Trithemius

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Roger Weir's lecture Tuesday evening March 22nd, 1983. Origins of Hermetic Science. Tonight Trithemius: Occult Renaissance, Teacher of Agrippa.

They wanted me to announce that on Friday, this coming Friday is a special day here Montségur day and Rosa miller. Reverendissimo Episcopo Rosa Miller will be down from Palo Alto to give about 45 minutes. She does this every year and those who know Rosa will be very glad to see her. Soteria: A Gnostic Mystery. And this is of course the commemoration of the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Cathars. And Stephan as the heir and bishop of that tradition carries it on. So that's really quite some ceremony and I encourage all of you to come and take that in. That's Friday at 8:00.

I have somewhat of a stiff neck tonight so if I look a little uncomfortable it's just physical. I will read a little bit from a manuscript of mine tonight. Very many of the individuals who are foremost in this hermetic tradition are almost unknown to school children because they're unknown to the school teachers. So it's only in places like Alexandria and Los Angeles. And it's only from those individuals like myself or like Doctor Hoeller or Mr. Hall who choose not to be in the academic flow, not to be ground up and ground out, who usually re-present these individuals from time to time so that the links in a chronological history can be observed and our own place in the tradition understood.

The man tonight, Trithemius, almost completely forgotten in our time, is one of the major figures if not the major figure in the Hermetic tradition. If there is anyone in the Hermetic tradition who would fill the shoes of the mysterious father C.R.C. of the Fama Fraternitatis it is Trithemius. He was born in 1462 and he was born in a little town, Trier or trees which is in Germany but just barely. It's very close to the border of Luxembourg. It's not so far from Belgium or France and the territory has been French and German and Belgian from time to time in its various history. But German was his language. Like so many of the very powerful incarnating spirits his beginnings were almost insignificant. He was born into a family that had a tyrannical father. No learning, no education, no contact with anything nourishing and it wasn't until he was 15 years old and finally tired of being subjected to the cruelty of the household that he ran away. And as form would have it, when those of a very very high spirit move supposedly blindly in the world, they follow the old hermetic pattern which resembles externally something like a figure eight on its side. So that when Trithemius whose family name would have been something like von Heidenberg, Johann von Heidenberg. So when Trithemius was moving he went to the east of the Rhine River almost exactly the same distance and mileage as his home town was and exactly on the same latitude about 50 degrees north. And that happened to be a community of ancient respect in Germany named Würzburg. And Würzburg was one of those places in Germany which had been consecrated about nine hundred years before eight or nine hundred years before by Irish missionary monks who were carrying with themselves, Prometheus-like, the seed of the Plutonian fire of insight wrapped in the little sheaf of the manuscripts of the Greek language which the Irish almost alone outside of the Byzantine confines had access to. And one of those most powerful monks - a monk named Kilian, Saint Kilian - realized when he got to Würzburg - which is on a very nice river - that this was an ancient sacred site according to the ley lines of the understanding of his ancestry. So Saint Kilian went to Rome to get permission and pontifical facility to establish a monastery. And in 686 AD Kilian established the great, very powerful, powerful in a sense not so much in its number of buildings or the number of students, but he founded a spiritual religious monastery on a site that had natural magnetic qualities - electromagnetic qualities.

The Irish of course at that time had had their spirit woken up. Especially by the happenings of the Venerable Bede and the mysticism of Dionysius the Areopagite so they were very tuned to this in the seventh century. So eight or nine hundred years later this very rarefied spirit Trithemius found himself at a very young age about 16, 15, or 16 in this city. And there was a kindly old humanist there who took him in and began to teach him Latin and Greek. And he found that Trithemius was an extraordinary intellect. We will see that many of the individuals in this series possessed an almost uncanny intelligence. That is to say, in terms of IQ they were very very high, but that's a paltry way to measure the kind of mystical intelligence which we're talking about. The kind of intelligence that we're talking about gains, in a geometric progression as it matures, so that information doesn't just add on to information that was already had but it exponentially fulfills a completing universal pattern so that there is a stage of self-recognition whereby the individual begins to realize their capacities and their purposes and begins to train themselves in a very time-honored way. The original classical formulation of it is in Cicero. The book is called Ad Herennium and it's the classical art of memory. And the old Latin phrase was loci et foci - place and focus. A clue and then the way to unravel the clue through a grid of information. And if that grid of information is in tune with a spherical universal pattern almost anything can be known not so much in its objective static factuality but in its infinite relationality to the whole. Trithemius, by the time he was 20 years old after four years of schooling was really somebody. He made up for lost time just like a plant that's been cut back and cut back and finally put into nourishing soil. He just flourished. So a friend of his and himself decided that he would go back home with his increased insight and he would take a look at his origins. But on his way back he was caught in a snowstorm, very fierce snowstorm, outside of a small little town called Sponheim very near the Rhine River. And this snowstorm because he had been taught to develop himself the young Trithemius realized that there was something significant here. So he and his companion put themselves up in this monastery. And the abbot of the monastery was immediately impressed by an uncanny sense that Trithemius was some incredible being which he was, a magical being, and so he talked all night to the young Trithemius about how his feeling of going back home to take himself as he had grown to compare himself with his home didn't mean his physical home but it meant his spiritual home. And that Trithemius was feeling inside of himself that maturity point where we realize that we belong in a pattern, in a companionship and that our life will find its fulfillment and meaning there. So within a week Trithemius had taken his initial vows and stayed at Sponheim and he was to stay there for 23 years. And in fact at the end of the first year when he was only 22 years old by unanimous consent he was made abbot of the monastery because of his very peculiar and particular talents.

He was in the first place an intellectual giant. He was in the second place a master linguist. He had one of those incredible facilities for language. But third and moreover he was one of the real great natural spiritual geniuses of all time. So Trithemius being given the keys to the monastery, the structure, began to work out a program of reform and improvement. And of course being a universal genius of very high caliber, he worked on all fronts at once so that as the years went on the situation began to mature increasingly. He eventually built the Library of Sponheim. Remember we're talking about the 1480s, 1490s and it eventually had over 2000 volumes and was one of the major libraries of its time because there were no works of fiction there were no duplicates. These were all works of very high level philosophy, language, and spiritual religion. So it was an enormous collection. And also Trithemius made Sponheim one of the great intellectual centers because there were always teachers there, a great number of them, able to reach their students. Ready and willing to be with those students to help those students to let those students achieve and climb over them to the information. And Trithemius set up this entire network and to back it up because he was a universal genius and worked on all counts he was in constant communication by letter with other individuals like himself. And there were half a dozen. There was mainly Ficino in Florence and John Colet in London. So that Colet in London and Trithemius in Sponheim and Ficino in Florence knew each other. And there was a fourth major figure who we’ll get next week from Venice Solomon Trismosin.

But as Trithemius set up this enormous complex he began to experiment. That is to say, he took the normal prayer time or contemplation walks of a monastery or of a Christian monk and he began experimenting scientifically with states of prayer and states of contemplation. And because of his capacity, Trithemius very very quickly developed what can only be described as a very high Christian yoga. That is to say, he began to mature in the inner world to the extent that he began to develop all those sithas, sithas those yogic powers which we are familiar with from the Vajrayana like Milarepa in Tibet or from some of the master Yogacarins in India or those Daoist yogis in China. That is to say Trithemius became a man for whom the internal powers opened up and unfolded. This capacity for inner insight on a very high level and the capacity to translate it into human action and into writings, both philosophical and linguistic, soon made for Trithemius the reputation underground - on the surface he was just the abbot of a monastery - but in the underground in the Hermetic underground, in the 1490s and the early 1500s Trithemius was the master. So much so that when the young Henry Cornelius Agrippa wrote his first draft of his great classic work on occult philosophy, De Occulta Philosophia, he wrote a covering letter to Trithemius and sent him the manuscript. And Trithemius being the man that he was, delayed the messenger for several days until he could read through the entirety of the manuscript and wrote a letter back to Agrippa. And I brought a copy of that and I think I'd like to read this to you. This is Agrippa receiving a letter from Trithemius in 1510.

“Your work, most renowned Agrippa, entitled of occult philosophy which you have sent by this bearer to me has been examined with how much pleasure I received it. No mortal tongue can express nor the pen of any write. I wondered at your more than vulgar learning that you being so young should penetrate into such secrets as have been hid from most learned men and not only clearly and truly but also properly and elegantly set them forth. Whence first I give you thanks for your goodwill to me and if I shall ever be able I shall return you thanks to the utmost of my power. Your work which no learned man can sufficiently commend I approve of now that you may proceed toward higher things as you have begun and not suffer such excellent parts of wit to be idle. I do with as much earnestness as I can advise entreat and beseech you that you would exercise yourself in laboring after better things.”

Now Agrippa's De Occult Philosophia is one of the classics of the Hermetic Tradition. It is used as a reference book as a textbook by almost everybody that came after. Trithemius is telling him this is all well and good but there are higher things yet. There is more to see and now that you have come this far you can see it if you will. This just to give you an indication of the very high level of Trithemius. If Agrippa is A+ then you can imagine what Trithemius must be.

“I can advise and entreat and beseech you that you would exercise yourself in laboring after better things and demonstrate the light of true wisdom to the ignorant according as you yourself are divinely enlightened. Neither let the consideration of idle vain fellows withdraw you from your purpose. I say of them, of whom it is said the wearied ox treads hard whereas no man to the judgment of the wise can be truly learned who is sworn to the rudiments of one only faculty.”

In other words no matter how high you have progressed in any given discipline you have isolated yourself on a narrow wedge of capacity which needs to be expanded because the spiritual man is not a wedge no matter how elegant no matter how high no matter how deep. He is a sphere and needs the fullness of the all. So he is telling this to Agrippa by letter.

“But you have been by God gifted with a large and sublime wit. And it is not that you should imitate oxen but rather birds. Neither think it sufficient that you study about particulars but bend your mind confidentially to universals.”

He's telling him to look up from the world of objectivity to the world of universality of which there is only one world, one universe. And he says, “for it is by so much the more learned anyone has thought by how much fewer things he is ignorant of. Moreover your wit is fully apt to all things and to be rationally employed not in a few or low things but many and sublimer. Yet this one rule I advise you to observe.” And this is a very good rule to observe. “That you communicate vulgar secrets to vulgar friends but higher and secret to higher and secret friends only. Give hate to an ox, sugar to a parrot. Only understand my meaning lest you be trod under by the oxen's foot. As oftentimes it falls out. Farewell my happy friend. And if it lie in my power to serve you. Command me. And according to your pleasure it shall without delay be done also. Let our friendship increase daily. Write often to me. And send me some of your labors. I earnestly pray you again. Farewell. April 8th 1510.”

Trithemius had by this time left Sponheim. There had as always come a hue and cry that the monastery was becoming an underground world scene. And who knew what was going on here? So Trithemius left Sponheim in 1506 but his reputation was so broad that the Emperor Maximilian the First, the great Habsburg ruler of Germany and oftentimes Belgium and France and Hungary and so forth, Great Maximilian the First invited Trithemius to come to his court and to receive a life pension and to set up a university there. Now Trithemius was somewhat tempted by this because one of the great artists working under Maximilian the First at this time was Albrecht Dürer and Dürer was a very good friend of Trithemius and one of his group. You have to see that this was a group. This was a network of geniuses across Europe. And Trithemius was really, after Ficino's death, the head, the leader and his closest associate was John Colet In London. In fact even though it doesn't say in the normal books, Agrippa went to visit Trithemius again after the letter after Trithemius had gone back to Würzburg back to this original monastery where the magical lines of the Earth's magnetic field came together where he could work in peace because he had some very delicate work to do. He had some internal yoga to do and he had some exterior encyclopedia writing to do and he wanted to be somewhat left alone. In fact when he went to Würzburg instead of going to the university or any of the normal larger places there were 5 or 6 of them there, he went to Saint Kilian's original monastery where there were only three monks left. By 1506 there were only three monks left but that was the place he wanted to go. He needed to be there, it was strategically located for all sorts of reasons. And Agrippa came and visited him there and Trithemius told him that he needed special seasoning, he needed to know more about how life integrates wisdom. So he sent him to John Colet in London, and it's almost impossible to find more information on this most strategic interchange of Agrippa going from Trithemius to Colet because it proves the great contact between them.

But Trithemius could no longer take individual students in because of the internal work that he was doing and because of the external work because during this ten years - he died in 1516 - so from 1506 to 1516 and those ten years at Würzburg he produced about 50 works and some of them of enormous size. He produced the great mystical history of mankind, called the Chronologica Mystica, which was published in a very small edition about the end of his life - 1516 - because we need to know how we have come to where we are. We need that mystical tradition. We need that hermetic linking up to ourselves and to go with it he produced a huge volume on ciphers and the volume was called the Steganographia - Steganographia, Steganographia. And this volume which was not printed formally until 1606, 90 years after he died. The Steganographia was written out as a secret manuscript as many of Trithemius’ more powerful works were. They were never printed. They were written in brown ink on parchment and they were circulated personally by hand. That is they were top secret. They could only be shown to those who had earned the right to see them. For instance when John Dee later on learned that a copy of the Steganographia might be available he got the Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Burghley to forward a thousand English crowns to buy a copy of it and Elizabeth herself okayed the purchase. This is how valuable these works were.

So Trithemius worked on the Steganographia and what it was was in three parts a complete mystical cipher manual of how to take language and transpose the meaning from one dimensional set to another. That is one was not just translating from one language to another but from one mental dimension to another. And in fact it was a manual, an encyclopedia to tutor the mind to recognize many dimensions of meaning so that he who would be the master of the Steganographia, of this great cipher manual, would be able to manipulate language, any language, into its secret meanings. That is to say there were universal templates of design which Trithemius worked out which could be put over any language and its secret meanings could be derived from it. So that Trithemius took the idea of the Kabbalah which had been brought into Renaissance magical thought by Pico and raised to a level of Kabbalistic Science by Johannes Reuchlin - a great friend of Trithemius and there are many letters between Reuchlin and Trithemius. But Trithemius took it a step further and he made instruments and he made designs and templates so that the secret dimensions of any language could be unfolded.

Later on in 1624 when it was necessary during the 30 Years War for great secrecy in the European Hermetic community and it was necessary to communicate between a half a dozen major languages, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Polish, Swedish. Trithemius’s Steganographia was reprinted in 1624 in Lüneburg by the great Duke Augustus of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, otherwise known as the Duke of Brunswick, and on the title page of the reprint of the Steganographia shows two great individuals of that time of the 1620s who were bringing Trithemius’s great work back into play. And on the title page of the Steganographia of 1624, down here in the bottom you can see it later on, is Sir Francis Bacon holding a special natural crown over the head of Duke of Brunswick passing on the baton as the head of the secret societies of Europe of that time and the work that they used which had been in use for over a hundred years by that time was Trithemius’s Steganographia. And again and again and again in the Steganographia you find pages of description in the highest praise possible of the great Magus of all time, Trithemius, and the Great Master. And one of Trithemius cipher instruments reproduced here on page 177 I have xeroxed off so you can see it. And also from page 281 a special cipher that Trithemius loved. And it looks very much like Tolkien's mystical writings in The Lord of the Rings which you can see later on. And there are examples of it and even a message written in Trithemius personal cipher so that the work that he was doing between 1506 and 1516 was setting up an enormous array of books and facilities that would be used for the next 100 or 150 years by the esoteric community of all of Europe. This is what kind of a fellow that we're dealing with, and yet the encyclopedias have half a paragraph on him. He also made sure that the old classical Alexandrian mystical magic which had been revived by Ficino and linked up to the Kabbalah by Pico was given a spiritual tone and a spiritual direction.

Now if you remember there is the notion of the seven governors the seven planetary powers. And that the old Alexandrian magic, the natural magic, was to use various objects which brought the influences of various combinations of those planetary powers into a focus, into what we know traditionally as a talisman. That's what a talisman is. A talisman is a magical image which integrates the planetary powers in a special recipe, recipe, just like a pharmacological prescription. You know the R-X of the pharmacological prescription is from the old mystical sign for Jupiter. It means received from the head of the gods. Therefore take this medicine. It will cure you because it is a medicine of completeness from the gods. In fact from God. Trithemius made sure that in the revival of magic that it not just be languished on a natural magic level with planetary powers or that its occult capacities at encipherment just be limited to the Kabbalah. And this is saying a great deal because in the lecture on Pico you could see how many variations almost infinitely there were in the Kabbalah. The assigning of numerical numbers to any letter. The taking of acrostics of certain phrases and taking the beginning letters of them and putting them and making a name. Or the taking of revolving alphabets and transposing any letter by any other letter so that Kabbalah in and of itself was almost an infinite capacity. But Trithemius - and we're dealing here with a universal genius, some real first rate mind - saw that man would be trapped in a metaphysical paradise and never be free to be directly available to the divine experience if he believed that even infinity was a proper matrix for him to find a home in. Trithemius wanted to make sure that man would go through that, go beyond that, go to a level which transcended even the infinite capacities of meaning made available by the Kabbalah even with its great juxtaposition with the planetary magic of Ficino and of ancient Alexandria. So that Trithemius wrote a wonderful volume which has never been translated - it's still in Latin - on the seven wonderful successes. And it's very much like the intone, it's almost like the Seven Sermons to the Dead by Carl Jung, our dear friend Stephan's book on that. That is there are seven levels and they correspond with the traditional seven planetary spheres except that this is in terms of inner experience or as Jung had in terms of inner dream life stages, and the sixth stage Trithemius called Potencias, and the seventh stage he called Miraculous. In other words the final stage is a miracle. It's a transcendent directness whereby the individual comes into an equilibrium with the divine with no intermediary whatsoever. Even an infinitely complex capacity of Kabbalistic alphabetizing, even that is transcended. Once Trithemius had written this out, had made all these books, had done all this work, this interior work. And Agrippa in a letter to a friend quotes one time, he says, I know for a fact that there is a possibility of universal telepathy because I myself have seen the Abbot Trithemius do this and external descriptions of it would be that you make some image of the person you would like to contact and you make a talisman of this image by bringing various influences, various objects representing influences in contact, and then putting it away, burying it, leaving it someplace, and within 24 hours Trithemius says there will be a contact there will be a message. And not only that, not only can he contact anyone in the world at any time by this method, but he can know all things by this method. And what he meant to say was that by the interior yoga capacity of the miraculous state, man became the operator of all the powers of the universe in his interior mode so that any communication or any juxtaposition could be affected by his spiritual inner capacity. Telepathy, teleportation, all of these are capacities, all these are yogic powers.

This later became the key, the fulcrum, the mysterium magnum of the effectiveness of the entire alchemical process. So that a century later when we find mystical documents which are speaking of the great Hermetic Rosicrucian juxtaposition, always one sees along with the chemical laboratory equipment one sees the image of the tent in the wilderness and of the alchemist praying. Praying not so much to a God out there but getting a sense of yogic presence within so that there was a direct contact which would enable him to transmute physical reality by using the objects of the laboratory which had become refined from the seven planetary governors of antiquity. So that Trithemius was the mastermind who made available this very comprehensive, high-powered integration. And all of the books and processes which were necessary to teach it and make it available. And he did all this in this old monastery of Saint Kilian's because of its magical properties and capacities.

Now almost none of Trithemius is translated into English. There is almost nothing, of 80 works, translated into English. The only thing I found were two pages which G. R. S. Mead, when he was editor of the Theosophical magazine Lucifer, which was founded by Madame Blavatsky, had a man named Wells - A. A. Wells - translate. And I'd like to give you these two pages because this is Trithemius himself and they're the only two pages that are really adequately translated out of 80 works. This translation was made in 1897 in London. This is the confession of Trithemius. In other words this is his code of religious understanding. This is the quintessence of what he stood for and what all of his activity was founded upon. This is his own words.

“God is an essential and hidden fire which dwells in all things and chiefly in man. From this fire is everything engendered; it engenders them and will forever engender them and what is engendered is the true Divine Light which exists from all Eternity.”

He is talking about what later became the problem plausibly of universals and particulars, appearances and reality. Is the mind distinct from the idea of the mind in the one forming that idea and of course is the true Divine Light, which exists from all eternity.

“God is a fire but no fire can burn, no light can manifest itself in nature without the presence of air to maintain the combustion and this the Holy Spirit should act within us as a Divine air or breath. Causing a breath to spring from a Divine fire upon the interior fire of the heart, so that the light may appear for the light must be fed by the fire and this light is love, bliss and joy in the Eternal Divinity. This light is Jesus who emanates for all eternity from Jehova whatever does not posses this light, within him, is plunged into a fire without light. But if this light is within him then the Christ is in him is incarnate within him and he will know the light as it exists in nature. All things we behold are interiorly fire and light in which is hidden the essence of this spirit. All things are a trinity of fire, light and air. In other words the spirit, the Father is a super essential light. The son is the Light manifested, the Holy Spirit is a moving breath Divine and super essential. This fire dwells in the heart and sends out its rays all through the body and thus maintains its life. But no light arises from the fire without the presence of the spirit of Sanctity.”


In other words, the sustaining goes on invisibly and it is only by comprehension that a man creates a way a cipher by which the invisible meaning can manifest itself. God's light is always there, he says, but it is only when man creates his soul does that light leap into manifestation and become a natural fact, so that spiritual man is the completion of nature and all he has to do is to fashion himself into the proper vehicle to reflect a condition which always is from eternity. By doing this man creates in nature a paradise. Trithemius goes on:

“All things have been made by the power of the Divine word which is the spirit or Divine breath emanated from the beginning from the Divine fountain. This breath is the spirit or soul of the world and so is called the Spiritus Mundi, the spirit of the world. It was at first like air, then condensed into a nebulous substance or fog, and finally transmuted itself into water. So that on one of the formula one can be baptized by water and brought into a capacity to engender the kingdom. But when one engenders the kingdom one is baptized by the transmuted water on thru steam to fire. So those who are baptized by fire are those who have completed the interior processing of the manifestation of the Light. This is why the alchemists were always at work. This water was at first spirit and life because it was impregnated and vivified by the spirit. Darkness filled the abyss but by the emission of the word the light was engendered. The darkness was illuminated by the light and the soul of the world was born. This spiritual light which we call nature, or soul of the world, is a spiritual body which may be rendered visible and tangible by alchemical process. But as it is naturally invisible, it is called spirit.”

So that those who understand the invisible are the religious and those who make a form for the invisible to manifest in a perfected nature are the scientists. So that the one works with the water of life and the other works with the fire of the spirit.

So, the only war between religion and science is that made up by the ignorant who think these are polar opposites and don't see them as two parentheses of one long expression of truth. Trithemius goes on; remember he wrote this about 1516. The fact that he is writing it in 1516 is almost unbelievable, if he had written it 200 years later, in 1716 it would have been amazing, but it showed also the emerging brilliance of a conscious finger testing the winds of time because it was the very next year just 6 months later that Luther would tack up his theses and start the Reformation by saying, we don't have to have a church between us and God. Luther knew Trithemius very well. So that we have here the central figure of this whole moving early 16th century integration. He goes on, he says:

“It is a living universal fluid, this spirit, diffused through out nature which penetrates everything. It is the most subtle of all substances, the most powerful by reason of its inherent qualities it penetrates everybody and determines the form in which it displays its activity because it moves on different levels. At each level it changes the forms of things manifested, mineral, animal, etc. all the way up to the supercelestial realm, so that the formed orders of even the angels are in a continuum which is natural. That is to say the angles are part of the natural continuum of which man is a mobile operator able to bring into his comprehension their expressions and their accessibility. So that man is a microcosm able to move in the universe freely if he is spiritually enlightened and has attained this center.”

He goes on; he says: “By its action, the spirit, it frees the forms of all imperfection, it makes the impure pure, the imperfect perfect, the mortal immortal by its indwelling.”

That is to say, because it works with almost a Pythagorean type of accuracy, the form, the true form, of any thing may be completed by man's participation. So that the impure may be purified and brought up to a wholesome state.

“The imperfect be completed and filled out and made perfect, lead may be made into gold. Mercury may be made into the timeless gold.”

Trithemius writes further:
“This essence or spirit emanated from the beginning from the center and incorporated itself as a substance of which the universe is formed.”

Now it is interesting because about this time, the idea of a Cosmos that was not earth centered was taking shape because within 20 years Copernicus in Nuremburg, not very far from Wiirtzburg, a city where Trithemius' friend Albrecht Diirer based his life, Copernicus would come up with the sun centered universe but notice that Trithemius, ever the master is talking about a Universe which is God centered. He's taking a step which Astronomy still hasn't taken. This essence or spirit emanated from the beginning from the center and incorporated itself with the substance of which the universe is formed. The universe is God centered. It is not centered anywhere in space, it is not centered anywhere in time. Those are forms perfected and manipulable by man. But it is centered on a spiritual refinement on a level called the miraculous. Trithemius says:

“It is the salt of the earth and without its presence the plant would not grow nor the field become green and the more this essence is condensed concentrated and coagulated in the forms the more stable they become.”

The more stable not so much just in terms of time/space but more stable in terms of their spiritual accuracy. The more archetypally real they become. As man acclimates himself to move in the world of this primal reality, it is so stable, to use the term that this world looks like shadows. This world of so called objective reality himself to move in the world of this reality, it is so stable (to use the term) that this world looks like shadows. this world of so called objective reality, and a hard headed practicality indoors looks just like shadows and flits of sunlight on water. So stable is this other realm, where man may move.

“It is the most subtle of all substances, incorruptible and immovable in its essence. It fills the infinities of space. So that all of this macrocosm is of the same fabric, so that one master's here and now, this transmutation capacity and its is good anywhere, anytime, throughout the universe.”

And he ends, he says:
“The forms in which this living principle establishes itself becomes perfect and durable, so that they no longer decay, nor deteriorate, nor change in contact with air. Water can no longer dissolve them, nor fire destroy them, nor the terrestrial elements devour them.”

And the reason he is putting this in here is that he is saying these four cardinal elements which go up so far in the actual make up of the phenomenal realm no longer have an effect, they can no longer participate because this transcended capacity has gone beyond and that man matures, he perfects himself in this beyond, and he goes there freely and what is needed is a threshold and it is almost like the childish notion of the magician who, wetting his pointing finger, his stylus of teaching, with a universal fluid of capacity draws the portal in space and goes through. A true magician. And he concludes:

“This spirit is obtained, in the same way that it is communicated to the earth by the stars. And this is performed by means of the water which serves as a vehicle to it. It is not the philosopher's stone but this may be prepared from it by fixing the volatile. I advise you to pay great attention to the boiling of the water. Do not let your spirit be troubled about things of less importance. Make it boil slowly, then let it putrefy till it has attained a fitting color for the water of life can change the germ of wisdom. In boiling the water will transform itself into earth, this earth will change into a pure crystalline fluid which will produce a fine red fire and this water and this fire reduced to a single essence.”

That is the two levels of the parentheses brought together, “come together and form that threshold through which only man's spirit may go and if it ready in its inner equilibrium, it will go.” “It will produce the great panacea composed of sweetness and strength, the lamb and the lion united.”
These are the only two pages of Trithemius that have been translated into English out of 80 volumes and I give them to you because they are almost impossible to find and almost nobody has paid attention and knows of them. This wonderful great capacity of Trithemius was noticed by just about everyone of the time. Even though he is hardly referred to, he was the center of attention for people as diverse as Erasmus and Martin Luther, John Colet and Pico, Reuchlin, Ficino, all of them. He stayed in one place, he spent almost the entirety of his life in just two monasteries, not more than a hundred miles apart. He made one trip in 1508 to go to the Emperor Maxmillian's court and Maximillian was involved in the siege of Venice at that time. In 1508 when he went to sit with Maximillian, in his court, Trithemius came into direct contact with a man that he had seen off and on through his esoteric travels. That man was Solomon Trismosin.

Trismosin is the wandering sage compared to Trithemius who is the fixed sage. So that the two of them together are like the point and the moving caliper, drawing the circle of fulness. Trithemius and Trismosin make the whole Hermetic sing because before them there was one single thread, one line very precarious of development and after them there were whole worlds of threads branching out, into everywhere, dozens of traditions hundreds of maguses, thousands of neophytes and after about a hundred years all of these various threads, which had gone off in various directions beut because they had had a common parentage, because they shared a method and they shared an outlook were brought together again and produced one of those incredible events, which we'll get to and we'll see.

I want to show you more and I'll leave all this up here so that you can see, but I want to bring one more person into play with Trithemius. It's a good transition and I'll end with this point and these facts. There are always a succession of geniuses. It is almost as if mother nature sensing that man is ready and she, like the Demeter that she is, is always ready to give man the cornucopia, always ready to give him every fruit of the universe, if he will only be ready for it. As soon as there is someone of the capacity of Trithemius there is a student equal to him who comes along. It always happens. You have a Socrates you have a Plato; you have a Plato you have an Aristotle. Thus Trithemius who had done most of his work and really established himself.

One of the great problems geniuses of all times was sent to him. Nobody could do anything with him. Somebody who was just an unholy terror. Who has so much smarter than any of his teachers that within two or three nonths he was already outdistancing them and was just turning into as sassy brat. So they sent this genius to Trithemius and he cooled him out and in a couple of years produced Paracelsus.

Paracelsus and Agrippa both owe their genius to the integrating capacity of the great teacher Trithemius. I mean aside from all the books that he did and all the occult processes that he set up, he was a great teacher. He could get his person next to the person of the student and make a bridge of rapport and carry all the information over it and let it reside in that person. He could give himself and the material that he had to the student in a way that the student could take it and think that was just his own learning and when Paracelsus was finished, right at the end of Trithemius' life, that is when he was finally matured to a point where he could take himself out into the world and he did and do wondrous things and we'll get to him. Trithemius had written out Paracelsus' degree and this has never been published. It exists only in manuscript, in brown ink on parchment, and the only copy in the world is here in Los Angeles in the PRS vault and I've xeroxed for you, this degree "Filipi Theophrastus Paracelsi Arcana Arcanorum Arcanus," the most secret of secret of secrets. From Johann Trithemius and Solomon Trismosin. This is 1516; this is the declaration that he had passed. He is ready to go out.

And then the Abbot Johann Trithemius, the master of the Hermetic tradition, the keeper of the secret arcanum, the manufacturer of the universal tincture gives here to Paracelsus the right to teach and create the Universa Materia, the material universal alicita. The great material which of course is a spiritual material. So we can see that Trithemius coming in this great age from 1462 to 1516, he only lived 55 years. But what a 55 years and what a change because the Europe of 1461 and the Europe of 1517 were totally different and many people have wondered about this mystery of how this great change happened and how does all of the Hermetic sciences tie in with the religious mystical movements. How do all of these great literary geniuses come together, artist geniuses, it is because there was somebody there, at the center, there was somebody at home, doing the work that needed to be done year in and year out, decade after decade. Making sure that the basic work is done. That when new generations of human beings with capacity would come along they would have some sites bulldozed and would have some good basic structures put up so that they could build the kind of structure that they would see fit for themselves and in this the generation of Colet, in London; and Trithemius at Würzburg and Solomon Trismosin wandering around and Ficino in Florence. Those four figures laid the bases, almost made a template of action which a century later would come into birth and we would have the 17th century transformation which forever matured man out of a level that he had been frozen in for almost 2000 years. He could understand, in his mind, higher things. He could dream in his heart about the higher things but he had never been able to get up out of his chair and with his hands go make in the phenomenal world of things the manifestation of the higher things and no he would because the great ciphers of Trithemius within a hundred and fifty years would become the universal mathematics of Liebniz and Newton.