Alchemy and Me
How I came to learn about Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and other occult religio-philosophical ways....
I've been interested in Hermeticism and alchemy since I was about 19. It started with a Psychology 101 course at Glendale Community College, where I was introduced to the work of a Swiss psychiatrist named Carl Jung. Jung was the thinker that gave voice to and coalesced ideas such as:
Archetype—a concept denoting universal and recurring mental images or themes.
Collective unconscious—aspects of unconsciousness experienced by all people in different cultures.
The complex—the repressed organization of images and experiences that governs perception and behavior.
Persona—element of the personality that arises for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience; the masks one puts on in various situations.
The self—an archetype, the central overarching concept governing the individuation process, symbolized by mandalas.
The shadow—an archetype; the repressed, therefore unknown, aspects of the personality, including those often considered to not benefit the individual.
His work gave language to the thoughts swirling in me’own head, so I quickly became a devotee (albeit a secret one). His work coincided with the work of Sigmund Freud, the famed founder of Psychoanalysis, another conception I had just learned of and was excited by. Jung was one of the earliest proponents of Freud’s Psychoanalysis conception. All of it was just mind-blowing stuff for me. I had found a path to explore the thoughts that seemed to be naturally occurring in my mind.
As I recall, the lecturer in the class referred to a text Jung wrote in 1946 entitled Psychology and Alchemy. It’s out of the 12th volume of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. In it, Jung illustrates analogies between alchemy, Christian dogma, and psychological symbolism. I was keen to get a hold of it. But in the process, I came across another of Jung’s works, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, in the 10th volume, so I read THAT instead. I didn’t get to Psychology and Alchemy. Until years later…
Psychology and Alchemy is Jung’s attempt to deepen his expression/understanding of the collective unconscious. The text is in three parts. In the first, Jung explains that alchemy draws on many symbols, images, and patterns from the Collective Unconscious of the Western mind. He argues for a deeper understanding of Western spiritual traditions like Esoteric Christianity and Alchemy, alongside examining Eastern ones like Buddhism and Hinduism. The second part recounts several cycles of dreams as told to him by one of his patients. Jung analyzes these dreams and interprets them by relating them to alchemical imagery. The final part explores religious ideas in alchemy, such as symbolism, our psychic nature, and the history of religions.
The Philosophical Research Society
During one of my days at Glendale Community College, I finally pulled my car into The Philosophical Research Society (PRS)—a campus off of Los Feliz Blvd., near the entrance of the famed Griffith Park. I had driven by it so many times and noted a statue of ancient Egyptian style gracing the outermost part of the campus. But I hadn’t stopped in to see what the place was about.
PRS is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit institution founded in 1934 by Manly Palmer Hall. It was to serve as a repository of multicultural wisdom sources and a learning center. It was funded by the monies of Caroline Lloyd and her daughter Estelle—members of a family who controlled an oil field in Ventura County, California.
Only one text I’m aware of details the nature of the relationship between these women and the Hall. Nonetheless, what is recorded is that it’s with their funds that he, a Canadian author, lecturer, and astrologer, traveled within Europe and Asia throughout the 1930s and acquired a substantial collection of rare books and manuscripts about Alchemy and esotericism (the largest trove of which came from a single sit at a Sotheby’s auction house).
All told, Hall collected 68 volumes (243 manuscripts) on Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, alchemy, and other related arts. This collection contained Babylonian tablets, 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones, a Japanese Buddhist sutra written in blood, etc. Much of it was on display for the public—at PRS, which just so happened to be 5.5 miles from where I grew up.
I discovered PRS and Hall’s amazing library just when he died in 1990. He had authored hundreds of articles and treatises on various topics. PRS would print/bind the texts and sell them in their local bookstore. The library is adjacent to the bookstore. It had become one of my secret getaways…
As a teenager, I remember asking about the library once. As I recall, the bookstore clerk said that it was the library of the person that founded the organization and that it contained some really rare pieces, such as:
Two triangular Masonic manuscripts
An early 17th-century illuminated Neoplatonist manuscript charting the search for the Philosopher’s Stone
17th-century French manuscript copy of Michael Maier’s “Atlanta fugiens”
I didn’t know what that stuff meant then. “Neoplatonist”? “Philosopher’s Stone”? Michael Maier? Sounded interesting. But Hall’s own publications with titles like “Atlantis and the Gods of Antiquity” or “The Secret Destiny of America” were SOOOO much more enticing to me.
So, that’s what I explored.
Terence McKenna
Simultaneously, my dear friend Ara had just started studying philosophy at the University of Southern California. On some sunny afternoon, Ara mentioned that one of his professors was lecturing on a text entitled Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna. Ara didn’t recall many details, but he did mention the subtitle—The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge; a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. How are you NOT going to read that?
Over the ensuing years, I read everything McKenna wrote and started collecting the cassette tape-recorded lectures he gave at various locations like Esalen Institute in Monterey, CA, or at the Starwood Festival or the Whole Life Expo, etc.
With a vague understanding that Manly Hall, this fascinating Los Angeles mystic, had collected a library of rare texts, including texts on this thing called “Hermeticism” in the background, I spent much of my early twenties learning from Terence McKenna’s work. He was an American ethnobotanist, lecturer, author, and advocate for collecting and preserving plants used as entheogens.
McKenna was born in the mid-40s and sadly died at age 53. He is almost entirely known today as the prime purveyor of the Stoned Ape Theory—a hypothesis concerning the influence of psilocybin mushrooms on human evolution, which he proposed in his 1992 book, Food of the Gods (mentioned above). McKenna (inaccurately) cited studies from the late 60s-early 70s conducted by pharmacologist Roland Fischer to posit that the transformation of Homo erectus to the species Homo sapiens mainly had to do with the addition of the mushroom Psilocybe cubensis to the diet. He claimed that this progressive event probably took place around 100,000 BC during the desertification of the African continent.
Our human forerunners were forced from the increasingly shrinking tropical canopy in search of new food sources. Mckenna believed they would’ve been following large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that were undoubtedly part of their new diet. As such, McKenna suggested they would’ve spotted and started eating the Psilocybe cubensis because it’s a dung-loving mushroom often found growing out of cow patties.
Although McKenna’s argumentation ruled my thinking about our evolution up and through the late 90s, and that over the past five years or so, thanks to the Joe Rogan podcast series, it has garnered a new life for itself, the Stoned-Ape Theory is not evinced by much paleoanthropological evidence. Sure, there are some interesting elements that can be pointed to (e.g., John Alegro’s 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross is a great place to start if you’re interested in this rabbit hole…). But all in all, I lost interest in the specific claim and generalized my understanding of it to a broader triggering mechanism.
And so did he, which is why I’m telling you about McKenna. Although I didn’t know it until about five years ago, McKenna also began to speak of his theory in broader terms (i.e., he got sick of talking about the DMT experience and his work with shamanism). The focus shouldn’t be on Psilocybe’s evolutionary effects. Instead, McKenna wanted his students to spend more time with how entheogens may’ve coaxed the faculty of controlled sound production out of our early primate selves. THAT’S what may’ve led to the REAL missing link—language!
It turns out that secretly (and so appropriately), while he was making a living with his ethnobotanical adventurers, ethnopharmacological lectures, and books on the topic of psychedelic drugs, he was much more fascinated by his own decades-long study of the European alchemical tradition, the use of virtual reality technologies (which were just being discussed seriously for the first time in the 90s) as well as this thing called Hermeticism.
WHAT?! That stuff from The Philosophical Research Society??
Yup.
Unlike Hall, McKenna didn’t write anything about Hermeticism. He did lecture on the topic, albeit rarely. Toward the end of his life, he even traveled to Prague (the unofficial homeland of the alchemical tradition) with a small production company to create a documentary about Hermetic arts and their religio-philosophical implications. Some of the clips are on YouTube, if you’re interested. Check it out…
McKenna’s audiences were primarily made of the New Age crowd—wonderful, liberated, and mostly college-educated folk looking for new dimensions to experience. Hermeticism requires an in-depth understanding of history, mythology, Renaissance literature, and so on: it wasn’t the shtick for the crowds he was pulling.
My introduction to McKenna’s texts, combined with my discovery of Carl Jung’s work and compounded by the work of Manly P. Hall, created a nexus that ignited a now three-decade-long fascination with the Hermetic tradition ( which opened up Gnosticism, Alchemy, then Manicheanism, then heretical/esoteric Christianity, then Neoplatonism, followed by anything I could get my hands on regarding Pythagoras or Newton or John Dee, etc.).
Coincidentia Oppositorum
We are living in the twilight of a great empire— the Empire of European thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern industrialism. The Empire of science.
But today, to my thinking, what we collectively refer to as “science” appears to have exhausted itself and become mere technology. It can still perform its magical tricks but has no claim on a metaphysic. The program of rational understanding 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, one inevitably is faced with the concept of the union of opposites, or coincidentia oppositorum in Latin. This union of opposites 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 is not. In alchemical symbolism, we will meet again and again, symbolic expression of the coincidentia oppositorum. It may be in the form of a hermaphrodite; it may be in the form of the union of sun and moon; it may be in the form of the union of mercury with lead or sulfur. In other words…
…alchemical thinking is thinking that is always antithetical and always holds the possibility that by a mere shift of perspective, its opposite premise will gain power and come into focus.
Alchemy
The word alchemy can be traced back as another name for Egypt. It may’ve meant blackening. In its earliest use, it probably refers to dyeing techniques—cloth coloring, metals gilding, etc. These abilities were very mysterious and powerful to ancient people. Shoot—they’re mysterious to us moderns! I mean, how many of us are welders or casters of metal? Isn’t it a magical process to take, for instance, cinnabar (a red saw soft ore) and, by heating it in a furnace, make it sweat liquid mercury onto its surface?
In an earlier age, mind and matter were seen to be combined throughout nature. So the sweating of mercury out of cinnabar is not a material process as far as the Alchemist is concerned. It's a process that evinces the Alchemist's capacity to separate mind from matter.
Spirit Mercurius is almost the patron deity of alchemy. At room temperature, Mercury is a silvery liquid that flows like a mirror for the alchemists. So, here’s a short exercise in alchemical thinking:
Mercury was mind itself, in a sense. By tracing through the steps by which they reached that conclusion, they can taste what alchemical thinking was about. Mercury takes the form of its container. If one pours Mercury into a cup, it takes the shape of the cup; if one pours 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.
Moreover, Mercury is a reflecting surface; you never see Mercury. What you see is the world surrounding it, perfectly reflected on its surface, like a moving mirror. This kind of thinking confuses scientific thought, where the effort is always to fix everything into a given identity and behavior.
The Empire of Science
Central to all Hermetic thinking is the microcosm’s integral connectivity with the macrocosm: that somehow, the great world, the whole of the cosmos, is reflected in the mystery of the human mind-body interface. So, it makes perfect sense for an Alchemist to extrapolate from these internal psychological processes to external processes in the world. For the Alchemist, there isn’t a distinction.
Part of the problem with understanding alchemy is its language is slipping out of our reach. We are entirely imbued with the Cartesian categories of the world of thought, three-dimensional space, causality, the conservation of matter and energy, and so forth, that, to do more than carry out a mere scholarship of alchemical practices, we have to create an alchemical language or a context in which alchemical language can take shape.
Drugs and Alchohol
Looking back through the alchemical literature, there's little evidence that it was originally pharmacologically driven. Only when you get to the last impressions 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 research.
For example, distilled alcohol is a product of alchemical work. Distillation separates the components or substances from a liquid mixture by selective boiling and condensation. Although this may seem like an invention of the European Rennaissance, evidence of distillation is found in Akkadian tablets dating to 1,200 BC (describing perfumery operations). It was known to the Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia, and, as explained in Robert Forbes’ 1970 text A Short History of the Art of Distillation, evidence of distillation was found related to Alchemists working in Alexandria (Roman Egypt) in the 1st century CE.
The structure of benzene came about as a result of a dream an alchemist named August Kekule had in 1862. The organic chemist said that he had discovered the benzene molecule's ring shape after daydreaming of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient alchemical symbol known as the ouroboros).
Led Into Gold
This is the first fiction you must purge from your mind. The only alchemists that ever tried to turn base metals into gold were charlatans: the so-called Puffers. They were called Puffers 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, but they were surrounded by misguided souls and outright con artists trying to change base metals into gold.
Scientists, in 1980, actually did it. They bombarded bismuth with neon and carbon particles, and sure enough, they generated gold isotopes. I mean, the cost is staggering —about $1,000,000,000,000,000 to make one ounce of gold). It has no economic importance whatsoever. But it can be done.
I'm glad we can change it into gold. But this is not what the original intent of alchemy was. Sadly, when we look at the history of 20th-century science, we see that our modern scientists have developed a misunderstanding of what the alchemical goals of our ancestors were. Bit by bit, the modern alchemist (i.e., physicist, chemist, botanist, astronomer, meteorologist, metallurgist, etc.) fell into the trap of the expectations foisted onto them by Christianity and the Catholic church. They forgot the REASON for alchemy—to travel without moving, to be everywhere at once, to be at one with the All.
I’ll dive deeper into the alchemical world and the Hermetic Tradition in the next post…