Lights & Shadows in the History of Alchemy
Alchemy is the Art of Transformation by means of transmuting the coarse into the subtle; a dynamic that encompasses the whole Universe. Yet, this art has not always been understood or properly used on earth, since it requires a special natural language and understanding.
Actually, ancient stories mention a unified universal language spoken by humanity before a destructive pole shift and flood that brought chaos, the confusion of the tongues. Any reminiscences?
The term Alchemy derives from the word Kemet, the black burnt land, symbol of the inner transmutation from the coarse physicality into a soul and spiritual subtlety, a process symbolized by the Scarab Beetle with the solar disc of consciousness on top.
Not by chance it was said Adam was formed from the red land Adamah to receive the Breath of Lives and become a Living Soul, or how humanity came from the ashes of the gods.
All alchemical allusions to an initial evolutionary stage where the divine Intellect ended up asleep, chained like Prometheus by the forces of Nature.
Do you remember how one of Noah´s sons was called Khem (burnt), and together with Jafet and Shem, these represented a soul integration work on the vital, psychic and spiritual levels to become Thrice Great, like Thoth Hermes, the god of Wisdom traditionally associated with the original transmission of Alchemy.
According to ancient Greek chronicles Hermes Trismegistus or Thrice Great Man was a reference to the pre-flood prophet Enokh, mentioned in the Book of Genesis: Enokh walked with Elohim, and he was no more, because Elohim took him (Genesis 5: 21-24).
In cabalistic terms this means that true master of inner alchemy refined his physical and soul bodies to such a degree that he fused with a subtle reality. In other words, he refined his vital, emotional and mental soul aspects, becoming thus Thrice Great Hermes, the one who access to the Unconscious, hermetically sealed for those who are trapped in the unconscious blackness of ignorance.
This goal is still lies ahead for each seeker, but in different conditions, since humans were different before the two last great earth upheavals. Those races got extinct, and from their ashes came modern humanity.
Today however we have the full alchemical demonstration by Yeshu, the Son of Adam who became a New Adam template, reversing the Atlantean and Pharaonic degraded teachings, as we see in a New Testament, which is plagued with alchemical language. Not by chance Master Yeshu heals a blind man using his sand and his own spitle, symbol of salted water plus the earthly element. Was this an allegory of inner purification folks?
There is even an interesting link here, since Kemet was not the conventional Egypt suggested by super wise egyptologists. We´re surely dealing with what Mr.Gurdjieff called pre-sand Egypt, which in prehistoric times was the meeting point for the Schools of Repetition, to which people from all the world attended every year to study the science of inner transformation.
Gurdjieff´s testimony about those schools was gathered by Ouspensky in his work Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. And there he goes on to tell how the Armenian sage explained that those schools of repetition were the origin of many ideas that later on were used in Egyptian and Hellenistic christianity.
Even the Torah can be read in alchemical terms, to prepare the ground for the coming of the inner and outer Mashiaj (Yesh Moaj, Divine Brain).
So here we have different anointings, different messiahs, different guides.
As some of you know, my take on these issue advocates for regarding the first spiritual Adam manifested on earth as a first guide known as Enki-Adapa, or Prometheus-Epimetheus, as the alchemist Zosimus of Panoplis explains in his Omega Letter.
Confirmation of all this can even be found in the Temple of Edfu, whose walls speak of the Shem-Shu Hor or Followers of Horus, son of Osiris/Ausar, which was dismembered and fragmented, just as Adam in the Torah. They left a primeaval island that was destroyed, and thus founded the first Egyptian temple in the Zep Tepi or First Epoch, presumably in a pre-sand Egyptian land full of vegetation.
So Egypt was possibly an Atlantean colony, and after the war between different Edomite and Adamic souls. And thus came to be known as Khem or khemet, a call for transmutation.
The Alchemical Atlantis
To me it was equally intriguing to find alchemical elements in Plato´s description of the materials used in the architecture of Atlantis, which mirror the stages of transformation Nigredo, Albedo and Rubedo:
In order to carry out these tasks they extracted from the interior of the island, black, white and red stones (Book Critias, by Plato).
In reference to Neptune/Poseidon´s Temple, we find alchemical metals and even the famous chariot driven by the god, a classical Soul allegory:
All the outside of the temple, with the exception of the pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles with gold. In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, adorned everywhere with gold and silver and orichalcum (mountain copper); all the other parts of the walls and pillars and floor they lined with orichalcum. In the temple they placed statues of gold: there was the god himself standing in a chariot--the charioteer of six winged horses--and of such a size that he touched the roof of the building with his head; around him there were a hundred Nereids riding on dolphins, for such was thought to be the number of them in that day". (Book Critias, by Plato).
Additionally, just as the ten sefirot in the Tree of Knowledge, Plato´s reference to the ten sons of Poseidon that ruled over different portions of the island and the world, are a reference to fallen knowledged spirits and corrupted Wisdom, all of which needs alchemical refinement.
Plato even admitted that those so called gods who gave out the world among themselves, ruled over humanity like a shepherd over sheep, by means of persuation. Hence the idea of misleading shepherds, pastors, in constrast with the Good Shepherd (Universal Messiah Conscience) mentioned in later times. There was even an old text known as Shepherd of Hermas, highly regarded in the first Nazarene congregation, and banned by the Satanic church of Rome.
It´s worth remembering also that in Atlantis´myth, Poseidon possessed and married Clito, the daughter of the first human couple (Adam and Eve?) in Atlantis. Therefore it seems a reference to the incarnation of some fallen Promethean spirit, the spiritual Adam that did not find the appropiate helpmate (Genesis 2) and ended up listening to the Serpent mind, eating from the Tree of Knowledge, moved by worldy Wisdom, incarnating in humans that then required some inner transformation and refimement. Even though, as we know, the ambition of some leaders led to a war and final destruction of Atlantis.
This means the alchemy was not complete and got corrupt even before the pharaonic times.
The Alchemical Torah
The words of the Dynamic Consciousness of Existence (YHVH) are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace/crucible (alyl) on the ground, purified seven times
(Psalm 12:6)
Reading poorly translated Bibles ends up in a dangerous sacrilege without knowing the details of alchemy, astrology, Kabalah and numerical science, since these sacred texts are a compendium of all those sciences, as was the Tarot of Marseille, later used to feed the fantasies and pockets of supposed fortune tellers.
The name Moshe itself means "over the waters", and was not a mere Egyptian title present in pharaohs (Tutmoses, Ramoses, etc.), but was an alchemical code.
The inner work begins by working with the emotional waters and that must lead to crossing the Red Sea of passions, defeating the Pharaonic army of the Ego.
Hence the alchemical work symbolized by Moshe and the Israelites leaving Mitzraim or the Egypts; although the Israelites rejected the first Torah based on Soul teachings and worshiped the Golden Calf, the false wisdom based on a contaminated astral body that needs to be refined by fire.
Hence in the allegorical story the Israelites were bitten by snakes, to which Moshe, by order of the dynamic Consciousness (YHVH), responded by raising a bronze snake, asking for alchemical work with copper and tin, two malleable metals, like the emotions and mental formations.
This wisdom was obviously missed by those who read the Torah and the Bible literally with an ape mind.
So here is why true Wisdom was passed down in special schools and congregations (not occult organizations nor churches); although out of their ideas some made their own religions and spiritualities: for even the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table (Matthew 15:26-28)
From Pythagoras to Newton & Contemporary Pseudo-science
One of the oldest preserved references to the alchemy of the Universe is found in Plato's Timaeus, where he associates the five alchemical elements: earth, water, fire and ether with the five regular solids (cube, octahedron, icosahedron, tetrahedron and dodecahedron). .
But it is well known that Plato learned all this from his Pythagorean friend Archytas of Taranto. And where did that Wisdom come from?
The chronicler Iamblichus says that Pythagoras studied with the Hebrew prophets as well as with the Egyptians and Iranians and was imprisoned in Babylon, where he also learned with Jewish Kabbalists. But after his adventures he returned to Magna Greece with a pair of Persian trousers, introducing such fashion to the West.
Although the most important fact is that he founded an Initiatory School, very similar to the Essene groups, and he began to teach everything he had learned.
However, due to envy and mistrust, some untransformed minds could not accept it, and raising false accusations, they turned the people against the Pythagorean community, killing the Pythagoreans, a Pythagoras among them.
But thanks to providence, Pythagoras's wife, Theano, managed to escape, with her children, among them Telagues, the son of Pythagoras who became Empedocles' teacher, magician, healer and alchemist from whose lineage drank alchemists such as Zosimus of Panoplis (3rd-4th centuries). Panoplis was the Greek name of a legendary Egyptian city known as Akhmim, the alchemical land for making the Akh or Immortal Soul.
However, with the arrival of the satanic church of Rome, these keys to understanding were banned and erased, even though they are the basis of the New Testament language. Such is the bestiality of institutions that call themselves holy and apostolic.
But again, by grace of the divine desire for real knowledge, the Arab philosophers and the Sufis recovered many ancient ideas from the Greeks. Many even studied with Jewish and Christian Kabbalists at the famous School of Toledo in the 13th century. That is why we find common elements.
Furthermore, in the poems of the great Sufi Ibn Arabi we find references to the Red Sulfur that consumes the ego, an alchemical allusion par excellence.
Likewise, Jabir Ibn Hayyan or Geber, from the 9th century, wrote the key alchemical texts that became a source for later alchemists, such as Paracelsus (1493-1541).
Ironically, Paracelsus is considered the father of modern allopathic medicine by those poor minds who see alchemy as a primitive precursor to modern medicine.
This is another reason why alchemy was also banned in universities, while smarter scientists like Newton, studied it in secret, making new discoveries thanks to it.
Curiously, from all those teachings emerged not only the ideas of Plato and many others, but even the superb Western mathematical science, which keeps what believes to be true and discards what understands even less, to form absurd theories that end up being refuted by new paradigms.
Thus were born modern superstitions and speculations about the machine universe and quantum mechanics, the new Golden Calf of the 20th/21st Centuries.
Luckily, in the face of such absurdities, some geniuses of psychological thought emerged.
The study of alchemy was brilliantly explained and resumed by the famous psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who even wrote commentaries on the Secret of the Golden Flower and the Diamond Body, keys mentioned in Hebrew and Taoist Alchemy.
As Jung rediscovered, the transformation of the shadows that govern humans from the Collective Unconscious involves an inner Work on what he considered the fourfold crystalline structure of the Self and its facets, which he compared to a tetrahedral diamond. All to complete the process of Individuation, the double Quaternio, Eight faces, where the shadows no longer obscure the Diamond Self.
He even tried to find proof of this in Alchemy and Kabalah, including even the ideas on the Tetragrammaton, which he saw as an explanation of how God and the Universe integrate the shadows in a process of Self-Knowledge.
On these bases he suggested a Psychological Typology quadrating the psyche in accord to intuition, sensation, thinking and feeling, to guess different patterns of personality, which he guessed were mirrored in astrology, alchemy and cabala. Even though he quitted this investigation, lacking enough details.
In the process he even inspired his protegee and lover Antonia Wolf (Toni Wolf), who suggested an structure of the femenine psyche: the Amazone, the Mother, the Hetera and Gran Mother.
Anecdotes apart, in the next part will be dedicated to an explanation of the mysterious 7 alchemical stages that alchemists mentioned to gain access with the Philosopher´s Stone that transforms coarse metals in gold.
Digest step by step. SaLuz
