Agrippa

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The date is April 12th, 1983. This is the seventh lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on The Origins of Hermetic Science. Tonight's lecture is entitled Agrippa: An Occult Philosophy; The Myth of the Magus.

I would just like to remind you that our only source of income is from these lectures and from the sale of cassettes. So if you can help us out and contribute in those areas we'd be most appreciative. We're trying to sustain ourselves purely in this way and we've done rather well I think for four months and hope to continue as long as we may.

This lecture tonight is on Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim and there's one emendation on the lecture schedule. Instead of devoting two lectures to John Dee, next week I will cover Johannes Reuchlin and try to bring John Dee into focus within one lecture. I think I can do that. Increasingly as this has developed the figure of Johannes Reuchlin is so major that I think we're going to have to just include him. And even though he comes really before Paracelsus and Agrippa in strict chronological terms, I think he's a better bridge to John Dee than would be Agrippa or Paracelsus even.

If you recall in the lecture on Salomon Trismosin in the delineation of his Red lion alchemy he often quotes an alchemist philosopher known as Morienus and in fact at the beginning of the Second Treatise On Matter and Nature of the Philosopher's Stone he recounts, Morienus says you shall know the whole work of this art ends in two operations hanging very close together so that when the one is complete the other may begin and finish this perfecting the whole mystery. And we will of course emphasize at the end of the course that the Green Lion operation is the natural concomitant to the Red Lion. And the major alchemical work of Isaac Newton was in terms of the quest for the Green Lion. This allusion to Morienus in Trismosin gives us some idea of the tremendous roots of the alchemical tradition. And while we are talking of individuals who lived in the 16th century we have to go back just momentarily some five hundred years, four or five hundred years in order to establish the figure of Morienus because it is from Morienus that the tradition recounted by Trismosin and then by Paracelsus and then by John Dee follows.

Now Morienus is very difficult to track down. There are several manuscripts of his work but the best edition collating all the known manuscripts in the world is a book called The Testament of Alchemy published, oddly enough, by Brandeis University Press about nine years ago. And it is subtitled The Revelations of Morienus, Ancient Adept and Hermit of Jerusalem to Khalid ibn Yazid King of the Arabs Being the Divine Secrets of the Magisterium and the Accomplishment of the Alchemical Art. And it's translated into English. The commentary that's included with it is insipid and not really useful for our purposes at all. We often run into redactors who are to be congratulated on collating and translating but actually the commentary on much of this type of work is just not of use at all.

Now Morienus, in this particular translation into Latin, comes into the very beginnings of the Western alchemical tradition. The first translation from the Arabic to the Latin was made by an Englishman named Robert of Chester and this translation was made around the 1180s. A very telling era for those who are following the Thursday night series. The 1180s also saw the rise of the mystical visions of Joaquim de Fiore and it gave us a prelude to that upheaval of the European psyche that accompanied the First Crusade so that the 1180s figure in the development of the spiritual visionary capacity of the European mind very much like the 1580s which were approaching very rapidly. It's curious that Robert of Chester would have chosen Morienus to translate from the Arabic to the Latin as the first text in alchemy because Morienus was in fact the first text to be translated from Greek into Arabic and started the Arabic alchemical tradition. So that we have in this one thin document the beginnings of both European or Latin language alchemy and the beginnings of Arabic language alchemy in the very same document. Now Morienus was said to have been a hermit outside of Jerusalem, up in the hills of Jerusalem. And in fact this is a mythological type of a designation because the hills around Jerusalem are actually concomitant, adjacent to, that wilderness which one can see from the Mount of Olives. And that wilderness goes all downhill to the Dead Sea where the Jordan River runs into the Dead Sea where the great Qumran Monastery was. So that the mountains around Jerusalem are a geographical way of saying that this individual had gone back into the primordial spiritual retreat from which emerged, not only the Christian and not only the Jewish, but the Hellenistic traditions of mystical synthesizing. Now Morienus was said to have been a student of the last great Greek alchemist Stephanos and so that Morienus, in himself, personifies the bridging technique between cultures. He is that Christian Greek. Actually his name was Morienus and his attempt to explain the inner secrets of alchemy to an Islamic figure very very strong. He was in line for very great power. Khalid ibn Yazid was an individual who did not live very long - about 40, 45 years - but he was in line for a position of power. But his basic inclination was to respect philosophy and especially the higher wisdom. So he is the prototype of that wise leader who we will see incarnates or manifests in the form of the figure of Maximilian the First in the time of Agrippa. All this figures very very strongly together. The patterns are once seen indelible and they reoccur. The parallels are almost incredible, in fact, and it was termed hermetic circles in the old tradition because the overlay of the pattern showed the truth of the moment and one could almost then prophetically predict from a truthful acquaintance with how the patterns had unfolded at any given time in the tradition because they would in fact unfold exactly the same way again so that there was a condition of prophesizing. And you remember last week that we talked about the prophecies of Paracelsus in which there were 32 illustrations which of course are the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the ten Sephiroth put together making 32 paths which is the form of the book of formation the Sefer Yetzirah.

So all of the reoccurring patterns that come again and again are proofs of the legitimacy of the tradition. Now Morienus or Morienus as he was known very often they affix the term Romanus to his name. He was not Roman but Greek. But in the Latin Christian tradition they were not about to admit that the beginnings of wisdom in this had affinity to the Greek church so they always affixed Romanos on to make sure that he was understood to be a Christian and his intent in giving these alchemical mysteries to Khalid was to convert Khalid from Islam to Christianity by showing him that at the innermost transmutation of matter there was a religious control in an equilibrium of contemplation that could only be achieved by understanding the cosmic position of the Christ so that Morienus came reluctantly out of his hills around Jerusalem condition to deliver a series of dialogues with Khalid which were recorded by the Arab secretary, I think his name was Gallienus or Gallianus. In this series of dialogues and they are not very long. It occupies, in Latin, about 25 pages, 30 pages at the most. Khalid is constantly probing, asking questions to go further and Morienus is constantly giving him stages in a form that Khalid can recognize that there is more to come and that the more to come fits in with what has already come and that all of this is leading towards a purpose. And the purpose of course is to understand how reality transmutes itself by going into a primordial condition, the primal material and reappearing by the direction of man's inner vision in a pristine form clued by heaven but controlled by the operation of man. So Khalid says at one point further into the dialogue, Oh, Morienus explained still further to me and Morienus replies but what more can I tell you? For this matter comes from you who are yourself its source where it is found and whence it is taken and when you see this your zeal for it will increase. Consider this and you will find that it is true.

So he is giving the secret, the mystery, the core of the treasury of the process and Khalid is trying to assume it and in trying to assume it he asks for the overall metaphor for the process so that he can review it in terms of his trying to be the center, the source in his own self. So that Morienus then gives to Khalid the overview of the alchemical process and the one that he gives is the basic process known as the Red Lion. And I'll just give you this, it's only a paragraph. Morienus gives it in a very fine summation. Morienus answered, it is indeed when you have treated the body or earth in the way we have described. Put into it a fourth part of the ferment or milk for the fermentation of gold is like that of bread. That is we're making an oil of gold. We're making a quintessence of gold which can be held in a solution and then projected out from that solution onto other material. For the fermentation of gold is like that of bread. Then put it in the sun or in dung to be warmed so that it is made one substance and body and dried. Then bless God and begin the washing.

And this of course is not simply a glib tandem. The blessing, the asking for blessings, and the washing are two concomitant processes which are absolutely indispensable. And we will see in about three weeks, four weeks that the really high powered alchemical documents of the early 1600s always use a style of tent in the laboratory for the beseeching of the divine. And that tent is very close to the iconography of the tabernacle in the desert and also the Arabic tent of the Caliph so that the beseeching of God here, absolutely important. And one begins the washing at the same time so that the inner process and the outer process follow ostensibly in an analogical way. But as I will quote from Jung, in just about ten minutes, it is not an analogical process. There's something else that's happening.

So Morienus goes on. Take one part of the mortifying substance and cook it for three days being careful not to lengthen or shorten the time. Do not let the fire, which should be gentle, go out or burn too low. He's asking for constancy, for consistency not too high and not too low. And it must be continuous. We will see later on that Paracelsus when he gives us the very same process in the treasury of treasures he makes it five days just to make sure that one carries through and one gets the sense that this is of some duration. But Morienus is now just talking about three days three basic days. The Kabbalistic understanding here on the three of course is that it is the only geometric form of primordial primordial equilibrium. The three produces the equilibrium. You can have fire, and you can have water, but then you have to have the air to balance it. So the three primordial letters, the Aleph, the MIM, and the shin - the fire, and the water, and the air - make an equilibrium. What one is seeking is not a synthesis but an equilibrium. This of course when it is misunderstood becomes a philosophy. But when it is understood it becomes spiritual vision. It's quite a different image.

So we have three days. Be sure not to lengthen or shorten the time and do not let the fire which should be gentle go out or burn too low. If you neglect this Morienus assures Khalid if you neglect this your pot and everything in it will be ruined much to your loss. So that this is the most delicate quality to be brought forth in the process. Then wait 17 days after which return to your pot and open it. Change the liquid in it, replacing it with fresh and do all this three times so that the entire process that's been described goes on three times.

Why is this? It is not simply to effect a chemical change but to assure a ritual purity in being able to reach this stage of equilibrium three times showing that it wasn't just by guesswork or by chance or by some fluke but that one consciously knows the feel of the process the use of the inner source to affect the equilibrium right on time, three times in a row. That should be sufficient to show that one actually knows how to do this. It's like riding a bike. One has to have a sense of inner balance or it doesn't obtain. And so Morienus is stressing this to Khalid.

Use the same pot and keeping it always in a suitable furnace until the fermentation of this gold is finished and this fourth of the brew is reduced by half. After 20 days, take it out and dry it. In Arabic it is called and the Arabic word is al iksir and in Latin elixir elixir elixir. So this is the making of the elixir. Then put the washed and prepared body upon your furnace and moisten it daily with the fourth part of the mortified matter which remains taking care that the flame of the fire does not touch the pot which will be destroyed if it does. Finally, place the pot in a large furnace and start a fire on top of it, keeping it up without diminution for two days and nights. Then take the pot from the fire and praise the creator for that which he has given you.

So that we have the basic source here at one of the most critical points in the exposition. For the whole tradition of alchemy, from the Ancient Greek, to the Arabic, to the Latin. And it was recounted by Trismosin in Splendor Solis and given directly to Paracelsus. Now Paracelsus, and it occurs in volume one of the Hermetic and Alchemical writings of Paracelsus, and in the first volume on page 36 Paracelsus has a very short treatise. I think it's about four pages, a little over four pages called The Treasure of Treasuries for Alchemists. And there is an introduction which is very short. Then there is a small section concerning the sulfur of cinnabar. Then a section concerning the Red Lion and the concluding section concerning the Green Lion. So that in these four pages Paracelsus shows, if I may use the term, quite adeptly that he has in fact received the tradition and understood it perfectly. That tradition going back all the way through the Greek tradition of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists back into ancient Egypt. We don't have time to trace it back that far this year. Next year we will.

In this Paracelsus gives us almost a verbatim rendition of what Morienus gave to Khalid. But it's interesting here that Morienus, who approached Khalid with the greatest of trepidation, came out of his hiding in the wilderness for the purpose of converting him to the Christian vision. What are we to think that Paracelsus is giving this treasure of all treasuries in print? Is he divulging the secret? Is he showing us by implication that he no longer honors it? Not so. He is in fact showing us that there has been an opening up of the Hermetic tradition, recognizing that what is mysterious and secret in these processes is mysterious and secret within the receiving individual as a quality of mystical capacity and is no longer hidden simply because it's in a language which he cannot understand or simply because he never in his life happened to run across masters who were able to teach it. In fact Paracelsus is saying we know that the secret will maintain itself regardless of whether we put it in print or not. And thus we give it to all because those who have eyes to see will see and those with ears to hear will hear.

So that with Paracelsus we have the first great individual who actually, in almost a democratic vision, sees that this information is being given to man-at-large because a new age is about to dawn and the self-elect have been scattered so that the prophecies of Paracelsus which we talked about last week are an attempt along with the rest of his alchemical works to set up a horizon of information made available to all who will come and get it. And this of course happened in the late 1520s, the 1530s. Paracelsus died in 1541.

Now this is the general overall strategy of what was happening in the Hermetic tradition when Henry Cornelius Agrippa came upon the scene. Agrippa was born in 1486. The correct date is September 15th. I have a Xerox here. Mr. Hall did Agrippa's chart one time and I found it in his note in his pencil writing in an old book and I have it for those who are curious about it. He was born about 25 miles south and a little bit to the west of Cologne. Cologne is the big German trading center on the Rhine River and in this little valley south of Cologne the von Nettesheim families had been employed for several generations, most of them in service to various noble houses associated with the Houses of Austria. So that they were aligned with the Habsburgs by service and Agrippa as a youngster was really quite happy well taken care of and at a very early age probably the age at which a young boy at that time would have been a page was sent to the great Emperor Maximilian the First to be a valet and then very quickly as secretary and then very quickly a soldier because Maximilian the First was a daring man of adventure. He had been curtailed as a youth. Maximilian had not really learned to speak properly until he was about 8 or 9 years of age. He had a little bit of a speech impediment and had not really been given a decent education so that when he came into a position of of power and money and so forth he was always interested in having around him scintillating individuals. He loved artists, he loved philosophers, he loved action soldiers of fortune, he loved this whole entourage of people. In his court one would find individuals like Albrecht Dürer and individuals like Henry Cornelius Agrippa. He was the man who sent a letter to Trithemius saying if he wanted to come to his court he would take care of him.

Maximilian the first was really somebody and the great Arch of Maximilian which I've been unable to find by Albrecht Dürer is one of the really great esoteric illustrations of all time. Agrippa was sent to Maximilian the First as a youngster - maybe 16, 17 on the outside - and his inner genius, his capacity to be a young man of the world, just charmed Maximilian the first. He recognized right away he had been 30 years old when Agrippa was born so that he was just old enough to really be almost like a father to him. So he entrusted Agrippa with several diplomatic missions and the young Agrippa brought them off. So Maxmilian being the kind of individual he was not only emperor with power to do things but as being a court center. And in his day he was the grand master of all the mystery traditions in the sense that he was the effective man of the world who if somebody needed funds he got them there. If somebody needed an education he got them there. He made things happen. He was the fire under the pot of his age. He sent the young Agrippa to the University of Paris. And from Agrippa's letters at this time we note that he begins to realize that there is a whole occult movement, a brotherhood, afoot in Europe and that he is now privy to all of these persons and personages and processes.

In fact, while he is at the University of Paris - and he is about 17 years old, maybe 18 at the most, 19 on the outside - is the first time that he goes to meet Trithemius. Now Trithemius at this time would have been just beginning to be the most outstanding intellect of his age. He was in correspondence with almost everybody. He had taken over the monastery of Sponheim at age 21 almost a generation back. One of the small exhortations that exists in translation to his monks, are for them to spend their leisure time copying manuscripts that what was needed now were great libraries in the world to energize the vision of man. That man was about to be born out of a condition of ignorance that he had been left in due to irreligious circumstances of past centuries and he was about to be born again and that he needed to have all this energizing. And Trithemius incidentally believed in this in a vibratory way that what a master does is to infuse from his own energy field out to the students so that they would feel the tingling possibility of knowing and understanding and would go in their own questing and their own questing would fall into place more naturally because the master was already giving out the right energy webbing. And this was of course the way in which Trithemius worked.

Agrippa then came into contact with this. He was a flamboyant individual, muscular individual. And while he was at the University of Paris and while he was having contacts with Trithemius. He was also meeting individuals from other countries and he realized that he could best. Affect his career by pleasing Maximilian the First by showing him that he could engineer some kind of a political coup showing him that he was in fact worth all the education and the attention that was being shown to him. And so Agrippa, looking around for a project by which to impress his master and will see that this was a natural trait, personality trait in Agrippa he does it several other times in his life much to his chagrin. But this first time he met a Spanish individual who had come from the disintegrating court Isabella Queen Isabella, Ferdinand and Isabella Queen Isabella had been the power. It's of no small matter that it's her jewels that go to Columbus. She was the power. And when she died, Ferdinand was ousted by the court officials and was banished down to Aragon. And he vacillated between Aragon and Naples. Southern Italy was in his domain at that time. And while this was going on they were trying to find somebody else to come into the throne in Spain. Philip did not last very long. And so in this turmoil Agrippa got the brilliant idea that as a master military strategist, at least a budding one, he would take over Spain for Maximilian the First. These people thought big and he thought the key to the whole campaign would be to take the city of Tarragon and hold that fortress against all comers and make propaganda across the countryside and bring the Spanish people together with this wonderful vision. And of course this would put him in good stead with Maximilian the First.

He made several declarations to traveling individuals and outlined his beautiful plans and the plans filtered down as they will to Maximilian who probably had a very hearty laugh and then thought to himself that there might be some possibilities of this after all. And so he let it be known by the way in which emperors let it be known. They send people around to tell you. One day somebody will come and the next day another person and so on. And Agrippa was let known that he should in fact undertake this exercise. And so the young Agrippa, not even 20 years of age, went on an adventure into Spain to try to see if he could engineer a takeover of that country. He got to Spain and found himself in the unfortunate position, after a month or two of intrigue, of being trapped inside of a tower and surrounded - the whole countryside was filled with foes - and he thought his glorious, wonderful career was going to come to an end except that he had been given this wonderful and visioning capacity and in fact he thought that he would use a little bit of a ruse. So he took the young son, a boy of about 12 years old, of somebody in the tower, the keeper of this tower who was on his side and knowing a little bit about medicine. In fact having studied a lot of medicine at the University of Paris he recreated out of flour and paint and mud and so forth all the symptoms of plague on this individual - painted him up. And sent him out with a message all wrapped up around this crooked staff. And the boy was told to go out and try to actually be captured. And of course there was a wide swath of peasants and armed knights got out of the way of this leprous looking individual and he was able to carry a message through to Agrippa's friends and under stealth of disguise Agrippa escaped and fled south with several friends and finally ended up in the port city of Valencia from where they took a boat to Italy looking for others of their brethren. Agrippa at this time felt rather good. He hadn't captured Spain but he had certainly proven himself to be a soldier of the highest order. And of course these tales and legends going back to Maximilian were then recounted at court and then repeated so that Agrippa, by the age of 20 or 21, was known as a fantastic flamboyant man of adventure and this reputation was to stay with him for the rest of his life. He finally made his way back to southern France, Avignon, and then went up to the Burgundy country and there one of the daughters of Maximilien, a woman named Margaret who was by this time in her early 30s twice widowed and actually capable of probably being impressed by a flamboyant young man. Agrippa though had no military campaigns to undertake so he hit upon the next best thing, a plan, a strategy of again showing his enormous capacities. So he advertised a lecture series on the most arcane subject he was acquainted with, on the Kabbalah. And he would use as his text Johannes Reuchlin's De Verbo Mirifico (The Wonder-Working Word) and in fact he advertised that this whole series was dedicated to Her Highness Margaret assuring that everybody of importance in this whole Burgundy area. He was in the city of Dole at that time but several other areas were included. So the young Agrippa about 22 years of age delivered in the most flamboyant style imaginable and using a subject matter which was all but taboo to the royalty of the Burgundy area and in the lecture series developed the whole notion that they had very little understanding of the way in which God works. And in fact the key to the whole process was hidden in the Kabbalah in the mystical understanding of the Hebrew language. And unfortunately those persons of influence and power hearing this thought he was telling them that they should convert from Christianity to Judaism. So that the reputation of Agrippa as being somewhat of an off-color black magician began to surface at this time and in fact several monks also vying for positions of power were only too glad to paint Agrippa in these colors, that in fact he was perhaps successful in his military adventures because he had maybe made a pact with somebody well known. And in fact all of these lectures that he was giving showed that he was of the other party and perhaps he should be closely watched.

It took a while for these accusations to percolate and make their way through European society. But we have to understand that Agrippa was already well known. He was headline news. He was the kind of character in his day that somebody in our day, say like Allen Ginsberg would be, everybody knows of him and is interested in following what is he doing now, that sort of thing.

Agrippa at this time 1508, 1509, married for the first time and he was riding a crest of ebullience. He had lectured on one of the most difficult arcane subjects known at the time. He had pulled off a military coup. He was a favorite with the most powerful monarch of the day so that he figured that his marriage would in fact be prime at this time and along with the marriage he published at this time a small treatise on the Preeminence of Woman to go along with his marriage. And of course we sense the showman in Agrippa. He had the ear of Europe. He had the scintillating mind of Europe. And now he would show himself a gracious courtier philosopher of the first caliber in writing this wonderful treatise on the Preeminence of Women and getting married at the same time.

He in fact says that women are somewhat superior to men because they are more comprehensive in their cosmic endowments. That while man is made of the earth, Eve is actually of a heavenly substance more comprehensive. And so from his letters, and I'm quoting here from A Life of Agrippa by Henry Morley in two volumes 1856 London - it's the only readable life of Agrippa. Unfortunately it's been out of print for over a hundred years. Morley translates from the Treatise of Agrippa in the first place woman being made better than man received the better name. Man was called Adam, which means earth - Woman Eva which is by interpretation life. By as much as life excels Earth, woman therefore excels man. And this it is urged must not be thought trivial reasoning because the maker of those creatures knew what they were before he named them and was one who could not err in properly describing each we know. And the Roman laws testify that ancient names were always consonant with the things they represented and names have been held always to be of great moment by theologians and jurists councils. And so he goes on. And of course this is directly consonant with his lecture series on the Mirific word because there in the Kabbalistic understanding of the power of the letters and the words and the combinations the geomatria of Kabbalistic thought the notarikon of Cabbalistic multiplication. All of these elements were brought to the fore and Agrippa was displaying his great occult understanding by writing this treatise showing that in his own life in his marriage and in his own understanding of the world of society women and men was all the way consonant with his understanding of occult happenings. And so it's no surprise that along with these lectures on Reuchlin and the treatise on the Preeminence of Woman he also wrote in this same year - he was about 22, 23 years of age - the manuscript of occult philosophy (De Occult Philosophy) even though it was not published for another 20 or 21 years. It was written in this time period and it was at this time that he then sent the manuscript to Trithemius. And if you were here for the Trithemius lecture you recall that Trithemius wrote back to him having held the manuscript and the messenger until he had read it marveling at the wondrous intelligence displayed but also cautioning Agrippa saying that one should just put straw before oxen lest they trample you as it so often falls out as Trithemius would say in his own language this warning. And this capacity should have been heeded by Agrippa. But we have to see at this time that he was just riding the crest of a wave of successes. And as a young individual he just couldn't be helped really. He was considered a genius, a person of absolute promise by this developing brotherhood. This tradition - Trismosin and Trithemius, Reuchlin, Maximilian the First. But he needed a little bit of seasoning. And so it was at this time that he was sent to England and he stayed while at England. Where else? In the house of John Colet. Yeah. So that the movements of Agrippa, and the movements of Paracelsus, if we follow them very closely with comprehension as to the strategy and the pattern will yield that secret society of that age and all the contexts. It's by following Agrippa and Paracelsus in their movements and keeping the strategy of the hermetic motion alive in our cognition that we're able to see the pattern. They never wrote it out. They would have considered it ignorance to declare it as a thing. It was to have been seen only in the occult motions of the entire process. And anyone who could see that, understand that, was then in the Hermetic tradition already capable of holding that inner equilibrium so that one could see that the alchemical process happened not just with minerals but happened in the world at large so that the producing of gold was also the producing of the utopia. And it is exactly at this time that we find one of John Colet’s mentors - who held the same relation to Colet as Agrippa held to Trithemius and Paracelsus to Trismosin - Sir Thomas More wrote the Utopia which was the first grand expression that the expectation was not simply to make gold or have an inner religious vision but in fact to produce a society of human beings that would be perfected that the alchemical process of regeneration would be applied to that most elusive of mineral substances man himself.

And so it's in connection with this that I bring in two quotations from Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. This is the second edition of Psychology and Alchemy when they made the collected works of Jung this was the first volume that was translated about 1952, 53 in the Bollingen Series. Later on as the collected works progressed they realized that several passages had been mistranslated from the German, misunderstood, and some material needed to be worked in. So the book was completely revised in 1968. So if you get Psychology and Alchemy and it's in paperback make sure that you get the 1968 second edition. It's the only one to have now. In the section called, The Psychic Nature of the Alchemical Work, Jung, who is one of the few individuals who understood what was going on here. There aren't many, you can probably count them on one hand. In the paragraph number 377 he gives us the following observation: “The assumption underlying this train of thought is the causative effect of analogy. In other words, just as in the psyche the multiplicity of sense perceptions produces the unity and simplicity of an idea. So the primal water finally produces fire. In other words, the ethereal substance and not” - this is the decisive point - “as a mere analogy but as the result of the mind's working on matter. As above, so below is not just an analogy. It is in fact a working rule of thumb so that when the architect takes the gnomon from the Kabbalistic square in his mind he is able also to take the builder's rule and put it on matter and build. So that one has not only the architecture of ideas but one has the architecture of a just society or the Temple of Solomon. So that one has to not only know the analogical correlations but one has to experience the belief that it is in fact done.”

Jung goes on, and on, in paragraph 390 - in the Collected Works all the paragraphs are numbered - paragraph 390 he makes the second observation absolutely indispensable. It's in a section labeled Meditation and Imagination. Meditation and Imagination. For they are related, but they are different. Jung in such great penetration observes, “the point of view described above is supported by the alchemist's remarkable use of the terms meditatio and imago. Rutland's lexicon Alchemiae defines meditatio as follows. The word meditatio is used when a man has an inner dialogue with someone unseen. It may be with God when he is invoked or with himself or with his good angel.”

Do you remember in the first lecture the good angel is the guardian spirit that Plotinus talked about - the guardian spirit that manifests. How? By the just use of magic. And if you recall in that lecture, Plotinus once in Rome went accompanied with an ancient old-style Egyptian priest looking for a sacred place to conjure up the guardian spirit and they were sorely pressed to find a pure place in Rome. And they finally found a little temple of a sort of a Vestal Virgin temple not the main one. It was impure in Plotinus’s day. And in this little tiny pure place on the outskirts of Rome the old Egyptian style priests conjured up Plotinus guardian spirit and his porphyry says in his Life of Plotinus he was overawed because he said this is no mere demon. Not a bad demon but a spiritual force but a veritable god. That Plotinus’s guardian spirit was a god.

So in this, the dialogue in the meditation may be with God. It may be with oneself or it may be with that good angel that guardian spirit. Jung observes, “the psychologist is familiar with this inner dialogue. It is an essential part of the technique for coming to terms with the unconscious.” Where have we seen that dialogue? That coming to terms with the unconscious with Morienus Morienus and Khalid having their dialogue with the very process that Trismosin was using. So that again and again. We have in this form of the dialogue the center of the secret process in that it is in this theater of interchange that a quality of unconditioned presence may be engendered so that by magic by using the dialogue of the elements one can create the oil of gold. But in the dialogue of the inner sense one may create the inner equilibrium of one's angelic order and later on the very same intelligence will inform the construct of theaters, especially the Globe Theater in London, because the play's the thing. It's only in this cosmic dialogue that the unconditioned can be engendered, can be brought down, into a form that is manifested by man and infuse and energize his construct with the unconditioned. So that when we get to it, the greatest magical ceremony of Elizabethan times was the performance of a Midsummer Night's Dream and the harmonizing of the world was really meant. It was a work of great magic.

But Jung, showing here again and again, and I just assume that all of you are acquainted with his work. “The psychologist is familiar with this inner dialogue. It is an essential part of the technique for coming to terms with the unconscious.” So that is meditation. And then the imagination Rutland says. And of course Jung is very careful, always. He's such a balanced individual. If he gives you a definition from one place he'll give the complementary definition from the same place. He's like a wonderful mathematician who never mixes his class of objects or his types of processes. This kind of fallacious thinking is just rampant in psychology and in metaphysics.

For those who are interested, Bertrand Russell, in his theory of types, gives us the way in which the confusion of classes and types of exposition always produces a fallacious result. So Jung using the same resource gives us now a definition for imagination as opposed to meditation. “Imagination is the star in man,” the guiding star. “Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or super celestial body. This astounding definition,” writes Jung “throws a quite special light on the fantasy processes connected with the opus fantasy processes connected with the work, the making of the process. We have to conceive of these processes, not as the immaterial phantoms we readily take fantasy pictures to be, but as something corporeal a subtle body,” a subtle body “being engendered and then being brought together by the meditation and then the imagination as a celestial or super-celestial star in man throws out and projects out these processes and their efficacy to the phenomenal realm.”

Later on, and I think we'll have a slide of it, in Robert Flood's work. This will be portrayed by a human face being set on the side and from the inner eye comes a beam of light the occult eye of imagination projecting out onto the world much like a movie projector would project out and whatever image integration has been achieved by the meditation is then given out and emanated by the imagination. This something corporeal, a subtle body, semi-spiritual in nature. And Jung goes on with this, and you can refer to this if you care to. “This particular balance between the inner equilibrium to maintain the core and the complementary process to be able to give out the core, project the core, are involved in these processes of the red lion and the green lion.”

Now Agrippa when he wrote the book on occult philosophy, De Occulta Philosophia, it was in three basic books. A fourth book has surfaced over the centuries. It is often referred to as spurious, but on personal recommendation for Mr. Hall, it may not be as spurious as people think. So if you run across Agrippa's fourth book it's worth looking at. Many of the so-called spurious documents that we have are really the repositories of some of our best treasures of information. So if you see a designation that such and such is spurious, overlook that, it's not always that anonymous is bad. But in the three books of De Occulta Philosophia, Agrippa gives us the first expression in print of the whole tapestry of the working of magic. The three books of occult philosophy are the three realms, the elementary realm, the celestial realm, and the intellectual realm. And these three interconnected rings or worlds are the operations for the world of elementals is where the physician has his place. And the world of celestials is where the astrologer has his place. And the world of intelligence and so forth is where the visionary, the magus, who is able to use religious rites and religious ceremonies to bring angelic presences into manifestation. So that in the Hermetic tradition we see that the functions of a doctor, a physician, the functions of an astrologer, and a mathematician, and the functions of someone who is incarnating angelic presences, are all related together. And in Occult Philosophy by Agrippa we have the first public declaration of the whole range of these activities being, not only related, but united through an inner vision. Further they're essentially connected together so that the efficacious practice of any of these levels ultimately revolves on the individual mastering all three. And we will see that the person who took Agrippa's occult philosophy as a guidebook and tried to work through the various levels was John Dee, the great advisor to Queen Elizabeth the First in England about another generation down the line. When it was published finally in 1531 Agrippa in a classic way of covering the magus covering his tracks published another volume On the Vanity of Sciences, De Vanitate Scientiarum, in which he declared that all sciences are vain and that there's no sense in anyone trying to understand any of these processes. In fact he says here that there are absolutely no sciences which are efficacious, that there is really only religious understanding. And he uses rather strong language in the conclusion of his work. Therefore all you asses who dwell now with your children under the command of Christ through his apostles prophets and those who being freed from the fogs and mists of flesh and blood are readers of true wisdom in his Holy Gospel. If you desire to attain divine and true wisdom not of the tree of knowledge of good and evil but of the Tree of life set aside the traditions of men and every inquiry and discourse of flesh and blood whether it concerns reason or causes and effects and converse now not with the schools of philosophers and sophisters but with your own selves for the notions of all things are held within your own breasts to the truth of this as the academics confess the scriptures themselves testify seeing that God created all things very good in the best degree that is to say possible to them just as he created trees full of fruit so he created our souls which are like rational trees full of forms and ideas. Though through the sin of our parents all things were concealed and there ensued oblivion the mother of ignorance.

So in the vanity of all sciences which many people at the time and since then have considered an apology for all these terrible occult things that he'd been doing his sort of his asking for forgiveness in a real religious change of heart is actually stating very openly the Hermetic secret passed on by Morienus and Trismosin and his fellow student Paracelsus that in fact the secret is in our own breasts. And in fact it is in the Holy Scriptures but not in a mundane way because we need that truth within our breast to be able to understand the arcane structure of that information that's in those scriptures. And so in a very flamboyant way consistent with the personality of Agrippa he puts the very key and core of hermetic secrets in the very book in which he is ostensibly denying them. And this of course baffled the population at the time. They were busy criticizing occult philosophy. But Agrippa in trying to flee from city to city during the last few years of his life found shelter by various bishops who would take him in and protect him. In fact when he died in 1535 just a few years after both these volumes were finally published in Grenoble he was under the protection of religious authorities at the time. He never renounced his ostensible Catholic faith. He was always keeping that cover. His life I think at this time is best described, and this is by Francis Yates on Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, “In Agrippa's Survey of Renaissance magic,” she writes of the third book in The Occult Philosophy, “Agrippa is evidently now taking us on from Ficino's type of magic carried much further than Ficino took it to Pico's type of magic. The mysterious allusions to Hermetic and Kabbalistic secrets. The dignification which the magus at this level undergoes are very much in the vein of Pico's oration on the Dignity of Man.”

If you remember the Pico Lecture, if you have the cassette, man is great because he alone is able to go up and down the core of creation to all the levels and transmute himself so that every aspect of the cosmos is accessible to him with this. Hence the dignity of man is not the dignity of a great frozen position in this world like royalty or scholastic philosophy. But the dignity resides in his transmutative of capacities to enter into all the levels of the universe. So that Agrippa is going on beyond Ficino's magical method which is incidentally in the third book of Ficino's Book of Life. Those of you who have been following this and have this, it's in the third book of Ficino's Book of Life. He is going beyond that, going into the Kabbalistic angle. But again, writes Frances Yates, “Agrippa is going much further than even Pico. For it is evident that the magic in the third or the intellectual world which is now going to be discussed is really priestly magic, religious magic involving the performance of religious miracles. What is that religious miracle which the church is based on? It is on the sacrament of communion, the transmutation of the wine and the bread to the blood and the body. The Mass itself is an alchemical process and the whole foundation of the efficacy of the power of the church resides in the effectiveness and the metaphysical understanding of the process of the Mass so that the third book of Agrippa's occult philosophy endangered the entire power structure of the church.

They very quickly realized that if magia became current that the whole situation of having a monopoly on the transmutation of the Holy Body was in serious jeopardy. This of course gave them an opportunity to use an old technique which they had used once before and that is that magic at this level is demonic, it is in fact a work of sorcery, but even more so it is irreligious to the core because it is Jewish and the designation of the pointing finger of the Inquisition has a definite anti-Semitic tone behind it. Now to get just a little bit of a feel for this. The development of the Kabbalistic mind first really manifests itself in Alexandria of about the first century BC. And in the writings of Philo Judaeus we have the first real understanding and exposition the hellenizing of the Hebrew mind at this time also yields a development in the second century AD. At this time there was said to be in a mythological tone an individual known out in the deserts again in the wilderness as the great Akiva Ben Joseph who was the author, supposedly, of the Book of Formation, the Sefer Yetzirah, and that one of his students who was able to hold on in the reign of Marcus Aurelius against the attacks on Jews at the time was able to write a document known as the Zohar. At least the basic core of the Zohar. This was the mythos that was circulating in Europe at this time in the time of Agrippa and Paracelsus. The actual facts are very close to that myth except that you need this information. These basic documents had been transformed, reworked entirely, and given into a new shape in the great generation of the 13th century. And in fact as Gershom Scholem points out in his little introduction to the Zohar, this is just abstracts and selections. The Zohar is five huge volumes that form a set. The Zohar owes its formulation to the mind of a genius named Moses de Leon who put the Zohar into some kind of formulation around the 1280s, that is about 100 years after the translations of Morienus and the visions of Joaquim de Fiore. So that in the 1280s there came this formulation that Jewish wisdom had transformed the way in which scripture could be seen, and that the key to this was a Kabbalistic understanding of form. And this further was available for the world to understand. And in fact it was a key to understanding not only the mysteries of Judaism but the mysteries of Islam and Christianity because they also were religions of the book. So it brought the whole form of understanding the mysteries of the world - we would say the Western world, they would say the world - back to an understanding of the mysteries of the Kabbalah.

This material was, as you've seen in the lecture on Pico, brought to a public disclosure in Florence at the Platonic Academy by Pico and what remains to be seen and we'll have to do it next week is how a real genius Johannes Reuchlin actually brought the Kabbalistic system into European thought in such a form that it was seen to be an occult revision of Christianity and not just Judaism but of Christianity and that it became the mystical mathematics of the Reformation and produced, not the primordial Jew for which it was designed, but produced in fact that Rosicrucian mystic who thought that he was the primordial visionary man, period.

All of this material was somewhat understood by Agrippa but really not in very much depth. Agrippa's Occult Philosophy is actually quite a tour de force but it doesn't have that penetrating power. And nowhere do we find Agrippa really in his own right, mastering the life. And of course the old hermetic adage constantly with us through the ages that the life lived is the doctrine received. And by that rule of thumb, one walks away from those who cannot, and one keeps companion to those who can. Mente be able, life lived is the doctrine received. Agrippa found himself at the end of his life haunted by poverty. He had married three times. By the end of his life he had had seven children. He had found himself fleeing from city to city and he found himself dying in poverty and ignominious circumstances.

I think next week when we take Johannes Reuchlin that will be able to bring the first seven lectures that we've had into some kind of a vast sweep because Reuchlin is born in 1457 and dies in 1522. So that he is actually a student of Ficino. He's a contemporary of and a coworker with Trithemius and Trismosin. He knows Paracelsus. He knows Agrippa. He knows John Colet, and he knows Pico della Mirandola. So with Reuchlin next week, I will try to integrate this somewhat so you get a feel of the sweep because with the 1541 death of Paracelsus there's a hiatus, a short hiatus of about six years where it's as if Europe is holding its breath. Who next? Who is there? And then a wondrous young man appears on the scene John Dee who just takes Europe by storm and we will see that his long long life is really an attempt finally to bring all of this into an operative working experimental condition. No longer satisfied with letting it repose in books, or just in processes in the laboratory, but wanting in fact finally openly to remake the entire world and mankind on a holy image. And we'll see how he will tragically misconstrue his interior capacities in this regard and becomes a signpost more enlightening than Agrippa for all the generations that came after him.

Well I think we'll stop there with your permission.