For the ancients, memory could influence the surrounding air.
For a long time it was believed that the writer’s essence could be preserved in a manuscript.
X
X
Yet, everything can only be understood in its entirety.
X
Yet, everything can only be understood in its entirety.
Unfortunately, due to our mind’s field limitations, we walk in segments, and if we go too far, we get lost in an explosion of points. Beyond the knowledge acquired from individual sciences, and despite philosophical views continuing to fluctuate from one system to another, we are left with the task of understanding, unless we transform ancient learning into meaningless chaos.
Métis
Her name meant Wisdom, but also a skill – or the intelligence of cunning – Métis was exercised on very different levels, but always for practical purposes: the bricklayer, the politician, the helmsman, the weaver. All protean realities that did not lend themselves to the immutable reasoning of abstract philosophical conjecture, and one which philosophers hastened to reject as ‘non-knowledge’. Even today it is incomprehensible to us that ancient symbolism is based on the practice of ancient crafts. Furthermore, the scholar must accept that a good percentage of esoteric symbolism reflects the science of matter, i.e. Alchemy.
Theurgy
If the word Alchemy is relatively recent, so is the word Theurgy. First attested in the fragmentary Chaldean Oracles and widely respected and used by later Neoplatonic philosophers, the meaning of Theurgy is disputed. Although it means “work of God” or “divine work”, it also designates a set of ritual routines coupled with a lifestyle based on ethical and intellectual practices. The aim of Theurgy was contact, assimilation, and, ultimately, union with what was defined as “divine”. In some ancient cultures Theurgy was considered such a complex discipline that it became a “sacred game”. Indeed, an actual “sacred hunt”, given the difficulty for the deities to capture a human being.
Sacred Game
Had it not been a real sacred game, we need to deepen why the ancient Celtic and Hittite deities who presided over the Chthonic world were often portrayed with gaming boards. However, the prohibition of practicing on the ritual board for purely recreational purposes was well known. It is easy to say that the gambling part of this priestly game soon entered the popular imagination: a ritual that puts the living in contact with the underworld can only be defined as “taking a huge risk” or at least “enduring a great fright”. Which humans, needless to say, find very exciting
Alchemy is Physics.
A bare hands Physics, within the reach of the Neolithic, but Physics nonetheless.
Unknowingly, Alchemists called their physics a “living organism”.
Alchemy works in a strange way, to the point that its goals seem alien to common belief. Neolithic historians tell us of a primordial vision of the world without disconnections or separations, where the air was imagined as teeming with life, however ineffable. They told us that the ancients did not have our conception of time as an ineluctable vector, but rather of an eternal present that must slavishly repeat the instructions received from legendary beings. Paradoxically, a modern alchemist today has the opportunity to better understand the archaic worldview through the discoveries of physics: particles, quasiparticles, wave functions, spintronics, quantum entanglement, nonlocality, protyposis, and even the properties of sound. Through the complex mathematical and engineering representations that constitute the substantial difference between us and the ancients, perhaps we can grasp that “private channel” concept which best defines Alchemy.
Stars vs Sun.
Only at night the stars can dive into the most inaccessible recesses of the Earth’s crust.
The stars and the sun may not act in unison, but in competition with each other.
It’s strange for us today to know that, at certain times of the year and day, the alchemists’ stellar ocean could actually circumvent the sun’s influence on Earth. Were it not for ancient knowledge, it would have been easy to imagine day and night as two separate realms: during the day, the blinding sun ruled, while at night, a blanket of stars completed the earth. This is the first alchemical axiom, the basis and foundation of all operations.
The second axiom is based on the moon’s inclusion in this competition: during the day, the sun prevents the stellar Spiritus Mundi from approaching the Earth and leaves it hovering in the upper atmosphere. At night, thanks to the moon, stellar influences can descend to penetrate the most inaccessible recesses of the Earth’s crust. It is well known that ancient agricultural calendars indicated stellar cycles rather than the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
The third alchemical axiom concerns the non-division of heaven and earth, in fact the alchemists grouped all the movements of the cosmos and the earth’s core in a “philosophical sea”. From this concept comes the definition of “alchemical machine or world machine” which appears so scandalous and inappropriate to spiritualists.
Air, oscillating and teeming, weaves at the loom and builds palaces.
For alchemists, air movements are “pantogenesis” or generators of all things.
Take Care, Alchemist, not to cut the ties.
For alchemists there were no clear boundaries between objects, but a continuum so dense that it could be cut with a knife, although invisible, ethereal and formless. The main concept is that the life principle or soul is itself windy or is carried by the wind. The languages we speak are ultimately languages of the air. Ultimately, air is moved by that which has the property of moving. Dust, nourishment of life, primary matter and bridge between different densities. For the ancients, the peculiar airborne alchemical “humidity” was not caused by terrestrial waters but by the proximity of the moon. In fact, the “space” between the moon and the earth was called “air“. While the upper part was called the aether. The latter has very little to do with the modern conception: in fact, it is closer to fire than to a void.