Nicholas Flamel (1330-1418)
Presented on: Tuesday, August 23, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
The date is August the 23rd, 1983. This is the 10th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where on the 14th century, the mystic century tonight's lecture is entitled Nicolas Flamel F-L-A-M-E-L, who lived 1330 to 1418 Alchemical hieroglyphics.
Well, make it to forgo the Dodger game and forego all the other attractions that Los Angeles has. So I'll try and make this a worthwhile for you. We've been exploring a little known area of human civilization, but one which is all important for those who were here for the origins of hermetic science. You're beginning to realize now that a lot of the root structures that surfaced in the 16th and 17th century were laid down in the 13th and 14th century. And it's a curious, uh, uh, realization that science and culture civilization, metaphysics were more advanced by 1350 than they were at any time. Until again, one got up to almost the 1600s.
We are always told, for instance, in science histories that Tycho Brahe was the first to use large astronomical instruments and his, um, version of the star finder, the Astro lab made into a large instrument was about six feet, nine inches tall, and it was posted against one wall and he would do his sighting of stars. And incidentally, the origin of that instrument was Hindu and origin and pass through Muslim culture. And the original calibrations were not on a 360 degree circle, but dividing the circle into 96 parts. And this was called a [inaudible], but 300 years, three years before Tyco brah, Hey, there were astronomer astrologers in Europe using 15 foot instruments.
And all of this information was lost sight of, and especially was blurred in the 19th century by the conception of the Renaissance, being a glorious explosion of culture that had come out of the dark ages. So everything before the Italian bankers got a hold of the situation and made it really delectable was considered to be village material hardly worth looking at. And yet we've been able to trace very clearly a monumental line of human intelligence directing itself towards an apt perception of the universe, which was total whole absolute. And we have realized somewhat along the way that this had social repercussions, that the very root origins of the nation state of the political party of the idea of a community in the modern sense as a political economic entity linked to its belief structure, separate from the culture at large, all of these offshoots had their beginnings in the 14th century and we're encouraged. And in fact, grew underground through the period called the Renaissance. And when they began to surface at the end of the Renaissance, and we're going to take a look at that phenomenon, the next series that the philosophic research society is on the Italian Renaissance. And right at the end of the Renaissance, you began to have good old fashioned religious revivalism taking over the city of Florence, taking over the city of Rome.
And it comes as a shock to some people who thought that they were just making beautiful paintings or having a beautiful libraries and, and redoing the Greek and Roman classics to suddenly find Sava neuro or somebody like that. Taking over. The fact is, is that there were a lot of power currents that were developed in the 14th century that were sent underground. And only by recovering that as a Terry history, are we able then to have a real clear idea of how they not only surface in the early 16th century, but came back to the surface with a vengeance in the 19th century. And in the 20th century, we find ourselves haunted by conditions whose origins. We have very little idea of all of this was tied up with the perception of man's place in a metaphysical universe whose wholeness had to be experienced by the individual.
And that that individual experience had to be shared, communicated to a group population, which could then translate that shared community of experience into a social fabric. That was the whole sine wave process. The culmination of that process is to be found in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, but that culmination is all but invisible. If one comes to Chaucer as a literary figure, yes, he is a literary figure, but he has much more than that. He is like Shakespeare. They cauldron, they matrix, which was large enough, intelligent enough, profound enough to hold all the disparate streams and have them blend into a universal view.
And it's very difficult to understand Western history until you can understand at least one of those majestic figures. Now, Dante was such a figure also, but Dante really was the culmination of the high middle ages. He is like the Gothic cathedral. He is that monumental structure who is architecture and architect. Tonics can be understood really in the classic sense of a building. But Chaucer, as we saw last week is distinctly different. He comes not at the end, but at the beginning of a new thought matrix. And in Chaucer, instead of having the Gothic cathedral one has the spiritual pilgrimage, the quest, the individual quest, which by now is expanded to include a series of traveling companions. So that one has really in Chaucer's Canterbury tales, the archetypal situation, that one finds, for instance, in Tolkien's Lord of the rings, a fellowship inquest of the vision together only instead of there being some positive objective purpose, like, uh, the ring and Lord of the rings or its destruction and so forth in Chaucer, very sophisticated, like the pilgrimage itself was the object of the quest.
The going itself was the object. So for Chaucer, as soon as he was able to sweep a world view in terms of the population of the travelers and come full circle, his job of writing the Canterbury tales was over his stated purpose at the beginning, which literary critics always take as the paradigm, the prima frosty, a structure that there were to be four tails for each traveler. And thus the Canterbury tales was incomplete. We saw last week was not the case at all. That is a misperception of Chaucer and his purpose at some time. I think at the end of the next series, when I deal with William Blake, I'll show you Blake's monumental, uh, atching of the Canterbury pilgrims, because Blake was enough of a visionary that he understood Chaucer on the visionary level and his completion. And Blake's illustration of the Chaucer Canterbury pilgrims is a monumental world-class presentation of the spectrum of man as a harmony that all the human types together.
Yes, some of them are despicable. Yes. Some of them are a little racy. Some of them are ignorant. Some of them are contemptible, but many are lovable. Many are intelligible. Many are a deserving of our sense of dignity and comradery, but the entire spectrum is a harmony. And it gives the possibilities of seeing mankind as a whole, because what one has is a pitch pipe cue to the totality of our nature. And when we have that, we have the, of the circle of life. We then are able to plan and you cannot have a society unless you can plan. You can't have a history and a civilization unless you know what you're working with. And you can't have an idea of individuation until you realize what the full shape of man might be. There is a possibility of going beyond there is a possibility of growing further, but at some point you have to have an idea of what man looks like full in all his vicissitudes and all his type Chaucer is that individual. And in Chaucer, very near the end in a tale called the cannon yeoman's tale. He gives us the archetypical vision of the Alchemist.
And this tail is our cue and our bridge to the person that we're dealing with tonight. The great Al chemist, Nicholas [inaudible]. So we go to Charles there's Kennan yeoman's tail, just for two minutes. Here's Chaucer's description of what was common knowledge in the 14th century, what an Al chemist was like, what he looked like. And particularly what he smelled like Chaucer. This is lines I'm about eight 75 and the cannon yeoman's tale yet of that art, they cannot wax and sad for unto him. It is a bittersweet. So seemeth it for nod. They bought a sheet which they, that they might wrap him in a night and a breath to walking in by daylight.
In other words, the alchemists were archetypally poor. They were likely to have a sheet to wrap themselves at night, and that's about it. And some kid or brat to come in in the morning to wake them up. In other words, a very poor family situation. They would him sell and spending on this craft. They cannot a stint tell no thing, be left and ever more where that ever they going men may him know by smell of brimstone for all the world they stink. And as a glute, her saver is so Ramish and so hot that though a man from him, a mile B, the saver would infect him. Trust me, there's more, of course, the cannon yeoman's tales, wonderful tale. It's the archetypical picture around 1390 of the Alchemist.
We've been stressing the English and the German traditions because they have a tendon happening, which was an inheritance of the high middle ages. The German and the English traditions are very close. They are closer spiritually, then the French and German or the French and English, which is a very peculiar statement to make. At first, those who came through the hermetic science series realize that the German and English, uh, as the Cherokee communities worked in tandem, and that the final combination at the time of Newton and live nuts was that the Royal house of Hanover became the Kings of England. The Kings of England were Germans. After that, the Georges, it was just a historical consummation of a condition that had been there all the while, but that relationship between the English mind and the German mind, the individual eccentric and the community, uh, tradition, family tradition was very often linked by individuals, our episodes, which were neither German, nor English quite frequently.
One has to go outside English history and outside German history to make the connections I've found that quite often, one has to go to Poland or occasionally one has to go to the Scandinavian countries, Sweden and quite frequently one would have to go to Spain. In this case tonight, one has to go to France because FLA Mel was French. And only by going outside the English histories and the German histories does one begin to get a sense of how the continuity approached almost a close spiral helix of passing the information on. Now, if you take only national histories of people, you miss the sense of continuity entirely. It's not there it's simply doesn't obtain. And so mines that have been trained in school to nationalistic histories since the 19th century have had to focus on the illusory level, the Wars, the Kings, the battles, the economic situation, for their sense of how history actually had its continuity, but the living vitality, the permanent water of human integrity has never flowed through those veins.
It's always flowed through the esoteric vision and it's there that we finally are able to trace man in terms of civilizations. And once we see men in terms of civilization wide aspects, we begin to realize that he moves in a historical landscape, which is the contrapositive of his spiritual aspiration Inscape. And so history and vision go together like an hour glass and the sands of what we call time flow between those poles and those conditions. So that the misnomer in our time of psycho history, actually, if it were meant exactly what the words mean would be quite accurate. Instead, what we get is a chopped up view. There is a real psycho history, but it's not the one which currently obtains in tracing someone like [inaudible].
We have almost nothing real to go on. We have his book in translation, they Al chemical hieroglyphics, which I'll get to and give you a rundown on it. The only other book by FLA Mel is still not published 600 years later. And in fact, it exists only in a very difficult to read manuscript written in Brown ink, in the French language and sort of a, uh, cribbed, elegant handwriting. And the only copy that exists was made in 1769. And it exists in the PRS ball. Now I've looked at it several days in a row, and my French is not quite good enough to read this crib handwriting. But if your French is the title of the manuscript there, uh, [inaudible] is the science of alchemy or the secret of the philosophers with an explication by Nicholas [inaudible], uh, written. Yeah. Uh, the primary of sun, jock of the Boucher Ray, and, uh, the copy there is done in 1767.
That's all translated out of the French title, which is legible in looking at over. It seemed that what is presented there is more of the historical background, but not so much as to really beef up and change the presentation. That's here in the Al chemical hieroglyphics. This incidentally was reprinted by, uh, a wonderful outfit called Hep tangle books in, um, 1980. And you can find copies of this around the Bodhi tray or the PRS gifts door. And these Al chemical hieroglyphs of Nicholas [inaudible] are extremely important. And he'll tell you in here that he's just giving you the first seven series, but that there are three series of seven making a total of 21 Al chemical hieroglyphs. Now, those who were here for the tryst medicine lecture and the previous series realize of course that the 21, he has a major Arcana matrix that it fits very close to it.
Um, Chris Muhsin was born within 25 or 30 years of Nicholas [inaudible]. So there's just one generation in between them. However, we can't go on such skimpy ground. We have to find some other structure that will hold for us a little better. And the one that I chose for you tonight to use is, um, one of the volumes by Lynn Thorndyke, it's an eight volumes, and it's called a history of magic and experimental science published by Columbia university, press and throne. Dyke is one of those great masterminds, and it came out in the mid 1930s and has never been superseded.
Now the history of magic and experimental science in the third volume goes into the 14th and 15th centuries. And in here, I have curved out for you in about 10 minutes worth of extracts and beads of information enough to string together for you, some background for [inaudible] so that you have some understanding. The main fact to keep in mind is that by the 1320s, the power of alchemy as a scientific process was so great that it became a threat to the established authority of the church. And thus there were papel bulls against publishing anything directly on alchemy. It became an offense for which you could be killed if you were caught thus in the 14th century, very often Al chemical illusions were just that they were metaphorical illusions flamenco, as we'll see wasn't extraordinary genius. And he covered his tracks very well. And it wasn't until this book actually surfaced. Uh, sometime later that the key to what he had done was seen to be Al chemical rather than theological. But the background from Thorndyke is as follows. [inaudible]
incidentally was born in 1330 and died, 88 years later, around 14, 18. So he's alive. He was born just after Meister, Eckhart would have passed on and he's alive up to 14, 18 things are going pretty well in Florence by 14, 18. So he's spans in his long life, the mystical century in chapter 20 of volume, three of Thorndyke. He entitles us John [inaudible] and the conjunction of 1345. And in 1345, the three superior planets had a conjunction that is Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars all came together in a triple conjunction. And it was a cause celeb at the time. And the interpretation by this John D mirrors more than anyone else at the time gave a sense of foreboding to Europe. And of course, three years later, the black death was decimating the population of Europe. It gave them in 1345 and 1348 in those years, a sense that the divine hand had put a form of culmination upon the human race. That man had come to a threshold where whatever he was capable of, he should not perform and whatever could be done should therefore be done because the day of judgment is certainly at, in this triple conjunction of 1345.
And incidentally astronomy was quite well developed by that time, not just astrology, but astronomy, some of the, uh, uh, first large instruments had been made already by Groza test day and, uh, Roger bacon some a hundred years before this, in this, um, conjunction the conjunction of 1345, right? So Thorndyke received much attention, especially subsequently when the black death occurred. And this proceeding conjunction was looked back upon as the celestial cause, which had corrupted the air. Remember they didn't realize about epidemiology and they were unknowing about the causes of this, even though in some of the prophecies of Demir around this time, there's a curious mention of fleas, which were the carriers, of course of it, uh, being all over the place that, uh, the ground, it seemed, uh, was infested by fleas. So the celestial cause was actually seen that the conjunction had corrupted the air of the planet and that this corrupted air was what had brought the plague about several of the prognostic locations were, which were made in 1344, 1345 have been preserved. And we find them more or less grouped together in the manuscripts in a 14th century, manuscript at Paris occur one after the other three, such predictions ascribed to John dimmers, a Leo Judice and a [inaudible].
And in these, we have the model of the reverberations of the apocalyptic writings in the book of revelation. And of course, all of this, another generation down the line would be handled by Julian of Norwich and the revelations of divine love showing that what had happened to man was not an end, but a new beginning. I knew flowering that man was going to be raised from the phenomenal level to the noumenal level, that he was going to be able to appreciate God on God's terms and not unmanneds terms any longer. And that one was then raised from the level of love and service through the figure of Jesus, to the level of participation in the realm of the Holy spirit. And so this material was being stressed at this time in the histories of Europe at this time, one of the most famous was a man named [inaudible], who wrote a history of Florence and villi Ani incidentally died in the black death of 1348.
Billy Ani noted in his Chronicle that the astrologers had predicted the great mortality from the revolution of the year, starting in 1347, since at the time of the Vernal Equinox in March Virgo was in the ascendant while mercury the ruling planet was in Aries and the eighth house signifying death. And if the fortunate planet Jupiter had not been found there, along with mercury, the mortality would have been infinite. In other words, the conditions were horrifying, but they came within a possibility how having been terminal for the human race in August of that year, villi Ani noted the appearance in Taurus of a comment comment named Negro black and interestingly now, which is of the nature of Saturn and signifies death of Kings and potentates and great mortality in regions under the aforesaid sign and planets before leaving the conjunction of 1345 rights there in Dyke, we may add a pro passage from the chronological Mystica of the learned Abbott [inaudible] because as I've mentioned several times and gave you in the lecture run for theme, yes, it was the mastermind [inaudible] who put together again, all of these sacred histories and made a matrix out of them that could be worked upon and produced the confidence that was reflected in the reformation.
And also the development of science truthiness then States that a certain astronomer skilled in his art had predicted all of it carefully three years before. And he goes a translation here of the prediction. There will be about one Lord of the world. The Roman empire will be exalted. There will be many struggles on earth. There'll be an unusual and fearful amount of thunder. A great, a fusion of blood. The Pope with his Cardinals will be dissipated. There will be great famine in the land's pestilence and terrible incalculable loss of human life throughout the whole world. Great heat in the summer, excessive cold in winter seeds will decay in the ground and fleas locus and venomous animals will abound in the face of the earth. Many signs and wonders in the air. Dorothea says, sure, it says that many of these things in fact happened in the year 1348, but not all of them. And he goes on to say that in 1347, in fact, a vast vapor from the North settled over the earth to the great chair of those who saw it. And that some writers mentioned that in this year in numerable minute forms of animal life fell from heaven to earth and produced the past, which were the spawn of the corruption.
So it's interesting is that we find one of the few designations of this peculiar, uh, vapor. Now this linking together of man and his interior state and nature and its exterior operations was of course the key structure, which alchemy sought to explore. And for them, the fulcrum of the intelligence of this continuum was for a man to understand the stages of transformation by which the interior realm of the spirit affected and changed the structure of the exterior around notice that the emphasis was always on the movement from the inside out, that when it's from the outside in you get something old fashioned called greed, if you're thinking about gold and what it can do for you, then you've got a phenomenon known as greed. But if you're concerned with the adjusting of the interior capacities to influence and manipulate the transformative keys in nature, to make gold from the inside out, not to have gold as a possession, but to understand the transformative processes, then you have alchemy so that the alchemists more than any other hermetic science, more than astrology, more than magic, the alchemists were concerned with the right order, the spiritual order of creation and activity.
And this was fortunate because as we'll see with, uh, Nicholas [inaudible], he's the first one to show that the key transformation takes place when one does a topsy turvy, 100% reversal of the process that got you to that stage. And that only by understanding that one has to double back that one has to work with coagulation rather than a solution can one effectively go through the most powerful transformation in alchemy. Now this structure is familiar to religious, uh, initiation schools throughout all time and all history. I think I gave several times the design of it, that one moves in a clockwise manner coming round, almost full circle to where you were, but not quite completing it and then reversing direction and coming counter-clockwise back around again, almost to the starting in each case. What one has left is a space, a gap which has been accentuated and made into a threshold, an entrance to a ritual vessel by that movement and counter movement together.
And that the seal of the vessel is making sure that that counter movement is exactly the opposite of what the movement was and of leaving the gap, the space, the presence, the pause, untouched, that it is that that creates the sealed vessel. And without that vessel one cannot have the egg that, that is the egg within which all of the other transformative processes take place. It's like creating a magnetic continuity that can only be sustained if there is an exact balance. And with that exact balance, the magnetic net holds, and one then has a trends, phenomenal space in world within which to raise phenomenal material to that trans phenomenal realm and change its nature by forcing it, guiding it through the transformative structures.
It's the case that you cannot have a hermetic seal until you have a vacuum. And once you have made a vacuum, then you have the capacity to make a hermetic seal. It's a Chinese puzzle, it's a conundrum. You can't have one without the other. Therefore we'll see in flamenco, the attention is all upon the equilibrium of the application and that the Alchemist who holds the equilibrium foremost is able to produce the most difficult stage. And that is the primer materia, the primal material. What is that primal material we have seen through our explanation in this series that the primal materia was a nothingness, a no thing a beyond, which was approachable, not as an object, but as a presence, which could be engendered given the capacity to create a sealed sacred space, either through ritual or through yoga or prayer, contemplation. And now with alchemy through a series of physiological processes, the theory behind it was that if there is a continuity and there should be because man himself is one, he is a unity.
He has a whole, he has a physiologic physiological form. He has a interior quality and he has a spiritual flame in the center of that interior quality. Therefore he manifests all the levels within himself. Therefore it should theoretically be possible that materia matter phenomenon should also have the possibility of being run down the scale of these values, given the transformative keys of structure, man, then using himself as a prototype, not just to draw on Leonardo DaVinci circle, but using as a harmony, as a pitch pipe, harmony to sound all the various levels that exist in the universe, including the beyond, which is no thing in and of itself, which is the divine.
So that the wholeness of man's capacity to envision all of his possibilities was rising to the fore, to the consciousness at this time in the late 14th century. And as it was expressed in a civilized Epic way by Chaucer, it was expressed in a scientific chemical mode by Nicholas [inaudible] now, from now. And I'll, I'll come back to Thorndyke in, in just a little bit, FLA Mel was concerned with the fact that he had been given by an experience of grace, the key to the whole situation he says in here that he actually was a Scrivener by trade. He was in his late twenties and out of nowhere and sort of a, what we would call an antique shop. He came across a book and it was sold to him for two florins by a man who couldn't read the language. The language was obviously Greek classical Greek. The book was not paper. The book was transparent. Bark of trees, as [inaudible] says, well, what that is is that it was Papyrus and the binding was of brass, not of leather.
And that in fact, there wasn't print on the pages, but that there were indentations made with an iron stylist, which were then colored so that someone in a very sophisticated way had made as permanent a record as they could. At some time in the past, you said the book was ancient. It looked old, had written in classical Greek, all, all the steps along with illustrations and diagrams 21 N number, which flamenco calls hieroglyphics hieroglyphics, because they were symbolic tightly knotted formations that had to be understood symbolically to be unfolded and that they were hieroglyphics because they formed a language of transformation. Each one of the hieroglyphics focused upon a transformative step. The keys to alchemy were in the first seven, the first seven processes. So you can imagine now that some of the processes, which formal does not give, but which Christmas and does go later on are the higher levels. But in the beginning level four, Mel said that when he looked at the VOC, he could make no sense out of it. He called in now on the other side, after a brief pause.
END OF SIDE 1
Quirks like the clerk's tail and Chaucer, you said they called, he called in many clerks from the university of Paris. No one could make heads or tails out of it. The few that could read the Greek were puzzled because it was all innuendo to them that could make no sense. Now [inaudible] was married to a woman named parallel in parallel, was his life companion in flack. In fact, a Nicholas [inaudible] and para Nell are a duo. They're almost like a cosmic, uh, uh, couple, they had no children, they lived their entire life together and they did everything together, including the Al chemical transformations. He says over and over again, that personnel is exactly his equal and his match in all things as a Terek and religious.
And that, in fact, one of the basic claims that [inaudible] makes is that it was only by virtue of having this male female equilibrium between the two of them, that they were able to affect the processes in the first place. That quite often, what would lead so-called Al chemists astray was that they were trying to do everything themselves. And that there were certain processes equilibriums that could only be held over a long duration in continuity, by a man and a woman together. There was a quality of interchange of spirit between a man and a woman which forms a hermetic seal, which allows for the longterm continuity necessary to carry out the transformative processes. [inaudible]
unable to read this book puzzle, driven to distraction by it. He and his wife poured over it for several years. Finally, flamenco decided that he was going to take a trip and scour Europe to try and say, if someone could read this, he took a series of extracts from his book. And when he was in Spain, he found an old Jewish Sage who was able to talk about these illustrations. And he was surprised when he learned from [inaudible] that the book was still X down. And then the man confess that the book was extremely famous and as a charity rabbinic circles, but was considered lost for centuries. And it was an apocryphal volume and he was unbelieving that it actually existed in flow. Mel had it so full now says that he decided to take the man into his confidence. He doesn't give his name. And the two of them then took a sea voyage back along the coast of Spain to France. The man was sick quite a bit of the way. And when they got to Orleans, France, the man died. Flo Mel saw to it that he was buried. And even though his Jewish Sage was unable to accompany him back to the book, the discussions had given [inaudible] enough of an insight into the basic principle singular principle. There was a principal involved. The principal was keeping a long term continuous equilibrium of spirit.
That was the it's expressed an alchemy as keeping an even fire that one does not have too much heat or too little heat that the continuity of the application of the fire is the key to the whole process because there is a time long time gray jaded interchange that needs to take place. And it's centered around the fact that the four primal elements, which are separate in phenomenal time space, and actually because they are separate phenomenal time space is a chaos that they are brought together slowly by the continuous application of the transformative processes and not the whole line of development of the Al chemical transformations is that with the continuity of application all the way through the four elements increasingly come into proximity to the focal point where they become unified and lose their individual chaotic properties and become assimilated to a fifth essence, a quintessence, which does not exist in the chaos. That is, it does not explicitly exist implicitly. It is there in all matter, but it explicitly comes into manifestation when the quintessence is brought about in the philosophic egg. And this quintessence is then given the Arabic name of the ELIC sear flamenco. Mel will say that when it first begins, the old Arabic alchemists would call it the Zaire. Xir the Zehr.
When it goes through the stage of, of blackness and darkness, it's the Zaire. When it comes to the stage of the whiteness, it becomes the I X I R X sear. And when it comes to the formative phase where the quintessence is somewhat permanent and able then to be used, then it is the elixir E L added to it. The L the divine influentials quest. He says his wife and he together worked for three years after the old Jewish Sage had passed on an Orleans. And finally in 1382 in January, they were able to go through the probate process and project upon a half pound of mercury the process. And it became a half pound of silver. And that [inaudible] then had the subjected to assay after assay. And it was seen to be of a very high quality silver. He said in April of 1382, his wife, and he finally brought the process through and gold was actually made.
And then he says as a postscript to it that they three times then went through that process to make sure that they knew the process and were able to at this rate, uh, understand what they had done. Now, the phlegm Nell's Nicholas and Kara now are known historically to have endowed a number of hospitals and orphanages and schools plus taking care of in numerable private widows. They had no children of their own. They felt very close to the phenomenon of widows and orphans and children so forth. He gives a list of, uh, half a dozen, uh, church yards that they constructed hospitals and so forth in the city of Paris, but also because the old Jewish Sage had come from baloney in Northern Italy, that they sent over, uh, a lot of well to bologne you to also make sure that, uh, the city of the old Jewish Sage was well taken care of. Now, it's interesting to mention baloney because it's actually in a balloon yeah. That we have many of the developments in the 14th century that are hidden from view blown area. And the pole river Valley has great proximity to Padua and Venice Mantua. These places of higher learning, which later were to figure so prominently in the Renaissance and in the development of Al chemical material, some of the really strong individuals at that time had come from the baloney area.
This matter of the fifth essence, the quintessence was such a high powered secret needing to be expressed an incomplete metaphor, a flamenco again, and again says he dare not go through the exact sequence. He can only mention salient points. And hopefully those who already have had the understanding and the teaching will be able to piece together the process for themselves. There was a volume written about this time in Northern Italy called the consideration of the fifth essence. The author was a man, John [inaudible], John [inaudible]. And Thorndyke says of this individual who was a Franciscan. He writes the recording angel, my smile frequently at the little ironies of history. One of these amusing inconsistencies of real life is that followers of st. Francis the apostle of poverty should have interested themselves in making goal.
And in fact, most of the very powerful alchemists were all of the gray friars order. Remember now gross. A test day was one of the first to become a friend Siskin. Roger bacon had been Franciscan so that the Franciscan order in its as a generic histories, as a Cherokee in the sense that almost nobody knows about it has a very good bead on the development of science. And if you want to investigate the histories of science in the 13th and 14th centuries, one could do no than to go to the archives of the Franciscan order, which very few people have done. Actually the consideration of the fifth essence is in two books, subdivided first into cannons. Uh, the first is in various cannons. And the second into remedies that is the first has a series of step phases given. And the second volume are the remedies.
The applications alchemists at this time were concerned often in their writings, instead of taking the process all the way through to making goal that is completing the process of showing the mastery of transformation would carry it through to the point where the Elyx here was made, because the Alix here was considered the archetypal medicine, because it had the properties of transforming. It could be applied as a universal medicine. So the whole process of healing, the whole profession of medicine was bound up very closely at this time with this particular phase of alchemy, instead of going on to complete the transformations, one, use the Alexia. And of course the popular misconception at the time was that this would yield immortality. What of course it yields is a fullness, a wholeness through which one could pass as a transformative threshold to the realms beyond. And that was the quote immortality, the immortality of the beyond in this, the application of the old cobblistic theories of Raymond law, which some of you have been to the Raymond law lecture at PRS, those hierarchies of application were brought into play, seeking to calibrate the Al chemical transformative processes at this time.
And, uh, it's here in the late 14th century that we find the first, uh, developments of the interpenetration of these one figure
That you may look up for yourselves. His name is always me, Nicholas arrays, me O R E S N E raised me died in 1382. He was Bishop of Les sear. And, uh, he was at the university of Paris for some years. He was the head of the college of [inaudible]. And, uh, he was in fact, uh, one of the great, uh, commentators and translators of Aristotle in the 14th century. He also is the link at this time of how mathematics and cobblistic, uh, determinations were brought into play to calibrate the Al chemical transformative processes. Dorn Dyke gives us about 70 pages in here on, uh, RAs, me and his relationships to astrology has relationships to alchemy and so forth. One of the interesting, uh, sections is a raised me on magic because magic was a different operation from alchemy using the series of sympathies, which exists between the different levels, the different hierarchical levels, and by sympathetic, uh, recalibrating of energy and process from the different levels.
One brought magic into a play, which was quite different really from the procedures that alchemy went through, which was using from the inside out the transformative key modes of changing the structure of matter by bringing it into an equilibrium where it no longer had its phenomenal roots, it's quite a different process, different procedure. Um, I think I'll skip over. I was going to give you a little bit of arrays me on magic, but I think I'll skip over that because we're running close on time. So now in order to make sure that the Al chemical process, what romaine had a arch in a churchyard constructed where all the symbolic cues of the initial Al chemical processy were given now, he's given in the arch, the out of order, there are seven diagrams. And actually the first one is a landscape with clouds above and down below.
There's a rod and there are two serpents and the two serpents are in, um, a sort of an Omega shape coming together so that the mouth of one is touching almost beginning to overlap with the mouth of the other. This Omega shape is actually a, uh, an Al chemical, uh, magnetic seal vessel. One row runs across the shape in Chinese alchemy. Uh, the same as here, it also is the basic cue for the archetypal structure that comes from, uh, antiquity so far back that we almost call it RK. You remember the story and the mosaic account of Moses, uh, taking his rod and throwing it down before Pharaoh. And it became a serpent. Well, the connection is between the rod and the serpent as a transformative key. And when this rod is held by an operator with the serpents arranged in a geometric interpenetration, one has the hermetic conduces and the first, so that mercury actually, um, the old hermetic image of mercury is that he is holding the conduces on high.
And he is reaching down with the other hand to pull man out of the hole that he's in. It's almost like a sewer. And what he is doing here is he is yes, we're, we're sort of in a sewer of chaos here. We think everything is separate. We think everything is an opposition and warring when it actually, that is an illusion, it's all in a timeless flow process, which has its home. It is the conviction that it is separate, that holds us into a peculiar sort of a bondage. So the hermetic, a figure who is pulling that out of the hole of his misconception holds the kudu, says the serpent rod tandem, a loft as a magnetic line guide for the energy to flow from him, the comprehension to flow through him, to man, to help. So in the first illustration, what should be the first and the sequence AML gives us the two serpents and the staff.
The next one is the staff planted in the ground and has become a cross like a towel or across. And the serpent has become a single serpent and wraps itself around the cross. Stefan uses that sacred symbol. That's the transformation of the rod and the serpents into a structure, into an anchor for the, one of the formative stages of the structure. In fact, if the formative stage of initiating they, the, the stage where the darkness in alchemy, they say that you will have a thick pitch like liquid in the ass SNR, which is blacker than black. It is an ultimate abbess of material. And the process is to keep that blackness because only out of that blackness then can come the transformation to blue and from blue to Azure and from Azure to white. And only by going through that whole continuum does one come full circle from darkness to light and the TA cross position with it, single serpent draped over it is the symbolic matrix understanding of how that is done.
The second stage involved, thus is very key and symbolized here. The third phase is, uh, down below with all of the ground covered with circuits coming out from everywhere. A stage of future fication after a crucifixion is the dissemble moment of the physical realm. The future fication, there must be a death. There must be a measurement. There must be a desolving then comes the hermetic helpers stage where he holds the conduces up. And, uh, we then have, uh, several other phases in here. I don't have time really to go through all of it. Uh, one of them, uh, concerns, uh, an image of father time coming in a crowd like structure. And he is in tandem with, uh, the hermetic figure. Another is a plant that grows gold roses on top of a sacred Mount where Griffins and dragons have their nests underneath the Mount.
Another is a garden where there's an old dead Oak tree, which has a series of Rose bushes that curl up on the dead Oak and bloom. And there's also one of the King with the sword and the infants that have been slain. The process here, of course, is not the horrific one that you would think it is a symbolic one that the purified blood of infants is the symbolical matrix out of which a certain transformative process happens. This is an esoteric meaning, which is in the new Testament, the phenomenon of Herod killing the infants in the search of Jesus and so forth. That sacrifice was a symbolic, transformative, uh, key structure, all of these plus other developments where Mel had illustrated in this arch, in the churchyard, uh, in Paris, as saying shock in the center of this Archway, he has Christ holding the world globe, and you see this in the Cero deck all the time, the globe with the cross and the top and below on the pedestal of Christ, there are two angels playing musical instruments and below them as a freeze of five processes, the first one are two dragons, one that's winged, and one that is wingless, and they are fighting each other.
The wing dragon is a volatile quality. It is feminine, and it's a symbolic application. The wingless dragon is fixed and is mail and its application. And these two dragons are always at war in the chaos. These are the same two dragons, the red dragon and the white dragon that Merlin in his vision. So underneath the, uh, place where they're going to build the grail chapel number, I don't know if you were there for that Geoffrey of Monmouth lecture. And I talked about that there, the symbolism of that, and about three years ago, I think we talked about Merlin and Athena as spirit guides. That lecture also has some of that information in it, but the process here begins with the two dragons, which are warring opposites, volatile, and fixed. And they are warring because they are in a chaotic condition. The next sequence shows a man and a woman together.
And that's the first step of bringing in a harmony of a man and a woman being together, able to be together. And there is a written scroll very often in these transformative processes by full ML. There's a written scroll, which has a, a homily, usually on it. It can be taken. Theologically is a very pious phrase, or it can be taken mystically as an Al chemical phrase. But the interesting fact is that the woman has the scroll wrapped around her in a circle. And formal says in here note the fact that the feminine, the woman does not have the scroll draped around her. Like the man has like a sash, but on her, it goes full around because she is the key to that circulation of the process. The feminine is the cage of the circulation of the equilibrium. She is the key to the later on in the process called multiplication. It's the feminine element that is able to multiply.
She carries that with her in the third one, there are three figures, two men and a woman rising from the ground. And these are resurrected figures in the next one. There are two angels instead of a man and a woman because the process after a resurrection phenomenon goes beyond men and women, it goes to a celestial realm where there are two angels and the scroll this time is a single scroll that the two angels hole only the two angels as they are holding the scroll. The scroll is running outside of their frame of reference outside of their context. And the last sequence on flamenco is freeze is of a man and a lion, a red lion, and the red line instead of biting, the man is holding his mouth open up and is, has the end of the scroll from the two angels that comes into his mouth.
So that actually the red lion at the end of the process is speaking back to the very beginning, the entirety of the process so that it has a hermetic seal of efficacy running all the way through it. And where does it come back? It comes back to the two dragons in their, uh, chaos. So that this time when you come back recursively, the symbolism is not two dragons fighting, but a uniform, one dragons following it tail, the Robert Rose as the symbol of the wholeness of the Al chemical process brought to its completion and projected back upon the world in the form of wholeness. That's what it is.
Einstein said, God, doesn't play dice. Neither does man in his book of chemical hieroglyphs again and again, urges the reader that if he finds this book, not to read it casually, he says, this is the worst thing to do is to try and read this casually that these processes are full of explosive possibility. And that many alchemists are laid dead in a flash because these transformative phases are actually dealing with universal energies. And when they're mishandled, they go and you do too. But it's interesting to note that on the last page, he gives us this wonderful quotation over which the heaven itself, nor his Zodiac can have no domination or power who is bright shining rays that dazzle the eyes. Same as though they did communicate unto a man, some super celestial things, making him one, he beholds it and knows it to be astonished and to tremble, to be afraid at the same time, give us grace to use it well to the augmentation of the faith and the profit of our souls to the increase of the glory of the noble realm. Amen. I think I'll end there. I've got some other things I wanted to give you from cross arts Chronicle that I think we'll end there.
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