Occult Hermeticism in the Dark Ages

Generally in lectures like this the population goes down by now so I'll have to step up the erudition so you will be driven away. So we can go back down in the library. I don't like standing by podiums. I'm thoroughly American and I resent authority, even my own. And I tend to want to sabotage the talk as my good friend Doctor Hoeller does so well with jokes but I can never remember them. All I remember is my laughter. Doctor Hoeller, as you know, some of you, is my dear friend and coworker for many years and all of these travails and he is still out of the country and I'll be doing a lecture for him on July 25th, which is a Friday, at his Gnostic Society over on Hollywood Boulevard. And the lecture may be of interest to some of you. It's on the Millennial Archetype, the archetype of the final conclusion of history, the end of time, the end of history. And of course we will experience in the 1990s the millennial archetype. So you might be interested to see what we're in for. The last three millennial efforts were extraordinary but I think we're ready. We don't believe anything anymore. We can take it all.

I had occasion last night at a function for Mr. and Mrs. Hall to address a hundred or so people. And my address came late in the program and I realized that from what other speakers had said that there's still a tremendous naivete about what is going on. And so I would like to say just a word about spiritual sight, spiritual vision.

Spiritual vision is distinct, quite distinct, from the material sensate vision which we enjoy as our birthright. And our spiritual vision, as the famous image that William Blake gave us, which we have as children as wings to the human person, are assiduously trimmed by our instructors in what is proper and what is right. And with the trimmed wings of the angel we adjust ourselves to hobbling through life in thinking only that what we sensately experience is real or if we are sophisticated what we think as we interpret about what we sensately experience is real. This promotes the growth of the psyche and the psyche as a mentality generally is seen as a parallel, an inner parallel, to the world and many people mistake them.

Spiritual teaching, when it speaks of an inner world, the assumption is– is that one is speaking of the psychic domain of a mentality. And this is an error. It is the cleansing of the mentality. It is the making pure, making transparent, of the psychic inner world that allows for the spiritual realm to manifest itself within. So that there is a third world as it were. Speaking colloquially, an exterior world, an inner world of our mentality, and then a cosmos which indeed fills us and inhabits us. So that very often when we come to the Hermetic materials now and we are addressed intelligently through these works they do not have in mind any kind of popular instruction. They have in mind a precious student – not so much a disciple that's lost its tone I think in our time – but the preciousness of the student who must be shown the truth and that the only way that this can be done is for the teacher to manifest spiritually in herself or in him– himself this truthfulness. And that if the student has been prepared in the right way the harmonic response will allow the truth to occur between them together. This is how it's stated in one of the Hermetic Treatises.

“Truly the doctrine of the Godhead to be understood needs a divine effort of the mind. It is most like a rushing torrent that plunges down from a heighth with headlong flow so that it manages by swiftness of speed to outpace our attention not only of the hearers but even of he who speaks.”

This is spiritual language, and obviously if one is attentive to the conditionless condition that you are going to be completely outstripped by the revelatory occurrence, one needs to prepare one's mind to accept the responsibility to at the appropriate moment step aside, and this takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It's like using, now a material analogy, it's like holding your eyes open and not blinking or flinching when someone moves their hand to strike at your eyes.

Everything that promotes the defense of our materiality of our psychicness defends against this and refuses to accept this – all of these are barriers – and so one must discipline oneself not to resist, not to fight. And this of course, one in our time recognizes the indelible message of Gandhi, in his wonderful scientific statement that truth and nonviolence are inseparable, they only occur together. That satyagraha and ahimsa are in fact the same occurrence because as we train ourselves not to defend not to respond in terms of the psyche or in terms of the sensate world, then the spiritual realm may manifest. In this– in this disciplining then for spiritual work most of the training is to discipline the mind to acclimate its coordination of sense of reality to what we would call, I think in the via negativa, pure nothingness that there are no expectations, or in the via affirmative– the affirmative way to acclimate ourselves to full light, full light.

As Plato remarks in The Myth of the Cave when we first see the light of reality it seems so bright we can hardly adjust to it. We are used to portioning out. The experience is then becoming disciplined for fullness. And this of course then requires that the mind perfect itself in terms of its ideation to the point to where it can clarify itself. And the mind, in its discrimination, on the highest levels uses language, and in using language brings into play an image base which at first is purely material and only later do we remember that there are images that come from within. And only later do we understand that some of the psychic associations which we have, obscure these images and thus the discipline becomes extremely refined and difficult in that where our attention needs to be directed towards, the transforming, from one image-base to another. And so some of the roots of alchemy lie in this kind of an interior yoga. Actually it turns out to be in many ways in the Renaissance, a Christian yoga. To purify oneself to allow for the entire image-base of the mind to transform itself to another dimension, another level. And in the transformation there is a point, a sort of a zero gravity point that is reached when the one base has just disappeared and the other has not yet come into play. And this threshold is very difficult to maintain oneself and pass through. It's like experience of ground zero. And so a lot of the discipline then, that we'll see in alchemy, centers itself around training the mind by revising the language-base that it uses to a picture-base – instead of words, pictures. And the transfiguration of certain words then into symbolic pictures is the initial key process in this.

And– Early on in our Christian tradition this was recognized in Alexandria, largely, by about 100 AD, and four basic words which described God, Jesus, Christ, and Kyrios. These four words were written in a completely different fashion whenever they were written. The word for this is called, ‘nomina sacra’, sacred words, nomina sacra. And the sacredness of the words, instead of having the words written out they were contracted. Sometimes they were contracted so that the first and the last letters of the Greek words were used or sometimes the first two letters and whenever they would be put into manuscripts instead of writing Jesus, or Jesus in Greek, one would put the IC with a line over it and, because in Hebrew Joshua and Jesus are the same – Yeshua – for Joshua it was sometimes written ICLN. But the IC with a line over it is a perfect example of a nomina sacra – sacred, sacred name. And it's the transformation of language into symbolic image. These nomina sacra, whenever they would appear in an early manuscript would always be written in gold. Later on, there were eleven other words, nomina sacra, which were added from time to time and several of them were questionable to the point that they became issues at doctrinal meetings and conferences and some of them were written just in silver, say, rather than in gold. But generally, the names for God and the names for Jesus, were written in gold. And the reason I bring this up is that this is indicative of the change of consciousness at this time, and going along with the nomina sacra there was a change in the way in which written material and the way in which books were made and presented.

From time immemorial, books were on rolls, on scrolls, and they were unrolled to be read. At this time – specifically in Egypt, in Alexandria – the codex replaced the roll and it took quite a long time for the codex form of a book – cut pages, sewn in signatures, and bound like this – for a book as we understand it today to displace the rolls. It was a it was about 50/50 in the third century in terms of Roman usage, state usage. So that the appearance of the nomina sacra and of the codex form of the book together illustrate to us graphically of a radical change in consciousness coming about peaking in its initial pioneering intensity about 100 AD in Alexandria. There are precursors to this. There are indications that some areas, like Antioch or Ephesus or Jerusalem even, or some incidents in Rome presage this, but it was in Alexandria that it was received and understood at this time. The understanding matrix in Alexandria that permitted consciousness to explicate the meaning of this– of this new event was the archetypal rise of the figure of Hermes Trismegistus.

Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice greatest, comes into being about that time. Thoth is a figure; Hermes is a figure. Go back into the farthest reaches of recorded literature, 3000 BC in Egypt, and we have references to Hermes in the Minoan-Mycenaean religious writings which are back into the third millennium BC also. Twice-blessed Thoth occurs in the New Kingdom writings about the time of Ikhnaton, and then about 100 AD as we have the thrice greatest Hermes.

There is in this a realization that a– a triad, an trinity, a triune structure, has achieved stability. And of course this is the flashing into existence of an integrated consciousness. Nature as the first realm– the first realm of referent experience, is mirrored largely by a ritual realm. The actions which we do are selected out from nature, selected out with a mind to be mobile in nature, to organize nature for purposes of our own. And this mirroring of nature, selectively by ritual action, is followed up later on by explanations in language, the mythic level. So that nature, ritual, and myth, in their primordial motions, are very similar except that progressively the– the understanding, the realm of understanding, has come from out there to what we're doing out there to what we're thinking about what we're doing in here. And so there is an implosion of meaning. The meaning comes inward. And this motion continues and eventually focuses. And all of– the all of the understandings from nature, from ritual, and from myth, come together, focus together, to what we would today, I think, call from esthetic language a synthesizing symbol and the symbol most used I think in the– in the original understanding of this would be an eye, an eye or more an inner eye.

And later on of course the– the projecting of the inner eye out to a star, a new star, this this sort of symbolic motion. The inner eye, when it sees, sees not by light but by new light, by an invisible light as it were, invisible in that it is illuminating not just the objects of the world but illuminates now, symbolically, the consciousness which is here in these objects of the world so that the– the mythic level has been transformed by the symbolic vision to a magical realm. And with the arrival of the– of the magical realm, man then is able to begin his long road back to transmuting by involving himself in the world. This goes through several stages of art, and religion, and– and science. But eventually in this Hermetic order there is a development of man's capacity, so that in speaking of God, in the Hermetic literature, we run across passages like this.

“I have no more to say of it than this. I see in myself a certain direct vision which has come into being from God's grace and I have passed through out of myself into a deathless body. I am not now the one I was before, but I have been born again in mind. I am not now seeing with those eyes as I was in my former form. I would, that you would also, pass in this way, transform in this way, and become yourself like those who are unsleeping. But if anyone is a bodiless eye, let him go out from the body to the vision of the beautiful. Let him fly away up and away and float on high seeking to gaze not on form or color but rather on that which made these the quiet, the serene, the unchanging; the one, the self from self, the self in self, the one itself alone.”

And this of course is– is the classic pure hermetic teaching. In the development of the fall of the Roman Empire and the unraveling of the classical world – the rise of the Christian Roman Empire. By the time of the late sixth century, by the late five hundreds, this entire change of order had taken place, but in such a catastrophic way, in such a messy way, that most people were unable to adjust themselves to the new condition. And simply transposed the old order, the old mind, the old way of thinking, onto the new. And so they romanized Christianity. They made it an understanding by which the Roman Empire could still function. But there were individuals and there were groups who had learned by that time that in order for them to survive, in order for them to maintain themselves in their spirituality, they had to excerpt themselves from the world. And this– this development is a separate history. And I suppose at some time we might go into the development of the– of the monastic tone.

But what concerns us is that towards the turn of the year 600, around that time, there was a change in the Egyptian, Middle Eastern area, and within a generation the rise of Islam, the sudden rise of Islam, brought into play a whole other worldview that was rising rapidly. So that by the year 700, just the difference between 600 and 700, it was apparent that all of the classical locations, of Christianity or of Judaism, of the Hermetic tradition were going to be covered by Islam and so the Hermetic tradition faced in its– in its experience, not only the– the rise of Christianity but the rise of Islam. And just as the Hermetic tradition had managed to change Christianity, esoteric Christianity a little bit by the introduction of certain techniques and certain words, certain styles of teaching. The Hermetic tradition around the 680s, the 690s, addressed itself to Islam and the classic document in that is a hermetic dialogue in its translation. The title is, A Testament of Alchemy, Being the Revelations of Morienus, Ancient Adept and Hermit of Jerusalem to Khalid ibn Yazid, King of the Arabs, The Divine Secrets of the Magisterium and the Accomplishment of the Alchemical Art. And so the Hermetic tradition at this time chose through the representatives who were alive at that time personified as Morienus, a hermit living on a hill outside of Jerusalem. And when you look at the topography what is that hill outside of Jerusalem? The Mount of Olives.

And this is the essence of the dialogue. Khalid has been looking for a teacher. He is a prince. He's very high up in the Arabic power structure, but he's looking for a teacher to deliver to him the secrets of the universe. For he feels that there is power in this and Morienus is trying to teach him in a spiritual manner to understand that the– the whole concern with– with power as he has envisioned it is permanently barring him from understanding truth. So Morienus says:

“O King, may God enrich you. Now attend to the examination of this operation and you will know it well and understand. Consider it thoroughly from beginning to end and you will know all things that pertain to it, God willing. No one will ever be able to perform or accomplish this thing which you have so long sought and attain it by means of any knowledge unless it be through this affection, this gentle humility, perfect and true love. For this is something which God gives unto the sure keeping of his elected servants until such time as he may prepare one to whom it may be handed on from among his most precious secrets. Thus the one to whom it may be handed on, this may only be a gift of God who alone chooses who may receive it.”

And so Morienus is trying to tell Khalid now that there is a purification which he must subject himself to. And that in this purification Morienus himself, as his spiritual teacher, already has disciplined himself already has subjected himself to and that he will then present himself in such a mode before Khalid. That if Khalid intuitively follow through the mental discipline on the outside of organizing his mind of following through the way in which transformative processes work, which all these realms from nature through ritual through the method of down to the symbol, through which the realm of nature is interiorized into man and man in his purification then, takes this interiorization of the symbolic quintessence of the four elements he made then through opening himself up to the inner realm, transmute that symbol and project it back out onto the world in a magical way, and the four elements will be transformed. The gold will be made but the laboratory work, the physiological work, the chemical work, is but a preparation, but a disciplining for the mind to hone itself and tune itself to this transformative capacity.

King Khalid then, as he seeks to try and follow the teacher, he's not sure. He's a wise young fellow, and he knows that this old hermit probably knows what he's talking about but he's having the difficulties which any student has. Finally the King asks,

“Is this thing of which you speak, is it rare or is it commonly found? Morienus answered. As an authority has said, it is there for both rich and poor, for the generous and the greedy, for him who runs and him who sits. It is cast in the streets trampled in the dung. Let none take pains to extract it. Fools have often wasted much zeal on the dung in hopes of extracting it, but they have acted in ignorance. The wise know that this unique thing is hidden and that it is what contains the four elements within itself and thus has power over it.”

And Khalid attempting to push his mental understanding to the limit comes to this question: “Tell me, where is the source of this thing whence it may be gathered as there is need of it?” And Morienus, in the hermetic dialogue, he has brought him finally to the point to where he can outlast envision and understand. Where is that source going to be? The man himself. This way man is a microcosm. But instead of saying this, Morienus then falls silent and casts his gaze downward. You see he's addressing a royal prince. The royal princes ask a question, the etiquette is you must answer. But the answer isn't obvious, it is you yourself. And so he casts his gaze downward in silence and the princes left with his teacher looking at his own feet in silence and Khalid then beginning to stir within realizes that a mystery is being presented. That knowledge is not being represented to him, but that a mystery is being presented. And Khalid because of the preparation before this, allows himself to experience the mysteriousness.

Then Morienus raises his head and speaks “Truly this matter is that created by God which is firmly captive within you yourself inseparable from you. Whatever and wherever you may be and any creature deprived of it will die.”

Then Khalid having understood something of this matter. And because he can't query any further about the thing, about his own true self, because he realizes now that this is an experience which– which he must have. So the dialogue shifts to a corollary mode. And Khalid says, “I have received this from you. From whom did you receive it?” And this is a legitimate question at this point.

And Morienus tells him that his teacher was Stephanos of Alexandria who was the teacher of the great Byzantine King, Heraclius around 630 AD, and that this was the legitimate property of wise men and kings, kings who must fashion the world in a just way before God's sight and that the archetype of this– the archetype of this, of Morienus instructing Kalid, of Stefanos instructing the Byzantine King Heraclius, is Aristotle who instructed Alexander the Great. And later on of course one of the great hermetic documents – I have a translation of it, made in Oxford England about the turn of the century and I'll bring it in when there's when it's appropriate – called The Secret of Secrets. And it's a translation of the secret instructions that Aristotle gave to Alexander the Great. The esoteric instructions of how to comport oneself so that the entire world is run as a unity. For only running as a unity does the entirety of the world ever become unreal. That if it is fragmented, the parts will always bind and it will always be falling into a disassociative pattern and never will be real. There will be no kingdom. There will be no king.

So having explained this then, Khalid realizes that he has become a part of a tradition. But that the other corollary to understanding that he is now a part of this tradition is how is this expressed then out into the world. All right, one may– one may come to understand this. One may experience this mystery. How then does it come out into the world? How does the magical realm project itself out from the interior symbolic eye of man's purified mind so that the world receives it? And it's this projective power that becomes all important in alchemy and generally later on in the Renaissance the– the stylization will be that a really good hermetic master, a really good alchemical process has a tremendous projective power a hundred thousand to one. Able to transform enormously in the outer world.

Morienus speaks in this way to Khalid in this dialogue: “For the conduct of this operation you must have pairing, production of offspring, pregnancy, birth, rearing. For union is followed by conception which– which initiates pregnancy whereupon the birth follows. Now the performance of this composition is likened to the generation of a man whom the Great Creator Most High made not after the manner in which a house is constructed nor anything else which is built up by the hand of man. For a house is built by setting one object on another. But a man is not made of objects. His substance rather, before he is formed before birth– before he is formed, for birth improves through successive transformations until the living being is made which then is born and then continues. So that in the hidden interior is where all the transformations happen and in making the transformations they have to follow a– a patterning which starts with nature, but which improves itself to art. So art and nature are going to be the– the two qualities that the two operation qualities that come into play in the Hermetic tradition. And if this is followed then, the work is successful.

Morienus is speaking to Khalid says: “Before I explain any further terms to you I will bring before you all of these things that are called by names that you may see them as well as work with them in your presence. Here are the materials. This is what they are called and this is what they do – their properties. These ten are of the same family and if you wish to seek, distribute, and dissolve them, stiffen, join, confect, them exactly as I am about to do before you. You have but to do likewise for this is the root of the knowledge and the operation of transformation which many look for in all sorts of minerals. But do you as one who sees for the ignorant is not as the wise nor the blind as the sighted. Do not depart from that which I have set forth for you and shown you or you will go astray.”

So that the discipline here is that if you're working in an alchemical way with the transformations one has to realize not to get caught up in the physical operations, in the material operations, or in the mentality which mirrors those physical operations. The mind has to be kept purified. The operations then are distinct and are separated from oneself by a disinterestedness and only in that state is the alchemical transformation able to be effected. And so Morienus says this is a very difficult balance.

“There are great hindrances to knowledge but one who has seen this operation performed is not as one who has sought it for only in books.”

So that there is a– a technique in the tome as we've seen in all of the Hermetic literature, that the teacher always presents a the way in which this is done the tone, the personal tone, and that the– the student is able to gain, intuitively at first, the quality of the way in which the the master works.

“The greater part of those books are written to be obscure and disorganized so that only those who wrote them can understand them.”

Meaning that, only until you understand the operations can you then understand the books, that the books will only become intelligible if they are as if you had written them yourself. And one of the great quandaries in the Hermetic tradition will be what happens when the lineage is broken? When there is no teacher to develop you? How can this come to pass and come back into being? I don't know the answer.

Let's take a break.

I thought of trying to present to you some of the traditional image-base from the Hermetic tradition. So I have some slides here for that. There is– or there was made, at one time, the translation of one of the more interesting compilations entitled The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, published by the Bollingen Series, 1950, very early on. And Horapollo, Horus Apollo, Egyptian Horus, and Greek Apollo – Horapollo. The name of the priest and Horapollo lived and the flourished in the 360s AD. And in the 360s AD the iron fist of Theodosius came into Alexandria and smashed the Serapeum and they destroyed it. They destroyed the– a great deal of the library at the time. It was a tremendous shock to the Hermetic tradition in Alexandria and many of the Hermetic teachers, priests – some people would call them – although this makes of it an order so different from the emphasis that we're giving it.

The emphasis has always been educational. The hermetic ideal is to– is to educate, to bring out and mature the capacities that are there, not simply to minister to capacities which are not personal, but functions which happen to you, but to develop oneself so that you participate with them. The Hermetic tradition is always that one is capable then of participating in this universe creatively. In– with a capital C. Being able to help through one's consciousness and through the power of the projection of the magia from one's symbolic understanding to transform this world and make it better. And so this is the emphasis of the Hermetic tradition so that the educators, the teachers in the Hermetic tradition fleeing from Alexandria in the 360s AD, fleeing up into the deserts along the old trade routes that led out eventually to the Nile Valley, brought with them excerpts what they could carry as illustrative material and one of the examples of that sort of a textbook – the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo are images. And these images are the origins of the Royal Road tarot cards that we have today that come back in the Renaissance. And we'll see how they come back in at the appropriate time in the lecture. I think next week we'll– we'll look at this closer.

In the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo the images are what we would today style as archetypal images that are meant not to refer back to the outside world, nor to refer to a mental psychic realm, but to evoke from the deeper spiritual cosmos a– a resonance. For instance, the first two hieroglyphics in Horapollo, the first one is eternity and the second is the universe.

“Eternity: When they wish to symbolize Eternity, they draw the sun and the moon [together], because they are eternal elements.”

Of course if you draw a circle for the sun and a circle for the moon together you get like a– an eight on its side – a Mobius strip.

“The Universe: When they wish to depict the Universe, they draw a serpent devouring its own tail, marked with variegated scales. By the scales they suggest the stars in the heavens. [And] This beast is the heaviest of animals, as the earth is [the] heaviest of elements. [and] It is smooth like water. And, each year sheds its skin… [and] each season of the year returns successively [and as it returns it is able to eventually] grow young again [and begin again.]” But its food is its own process, its own body.

So these are just two of the hieroglyphics of Horapollo, and when they– the year when they wished to symbolize the year they draw Isis. That is a woman, a woman, and they signify the goddess in the same way. So we have– we have this kind of material. But I chose instead, a series of images starting with this cartouche from about 300 BC.

This is the name of Ptolemy I Soter in Egyptian hieroglyphic. And of course Ptolemy was one of the– He was of a Greek family. He was a general, one of Alexander's great Greek generals. And he's the one who went back to Alexandria to found the Ptolemaic dynasty, to bring Alexander's vision of a great new world city together. They had understood that Athens had come to symbolize the ancient world, the power of the ancient world. And they wanted Alexandria to be the projection out of a new world order. And so this is the– the name in Egyptian cartouche.

And the next slide shows us Caesar Augustus still keeping three hundred years later. This policy, this– this hermetic touch of having one's name still translated into the hieroglyphic language into the cartouche.

And then the next slide. This is a page from the Book of Kells. And here we have a ninth century cartouche which gives us the– the divine name in this kind of mode. So there are– there are still a flow all the way through that is recognizable. Once we have the understanding of the– of the qualities of the tradition and the understanding of the way in which that matrix operates in the set we can recognize it anywhere that it falls into operation.

Next slide. This is Serapis. The butterfly’s soul. The– the lightness of the soul and the balance of it is the cornucopia the fruitfulness that the attainment of the of the inner self which is able to fly up and away that the– what we would now I suppose style as an angelic self the the capacity for us to transcend the material, to transcend the psychic polarities and that this is the source of nutrition. And Serapis, of course, the Alexandrian hermetic figure of the way in which life is able to bring the cornucopia and the butterfly soul together in a single person.

Again from the Book of Kells, this is Saint John. Here's the person. Instead of Serapis we have Saint John and what he is holding up here is this book, the testament. And the testament here is– is this capacity for the– the source of nourishment for all. And here the stylus which enables him to compose.

Next slide. Like– like the cornucopia. This is Saint John as a symbol of interior vision. Spiritual eagle. You find the same symbol– a spiritual symbol in Dante's Paradiso. I think around the 30th canto or so when he has the– the transformation that he has gone through the first transformation of being able to be guided by Virgil and then the transformation out of the psychic realm into the seraphic realm of Paradise where his guide is now Beatrice. And there's a certain point in the– the Paradiso where Dante has to have the third transformation and his third guide is Bernard of Clairvaux who enables Dante to understand that he is now seeing with the– the eye of a celestial eagle and so Saint John has this.

Next slide. And the– on this level, on the level of the synthesizing symbol within where all meaning has imploded to a single focus the first projection of symbolic understanding then is that the– the four Gospels together make a mandala which is the cover of the book. And the book then becomes a– a living teacher – living teacher. And one brings oneself as bringing oneself to a living teacher in the Hermetic tradition purifying one's mind ordering it allowing for the occurrence of the spiritual purity to happen within and the concurrence of the images in the book to occur in one's living life. This way the word becomes light, and that light is the life of man, in this way. Okay, it's all very hermetic.

The world egg here lays the protection of the sea so that the levels must be understood not as like I drew on the blackboard is like an onion level going in, but that this is a spiral, that this happens continuously again and again, and that the seed the– the egg of this renewal this symbolic vision within can only be approached by the courageous following of this path fearlessly.

Next slide. This is a vision from Joaquin de Fiore of the way in which all of cosmic history unfolds. And when we get a little bit into it next week we'll see that some of these cosmic envisionings here are almost like hermetic vessels within which the process of magical transformation of nature into a history occurs. And instead of there just being the dull round of the seasons, there's the development in– in a planned way. That history then is shaped and that man participates in the shaping then of time into a history which will culminate.

Next– upside down here– Again one of Joaquin de Fiore's great drawings, great symbolic envisioning. Here– here the symbol which was eternity of the serpent swallowing its tail is being unfolded and like the spiral of the serpent around the Orphic egg now it's being unfolded so that the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven heads – the the differentiated circuit now – is going to be arched like a mother like Nut over the– the capacity of man. And Hildegard von Bingen. The– the vision here, the symbolic vision here of the whole face. Hildegard put her– her whole face instead of just an eye but without the definition. You can see that this is like the wings of forests and the sun very very similar.

Now the next slide. Again by Hildegard von Bingen. Contemporary of Bernard of Clairvaux. The– the inner celestial realm, which is all eyes, which is all seeing, which is all comprehending, coming down like a reverse umbilical or the impregnation.

And the next slide. And here, a drawing from Roger Bacon. One of Roger Bacon's secret manuscripts that was found in the 20th century and composed about 1265 AD. And this is the impregnation of the ovum of the egg by the sperm or spermatozoa. How can this be? How could somebody in 1267 see this? There– there was no way instrumentation was available. But the interior envisioning of the Hermetic Magus – as we would say, or sage, or teacher – on the level of Roger Bacon, able to– to accurately record the correct image-base, the correct symbolic expression of it.

Next slide. This is the title page from John Dee's The Hieroglyphic Monad, 1564. And here is the basic hermetic symbol transformed by Dee into a new mode so that it's able to carry a mathematical expressive meaning. And we'll get into that a little later on too.

Our next slide please. And Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia. Here is presented the mind which is still locked in its mentality, is a surrogate and Angel, is a psychic angel, a psychic approximation of an angel, who is baffled by all of the new capacities. I don't know if you can see or not, but there is a magic square above the head of the angel here and we'll see, later on, that that magic square appears above the head of Paracelsus in the classic frontispiece to The Collected Works of Paracelsus from 1564, the very same magic square. But being baffled by all of the occurrences of the– the new technology, the new science, they– the expressiveness by which the Hermetic tradition is now begun to change the world. Surrogate, mental, angelic states are puzzled by this because they are not real, they are fictive.

Next slide. This is the title page of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World – I think we need to focus – We'll see later on when when we get to the way in which the Hermetic tradition came to the United States, came to America. We'll see that and we'll get that slide straight at that time that Raleigh's History of the World is a major document for us, a major watershed. All of the early expeditions to Virginia were all under Sir Walter Raleigh. All during the 1580s and 1590s it was Raleigh in his vision attempting to develop the New Atlantis really, the new world.

Let's take the next slide. We'll come back to these.

I'm giving you a preview now of some of the things that we're going to get into. This is the title page from 1609 of the Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom. The Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternum of Heinrich Khunrath. This is from the edition, all of these are from editions in the vault of the press. They're almost never seen or available. You can't– You can't buy these anymore. There are no reprints at all. But we'll see here that the– that the Hermetic tradition by the time of 1600 becomes ready to project out a whole new dimension of refashioning the world to take on a whole new hemisphere as it were. That the Western Hemisphere, the other side of the world now, is going to become in the Hermetic vision the spiritual realm that man has disciplined himself in the Eastern hemisphere, in the Old world, to a point to where he understands how to do it and what to do. And instead of just making gold, instead of just projecting out in this smaller way, he is now ready to project a new world, which is like a New Testament. And all of this will become extremely important in the Hermetic tradition and all through the 17th century the drive will be to get this done, to find a way in which to do this right. This is an illustration from Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternum.

Here is the Alchemist Studio and of course here he is praying before a tent which is somewhat like an Arabic tent. And here the Hermetic star and as a symbol in the middle of the triadic circles. And here on the other side is the projection out of the triangle within the square and its circles also. And here he is praying to organize himself to keep his interior balance and here are all of his equipment. Knowing the equipment of the Alchemist. But of music and harmony of the arts. In keeping all of the levels of consciousness –/ magic, and art, and religion, and science – balanced in that quaternary so that the alchemist may move with surety in the transforming process.

This is the title page of La Toison d'Or, the– by Salomon Trismosin. And we'll see that this illustrated alchemical book – which I have all on the slide now – this will be the title page. All the steps of the alchemical process are outlined around the border of it.

Give us the next two slides. This is one page from it. The King and the queen. The beginnings. Armies the blue ground. And here he is holding up the beginning of the vessel. The fruitfulness of this whole process is going to begin. And we'll get into all of this. We'll see it in complete.

And the next slide. This is the title page of Sir Francis Bacon's last great monumental work, The Great Instauration. The beginnings of a new cosmic order sailing out across the sea to the new world. Everything is prepared. All of the processes understood. All of the tradition understood and– and brought together. And now it's being taken across the ocean across the horizon to the new world which will be made. And this wonderful title page showing us Hermes up here with his living caduceus being brought here, and Juno receiving it, and Apollo on the far side. We'll get to the–

Refocus that at all? I can't quite get it. Can you bring it back there? That seems better.

This is from an alchemical– a Rosicrucian alchemist named Schweigart. We have a copy here in the library. Here is the microcosmic man from the simple truth on the single unity stand of the single truth. His ability to project out not only from an inner eye but from his– from his whole self from his whole body. And out comes the– the various realms and the tree of life in a non kabbalistic mode here is projected out.

Next slide. This is also from Schweigart of Rosicrucian. This is the invisible college and all of this is– yes, the invisible College. This is the new PRS when we rebuild it and look at it. And it'll be a lot of fun. It'll stop traffic on Los Feliz I'm sure. And there are occasional people like me who get over curious and have to pick up the pieces a little later on, but we'll come to all of this tremendous symbolism. Put in all this.

And the next slide, sort of the Green Knight and one of the last great documents in that whole movement in the early 17th century in the Hermetic tradition will be the Steganographia, a revision of Trithemius’s Steganographia from about 1510. This one was published in 1626 and it was a way to decode cryptic– cryptic messages, cryptic images, cryptic images that were built into language and into a visual symbolic base. So that only if you had the– the key could you decode and understand the messages that were being delivered. And by this time of course the Hermetic tradition would be extremely sophisticated here.

Can we focus on just a touch? Here's the back a little bit? There.

There's the hermetic teacher holding the crown over the– the person who is seated here. This is Sir Francis Bacon and this is a bust of Augustus.

All of this will be the taproot of the development at the end of that century in about fifty years because of the tremendous proliferation of consciousness at that time. This code manual will in fifty years become the calculus of Leibniz and Newton. That they will find the universal language is not so much in an encoding of language by levels of manipulation in the structure of the letters, but that the universal language will be in numbers, and it will be in mathematics, and from codes, hermetic complicated codes of languages to mathematics will be the great shift that will happen in the 17th century.

And the next–I think the last slide now. We have one more after this.

Man is a microcosm. All the various presentations of this, Robert Flood and Agrippa, Leonardo da Vinci. We will become astounded at who is in the Hermetic tradition and to see Leonardo along with Flood and Agrippa and so forth it will be amazing.

And then the last slide. I thought you'd like to see what an Alexandrian lady looked like. They were people very much like us. And we should keep in mind that the– the so-called ancients left not just dry books but they were human beings like us. And sometimes they were gorgeous, mysterious, lovable, and did their best to keep things alive so that we could be here.

Thank you.