McKenna, Terence - Lectures on Alchemy.pdf - ►Alchemy - adad.molo

Terence McKenna--Lectures on Alchemy

Well, it is a small group and this was my intent by focusing on the Hermetic Corpus and alchemy. I've just gotten

tired of talking about psychedelic drugs and always saying the same things over and over again, nevertheless it's

a challenge to go outside my own ballywick. I mean I've had an interest in hermeticism and alchemy since I was

about 14 and read Jung's psychology and (of) alchemy and it opened for me the fact of the existence of this

vast literature, a literature that is very little read or understood in the modern context. The Jungians have

made much of it, but to their own purposes and perhaps not always with complete fidelity to the intent of the

tradition. We'll talk a lot about the Jungian approach but there are other approaches even within the 20th

century. I believe, since I don't have the catalog I'm not absolutely certain, but I believe the catalog urged

you to read Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Dame Frances Yates and this is, though Frances Yates

scholarship is very controversial, I think that to get an overview of the landscape her book is probably the best

single book between covers. It's not pleasing to some factions and we can talk about that, I mean, we will

probably discover within the group all strains of alchemical illusions and delusions that have always driven this

particular engine, but I thought to get one book that sort of covered the territory that was a good one to start

with. Well then I found out that it's very hard to get this book. I didn't realize that because it's been sitting

on my shelf for years. Richard Bird found a reprint at the Bodhi Tree. I wasn't aware of this particular edition

so, though probably none of you brought it with you in heavily underlined form, if after this weekend you want to

try and get it, it is available and if you can't get that edition, why, a good book service can probably come up

with the first edition which is Routledge Kegan Paul.

I wouldn't hold a weekend like this simply to go over a body of ancient literature if I didn't think it had some

efficacy or import for the modern dilemma and some of you may know the song by the Grateful Dead in which the

refrain is "I need a miracle every day." I think any reasonable person can conclude that the redemption of the

world, if it's to be achieved, can only be achieved through magic. It's too late for science. It's too late for

hortatory politics.

Well, it's very interesting - every ancient literature has its apocalypses and in the hermetic literature there

is a prophecy, I think it's in book two but that really doesn't matter, and the prophecy is that a day will come

when men no longer care for the earth and at that day the gods will depart and everything will be thrown into

primal chaos and this prophecy was very strongly in the minds of the strains of non-Christian thought that

evolved at the close-at the centuries of closure-of the Roman Empire. When you look back into historical time

it's when you reach the first and second centuries after Christ that you reach a world whose psychology was very

much like the psychology of our own time. It was a psychology of despair and exhaustion. This is because Greek

science which had evolved under the aegis of democratian atomism and Platonic metaphysics had essentially come to

a dead end in those centuries. We can debate the reasons why this happened. An obvious suggestion would be that

they failed to develop an experimental method and so everything just dissolved into competing schools of

philosophical speculation and a profound pessimism spread through the Hellenistic world and out of that pessimism

and in the context of that kind of universal despair which attends the dissolution of great empires a literature

was created from the first to the fourth centuries after Christ which we call the Hermetic Corpus or in some

cases the Trismegistic Hymns. Now this body of literature was misunderstood by later centuries, especially the

Renaissance, because it was taken at face value and assumed to be at least contemporary with Moses if not much

older. So the Renaissance view of Hermeticism was based on a tragic misunderstanding of the true antiquity of

this material and there are people, hopefully none in this room, who still would have us believe that this

literature antedates the Mosaic Law, that it is as old as Dynastic Egypt. But this is an indefensible position

from my point of view. In the early 16th century two men, a father and son, Issac and Marik Casaubon, showed

through the new science of philology, that this material was in fact late Hellenistic. Now, I've always said that

I am not a Classicist in the Viconian sense, in the sense that there is a certain strain of thought that always

wants to believe that the oldest stuff is the best stuff. This is not the case to my mind. To my mind what is

amazing is how recent everything is. So I have no sympathy with the fans of lost Atlantis or any of that kind of

malarky because to me what is amazing is how it all is less than 10,000 years old. Anything older than 10,000

years puts us into the realm of an aceramic society relying on chipped flint for it's primary technology.

What the Hermetic Corpus is is the most poetic and cleanly expressed outpouring of ancient knowledge that we

possess. But it was reworked in the hands of these late Hellenistic peoples and it is essentially a religion of

the redemption of the earth through magic. It has great debt to a tradition called Sevillian which means to mean

Mandeanism and Mandeanism was a kind of proto-Hellenistic gnosis that laid great stress on the power of life, Zoa,

Bios, and in that sense it has a tremendously contemporary ring to it.

We also are living in the twilight of a great empire, and I don't particularly mean the American empire, I mean

the empire of European thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern

industrialism, the empire, in short of science. Science has exhausted itself and become mere techni. It's still

able to perform its magical tricks, but it has no claim on a metaphysic with any meaning because the program of

rational understanding that was pursued by science has pushed so deeply into the phenomenon of nature that the

internal contradictions of the method are now exposed for all to see. In discussing alchemy especially we will

meet with the concept of the coincidencia apositorum-the union of opposites. This is an idea that is completely

alien to science. It's the idea that nothing can be understood unless it is simultaneously viewed as both being

what it is and what it is not and in alchemical symbolism we will meet again and again symbolical expression of

the coincidencia apositorum. It may be in the form of a hermaphrodite, it may be in the form of the union of soul

and Luna, it may be in the form of the union of Mercury with lead, or with sulphur, in other words alchemical

thinking is thinking that is always antithetical, always holds the possibility of by a mere shift of perspective

its opposite premise will gain power and come into focus.

I think it was John, when we went around the circle, who mentioned his interest in shamanism. There's a wonderful

book called The Forge and the Crucible by Mircea Eliade in which he shows that the shaman is the brother of the

smith, the smith is the metalurgist, the worker in metals, and this is where alchemy has its roots. In a sense,

alchemy is older than the Trismegistus Corpus and then it is also given a new lease on life by the philosophical

underpinings which the Corpus Hermeticum provides it. Alchemy, the word alchemy, can be traced back to mean Egypt

or a blackening and in its earliest strata it probably refers to techniques referring to dying, meaning the

coloring of cloth, and gilding of metals, and the forging and working of metal. I mean, we who take this for

granted have no idea how mysterious and powerful this seemed to ancient people and in fact it would seem so to us

if we had anything to do with it. I mean how many of us are welders or casters of metal. It's a magical process

to take for instance cinnibar, a red, soft ore and by the mere act of heating it in a furnace it will sweat

liquid Mercury onto its surface. Well, we have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science where we have mind

firmly separated out from the world. We take this for granted, it's effortless, because it's the ambience of the

civilization we've been born into but in an earlier age, and some writers would say a more naive age, but I

wonder about that, but in an earlier age mind and matter were seen to be alloyed together throughout nature so

that the sweating of mercury out of cinnibar is not a material process, it's a process in which the mind and the

observations of the metalworker maintain an important role, and let's talk for a moment about mercury because the

spirit Mercurius is almost the patron deity of alchemy.

You all know what mercury looks like-at room temperature it's a silvery liquid that flows, it's like a mirror.

For the alchemists, and this is just a very short exercise in alchemical thinking, for the alchemists mercury was

mind itself, in a sense, and by tracing through the steps by which they reached that conclusion you can have a

taste of what alchemical thinking was about. Mercury takes the form of its container. If I pour mercury into a

cup, it takes the shape of the cup, if I pour it into a test tube, it takes the shape of the test tube. This

taking the shape of its container is a quality of mind and yet here it is present in a flowing, silvery metal.

The other thing is, mercury is a reflecting surface. You never see mercury, what you see is the world which

surrounds it, which is perfectly reflected in its surface like a moving mirror, you see. And then if you've ever,

as a child, I mean I have no idea how toxic this process is, but I spent a lot of time as a child hounding my

grandfather for his hearing aid batteries which I would then smash with a hammer and get the mercury out and

collect it in little bottles and carry it around with me. Well, the wonderful thing about mercury is when you

pour it out on a surface and it beads up, then each bead of mercury becomes a little microcosm of the world. And

yet the mercury flows back together into a unity. Well, as a child I had not yet imbibed the assumptions and the

ontology of science. I was functioning as an alchemist. For me, mercury was this fascinating magical substance

onto which I could project the contents of my mind. And a child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work,

no doubt about it.

Well, so then, this is a phenomenon in the physical world and then mind is a phenomenon in the Cartesian

distinction, which is between the Res Extensa and the Res Verins. This is the great splitting of the world into

two parts. I remember Al Wong once said to me, we were talking about the yin yang symbol, and he said you know

the interesting thing is not the yin or the yang, the interesting thing is the s shaped surface that runs between

them. And that s shaped surface is a river of alchemical mercury. Now, where the alchemists saw this river of

alchemical mercury is in the boundary between waking and sleeping. There is a place, not quite sleeping, not

quite waking, and there there flows this river of alchemical mercury where you can project the contents of the

unconscious and you can read it back to yourself. This kind of thinking is confounding to scientific thought

where the effort is always to fix everything to a given identity and a given set of behaviors.

Now, the other hermetic perception that is well illustrated by just thinking for a moment about mercury is the

notion, and this is central to all hermetic thinking, of the microcosm and the macrocosm. That somehow the great

world, the whole of the cosmos is reflected in the mystery of man, meaning men and women, it's reflected in the

mystery of the human mind/body interface. So, for an alchemist, it makes perfect sense to extrapolate from this

internal, what we call internal psychological processes, to external processes in the world. That distinction

doesn't exist for the alchemist, and let me tell you, the longer I live the more I am convinced that this is

absolutely the truth.

The myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast into matter, that we are lost in a universe that

has no meaning for us, that we must make our meaning. This is what Sartre, Kierkegaard, all those people are

saying, that we must make our meaning. It reaches its most absurd expression in Sartre's statement that nature is

mute. I mean, this is as far from alchemical thinking as you can possibly get because for the alchemist nature

was a great book, an open book to be read by putting nature through processes that revealed not only its inner

mechanics, but the inner mechanics of the artifex (person performing experiment)-the person working upon the

material, in other words, the alchemist.

Well, in other contexts I've talked about the importance of language and how our world is made of language and

part of the problem in understanding alchemy is that the language is slipping out of our reach. We are so

completely imbued with the Cartesian categories of the Res Verins, the world of thought, and the Res Extensia,

the world of three dimensional space, and causality, and the conservation of matter and energy, and so forth that

in order to do more than carry out a kind of scholarship of alchemy we have to create an alchemical language, or

a field in which alchemical language can take place. Some of you may have been with me a couple of weeks ago in

Malibu when Joan Halifax and I debated the roots of Buddhism and I think Joan deserves great credit for saying

that Buddhism would never have taken root in America were it not for the psychedelic phenomenon. Not that

Buddhism is psychedelic, it in fact is fairly touchy about that, but Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in

America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root, And I wager that I would never

have gotten to first base with proposing a weekend on alchemy at Esalen were it not understood that psychedelics

have prepared people for the notion that mind and world can be pureed together like mercury and sulphur, like the

Sophic waters, to create a new kind of understanding because otherwise modernity has fixed our minds in the

category of Cartesian rationalism and so I will not claim, and do not in fact think it's so, that there was

anything overtly psychedelic in the sense of pharmacologically-based about alchemy. When we look back through the

alchemical literature there's very little evidence that it was pharmacologically driven. Only when you get to the

very last ademptions of the alchemical impulse in someone like Paracelsus do you get the use of opium. But it is

interesting that the great drugs of modern society were accidentally discovered by alchemists in their researches;

distilled alcohol is a product of alchemical work and then, as I mentioned, opium was very heavily used by the

Peracelsian school. But what they possessed was an ability to liquify their mental categories and then to project

the contents of the mind onto these processes and read them back.

Now this is what made alchemy so fascinating to the Jungian school because the Jungians were discovering the

unconscious and they realized, before Jung's involvement with alchemy, that the best material for psychotherapy

to work upon was dreams and mythology and these were the two poles of the data field that the discovery of the

unconscious was working on. Well then Jung had the prescience to realize that alchemy, which to that point, as

the gentleman over here said, had been dismissed as a naive effort to turn base metals into gold-this is the

first fiction that you have to absolutely purge from your mind, the only alchemists who ever tried to turn base

metals into gold were charlatans, the so-called puffers. They were called that not only for their exaggerated

speech but for their use of bellows to drive their fires. Alchemy has always had a core of true adepts and then a

surround of misguided souls and outright con artists who were trying to change base metals into gold. Now, it's

interesting that science, in its naivety, in the 20th century has actually completed the program of

psuedo-alchemy. You can, if you have a sufficiently powerful nuclear reactor, change lead into gold. I mean, the

cost is staggering. It has no economic importance whatsoever but it can be done by bombarding gold with a

sufficient amount of heavy particles. Lead, you can change it into gold, but this is not what the original intent

was. In fact, when we look at the history of 20th century science we will see that, in a way, it's a

misunderstanding of what the alchemical goals were to be and, one by one, it has done these things that were

stated goals of the alchemists except that the alchemists always spoke in similies and in a secret control

language that was symbolic.

O.k., now, another point that was brought up in going around the circle was the externalization of the soul and

what we're trying to do in this weekend is study and talk about the idea of redeeming the world through magic.

And how is this to be done? Well, the philosopher's stone is a complex of ideas that, no matter how you divide it,

no matter how you slice it, it's very difficult to hold the pith essence of this concept, but what it really

comes down to is the idea that spirit is somehow resident in matter in a very diffuse form. The goal of hermetic

thinking and later alchemy is the concentration and redemption of this spirit, a focusing of it, a bringing of it

together. This is an idea that was common in the Hellenistic world not only to hermetic thinking but also to

Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is the idea that somehow the pure, holy, real light of being was scattered through a universe of

darkness and of Saturnine power and that the goal is that by a process which we can call yogic or alchemical or

medatative or moral/ethical, the light must be gathered and concentrated in the body and then somehow released

and redeemed. All esoteric traditions, East and West, talk about the creation of this body of light and we will

not, in this weekend, talk very much about alchemy, non-western alchemy, Taoist and Vedic alchemy, but in those

systems too the notion is about the creation of this vehicle of light. This is one metaphor for the

externalization of the soul.

The philosopher's stone is another and I will challenge you to try and imagine what the achievement of the

philosopher's stone would be like because it's in trying to think that way that you begin to dissolve the

categories of the Cartesian trap. So, image for a moment an object, a material, which can literally do anything.

It can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever. So what do I mean? I mean that if you

possess the philosopher's stone and you were hungry, you could eat it. If you needed to go somewhere you could

spread it out and sit on it and it would take you there. If you needed a piece of information, it would become

the equivalent of a computer screen and it would tell you things. If you needed a companion, it would talk to you.

If you needed to take a shower you could hold it over your head and water would pour out. Now, you see, this is

an impossibility. That's right, it's a coincidencia apositorum. It is something that behaves like imagination and

matter without ever doing damage to the ontological status of one or the other. This sounds like pure pathology

in the context of modern thinking because we expect things to stay still and be what they are and undergo the

growth and degradation that is inimical to them, but no, the redemption of spirit and matter means the

exteriorization of the human soul and the interiorization of the human body so that it is an image freely

commanded in the imagination.

Imagination. I think this is the first time I've used this word this evening. The imagination is central to the

alchemical opus because it is literally a process that goes on the realm of the imagination taken to be a

physical dimension. And I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in

terms of a journey into the imagination. We have exhausted the world of three dimensional space. We are polluting

it. We are overpopulating it. We are using it up. Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the

dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand

years of science and Christianity and rationalism and we have to re-empower and re-encounter the mind and we can

do this psychedelically, we can do this yogically, or we can do it alchemically and hermetically.

Now there is present in the world at the moment, or at least I like to think so, an impulse which I have named

the archaic revival. What happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble, and you can use this in your

own life-when you really get in trouble-what you should do is say "what did I believe in the last sane moments

that I experienced" and then go back to that moment and act from it even if you no longer believe it. Now in the

Renaissance this happened. The scholastic universe dissolved. New classes, new forms of wealth, new systems of

navigation, new scientific tools, made it impossible to maintain the fiction of the Medieval cosmology and there

was a sense that the world was dissolving. Good alchemical word-dissolving. And in that moment the movers and

shakers of that civilization reached backwards in time to the last sane moment they had ever known and they

discovered that it was Classical Greece and they invented classicism. In the 15th and 16th century the texts

which had lain in monasteries in Syria and Asia Minor forgotten and untranslated for centuries were brought to

the Florentine council by people like Gimistos Placo(sp?) and others and translated and classicism was born-its

laws, its philosophy, its aesthetics. We are the inheritors of that tradition but it is now, once again,

exhausted and our cultural crisis is much greater. It is global. It is total. It involves every man, woman and

child on this planet, every bug, bird and tree is caught up in the cultural crisis that we have engendered. Our

ideas are exhausted-the ideas that we inherit out of Christianity and its half-brother science, or its bastard

child science. So, what I'm suggesting is that an archaic revival needs to take place and it seems to be well in

hand in the revival of Goddess worship and shamanism and partnership but notice that these things are old-10,000

years or more old-but there was an unbroken thread that, however thinly drawn, persists right up to the present.

McKenna, Terence - Lectures on Alchemy.pdf

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