing on the hermetic corpus and alchemy, I've just gotten tired of talking about psychedelic drugs and always saying the same things over and over again. Nevertheless, it's a challenge to go outside my own baywick. I mean, I've had an interest in uh hermeticism and alchemy since I was about 14 and read Jung's psychology and alchemy and it opened for me the fact of the existence of this vast literature uh a literature that is very little read or understood in the modern context. The

youngians have made much of it but to their own purposes and uh perhaps not always with a complete fidelity to the intent of the tradition. We'll talk a lot about the yungian approach but there are other approaches uh even uh within the 20th century. Uh I believe since I don't have the catalog I'm not absolutely certain but I believe the catalog urged you to read Gerardano Bruno and the hermetic tradition by Dame Francis Yates and uh this is uh though Francis Yates scholarship is very controversial I think to get an overview of the landscape her

book is probably uh the best single book between covers. It's not pleasing to some factions and we can talk about that. I mean, we will probably discover within the group all the strains of alchemical illusion and delusion that have always driven the uh this particular intellectual engine. But I thought to get one book uh uh that sort of covered the territory that was a good one to start with. Well, then I found out it's very hard to get this book. I didn't realize that because it's been sitting on my shelf for years. Richard Bird found

a reprint at the Bodhi Tree that I wasn't aware of this particular edition. So, um, though probably none of you brought it with you in a heavily underlined form, if after this weekend you want to try and get it, uh, it is available. And if you can't get that edition, why um, a good book search service can probably come up with the first edition, which is RLage, Keegan Paul. I wouldn't hold a weekend like this simply to go over a body of ancient literature if I didn't think it had some efficacy or import for the

modern dilemma. And some of you may know the song by the grateful dead uh in which the refrain is we need a miracle every day. I think any reasonable person can conclude that the redemption of the world, if it's to be achieved, can only be achieved through magic. It's too late for science. It's too late for hordy politics. Well, it's very interesting. I mean, every ancient literature has its apocalypsis. And in the hermetic literature, uh there is a prophecy. I think it's in book two, but that really doesn't matter. Uh, and the prophecy is that

a day will come when men will no longer care for the earth and at that day the gods will depart and uh everything will be thrown into primal chaos. And this prophecy was very strongly in the minds of the uh strains of non-Christian thought that evolved at the close the centuries of closure of the Roman Empire. When you look back into historical time, it's when you reach the first and second centuries after Christ that you reach a world whose psychology was very much like the psychology of our own time. It was a psychology of despair

and exhaustion. This is because um Greek science which had evolved under the eegis of uh democratian atomism and platonic metaphysics had essentially come to a dead end in those centuries. We can debate the reasons why this happened. Uh, an obvious suggestion would be that it was because they failed to develop an experimental method. And so everything just dissolved into competing schools of philosophical speculation and a profound pessimism spread through the henistic world. And out of that pessimism and in the context of that kind of universal despair which attends the dissolution of great empires, uh, a

literature was created from the first to the fourth centuries after Christ which we call the hermetic corpus or in some cases the tismagistic hymns. Now this body of literature was misunderstood by later centuries especially the Renaissance because it was taken at face value and assumed to be at least contemporary with Moses if not much older. So the the Renaissance view of hermeticism was based on a tragic misunderstanding of the true antiquity of this material. And there are people, hopefully none in this room, who still would have us believe that this literature antidates uh uh the

mosaic law that it is as old as dynastic Egypt. But this is an indefensible position from my point of view. In the early 16th century, two uh a father and son Isaac and Marik Casabon showed through the new science of theology that uh this material was in fact late henistic. Now I've always said that I am not a classicist in the viconian sense in the sense that I there is a certain strain of thought that always wants to believe that the oldest stuff is the best stuff. This is not the case to my mind. To

my mind what is amazing is how recent everything is. So I have no sympathy with the fans of Lost Atlantis or any of that kind of malarkey because to me what is amazing is how it all is less than 10,000 years old. Anything older than 10,000 years puts us into the realm of an asceramic society relying on chipped flint for its primary technology. Um, what the hermetic corpus is is the most poetic and cleanly expressed outpouring of ancient knowledge that we possess, but it is was reworked in the hands of these late henistic peoples. And

it is um essentially a religion of the redemption of the earth through magic. It has great debt to a tradition called seian which means to me malachianism and I'm sorry mandionism and mandionism was uh a kind of protohalanistic nosis that laid great stress on the power of life zoa bios and in that sense it has a tremendously contemporary ring to it. We also are living in the twilight of a great empire. And I don't particularly mean the American empire. I mean the empire of European thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the

rise of modern industrialism. the empire in short of science. Science has exhausted itself and become mere techni. It's still able to perform its magical tricks, but it has no claim on a metaphysic with any meaning because the program of rational understanding that was pursued by science has pushed so deeply into the phenomenon of nature that the internal contradictions of the method are now exposed for all to see. And uh in discussing alchemy especially we will meet with the concept of the coincidencia opposurro the union of opposites. This is an idea that is completely alien to

science. It's the idea that nothing can be understood unless it is simultaneously viewed as both being what it is and what it is not. And in alchemical symbolism we will meet uh again and again symbolic expression of the coincidencia postorum. It may be in the form of a hermaphrodite. It may be in the form of the union of soul and luna. It may be in the form of the union of mercury with lead or with sulfur. In other words, alchemical thinking is thinking that is always uh antithetical always holds the possibility of by a mere

shift of perspective its opposite premise will gain power and come into focus. I think it was John when we went around the circle mentioned his interest in shamanism. Uh there's a wonderful book called The Forge in the Crucible by Mercile Leonad in which he shows that the shaman is the brother of the smith. The smith is the metallurgist, the worker in metals. And this is where alchemy has its roots. In a sense, alchemy is older than the tismagistic corpus. And then it is also given a new lease on life by the philosophical underpinnings which the

corpus or medic provides. It alchemy uh the word alchemy can be traced back to mean Egypt or a blackening. And in its earliest strata, it probably refers to techniques of dying, meaning the coloring of cloth and gilding of metals and the forging and working of metal. I mean, we who take this for granted have no idea how mysterious and powerful this seemed to ancient people. And in fact, it would seem so to us if we had anything to do with it. I mean, how many of us are welders or casters of metal? It's a it's

a magical process to take, for instance, cineabar, a red soft ore, and by the mere act of heating it in a furnace, it will sweat liquid mercury onto its surface. Well, we have unconsciously embibed the ontology of science where we have mind firmly separated out from the world. We take this for granted. It's effortless because it's the ambiance of the civilization that we've been born into. But in an earlier age, and some writers would say a more naive age, but I wonder about that. But in an earlier age, mind and matter were seen to be

alloyed together throughout nature. So that the sweating of mercury out of cineabar is not a material process. It's a process in which the mind and the observations of the metal worker maintain an important role. And let's talk for a moment about Mercury because uh the spirit Mercurius is almost the patron deity of alchemy. You all know what mercury looks like. It's a at room temperature a silvery liquid that flows. It's like a mirror. For the alchemists, and this is just a very short exercise in alchemical thinking, for the alchemists, mercury was mind itself in a

sense. And by tracing through the the uh steps by which they reached that conclusion, you can have a taste of what alchemical thinking was about. Mercury takes the form of its container. If I pour mercury into a cup, it takes the shape of the cup. If I pour it into a test tube, it takes the shape of a test tube. This taking the shape of its container is a quality of mind. And yet here it is present in a flowing silvery metal. The other thing is uh mercury is a reflecting surface. You never see mercury.

What you see is the world that surrounds it which is perfectly reflected in its surface like a moving mirror. You see? And then if you've ever as a child, I mean, I have no idea how toxic this process is, but I spent a lot of time as a child hounding my grandfather for his hearing aid batteries, which I would then smash with a hammer and get the mercury out and collect it in little bottles and carry it around with me. Well, the wonderful thing about mercury is when you pour it out on a surface and

it beads up, then each bead of mercury becomes a little microcosm of the world. And yet the mercury flows back together into a unity. Well, as a child, you see, I didn't I had not yet embied the assumptions and the ontology of science. I was functioning as an alchemist. For me, mercury was uh this fascinating magical substance onto which I could project the contents of my mind. And a child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work. No doubt about it. Well, so then this is a phenomenon in the physical world and then mind

is a phenomenon as in the cartisian distinction which is between the res extens and the reverence. This is the great splitting of the world into two parts. I remember Al Hang once said to me, we were talking about the yinyang symbol and he said, you know, the interesting thing is not the yin or the yang. The interesting thing is the sshaped surface which runs between them and that sshaped surface is a river of alchemical mercury. Now where the alchemists saw this river of alchemical mercury is in uh the boundary between waking and sleeping. There is

a place not quite sleeping not quite waking and there there flows this river of alchemical mercury where you can project the contents of the unconscious and you can read it back to yourself. uh this kind of thinking is confounding to scientific thought where the effort is always to fix everything into a given identity and a given set of uh behaviors. Now the other hermetic perception that is well illustrated by just thinking for a moment about Mercury is the notion and this is central to all hermetic thinking of the microcosm and the macrocosm that somehow the

great world the whole of the cosmos is reflected in the mystery of man of man meaning men and women. It's reflected in the mystery of the human mind body interface. So for an alchemist it makes perfect sense to extrapolate from these internal what we call internal psychological processes to external processes in the world. That distinction doesn't exist for uh for the alchemist. And I tell you, the longer I live, the more convinced I am that this is just absolutely the truth. Our the myth of our society is the existential myth. That we are cast into

matter. That we are lost in a universe that has no meaning for us. That we must make our meaning. This is what Sartra and all and Kirkagar or all those people are saying that we must make our meaning. It it reaches its most absurd expression in Sartra's statement that nature is mute. I mean, this is as far from alchemical thinking as you can possibly get because for the alchemist, nature was a great book, an open book to be read by putting nature through processes which revealed not only its inner mechanics but the inner mechanics of

the artifacts, the person working upon the material. In other words, uh the alchemist. Well, in other in other contexts, I've talked about uh the importance of language and how our world is made of language. And part of the problem with understanding alchemy is that the language is slipping out of our reach. We are so completely imbued with the cartisian categories of the reverence the the world of thought and the res extensor the world of three-dimensional space and causality and uh uh the conservation of matter and energy and so forth that in order to do more

than carry out a kind of scholarship of alchemy me. We have to create an alchemical language or a field in which alchemical language can take place. Some of you may have been with me a couple of weeks ago at uh in Malibu when Joan Halifax and I debated the roots of Buddhism. And I think Joan deserves great credit for saying that Buddhism would never have taken root in America were it not for the psychedelic phenomenon. Not that Buddhism is psychedelic. It in fact is fairly touchy about that. But Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America

had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root. And I would wager that I would never have gotten to first base with proposing a weekend on alchemy at Eselin were it not understood that psychedelics have prepared people for the notion that mind and world can be poured together like mercury and sulfur like the sulfic waters to create a new kind of understanding because otherwise modernity has fixed our minds in the categories of cartisian rationalism. And so uh I will not claim and do not in fact think it's so that there was anything

overtly psychedelic in the sense of pharmacologically based about alchemy. Uh when we look back through the alchemical literature, there's very little evidence that it was uh it was uh pharmacologically driven. Only when you get to the very last admirations of the alchemical impulse in someone like paracelis do you get the use of opium. and uh of but it is interesting that the great drugs of modern society were accidentally discovered by alchemists in their researches. Uh distilled alcohol is a product of alchemical work and then as I mentioned opium uh was very heavily used by the

paraselen school. But what they possessed was a an ability to liquefy their mental categories and then to project the contents of the mind onto these processes and read them back. Now, this is what made alchemy so fascinating to the Yunian school because the Yunians were discovering the unconscious and they realized before the Jung's involvement with alchemy, the best material for uh psycho therapy to work upon was dreams. uh but dream and mythology and these were the two uh the two poles of the uh data field that the discovery of the unconscious was working on. Well

then young had the precience to realize that alchemy which to that point as the gentleman over here said had been dismissed as a naive effort to turn base metals into gold. This is the first fiction that you have to absolutely purge from your mind. The only alchemists that ever tried to turn base metals into gold were charlatans, the so-called puffers, because they were called that not only for their exaggerated speech, but for their use of bellows to drive their fires. And alchemy has always had a core of true adepts and then a surround of misguided

souls and outright con artists who were trying to change uh uh base metals into gold. Now it's interesting that science in its naivity in the 20th century has actually completed the program of pseudo alalchemy. Uh you can if you have a sufficiently powerful nuclear reactor change lead into gold. I mean the cost is staggering. It has no economic in importance whatsoever. But it can be done by bombarding gold with sufficient amount of uh heavy heavy particles. I'm lead you can change it into into gold. But this is not uh what the original intent was. In

fact, when we look at the history of 20th century science, we will see that in a way it's a misunderstanding of what the alchemical goals were to be. And one by one it has done uh these things that were uh stated goals of the alchemists except that the alchemists always spoke in simileies and in a secret control language that was symbolic. Okay. Uh now another point that was brought up was in going around the circle was the externalization of the soul and um what we're trying to do is in this weekend is study and talk

about the idea of redeeming the world through magic and how is this to be done? Well, the the philosopher's stone is a complex of ideas that no matter how you divide it, no matter how you slice it, it's very difficult to hold the pith essence of this concept. But what it really comes down to is the idea that spirit is somehow resident in matter in a in a uh very duse form. And that the goal of hermetic thinking and later alchemy is the concentration and redemption of this spirit. A focusing of it, a bringing of

it together. This is an idea that was common in the henistic world not only to hermetic thinking but also tonosticism. Nosticism is the idea that somehow the pure, holy, real light of being was scattered through a universe of darkness and of saturnine power. And that the goal is by a process which we can call yogic or alchemical or meditative or moral/ethical. The light must be gathered and concentrated in the body and then somehow released and redeemed. And all uh esoteric traditions east and west talk about the creation of this body of light. And we will

not in this weekend talk very much about alchemy nonwestern alchemy dowist alchemy and vadic alchemy but uh in those systems too the notion is about the creation of this vehicle of light. This is one metaphor for the externalization of the soul. The philosopher stone is another. And I will challenge you to try to imagine what the achievement of the philosopher stone would be like. because it's in trying to think that way that you begin to dissolve the categories of the cartisian trap. And so imagine for a moment an object, a material which can literally do

anything. It can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever. So what do I mean? I mean that if you possessed the philosopher<unk>'s stone and you were hungry, you could eat it. If you needed to go somewhere, you could spread it out and sit on it and it would take you there. If you needed a piece of information, it would become the equivalent of a computer screen and it would tell you things. If you needed a companion, it would talk to you. In other word, if you needed to take a shower, you would hold it

over your head and water would pour out of it. Now, you see, this is an impossibility. That's right. It's a coincidencia posum. It is something which behaves like imagination and matter without ever doing damage to the onlogical status of of one or the other. Now we this sounds like you know pure pathology in a context of modern thinking because we expect things to stay still and be what they are and undergo the growth and degradation that is enimical to them. But no, the redemption of spirit and matter means the exteriorization of the human soul and

the interiorization of the human body so that it is an image freely commanded in the imagination. Imagination, I think this is the first time I've used this word this evening. The imagination is central to the alchemical opus because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination taken to be a physical dimension. And I think that uh we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination. We have exhausted the world of three-dimensional space. We are polluting it. We are

overpopulating it. We are using it up. Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of uh science and Christianity and rationalism. And we have to re empower and reenounter the mind. And we can do this psychedelically, we can do it yogically or we can do it alchemically and hermetically. Now there is present in the world at the moment um or at least I like to think so an impulse which I have named the

archaic revival. It's uh what happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble and you can use this in your own life when you really get in trouble, what you should do is say what what did I believe in the last sane moment that I experienced and then go back to that moment and act from it even if you no longer believe it. Now in the Renaissance this happened. The the uh scholastic universe dissolved. New classes, new forms of wealth, new systems of navigation, new scientific tools made it impossible to maintain the fiction of

the medieval cosmology. And there was a sense that the world was dissolving. good alchemical word, dissolving. And in that moment, the movers and shakers of that civilization reached backwards in time to the last sane moment they had ever known. And they discovered that it was classical Greece and they invented classicism in the in the 15th and 16th century. The texts which had lain in monasteries in Syria and Asia Minor, forgotten and untransated for centuries were brought to the Florentine Council by people like Jistus Pletho and others and translated and classicism was born. Its laws, its

philosophy, its aesthetics and we are the inheritors of that tradition. But it is now once again exhausted. And our cultural crisis is much greater. It is global. It is total. It involves every man, woman, and child on this planet. Every bug, bird, and tree is caught up in the cultural crisis that we have engendered. Our ideas are exhausted. the ideas that we inherit out of Christianity and its half brother science or its bastard child science. So what I'm suggesting is that an a a an archaic revival needs to take place and it seems to be

well in hand in the form of the revival of goddess worship and shamanism and partnership. But notice that these things are old, 10,000 years or more old. But there was an unbroken thread that however thinly drawn persists right up to the present. So the idea of this weekend is to show the way back to the uh high magic of the late paleolithic to show that there were intellectual traditions. There were minority points of view that kept the faith that never allowed it to die. And to my mind, this alchemical, hermetic, gnostic, Egyptian, calaldian thread is

the thread. And if we uh you know unravel it with sufficient care and attention then we can build a bridge from the otherwise nearly incomprehensible high magic of the late Paleolithic. We can get it as near to ourselves as John D who died in604. We can discover that it's no further away from us than the beginning of the 30 years war. And uh you know for my money after that it gets pretty mucked up. I mean after Elias Levy who's already waffling I'm not very interested in the al in the occultism of the 17th 18th

and 19th century but it's not necessary because scholarship gives us the calaldian oracles the tismagistic hymns uh the library at Nagamadi um and so forth and so on. So uh I my impulse is to in the most austere sense repopularize reintroduce this kind of thinking so that people can live it out and then step by step we can evolve our language and evolve our understanding to make our way back to the garden back to Eden. It's occurred to me recently, you know, it's said that Christ opened the doors to paradise. Yes. But he closed the

doors to Eden. And paradise is a very airy place where everybody sits around on clouds strumming their liars. I think what we want to do is make our way back to the alchemical garden. That's where our roots are. That's where meaning is. meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction. The coincidencia ofum, that's what we really feel. Not these rational schemas that are constantly beating us over the head with the thou shalts and thou shoulds, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being, an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble

and ignoble, future oriented, pastfacing. We each need to become Janusfaced and to incorporate into ourselves the banished contradictions of being that so haunt the uh enterprise of science. We can leave that behind. And when we do, we reclaim authentic being. And authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is. That's what they're talking about. Authentic being born. So that's uh tonight right now what we're led. We're Saturnine and we'll talk about Saturn and Pluto and all of that. Yes, we tomorrow we'll talk about the stages of the alchemical opus. And though

the stages are many and multiferous, it all begins in what is called the negrado. the blackening the depths of the leen Saturn nine chaotic fixed place and that's where we have been left by science and modernity and so forth and so on and that's where that's where the alchemist loves to begin that's where he then stokes he or she stokes the furnace and begins the dissolucio at collagulatio that leads to the uh appearance of the stone. I'll show you some books and this is you know by no means exhaustive. The literature of hermeticism and alchemy

is vast and I could have brought five or six books boxes of this size from my own library and this is a smattering. It doesn't mean what I show you is the best. It simply tries to uh spread over a 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 Weddings. And I see last week it was number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list, which is astonishing for such an obscure uh subject. It's a retelling of a famous incident in

alchemy in the 19th century when a woman named Mary Alice Atwood uh who was had a very very close relationship to her father Dr. South. And the two of them worked together, she on a text and he on a long poem. And uh 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 had given the secret away. At least that's one version. So this is a fictionalized retelling of that incident intercut with a modern uh cast of characters very clearly modeled

on the poet Robert Graves. So uh if you like to absorb your information in a fictionalized form, this is a wonderful book. Uh John Borman, the movie director, recently optioned this book. to the guy who made the Emerald Forest and Excalibur. So, we may have an alchemical movie downstream a year or two. 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 Festoi and Bartholo. uh they collected uh alchemical texts into

encyclopedic size volumes but unfortunately these have never really come into English. One that did come into English is the museum hermeticum amplificarum etiram I think which A.E. We wait who some of you may know for his role in the Golden Dawn uh collected. There are about 40 alchemical texts and all the greats are in here. uh Low, Villanova, uh Michael Meyer, um Basil Valentine, Kramer, Edward Kelly, and so forth. The place to begin, I think, is obviously with the question, who is Hermes Trismagist? What are we talking about here? I mean, this sounds so incredibly

exotic to people. Uh, the Renaissance had the concept of what it called. And if my Latin and Greek irritates you, you have to understand you're dealing with a boy from a coal mine local in Colorado. So, uh, I do mangle these things. The presogi were Orpheus, Moses, and primarily Hermes Trismagistus. Hermes Trismagistus was the primary uh source from the point of view of the Renaissance of this whole mystery tradition. And um you recall from last night's lecture that this is based on a misunderstanding. The Renaissance believed that uh Hermes Trismagistus was older than Moses. We

know now thanks to Isaac and Marik Casabon, 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 kasabons was to examine the uh the philosophical language of the corpus hermeticum and show that there were words and phrases there that were postplatonic and derivative from philosophers whose dates we have fully in hand. Now, if you go to an occult bookstore, you will find that to this day, this error persists. There are people who still want to claim that this stuff is

older than dynastic Egypt. Uh there are even books available. I was in Shambala a week ago, claiming to teach you how to change lead into gold. Well, from my point of view, this just evokes a small and a small smile. The old errors persist. The puffers are still at it. Uh, but what Hermes Trismagisttos is is a character uh who appears in many guises in these hermetic dialogues. The dialogue, the hermetic hymns are usually couched in the form of dialogues between Hermes and his son Thoth. And Thoth takes the role of the uninitiated Anenu who

is sitting at the feet of the master. And 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 dialogue which builds to an ecstatic revelation and then in the wake of the ecstatic revelation there is a hymn of praise to uh to uh Hermes Trismagist. Trismagistus means thrice blessed and is sometimes called Hermes triplex to distinguish this Hermes from all the other Hermes of 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 uh Hermes Trismagist Thoth Hermes uh was imagined. He was associated with the scribe god of the Egyptian pantheon. The two distinguishing factors at least that stand out for me that I think you need to incorporate into your thinking about uh the hermeticism. Two very important concepts. The first is the divinity of human beings. an extraordinarily radical idea in the

context of late henistic thinking. We all operate on under the spell of the concept of the fall of man. That man is an inferior being. Errors were made in the garden of Eden and that we are far far from the nature of divinity. All magic and all magic in the west is derivative from this tradition takes the position that man is a divine being. Men and women are divine beings. The corpus hermeticum actually refers to man as God's brother. And this is a double-edged perception. It gives tremendous dignity to the human enterprise but it also

raises the possibility of the error of pride and hubris. In the Renaissance, Marello Facino boiled this notion down to the apherism, man is the measure of all things. And you may notice that this is the position really of science that man is the measure of all things. That it is up to us. We can decide the course of the cosmos. All magic stems from this position. This is why the church was so concerned to stamp out magic because it assigns man an importance that the church would rather reserve. uh to deity. So that's the first

great division between Christian thinking and hermetic thinking. An entirely different conception of what human beings are. And when we get into the text, I'll read you some of these passages. Now the second distinguishing factor, and notice that this position on man empowers tremendous freedom, then is the measure of all things. The second uh distinguishing factor uh in hermeticism is the belief that we can control fate that we can escape from cosmic fate. The late Henistic mindset was and what you get in the Gnostics is the belief that because of astrology, because of the stars, we

are subject to control from these exterior forces. uh in in most gnostic thinking the whole concern is to somehow evade what is called the himarmony cosmic fate. uh and in the gnostic systems the only way it can be done is by ascending through the shells of cosmic ordering forces the archons the planets planetary demons so forth and so on and then beyond the hearmony which is actually thought of as a as a place in space that you burst through you transcend fate what the hermetic thought is is that these fates become personified as the deacons,

as the stellar demons. And then it is held that there is a magic a magical system which is possible where you can call these archangels to your side and work with them and not be subject to the inevitable working of the cosmic machinery. And this burst like a revelation over the late henistic world because there was such philosophical and emotional and political exhaustion that this comes this is a counterpoise to the message of the of the New Testament which is a similar message you know that you can be saved in the body that you can

escape the inevitable uh dissolution and degradation laid upon us by time. So these are the two distinguishing factors, the divinity of man and the possibility of using magic to evade the machinery of fate. So I want to read some of the uh corpus to you to give you the flavor of it. Uh but before I do I want to say something about the history of these texts. You're all familiar more or less I'm sure with Apulius's the golden ass which is a novel of initiation that is late Roman. Apulius also um put together what is

called the escapius and the escapius is true hermetic literature that was not lost. It was the only one that was available throughout the dark and middle ages. Uh all the rest was lying untransated in uh in Syrian uh monasteries until Jistus Plateau in 1490 brought these manuscripts to Florence to the court of the Demetic and then the translation project began. Now the only other hermetic material that was accessible throughout the high Gothic period uh was a book of magic called Pikatrix. Pikatrix and the Pikatrix was probably written in the 1200s although this elicits screams of

dissent from the burning eyed faction. uh but reason dictates that we consider Pikatrix 12th century. So only the escapius and the picatrix represented this strain of thought before uh the 1460s. And the importance of hermetic thinking can be seen by the fact that jistus pleth brought Plato to the Florentine council as well as Hermes Trismagistos. And when Marello Facino sat down to do this translation work, Cosmo Demedi said, "Plato can wait. I'm getting old. You You do the hermetic corpus first. That's much more important. We'll sort out this Plato business in a few years." And

so it was done. And the complete It was completed in 1493. And in 1494, Cosmo died. So he never saw the translations of Plato but felt that uh the corpus or medic was more important. Just I mention this to show you the importance that was uh attached to this stuff. See here is the one of the key passages on man's nature. This is from book one of the corpus medic. But mind the father of all, he who is life and light, gave birth to man, a being like to himself. And he took delight in man

as being his own offspring. For man was very goodly to look on, bearing the likeness of his father. With good reason then did God take delight in man. For it was God's own form that God took delight in. and man and God delivered over to man all things that had been made. This is the basis of the Finanian statement. Man is the measure of all things. And man took station in the maker's sphere and observed the things made by his brother who was set over the region of fire. And having observed the maker's creation in

the region of fire, he willed to make things for his own part also. And his father gave permission having in himself all the working of the administrators. This is a reference to the angel hierarchy. And having in him and the administrators took delight in him and each of them gave him a share of his own nature. So man is the brother of God and a creature at home with the angels. Um it the this idea is echoed in the esclus which you'll recall was available throughout the middle ages. Um the range of man is yet

wider than that of the demons meaning the angels. This term is uh you know transposable in hermetic thought. The individuals of the humankind are diverse and of many characters. They like the demons come from above and entering into fellowship with other individuals. They make for themselves many and intimate connections with almost all other kinds. And then the famous passage, man is a marvel. Then Eslepius, honor and reverence to such a being. Man takes on him the attributes of a god as though he were himself a god. And he is familiar with the demon kind. For

he comes to know that he is sprung from the same source as they, and strong in the assurance of that in him which is divine. He scorns the merely human part of his own nature. How far more happily blended are the properties of man than those of other beings. He is linked to the gods in as much as there is in him a divinity akin to theirs. He scorns that part of his own being which makes him a thing of earth. And all else with which he finds himself connected by heaven's ordering, he binds to

himself by the tie of his affection. So this is a incredibly radical conception of what it means to be human. So radical that it is unwelcome even in the present context. Notice the modern feeling of this stuff. I mean, this is not biblical rhetoric. This is philosophical discourse as we know it and carry it out ourselves. This is a passage on the adept and [Music] initiation. Now, this is uh let me see who's speaking here. Uh Thoth speaks to Pandas. This is book one. But tell me this too, said I. God said, let the man

who has mind in him recognize himself, but have not all men mind. And then Pandandre replies, "Oh man, said mind to me, speak not so. I even mind come to those men who are holy and good and pure and merciful and my coming is a sucker to them and forth with they recognize all things and win the father's grace by loving worship and give thanks to him praising and hemming him with hearts uplifted to him in felial affection. Again the reference to being God's brother in felial affection. And before they give up the body to

the death which is proper to it, they loathe the bodily senses knowing what manner of work the senses do. Now this introduces the theme of uh aestheticism that like excuse me like the Gnostics uh there is a in much of the hermetic literature a kind of horror of the earth a desire to ascend and to get away from it. Um Scott makes the distinction between what he calls pessimistic nosis and optimistic nosis. And within the 20 texts of the corpus medic you get vacasillation on this point. In some cases the man the mandion the Sibian

tendency is there and the world soul is invoked and the whole of creation is seen as a living being involved in this sotiological process this process of salvational mechanics through magic. In other texts, this gnostic horror of latter is very strongly stressed. It's very clear that u the the henistic mind was ambivalent on this point even as we are ambivalent on this point. I mean it's a real question. Are we here to be the caretakers of the earth or are we strangers in the universe? and is our task to return to a forgotten and hidden

home, no trace of which can be found in the Saturnine world of matter. It's very hard to have it both ways. Uh you're going to have to sort of take a position on that. And these people were forced into the same dilemma. There's no middle ground between those two positions. And and so that that dichotomy that conundrum haunted a a lot of uh of hermetic thinking. Here is uh the hermetic creation. This is book three paragraphs one through a few. And you will see the comparison the similarities to the uh to the Christian creation but

with extraordinary differences. There was darkness in the deep and water without form and there was a subtle breath intelligent which permeated the things in kaio with divine power. Then when all was yet undistinguished and unrot, there was shed forth holy light, and the elements came into being, all things were divided one from another, and the lighter things were parted off on high, the fire being suspended a loft, so that it rose unto the air. And the heavier things sank down, and sand was deposited beneath the watery substance, and the dry land was separated out from

the watery substance, and became solid, and the fiery substance was articulated with the gods therein. And heaven appeared with its seven spheres, and the gods visible in starry forms with all their constellations. And heaven revolved and began to run its circling course, riding upon the divine air. And each god by his several power set forth that which he was bidden to put forth. And there came forth four-footed beasts and creeping things and fishes and winged birds and grass and every flowering herb, all having seed in them according to their diverse natures. for they generated within

themselves the seed by which their races should be renewed. And then it goes on to describe the birth of man. Now this kind of thinking is what alchemy seized upon in its uh ambitions. In a way, one way of thinking about uh what alchemy came to attempt is the thinking went like this. Since man is God's brother, the purpose of man is to intercede in time and it was believed that ores, precious metals, uh and things like this grew in the earth. It was a thoroughgoing theory of evolution that reached right down into the organic

realm. So it was thought that uh gold um deposits in the earth would actually replenish themselves over time. And it's passages like this that give permission for that kind of thinking. In line with that, uh, we're now in book four. And remember, the tone changes slightly from book to book. They were, after all, uh, written over a 300year period by various people. Um, you must understand then that God is pre-existent and everexistent, everexistent, and that he alone made all things and created by his will the things that are. And when the creator had made the

ordered universe, he willed to set in order the earth also. He willed to set in order the earth also. And so he sent down man, a mortal creature made in the image of an immortal being to be an embellishment of the divine body. For it is man's function. Here it comes. The purpose of man for according to book four for it is man's function to contemplate the works of God and for this purpose he was made that he might view the universe with wondering awe and come to know its maker. Man has this advantage over

all other living beings that he possesses mind and speech. Now speech, my son, God imparted to all men, but mind he did not impart to all. Not that he grudged it to any, for the grudging temper does not start from heaven above, but comes from being here below in the souls of those men who are devoid of mind. This introduces the concept of the of an elect or a perfecting a a hierarchy of human of human accomplishment and understanding. And this is also basic tonosticism. It's not for everyone. They're saying it's for the pure of

heart. And then what pure of heart means depends on the school you're looking at. You know, for some it was mathematical accomplishment. For others it was contact with the logos. For others it was an ability to resist the temptations of the senses. But there was always this sense of the higher and lower possibility within the human experience. Everybody with me so far? This is at the opening of book 12. And this is a book with a heavy uh mandion sensitivity. This sensitivity to life now this whole cosmos and notice how this transcends even the Buddhist

point of view because in Buddhism plants have no soul. This is a tremendous failure in the Buddhist conception as far as I'm concerned. Uh okay this is uh book uh book 12. Now this whole cosmos which is a great God and an image of him who is greater and is united with him and maintains its order in accordance with that will is one mass of life. And there is not anything in the cosmos nor has been through all time from the first foundation of the universe neither in the whole nor among the several things contained

in it that is not alive. There is not and has never been and never will be in the cosmos anything that is dead. For it was the Father's will that the cosmos, as long as it exists, should be a living being, and therefore it must needs be a God also. How then, my son, could there be dead things in that which is a god, in that which is an image of the father, in that which is one mass of life? Deafness is corruption, and corruption is destruction. How then can any part of that which is

incorruptible be corrupted, or any part of that which is a god be destroyed? And there are other passages. Um, this is a good one. This is uh book eight. For as the son who nurtures all vegetation also gathers the first fruits of the produce with his rays as it were with mighty hands, plucking the sweetest odors of the plants. Even so, we too, having received into our souls, which are plants of heavenly origin the efflux of God's wisdom, must in return use his service for all that springs up in us. Now, this conception that the

human soul is a plant is a unique idea. I I don't know of another tradition. Uh those of you who were with us in Ohhigh, we heard Johannes Wilbur talk about uh how among the Amazon Indians, the Waral, the men actually marry trees. They actually take trees as their wives, a tree. And it is a man's job throughout his life to take care of this tree with the same tenderness and attention that he lavishes on a living life. This is a more radical conception than that. This is the conception that the most important part of

us is a plant. It it reminds me of the joke that I occasionally make in these groups. Uh the notion that animals are something invented by plants to carry them from place to place. Well, according to this, that's right on. So uh the the sensitivity to the vegetative nature of the world is so great that it raises the plant to be the pithence the soul of man the brother of God. So you see the valuation of the vegetative universe here is of an extremely radical type. Yes, Canon. I I was just going to ask if

the upper echelon the section is the humanity that was given the mind. Was that predetermined at first for someone to tell a line? No, it's it is not predetermined. It is something that is acquired through cultivation of a relationship to in the hermetic language noose the higher mind and in the Gnostic language logos the informing spirit but yes no the whole thrust potential yes and the and the nothing is predetermined uh in the hermetic system because through magic we can overcome the energies of cosmic fate. This is the great good news of of hermeticism that

we are not subject to fate. Uh we should probably talk a little about this logos concept. Uh this is something which seems very alien to modern people unless they are psychedelically sophisticated. The logos was the sin quuanon of henistic religion. And what it was was an informing voice that spoke in your head or your heart, wherever you want to put it. And it told you the right way to live. You get this idea even in the later Old Testament where uh it's said that uh the truth of the heart is can be known that if

that it is no great dilemma to know good from evil. You simply inquire of your heart, is it good or evil? And you will discover a voice which will tell you. And and all the great thinkers of this Greco Helenistic period uh sought and cultivated the logos. Plato had his demon. Everyone sought the informing voice of the noose. That's what it's called in neoplatanism. And then in hermeticism, I mean in and in hermeticism and then innosticism, the logos. Now, uh, for modern people, well, no, for me, the only way I've ever had this experience is

in the presence of psychedelic substances. And then it is just crystal clear. There is no ambiguity about it. Somehow it's possible for an informing voice to come into cognition that knows more than you do. It is a connection with the collective unconscious I suppose that is convivial conversational and just talks to you about uh uh the nature of being in the world and the nature of your being in the world. Uh it's puzzling to us because it seems so remote. I mean for us a voice in the head or the heart is pathology. And uh

you may know the famous story of uh in the first century uh some fishermen were off the shore of the island of Argos in the Mediterranean Sea and they heard a great voice from the sky and the voice said, "Great Pan is dead." Great Pan is dead. Well, people like Lactantius and Eczeius, these petristic fathers, the people who built Christianity, who took the gospels and turned it into a world religion. They took this enunciation from the sky of the death of Pan as the enunciation of the change of the Aon. In other words, by the

aon, I mean these 2,000 year roughly 2,000year periods that are associated with the equinoxial procession. Do you all understand how this works? that over 26,000 years the helical rising of the of the solsticial sun slips slowly slowly from one house to another and around AD 100 I mean there's argument because these things are never precise but around AD 100 the age of Pisces began and the previous Aon all ceased and the cosmic machinery, the great gears of the largest scale of the cosmic machinery clicked past a certain point and into the age of Pisces and

this was then taken as um very fortuitous for Christianity because Christ was associated with the sign of the fish and was seen as a Pycan movement. But I believe that it's entirely possible that the logos at that moment, that rough moment in time, fell silent and that it has been silent for 2,000 years. And what we have had then is the exugesis of text and you know noetic archaeology of the sort we're carrying on here. But that now in and a phenomenon as as trivial and and hype haunted as channeling can be seen as the

reawakening of the locos. The long night of Piscian silence is ending and the spirit of noose is again moving in the world speaking in the minds of the adepts and the hieropofants who have uh the techniques and the will to connect with this stuff. I don't know how I got off on that, but obviously this kind of literature can be seen as the last message from the fading logos. The the last statements before uh the change of the aon rendered this control language uh very difficult and non-intuitive and somewhat incomprehensible. Chad, go ahead. Back to

the the first of the the reading where you broke off. I'm a little puzzle. Ralphie used this word mine. What the in this context was it's uh Scott's translation of this word noose. It simply means this universal permeating intelligence. And the statement there is that it is only available to an elite through through um aestheticism and desire intent. Uh and then there are prescriptions. We haven't gotten into this, but you know, they lived a life of uh purity, although their definitions of purity varied widely. Part of the of the flip-flop that uh a man is

brother of God and still we have to earn it. It it makes it not uh That's right. kind of a denial of that. That's right. No, this persists right up until well to this moment. But for instance, the quote I always love is from Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes, you know, was the great theoretician of uh modern government and social organization. And he was basically a paranoid so and he says uh in the Leviathan he says man to man is like unto an errant beast and man to man is like unto a god. And it's

absolutely true. You know, our noblest aspirations and our most hideously dehumanizing activities take place in the context of our relationship to other people. This is this is what the alchemists were trying to do. You see, they were trying to separate the gold from the dross. They were trying to take the errand beast. And when we look at alchemical art, we will see dragons, dogs, pigs, we will see the errant beasts and we will see the angelic beings that are trying to be separated out of our nature. This is within each and every one of us.

Manto man is like unto a god and man to man is like unto an errant beast. This question having to do with the mind. Uh according to my understanding of um some of the platonic tradition and neoplatonic thought, this has to do with the divide design in Plato. Well, you raise an important point. It further complicates the picture, but it it's how it was folks. And that is the reference here is to neoplatonism which is a kind of paralleled tradition to what we're talking about. Uh Plato had a at least a couple of phases in

the evolution of his thinking. The young Plato is a a rational thinker. But the later Plato apparently after he fell under the influence of Pythagorean schools becomes a full-blown mystic. And then in the late Roman Empire um now this is almost a thousand years after Plato. We have to remember in our minds all these people get squeezed together like they could all have dinner together. But you know Platinus is as far from Plato as we are from King Canoot. So uh you have to bear in mind the scale of history but so 900 to a,000

years after Plato a Byzantine school of philosophy arose around pfury uh platinus and proclas as the major exponents and they worked with the late Plato and elaborated a beautiful mystical cosmology. This is what I did a workshop here on a year ago. And many of those ideas and terms parallel conceptually the stuff in the corpus and if you're of a certain intellectual bent, you may find yourself more comfortable with the neoplatonists than with this. This material tends to be emotional uh evocative poetic and while there's great poetry in Plutinus there's also very tight thinking that

goes along with it and there are other traditions I mean I'm making it simple for you there was a whole tradition of what was called the calaldian oracles uh and this was a s a collection of a hundred uh or more fragments all of which have uh were the great commentary of Ucius in 30 volumes one of them uh that's all lost we don't have that material and it is in a way the most mysterious of these traditions because it just didn't survive and it may be that that the Calaldian oracles is the missing link

to push this stuff back several several centuries deeper into time because the Calaldian oracles may actually be pre-platonic. There's considerable evidence of that. But these are very arcane matters. I mean, you have to give yourself over to a lifetime of learning these languages and the philology of these languages to penetrate this stuff. uh the hermetic cororpus was largely Alexandrian and there were also Christian Platonists in Alexandria. There were certain centers Rome, Bzantium, Alexandria uh uh Helopoulos in Egypt was a cult site that was maintained for a very long time. If you're interested in this stuff

but you don't like to absorb it this way, uh, Flobear of all people, the Flobear of Ma Madame Bovery wrote an incredible novel called The Temptation of St. Anthony and uh in which he describes 2 century Alexandria in a fictionalized form and gives you a real flavor for the intellectual complexity of the Alexandrian world. You see Christianity had not yet gelled. It was many things. So you not only have Gnostics of five or six schools, Simonists, Valentinians, uh, Baselians and so forth. But you also have Christians or a number of cults calling themselves Christians that

were also in furious competition, dosetists, montists and later Ntorians. uh there were gymnosophists from India, people who were actually carrying yogic doctrines into the Mediterranean world. Plus you then have all the uh surviving cults of the older Egyptian strata, the cults of Isis and Seville and Adonis and Dionis and it just goes on and on. I mean the richness of this intellectual world uh is very there's nothing comparable in our experience and uh it shows uh the passion with which people were trying to understand the dilemma of a dying world because this is what they

were confronted with. The intellectuals of the empire could feel it all slipping through their hands and Flo gives a wonderful picture of this. I mean, Flobear has a very romantic streak and he it's like smoking hashish to read this book. I mean, the attention to fabric and architecture and uh food and odor and and then because the subject matter is the temptation of St. Anthony, it's an excuse to describe these temptations in all their sensual richness and erotic kinkiness and it it's a it's a wonderful way to absorb uh this material. But you know if

you somebody else raised the point about weism or economic group of people and if one considers society as you had in Alexandria were some of the large sectors. But the only people who really had access to this were people who first of all had money then correct and who were well educated could read and yeah yes you had to be able to read there already you have an elite group. That's right. That's right. No, it very definitely what survives from a civilization is its literatures and these literatures are usually the production of uh an elite

and we have to remember you know don't have any illusions about the Roman Empire. I mean I always think of the wonderful description I don't even know why it's there but Boris Pastinoak in Dr. Shivago goes off on a rip about ancient Rome and he describes it as a bargain basement on three floors. I mean this was an empire that lived by human cruelty. It was on the backs of slaves that this uh airy intellectual speculation was based. I mean it was uh uh a tremendously pluralistic society but that pluralism was maintained by standing armies

of enormous size and uh policies of occupation of enormous cruelty. I mean because of our relationship to the Christian tradition we're aware of such things as the zealot revolt of 69 and the reign of Herod Antious in Jerusalem and so forth and so on. But that was just one little corner of the empire. And in Armenia, in Gaul, in Spain, in North Africa, military governors were carrying out uh outrageous suppressions of native populations. I mean, it was not a pretty time to be alive. And uh and what comes down to us then is the yearning

to escape from that. No wonder these people saw the earth as a cesspool and a trap because that's what it was for them without doubt. And our own age is very similar. I mean we do not have slavery but we suffer under uh propaganda, mass manipulation of ideas and uh you know uh the degradation and exploitation of the third world on a scale the Roman Empire couldn't even dream of. So there is a great affinity. If any of you are interested in this kind of thing, I highly recommend a book by Hansonus called uh the

phenomenon of life. It's a book of philosophical essays. But there's one essay in there called Gnosticism and the modern temper in which he shows that once you take and dump the angels and the star demons and all the colorful brick of late Roman thinking, what you have is a thoroughgoing existentialism completely compatible with uh uh Jean Paulart Jean Jane and the kind of intellectual despair that characterized the postworld war II generation in Europe. Haidiger Haidiger is thoroughgoingly gnostic in his uh intentionality. It's just that the the language is modern and and stripped of this magical

thinking. And by being stripped of magical thinking in a way modern uh the modern resinion of that uh uh state of mind is even more hopeless and disempowering. Fortunately uh I think we're moving out of the shadow of that. But you know I'm 44 years old. I grew up reading those people and it made my adolescence much harder than it needed to be. I mean, my god, there wasn't an iota of hope anywhere to be found, you know, and that's why for me, psychedelics broke over that intellectual world like a tidal wave of revelation. I

mean, I just I quoted to you last night Jerome Paul Sartra's uh statement that nature is mute. This is uh now I see this as an obscenity almost an intellectual crime against reason and intuition of a logos. It's the absolute antithesis of of the logos. And much of our world is ruled by men older than I am who are fully connected into that without any question. And they just think all the rest of this is nambby pami ecological softhe-heartedness or some sort. There is no openness to the power of bios to the fact of a

living cosmos. This is what Rupert Sheldrake is always trying to say. The reinvestature of spirit into matter, the rebirth of the world soul uh is a necessary concatant to what we now understand uh about the real nature of the world. In a way, the theory of evolution which is was born in the 1850s is the beginning of the turning of the tide. Because even though the first hundred years of evolutionary theory was fantastically concerned to uh eliminate teiology, eliminate purpose. Nevertheless, nobody ever understood that except the hardcore evolutionists. To everybody else, evolution meant ascent to

higher form. And once, you know, I once heard someone say, if it doesn't have to do with genes, it ain't evolution. Well, that's a a tremendously limited view of what evolution is. I mean, the or inorganic world is evolving. The organic world is evolving. And there the currency is genes. But also the social and intellectual world of human beings is evolving and there the currency is not genes but means. So that idea carries with it the implication of ascent to higher form and correctly broadened and understood becomes permission for a return to optimism and to

the kind of hope that these folks were were trying to uh articulate. It seems to me that mine is if it is available through trial then we're back in a separation. I thought it was old. Sometimes I do it. And this is this is to me a false separation. Yes, you're right. Uh but it's a separation necessary for philosophical discourse. That's why philosophical discourse is not the top of the mountain. Language itself is the process of making distinctions that are false. This is why all language is a lie. This is why the ultimate truth lies

in something unspeakable. But the ascent to the unspeakable is is through this kind of philosophical analysis that um let me see that reminds me of something. But does somebody else have something they want to The language is only the vehicle. Well, it's the vehicle but eventually there's no road and you have to park the vehicle and and get out and walk, I think. And that's the journey. Platinus the great neoplatonist has this wonderful phrase. He calls the mystical experience the flight of the alone to the alone. And I love this image. It's so uncompromising and

it's so it's about as true as something can be and still move in the realm of language because it's saying you know finally words fall away and finally there is only that which cannot be said. Many of you who've stuck with me know that I love to quote this poem by this obscure poet who died in the trenches of France in the First World War, Trumbull Sticky. And he wrote a poem called Meaning's Edge. And the punchline goes like this. Um, Meaning's Edge. I look over Meaning's Edge and feel the dizziness of the things you

have not said. And I think that every one of these weekends, this is the effort to carry you to the edge of an abyss and then push you over into the dizziness of the things unsaid. And they'll always be unsaid. I mean they are Vickenstein, God bless him had the concept of what he called the unspeakable. He said philosophy operates in the realm of the speakable but eventually we must confront that which cannot be said the dizziness of things unsaid. And that's where real authenticity then flows back into the world of community and speech. But

it comes from a place of utter silence and unsayability. How could it be otherwise? I mean, what hubris it would be to expect that the small mouth noises of English could encompass being I mean that that's a primary error that all philosophy chooses to make at the beginning of its enterprise in order to do this setup shop at all. Uh, no. These are lower dimensional slices of of a reality that is ultimately unitary, ineffable, unspeakable and dazzling is anybody else know we do more. Yeah, please. The philosophical discourse is the verbal and mental masturbation. Absolutely.

And masturbation, you see, because it is um there's a pun here, but it's autopoetic. It is completely out of yourself. There is no uh union with the other. And the other is what you're always trying to get to. The other is a common term in these literatures. Uh the other uh is that which cannot be fully known. You know uh I always like to quote the British enzyologist JBS Halane who made a wonderful statement. He said uh the universe is not only stranger than we suppose it is stranger than we can suppose. And that's a

dizzying perception. It's one thing to think it's very strange. It's quite another thing to realize that it is stranger than you can suppose. You may suppose and suppose and suppose and you will fall so far short of the mark that it's absurd. That's what it means to be in the presence of a mystery. You see the modern word mystery translates out to unsolved problem. That's not what a mystery is. A mystery is not an unsolved problem. A mystery is a mystery and rioination can exhaust itself and make no progress with it. And that's what's at

the core of our being. And that was what was at the core of this ancient perception. I mean, these were thoroughly modern people. They were shoved up against the same things that tug at our hearts and our minds and our souls. And uh beyond that, there's not a whole hell of a lot that you can say about it. This is an idea that will not die, but its practitioners, as you say, they end up in footnotes. They do not have a happy faith. Certainly Alre Bergen with his idea of the Alain Vital. This is a

an effort to preserve this idea of the world's soul and yet you know the fate of Bergen his influence on modern societ on modern philosophy is certainly minimal. Uh Alfred North Whitehead is my great favorite. I mean, I think Whitehead is just uh uh you know, the cat's pajamas and he has this idea of the living cosmos. He that life and vitality extend right down into the electron. And yet, um in spite of his mathematical contributions, the fact that he wrote Principia Mathematica with Vertin Russell, uh Whitehead is not taught. I mean there's some I

guess one university in this country where they take him seriously. Uh the modern philosophy is a desert for my money. And who cares about it? Nobody cares about it. Who's living their life according to uh the the conceptions of modern philosophy? Nobody as far as I can see. But yes, vitalism was this impulse in biology that persisted clear up until the 1920s with embryologists like Dre and and uh his school and it it mechanical biology has been at great pains to suppress that. That's why Rupert Sheldrake is such a breath of fresh air because he

can be seen as a a person carrying the vitalist message back into science. I mean, his new book on the greening of science and nature is nothing more than a manifestation I'm I'm sorry, a manifesto for the re-recognition of the presence of uh of the world soul. What about the Native Americans that were living that philosophy? Can you tell me why it's important? Yes. Well, Aboriginal people, not only the Native Americans, but the tribes of the Amazon. If you live next to nature, this is such an overwhelming perception that it's never called into question. But

you see, we trace we most of us trace our civilization to desert dwellers who invented agriculture which gave us surpluses. So then we had to build walled enclosures to defend our surpluses from starving neighbors. And we're talking 6,000 BC at Jericho for this kind of stuff. And so we have been cut off from the natural mind longer than any other group of people on earth. This is how we are able to carry out the demonic in the negative sense the demonic uh uh reconstruction of the world that we have. I mean uh uh what we

have done is you know if there is a sin then we have sinned. You know, Robert Oenheimer said, "By all rational argument, the physicists have known sin." It's because they reached into the heart of matter without reverence. And their best trick was to call down the light that burns at the center of stars. And they call it down to the test centers of our deserts and onto the heads of our enemies if necessary. But this is a cosmic sin. It's an abomination. Um, it's the story of Western civilization. The first great error was the the

urbanization. Well, I don't know. First great error. The invention of agriculture was a pretty staggering. Where else have we done it? Bad turn. Then urbanization. And then a piece of bad luck that really we didn't need to have befall us, which was the invention of the phonetic alphabet. And with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, we moved away from symbolism and lost even the symbolic connection to the world. And that happened with the evolution of uh of deotic Greek and uh and even earlier languages linear A and B and that kind of stuff. McLuhan talks

a lot about this. I mean, we live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive uh of the way back, but hopefully um you know, archaeology is a wonderful thing. I mean, we are actually, as I said to you last night, digging into the stratographic layers of our past and reconstructing these ancient intellectual machines and setting their gears turning and and seeing how it works. And hopefully when we recover, we're like amnesiacs. We're like people who don't remember who we are or where we came from. We just wander mumbling through the streets of

our cities, foraging in garbage cans and and uh frightening other people. And yet, if we could wake up and archaeology and and uh and the you know the rebirth of an awareness of the goddess and uh the pushing of science to the point where its irrational foundations become more clear. This is all part of a program of awakening of an archaic revival that will then make us part of the living world rather than a disease and parasitic force upon it. This refers to the theme I touched on a little bit last night of the importance

of the imagination and how I think that our destiny lies in the imagination. God is ever existent and makes manifest all else. But he himself is hidden because he is ever existent. He manifests all things but is not manifested. He is not himself brought into being in images presented through our senses. But he presents all things to us in such images. It is only things which are brought into being that are presented through sense. Coming into being is nothing else than presentation through sense. This is so thoroughly modern. It's just staggering. I mean it's for

a thousand or 1500 years people couldn't say anything that clearly. It is evident then that he who alone has not come into being cannot be presented through sense. And that being so, he is hidden from our sight. But he presents all things to us through our senses, and thereby manifests himself through all things and in all things, and especially to those whom he wills to manifest himself. For though thought alone can see that which is hidden, in as much as thought itself is hidden from sight, and if even the thought which is within you is

hidden from your sight, how can he being in himself be manifested to you through your bodily eyes? But if you have power to see with the eyes of the mind, then my son, he will manifest himself to you. For the Lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe and you can behold God's image with your eyes and lay hold on it with your hands. To my mind, this is the permission for the psychedelic experience that we lay hold of the image of the ineffable through the eyes. If you wish to see him, think on the

sun. Think on the course of the moon. Think on the order of the stars. The son is the greatest of the gods in heaven. To him as to their king and overlord. All the gods of heaven yield place. And yet this mighty God, greater than earth and sea, submits to have smaller stars circling above him. Who is it then, my son, that he obeys with reverence and awe? Each of these stars too is confined by measured limits and has an appointed space to range in. Why do not all the stars in heaven run like and

equal courses? Who is it that has assigned to each its place and marked out each for the extent of its course? And then it goes on and on. And then here is an amazing modern anticipation of modernity. would that it were not possible for you to grow wings and soar into the air. Poised between earth and heaven, you might see the solid earth, the fluid sea and the streaming rivers, the wandering air, the penetrating fire, the courses of the stars and the swiftness of the movement with which heaven encompasses all. What happiness were that, my

son, to see all these born along with one impulse, and to behold him who is unmoved, moving in all that moves, and him who is hidden, made manifest through his works. This is an image of the planet seen from space. I mean it's uh absolutely the unified image of our planet and it is I think the the central image in this early hermetic thing. This is the unifying this is as close to an image of what Godhead is that they were able to reach. I mean this is a shamanic flight that delivers uh a scientific

description of the earth moving in space. This is written AD 150. Uh this is book five. Uh nobody had that insight until we reached Jordano Bruno. And if you read Jordano Bruno in the hermetic tradition, you know that Bruno was burned at the stake. And the reason he was burned at the stake was because he looked up into the sky and did not see the stellar shells and the angelic hierarchies. Bruno had a mystical experience and when it was over he said the universe is infinite. The stars go on forever. And that single statement was

just the intellectual dynamite that destroyed the whole medieval henistic the entire previous cosmological vision was left behind with that single statement. It was such a powerful statement that he had to go to the stake for that. And uh we have never recovered from from that perception. It was a fundamental perception and it occurred because he looked without precondition into the night sky and did not see, you know, wheels and demons and angels and shells of cosmic fate and necessity. He just said, you know, that's What is there is infinite space, infinite time. The stars are

hung like lamps unto the utmost regions of infinity. And this then inaugurates the beginning of modernity. And uh and it's a perception that arose on the foundation of all of this uh earlier thinking. Here's another passage uh on the imagination. Yes. How is it there to achieve a vision? Well, the practice we know a lot less about that because there was much secrecy around this. What we have are the philosophical discourses and then when we talk about alchemy this afternoon we'll see that there the technique becomes projection onto matter that you enter into a kind

of self-hypnosis where by having these what we call naive onlogical categories in other words not being sure exactly how much of mind is in matter or how much matter is in mind you can erase the boundary between self and world and project the contents of the unconscious onto uh chemical processes. Now what went on in the early phase here we don't know. The hermetic the chismagistic hymns are largely as you see them here philosophical discourses. There was stress on diet and purity. Aseticism was typical of the hermetic approach. Innosticism it one went one of several

ways. There were schools ofnosticism which were uh vegetarian and uh puristic and then because they felt that man was no part of the universe that man was somehow hermetically sealed if you will hermetically sealed against contamination from the universe. Uh some Gnostic schools said you can do anything you want. You can have any kind of sexual arrangement you want. You can do anything you want because you are not do not think that you are part of the universe. And so you you had gnostic schools side by side, some orgastic and quasi tantric and some aesthetic.

There were gnostic sects that you see because the idea was that light was trapped in matter by the act of procreation. There were gnostic sects that only practiced forms of sexual union that couldn't lead to conception. So there were presumably exclusively uh homosexual sects. There were sects which only practiced uh anal intercourse and for them that was the same as celibacy because the real concern was not to trap any more of the light and you know I don't seriously advocate this but I think in our current situation of overpopulation a little dose of this kind

of thinking wouldn't be a bad thing. I mean, too much light is trapped in the organic matrix. And and so they they and these Gnostic sects that, for instance, were uh exclusively homosexual or exclusively uh practiced anal intercourse, of course, they were suicide sects. Uh they disappeared very quickly because they could only make converts by uh uh con in missionary conversion. you couldn't you didn't have children, you couldn't hand it on. But it shows, you know, how thoroughgoing their rejection of uh of the world was, how contaminated they felt themselves to be uh by the

material world. And but then you also had as I mentioned these optimistic schools that saw nature as something to be perfected and uh and said man has been set onto the earth not to reject it but to perfect it. And um utopianism the belief that one can create a perfect society. It goes back into these hermetic uh ideals because the idea was that a perfect society could be the goal of the alchemical work. Let me read you a passage from uh Gerardano Bruno. This is a wonderful passage from the Pikatrix. Remember Pikatrix? This was the

book of magical 12th century magical texts that began to introduce these hermetic ideas. And this passage is the core passage that inspired the Rosacruians and numerous other uh utopian movements. Um this is a a here is Francis Yates. Hermes Chismagistos is often mentioned as the source for some talismanic images and in other connections. But there is in particular one very striking passage in the fourth book of Picatrix in which Hermes is stated to have been the first to use magical images and is credited with having founded a marvelous city in Egypt. And here is the

passage from the Picatrix. There are among the Calaldanss very perfect masters in this art and they affirm that Hermes was the first who constructed images by means of which he knew how to regulate the Nile against the motion of the moon. This man also built a temple to the sun and he knew how to hide himself from all so that no one could see him although he was within it. Now those of you who are scholars of Rosacruianism know that one of the things that was always said about rosacians was that they were invisible. This

this was how Robert Flood proved to people that he wasn't a Rosacrruian. Say you're looking at me so how can I be one? And so he's in the temple but he could not be seen within it. It was he Hermes Meaggistus 2 who in the east of Egypt constructed a city 12 miles long within which he constructed a castle which had four gates in each of its four parts. On the eastern gate he placed the form of an eagle. On the western gate the form of a bull. On the southern gate the form of a

lion. And on the northern gate he constructed the form of a dog. Into these images he introduced spirits which spoke with voices. Nor could anyone enter the gates of the city except by their permission. There he planted trees in the midst of which was a great tree which bore the fruit of all generation. On the summit of the castle, he caused to be raised a tower 30 cubits high, on the top of which he ordered to be placed a lighthouse, the color of which changed every day until the seventh day, after which it returned to

the first color. And so the city was illuminated with these colors. Near the city there was abundance of waters, in which dwelt many kinds of fish. Around the circumference of the city, he placed engraved images and ordered them in such a manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm. The name of the city was Adosentine. Now what we're familiar with from the Platonic literature is a quasi rational largely rational approach to utopian thinking that you get in the republic. However, students of the republic will recall that

the fif the fifth is it the fifth or tenth book of the republic contains the myth of which we went over in detail in the section I did on neoplatanism. And the myth of is one of the most bizarre and puzzling passages in the entire in the entire ancient literature. You recall er was a soldier who died. He was killed in battle but after 8 days he returned to life and then he told a story that is the absolute puzzlement of ocean scholars. It's highly mathematical. It has to do with the spindle of necessity and

the description of some kind of cosmic machine and all the ratios of the gears of this machine are given and nobody knows what is being talked about. But here we have a different thrust a magical utopianism and the idea of a perfected human society using magic because uh uh these engraved images that he ordered in such a manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous that means he was able to deflect the energies of cosmic fate. the city was immune to astrological uh maleific influence. It was protected. Uh and when we talk later

about the alchemical aspirations of the rosecutions and John D and Frederick the elector Palatine of Bohemia, we'll see that this impulse toward an alchemical kingdom returns again and again. In a way, utopianism is the the the forged city of utopian magical dreaming is one version of the philosopher stone. It's a a kind of duse notion of the philosopher stone, but it's a society in perfect harmony with fully realized beings uh living within it, practicing a cosmic religion that frees them uh from the ex the um the impulses of cosmic fate. The other thing that is

going on in some of this alchemical imagery is uh a kind of subtext of late alchemy is what's called the ars memorialia the art of memory and um in fact Francis Yates has a book called the art of memory and uh this is a a lost art literally it begins with the Roman orator Chichiro and was practiced up until the early 17th century. And what it consisted of was uh people uh orators, it was considered very bad form to read your speech if you were an orator. And so you had to memorize your speech and

there were tricks of memory. And uh the commonest pneummonic trick was to think of um a building was called the memory palace. A building that is familiar to you. I've done this myself with the University of California because it's an area that I'm very familiar with because I was a student there and there are many buildings and many hallways and many floors. And what you do is when you make your speech in your mind you are moving through the memory palace and at various points you construct what are called emblemata. And the idea of these

emblemata is that they be as um unusual, shocking and unexpected as possible in order to be memorable to you. So, say you're giving a a a speech about the seven deadly sins. Well, so then uh uh Luxoria might be for you a nun copulating with a dog and and and you'll set the nun and the dog in a little niche in the hallway of the memory palace. Well, then when you reach that place in your imaginary journey, all these associations will spring to mind and you will be able to give your speech um flawlessly. To

us, this sounds tortured and peculiar, but it works quite well. One of the great practitioners of the RS memorialia was Jordano Bruno and he wrote a book called Losio deistia triumpante the expulsion of the triumphant beast and my god Max Ernst eat your heart out. I mean this is a surreal epic read as straight plain text because that's not how it's supposed to be read. It's an elomeration of these pneummonic emblemata that led him on then to probably give a fairly conventional disputation on one subject or another. But there are even uh old books of

these emblemata that are before surrealism. These were some of the wildest images that the western mind uh would tolerate. The one thing that we didn't get into this morning was talking about uh the astrological side of it and the role of the deacons. The deacons are these demons three to assign. So there are 36 of them. And this was thought to be an an astrological conceit that goes back to Egypt as opposed to the ordinary zodiacal um significators which go back to Haran in uh in what is now modern Iraq. And these um these deans

were the demons that were summoned by these Renaissance uh magi in an effort to control and manipulate fate. You may if you were paying attention this morning noticed that in all the reading I did from the corpus hermetic there was really nothing explicitly magical uh about it. It was philosophical. There was one mention I think of animating statues in the description of the four gated city. But it was those magical u animation passages that really captured the imagination of the Renaissance and they built on that. And the idea simply put is that these deans and

zodiacal signs are um at the center of associative schemata which include plants, minerals, odors, certain flowers, certain animals, everything had its donic as asignation. And so if you were involved in uh promoting an affair with a woman or something like that, then you would do an invocation to Venus and you would gather the associated minerals, stones, animals, and you would put them in a room and then certain musical certain tonal modes were also associated with these things. And so you would play the music, you would have the flowers present, the minerals present, the invocations, and

what you were trying to do is create a microcosm of the macrocosm to draw down this stellar energy. It wasn't about the classical Hollywood appearance of demons in a circle. That's the stuff of Pikatrix, the earlier somewhat less refined uh style of magic. Um let's see. Yes, here it is. I did bring it. I wanted to read you one passage here from uh this is Francis Yates again in Gerardano in the hermetic tradition because this describes this change of status of the magician that we're interested in. Um and also what we didn't talk about this

morning was the importance of Cabala which came in uh quite late but was then worked out in great detail. This was originally the idea it it was the Jewish contribution to this kind of magic. It was the idea that since the world had been made by Jehovah by the speaking of words in friendship at verbboist. In other words, the speaking of Hebrew was thought to be the uh use of a primary linguistic tool for the purposes of creation. The problem for these Italians was very few of them spoke Hebrew. And so uh it was uh

sometimes practiced silently. The mere constructing of these Hebrew letters and the setting out of messages in Hebrew was deemed efficacious as well. And then a further decclenion for people who were even frustrated was with that was to um channel magical languages which were pseudohbraic in structure and appearance. And uh this is a whole branch of research much too arcane for us to go into here. The only non Hebraic magical language that I may mention will be Inoakian. And Inoakian was an angelic language chneled to John D and used by him uh in his magical evocations

and then later it was taken up by Alistister Crowley and Crowley and the and the folks of the Golden Dawn. But there were many many of these magical uh languages. The Vonich manuscript is is written in one of them. But I want to read you this passage about how the Renaissance changed the status of the magician. We begin to perceive here an extraordinary change in the status of the magician. The necromancer concocting his filthy mixtures. The Conjurer making his frightening invocations were both outcasts from society. Regarded as dangers to religion and forced into their trades

in secrecy, these old-fashioned characters are hardly recognizable in the philosophical and pious magi of the Renaissance. There is a change in status almost comparable to the change in status of the artist from the mere mechanic of the middle ages to the learned and refined companion of princes of the Renaissance and the magics themselves are changed almost out of recognition. Who could recognize the necromancer studying his picatrix in secret? in the elegant fino with his infinitely refined use of sympathies, his classical incantations, his elaborately neoplatanized talismans, who could recognize the conjurer using the barbarous techniques of

some clavis salamanas, in the mystical pico, lost in the religious ecstasies of Cabala, drawing archangels to his side. And yet there is a kind of continuity because the techniques are at bottom based on the same principles. Facino's magic is an infinitely refined and reformed version of pneumatic necromancy. Pico's practical cabala is an intensely religious and mystical version of conjuring. So now we move in this realm. I mean these were the companions of princes and there was uh in that 120 years from let's say 1500 to the beginning of the 30 years war a constant effort

in various parts of Europe to try and turn European society toward a kind of magical revolution. I mean 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 century where you get this tremendous proliferation of magical systems, magical ideas and social hysteras related to witchcraft, alchemy, conjuring uh and magic. I mean that those are the centuries when these things really broke out into the open and alchemy in th in that period is basically a story of personalities wonderful personalities too

many for us to really talk about in detail I mean we have Nicholas and and partnel fll who sought and found the philosopher stone according ording to legend and according to legend are living to this day somewhere in Central Asia in perfect happiness having achieve not only the chemical wedding but the water stone of the wise and then we have uh Basil Valentine who um uh refined red wine and distilled it in distillation apparatus until he got uh essentially pure alcohol. And upon drinking this, he was so convinced that he had found the philosopher 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 he propagated his recipes and uh and in fact sampled the uh distillates of some of his brother alchemists and popularized this very widely to this day. The reason uh 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. Uh uh quite a a number of them. So what I

thought I would do is um in a highly chaotic fashion read you some of these some of this alchemical literature. Now, the big bringdown about alchemical literature is that uh apparently the muse didn't always smile on the alchemist and some of this poetry is pretty tormented stuff. Um why this is who can say um but uh let's try one here and see if you can bear with it. Also, my middle English is not as good as it uh it might be. This is a short one and typical and you will see why the alchemists were

charged with unbearable obscurity and uh and um prollex pros. This poem is called a description of the stone. Though Daphne fly from Feebas, yet shall they both be one. And if you understand this right, you have our hidden stone. For Daphne, she is fair and white, but volatile is she. Feebis, a fixed god of might, and red of as blood is he. Daphne is a water nymph, and hath of moisture store, which Feebas doth confine heat, and dries her very shore. They being dried into one of crystal flood must drink till they be brought to

a white stone which washed with virgin's milk so long until they flow as wax and no fume you can see. Then have you all you need to ask praise God and thankful be. This is a recipe for the production of uh the philosopher's stone. And the author, I'm sure, felt that he'd spoken as clearly as he dare speak. And yet, you know, making something of this is no easy task. This is from the Teatrium Chemicum Britannicum and the late phase of uh of alchemy. Here's another one. The world is a maze. And what you why?

For sooth of late a great man did die. And as he lay a dying in his bed, these words in secret to his son, he said, my son, quot he, it is good for thee I die, for thou shalt much the better be thereby. And when thou seeest that life hath me bereft, take what thou findest, and where I have it left, thou dost not know, nor what my riches be. All which I will declare, give ear to me. An earth I had, all venom to expel, and that I cast into a mighty well. a

water ick to cleanse what was a miss. I threw into the earth and there it is. My silver all into the sea I cast my gold into the air and at the last into the fire for fear it should be found. I threw a stone worth 40,000 pound which stone was given me by a mighty king who bade me wear it in a four-fold ring. Quote he, "This stone is by that ring found out, if wisely thou canst turn this ring about, for every hope contrary is to other, yet all agree, and of the stone

is mother." So now, my son, I will declare a wonder, that when I die, this ring must break a sunder. The king said so. But when he said with all, although the ring be broke in pieces small, an easy fire shall soon close again. Who this can do, he need not work in vain, till this my hidden treasure be found out. When I am dead, my spirit shall walk about. Make him to bring your fire from the grave, and stay with him till you my riches have. These words a worldly man did chance to hear,

who daily watched the spirit, but nay near, and yet it meets with him and everyone, yet tells him not where is the hidden stone. Now, this stuff is obscure. It's deliberately obscure. It was obscure to its contemporaries. And the whole effort became one of collecting this kind of material and finding it out. And you have to understand this was all circulating in manuscript. Very little of this was printed. The tatrium chemicum britannicum uh was not printed um until uh 1652. So this was a world without vehicular transportation other than the horse and carriage and uh

these people were paranoid of being discovered and persecuted for wizardry and witchcraft by the church. So each alchemist working in secret with a limited number of texts with a local control language created this vast conceptual patchwork of ideas and um uh this is in large measure responsible for the obscurity of what is said. Then another factor which impinges on this and further complicates the matter is that um the the name of the game was projection of the contents of the imagination onto physical processes. So uh taking red cineabar which I mentioned last night and heating

it in a furnace until it sweats mercury. Uh for one alchemist this is the incineration of the red salamander and the collection of our mercurious in the great pelican. They named their chemical apparati after animals and gods. And so the pelican is a standard distillation apparatus basically a condenser on top of something which is boiled. And um and then these materials would be collected, ground, powdered, refired, mixed with other materials, refired again. And in the process, uh these people were we call it I mean it's such a weak term, the projection of the intellect into

this dimension. They were living in a waking dream. And many of the recipes are designed to wipe out the boundaries between waking and sleeping. Remember I talked about the river of mercury that runs between the yin and yang. Uh many of the alchemical processes were of 40 days duration. Well, you can imagine a hermit fearing discovery by the church, trying to keep his fires not too hot, not too cold, working day after day, night after night. Uh eventually all boundaries dissolve and you're just living in a pure world of intellectual projection. And then in the

swirling of the olyic in the in the chemical processes going on in the retort you begin to be able to project your conscious onto this. It's what we call visualization. But for us, it's a very it's a kind of a weak term because we don't we are never really able to accept in the psychedelic state to transcend the belief in the inner world and the outer world being somehow separate. So for us, it's always separate from us. But they were able to wipe out that boundary. Well, then what they saw in their swirling retorts and

Olympics was not uh carbonization, calcination, condensation of various molecular weights of liquids and oils out, but rather the birth of the red lion, the coming of the eagle, uh the appearance of the smaragdine stone. They had hundreds and hundreds of these words and I didn't bring any with me but much alchemical literature are dictionaries. Uh Mart Martineis Rolandis's alchemical dictionary is a huge book of uh words with special meanings in the alchemical context. and uh the these okay so why why do this and what happens when you do it well no matter what alchemist you're

reading there's always an agreement that there are stages in the great work stages in the opus as they called it and you can't get any agreement on in what order these stages come but roughly it's something like this most agree agree that it begins in the negrado, the blackening, our crow, the saturnine world of what we would call manic depression, despair and and that our chaos, a chaotic near psychotic state of unbounded hopelessness. and in and that is the precondition then for the alchemical work though the stages of the opus never occur in order. I

had a dream last night that was I think triggered by an illustration in Fabricius that I'll show you tonight. But uh it was a classical alchemical dream. It was that I was at a country fair and its antiquity was indicated by the fact that it was happening on the schoolyard of my childhood. And as I moved among the participants of this country fair, I began to notice that they were freaky. I mean, there were people with withered arms and one side of their face slid down and so forth and so on. whole thing began to

drift toward nightmare and uh her Richard Hermes Bird appeared in my dream as my uh alchemical compadre and uh and at one point a a black woman, perfect symbolism for the negrado, a black woman with three withered arms and and six or seven breasts slid herself sideways in front of me and it at that point that I went and found Richard and said, "I think we better get out of here." Uh, well, now an alchemist would greet a dream like this with great uh uh anticipation and joy and would understand that this sets the stage

now for the next movement forward. Well, then accounts differ. And those of you who really want to get into this, I I recommend you read um Mysterium by Yung, the mysterious conjunction. Uh and he discusses the negro uh the negrado in great detail. Another symbol for the negrado is the sinx, the old man, because the old man is just short of death. And that's the state that the negrado makes you feel. Well, then you must take this raw, chaotic, unformed material, often compared to feces, compared to corruption, compared to the contents of a of an

opened grave. And you must cook it in the alchemical fires of contemplation, prayer, and aesthetic self-control. And then you will move through a series of stages that are associated with colors. Uh there is the rubdo, the reening, there is the citrinas, the yellowing, there is uh the veridas, the greening and the order in which these occurs differs according to who you follow. But then there is closure at the end of the process. Most alchemists, although certainly not all, agree that the higher state is the albido, the whitening, the purificio. Right? So at each stage there

are substages of dissolution, dissolucio, ecoagulacio. And there's one alchemical uh apherism that says dissolucio at coagulacio know this and this is all you need to know and and so it's a it's a melting and a recasting and a purifying of psychic contents. Well then uh uh whole so finally you reach the albdo the whitening the highest stage the stage of great purity. But remember how I said last night that mercury was always the metaphor for mind in alchemy or one of the metaphors for mind in alchemy. And I talked about its mutability and its ability

to take the shape of its container and when you shatter it it then splits into many reflections. So once you move into the domain of the albdo the whitening then a whole new problem arises for the alchemist and this is the problem of the fixing of the stone. Somehow the mutability of mercury must be overcome and it must be crystallized. It must be fixed so that it doesn't get away from you. So that it doesn't slip through your fingers to achieve our mercury is nothing unless you have the secret of the coagulacio. And so then

there's a huge amount of effort devoted to this. Well, what is being described is what Yungians call the individuation process. A dissolving of the boundaries of the ego, an allowing of the chaotic material of the unconscious to pour forth where it can be inspected by consciousness. And we'll see tonight when we look at this art that these images are full of ravening beasts, incestuous mother son pairs, incestuous brother sister pairs, hermafhrodites. Um all taboss are broken. This stuff just boils up from the unconscious, then is sublimed through these processes, and then is somehow fixed. And

this fixing then is the culmination of alchemy. And if you can bring off this trick, then you possess our stone, the philosopher stone, the lapis, the sopic hydrolith of the wise, Aranius Filipes calls it. And there were hundreds of of uh control words for naming the secret difficult to obtain alchemical gold. In short, this is what we're after. And if you possess it, nothing else is worth anything because it is psychic completion, peace of mind. Jung called it the self. It's the self that we are trying to uh recover. And remember we talked about the

gnostic myths of the of the light trapped in matter. Well, this is the luminina delumina. This is the light of light, the lux nura, the light drawn out of nature and condensed into a fixed form which then becomes the universal panacea. And I'm using as many of these alchemical terms as I can draw out of my memory to give you a feeling for it. This is the universal medicine. It cures all ills. Uh you know it brings you riches, fame, wealth, selfrespect. It's the answer. It's what everyone is looking for and no one can find.

You see? So this just became a consuming passion of the 15th and 16th century uh mind and they thought they were on the brink of it and along the way they were discovering stuff like distilled alcohol, phosphorus, gunpowder, all of these things were coming out of the alchemical laboratories. But that was not it. You see, they kept driving themselves onward because they knew that the real that this was not the real thing and they were pursuing uh the real thing. Well, then uh for some uh people it became then reassociated with this notion of the

utopia that I mentioned uh this morning in the passage that I read about the city of Hermes Tismeagistus and they began to see it's almost like the crisis which overcame Buddhism. It must be an archetypal and notice how rarely we've used that word here. It must be almost an archetypal stage in human thought. You know, Theravodan Buddhism stressed individual redemption through meditation on emptiness. And then with the great reforms of Nagarjuna, the idea of bodhicattv compassion was introduced and that carries with it a political freight, an obligation to society and mankind. And so as the

15th and 16th century progressed, there began to be this awareness that what was wanted was not for an alchemist to break through to uh his own personal salvation, but somehow to create an alchemical world. And you get then the uh notion of the multiplicatio, the the idea that the stone once created will replicate itself and be able to change base matter into itself in almost like a virus spreading through the onlogical structure of matter itself and the world will be um reborn. And um this idea then what was happening was these alchemists were getting bolder

and printing was invented in mines near Frankfurt in 1540. The distribution of these alchemical books was changing the character of alchemy. It was no more the solitary hermit uh working away in his cave or mountaintop far away from the minions of the church. These alchemists began to dream of banding together of forming societies of uh creating brotherhoods that were united in the sharing of their knowledge and their purpose. And uh this brings us to um the the curious episode in history called the Rosacruian Enlightenment. And Dane Francis Yates once again got there first and she

wrote a book called the Rosacrruian Enlightenment which traces um the the history of these alchemical brotherhoods and reveals to us what they were really about. And what they were about was this dream of somehow taking the philosopher stone and the power, the immortality, the insight that it would bring and making it a general utility of mankind and in the, you know, one way of looking at modernity. I mean, I have a friend who claims that the the summoning of the Holy Spirit into matter can be seen as uh the creation of the modern world of

electrical energy that people like uh Helmholtz and Faraday uh were completing the alchemical work. It's very hard for us to realize how mysterious the electromagnetic field seemed to the 19th century. The 19th century had entirely uh imbued itself with the spirit of democratian atomism translated through Newtonian physics. And they believed, you know, that everything was little balls of of hard matter winging through space. Well, when uh Helmholtz and Faraday and these people began to talk about action at a distance and generating the electromagnetic field and trapping um lightning in lighten jars and running it through

wires, what could this be but numa? What could this be but the trapping of spiritus? What could it be but the literal descent of the Holy Ghost into history? And you know, give it a moment's thought. For thousands of years, electricity was something that you saw when you took an amber rod and a piece of cat fur and went into a darkened room and stroked the cat fur. And then when you would bring the amber rod close to the cat fur, you would see the crackle of static electricity through the cat fur. For thousands of

years, that's what electricity was. Who would dream that you could light cities, that you could smelt metals, that you could illuminate the earth with this energy? And yet, you know, from the 1850s to the present, this was done. It's almost a literalizing, the final literalizing of the alchemical dream. But to go back, now I digress, I fear. Uh let's go back to the climate of the 1580s and the central culprit here and the to my mind a giant figure casting an enormous shadow over the landscape of alchemy and modern science is uh the Englishman John

D. John D united in himself the complete spirit of the medieval magus and the complete spirit of the modern scientist. He invented the navigational instruments that allowed the conquest of the round earth. When Francis Drake sailed up the coast of California, he had navigational instruments that were top secret. The French, the Spanish must be kept away from this stuff. And these were navigational instruments created by John D that allowed him to locate himself anywhere on the globe. But John D was a man who uh on a late summer evening in Mort Lake, in his house

in Mort Lake outside London, uh the angel Gabriel descended into his garden and gave him uh what he called the shoe stone, shw in old English, the show stone. And the show stone exists to this day. You can see it in the British Museum. And what's amazing about it is it's a uh it's a uh piece of uh polished obsidian. It's an Aztec mirror is what it is. And you know there was a ruler of the Aztecs named Smoky Mirror. How John D got this thing we cannot even imagine. I mean he says he got

it from an angel. Nobody can really nay say that. However, I suspect that Cortez on his first return to Spain from the new world, he brought a number of objects with him that he had collected in central Mexico. And somehow John D got his hands on this thing. and it was for him a [Music] um a television screen into the locos and he used it over a number of years to uh direct the foreign policy of England. He was uh the confidant of Queen Elizabeth I. And he also was the most accomplished astrologer in Europe.

And he used his ability to cast horoscopes as an entree into all the great houses of Europe, the kings and nobles of Europe. Well, he was functioning as an intelligence agent. He was a spy for the British crown. uh insinuating himself into these various courtly scenes and then writing back to Elizabeth in ciphers ciphers that had previously only been used for magical purposes. He was sending back data on the strength of military garrisons and the placement of fortifications and this sort of thing. And um but this was what he was doing in the 1580s. He

kept the show stone for a number of years and he didn't seem to be able to make much p much progress with it. He had other methods too. He had wax tables and sigils and but finally into his life came a very mysterious character named Edward Kelly. And some accounts say that Edward Kelly had no ears, which indicates that he had had his ears removed for being a charlatan and a Monty Bankank. This was a common punishment in the provinces of England. So Edward Kelly was a very dubious character. I think uh for one one

strong piece of evidence that he was a shady character was John D was married to a much younger woman named Andy who by all accounts was quite a beauty and after gaining um De's confidence as a scrier uh the person who could look into the showstone and lay out these scenarios that the angels and the and the entities coming and going in the Showstone were putting forth. Kelly revealed to D that the angels had instructed him to uh hit the hay with an and this was a great crisis in their relationship. However, uh according to

De's diary, and so it was done, we read. So, you know, Hanky Panky didn't begin with the Golden Dawn. Uh, believe me, in 1582, And D, John D. and Edward Kelly set out for Bohemia, and Rudolph, the mad king of Bohemia, held sway at that time. Now, this is another one of these bizarre figures in the whole story of this. Rudolph uh collected dwarfs. He collected giants. He had what was called a vunder camera, a a a wonder cabinet. You see, before Lanaeus, before modern scientific classification, these great patrons of the arts and natural sciences,

they would just collect weird stuff and that was all you could say about. I mean it was rhinoceros horns, fossilonites, uh broken pieces of statues from antiquity, giant insects from southern India, seashells, all this stuff would just be thrown together in these vundur these wonder cabinets. And uh uh Rudolph was a great patron of the arts. Well, uh, Kelly sent the word that he and D had perfected the alchemical process and, uh, Rudolph immediately paid their way to Prague and, uh, patronized them very lavishly over a number of months, but then uh, they didn't seem

to be coming through. and he rented he ordered a castle put at their disposal in Bohemia and they still weren't able to come through. The Bonich manuscript figures in here too because Kelly's entree to D was that he had a manuscript in uh an unknown language and I believe that this probably was the Vone manuscript. The Vonage manuscript turns up in the estate of Rudolph. And the very month that he paid 14,000 gold ducats for it to persons unknown, D who was always writing back to the Elizabeth and courtounding them to send money entered in

his account book that they received 14,000 gold ducats from an unknown source. uh D was able to talk himself out of this alchemical imprisonment but not before he had written a book called the hieroglyphic monad. Now you have to understand the importance of this. as late as the 1920s in England in in the better schools of England like Ether uh when you study geometry you studied Uklid's works and uh Uklid's geometry was always preceded by DE's preface to Uklid until the 1920s every English school child studied this he was a master mathematician as well as

all these other things this was how he was able to uh um produce this these navigation instruments. So D while imprisoned in Bohemia wrote a book called the hieroglyphic monad in which he proposed to prove through a a series of occult theorems that a certain diagram which unfortunately I don't I didn't bring the hieroglyphic monad but it's basically the symbol of you know the symbol of Mercury which looks like the symbol for female but you put horns on it and then there were some Adam ations to that. By a series of theorems, he built up

this hieroglyphic monad and he initiated a couple of young men named Johan Andre and Michael Meyer into the mysteries of the hieroglyphic monet. Well, then he was able to get out of Bohemia and he went back to England. Kelly, who had made much more extravagant claims, Rudolph kept at work on the alchemical opus. And Kelly became more and more desperate to escape. And one night in 1587, he crept out on the parapit of this Bohemian castle. and uh a roof tile slipped beneath his feet and he fell to his death and became so far as

I can tell alchemy's only true martyr. Well, de returned to England and uh he was now very old and uh he died at Mort Lake in6006. Elizabeth died in6004. Shakespeare was happening. Sir Phillip Sydney was happening through this period. John Dutedly had over 6,000 books in his library. He had more books than any man in England. He had books. We have a partial catalog of his library. He had books that do not exist now. He had Roger Bacon manuscripts because you see when Henry VIII kicked the Catholic Church out of England, the North Umbrean monasteries

were looted by the Earl of North umberland and uh and basically D was allowed to pick over the loot from these monasteries and there were Roger Bacon manuscripts which perished when De's library was burned by an angry mob when while he was on the continent. because he was suspected of being a wizard. He was the model for FA in the later recensions of FA. And whenever you see an old man with a white beard and a pointed cap, this image is really referenced to D. Well, Elizabeth died in6004, I believe, and um James the first

became king of England. And James was a peculiar character. The wags of the time liked to say Elizabeth was king and now James is queen. Uh and not only that, he uh he hated occultism. He had no patience with the whole magical court that Elizabeth had assembled around herself. Well, now meanwhile in606 a very mysterious document began to circulate in Europe and in England called the fama. This is the first word of a string of Latin words the fama and two years later the confessesio. And what these were were announcements that an alchemical brotherhood was

seeking recruits. It was these are the primary documents of roacianism. Now Rosacruianism uh was based on a fiction and a fictional person Christian Rosen who was imagined to have lived uh almost 200 years earlier in the 1540s and been a great alchemist. And it was claimed that his tomb had been recently opened and that there were books inside it which set the stage for the alchemical revolution of the world. Notice how this occult mind always tries to reach back in time to give itself uh validity. So uh and Christian Rosen Crrance was claimed to be

the author of a series of books uh the chief of which is called the chemical wedding. What this was all about, I believe, and the Rosacrussian Enlightenment makes it fairly clear, was During the period when he had been in Bohemia had set out uh to lay the groundwork for an alchemical revolution in Central Europe. And he had made Johan Andre and Michael Meyer his agents in this plot. And it was a plot, a plot to meddle with European history and to turn the Protestant Reformation toward an alchemical completion. They felt that the that Luther and

and Hus and these people had only gone so far and that the culmination of throwing off the yoke of the church would be the establishment of an alchemical kingdom in central Europe. the uh target then of the attention of Michael Meyer and Johan Andre and a number of these alchemists became the young Frederick the he's called Frederick the elector Palatine. Uh he was a prince of the Northern League in Germany. He ruled in H Highleberg and H Highleberg as you know is a thousand-year-old university city and I believe I mentioned that the alchemical press of

Teodor de Brry was operating out of H Highleberg. H Highleberg became a magnet for all the occult thinking going on in Europe and all the puffers and alchemists, the gold makers, the philosophers, the charlatans, they all converged on uh on H Highleberg and uh Andre and Meyer were advisors of the young Frederick and they steered him by a series of political manipulations too complex. text to tell toward a marriage with the daughter of James I of England who was named Elizabeth interestingly enough. So Frederick the elector made Elizabeth the son of James of England his

wife. Now, Frederick here made a serious miscalculation because he thought that if James would give his the hand of his daughter in marriage that this was his way of blessing this alchemical conspiracy. Actually, what was on James's mind was he was about to give one of his sons in marriage to a Spanish princess of the Hopsburg line, a Catholic. In other words, he was playing both sides against each other. He was not giving the green light to an alchemical revolution at all. But um it was assumed so. Well, then uh in in 1617, 18, Rudolph,

remember Rudolph the emperor, he finally dies at a very ripe old age. And at that time, the Protestant League, which was made up of these princes, of these small principalities scattered across Germany and Poland, they actually elected the emperor. It was not by right of primogenitor but by election by the league the what was called the northern league. this group of princes, Frederick and yes, Frederick and his uh alchemical cohorts had done their political groundwork very very skillfully and they were able to engineer the election of Frederick to emperor of the empire and he became

Frederick the Electropalatine of Bohemia. And this set the stage for an episode called uh the episode of the winter king and queen. One of the great after Nicholas and Bertinel Fll. This is one of the great romantic stories of alchemy. They moved their court from H Highleberg to Prague and uh and all the alchemists went with them and they assumed that English armies would support them if there was any squawk from the Hopsburggs. and uh the winter of 1618 they ruled there and began to lay the groundwork for the transformation of northern Europe into an

alchemical kingdom. The problem was as I said the faithlessness and duplicity of James I of England. He did not support them in spite of the fact that the fate of his daughter hung in the balance. And by May of 1619, the the local bishop of the Catholic Church was fully aroused and word had been sent to Madrid and the Hopsburggs raised an army and lay siege to Prague. And in in the in the late summer, in the midsummer of 1619, the winter king and queen were driven from Prague and the city fell to Catholic forces.

The alchemical presses were smashed and Michael Meyer, who was like the prime minister of this scene, was murdered in an alley of Prague. And the entire alchemical dream went down the drain. Frederick was killed in the siege of the city and Elizabeth escaped to the Hague where she lived in exile for many years. Well, until recently I thought that that was the end of the story. But there is a a codeex that's very or a kod that is uh amusing if nothing else. In that Hapsburgian army, there was a young soldier of fortune, only 19

years old, still wet behind the ears, knowing nothing, happily soldiering and wenching his way around Europe while he decided what to do with himself. And his name was Renee Deart, a Frenchman. And uh Deart uh in his later years uh reminisced about his his period as a soldier in this army. And uh I like to think that it was actually Deart who murdered Meyer. One of my ambitions is to write a play or a novel where these two confront themselves in a back alley of burning Prague and carry on a debate about the future of

Europe before Michael Meyer falls to the sword of Deart. Well, that may be apocryphal, but what is not apocryphal is that this Hubsburgian army having laid siege and destroyed the alchemical kingdom began to retreat across Europe that fall and by midepptember was camped near the town of Olm in southern Germany. Now, by a strange coincidence, Olm is the birthplace of Einstein some hundreds of years later. But on the night of September 16th, uh, Deart had a dream. And in this dream, an angel appeared to him. And this is documented by his own hand. And the

angel said to Deart, "The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number." And that revelation lay the basis for modern science. Renee Deart is the founder of the distinction between the reverence and the res extensor. The founder of modern science, the founder of the scientific method that created the philosophical engines that created the modern world. How many scientists working at their workbenches understand that an angel chartered modern science, it's the alchemical angel which will not die. It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and peoples toward an unimaginable conclusion.

I mean that's not the last time that this angelic intervention in the history of science has occurred. Some of you may know the story in the 19th century of Culle, the German chemist who was struggling with the molecular structure of benzene, couldn't get it straight and then had a dream in which he saw the oraboric snake take its tail in its mouth and he awoke from that dream with the carbon ring burning in his mind. Well, the carbon ring, the sixsided heptadal state uh form of the carbon ring is the basis for all organic chemistry.

So, um you know and then I mentioned earlier Faraday and Helmholtz and the rise of of the electromagnetic field. The point I'm trying to make is that however rational we may assume ourselves to be, however rational we may assume modern science to be, it is all really founded on angelic revelation, demonic intercession, and an extremely mysterious relationship between the human mind and the world of what science calls inert math. matter which from this point of view is revealed to be not inert at all but alive and pregnant with purpose for mankind. The alchemical um the

alchemical kingdom of Frederick the Frederick the elector then there were a series of admbrations of this kind of thinking. I mean, many of you may know about the the Freemasonry and the many Freemasonry revolts in Bohemia and Bavaria throughout the 16th and 17th century. Adam Vice and the Illuminati is another effort to do this. And even the Royal Society founded by uh Newton and uh Hook and those people was still an effort to redeem science for the spirit. So the alchemical spirit lives on. It never really died. It's just that it has taken peculiar forms

in our own day. And I mentioned I think last night that when you enter into nuclear chemistry, the most literal dreams of the al of the of the u profane side of alchemy, the transformation of lead into gold is actually been achieved. I mean it has no economic significance because the instrumentality to do it costs tens of millions of dollars. But nevertheless, yes, lead in our time has been changed into gold. So, um that's basically what I wanted to say about this. I hope there are questions and uh and stuff that we can say about

it. Yes, Richard. Well, take you back to the Bon manuscript for a minute with there was this thing about it. It was a lurggical manual for some. Is that your opinion on it that you Well, this is Yes. This is kind of a footnote on all of this. You remember I said that D's uh that Kelly's entree to D was that he had a mysterious book. And you can tell from what I've said already, D was as big a sucker for books as I am. I mean, and so this book Kelly's story was that he

had gone to sleep in the ruins of a North Umbrean monastery and slept in a in an open seereer, a crypt of some sort. And when he awoke, he found beneath him two things. a vial of red powder which he said was uh the transmissing powder the a necessary part to the alchemical opus and a book in an unknown language which he called the gospel of St. Dunstable possibly because this monastery had been dedicated to St. Dunstable. Well, now Arthur D was John D's son and he said that when in his own he became an

alchemist in his own right and he said that when he was growing up he recalled that his father spent many hours puzzling over a book as he put it all covered with hieroglyphics. Brilliant. And but D who elaborated the angelologic language called Inakian uh never actually wrote or discussed the the book that he had received from Kelly. It is definitely not written in Inkian. Inkian when grammatically analyzed by computers has a curious relationship to 16th century English. Um, but when D and Kelly traveled to Europe, uh, they were talking up Roger Bacon, who was a

third a a 14th century English monk who had dabbled in alchemy. And they claimed to have Bacon manuscripts. and um Rudolph became very interested in this and wanted to obtain some of these Baconian manuscripts. Now I suspect that what happened was that D by this time had given up on deciphering the gospel of St. Dunstable and decided that he would palm it off on the emperor as a bacon manuscript because he didn't want to give up a real bacon manuscript because they were too valuable to him. So for 14,000 gold dukes, this thing changed hands

and Kelly and D and an were able to pay their bills. And uh Frederick had I'm I'm sorry Rudolph had immense resources because of his position as emperor and he brought his cryptographers and deciphers in to work on this ma on this gospel of St. Dunstable and got nowhere. Well, then uh when Rudolph died, the the a mysterious book was numbered among the uh artifacts of his estate. And I think we can assume it's this book. And one of the interesting things about this book is it has pages and pages of plant drawings, over 150

watercolors of plants, each carefully labeled, captioned in this unknown language. Well, if you know anything about decipherment, this isn't what a decipherer dreams of. Because if you have a picture of the thing and the caption, it doesn't take too much smarts to be able to figure out what's going on. Nevertheless, this was completely unhelpful. A third of the manuscript has pseudoastrological material. In other words, what look like horoscopes and drawings of stars and stellar shells, but when carefully analyzed dissolve into meaninglessness cannot be associated with anything. And then a third of the manuscript shows little

naked ladies in what can only be described as elaborate plumbing systems. And it was not it was thought at one time that these must be drawings of the humors of the body in the liver that these little naked women represented uh spirits uh moving inside the human body or then somebody else's guess was it must show an obscure form of German hydrotherapy. Uh because you know the Germans were if you've ever been to Badenbaden or Marianbad or or these places where people take the waters well those places are old old then and all this stuff

is captioned and there are even tables of contents which again you would think would yield to decipherment and uh so when Rudolph died because of the botanical material in this book it passed to the court botist, a man named uh Marici, and he got nowhere with it. Well, then in the early 16th century, a great alchemist and polymath, some of whose art we'll see this evening, was Hinrich Kundrath. And Hinrich Kundrath was fascinated by artificial languages. And he heard about the Vonich manuscript. And we have a whole bunch of letters from Kundroth to the uh

keepers of the estate of the emperor trying to obtain this manuscript which he finally did obtain. And then at that point he makes no further mention of it in his diaries. The conclusion being that he too could get nowhere with this thing that it just defied decipherment. Well, in 16 uh9 at the outbreak of the 30 Years War, and that's what I forgot to mention in my earlier discussion, this episode of the Winter King and Queen is one way of debating the the 30 Years War. It's usually considered to be the moment when a certain

personage was hurled from a thirdstory window in Prague and then fighting broke out in the streets. But really the episode of the of the winter king and queen brought the thing to a head. Well, in 1619 to avoid being caught up in the 30 years war, Kundra decided to take holy orders and become a Jesuit. And so he gave his uh library which was compendious to the monastery that he joined which was a monastery in southern Italy. And there this thing sat until 1906 when uh a New York rare book dealer named Alfred Vonich bought

the entire contents of this monastic library. And when he got it all back to New York and cataloged it, it was all very predictable 16th century theological and alchemical speculation except here was this book in an unknown language. And Vonich kept it throughout his life and then when he died he gave it to Yale and it is to this day at the Benicki rare bookroom at Yale. Well, in the 1960s, the CIA became interested in it because um the CIA is in the business of code making and breaking. I mean, this a huge amount of

energy goes into this. And if you know anything about the Enigma project in World War II, you know that vast energies go into the production of unbreakable codes. And so they very uh systematically sought out all examples of encrypted material throughout history and just lickety split deciphered it one after another. And all occult and magical codes known to exist in Europe can be traced back to one person virtually to one person to Tremius bishop of Spawnheim who was the the great teacher of Henry Cornelius Agria. All magical codes if you know the tranian method within

a few hours you can get plain text. Well, the Vonich manuscript did not yield at all to this method and um the CIA formed a a working group that for over 10 years would invite scholars in to have a look at this. And uh if you're interested in this um Marid de Imperio who was a great Renaissance scholar wrote a book called uh the Vone manuscript an elegant enigma in which she traces the efforts of the CIA to figure this thing out and figure out what it could be. Well, there the matter uh rested until

about three years ago when uh um I think his name is Leo Lever, 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 the imperio goes through all the decipherment and there were many efforts at decipherment. There was a scholar at Yale in the 20s named Bruma who was a very respected man who ruined himself by claiming a complete decipherment of the Vonnage manuscript. And you know when you the way the game is played is you say what your rules for

the decipherment were. You give them to a colleague. 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 down in flames. Well, the Brahmanian method for deciphering the deciphering a vonage 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 Brahma demonstrated that you could

make this thing say anything you wanted it to. Brahma supported De'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 at Christmas time in 1385 uh at Oxford, but nobody else could make it say that or make it say anything. So, Brauma was went disgraced him and ruined his career. So then and then there were other efforts at decipherment which I won't bore you with but along comes Leo Leverto just four years ago and he wrote a book called the

Vonnage manuscript a lurggical manual for the Cathites and he 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 has it pretty well 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 No. And one of the things that baffled the CIA was they looted the libraries of

Europe and they could never find another example of what is called a Vonnage script. And this was just baffling. I mean, how could there be um no other example of this script? Well, it appears that what happened was um someone created a synthetic alphabet and then in a mixture of uh medieval polyglot Flemish with a huge number of lone words in old French, middle high German and Swedish. uh wrote down a uh sacramental man uh a sacramental manual for the dying in the Catherite sect. Now, what is the Catherite sect? Uh you're probably familiar with

something called the Albagensian Crusade. This was not a crusade carried on against the infidel for the recovery of Jerusalem, but rather a a series of military actions carried on by the pope against communities in southern France in the uh early 1200s. And these people were Catherites. They were, as far as we can tell, and we can't tell much because we only have descriptions of the Catherites written by the 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 uh European history. Uh to give you the flavor of it, the second Albagenzian crusade was prosecuted by a general of the pope named Simon de Mo Fort and his lieutenants came to him uh at a point and some of you may have visited the city of Carcasson in southern France which is a walled medieval city very beautiful and Simon de Montfort fort's lieutenants came to him and told him they said uh uh we have cornered the Catherites at

Carason. Uh but the problem is 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 forward. And they did. They did. Uh so what we do know about the Catherites is that they they had a sacrament, the holiest mis Well, first let me tell you a little bit more about them. Uh at first it was thought that they were pretty much heterodox Christians. They were into nudity and vegetarianism. They sound like early hippies as far as we can

tell. They got together, men and women, and they took off their clothes. They bathed. Whether there were orgies or not, we don't know. They were vegetarians. And the one thing we do know was that they had a sacrament called the consolum. And the consolmentum was [Music] um it it was uh ritualized vivisection or not vivisection. Um um 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. And this was called the consolum. Well, what Leo Levito is claiming is that the Vonnage manuscript is uh a description, a manual for the perfect eye of the Catherite sect telling how to properly carry out the consolum and uh I see no reason to challenge it. I mean, even with my limited knowledge of German, once you get once you get the vowel and the the letter assignments right into this weird manuscript, into this weird language and change it into English text or, you know, alphabetic text is what I'm trying to say. You can see

that there's enough German there and then these lone words in Flemish and and so forth. It looks to be true. And what emerges from this if we accept the Vonage manuscript as the only primary document on the Catherite faith is that this was not a form of hetradox Christianity at all. It was much more radical than that. And this may explain the church's fury at this group of people. It was a cult of ISIS. It can be traced straight back into the mystery religions of Eiois in Egypt. And I have not seen any critical commentary

on Levito's work. It was his book was published by this weird press in Roondo Beach that specializes only in books on military encryption. I mean their catalog is a revelation to see. I mean it's amazing. Uh and the voonnage the book on the vonnage manuscript stands out like a sore thumb because most of it is like threeletter dictionaries of threeletter words in Swahili and their numerical transforms and stuff like that. Uh so that's the history to date of uh of the phonage manuscript. And it's not that um a skew of our subject because uh all

of this heterodoxy in Europe blends together. Uh the presence of Teodor Debry as an alchemical printer in H Highleberg may be a clue because there were survivals of this Catherite faith in the form of a heresy called the brotherhood of the of the free spirit. If any of you are familiar with the altarp piece called the garden of earthly delights by Heronomous Bosch, it's thought that this was created uh by a commission for a brother a a a uh a congregation of the brotherhood of the free spirit. And the brotherhood of the free spirit was

always associated for some reason, we don't know why, with printers. Printers seem that's seemed to be the profession that the brotherhood favored. And like the Catherites, they practiced ritual nudity, vegetarianism, and gathering together in a ritual bath. just let go of the whole idea complex they would be be liberated from this kind of uh of minutia. So uh belief kills the spirit the spirit transcends belief. So I wanted to say that then someone asked about Bruno and D since I suggested you read Gordono Bruno and the hermetic tradition it's ironic that so little time was

spent on Bruno but on the other hand I recommended you read the book so you should be well informed on Bruno. Uh for me, Bruno uh we just didn't get into that particular historical episode because I wanted to tell you about the Rosacrruian enlightenment. But the thing to remember about Bruno is his discovery of 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 uh pure cognition, he was able to destroy an entire cosmological vision that had uh limited and confined the human soul for millennia. That's half of his story. The other half is he was burned at the stake for refusing to back down from this. And it's uh it's a model for us all that trust your perception, trust your intuition and then accept the consequences because this is what existential validity must be. Uh as far as the relationship between D and Bruno, uh the relationship is that they

were both uh derivative of the magical school that can be traced back to Henry Cornelius Agria Fonetshine who was the model for another model for FA. Agria wrote uh Dibbri quattro deacultata philosophia four books of occult philosophy and and that was the um the core work for European magic. All magic is derivative. All European magic can be traced back to the Agrippen system and Agrippa was the direct student of the abbotius of Spanheim that we mentioned yesterday as the source of all the magical codes in the Middle Ages. If you're interested in a a brilliant

but fictional treatment of John D and Gerardano Bruno, um I'd like to recommend a novel to you. It's called Egypt, spelled Ae Gy PT. It has the A in front of the E. 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 Egypt uh fully half of the book is given over to a wonderfully rich retelling of the relationship between Bruno and D. Now, some people have wanted to say that D and Bruno actually crossed physical paths in London, but

I've looked into it and they missed each other for by about two weeks. Bruno was setting sail for France, I mean for England as D was setting sail for France and the Rosacruian enlightenment episode that uh I talked about. Then someone asked about tantra and uh and the uh contrast between the imaginative internalized invocation of the anima or the anonymous depending on your own sexuality and that contrasted with uh something which actually happens between two people. uh we didn't talk that much about the concept of the chemical wedding or the alchemical marriage is another way

of putting it. But this is the the western resonance to the eastern idea of tantra. And it is the idea that sexual energy being the rawest and and most accessible energy to the organism can be channeled into a higher spirituality. Well, it it's entirely so. The problem is of all paths this is probably fraught with the um greatest difficulty because sexuality is such a uh 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. Uh in in eastern tantra that is

actually practiced in this physical manner. Uh there is uh usually the admonition is that you should have no attachment to your tantrica that the relationship should be entirely given over to um the technical details of this union. And of course it has to do with the forest stalling of orgasm and the raising of energy within the organism. In the chemical marriage, in the alchemical marriage, due honor is given to the um uh importance and uniqueness of the other person. In other words, it isn't the idea of the temple prostitute who serves uh as the vessel

for this process, but there's actually an effort to keep individual identities and individual uh uh dignity in some sense together. And uh this is you know the higher up the mountain you go the steeper it becomes. And when you begin to scale the heights of alchemical or t tantric sexuality, the fall back into the negrado can be shocking indeed. So, uh, 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, uh, you have to, as the Iching says, inquire of the

oracle once again if you have purity uh, of intent. Okay. Yeah. Gracaling between the two, I think. Yes. It's a complete alchemical system and uh, the energy is passed between. This is probably the highest completion that is possible. You know, the idea of romantic love. I mean, I don't want to digress too much into this, but the ideal of romantic love was introduced into Europe in the in the uh 1400s and earlier at the anine court of Elellanar of Aquitane by Trouidors. And the this trouidor tradition can scholarship now reveals pretty convincingly that this is

a an esoteric Sufi uh system. It also occurs in um Indian teachers such as Caitana. You know Citana is the guy who the Hari Krishna go back to but the radical teaching of Citana was that you could achieve ecstasy not by sitting in yoga but by dancing and singing on street corners. And uh it's now pretty clearly shown that Sufi um the penetration of Sufi ideas into Bengal was happening at the same time that these Sufi ideas were penet coming across from North Africa and into Spain and southern France. So um it it's a tremendously

old and vital tradition. But you have to be very careful. The romantic impulse is a real double-edged sword. It has been ever since the early 19th century because you see the rise of romanticism of the as that term is normally understood meaning the 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 further retreat into cities more massive than any that had ever been built before. Did you want to say something like add

that the question was about healing and I think there's a tremendous difference between the Indian and Tibetan country systems in order practice in Dowism in terms of dual cultivation or shingle cultivation. um in the Dow system certainly self-healing is of paramount importance before you can even consider uh dual cultivation dual cultivation was then begun then again other considerations come in but the uh so in the Indian and Tibetan systems where Dainis and various deities are invoked in the process of of their alchemical um it's really quite different from the dollar system which is devoid of

belief in gods. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, I talked yesterday about the alchemical stages. When you have reached the the albido, the final whitening of these processes that final whitening is from a higher perspective a new negrado. And you must always build and build again. And so uh you have to be fairly confident that you have already realized a certain portion of yourself before you then embark on these tantric uh double uh uh experiments because you know a lot of tantric text is to read very vampire radatical 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. It turn you the the losing partner in these deals is just left a withered husk and this is not a a a higher completion to be sought for. You're correct. There is in fact there are supposedly uh whether they're myths or or documented stories about one Chinese empress who caused the death of of more than a thousand men because of her vampirism and it was sexual in nature. Sexual in nature. Uhhuh. Okay. Then uh couple of other

points here and then we'll break up. Um, the gentleman here who had nothing to uh comment or wanted to sit it out reminded me uh since we were talking about the Valentinian system this morning, my favorite archon, aside from 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 and that's all he does. He does not input into

the system at all but is the witness and somehow then this creates a validating dimension that is very important. So I just want to affirm that the watcher is a a very strong platform on which to stand. I mean wood that I could learn to keep my mouth shut. A wood that we all could. So uh the watcher is a good archon to keep uh active on your inner altar. So then the the future occurs three times in the list and uh 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 um the the remember how I said that um one view of alchemy was that the alchemy intervened in natural process in the role of a catalyst. For those of you who aren't chemists, a catalyst is something which causes a chemical reaction which is going on anyway to proceed at a faster rate. But the catalyst is not consumed in this process. It it simply accelerates it. And uh if we think of nature as a great alchemical furnace that

continuously produces and bring forths wonders, then must it not be that humanity is the yeast of the Gian alchemical uh rarifaction and that human history is the process of catalyzing the alchemical condensation. If we look back into nature before the advent of uh speaking and writing human beings in the last 15,000 years, what we see are very leisurely processes. I mean the uh speciation of a single plant from another can occupy 50 or 60,000 years. It never happens more quickly than that. And the grinding down of glaciers from the poles. These are processes that take

hundreds of thousands of years. With the advent of human beings, an entirely new onto becoming, 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 nuantos of becoming is what I call epigenetic as opposed to genetic. All other change in the living world uh in the world of bios of zoa. It it 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 genetics, epigenetic processes become possible and time accelerates. One way of thinking about what is happening in this con in this cosmos is that it is a gradual conquest of dimensionality by becoming or process. I mean we hardly have the word inclusive enough. The earliest forms of life uh were probably uh 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 between 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 psyia that dot the surfaces of protozones 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 uh 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 with the advent

of memory and memory must be mediated by language except at a very crude instinctual level. Memory is a timebinding function. It's a way of somehow taking the past and calling up its essential properties so that they are co-present with the given moment of experience. And when you uh it's one thing at the level of of the song and dance of pre-iterate peoples, but once you begin to chisel stone and write books, then you're into the epiggeretic 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 the solar system, these are timebinding functions. And the alchemical intent, recall, was to accelerate nature's intent toward perfection. And the the alchemists all believed that nature was growing toward a 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 Plutonian one. Uh so now we live in a a world that appears to be on the brink of its own death or extinction. And the reason we make that assumption

is because 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 uh you know the Gothic piety of a Europe with under 30 million people in it. Our bridges are burning and our religions, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, uh the major western religions persistently insist that we are caught in a tightening spiral of everinccreasing speed that is carrying us toward an unimaginable confrontation with something which they call u God, the second coming, the Messiah.

you name it. As coolheaded a rationalist as Arnold Toinby, when he sat down to write a study of history, he finally had to face the question, what is history for? And the, you know, 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 stone. Let's call it the sophicic 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 which taking a page from the mathematical concern called dynamics. We can call an attractor. The attractor lies ahead of us in time. Universal process is not driven by a downward cascade of cartisian kazouistry. 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, ecosystems, uh the the solar system itself is beginning

to knit itself into a tighter and tighter organization. Uh I believe that alchemy provides the best metaphors for understanding this. Nature is the great alchemist par excalance and we as its minions through history are accelerating the condensation of being toward the unimaginable. So that in my system of my way of thinking there's ultimately um a symmetry break with ordinary history and uh an I call it um 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 deonian seas caught the call and every step that has been taken since then has been ever quicker, ever quicker toward uh the transcendental other. It beckons us and history is haunted by this thing. History is the shockwave of esquetology. History is a process that lasts, let's be generous, 25,000 years. The the wink of an eye in geological time. And in that 25,000 years, religious systems rise and fall, governmental systems, teachers come and go, and there is a a a sense of being caught in a whirlpool that is spinning us toward

fusion with the unimaginable. And this is why the skies of Earth are haunted by flying saucers. They aren't coming from other solar systems. They are cintillas. Remember this alchemical term sparks. They are cintillas being thrown off from 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 meaning's edge and feel

the dizziness of things unsaid. And uh this lies now I believe within our lifetimes within the lifetime of most of us. This is actually going to break through. I mean 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 um that is the the point of talking about alchemy and this melding and the production of the quintessence and all that. It is because we are a

nat'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 a psychedelic drug, it's revealed before us in all its splendor. Uh this is the force that is pulling us inexraably toward uh completion. I remember once in a in a psilocybin trance uh I I expressed concern about the state of the world and the news spoke the logo 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 um 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 of 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. Uh the Gnostics believe that the earth is like an egg and that a moment will come when the egg must be split aunder. There uh you know I love to quote the 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 funneled toward. That is the message of alchemy. That is the quintessence and perfection of uh the human enterprise, the biological enterprise. I like to recall the Irish toast.

May you be alive at the end of the world. Yes. and we have a real crack at it. It's uh 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. I like, you know, there is much still to be learned and still to be teased apart in the art history and uh and the history of uh heterodox thinking in Europe, of which alchemy then is seen to be one facet of a faceted ge includes the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit,

early Freemasonry, uh, Catherites, uh, uh, survivals of Manakanism, uh, Bogamills in Yugoslavia. There are bogum, bogum, Vostrian graves on the southern coast of Thessalonica. and just a whole uh zoo uh of intellectual systems that have been forgotten and overlooked. This is what I meant when I said we will explore the strategraphy of of lost thought systems. And in some cases we possess quite complete skeletons. In the case of alchemy in the case of the bogamills and the cathars what we possess is almost a footbone 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. Yes. And bless you. Pretty nice just and I just about finished. I think this person is a regular English historian for Kentucky. Yes. culture and I I think it's so popular some interest very interesting history because the Masonic historians themselves have been writing over this for a couple hundred years. So it's strange that there's varnish manuscript all of a sudden the last couple of years sort of is old that sense of the street that's

always yes you make an interesting point John brought me John Glavas brought me an article yesterday you know we're all tied up now in this Pluto return I'm not an astrologer but John brought me an article talking about how I don't know whether it was the last time or the time before last that the Pluto return occurred uh 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 uh exactly equivalent to that period and the Vonnage manuscript appears to have

been deciphered. I mean I'm willing to accept it. You mention this revelation of the true nature of Freemasonry and of course what is going on at the moment that is a skew of our subject but tremendously exciting and relevant to the idea of of lost knowledge coming to light is that this is the the golden moment in Mayan study. It is happening right now day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. The log jam has been broken. The Mayan glyphs are being uh deciphered. No And uh it it has to do with an entirely

new approach that some Russian linguists have taken. And if any of you are in it, it will never happen again. So far as I know, there are now with the Mayan decipherment no real undeciphered languages left. Uh, the Harapan script was deciphered a few years ago, but really it wasn't that interesting because we only possessed something like 6,000 characters in Harapan. But the literature of the Maya when you take not only the hieroglyphic the the stone texts but when you add in the ceramic texts why we have a lot of Mayan material and uh it

is being deciphered at a furious rate. If you're interested in this, Linda Shield has written a book called A Forest of Kings. And uh what a how I do envy this woman because what she is doing is writing the first history of the Maya in a thousand years. This is not 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 Al Caracle met an army from Tikall and triumphed and deposed uh uh three Flint and placed on the throne. It's this

kind of stuff. Real history and uh the the conceits of Mayan religion and Mayan courtly life are all coming into focus and it's very exciting. Uh it's uh all these 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 is not as pretty as we might wish. But hey, know the truth and the truth shall set you free. I would choose truth over illusion anytime no matter how damaging it might be to somebody's u uh conceptions of these

things. So uh and if any of you are interested in these subjects uh another area where this has occurred is some of you may know the book by Michael Chadwick called the decipherment of linear B. Linear B is a proto Manolan language and uh a linguist at Cambridge named Michael Ventress, a a genius in the 50s took this language. There was no Rosetta Stone. This is the amazing thing. You you know what I mean by a Rosetta stone? When 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, uh was a a soldier found a a tablet which had a column of deotic 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 uh because you

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 B and in the case of Harapan, uh there was no Rosetta Stone. Well, then you talk about an excruciatingly difficult problem to solve. And I'll explain to you how it was done with the Maya because it's so neat. It turns out that Mayan is the Reebus 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 a

picture of an eye and then it would show a picture of a saw going through a log 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's that it's all based on puns that depend entirely on a knowledge of the spoken language. If you lose the sounds of the spoken language, how the hell could you ever tell? But 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 the sounds. Well, how do you recover the sounds of a language dead a thousand years? Well, um, these Soviet linguists had the good sense to go and look at living Mayan languages, of which there are 15 uh, living Mayan languages uh, 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 know, you just rev up your computers and and use all the standard tools of modern linguistics and theology and the stuff just begins to pour out clear as day. No problem. They ask a yes, they had to go to a Maya. You're right. Good point. It it had never occurred to them because they always always before when they would show this stuff to minds they would say what does it mean instead of saying what do you see here and

then when they said what they saw there then meaning came out of their mouths. So it was very very neat. It shows once again the hubris of modern scientific methods that we tend to dismiss the aboriginal and the primitive. I mean this was to turn it toward my own favorite subject. This was the state of modern medicine. Nobody would ask people in the Amazon basin, you know, what plants do you use for malaria, brain tumor, shrinkage, and so forth and so on because they were just dismissed as as superstitious primitives. It was thought that the

doctrine of signatures was operating. They didn't realize uh how subtle and how complete human knowledge systems grow under the care of those people for whom it uh it really matters. Is there anything that needs to be said about this? Um, the redemption, the project of the redemption of spirit from matter turned into the project of redeeming the general uh, society of the time toward a utopian vision. And uh, this is working right up until the present. Millinarianism is still with us. Marxism is the last great millinarian faith. You know the belief in the worker state.

It occupies the same relationship to these alchemical utopias as high degree existentialism has to uh second century gnosticism. The poetry has gone. The the Baroque filigree has been stripped away, but the impulse is still toward a perfect society where each from his ability according to his needs and means and it lives on. I mean democracy is also an effort let us not forget to recapture the style of fifth century Athens and we forget that this was a city state half of whose inhabitants were slaves and yet we are so under the spell of the utopian

uh 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 uh the alchemical dream. I very much enjoy flashbacks to actually history in college. the first history professor that I have Mr. was that but the really what I now look back at is what the history of my ideas rested my history politics all this kind of thing and it's it's kind of a wonderful experience to suddenly get back to what got

me turned on by history and what just being turned off was again just looking at some of these thoughts some of these things for us questions put down that's traditionally trained scientist so on that eyes from what's gone before great ideas that are there we just have to grasp what's right it really interested in how we make breakfast. One thing that occurs to me to say um I I once in one of these revelatory dialogues with the logos asked the question, why me? Why are you telling me this? Because my uh you know I was

a poor hippie. I was penniless. I was a traveler. And the answer was uh instantaneous. It was because you don't believe in anything. Because you don't believe in anything. And I I think that that's a very pure position to hold. We're not trying to ensnare you to abandon your Jewishness or your Presbyterianness or it belief abluded 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 um I think that uh I have a horror of all

belief systems. I just don't like them. If somebody tells you they have the answer, flee from this person. I mean they are obviously some kind of low being who has not at all 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 dialogue with the logos uh can go forward unhindered. Sometimes when I am in the 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. Begin to show your true nature. And after a few moments of that, then I have to raise my hand and say enough. you know, I can 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 think and what we conceive. But if you begin to believe something then you are pulled down because every belief has consequences you know. I mean a

perfect example is u as some of you may know when Muhammad descended into heaven from the site of the mo uh what was to become the mosque of Omar from the site of the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. uh he happened to be on horseback. Well, if you believe Muhammad descended into heaven, imagine the theological and hermeneutic 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 then contains absurdity. I mean the the onlogical status of this horse

has troubled Islamic theologians for centuries.