Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What we would call manic depression, despair, and that chaotic, near psychotic state of unbounded hopelessness is the precondition then for the alchemical work.”
“An angel chartered modern science. It’s the alchemical angel, which will not die. It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and people toward an unimaginable conclusion.”
“The alchemical spirit lives on. It never really died. It’s just that it has taken peculiar forms in our own day.”
Podcast 319 - “The Voynich Manuscript”
by Terence McKenna
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:29 ►
Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And today, March 17th, 2016, marks the first day of what will become my 12th year of producing these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:36 ►
And after we listen to today’s talk, I’ll be back and add a few more comments about that.
00:00:41 ►
But first, we are going to return to the May of 1991 weekend workshop,
00:00:47 ►
where Terence McKenna focused on alchemy and the hermetic tradition. As you’ll soon discover,
00:00:54 ►
much of the literature from that tradition is, well, at least to me, really obscure. But if you
00:01:00 ►
are truly interested in the subject, I can now second Terence’s earlier recommendation of the novel The Chemical Wedding by Lindsay Clark.
00:01:09 ►
While there are a few brief quotes in it that come directly from the Corpus Hermetica,
00:01:14 ►
for the most part the novel brings some of the ideas that may be found in ancient alchemical texts
00:01:20 ►
into a more modern and more easily understandable form than what you’ll soon
00:01:26 ►
hear Terence read from. And in case you think that alchemy is a new interest of mine,
00:01:32 ►
let me read for you the opening paragraph of my novel, The Genesis Generation.
00:01:38 ►
Prologue, The Lost Book of Toth. Myths and legends only spare the non-believers. Johannes’ hands trembled as he
00:01:48 ►
carefully closed the old leather pouch containing the parchment pages that had been among his
00:01:53 ►
grandfather’s most precious possessions, having been left to him by Giordano Bruno more than a
00:01:59 ►
half a century earlier. Although the bulk of the alchemical library of Rudolf II had previously been shipped
00:02:06 ►
to Vienna, it was the Winter King, young Frederick himself, who had seen to it that this magical
00:02:13 ►
treatise remained well hidden in Prague Castle, just before he fled to Holland along with his
00:02:18 ►
young bride. That was around the same time that the pilgrims were stepping out of their boats at Plymouth Rock.
00:02:29 ►
A generation later, Swedish troops were storming the castle gates,
00:02:35 ►
and old Johans knew that the time had come for the mysterious leather pouch to be hidden in plain sight,
00:02:39 ►
so that it would not be destroyed in the looting that was sure to follow.
00:02:47 ►
But enough of my own fictional fantasies. Now let’s take a deeper peek into this mysterious arena by rejoining Terence McKenna’s 1991 workshop on the Hermetic Tradition.
00:02:54 ►
So what I thought I would do is, in a highly chaotic fashion,
00:03:03 ►
read you some of this alchemical literature.
00:03:08 ►
Now, the big bring-down about alchemical literature
00:03:11 ►
is that apparently the muse didn’t always smile on the alchemist,
00:03:19 ►
and some of this poetry is pretty tormented stuff.
00:03:25 ►
Why this is, who can say?
00:03:29 ►
But let’s try one here and see if you can bear with it.
00:03:34 ►
Also, my Middle English is not as good as it might be.
00:03:38 ►
This is a short one and typical,
00:03:41 ►
and you will see why the alchemists were charged with unbearable obscurity and
00:03:48 ►
prolex prose. This poem is called A Description of the Stone.
00:03:56 ►
Though Daphne fly from Phoebus bright, yet shall they both be one, and if you understand this right, you have our hidden stone,
00:04:06 ►
for Daphne she is fair and white,
00:04:09 ►
but volatile is she,
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Phoebus a fixed god of might,
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and red as blood is he,
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Daphne is a water nymph,
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and hath of moisture store,
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which Phoebus doth confine and heat
00:04:25 ►
and dries her very shore
00:04:28 ►
they being dried into one
00:04:30 ►
of crystal flood must drink
00:04:33 ►
till they be brought to a white stone
00:04:36 ►
which washed with virgin’s milk
00:04:39 ►
so long until they flow as wax
00:04:41 ►
and no fume you can see
00:04:44 ►
then have you all you need to ask
00:04:47 ►
praise God and thankful be
00:04:50 ►
this is a recipe for the production
00:04:53 ►
of the philosopher’s stone
00:04:56 ►
and the author I’m sure felt
00:04:59 ►
that he’d spoken as clearly as he’d dare speak
00:05:02 ►
and yet making something of this
00:05:05 ►
is no easy task.
00:05:06 ►
This is from the Teatrium Chemicum Britannicum
00:05:09 ►
and the late phase of alchemy.
00:05:14 ►
Here’s another one.
00:05:17 ►
The world is a maze, and what you why?
00:05:21 ►
Forsooth of late a great man did die,
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and as he lay a- in his bed these words in secret
00:05:28 ►
to his son he said my son quoth he tis good for thee i die for thou shalt much the better be
00:05:36 ►
thereby and when thou seest that life hath me bereft take Take what thou findest. And where I have it left,
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thou dost not know,
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nor what my riches be.
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All which I will declare,
00:05:52 ►
give ear to me.
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An earth I had all venom to expel,
00:05:57 ►
and that I cast into a mighty well.
00:06:01 ►
A water eck to cleanse what was amiss,
00:06:04 ►
I threw into the earth
00:06:06 ►
and there it is
00:06:07 ►
my silver all into the sea
00:06:10 ►
I cast my gold
00:06:12 ►
into the air and
00:06:14 ►
at the last into
00:06:15 ►
the fire for fear it should
00:06:18 ►
be found I threw a stone
00:06:20 ►
worth forty thousand pound
00:06:22 ►
which stone was
00:06:24 ►
given me by a mighty king
00:06:26 ►
who bade me wear it in a fourfold ring.
00:06:30 ►
Quoth he, this stone is by that ring found out,
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if wisely thou canst turn this ring about.
00:06:38 ►
For every hope contrary is to other,
00:06:41 ►
yet all agree, and of the stone is mother.
00:06:45 ►
So now, my son, I will declare a wonder, that when I die, this ring must break asunder.
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The king said so, but when he said with all, although the ring be broke in pieces small,
00:06:59 ►
an easy fire shall soon it close again.
00:07:04 ►
an easy fire shall soon it close again who this can do he need not work in vain
00:07:08 ►
till this my hidden treasure be found out
00:07:11 ►
when I am dead my spirit shall walk about
00:07:14 ►
make him to bring your fire from the grave
00:07:18 ►
and stay with him till you my riches have
00:07:22 ►
these words a worldly man did chance to hear
00:07:26 ►
who daily watched the spirit
00:07:28 ►
but nay the near
00:07:30 ►
and yet it meets with him and everyone
00:07:33 ►
yet tells him not where is the hidden stone
00:07:37 ►
now this stuff is obscure
00:07:40 ►
it’s deliberately obscure
00:07:41 ►
it was obscure to its contemporaries
00:07:44 ►
and the whole effort became one of collecting this kind of material and finding it out. And you have to understand, this was all circulating in manuscript. Very little of this was printed. Britannicum was not printed until 1652.
00:08:07 ►
So this was a world without vehicular transportation
00:08:12 ►
other than the horse and carriage.
00:08:15 ►
And these people were paranoid of being discovered
00:08:18 ►
and persecuted for wizardry and witchcraft by the church.
00:08:22 ►
So each alchemist working in secret with a limited number of texts,
00:08:28 ►
with a local control language, created this vast conceptual patchwork of ideas.
00:08:37 ►
And this is in large measure responsible for the obscurity of what is said.
00:08:44 ►
is in large measure responsible for the obscurity of what is said,
00:08:48 ►
then another factor which impinges on this and further complicates the matter
00:08:50 ►
is that the name of the game
00:08:54 ►
was projection of the contents of the imagination
00:08:58 ►
onto physical processes.
00:09:02 ►
So taking red cinnabar
00:09:06 ►
which I mentioned last night
00:09:07 ►
and heating it in a furnace
00:09:09 ►
until it sweats mercury
00:09:11 ►
for one
00:09:13 ►
alchemist this is the
00:09:15 ►
incineration of the red salamander
00:09:18 ►
and the collection of
00:09:19 ►
our mercurius in the great
00:09:21 ►
pelican
00:09:22 ►
they named their chemical apparati after animals and gods,
00:09:28 ►
and so the pelican is a standard distillation apparatus,
00:09:33 ►
basically a condenser on top of something which is boiled.
00:09:38 ►
And then these materials would be collected, ground, powdered, refired, mixed with other materials, refired again.
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And in the process, these people were, we call it, I mean, it’s such a weak term, the projection of the intellect into this dimension.
00:10:00 ►
They were living in a waking dream.
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They were living in a waking dream, and many of the recipes are designed to wipe out the boundaries between waking and sleeping.
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Remember I talked about the river of mercury that runs between the yin and yang?
00:10:25 ►
Many of the alchemical processes were of 40 days duration well you can imagine a hermit fearing discovery by the church
00:10:28 ►
trying to keep
00:10:29 ►
his fires not too hot
00:10:32 ►
not too cold
00:10:33 ►
working day after day
00:10:35 ►
night after night
00:10:37 ►
eventually all boundaries
00:10:40 ►
dissolve and you are just living
00:10:41 ►
in a pure world of intellectual
00:10:44 ►
projection and then in the swirling
00:10:47 ►
of the alembic in the in the chemical processes going on in the retort you begin to be able to
00:10:55 ►
project your conscious onto this it’s what we call visualization but for us it’s a very it’s a kind of a weak term because we don’t we are never really able to
00:11:08 ►
accept in the psychedelic state to transcend the belief in the inner world and the outer world
00:11:16 ►
being somehow separate so for us it’s always separate from us but they were able to wipe out that boundary. Well then, what they saw in their swirling retorts and alembics
00:11:30 ►
was not carbonization, calcination,
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condensation of various molecular weights of liquids and oils out,
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but rather the birth of the red lion,
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the coming of the eagle,
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the appearance of the smaragdine stone. They had hundreds and hundreds of these words, and I didn’t bring any with me, but much alchemical literature are dictionaries.
00:12:11 ►
Martinez Rulandos’ Alchemical Dictionary is a huge book of words with special meanings in the alchemical context.
00:12:17 ►
And these, okay, so why?
00:12:18 ►
Why do this?
00:12:20 ►
And what happens when you do it?
00:12:26 ►
Well, no matter what alchemist you’re reading, there’s always an agreement that there are stages in the great work,
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stages in the opus, as they called it.
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And you can’t get any agreement
00:12:35 ►
on in what order these stages come,
00:12:38 ►
but roughly it’s something like this.
00:12:41 ►
Most agree that it begins in the negredo,
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the blackening, our crow, the saturnine world of what we would call manic depression, despair, and that our chaos, a chaotic, near psychotic state of unbounded hopelessness. And that is the precondition then
00:13:11 ►
for the alchemical work, though the stages of the opus never occur in order. I had a dream last night
00:13:19 ►
that was, I think, triggered by an illustration in Fabricius that I’ll show you tonight.
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But it was a classical alchemical dream.
00:13:29 ►
It was that I was at a country fair,
00:13:32 ►
and its antiquity was indicated by the fact that it was happening on the schoolyard of my childhood.
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And as I moved among the participants of this country fair,
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I began to notice that they were freaky.
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I mean, there were people with withered arms and one side of their face slid down and so
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forth and so on.
00:13:54 ►
The whole thing began to drift toward nightmare.
00:13:57 ►
And Richard Hermes Bird appeared in my dream as my alchemical compadre. And at one point, a black woman,
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perfect symbolism for the Negrito, a black woman with three withered arms and six or seven breasts
00:14:19 ►
slid herself sideways in front of me. And it was at that point that I went and found Richard and said,
00:14:26 ►
I think we better get out of here.
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Well, now, an alchemist would greet a dream like this
00:14:34 ►
with great anticipation and joy
00:14:39 ►
and would understand that this sets the stage now
00:14:43 ►
for the next movement forward.
00:14:46 ►
Well, then accounts differ.
00:14:48 ►
And those of you who really want to get into this,
00:14:52 ►
I recommend you read Mysterium Conjunctiones by Jung,
00:14:57 ►
The Mysterious Conjunction.
00:15:00 ►
And he discusses the negro, the negredo, in great detail.
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Another symbol for the negredo is the sennex, the old man,
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because the old man is just short of death,
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and that’s the state that the negredo makes you feel.
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Well, then you must take this raw, chaotic, unformed material, often compared
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to feces, compared to corruption,
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compared to the contents of an
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opened grave, and you must cook
00:15:35 ►
it in the alchemical fires of
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contemplation, prayer, and ascetic
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self-control. And then you will move through
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a series of stages
00:15:45 ►
that are associated with colors.
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There is the rubedo, the reddening.
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There is the citrinitas, the yellowing.
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There is the veriditas, the greening.
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And the order in which these occurs differs according to who you follow.
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But then there is closure at the end of the process.
00:16:11 ►
Most alchemists, although certainly not all, agree that the higher state is the albedo,
00:16:18 ►
the whitening, the purificatio, right? So at each stage, there are sub-stages of dissolution,
00:16:29 ►
dissolution et coagulatio.
00:16:33 ►
And there’s one alchemical aphorism that says,
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dissolution et coagulatio, know this,
00:16:41 ►
and this is all you need to know.
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And so it’s a melting
00:16:47 ►
and a recasting and a purifying
00:16:49 ►
of psychic contents
00:16:52 ►
well then a whole
00:16:55 ►
so finally you reach the albedo
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the whitening, the highest stage
00:17:00 ►
the stage of great purity
00:17:02 ►
but remember how I said last night
00:17:05 ►
that Mercury was always the metaphor for mind
00:17:09 ►
in alchemy or one of the metaphors for mind in alchemy
00:17:12 ►
and I talked about its mutability
00:17:15 ►
and its ability to take the shape of its container
00:17:18 ►
and when you shatter it, it then splits into
00:17:21 ►
many reflections, so once you
00:17:24 ►
move into the domain
00:17:26 ►
of the albedo, the whitening
00:17:29 ►
then a whole new problem arises
00:17:32 ►
for the alchemist
00:17:34 ►
and this is the problem of the fixing
00:17:37 ►
of the stone
00:17:39 ►
somehow the mutability of mercury
00:17:42 ►
must be overcome
00:17:44 ►
and it must be crystall and it must be crystallized.
00:17:47 ►
It must be fixed so that it doesn’t get away from you, so that it doesn’t slip through your fingers.
00:17:54 ►
To achieve our mercury is nothing unless you have the secret of the coagulatio.
00:18:02 ►
And so then there’s a huge amount of effort
00:18:05 ►
devoted to this.
00:18:06 ►
Well, what is being described
00:18:08 ►
is what Jungians call
00:18:11 ►
the individuation process,
00:18:13 ►
a dissolving of the boundaries of the ego
00:18:16 ►
and allowing of the chaotic material
00:18:20 ►
of the unconscious to pour forth
00:18:23 ►
where it can be inspected by
00:18:25 ►
Consciousness and we’ll see tonight when we look at this art that these images are full of ravening beasts
00:18:34 ►
incestuous mother-son pairs
00:18:38 ►
incestuous brother-sister pairs
00:18:41 ►
hermaphrodites
00:18:44 ►
All taboos are broken
00:18:46 ►
this stuff just boils up from the unconscious
00:18:49 ►
then is sublimed through these processes
00:18:52 ►
and then is somehow fixed
00:18:56 ►
and this fixing then is the culmination of alchemy
00:19:00 ►
and if you can bring off this trick
00:19:03 ►
then you possess our
00:19:05 ►
stone, the philosopher’s stone, the lapis
00:19:09 ►
the Sothic hydrolith of the wise
00:19:11 ►
Arrhenius Philolithes calls it
00:19:14 ►
and there were hundreds of control
00:19:17 ►
words for naming the secret
00:19:21 ►
difficult to obtain
00:19:23 ►
alchemical gold in short.
00:19:26 ►
This is what we’re after.
00:19:27 ►
And if you possess it,
00:19:30 ►
nothing else is worth anything
00:19:31 ►
because it is psychic completion,
00:19:36 ►
peace of mind.
00:19:38 ►
Jung called it the self.
00:19:39 ►
It’s the self that we are trying to recover.
00:19:45 ►
And remember we talked about the Gnostic myths of the light trapped in matter.
00:19:50 ►
Well, this is the lumine, dilumine.
00:19:53 ►
This is the light of light, the lux natura,
00:19:56 ►
the light drawn out of nature and condensed into a fixed form,
00:20:02 ►
which then becomes the universal panacea.
00:20:06 ►
And I’m using as many of these alchemical terms as I can draw out of my memory
00:20:11 ►
to give you a feeling for it.
00:20:13 ►
This is the universal medicine.
00:20:15 ►
It cures all ills.
00:20:18 ►
It brings you riches, fame, wealth, self-respect.
00:20:24 ►
It’s the answer
00:20:25 ►
it’s what everyone is looking for
00:20:27 ►
and no one can find
00:20:29 ►
so this just became a consuming passion
00:20:34 ►
of the 15th and 16th century
00:20:37 ►
mind
00:20:38 ►
and they thought they were on the brink of it
00:20:41 ►
and along the way they were discovering stuff like distilled
00:20:46 ►
alcohol, phosphorus, gunpowder, all of these things were coming out of the alchemical laboratories.
00:20:54 ►
But that was not it. You see, they kept driving themselves onward because they knew that the real,
00:21:00 ►
that this was not the real thing. and they were pursuing the real thing.
00:21:06 ►
Well then, for some people, it became then reassociated with this notion of the utopia
00:21:16 ►
that I mentioned this morning in the passage that I read about the city of Hermes Trismegistus, and they began to see
00:21:27 ►
it’s almost like the crisis which overcame Buddhism. It must be an archetypal, and notice
00:21:34 ►
how rarely we’ve used that word here, it must be almost an archetypal stage in human thought. You
00:21:40 ►
know, Theravadan Buddhism stressed individual redemption through meditation on emptiness.
00:21:46 ►
And then with the great reforms of Nagarjuna, the idea of bodhisattvic compassion was introduced.
00:21:55 ►
And that carries with it a political freight, an obligation to society and mankind.
00:22:02 ►
to society and mankind.
00:22:08 ►
And so as the 15th and 16th century progressed,
00:22:11 ►
there began to be this awareness that what was wanted
00:22:12 ►
was not for an alchemist to break through
00:22:16 ►
to his own personal salvation,
00:22:20 ►
but somehow to create an alchemical world.
00:22:24 ►
And you get then the notion of the multiplicatio,
00:22:30 ►
the idea that the stone, once created,
00:22:34 ►
will replicate itself
00:22:36 ►
and be able to change base matter into itself
00:22:42 ►
almost like a virus
00:22:45 ►
spreading through the ontological structure of matter itself
00:22:49 ►
and the world will be reborn.
00:22:55 ►
And this idea then, what was happening was
00:23:00 ►
these alchemists were getting bolder
00:23:02 ►
and printing was invented in Mainz
00:23:05 ►
near Frankfurt in 1540
00:23:08 ►
the distribution of these alchemical books
00:23:11 ►
was changing the character of alchemy
00:23:14 ►
it was no more the solitary hermit
00:23:18 ►
working away in his cave
00:23:21 ►
or mountaintop far away from the minions
00:23:24 ►
of the church
00:23:25 ►
these alchemists began to dream
00:23:28 ►
of banding together
00:23:30 ►
of forming societies
00:23:32 ►
of creating brotherhoods
00:23:36 ►
that were united in the sharing of their knowledge
00:23:39 ►
and their purpose
00:23:41 ►
and this brings us to
00:23:44 ►
the curious episode in history
00:23:48 ►
called the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
00:23:52 ►
And Dame Frances Yates, once again, got there first,
00:23:57 ►
and she wrote a book called the Rosicrucian Enlightenment,
00:24:00 ►
which traces the history of these alchemical brotherhoods and reveals to us what
00:24:08 ►
they were really about. And what they were about was this dream of somehow taking the philosopher’s
00:24:17 ►
stone and the power, the immortality, the insight that it would bring, and making it a general utility of mankind.
00:24:28 ►
And in the, you know, one way of looking at modernity, I mean, I have a friend who claims
00:24:33 ►
that the summoning of the Holy Spirit into matter can be seen as the creation of the modern world of electrical energy,
00:24:45 ►
that people like Helmholtz and Faraday were completing the alchemical work.
00:24:54 ►
It’s very hard for us to realize how mysterious the electromagnetic field seemed to the 19th century. The 19th century had entirely imbued itself with the
00:25:09 ►
spirit of democracy anatomism translated through Newtonian physics. And they believed, you know,
00:25:16 ►
that everything was little balls of hard matter winging through space. Well, when Helmholtz and Faraday
00:25:27 ►
and these people began to talk about action at a distance
00:25:30 ►
and generating the electromagnetic field
00:25:33 ►
and trapping lightning in lightened jars
00:25:38 ►
and running it through wires,
00:25:40 ►
what could this be but pneuma?
00:25:43 ►
What could this be but the trapping of spiritus
00:25:46 ►
what could it be but the literal descent of the holy ghost
00:25:50 ►
into history
00:25:51 ►
and you know give it a moment’s thought
00:25:54 ►
for thousands of years
00:25:57 ►
electricity was something that you saw
00:26:01 ►
when you took an amber rod and a piece of cat fur
00:26:04 ►
and went into a darkened room and stroked the cat fur.
00:26:09 ►
And then when you would bring the amber rod close to the cat fur,
00:26:12 ►
you would see the crackle of static electricity through the cat fur.
00:26:16 ►
For thousands of years, that’s what electricity was.
00:26:18 ►
Who would dream that you could light cities, that you could smelt metals,
00:26:24 ►
that you could illuminate the earth
00:26:27 ►
with this energy
00:26:28 ►
and yet you know
00:26:29 ►
from the 1850s to the present
00:26:31 ►
this was done
00:26:32 ►
it’s almost a literalizing
00:26:35 ►
the final literalizing
00:26:36 ►
of the alchemical dream
00:26:38 ►
but to go back now
00:26:40 ►
I digress I fear
00:26:42 ►
let’s go back to the
00:26:45 ►
climate of the 1580s
00:26:48 ►
and the central
00:26:50 ►
culprit here
00:26:51 ►
and to my mind
00:26:54 ►
a giant figure
00:26:55 ►
casting an enormous shadow
00:26:58 ►
over the landscape of alchemy
00:27:00 ►
and modern science
00:27:01 ►
is the Englishman
00:27:04 ►
John Dee John Dee.
00:27:06 ►
John Dee united in himself the complete spirit of the medieval magus
00:27:12 ►
and the complete spirit of the modern scientist.
00:27:16 ►
He invented the navigational instruments that allowed the conquest of the round earth.
00:27:23 ►
When Francis Drake sailed up the coast of California,
00:27:27 ►
he had navigational instruments that were top secret.
00:27:30 ►
The French, the Spanish must be kept away from this stuff.
00:27:35 ►
And these were navigational instruments created by John Dee
00:27:39 ►
that allowed him to locate himself anywhere on the globe.
00:27:43 ►
allowed him to locate himself anywhere on the globe. But John Dee was a man who, on a late summer evening in Mortlake,
00:27:51 ►
in his house in Mortlake outside London,
00:27:54 ►
the angel Gabriel descended into his garden
00:27:59 ►
and gave him what he called the showstone,
00:28:09 ►
S-H-E-W in Old English, the showstone.
00:28:13 ►
And the showstone exists to this day.
00:28:15 ►
You can see it in the British Museum. And what’s amazing about it is it’s a piece of polished obsidian.
00:28:23 ►
It’s an Aztec mirror, is what it is.
00:28:27 ►
And, you know, there was a ruler of the Aztecs
00:28:30 ►
named Smokey Mirror.
00:28:32 ►
How John Dee got this thing, we cannot even imagine.
00:28:36 ►
I mean, he says he got it from an angel.
00:28:39 ►
Nobody can really nay say that.
00:28:42 ►
However, I suspect that Cortes, on his first return to spain from the new
00:28:48 ►
world he brought a number of objects with him that he had collected in central mexico and somehow
00:28:54 ►
john d got his hands on this thing and it was for him a um a television screen into the Logos, and he used it over a number of years to direct
00:29:14 ►
the foreign policy of England.
00:29:17 ►
He was the confidant of Queen Elizabeth I, and he also was the most accomplished astrologer in Europe.
00:29:28 ►
And he used his ability to cast horoscopes
00:29:31 ►
as an entree into all the great houses of Europe,
00:29:37 ►
the kings and nobles of Europe.
00:29:39 ►
Well, he was functioning as an intelligence agent.
00:29:42 ►
He was a spy for the British crown, insinuating himself into these various courtly scenes
00:29:50 ►
and then writing back to Elizabeth in ciphers, ciphers that had previously only been used for magical purposes.
00:29:58 ►
He was sending back data on the strength of military garrisons and the placement of fortifications and this sort of thing.
00:30:10 ►
But this was what he was doing in the 1580s.
00:30:14 ►
He kept the showstone for a number of years,
00:30:17 ►
and he didn’t seem to be able to make much progress with it.
00:30:22 ►
He had other methods, too.
00:30:24 ►
He had wax tables and sigils. But finally into his life
00:30:30 ►
came a very mysterious character named Edward Kelly. And some accounts say that Edward Kelly
00:30:38 ►
had no ears, which indicates that he had had his ears removed for being a charlatan and a montebank.
00:30:46 ►
This was a common punishment in the provinces of England.
00:30:50 ►
So Edward Kelly was a very dubious character, I think.
00:30:55 ►
For one strong piece of evidence that he was a shady character
00:31:00 ►
was John Dee was married to a much younger woman named Andy, who by all accounts
00:31:06 ►
was quite a beauty. And after gaining Dee’s confidence as a scryer, the person who could
00:31:16 ►
look into the showstone and lay out these scenarios that the angels and the entities
00:31:22 ►
coming and going in the showstone were putting forth, Kelly revealed to Dee that the angels and the entities coming and going in the showstone were putting forth.
00:31:26 ►
Kelly revealed to Dee that the angels had instructed him to hit the hay with Anne,
00:31:33 ►
and this was a great crisis in their relationship.
00:31:37 ►
However, according to Dee’s diary, and so it was done, we read.
00:31:48 ►
So, you know, hanky-panky didn’t begin with the golden dawn believe me in 1582 andy john d and edward kelly set out for bohemia and rudolph
00:32:01 ►
the mad king of boh, held sway at that time.
00:32:06 ►
Now this is another one of these bizarre figures in the whole story of this.
00:32:12 ►
Rudolf collected dwarfs.
00:32:16 ►
He collected giants.
00:32:18 ►
He had what was called a wunderkammer, a wonder cabinet.
00:32:29 ►
what was called a wunderkammer, a wonder cabinet. You see, before Linnaeus, before modern scientific classification, these great patrons of the arts and natural sciences, they would just collect
00:32:36 ►
weird stuff. And that was all you could say about them. It was rhinoceros horns, fossil ammonites,
00:32:53 ►
I mean, it was rhinoceros horns, fossil ammonites, broken pieces of statues from antiquity, giant insects from southern India, seashells.
00:32:59 ►
All this stuff would just be thrown together in these wunderkammer, these wonder cabinets.
00:33:06 ►
And Rudolf was a great patron of the arts.
00:33:14 ►
Well, Kelly sent the word that he and Dee had perfected the alchemical process and Rudolph immediately paid their way to Prague
00:33:20 ►
and patronized them very lavishly over a number of months.
00:33:26 ►
But then they didn’t seem to be coming through.
00:33:30 ►
And he rented, he ordered a castle put at their disposal in Bohemia.
00:33:37 ►
And they still weren’t able to come through.
00:33:40 ►
The Vonage manuscript figures in here too,
00:33:52 ►
The Vonage Manuscript figures in here too, because Kelly’s entree to Dee was that he had a manuscript in an unknown language.
00:33:57 ►
And I believe that this probably was the Vonage Manuscript.
00:34:08 ►
The Vonage Manuscript turns up in the estate of Rudolf, and the very month that he paid 14,000 gold ducats for it to persons unknown,
00:34:14 ►
Dee, who was always writing back to the Elizabethan court hounding them to send money,
00:34:21 ►
entered in his account book that they received 14,000 gold ducats from an unknown source Dee was able to talk himself out
00:34:25 ►
of this alchemical imprisonment
00:34:29 ►
but not before he had written a book
00:34:31 ►
called the hieroglyphic monad
00:34:34 ►
now you have to understand the importance of this
00:34:37 ►
as late as the 1920s
00:34:40 ►
in England in the better schools
00:34:43 ►
of England like Eton,
00:34:47 ►
when you studied geometry, you studied Euclid’s works.
00:34:53 ►
And Euclid’s geometry was always preceded by Dee’s preface to Euclid.
00:34:59 ►
Until the 1920s, every English schoolchild studied this.
00:35:03 ►
He was a master mathematician as well as all these other things.
00:35:07 ►
This was how he was able to produce these navigation instruments.
00:35:14 ►
So Dee, while imprisoned in Bohemia,
00:35:18 ►
wrote a book called The Hieroglyphic Monad
00:35:20 ►
in which he proposed to prove through a series of occult theorems that a certain diagram
00:35:28 ►
which unfortunately i don’t i didn’t bring the hieroglyphic monad but it’s basically the symbol
00:35:35 ►
of you know the symbol of mercury which looks like the symbol for female but you put horns on it
00:35:41 ►
and then there were some adumbrations to that.
00:35:45 ►
By a series of theorems, he built up this hieroglyphic monad,
00:35:49 ►
and he initiated a couple of young men named Johann Andrei and Michael Meyer
00:35:59 ►
into the mysteries of the hieroglyphic monad.
00:36:03 ►
Well, then he was able to get out of Bohemia,
00:36:06 ►
and he went back to England.
00:36:08 ►
Kelly, who had made much more extravagant claims,
00:36:12 ►
Rudolf kept at work on the alchemical opus,
00:36:16 ►
and Kelly became more and more desperate to escape.
00:36:20 ►
And one night in 1587,
00:36:22 ►
he crept out on the parapet of this bohemian castle
00:36:27 ►
and a roof tile slipped beneath his feet and he fell to his death
00:36:34 ►
and became, so far as I can tell, alchemy’s only true martyr.
00:36:44 ►
well Dee returned to England and he was now very old
00:36:47 ►
and he died at Mortlake
00:36:51 ►
in 1606
00:36:54 ►
Elizabeth died in 1604
00:36:58 ►
Shakespeare was happening
00:37:00 ►
Sir Philip Sidney was happening through this period
00:37:03 ►
John Dee reputedly had over 6,000 books in his library. He had more books than any man in England. He had books, we have a partial catalogue of his library. He had books that do not exist now. manuscripts because you see when Henry VIII kicked the Catholic Church out of England
00:37:25 ►
the Northumbrian monasteries were looted by the Earl of Northumberland and basically Dee was
00:37:34 ►
allowed to pick over the loot from these monasteries and there were Roger Bacon manuscripts
00:37:40 ►
which perished when Dee’s library was burned by an angry mob while he was on the
00:37:47 ►
continent because he was suspected of being a wizard. He was the model for Faust in the later
00:37:54 ►
recensions of Faust. And whenever you see an old man with a white beard and a pointed cap,
00:37:59 ►
this image is really referent to Dee. Well, Elizabeth died in 1604, I believe,
00:38:08 ►
and James I became king of England.
00:38:15 ►
And James was a peculiar character.
00:38:18 ►
The wags of the time liked to say,
00:38:21 ►
Elizabeth was king and now James is queen. And not only that, he hated occultism.
00:38:34 ►
He had no patience with the whole magical court that Elizabeth had assembled around herself. Well, now, meanwhile, in 1606,
00:38:48 ►
a very mysterious document began to circulate
00:38:52 ►
in Europe and in England called the Fama.
00:38:56 ►
This is the first word of a string of Latin words,
00:39:00 ►
the Fama, and two years later, the Confessio.
00:39:03 ►
And what these were were announcements
00:39:06 ►
that an alchemical brotherhood was seeking recruits.
00:39:12 ►
These are the primary documents of Rosicrucianism.
00:39:16 ►
Now, Rosicrucianism was based on a fiction
00:39:21 ►
and a fictional person, Christian Rosenkranz, who was imagined to have lived
00:39:28 ►
almost 200 years earlier in the 1540s and been a great alchemist. And it was claimed that his tomb
00:39:38 ►
had been recently opened and that there were books inside it which set the stage for the alchemical revolution of
00:39:48 ►
the world. Notice how this occult mind always tries to reach back in time to give itself
00:39:57 ►
validity. And Christian Rosencrantz was claimed to be the author of a series of books, the chief of which is called The Chemical Wedding. when he had been in Bohemia, had set out to lay the groundwork
00:40:26 ►
for an alchemical revolution in Central Europe.
00:40:30 ►
And he had made Johann Andrei and Michael Meyer
00:40:35 ►
his agents in this plot.
00:40:38 ►
And it was a plot,
00:40:40 ►
a plot to meddle with European history
00:40:43 ►
and to turn the Protestant Reformation
00:40:46 ►
toward an alchemical completion.
00:40:51 ►
They felt that Luther and Hus
00:40:56 ►
and these people had only gone so far
00:40:58 ►
and that the culmination of throwing off the yoke of the church
00:41:02 ►
would be the establishment of an alchemical kingdom
00:41:06 ►
in Central Europe.
00:41:09 ►
The target then of the attention of Michael Meyer
00:41:14 ►
and Johann Andrei and a number of these alchemists
00:41:18 ►
became the young Frederick,
00:41:22 ►
he’s called Frederick the Elector Palatine.
00:41:26 ►
He was a prince of the Northern League in Germany.
00:41:31 ►
He ruled in Heidelberg.
00:41:33 ►
And Heidelberg, as you know, is a thousand-year-old university city.
00:41:38 ►
And I believe I mentioned that the alchemical press of Theodore de Bry was operating out of Heidelberg.
00:41:45 ►
Heidelberg became a magnet for all the occult thinking going on in Europe.
00:41:51 ►
And all the puffers and alchemists, the gold makers, the philosophers, the charlatans,
00:41:57 ►
they all converged on Heidelberg.
00:42:03 ►
And Andrei and Meyer were advisors of the young Frederick,
00:42:09 ►
and they steered him, by a series of political manipulations too complex to tell,
00:42:16 ►
toward a marriage with the daughter of James I of England,
00:42:21 ►
who was named Elizabeth, interestingly enough.
00:42:24 ►
So Frederick the Elector made Elizabeth the son of James of England who was named Elizabeth interestingly enough so Frederick the
00:42:25 ►
Elector made Elizabeth the son of James
00:42:29 ►
of England his wife now Frederick here
00:42:33 ►
made a serious miscalculation because he
00:42:37 ►
thought that if James would give his the
00:42:41 ►
hand of his daughter in marriage that
00:42:44 ►
this was his way of blessing this alchemical conspiracy.
00:42:50 ►
Actually, what was on James’ mind was he was about to give one of his sons in marriage
00:42:56 ►
to a Spanish princess of the Habsburg line, a Catholic.
00:43:01 ►
In other words, he was playing both sides against each other. He was not giving the green light to an alchemical revolution at all, but it was assumed so. 18 Rudolf, remember Rudolf
00:43:25 ►
the emperor
00:43:25 ►
he finally dies
00:43:28 ►
at a very ripe old age
00:43:31 ►
and at that time
00:43:33 ►
the Protestant League
00:43:35 ►
which was made up of these princes
00:43:37 ►
of these small principalities
00:43:38 ►
scattered across Germany and Poland
00:43:41 ►
they actually elected the emperor
00:43:44 ►
it was not by right of primogeniture
00:43:47 ►
but by election by what was called the Northern League
00:43:51 ►
this group of princes
00:43:53 ►
Frederick and his
00:43:57 ►
alchemical cohorts
00:43:59 ►
had done their political groundwork
00:44:02 ►
very very skillfully
00:44:04 ►
and they were able to engineer the election of Frederick
00:44:08 ►
to emperor of the empire.
00:44:11 ►
And he became Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia.
00:44:15 ►
And this set the stage for an episode called
00:44:19 ►
The Episode of the Winter King and Queen,
00:44:23 ►
one of the great, after Nicholas and Pertinelle Flamel,
00:44:28 ►
this is one of the great romantic stories of alchemy.
00:44:33 ►
They moved their court from Heidelberg to Prague
00:44:37 ►
and all the alchemists went with them
00:44:43 ►
and they assumed that English armies would support them if there was any squawk from the Habsburgs.
00:44:52 ►
And the winter of 1618, they ruled there and began to lay the groundwork for the transformation of Northern Europe into an alchemical kingdom.
00:45:07 ►
The problem was, as I said, the faithlessness and duplicity of James I of England.
00:45:14 ►
He did not support them, in spite of the fact that the fate of his daughter hung in the balance.
00:45:20 ►
And by May of 1619, the local bishop of the Catholic Church was fully aroused and word had been sent to Madrid and the Habsburgs raised an army and lay siege to Prague.
00:45:45 ►
In the late summer, in the mid-summer of 1619,
00:45:48 ►
the Winter King and Queen were driven from Prague and the city fell to Catholic forces.
00:45:53 ►
The alchemical presses were smashed
00:45:55 ►
and Michael Meyer, who was like the prime minister of this scene,
00:46:01 ►
was murdered in an alley of Prague
00:46:04 ►
and the entire alchemical dream went down the
00:46:07 ►
drain. Frederick was killed in the siege of the city, and Elizabeth escaped to the Hague, where
00:46:14 ►
she lived in exile for many years. Well, until recently, I thought that that was the end of the story, but there is a codex that’s very, or a coda, that is amusing, if nothing else.
00:46:44 ►
still wet behind the ears, knowing nothing,
00:46:48 ►
happily soldiering and wenching his way around Europe while he decided what to do with himself.
00:46:52 ►
And his name was René Descartes, a Frenchman.
00:46:57 ►
And Descartes, in his later years,
00:47:04 ►
reminisced about his period as a soldier in this army.
00:47:10 ►
And I like to think that it was actually Descartes who murdered Meyer.
00:47:16 ►
One of my ambitions is to write a play or a novel where these two confront themselves in a back alley of burning Prague and carry on a debate about the future of Europe
00:47:27 ►
before Michael Meyer falls to the sword of Descartes.
00:47:31 ►
Well, that may be apocryphal,
00:47:34 ►
but what is not apocryphal is that this Habsburgian army,
00:47:38 ►
having laid siege and destroyed the alchemical kingdom,
00:47:43 ►
began to retreat across Europe that fall.
00:47:48 ►
And by mid-September was camped near the town of Ulm in southern Germany.
00:47:54 ►
Now, by a strange coincidence, Ulm is the birthplace of Einstein
00:47:58 ►
some hundreds of years later.
00:48:01 ►
But on the night of September 16th
00:48:05 ►
Descartes had a dream
00:48:08 ►
and in this
00:48:10 ►
dream an angel
00:48:12 ►
appeared to him
00:48:13 ►
and this is documented
00:48:15 ►
by his own hand
00:48:17 ►
and the angel said to
00:48:19 ►
Descartes the conquest
00:48:22 ►
of nature
00:48:23 ►
is to be achieved through measure and number.
00:48:29 ►
And that revelation lay the basis for modern science.
00:48:37 ►
Rene Descartes is the founder of the distinction between the res verans and the res extensa the founder of modern science the founder of
00:48:48 ►
The scientific method that created the philosophical engines that created the modern world
00:48:55 ►
How many scientists working at their workbenches?
00:48:59 ►
Understand that an angel chartered
00:49:03 ►
Modern science, it’s the alchemical angel which will not die that an angel chartered modern science.
00:49:07 ►
It’s the alchemical angel,
00:49:09 ►
which will not die.
00:49:12 ►
It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and peoples
00:49:16 ►
toward an unimaginable conclusion.
00:49:21 ►
I mean, that’s not the last time
00:49:23 ►
that this angelic intervention in the history of
00:49:26 ►
science has occurred. Some of you may know the story in the 19th century of Kekule, the German
00:49:33 ►
chemist who was struggling with the molecular structure of benzene, couldn’t get it straight,
00:49:40 ►
and then had a dream in which he saw the Ouroboric snake take its tail in its mouth
00:49:47 ►
and he awoke from that dream with the carbon ring burning in his mind.
00:49:53 ►
Well, the carbon ring, the six-sided heptadal form of the carbon ring
00:49:59 ►
is the basis for all organic chemistry.
00:50:03 ►
is the basis for all organic chemistry.
00:50:10 ►
So, you know, and then I mentioned earlier Faraday and Helmholtz and the rise of the electromagnetic field.
00:50:13 ►
The point I’m trying to make is that however rational we may assume ourselves to be,
00:50:21 ►
however rational we may assume modern science to be, it is all
00:50:27 ►
really founded on angelic revelation, demonic intercession, and an extremely mysterious
00:50:36 ►
relationship between the human mind and the world of what science calls inert matter, which from this point of view is revealed to be not
00:50:48 ►
inert at all, but alive and pregnant with purpose for mankind. The alchemical kingdom of Frederick
00:51:01 ►
the Elector, then there were a series of adumbrations of this kind of thinking.
00:51:08 ►
I mean, many of you may know about the Freemasonry and the many Freemason revolts in Bohemia and
00:51:17 ►
Bavaria throughout the 16th and 17th century. Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati is another effort to do this and
00:51:28 ►
even the Royal Society founded by
00:51:32 ►
Newton and
00:51:35 ►
Hook and those people was still an effort to redeem
00:51:40 ►
Science for the spirit so the alchemical spirit lives on
00:51:46 ►
it never really died
00:51:48 ►
it’s just that it has taken
00:51:50 ►
peculiar forms in our
00:51:52 ►
own day and I mentioned
00:51:54 ►
I think last night that
00:51:55 ►
when you enter into nuclear
00:51:58 ►
chemistry the most
00:52:00 ►
literal dreams of the
00:52:01 ►
of the
00:52:02 ►
profane side of alchemy,
00:52:06 ►
the transformation of lead into gold,
00:52:09 ►
has actually been achieved.
00:52:11 ►
I mean, it has no economic significance
00:52:13 ►
because the instrumentality to do it
00:52:16 ►
costs tens of millions of dollars.
00:52:18 ►
But nevertheless, yes, lead in our time
00:52:21 ►
has been changed into gold.
00:52:24 ►
So that’s basically what I wanted to say about this.
00:52:28 ►
I hope there are questions and stuff that we can say about it.
00:52:33 ►
Yes, Richard.
00:52:34 ►
I’m going to take you back to the Bonich manuscript for a minute.
00:52:40 ►
There was this thing about it was a liturgical manual for some.
00:52:44 ►
Is that your opinion of it
00:52:47 ►
well this is yes this is kind of a footnote on all of this you remember i said that d’s uh that
00:52:54 ►
kelly’s entree to d was that he had a mysterious book and you can tell from what I’ve said already D was as big a sucker for books as I am I mean and so this book
00:53:08 ►
Kelly’s story was that he had gone to sleep in the ruins of a Northumbrian monastery
00:53:17 ►
and slept in a in an open sepulcher a crypt of of some sort. And when he awoke, he found beneath him two things,
00:53:29 ►
a vial of red powder, which he said was the transmissing powder,
00:53:36 ►
a necessary part to the alchemical opus,
00:53:40 ►
and a book in an unknown language,
00:53:43 ►
which he called the Gospel of St. Dunstable,
00:53:47 ►
possibly because this monastery had been dedicated to St. Dunstable.
00:53:52 ►
Well, now, Arthur Dee was John Dee’s son, and he said that when in his own,
00:54:01 ►
he became an alchemist in his own right, and he said that when he was growing up, he recalled that his father spent many hours puzzling over a book, as he put it, all covered with hieroglyphics.
00:54:29 ►
angelologic language called Enochian, never actually wrote or discussed the book that he had received from Kelly. It is definitely not written in Enochian. Enochian, when grammatically
00:54:36 ►
analyzed by computers, has a curious relationship to 16th century English.
00:54:42 ►
to 16th century English but
00:54:45 ►
when Dee and Kelly traveled to Europe
00:54:49 ►
they were
00:54:52 ►
talking up Roger Bacon
00:54:55 ►
who was a 14th century
00:54:58 ►
English monk who had dabbled in alchemy
00:55:02 ►
and they claimed to have
00:55:04 ►
Bacon manuscripts.
00:55:07 ►
And Rudolf became very interested in this
00:55:11 ►
and wanted to obtain some of these Baconian manuscripts.
00:55:17 ►
Now, I suspect that what happened was that Dee, by this time,
00:55:21 ►
had given up on deciphering the gospel of St. Dunstable and decided that
00:55:28 ►
he would palm it off on the emperor as a Bacon manuscript because he didn’t want to give
00:55:36 ►
up a real Bacon manuscript because they were too valuable to him.
00:55:42 ►
So for 14,000 gold ducats this this thing changed hands, and Kelly and Dee and Anne
00:55:48 ►
were able to pay their bills. And Frederick had, I’m sorry, Rudolf had immense resources because
00:55:59 ►
of his position as emperor, and he brought his cryptographers and deciphers in to work
00:56:06 ►
on this gospel of St. Dunstable
00:56:10 ►
and got nowhere
00:56:12 ►
well then
00:56:15 ►
when Rudolf died
00:56:18 ►
a mysterious
00:56:21 ►
book was numbered among the
00:56:24 ►
artifacts of his estate,
00:56:27 ►
and I think we can assume it’s this book.
00:56:30 ►
And one of the interesting things about this book is it has pages and pages of plant drawings,
00:56:38 ►
over 150 watercolors of plants, each carefully labeled, captioned in this unknown language. Well,
00:56:47 ►
if you know anything about decipherment, this isn’t what a decipherer dreams of,
00:56:52 ►
because if you have a picture of the thing and the caption, it doesn’t take too much smarts to
00:56:59 ►
be able to figure out what’s going on. Nevertheless, this was completely unhelpful.
00:57:06 ►
figure out what’s going on. Nevertheless, this was completely unhelpful. A third of the manuscript has pseudo-astrological material. In other words, what looked like horoscopes and drawings of stars
00:57:14 ►
and stellar shells, but when carefully analyzed, dissolve into meaninglessness, cannot be associated with anything. And then a third of the manuscript shows little naked ladies
00:57:28 ►
in what can only be described as elaborate plumbing systems.
00:57:35 ►
And it was thought at one time that these must be drawings of the humors of the body in the liver that these little naked women represented spirits moving inside
00:57:49 ►
the human body or then somebody else’s guess was it must show an obscure form of German
00:57:56 ►
hydrotherapy because you know the Germans were if you’ve ever been to Baden-Baden or
00:58:03 ►
Marienbad or these places where people take the waters,
00:58:08 ►
well, those places are old, old.
00:58:11 ►
And all this stuff is captioned.
00:58:13 ►
And there are even tables of contents,
00:58:16 ►
which again, you would think would yield to decipherment.
00:58:20 ►
And so when Rudolf died,
00:58:23 ►
because of the botanical material in this book,
00:58:26 ►
it passed to the court botanist, a man named Marici,
00:58:31 ►
and he got nowhere with it.
00:58:35 ►
Well, then in the early 16th century, a great alchemist and polymath,
00:58:40 ►
some of whose art we’ll see this evening, was Heinrich Kundrath.
00:58:45 ►
And Heinrich Kundrath was fascinated by artificial languages,
00:58:52 ►
and he heard about the Vonage manuscript.
00:58:55 ►
And we have a whole bunch of letters from Kundrath
00:58:58 ►
to the keepers of the estate of the emperor
00:59:02 ►
trying to obtain this manuscript
00:59:06 ►
which he finally did obtain
00:59:09 ►
and then at that point he makes no
00:59:12 ►
further mention of it in his diaries
00:59:14 ►
the conclusion being that he too
00:59:17 ►
could get nowhere with this thing
00:59:20 ►
that it just defied decipherment
00:59:23 ►
well in 1619,
00:59:27 ►
at the
00:59:28 ►
outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War,
00:59:30 ►
and that’s what I forgot to mention
00:59:31 ►
in my earlier discussion, this episode
00:59:34 ►
of the Winter King and Queen
00:59:36 ►
is one way of debating
00:59:37 ►
the Thirty Years’
00:59:40 ►
War. It’s usually
00:59:41 ►
considered to be the moment when a
00:59:43 ►
certain personage was hurled from a third
00:59:46 ►
story window in Prague and then fighting broke out in the streets. But really the episode of
00:59:53 ►
the Winter King and Queen brought the thing to a head. Well, in 1619, to avoid being caught up in
01:00:01 ►
the Thirty Years’ War, Kundrath decided to take holy orders and become a Jesuit.
01:00:07 ►
And so he gave his library,
01:00:10 ►
which was compendious,
01:00:12 ►
to the monastery that he joined,
01:00:15 ►
which was a monastery in southern Italy.
01:00:18 ►
And there this thing sat
01:00:21 ►
until 1906,
01:00:24 ►
when a New York rare book dealer
01:00:27 ►
named Alfred Vonich
01:00:29 ►
bought the entire contents
01:00:31 ►
of this monastic library.
01:00:34 ►
And when he got it all back to New York
01:00:36 ►
and cataloged it,
01:00:37 ►
it was all very predictable
01:00:39 ►
16th century theological
01:00:42 ►
and alchemical speculation,
01:00:44 ►
except here was this book in an unknown language. 16th century theological and alchemical speculation,
01:00:49 ►
except here was this book in an unknown language.
01:00:53 ►
And Vonage kept it throughout his life,
01:00:55 ►
and then when he died, he gave it to Yale.
01:01:00 ►
And it is to this day at the Benneke Rare Book Room at Yale. Well, in the 1960s, the CIA became interested in it because the CIA is in the
01:01:11 ►
business of code making and breaking. I mean, this is a huge amount of energy goes into this.
01:01:16 ►
And if you know anything about the Enigma project in World War II, you know that vast energies go into the production of unbreakable codes. And so they very
01:01:28 ►
systematically sought out all examples of encrypted material throughout history and just
01:01:37 ►
lickety-split deciphered it one after another. And all occult and magical codes known to exist in Europe
01:01:47 ►
can be traced back to one person, virtually to one person,
01:01:53 ►
to Trithemius, Bishop of Sponheim,
01:01:56 ►
who was the great teacher of Henry Cornelius Agrippa.
01:02:03 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:06 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:10 ►
Now I’m going to have to leave it there for today,
01:02:13 ►
but I’ll play the remaining part of this workshop in my next podcast.
01:02:17 ►
However, I thought that it may be interesting to take a break right now
01:02:20 ►
and re-listen to my podcast number 319,
01:02:24 ►
which is also by Terrence and is about the Vonage manuscript in great detail.
01:02:29 ►
But if you don’t want to take that side trip right now, don’t worry, because, well, next Monday I’ll pick up right where we just now left off.
01:02:37 ►
You know, as I was listening to this talk with you just now, when Terrence spoke about the long-ago dream of an alchemist revolution,
01:02:46 ►
one that would change the world, well, I thought about the chaotic state of the human condition
01:02:51 ►
in all parts of our world today. And that made me think about what Terrence said early
01:02:57 ►
on in this talk, where he said, what we would call manic depression, despair, and that chaotic, near-psychotic state of unbounded hopelessness
01:03:07 ►
is the precondition, then, for alchemical work.
01:03:12 ►
So, what do you think?
01:03:14 ►
Could today’s psychedelic renaissance, one that was without doubt catalyzed by our old departed friend Sasha Shulgin,
01:03:22 ►
who seemed at times to be more alchemist than chemist,
01:03:26 ►
well, is this current resurgence of interest in psychedelic compounds a sign that perhaps alchemy is back
01:03:33 ►
and indeed may be on the brink of a new revolution?
01:03:36 ►
Well, I’m afraid that you and I will never know the answer to that for sure.
01:03:41 ►
But if you and I fulfill our psychedelic destinies, then, well, maybe we will
01:03:46 ►
have played our own small part in the birth of a new human civilization. And while that may seem a
01:03:52 ►
bit over the top, well, the next time that you’re in a deep psychedelic state, think about the fact
01:03:59 ►
that science may, in fact, be an inferior form of human endeavor when compared with alchemy.
01:04:06 ►
After all, the scientists who discovered DNA,
01:04:09 ►
and the scientists who discovered a way to sequence it,
01:04:12 ►
both stated that their insights came while under the influence of LSD.
01:04:17 ►
And as we have recently learned,
01:04:20 ►
microdosing with psychedelics is now all the rage in Silicon Valley, among other places.
01:04:26 ►
As Terence just said, an angel chartered modern science.
01:04:31 ►
It’s the alchemical angel which will not die.
01:04:34 ►
It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and people toward an unimaginable conclusion.
01:04:43 ►
And then he went on to say,
01:04:45 ►
The alchemical spirit lives on.
01:04:48 ►
It never really died.
01:04:49 ►
It’s just that it has taken peculiar forms in our own day.
01:04:54 ►
However, I suspect that there are many, many miles to go
01:04:58 ►
before that conclusion is at long last reached.
01:05:02 ►
And one more thing about today’s topic, and that is that if you go to the
01:05:07 ►
program notes for today’s podcast, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com, you’ll see a photo
01:05:13 ►
of the experimental device that alchemists called pelicans, and hopefully that’ll allow you to not
01:05:19 ►
think of birds the next time that Terrence speaks about alchemical pelicans. I’m not sure if you’re aware
01:05:25 ►
of this, but for most of the talks by Terrence McKenna that I’ve podcast, I’ve also posted a
01:05:31 ►
number of my favorite quotes from the episode. And the reason that I began doing this is so that if
01:05:37 ►
you go to our program notes site, you can search for various phrases of Terrence that you once
01:05:43 ►
heard but can’t remember where they came from.
01:05:45 ►
And with luck, that’ll take you to the podcast that you’re looking for.
01:05:50 ►
Last week, my wife and I spent an interesting afternoon and evening with one of our fellow
01:05:54 ►
salonners, who everyone on the forums already knows as Dandelion. And Dan told me that when
01:06:01 ►
iTunes dropped our feed and he instead went to our program notes page to stream these podcasts,
01:06:07 ►
that he found it helpful to be able to scroll through the program notes at the same time as he was listening to the podcast.
01:06:13 ►
So if you are into multitasking, you might want to give this a try yourself.
01:06:19 ►
Now, as I said at the beginning of this program, I’d like to say a few words about today’s
01:06:25 ►
podcasting anniversary for the salon. It was on March 17th, 2005, that I posted my first podcast
01:06:33 ►
from here in the salon. As you may know, for several years before that, I ran a clandestine
01:06:40 ►
audio chat room each week for several of my more psychedelically inclined friends,
01:06:46 ►
and we called our little website the Psychedelic Salon. Now, since I first was only experimenting
01:06:53 ►
with podcasts and had no idea that I would still be doing it all these years later,
01:06:57 ►
I just used that old URL and called the first few podcasts the same thing, the Psychedelic Salon.
01:07:04 ►
By early June, however, I realized that, well, this may be something that I wanted to do for a while longer.
01:07:10 ►
And so I went back and added numbers to those first few podcasts and rebuilt the site,
01:07:15 ►
which I launched on June 10, 2005.
01:07:19 ►
So I actually have two dates on which I can celebrate the birth of these podcasts if I want to.
01:07:25 ►
Now, I realize that having now completed 11 years of doing this show may not seem like that big of
01:07:31 ►
a deal, but considering my former track record of sticking to something, well, for me, it’s a really
01:07:37 ►
big achievement. You see, after I graduated from college, I had quite a wide variety of jobs and occupations.
01:07:46 ►
After only one semester of law school, I took a break to work as a stuntman in the movies,
01:07:51 ►
and that led me to a stint as a naval officer where I served in Vietnam, among other places.
01:07:57 ►
Then the GI Bill got me back into law school, and I practiced law school in Texas for a while
01:08:02 ►
before starting a personal computer company where we designed, built, and sold our own brand of personal computers
01:08:08 ►
several years before IBM got into the PC business.
01:08:12 ►
After that, I became a motivational speaker and, well, I guess that I should also mention this as well.
01:08:19 ►
I became a very successful dealer of MDMA, or Ecstasy, in Dallas, Texas
01:08:24 ►
during its wild ride before
01:08:26 ►
being declared illegal.
01:08:28 ►
After that, I worked as a legal secretary, a technical writer, a corporate geek, and
01:08:33 ►
eventually an internet evangelist for what was at the time the nation’s largest telephone
01:08:38 ►
company.
01:08:39 ►
Then, in January of 1999, I attended Terrence McKenna’s Entheo Botany Conference in Palenque, Mexico.
01:08:48 ►
And there I met the woman who is now my wife.
01:08:51 ►
Six months after attending that conference, I took a leave of absence from my cushy corporate job
01:08:56 ►
and moved out here to the coast to try my hand at being a writer.
01:09:01 ►
My point is that throughout my entire life, I’ve tried one thing after another.
01:09:07 ►
You know, I was sort of following that old U2 song that goes, I still haven’t found what I’m
01:09:12 ►
looking for. And along the way, I built a net worth of almost two million dollars before my 40th
01:09:18 ►
birthday. But I spent my 45th birthday broke and sleeping in my car under a freeway overpass in Tampa, Florida.
01:09:27 ►
It’s been a really wild ride, but over all that time, I never stuck to anything for even close to 11 years.
01:09:35 ►
So here’s the point of my story.
01:09:37 ►
Just because you haven’t found what it is that you’re looking for yet, don’t quit looking.
01:09:43 ►
For the first 50 years of my quest, the World Wide Web
01:09:46 ►
didn’t even exist, and until about 12 years ago, neither did podcasting. And while I didn’t know
01:09:53 ►
exactly what it was that I was looking for, I was sure that I would know it if I ever found it.
01:09:59 ►
It was during my 63rd year that I came across podcasting, and after dipping my toe in the podcasting waters for a bit,
01:10:08 ►
I discovered that at last I had found what it was that I had been looking for.
01:10:13 ►
And without you and the rest of our fellow salonners who stop by here each week,
01:10:18 ►
I would never have found it.
01:10:20 ►
So, thank you very much for joining me here in the Psychedelic Salon each week. You mean a lot
01:10:27 ►
to me. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.