Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.”
“In a Christian context magic is heresy because it implies that man can command god to act. In other words that in some strange way the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires.”
“The Hermetica actually refers to humanity as the brother of god. So it’s a completely different attitude toward being human. It’s an empowering attitude.”
“In the hermetical, magical view human beings are not tainted by Original Sin.”
“Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings.”
“Had Western Europe stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient Greece, Christianity would never have been able to force its agenda to the degree that it did.”
“Alchemy, and conjuration, and tailsmanic magic, and sympathetic magic, all of these things flourished, really, not as a throwback but as a kind of prelude to modern science. Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise.”
“[John] Dee is the last person to be able to unify into one world view science, and mathematics, and magic, and astrology all together.”
“Paracelsus was an interesting guy. He’s essentially the inventor of drugs because he was the first person extract herbs and to get this notion of the essence.”
Today’s podcast begins a newly uncovered lecture by Terence McKenna. His topic is “Hermeticism and Alchemy” and he begins this 1991 workshop in fine form, making statements such as: “Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.” And, “Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings.”
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224 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 2
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And before I do another thing, I first want to offer my apologies to Brett J. and Perry B., who were our fellow salonners who sponsored my podcast number 206.
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And why am I only getting around to thanking them now, you might ask?
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Well, by a mere happenstance, I was testing part of one of my websites
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and discovered that when I did
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the post-production work on number
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206, that I failed to include
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the introduction that I had
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already recorded. So
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if you got an original version of
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that podcast, you may want to download it
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again with the full program on it.
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But here’s what really puzzles me.
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Usually I listen to all the download versions of each podcast just to be sure they’re okay,
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but for some reason I didn’t do it this time.
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And what surprised me is that nobody said anything.
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Not a soul was mentioned to me.
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Of course, I’ve been bad at keeping up with the posts over on thegirlreport.com,
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so maybe it was discussed there and I missed it.
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So should you ever download a podcast that doesn’t seem quite right,
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you may want to get over your politeness
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and let me know that maybe I had a little short-term memory problem
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and screwed up or something, huh?
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Anyway, Brett J. and Perry B., I am sorry it took so long to thank you,
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but I really do appreciate your support.
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And now, bringing us back to the present, there are some other fellow salonners I would like to thank for sending in donations during the past two weeks.
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And these fine souls are Greg J., Elliot W., George P., who sent in a very generous donation.
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And, George, consider yourself all donated up for life, okay?
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Matthew P., Adam D., and our longtime friends, SMD Books, who also wrote to say,
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Hi, Lorenzo. Hope you are well. Thank you so much for what you are doing.
00:02:23 ►
Recent podcasts have been great.
00:02:27 ►
McKenna’s Evolving Times is a high watermark.
00:02:30 ►
Please give from this donation to Mr. Ott.
00:02:32 ►
Mr. Ott’s work is very, very important.
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Best, Kay.
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And Kay, I have already passed along your donation to the Jonathan Ott Fund,
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and I’ve also included part of the other donations as well. So thank you all on behalf of myself and for Jonathan Ott as well.
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And his story, of course, you know you can hear in my previous podcast,
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just in case you’re just joining us for the first time here.
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Now, after we hear today’s talk, there are still a few more fellow slaunters that I’d like to thank.
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But first, let’s get on with what for me was a talk by Terrence McKenna that I’d not heard before.
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It was sent to me by Brian P., who also sent about 15 hours of McKenna MP3s that I hadn’t seen anywhere before,
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and so you and I are going to be working our way through them together.
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And we’re going to begin with a talk that came under the heading
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1991, Exploring the Hermetic Tradition. It was actually eight mp3 files, and right now I’m going
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to play all of the second tape and part of the first one. What I’m not including are the first
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36 minutes of the first tape, and here’s why. As you know, when Terrence did workshops, he usually began each day
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by first asking if there were any questions from the session before. And in this case, the session
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the night before must have been about his time wave theory, because that’s what they talked about
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for the first half hour or so. And so it didn’t actually fit into the subject matter for this talk, which he
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titled Hermeticism and Alchemy.
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Now, I’ve always been interested in these topics myself, but to tell you the truth,
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every time I pick up a book on the subject, I seem to get bored before I can finish it.
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So I’ve really enjoyed listening to this background on Hermeticism and Alchemy, because
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these little personal vigenettes that he gives to tell the story are just what it takes to keep me
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interested. And I hope it’s the same for you. So let’s get started and join
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Terrence McKenna right now.
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All right. We’ve probably staved off serious work just about as long as we can
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unless someone insists no okay well today’s thing is sort of a return to a more
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orthodox educational kind of mode hopefully not to such a degree that it’s boring but the agenda is to talk about
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hermeticism and alchemy
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the way in which this tradition
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which is counterintuitive
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and heterodox
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if not heretical
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from the point of view of Christianity,
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and what it can mean for the present, what it means for the psychedelic experience,
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what it means for the notion of the end of history,
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and how the loss of this point of view has probably done us a certain amount of damage.
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The great tension in the Middle Ages was between the late Middle Ages,
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was between the magical schema, the magical view of human beings,
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and the Christian view.
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And the Christian view is very strongly marked
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by the idea of man’s fall,
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that we screwed up early on,
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and somehow then, by virtue of that we’re forced into a secondary position in the cosmic drama.
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We are doing penance as we speak.
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The world is a veil of tears.
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The lot of human beings is to till hard land.
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human beings is to till hard land and you know we are cursed unto the 19th generation or something like that by the fall of our first parents and we can be redeemed this is I’m giving you the Christian rap we can be redeemed through Christ
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but we don’t deserve
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it it is
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if you are saved
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it is because there is
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a kind of
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a hand
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extended to you
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from a merciful God
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who is willing to overlook your wormy nature
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and draw you up in spite of yourself.
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And this is deep in us,
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no matter how, you know,
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whether you’re, you may not think you’ve bought in
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because you’re black or because you’re Chinese or something but
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it’s just in the air we breathe it’s what Western civilization makes you
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think whether you want to think it or not you know even if you don’t come out
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of these traditions for us the concept of that you’ve got to pay your dues human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being
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this is the basis of all magic you see in a christian context magic is heresy because it implies that man can command God to act.
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In other words, that in some strange way,
00:08:31 ►
the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires.
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In Hermeticism, it isn’t so much put in terms of compel, but the idea is that humanity, human beings, men and women of great spiritual accomplishment are co-partners in the project of being.
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God, as it were, stepped off the stage of creation with it only 90% completed.
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And the rest is left in the hands of his brother.
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The Hermetica actually refers to humanity as the brother of God.
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So it’s a completely different attitude toward being human it’s an empowering attitude with power comes the potential to abuse power
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because you’re no longer a worm you remember that image in Jonathan Edwards
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sermon that sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,
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where he says you’re like a worm
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suspended over an abyss,
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held there only by the love of a merciful God,
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implying that if he weren’t a merciful God,
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he’d just let go of your thread
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and you’d go down the tubes.
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In the hermetic magical view,
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human beings are not tainted by original sin.
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And no ideology is without the potential of abuse.
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The hermetic attitude in the Renaissance
00:10:23 ►
was summed up in a single aphorism by the great Renaissance Platonist Marcello Ficino.
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And what he said was, and I have to, you know, there’s no sexism in all of this.
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You just have to realize these guys were primitive types and they hadn’t confronted
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the political issues we’ve confronted so when they say man they mean humanity
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the renaissance magical attitude is summed up in facino’s aphorism man is the measure of all things and this is a double edged sword
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because in a single
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affirmation
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you cast off the guilt trip
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you cast off the view of ourselves
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as a flawed creature
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but when you say man is the measure of all things
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I mean you could be the chairman of the board
00:11:30 ►
of Louisiana Pacific or Dow Chemical
00:11:33 ►
I mean this is approximately their attitude
00:11:36 ►
in other words it ain’t rainforests
00:11:39 ►
it’s not the life of the earth
00:11:41 ►
it’s none of that malarkey
00:11:43 ►
we are to be the measure of all things.
00:11:47 ►
So it has to be tempered.
00:11:50 ►
We’ll probably end up talking a bit here
00:11:53 ►
about the pathological expression
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of the hermetic position,
00:12:00 ►
which is called Faustianism.
00:12:04 ►
And Faustianism is where you have unbridled ego,
00:12:10 ►
unbridled faith in the intellect
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so that you proceed forward without self-doubt.
00:12:19 ►
If you haven’t read Faust recently,
00:12:22 ►
it’s a surprising read.
00:12:25 ►
First of all, you know, it’s very funny. It’s a surprising read. First of all, you know,
00:12:26 ►
it’s very funny.
00:12:27 ►
It’s hilarious.
00:12:28 ►
It’s funnier than any
00:12:29 ►
of Shakespeare’s plays,
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I think.
00:12:32 ►
And the way it ends
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is the guy dedicates himself
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to land reclamation
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and the draining of swamps
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to build low-cost housing for poor people and people
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don’t know this they they’re caught up in the images of the center of the story where you know
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magical power is running rampant but faust’s final conclusion is that he should do some good work for the least of society
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and give up these Promethean and titanic dreams of the mastery of power.
00:13:15 ►
Well, a little bit of history about this hermetic ideal.
00:13:22 ►
It’s an interesting story in the light of our discussion of time yesterday western
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civilization in a way can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings
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and one of the most severe of these misunderstandings has to do with this whole business of Hermeticism.
00:13:45 ►
The Renaissance really believed that Hermes Trismegistus
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was a great teacher of antiquity who preceded Moses,
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who was in time older than Moses and they they had what they called the Prisci Theologica
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the three theologians and they were Hermes Trismegistus Moses and Orpheus in that order. And the reason that I say Western civilization is built on a series of misunderstandings
00:14:31 ►
is because they got it all wrong about Hermes Trismegistus.
00:14:36 ►
And there was great confusion and unhappiness in the 16th century
00:14:49 ►
when Marie Cassabon, who was an early philologist,
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attacked the dating of the Hermetic Corpus
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and argued correctly that this could not possibly have been written in a period preceding Moses.
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That, in fact, this was post-Christian, written no earlier than the first century A.D.
00:15:23 ►
the equivalent of us finding out that, you know,
00:15:30 ►
George Washington was alive in Greenwich Village in the 1930s or something. I mean, it was a completely mind-bending realignment
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of how people thought the history of the world had unfolded
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because they had up to that time thought that
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when you studied Hermes Trismegistus,
00:15:45 ►
you were reading the oldest philosopher in human history.
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Actually, it’s very late.
00:15:51 ►
And in a way, this is what destroyed the magical alternative.
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The advent of modern philology showed that these so-called ancient texts were not ancient at all.
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They were late Roman.
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They were Hellenistic.
00:16:13 ►
And so strongly was imprinted in the Western mind what’s called, and we’ve talked about it here this weekend,
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what’s called the and we’ve talked about it here this weekend, what’s called the nostalgia for paradise.
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In other words, the belief that the older it is, the better it is.
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And Guillaume-Baptiste Avico in La Sciencia Nuova
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laid the basis for this kind of thinking.
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It’s called classicism in the Renaissance context.
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So once they found out that the Hermetic corpus
00:16:49 ►
had been written in late Roman times,
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it was like it was finished.
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And science was able to use the confusion
00:16:58 ►
in the magical community at that point
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to force its own agenda very strongly and there were new there have been
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numerous episodes of misplaced dating like this that have contributed to the confusion
00:17:17 ►
around the history of magic for example and i hope this doesn’t bring somebody rising out of their chair in an air-clawing rave,
00:17:28 ►
but Rosicrucianism rests on a whole bunch of phony dates
00:17:36 ►
because they want to tell you that somebody named Christian Rosencrantz
00:17:42 ►
wrote a book called The Chemical Wedding
00:17:45 ►
and sealed it up in a time capsule in the 12th century
00:17:53 ►
and that it was then dug up in the 15th, 15th?
00:18:02 ►
16th, dug up in the 16th century.
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But actually all these Rosicrucian documents were ponied up by people in the 16th century
00:18:13 ►
who had a very complicated political agenda,
00:18:16 ►
which we will probably discuss as part of this weekend.
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Hermetic philosophy is based on
00:18:26 ►
what is called the
00:18:27 ►
hermetic corpus this is
00:18:29 ►
a group of books the
00:18:33 ►
most important of which
00:18:34 ►
is called the
00:18:35 ►
Asclepius and these
00:18:37 ►
books most of them
00:18:39 ►
were completely lost
00:18:42 ►
during the Middle Ages.
00:18:45 ►
At the fall of the Roman Empire,
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copies of these Hermetic manuscripts
00:18:51 ►
were systematically destroyed
00:18:54 ►
by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.
00:19:00 ►
And the Hermetic manuscripts were scattered
00:19:05 ►
and they only survived then in monasteries in Syria
00:19:10 ►
and places like that.
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Well, then in the Renaissance,
00:19:15 ►
the Council of Florence,
00:19:18 ►
under the patronage of the Borgias and people like that,
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there was this great interest suddenly in antiquities
00:19:31 ►
because these Roman statuary and stuff
00:19:34 ►
was coming out of the ground.
00:19:36 ►
So the Council of Florence commissioned a character
00:19:39 ►
named Gemistus Pletho to go to Syria
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and bring back these manuscripts and they
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established a translation Commission and they had in manuscript the man the the
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works of Plato the works of Hermes Trismegistus a whole bunch of ancient
00:20:01 ►
literature and to show you what the psychology of the renaissance was
00:20:06 ►
here they had plato which they hadn’t been able to read for a thousand years sitting there waiting
00:20:13 ►
for translation and um the the uh cosimo de medici said to Marcello Ficino, Plato can wait.
00:20:26 ►
Translate the Hermetic corpus first.
00:20:30 ►
And so it was done.
00:20:32 ►
If you’re interested in Renaissance Hermeticism,
00:20:36 ►
you can’t do better than read
00:20:38 ►
Dame Frances Yeats’ book,
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Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.
00:20:44 ►
Well, I want to read you some of this stuff
00:20:47 ►
because it’s very interesting and it has a
00:20:51 ►
modernity that is astonishing
00:20:56 ►
it’s also very psychedelic
00:20:58 ►
here’s a little passage on
00:21:01 ►
the imagination.
00:21:07 ►
I’m reading from book nine of the Corpus Hermeticum
00:21:11 ►
in the Scott translation.
00:21:14 ►
This is a four-volume set.
00:21:16 ►
I only brought the text and translation volume.
00:21:20 ►
But if you read Greek, it’s all here.
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If you don’t, it’s all here if you don’t it’s all here in English
00:21:26 ►
but this will just give you a feeling
00:21:30 ►
for the approach if then you do not make
00:21:34 ►
yourself equal to God you cannot
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apprehend God for like is known by like
00:21:41 ►
leap clear of all that is corporeal and make yourself to a like expanse
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with that greatness
00:21:49 ►
which is beyond all measure.
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Rise above all time
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and become eternal.
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Then you will apprehend God.
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Think that for you too
00:21:59 ►
nothing is impossible.
00:22:01 ►
Deem that you too are immortal
00:22:03 ►
and that you are able
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to grasp all things
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in your thought
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to know every craft
00:22:09 ►
and every science.
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Find your home
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in the haunts
00:22:12 ►
of every living creature.
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Make yourself higher
00:22:15 ►
than all heights
00:22:16 ►
and lower than all depths.
00:22:19 ►
Bring together in yourself
00:22:20 ►
all opposites of quality,
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heat and cold,
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dryness and fluidity. think that you are everywhere at
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once on land at sea in heaven think that you are not yet begotten that you are in the womb that
00:22:34 ►
you are young that you are old that you have died that you are in the world beyond the grave grasp
00:22:41 ►
in your thought all this at once all all times and places, all substances and qualities
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and magnitudes together. Then you can apprehend God. But if you shut up your soul in your body
00:22:55 ►
and abase yourself and say, I know nothing. I can do nothing. I am afraid of earth and sea I cannot mount to heaven I know not what I
00:23:05 ►
was nor what I shall be then what have you to do with God your thought can
00:23:11 ►
grasp and good if you cleave to the body and are evil interesting very different
00:23:20 ►
from the humble yourself hard labor spun wool and watery beer approach of medieval Christianity.
00:23:33 ►
Here’s an amazing passage.
00:23:37 ►
You know, people like to think people thought the world was flat until the Renaissance.
00:23:48 ►
was flat until the Renaissance this is a an incredible psychedelic image of outer space that is second century AD would that it were possible for you to grow
00:23:55 ►
wings and soar into the air poised between earth and heaven you might see
00:24:02 ►
the solid earth the fluid sea and the streaming rivers the wandering
00:24:07 ►
air the penetrating fire the courses of the stars and the swiftness of the movement with which heaven
00:24:14 ►
encompasses all what happiness were that my son to see all these born along with one impulse and to behold him who is unmoved
00:24:25 ►
moving in all that moves
00:24:27 ►
and him who is hidden
00:24:28 ►
made manifest through his works
00:24:31 ►
and it goes on and on
00:24:34 ►
it’s very readable
00:24:35 ►
it’s very literary
00:24:37 ►
it’s highly poetic
00:24:38 ►
it’s a celebration of nature
00:24:41 ►
the notion of sin is completely absent and it rings with a kind of confidence a kind of
00:24:50 ►
joy that was completely running counter to the brimstone and damnation point of view of of Christianity. Here’s a, to me,
00:25:08 ►
a psychedelic passage.
00:25:12 ►
But he who presents all things to us
00:25:15 ►
through our senses
00:25:16 ►
and thereby manifests himself
00:25:18 ►
through all things
00:25:19 ►
and in all things
00:25:20 ►
and especially to those
00:25:22 ►
to whom he wills
00:25:23 ►
to manifest himself,
00:25:27 ►
begin then, my son, taught with a prayer to the lord and father who alone is good pray that you may find favor with him
00:25:33 ►
and that one ray of him if only one may flash into your mind so that you may have power to grasp in
00:25:41 ►
thought that mighty being for thought alone can see that which is hidden in as
00:25:47 ►
much as thought itself is hidden from sight and if even the thought which is within you is hidden
00:25:53 ►
from your sight how can he being in himself be manifest to you through your bodily eyes but if
00:26:01 ►
you have power to see with the eyes of the mind then my son he will manifest
00:26:07 ►
himself to you for the lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe and you
00:26:14 ►
can behold god’s image with your eyes and lay hold on it with your hands if you wish to see him
00:26:21 ►
think on the sun think on the course of the moon,
00:26:27 ►
think on the order of the stars.
00:26:29 ►
Who is it that maintains that order?
00:26:32 ►
The sun is the greatest of the gods in heaven.
00:26:38 ►
To him as to their king and overlord and all the kings of heaven yield place. And yet this mighty God, greater than earth and sea,
00:26:42 ►
submits to having smaller stars circling above him
00:26:46 ►
who is it then my son that he always obeys with reverence and all each of
00:26:52 ►
these stars too is confined by measured limits and has an appointed space to
00:26:57 ►
range in why do not all the stars in heaven run like and equal courses who is
00:27:04 ►
it that is assigned to each its place
00:27:06 ►
and marked out for each the extent of its course?
00:27:10 ►
And so forth.
00:27:11 ►
So it’s a nature-oriented celebratory.
00:27:17 ►
It glories in the exercise of the mind.
00:27:22 ►
It is not doctrinal.
00:27:24 ►
It is not pietistic it is magical psychedelic expansive
00:27:33 ►
and i’m not implying that they used psychedelic substances the evidence for that is incredibly
00:27:40 ►
murky and hard to get at and probably they didn’t i mean one of the real tragedies of western
00:27:47 ►
history is that western europe is so poor in psychoactive plants i mean had had western europe
00:27:58 ►
stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient g, Christianity would never have been able to
00:28:06 ►
force its agenda to the degree that it did.
00:28:12 ►
I think you can make an argument that
00:28:15 ►
there were psychedelic mysteries in Europe
00:28:21 ►
probably up until the time of the fall of Eleusis.
00:28:27 ►
Hermeticism is only one heterodox strain among many
00:28:32 ►
that were in existence in Europe in the late Roman period
00:28:37 ►
and that then partially survived into the Dark Ages.
00:28:42 ►
I mean, you have neoplatonism which is a group of philosophers in the in the
00:28:50 ►
third and fourth century who Plotinus porphyry Proclus and that crowd and they took Plato the Plato, the late Plato, and contorted that into a mystical doctrine of emanation.
00:29:11 ►
They were what are called emanationists.
00:29:14 ►
What this means is you start with, it’s either called the one or the unnameable or Brahman Atman or something like that.
00:29:25 ►
And then you have a series of declensions into more and more material
00:29:31 ►
and more and more multiplistic expressions of being.
00:29:35 ►
These Neoplatonists were emanationists,
00:29:39 ►
and their theories about how the universe is constructed
00:29:43 ►
have become sort of the unconscious basis of all
00:29:47 ►
later magical speculation if they are the people who brought the angels into the picture so so
00:29:56 ►
intensely because they were trying to create a descending hierarchy of being from the most high down to the most low.
00:30:05 ►
And angels, once set in place, became a real problem for Christianity
00:30:12 ►
because they are not very easy to distinguish from the old stellar demons of paganism.
00:30:24 ►
stellar demons of paganism.
00:30:27 ►
Paganism was largely the belief that the power of the stars
00:30:30 ►
could be drawn down to earth
00:30:34 ►
through sympathetic magic, really.
00:30:39 ►
By setting up resonances
00:30:43 ►
in a ritual situation, you could draw the power of the stars down into your projects and
00:30:52 ►
your intentions and the late Middle Ages was a period of intensely working out all the associations between minerals, colors, perfumes, plants,
00:31:14 ►
musical notes and styles,
00:31:19 ►
so that you could then bring together all these things
00:31:23 ►
for purposes of magical evocation.
00:31:28 ►
And if any of you are interested in this,
00:31:30 ►
the book to read, which will point you toward many other interesting books,
00:31:34 ►
is a wonderful book called
00:31:37 ►
Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella.
00:31:43 ►
Some of you may remember Campanella.
00:31:46 ►
Hell of a fighter.
00:31:48 ►
Anyway.
00:31:49 ►
Hello?
00:31:50 ►
Hello?
00:31:56 ►
And in the Renaissance,
00:32:00 ►
over a period of about three generations,
00:32:03 ►
this became a real problem
00:32:04 ►
because what starts out as angel magic ends up as out-and-out demonic conjuration,
00:32:14 ►
something which I’ve noticed my 14-year-old son has an incredibly unhealthy interest in,
00:32:20 ►
which I did as well at his age.
00:32:23 ►
I hope it’s not the family curse coming back
00:32:27 ►
yeah so I mentioned the dating error it was Lactantius was one of the fathers of the early
00:32:40 ►
church one of of the patristic. That’s that generation of theologians that followed Christ
00:32:49 ►
who canonized the Christian religion.
00:32:53 ►
And he placed Hermes Trismegistus as older than Moses,
00:32:58 ►
older than Pythagoras, older than Plato.
00:33:01 ►
And then it wasn’t until Marie Cassebon corrected that problem.
00:33:09 ►
See, we forget how the really transformative breakthrough that was represented for Western
00:33:21 ►
Europe by the recovery of all of this ancient literature. It had been
00:33:26 ►
completely lost. And also a misimpression that probably needs correcting is I think most people
00:33:36 ►
who are not schooled in Western history think that the further back in time the more quote-unquote superstitious people were.
00:33:51 ►
This isn’t actually the case.
00:33:54 ►
It isn’t a case of the further back in time you go,
00:33:57 ►
the more belief in demons, magical conjuration,
00:34:01 ►
and stuff like that you get.
00:34:03 ►
The 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries in Europe were periods of
00:34:10 ►
remarkable piety and intellectual cohesion. Of course, it was also some kind of a fascist nightmare.
00:34:18 ►
That’s how they achieved it. They had stamped out paganism. They had pushed heresy and heterodox thinking to the very distant frontiers of the empire,
00:34:32 ►
of the Holy Roman Empire.
00:34:35 ►
And people were not superstitious,
00:34:41 ►
and people were not obsessed with horoscopes and conjuration and this sort of thing
00:34:46 ►
where that all began was uh well or where it reached its culmination is in the 16th century
00:34:56 ►
the 16th century the 1500s it was the most magical obsessed century in the last ten.
00:35:06 ►
And alchemy and conjuration and talismanic magic and sympathetic magic.
00:35:16 ►
All of these things flourished really not as a throwback, but as a kind of prelude to modern science.
00:35:30 ►
Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise.
00:35:34 ►
And we will see, as we discuss this stuff,
00:35:38 ►
that in a curious and little, rarely discussed way, the program, the agenda of magical dissidents in Europe
00:35:51 ►
have been entirely achieved by the forces of what we call modernity.
00:35:57 ►
It’s simply that it has been done in an entirely secular metaphor.
00:36:02 ►
I mean, if you take even the trivial belief about alchemists, that they were concerned with changing lead into gold, of course, that isn’t what it was about. But there were plenty of con artists running around on the periphery of these deeper scenes who were claiming they could change lead into gold. Well, in the 20th century, we routinely
00:36:26 ►
change lead to gold. You do it with neutron bombardment in particle accelerators. And of
00:36:34 ►
course, it costs far more to do it than the worth of the gold that you get out. But that really
00:36:40 ►
wasn’t the point, was it? It was to prove that it could be done. The dreams of creating the homunculus are dreams that dovetail directly into the aspirations of a dimension of motion, and lo and behold, it becomes the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution.
00:37:27 ►
the alchemical dreams of the 15th and 16th century have been brought to fruition in the 20th century but again in the absence of magical rhetoric but certainly in a spirit of magical and Faustian
00:37:37 ►
recklessness for sure I mean this is scientists know, they claim such a devotion to truth that decency must never stand in the way because they serve a higher God than human values.
00:37:52 ►
They serve the golem of the truth in some weird way that makes the truth okay even if it kills you.
00:38:02 ►
even if it kills you I studied philosophy from Paul Feyerabend
00:38:05 ►
and he used to say at the beginning of his epistemology 101 course
00:38:09 ►
I will teach you to recognize the truth
00:38:13 ►
and I will teach you to ask the question
00:38:16 ►
what’s so great about it?
00:38:19 ►
you know, I mean, so now you’ve got the truth
00:38:21 ►
so what’s so great about it?
00:38:25 ►
it was 1460 when these manuscripts were brought to Florence.
00:38:30 ►
Those of you with photographic memories can see the time wave signature
00:38:35 ►
as it turns over and heads through the floor.
00:38:45 ►
and the Cosimo de’ Medici immediately ordered Ficino
00:38:47 ►
to abandon his work on Plato
00:38:51 ►
and the Paimander
00:38:54 ►
which was one of these books
00:38:57 ►
it was the only one which existed in Europe
00:39:00 ►
even in partial form during the Dark Ages
00:39:04 ►
Cosimo died in 1464 in Europe, even in partial form during the Dark Ages.
00:39:09 ►
Cosimo died in 1464,
00:39:13 ►
but the translation project went forward.
00:39:19 ►
And just so you understand, the tree, the developmental process in Western magic
00:39:23 ►
basically all goes back to this Florentine translation project.
00:39:30 ►
And from there, people who were well-placed got a hold of this stuff.
00:39:35 ►
The most important person probably being a person,
00:39:40 ►
certainly an unsung hero in the development of Western thought,
00:39:45 ►
Trithemius, Bishop of Sponheim and
00:39:49 ►
Trithemius
00:39:50 ►
Wrote a book. He was really a manuscript. It was never printed as a book in his lifetime
00:39:55 ►
but later called the stenographica and
00:39:59 ►
in it he put forth many of these magical doctrines and also encryption methods for code making and
00:40:09 ►
breaking so that this stuff could be circulated under the eyes of the clergy without causing a
00:40:17 ►
problem and then the the development of western magic splits into two strains.
00:40:26 ►
The Bruno strain, Giordano Bruno.
00:40:31 ►
I understand he’s running for President of the United States this year.
00:40:37 ►
Giordano Bruno and his school, he was a Franciscan monk who ended up being burned at the stake his sin for which he was burned
00:40:47 ►
at the stake was he was sitting on a rooftop of one of these italian city states one evening
00:40:55 ►
presumably smoking some pretty decent boo that they’d brought in from north africa and uh from North Africa. And he was looking at the stars
00:41:06 ►
and it occurred to him,
00:41:09 ►
these things are suns.
00:41:13 ►
These little points of light
00:41:15 ►
are like the sun.
00:41:17 ►
Jesus Christ.
00:41:19 ►
And in a single moment,
00:41:21 ►
the universe became infinite.
00:41:24 ►
And he said, if these are suns and he just you know his
00:41:28 ►
mind was boggled literally i mean can you imagine inside the medieval worldview where they have
00:41:35 ►
these concentric shells of angels and demons and all this suddenly this guy gets it in a single moment and he sees that the universe is infinite and he begins
00:41:47 ►
to say so and this is against aristotle and the church just goes nuts and they drive him out of
00:41:57 ►
italy and he has a whole bunch of adventures in england and places. Eventually he makes the mistake of coming back
00:42:05 ►
to a place in northern Italy
00:42:06 ►
where he’s betrayed by his patron
00:42:09 ►
and he’s burned at the stake
00:42:13 ►
for a point of view which all of us
00:42:16 ►
take quite for granted.
00:42:19 ►
The other strain of magic
00:42:23 ►
coming down from Trithemius is the D strain.
00:42:28 ►
And it is a bit more accessible to people like ourselves
00:42:32 ►
because John Dee was an Englishman and he wrote in English.
00:42:37 ►
And so you don’t have to conquer 16th century Italian or late Latin in order to read him,
00:42:47 ►
although he wrote a lot in Latin as well.
00:42:49 ►
D is a very interesting character worth spending some time on
00:42:55 ►
because D is the last person to be able to unify into one world view science and mathematics and magic and astrology all together.
00:43:13 ►
So he is the greatest magician of his age and the greatest scientist of his age. He designed the navigation instruments that Sir Francis Drake used to go around the Cape Horn and sail up the coast of California.
00:43:35 ►
He was an intelligence operative serving Queen Elizabeth on the European continent. He could cast the best horoscope in Europe,
00:43:47 ►
and that was his entree into these various royal families
00:43:52 ►
of these various capital cities of Europe.
00:43:55 ►
And then he was making maps of battlements
00:44:00 ►
and of the deployment of war facilities
00:44:03 ►
and shipbuilding capacity and stuff like that
00:44:07 ►
and sending it all back to Elizabeth
00:44:10 ►
in these codes that he had learned from Trithemius
00:44:14 ►
not personally but from the stenographica
00:44:18 ►
and D
00:44:20 ►
a very strange incident happened,
00:44:26 ►
which was on a cold day in April
00:44:30 ►
at his house in Mortlake,
00:44:33 ►
which is on the outskirts of London.
00:44:35 ►
Now it’s completely surrounded by modern London.
00:44:39 ►
I should say, he had the largest library in England.
00:44:44 ►
He had 6,000 books.
00:44:47 ►
Sir Philip Sidney and the Queen
00:44:50 ►
would occasionally call upon him to shoot the bull.
00:44:54 ►
And he was a very learned man.
00:44:58 ►
So one day in April of 1582,
00:45:01 ►
he’s working at his desk at his room in Mortlake,
00:45:03 ►
and he goes outside. There’s some disturbance in the garden, and he goes outside, and his story, and we have only his story, is that an angel descended in a ball of light and gave him an object which is to this day on exhibit in the British Museum.
00:45:29 ►
If you ever have a chance, it’s worth hunting it down.
00:45:32 ►
It’s in the Renaissance Hall.
00:45:34 ►
And it’s a piece of black polished obsidian, roughly about this big and about that thick and very highly polished
00:45:45 ►
he called it the show stone
00:45:49 ►
S-H-E-W
00:45:50 ►
and what the deal was
00:45:53 ►
was you could look into the show stone
00:45:56 ►
if you had the right talent
00:45:58 ►
and it was a magical theater
00:46:01 ►
there were gods and demons
00:46:04 ►
and female spirits and all kinds of things swirling
00:46:09 ►
around this thing well for the next many years the show stone was the major guiding force on on Dee’s life. And a guy came to him named Edward Kelly.
00:46:27 ►
And Edward Kelly,
00:46:33 ►
legend has it that he had no ears,
00:46:35 ►
which in England at that time meant that you had committed some infraction in the province
00:46:40 ►
and they had removed your ears.
00:46:42 ►
It was the mark of a con artist was so you couldn’t fool
00:46:48 ►
anybody else they took your ears off so then if you met somebody with no ears and a big scheme
00:46:53 ►
you knew to keep your wallet in your pocket so so this guy kelly had an immense facility
00:47:06 ►
So this guy Kelly had an immense facility with this show stone.
00:47:08 ►
I mean, he could just sit down with it,
00:47:12 ►
and it is one of the most puzzling and undiscussed episodes in the evolution of Western thought.
00:47:15 ►
The straight people just say,
00:47:18 ►
whoa, this is a bunch of crap, you know, this guy Kelly.
00:47:22 ►
First of all, Dee was married to a much younger woman named Ann D.
00:47:28 ►
And at one point in the ten years or so that D and Kelly were together,
00:47:32 ►
the angels of the show stone gave very explicit instructions.
00:47:39 ►
So this guy was a sharpie for sure.
00:47:50 ►
was a sharpie for sure however it’s it’s very puzzling because if he was if he was a con artist he must have been a con artist of immense uh cleverness because often the way the de-angels is they would deliver very, very long messages in Latin backwards.
00:48:09 ►
And Kelly would just dictate this stuff at a very rapid speed,
00:48:14 ►
and Dee would write it down, and then they would put away the showstone,
00:48:18 ►
and then they would very laboriously rewrite this stuff from back to front,
00:48:24 ►
laboriously rewrite this stuff from back to front.
00:48:28 ►
And then there was these long, coherent harangues about what they should be doing,
00:48:30 ►
about which courtly figures they should support with money
00:48:36 ►
and who should be introduced to who.
00:48:39 ►
It was very political, you know.
00:48:42 ►
Well, what kind of a polymathic talent was Edward Kelly that
00:48:47 ►
he could invert whole pages of Latin and reel it off and then have it be
00:48:53 ►
reconstructed and make sense also there are you see this we know about this
00:48:58 ►
because Dee kept a diary over the years that this was all going on. It’s one of the most astonishing books in all of
00:49:09 ►
English literature, and until the last 10 years, the 1658 edition was the only edition ever published.
00:49:20 ►
It’s called A True and Faithful Relation, or in full, A True and Faithful Relation
00:49:27 ►
of what passed for many years
00:49:29 ►
between Dr. D and some spirits,
00:49:33 ►
with annotation by Maric Casabon,
00:49:36 ►
the guy who did the correct dating on the Hermetica.
00:49:41 ►
And it’s very interesting reading.
00:49:44 ►
It’s, as I say, one of the most puzzling incidents
00:49:48 ►
in the whole history of science.
00:49:51 ►
What Dee was doing was eventually he came to rest
00:49:56 ►
at the court of Rudolf II, Rudolf I of Bohemia,
00:50:03 ►
who ruled from Prague.
00:50:06 ►
Now, you have to understand… Is that a hand up?
00:50:08 ►
Is there evidence of drug use?
00:50:13 ►
Not strong enough to warrant any getting thrilled about it.
00:50:21 ►
The great awareness of drug use came slightly later and strangely enough the drug was opium
00:50:30 ►
it’s an it’s it’s interesting the history of opium you know we think of of opium and its
00:50:39 ►
derivatives uh junk and heroin as just the lowest well maybe crack is now the lowest of the low but anyway
00:50:46 ►
it’s a real scuzzball drug according to most people’s opinion but did you know that no they
00:50:55 ►
had been using opium for 3 000 years before anybody noticed that it was an addicting drug it was not ever noted that opium was
00:51:07 ►
addicting until 1611 when John play fair a very famous English physician wrote a
00:51:16 ►
book in which he commented on opium and said once one has begun the habit of opium it must be maintained unto death
00:51:26 ►
so
00:51:28 ►
in the 30 years after D
00:51:33 ►
there was a great hermeticist
00:51:36 ►
and alchemical thinker named Paracelsus
00:51:39 ►
who arose on the European continent
00:51:42 ►
Paracelsus is an interesting guy.
00:51:45 ►
He’s essentially the inventor of drugs
00:51:49 ►
because he was the first person
00:51:52 ►
to extract herbs
00:51:56 ►
and to get this notion of the essence
00:52:00 ►
that if you have a medicinal plant,
00:52:04 ►
then there’s something in there
00:52:07 ►
which you want to get out and concentrate
00:52:09 ►
he called his school of alchemy
00:52:14 ►
iatrochemistry
00:52:15 ►
the doctor’s chemistry
00:52:18 ►
and he invented pills of the ordinary sort
00:52:22 ►
and he said,
00:52:25 ►
I have made a great discovery.
00:52:28 ►
The center of my alchemical opus
00:52:31 ►
rests with the magic of laudanum,
00:52:35 ►
which was, of course, gum opium.
00:52:39 ►
There was a craze in the late 15th century
00:52:43 ►
among alchemists for opium.
00:52:45 ►
The alchemist von Helmut, he signed some of his alchemical tracts, Dr. Opiatus.
00:52:55 ►
He was the first croaker.
00:53:04 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a
00:53:09 ►
time well i’m sorry that we’re going to have to cut off right now but uh there’s a few other
00:53:18 ►
things i’ve got to cover before i get out of here and i just want to let you know that I will get to the rest of this podcast series as soon
00:53:26 ►
as I can, early next week, I hope.
00:53:28 ►
But, first of all,
00:53:30 ►
I want to thank Eric K.,
00:53:32 ►
David, Stephan B.,
00:53:34 ►
Seth M., Mark C.,
00:53:36 ►
Andy W., Neil B.,
00:53:38 ►
and Dean H., all of whom
00:53:40 ►
have offered to help me fix the problems
00:53:42 ►
I’ve been having on our Notes from the
00:53:44 ►
Psychedelic Salon blog.
00:53:46 ►
And so I think we’ve got sufficient help here.
00:53:48 ►
And in case you’re just hearing about my call for help recently, I think you can hold off.
00:53:53 ►
I think we’ll get it fixed because I’m sure that with their help I’ll get things humming along again, hopefully by the end of this month.
00:54:01 ►
by the end of this month.
00:54:03 ►
But before I get to that project,
00:54:07 ►
I’ve got to finish working on my 16 blogger sites that are no longer going to be supported by FTP,
00:54:11 ►
so Google is taking that service away from us,
00:54:14 ►
so I’ve got to make some adjustments.
00:54:16 ►
But that project is actually going pretty smoothly,
00:54:19 ►
and so late next week I’ll finally get back to the Salons blog
00:54:23 ►
and fix that with the help of our great volunteers.
00:54:27 ►
Now, before I go, there are also two quick other announcements that I think you may want to follow up on.
00:54:33 ►
One is a reminder that Mike M. sent the other day, which read in part,
00:54:37 ►
By the way, the scene you said in the book of the festival reminds me of a rainbow gathering.
00:54:43 ►
The national gathering will be held this year somewhere on the East Coast.
00:54:47 ►
On the 4th of July, for three hours, there will be 5,000 to 10,000 people in one gigantic circle,
00:54:54 ►
meditating for world peace.
00:54:56 ►
At noon, the silence will be broken by the Kids Parade,
00:54:59 ►
an army of rainbow children pouring into the circle with laughter and song.
00:55:05 ►
And I’ll tell you what, Mike, if I was going to be anywhere near there, I would definitely
00:55:09 ►
attend, because I’ve always really wanted to attend one of these gatherings.
00:55:13 ►
And my friends that do attend them regularly tell me that they’re not to be missed.
00:55:17 ►
So if you are in the neighborhood anywhere, you definitely ought to look into that.
00:55:22 ►
And another of our fellow slawners, Martin Dockery,
00:55:26 ►
who I hear is a frequent performer in New York’s storytelling scene,
00:55:30 ►
is traveling around presenting his one-man show titled The Bike Trip,
00:55:35 ►
which is billed as a comedic monologue about peddling chemical truths.
00:55:41 ►
And among other adventures Martin experienced was a recreation of Dr. Albert’s
00:55:46 ►
famous bike trip that we are all so thankful for. And besides various performances in the New York
00:55:54 ►
area, Martin will also be appearing at festivals all the way from Florida, all the way to Vancouver
00:56:01 ►
this spring and summer and fall. And as soon as I get our program notes working again, I’ll post the link.
00:56:07 ►
But here it is if you want to write it down now.
00:56:10 ►
There’s no www, just web.me.com slash martindockery.
00:56:17 ►
M-A-R-T-I-N-D-O-C-K-E-R-Y.
00:56:21 ►
Web.me.com slash martindockery.
00:56:25 ►
Well, that’s going to have to do it for now.
00:56:29 ►
And I’ll get the next part of this talk out as soon as I can next week.
00:56:34 ►
Probably going to be the end of the week,
00:56:36 ►
but most likely it’ll come out as quick as I can because I can’t wait to hear it either.
00:56:41 ►
But it could be late because I’m right now heading out on my way up to Boulder Creek
00:56:46 ►
to spend a little time with Bruce Dahmer.
00:56:49 ►
And who knows, we may even get a podcast out of one of our late night conversations.
00:56:55 ►
And also, since Bruce is planning on attending some of the sessions
00:56:59 ►
at the Psychedelic Conference in San Jose this weekend,
00:57:02 ►
I decided to tag along and volunteer at the Arrowwood Table where you can become a member for a very modest sum. Thank you. namely arrowwood.org but you also will receive their most excellent publication Arrowwood Extracts
00:57:26 ►
which comes out a couple times a year
00:57:28 ►
and right now
00:57:30 ►
if you’re an Arrowwood member you’ll also
00:57:32 ►
receive an invite to their hospitality suite
00:57:34 ►
at the conference hotel
00:57:35 ►
and that’s where I plan on spending
00:57:38 ►
Thursday evening and most of Friday
00:57:40 ►
when I’m not helping out in their information booth
00:57:42 ►
so if you are
00:57:44 ►
at the conference and may be listening to this at this very moment well Thank you. from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution
00:58:06 ►
Non-Commercial
00:58:07 ►
Share Alike 3.0 License.
00:58:09 ►
And if you have any questions
00:58:10 ►
about that,
00:58:11 ►
just click the
00:58:12 ►
Creative Commons link
00:58:13 ►
at the bottom of the
00:58:14 ►
Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:58:15 ►
which you can find
00:58:16 ►
at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:58:18 ►
And it is working,
00:58:19 ►
by the way.
00:58:20 ►
It just hasn’t been updated
00:58:21 ►
since Podcast 218.
00:58:24 ►
However,
00:58:24 ►
by clicking on the RSS feed link there,
00:58:27 ►
you can see links to all the podcasts and actually listen to them there, too.
00:58:30 ►
So it’s not too bad a deal.
00:58:33 ►
And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the psychedelic salon,
00:58:37 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
00:58:41 ►
which is available as an audio book that you can download at genesisgeneration.us. And for now,
00:58:48 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:58:52 ►
Be well, my friends.