Trithemius

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Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 7 of 13

Trithemius
The Mysterious Rosicrucian Abbot.
Teacher of Agrippa and Paracelsus
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 14, 1986

Transcript:

We come tonight to one of the most esoteric figures in Western history and the fact that he is not understood at all is just a symptom of the quandary which Western civilization is in. We don't understand our own integration and we're rather like grandchildren who don't realize that the grandparents were geniuses and set up a condition for us to be free in and we enjoy the freedom but we don't understand that it needs to be maintained in a very real esoteric way.

The figure that we come to tonight is Trithemius and I don't know how to convey to you the enormous genius of Trithemius except to say that he sets the tone for the next five hundred years of Western intellectual history. He is of the stature that we colloquially think of Leonardo da Vinci. Trithemius was born early in 1462 in Germany in the Trèves area and was mistreated as a child, as a boy, by his stepfather. And it wasn't until he was a teenager that by chance he began to receive a little kindness and a little schooling, and it was discovered that he was indeed an intellectual genius. And so Trithemius was able to leave home, at age 16 or so, and by foot he made his way to the city of Heidelberg and was educated there at the University of Heidelberg. They took him in, they cared for him, and he responded tremendously. And it was found there that he had a genius for languages.

At Heidelberg Trithemius mastered, progressively, all of the major languages of the ancient world. He mastered including Greek and Latin, also Hebrew, ancient Chaldean Arabic. He was a phenomenon and as he approached his 21st year he was given leave to go home, and walking in early January, in southern Germany with a friend they encountered a snowstorm and they took refuge in a monastery at Sponheim. And when he entered the monastery there at Sponheim something called out to Trithemius – something which we today colloquially call occult vibrations. It was a vision of spiritual impression that had been left at Sponheim about four hundred years before by one of the great visionary women of Western history, Hildegard of Bingen. And the young genius Trithemius was overcome by the fact that without any language whatsoever that he received a spiritual impression which was indelible to him. He knew that something had been communicated to him; that it was all neatly tied in a bow of symbolic impression and that he understood that he was somehow at home. And so he stayed in the monastery at Sponheim – from what was a chance meeting became a synchronistic contact. And the young Trithemius was so at home, so energized, so charismatic – if we can use that term – that within a year and a half he was elected abbot of the monastery at Sponheim unanimously by all the monks there – he was about less than 23 years old.

And pursuant to his vision, Trithemius then began entrusting himself in this phenomenon. Who else has experienced this? And one of his early investigations was to try and identify individuals in German history who had similar experiences to his and he found that there were three hundred and six that he could identify and he wrote up their short biographies and he arranged them. And he realized that this historical pattern seemed to make sense to him, that there was indeed some kind of a like a sine wave flow, that spiritual symbolic truth moves in a confluence through a historical motion and that at his time now, in the 1480s, was an asymptotic rise in the occult capacity for spiritual symbols to be effective.

It was about this time that Trithemius then began to correspond with one of the few individuals who was sensitive like himself who was still alive and able to be contacted, and that was Johannes Reuchlin. And Reuchlin had gone to Florence earlier in that decade. He was– He arrived in Florence according to his own writings on the vernal equinox of 1482 and immediately contacted an individual. He was– Reuchlin was traveling with a Swabian count at that time. The count wanted to meet Lorenzo de Medici. They happened to run into each other on the streets of Florence and Lorenzo the Magnificent began enjoying the companionship of the Swabian Count and Reuchlin the young genius who also was a great linguist, showing them around the city and eventually Reuchlin made his way to the Platonic Academy at the Villa Careggi on the hills outside of Florence where he met Ficino and eventually met Pico, Pico della Mirandola.

And it was Reuchlin who, in meeting Pico, realized that Pico had put his finger upon the most arcane of all capacities of man. Pico in his oration, On the Dignity of Man, which he wrote having organized himself with Ficino's backing to challenge the intellects of Florence by posting nine hundred theses which he would publicly debate with any and all and that they should meet him in the town square on such and such a date. And there were nine hundred theses they could choose from and he would extemporaneously defend them all, or any of them against all comers.

Pico is like the flamboyant d'Artagnan to the wise old cavalier Ficino. And Reuchlin, in meeting Pico, realized that Pico's energized consciousness had made contact with the old Kabbalistic tradition through his study of the Hebrew language. And so Reuchlin began studying Hebrew to try to understand through the Hebrew language the way in which Kabbalistic structures are made. And of course this will later become one of the elements that Trithemius and Reuchlin will not only compare notes on, but will discuss in depth and will come to a startling conclusion about human intelligence.

Pico in his oration, On the Dignity of Man, talks about how man has received from every celestial power a little bit of the capacity. And so man represents a kaleidoscopic panorama of all the powers in the universe, that he is a microcosm not because he is a miniature, but because he has direct contact with the entire range of power in the universe, and that he is not just a passive recipient of this key of powers but that he may, through self-development, become activated and become an operator of these powers. So that man in the Hermetic tradition is a magus in the sense that he is able to work the universe through his integration but that they must all be integrated together first before any of them work.

So Pico, in the Oration on the Dignity of Man, says that man's great universal mobility sets him aside from every other creature in the universe, and that the only real science for fully developed man is magic – magia. And he says, “By magia”– this is from On the Dignity of Man. This is a translation made in the Library of Liberal Arts and Philosophy series. Pico writes,

“I have proposed theorems about magic too, wherein I have signified that magic is twofold. The first sort is put together by the work and authorship of demons and is a thing, as God is true, which is execrable and monstrous. The other sort is when well-explored nothing but the absolute consummation of the philosophy of nature.”

And he goes on to say that the Greeks in fact had two different words for this that they do not call the first magic at all, but goetia, and the second is magia – the highest and the most perfect wisdom as it were. That, according to Porphyry, Plotinus’s secretary, that in the language of the Persians, magician means the same thing as interpreter and lover of divine things. So that magia, a magi, in Persian, is like a philosopher – great lover of wisdom – but one who knows how to make wisdom work in nature. And Reuchlin, in contacting Pico, wrote a book in 1494 called De Verbo Mirifico (The Mirific Word), and after the publication of that is when Trithemius began corresponding with Reuchlin on these matters. And for the next twenty years Trithemius and Reuchlin together, through physical contact, through extended correspondence, through sharing students, through tremendous intellectual work, devised a number of books which would help man to capture what later would become in the 16th century the faculty of Angel magic – the ability to contact all the power levels of the universe and coordinate them, make them work. That the harmony of the universe was there waiting for man to mature and that the mature man then could play the universe and make it come to perfection. That somehow the New Jerusalem was waiting for this scale of man and that the Renaissance magus was in fact that personage who was now whose time was now coming.

And after– the year after Trithemius died in 1516 Reuchlin would publish his great book On the Art of the Kabbalah (de Arte Cabalistica). We have in this an enormous realization because the contribution of Trithemius is so difficult to understand, when we come to write Reuchlin’s introduction. And he dedicated this book to the mutual friend, the Emperor Maximilian, a friend of Trithemius as well as of Reuchlin. He writes in here that there is a particular quality to thought which the Kabbalah brings out in man, which is not brought out in the Aristotelian thought structure which has become the medium for thought since the fall of the classical world.

Reuchlin in writing to Maximillian says in de Arte Cabalistica, “With all this activity we cheerfully flatter ourselves that we can hunt down truth with some self-evident (as they call it) demonstration, which goes from one extreme to the other (like running from starting line to winning post) using that device known as the syllogism” – a form of thought, the Aristotelian syllogism. “The cunning and evasion on which these sophistries are based is shown in the following: ‘Every syllogism and demonstration is made up of two premises, major and minor, and each has three particulars called terms, one being the subject term, called the lesser extremity, the second being the shared term, called the middle term, and the third being the predicate term, called the major extremity; and from these is drawn the conclusion.’ This is the trap, [this is] the snare, the bait, the noose in which, in their opinion, free truth is to be captured.”

And Reuchlin is making the point to maximum that this whole form of thought is flawed, that anything learned in this frame of mind is flawed, and that because of the basing of human lives and of empires and of histories and of expectations and personalities the whole chaos of the Western world is due to a gross misunderstanding of the true nature of intelligence in mind. But that the Aristotelian syllogistic thought form is in fact a glaring error which can be corrected by the antidote to that, which is the thought of Plotinus, that Neoplotinian thought, is in fact the cure for this because Plotinus went back to Plato the teacher of Aristotle before the Aristotelian thought form was made and Plotinus then in his development was able to project out a real way of comporting intelligence to the world. But that in the development of Plotinus thought there was a hidden esoteric core that Plotinus did not talk about in his writings, but rather taught personally. And the reason for this is that Plotinus himself was a traditional Hermetic master, a Hellenistic magus from the third century, and that at the core of Neoplatonic thought is a hermetic discipline which if not mastered, the Neoplatonic way of thought, that thought frame of reference, does not have a real effect either on the person or upon nature. That recapturing the Hermetic core then is the task for the Renaissance to bring this back. And of course with the great translation of Ficino of the Corpus Hermeticum for Cosimo de Medici in the 1470s, 1460s, we find that all of the basic translations had been done, except for the translation of Plotinus, and Ficino finished that in 1492.

So in the 1490s in Florence we find this tremendous culmination of these esoteric cycles and insights of the 1480s. But when we look at the history of Florence in the early 1490s we find instead of there being a flowering of human intelligence that there is a crisis of consciousness. That in fact by 1494 Florence is absolutely taken over by a demagogue – the monk Savonarola – and that Savonarola preaching damnation and hellfire to the Florentines convinces them that they should let go of all of this magia, that this in fact is leading them astray. And someone like Botticelli who is totally happy with Ficino up at the Florentine Academy will no longer paint Primavera or Venus being born from the sea, becomes religious convert, begins painting very quiet religious scenes according to formula.

On the other hand someone who braves this like Michelangelo for the rest of his life is tormented by the fact that he has stepped outside of the bonds which normal human life need to survive. And Michelangelo is haunted by the fact that he is an errant specter in human civilization hardly belonging anymore and not knowing quite where to be and is tortured trying to make an expressive world to expiate himself. And someone like Leonardo, who also powers his way through this era, becomes also an errant genius and begins in his notebooks almost a kind of a daydream fantasizing of things to come.

But the really powerful individual is Trithemius, who is not in Florence, who is not in Italy, who is not an Italian, who is a German, who is in his monastery in Sponheim, and is realizing that this pattern that he is seeing has happened again and again in history, and that with the high there's always a low, that there's a polarization of human consciousness and one has to deal with the polarization, one has to deal with the wholeness. Therefore the symbolic pattern, as we would colloquially call it today the mandala, is the controlling symbol and not the equation. That the equation is symbolic of the syllogistic mind, but that the esoteric symbol is the expression of true reality. And this is what is needed because the polarities are brought in.

So at Sponheim we find Trithemius busy building a tremendous library. Now there were not many libraries that were capable at this time anywhere in the world. The first really major library Cosimo de Medici set up when his friend Niccolo Niccoli died he took a few manuscripts he didn't have and put them in his own collection and gave the rest of these manuscripts to the monastery of Saint Mark in Florence. And it was at that library that Savonarola as a young monk came from Ferrara. And in reading through these manuscripts, this tremendous collection, was scared at the dimensions, of vast dimensions of learning. And won't man get lost in all of this intellectual array? And he shouldn't stake the salvation of his soul upon the development of this most erudite intelligence because it needs to constantly proliferate itself and amplify itself without end. And so Savonarola, there at the monastery of Saint Mark's, scared of the tremendous library put there by Cosimo, turns his back on the Hermetic tradition and says these people are to blame. And later on that queasiness in himself he projects out from the pulpit to the population of Florence.

But what has happened, as we have seen in tracing the Hermetic tradition, is that these powers are not just intellectual but have as we would say today an archetypal amperage behind them, that when they come up they rise up with all the power that stars have in them. And the collision of Savonarola with that archetype in Florence ended up a few years later with the Florentines burning him at the stake in the city center and all kinds of hellfire and damnation images came out from this encounter.

In this turmoil northern Italy just about to take a giant step forward is caught off balance and unable to take that step. And it was in Germany that the next step was taken. That the Hermetic tradition passed to– and it was Trithemius almost alone who took the responsibility to keep that tradition. But he realized having seen with his own intelligence, the pattern in history, having seen with his own life how powerful these movements are devoted his time increasingly to putting together not only the development of three hundred and six psychically sensitive Germans, but tracing, in what he called the Chronologica Mystica, the entire history of the human race, all of the sensitive people plotting the course, plotting the shape of the movement of truth through history, and at the same time realizing that the communication of this movement was all important. That in fact the development of languages showed great similarities at certain synchronistic times in history and what was needed in his time by 1500, by 1505, really began to realize that what man needed now to take that next step was a universal language, a single language which could accurately talk in real terms, which could command nature to change according to man's understanding according to the integrated spiritual pattern of his wholeness. And thus the cosmos could be brought into integration and unity.

When the monks at Sponheim realized that Trithemius was not just running a monastery, that the thousands of volumes that he had amassed there were not just for studying scholastic philosophy they revolted, they threw him out. They were like Savonarola, they were afraid of the massive scale of consciousness that was coming into play. But the kindly charismatic figure of Trithemius, always ready to understand that it takes patience and large winning strategies, left the monastery at Sponheim. And after that, Sponheim declined and became a minor junkyard for derelict monks. But by this time Trithemius was well known all over Europe and the Emperor Maximilian invited him to come to his court to be the personal tutor of the emperor. But Trithemius assured him that the work that he was carrying on was so delicate that he needed– he needed time to think it through.

And so Maximilian found a monastery at Würzburg, which had only three monks, and so he gave this monastery to Trithemius and made arrangements for the library to be moved and any books that he needed to be bought and put there. And in early 1506 Trithemius went there and he spent the next, the last ten years of his life, at Würzburg, patiently sifting through and putting together all of the data and arranging it just like we would do now into graphs, into overlapping designs. And he made every attempt to try and find that universal language. He called it Steganographia and that attempt by Trithemius about almost two hundred years in the future would become the Calculus of Leibniz and Newton, that was the seed of it, it was never let go and the Hermetic tradition never forgot the fact that there must be a universal language which could think directly upon the real ratios, the real movement and continuity of reality. The reality of the infinity of the one of the infinitesimal divisibility still within the unity. And this is what differential and integral calculus deals with all the time. So Trithemius is really the founder of that whole seminal idea.

In our time – in the late 20th century, the early 21st century – the idea is now being amplified in the field of linguistics and semiotics and so forth, to find a basic symbolic frame of referencing, which is true for any ethnocentric mind – we're doing now for cultures what Trithemius tried to do for language. And there's a lot of books and information on this now, but it's Trithemius who is really the– the root– the taproot for this. He published about 80 manuscripts. Published, we say, he wrote them out, had the monks write them and he corrected them. And I think three or four have been published in the last five hundred years. The rest of them lie on shelves mainly there at Würzburg. But the ones that have been published have been very, very influential.

In Trithemius we find then for the first time a comprehensive understanding that history has a pattern, that the pattern is increasingly to find a language by which man's capacities can be explored and amplified, and that the making of that man, the making of the magus, is the whole point of history, is the whole point of of the reality of the universe. He had two students. One of them was Paracelsus and the other was Agrippa. And for Paracelsus he realized that Paracelsus’s tremendous capacity needed to have a practical side to it. And so when Trithemius was through with Paracelsus he sent him to Salomon Trismosin. And from that Paracelsus used his great universal character to focus upon, what we call today iatro-chemical medicine, the making– the making of effective medicine.

The other student, Agrippa, was a different case. Agrippa was a soldier of fortune, a bon voyant. And so to round him out Trithemius sent him to England to John Colet in London. And we'll get to Colet, and Erasmus, and Thomas More next week. But in the motion of trying to round out Agrippa, Agrippa in his catastrophically flamboyant character decided that he was ready to write his dissertation. And so he wrote a book which we have called the, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Natural Magic, Book One. And when he finished writing them he sent a copy of the manuscript to his teacher, Trithemius. And we have in the beginning of the manuscript, Agrippa to Trithemius, to, “John Trithemius, an Abbot of Saint James in the suburbs of Herbipolis, Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim sendeth greetings.” So he identifies him in terms of his hermetic archetypal location.

“When I was of late, most reverend father, for a while conversant with you in your Monastery of Herbipolis, we conferred together of diverse things concerning Chemistry, Magic, and Cabala, and of other things, which as yet lie hid in Secret Sciences and Arts; and there was one great question amongst the rest– Why Magic, whereas it was accounted by all ancient philosophers to be the chiefest science, and by the ancient wise men and priests was always held in great veneration, came at last, after the beginning of the Catholic Church, to be always odious and suspected by the holy Fathers, and then exploded by Divines, and condemned by sacred Canons, [and then forbidden by laws].”

And he goes on in this way to say that he has now written this book to be of use to his fellow man. But of course Agrippa is writing it to popularize. So Trithemius corresponds to Agrippa as a teacher would to a brilliant but errant student:

“Your work, most renowned Agrippa, entitled Of Occult Philosophy, which you have sent by this bearer to me, has been examined. With how much pleasure I received it no mortal tongue can express nor the pen of any write. I wondered at your more than vulgar learning– that you, being so young, should penetrate into such secrets as have been hid from most learned men;...” Do you see how he's slowly saying to him, it's taken us thousand years of genius to be able to get a few kernels out and here you have written, in your young age, three hundred pages off the cuff.

But you have truly and “properly and elegantly set them forth I trust. Whence first I give you thanks for your good will to me, and, if I shall ever be able, I shall return you thanks with my utmost power. Your work, which no learned man can sufficiently commend, I approve of. Now that you may proceed toward higher things, as you have begun, and not suffer such excellent parts of wit to be idle, I do, with as much earnestness as I can, advise, and intreat and beseech you that you would exercise yourself in this labor.”

In other words, you– you think that you have accomplished something. This is like a little mental exercise which shows that you have heard things but the fact that you have made this public shows that you have not lived this properly. The Hermetic tradition is for the benefit of the spiritual core of man and not for popularization.

“...exercise yourself in laboring after better things, and demonstrate the light of true wisdom to the ignorant, according as you yourself will be divinely enlightened.” That there's an inner core. “Neither let the consideration of idle, vain fellows withdraw you from your purpose; I say of them, of whom it is said, ‘The wearied ox treads hard,’ ” – the dull mind of man anesthetized by the flawed frame of reference is like a plodding ox in field. Trithemius says, “But as you have been by God gifted with a large and sublime wit, and it is not that you should imitate oxen but rather birds; neither think it's sufficient that you study about particulars, but bend your mind confidently to universals; for by so much the more learned any one is thought, by how much fewer things he is ignorant of. Moreover, your wit is fully apt to all things, and to be rationally employed, not in a few or low things, but many and more sublime. [So] This one rule I advise you to observe– that you communicate vulgar secrets to vulgar friends, but higher and secret to higher and secret friends only: Give hay to an ox, sugar to a parrot only. Understand my meaning, lest you be trod under the oxen's feet, as oftentimes it falls out.”

This was the age of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and religious wars and persecutions. And at the end of that century they would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for holding the same views.

Well let's take a little break and then we'll come back.

What comes out of this, increasingly, in the 16th century will be a recognition that sophisticated minds need to be multilingual, so that for instance in Elizabethan England the well-educated Elizabethan man or woman will be trilingual with Greek and Latin and Hebrew, as well as English or French.

The emphasis that Trithemius draws out is that our mental capacity needs to be amplified. And that in order to amplify it, we have to arrange it in a spiritual structure or to be more characteristically Trithimian we have to have a structure which is able to operate with spirituality and not with mentality. That the emphasis on a mind which only imitates nature, only records what then referentially is material and external, slowly makes man material and an exoteric idiot and a slave really to whoever manipulates the material world. That man needs to have that metanoia; he needs to turn around inside of himself and realize that what is able to rise from him are universal symbols that teach him and instruct him instantaneously, that there is no time-lapse, there is no syllogistic causal order, but that he instantaneously knows, he understands, that spiritual man by looking by the act of spiritually perceiving understands, and his cognition is a recognition. And in this way he remembers. And the arcane center core of all this is for him to recognize himself, who he really is. He is not that image mirrored out there, or what someone thinks he is, or the occupation that he does, or the incidentals, but that he is a spiritual presence who is individual, who is recognizable, who is memorable. And thus when he remembers himself, he then operates in the real world in the real cosmos. And when he calls out, he calls the names of the angelic powers that he is no longer limited. For instance, by the– the seven planets in a kind of an astrological way, or really an almost a Gnostic sense of the hebdomad of Heimarmene destiny constraining man. And all these seven levels are holding him in and he just being capable of puppet-like living out that destiny, he learns their names: Saturn – Trithemius uses the name Orpheo – Jupiter, Zacharilio; Mars, Samuel; the Sun, Michael; Venus and Io; Mercury, Raphael; the Moon, Gabriel. All these are in the Steganographia.

In the Steganographia, give you a little description, this is from Dame Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. She writes, “An interesting example of applied magic” – it's almost like we would speak today of– of applied science technology because he's thinking in the same way that we are thinking, only instead of calling it science he calls it magic. And science comes from this. It's born out of this. There never was a science like we have now in the 20th century because no one had the mind to comport in this way the last three hundred years or so.

“An interesting example of applied magic, or power magic, is the Steganographia of Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, printed in 1606 but known in manuscript before that.” I should say he died in 1516. He corresponded with Luther, incidentally, among other people, who liked him. Liked the man, liked the ideas. “The Steganographia purports to be, and perhaps really is to some extent, about cryptography or ways of writing in cipher. It is also, however, Cabalist angel magic. The first book is about summoning district angels, or angels that rule over parts of the earth;” – a geographical concordance – “the second [book] is about time angels who rule,” she says, “the hours of the day and the night; …”

But actually this timeline being– some of you who are in my Hellenistic lectures remember that after the Book of Enoch and the development in the second century BC the development of the Essene esotericism about timeline beings. And this is the development from that.

“... the third is about seven angels higher than [those that] rule the seven planets.” The planets rule destiny and rule you until you understand the names of the angels for whom the planets are operable symbols and then man can call out for help in this way. “Trithemius aims,” she writes, “at using this angelic network for the very practical purpose,” she writes here, “of transmitting messages to people at a distance by telepathy; …”

In fact Trithemius held quite reasonably and quite sanely, that spiritual man should be able to communicate with any other spiritual person anywhere on the earth, instantaneously. There should be no problem whatsoever, or anywhere that they are, since he can contact the angelic presences that rule the planets why not fellow beings in the spirit? And also, that such a– he hopes “to gain from it knowledge ‘of everything that is happening in the world’.” That the world at any given moment is an integrated unity, and that the true movement of reality is the continuity of this unity, not so much from moment to moment in time, but from eternity to eternity in any given moment. And that spiritual man then is masterful for the infinities of continuity. And this of course is just what Leibniz will say is one of the virtues of his universal language, the calculus. It allows man to think in terms of continuities and infinities with precision. And we do it every day now – millions of people do. This was new once and it was new in the mind of Trithemius about five hundred years ago.

He goes through, “The technical side of this science is very complex, pages and pages of elaborate calculations,” and she goes on to describe this and so forth. And I have as one of the slides the title page of a reprint of Trithemius’s Steganographia which was done in 1624. And it was the– the Rosicrucian reprinting of the Steganographia with Francis Bacon and Augustus of Braunschweig Lunenburg and a number of other individuals in the 1620s who were hoping to amplify Trithemius work at that time. But of course, the element that was lacking there in the 1620s was the just appreciation of the– of the indelible need for mathematics. In the 1620s the Rosicrucians, like Fludd and Mayer and Bacon and so forth, were quite accurate but they were unable to put it into effect, to make it an application of it, because there wasn't the insight that Trithemius had, that you have to have a mathematic. And of course in his day he went as far as you could go.

In Elizabethan times John Dee would take up the angel magic of Trithemius. And when he was young, Dee was a mathematical genius and would also especially like in the introduction to the translation of Euclid's Elements around 1571 – about one hundred years after Ficino’s translating the Corpus Hermeticum – is a very fine Elizabethan translation of Euclid. The progression of the training of the mind through geometry beginning with a point, which is a point has no dimension. Beginning with the– with the– the infinity of the point. Euclid is very esoteric a Hellenistic thinker. But Dee's introduction to that – which is now translated, or reprinted I should say– he wrote it originally in English which, in 1571, was amazing because Latin was still the current language but there's every appreciation that one has to have the mathematical language in order to make the application to the world. Otherwise, one is altruistically trapped in the intention and unable to apply it. That it's the language of the Magus who makes it applicable to the world and that once upon a time there were sigils that could be used for this, but they weren't very precise. It took a very great Magus to be precise with occult sigils but with mathematics one can be taught. Millions can be taught to use it with great precision. And of course, it would be later on the man who on the other end of the parentheses from Trithemius, Leibniz really, who develops this.

Maximilian wanted Trithemius in 1505 to be– to write the history of the esoteric tradition from his family’s perspective. Leibniz was given that same office by the same noble family, the Lünenburg, Braunschweig Lunenburg family, who later on became the House of Hanover and who became the kings and queens of England. There’s all of this interplay. It's difficult for us to relate though to a man who spans both the kind of subject matter that you would find in this volume, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella published originally by the Warburg Institute in London. And a book like this, The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing by William Johnston. It's difficult for us to get a notion until we begin to put into perspective for ourselves the kind of man that he was.

Johnstone, in his final appendix to The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, in writing about the culmination of spiritual practice– spiritual practice, not mysticism as an altruistic attitude but the practice of it, the effective practice ends with union with the divine and that this is not a science fiction expectation, but that it happens around the world for all time. The testimony is there in any language you want to consult.

He says here, “The answer, it seems to me, is first of all the historical evidence that people who incline to vertical thinking and those who devote themselves exclusively to discursive or logical thinking [or horizontal thinking] always have the greatest difficulty in understanding one another.”

That the syllogistic mind, the so-called logical mind, dealing with inference, moves along in trains of thought, horizontal. The mystic leaves at any point along that path and goes vertically and is interested then in ascension and is willing to accept that what he is going towards is unknown and that it takes spiritual courage because at a certain point in his ascent not only is where he is going unknown, but where he has been becomes unknown, and he becomes suspended as it were between two unknowns out there all alone – that solitude has this eerie practical, crackling reality at that point, but it's just there that the archetype of infinite unity rises and flames up in man because he is a spiritual being. And it's only in that suspension of all belief, and all disbelief, that the motion of the all becomes congruent with himself. And then he knows; then he understands.

Trithemius was this kind of individual from a teenager but he had the grit, as we would say, to try and find a way to understand how to see this in terms of universal history and in terms of the universal language and how the movement through history led to the development of this language somewhere along the way. Maybe not in his time, but somewhere in the future it would happen and all that future generations needed to know was that the wisdom was buried, archetypally within. And so of course the great mythological archetypal figure of Christian Rosenkreuz would come out. It would be a perfect blending of Trithemius and Trismosin – their personalities together and the arcane mythological history of the Hermetic tradition and the implication that somewhere along the line will be revealed again to those who are sensitive the exact truth of all of this; that the occult mystical language will become intelligible to them. They will be able to speak it and that world history then will come true in the sense that the sine wave of development will have come back into its fullness.

I have twelve slides which will show a few things and I think maybe we should see those now. Right there.

This is recognizable, a card from a popular tarot deck, and we have here an exoteric symbolism. That is this symbolism is meant to train the mind to be sensitive in a way which we would technically have to think of in terms of signals and responses and referent correspondences. We have to think in terms of systems in terms of graphs with this kind of symbolism. But there is a different symbolism. There is this kind of internal symbol. This is a page from Carl Jung's esoteric the Red Book. This is his only unpublished volume. Is that clear enough?

And here is Philemon standing on the dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This is an angelic presence within who comes to instruct from within and not dependent at all on correspondences or on a system. Instead of there being a system of correspondences, there is the certainty of spiritual unity; that one deals with infinity as the familiar intelligence and not with correlation. So instead of having a mentality one has a mind. And the beginning of the first hermetic teaching the Poimander says I experience myself as a mind rising in vastness and thus I am ready to learn. It's different from school.

This you recognize from last week. This is Hermes Trismegistus from Salomon Trismosin’s The Golden Fleece. The alchemical presentation in twenty-two images of the progression of the quest for the Red Lion. The alchemical transformation of the individual to his spiritual homes. And that figure is combined with all of the other figures on the title page so that we have a complete array, almost a mandala as it were. I think the slide must be done a little bit.

This was as far as the pictorial esotericism could go. Trithemius changes this to language, to language where number and language come together and that the emphasis is subtly changed from Neoplotonian thought to Neo-pythagorean thought. And with the movement in Trithemius, in his outlook, along with Reuchlin, the Pythagorean view is the one that comes into play. And modern mathematics comes out from the Pythagorean faith of the Hermetic tradition.

This is a page – I've got it in backwards – This occurs in one of the manuscripts that we have here in the library and this deals with the transformation of traditional esoteric imagery into correlated symbolic systems.

This is a page – also in backwards, I'm sorry to say – from Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico in which he is discussing the esoteric meaning in the name of Jesus in Hebrew. And he is saying that in the word, in the language, is the true esoteric understanding. That imagery is meant to train the mind from the material world to an understanding of correspondences setting up the mind to a mature point to where then the mind in its transformation, can receive the internal symbols and translate them into a universal language.

This is a page from the Book of Kells. This is– This is a churning of visual imagery into symbolic words. It's not important to be able to read those words so much as to be able to respond to them in a spiritual way. That is, it isn't the sentences in the Book of Kells which is the Gospels the four Gospels. There's no real emphasis on completeness or accuracy of text. It's an incidental but it is the spiritual symbolic language that's being taught by this arrangement here. So that one goes into the infinite complexities realizing it is all part of the unity. And in the Book of Kells we have symbols of angelic presences.

Also here we have an icon. This is a Russian Orthodox icon of an angel. This is an angel in the Book of Kells. Throughout the entire tradition of the West, especially in Christianity, angelology is the– the high intelligence. In fact, I think there was a mention of that by Pope John Paul just a couple of weeks ago, that there needs to be a restructuring of the place of angels in Christianity, that they are intelligences and that they have individualities and they are quite real. This is 1986.

This is the presentation of Christ in the Book of Kells. The esoteric monks who made the Book of Kells, these Irish esoteric monks, are descended from the seventh century Irish monks who also founded the Monastery of Würzburg, Saint Kilian who in 690 founded Würzburg where Trithemius was. And just like Trithemius, responding to Hildegard von Bingen when he was at Sponheim, when he was at Würzburg he responded to the old ancient Irish Celtic mystical tradition.

This is the psychostasia from the Old Egyptian, the Theban recension. Notice here immediately that the hieroglyphics are not expressions in an equation. There is no syllogistic mind working here. There is no mind that needs to have difference in identity in terms of a comparison or contrast but that the religious mind here is seeing in terms of wholenesses and reverberations, as we would say, resonances, spiritual resonances so that the resonances come together and fit together in a pattern of unity. And the instantaneous recognition of a pattern of unity is a different mind. It's a spiritual mind from that mind which is addicted to a mentality where there are equivalencies or differences because they are not equivalencies. Where the sense of one's identity is because you have what you think you need to have to be. That's a mentality which is destructive and enslaving of human beings. But the mind which understands recognizes its spiritual integrity as such, needs no equivalencies, needs nothing external to prop it up and make the equation equal. There's nothing to expect. One is. And so the weighing of the soul here in the psychostasia is the identification that the real occurs and doesn't need to be filled in later. And so in the late 20th century we find that we have a whole different understanding for instance of what Saturn might be instead of being some kind of a shell which would bind us in some kind of hebdomad hierarchy. It's simply a beautiful aspect of the cosmos in which we are free to move. We're part of its unity.

Well we'll look next week at the English Hermeticists who are kind of a counterbalance to the Germans.

Thanks very much.