Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://freeross.org[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“A child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work, no doubt about it.”
“Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root.”
“Modernity has fixed our minds in the categories of Cartesian rationalism.”
“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.”
“We cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination.”
“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 science and Christianity and rationalism.”
“Authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is. That’s what they’re talking about, authentic being.”
“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 the nature of being in the world and the nature of your being in the world.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0226950077Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
by Frances A. Yates
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490 - Bridging Western Medicine and Shamanism
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin today by thanking Eric H., who made a donation to our forums this past week,
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and which I’ll be using to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon.
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As you know, the vast majority of our forum participants do so for free,
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and that’s the way it should be, because all of us have, well, we’ve got many demands on our scare resources.
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But it’s always gratifying to have a few people each month make a donation so as to keep these podcasts coming your way.
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And also, if you want to contact me directly, I suggest that you sign up for a free membership on the forums and send me a private message.
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In fact, that’s now going to be my primary source of online communication.
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The fact is that, well, my blood pressure is much higher than it should be,
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and since I refuse to take any pharmaceuticals because of the potential side effects that they bring with them,
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I’ve got to do other things to lower my blood pressure,
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things like losing weight, doing more exercise, and reducing my stress as much as possible.
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Now, when my mother was in her 70s and told me about the things that were causing her stress,
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well, I couldn’t understand how a retired person who didn’t have to worry about paying the bills could have much stress.
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But now that I’m in my own 70s, it’s become clear that even when you get out of the corporate grind, you can still find ways to induce stress on yourself.
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In my case, I’ve taken a close look at my stress levels and uncovered the single biggest source of it all.
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And are you ready for this? It’s email.
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Don’t laugh. I wake up at night thinking of all the unanswered email that continues to pile up on my computer each day.
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And then I wind up spending so much time doing email that some of the other things I would still like to accomplish in my life just sort of silently slip by the way and never get done.
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So I’m going to quit using email. You know, for the first two-thirds of my life, I lived without it quite well.
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In fact, getting a snail mail letter usually brought good news,
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and, well, it was something that I looked forward to reading.
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But email just doesn’t do that for me.
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Now, don’t get me wrong, I really have enjoyed hearing from so many of our fellow salonners,
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but the time has come for me to go back to a time when I didn’t continually
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feel that a lot of people were wondering why they hadn’t heard back from me. It’s silly, I know, but
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you would be amazed at how much stress I put on myself about keeping up with email.
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So from here on out, at least until I change my mind again, if I want to, but from here on out,
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I’ll be readily available in the forums, interacting with postings and exchanging Thank you. and click the forums link at the top of the page. Hopefully I’ll see you there.
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Now, do you remember back when, in the middle of January, I said that I was going to give you a little break from my playing so many Terrence McKenna talks,
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and that, well, it might even be summer before I brought him back to the salon?
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Well, guess what?
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I couldn’t wait that long, and I just had to have another short blast of the Bard McKenna.
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So, here’s the deal. There’s a good chance that I already played this talk before.
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You see, way back in April of 2010, I began a series of four Terrence McKenna talks that were titled Hermeticism and Alchemy.
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And these talks were sent to me by one of our fellow Saloners,
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along with about 15 other McKenna tapes. And the Hermeticism talk was among them and was given
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sometime in 1991. Now, the talk that I’m going to play for you right now was also given in 1991,
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but it begins quite differently from the one that I played in 2010. However, I’m too lazy to actually listen to the entire set of four talks from 2010
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to actually be sure about what I’m going to play now is different.
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My guess is that in 1991, Terrence gave several workshops that had the same title,
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and so what I have for you today, I hope, is a completely different talk from the one that I played in 2010,
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even though the topic of the workshop may have been the same.
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But there’s another problem.
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I distinctly remember hearing the beginning of this talk in the very recent past.
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Now, there was a point a month or so ago when I had begun to edit a new Terrence talk,
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but I think that I abandoned
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it when I got a different idea for that particular program. However, I can’t find where I filed that
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earlier attempt, if in fact I actually did that. So I figured there’s four different things that
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I can do right now. One, I can either skip this entire set of four tapes and move on,
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- I can either skip this entire set of 4 tapes and move on or 2. I can admit that maybe I’m getting too old for this
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and can’t keep up with things and just close the salon
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or 3. I could cut back a little on my cannabis use
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or 4. Well, I can just play it here right now
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and if you’ve heard it recently and don’t want to listen to it again
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well, then just turn off your MP3 player you won’t hurt my and if you’ve heard it recently and don’t want to listen to it again, well, then just turn off your MP3 player. You won’t hurt my feelings if you do, because, well,
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unless you tell me that you did that, I’ll never even know. And by the way, option number
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three, cutting back on my cannabis use, well, that really isn’t an option in case you’re
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wondering. So, do you want to take a chance with me and go with option four and listen to the first tape in this series?
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It’s marked only that it was recorded in May of 1991.
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Great. Well, now here’s Terrence.
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And by the way, if you don’t think that the first five minutes or so of this talk are directly related to us in the here and now,
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well, then you just haven’t been paying very close attention
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to the world news lately.
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Well, it is a small group, and this was my intent.
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By focusing on the hermetic corpus and alchemy, I’ve just gotten tired of talking about psychedelic
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drugs and always saying the same things over and over again.
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Nevertheless, it’s a challenge to go outside my own bailiwick. I mean, I’ve had an interest in
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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,
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a literature that is very little read or understood in the modern context. The Jungians
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have made much of it but to their own purposes and perhaps not always with a complete fidelity to the intent of the tradition.
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We’ll talk a lot about the Jungian approach, but there are other approaches, even within the 20th century.
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I believe, since I don’t have the catalog I’m not absolutely certain but I believe the catalog urged you to read
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Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
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by Dame Frances Yates
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and this is
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though Frances Yates’ scholarship
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is very controversial
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I think to get an overview of the landscape
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her book is probably the best single
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book between covers. It’s not pleasing to some factions, and we can talk about that. I mean,
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we will probably discover within the group all the strains of alchemical illusion and delusion that have always driven
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this particular intellectual engine. But I thought to get one book that sort of covered the territory,
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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
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because it’s been sitting on my shelf for years.
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Richard Bird found a reprint
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at the Bodhi Tree
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that I wasn’t aware of
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this particular edition.
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So, though probably none of you
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brought it with you
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in a heavily underlined form,
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if after this weekend you want to try and get it
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it is available and if you can’t get that edition
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why a good book search service can probably come up with the first edition
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which is Rutledge, Keegan-Paul
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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.
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And some of you may know the song by the Grateful Dead in which the refrain is,
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we need a miracle every day.
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I think any reasonable person can conclude
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that the redemption of the world,
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if it’s to be achieved,
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can only be achieved through magic.
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It’s too late for science.
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It’s too late for hortatory politics. Well, it’s too late for science it’s too late for hortatory politics
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well it’s very interesting
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I mean every ancient literature has its
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apocalypsus and in the hermetic literature
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there is a prophecy
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I think it’s in book two but that really doesn’t matter
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and the prophecy is
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that a day will come
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when men will no longer
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care for the earth
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and at that day the gods
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will depart and
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everything will be thrown into primal
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chaos and this prophecy
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was very strongly
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in the minds
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of the
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strains of
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non-Christian thought
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that evolved at the close
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the centuries
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of closure
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of the Roman Empire
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when you look back
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into historical time,
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it’s when you reach the first and second centuries after Christ
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that you reach a world whose psychology
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was very much like the psychology of our own time.
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It was a psychology of despair and exhaustion.
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This is because Greek science, which had evolved under the aegis of democracy and atomism and platonic metaphysics, had essentially come to a dead end in those centuries. We can debate the reasons why
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this happened. An obvious suggestion would be that it was because they failed to develop an
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experimental method. And so everything just dissolved into competing schools of philosophical speculation
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and a profound pessimism spread through the Hellenistic world.
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And out of that pessimism,
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and in the context of that kind of universal despair
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which attends the dissolution of great empires,
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a literature was created
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from the first to the fourth centuries after Christ,
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which we call the Hermetic Corpus,
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or in some cases, the Trismegistic Hymns.
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Now, this body of literature was misunderstood by later centuries,
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especially the Renaissance, because it was taken at face value and assumed to be at least contemporary with Moses, if not much older.
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So the Renaissance view of Hermeticism was based on a tragic misunderstanding
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of the true antiquity of this material.
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And there are people, hopefully none in this room, who still would have us believe
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that this literature antedates the Mosaic law, that it is as old as dynastic Egypt.
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But this is an indefensible position from my point of view. In the early 16th century, a father and son, Isaac and Marik Casabon,
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showed through the new science of philology that this material was in fact late Hellenistic.
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was in fact late Hellenistic.
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Now, I’ve always said that I am not a classicist in the Viconian sense,
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in the sense that there is a certain strain of thought that always wants to believe that the oldest stuff is the best stuff.
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This is not the case to my mind. To my mind what is amazing is how recent everything is.
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So I have no sympathy with the fans of Lost Atlantis or any of that kind of malarkey because
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to me what is amazing is how it all is less than 10,000 years old.
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Anything older than 10,000 years
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puts us into the realm of an aceramic society
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relying on chipped flint for its primary technology.
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What the hermetic corpus is
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is the most poetic
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and cleanly
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expressed outpouring
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of ancient
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knowledge that we possess
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but it is
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reworked in the hands of
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these late Hellenistic
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peoples and
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it is
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essentially a religion
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of the redemption of the earth through magic
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it has great debt to
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a tradition called Sevillian which means
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to mean Manichaeanism and I’m sorry
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Mandianism and Mandyanism was
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a kind of
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proto-Hellenistic gnosis
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that laid great stress
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on the power
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of life
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zoa, bios
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and in that sense
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it has a tremendously
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contemporary ring to it.
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We also are living in the twilight of a great empire.
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And I don’t particularly mean the American empire.
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I mean the empire of European thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern industrialism,
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the empire in short of science. Science has exhausted itself and become mere technique.
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It’s still able to perform its magical tricks, but it has no claim on a
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metaphysic with any meaning
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because the program
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of rational understanding
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that was pursued by science
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has pushed so deeply
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into the phenomenon of nature
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that the internal
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contradictions of the method
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are now exposed
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for all to see. And in discussing alchemy especially,
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we will meet with the concept of the coincidencia oppositorum, the union of opposites. This is an
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idea that is completely alien to science. It’s the idea that nothing can be understood
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unless it is simultaneously viewed
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as both being what it is and what it is not.
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And in alchemical symbolism,
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we will meet again and again
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symbolic expression of the coincidencia
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appositorum. It may be in the form
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of a hermaphrodite. It may be
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in the form of the union of soul and
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luna. It may be in the form of
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the union of mercury with lead
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or with sulfur. In other words
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alchemical thinking
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is thinking that is always
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antithetical
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always holds the possibility
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of by a mere shift of perspective
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its opposite premise will gain
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power and come into focus
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I think it was John when we went around the circle,
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mentioned his interest in shamanism.
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There’s a wonderful book called
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The Forge and the Crucible by Mercier Léon
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in which he shows that the shaman
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is the brother of the smith.
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The smith is the metallurgist, the worker in metals.
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And this is where alchemy has its roots.
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In a sense, alchemy is older than the Trismegistic corpus,
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and then it is also given a new lease on life
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by the philosophical underpinnings
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which the corpus hermeticum provides it.
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Alchemy, the word alchemy,
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can be traced back to mean Egypt or a blackening.
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And in its earliest strata, it probably refers to techniques of dyeing,
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meaning the coloring of cloth, and gilding of metals, and the forging and working of metal.
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I mean, we who take this for granted have no idea how mysterious and powerful this seemed to ancient people. And in fact, it
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would seem so to us if we had anything to do with it. I mean, how many of us are welders or casters
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of metal? It’s a magical process to take, for instance, cinnababar a red soft ore
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and by the mere act of heating it in a furnace
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it will sweat liquid mercury onto its surface
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well we have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science
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where we have mind
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firmly separated out from the world
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we take this for granted
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it’s effortless because it’s the ambiance
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of the civilization that we’ve been born into
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but in an earlier age
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and some writers would say a more naive age
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but I wonder about that
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but in an earlier age
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mind and matter were seen to be
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alloyed together throughout nature
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so that the sweating of mercury
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out of cinnabar
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is not a material process
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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 the spirit Mercurius is almost the patron deity of alchemy.
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You all know what mercury looks like.
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It’s at room temperature, a silvery liquid that flows.
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It’s like a mirror.
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For the alchemists, and this is just a very short exercise in alchemical thinking,
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for the alchemists, mercury was mind itself in a sense, and by tracing through the
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steps by which they reached that conclusion, you can have a taste of what alchemical thinking was
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about. Mercury takes the form of its container. If I pour mercury into a cup, it takes the shape of the cup.
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If I pour it into a test tube, it takes the shape of a test tube.
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This taking the shape of its container is a quality of mind.
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And yet here it is present in a flowing silvery metal.
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The other thing is, mercury is a reflecting surface. You never see mercury.
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What you see is the world that surrounds it, which is perfectly reflected in its surface,
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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,
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but I spent a lot of time as a child hounding my grandfather for his hearing aid batteries,
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which I would then smash with a hammer and get the mercury out and collect it in little bottles
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and carry it around with me. Well, the wonderful thing about mercury
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is when you pour it out on a surface and it beads up, then each bead of mercury becomes a little
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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 imbibed the assumptions
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and the ontology of science. I was functioning as an alchemist. For me, mercury was this fascinating
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magical substance onto which I could project the contents of my mind.
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And a child playing with mercury is an alchemist,
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hard at work, no doubt about it.
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Well, so then, this is a phenomenon in the physical world,
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and then mind is a phenomenon as in the Cartesian distinction,
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which is between the res extensa and the res virans. This is the great splitting of the world into two parts.
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I remember Al Huang once said to me,
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we were talking about the yin-yang symbol,
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and he said, you know, the interesting thing
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is not the yin or the yang.
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The interesting thing is the s-shaped
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surface which runs between them
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and that s-shaped surface
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is a river of alchemical
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mercury now where the alchemists
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saw this river of alchemical mercury
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is in the boundary
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between waking and sleeping.
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There is a place,
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not quite sleeping,
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not quite waking,
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and there there flows this river of alchemical mercury,
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where you can project the contents of the unconscious
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and you can read it back to yourself. 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 behaviors.
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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
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the macrocosm, that somehow the great world, the whole of the cosmos,
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is reflected in the mystery of man, of man meaning men and women.
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It’s reflected in the mystery of the human mind-body interface.
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So for an alchemist, it makes perfect sense to extrapolate from these internal,
00:26:07 ►
what we call internal psychological processes, to external processes in the world.
00:26:15 ►
That distinction doesn’t exist for the alchemist.
00:26:20 ►
And I tell you, the longer I live, the more convinced I am that this is just absolutely
00:26:25 ►
the truth our the myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast into matter
00:26:36 ►
that we are lost in a universe that has no meaning for us, that we must make our meaning. This is what Sartre and Kierkegaard,
00:26:48 ►
all those people are saying, that we must make our meaning. It reaches its most absurd expression in
00:26:55 ►
Sartre’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,
00:27:10 ►
an open book to be read by putting nature through processes
00:27:17 ►
which revealed not only its inner mechanics,
00:27:21 ►
but the inner mechanics of the artifacts,
00:27:27 ►
the person working upon the material, in other words, the alchemist. Well, in other contexts, I’ve talked about
00:27:36 ►
the importance of language and how our world is made of language and part of the problem with understanding alchemy
00:27:46 ►
is that the language is slipping out of our reach
00:27:50 ►
we are so completely imbued
00:27:53 ►
with the Cartesian categories
00:27:56 ►
of the res virans
00:27:58 ►
the world of thought
00:27:59 ►
and the res extensa
00:28:01 ►
the world of three-dimensional space
00:28:03 ►
and causality and the conservation of matter and energy and so forth,
00:28:12 ►
that in order to do more than carry out a kind of scholarship of alchemy,
00:28:20 ►
we have to create an alchemical language
00:28:24 ►
or a field in which alchemical language can take place.
00:28:30 ►
Some of you may have been with me a couple of weeks ago 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
00:28:48 ►
taken root in America were it not for the psychedelic phenomenon. Not that Buddhism
00:28:55 ►
is psychedelic. It in fact is fairly touchy about that. Butism would have gotten nowhere in america had not psychedelics created a context
00:29:07 ►
for buddhist language to take root and i would wager that i would never have gotten to first
00:29:14 ►
base with proposing a weekend on alchemy at esalen were it not understood that psychedelics have prepared people for the notion that mind and world can be poured
00:29:30 ►
together like mercury and sulfur, like the sophic waters, to create a new kind of understanding because otherwise modernity has fixed
00:29:45 ►
our minds in the categories
00:29:48 ►
of Cartesian rationalism
00:29:50 ►
and so I will not claim
00:29:54 ►
and do not in fact think it’s so
00:29:57 ►
that there was anything
00:30:00 ►
overtly psychedelic in the sense of
00:30:03 ►
pharmacologically based about alchemy
00:30:07 ►
when we look back through the alchemical literature there’s very little evidence
00:30:12 ►
that it was it was pharmacologically driven only when you get to the very
00:30:20 ►
last adumbrations of the alchemical impulse in someone like Paracelsus do you get the use of
00:30:28 ►
opium and but it is interesting that the great drugs of modern society were accidentally
00:30:37 ►
discovered by alchemists in their researches a distilled alcohol is a product of alchemical work. And then, as I mentioned,
00:30:49 ►
opium was very heavily used by the Paracelsus school. But what they possessed was an ability
00:30:59 ►
to liquefy their mental categories and then to project the contents of the mind onto these processes and read them back.
00:31:10 ►
Now this is what made alchemy so fascinating to material for psychotherapy to work upon was dreams and mythology.
00:31:39 ►
And these were the two poles of the data field
00:31:45 ►
that the discovery of the unconscious was working on.
00:31:49 ►
Well, then Jung had the prescience to realize that alchemy,
00:31:54 ►
which to that point, as the gentleman over here said,
00:31:58 ►
had been dismissed as a naive effort to turn base metals into gold.
00:32:03 ►
This is the first fiction that you have to absolutely
00:32:07 ►
purge from your mind. The only alchemists that ever tried to turn base metals into gold
00:32:14 ►
were charlatans, the so-called puffers, because they were called that not only for their
00:32:21 ►
exaggerated speech, but for their use of bellows to drive their fires
00:32:27 ►
and alchemy has always had a core of true adepts and then a surround of misguided souls and
00:32:38 ►
outright con artists who were trying to change base metals into gold
00:32:46 ►
now it’s interesting that science
00:32:49 ►
in its naivete in the 20th century
00:32:52 ►
has actually completed the program
00:32:55 ►
of pseudo-alchemy
00:32:57 ►
you can, if you have a sufficiently powerful
00:33:01 ►
nuclear reactor, change lead
00:33:04 ►
into gold.
00:33:06 ►
I mean, the cost is staggering.
00:33:08 ►
It has no economic importance whatsoever,
00:33:12 ►
but it can be done by bombarding gold
00:33:15 ►
with a sufficient amount of heavy particles,
00:33:21 ►
I mean, lead.
00:33:21 ►
You can change it into gold.
00:33:24 ►
But this is not 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 these things that were
00:33:47 ►
stated goals of the alchemists except that
00:33:52 ►
the alchemists always spoke in similes
00:33:55 ►
and in a secret control language that was
00:33:59 ►
symbolic. Okay
00:34:03 ►
now another point that was brought up was, in going around the circle,
00:34:09 ►
was the externalization of the soul. And what we’re trying to do is, in this weekend, is study and talk about the idea of redeeming the world through magic
00:34:27 ►
and how is this to be done.
00:34:32 ►
Well, the philosopher’s stone is a complex of ideas
00:34:38 ►
that no matter how you divide it, no matter how you slice it,
00:34:43 ►
it’s very difficult to hold the pith essence of this concept.
00:34:48 ►
But what it really comes down to is the idea that spirit is somehow resident in matter
00:34:57 ►
in a very diffuse form, and that the goal of hermetic thinking and later alchemy is the concentration
00:35:09 ►
and redemption of this spirit, a focusing of it, a bringing of it together. This is an idea that
00:35:18 ►
was common in the Hellenistic world, not only to hermetic thinking, but also to Gnosticism. Gnosticism 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
00:35:49 ►
which we can call yogic or alchemical
00:35:52 ►
or meditative or moral slash ethical,
00:35:58 ►
the light must be gathered and concentrated
00:36:01 ►
in the body and then somehow released and redeemed.
00:36:07 ►
And all esoteric traditions,
00:36:11 ►
East and West,
00:36:13 ►
talk about the creation of this body of light.
00:36:17 ►
And we will not, in this weekend,
00:36:19 ►
talk very much about alchemy,
00:36:22 ►
non-Western alchemy,
00:36:24 ►
Taoist alchemy and Vedic alchemy.
00:36:27 ►
But in those systems too, the notion is about the creation of this vehicle of light. This is
00:36:36 ►
one metaphor for the externalization of the soul. The philosopher’s stone is another. And I will challenge you to try to imagine what the
00:36:50 ►
achievement of the philosopher’s stone would be like, because it’s in trying to think that way
00:36:58 ►
that you begin to dissolve the categories of the Cartesian trap.
00:37:06 ►
And so imagine for a moment an object, a material, which can literally do anything.
00:37:16 ►
It can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever.
00:37:23 ►
So what do I mean?
00:37:22 ►
with no difficulty whatsoever.
00:37:24 ►
So what do I mean?
00:37:28 ►
I mean that if you possessed the Philosopher’s Stone and you were hungry, you could eat it.
00:37:32 ►
If you needed to go somewhere,
00:37:34 ►
you could spread it out and sit on it
00:37:37 ►
and it would take you there.
00:37:40 ►
If you needed a piece of information,
00:37:43 ►
it would become the equivalent of a computer screen, and it would tell you things.
00:37:48 ►
If you needed a companion, it would talk to you.
00:37:53 ►
In other words, if you needed to take a shower, you would hold it over your head and water would pour out of it.
00:37:59 ►
Now you see, this is an impossibility.
00:38:03 ►
That’s right, it’s a impossibility. That’s right.
00:38:07 ►
It’s a coincidencia positorum. It is something which behaves like imagination and matter
00:38:13 ►
without ever doing damage to the ontological status of one or the other.
00:38:22 ►
of one or the other.
00:38:27 ►
Now, this sounds like pure pathology in the context of modern thinking
00:38:30 ►
because we expect things to stay still
00:38:33 ►
and be what they are
00:38:34 ►
and undergo the growth and degradation
00:38:37 ►
that is inimical to them.
00:38:39 ►
But no, the redemption of spirit and matter
00:38:41 ►
means the exteriorization of the human soul
00:38:46 ►
and the interiorization of the human body
00:38:52 ►
so that it is an image freely commanded in the imagination.
00:38:59 ►
Imagination.
00:39:00 ►
I think this is the first time I’ve used this word this evening.
00:39:03 ►
The imagination is central to the alchemical opus
00:39:09 ►
because it is literally a process which goes on
00:39:15 ►
in the realm of the imagination
00:39:17 ►
taken to be a physical dimension.
00:39:22 ►
And I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us
00:39:29 ►
unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination.
00:39:34 ►
We have exhausted the world of three-dimensional space.
00:39:38 ►
We are polluting it.
00:39:40 ►
We are overpopulating it.
00:39:42 ►
We are using it up.
00:39:51 ►
we are overpopulating it, we are using it up. Somehow the redemption re-empower and re-encounter the mind.
00:40:13 ►
And we can do this psychedelically,
00:40:16 ►
we can do it yogically,
00:40:17 ►
or we can do it alchemically and hermetically.
00:40:21 ►
Now there is present in the world at the moment,
00:40:24 ►
or at least I like to think so
00:40:27 ►
an impulse which I have named
00:40:29 ►
the archaic revival
00:40:31 ►
what happens
00:40:34 ►
is that whenever a society
00:40:35 ►
really gets in trouble
00:40:37 ►
and you can use
00:40:39 ►
this in your own life
00:40:41 ►
when you really get in trouble
00:40:42 ►
what you should do is say
00:40:44 ►
what did
00:40:46 ►
i believe in the last sane moment that i experienced and then go back to that moment and
00:40:53 ►
act from it even if you no longer believe it now in the renaissance this happened the the The scholastic universe dissolved.
00:41:07 ►
New classes, new forms of wealth,
00:41:11 ►
new systems of navigation,
00:41:13 ►
new scientific tools
00:41:15 ►
made it impossible to maintain the fiction
00:41:18 ►
of the medieval cosmology.
00:41:21 ►
And there was a sense that the world was dissolving.
00:41:24 ►
Good alchemical word dissolving
00:41:27 ►
and in that moment the movers and shakers of that civilization reached backwards in time
00:41:35 ►
to the last sane moment they had ever known and they discovered that it was classical Greece. And they invented classicism in the 15th and 16th century.
00:41:50 ►
The texts which had lain in monasteries in Syria and Asia Minor,
00:41:56 ►
forgotten and untranslated for centuries,
00:41:59 ►
were brought to the Florentine Council by people like Jamistus Pletho and others
00:42:04 ►
and translated and translated
00:42:06 ►
and classicism was born.
00:42:09 ►
It’s laws,
00:42:10 ►
it’s philosophy,
00:42:12 ►
it’s aesthetics
00:42:12 ►
and we are the inheritors
00:42:15 ►
of that tradition
00:42:16 ►
but it is now once again
00:42:19 ►
exhausted
00:42:20 ►
and our cultural crisis
00:42:22 ►
is much greater.
00:42:24 ►
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 inherit out of Christianity and its half-brother science or its bastard child science. place and it seems to be well in hand in the form of the revival of goddess worship and shamanism
00:43:09 ►
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.
00:43:29 ►
So the idea of this weekend is to show the way back to the high magic of the late Paleolithic,
00:43:41 ►
to show that there were intellectual traditions, there were minority points of view that kept the faith, that never allowed it to die.
00:43:51 ►
And to my mind, this alchemical, hermetic, Gnostic, Egyptian, Chaldean thread is the thread and if we uh you know unravel it with sufficient care and attention
00:44:09 ►
then we can build a bridge from the otherwise nearly incomprehensible high magic of the late
00:44:16 ►
paleolithic we can get it as near to ourselves as john d who died in 1604 we can discover that it’s no further away from us
00:44:27 ►
than the beginning of the 30 years war
00:44:30 ►
and you know for my money after that
00:44:33 ►
it gets pretty mucked up
00:44:35 ►
I mean after Eliphas Levy
00:44:37 ►
who’s already waffling
00:44:39 ►
I’m not very interested in the occultism
00:44:44 ►
of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century.
00:44:47 ►
But it’s not necessary because scholarship gives us the Chaldean oracles,
00:44:55 ►
the Trismegistic hymns, the library at Nag Hammadi, and so forth and so on.
00:45:03 ►
and so forth and so on so my impulse is to
00:45:07 ►
in the most austere sense
00:45:10 ►
repopularize, reintroduce
00:45:13 ►
this kind of thinking
00:45:15 ►
so that people can live it out
00:45:18 ►
and then step by step
00:45:20 ►
we can evolve our language
00:45:22 ►
and evolve our understanding
00:45:24 ►
to make our way back to the garden
00:45:28 ►
back to eden it’s occurred to me recently you know it’s said that christ opened the doors to paradise
00:45:36 ►
yes but he closed the doors to eden and paradise is a very airy place where everybody sits around on clouds strumming their
00:45:47 ►
lyres I think what we want to do is make our way back to the alchemical garden that’s where our
00:45:56 ►
roots are that’s where meaning is meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction the coincidencia
00:46:05 ►
appositorum
00:46:07 ►
that’s what we really feel
00:46:09 ►
not these rational schemas
00:46:12 ►
that are constantly beating us
00:46:14 ►
over the head
00:46:15 ►
with the thou shalts
00:46:17 ►
and thou shoulds
00:46:18 ►
but rather a recovery
00:46:20 ►
of the real ambiguity
00:46:22 ►
of being
00:46:23 ►
an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak,
00:46:30 ►
noble and ignoble,
00:46:32 ►
future-oriented, past-facing.
00:46:36 ►
We each need to become Janus-faced
00:46:39 ►
and to incorporate into ourselves
00:46:42 ►
the banished contradictions of being that so haunt the enterprise of science.
00:46:50 ►
We can leave that behind and when we do, we reclaim authentic being.
00:46:57 ►
And authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is.
00:47:05 ►
That’s what they’re talking about.
00:47:06 ►
Authentic being.
00:47:10 ►
So that’s tonight.
00:47:13 ►
Right now what?
00:47:13 ►
We’re led.
00:47:14 ►
We’re led.
00:47:15 ►
We’re Saturnine.
00:47:16 ►
And we’ll talk about Saturn and Pluto
00:47:20 ►
and all of that.
00:47:21 ►
Yes, we…
00:47:23 ►
Tomorrow we’ll talk about the stages
00:47:25 ►
of the alchemical opus
00:47:27 ►
and though the stages are many
00:47:30 ►
and multifarious
00:47:31 ►
it all begins in what is called the negredo
00:47:34 ►
the blackening
00:47:35 ►
the depths of
00:47:37 ►
the leaden saturnine
00:47:39 ►
chaotic
00:47:40 ►
fixed place
00:47:43 ►
and that’s where we have been left
00:47:45 ►
by science and modernity
00:47:48 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:47:50 ►
And that’s where the alchemist loves to begin.
00:47:54 ►
That’s where he then stokes,
00:47:57 ►
he or she stokes the furnace
00:47:59 ►
and begins the dissolution
00:48:01 ►
et coagulation
00:48:03 ►
that leads to the appearance of the stone.
00:48:09 ►
I’ll show you some books.
00:48:14 ►
And this is, you know, by no means exhaustive.
00:48:19 ►
The literature of Hermeticism and alchemy is vast,
00:48:24 ►
and I could have brought five or six boxes of this size
00:48:28 ►
from my own library, and this is a smattering.
00:48:33 ►
It doesn’t mean what I show you is the best.
00:48:35 ►
It simply tries to spread over a large area.
00:48:42 ►
Oh, someone put this here.
00:48:46 ►
This is a new novel that’s just been published
00:48:48 ►
by Lindsay Clark called
00:48:50 ►
The Chemical Wedding
00:48:51 ►
and I see last week it was number
00:48:54 ►
10 on the New York Times best
00:48:56 ►
seller list which is astonishing
00:48:58 ►
for such an obscure
00:49:00 ►
subject
00:49:02 ►
it’s a retelling of
00:49:04 ►
a famous incident in alchemy
00:49:06 ►
in the 19th century
00:49:08 ►
when a woman named Mary Alice Atwood
00:49:12 ►
who had a very, very close relationship
00:49:17 ►
to her father, Dr. South,
00:49:21 ►
and the two of them worked together.
00:49:24 ►
She on a text
00:49:26 ►
and he on a long poem
00:49:28 ►
and to make a long story short
00:49:33 ►
eventually they decided to destroy
00:49:35 ►
both the poem and the book
00:49:38 ►
feeling that they had said too much
00:49:41 ►
and had given the secret away
00:49:44 ►
at least that’s one version.
00:49:46 ►
So this is a fictionalized retelling of that incident intercut with a modern cast of characters very clearly modeled on the poet Robert Graves.
00:50:00 ►
So if you like to absorb your information in a fictionalized form
00:50:06 ►
this is a wonderful book
00:50:08 ►
John Borman the movie director recently optioned this book
00:50:14 ►
the guy who made the Emerald Forest an Excalibur
00:50:17 ►
so we may have an alchemical movie downstream a year or two
00:50:23 ►
a number of compendiums
00:50:25 ►
of alchemical texts have been published
00:50:28 ►
over the centuries and if you
00:50:30 ►
wish to study alchemy
00:50:31 ►
you have to obtain these
00:50:33 ►
if you’re fortunate enough to read French
00:50:36 ►
you should read
00:50:37 ►
Festugieri and Berthelot
00:50:40 ►
they collected
00:50:42 ►
alchemical texts
00:50:44 ►
into encyclopedic size volumes
00:50:47 ►
but unfortunately these have never really
00:50:50 ►
come into English
00:50:51 ►
one that did come into English
00:50:54 ►
is the Museum Hermeticum Amplificarum
00:50:59 ►
et Theatrum I think
00:51:02 ►
which A.E. Waite
00:51:04 ►
who some of you may know for his role in The Golden Dawn, collected.
00:51:09 ►
There are about 40 alchemical texts, and all the greats are in here.
00:51:15 ►
Lull, Villanova, Michael Meyer, Basil Valentine, Kramer
00:51:25 ►
Edward Kelly and so forth
00:51:28 ►
the place to begin I think is obviously
00:51:32 ►
with the question who is Hermes Trismegistus
00:51:36 ►
what are we talking about here
00:51:38 ►
I mean this sounds so incredibly exotic
00:51:41 ►
to people
00:51:42 ►
the Renaissance had the concept of what it called the Preschi Theologie.
00:51:51 ►
And if my Latin and Greek irritates you,
00:51:54 ►
you have to understand you’re dealing with a boy from a coal mining town in Colorado.
00:51:59 ►
So I do mangle these things.
00:52:02 ►
The Preschi Thei were Orpheus
00:52:06 ►
Moses
00:52:07 ►
and primarily Hermes Trismegistus
00:52:11 ►
Hermes Trismegistus
00:52:13 ►
was the primary
00:52:15 ►
source
00:52:17 ►
from the point of view
00:52:19 ►
of the Renaissance
00:52:19 ►
of this whole mystery
00:52:21 ►
tradition
00:52:23 ►
and
00:52:24 ►
you recall from last night’s lecture
00:52:28 ►
that this is based on a misunderstanding.
00:52:31 ►
The Renaissance believed that Hermes Trismegistus
00:52:36 ►
was older than Moses.
00:52:39 ►
We know now, thanks to Isaac and Marik Casabon,
00:52:43 ►
two philologists of the early 17th century,
00:52:47 ►
that definitely the Hermetic Corpus was composed
00:52:50 ►
between the 1st and 2nd centuries after Christ.
00:52:55 ►
The method of the Casabons was to examine
00:52:58 ►
the philosophical language of the Corpus Hermeticum
00:53:04 ►
and show that there were words and
00:53:07 ►
phrases there that were post-platonic and derivative from philosophers whose dates we have
00:53:15 ►
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
00:53:28 ►
want to claim that this stuff is older than dynastic Egypt. There are even books available,
00:53:35 ►
I was in Shambhala a week ago, claiming to teach you how to change lead into gold. Well,
00:53:41 ►
lead into gold well from my point of view this just evokes
00:53:44 ►
a small
00:53:45 ►
smile
00:53:47 ►
the old errors persist
00:53:50 ►
the puffers are still at it
00:53:52 ►
but what
00:53:54 ►
Hermes Trismegistus
00:53:56 ►
is
00:53:57 ►
is a character
00:53:59 ►
who appears
00:54:02 ►
in many guises
00:54:04 ►
in these Hermmetic dialogues.
00:54:07 ►
The hermetic hymns are usually couched in the form of dialogues
00:54:13 ►
between Hermes and his son Thoth.
00:54:18 ►
And Thoth takes the role of the uninitiated ingenue
00:54:22 ►
who is sitting at the feet of the master
00:54:25 ►
and Thoth asks questions
00:54:28 ►
what is the true nature of the world
00:54:30 ►
what is the true nature of man
00:54:33 ►
and Hermes answers
00:54:36 ►
and the general form of these texts
00:54:40 ►
with exceptions because there are 20 of them
00:54:43 ►
is an intellectual dialogue which builds
00:54:47 ►
to an ecstatic revelation and then in the wake of the ecstatic revelation there is a hymn of praise
00:54:55 ►
to uh to uh hermes trismegistus trismegistus means thrice blessed and is sometimes called Hermes triplex to distinguish this Hermes from all the other Hermes of early, middle, and late Greek thinking.
00:55:16 ►
Hermes is, of course, theossed on the cover of each of these books is because this is how Hermes Trismegistus Thoth Hermes was imagined.
00:55:35 ►
He was associated with the scribe god of the Egyptian pantheon.
00:55:41 ►
pantheon the two
00:55:44 ►
distinguishing
00:55:46 ►
factors
00:55:47 ►
at least that stand out for me
00:55:50 ►
that I think you need
00:55:52 ►
to incorporate
00:55:54 ►
into your thinking about
00:55:56 ►
the hermeticism
00:55:58 ►
two very
00:56:00 ►
important concepts
00:56:01 ►
the first
00:56:03 ►
is the divinity of human beings,
00:56:08 ►
an extraordinarily radical idea
00:56:11 ►
in the context of late Hellenistic thinking.
00:56:14 ►
We all operate under the spell
00:56:19 ►
of the concept of the fall of man,
00:56:22 ►
that man is an inferior being,
00:56:25 ►
errors were made in the Garden of man, that man is an inferior being, errors were made in the Garden of Eden,
00:56:27 ►
and that we are far, far from the nature of divinity.
00:56:35 ►
All magic, and all magic in the West is derivative from this tradition,
00:56:41 ►
takes the position that man is a divine being.
00:56:45 ►
Men and women are divine beings.
00:56:48 ►
The Corpus Hermeticum actually refers to man as God’s brother.
00:56:54 ►
And this is a double-edged perception.
00:56:59 ►
It gives tremendous dignity to the human enterprise,
00:57:07 ►
but it also raises the possibility of the error of pride and hubris.
00:57:14 ►
In the Renaissance, Marcello Ficino boiled this notion down to the aphorism,
00:57:22 ►
man is the measure of all things.
00:57:26 ►
And you may notice that this is the position really of science,
00:57:31 ►
that man is the measure of all things,
00:57:34 ►
that it is up to us.
00:57:37 ►
We can decide the course of the cosmos.
00:57:41 ►
All magic stems from this position. This is why the church was so concerned to stamp
00:57:49 ►
out magic, because it assigns man an importance that the church would rather reserve to deity.
00:57:58 ►
So that’s the first great division between Christian thinking and hermetic thinking,
00:58:03 ►
an entirely different conception of what
00:58:06 ►
human beings are. And when we get into the text, I’ll read you some of these passages. Now, the
00:58:13 ►
second distinguishing factor, and notice that this position on man empowers tremendous freedom. Man is the measure of all things. The second distinguishing factor in Hermeticism
00:58:30 ►
is the belief that we can control fate, that we can escape from cosmic fate. The late Hellenistic mindset was, and what you get in the Gnostics, is the belief
00:58:48 ►
that because of astrology, because of the stars, we are subject to control from these exterior
00:58:59 ►
forces. In most Gnostic thinking, the whole concern is to somehow evade what is called the
00:59:08 ►
hemarmony, cosmic fate. And in the Gnostic systems, the only way it can be done is by ascending
00:59:17 ►
through the shells of cosmic ordering forces, the archons, the planets, the planetary demons, so forth and so on, and then
00:59:27 ►
beyond the hemarmony, which is actually thought of as a place in space that you burst through,
00:59:34 ►
you transcend fate. What the hermetic thought is, is that these fates become personified as the decans, 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
01:00:09 ►
cosmic machinery and this burst like a revelation over the late hellenistic world because there was
01:00:17 ►
such philosophical and emotional and political exhaustion that this, this is a counterpoise to the message of the New Testament,
01:00:27 ►
which is a similar message, you know, that you can be saved in the body, that you can escape the
01:00:35 ►
inevitable dissolution and degradation laid upon us by time. So these are the two distinguishing factors the divinity of man and the possibility
01:00:46 ►
of using magic to evade
01:00:49 ►
the machinery of fate
01:00:51 ►
so I want to read some of the
01:00:55 ►
Corpus Hermeticum to you
01:00:58 ►
to give you the flavor of it
01:01:00 ►
but before I do I want to say something about the history of these texts
01:01:04 ►
you’re all familiar
01:01:05 ►
more or less I’m sure with Apuleius’s The Golden Mass which is a novel of initiation that is late
01:01:14 ►
Roman Apuleius also put together what is called the Asclepius and the Asclepius is true Hermetic literature
01:01:26 ►
that was not lost
01:01:27 ►
it was the only one that was
01:01:30 ►
available throughout the
01:01:32 ►
dark and middle ages
01:01:33 ►
all the rest
01:01:35 ►
was lying untranslated
01:01:38 ►
in
01:01:39 ►
Syrian
01:01:41 ►
monasteries
01:01:43 ►
until Jamistus Platho in 1490
01:01:47 ►
brought these manuscripts to Florence
01:01:50 ►
to the court of the de Medicis
01:01:52 ►
and then the translation project began
01:01:55 ►
now the only other hermetic material
01:01:59 ►
that was accessible throughout the high gothic period
01:02:03 ►
was a book of magic called picatrix
01:02:08 ►
picatrix and the picatrix was probably written in the 1200s although this elicits screams of
01:02:17 ►
dissent from the burning eyed faction but reason dictates that we consider Picatrix
01:02:25 ►
12th century so only
01:02:27 ►
the Asclepius and the Picatrix
01:02:29 ►
represented this
01:02:31 ►
strain of thought
01:02:33 ►
before the 1460s
01:02:36 ►
and
01:02:37 ►
the importance of hermetic
01:02:39 ►
thinking can be seen by the
01:02:42 ►
fact that Gemistus Pletho
01:02:44 ►
brought Plato
01:02:45 ►
to the Florentine Council
01:02:48 ►
as well as Hermes Trismegistus.
01:02:51 ►
And when Marcello Ficino sat down
01:02:53 ►
to do this translation work,
01:02:56 ►
Cosimo de’ Medici said,
01:02:58 ►
Plato can wait.
01:03:00 ►
I’m getting old.
01:03:02 ►
You do the Hermetic corpus first. That’s was more important.
01:03:28 ►
Just, I mention this to show you the importance that was attached to this stuff.
01:03:35 ►
Here is one of the key passages on man’s nature.
01:03:40 ►
This is from Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum.
01:04:06 ►
This is from Book 1 of the Corpus Hermeticum. 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
01:04:15 ►
all things that had been made this is the basis of the fascinian statement man is the measure of all things. He willed to make things for his own part also, and his father gave permission,
01:04:46 ►
having in himself all the working of the administrators.
01:04:51 ►
This is a reference to the angel hierarchy.
01:04:53 ►
And the administrators took delight in him,
01:04:59 ►
and each of them gave him a share of his own nature.
01:05:04 ►
So man is the brother
01:05:06 ►
of God and a creature at home
01:05:09 ►
with the angels
01:05:10 ►
this idea is echoed
01:05:15 ►
in the Asclepius which you’ll recall
01:05:18 ►
was available throughout the middle ages
01:05:20 ►
the range of man is yet
01:05:24 ►
wider than that of the demons meaning the angels this term is
01:05:29 ►
you know transposable in hermetic thought the individuals of the humankind are diverse and of
01:05:37 ►
many characters they like the demons come from above and entering into fellowship with other individuals, they make for
01:05:46 ►
themselves many and intimate connections with almost all other kinds. And then the famous passage,
01:05:54 ►
man is a marvel then, Asclepius, honor and reverence to such a being. Man takes on him the attributes of a god
01:06:05 ►
as though he were himself a god,
01:06:07 ►
and he is familiar with the demon kind,
01:06:11 ►
for he comes to know that he is sprung
01:06:14 ►
from the same source as they,
01:06:16 ►
and strong in the assurance of that in him
01:06:20 ►
which is divine.
01:06:21 ►
He scorns the merely human part of his own nature
01:06:26 ►
how far more happily blended
01:06:29 ►
are the properties of man than those of other beings
01:06:32 ►
he is linked to the gods
01:06:35 ►
inasmuch as there is in him a divinity
01:06:38 ►
akin to theirs
01:06:39 ►
he scorns that part of his own being
01:06:42 ►
which makes him a thing of earth
01:06:44 ►
and all else with which he finds himself connected by heaven’s ordering,
01:06:49 ►
he binds to himself by the tie of his affection.
01:06:54 ►
So this is an incredibly radical conception of what it means to be human,
01:07:01 ►
so radical that it is unwelcome even in the present context.
01:07:07 ►
Notice the modern feeling of this stuff.
01:07:12 ►
I mean, this is not biblical rhetoric.
01:07:14 ►
This is philosophical discourse as we know it and carry it out ourselves.
01:07:21 ►
This is a passage on the adept and
01:07:25 ►
initiation
01:07:26 ►
now this is
01:07:30 ►
let me see who’s speaking here
01:07:32 ►
Thoth speaks to Paimandris
01:07:36 ►
this is book one
01:07:37 ►
but tell me this too
01:07:39 ►
said I, God said
01:07:41 ►
let the man who has mind
01:07:43 ►
in him recognize himself but have not all men mind?
01:07:50 ►
And then Paimandres replies, O man, said mind to me, speak not so. I, even mind, come to those men
01:08:01 ►
who are holy and good and pure and merciful merciful and my coming is a succor to them
01:08:07 ►
and forthwith they recognize all things
01:08:10 ►
and win the father’s grace by loving worship
01:08:13 ►
and give thanks to him
01:08:15 ►
praising and hemming him with hearts uplifted to him
01:08:19 ►
in filial affection
01:08:21 ►
again the reference to being God’s brother
01:08:24 ►
in filial affection and before they the reference to being God’s brother,
01:08:26 ►
in filial affection.
01:08:29 ►
And before they give up the body to the death which is proper to it,
01:08:31 ►
they loathe the bodily senses,
01:08:34 ►
knowing what manner of work the senses do.
01:08:37 ►
Now, this introduces the theme of asceticism
01:08:42 ►
that like the Gnostics
01:08:46 ►
there is
01:08:47 ►
in much of the Hermetic literature
01:08:50 ►
a kind of horror
01:08:52 ►
of the earth
01:08:53 ►
a desire to ascend
01:08:55 ►
and to get away from it
01:08:57 ►
Scott
01:09:00 ►
makes the distinction
01:09:02 ►
between what he calls
01:09:04 ►
pessimistic Gnosis and optimistic gnosis.
01:09:08 ►
And within the 20 texts of the Corpus Hermeticum, you get vacillation on this point.
01:09:16 ►
In some cases, the Mandaean, the Sabaean tendency is there,
01:09:46 ►
The Sabaean tendency is there, and the world soul is invoked, and the whole of creation is seen as a living being involved in this soteriological process, this processnostic horror of matter is very strongly stressed. It’s very clear that the Hellenistic mind was ambivalent on this point,
01:09:55 ►
even as we are ambivalent on this point.
01:09:58 ►
I mean, it’s a real question.
01:10:00 ►
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?
01:10:23 ►
you’re going to have to sort of take a position on that.
01:10:27 ►
And these people were forced into the same dilemma.
01:10:31 ►
There’s no middle ground between those two positions. And so that dichotomy, that conundrum,
01:10:35 ►
haunted a lot of hermetic thinking.
01:10:41 ►
Here is the her Hermetic creation
01:10:46 ►
myth
01:10:47 ►
this is book 3
01:10:49 ►
paragraphs 1 through a few
01:10:52 ►
and you will see
01:10:54 ►
the comparison
01:10:55 ►
the similarities
01:10:58 ►
to the
01:10:59 ►
Christian creation myth
01:11:01 ►
but with extraordinary
01:11:03 ►
differences
01:11:04 ►
there was darkness in the deep to the Christian creation myth, but with extraordinary differences.
01:11:10 ►
There was darkness in the deep and water without form, and there was a subtle breath, intelligent,
01:11:14 ►
which permeated the things in chaos with divine power.
01:11:19 ►
Then, when all was yet undistinguished and unwrought,
01:11:23 ►
there was shed forth holy light,
01:11:26 ►
and the elements came into being.
01:11:28 ►
All things were divided one from another,
01:11:32 ►
and the lighter things were parted off on high,
01:11:35 ►
the fire being suspended aloft so that it rose unto the air,
01:11:40 ►
and the heavier things sank down,
01:11:44 ►
and sand was deposited beneath the watery
01:11:46 ►
substance and the dry land was separated out from the watery substance and became solid
01:11:53 ►
and the fiery substance was articulated with the gods therein and heaven appeared with
01:12:00 ►
its seven spheres and the gods visible in starry forms with all their constellations
01:12:06 ►
and heaven revolved
01:12:09 ►
and began to run its circling course
01:12:12 ►
riding upon the divine air
01:12:15 ►
and each god by his several power
01:12:18 ►
set forth that which he was bidden to put forth
01:12:21 ►
and there came forth four-footed beasts
01:12:24 ►
and creeping things and fishes and winged birds, and grass, and every flowering herb,
01:12:30 ►
all having seed in them according to their diverse natures.
01:12:35 ►
For they generated within themselves the seed by which their races should be renewed.
01:12:41 ►
And then it goes on to describe the birth of man. Now, this kind of thinking is what alchemy seized upon in its ambitions.
01:12:55 ►
In a way, one way of thinking about what alchemy came to attempt
01:13:01 ►
is the thinking went like this.
01:13:05 ►
Since man is God’s brother,
01:13:08 ►
the purpose of man is to intercede in time.
01:13:15 ►
And it was believed that ores, precious metals,
01:13:19 ►
and things like this grew in the earth.
01:13:24 ►
It was a thoroughgoing theory of evolution that reached right down into the organic realm.
01:13:29 ►
So it was thought that gold deposits in the earth would actually replenish themselves over time.
01:13:40 ►
And it’s passages like this that give permission for that kind of thinking.
01:13:47 ►
In line with that, we’re now in book four.
01:13:52 ►
And remember, the tone changes slightly from book to book.
01:13:56 ►
They were, after all, written over a 300-year period by various people.
01:14:01 ►
by various people.
01:14:05 ►
You must understand then that God is preexistent
01:14:07 ►
and ever existent,
01:14:09 ►
ever existent,
01:14:11 ►
and that he alone made all things
01:14:13 ►
and created by his will
01:14:14 ►
the things that are.
01:14:16 ►
And when the creator
01:14:17 ►
had made the ordered universe,
01:14:19 ►
he willed to set in order
01:14:21 ►
the earth also.
01:14:23 ►
He willed to set in order the earth also. He willed to set in order the earth also.
01:14:27 ►
And so he sent down man, a mortal creature made in the image of an immortal being,
01:14:35 ►
to be an embellishment of the divine body.
01:14:40 ►
For it is man’s function, here it comes, the purpose of man, according to book four,
01:14:47 ►
for it is man’s function to contemplate the works of God and for this purpose he was made
01:14:53 ►
that he might view the universe with wondering awe and come to know its maker.
01:15:01 ►
Man has this advantage over all other living beings
01:15:06 ►
that he possesses mind and speech
01:15:09 ►
now speech my son
01:15:11 ►
God imparted to all men
01:15:14 ►
but mind he did not impart to all
01:15:17 ►
not that he grudged it to any
01:15:21 ►
for the grudging temper does not start from heaven above but comes
01:15:26 ►
from being here below in the souls of those men who are devoid of mind this
01:15:31 ►
introduces the concept of the of an elect or a perfecti a hierarchy of human
01:15:38 ►
of human accomplishment and understanding and this is also basic to Gnosticism. It’s not for everyone,
01:15:46 ►
they’re saying. It’s for the pure of heart. And then what pure of heart means depends on the
01:15:53 ►
school you’re looking at. You know, for some, it was mathematical accomplishment. For others,
01:16:00 ►
it was contact with the logos. For others, it was an ability to resist the temptations of the senses.
01:16:07 ►
But there was always this sense of the higher and lower possibility within the human experience.
01:16:17 ►
Everybody with me so far?
01:16:20 ►
This is at the opening of book 12.
01:16:31 ►
This is at the opening of book 12, and this is a book with a heavy Mandaian sensitivity, this sensitivity to life.
01:16:42 ►
Now this whole cosmos, and notice how this transcends even the Buddhist point of view, because in Buddhism plants have no soul.
01:16:45 ►
This is a tremendous failure in the Buddhist conception,
01:16:47 ►
as far as I’m concerned.
01:16:51 ►
Okay, this is Book 12.
01:16:53 ►
Now this whole cosmos,
01:16:57 ►
which is a great God and an image of him who is greater and is united with him
01:16:58 ►
and maintains its order in accordance with that will,
01:17:02 ►
is one mass of life,
01:17:04 ►
and there is not anything in the cosmos
01:17:07 ►
nor has been through all time from the first foundation of the universe neither in the whole
01:17:14 ►
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.
01:17:29 ►
For it was the Father’s will that the cosmos, as long as it exists, should be a living being,
01:17:36 ►
and therefore it must needs be a God also.
01:17:40 ►
How then, my son, could there be dead things in that which is a God
01:17:45 ►
in that which is an image of the Father
01:17:47 ►
in that which is one mass of life
01:17:50 ►
deafness is corruption and corruption is destruction
01:17:55 ►
how then can any part of that which is incorruptible
01:17:59 ►
be corrupted or any part of that
01:18:01 ►
which is a God be destroyed
01:18:04 ►
and there are other passages which is a god be destroyed.
01:18:07 ►
And there are other passages.
01:18:09 ►
This is a good one.
01:18:13 ►
This is book 18.
01:18:19 ►
For as the sun, who nurtures all vegetation,
01:18:24 ►
also gathers the first fruits of the produce with his rays,
01:18:26 ►
as it were with mighty hands,
01:18:29 ►
plucking the sweetest odors of the plants,
01:18:34 ►
even so we too, having received into our souls, which are plants of heavenly origin,
01:18:38 ►
the efflux of God’s wisdom,
01:18:40 ►
must in return use his service for all that springs up in us
01:18:46 ►
now this conception that the human soul is a plant
01:18:49 ►
is a unique idea
01:18:52 ►
I don’t know of another tradition
01:18:55 ►
those of you who were with us in Ojai
01:18:59 ►
we heard Johannes Wilber talk about
01:19:01 ►
how among the Amazon Indians
01:19:04 ►
the Warao, the men actually marry trees.
01:19:09 ►
They actually take trees as their wives. A tree, and it is a man’s job throughout his life
01:19:17 ►
to take care of this tree with the same tenderness and attention that he lavishes on a living wife.
01:19:25 ►
This is a more radical conception than that.
01:19:29 ►
This is the conception that the most important part of us is a plant.
01:19:35 ►
It reminds me of the joke that I occasionally make in these groups,
01:19:42 ►
the notion that animals are something
01:19:45 ►
invented by plants to carry them from place to place
01:19:48 ►
well according to this
01:19:51 ►
that’s right on
01:19:53 ►
so the sensitivity to the vegetative
01:19:58 ►
nature of the world is so great
01:20:00 ►
that it raises the plant to be
01:20:03 ►
the pith essence
01:20:05 ►
the soul of man
01:20:07 ►
the brother of God
01:20:09 ►
so you see the valuation
01:20:12 ►
of the vegetative
01:20:13 ►
universe here is of an
01:20:15 ►
extremely radical type
01:20:17 ►
yes, Kenoma
01:20:19 ►
I was just
01:20:21 ►
going to ask
01:20:22 ►
that upper echelon section
01:20:25 ►
of humanity that was given the mind
01:20:28 ►
was that predetermined at birth
01:20:30 ►
or can someone develop a mind?
01:20:35 ►
No, it is not predetermined.
01:20:40 ►
It is something that is acquired
01:20:42 ►
through cultivation of a relationship to,
01:20:45 ►
in the hermetic language, nous, the higher mind,
01:20:51 ►
and in the Gnostic language, logos, the informing spirit.
01:20:58 ►
But yes, no, the whole thrust…
01:21:02 ►
Yes, and nothing is predetermined
01:21:06 ►
in the hermetic
01:21:08 ►
system because through magic
01:21:10 ►
we can overcome
01:21:11 ►
the energies of cosmic
01:21:13 ►
fate this is the great good
01:21:16 ►
news of
01:21:17 ►
hermeticism that we are not subject
01:21:20 ►
to fate we should probably
01:21:22 ►
talk a little about this
01:21:23 ►
logos concept this is something which seems
01:21:27 ►
very alien to modern people, unless they are psychedelically sophisticated. The Logos was
01:21:36 ►
the sine qua non of Hellenistic religion, and what it was was an informing voice that spoke in your head or your heart wherever
01:21:48 ►
you want to put it and it told you the right way to live you get this idea even in the later old
01:21:56 ►
testament where uh it’s said that uh the truth of the heart can be known,
01:22:07 ►
that it is no great dilemma to know good from evil.
01:22:12 ►
You simply inquire of your heart, is it good or evil?
01:22:16 ►
And you will discover a voice which will tell you.
01:22:20 ►
And all the great thinkers of this Greco-Hellenistic period sought and cultivated the logos. Plato had his demon. Everyone sought the informing voice of the nous, that’s what it’s called in Neoplatonism and then in Hermeticism, I mean, and in Hermeticism and then in Gnosticism, the logos.
01:22:49 ►
Now, for modern people, well, no, for me,
01:22:53 ►
the only way I’ve ever had this experience is in the presence of psychedelic substances.
01:23:00 ►
And then it is just crystal clear.
01:23:02 ►
There is no ambiguity about it. Somehow it’s possible for an informing voice to come into cognition that knows more than you do. collective unconscious, I suppose, that is convivial, conversational, and just talks to you about the nature of being in the world and the nature of your being in the world.
01:23:36 ►
It’s puzzling to us because it seems so remote.
01:23:41 ►
I mean, for us, a voice in the head or the heart is pathology and you
01:23:47 ►
may know the famous story of in the first century some fishermen were off
01:23:56 ►
the shore of the island of Argos in the Mediterranean Sea and they heard a great voice from the sky,
01:24:07 ►
and the voice said, Great Pan is dead.
01:24:11 ►
Great Pan is dead.
01:24:14 ►
Well, people like Lactantius and Eusebius, these patristic fathers,
01:24:19 ►
the people who built Christianity, who took the Gospels and turned it into a world religion,
01:24:25 ►
they took this annunciation from the sky of the death of Pan as the annunciation of the change
01:24:33 ►
of the aeon. In other words, by the aeon, I mean these 2,000 year, roughly 2,000 year periods
01:24:41 ►
that are associated with the equinoctial procession do you all understand
01:24:46 ►
how this works that over 26 000 years the heliacal rising of the of the solsticeal sun
01:24:56 ►
slips slowly slowly from one house to another and And around A.D. 100,
01:25:06 ►
I mean, there’s argument
01:25:07 ►
because these things are never precise,
01:25:09 ►
but around A.D. 100,
01:25:12 ►
the age of Pisces began
01:25:14 ►
and the previous aeon ceased
01:25:18 ►
and the cosmic machinery,
01:25:21 ►
the great gears of the largest scale
01:25:24 ►
of the cosmic machinery, the great gears of the largest scale of the cosmic machinery
01:25:26 ►
clicked past a certain point and into the age of Pisces.
01:25:30 ►
And this was then taken as very fortuitous for Christianity
01:25:37 ►
because Christ was associated with the sign of the fish and was seen as a Piscean movement.
01:25:44 ►
with the sign of the fish and was seen as a Piscean movement.
01:25:51 ►
But I believe that it’s entirely possible that the Logos at that moment, that rough moment in time, fell silent,
01:25:55 ►
and that it has been silent for 2,000 years.
01:25:59 ►
And what we have had then is the exegesis of text
01:26:04 ►
and, you know, noetic archaeology of the sort we’re carrying on here.
01:26:09 ►
But that now, a phenomenon as trivial and high-paunted as channeling can be seen as the reawakening of the Logos.
01:26:26 ►
The long night of Piscean silence is ending,
01:26:30 ►
and the spirit of noose is again moving in the world,
01:26:36 ►
speaking in the minds of the adepts and the hierophants
01:26:39 ►
who have the techniques and the will to connect with this stuff.
01:26:46 ►
I don’t know how I got off on that.
01:26:48 ►
But obviously this kind of literature can be seen as the last message from the fading logos.
01:26:57 ►
The last statements before the change of the aeon
01:27:03 ►
rendered this control language very difficult and non-intuitive
01:27:09 ►
and somewhat incomprehensible.
01:27:16 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:27:18 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:27:23 ►
So, what do you think?
01:27:46 ►
Has the Logos been reawakened? One thought at a time. Well, who knows? And since we are right smack in the middle of whatever is now taking place on this planet,
01:27:50 ►
none of us are going to live long enough to get the perspective required to understand what is actually taking place right now.
01:27:54 ►
In fact, what has probably been taking place since sometime in the 60s.
01:27:59 ►
You know, the same was true of the people who lived through the Renaissance.
01:28:02 ►
Most of them had little or no idea of the fact that a Renaissance was then underway.
01:28:08 ►
Look around you.
01:28:09 ►
Ten years ago, there was no such thing as an Internet-enabled phone.
01:28:14 ►
Twenty-five years ago, there was no World Wide Web.
01:28:17 ►
The Middle East is coming unglued before our eyes.
01:28:21 ►
And what may turn out to be the largest human migration ever may now be underway.
01:28:27 ►
Warfare is being taken over by robots, and a big-time racist is getting close to taking
01:28:32 ►
over the White House, and yet all too many of us still don’t understand that black lives
01:28:38 ►
really do matter.
01:28:40 ►
It was in the 1960s that a concept of a new aeon first became popularized.
01:28:46 ►
In 1967, the musical Hair featured a song that was popularly known as
01:28:51 ►
The Age of Aquarius, or Let the Sunshine In,
01:28:55 ►
and it reached a mass audience, mainly of us then young people.
01:29:00 ►
And right now, I’d like to play for you what a 22-year-old songwriter had to say about our situation back in 1967.
01:29:09 ►
His name is Stephen Stills, and his words were sung by Buffalo Springfield.
01:29:26 ►
There’s something happening here What it is ain’t exactly clear
01:29:31 ►
There’s a man with a gun over there
01:29:36 ►
Telling me I’ve got to beware
01:29:41 ►
I think it’s time we stop
01:29:44 ►
Children, what’s that sound?
01:29:46 ►
Everybody look what’s going down.
01:29:57 ►
There’s battle lines being drawn.
01:30:02 ►
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. Thank you. Everybody look what’s going down What a field day for the heat
01:30:35 ►
A thousand people in the street
01:30:39 ►
Singing songs and carrying signs
01:30:44 ►
Mostly say hooray for our side
01:30:49 ►
It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound?
01:30:54 ►
Everybody look what’s going down
01:30:58 ►
Paranoia strikes deep
01:31:09 ►
Into your life it will creep
01:31:13 ►
It starts when you’re always afraid
01:31:18 ►
Step out of line, the man come
01:31:22 ►
And take you away
01:31:24 ►
We better stop.
01:31:26 ►
Hey, what’s that sound?
01:31:27 ►
Everybody look what’s going.
01:31:29 ►
We better stop.
01:31:30 ►
Hey, what’s that sound?
01:31:32 ►
Everybody look what’s going.
01:31:34 ►
We better stop now.
01:31:36 ►
What’s that sound?
01:31:37 ►
Everybody look what’s going.
01:31:38 ►
We better stop.
01:31:40 ►
What’s that sound?
01:31:51 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:31:53 ►
Be well, my friends.