Salomon Trismosin

Transcript (PDF)

The date is March 29th 1983. This is the fifth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the Origins of Hermetic science. Tonight's lecture is entitled Solomon Trismosin. That name is spelled T-R-I-S-M-O-S-I-N. Splendor Solis, Teacher of Paracelsus. This is one, two, three, four. This is the fifth of the lecture series. And it might pay to recap the conditions under which we've been divulging or revealing material. This material was put together over the last 9 or 10 months working out of the manuscript area of the Philosophical Research Society out of their vault. Many of the documents that had not ever really been treated sufficiently I found them reoccurring on my work table, my desk, both at home and in the library. And after 4 or 5 months of continually running across several names which I could find very little information on in the encyclopedias or in the standard histories or in the so-called books of experts on the field, I began to do the basic footwork of going back into the Latin as much as I could, back into some of the French, but again many of the documents were written in a confused, on purposely confused, jumble of languages where German and Latin and Greek and sometimes French and English and occasionally Italian would all be thrown in together in the same manuscript, in the same page. And I began to notice that this was a code, a challenge to the ignorant so that they would not be able to readily disclose the secrets contained in the manuscripts. So whenever I would run across a material that had this telltale sign of multilingual material I would make a note and try to come back to it at some later date. Eventually several major figures emerged who are not at all adequately treated and I'm afraid as paltry as they are that these lectures must serve as an introduction to placing them in the intellectual current to which they belong. And that is they are the major figures who transmit from the Renaissance to the 18th century, the wisdom which we know as occult or hermetic. And these figures are absolutely indispensable. Just to give you an idea, for instance last week we had a lecture on Johannes Trithemius the great Abbot of Sponheim and later of Würzburg. And I gave you some indication of his stature and also made a suggestion that if there is anyone in the historical annals that qualifies as Father C.R.C. of the Rosicrucians it is the good Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim. I would like to just bring back into focus for you a couple of documents which do exist here in Los Angeles which you can investigate on your own. We have in the vault at the Philosophical Research Society two books by Trithemius one of them from 1621 and the other from 1635. Now Trithemius died in 1516. So if they are reprinting his books at great expense 100 to 130 years later you get some idea of the stature of the man. Both of these books bear the title Steganographia. The one is the first part. They're both in Latin. The one is the first part of the Great Cipher Code Manual which Trithemius wrote and the great issue that he addressed himself in that volume was, what is a mystic language? That is to say, not only a language which of its own syntactical nature is mystical, but this for a purpose that it may express multidimensional states of consciousness which normal languages are unable to float in terms of progressive meaning. That is to say, most languages, unless they have been enriched by poetic genius, are really clumsy, reductive pointing referential systems which are like tools rather than artistic backgrounds. If you take a look at, for instance, the English language it was not until really there was some poetical, epical expression given in the Old English that literally raised the language from the kind of pedestrian referential horizons that it had. This fortunately in English happened very early on and it was the great genius of the generation of the Venerable Bede who produced the old English classic Beowulf in which the language was spiritualized, was raised up to a level. The same thing happened in ancient Greek with Homer's epics that the Greek language was raised up and spiritualized. And again and again we find in national modern languages those geniuses who spiritualized the language. Dante for Italian, later on Goethe for German and so forth. These were great individuals not just for the stories they told and the epics they gave to us but because they took language out of its pedestrian mode and raised it up to a multidimensional reflective medium. Now what Trithemius did was to create for the first time - I've not been able to discover even in Asian history anyone creating a complex cipher system code system such as Trithemius made and gave the name Steganographia to. So that when European society faced a crisis of consciousness in the 17th century, one which was every bit as difficult as the fifth century BC or the third century AD, it was a major crisis of consciousness. Trithemius's Steganographia performed yeoman labor and the reason that it was reprinted - 1621, 1624 - there was another edition which we have - 1635 - all within the decade or two of this major transition from about 1614 to about 1640 was a tremendous period in European thought. And the crisis that it faced was that the mind matures, the spirit matures, it reaches to a level of comprehension where if it does not have an expressive facility to bring into one's life and into one's capacity the perceptions newly honed one faces of course the danger of not only mental breakdowns but cultural breakdowns on a massive scale. If we look at European history just in that period that I gave a definition to - 1614 to 1640 or so - we notice that European society is absolutely dominated, and finally devastated, by a phenomenon known as the 30 Years War, which started in 1618 and ended in 1648. And on the coattails of that we noticed the great civil war in England, Cromwell and the great uprooting of the monarchical tradition and the devastation of the ancient monuments and so forth. All of these happenings are germane to the issue which we have to attend to and that is that evidently consciousness has a career, perhaps not consciousness so much as ideas reflecting in our consciousness, and that ideas grow and ideas have a career and they have a way of maturing on time and if we are not ready as a people those ideas seek to dominate us rather than become useful expressive tools for our furtherance and our development. In the 20th century of course we faced a very similar happening. The period from the First World War through the Second World War and all of that was one major conflict, was remarkably similar to the conditions that obtained during the 30 Years War. And again our problem today is one which bears upon all of these issues. We are trying to master ways of expressing new insights which have come to encourage us at first but if we find no adequate means of giving utterance and meaning in a communicative form to others then the inspiration will begin to haunt us. And of course we're very familiar with those aspects of our time. So that Trithemius having his Steganographia, his great mystical language cipher manual, brought back into print again and again through this 30 years War period gives us some idea of the tremendous usefulness and importance of the man. Trithemius, as I mentioned last week, was the mentor of Henry Cornelius Agrippa who we will get to in a little bit in this series. He was also the mentor of Paracelsus. We have a document written in brown ink in the PRS vault that is just called Secret Manuscript and I have some slides showing you the pages where Trithemius gives his okay, his degree, to Paracelsus but in the same volume there are all, there is also a degree to Paracelsus from another man and his name is Salomon Trismosin - Salomon Trismosin. And he is intimately tied up with Trithemius. And there is no way in the world at the present time to track it down except by the indirect ways which I've been working at for the last six months. So I'll give you what I have and because these documents are so very difficult to find I have put one of Trismosin's great sequences on slide for you. They are on little papyrus squares that are tipped in by hand. In a French translation of one of his manuscripts from about the early 17th century. The original of it is in the British Museum and dates from the late 1590s, but all of this is long after Trismosin had passed on. Now as far as I can determine, Trismosin says of himself that he was a young man in 1473 because he says at that time he took himself traveling to try to find alchemists who could teach him the secret processes. He was determined to find them and evidently he was of such an age that he had been searching several years previously and had been traveling several years previously. So that he says by 1473 still as a young man he made his way to Venice, northern Italy. So I placed Trismosin as being born probably around 1450 something like that, just roughly. Now when Trismosin who spoke Latin and German only and therefore had a little bit of a difficult time in northern Italy, so that when he was traveling in the cities like Siena or Florence he felt himself somewhat compromised and took himself to Venice because of its maritime connections and also because he had heard that Venice was really the center for re-processing manuscripts and treasures and teachers from the East - that is from the Byzantine, so-called Empire. At that time the city of Byzantium had fallen for about 20 years. I think it was 1453 when Mehmed the Conqueror finally breached the great walls of Constantinople and destroyed the Christian city. So probably by the early 1470s in Venice there were many scholarly refugees still taking up abode there. And there were many manuscripts that were surfacing and several times Trismosin alludes to the fact that he has just come into possession of new documents. And finally in one place he very cryptically says, I now have the Egyptian originals which I had translated into Greek and from the Greek into Latin. And I now have the old alchemical process. And I think I should footnote this here, that there is not just one alchemical process. There were dozens, if not hundreds of different processes. And this produced a kind of intellectual vertigo among those trying to learn because each teacher had a different version. And not only that as Carl Jung points out in Psychology and Alchemy, the code was never to teach directly, to make the obscure increasingly obscure, to make the unknown increasingly unknown, so that the emphasis was not on clear explication. It was not an emphasis on giving an argument of meaning which should be understood to some conclusion which was increasingly apparent and logical, but it was on purpose to obscure, to create an artful labyrinth which would force that neophyte or that student to have to use his inner intuitive integration to probe and find the true threads which could be brought together. So that - and I'll give you a little later on - one of Emerson's alchemical processes called the Red lion. But he says at the end of the process it takes a couple of pages just to give it. He says I have left out several very important points and this is filled with booby traps and you will probably blow yourself up if you try to literally follow what I have told you. Because he says some of these chemical processes are highly volatile and he has left out the very important parts. So that in order to find one's way in this most important undertaking as I said last week one had to find the right teacher and this was paramount. And thus it's almost an imperative upon a teacher if he is writing something to include name dropping like crazy so that you can see that he got his from this tradition and all these teachers fit in and now here he is and he is giving this unto you so that the trustworthiness had to be established so that we have an increasing sense of labyrinthian innuendo. And the greater the teachers the more artfully this was done. And Trismosin was such a great teacher, such a monumental teacher that we hardly have any thread to approach him by. With Trithemius we at least had the advantage of knowing that he had a Benedictine background. We know that there were at least short capsule biographies of him in the old Catholic encyclopedias. There were records. We had his major book, The Steganographia, which we could take a look at. We don't have yet what I would consider his really most important work at the end of his life, the Chronologica Mystica, which I think we should have because there Trithemius gives the lineage all the way back from the Alexandrian synthesis to his day. But with Trismosin we have an occult master and when you see his face on the slide that I have brought from a drawing done in 1509 you will understand. He looks a little bit like Rembrandt's version of Richard Wagner. He is a grand wise old man. He's the big fish in the sea. And to catch his wisdom one needs to have a lot of patience and to have been out on the ocean of chaos for a very long time. Trismosin says that in Venice after he was there for about 18 months that he found himself in a laboratory where they were making out of tin a kind of gold and Trismosin knew enough about chemical processes so that he was able to demonstrate to these individuals that he could do pretty well what they were doing, so he got a job. And he was found out when he took some of his material to an assayist. And the material of course exploded when the aqua regia was brought into contact with it. But somebody in the assay office realized that he had done a very good job and so contacted Trismosin afterwards probably by stealth. We can imagine a midnight meeting somewhere in Renaissance Venice and foreshadowed in the reflections of the canal, Trismosin finally getting the introduction that he wanted, and he was taken about eight miles outside of Venice and there around 1475, 1476 he was introduced to a palatial-sized laboratory where there were dozens of individuals working in cubicles and they were all working with varying processes. And these processes were so sophisticated that the projective quality, Trismosin says, was about one upon a thousand, which is very very high alchemy. That is to say they were making out of a silver base a gold projection upon that base a kind of an electrum an advanced electrum, an alloy of gold and silver that could pass almost any test for fine gold by weight, by condition, by attack from the various acids and so forth. What is interesting is that Trismosin gives us the insight that at this so-called early date - this is 500 years ago - that there was an enormous factory laboratory devoted to chemistry. And there were dozens and dozens of chemists there, practitioners. And in fact he says that the big man, the owner, the royal individual who was supporting all this was extremely happy with Trismosin's work and often gave him special bonuses. And one of the bonuses was that he brought him into contact with the source of manuscripts coming over for translation. Now you have to get the idea here. When we are talking about Ficino having a school, or we're talking about Colet opening up Saint Paul's School in Saint Paul's Cathedral, or even Trithemius having his monastic school at spawn time and later on at Wurzburg, we're talking about something which we have a traditional understanding for. We know that there were monastic schools. We know that there were philosophic specialty schools in the Italian Renaissance. We know in fact that in England there were large cathedral schools and Saint Paul's was the best of them. But what we are not prepared for is the conception that there was a huge alchemical factory in Venice, 500 years ago, producing massive quantities of chemical experiments and all of these being annotated and all of this information being collated and there being a regular scientific establishment going on and that increasingly Trismosin found himself the favored individual. He recounts that the man who wrote this or financed this laboratory was out on the Adriatic Sea and a huge storm came up and he was drowned. The man and several very high officials of the city-state of Venice and suddenly Trismosin and all the rest of them found themselves out of a job. And this huge combine of alchemists dispersed all over northern Italy, and southern Switzerland, and on into southern Germany, and into some parts of France from about 1480 through about 1490. For that decade, the 1480s, there was this huge dispersal of very highly technically accomplished alchemists and of them Trismosin was increasingly the genius. And it was at this time with his contacts that he came into possession of what he calls his Egyptian books. Now I think that these Egyptian books were the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo. Horapollo was an Alexandrian priest alchemist who fled at the destruction of the Serapeum sometime in the fourth century, fled with pages or excerpts or some volumes taken from the, before the flames of the last great Alexandrian library and found himself along with the ascetic communities along the Nile River. And I searched through the early church father records and I found no one really that could stand for Horapollo. But we do know that the very highly sophisticated synthesis of information was codified and packed into a series of illustrations, pictures, and that this book of pictures survived by an underground channel through the various intervening centuries. They surfaced occasionally in the ninth century among the more educated Arabs. And when they surfaced, one had a sudden outburst of alchemy among the Arabs and at the same time Kabbalah among the Jews. Then they seemed to disappear and the Arabic tradition became more and more dependent upon traditional learning and the emphasis shifted from alchemy to Aristotle. And so one had the kind of progression where finally you would have someone like Al-Ghazali writing a book on the incoherence of the incoherent saying that the Greek philosophers knew nothing next to us. Obviously the secret tradition had disappeared again, had gone underground again, was not there to manifest itself in the culture, in individuals who could then influence the culture. Trismosin, I think, found a copy, an original copy of the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo. Now there was a translation done about 30 years ago, the Bollingen Series - when Carl Jung was still alive the Bollingen Series was really something. They published a small book called The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo but unfortunately the illustrations that are in there have no annotation whatsoever and are in a jumbled order and in fact are from a secondary manuscript. And I compared those Hieroglyphics of Horapollo with one that we have in the press vault which is an old edition unabridged and hasn't been tampered with and I found that the one that the Bollingen Series used was so adulterated that one could just not even make use of it. It doesn't even occur to someone looking through that volume of the basic tone of the pattern that was the basic structure of this document. When Trismosin got ahold of the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo and had that book translated into Greek and then into Latin he preserved the core of the illustrations and preserved their order. And twice in his life he produced volumes that took these 22 pictures, these 22 plates, and preserved their order so that anyone with an intuition honed by having struggled in this ocean of incoherence for some time would be able to put together from these 22 pictures some indication of a thread of order. Now remember this is not an order of a logical argument. It's not leading step by step clear step by clear step but rather moving in a hermetic fashion of arcing out and coming back to some central themes going out again bringing in more material and echoing, paralleling, those central themes so that by this hermetic symbolic motion one would integrate a field of learning and that the only way that that field of learning would integrate, would record, would be upon the personal psyche, the soul as they would say, of the individual making that integration. Only he who makes that journey knows what happened so that the design, always with this very high level hermetic material, was to leave it in a condition of either complete naturality so that one used only natural structures so that if you did not understand how to crack natural structures and get their meaning, one would be at a loss. Or on the other hand they were improved by an artistic hermetic emendation so that one would have to have the Hermetic insight brought out by a teacher in the tradition, someone capable of doing this, or by an individual who was sufficiently talented and insightful enough, and determined enough, not to give up to carry themselves all the way through these kinds of people happen. Carl Jung is a great example. Carl Jung never had some great hermetic master who took him aside and said this is how to go about this. He had to go through his breakdowns and through his decades of wandering. And finally after 25 or 35 years it was only from the clue, from Chinese alchemy, Daoist yoga, light yoga, that he realized that there it was all the time in front of him. What is it that is in front of us? That the pattern of our movement is the intelligibility, the very method by which an explication of integrative wisdom can be obtained, that only by doing it are we free to acquire it. That any other process makes such a falsity of what we understand that we very soon go off on tangents and lose ourselves in an illusory realm which has no efficaciousness. And in fact in terms of alchemy, leads to your death, because the poisonous fumes will come up from those concoctions, or those explosions will happen. All the natural pitfalls are there. And as Trismosin says very happily he says a good master always leaves the booby traps in place because if you don't know the architecture and can't find your way around in that dark then you have no business being there. So there is never ever going to be any clear explication of what alchemy is about. But there are clues and in fact part of the charm is that there are almost an infinite number of clues. So you can take your choice if you like crossword puzzles, alchemy is your fort, this is it. Now Trismosin then took himself back to Germany. We lose track of him. His original name I think was Pfeifer, P-F-E-I-F-E-R, Pfeifer. Pfeifer as a name would be probably Saxon, perhaps somewhere along the Rhine area. I think anywhere from Cologne to Leipzig, around in that area. He took himself back to Germany but then refused to settle down in any one place and constantly traveled so that Trismosin, unlike the other three great masters of this beginning tradition - and there were four of them Ficino, Colet, Trithemius, and then Trismosin and Trismosin was the wanderer, he was the rover. And it is from Trismosin then that one gets the traveling hermetic genius prototype. And of course the great protagonist of this was Paracelsus. And I have on slide Solomon Trismosin degree to Paracelsus because it was through Trismosin that Paracelsus actually became not only an alchemist but a really great physician, an astrochemical physician because Trismosin did not work so much with books. He didn't work in the books philosophically with the ideas and he didn't work with the students. As an educator like all three of the other founders of this tradition did, but Trismosin was the mechanic in the works, the wandering mechanic. He worked with the processes themselves and in his writings is always this tone of the natural artist who works with the minerals, who works with the metals, who works with the plants, and his whole vocabulary and his whole idea of a syntax and its arrangement all comes from these kinds of natural processes. Now his alchemical process called the Red Lion is one half of a process which is complemented by the Green Lion. And when we get to the end of this series the last person that we take in this series was the person who concentrated on the alchemical process of the Green Lion and that person was Sir Isaac Newton. So that we find increasingly as we go along the most incredible kinds of parallels and the information that we had previous and the ideas that we had previous come into play and begin to show us, illuminate for us, a structure which was increasingly refined and never let go until it was brought to fruition at the end of the 1600s, the beginning of the 1700s, because all of this yields finally not only science as we know it today but yields for us the kind of mind which we today have. And we have a very peculiar, particular mind. It has a structure. It has an architecture. It has all kinds of patterns and predispositions which we need to know about. And it is not a mind based on ancient Greece, not a mind based on ancient Rome. It's not based even on the Old Testament or the New Testament. And it isn't medieval. It's a mind that was made and was given a certain predilection in those faithful centuries from the time of the 1500s to about the time of 1700. And by that time the structures were in place and the first generations to come in conflict with that of course produced what we call the romantic rebellion. People like Blake and Shelley, Napoleon, Jefferson, all of these people were trying to break out of the mind that had been created. But unfortunately none of their particular developments seems to have borne fruit. And so we have to do it all over again in our time. So all of these processes are extremely important because they are in fact the clues. This is the old Greek word, the clue, that is the thread which if we will wind up and follow its way through the labyrinth we will not have to meet that Minotaur and be consumed, and we can find our way out into daylight. One of those clues, one of those threads, is this alchemical process called the Red Lion. Little background. Basic alchemical processes in the classical world had four basic stages. The first stage was a stage which was called Nigredo - the darkness, the blackness. The second stage was Albedo, the whiteness. The third stage was Alredo, the yellow or the gold. And the fourth stage was Arubedo a red. So that in the classical mind in the third century AD in Alexandria, or in China of that time, or in Persia of that time. If you were to understand alchemy you would have a four part schema always operating in your symbolism. In the 15th and 16th century the third step was left out - sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose - and finally it became conditional so that there was only a three-part process: the black, the white, and the red. And this was an archetypal prejudice that came from a Trinitarian outlook on ultimate things instead of a four part natural foundation on the elements. This is why for instance American Indian ceremonies which did not go through that work always have a four-part structure whereas European-styled minds tend to have four ultimates now a three-part structure. Within this four-part structure, the balance of the four allowed for a expression of the processes so that nature itself was clearly seen to be in parallel with what you were understanding - both internally as a psychological being, and expressively as a chemist working with tools and materials, and as a human being able to see that yes this fits in from me through this to out there. But with this quirk that was engendered in the late 15th and early 16th centuries there needed to be some kind of a transposition because the interior structures and the natural structures no longer quite fit. And so all kinds of new amalgams were tried and brought together. And of course none of it would work because you're never going to roll something unless it's on a wheel. You can't roll it on triangles. And the sphericality of nature comes from a four-part basis so that we have some very interesting occurrences which will increasingly become clear to us. What we need now is to take a look at Trismosin's Red Lion process to try and fix in our mind an example of one of these dozens and dozens of threads clues. He says the first part - and he uses the term here loth sometimes, L-O-T-H, a loth is a measurement of weight, there are two lots in an ounce. You take eight loths, that is four ounces, of calcinated alum and you take a similar measure eight loths or four ounces of calcinated saltpeter and four loths or two ounces of calcinated table salt until you have 20oz of salted materials and these are triturated with 20 loths of corrosive sublimate and this all taking place in a proper sublimating vessel usually something spherical. At this early date it was still spherical, or at least egg shaped. The idea was that it still carried the natural wholesomeness of its context so that you have 20oz of a very corrosive acid and 20oz of various kinds of salts. And you bring these together. And the first thing that will happen is that the material will dissolve so that one could have the beginning of an alchemical process by saying well the first step must be to solvate, dissolve. And you would think to yourself well the old alchemical formula was dissolve and then coagulate and re-precipitate. So it must run something like this. I'm trying to make for you the the kinds of quandaries that people would get into. But Trismosin says, second step, carefully take out the sublimate and re-sublimate it with 20 loth fresh salts. During this operation it will be wholesome on account of the poisonous fumes to eat bread thickly spread with butter. Well this is ridiculous. How are you going to protect yourself with a slice of bread no matter how thick you spread the butter on? This is Trismosin's great genius, poking fun at the same time that he is giving the basic information because anybody who is like ignorant enough and greedy enough to follow this who thinks that he's going to make a gas mask out of bread and butter deserves what he gets. This is as soon as you see the sleight of hand. You see Christensen was this kind of a character capable of telling you the most sublime truths but there would be briars in among the roses. Put the sublimate then, he says, in a glass retort if you're still alive cover it with alcohol and distill over a water bath until half the fluid remains as an oil behind. So you're making an oil, that is you're taking an essence, but you're going through several steps and several stages and you're bringing together in your vessel and all the great alchemists always strive to express the idea that this vessel is a cosmos. It's not just a box, it's not just a container. The process itself requires that you address this vessel in a wholesome way because you're having to keep track of the entirety of this process because the things that count are little emendations in this process and the emendations are only visible if you are together. Your own equanimity of mind is the only key that you have because no one's going to spell it out for you. We have a phone book full of recipes and if you want to try and go that way you can go that way. It's like somebody trying to learn philosophy by taking the Oxford English Dictionary and trying to go by definition and trying to learn how to express themselves by going by definition. Pretty soon your notes are as big as the dictionary set because it's an endless, thankless, labyrinth. That way you have to be able to bring it together you have to be able to integrate it and that means that you have to have some kind of a perspective so that this whole process is forcing the quester, forcing the student, to rise above his mental capacities of just slavishly following arguments or information to get the bird onto the head and get that bird off the head and flying. And we'll have a slide of that, one of these alchemical processes. We've got to get that bird alive and well inside and get him up here and get him off. And you can think of all kinds of parallels. You could think of Noah and the ark sending the birds out over the ocean. Of drowning in the world as an alchemical indication. You can go through all these kinds of things but unless you do it yourself you never have any understanding that it's essential. In fact Trismosin would say, and does say, it is quintessential, quintessential. So we have an oil that's being distilled. The alcohol distilled over and over is poured back and there begins to be a residue and the retort, until it is covered with about a finger's breadth of residue in the retort. This distillation repeat three times, he says, and the whole of the sublimate will pass over into the recipient. Two retorts and you have them joined together and there's a transformation that's going on. This that you have now is the mercury of the philosophers, the mercurial water. This is a liquid, but this liquid is highly combustible. It fumes constantly. Very powerful acid. This mercurial water is sometimes called hellish fire in water. This mercurial water fumes always and must be kept in a closed vial of glass and stoppered. Then Trismosin says, now we take fine gold, usually in leaf or very thinly beaten, because he will say in here that one cannot work the original creation again. One cannot just make gold again because creation has already happened. So we have to take some gold and we have to project this gold upon another substance. And this is the way that we are going to make this transformation. Take fine gold in leaf or beaten thin, put it in a glass retort, just cover it with mercurial water, and put the retort on gentle heat then the water will begin to act upon the gold and dissolve it but it will not be reduced to a liquid entirely and only remain at the bottom like a greasy substance. Then pour off the mercurial water which can be used again. This gold sediment that remains divided into two parts. Take one half and pour thereon alcohol and let the mixture putrefy on gentle heat for 15 days. By putrefy that means let it make an amalgam, come together, cook together, not putrefy and becoming a corpse but meld itself together. And he says after 15 days this will begin to show a red colour blood red. And when you have the right red this is the lion's blood red. And this is a very special red and this red which we'll see in one of these slides was the color almost of pink when introduced into the natural world again when it was mixed with anything else ready to be projected it turned into a rosy color. So that this rosy-crucian, rosy color in the crucible, was a sign that one knew this process and could do it for oneself so that one knew nature and also oneself to the point to be able to produce the lion's blood which is also that rosy light color. And it comes out of a transposition which originally was black and then became sort of milky white and then became gold-colored and then became red so that this rubedo, this blood red, this lion's blood, very important because this lion's blood then can be used in several different ways in Trismosin gives us the ways. At least he gives us part of the way in which these ways could be used. He says this lion's blood pour into another glass retort which then you seal hermetically. And of course this has a lot to do with the whole tradition. If it isn't sealed properly, if there isn't a hermetic seal on it, and a hermetically seal something if you remember you use a little bit of beeswax - remember in your physics classes how you seal that? Yeah, like that. Then you put it on the heat and then it will turn black, then variegated, that is many many colors. Sometimes they call this the peacock's tail this particular stage. Then it will turn a very light gray which is almost a white almost like an ashen white. If you burn really fine paper it has that color of whitish gray then it will turn yellow and at last come back to a deep red, and this deep red after it has gone through from the lion's blood through all these processes again, this is the tincture. This is what every alchemist talks about. And this is what Jacob Bierman would talk about and all the mystics from then on will talk about, the tincture is this, that is the tincture, this doubly processed redness. Then Trismosin gives us a nice little aside. He says all that this will all happen provided it does not explode because this particular process he says is extremely dangerous and it likes to explode. The red tincture then, you have to try to rate in a glass mortar. You take one grain or part thereof and wrap it in paper and project it upon a thousand grains of gold infusion. When it has remained in fusion for about three quarters of an hour the gold will turn to tincture. So this tincture, this twice processed blood red the lion's blood and now the tincture accepts the gold in a very peculiar kind of plasma solution. Then take one part of this particular tincture and project it upon fine silver and it will transmute all of the silver into gold. In other words one has a medium which is extremely complicated to produce and very sophisticated and it in itself is only valuable because it has a capacity to communicate gold into a solution within itself and project it upon silver and turn it into gold. Now all of this is ready-made for the metaphors of the Christian mysteries. All of this just couldn't occur in a more natural form. And any person working with this kind of a process, day in and day out, year in and year out, with the kind of intelligence that these people had would begin to understand that they were talking about the exact process that the New Testament was talking about in terms of Jesus. And so they were saying to themselves, my God, we've been understanding this as cute parables which we learned as kids and then didn't quite want to believe in when we grew up and here look at us, we're proving it all over the place because it happens in nature just exactly this way and no other. So they looked back upon ecclesiastical history and began to understand that maybe there had been some kind of a spiritual tincture at the time of Jesus that had projected a kind of spiritual quality upon the world, a kind of a gold of the Holy Spirit and that that was what they should be looking at all this time. And when people like Trismosin came into contact with people like Trithemius and they could hold some really long-term interesting conversations throughout many nights and days without sleep, you can bet that it just occurred to them to go back and check on things. And the more they checked the more it read out just like they had uncovered the secret of the ages. And that's just what they called it. And that's just what they said. And not only that they said isn't it strange that this process comes to us from this underground all this time and that the origins of this process that we have now recovered for ourselves, hightailed it just about the time that all the councils were taking over the Christian church and the Christian communities, were becoming power struggle centers and all the people that had run the Roman Empire just exchanged their togas for a new kind of dress and that we had a different kind of an empire but very similar people and that the real secret esoteric message that had been given went out into the deserts just like it did in old times. And so they thought to themselves the only thing that we can do then is this. There's only a handful of us and we understand what we've got. We understand exactly what it is. We know how to make it work. We have to put together some understanding of how it got to us. We have to go back and study our traditions all over again. And not only that, we have to set up educational systems in our way so that we can teach other people, and bring people into this, and literally wake them up, retrain them. And then we have to prepare for the future because obviously man has a sacred duty upon this planet to reinstate the kingdom, to reinstate the New Jerusalem, and we haven't even begun on it because we had misunderstood it for some 1500 years. So they were faced with this kind of a problem. And this is where the impetus came to make a secret occult fraternity, to bring together those 4 or 5 or 6 at the most individuals, who could understand the incredibly difficult complex maneuverings and meanderings and the philosophic insights and the religious revelations and the linguistic learning and the human sophistication to bring all this together and be able to hold it in suspension of comprehension and share it among themselves. They knew that they could not stay in any one place. You can't risk putting all your eggs in one basket. And they knew that they could not make some kind of public declaration because if they were right, as they really did believe that they were, then the people in power were definitely wrong and they were not only just wrong but they were perpetrating conditions that would never make it right. So they had a political problem, they had a power problem, that they were going to have to work under a cloak of secrecy for their very lives. And if they stayed in any one cultural condition they would face the vicissitudes of that cultural condition. Whereas if they spread themselves out and went to several different countries, several different kinds of conditions, they might have a better chance of surviving but if they did the difficulty would be to keep alive the comprehension between all of them and to allow their students to mature with all these contacts. So they work with it, because they were hermeticists they didn't plan it out in their minds and then draw up the design and then try to force life to crack the whip. They were hermetic geniuses so they began to organize themselves in the way that they could and to set in motion the processes which they felt were necessary. And the first generation of students included both Paracelsus and Agrippa. They were the first graduating class - and there were some others we don't hear about so much - out of this secret fraternity. And they covered their tracks so well that 500 years later there's only 1 or 2 ways to show that there was even any contact among them, much less put together the story which I have dug back out again for you. One of the clues is in a manuscript, a volume, which was done to honor Paracelsus and was never published was written out in longhand in brown ink that ended up here in Los Angeles. And I have slides of that this evening to show you. And it's the only indication that I had for at least 3 or 4 months of searching that any of this was even possible. And then once the story is put together and you have some inkling of what happened you achieve an inner sense of illumination, a kind of equality of understanding, and every time you go back to this information this material, this era, you begin noticing more and more that it reads out correctly and that in fact individuals that you never would have supposed were right in the center of things. The artist Albrecht Dürer was one of the great geniuses associated with all of these people and the artist Andrea Mantegna also. And in fact Mr. Hall published Spontaneous Tarot Deck not so long ago. And you have to see that the 22 pictures of Trismosin's process are the arcana of the tarot deck and that the orders are peculiarly there. They're there in a way in which there has been no cultural adulteration, no one has toyed with them. So that they come to us in such a primordial state that at first we're not quite sure and we would not be sure if we were to lard them up prematurely with all kinds of explication and footnotes so that all that we would get then is the larded up mind of the emendations of the critics all over again and cheat ourselves of the very threshold of freedom which this entirety was about. That is, all these processes were about achieving a quality of spiritual freedom and insight. Now Trismosin goes on with this and he gives us about 7 or 8 different tincture usages. And each time he says this will produce such and such a quality, this will work on such and such a thing, so that one gets the idea that this really was the basic material, this tincture, this blood, that allowed transmutation. And of course Trithemius would have seen this as the blood of Christ but later on they became convinced that this was a quality that resided in the spiritual nature of man. And the symbol for it was the sphere, the sphericality. And in fact in the symbolism of this because a sphere has to be based on a spiritual understanding of nature, the sphere always has to be given a four-part nature, and commensurate with its process there has to be a water and a fire solution operating in the symbolism. And of course we find all of these requirements are met in the baptismal fount, the circular basin, and making the sign of the cross over that divides it into a four part and then the use of it to make a solution of the person's spirit and then of course the second part of that alchemical process is through a belief in the Christ. And so that one then is baptized and purified by this. And later on of course the symbolism became absolutely astoundingly refined because as the conception dawned on them increasingly that they were working with a very distant projection from the events that had happened in the New Testament times or even in the third century times and they realized that they were in fact working in a condition where history was controlled in a synthesizing spiritual way by the mystical presence of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost more than the Christos. Now this is a very complex process of how that came about and in fact it's such a difficult process that I had to devote an entire lecture series to it. And my next lecture series at the Philosophical Research Society starting next week, next Thursday, traces the way in which that realization first began to occur around the year 1000 AD and reached a fruition about 1250, 1270 AD but then was completely forgotten about and then was rediscovered later on by these individuals and brought back into play. What was understood by Trismosin and Trithemius, Ficino and Colet, as a very small family of spiritual questers, took almost a hundred years for it to mature to the point, to where there were adequate numbers of persons not only informed about it but capable of being informed about it. And when we have that generation we'll get to them. In this particular lecture series we have a renaissance. We have in England where four out of four daughters of one man read Hebrew, Greek, and Latin perfectly and it was no big thing. We get to a state of Civilization where some of the books that are written in Germany are still used today as manuals of true religion. Johann Ernst's True Christianity as an example. So we'll find that there are large patterns that are going to become clearer to you. There are individual tones of personal development that will become clearer to you. But all of this is contingent upon giving this information in the correct way. So I wish to say no more at this particular time and to show you I have about 30 slides and I wish to give them to you with as little comment as possible so that you have a chance to experience them firsthand and go through them. Let's do that and then we'll have a break after that. This is a page from that manuscript that I told you about - Philipi Theophrasti Paracelsi. Notice the designation that this is the secret of secret of secrets. And you can see Johannes Trithemius, you can see his name there, Abbot Trithemius. And Signor Salomonis. So both their names occur together here. Trismosin and Solomon. Trismosin mean most sin that comes from Moses. Remember Hermes Trismegistus. Well this is Solomon instead of Hermes and this is Christ Moses rather than Trismegistus. So that he took this name upon himself. This is the title page to the Steganographia. This is a 1624 printing of it and down in the bottom portion there is Sir Francis Bacon holding a hat almost like a crown over the head of the author. That is not Trithemius so much but the man the redactor who brought Trithemius work back into play and enlarged it. On the title page his name is Gustav Selene. And Selene of course refers to the moon and the only connection this man had with the moon is that he lived in a city called Luneburg and he was the Renaissance the Elizabethan Renaissance man in the moon and he was the occult master of Europe. He was the Trithemius of his day and his name was Duke Augustus the Duke of Brunswick or Braunschweig-Lüneburg in Germany. That word in Additio. Incidentally there is a Latin word which means to unravel the knot but it was particularly used of Kabbalistic understanding. In other words when one had a complete jumble of external confusion the only way to make one's way through that Gordian knot was to have the sword of truth to cut through it. So that's what that word refers to. Now let's see here we can get this to work. This is a diagram, the only diagram in the Steganographia of 1624. We're jumping a little ahead. Bacon was alive still at this time of course. I will have all of these available for your inspection. I have a great many of these xeroxed. That's Paracelsus. And you notice his sword? See the handle of his sword, the great jewel Azoth. And his elbow resting on the Kabbalah. And we have a few other books down there. And up in the corners are magic squares. And the magic square that you see up there on the right reoccurs in one of Albrecht Dürer's most famous engravings, woodcuts, called Melancholia I. If you remember that in the Ficino lecture that melancholia was the philosopher's temperament. So the primordial philosopher's temperament is what Paracelsus had here. In fact this was done about 1539 - this portrait of him. He died in 1541. And we'll get to Paracelsus and cover him. This is an illustration from the final pages of the Steganographia, very mysterious. The only color in this are the red lips of the man asleep with the lion. And of course we're just talking about the Red Lion process of alchemy. One is at home with the lion. There is of course still a leopard available, fraught with dangers. This was also in there and this is very peculiar. Here is a man who is shooting off a little handgun. There's one puff of smoke from the fuse and the other from the barrel of the gun. But he's shooting a painting of himself. Yes. He no longer needs to have a painting to remind him who he is. He no longer needs a map of himself to hold in front of his face. He is able to dispense with it. And then the colors of course, blue for black. 1515, signed by Salomon Trismosin himself, and you can see from his handwriting what an elegant character he was. The tincture magustrasies and these are all indications so that the next generation would know that Paracelsus indeed was the correct master to follow. So that with all great humility when they passed on, Trismosin and Trithemius and Colet and to many much extent Ficino all passed from the scene and were just never really seen in their true light. But their students were all highly regarded. Pico and Paracelsus are far more famous and Agrippa than their masters. This is the title page of this secret document. This secret manuscript. I-N-R-I. And you notice that the initial I is buried underground in the darkness where it begins so that the word for Christ is buried and its initial letter and comes out of the dark earth. Then there's an acrostic of Jesus and you notice I don't know if you can pick it out, maybe your eyes are a little better than mine. On the right hand side of the upright portion of the cross there is a line of rosy red light that matches the letters so that we're given to see that the cross is hollow and that the wood or the black volume facing us actually does not have something written upon itself but it's carved out allowing us to see what's behind it. And what is behind it is a rosy light, rosy light. In alchemical terms the white, the albedo was the daylight the daybreak, but the red was the sunrise and that the lion only comes out with the sun. The true self only comes with the sun. So that there's such a thing as having intuition. And then there's such a thing as having comprehension which is more and better and later and surrounding it says from the cross a sphere. And then comes wisdom so that the cross is the intuition. And it's what comes after that that is the Sapientia, the wisdom. And what does that come? Resurrection. Resurrection. So that one can gain an insight, in fact you can gain all the insight that you want, into life after death but it's only when you are resurrected that you then have Sapientia. This increasingly became material that they followed and refined. This is the title page of La Toison d'Or, The Golden Fleece. And it has excerpts from all the other illustrations in the document and I have 22 slides in color like this which I'll show you in order. I want to just make as few comments as possible so that you can come to this material in your own way but notice it's almost like a Marc Chagall painting. And the figure in the lower left looks for all the world like the hermit in the tarot deck. He also looks like the portrait of Hermes Trismegistus in the great cathedral at Siena. You notice the angelic white figure up in the upper left. You notice several hermaphroditic figures. You notice all kinds of retorts with various stages of bird formations within them. You notice the king and the queen down in the lower right with trees of life. Arbor. Philosophy. Growing up. About. And then you notice the sun. And by the sun you notice the staff with the red cross, the paschal lamb insignia of the resurrection. Now let's see if I can get this right. The sun and the moon; the king and the queen. Notice that the books that they have are not pages but scrolls. And notice that the motion of the scrolls is like a drapery. They hold their material with grace and regality and style. The information that they have is almost flowing around them like clouds or light. Or for those that have been attending the Mahayana lectures it's like the draperies at Dunhuang. They flow gravity-free because they are of the other realm. They are not of this world. They are not held in by this world. The king and the queen. And there the scroll makes a hermetic pass around the retort. And notice the barefoot sage. This is often portrayed as a knight standing upon two fountains with a sword raised and a shield, a red shield. Notice how red and white and green, primordial colors here. They have picks. And those are mountain goats in a style known in heraldry as rampant. Mountain sheep rampant. The birds are in the trees. The youngster is climbing a ladder to try and fetch those birds. The tree has a white trunk though and it roots itself in a crown and exactly at the crown the white trunk becomes a flow of white water. But this is a very peculiar tree. Extraordinary capacities. So that perhaps it is not just a tree, perhaps it's a green cloud, or perhaps these birds are not just birds. I want to keep some of the mysteriousness alive in here because it really is a profound process. A little bit of inundation counts I think. There is a king in the sea there in that white ocean. He's calling for help. The king in the deep of us is calling for help. In order to go and rescue, one has to go under the waters. One has to go under and face those perils. And when one does, of course then one becomes that king. And then you notice that that king is very much like the one who was calling for help. But look how he holds himself. He has the imperium globe. The globe again the spear. And he has the scepter. And above his head rises the sun. And Trismosin always used the phrase Splendor Solis Splendor because the sun has not just its rays but that the rays carry a brightness about them, a quality which is its splendor. These are extraordinarily pregnant illustrations in terms of universal symbolism. They just as you look at them, more and more occurs. So I don't want to jumble them up too much. We'll come back to them again, and I will in fact, I have xeroxes in black and white of these so you can take a look at them closer. So he is coming out of the water. He is naked. He is nude. He is back to his primordiality. And as he comes out of the water this wonderful angelic presence with the six-pointed star above her crown and her angel wings and her dress like Flora in the Primavera of Botticelli is waiting for him. And there are times when we realize that they are not just ourselves as we thought but that there are other capacities that are in motion with us and in fact are us as much as we thought we were ourselves and they seem to have purposes. There is an alchemical stage, the process of separation, which is often experienced as the dismemberment of a body. If you get dissociated enough you get to the separation in the supermarket and you're really standing in line. So purification usually is turning up the energy, turning up the heat. And here notice that above the man in this alchemical hot tub, the elusive bird. More heat. More intensity. Notice the Bellagio-style of architecture. The terrazzo courtyard and the Italianate arches and the facade being divided up. Now a series of images in the retort. Retort, the alchemical vessel. Alembic. Sometimes it has many names. Notice the dragon. I watched the transmutation of this dragon. Where I turneth a dragon. Here we have three primordial birds or three primordial forces - the black, the red, and the white. And in the next one, the three have become like a phoenix. And then our phoenix becomes differentiated. Notice the green appearing and the green becomes the peacock's tail - the grand fanning of variegated colors. What it signifies in terms of the chemistry and alchemy is the iridescence of the materia at this point. Pearly opalescence reflecting rainbow colors but not in a rainbow. And after that we have this figure, which is of course the later rebirth symbolism is very apparent. In the King with the universal orb and the scepter. The universal orb is a sphere with a cross on top. And you see this of course again and again in the tarot deck and in Renaissance art. And we're back to nature as it is with the traveler need not be delineated in any particular way, is able to move with the entirety of the process as it is and returns to a condition like children playing. Well as you can see there's one playing with the top that's in front and children play. That is to say this exuberance of life, child-like again, footloose in the world again. And here is the purifying of the external realms. We're going to wash the world and clean it up. There isn't anything wrong with it that we cannot now attend to with our processes and the last frame and the sequence free in the world and sunrise ready to go back to the cities. Well, that's the sequence and I better give you this last slide. That's the man who made it. Oh wow. Well there's old Salomon Trismosin. That was a pencil sketch done of him in 1509. And I think you can see that he's really somebody. With great granddaddies like that behind us we can't be all that bad. Well that's all for tonight. Thank you.