Alchemy & Mysticism The Hermetic Cabinet is by Alexander Roob. Roob is an artist, into line drawings and the author of a few things on art.  I suspect him of being a closet alchemist because of the relative obscurity of his text, but then, one buys this book for its art. It makes the price seem more than manageable and probably partly explains the book’s constant reissue and apparent continuing sales.

If you look at his art (“line drawings” link above) you’ll have a pretty good idea of what his prose is like. One the first page of his introduction (approximately 300 words) he talks about puzzle pictures (or hieroglyphics), Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth, the concept of the psychopompos, the “emerald tablet” Hermeneutics, alchemical literature, Jacob Böhme, Romanticism, German idealism and modern literature. In 300 w0rds.

I wonder if he draws that way, the line flowing out and around a variety of shapes to, finally, cohere into a recognizable shape?

The problem with text (as opposed to graphic or pictorial communication) is that text requires a different kind of order, one that builds a path for the reader to follow. It may (and should) offer views of distant prospects, and glimpses of future paths, but the bricks under one’s feet should never simply vanish. A really good writer can make one question their solidity, but to make them invisible? Vertigo is not conducive to successful navigation.

Nevertheless I do not regret the book’s purchase. The collection of art is wonderful and feels like a significant pictorial reference despite the fact that it only amounts to 191 small-format pages. Roob collects the images (many in glorious colour) into sections pertaining to the general alchemical subject: genesis, resurrection, philosophical tree, conjunctio, mandala, serpent.

The two pictures below are my favourite. They are from a section called “Aurora” and are out of 16th century London. They are why I bought the book.

Gorgeous.

On awaking just before 4 and realizing that I was not going to be able to sleep again I got up and went to my desk. I started reading more of Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith. What a delight the book is.

Compared to some others I have read on the topic his command of both his material and his imagination makes reading it an act of mental nourishment – a bit like a huge fresh seafood salad after weeks of sausage with mac and cheese. I feel like my brain has had its palate refreshed.

More on the book later, but just a little sparkly I found.  In the introduction (“The European Religious Heritage”), during a discussion of the rise of Dissenting Protestantism there was a reference to “endless cycles of religious extremism” (nice!) and a list of

social and spiritual radicalism at Munster, anabaptism in Switzerland and the Low Countries, and Familism, Fifth Monarchism, Ranterism, Muggletonianism, and Quakerism in England.

Muggletonianism! I actually giggled. I have always admired J. K. Rowling’s apparent familiarity with little bits of European esoteric history (she does have a French and Classics degree after all). I actually giggled when Nicholas and Pernelle showed up in HP. Imagine introducing actually history into a kids book! I suspect the delvings of some readers into European magical history will show up in tomorrow’s scholarship, sort of like early StarTrek technological fantasies have showed up in today’s shoulder sling bags.

I had never come across Muggletonianism before. No idea if Rowling knew about them but, even if not (and the wikipedia article suggests not), the coincidence is delightful anyway.

This from the wikipedia article linked above:

The six principles of Muggletonianism have perhaps been best set out by George Williamson

• There is no God but the glorified Man Christ Jesus.
• There is no devil but the unclean Reason of men.
• Heaven is an infinite abode of light above and beyond the stars.
• The place of Hell will be this Earth when sun, moon and stars are extinguished.
• Angels are the only beings of Pure Reason.
• The Soul dies with the body and will be raised with it.

Is this what muggles believe? No magical ability perhaps, but magical thinking seems to obviate its need.

Anyway, this is what I do with sleeplessness when I don’t have to freak out about having to spend all day at work. I can (and will) take a nap later and continue my pursuit of restedness.

I was wandering around on the web the other day looking at stuff on that late 17th century mystical sect in Pennsylvania – Society of the women in the wilderness –  led by Kelpius and came across this paper by Jon Butler called “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760.” It was published in 1979 in The American Historical Review.  Essentially what it says is that historians have “always treated America’s earliest colonists as especially religious people” but that they weren’t, or at least not in the pious Christian way history tends to teach. Citizens had to be, more or less, brow beaten into the churches; people preferred their astrological almanacs and what Butler calls “noninstitutional religious practices.”

Butler talks about the relationship between Christianity and occult practices and how the literate English compatriots of the Puritans turned on a regular basis to mystical writings “in the cabala to complement both their Christianity and their astrology.”

While these practices came with immigrants to North America, and certainly occult practices were no stranger to the early Americas, the last portion of the paper seeks to begin an explanation as to why these practices declined in popularity.  He gives two reasons. The first is that the literary tastes in England changed and occult reading materials became harder to get. The second was that the churches were often also the governing authority and they pushed for legal and civic penalties for practices in contravention of their particular doctrine. I mean did you know that “on the eve of the American Revolution only about 15 percent of all of the colonists probably belonged to any church.”

Cool. Too bad it didn’t last.

Anyway, it turns out Butler went into it further and wrote a book called Awash in a Sea of Faith, Christianizing the American People published in 1992. I got it today, so I am looking forward to some happy reading.

I know I’ve been griping about Gilchrist’s book in the other two posts and before I go off on this last rant I do want to say I still found the volume useful.  I’d forgotten about Kelpius’ Women in the Wilderness, for example (you’ll be hearing about that in a future post) which made me think about Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death” (a bit of a circuitous route but I got there). I am not suggesting that you don’t go find Alchemy and read it if you’re interested in the topic – just be wary of her “slides.”

(Wow! When I went hunting the link to Alchemy I found that Gilchrist has a book called Millennium: the Year 2000 published in 1969. I soooooooo want to read that and she what she predicted.)

So for my final grouse – in the final chapter there is the inevitable reference to quantum theory and how our collective

world view has grown; boundaries have been pushed back by the advent of new branches of science, including quantum physics, which breaks down the distinction between energy and matter, and demonstrates how the ‘observer’ is in reality a ‘participator’ in atomic experiment, affecting the very particles that are worked on.

Bah! She did it again! Our existence affects particles because we are particles. An example: jump in a lake. Your mass will displace an equal mass of water. The water will go splooooey all over the place. The universe in action: particles affect other other particles even at the gross level of our human existence.

The fact that we have discovered that this is true at the particulate level is cool and interesting but doesn’t change the fact that particles affect particles. So my grouchiness is caused by what? See it?  Her use of “affect” implies intent. Mine does not. What she is implying with that sentence is that in our experiments we can affect particles in particular ways – we can make them do things we want them to – you know like change their atomic mass just by our presence – i.e. don’t need high-tech stuff like a fission bomb or a particle accelerator – an alchemical lab and the right intent will do.

Back to the water going all sploooey – jump in the lake again. This time go in with intent. Intend that the water you are about to displace, will displace itself in a jiggling cube right into my bathtub.

(I just went in to the bathroom and checked. The tub is still dry. Try again.)

OK, so it didn’t work and there is a reason why. Matter affects matter. Matter is in a fixed relationship with energy. None of that includes intent and without intent, the alchemist cannot accomplish his or her goals without the high techy stuff.

(The “intent” piece is a thorny problem having to do with operating in a fundamentally dualistic universe [the one that is posited by belief systems like Alchemy, Hermeticism in general and other related religions like Christianity.] I’ve alluded to the problem elsewhere and may dive in again, but not here.)

In Gilchrist’s fifth chapter “A Mirror of the World” she wants to establish that alchemy has had an important impact on the practical endeavours of humanity. She asks if “such a secretive, enigmatic study as alchemy has any relevance at all to the world at large.” Of course her answer is “yes” and the chapter proceeds to show ways in which alchemy is relevant. She has examples, albeit some are a bit of a stretch, but what interests me is how she sets up the chapter in first paragraph. Still worrying the truth that alchemists tended to be secretive, she seeks for a way that the truth of an ultra secretive discipline could, at the same time, be public enough that it becomes one of the foundation stones of the mundane world.

If its (alchemy’s) structure is rooted in universal principles, in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘perennial philosophy’, then it can affect every level of human existence, right through from the spiritual to the practical. Even if its inner teachings remain concealed, perhaps for a number of years, perhaps permanently, it will almost inevitably affect the course of human endeavour sooner or later. Esoteric becomes exoteric; theory turns into practice; abstract becomes concrete. It can be said that the capacity of a wisdom tradition to bear fruit in everyday life is at least as important as the illumination of its followers.

Whoa – another alchemical slide.  The fact that alchemy’s questions may in fact be the same questions normally associated with perennial philosophy doesn’t make them universal in the ideological/structural sense.  All the phrase perennial philosophy means is that these are the kinds of questions that keep arising in human societies regardless of cultural age or ethnicity. The question what is the meaning of human existence is a perennial question. All human societies past and present ask it in one form or another.  The critical thing is how the various societies answer the question. This is where “structure” comes in. “Structure” used like this is just a short-form for “belief system” and these vary wildly across age and culture. So a question like “what do I mean” may be asked human-universally, but the answers – oh no. Not “universal” at all. So the fact that the alchemical experts asked perennial questions had nothing whatsoever to do with alchemy’s (ideological) structure or its practices (which presumably are a result of its ideological structure) except in as far as those structures guided what kind of answers “appeared”. What Gilchrist does with that sentence is put “structure” on one side of “universal” and “perennial philosophy” on the other allowing the slippery meaning of the world “universal” to appear to connect the two outlying terms. Nice slide!

To be clear: the ideological structure of alchemy – the idea that it is important to separate the tripartite nature of the material world, purify it, and return the elements back into some ideal configuration, let alone that man is responsible for this – is not “universal.” The assumptions about the nature of reality that underly alchemy are Western. A close look at Eastern forms of the search for physically transformative wisdom (i.e. magic), even though they may appears to be similar to those of the West, reveal profound differences in the underlying cultural realities.

The other interesting thing about that section I quoted is that she never addresses the question of how a “secret” tradition bears everyday fruit. What it implies, of course, is that there is some unseen way in which the work done by alchemists (even in the deepest secret) secretly influences the daily life of others. Sort of like those who pray for unknown others expect that this secret “work” of theirs will influence the outcome of the prayed-about parties. The assumption posits another realm, an aether or etheric plane, which does the actual transmitting. Of course the other possibility is that alchemy and its practices were one of those secrets that everybody knew. I’m plumping for the second possibility.

Still, the fact that Gilchrist posits a problem and never answers it but takes off instead on this nice little homily to close out the paragraph is a good way to close out the previous “slide.” Religious writings do it all the time. I don’t see why alchemical writings should be any different.

OK, that was a bit of mean-spirited grousing, but really, since it wasn’t really necessary for the content of the chapter, it surely does feel like she thinks her readers’ a bit thick. All she had to say was that this secretly-affecting-the-world thing is a cool mystery and leave it at that.  She does have some actual evidence to back up her claim that alchemy has been an important cultural influence. I mean the chemistry thing alone is good enough for that. I think the alchemical slide should be used only when it is actually necessary – like when you really don’t have a leg to stand on but you still have to prove your ambulatory nature anyway.

I have been re-reading The Elements of Alchemy by Cherry Gilchrist.  It’s a basic introduction to the history and concepts of alchemy – like one of those cool Very Short Introduction to (a name of some disciple here) books but for the metaphysically rather than the philosophically or scientifically inclined.

I’ve always like alchemy. It’s arcane, deeply symbolic and a bit like the game bookworm mixed up with a good dash of sudoku. One can get really captivated by it.

Gilchrist does a pretty good job of pulling together a nice mix of history and the basic ideology but with this reading I am paying more attention to how she writes rather than what she says. The thing about alchemy is that it has kind of a bad reputation. Like Ouija boards and tarot cards, it is largely considered the province of crazies, except maybe in the vastly cut down version that supports some branches of psychology (primarily counselling) today.

You can tell this from the way she (rather cleverly) slides around alchemy’s (lack of?) efficacy.  I’ve noticed it several times so far (I’m about half way through the book) and I am hereby dubbing it the “alchemical slide.”

For example, from right at the beginning of the book:

Secondly, alchemy’s claims to produce extraordinary results in the physical world are hard to assess objectively. By the laws of science as normally understood today, it is not possible to convert other metals into gold, except by nuclear fission. But since alchemy encompasses mental as well as physical participation it inevitably goes beyond the realms of material science in its scope and may be able to produce effects on the physical level that cannot be accounted for by normal chemistry. Additionally, as we shall see, the gold produced is usually said to be quite different from ordinary gold.

Whew! Nice slide!

Three things to notice: 1) the assumption is made that the mind is removed from the material world and is yet able to influence it, 2) what is produced is not “ordinary” – another hidden assumption of the extra-ordinary realm and lastly 3) the hesitant language.

Alchemy as a practice relies upon the existence of an “above” and a “below” that coexist but that can be separated and manipulated. Gilchrist is making the same assumption and using it to argue for alchemy’s efficacy. Her “above” is the mind and her “below” is the matter that “material science” works upon. Logically, using an assumption to prove the efficacy of a system built on that same assumption, seems problematic to me but OK, I’ll agree to run with it for the duration of the book. Mostly I am willing to do this because it was so nicely slid into the book. I mean if you are going to write about alchemy in today’s world you have to deal with the fact that metals aren’t actually impure forms of gold at some point and by just assuming the reality of a 2-toned universe and limiting “material science” to only one of them is a good way to undercut the power of your opposition when you don’t actually have a product that works as advertised.

Alchemy exists in a Cartesian world – dualistic (despite certain emphasis on the One) and full of the magic of  ”And Lo! A thought moves matter!”

Point 2 above though is easily my favourite slide. Not ordinary gold?  What the heck does that mean? And that is its power. Like alchemy itself, if it doesn’t work it isn’t that the system is faulty, it is because your perception is off, or because you didn’t take enough care while you were processing in the bain-marie or because you haven’t managed to ascend to include the immaterial universe. There is no way to prove something like this wrong. Nice job.

Then there is point 3. Hesitant language like “the gold produced is usually,” “hard to assess,” “laws of science as normally understood” and “may be able to produce effects” are clear clues that the discipline is in trouble and that the author is having trouble getting behind her own words. No definitive statements here. It isn’t “hard” to assess objectively. Not at all. It’ll be a thumbs-down or a thumbs-up depending on the content you give to “objectively.” And “as normally understood?” So what is the content of abnormally understood science and why should I attend to its utterances?

That paragraph is a minefield but basically what it says is: Alchemy is a load of codswollop, science has shown us that, but it is still great fun and that in itself is worth pursuing. Yeah imagination! Still, I suppose she couldn’t actually write that and expect her editors to let it pass. I imagine that they thought potential purchasers of the book might object to sentences that boot them out of the alchemical story. Bad narrative practice.

Anyway, back to the book. Alembics, two-headed dragons, emerald tablets, and the possibility of learning to listen in on the gods! It really is a fun ride.

I recently purchased The Red Book. As you probably know it is the reproduction of Carl Jung’s most personal work on what he calls the collective unconscious. The book is astoundingly beautiful. It is full of illuminations and calligraphic text.  I know this despite the fact that I have yet to open the cover.

I may have reservations about Jung’s theories and the concept of humanity that results but I nevertheless feel a sense of reverence for The Red Book.  Partly it is the sheer beauty of the drawings. When its publication was announced and I went surfing looking for material on it, deciding whether I would buy a copy, I stumbled across a few example illustrations. From the first I knew I was going to drop the (then) $200.

So I did. The day it came I was home ill. During one of my breaks between waves of pain, I went up to the front yard with the dog and found that UPS had been. I found the package (huge) propped up in the open laundry room. When the dog was done we all went inside.

I sat down with the box and just held it for a while. I knew what it was and I was kind of awed at its heft. Bodes well for the interior heft I am currently seeking, I thought.

I got the scissors and opened the outer box only to find a slightly smaller inner box that was free of markings. An indiscript brown package.

Jung’s work, as is true of many of today’s magicians and alchemists, roots in and through the mythic imagination. There’s usually no question when you’ve found yourself connected to the master narratives: hackles, goosebumps, shivers and other bodily signposts shudder into awareness.

What I felt holding the blank brown box were the trembling fingers of the great silence, the inhuman void that I have always known as the wyrd. When I feel that prickle, I take it as bodily recognition of something potentially and powerfully connective. I got a quick sense of a new aspen sucker wiggling above ground and beginning the transformation of what had been fundamentally barren ground.

Anyway after a while I opened the inner box and lifted out The Red Book. I just sat and paid attention to what I was feeling. It was immediately clear that I was not going to open the cover. I just stroked it. Reminded myself of Hagrid and his book of monsters, but that is what it felt like.  I had just met a new friend, one that I knew I would be able to communicate with and that would, in its turn, communicate with me.  I knew that I had met something fundamentally non-human and I was glad to get the chance to share space.

The power to be momentarily deeply, viscerally aware of sharing space, that’s the sacred thing, the magic that powers transformation. Even though this is a book of a man’s exploration of his inner narratives, symbols, and images, there is a network of dense mythic and narrative root-stuff under what shows and, like the aspen root network, it is longer lasting than the things that grow up into the air from its earthly source. How this works seems of some import, yet the question has not been answered in any satisfactory way. I don’t think archetypes float in some plane any more than I can get behind Potinus’ emanations — but the evolutionary biomechanics of it? Waaaaay to soon to say. Still, mythic magic works on us and if we create a bunch of new narratives to explain it, what of it? Isn’t the creative process what makes being human so much fun?

All these days later I have yet to open the book. I am waiting for my hands to feel like meeting the first page. But despite the physical stillness of the material book, it is already moving around in my cavernous interior. I have, for example, been thinking about what makes this reverence of mine for Jung’s book any different from my recent JW visitor’s reverence for the Bible.

I don’t think there is any real difference, except that I know the red book is a mythic representation of self and she, I’m afraid, thinks the black book is representative of something other than human reality. But all the bodily awareness, the perceptual reactions, the consequent sense of connection, all this is identical.

But wait a minute!  I just said that I felt that what lies underneath the red book and provides it’s power to provoke sensory reaction is fundamentally inhuman and yet I am aware that what Jung represents is the human universe (not the larger material one out of which we sprout).  The only way I can reconcile the two things (both of which I feel as fundamentally true), is to understand that there are parts of what shape human existence that are essentially non-human.

At the biological level this is easy to see. There are, for example, these fascinating little buggers called mitochondria. They are part of us, we cannot exist without them and neither can much of the rest of life (human or otherwise) on the planet. Yet they are not human. I mean even my finger nail isn’t really human despite the fact that it is part of me, but mitochondria are really not human. (Go read about how they work and their history if you don’t believe me.) So imagine getting a quick peak at the world from the point of view of the mitochondria. What it means to be human doesn’t have any meaning at that level. What it means to be human can only exist at a state of complexity far distinct from that of the lovely mitochondria. The two realms are invisible to each other with respect to meaning. Not that we can’t understand how they work but that is not the same thing at all as describing what it means to be mitochondria. In fact, that last bit is really a nonsensical phrase.

There are these limits beyond which what it means to be human just has no purchase. Meaning itself begins to dissolve at these margins. Sacred objects, poems, mythic narratives are those that allow us to approach the limits of intelligibility and experience for ourselves where in us the wyrd pushes. That’s what The Red Book is to me, a pathway to the thin outer reaches of the wyrd. It is a bridge to that realm where I experience the fundamental meaningless of the world that supports me and paradoxically, it is by that very experience, that the potency of my power to generate meaning for myself is made evident. At the edge of death, life is the most precious.

So both human and inhuman — when, through the gifts of the evolved brain and body we reach into that dynamo that Jung called the collective unconscious we get zapped by the inhumanity of our origins. Whether through Jung’s “active imagination” or any of the other myriad perceptual techniques, we seem to connect to aspects of ourselves that have  a longer evolutionary history than has this current set of properties and skills that we define as “what it means to be human.” The contact of realms is always electric and if one is the studious type, sometimes transformative.

Contemporary alchemy. The transformation of awareness. That’s what Jung offers and make no mistake, this capacity humans have to make meaning out of drawings and words is our most sacred magic. The bodily shiver that comes with the contact with the other, even if the other is actually as aspect of self, that’s the instinct for the sacred. And one day, soon probably, I’ll get to open the cover and step across the threshold to the meeting ground.

Cool.

The purpose of Western esoteric tradition, writes Versluis, is “the restoration of paradise, which could also be expressed as the ending of objectification, or division into self and other.” For this to occur, a change of consciousness (or rather a transcendance of consciousness into awareness) is required. In the Western tradition, this change is codified in text providing both the means and the method of personal transformation. The word (lettter, number, glyph, what have you) is sacred because it is both the method of transformation and the desired outcome.
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I am struggling with Versluis. I keep running into things that tick me off. Why keep reading then? For a couple of reasons. The first is that the subject matter is important to understanding the Western mind and because he is an academic writing about a subject I consider to be important (I expect a certain quality and tenor to his presentation based on this.) It is this last bit, my expectation, that keeps getting nicked by the jagged edges of his presentation.

The thing is he appears to be a practitioner. Not that this is a problem in itself. Every human being comes to a subject with a point of view, with a set of beliefs and ways. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to be able to bracket his beliefs to allow for the reader’s, nor to take into account that some of his beliefs may need support. At least that’s what I think is the problem.

For me writing about the magical mind requires this bracketing as much if not more than any other subject. For one thing, the magical mind by its very nature posits more than one reality. To understand it, to get a glimspe of its workings as part of the human mind, multiple realities must be maintained, not just the belief in multiple realities.
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aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh…………….

Ok. That’s better.

I find I am having to read this book of Versluis’ in the same way I read Bachelard. Let me give you an example from his book.

In setting up the thesis that text has become a primary route for initiatory transmission of esoteric understanding in the Western tradition, Versluis has come up with a three-fold description of readers (i.e. potential receivers of this proffered understanding). These are:

1.Closed readers—those who come to a work with predetermined theses that disallow their imaginative entry;
2.sympathetic readers, who enter into a work imaginatively; and
3.Initiates, who see the work as mirroring a process that they seek to undergo in themselves.

While I agree with Versluis that text is being used as a tool for esoteric transmission, and while I agree that to understand these texts as intended one must imaginatively allow the world entry in one’s imagination, I think number three above would be more accurately stated as

3.Open readers—those who come to a work with predetermined theses that allow their imaginative entry. (And perhaps permanent residence if these readers tend to think of themselves as initiates. –perhaps this last coda is a touch uncharitable of me, but I am irritated–)

And perhaps number 2 might be better if it read:

2.Sympathetic readers, who enter into a work imaginatively but also maintain simultaneously an active recognition that the world of the text is provisional.

OK, Mary, calm down. (Breathe, breathe, breathe….)

Having got that little hissy fit over and done with, I will now proceed to read the rest of the book.