Alchemist of the High Renaissance

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 6 of 13

Alchemist of the High Renaissance
Salomon Trismosin
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 7, 1986

Transcript:

Well, welcome to the occult show and tell.

[from the audience] Who took your pictures?

This one was taken about 1970 in Canada, somebody took– they’re from all over.

I have so many slides tonight. I thought we would start with them and then take a break. And then I'll do my best to confound it so that no secrets are given. The Hermetic tradition is not to let you do it too easily so that it's very very difficult. So that later on when it becomes easy you say, gee I'm really glad it finally was easy.

So our– our lecture tonight concerns a very mysterious adept. I don't much like to use the term adept, but in this case it's appropriate. The massive rediscovery of the Hermetic tradition in northern Italy from the 1450s and 60s and 70s was by and large an intellectual phenomenon. It was a learned phenomenon, and it took a tremendous amount of effort and education – schooling really – to address oneself. This material was showing up in Latin, beautiful classical Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, even Aramaic documents were showing up. And the pressure there was to no longer rely upon the experts – who were the monks in the monasteries – but for individuals themselves to master the languages and the approaches so that we find, for the first time in over a thousand years, the talented layman the individual who considers it well within his province to have access, himself, personally, to the secrets of the ages. And it is this character of the individual sprung free that really makes of this epoch a renaissance, a rebirth of learning.

There are occasional individuals in the late Middle Ages for whom when we study their lives and their works, like Roger Bacon it seems to us that the Renaissance started in the 13th century or perhaps even in the 12th century. But these were scattered individuals of rare and high genius. But we are now talking about the close of the Quattrocento where there were thousands of individuals, men and women, who felt that these secrets of the ages were accessible to them personally. And that in their coterie of friends they were well able to discuss among themselves in the gardens the patios of their own villas, secrets which had been arcane buried underground for more than a thousand years.

So this is a whole new epoch, a whole new development. And when the spark of this moves north out of Italy into Europe – Western Central Europe – the Renaissance will spur also the Reformation and out of this will come eventually the great 17th century revolution in consciousness. That a person may learn the techne, the how to do it. He may acquire the skills by which to educate himself and that through this education there is literally no upper limit except for final perfect illumination. And this will become a standby increasingly in the 17th century. And it is this peculiar particular èlan that is percolated out of 15th century northern Italy into 16th century Western Europe and refined in 17th century minds that will come to the United States, that will come to America. And America will be the grand hermetic utopia. It will be the visionary promised land already visible in the 16th century, already visible in the 1580s in the vision of men like Sir Walter Raleigh. That here we not only have the secret of the ages back in circulation with large enough populations that we could found colonies now. And the problem is is that the old ghosts and ruins of Europe are what are holding us back. Let us take this new man, this new current of man, and take it to a new world. And of course the individual who is the culmination of the whole Hermetic tradition the one person who whose life is exactly the epitome of the Hermetic Perfectibility of man by daily perfecting daily work towards an almost infinite refinement will be Benjamin Franklin. And Benjamin Franklin will make the American character by his own life and his great delight will be the fact that he will have a Thomas Jefferson to pass on the experiment. And Jefferson, like one of the greatest alchemistic hermetic philosophers of all time, will not be interested in projecting gold but will be interested in projecting the new man on the face of the new world. So that instead of just having thousands of individuals who feel this way, one will have millions, and one will in fact have a whole continent. The vision was continental from the beginning.

So, we're dealing here with an esoteric tradition which is the very backbone and the background of the Western individual. And we are sorely put today because so much of a surrogate mentality has come into play that we should defer our individuality to something nebulous or something ambiguous or someone else or something else that we have lost contact momentarily with this. And so this series addresses itself largely to the restatement of, how did we get to where we are to this kind of glorious splendor which we really have. And is still there.

All of the northern Italian intellectual work would have come to nothing. It would have really been a long term fad had it not been put into practical purpose. And for this, the northern Italian temperament was not quite enough. Yes, it was practical in terms of making paintings or sculptures or architecture or writings or cities or politics, but not for the engineering – the actual scientific laboratory work. And for this the German temperament was needed. And our sage tonight, Solomon Trismosin, was the first great Germanic sage who realized that these techniques worked, and that one could master them, one could have them and understand them. But he is the most mysterious and misunderstood of all individuals. In fact, if we come to standard works on alchemy – I have here one called The Royal Art of Alchemy, Reinhard Federmann, translated from the German, and published in this translation, 1969. We read in here:

“Legend has Paracelsus learned the royal art on one of his trips to Constantinople from one Solomon Trismosin a magician born around 1490 in Germany.” And this of course is totally wrong as a date. Trismosin is the author of the treatise Aureum Vellus that however saw print only in 1598 and reprinted in 1604 under the title, the French Title, Toison d'Or, or The Golden Fleece. Trismosin tells us in his own writings that by the 1470s he was already traveling as a young man searching for the techniques. So saying he was born in 1490 is just completely out of the picture.

We have also, in one of the best biographies of Paracelsus – Magic into Science by Henry Pachter – one of the very best biographies of Paracelsus published in New York, I believe in the 50s – yeah, in the early 50s. But even here we have an individual who is a very conscientious writer otherwise, but simply does not know. He writes in here, in page 57, under the headline, The Missing Diploma, he says we have never found Paracelsus’s diplomas. And he says here that they must have been given, but “Paracelsus turned into a passionate empiricist” all of a sudden. And, “...in his career and after his death, his detractors accused him of belonging to,” an occult sect. “They held against him his failure to obtain the doctor's degree at Ferrara. Indeed, to the chagrin of his eulogists, no record of his graduation exists, and he was unable to show that important document [which], later, his right to practice medicine [when it] was disputed.”

He was unable to show them his document. I have a copy of Paracelsus degree. In fact, he has two degrees – handwritten out by his two masters. And I have the reproductions of them done about in the 1540s. We have here in the vault at the Philosophic Research Society the only copy in the world of this book and it has copied in it all of the pertinent data concerning the confirmation of Paracelsus by the two great Hermetic masters, Solomon Trismosin and the Abbot Trithemius. And of course next week we're going to take up Trithemius also.

These two currents, Trithemius for the religious contemplative the master mind, who reconstructed the whole intellectual landscape of the Western tradition, who was in a position to stand on Ficino's shoulders and able to reinstate what he called, the Chronologica Mystica, that thousands of year old tradition leading up to about 1500 when he did this in Germany. And along with his intellectual work Trismosin who had mastered all of the alchemical processes and had distilled them all into one specific process, the best process of all, which he called the Red Lion. And the alchemical process of the Red Lion became the alchemical royal road. In fact, when the Red Lion became standardized, esoterically, in the 16th century it was the rosy tincture of the Red Lion process that gave rise later on to the Rosy Cross presentation of the Hermetic tradition. And, in fact, the title page, the colored title page in our handwritten manuscript– This was never published. It's hand bound and handwritten in brown ink on vellum paper. And we'll see– I have a slide of the title page and it has the alchemical black cross with the rosy light of resurrection within the darkness.

Trismosin is the engineer. He's the structural designer. He's like the civil engineer who takes the hermetic tradition and he finds a way to articulate the skeleton and the structure of the processes so that it can then be effectively taught. And of course Paracelsus was the prize student. He was the culmination of the culmination. And it is due to Trismosin that the Major Arcana of the tarot deck comes to be numbered at twenty-two cards. And it is the twenty-two-stage process of the Red Lion alchemical transformative process that is the real core of the Major Arcana in the tarot deck. We have, of course, the familiar magician card out of the Waite deck here, and we see before the Magician, the elements of the suits and the double scepter raised on high with the infinity sign, the hermetic sign, over his head and pointing down to the fruitful earth and raising up a torch of liberty of unified polarized energy. But we do not see this except in an allegorical mode. Our contemporary minds have been ruined by miseducation, by about one hundred years almost of miseducation. And so we read this not symbolically from within, but allegorically from a mentality. And of course we miss it completely. We see it as an element to be juggled and in fact the popular misstatement of the Magician as the Juggler is a play on this whole capacity that when one doesn't know how to transform all you can do is rearrange. And a personality rearranged, very often, is a deterioration from what you had before. Transformation is what we want. We want not just to be presentable in a different way. We don't want to just change clothing but we want to actualize the energies that are within and only transformation allows for that.

Now in our time, the– the great alchemist in our time was Carl Jung, and Jung is the one of the individuals– There were many and we'll see some of their work in just a minute– But Jung was one of the individuals who realized through a crisis in his life that his allegorized mentality was not enough to understand that in fact the medical background that he had received that was sufficient to allow him to be the director of the Burghölzli institution in Switzerland – he was 38 years old did nothing to protect him from having a mental breakdown. And it's embarrassing, to say the least, to be a professional doctor, the head of an institute, to be almost 40 years old, and to have absolutely no defense whatsoever against one's own inner energies that are bent on tearing you apart. But they're not just tearing you apart, but they are alchemically dissolving an inadequate structure, a brittleness that is integral to the spirit. And this is why it is being challenged. And so, Jung finally after a year or two of floundering around as we all do in these conditions began to let an interior symbol rise. He had the courage to let it happen. And of course the interior symbol, rose, and in the archetype of the wise old man Jung's teacher became Philemon. And Philemon identified himself as an old Alexandrian magus alive in the collective levels of the psyche that Jung was now open to. And you can see there's quite a difference between an allegorical figure like this, and a symbolic figure like this.

If we try to read this in the same way as we would try to read that it doesn't quite work. This can be manipulated. This cannot be manipulated. This evokes something mysterious out of us that we feel at least the need to respond to. There's something here which we have to open up to. It's not a mentality that we're dealing with but instead it's the psyche that we are dealing with here.

And of course anyone who deals with the psyche on this level, symbolically, for a lifetime. We see here Jung at age 85 – the age that Mr. Hall is now – coming to his front door. And you can see that on the front door of the archetypal self symbols– one can say well this is an interesting crystalline structure. What's– what's it mean? But it's not an allegorical meaning. It's a symbolic representation of this portal for the man. In fact, in his garden one finds a stone, like a philosopher's stone– Carved with the statements of veracity that came out of the man and the little alchemical figure here, the little hermetic homonculus. That came out of Jung in the center of the wheel of eternity.

So we can see that this experience of the eclipse of an old self reveals to us is necessary to us to reveal the hidden splendor, the fires within, the energies that are there. And so the image of the nigredo, alchemically, of an eclipse of our identity that what we took to be our identity no longer stands up; the equation doesn't hold; the tautology will not work anymore. It's not that the elements of the tautology were so poorly arranged but it's that all tautological arrangements are insufficient, and that only a true perspective, a real ratio of man cosmos is going to work and it's in the eclipse of the old self that we come to understand legitimately that while the old self fills up completely with the negativity, there is still some sense remaining. And that sense that it can exist in the midst of total despair of an identity, yields the confidence that there is a movement, there is an energy, there is a splendor there – as Trismosin would say – there is a solar splendor within man which is real which we can get at and that the way can be learned through a techne.

Now in our time I guess the machine wants to stop there with the eclipse. In our time the experience of the nigredo often is jammed in this way. If you go into a home–

You need a light Steve?
Yeah.
Perhaps somebody can– Okay, good. We'll just talk for a while until that– the lights are off too. I'm used to it– So, on Saturdays when I– When I teach self-development the students often, at first, think that I'm joking when I say that the machines do not want to record these things, but after about 20 or 30 years of working with these things you realize that this always happens. It needs to happen this way.

For some reason the Yoga Publication Society in Des Plaines, Illinois reprinted this occult classic, Splendor Solis. Splendor Solis exists in the original and only one copy in the world in the British Museum. It was– It hadn't been seen for about 300 years and somebody at the English publishing house of Kegan Paul published this in edition in the 1920s. There was a tremendous opening up in the 1920s in London and there at Broadway House on Carter Lane, Splendor Solis was published again for the first time, and the Yoga Society in Des Plaines, Illinois reprinted it. And so, one can actually buy a copy of Splendor Solis today for about ten dollars America – Unbelievable!

In here it reads on the title page: “Splendor Solis: Alchemical Treatises of Solomon Trismosin, Adept and Teacher of Paracelsus; Including 22 Allegorical Pictures Reproduced from the Original Paintings in the Unique Manuscript on Vellum, dated 1582, in the British Museum.”

And in this volume, Trismosin’s own statement at the title page reads in this way – and you get a key to his personality from just the way that he phrases this. Remember now, he's not Italian, but he's German; he's not so much an intellectual but he's an engineer. He's a craftsman raised to the level of art. He's like a great mechanic who knows how to make this work. He writes in here, that this book, “is divided into seven parts, in which is described the hidden mystery of the old philosophers, as well as all that nature requires to clearly accomplish the whole work, including all the added things; after which no one shall be advised to grapple with the mystery of the noble art with his own senses.”

And Trismosin, towards the end of his book, will write this:

Study what thou art,
Whereof thou art a part,
What thou knowest of this art,
This is really what thou art.
All that is without thee
Also is within, [thee]
Thus wrote Trismosin.

And so, there is a turning here, there is a turning. Instead of having the old emerald tablet hermetic rule of thumb – as above so below – Trismosin now turns it 90 degrees so that the figure eight, the Ogdoad, turns on its side and becomes like an infinity sign so that what is out there is also in here, but that if you only see it in an allegorical way, the registry of the recognition of the order of the world will only appeal to you as a mental idea. And you will have a very good idea. And you can be taught to develop your mentality to such an extent that you have in fact very clear ideas of it. In fact, the art, the language of this ideation of the laws of nature is mathematics, and mathematical ideas are exactly correspondent to the world. One can though – as Trismosin was the first to really point out – one can have it record not on the mind, but in the spirit. And that when the spirit records it, when the spirit records the affinity with the world, then a man, a human being, may project out his spiritual life upon the world, and the world will respond to him. That instead of it just being a dead issue as clear ideas it then is a process of affecting the world.

Trismosin tells us, in his “Alchemical Wanderings” – listen to the tone, the sort of 15th century North German practicality in the way it's translated out of the German; it was first published in Rohrschach.

“When I was a young fellow, I came to a Miner named Flocker, who was also an Alchemist, but he kept his knowledge secret, and I could get nothing out of him. He used a Process with common Lead, adding to it a peculiar Sulphur, or Brimstone, he fixed the Lead until it became hard, then fluid, then soft [as] wax. Of this prepared Lead, he took ten ounces, and one mark of pure unalloyed Silver, put both materials in flux and kept the composition in fusion for [about] an hour. Thereupon he parted the Silver, cast it upon an ignit– ingot, and when this ingot was half gold he stopped the process and invited me to see it.”

So, Trismosin is a young man then, was personally able to observe this alchemical transformation. He says, “I was grieved at heart that I could not have this art, but he refused to tell [me] his secret process.” Now always in Trismosin he uses the word process, over and over again in the manuscript. In fact the– the the term in here, process, comes to signify what we would call technology today. That there is a science to understanding it, but that the science is incomplete without being able to actually do it. So that alchemy becomes a technological process for Trismosin. But note here, the inseparable, ineffable reality of the technological process is that it is a spiritual process. The difficulty is to keep a technology which is spiritual and doesn't tend to skew off into a mentality in which case one's work is ruined. It doesn't work. You don't have gold. You don't have the projection.

So that the Philosopher's Stone in here– the Philosopher's Stone in the world is correspondent to a spiritual quality of openness in the technological sense of being able to interpenetrate with the world so that it is real. This is the difficulty.

Trismosin says of this man: “Shortly thereafter he tumbled down a mine and no one could tell what process he had used…. [So that] in the year 1473 I started on my travels to search out an artist in Alchemy.”

And he traveled all over, and eventually he found himself in Italy. And when he went to Milan– he spent about a year in Milan, this was about 1475. This is about– about the time that the Mantegna tarot deck would have been about ten years old by now would have been used. The Visconti-Sforza tarot deck would have been out by now, probably somewhere around fifteen to twenty, twenty-five years, something like that. Ficino would be about twenty years into the Florentine Academy. So that this is right in the midst of everything. He spent about a year. He said,

“I heard some excellent lectures and served as an assistant for about a year,” in Milan. Then he teamed up with two individuals. One was a Jewish tradesman and another was an Italian industrialist, a banker, and they were making silver by a certain process. They were taking English tin and they were projecting a silver as an alloy coating this tin and then making things out of it. Silverware at this time would consist mainly of knives. The– the spoon doesn't really come into play until Elizabethan times, and the fork isn't used until later– much later than that. So making dishes and making knives.

Then he went on a trip with the Jew to Venice. And while he was in Venice, Trismosin’s own intellectual technological curiosity got to him and he took a piece of this silver to an assay office and, just the way that he comported himself in the assay office they tested it by cupelation, and of course he says that it fell apart in the fire because it was a very bad job of– of alloying. But his following the process alerted somebody else who was in the assay office and they looked him up then, and contacted him, and said if you are able to carry out a couple of test processes we may have a position for you. And so the first thing that they gave him was a piece of modified cinnabar – hydrogen sulfide in a mineral form – and Trismosin was able to go through the processes in about two days. And he presented his work to the chemical master in Venice, and they were satisfied. So they took him, he says, the length of, “about six Italian miles outside of Venice” to a huge villa complex. I think he called it Ponteleone – And at this villa he said there were dozens of alchemists who were being employed and they were working with the entire repertoire of alchemical processes that each artisan had his own workshop so that there would be arranged in scientific laboratories. And that the master of this villa was much interested in Trismosin because he was German himself and that in fact he liked the young Trismosin for being a fellow countryman, and he liked his capacity to master these processes. And they had a huge library there. And Trismosin says that in this library was every conceivable kind of book that you would want. In fact he said one of them cost 6000 crowns there and that there was a section of this book that was in Egyptian and that the Egyptian was then translated into Greek and the Greek was then translated into Latin so that it could be worked with. And Trismosin said that in following the Egyptian original of this, because of his experience, he could see that the Egyptians were master alchemists, that they had already mastered all of these techniques. And what he's talking about of course are Hellenistic Alexandria Egyptians from the third century AD. Because in the third century AD in Alexandria, the sophistication was already there, the capacities were already there.

So Trismosin then got the idea from the Egyptian picture sequence that one could train the openness of the spirit which was the quintessential element in the alchemical process.

Yes you can teach someone chemistry but you can't teach them the fine balance of remaining completely open continuously while the process is going on so that it doesn't become an allegorical meditation, so that it keeps as a spiritual flow, so that you have spiritual technology and not just a surrogate idea. In this, the Egyptian picture sequence was refined by Trismosin to twenty-two stages. He's the one that made this. He's the one that made the Arcana a structure of this nature so that in its interior skeleton it is able to flesh out the world wherever it is projected. That this transformational understanding is valid anywhere in the universe, not only for sentient beings, but for so-called inorganic matter, that it must correspond to this process.

And so, Trismosin then says of himself, “After a while I saw the fundamental principles of this art, then I began working out the Best Tincture…” and he uses the term tincture here– we have an allegorical understanding of this. We think of tincture in the sense that it's kind of like a dissolved color or something like that. Trismosin is using it in a– an engineering sense. That the the spiritual life is given to it. It isn't just that something becomes rose-colored, it's that it has a rosy, liveliness to it. He says of the– In one of his allegories he says, if you have an egg it will never hatch by itself, but if you apply warmth to it and it's a fertile egg it will become a chicken. Well this is like applying the tincture. The tincture is the life, the spirit life and all that matter needs is spirit life projected upon it and then it becomes alive. Alive in the sense that it will then be malleable and ductile and eventually even transformable.

So that metals have properties of not only ductility and malleability but transformability, and the essential metal that the spiritual technology uses as its leverage on the transformation of metals is quicksilver – the spiritus mercurius. The mercury– Mercury itself is the mercury; but the alchemist provides the spirit. So that the Spiritus Mercurius is actually the man and the horse, the man and the– and the alchemical metal working together to liven up whatever metal you're working with, even lead, and be able to raise it in the transformation all the way up to goal. So Trismosin’s– Trismosin said, I worked out the best tincture the best the very one and all tinctures, “proceed, in a most indescribable manner from the same root), [and] when I came to the end of the Work I found such a beautiful red color as no scarlet can compare with, and such a treasure that no words can tell, and which can be infinitely [infinitely] augmented.”

And this of course is the hermetic sign that it's inexhaustible, that it isn't a property of a being who is cut off in their own mental individuality, but that their own universal self is opened up to the cosmos, and that there is a circulation of the spirit. What– What does Saint John say? Nobody knows where it comes from, or where it goes but it blows right along.

Well let's take a little break here, and then we'll see if the machines will cooperate.

I guess we can continue where we were. We had seen an eclipse of the sun and the eclipse. That corona around the eclipse of the sun is symbolically presented in this abstract painting by Kandinsky done about 19, in the 1930s. And you can see here that the modern symbolic consciousness when it's highly differentiated and Kandinsky is very very sophisticated consciousness by the 1930s as advanced as– as an Einstein or a Heisenberg. Kandinsky is really somebody. And you can see here the interplay of planes and variations that occur in a free form matrix which also suspends the eclipsed self. And it doesn't bother the artist at all that he's having that experience because his widening of horizons spiritually is so attenuated by this time that he can carry an eclipsed self as just another element in the symbolic texture of his– of his livingness as the Egyptians would say. This is by Max Ernst Another highly differentiated consciousness. And we see here the the spirit as an abstract bird radiating out.

This is a Western hermetic mandala really for instance. The presentation of self here in this Morris Graves painting is simply entitled Guardian where the experience of the central self is of an incredible spiritual eagle with antlers juxtaposed to that this presentation of a spiritual eagle from the Book of Kells. This is the way in which the ninth century Irish mystics who made the Book of Kells saw Saint John. The symbolic Saint John was the spiritual eagle in Jung's Great Red book. The presentation of self there became so highly energized after a while that we see down below a typical Swiss townscape semi-industrial and hovering over it this radiant almost a bleeding of energy central self. This was in the 1920s. Here's a sequence then of paintings by Max Ernst. This was done in 1909 when Ernst was about 17 years old. His first painting he ever did. You could see a similarity with you. An experience of an attenuated self. In fact in Ernst's life as he went on he was able to differentiate that. It's just that the life that he was living went through two world wars and the German psyche by the Second World War even when it was able to differentiate itself records the earthly part as a vast tombed ruin. But the painting itself in its entirety presents the full moon of consciousness quite serene even over this nightmarish death landscape. And of course the same artist towards the end of his life.

This is the late 50s is able to differentiate now and present what would have been a nigredo experience to an uninitiated consciousness now becomes full of magical symbolic charm and the artist is able to disclose to us the similarity here of the spiritual shapes the Magus. This is the real Magus. This is the real magician. He does not have so much a table of accouterments which can be juggled but he has a self which can be radiant and scintillating. It has the splendor of the spirit. This is the title page of the secret manuscript which we have. Here in the cross is the sphere of eternal wisdom. Notice here that the quaternary and cross. Only three of the arms of the cross are available. For termination the fourth is buried in the earth. Buried in the earth. But the earth is a fruitful earth. It is earthy with the brown soil. But it's verdant also. It is nourishing. It's– It's capable of growth. As we look at this, the blackness of the crucifixion of the cross juxtaposed to the living earth discloses to us that the sacred name here is carved out of the blackness, out of the– the black substance and discloses the tincture behind it.

In fact, as we look closer we can see that the interior of the entire blackness of the cross contains a rosy light. And that is it is the name of being able to understand the name the symbolic name that allows us face on head on to see the light in the darkness. This power of the word is what in Renaissance Hermeticism would be called the ‘mirific word’ by Johannes Reuchlin writing in the 1490s – the first really great European Kabbalist. Pico della Mirandola had studied Kabbalism but really never mastered Hebrew enough so that he was able to read in the Zohar. But Reuchlin, who had been working since the 1470s on Hebrew, had a fine old Jewish doctor as his mentor in the language and eventually was able to compile a very, very great dictionary, Hebrew dictionary, even he has understanding of the word is very much like this. And he is a contemporary of friend of Trismosin, a teacher also of– of many students. One of his students was Agrippa who was also taught not only by Reuchlin but was taught by Trithemius.

Also here is a typical presentation of Paracelsus from the kind of manuscripts that you find around in rare book rooms. But from our secret manuscript of which there is only one copy, the presentation of Paracelsus is remarkably different. We have in this first portrait an interesting figure. We have here a spiritual sojourner who's not caring at all about what kind of figure he's cutting. He could care less. His right hand rests upon the handle of the sword. And there on the pommel is azoth, the truth of veracity, the verity. And next to him there are the volume of the cabal engraved. And above him magic squares which when they are translated into alchemical symbolic figures are the same that appear in Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia One, where the angel is befuddled by the new range of spiritual technology that man has created because in the heavens that we’re a part of, nature there never was any of these spiritual technologies. There were the spheres of nature but now man has through his art begun to complement nature and bring in aspects that never were. They never occurred in nature so that the angelic orders are surprised as any natural phenomenon would be that man is capable. He is fertile spiritually. He is prolific in the sense like the creator. He is able to make something new that wasn't seen in nature. And so the Hermetic tradition then uses the term art for this Art, capital A.

Paracelsus’s degrees are copied in this secret manuscript in the brown ink on vellum. And he studied under both Trithemius and Trismosin. And we have here, this is a– this is not his own handwriting but is a copy done about 30 years later but imitating his handwriting so that we can see how he signed his name on the degree of Paracelsus here. He gave him to go ahead and 1515. Paracelsus was at that time 22 years old. This appears in the secret manuscript, the Red Lion, the fierceness of matter, the material world which can consume man. It eventually kills him. He's subject to time. He's subject to space. He's subject to all the limitations. But with alchemy, with magic, with magic, with the Hermetic tradition, he has learned to raise himself up. And he is at one now with nature on a par with nature through his art not working against nature. Nature is the root, it is the way. But his art now projects back and interweaves and introduces a new texture to reality that man's hermetic capacities unveiled liven up the universe. There are new children in the mansion of the cosmos. Man's doing and he is at home in this.

At the very end of the manuscript is this color drawing here of the freed individual with gentlemanly precision doing away with the picture of himself which was not himself and he is quite free to plug it with a derringer because he knows it's not himself. It's just an image. It's just some picture freed from the mentalities which would have kept him bound.

This is a portrait of Trismosin. This is a sketch that was done originally in 19– 1509, and I think you can see the old ellipse features, the hard dramatic precision, the careful decades and decades of watching through processes and keeping an interior balance. One is almost reminded here of the kind of quality that Rembrandt, in his old age, will have that ability to look out freely upon the world with his whole self in play.

This is the title page of his book The Golden Fleece. Not only in Splendor Solis did he present the twenty-two stages of the Red Lion process, but in the Golden Fleece, this title page has excerpts from the entire movement of the process. Again in twenty-two stages he presents the Hermetic alchemical process in the 16th century version of the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo.

And I will just show you these twenty-two and try to comment as little as possible and then we'll call it a day and we'll bring the twenty-two back next week when we talk about Trithemius and go into it in a little more depth. So let me just for tonight acquaint you with the images and then next week we'll see.

As we do Trithemius we'll bring in the philosophic and intellectual cognition that goes along with the spiritual technology. And when the two are put together then you have someone like Paracelsus who is able to cure, to really heal.

A very nice portrait of Hermes. And interesting developments begin to occur. This particular figure, figure five – the fourth figure is missing in this sequence – this particular figure is interesting because it appears upon the heraldry of a certain famous family in Europe which I did some research about three or four years ago with Mr. Hall on the family, the Schlegel family– And this was on the original coat of arms of the Schlegel family and later on about six, or seven, eight generations down the line one of the Schlegels was a member of– forty members of a Rosicrucian group that came to Philadelphia in 1690 for the two hundredth anniversary of Ryerson's publishing of the work and it was the first founding of a Rosicrucian colony in what becomes the United States, in the part of Philadelphia that now is Fairmount Park along the Wissahickon River, the Cave of Johannes Kelpius the leader of the group is still there, it’s still extant. The Spiritual Meditation Hall has disappeared but we have a good description of it. So these become archetypal figures.

You know this occurs in the 1598 publication. You can see it's hand-colored. And if you're acquainted with Egyptian papyrus, the background of the paper is made to look like papyrus. Another little nicety with the Egyptian tone to it. And yet the style is definitely here, the early 16th century. We'll get into all this next week in depth. You see it's the royal self that's being called out. It's not the everyman who's the basis of a spiritual democracy but it's all the kings and queens of the cosmos who wake up to themselves. And it's with that Islam then that the– the true utopia is established in the inner spiritual guides the guardian spirits the angelic beings occur to us in that symbolic horizon of spiritual clarity. Not so much in the material world. They're not projections of allegorical ideas out.

Saw in the L.A. times today that John Paul is talking about the traditional view of angels and the dogma of the Catholic Church that angels actually exist materially and that they think and so forth, they just don't have bodies. And this is rather a– an unfortunate way to state the case. I think the newspaper said that his speech was received with amusement and confusion, right, right.

Here we find the– the other self quite alive in us. Notice the polarities here. Not only black and white, but red and white and then red to green. And then the quaternion went red, white, black, and green but all within the context of the quintessential fifth color, the texture of the papyrus. The texture of the tradition is not another color, but it's a different scale of dimension. It's the texture of spiritual reality that is the fifth part that is able to bring into being the harmonia, the arcane harmonia, of all the elements. The fifth business of the theater the– the èlan of the company. One has to take apart and go through the process and strange new creatures into being (nigredo, albino, rubio, countess, poloni) new radiant qualities begin to occur. Notice that the crucible is all important here and is royal. And we're just acquainting ourselves this week. Next week we'll go into more great return– the return back to what seems like the everyday but it's a magical everyday and that makes all the difference in the world.

Well we'll come to Trismosin’s great compatriot, Trithemius next week, and we'll look at some more of these and go deeper into it.

Thank you very much.