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.