Alchemy
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Taken from The New Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus of the English Language:
“Al-che-my: a medieval chemical art whose principal objectives were to find the panacea, and to transmute base metals into gold; the power to transform something base into something precious (Arabic, al, the + kimia, transmutation)”
On the surface, it’s a very adequate description of the word Alchemy; it has a literal meaning, a more philosophical, rhetorical meaning, and the composition and the origin of the word itself. Granted, it’s only a dictionary and not an encyclopaedia, but there’s very little in that definition to work with. More importantly, the roots of the word are wrong.
“Alchemy: a very ancient scientific and religious system encompassing magic, chemistry, philosophy, hermetic thought, sacred geometry, cosmology, music, genetic engineering, and the quest for long life and immortality, among others (al, Arabic, the + khame, Egyptian, blackness; hence the art of overcoming the blackness)”
That’s my own definition. It’s not fantastic, but it’s a lot closer. More importantly, the origins of the word are correct. When you equate blackness with lack of knowledge – an alchemist is not a torch maker! – you can truly start to appreciate what alchemy is.
“Alchemy: a vehicle for spiritual purification, where conventional metallurgical practices are strictly preparatory to the purification and perfection of the soul.”
They are the words of the alchemist Zosimus of Panaopolis, who lived in the late third century AD. That’s a lot more concise than my definition without giving any indication of the constituent practices of alchemy.
Being able to draw a perfect circle freehand is, I’m told, a measure of an artists worth, nigh upon impossible for all but the most skilled and practised. To be able to do that would be a crowning achievement for an artist. But on the other hand, it is only the ability to draw a circle. It’s a benchmark, a high point, but under no circumstances could it be considered the be all and end all of art. That’s how the ability to turn base metal into gold should be considered when one talks about alchemy. An artist doesn’t need to be able to draw a perfect circle freehand to be considered a good artist, and neither does an alchemist need to be able to turn base metal (not just lead) into gold to be considered a good alchemist.
So what is the aim of an alchemist, if he isn’t trying to make himself rich with all that spare gold? Well, it might be a surprise to learn that the roots are religious, rather than material. For the Catholic Church, for example, man is the lowest of the low, drenched in sin, headed at best for a life in purgatory if not hell itself. The alchemist believes that man is unique, that he has a divine spark and is nothing if not miraculous. It’s a very old belief, but not one that has been particularly prevalent in the last two thousand years, especially in the westernised world. It’s also a belief that the Church has done much to suppress; after all, how can you tell the flock that they have a hint of the divine in them, that each one of them is a minor miracle and that they are only a few steps from knowing the mind of God, and then expect them to cower in front of you? No, far better to tell them that they are worthless slugs, and that only by doing every single that the Church tells them are they able to think about putting their feet up in the afterlife. The alchemist – and the hermeticist – have no truck with this point of view, and that’s why for the last two thousand years alchemy has been suppressed, and driven underground, and labelled by the Church as ‘The Black Art’. However, it’s been around for a lot longer than the Church, so let’s explore the origins of alchemy a little.
To do this we need to explain a little about hermeticism, and explain its close relationship with alchemy. It’s a mystical tradition, a body of teachings and a mode of thought. It entirely rejects blind faith and dogma, and the necessity of the clergy and houses of worship. It emphasises the need for experience – direct and first hand knowledge, as a means of coming to know the mind of God. As you might guess, this is entirely why it’s been suppressed. Alchemy is a means towards this end – an unstructured (but not undisciplined) means of achieving this final, glorious goal. It has, as listed above, a number of linked practices that help towards the goal.
Think of it all as a journey in a car, if you want a metaphor. You don’t need the boot, for example, on a journey, but you won’t be able to take much with you. You don’t really need the roof, but you might get wet. You don’t need 16 cylinders and a large bore exhaust and a sixteen CD interchanger and reclining heated seats, but if you’ve got them they’ll all add to the experience of your journey. That’s how alchemy works. If you know about sacred geometry, pi and the golden mean, you’ll have a better understanding of proportion and harmony. To switch metaphors for a moment, the jigsaw always looks better with all the pieces, but you get an idea of the picture without having all the pieces.
So, back to the roots of alchemy. The historical figure of Hermes Trismegistus, or Thrice Greatest, was believed to be the same person as the Egyptian God Thoth. He was a sage and a seer and ranked alongside Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Moses, and was believed to be the mentor of the latter. He was described as ‘a mortal who receives revelations from the divine world and eventually achieves immortality himself through self-purification, but stays amongst mortals in order to unveil to them the secrets of the divine world’ – practically a description of alchemy itself. As late as the seventeenth century Hermes was believed to have been an actual historical figure, but current opinion sways towards him being a composite figure created from a number of legends. The works attributed to him are now believed to have been written over a great period of time, but in most instances are said to have been divinely dictated by Hermes, or having his stamp of approval, or at least inspired by him. The major work is the Corpus Hermeticum, best described as a collection of poems explaining the elements of Hermeticism. Fragments of hermetic work were found amongst the scrolls at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Hermeticism is often confused with Gnosicism, and does indeed share many elements. However, where Gnosticism recognises evil and repudiates it, Hermeticism sees evil as necessary for the balance required in nature. Day without night has no meaning, pleasure without pain is worthless, and the truth is meaningless without lies. All parts are required in this respect as balance is of the utmost importance. Fire is bad when it burns your house down, but you feel differently about it when you want beans on toast! Thus all things have their use. Another important aspect is the phrase ‘As above, so below’. From this, we draw that Earth is intended as a mirror of heaven, and vice versa. The macroverse matches the universe. This is shown by the use of the six-pointed star as a symbol – two interlocking triangles, one pointing up, and one pointing down. This is an important statement because we also draw from it that man should be the image of God, but also that God should be the image of man. After all, in a mirror the reflection has to look like the object it’s a reflection of, but the object also has to look like its reflection – which is not as obvious a statement as it first seems.
When Webster’s refers to alchemy as being medieval, they are referring to the renaissance of hermetic and alchemical thinking. It is fair to say that the renaissance of hermetic and alchemical thinking and the Renaissance with a capital R are one and the same thing. As the great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance brought self-expression and enlightened thinking to the fore, they were doing no more than following hermetic and alchemical practices, but without referring to them as such. To do this would only have been to sign their own death warrant, or at least invite threats of excommunication and retribution from the Church. Let’s briefly examine a couple of notable exponents of the arts.
Today, Sir Isaac Newton is regarded as one of the foremost scientists that history has to offer. If, for example, aliens were to visit us tomorrow asking to learn of our culture and our scientific knowledge, we could hold him up as one who did a great deal to enlighten our thinking. Yet, were Newton to hear us call him a scientist, he would most likely recoil in horror. It is clear that he viewed himself as a natural philosopher, using scientific means to explain the workings of God. Amongst his private papers, science took up the minority of space, far outnumbered by works on alchemical research, prophecy, studies of the architecture and dimensions of Solomon’s temple, the chronology of ancient kingdoms and the genealogy of ancient kings. 650,000 words in his own hand on the subject of alchemy were found amongst his papers after his death, all marked Secret and Not Fit To Be Printed. When Newton’s descendants decided to auction off his unpublished papers, 121 lots were concerned with alchemy and hermetic thought and all were copiously annotated. His hand-written index to all these works covered 162 pages. Lord Keynes called him ‘the last of the magicians, not the first of the age of reason’ and explained his comments so:
“Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked upon the whole universe and all within it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world as a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of the elements… but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty… By pure thought, by concentration of the mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.”
John Dee was born in 1527, and studied at Cambridge, reading Greek and mathematics. He had a life-long interest in navigation and cartography, and was well versed in the sciences, especially mechanics. Dee travelled widely in Europe and was a vociferous opponent of Queen Mary and was briefly imprisoned for his views. Hence, when Queen Elizabeth found her way to the throne he was high in her favour, and indeed it was he who chose the most propitious day astronomically for her coronation.
He established his home at Mortlake, and this soon became an informal university of like-minded scholars. By this time he had written a number of works, some of them, such as Monas Hieroglyphica, becoming massively important. This work in particular had a new revision published every other week for an entire year. It was an attempt to sum up the entire three volume work of Agrippa down to a single equation, like Einstein’s E=mc². Mortlake had four or five rooms set aside for the storage of books, and soon became regarded as the premier library in the country in terms of science, and it was said that the entire Renaissance could be summed up from the contents of this room. He reformed the Julian calendar, proposed the idea of a permanent Navy, and established the English quest for an Empire.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim is believed to be the figure whom Marlowe modelled his Faust character on. He was born to a minor noble family in Cologne in 1486, graduating with a Master’s degree in 1502. In 1507, whilst living in Paris, he met hid guru Trithemius, himself a master alchemist. At the age of 21 Agrippa established the first European secret society. Two years later, he was lecturing on Kabbalistic thought at the University of Dôle. In 1510 he published his first major work, De occulta philosophia. Soon after he was lecturing on hermeticism and in 1518 he wrote a series of antidotes for the plague which he had discovered through his alchemical studies. He was a fanatical supporter of the divinity of women and their standing as the pinnacle of creation. He issued various statements concerning his allegiance to alchemy, such as, “Whoever therefore shall know himself, shall know all things in himself; especially he shall know God… and how all things may be fitted for all things in their time, place, order, measure, proportion and harmony”.
Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Parascelsus Bombastus von Hohenheim was a contemporary of Agrippa. But the two were polar opposites; where Agrippa was cold and aloof, Parascelsus were approachable and jovial; where Agrippa was restrained and self-effacing, Parascelsus had an ego bigger than his name. They were born and died a few years apart, but it could be argued that Parascelsus was far ahead of his time, and some of his writings are only being appreciated today. His approach to medicine, for example, would today be called holistic in that he would treat the whole body rather than the affliction. He was self-taught to a large extent: “I considered with myself that if there were no teacher of medicine in the world, then how would I set about learning the art? No otherwise than with the great open book of Nature, written with the finger of God.” Compare this to Lord Keynes words about Newton, and you will see a parallel.
The last notable we shall discuss is Nicolas Flamel. Born around 1330, he worked as a scrivener (copyist) in Paris, and by dint of this he soon amassed a body of knowledge concerned with all the aforementioned subjects, until one day be chance he came across a work that would change his life. He supposed it was Judaic in origin and recounts that it was inscribed ‘Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher to the nation of the Jewes, by the wrath of the God dispersed amongst the Gaules, sendeth Health’. Apparently, every seventh page contained only an illustration, and the original can be seen in the Arsenal Library in Paris. It was not written in French or Latin, which Flamel knew, and he supposed one could not understand it until one knew the Kabbala. At last, twenty years later, he happened upon a converted Jew in Santiago de Compostela who translated the text for him.
He returned immediately to Paris to carry out what he had just learned, and at noon on 17 January 1382 reportedly carried out the first in a series of alchemical transmutations. Because of this, by the end of his life he had become phenomenally wealthy, owning thirty houses or pieces of land in Paris alone. He had founded and endowed fourteen hospitals, seven churches and three chapels in Paris, and a similar number in Boulogne. He was still revered by the time of Newton, who copied out his work himself, by hand, annotating and adding to as he went along.
We see then that alchemy is more than the creation of gold, it is the creation of the divine from the mortal. But how is this carried out? It’s a question that requires a lifetime of answering or none at all. Certainly the application of the arts listed in the second definition at the head of this article plays a part. But these are studies that take time, whereas the allegorical chemical reaction is the work of a split second. Is there a catalyst that provides this spark, that triggers the catalyst? It appears that there is, and in exploring this catalyst we find we can explain another of the Church’s unhealthy obsessions.
When Nicolas Flame performed the first of his alchemical transmutations, he went to great pains to point out that his wife, Perenelle, was with him. Was it just an acknowledgement of the assistance she had given him? Anyone could have helped out if they were just fetching instruments or weighing chemicals. There is only one reason that it had to be his wife and no other person on other – the alchemical transmutation involved sex.
The subject of scared sex is not new, at least to the world. In the east, couples have been practising tantrum sex for thousands of years. Taoism involves sacred sex. The idea that sex promotes well-being, physical regeneration, promotes long life, and transports the participants to a higher state of consciousness is second nature to the proponents of these religions. In these activities both participants enjoy an equal amount of pleasure and pleasure giving – the balance spoken of earlier. In fact, it could be argued that the woman is built for pleasure as the clitoris serve no purpose other than those connected with sexual pleasure. So, if you have a system that promotes first hand knowledge of God without need for middlemen, that uses sacred sex as a means of achieving this knowledge, and requires women for both of these, and it threatens the status of the Church, how best to control it?
The answer is simple – relegate women to second class citizen. Ensure that the population knows that sex is sinful, and shameful, dirty, and should only be undergone for procreation. Decree that childbirth is an agony that should be endured, and proclaim that midwives are witches, and burn them for good measure. Admittedly, there are religions other than the western ones that share some of these views. In India, for example, there are traditions of wife burning. But there is also another reason for suppressing half the population, and even in these days of sexual liberation, and DIY Orgasm videos in Woolworths, it’s one that’s connected to a subject many of us still hold taboo, no matter how enlightened we consider ourselves.
In Christian tradition (which as we have seen before, stole its ideas from pretty much anywhere and everywhere: See A246610, The Council of Nicea) wine is drunk from the sacred chalice, and the wine is representative of the blood of Christ. It is possible therefore that this is itself representative of some older tradition of actually ingesting blood. After all, it is Jewish custom to hang meat for blood letting before consumption, as the thought of ingesting blood is abhorrent to Jews. And as we have just seen, what is abhorrent at one point in history can also be evidence of widespread use at a different point in history. We can also see from history that the chalice, from which the wine/blood is drunk, is a piece of wholly feminine imagery, and is normally representative of the womb in particular. There’s an inescapable conclusion forming here, but let’s approach the subject from a different angle and see if we reach the same conclusion.
The pineal gland is located centrally within the human brain, outside the ventricles and as such not really part of the brain matter. It’s really quite small, being about the size and weight of a grain of corn. Descartes considered it to be the seat of the soul, where the spirit and the body were joined. The ancient Greeks considered it to regulate the flow of thought. It is something of a mystery, as while the brain has two halves there is no counterpart to the pineal gland. It is known to produce melatonin. Melatonin enhances and boosts the immune system, and there is a correlation between high pineal secretions and resistance to cancerous diseases. High melatonin production heightens energy, stamina, and physical tolerance. It is directly related to sleep patterns, and regulating body temperature. It is the body’s best weapon against oxidants, and also has positive mental and physical anti-ageing properties. Blind people produce higher than average levels of melatonin to enhance the remaining senses.
It is written that in the days of ancient Sumer and Egypt that the higher classes had access to a substance that promoted great health and long life. The Sumerians called it Star Fire, and as such it was a principal part of an elixir called ‘Gold Of The Gods’.
In organic therapy circles, melatonin supplements can be found. They are made by desiccating the glands of dead animals, but in doing this the truly vital components are lost. Only one way exists of ingesting extra melatonin, and in nature it exists in only one place – a woman’s menstrual secretions.
It sounds distasteful as we have been conditioned to think of all things connected to the menstrual cycle as being dirty and shameful, but in truth we ingest far worse. The premarin hormone, for example, is produced from the urine of pregnant mares. Some forms of insulin and growth hormone are produced by the E.coli bacteria, which is found in human faeces.
In Sumer, Scarlet Women were employed by the temple to hand over their menstrual secretions. These were holy women, and their counterparts could be found much later in History. By the time of the Roman Empire, six Vestal Virgins were kept by the temple, but by then their role was symbolic and the original purpose served was long lost.
The idea that this practice has taken place is not new, and has mostly been kept underground for fear of the reaction that it would provoke in people. It would make the Church’s job of discrediting the alchemists much easier if they could show that they were drinking menstrual blood, without the populace knowing why they should want to, or see the preparations applied to it. Agrippa in particular was said to understand the uses and applications for the ingestion of menstrual blood. Even the Oxford English Dictionary, under Menstruum, lists one definition as being, ‘an alchemical parallel with the transmutation into gold.’
“Al-che-my: a medieval chemical art whose principal objectives were to find the panacea, and to transmute base metals into gold; the power to transform something base into something precious (Arabic, al, the + kimia, transmutation)”
On the surface, it’s a very adequate description of the word Alchemy; it has a literal meaning, a more philosophical, rhetorical meaning, and the composition and the origin of the word itself. Granted, it’s only a dictionary and not an encyclopaedia, but there’s very little in that definition to work with. More importantly, the roots of the word are wrong.
“Alchemy: a very ancient scientific and religious system encompassing magic, chemistry, philosophy, hermetic thought, sacred geometry, cosmology, music, genetic engineering, and the quest for long life and immortality, among others (al, Arabic, the + khame, Egyptian, blackness; hence the art of overcoming the blackness)”
That’s my own definition. It’s not fantastic, but it’s a lot closer. More importantly, the origins of the word are correct. When you equate blackness with lack of knowledge – an alchemist is not a torch maker! – you can truly start to appreciate what alchemy is.
“Alchemy: a vehicle for spiritual purification, where conventional metallurgical practices are strictly preparatory to the purification and perfection of the soul.”
They are the words of the alchemist Zosimus of Panaopolis, who lived in the late third century AD. That’s a lot more concise than my definition without giving any indication of the constituent practices of alchemy.
Being able to draw a perfect circle freehand is, I’m told, a measure of an artists worth, nigh upon impossible for all but the most skilled and practised. To be able to do that would be a crowning achievement for an artist. But on the other hand, it is only the ability to draw a circle. It’s a benchmark, a high point, but under no circumstances could it be considered the be all and end all of art. That’s how the ability to turn base metal into gold should be considered when one talks about alchemy. An artist doesn’t need to be able to draw a perfect circle freehand to be considered a good artist, and neither does an alchemist need to be able to turn base metal (not just lead) into gold to be considered a good alchemist.
So what is the aim of an alchemist, if he isn’t trying to make himself rich with all that spare gold? Well, it might be a surprise to learn that the roots are religious, rather than material. For the Catholic Church, for example, man is the lowest of the low, drenched in sin, headed at best for a life in purgatory if not hell itself. The alchemist believes that man is unique, that he has a divine spark and is nothing if not miraculous. It’s a very old belief, but not one that has been particularly prevalent in the last two thousand years, especially in the westernised world. It’s also a belief that the Church has done much to suppress; after all, how can you tell the flock that they have a hint of the divine in them, that each one of them is a minor miracle and that they are only a few steps from knowing the mind of God, and then expect them to cower in front of you? No, far better to tell them that they are worthless slugs, and that only by doing every single that the Church tells them are they able to think about putting their feet up in the afterlife. The alchemist – and the hermeticist – have no truck with this point of view, and that’s why for the last two thousand years alchemy has been suppressed, and driven underground, and labelled by the Church as ‘The Black Art’. However, it’s been around for a lot longer than the Church, so let’s explore the origins of alchemy a little.
To do this we need to explain a little about hermeticism, and explain its close relationship with alchemy. It’s a mystical tradition, a body of teachings and a mode of thought. It entirely rejects blind faith and dogma, and the necessity of the clergy and houses of worship. It emphasises the need for experience – direct and first hand knowledge, as a means of coming to know the mind of God. As you might guess, this is entirely why it’s been suppressed. Alchemy is a means towards this end – an unstructured (but not undisciplined) means of achieving this final, glorious goal. It has, as listed above, a number of linked practices that help towards the goal.
Think of it all as a journey in a car, if you want a metaphor. You don’t need the boot, for example, on a journey, but you won’t be able to take much with you. You don’t really need the roof, but you might get wet. You don’t need 16 cylinders and a large bore exhaust and a sixteen CD interchanger and reclining heated seats, but if you’ve got them they’ll all add to the experience of your journey. That’s how alchemy works. If you know about sacred geometry, pi and the golden mean, you’ll have a better understanding of proportion and harmony. To switch metaphors for a moment, the jigsaw always looks better with all the pieces, but you get an idea of the picture without having all the pieces.
So, back to the roots of alchemy. The historical figure of Hermes Trismegistus, or Thrice Greatest, was believed to be the same person as the Egyptian God Thoth. He was a sage and a seer and ranked alongside Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Moses, and was believed to be the mentor of the latter. He was described as ‘a mortal who receives revelations from the divine world and eventually achieves immortality himself through self-purification, but stays amongst mortals in order to unveil to them the secrets of the divine world’ – practically a description of alchemy itself. As late as the seventeenth century Hermes was believed to have been an actual historical figure, but current opinion sways towards him being a composite figure created from a number of legends. The works attributed to him are now believed to have been written over a great period of time, but in most instances are said to have been divinely dictated by Hermes, or having his stamp of approval, or at least inspired by him. The major work is the Corpus Hermeticum, best described as a collection of poems explaining the elements of Hermeticism. Fragments of hermetic work were found amongst the scrolls at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Hermeticism is often confused with Gnosicism, and does indeed share many elements. However, where Gnosticism recognises evil and repudiates it, Hermeticism sees evil as necessary for the balance required in nature. Day without night has no meaning, pleasure without pain is worthless, and the truth is meaningless without lies. All parts are required in this respect as balance is of the utmost importance. Fire is bad when it burns your house down, but you feel differently about it when you want beans on toast! Thus all things have their use. Another important aspect is the phrase ‘As above, so below’. From this, we draw that Earth is intended as a mirror of heaven, and vice versa. The macroverse matches the universe. This is shown by the use of the six-pointed star as a symbol – two interlocking triangles, one pointing up, and one pointing down. This is an important statement because we also draw from it that man should be the image of God, but also that God should be the image of man. After all, in a mirror the reflection has to look like the object it’s a reflection of, but the object also has to look like its reflection – which is not as obvious a statement as it first seems.
When Webster’s refers to alchemy as being medieval, they are referring to the renaissance of hermetic and alchemical thinking. It is fair to say that the renaissance of hermetic and alchemical thinking and the Renaissance with a capital R are one and the same thing. As the great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance brought self-expression and enlightened thinking to the fore, they were doing no more than following hermetic and alchemical practices, but without referring to them as such. To do this would only have been to sign their own death warrant, or at least invite threats of excommunication and retribution from the Church. Let’s briefly examine a couple of notable exponents of the arts.
Today, Sir Isaac Newton is regarded as one of the foremost scientists that history has to offer. If, for example, aliens were to visit us tomorrow asking to learn of our culture and our scientific knowledge, we could hold him up as one who did a great deal to enlighten our thinking. Yet, were Newton to hear us call him a scientist, he would most likely recoil in horror. It is clear that he viewed himself as a natural philosopher, using scientific means to explain the workings of God. Amongst his private papers, science took up the minority of space, far outnumbered by works on alchemical research, prophecy, studies of the architecture and dimensions of Solomon’s temple, the chronology of ancient kingdoms and the genealogy of ancient kings. 650,000 words in his own hand on the subject of alchemy were found amongst his papers after his death, all marked Secret and Not Fit To Be Printed. When Newton’s descendants decided to auction off his unpublished papers, 121 lots were concerned with alchemy and hermetic thought and all were copiously annotated. His hand-written index to all these works covered 162 pages. Lord Keynes called him ‘the last of the magicians, not the first of the age of reason’ and explained his comments so:
“Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked upon the whole universe and all within it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world as a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of the elements… but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty… By pure thought, by concentration of the mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.”
John Dee was born in 1527, and studied at Cambridge, reading Greek and mathematics. He had a life-long interest in navigation and cartography, and was well versed in the sciences, especially mechanics. Dee travelled widely in Europe and was a vociferous opponent of Queen Mary and was briefly imprisoned for his views. Hence, when Queen Elizabeth found her way to the throne he was high in her favour, and indeed it was he who chose the most propitious day astronomically for her coronation.
He established his home at Mortlake, and this soon became an informal university of like-minded scholars. By this time he had written a number of works, some of them, such as Monas Hieroglyphica, becoming massively important. This work in particular had a new revision published every other week for an entire year. It was an attempt to sum up the entire three volume work of Agrippa down to a single equation, like Einstein’s E=mc². Mortlake had four or five rooms set aside for the storage of books, and soon became regarded as the premier library in the country in terms of science, and it was said that the entire Renaissance could be summed up from the contents of this room. He reformed the Julian calendar, proposed the idea of a permanent Navy, and established the English quest for an Empire.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim is believed to be the figure whom Marlowe modelled his Faust character on. He was born to a minor noble family in Cologne in 1486, graduating with a Master’s degree in 1502. In 1507, whilst living in Paris, he met hid guru Trithemius, himself a master alchemist. At the age of 21 Agrippa established the first European secret society. Two years later, he was lecturing on Kabbalistic thought at the University of Dôle. In 1510 he published his first major work, De occulta philosophia. Soon after he was lecturing on hermeticism and in 1518 he wrote a series of antidotes for the plague which he had discovered through his alchemical studies. He was a fanatical supporter of the divinity of women and their standing as the pinnacle of creation. He issued various statements concerning his allegiance to alchemy, such as, “Whoever therefore shall know himself, shall know all things in himself; especially he shall know God… and how all things may be fitted for all things in their time, place, order, measure, proportion and harmony”.
Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Parascelsus Bombastus von Hohenheim was a contemporary of Agrippa. But the two were polar opposites; where Agrippa was cold and aloof, Parascelsus were approachable and jovial; where Agrippa was restrained and self-effacing, Parascelsus had an ego bigger than his name. They were born and died a few years apart, but it could be argued that Parascelsus was far ahead of his time, and some of his writings are only being appreciated today. His approach to medicine, for example, would today be called holistic in that he would treat the whole body rather than the affliction. He was self-taught to a large extent: “I considered with myself that if there were no teacher of medicine in the world, then how would I set about learning the art? No otherwise than with the great open book of Nature, written with the finger of God.” Compare this to Lord Keynes words about Newton, and you will see a parallel.
The last notable we shall discuss is Nicolas Flamel. Born around 1330, he worked as a scrivener (copyist) in Paris, and by dint of this he soon amassed a body of knowledge concerned with all the aforementioned subjects, until one day be chance he came across a work that would change his life. He supposed it was Judaic in origin and recounts that it was inscribed ‘Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher to the nation of the Jewes, by the wrath of the God dispersed amongst the Gaules, sendeth Health’. Apparently, every seventh page contained only an illustration, and the original can be seen in the Arsenal Library in Paris. It was not written in French or Latin, which Flamel knew, and he supposed one could not understand it until one knew the Kabbala. At last, twenty years later, he happened upon a converted Jew in Santiago de Compostela who translated the text for him.
He returned immediately to Paris to carry out what he had just learned, and at noon on 17 January 1382 reportedly carried out the first in a series of alchemical transmutations. Because of this, by the end of his life he had become phenomenally wealthy, owning thirty houses or pieces of land in Paris alone. He had founded and endowed fourteen hospitals, seven churches and three chapels in Paris, and a similar number in Boulogne. He was still revered by the time of Newton, who copied out his work himself, by hand, annotating and adding to as he went along.
We see then that alchemy is more than the creation of gold, it is the creation of the divine from the mortal. But how is this carried out? It’s a question that requires a lifetime of answering or none at all. Certainly the application of the arts listed in the second definition at the head of this article plays a part. But these are studies that take time, whereas the allegorical chemical reaction is the work of a split second. Is there a catalyst that provides this spark, that triggers the catalyst? It appears that there is, and in exploring this catalyst we find we can explain another of the Church’s unhealthy obsessions.
When Nicolas Flame performed the first of his alchemical transmutations, he went to great pains to point out that his wife, Perenelle, was with him. Was it just an acknowledgement of the assistance she had given him? Anyone could have helped out if they were just fetching instruments or weighing chemicals. There is only one reason that it had to be his wife and no other person on other – the alchemical transmutation involved sex.
The subject of scared sex is not new, at least to the world. In the east, couples have been practising tantrum sex for thousands of years. Taoism involves sacred sex. The idea that sex promotes well-being, physical regeneration, promotes long life, and transports the participants to a higher state of consciousness is second nature to the proponents of these religions. In these activities both participants enjoy an equal amount of pleasure and pleasure giving – the balance spoken of earlier. In fact, it could be argued that the woman is built for pleasure as the clitoris serve no purpose other than those connected with sexual pleasure. So, if you have a system that promotes first hand knowledge of God without need for middlemen, that uses sacred sex as a means of achieving this knowledge, and requires women for both of these, and it threatens the status of the Church, how best to control it?
The answer is simple – relegate women to second class citizen. Ensure that the population knows that sex is sinful, and shameful, dirty, and should only be undergone for procreation. Decree that childbirth is an agony that should be endured, and proclaim that midwives are witches, and burn them for good measure. Admittedly, there are religions other than the western ones that share some of these views. In India, for example, there are traditions of wife burning. But there is also another reason for suppressing half the population, and even in these days of sexual liberation, and DIY Orgasm videos in Woolworths, it’s one that’s connected to a subject many of us still hold taboo, no matter how enlightened we consider ourselves.
In Christian tradition (which as we have seen before, stole its ideas from pretty much anywhere and everywhere: See A246610, The Council of Nicea) wine is drunk from the sacred chalice, and the wine is representative of the blood of Christ. It is possible therefore that this is itself representative of some older tradition of actually ingesting blood. After all, it is Jewish custom to hang meat for blood letting before consumption, as the thought of ingesting blood is abhorrent to Jews. And as we have just seen, what is abhorrent at one point in history can also be evidence of widespread use at a different point in history. We can also see from history that the chalice, from which the wine/blood is drunk, is a piece of wholly feminine imagery, and is normally representative of the womb in particular. There’s an inescapable conclusion forming here, but let’s approach the subject from a different angle and see if we reach the same conclusion.
The pineal gland is located centrally within the human brain, outside the ventricles and as such not really part of the brain matter. It’s really quite small, being about the size and weight of a grain of corn. Descartes considered it to be the seat of the soul, where the spirit and the body were joined. The ancient Greeks considered it to regulate the flow of thought. It is something of a mystery, as while the brain has two halves there is no counterpart to the pineal gland. It is known to produce melatonin. Melatonin enhances and boosts the immune system, and there is a correlation between high pineal secretions and resistance to cancerous diseases. High melatonin production heightens energy, stamina, and physical tolerance. It is directly related to sleep patterns, and regulating body temperature. It is the body’s best weapon against oxidants, and also has positive mental and physical anti-ageing properties. Blind people produce higher than average levels of melatonin to enhance the remaining senses.
It is written that in the days of ancient Sumer and Egypt that the higher classes had access to a substance that promoted great health and long life. The Sumerians called it Star Fire, and as such it was a principal part of an elixir called ‘Gold Of The Gods’.
In organic therapy circles, melatonin supplements can be found. They are made by desiccating the glands of dead animals, but in doing this the truly vital components are lost. Only one way exists of ingesting extra melatonin, and in nature it exists in only one place – a woman’s menstrual secretions.
It sounds distasteful as we have been conditioned to think of all things connected to the menstrual cycle as being dirty and shameful, but in truth we ingest far worse. The premarin hormone, for example, is produced from the urine of pregnant mares. Some forms of insulin and growth hormone are produced by the E.coli bacteria, which is found in human faeces.
In Sumer, Scarlet Women were employed by the temple to hand over their menstrual secretions. These were holy women, and their counterparts could be found much later in History. By the time of the Roman Empire, six Vestal Virgins were kept by the temple, but by then their role was symbolic and the original purpose served was long lost.
The idea that this practice has taken place is not new, and has mostly been kept underground for fear of the reaction that it would provoke in people. It would make the Church’s job of discrediting the alchemists much easier if they could show that they were drinking menstrual blood, without the populace knowing why they should want to, or see the preparations applied to it. Agrippa in particular was said to understand the uses and applications for the ingestion of menstrual blood. Even the Oxford English Dictionary, under Menstruum, lists one definition as being, ‘an alchemical parallel with the transmutation into gold.’
