The Philosopher’s Stone: Spiritual Alchemy, Psychology, and Ritual Magic - Israel Regardie 2013
Conclusion
Book Three The Mystic Core
Whereas the former two texts of this book have dealt principally with the obscure practice of the alchemical art, this text of Vaughan also includes certain of the philosophical and mystical notions peculiar to the alchemists. As I have earlier suggested, the basis of the entire scheme is rooted in that system which is called the Qabalah—something of which I attempted to expound on a previous page, and also at some length in other of my books. This assumption is confirmed by Vaughan himself. The entirety of this book Coelum Terrae is based upon Qabalistic implicits. For example, on the second page of the book he says, quoting one of the Qabalistic authorities, that “the building of the sanctuary which is here below is framed according to that of the sanctuary which is above.” This is simply a repetition, of course, rather similar to the other Hermetic one that “that which is above is like unto that which is below,” and vice versa.
It was upon that philosophical foundation that the alchemists reared their art. Taking the first few lines of Genesis as their guide, they sought to duplicate that vast creative process in the lesser world of man’s own nature. “The spirit of God hovered over the great waters of creation.” So also the production of the Philosopher’s Stone was imagined to be a process not too dissimilar to the creation of the universe. For whatever powers and forces their philosophy posited as existent in the macrocosm, in the universe, just those forces were mirrored and so were operative in the microcosm that was man. The alchemists sought to perform a re-creation in man that was comparable to what, in the vast periods of distant time, God had done with the universe. They sought a differentiation of the myriad elements of the human personality so that the inward spirit could be rendered independent in consciousness of the physical frame. Being thus separated from its vehicle, that spirit could by its own innate divine power gain complete control of that vehicle and rebuild it, in very much the same way as the waters of creation were manipulated and made subject to the original creative fiat.
Herein, Vaughan embarks upon a lengthy description of what in the first book of the Bible is called “the waters of creation”. Other alchemists at other times have given it different names. They named it Virgin’s Milk, the Water of the Wise, Azoth, Mercury, and the First Material. But few, possibly, have described it half as eloquently and suggestively as has Vaughan. He personalizes the entire concept in a very poetic way, speaking of her as a “pure sweet virgin”. In so far as he gives a description of her, stating that “she yields to nothing but love and her end is generation”, we at once are enabled to associate the idea with concepts inhering in our own philosophical scheme of things. First of all, we are able to identify her with what in the Qabalah is called the Sephirah named Binah, who, in a cosmic sense, is described as being the Great Mother of all. Another of her attributions is the Great Sea, that passive plastic base over which the Spirit of Life originally hovered. Because of the synthetic nature of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, we are able also to place other ideas in juxtaposition with this one. Hence when Vaughan speaks of an active and a passive agent in Nature, identifying this Pure Virgin whose nature is love with the passive First Material who is our Qabalistic Great Mother, we are able to assume that the active agent is what the Zoharists speak of as Chokmah, the Father. His nature is Wisdom, Power, and Ideation.
These are broad concepts which exist on a cosmic universal plane—generalizations recapitulating themselves as particulars within the lesser human cycle. Following the aphorism that Vaughan uses as the beginning, that the lesser sanctuary is builded on the same pattern as the greater sanctuary above, we may assume therefore that these principles likewise inhere within every human being. Thus the two agents, passive and active, are part and parcel of each individual’s psycho-spiritual constitution.
His statement that he has experimentally handled the First Material in itself is not the strange fantastic thing that it might at first sight have seemed. It is not, because, in a word, you and I and everybody else in this world has done precisely the same. The only difference is that some have realized their own true natures consciously. Others are in ignorance of it. This statement of Vaughan’s, and this interpretation, imputes a very high philosophical level to Alchemy. It is clear from our author that it would be ridiculous to interpret Alchemy in a physical, metallurgical manner.
Quite early in his book he says that there are in this world two extremes—Spirit and Matter. He also proceeds to state that in the middle natures such as fire, air, and water the seed of the spirit is not constant. Like all occult philosophy, the Qabalah speaks at great length of these elements of earth, air, water, and fire. Many are the ways in which we can interpret them. Most commonly held, however, is the view that fire is mind, water emotion, air the vital life energy, and earth the body in which all of these forces operate. Above them, and acting through them, is the Spirit. Other thinkers, however, prefer to consider the elements as so many levels or strata of what is known in this day and age as the Unconscious. Vaughan’s idea is that the middle natures of fire, air, and water are only the media which convey that vital spirit from one extreme to the other—from the heights to the depths. It is also added that in the material extreme the seed of the Spirit is to be found. To that sentence Mrs. Atwood has added an additional clause: “in the material extreme, when it is purified, the seed of the spirit is to be found.” The implication is that Alchemy is a technical process of extracting the seed of the spirit from the gross body in which it has been imprisoned for countless ages. After this separation the seed can be subjected to warmth and light and stimulated into further growth, so that it can begin to exert its own divine nature and power by the reformulation of the vehicles through which it must act. Therefore the building up or the concoction of the Philosopher’s Stone is nothing more nor less than consciously reorganizing the material with which one has to deal in life. Reconstructing it in such a way that it really shows forth and manifests the splendour and glory of the ineffable spirit that dwells always in its own abiding city within.
Like all other alchemists, Vaughan too lays great stress on that secret fire which is to encompass that differentiation. It is by means of fire that the spirit separates itself from the body in which it has been bound and by which it has been blinded. By means of fire the new personality may be built up in conformity with the wishes and dictates of the spirit. In the Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower we read: “The spirit is thought; thought is the heart; the heart is the fire; the fire is the Elixir.” Again it seems incredible that there could be individuals who were so blind to the intrinsic evidence of alchemical writing as to believe the alchemists worked with metals and with furnaces and with coals. For what says Vaughan here? Speaking of this fire, he says, “It is not kitchen fire nor fever that works upon the sperm in the womb, but a most temperate, moist, natural heat, which proceeds from the very life of the mother.”
This is good symbolism. The mother, as we have already discovered, is that Sephirah on the Tree of Life named Binah, and whilst she has various cosmic attributions she is also by reflection an interior or psychological principle. She it is who works in our interior natures as love, as intuition, as aspiration, and all those higher and finer emotions which we seek to express just a little more easily in our own daily lives. From the psychological point of view she would represent the Unconscious, or more especially what the analytical psychologists call the Anima, that vast sphere of feeling, emotion, instinct, and intuition which lies beneath or beyond our normal awareness.
What is it that proceeds from the very life of the Mother? Again, from the psychological viewpoint, we know that the Unconscious is the receptacle of the libido. We need not interpret libido in the crude sexual way that Freud does, but rather we can speak of it as does Jung. Beatrice Hinkle, who translated Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, gives us in a few words what Jung meant by this libido.
He saw (she says) in the term libido a concept of unknown nature comparable to Bergson’s élan vital, a hypothetical energy of life, which occupies itself not only in sexuality but in various physiological and psychological manifestations such as growth, development, hunger, and all the human activities and interests.175
Now, in the Qabalah the active agent in opposition to the passive agent is Chokmah, Will and Wisdom. When we apply these principles to the human being there is of course no spatial concept involved, for we must not be led astray by the formal glyph which shows Chokmah to exist opposite Binah on the Tree of Life. These principles are interior principles, operating within. So Chokmah is, from one point of view, our libido. Therefore the fire of the alchemists is libido, the internal fire—the Will, the Superior Will which Blavatsky has elsewhere defined as the power of the Spirit in action. The heat arising from the very life of the mother is none other than the power of Chokmah arising and welling up from the Unconscious depths of the psyche. The awakening of the Will therefore to renewed activity is the crucial experience of the Spagyric Art. In one of the Golden Dawn documents entitled “Man, the Microcosm” we are told that “in the Adept death can only supervene when the Higher Will consenteth thereto, and herein is implied the whole Mystery of the Elixir of Life.”176
Our text says of the fire that “it is in itself natural, but the preparation of it is artificial.”177 This we have already understood from our perusal of the former texts. And Vaughan goes on to remark that “it is not part of the matter, neither is it taken out of it, but it is an external fire and serves only to stir up and strengthen the inward oppressed fire of the Chaos.”178 Here we are back once more on familiar ground. In occultism there can be no initiation—that is, the commencement of a new interior life—in a candidate or aspirant without an initiator. This process has been somewhat described in the magical section of Chapter Eight. In the mesmeric art it is the magnetism projected upon the patient by the magnetizer which enables the former to pass regressively, as Mrs. Atwood suggests, through the many phases of his historical and evolutionary development back to his long-forgotten life in Reality. Where psychological clinical work is concerned, it is the influence of the analyst which assists the analysand to throw off, through understanding, his infantile and other ignorant modes of reaction towards life, thus coming to know and of course to express what he really is. All these systems, therefore, while expressing the necessity of an inward development, point to the necessity of some extraneous force or personality, which answers to the external fire, to awaken the individual into enlightenment.
I do not wish to comment at too great length upon this Coelum Terrae of our Welsh Alchemist. I feel that enough has already been said in commentary upon the other two very important books to enable the individual to see herein very great significance. I have dwelt at great length on earlier pages with three different approaches, three different possible interpretations of the alchemical mystery. All yield a vast store of illuminating material to assist us in our comprehension of what the Alchemists meant. In this present text I believe we have a synthesis of all these three possible approaches. Here and there one finds statements which can only be interpreted along certain lines. By combining them, however, the entire text and the entire subject, which would otherwise be utter obscurity, emerge into the broad daylight of comprehension and understanding.
It is not difficult to realize what Vaughan’s feeling is about alchemy. Nor will we experience any perplexity in understanding on what particular plane he himself interprets it. All we are asked to do is to apply ourselves just a little in meditation and reflection upon his statements. Do this in the light of the material we have uncovered above, and Alchemy at once reveals itself to us and discloses the golden treasure which it has concealed. Not only so—and this is most important—but at once something in us begins to stir, to awaken slowly into a new life. It seems as though the mere attempt, if it be accompanied by sincerity and devotion, to fathom and unravel these mysteries brings about in our own inner souls something of that divine transmutation which it is the object of Alchemy to accomplish. And while from all we have said it seems that the alchemists required the stimulus of an external fire in order to arouse the internal, I am quite convinced that the individual who attempts to divine the significance and subtle implications of Alchemy is doing two things.
Not only will he acquire some intellectual knowledge of what Alchemy is, but he will at once awaken, partially at any rate, his own internal fire. This will, to use mystical phraseology, eventually kindle the Light within him.
There are those in the universe, so the great archaic traditions of Mysticism run, whose task is to watch over mankind and to assist in the initiation of the race. They, we are told, never refuse the training of those made ready by life and by experience. How do they become aware of suitable individuals whose training they may further? These guardians or custodians of the secret knowledge find and select their students because with their spiritual vision they perceive the light emanating from that particular individual. It is a commonplace in occultism that surrounding each individual is a magnetic light-sphere, which glows with different colours corresponding to the status of that individual. Likewise it is susceptible to changes induced by will, thought, and feeling. So far as the student is concerned, he himself inexorably draws to his sphere the initiator, who will be to him as the external fire which will fan the dormant inner spiritual fire into a flame—a flame that is both creative and destructive. It is destructive to the coarse grosser elements of his constitution, but stimulating to that spiritual sperm which has been dormant for the countless ages of time.
It has been written in a book which nowadays possibly we are prone to ignore, The Light on the Path, that “when the disciple is ready the teacher appears.”179 Let us not therefore be saddened or dejected by our lack of immediate knowledge of our own divine natures. Our task is not so much to worry ourselves as to the final implication of the alchemical art. That is something we must take in our stride, leaving it until such time as we have further and greater knowledge.
Meanwhile we have much work at hand. By reflection, by study, by deep meditation upon these mysteries, we can make our light glow from within. By an ineluctable process of magnetic attraction we will be drawn to, and likewise draw to us, the presence of just those students or teachers who will further our growth in the direction of self-knowledge and self-transmutation.
The Alchemists themselves have promised that divine aid is always forthcoming to those who in all sincerity and humility do even no more than study their writings. In one sense we can see why this should be so. For, as power awakens power, and as light does expel the darkness, so by assimilating the written word of their wisdom, their illumination, and their undoubted spiritual experience, we awaken within ourselves spontaneously a reflection of what it was that blessed them.
Really, the process is not too dissimilar to the ordinary process of initiation. For example, in the Lodge or Temple where once the rites of initiatory magic were celebrated, initiation was accomplished by hardly more than the candidate being bathed in the presence of, or the magnetism emanating from, an advanced initiator who was illuminated and knew how to stir up the spirit within him. On an earlier page I have described how, in the elemental initiations of that magical organization called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the evocation of the powers of the elements—whatever they actually may be—had the effect of arousing the elemental bases of the candidate, of exciting the various levels of his Unconscious psyche. Mere contact suffices.
A similar process on another plane is narrated by Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine.180 There she describes how men lacked mind in the early days of primitive evolution. The thinking principle had not yet been developed. It is her theory, and she quotes from innumerable sources to further her contention, that it was by the contact of nascent humanity with beings of a superior mental evolution that Mind was reflected into the brain of man. How that came about we do not know, and I hardly need to labour the point. I am simply concerned at this moment in pointing out that in the contact of one mind with another, of one class of function with a superior function, the one may be assisted and elevated into a similar superior function. In this instance the initiator at the beginning of the path upwards to the Light can well be hardly more than a text. In such a text we have the living dynamic thought of great adepts, great initiators. What they have recorded as being an experimental path to surmounting Nature, as a way to the discovery of ourselves, to the transmutation of the gross lead of humanity into the pure gold of spiritual realization and divine action, can be for us exactly as if we had entered into direct communion with their own natures.
I have a theory, and it is only a theory, that the adepts of all time—the saints, the Bodhisattvas, call them by what name you will—in having achieved the spiritual heights that they did achieve, left an indelible impress on the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, what Jung has called the Collective Unconscious. At great length this master psychologist has spoken of primordial archetypes or archaic images that exist in the Unconscious of the Collective psyche. I believe that, because of what they have done, these great beings become identified with these archetypes, or themselves become other primordial images. Their spiritual liberation identifies them with the celestial substratum shared by all men alike. The energy involved in such an attainment sets into motion powerful currents of impulse and ideation which work their way, gradually and slowly, through the unconscious levels of the mass into the consciousness of the individual. Thus changes occur to an individual here and an individual there without his actually being aware of the process involved in the incubation of ideas. These archetypes are the final cause of the instigation of movements based upon apparent personal inspiration. For Jung says, in confirmation, that the Unconscious contains not memories of infancy alone, but ideas as root and stem and seed which may not develop into conscious thought and action for very many years.
How do these root concepts arise in the collective Unconscious sphere? I believe, because of the existence and attainment of individuals whose spiritual attainment has a dynamic effect upon the collective sphere.
Since every individual is not only a conscious ego, but also possesses a personal Unconscious, and since, moreover, that personal Unconscious is always in direct contact with, or is a part of, the Collective Unconscious, we as ordinary individuals have direct access at all times to those primordial archetypes, to those great beings. In a word, they exist in ourselves, as mainsprings of our psychic and spiritual life, of which we are not even aware. We have much for which to be grateful to modern psychology. For in confirmation of ancient occultism it has demonstrated to the world that there may exist psychological principles of which we may be totally unconscious.
In these secret psychological or spiritual depths there exist, so I contend, the archetypes of all the saints that ever lived, the divine images of their attainment. Hermes, Basil Valentine, Sendivogius, Synesius, Khunrath, Eudoxus, and all the other beings we consider great not only in alchemy but also in Mysticism and Religion—these beings have left indelible traces in the deeper parts of our own souls.
Logically, it would follow, then, that by conscious reflection and inspired meditation upon the writings of these beings we have at least one technical method of evocation of the divine in us. Their words, should they take root, will awaken within us the archetype or primordial image which answers by sympathy to the writer thereof.
Since these beings were illuminated, and were abundantly blessed and divinely gifted, it is evident that we too are already, here and now, likewise illuminated. We also are similarly divinely blessed and divinely guided, if only we would realize it. We can realize it. They realized it. They were but men even as we are now. They achieved and accomplished the supreme transmutation. We also can achieve. That transmutation already exists in us now—at this very moment both of space and time. We are not asked to do the impossible. All we must do is somehow to realize it. Then the transmutation is made manifest and clear. As we come to understand that Jesus and Buddha, Hermes, and all the other adepts and saints of all time already exist deep within us, then by reflection upon their lives and their words we make manifest what hitherto had been concealed. We evoke them from within, and become consequently that which we have invoked. The transmutation is effected for all to see. The Philosopher’s Stone of divine understanding and knowledge will then have been concocted.
175. Jung, Carl Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido (New York: Dodd, Meade and Company, 1949), 32. This book can also be found online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/26553579/Carl-G-Jung-Psychology-of-the-Unconscious-1949 and at http://archive.org/details/psychologyofunco00junguoft.
176. Regardie, Israel, The Golden Dawn, 6th edition (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2002), 111.
177. See Chapter Nine, page 167.
178. Ibid.
179. “For when the disciple is ready the Master is ready also.” Collins, Mabel, The Light on the Path (London: George Redway, 1888), 34. This book can be found online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14599/pg14599.txt. See also Google Books version (Los Angeles: United Lodge of Theosophists, 1920), 26.
180. Blavatsky’s text can be found online at: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ts/sd.htm.