The Philosopher’s Stone: Spiritual Alchemy, Psychology, and Ritual Magic - Israel Regardie 2013
Commentary
Book One Alchemy, Psychology, and Qabalah
In selecting the psychological method to elucidate The Golden Treatise of Hermes, I have been guided solely by personal predilection. For the Six Keys of Eudoxus I have reserved the magnetic and magical scheme as more appropriate. The former treatise is peculiarly adapted to psychological treatment, yielding interesting and significant material. In fact one could almost imagine that the unknown author wrote his text with just such a viewpoint in mind. What has impelled me to analyze and interpret these texts is the hope that a deeper motive or a greater significance may be discovered for psychological practice than the mere elimination and cure of neurotic symptoms. While, therefore, we may learn nothing startling about method, Hermes has something significant and vital to teach us about the true goal and aim of psychotherapy. This is the justification for time and effort spent in elucidating these obscurities. In concluding her highly suggestive book on Alchemy, Mrs. Atwood has expressed the opinion that “the thresholds of ignorance are already overpast, and experiment is in need rather of a motive to dignify it than of practical machinery.”46 Moreover, when we find a well-received modern writer on psychology, such as Geraldine Coster, insisting that Western psychology today is in need of a new impetus to a higher goal, then I hope it may be admitted that an examination of these intriguing texts on Alchemy will provide an impetus in the right direction.
Turning now to the opening verses of The Golden Treatise, what strikes us first is the preliminary demonstration of the essential religious or spiritual nature of the undertaking. It strikes a keynote of the entire treatise, raising the level of the interpretation of its subject matter considerably above the merely physical. Almost it implores the student to seek for a higher and loftier point of view than usually obtains. In her examination of the Yoga sutras of Patanjali, Geraldine Coster makes the contribution that not only does resignation to God imply a devotion to a personal deity conceived of in the conventional sense, but rather more. To resign oneself patiently to God’s will, or to acknowledge as Hermes does that he obtained this knowledge by the “inspiration of the living God alone, who judged fit to open them to His servant,”47 implies a thorough-going acceptance of the whole of life, so that there is no place for conflict. It suggests an unconditional acquiescence in life as it actually is, an acceptance of oneself with all one’s faults and vices. It intimates a willingness to sacrifice all other aims to the one end, the attainment of the Philosopher’s Stone.
3. The First Matter of the Alchemists is a synthesis or Quintessence of the four elements or qualities of dryness and moisture, heat and cold. Nothing can be done to perfect the Stone until this interior subtle or design body is first known and then subjected to a decomposing process so that its crystallization and inflexibility is brought to naught. The colours to be passed through refer to the fact that in all occult systems a different colour is attributed to each specific item of the magical alphabet. Usually for the elements we have black, russet, or dark green for earth, blue for water, yellow for air, red for fire. But in the alchemical working another, possibly a simpler, attribution is employed. The sequence runs—first black to represent the decomposition or putrefaction of the Stone as first it is found. Then white—its first purified and refined state. This is followed by greenness, which expresses immaturity and the possibility of complete spiritual growth, as witnessed by the colour displayed by Nature in Spring; the colour of expectancy and hope. Red succeeds this, red for maturity, full growth, and ripeness; whilst citrine or yellow, the colour of gold and of value and worth, is the final and desired resultant.
4. Here the First Matter is called Water. Elsewhere, and in other texts, it is named “A stone which is not a stone, spirit, soul and body, which if thou dissolvest, it will be dissolved; and if thou coagulatest, it will be coagulated; and if thou dost make it fly it will fly, for it is volatile and as clear as a tear.” 48
Here are described the nature of the alchemists’ basic material and the divisions made upon it. The four substances of the verse refer to the four elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. “One to two” represent the automatic division of the homogeneous magical Agent into its polarities of male and female, the two poles of positive and negative, active and passive, etc., the two opposites which pervade and characterize the whole of nature. These are the two extremes between which, in its unenlightened state, the ego constantly swings like a pendulum. It is this extreme which has to be overcome psychologically.
“Three to One” are the alchemical principles of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury—the three modes of operation of the One Thing, the True Quintessence. This Water is comprised of intelligence—Mercury; feeling—Sulphur; and energy-substance—Salt.
The Four Elements
5. This is obscurity and vanitas vanitatis. These further veils are deliberately employed, we are constantly assured, in order to confuse the ignorant and unworthy. The humidity possibly refers to the magical Earth, Meridian Redness is Fire, citrine Seyre is Air, and Auripigment is Water. The instruction simply names the ingredients of the Stone.
The Vine of the Wise is the perfected and purified Stone. It bears comparison with the opening verses of the 15th chapter of the Gospel of St. John:
I am the true Vine, and my Father is the husband-man. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away; and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through with the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing.49
The Vine yields wine for man’s pleasure. But it does so only through the application of an intelligence and a skill external to itself. Itself unaided, it remains but a vine. So by the alchemical artifice of putrefaction and distillation, the crude material of the astro-mental sheath is purified, becoming, so to speak, the wine or spirit thereof. Noteworthy also, is the fact that the Vine and wine generally are sacred in mythology to Bacchus. On the Qabalistic Tree of Life he is referred to Tiphareth, the solar center, the source of reference of all the dying Gods who teach immortality, resurrection, and healing. The glorified and purified consciousness which is the Philosopher’s Stone is likewise a Tiphareth attribution—and often is termed the Augoeidês, the deathless solar body, the wedding garment of scripture. Thus the Stone is immortality, it is consciousness resurrected from death, gifted with divine healing.
6. The method of working is here summarily described. Luna is the celestial symbol of the Astral, the philosophical Water, and therefore of the Collective Unconscious. In every system of ancient symbolism, the Moon refers to the Soul of the World. The first part of the operation, represented by the waning of the moon, the dark fortnight, is the breaking down process—decoction, putrefaction, which dissolves the matter, and discharges all and every impurity. The second half is the bright fortnight, the waxing of the Moon—the reverse half of the “Solve et Coagula” formula, the reconstruction, the coagulation of the volatile.
8. Argent-vive is Mercury which, naturally, is within man himself, in the innermost chamber of his being. It is the world of the psyche itself. Another definition is given by Hermes. He calls it the residual Earth; that is Holy Earth. Here we have a reference on the Tree to the sphere of the operation of the four elements. Another name for it is the unredeemed Virgin, the animal Soul in its natural state. Yesod the upper half of the seventh sphere on the diagram represents the state of the first purification, of which the term Quintessence can be used. “If you have found this argent vive, which is the residuum of the philosophic earth after the purification, keep it safely, for it is worthy.”50 Also note the encouragement that Vaughan gives, for he says: “If thou dost know the First Matter, know also for certain that thou hast discovered the Sanctuary of Nature. There is nothing between thee and her treasures but the door. That indeed must be opened.”51
10. On the Tree of Life there are several other Sephiroth, of which but little mention has heretofore been made. It will now be found useful to consult the chart.52 The uppermost three spheres called the Supernals are often classed together as a unit. As such, this triad is then governed by the attributions of the third Supernal Binah, which synthetically represents the Supernals. Binah means Understanding, and as a glyph of the Triad conceals Wisdom and the essence of the divine Light. Thus the Supernals are Spirit, the so-called Light itself, the concealed and unknown higher Self in man.
One of the astrological attributions to Binah is Saturn, among whose correspondences are such ideas as stability, peace, blackness, death, time, etc. Notoriously the Vulture is a bird of prey, living on corpses and refuse. Hence, it is a particular idea or a symbol that can be included within the larger abstract generalization of Saturn. The versicle we are dealing with reads, “A Vulture stands upon the mountain.” 53 Constantly recurring in all mystical literature is this theme of a mountain. The Psalmist lifted up his eyes to the hills, Moses obtained the books of the law on Horeb. Jesus ascended the mountain to deliver his sermon. It refers evidently to an illumined or heightened state of consciousness, to spiritual heights of exaltation. It is that inward divine peak when, turned inwards in meditation and prayer, the soul withdraws to its own root and source of perfection.
In addition to being that bird which preys upon deceased and putrefying things—represented in Alchemy by the corroded First Matter—the Vulture is also a maternal symbol. Binah has another correspondence or association, the Great Mother. She it is who gives birth to the divine newly formed Stone, after her surrogate symbol, the Vulture, that is illumination and the lapse of time, has devoured (changed) the substance of which it is formed. The Vulture in its travels flies extremely high, and is capable of wheeling about slowly, seeming often to remain poised and stationary in mid-air. It is also credited with extremely clear and penetrating vision, sensing its prey from a distance of many miles. For our purposes then it represents extraordinarily clear and penetrating insight, intuitive understanding, and the “immovable” illuminating Spirit within.
As the Supernals are conceived of as the Light, white in colour, the Vulture’s speech becomes moderately clear. Malkuth, the secondary meaning of the seventh sphere, is the residual earth and is black, whilst the Supernals, which are the highest extreme of the Tree, represent the same residual earth brought to transcendental perfection—to whiteness. “Red of the white” would convey a further ripening of that process, of bringing it ineluctably to maturity and ripeness. The citrine is the colour of gold,54 the perfect metal, Tiphareth, the sphere of harmony and balance. It is neither transcendental nor terrestrial but the reconciliation of both, the child of the extremes, the integrated consciousness between, the Middle Way. The Supernals are divine wisdom and understanding, the Truth itself.
11. The Crow is the so-called bird of Hermes—the volatile astro-mental body, capable of sustained and prolonged flights of ideation and fantasy. It requires no wings; it is Air itself.
The throat is the seat of the voice, the instrument of the expression of the mind. Speech is the logos of thought, giving evidence of thought. The tincture is clearly a mercurial extract, a thought-extract—it is therefore that intellectual ferment which eventually transforms consciousness. Moreover, the throat is the seat of Daath, the unnumbered centre on the Tree which is made manifest in man as evolution proceeds, as self-consciousness and perfection are developed. Because of its colour, the bird refers more particularly to that aspect of the psyche which is the unredeemed animal soul Malkuth. It is evident that Red represents Sulphur, intensity of feeling and emotion and it “cometh from him” as we ascend the Tree. “And from his back is taken a pure Water”55—that is Yesod again, the Quintessence, the water of the Wise, “the viscous humidity made by the dissolution which radically dissolves all metals, and reduces them into their first ens, or water.”56
12. Again, we have definitions of the First Matter and of the Stone—a classical and oft-repeated definition particularly. The alchemists considered the discovery of the First Matter so important that although unwilling or unable to give absolutely clear indications of its nature, they were anxious constantly to throw out suggestive hints. It was their belief that study and meditation would expand such hints into tangible ideas.
“The cavern of the metals”57 evidently refers to the interior depths of Man, the principles of whose external form are the metals drawn from the mineral kingdom. As such it is an excellent symbol for the Unconscious.
13. Here now we have the first instructions as to the practical nature of the hermetic work. The First Matter, which is to say the hard, inflexible condition of consciousness encased in its crystallized sheath, must be subjected to heat, and boiled. By these means the dryness and crystallizing qualities of the etheric substance are destroyed, leaving only the essential root nature of the substance, devoid of the rigid and restricting attributes imposed upon it by the natural self-willed life.
To refer yet again to Miss Coster, we find the following clue to the meaning and significance of heating and boiling:
It is the nature of the human mechanism to set or harden into fixities of habit, and this is true not only of the body but of the mind and emotions. Speaking figuratively, it is as though the mento-emotional nature tended to harden like the stuff in an old glue-pot. The material must be brought to a perfectly homogeneous fluid consistency, and the relaxation of habitual restraint is comparable to a melting process.58
I am inclined to believe that this last analogy would meet with the approval of the alchemical writers themselves, though I tend to the belief that rather more is implied by the technical use of the word “fire” in our text.
An internal agent is mentioned which is the secret fire of the alchemists. It is the effect of this fire which, it is said, reduces the silver-grey substance of the astral vehicle to dark ashes, the black Saturn. Here is the central secret of the alchemical art. All the operations depend upon this caloric operation, the regimen of the Fire. Almost ad nauseam are we given reiteration and emphasis of this fact. Yet no single text gives a clear straightforward indication either as to its real nature or the means of its kindling. Even the symbols employed are of such a catholic and generic nature that they can be made to yield almost anything.
We determined previously that the dynamic nature of the feelings and emotions could well be symbolized by fire, particularly in view of poetic expressions and widely employed colloquialisms and local idioms. On the other hand, from a philosophical point of view, we could equally argue that because of its penetrating, incisive and illuminating quality the intellect might be that fire so beloved of the alchemists. This would imply that they were thinkers and philosophers almost after the fashion of the Schoolmen, delighting in sophistries and intellectual quibbles. With these symbols, it is obvious, however, that we make but little real progress.
Turning for aid to the psychological realm we are confronted with a maze of symbols which some consider illuminating, whilst others in all sincerity and intellectual honesty believe to be of no final value. For example, the Freudian interpretation of the nature of the furnace, the fire, and the oven is exclusively in terms of sex. That is to say, objects such as the furnace or the oven represent the female genitalia. Heat itself is, according to Freud’s manner of seeing things, sexual excitation or libido, which he defines solely in terms of sexual desire. Popular expression known to almost everyone certainly lends some degree of credence to the idea of heat as sexual desire. In his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud observes that:
An Athanor, or Alchemical Furnace
The kindling of fire and everything connected with this is permeated through and through with sexual symbolism, the flame always standing for the male organ, and the fireplace or the hearth for the womb of the mother.59
An analysis of the alchemical text along these lines would lead us finally to the conclusion that the unknown author was indulging consciously or otherwise in a sexual phantasy. Hence a detailed analysis of it would produce nothing of any ultimate psychological or practical value other than providing us with a new set of symbols for the sexual organs and the sexual act and infantile fantasies concerning their use.
It is, I am quite willing to agree, a valid line of interpretation. And, in point of fact, it was along such lines as these that I proceeded when dealing with alchemy in a former work. In the 16th chapter of my Tree of Life I produced as symbolical of the penis and semen the ideas of the alchemical Athanor and the Blood of the Red Lion. The Curcurbite and the Gluten of the White Eagle were symbols to represent the female genitals and their secretion.60 But adolescent fantasies of this kind are of no deep spiritual significance. They teach us nothing with regard to the object enunciated as my principal interest. We learn nothing of practical means of integrating the human psyche, of developing its latent faculties, of elevating it to a loftier level of function and psychic action. I discard therefore without further argument the Freudian interpretation unless it be subjected to considerable modification and extension.
If we do accept the furnace as being a female symbol, then, instead of halting desperately here, we must proceed along an extended association track to discover other valid meanings and significations for such ideas. The sexual correspondence is a perfectly valid objective association. It is accurate as far as it goes. But its meaning is considerably enhanced if we transfer it to the subjective level—that is if we ascertain what is the symbolic meaning, either to the dream faculty or the active imagination, of women and their sexual organs. So far as man is concerned, women represent three things: First, their primary reaction to life is an emotional one; it is always expressed in terms of feeling, love, and emotion. Second, they represent sexually an object of gratification. Third, as the mother they represent the source of human life. Thus we have several correspondences for the alchemical furnace and the fire it generates. It represents something whose action is generative, from which pleasure may be derived, and which has a definite association with the emotional faculties. It may be contended, therefore, that if we associate the furnace with the Unconscious we have a valid and reliable correspondence. The female symbol is the furnace—Unconscious, whilst the masculine one is the fire-libido. In my opinion a consideration of the text along broader lines such as these will yield infinitely more meaning and practical information than if we adhered to what is in reality an adolescent fixed and unscientific code of symbol attribution.
Dr. Jung, who differs very considerably from Freud’s rather narrow sexual interpretations, has something to say on this question of fire in his Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower. Referring to the Chinese text, he remarks that:
These verses contain a sort of alchemistic instruction as to a method or way of creating the “diamond body,” which also appears in our text. “Heating” is necessary; that is, there must be a heightening of consciousness in order that the dwelling-place of the spirit can be “illuminated.” But not only consciousness, life itself must be heightened. The union of these two produces “conscious life.” According to the Hui Ming Ching, the ancient sages knew how to bridge the gap between consciousness and life because they cultivated both. In this way the immortal body is “melted out” and in this way “the great Tao is completed.”61
15. Here follow further instructions on the Stone, each one, by meditation, revealing some further point in clarification of the issue. Again we have technical references to a method to be pursued. The Heavenly Flyer is consciousness, the human soul so-called. The Fire is the internal re-creative agent, suggesting an intensity of feeling and emotion. On the other hand, the action of a keen and penetrating intellect, which burns up dross and confused thinking, may well be likened to Fire.
Quite valid at this juncture are the psychological correspondences, and they follow the same routine as we followed above. Generally speaking, free association will produce the Mother as an association of Sea. The Mother is the source and root from which we have come; that which has given us birth. Transferring the objective symbol to the purely subjective level, the Mother as an idea is related to the Unconscious. It is axiomatic that consciousness is a more or less recent development in the long history of man, and the Unconscious is its source and antecedent. Consciousness is born from and issues out of the dark creative fertile depths of the Unconscious. The Unconscious, wrote Jung, is always there beforehand as a potential system of psychic functioning handed down by generations of men. Consciousness, however, is a late-born descendant of the unconscious psyche. It would certainly show perversity if we tried to explain the lives of our ancestors in terms of their late descendants; and it is just as erroneous and stupid to regard the unconscious as a derivative of consciousness. We are much nearer the truth if we put it the other way round.
In this event, we must enlarge the psychological idea of the Unconscious very considerably. We have identified this Collective Unconscious with what in occultism is called the Anima Mundi. But even in magical literature this latter concept is conceived to have two aspects or poles, if so we may speak. To explain their nature, we may be obliged to use in addition to the word Unconscious another term not in general acceptance, the Superconscious. This includes all the finer spiritual aspirations, inner faculties of discrimination and innate wisdom and love. Both of these principle concepts have become united in the general term, the Unconscious. So long as we understand this, no harm may come. But it would be erroneous to suppose literally that consciousness has issued from the lower levels of the Anima Mundi. This latter is itself a derivative—so runs magical philosophy—of the higher more divine level, corresponding to the supernal triad of Spirit and Wisdom and Understanding.
But before consciousness can attain to the Supernals, it must have passed through Avernus.62 And this is the implication of the text. Consciousness and feeling together must, by no matter what means, be immersed in the fructifying sea of the Unconscious. Naturally, this would appear at first as a destructive process. For as Jung has so concisely expressed it:
Danger arises whenever the narrowly delimited but intensely clear individual consciousness meets the immense expansion of the Collective Unconscious, because the latter has a definitely disintegrating effect on consciousness.63
This species of disintegration, of conscious schizophrenia, is precisely what the alchemists wish to produce as their first step. For one thing, if the process is accomplished deliberately and consciously, the larger part of the danger is eliminated. In fact to do so implies an understanding of the mechanism of the unconscious. And such a knowledge, psychotherapists inform us, confers freedom from unconscious automatisms, from compulsive domination of consciousness by repressed material stored in the Unconscious, and also from the dangers of any such lack of insight and discrimination.
Their practical experience has taught them, the alchemists aver, that if the immersion of the heavenly flyer in the Sea where lies latent the internal fire be repeated sufficiently often, then instead of destruction being effected, the nascent spirit stirs to renewed activity. The German poet Holderlin has written: “Danger itself fosters the rescuing power.”64
And moreover, to quote Jung once more:
What we observe here is a fundamental law of life—enantiodromia—the reversal into the opposite; and this it is that makes possible the reunion of the warring halves of the personality, and thereby brings the civil war to an end.65
The result of this renewal of life is a second birth. For the elements of consciousness, or the human soul and its vehicle, are reassembled spontaneously upon an entirely new and higher pattern. This new consciousness is the result of the union of the several constituents of consciousness, or levels of awareness. Its major characteristic is the absence of any hard-and-fast barrier or partition which consciousness has erected before the portals of the Unconscious. A harmony is established between the human soul and infinite life without. The result is the ability of the natural vital spirit to flow freely into all the parts and levels of the whole consciousness, producing health and true happiness and integrity.
Alchemists frequently quote Francis Bacon with regard to this law of enantiodromia, as follows:
And if any skilful minister shall apply force to nature; and, by design, torture and vex it in order to its annihilation, it, on the contrary, being brought to this strange necessity, changes and transforms itself into a strange variety of shapes and appearances; for nothing but the power of the Creator can annihilate it or truly destroy; so that, at length, running through the whole circle of transformation and completing its period, it in some degree restores itself, if the force be continued.66
It is the spontaneous reversal of the spiritual life, the restoration of itself after continuous and persistent attempts to dissolve the frame and groundwork of the soul which the alchemists believed to occur, and claimed, furthermore, to have achieved.
17.The perfected inner body restored spontaneously to itself by its own inherent dynamic power, glows and scintillates outwardly with an inward light like a diamond or other very precious jewel. It is interesting here to quote Aleister Crowley’s description of the aura, which is the glorified inner body together with its own dynamic emanation:
The Aura should be clean-cut, resilient, radiant, iridescent, brilliant, glittering. “A Soap bubble of razor-steel, streaming with light from within,” is my first attempt at description; and it is not bad, despite its incongruities.67
It is the opinion of the Zurich school that the development of this inner or diamond body is the automatic adjustment on the part of the psyche itself in its preparation for death. Jung declared that such a development is “psychologically symbolical of an attitude which is invulnerable to emotional entanglements and violent upheavals; in a word they symbolize a consciousness freed from the world. I have reasons for believing that this is a natural preparation for death, and sets in after middle life. Death is psychologically just as important as birth and, like this, is an integral part of life.”68 And a little further on, the same psychological exponent refers to the “psychic spirit-body (’subtle body’) which ensures the continuity of the detached consciousness.”69
As our text puts it, with regard to this newly found but still highly concealed stone, “it leads from darkness into light, from this desert wilderness to a secure habitation, and from poverty and straits to a free and simple fortune.”70
This is that celebrated Elixir of Life which, freed from every restriction on the part of an inelastic, confused, and unseeing mentality, is said to prolong life—though we need not necessarily interpret this in a wholly physical sense. It is a truism in certain philosophies that man is not immortal though his essence is. His immortality as an individual conscious entity is a condition of things that requires achievement through his own unaided and unfailing effort.
Certain comparative philosophical views are worthy here of consideration. Notably, the Buddhist idea as contrasted with typical Western ideas. As is more or less well known, all schools of Buddhism hold that man has no individual ego or permanent unit of consciousness which is capable of surviving death, as is maintained both by Hindu philosophers and those of the West. Whilst in Buddhism the idea of transmigration or reincarnation is held, the rationale or modus operandi departs considerably from the usually held idea that it is the immortal ego which incarnates again and again. It is the Buddhist claim that man is comprised of various bundles or aggregates of attributes and qualities. Their view, moreover, is that man is a combination of several consciousnesses strung together by natural law to form an apparent unit. So far as his ego-sense is concerned, their psychology holds it to be a false perception. It is a convenient expression to speak of the ego just as commonly we still refer to the rising and setting of the sun. Such a view is directly attributable to taking appearances on their face value and ignoring the true nature of reality. It is precisely this ego-sense, false and illusory, which impedes the perception of the true nature of reality, of the universe as it is in and for itself. From such a point of view it follows that the goal to be sought—since this false ego-sense is responsible for an imperfect view of life and thus responsible for suffering, mental conflict, and psychic torture—is the dissolution of that obstinate and persistent falsity. This accomplished by various means, the aggregate, which is called man, sinks into the Void. Buddhism considers the Void most certainly not as a negative conception of nothingness, but rather as analogous to transcendental divinity, the Clear Light, or absolute Consciousness.
In the West, however, ignorant though we may be of the loftier flights of the philosophic and spiritual perception indubitably enjoyed by the protagonists of the Mahayana Bodhi, our point of view is fundamentally different. It is the Occidental view that the ego has some value for us in that we are individual human beings obliged by our destiny to deal with a very practical world. Therefore the egocentric concept has been preserved despite all arguments and efforts to the contrary. This is not to say that our philosophers fail to realize the defects and the inadequacies and the occasional lapses of the ego itself. On the contrary this is clearly recognized. The Western religious and philosophic ideal seems to be the enlightenment of the mind by God or the Absolute or the Universal Spirit removing the tarnish from the bright mirror of the mind. It tends to nullify the false accretions which a worldly civilization builds around the ego, without in any wise wishing to destroy the ego itself. The ego as a separate practical psychic entity they seek to preserve in its own right that it may consciously manifest to the world the divine consciousness which informs it. “Life and yet more life” is the prevalent ideal here. And illumination which sanctifies life through a purified and clarified consciousness seems to be, summarily speaking, the central pivot of its system—God and man conjoined in a single being.
Alchemy, in Europe, has acquired a singularly Occidental flavour, and this too is pretty much the Alchemical ideal. To manifest and use the Stone of the Wise for the further glory of God is that ideal. Its virtue over and above other Western systems is that it provides a practical scheme to this end. A glorified body with a purified spirit and soul elevated to the heights of spiritual kingship—a glorified inner pneumatic body used by a regenerated soul—is the attainment it holds up. No final dissolution does it countenance, or an absorption at the expense of the ego. This, in its eyes, would imply the extinction of the individual.
At the outset of the second section Hermes again emphasizes the essentially spiritual attitude required of him who would undertake this divine work. Were Alchemy a mere torturing and vexing of material metals, such a stand would be absurd. And, moreover, our author shows by what means the knowledge of the divine art may be obtained. For whilst all the alchemists urge that nothing can be known of the spagyric art save by the grace of God, yet Hermes states the entire process is a rational one and urges constant reflection and meditation on rational principles. This being so, the art must be accessible to rational inquiry if conducted in the right way and if persisted in so as to penetrate the convention of the apparently arbitrary use of obscurities. Meditation above all must lead to the solution of the great problem. Together with diligent study of his protracted instructions, aided by sincerity, devotion, and a complete acceptance of life and human nature, meditation will lead far if conducted with or motivated by a true spiritual motive. Hermes urges that reflection on the matter is of tremendous importance and persisted in will impart the vital clues. For, says he, consider the text as though you, the reader, had written it. In such a way, one may identify oneself with the motive of the writer and sense or intuit his purpose. Consider the writer’s motive for the employment of the various phrases and conventionalities of expression. Probe into the significance of his various instructions and “so let thy heart be fitted” for the truth.
2.Having premised this much, at once the venerable adept dives into the obscure deeps of alchemical intricacy. The “rust” of the verse is, evidently, the crippling superficial world-view of the individual, which corrupts and corrodes consciousness and its experience of life. Infantility, compulsive behaviour, adherence to adolescent expression both of feeling and thinking—these are the traits which interfere with the free growth and expression of the psyche. Not only so, but if persisted in, and if they become chronic or severe or intense, we have the production of psychosis, true schizophrenia, and other forms of insanity—rusts which eat up the metal of consciousness and involuntarily disintegrate the ego itself.
Therefore we are to take consciousness, which in view of the airy volatile nature of the mind is named by the text as the Flying Volatile, and drown it flying. The curious use of the last phrase is most intriguing. It seems to indicate the specific nature of the technique employed. That is to say consciousness is to be drowned by its own activity—whilst it flies. It would point to the immersion of consciousness in the sea—“drowning” points in that direction—by its own intellectual and critical activity. Analytical therapy would most certainly correspond to such an activity. Certain forms of meditation likewise function in much the same way. Often, during the course of analysis, the patient becomes quite unsettled and disturbed. The analytical process consists of an impartial critical examination of the memory, fantasy, feeling and the other contents of consciousness in order to divine their origin and significance, and thus to estimate their true value. Moreover the contents of the Unconscious well up from the hidden depths and make their appearance at various stages either in dream or by direct perception and feeling. It may sometimes appear to the analysand, when he has learned a little of the art of mental relaxation and can actually loosen his emotional tension, that he is in danger of being swamped or overwhelmed by the wealth of unconscious image and ideation that arises. The entire therapeutic process is accomplished by the active use of the consciousness whose contents are being examined and changed, and whose boundaries and horizon of vision are being enlarged and enhanced. By immersing consciousness in, at first sight, the disintegrating sea of the Unconscious, it is divided from “its rust which yet holds it in death.”71 That is, these infantile attitudes and fantasies which are so inhibiting and disturbing to consciousness are seen for what they are, and in the light of a dawning understanding and discrimination are discarded.
Mental conflict, when unconscious, as usually it is, is always inhibitory and leads to indecisive action and loss of physical and mental tone. Conflict invariably, though not inevitably, arises from a one-sided and unbalanced attitude towards life. It arises either from a stressing of conscious viewpoints at the expense of those of feeling and emotion, or vice versa. Such an attitude may lead to a sudden loss or withdrawal of libido. All our previous activities may become uninteresting, even senseless, and the goals towards which we strive lose their value.
Conscious conflict, however, has another value, quite apart from the superficial fact that a conscious conflict can consciously be dealt with. Our text appears to encourage conflict when, however, it is cultivated deliberately and with full intent in order to hasten the cessation of its activity. Then follows a new birth and production of an integrated attitude which appertains to neither element of the conflict. What possibly is a more accurate expression is not that conflict is encouraged consciously or otherwise, but that analysis and meditation increase the perception of the presence of the conflict so that the true extent of the internecine warfare waging within is fully realized. Jung has described at some length in Psychological Types72 the phenomenon whereby the conflict between the pairs of opposites when becoming too acute to be borne, causes consciousness of them to undergo an eclipse. A third or higher reconciling point of view spontaneously comes to birth and is the outcome of surmounting or growing out of a psychic position which is untenable and unendurable.
Whilst this battle royal proceeds, every care must be taken to prevent consciousness from flying off at a tangent, an escape, a defensive operation of the self-preservation mechanism. The hysterical escape from one opposite to another, from the sea beneath into the “regions above,” must be checked, the pain and torture of the conflict being accepted and endured. Then, says the text, the hysterical symptoms of escape pass away and disappear, and the flying volatile will truly forbear to fly. Patiently will it endure the appalling unsettling of itself, the threatened disintegration of its own being, with the quiet stoicism of a sage. And it does so primarily because of its full acceptance of itself and of the conflict raging within.
Fairly obvious is the result. If the analysand can endure the exposure of his inner life, the destruction of long-cherished points of view, the elimination of beloved yet loathsome symptoms and behaviour, by arriving consciously at an understanding of his own realized self by how much is he not enriched.
The rest of the text is comparatively clear. In making conscious and assimilating with intent the wealth of content domiciled in the Unconscious, the vast inspiration, the peace and power, Consciousness itself is enhanced. And it becomes a suitable companion. The psyche thus integrated and made whole is indeed “a conquering lord, with it adorned.”
3. Because of the highly specialized nature of consciousness, its exaggerated independence and self-satisfaction and the guilt sense resulting therefrom, a barrier is erected in the psyche of modern man between the several levels of consciousness. The treatise calls this barrier set up by persistent repression, “the shadow and impurity by which the clouds hang over it, defile and keep away the light.”73 In fact, it is common evidence that many neurotics, feeling themselves cut off from their roots and thus from the vibrant stream of life about them, imagine that actually clouds do hang over them, darkening their lives. Freud calls this overshadowing cloud of self-criticism and recrimination the Super-ego. It prevents a free and adequate contact with people and things, dulls the brain, inhibiting the easy flow of life and light, the libido, from welling up from the Unconscious. The ray is, I take it, the light itself shining over and into consciousness after the latter has been separated from or has deliberately absorbed (accepted) its shadow.
It is because of the psychic inhibitions, the “constrictions” of Hermes, that consciousness becomes inflamed and feverish within the narrow boundaries to which it is confined by repression—the fiery redness. These burn the psyche, causing it to become restless and costive, unable to accept and adapt itself to life, ill-capable of functioning smoothly and easily. Repression might be an alternative word to that employed by Hermes.
The Water is the Unconscious—using the latter in its widest sense to include not only the realm of instinct and emotion but also of the highest intuition and wisdom. It is the domicile, so to say, of the libido, vital energy, the fire of life. The association of water with fire seems curious. It recalls other alchemical allusions, such as “the fire of thy water.” And again, “Inwardly at its (water) heart there burns purest infernal fire.” Likewise The Golden Treatise speaks of the “water, which is as a live coal holding the fire.”
Invariably a neurosis is caused by repression of certain at one time conscious material. Thrust into the deepest portions of the psyche, this material remains as an autonomous unit, fed by libido, and rendered a powerful complex of ideas.
Gradually, by association, this latter extends itself. Nervous and physical symptoms of disorder, as well as psychic compulsions, owe their existence to the repressed complex refusing, as it were, to abide quietly and peacefully in the Unconscious. It becomes explosive and dangerous. And since it has become associated with other variegated ideas, innocuous in themselves and which are not necessarily to be repressed, it forces an entry into consciousness by a backdoor method. These repressions torment and constrict the psyche. Its integrity and sense of security is attacked. The therapeutic mode of release is to become aware of what in the past has happened and what is now happening to oneself; and no longer to repress what really must be expressed in daily life. The unconscious material, set free and assimilated rationally into consciousness, is relieved of its explosive tendency, and thereby becomes, so to speak, purified. It no longer seeks a forcible exit.
To face the neurosis or repression frankly, and thus to accept it, robs it of its terror, lifting it out of the unconscious psyche where it became charged with psychic energy emerging continuously from the very deepest parts of the self. Released from the unconscious where it had obtained vitality and life, the inhibited material no more acts on consciousness in a compulsive way. No longer does it seek vengeful expression outside its normal and proper sphere. That is to say, the dynamic stimulus of the Unconscious is withdrawn from the inhibitions and fiery redness, the neurotic symptoms or distressing qualities of the ego, and the “redness is made pure.” The symptoms subside, or else resume their usual function in the psychic economy. They “associate with thee by whom it was cherished, and in whom it rests.”
The rationale of the process is purification by understanding. To understand the Unconscious is at once to be freed from its domination.
4. The symptoms having subsided by the pursuit of this technique—by the assimilation of Unconscious material—the psyche having regained its integrity, and strengthened by the vast accretion of libido brought up by the released material, is definitely enriched. It is freed to the point where Hermes is justified in speaking of it as a crowned king. It rests over an inexhaustible fountain of life, for such is the nature of the Unconscious and the life force which ever flows through it.
5. Here is an injunction with regard to the component principles of our Philosophic Water—the Unconscious. The elements themselves require stimulation and purification before being reconstructed in the proposed new and perfected form. In ancient magical systems of initiation the candidate had to pass through so-called elemental initiations. The spirits of the element were invoked in four specific rites, each one relating to a different element. And the impact of their power upon the psyche of the candidate purified him, awakening within the psychic realm a dormant faculty corresponding to the nature of the element. The true power of the element is also imparted to the interior astral form which is being consolidated by the ceremonial system. But I shall deal more fully with the ceremonial aspect in a later chapter.
“Convert the elements,” says Arnold of Villa Nova, “and you shall have what you desire.”74 And Mrs. Atwood elaborates by adding: “Separate matter into its essential relationships and join them together in harmonious proportion.”75 Whilst Jung writes in The Secret of the Golden Flower:
Without doubt, also, the question of making the opposites conscious (conversion) means reunion with the laws of life represented in the unconscious or, expressed in Chinese terms, the bringing about of Tao (the conscious way of union).76
The phrase, “restore thou it, also, to the superiors by its proper windings,”77 is, I believe, a significant phrase. For this reason. The Qabalistic Tree of Life, which we have decided to use as our means of reference, may be looked at from several angles. One of the simplest methods of classification is by means of the elements. That is to say Kether is considered to be Air, Chokmah is Fire, and Binah is Water. These three constitute the first and most important triad. It is considered that this triad reflects itself downwards so that the elements make a sort of criss-cross pattern. Thus we have Chesed reflecting the Water from Binah, Gevurah reflecting the Fire from Chokmah and Tiphareth reflecting the Air down the Middle Pillar from Kether. This completes the second triad, which again reflects itself downwards as in a mirror. Netzach reflects the Fire from Gevurah, Hod, the Water from Chesed, and Yesod, the Air from Tiphareth. Here we have the third triad, which reflects itself and forms a new element, the combination and base of all the others, Earth in Malkuth. Thus, as the simplest means of classification, the entire universe and man himself may be understood in terms of the operation of the four elements.
To restore therefore the elements to their superiors becomes comparatively clear in view of the above scheme. Sublimation is clearly referred to. The spiritual energy, the life force manifesting through the Unconscious, must gradually be referred back to its manifest antecedent, and this further back, until finally we reach its ultimate source or a very lofty degree of expression. The possibility of sublimation is likewise recognized in Psychotherapy. For where energy and attention is wasted in unproductive and antisocial habits, by cultivating a more creative and socially useful one the former bad habit is eliminated by the deviation of the life-giving force from its channel. The magical view goes deeper, however, and holds out a better hope of true usefulness.
The Elements on the Tree
8. The Egg of the Philosophers refers to the aura, the ovoid emanation exuding from and surrounding the astromental form. It is this shape which is the subject of the work. When brought to fulfillment, it glows and scintillates most brilliantly like some more than precious gem.
11 and 12. These verses obtain particular interest in the light of the research done and nomenclature decided upon by Dr. Jung. I make reference here to his terms anima and animus, parts of the personality.
When speaking of the masculine which is “the heaven of the feminine,”78 Hermes refers to what Jung would consider the animus. It is the ideal principle operative in a woman’s psyche, as is the anima in man. He declares: “Mind makes up the ’soul’, or better the animus of woman … (it) consists of inferior judgments, or better said, opinions … (it) consists in a plurality of preconceived opinions … (it) is an inferior logos, a caricature of the differentiated mind.”79
“The feminine is the earth of the masculine” without a doubt corresponds to the anima. “The emotional nature of man (his inferior not superior function, not his mind) corresponds to the conscious nature of woman.” That is, therefore, the ground whereon his conscious psyche may function. Anima Jung further defines “as an image, or archetype or as the resultant of all the experiences of man with woman …” It represents the emotional and feeling aspect of his psyche. “I have defined the anima in a man,” continues he, “as a personification of the unconscious in general, and have therefore taken it as a bridge to the unconscious, that is, the function of relationship to the unconscious.”80 See also the two large coloured diagrams in Vol. I of The Golden Dawn, which extend these concepts.81
13. A vast amount of material exists in early psychoanalytical literature on the subject and significance of the Dragon. A great deal of this is well synthesized in The Psychology of the Unconscious by Jung.82 Briefly it may be said that the Dragon refers to the instincts, to undomesticated libido. We have already defined the libido not as sexual desire alone as the Freudians claim, but as the sum total of all psychic energy, the life force peculiar to any organism. Undomesticated libido would therefore represent that portion of psychic energy which has not yet been recognized and hence employed by consciousness. In consequence, it remains in a crude, undeveloped, unutilized and undomesticated state. Adding to this condition the psychic state of fear and anxiety which so to speak poisons this energy, it comes to represent a source of real danger to the individual. Whatever within cannot be dealt with invariably becomes a psychic projection, an objective something which the undeveloped psyche can suppress, or from which it may make frantic efforts to escape, or deal with in other ways.
The Dragon
All primitive and archaic concepts of the devil, satan, evil, etc., represent just such projected or objectified psychic energy that has not been recognized nor included within the scope of the ego. Ignorance as to its true nature gives rise to further fear, and this emotion invests the psychic object with innumerable qualities and predicates born and bred from fantasy. The dragon, which is precisely such a projection of feared (because untamed) psychic energy and content, is symbolic of the instinctual nature. It represents enormous power and dynamic energy, the emotional drives and urges which are at the foundation and root of all conscious development. Accepted and thus brought within the possibility of development and utilization—for denial and repression transforms it into a fearful life-rending monster—it serves as a trained and faithful beast whereupon the psyche may ride and proceed upon its individual evolution.
One alchemical commentator defines the dragon as “the self-willed spirit, which is externally derived into nature, by the fall into generation.”83 That is to say, summarily, the instinctual life divorced from the higher and intellectual faculties.
In another text Coelum Terrae by Thomas Vaughan, given in Book Three of this work, there is the following with reference to the nature of the Dragon:
I am a poisonous dragon, present everywhere and to be had for nothing. My water and fire dissolve and compound. Out of my body thou shalt draw the Green and the Red Lion; but if thou dost not exactly know me thou wilt—with my fire—destroy thy five senses. A most pernicious, quick poison comes out of my nostrils which hath been the destruction of many. Separate therefore the thick from the thin artificially, unless thou dost delight in extreme poverty. I give thee faculties both male and female and the powers both of heaven and earth. The mysteries of my art are to be performed magnanimously and with great courage, if thou wouldst have me overcome the violence of the fire, in which attempt many have lost both their labour and their substance. I am the egg of Nature known only to the wise, such as are pious and modest, who make of me a little world. Ordained I was by the Almighty God for men, but—though many desire me—I am given only to few, that they may relieve the poor with my treasures and not set their minds in gold that perisheth. I am called of the philosophers Mercury; my husband is gold philosophical. I am the old dragon that is present everywhere on the face of the earth. I am father and mother, youthful and ancient, weak and yet most strong, life and death, visible and invisible, hard and soft, descending to the earth, and ascending to the heavens, most high and most low, light and heavy. In me the order of Nature is oftentimes inverted—in colour, number, weight and measure. I have in me the light of Nature ; I am dark and bright ; I spring from the earth and I come out of heaven; I am well known and yet a mere nothing; all colours shine in me and all metals by the beams of the sun. I am the Carbuncle of the Sun, a most noble clarified earth, by which thou mayst turn copper, iron, tin, and lead into most pure gold.84
Our present text states that all the principles of man are polluted by the dragon—by an anxiety and fear-laden Unconscious. The instinctual expression at the base of the individual life when ill-understood is distinctly poisonous and dangerous. It is evident that every attempt to classify such a condition must be in terms of evil and blackness. Hence a blackness pollutes the very nature of man so long as he remains subject to the unconscious psyche, and dominated by its impulses—which latter in any event, by reason of repression and confused thinking and feeling, are false and untrue. Even the mind, rational and logical as it may seem, is not exempt from this pollution. Its very habits and its “exact” methods of thinking, its intellectual predilections, are coloured and compulsively motivated by the emotional repressions. As Hermes remarks, “By it (the blackness) he (the dragon) ascends into the air”85—air being the element representing the intellectual and rational life. So long as this unrighteous condition prevails, by just so long is man deluded as to the real nature of the universe and of his own interior possibilities. It prevents him from ever becoming aware of his destiny, and of integrating himself. This perpetual tendency to schizophrenia is precisely that which renders him mortal and incapable of living consciously and divinely for his own high spiritual ends beyond physical death.
Hence our text advises us what to do. A dissolution of the entire emotional and mental nature is to be achieved before we can proceed. The hovering vapour is to be removed from the Water, from the Philosopher’s Mercury, which is the inner intelligence, before the latter can perceive life clearly and accurately. The blackness requires elimination from the oily tincture—the emotions must be cleansed and purified following a full-blooded acceptance of their existence. Then they may shine forth in daily life for what they truly are, the fire of life. Death dies from the faeces, the substantial vehicle of the above, by the same sort of achievement. As soon as the emotional and feeling principle functions cleanly in its own right, and the mind’s perceptions and functions are enhanced by a divorce from automatic emotional and instinctual compulsion, then also their sheath undergoes a transformation. We know what tremendous changes can be wrought upon the physical body through neurosis and repression. We are also aware how functional and organic diseases and neurotic symptoms fall away under psychotherapeutic treatment. How much more so should not the ethereal vestment of the inner man react to a more perfectly functioning psyche? Such is the reward promised by the Golden Treatise.
14. Oils and sulphurs are here identified. Both become synonymous of the emotional life, and the libido which fires it. One commentator here remarks, “The knowledge of this secret sulphur, and how to prepare it and use it in this work includes the whole art of perfection. It is the stirrer-up of the whole power and efficacy and purifier of the matter; hence Hermes calls it the Perscrutinator, eminently distinguishing the Rational Ferment.”86 Here our commentator prefers to look upon Sulphur as a mental rather than an emotional principle.
17. The Stone—the integrated and perfected mind functioning easily and unimpeded in a newly constructed etheric vehicle—is quite evidently composed of various elements, etc. But in order to produce the Philosopher’s Stone, the elements as found in their natural state in the natural unillumined man, must be divided, dissevered, and broken down. For the elements in this world, so far from being simple, are compounded. There is no water that is only water; no fire that is only fire, nor any known earthly element that is complete or single by itself; no gas is complete in itself. The elements, therefore, in this world are all now compounded, mortal, subject to division—adulterated and mixed. After dividing and dissevering them, it will be possible to reassemble those principles and elements on an entirely new pattern for the further development of the individual.
18. The disintegration accomplished, it is the freed Mind united to its anima, forming a complete and reintegrated psyche, which is the key of the restoration. A new heaven and a new earth. No wonder Hermes apostrophizes the virtue of this healing water! The regenerate soul does have the power to heal and to save—a mind cleansed by analysis, aware of its own true essence, made strong by the Union with its anima, and filled with the influx of the awakened vital spirit, the libido. Here are the keys of Wisdom.
46. Atwood, 543.
47. See Chapter Two, “Section First,” paragraph 1.
48. Atwood, 111. This quote can be attributed to Zosimos Demokritos.
49. John 15:1.
50. Atwood, 109.
51. Vaughan, quoted in Atwood, 449.
52. See p. 81: Elements on the Tree of Life.
53. See Chapter Two, “Section First,” paragraph 10, p. 45..
54 . This refers to the color of the gemstone citrine, not the mixture of orange and green as in the Golden Dawn’s colors for Malkuth (which is more the color of an unripened citrus fruit).
55. See Chapter Two, “Section First,” paragraph 11.
56. Atwood, 110.
57. See Chapter Two, “Section First,” paragraph 12.
58. Coster (Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 33, original 1934.
59. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1966), 200. First published in English in London by Allen & Unwin, 1922. Translated by Joan Riviere from Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Vienna, 1917—18.
60. Regardie, The Tree of Life, 372—74.
61. From Jung’s Commentary on Richard Wilhelm’s The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, (1931), 98.
62. Lake Avernus in Italy. Considered by the Romans to be the entrance into Hades.
63. Ibid., 108.
64. Jung, quoting Holderlin in Modern Man In Search of a Soul, 225.
65. See Jung, Aspects of the Masculine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, UP, 1989) for a complete discussion on enantiodromia.
66. Bacon, Philosophical Works, ed. Shaw, Vol. 1, p. 567.
67. Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter XII, 99—100.
68. Jung, Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower, 124—25.
69. Ibid.
70. See Chapter Two, “Section First,” last paragraph.
71. See Chapter Two, “Section Second,” paragraph 2.
72. Jung, “Psychological Types,” 1921, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (translation by H. Godwyn Baynes, 1923).
73. See Chapter Two, “Section Second,” paragraph 3.
74. Atwood, quoting Arnold, 117.
75. Ibid.
76. Jung, Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower, 95—96, 99.
77. See Chapter Two, “Section Second,” para. 5.
78. Ibid., para. 11.
79. See C. G. Jung’s Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower (1931) in CW 13: Alchemical Studies, 60.
80. Ibid., 118.
81. See Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 6th Edition (St. Paul, MN, Llewellyn, 2002), between pages 118 and 119.
82. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, (New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1916).
83. Atwood, 120.
84. Vaughan, writing under the pseudonym “Eugenius Philalethes,” published this work as Magia Adamica: or the antiquitie of magic, and the descent thereof from Adam downwards, proved. Whereunto is added a… full discoverie of the true coelum terræ… By Eugenius Philalethes. London: printed by T.W. for Humphrey Blunden, 1650.
85. See Chapter Two, “Section Second,” para. 513.
86. Atwood, 121.