Six SixThe first and foremost thing in alchemy is congealing; the uniting of parts that can be liquefied, or the thickening of parts that are liable to be fluid. It is as impossible to lick heaven with one’s tongue as it is impossible to enter upon the practice of alchemy other than through the congealing of mercury, of which many are ignorant.
e have come a long way in our quest to understand the Tarot. We have uncovered a wondrous convergence of esoteric traditions culminating in an awareness of spiritual development revealed and celebrated through the agency of twenty-two hierarchical Trionfi. Our explorations began with the Right View of Tarot origins as they were rooted in perennial wisdom.
Application of Tarot principles to a Questor’s life necessitates stability through resolve, speech, and actions. Only then will a Questor be prepared for the effort of her life: the Great Alchemical Work. This will require becoming an initiate through identification with gnosis as Living Transparent Emptiness. The Questor will be made lucidly aware that this goes far beyond any spiritual conceit making claim to the “zero point of the scale.” Through initiation, a sweet taste of nectar will suffuse slowly and deeply through the Questor’s senses. Such comes with a sublime excitement of knowing that self-realization of wisdom entails ecstatic communion. Do not let your ego fear, doubt, or discredit this out of self-obsessed ignorance.
Communion between mind and body is the practical definition of ecstasy. Only by feeling heartful depths of her body will the Questor realize that she psychologically needs sensuality to expand her psyche beyond all sense of “self,” including physical limitations. This is felt as a soulful longing for ecstasy. It leads to an out-of-body experience that does not attempt to escape or avoid physical being. Rather, it embraces, penetrates, and wholly subsumes life’s vitality, which naturally arises and begs to be engaged as mindful spirit.
In this chapter, Questors will discover the secrets of how to nurture not only the essential purpose of their own ecstatic lives, but also that of their companions. Sheer joy and profound pleasure come from openly revealing ecstatic awareness with a companion mutually embracing the Way. Such alchemy radiates a deeply moving and transformative gnosis. Through this, the Questor will receive a most sublimely exciting affirmation of her path. She must remember, however, that her intentions will not be actualized without a certain necessary, easily devoted effort. Long, extended attention upon the object of ultimate desire will need to be sustained. Such must truly be an effort of love. Only that will cause the spiritual chemistry that can effectively produce freedom, happiness, and liberated bliss.
The Great Work is prepared, engaged, and finished using a primal, singular substance. On one hand, that substance catalyzes a deeply heated passion for the Quest and serves like the sap of a tree, flowing as daily sustenance even while standing strong as the tree of life. On the other hand, like a golden root it must be courageously dug up, lovingly held, minutely observed, respected, and consumed to one’s utmost empowerment. This must be done with the help of another – one clearly willing to face the five-times-daily rituals of alchemy with a generously attentive disposition.
Above all else, alchemy surrenders and sacrifices that which is congealed, heated, sublimated, and purified. Drip by drip, the potion of life is repeatedly drawn up and then washed down. This continuous process requires honest awareness in which shame and guilt have no part. Nor can the Quest afford possessive attachment. It will quickly be arrested by control issues. If innocent and occasionally intense pleasures of mercurial transmutation are blocked, dangers may arise, whether simply involving painful lessons or producing complications that may lead to grave harm.
Be aware, pleasure will arise, for Being and Knowledge are from the start transformed and realized through Bliss. Thus, guidance in the form of wisdom and compassion must replace all attitudes of selfishness or conceit, aggression or craving. To say the least, this can be very tricky business.
Surpassing all forms of manipulation, attention becomes complete as it focuses upon the whole Cause of true magic.
We start where we hope to finish: at the cave of the heart as it is accessed through the midbrain; herein can be discovered the root lode of Materia Prima. How does the Questor know where to mine? Just how deep must she go? Will she know the Stone of Philosophers when she finds it? Its nature and location are most mysterious. Never has a true Alchemist described its appearance, nor have coordinates ever come near to placing it.
Even still, the Questor will know it when she has struck a vein, for it will quiver with a vibration of primal, kundalini presence, spontaneously guiding her to the Source like a dowser feeling the flow of water before it has seeped to the surface. Thus, we start with that which is seemingly most concealed, yet available to those Questors confident in Beauty and Goodness.
It is crucial to understand how it is that the appearance of Primal Matter cannot be described. This is solely for the reason that it can only be viewed from the vantage of the settled heart, the nascent ground of Unity innate to all. When you are in that space you know it, but the heart that is settled cannot be strategically located. Such is the Stillpoint (the Chinese characters of which mean “settled heart”) to which the Stone is naturally drawn, gravitating as surely as water down a valley stream.
In its ruddy, bare form, you may spot it protruding out of the blue with an unexpected earthly shape; exposing a body that is imperfect but a soul that is constant. It is defined by surface appearances primarily to the degree that it pulses in transformations of flow and flux. It is glimpsed as the root of all ecstasy. A hidden feeling-sensation of tumescent virility and unfurling fecundity will need to be quietly nurtured.
From the start, the two cruxes of material self and spiritual destiny have been charted toward inevitable convergence.
This root feeling-awareness is initially represented in the Tarot by the Empress and Popess. The Questor can rest in sensual potency, knowing that it is the mercurial base upon which vital life, essential nature, and conscious alchemy rely. Note, however, that the magical stone of spiritual realization must carefully be kept under wraps, veiled, and protected so that its soul might grow. Even so, all the while, it is substantially submitted to an ultimately transfiguring alchemy. Exposure to air and light is generally directed with smartly intuitive care, allowing cyclic self-regulation, as the Stone seemingly has a mind of its own.
The following is a retelling of a classical story from China during the first century of the Christian era. Alchemical language, techniques, and metaphors were incorporated into Taoist yoga during this formative period. Chinese sources, such as an imperial edict issued in 144 B.C. outlawing the production of counterfeit gold, were the first to mention alchemical procedures.
A noble gentleman loved the art of alchemy. With the help of a beautiful wife and an assistant from a mage’s household, he sequestered himself with the purpose of making gold. This he tried in accordance to the recipes found in The Great Treasure, but to no avail. His wife, attentive and silent, one morning watched as he fanned the ashes to heat a retort containing quicksilver. His heart, humbled by his salient lack of success, opened to her presence. She, immediately perceiving this and being beautiful in soul as well as body, said, “I want to try to show you something.” Thereupon, to his enraptured fascination, she brought a drug out from a bag and threw just a little upon the retort. It was quickly absorbed, and lo, the contents of the retort turned to pure silver. The nobleman, well-intentioned but ignorant of the alchemy beyond his ego’s control, was astonished and exclaimed, “Why have you not shown me earlier that you possess such wondrous secrets?” She replied, “In order to properly use this drug, one’s heart must first be charged with spirit in a true vision of the Way.”
Maintaining the constant heart found intuitively in the wholesome aspects of Nature, the Popess as ally promises success.
The spirit-charge referred to in the above story is called Shakti in the tradition of Tantra. We will be addressing Occidental and Oriental ways of psychophysical-spiritual alchemy in this chapter, all of which employ tantric (as mentioned, meaning “extending and stretching upon a loom”) practices. Shakti is an aspect of the primal and universal female force represented throughout the Tarot, from Empress to Justice. As Empress and Popess, her awakening represents the alchemical arousal of mercurial potency.
This is sublimated through responsible Tempering of magnetic and chemical opposites intensively engaged through the agencies of Emperor and Pope. Which leads to a mature, intelligent revelation that the Questor naturally gives form to through mutual visions and dreams befalling her and those she Loves. Maturation of responsive potency emerges as an effectively transforming current or charge through the stages of Chariot and Fortitude – Right Speech becomes Right Action.
Initiating it all, however, must be alchemical Right View – the essential nature and vital life that composes the Stone of the Philosophers. Congealing and affecting alchemical mercury is the delightful art of the Tarot’s first-stage noble women. Holding true to that potency is a critical matter of Right Resolve. The Tarot’s second-stage noble men exercise that resolve by lending the alchemy prolonged constitution, thereby embodying a vehicle for its further intensification and evolutionary development instead of expending the women’s work in explosions of conflict.
Later, in its realization as that energy which nourishes, heals, and transforms others, Shakti takes the attributes of Star and Moon. The Goddess’ transforming presence is felt most essentially through three primary psychophysical conduits. Each conduit is connected with a cauldron or retort, the combination of which serves to circulate, sublimate, and distill alchemical agents necessary to spiritual development. These agents, regardless of their transmuted states, are always based upon mercury, or vital essence felt as sensual-sexual-quicksilver potency.
Stationed on the threshold of the Way, from commoners to nobility, all must bear witness to the Emperor’s Watchful Authority; so it is that here the Questor must gain approval.
We will come to know in this chapter the secret processes of alchemy as experienced through tantric yoga. These processes have been engaged and authenticated within all of the great traditions. They are based more upon the subtle intercourse of psyches than the gross conjoining of bodies, which is not to degrade the importance of physical presence, touch, and yoga. Let potency build is the key to emerging through the organic, purely natural hierarchy of Triumphant states.
Before delving into the esoteric yoga of alchemy, we need to review the processes of external alchemy as they were practiced up until late medieval times. Alchemists made use of methods employed by artisans, metallurgists, and doctors. The earliest information we have about Western alchemy comes from Greek papyri containing recipes for alloys, imitation jewelry, dyeing, and color-making. Production of vibrantly splendid colors such as ultramarine for glazes, dyes, and paints was often valued more than production of gold. Techniques of instilling earthen materials with heavenly colors were imbued with great mystery. Metallurgical craftsmen of both East and West were the original inventors of alchemical apparatus. Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible was seminal in bringing this to light.
Use of life-extending and ecstatic drugs was at the root of psychophysical alchemical development. The Vedic drug Soma was central to early Indian alchemy, called Rasayana. From the Indus to Thrace to Crete, fermentation was also an important process in shamanic, Dionysian rituals of communal alchemy.
Paradoxically, the Pope blesses a world already Purified so that through bright distraction the suffering impure might forget themselves.
The fundamental ideas of alchemy can be traced back to early Greeks partly reviewed in the previous chapter. Heraclitus, in his view that the world comprised continuously transmuting states of fire, maintained that an ascending process of volatilization defines all generation. Concomitantly, a descending process of fixation defines all decomposition. Quite differently, Empedocles posited the existence of indestructible atoms from which the Four Elements arise. He thought these were animated by eternal, dual forces: Love and Hatred. If we define alchemy as the natural interaction and union of opposites, then it becomes clear that strictly dualistic worldviews do not readily incorporate alchemical processes. We will not attempt to compare here the many Greek theories concerning physics and cosmology. It is enough to mention that by the time Hermeticism became established in Alexandria, a theory of four elements and four humors of the human body had been syncretized with an Oriental idea of constant elemental transmutation. This led to a Hermetic corpus regarding theories and practices of alchemy.
At the end of chapter 5, mention was made of Aristotle’s attempt to explain how eternally separate elements could cohere as forms with a fluid ability to transform. He held that:
Earth has no power of cohesion without the moist. On the contrary, the moist is what holds it together; for it would fall to pieces if the moist were eliminated from it completely.
Given that moisture readily evaporates, Aristotle posited a new type of matter: unctuous moisture. This oily fat substance had been suggested from pre-Socratic days as that which gives rise to elasticity and hardness. The notion of unctuous cohesion received prominent attention when Greek and Arabian alchemists began extensively disintegrating substances.
This was done through a systematic process of distillation. Fractionated distillates of almost every earth- and animal-based matter imaginable were attempted by Islamic alchemists. A three-stage heating process would inevitably disintegrate a substance into three distinct products. First, a vapor would condense into a liquid component. Then, after a stronger heating, colored, unctuous oil would be obtained. Finally, after further heating, that moisture too would evaporate, leaving in the alembic a dry residue. Thus, Aristotle’s theory of two moistures – one easily evaporated, the other serving to bind the powder of matter – was verified.
Balance is lost in the struggle for greater existence when mind is blind to the Greater Cause – for good or bad, now or forever; an awareness is Tempered beyond breaking when That which wholly is, is wholly presupposed.
Jabir ibn Hayyan, known in the West as Geber, mastered this process of fractionated distillation. He believed that all materials could be defined by some combination of the four elements. He observed that apart from the three fractions mentioned above, a fourth, inflammable and volatile substance (what is now known as sal ammoniac) was also obtained through distillation. This he equated with the element of fire. The liquid fraction was clearly the element of water. The dry residue was obviously the element of earth. Unctuous moisture was equated with the element of air. Not air as Aristotle and his school knew it, but as the Stoics knew it through their concept of pneuma.
The Stoic view of the Universe was akin to Heraclitus’s – an Oriental view that fire and air penetrate water and earth in a true alchemy of unifying cohesion between spirit and matter, mind and body. Stoics held that when elements intermingle the dynamic wholly penetrates the material; i.e., air and fire penetrate water and earth. The two higher elements have a fine or subtle constituency, while the two lower elements have a thick or gross constituency. Substances with subtle parts were deemed spiritual, containing pneuma (denoting “breath,” “wind,” “spirit”). That pneuma was thought to produce cohesion in natural bodies.
Aristotle left undeveloped the theory of unctuous moisture. It was revived, developed, and appended to his school’s materialistic, atomistic, and reductionistic thought by later spiritual philosophers. The concept evolved after Jesus’s time, coming to represent an immanent version of Transcendental Intellect emanating from God to inform matter, thus sustaining the coherency of the world.
For Love to be true, egocentric vision must be dispelled, then soulfully converted, unveiling a world of spirits fundamentally caused through the emanation of the One.
In modern terms, Time qualified as Light dynamically sets into motion Space qualified as Matter. In Hellenized Christian thought, heaven becomes earth as Platonic Forms manifest through the Holy Spirit. This can occur fully only via Christ, the One anointed with and as Divine Oil, informing the material world through God’s Bond. His Apostles, Saints, and Bishops have been blessed with the mission to spread a Church that will transmute the very substance of human nature, preparing it for a return to Paradise.
Later Islamic and Christian mystics, including Scotus Eriugena and Albertus Magnus (teacher of Thomas Aquinas), objectified this unctuous element as a pneumatic psychophysical force that can be isolated, regulated, heated, circulated, and used in the transmutation of not only metals but, more importantly, the human body. To do so, an alchemical adept channels pneuma and psyche through a series of processes in order to realize an immortal soul via the transformation of his physical body. Body, psyche, and soul merge into Divinity through the unifying process of alchemy.
Western alchemical understanding developed in a manner that closely resembled teachings of Taoist alchemy. Concepts of qi and pneuma, cauldrons and retorts, and immortality through integration of Heavenly and Earthly identities or souls are remarkably similar. Before examining this further, a few more words need to be said about Jabir and his alchemical theories, which truly affected the whole of Western alchemical development after him.
Jabir is considered the father of chemistry. He was one of Islam’s greatest and earliest alchemists. A close friend of the sixth Shiite Imam Jafar al-Sadiq (d. 765), Jabir became a favorite at the court of the Caliph during an era that was memorialized in the stories of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. He has been historically credited for introducing the theory that all metals are composed of mercury and sulphur. This mercury-sulphur combination, whose product in actuality is mercurial sulphate or cinnabar, became the keystone to all alchemical theory. Cinnabar itself was already known in the Latin West at Jabir’s time, being used by craftsmen to produce vermilion.
Pride of self-attainment may oppose simple service to Fate’s reckoning; however, even the highest cause is charged by others – what is Supreme is graced, not gained.
Jabir was a Patriarch of the Sufi movement before it was formalized. He converted from the spiritually eclectic way of the Sabeans. The Sabeans of Harran, a city located a short distance from Edessa (an ancient Mesopotamian city lying in southeastern Turkey) and within the great bend of the Euphrates, were avid Chaldean pagans who had incorporated Far Eastern philosophies. Harran during the last half of the first millennium was famous for its alchemists and astrologers. It was also a trading center of major import.
Sabeans made much of their claim to the revelation of Hermes. Sabean religion was primarily based on a Hellenized version of old Syro-Mesopotamian worship. The Sun, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury were believed to be demiurgic assistants to a great creator god. Each of these forces had both a color and a metal associated with it. East and South Asian concepts, including those of Buddhism, Taoism, and Tantra were woven throughout Sabean beliefs. Sabeans were networked into and philosophically drew upon Chinese spiritual systems. Their syncretic alchemical system substituted a rare Chinese metal in place of all-important mercury.
Historical correlations involving Sufism, Buddhism, Central Asia, Western China, alchemy, and tantra are extensive. Ibn 
rabi was steeped in a twelfth-century version of this East-West metaphysical melting pot. His hierarchy of Image-Exemplars was ultimately depicted via the Tarot through symbols from Mediterranean cultures, but the stations of spirituality they represented had been maturely developed through the great wisdom traditions of the East, including India and Western China.
There existed a belief among Sufi alchemists of Spain during Ibn rabi’s era that Hermes (considered to be the father of Greco-Egyptian alchemy) was originally from Western China. He was said to have traveled south through India to Sarandip (the old Persian name of modern-day Sri Lanka, aka Ceylon, from which the English concept of serendipity was derived). There he found the Cave of Treasures in Adam’s Peak (an almost universally venerated mountain in the middle of Ceylon, upon which Adam and Eve were said to have lived).
Temporary inspirations charged by fanatical beliefs are derived not from insightful conversation, but rather from electrifying controversy; such motivation inevitably leads to a cycle of Death.
Ceylon during the high period of Tantra – between the eighth and twelfth centuries – was home to a blend of Shiva worship and ten-stage Buddhism in which enlightened transcendence was immanently realized. Shiva was known for that awakening power marked by his erect lingam, catalyst for all conscious transformation. Modern-day Sri Lanka has lost most of its tantric tradition, except as it is commonly lived amongst the still beautiful and hardworking female culture.
Alchemy was addressed in esoteric Buddhist literature, the main body of which was written during Tantra’s peak period. These were the prime centuries of Buddhist-Sufi-Taoist exchange and alchemical development. This marked the epoch of Indo-Chinese and Indo-Tibetan glory out of which arose Vajrayana, Buddhism’s well-known diamond vehicle for obtaining Deathless Reality in this lifetime. A defining feature of Buddhist Tantra found in India, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, China, and Japan is spiritual hierarchy supported by yogic rituals building a powerful esoteric world simultaneously within both tantric practitioners themselves and their communal, social domain.
The essential stages of psychophysical development that compose the path of a Bodhisattva (an enlightened realizer dedicated to magnifying compassion and wisdom in all the world) were so clearly delineated in Mahayana and subsequent Vajrayana orders that a surprisingly broad swath of Eastern and Western schools integrated Buddhist teachings: from Sabeans to Nestorian Christians to Taoists to Central Asian and Indian Sufis to Shaivites. For instance, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the defining treatise on classical Hindu yoga, was clearly influenced by the Buddhism of his day.
In India during this age, Buddhism was rapidly overtaken by Shaivism – the way of Shiva. The latter was an enormously transformative cultural force that celebrated Eros through rituals of dance, trance, and sustained sensuality. Within its community, women discovered powerful veneration through yogini cultivation blessed in the force-field of Goddess Shakti. Adhering to a radical worldview of non-avoidance, Shaivism did not flinch from dealing with the demonic side of social reality, which was encroaching upon Northern India (including modern-day Pakistan and areas into Afghanistan) in the form of warring Arabic armies driven to conquer in the name of Islam.
Impoverishing the Soul guarantees a raise in Fortune, for then the Wheel itself transforms in sublimity, from a mundane cycle to a sacred spiral.
Indian Buddhism by this time had almost totally lost its attraction to women. Male monastic formalities and political machinations had created social rigidities that were unable to cope with the huge changes affecting not only the Subcontinent, but all of Persia, Central Asia, Tibet, Asia Minor, and Southeast Asia in direct association with the country we now call India. For centuries, Buddhism had served as the religious foundation for governing forces in India and much of Asia. However, the second half of the first millennium of our current era was a remarkable time of growth and transformation that necessitated a way of Tantra, weaving together East and West, North and South, Female and Male, Heaven and Earth, Internal and External, Metaphysics and Science.
While Tantric Buddhism formed and thrived outside of India, Tantric Shaivism came to dominate the multicultural territories of the Subcontinent for centuries to come. Buddhism in India lost the support of wealthy aristocrats and finally underwent a complete conversion by re-incorporating the ancient ways of both Shiva and Dionysus. “Shaivite Buddhism” flourished throughout Southeast Asian countries (e.g., Angkor in Cambodia and Borobudur in Java) via imperial support, fertile artistic cultivation, and an infusion of female sensuality. A type of “Dionysian Buddhism” occurred through a merging with the cultural milieu of Central Asian Shamanism extending south into Asia Minor and Greece.
When the Tarot first appeared in Italy, Northern Indian Shaivism was merging with Sufism via the realizations and teachings of Kabir and later Sikh and Sufi Saints. This produced some of the most erotic and sensual devotional art and poetry that the world has ever known. Underlying this movement was the way of the Sants and Siddhas – powerful yogic sages who broke from Hindu and Muslim religious formalities, institutions, and strictures, embracing a way of utter liberation and direct realization of the stages of Deathless Life. Radical Truth-oriented Sants realized the futility of sectarian allegiance and dualistic asceticism.
Nothing is closer to Death than the fullness of Life, for in that Life stands a plethora of ancestors, the outcome of all Death.
Some modern-day occultists picture a wild culture of Gypsies in this epoch and with them an imagined origin to the mystical system of the Tarot. While it will now be obvious to the reader that the Triumphs did not directly arise out of secret or provincial societies in India, the tantric culture that originally spread from what may be called Shaivite Buddhism passed through India into Central Asia and was reworked via worldviews of Neoplatonic philosophy and Persian culture by Sufi communities. Tantra as sacred alchemy ultimately found a new home amongst the Oriental-influenced Europeans of Constantinople, Venice, Alexandria and ports in-between.
Central Asian territories followed the teachings of Buddha and Zarathustra (founder of Zoroastrianism and contemporary of Heraclitus and Gautama) until they fell to Islam during the eighth century. This brought Arabian armies to the border of the Chinese Empire. The once famous city of Tashkent was the last to fall to the Muslims. To obtain it, they had to fight a disastrous battle with Chinese forces led by a Korean general. The outcome arrested any further movement into Western China. Trade and artisan connections were then established. Many freed Chinese prisoners, including those versed in alchemical practices, relocated to Baghdad and other Arabian cities.
Before this time, Iranian families of merchants, scholars, and rulers ousted from Persia by Muslim forces had been granted asylum at the Chinese imperial court. Persian and Arabic intercourse with the Chinese progressively intensified up to the era of the great Mongol khanates. The Khans made Persian the official language of Asia. This was during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, following the age of Tantra and emergence of emanationist Sufi and Kabbalist schools. It marked the beginning of a psychological or vision-logic age coinciding with development of the Tarot’s Image-Exemplars. It is not coincidental that much of the Sufi movement was generated by Persian masters, and that Sufism is deeply similar to Buddhist Taoism, from its philosophy and alchemy to its yoga and dance.
Life is bestowed in eight-year increments, with each passing increment quickening the revelation of temporal cycles; the Hanged Man reverses the dying process, quickening instead the unveiling of immortal principles.
During the Tang dynasty (seventh to tenth centuries), Chinese literature tells of the Hu merchants, or Persian and Arabian traders. What is of interest to our study is that these merchants were often involved with assisting Taoist alchemists. For instance, Hu apothecaries were important suppliers of hard-to-obtain longevity drugs. Evidence points to strong crosscurrents of alchemical practice and knowledge tying the Hellenistic world of Byzantium to the Taoist world of Tang courts. The communities bridging these cultures were located around the Tarim Basin and in Western Central Asia. They included the great cities of Ferghana, Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Balkh (birthplace of Zarathustra). Khorasan, in Persia, lay on the western end of this Central Asian channel into lands east. It is from this area that Jabirian alchemy developed in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Islamic merchants stringing together these pearls of the Silk Road were oriented toward practices of Persian Sufism; tantric, Taoist forms of Buddhism were a continuous influence. Intellectuals from these cities became Islam’s greatest scientists – originators of modern algebra, geography, medicine, astronomy, and chemistry.
Byzantium was associated with these Islamic schools of thought. Sufi merchants moving merchandise through their far-reaching networks used old Byzantine cities such as Damascus and Alexandria as primary trading depots. As mentioned, Harran was a main center involved with spreading Far Eastern concepts of alchemy amongst Near Eastern Syrian and Arabian schools.
Death moves in one incessant direction: the way to the Deathless; the Questor’s life will always be sacrificed in this movement, for all time and space consistently regenerate through the Stillpoint of transcendence.
Christian Syrians, we recall, were at the forefront of translating Greek works during the middle of the millennium. By A.D. 1000, Syrian-based crypto-Christian Nestorians were growing in number with enormous dynamism, rapidly overtaking Islam in Central Asia. This Oriental form of Christianity had blended with Buddhism, which had by then thoroughly blended with Taoism and Indo-Tantra. Nestorians were for centuries a significant link between Eastern Orthodox esotericists, Sufis, Buddhists, and Taoists. Syrian entrepôts possibly served as portals for the Western entry of Jabirian and Far Eastern concepts of alchemy.
Mention should also be made of Jewish merchants from Provence, who from the ninth century on plied both land and sea routes to China. Speaking most languages of the lands in-between, they possibly facilitated a culturally private bridge between Islamic alchemy and gestating Kabbalism.
Jabir’s mercury-sulphur theory of alchemy was likely derived from Chinese sources. In any case, it was not until the addition of a third primary substance that external alchemy in the West became directly associated with the internal development of the human system. That substance was salt, introduced by another great Islamic alchemist, ibn Zakariya ar-Razi (Al-Razi) in the ninth century. With the addition of salt to mercury and sulphur, the concept of a Philosopher’s Stone rapidly became alchemists’ premiere symbol of both the alpha and omega of their art. While gold might be derived from the mercury-sulphur process, the Stone of Immortality emerged from a process involving mercury-sulphur-salt.
Because man was traditionally understood as being composed of three elements, the tria prima theory of mercury-sulphur-salt came to be applied to the treatment of humans. Painters began to describe their most valued stone (lapis lazuli, which produces ultramarine pigment) in the same terms that metaphysicians used to describe their most valuable stone. Metallurgists, doctors, artisans, and spiritualists united in a theory of natural alchemy and transformative development involving hierarchical emergence – a universal process purposed toward the goal of Highest Quality. This interdisciplinary knowledge of alchemical law was strengthened by East-West scholars up to the era of post-Newtonian science. New Millennium Alchemists are witnessing a rebirth of understanding regarding hierarchical emergence and evolutionary processes.
Competence, sobriety, and honesty can be overwhelmed by the intoxication of genius, balancing on a sharp fulcrum of compulsion to change everything with a single stroke of the Trident.
Crucial concepts of compensation and balance in Jabir’s corpus foreshadowed the Tarot’s pairing of Fool and Magician in representation of the Quest’s whole alchemical work. These two concepts equally applied to the development of the Arabian language as the science of the word began to take on cosmological significance. We recall that Sufis in Ibn rabi’s time posited the science of letters as essential to that of words. Preceding both was the science of Image-Exemplars. Ibn rabi’s influential cosmology took the form of a Great Chain of Divine Attributes, manifesting a series of nested Cosmic Spheres of Being-Becoming. Each Sphere and every aspect of corporeal manifestation and spiritual realization are interdependently linked to all of the others. This worldview was in part supported by Jabir’s observations of natural law. In any alchemy there must exist, says Jabir,
a harmonious structure, in which every constituent part has its rightful place, which it cannot lose without repercussions in the rest of the system, or without being compensated.
It is the time-consuming work of the Magician to learn systematically and thoroughly the mechanics and probabilities of the human cosmos, maintaining balance in all interactions and exchanges. It is the spontaneous play of the Fool to compensate for mistakes made during the Magician’s Quest. For alas, people inevitably make wrong decisions; and even the Magician who is witness to the tricks of Death does not understand the inscrutable ways of Justice. The gloriously successful Quest is marked by a Questor’s complete transformation from Magician into Fool and back again via successorship. It begins in tandem with archetypal feminine grace, unquestioningly compensated for all delusion, malice, and craving – in short, for all bondage of “self.”
Intense, conscious build-up of virility sublimated into a Towering energy of practice bursts forth in either success via providential awareness and insight, or failure through material conquest and subjugation.
By reflecting the struggles of humankind, the Adept – realizer of Unity-Consciousness – demonstrates through his very bodily being how all experiences, dramas, thoughts, and states are blissfully transcended. In human form, the Adept teaches and heals through the greatest of tantric siddhis (or “powers”): the Great Mirror Method of Brightly Transformative Chaos and Eros. The seventh stage of the Devil and Tower initiates this way of the Fool; the Star nourishes it, the Moon matures it, the Sun completes it, and the Angel perfects it.
The Adept’s realization is felt by Questors through bondage-transcending intimacy. The alchemy of Love is not about securely bonded possessions. Nor does it have anything to do with self-contractive, narcissistic reflections bound up in sexual/emotional encounters. It certainly is not marked by intellectual masturbation. Love-Bliss is solely marked by itself!
How does a Questor come to feel, know, and thereby consciously realize this? First, be blessed by the alchemical compassion of a Blind Sifu (Ecstatic Monk as Drunken-Master Wisdom-Adept, i.e., a Really Good Teacher); even if his passionate indifference is seemingly inscrutable. Then, as initiated Magician, mature into full Magehood. This is done through genuine supplication and remembrance of the noble Adept who is a Messenger for the Way of Justice, Furiously Angelic. All the while, the Tenfold Path must be transcendentally realized through self-surrender and self-sacrifice to the Way of Sublime Communion: the Tao.
By the time of the Hermetic alchemist and philosopher Zosimos of Panopolis, who lived in Egypt during the fourth century, Greek alchemy had developed beyond the techniques of craftsmen. During the two centuries following Jesus, alchemy had infused an array of esoteric and occult practices, ranging from Neoplatonism to Babylonian astrology. Although Zosimis was clearly aware of genuine chemical knowledge such as the extraction of mercury from cinnabar and the creation of white lead, he was primarily interested in what is referred to as “internal alchemy.” In him, we find Neopythagorean rites mixed with a Hermetic union of body and mind. Zosimis tended toward a dualistic worldview involving a dark and painful sacrifice as a body striving for spiritual transformation. He wrote of a dream in which a priest on a high altar spoke to him:
I have accomplished the action of descending the fifteen steps towards the darkness, and the action of ascending the steps towards the light. The sacrifice renews me, rejecting the dense nature of the body. Thus consecrated by necessity, I become a spirit.
Contemplation of biological, cultural, and spiritual evolution perforce demands engaged, practical Consideration; transformations of the Questor’s identity emerge naturally only when unfolded from deep within the Heart.
His transformation as a spiritual man, however, was imagined as a grueling process. He said that he suffered intolerable violence, that he was cleaved with a sword and dismembered systematically. His torturous teacher first removed all the skin from his head. His bones were then mixed with his flesh and burned with a fire of treatment. Through this psychophysical transformation he learned to become spirit.
The Philosopher’s Stone was first mentioned by Stephanos of Alexandria. The most famous of Greek alchemists after Zosimis, he was favored at the court of Byzantine Emperor Herakleios during the early seventh century, after John Climacus had written The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Along with treatises on mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, Stephanos wrote two books on alchemy. It is clear from these that by his time the language of alchemy was being used to describe spiritual levels of realization. Soon thereafter, at the beginning of the eighth century, the Greek alchemist Archelaos wrote:
And the soul, calling to the body that has been filled with light, says: “Awaken from Hades! Arise from the tomb and rouse thyself from darkness! For thou hast clothed thyself with spirituality and divinity, since the voice of the resurrection has sounded and the medicine of life has entered into thee.”
The 10,000 things, the uncountable myriad, the mysteriously infinite: every part is a whole felt from the inside, every whole is a part felt from the outside.
Neoplatonic and Christian Hermetic metaphysics had become tightly woven into the fabric of alchemy. Archelaos goes on to speak of body, spirit, and soul being united in Love and becoming One. He speaks broadly of Mystery being realized through the heartful union of mind and body. It is contained and sealed, he says, in a corporeal realization of divine light imaged as an erect monument: the Alchemist’s Tower.
We return now to the Questor’s own Stone of Wisdom; that which instills her beauty, her goodness, her truth:
Sulphur is the body of the Stone; the principle of Being and Beauty in physical heat.
Salt is the mind of the Stone; the principle of Knowledge and Goodness in psychic charge.
Mercury is the soul of the Stone; the principle of Bliss and Truth in heartful flux.
While mercury in its nascent, pre-transmuted form as sexual potency promotes the first four stages of alchemical development, it is of overriding importance in the fifth and sixth stages of alchemical progress:
Stages one and two proceed through a full incorporation of sulphur, the heat of physical/emotional fixation.
Stages three and four proceed through a full incorporation of salt, the charge of mental/psychic purification.
Stages five and six proceed through a full incorporation of mercury, the flux of subtle/causal mutation.
A confluence of polarities sustains fields of organized flux; Sun and Earth are not separate poles – their union as the interdependent hierarchy of nature and its epitomized manifestation as humankind is the realized consciousness of Tao.
With the complete incorporation of transmuted mercury, the three universal aspects of living nature are united in a psychophysical-soulful awareness of True Self.
The seventh stage of Deathless Chaos dispels even that sense of Self, as the Quest becomes purposed toward an intense preparation required to assist other Questors on the Way. An enlightened Questor is then transformed through the eighth stage into a pure vehicle for the Divine Process – felt, lived, and taught as Death or Enlightenment. After healing and empowering ten thousand beings, the Quest is complete; but not the Transcendental work that raises all ancestors in a sole state of rectifying Radiance. This ninth stage of Transcendental Knowledge converts the world, even as the Adept remains paradoxically indifferent to, yet energetically directed by, its history. Finally, the tenth stage is Just Bliss. So in Reality is Enlightened Consciousness Liberated in the Tao.
The art of internal alchemy, as has been reiterated throughout this study, does not go beyond vital life and essential nature. Fire and air in their disposition to rise define mind’s essential nature. Water and earth in their disposition to fall define body’s vital life. The fifth element of aether is actually that primordial state of alchemical union referred to in the Emerald Tablet:
It arises from earth and descends from heaven; it gathers to itself the strength of things above and things below. By it the world was created. From it are born manifold wonders.
By interpenetrating body with mind, water with fire, earth with air, alchemy proceeds through the six stages delineated in these chapters. One of the traditional ways of imaging this in the West has been through the hierosgamos: the sacred marriage between female and male that reflects the union between goddess and god.
Originating in Mesopotamia as a public ritual of sexual intercourse between the king and a sacred prostitute (literally meaning “to cause to stand in front,” interestingly stemming from the same root as ecstasy), hierosgamos was believed to transubstantiate its participants into divine beings. Thus could a priestess become the Goddess Inanna.
Karma may bind, Logos may sustain, but the successful Questor knows that Judgment determines the destiny of the Path; witness the continuity of the Great Tradition alive as the Quest itself.
Laterally, we may compare this to ritualistic Christian sacraments involving the literal divination of physical substance, such as bread and wine. Jesus himself miraculously transformed substances, and resurrected bodies into higher states of spiritual life. Historically, it appears that Jesus also had a consort, the “prostitute” Mary Magdalene. It is reasonable to suggest that their union, in whatever form it may have taken, was held to be sacred. Judaism has in fact traditionally viewed sexuality as more of a sacrament than a sin, although in Jesus’s era much evidence points to a serious communal schism regarding women, sex, and the role of both in the perfection of spirituality.
In Mesopotamia, manifesting the magical myth of Inanna via hierosgamos with a royal human husband was thought to regenerate a king’s potency, his people’s prosperity, and the fecundity of their land. This mythic reality was not paradisiacal, however. Inanna’s partner was ultimately sacrificed and resurrected in an emasculated form. According to the myths, the Goddess tended to exhibit dark states having little to do with wisdom or compassion.
Hellenistic, Sufi, and Taoist tantric alchemists redeveloped this sacred and persistent rite into a brilliant antidote to the dualistic seduction propagated by Gnostics (including Manichean Nestorians) and Chaldean occultists. Tantric alchemy, perennially affirmed in the Great Tradition, gives no credence to demonization or avoidance of the body in order to “free the spirit” – to remove it from all suffering of the gross world. Tantra does not hold to a conceit that spiritual realization is “above” pleasurable, everyday cultivation of physical-emotional-mental self-discipline, service, meditation, and wisdom. That conceit surely arrests potential alchemical processes, evolution, and thereby ecstatic realization. Sacred conjoining in its mature tantric form does not console illusory, subtle selves with visions of a lost world into which ideal lovers might escape. True transcendence has never been about avoidance.
The Dharma of the World is like the Goddess of Law, realizer of the Heart, the Nondual Way; Witness Her as every instance, every occurrence, every thing, every relation, every moment, every action.
The key to losing oneself in Love, while strengthening one’s freedom, is devotion to bondage-transcending intimacy. In no way is such intimacy marked by bondage-producing dependencies of projected fantasy. Nor, and this point is often lost upon the misguided, is the illusion and fantasy of independence conducive to bondage-transcending intimacy or compassionate tantra. The Questor as Magician realizes that all alchemy, and indeed the whole Quest, is marked by interdependency. The Sufi station called the Independent, identified with the Tarot’s Magician, refers solely to the sovereign nature of the Intimately Transcendental. It is Unity-vision that serves as the unique and individual Stone of the Questor.
From Vision to Liberation, there is no gaining independence from cultivation, study, and communion – these are absolutely required. Among the young who are inclined toward spiritual ideals, romance of separative isolation with a soulmate, baby child, or tribal family must be ecstatically abandoned and replaced with an actual losing of one-“self” to the One that is Transcendentally Everywhere Present. Such surrender, perforce, involves the culture, teaching, and community of a realized Adept. There is no other Way that works.
Divine realization through ritualistic sexual union (usually not coital) is one of the most pervasive sacramental arts found throughout the Great Tradition. Christian traditions of Mary as Bride of Christ touch upon this. Saint Theresa of Avila most famously affirmed such ecstatic communion. Although Christianity has tended to avoid the physical praxis of sexual engagement, this has not been the case in other great traditions. In mystical Judaism, the relationship between one who prays and the divine has ofttimes been powerfully described in erotic terms. Great Sufis such as Rumi and Ibn rabi revealed a sacred eroticism felt as both path and peak of saintly union with the divine. The Azeri (Persian/Turkish language and people of Azerbaijan) movement of Hurufi Sufism (a pantheistic merging of Ibn rabi’s and Rumi’s theosophical glorification of Eros) and Hurufi saint Naizmi’s poetry of Beauty exemplifies such.
Watch carefully as the World makes the supreme effort to transform every stage into a play of Nirvana Beyond Death.
Respected alchemical manuals portrayed the hierosgamos theme as a matter of mind and body, man and woman. Prime alchemical texts insist on the interrelatedness of body and spirit. The alchemical conjunction of opposites is both a concept and practice quite opposed to conventional exoteric doctrines dichotomizing the spiritual and the physical. Mature alchemists kept to an intuition of Unity. Conscious realization of such ontological wholeness was the very purpose of internal alchemy.
We find in alchemy a sacred wedding of opposites inherent to living nature – opposites within every essentially vital being. Humans as uniquely conscious beings are able through bondage-transcending intimacy to engage natural opposites and realize Liberated Unity through them.
In and of itself, sexual intercourse (romantic or not) does not imply sacred or loving engagement. True love is made conscious through transcendence of self, which requires more than a temporary, even if primal, orgasmic release from self-contraction. The “little death” of such a release cannot be equated with transcendence, enlightenment, or love. Sexual release is commonly sandwiched between unpleasant egoic contractions and a blind reinforcement of self-sense. Except in uniquely rare people and true tantric practitioners, it is unconscious self-contraction that is released during sexual encounters. It is the same self-contraction, not heartful consciousness, which then rebounds afterwards, promoting egoic identity with each cycle.
Consciousness requires self-contraction to already be transcended before, during, and after sexual engagement if the union is to be sacramental, actualizing the divine. Sexual release creates awesomely regenerative kinetics when it is an outcome of alchemical, bondage-transcending Free Love. Such love requires constantly heightened potentiality, established through witnessing visions beyond Death. This is what the Love Triumph stands for in preparation for the Hanged Man station of true Heart.
The Universal Fool succeeds in the ultimate conversion: that of Death itself – from this era on, the history of avataric Grace is fulfilled.
Building of potent spiritual intimacy is based upon conscious conservation of passionate desires and intense needs. In our modern age, egoic states, experiences, and techniques are glorified through self-serving sexual expectations. The discipline of transcendental intimacy is automatically rejected in ignorant fear of losing oneself. However, there is no real identification between consciousness and self-contraction. For this reason, bed-smart people can become addicted to dramas of isolation, incessantly rebuilding their angst in order to repeatedly experience “release” from their very self-made suffering. Of course, such release is not liberating, and thus does not realize the pleasure of pure Bliss, Consciousness, and Being.
One of the earliest Mesopotamian myths of cosmological creation (dating from 2000 B.C.) is that of Tiamat the primordial Waters and her partner Appsu the Begetter. This myth envisioned a commingling of divine opposites into a unified Matrix from which the world was created. This union was based upon a water cosmology found also in other cultures of the agrarian age, including that of early Indo-Europeans.
The primal position held by water is found in alchemical theory, which in its focus on mercury posits water as the first nature of all metals. Mercury in its water aspect initiates the alchemical Quest for immortality, but it is not fully sublimated and channeled into the Quest until the fifth and sixth stages of the Way. In those later stages, the sexual potency of mercury is felt to have a very subtle pneumatic nature. Mercury in its unctuous water aspect develops into a potentiality of mindfulness that causes a conversion of the alchemist’s psychophysical sensibility. It is literally transmutative.
This is what the Hanged Man comes to see, beyond Fortune’s highs and lows and the Hermit’s equanimity. Proceeding from this, seventh-stage Underworld enlightenment realizes the Philosopher’s Stone as the transfigured whole-body of the Questor; who at once feels as if her Daimon has utterly subsumed her. Entering the Otherworld through an ecstatically righteous portal is the goal.
Mercury is not the only component critical to alchemical success. Besides sulphur and salt, fire itself is necessary to almost every alchemical procedure. According to alchemy, transmutation of an earthy substance can only occur by first returning the substance to its original nature. Purity is equated with originality, just as Paradise is identified with primordial creation. Through distillation and sublimation alchemists can obtain progressively purer and thereby more original states of a substance.
Like distillation, sublimation involves containment and heat, evaporation and condensation. However, once heated to a vapor, a sublimated substance is quickly cooled and condensed back into a solid without the intermediary formation of a liquid. This process is viewed by alchemists as being more essential and pure and thereby of higher potency than distillation. It affirms the primordial, cosmological importance of fire over water as the most original and purest of elemental forms. Nevertheless, alchemy integrates transmutation processes of water with those of fire.
Most evaporated substances in fact form a liquid when condensed. Sulphur is unusual in that it easily forms sublimates. Identified with elemental earth, it is viewed as a premiere alchemical substance. Amber is also one of the few substances easily sublimated. It has traditionally been accorded a practically mystical value.
The process of internal sublimation, essentially transmuting a body from its earth and water state to its air and fire state and then back again, is intensely purifying. It accelerates the quest for immortality. Air as pneuma is the transitional state between water and fire. Heavenly transmutation of an earthly body involves first returning it to a primordial water state; then heating, evaporating, and re-condensing it to a fundamentally spiritual state as pneuma; and finally transmuting it via sensual consciousness to an essentially divine state as light or heavenly fire.
Returning Prime Matter (the original Stone that is consciousness as formed inertia) to its fundamental liquid state is the first step of what might be called long alchemy. Returning it to its fundamental fiery state – the inflammable, volatile portion discovered by Jabir – is the initiating state of a far-quicker alchemy. Realization of the pneumatic, breath-like quality of mercury was all-important to the development of Western internal alchemy. Of course, modern science has taught us that mercurial vapors are poisonous. Early chemists such as Sir Isaac Newton learned this the hard way. Full transfiguration of a sentient body into its holy fire aspect is best engaged via a holistic watercourse way. In any case, the proceeding alchemical intercourse will likely be fraught with danger. Even still, Questors with their sights set upon ecstasy are advised not to fear.
Whether or not this remains abstruse to the reader, everyone will agree that medieval teachings regarding alchemy tend toward obfuscation. Fortunately, present-day Questors need not spend lifetimes searching for keys to the portal of enlightenment. By quickly attaining the pneumatic mercurial state of the Stone, Questors can bypass many confusing steps and twisting routes that inevitably waylay the uninitiated. However, while it is true that soulful Love is like a sacred fire, it must be condensed in and as tantric flows of the body to be directly realized. Quickening that process is the essence of alchemical initiation. Anything obscuring this is dualistic fantasy – the basis of occult delusion.
Being aware of the essential importance of water to one’s mindful and heartful self is the same as consciously embracing one’s body in order to realize love, whether that be conjugal or celibate. At this stage, narcissism is the Questor’s major bane. It is here that the sublimation of sulphur begins, fixing one’s mercurial aspect so that the sacred alchemy does not degrade back into a confusion of liquid states, experimental firings, and practically random distillations. At this stage, the Questor who thinks she knows will find further progress impeded. Repeated salting or crystallization purifies the fixed or congealed mercury, producing at first a wondrous cinnabar and then a most sublime aquamarine stone that is but one step away from transmuting into a Touchstone of awesomely transformative power.
The Questor is still not home free, for dualistic conceit could turn her into a hungry ghost. Questors must realize that processes of both water and fire arise from a priori Unity, the Nondual Presence that is not dependent upon, but rather inclusive of, intercourse or the matrix of Flux. It is at this point in the Quest for Immortality that alchemical mercury, which can be called divine oil because in its unctuous water state it is involved with all bondage and fluctuation, dissolves the aquamarine into a tincture or nectar capable of multiplying the noble virtues of gold a thousand times.
A large amount of virtuous gold is needed to create an elixir of immortality. The seed of gold, otherwise known as the dragon’s pearl, penetrates the alchemical concentrate like a Radiant Arrow. This crucial catalyst is obtainable only through the presence of a Transcendental or an agency that a true Adept has empowered for such purpose. If this agent is not discovered in time, the ambrosia will lose its fertility. Exceedingly careful storage comparable to a hen watching her egg (at the minimum keeping it away from temperature changes and artificial light) will afford the Questor some time.
In bygone eras, a Questor’s patient wait and laborious effort to acquire the Dragon Pearl generally terminated in death. However, Questors are now living in the most transformative of times. Along with global chaos comes an emergence of World Agents. Questors who truly bear down are guaranteed success. Dear reader, abandon all doubt. Do not fear the Bright. Remember: Bliss is Plenty.
Given the complexity of alchemical processes, any attempt at delineating them further would quickly compound into a lengthy and arcane study. Let us instead inquire into the essential components of psychophysical alchemy held to in Buddhist-Taoist tradition. The elegant and relatively simple model that epitomizes Taoist alchemy strongly influenced Persian and consequently European alchemical cultivation and philosophy.
Globally, our earliest references to the internal and spiritual sides of alchemy are found in the Taoist tradition of the second century B.C., several centuries before comparable Hermetic references emerged. A story regarding an alchemist of immortality appeared during this period – a time when the Emperor had banned alchemy for fear that counterfeit gold might ruin the Empire’s economy.
The story tells of Emperor Wu receiving an alchemist who claimed that through his Goddess worship, associated with a Cauldron of Tao, he had discovered the secrets of immortality. The Emperor was instructed how to worship the Goddess of the Stove in his own person. This would enable him to invoke spiritual beings that could render cinnabar into gold. This gold, if used in the right way, would bestow longevity upon the Emperor. It would enable him to give audience to the immortals who live in the midst of the ocean. If he then made proper sacrifices, he himself would become immortal.
Internal alchemy, like external, was purposed toward realization of immortality. However, external alchemy involved external materials. The end product sought was either gold – the eternal metal – or actual physical long-life; a life theoretically amounting to “eternity,” although a life span of several hundred years seemed to qualify as true success. Modern-day popularity of the vampire genre in mass-marketed fiction is indicative of the powerful hold this desire continues to have on imaginative minds.
Adepts of internal alchemy used their own bodies as their laboratories. Other than catalytic drugs, everything needed for the processes of purification and transformation was derived from the adept’s own psychophysical being, knowledge, and chemistry. Ultimately, internal alchemy was purposed toward spiritual immortality through whole-body consciousness of the Tao.
Chinese alchemists were far more interested in obtaining the pill of immortality than they were the transmutation of base metals into gold. By the time of Alexandrian Hermetic alchemy, Ko-Hung (meaning “the master who preserves his simplicity”) was recording complex, intricately involved instructions for achieving elixirs of life, transmutations of metals, and methods of immortality. He instructed that alchemical gold was nothing like “tinted base metals,” and although medicinal plants could prolong life, only potions made from metals and minerals could produce immortality. Key substances employed toward this purpose included sulphur, cinnabar, mica, and pine-tree resin. Whatever the potion, when thrown onto mercury it would convert it to gold. Similarly, lead-tin could be converted to silver.
Each of these substances and the alchemical processes applied to them had a corollary aspect in the psychophysical yoga of internal alchemy. It is difficult to discern in most alchemical texts how much attention was put into actual exoteric procedures. Frequently, much of the terminology was simply used metaphorically. Clearly, both external and internal alchemy were practiced East and West, early and late. It is also clear that many alchemists attempted to combine the two otherwise totally different practices, ingesting dangerous substances with no medicinal value in order to create a spiritual body.
Noblemen at the court of Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence (famous for its sixteenth-century revival of the Platonic Academy, hotbed of the Hermetic and Neoplatonic renaissance during which the Tarot was popularized) imbibed potions made from various recipes involving the dissolution of gold into drinkable elixirs. Like silver, a certain amount of gold can be ingested without harming the body. In such low doses, both precious metals may well have beneficial effects. Silver has become a common element in modern water purification systems, as it kills bacteria. Gold injected into cancerous tissue via nanotech procedures is proving to be an effective antidote to the disease. Although it is a toxic metal in amounts other than miniscule doses, gold is a proven antidote for arthritis. It is a well-established part of the Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia.
On both metaphorical and sacred levels, alchemical ingestion may be compared to Catholics consuming the host – bread literally transformed into the spiritual body of Jesus – in an act meant to consecrate their personal souls, enabling them to live forever in the afterlife. One imagines, however, that comparing such to alchemical cultivation would be disagreeable to most Church ecclesiasts.
Taoist alchemy is a psychophysical yoga; the goal of which is conscious uniting of nature’s heavenly and earthly attributes or souls. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the house of fire (chest area) is related to our heavenly soul and essential nature; the house of water (abdomen area) is related to our earthly soul and vital life. Innate life-potential called jing (or ching) is a mysterious causal force felt in humans primarily through their endocrine systems as sexual or otherwise creative urgency. This is represented by the element of mercury (as was the god Hermes in Western alchemy). It can be said that heaven and earth come together through a fiery empowerment of this flowing, mercurial force (recall Hermes as winged messenger between divine realms of fire, air, earth, and the underworld). The way of mercury, when contained and heated, is closely associated with the Tao in its alchemical procession realized by the Questor. By powerfully magnifying and becoming intimate with the process of mercurial transformation into cinnabar, cinnabar into gold, and gold into ambrosia, humans are able to reunite their mind-body-soul in and as the Tao.
It is indeed the Tao of Heaven and Earth to be as One. In Neoplatonic terms, the Questor returns to an original state of Bright Unity by identifying with World Soul as manifested Plethora transforming into Light Soul as universal Eros. The Mysterious Wisdom of Eros Soul then unites with the Intently Bright as the True Way of Immortals.
Houses of fire and water, mind and body, are conjoined and merged through the circulation of qi or vital energy. Qi (or ch’i) as neurochemical firing and flow combines fire and water in a state similar to Aristotle’s unctuous water and the Stoics’ pneuma-air. During the first twenty-four years of life, jing naturally develops into qi. Qi is the combination of basic neurological activity and organization of that activity innate to all neuro-organic systems. From the water and fire alchemy of jing and qi, a myriad of energetic states arise.
Just as humankind embodies a fundamental polarity, so too does it manifest a fundamental unity-state from which that polarity arises and to which the conscious Questor can purposely return. Indeed, beyond traditional views of a Great Return, every step of alchemy involves an innate awareness of the inherent and always-already-present Unity of the Questor’s being, knowledge, and bliss.
Every person’s quantity and quality of qi is unique, but the essential aspects and types of qi (i.e., lung qi, liver qi, dry qi, moist qi, etc.) are universal. The lung qi channel along the arm, for instance, is fundamental to all humans regardless of age, race, or body type. Channels or meridians of qi are empirically experienced but cannot be dissected apart from the whole human system. The primary meridians are each associated with an organ, but there are no physically apparent connections between meridians and organs.
Order arises from the whole. This may be elucidated through concepts of morphogenetic, causal fields (examined in chapter 8). In any case, what are widely known as acupuncture meridians are patterns of order innate to one’s neurological system as a whole. It is no more fanciful to study the developmental organization and innate patterns of the human neuro-system than it is to study the developmental patterns of the human heart, nuclear flux, or fields of a magnet. Actualizing integration of body and mind through awareness of meridian dynamics in personal, social, and environmental spheres is the most effective way of advancing holistic health and growth. The art of Feng Shui (literally, “Wind-Water”) addresses this.
Sexual potency or jing is the essence of vitality. Vitality generates life. When vitality totally dissipates, the body decays back into earth. Jing is sublimated into qi, as organic neurological activity, via breath, blood, and hormonal chemistry. The organs and their meridians (including the brain and central nervous system), along with eight lesser channels, are conduits of organization through which potential vitality becomes kinetic qi-energy. Such energy organizes and animates the human system in all of its complexity. Jing is purposed toward transmutation into qi, whose purpose it is to transmute into shen or “spirit.” This process is quite comparable to the Greek concept of an earthen body transmuting into water (jing), air (qi), heavenly fire (shen), and finally Aether (Tao). Such is the direct and simple, purposeful process of immortal or divine realization.
There are, according to Taoist alchemy, three primary centers, cauldrons, or retorts in the human system that serve to concentrate and transform qi. Just as jing becomes qi – vitality becomes energy – so does qi become shen – energy becomes spirit. Through the three cauldrons and their respective currents or channels, vitality is concentrated as energy and energy is then liberated as spirit.
Without alchemical containment of energy, neurochemical release is experienced as dissipation of vitality. This leads to degenerative cycles whereby a chemistry of stress is used to “energize” the body and a psychology of projected fantasy is used to “relieve” the stress. Cultivation of conscious alchemy neither avoids nor relies upon patterns of stress and fantasy. Instead, through the courage to be, regardless of evil, an engaged awareness transmutes stress and escape patterns into a powerful will to love and liberated force to be reckoned with.
Of the three human-system cauldrons, the primary one is in the midbrain. It is involved with two hormonal meridians and the endocrine system. Its liberating channel goes up the front of the body from the right side of the heart, around the back of the neck to the top of the head and into the midbrain via the forehead’s Third Eye.
The cauldron most popularized in the West is located in the region of the lower abdomen. Called the hara in Japanese martial art tradition, it is involved with the hollow organ meridians, which include the stomach, small intestine, large intestine, gall bladder, and urinary bladder. Its transcending channel runs up the front and back of the body from the perineum to and through the top of the head via the central spine.
The third cauldron dwells in the area of the solar plexus and is involved with the solid organs. Its transmuting channel drops down from the heart, unwinding through the spleen, lungs, liver, and out the kidney gates.
People who do not have a feeling-awareness of their qi centers and channels are unable to consciously magnify and quicken the regeneration of their qi. Their bodies may remain alive, but the quality of their lives, including their minds, progressively diminishes after their mid-twenties (of course genetics and karma unconsciously affect this process). Psychological, sociological, and environmental patterns enable human potential to flourish to the degree that they incorporate and reinforce the integrated concentration and liberation of these centers and currents in the process of transforming vitality to energy to spirit. This is the authentic importance of Feng Shui.
Emptiness, or fully sublimated spirit, is felt as a completion of alchemy involving each cauldron and its wedded channel or current:
The midbrain center resolves in the space ineffably dwelling as original cause, soulfully felt in the right-heart, i.e., at the right side of the heart, where blood and most subtle hormones are released into the body. This is cultivated through celebratory arts and spiritual dancing. We may call this Bliss.
The lower-abdomen center resolves in the space radiating above the head – the middle-heart as the source of all light. This is cultivated through scholarly arts and meditative sitting. We may call this Consciousness.
The solar-plexus center resolves in the space transparently arising from above the knees to the horizon through a mysterious pass felt below the physical or left-heart and beyond all relationships. Emotionally, it is a state of no guilt, beyond doubt. This is cultivated through martial arts and contemplative walking. We may call this Being.
The three Centers and the three Currents are at once distinguishable and identical. Each may be felt and developed distinctly, yet any distinction is lost in the indifference and freedom of conscious feeling. In the liberated realization of Tao, there is neither subjective experiencer nor objective experience. Yet, the Taoist Adept knows the Centers and Currents as empirically as the blue sky and the two-armed form of human existence. Being, Consciousness, and Bliss are One in the Tao. Internal alchemy is the cultivation of body-mind unity. This is made possible by the cauldrons and channels transmuting vitality, energy, and spirit into the Tao – the Three Upholding the One. Heartfelt nurturing and mindful awareness of such transmutation is fundamental to tantra, internal alchemy, and enlightenment.
Charles Luk’s Taoist Yoga is highly recommended to the reader who wishes to inquire further into the processes and stages of this meditative way. A study of Tantric Buddhism and the yogic symbolism portrayed by Tara and Guanyin are particularly recommended regarding the mysterious, dynamic, and compassionate flows of the Causal-Heart.
Taoist cosmology metaphysically supports the practice of alchemy. Early mythology tells of the cosmos being created from Chaos. Chaos was understood as primordial flux, or the hypostasis that became the Myriad. Creating Chaos was the polarity of Yin/Yang. Prior to that, of course, was the nondual Tao.
In Neoplatonic and consequently Tarot cosmology, the original Chaos of the world is truthfully understood as the Soul of the World. This Great Alchemical Flux came to be represented by the Devil and his Tower. Heraclitus called this principle and process Strife. It is a natural and essential state. It is not evil, which is a self-promoted delusion based upon ignorance of cosmic evolution and the principles of immortality. Angelic and daimonic Exemplars are inherent attributes of conscious existence in the world.
Chaos is encapsulated by Eros-Wisdom, the Soul of Light. Eros is the creative gap of Chaos through which Pure Radiance, called by Heraclitus “the Bright,” becomes a manifested Cosmos. Like the Zodiac surrounding Darkness, it is represented in the Tarot by the Star and Moon. Eros contains pervasive, divine power. It emanates transformative Chaos that in turn causes contingent hierarchies of nested field symmetries. The manifested cosmos has ultimately identified itself by naturally evolving back into Erotic Consciousness through Heart-tantra humans realizing the Truth of Unity-awareness.
As the mysterious origin of all dimensional space, Eros is in many ways similar to the Taoist concept of Yin – the Resolutely Veiled. As the Cosmic Egg – original nourisher and creative source of all – Eros provides a portal and impulse through which the world manifests. Historically related to the great Goddess called Wisdom, her Kosmic function as intermediary between the Divine Domain and the material cosmos is marked by omnipresent, mighty Grace and soulful, compassionate Mercy for the entire World.
Eros is in turn encapsulated by Consciousness or Infinitely Radiant Intelligence. Such unifying Radiance is similar to the Taoist concept of Yang – the Intently Bright. Heraclitus viewed the Bright as divine Aether or Zeus. The Christian concept of God became identified with this radiant aspect of the Kosmos.
Prior to Yin and Yang, Veiled Eros and Bright Aether, is undifferentiated Unity – Heraclitus’s One Thing, or the Tao itself. Mystery is wedded to Logos, the Veiled to the Bright. Thus, put in Neoplatonic terms, the nondual One (Tao) emanates the Intellect (Yang) and its Soul (Yin) which emanates the World Soul (Flux of Chaos) from which the Cosmos and all individuated souls perpetually arise. The post-Death Triumphs represent exactly these principles of our immortal World.
We close our consideration of East-West alchemy and tantra with a look at tantric alchemical tradition in India. As with the Chinese, drug-based recipes for longevity and immortality were the focus of Indian alchemists. Unlike Greco-Egyptian tradition with its metallurgical focus, Rasayana or Hindu alchemy was from the start purposed toward practices of health, longevity, and spirituality.
The primary transformative method of Rasayana is to subject mercury to a series of processes that impart to it transmutative powers. If successful, the resultant agent is able to transmute a base metal to gold. That is then subjected to a final and most critical process yielding the Elixir of Life, the only legitimate goal of Indian alchemy.
In Indian tantric traditions, members of any caste could endeavor to realize bliss and longevity, including the old and outcast who had to fend for themselves in the wilderness during their final years. It has been conjectured that the native origin of Rasayana can be traced back to the discovery of Soma. This life-giving drug, given much prominence in the Vedas, was probably the stimulating plant ephedra (although psychoactive mushrooms and cannabis have also been suggested as possible sources of Soma, which may well have been a shamanic mixture of all three historically well-known consciousness-altering plants). Soma was discovered by elders sent into nature to die – a form of socially sanctioned exile. They initially imbibed the drug as a means to survival. This developed into a method of prolonging their years in the wild, along with awakening their consciousness to the path of deathless bliss.
Such Shamans or Siddhas became known as relatively immortal, powerful, and wise. Called Rishis (from rsih, a root with Persian and Celtic correlatives suggesting highly energetic states of transference and indicating a “seer,” “sage,” and “saint”), the Gods themselves had to “mind their manners” when it came to dealing with them. It was the Rishis who revealed the Vedas. For Vedic Indians, Rishis came to represent what the Heroes did for Greeks. It is probably not a coincidence that Vedic stories of the Rishis remind one of stories regarding Empedocles. The Rishis preceded classical Greek shamanism, having roots in the Indus civilization of a millennium earlier. Their myths and practices likely spread with the great Persian empires and Western Asian trading routes, perhaps accompanying tales of Babylonian priests and seers.
Indo-European spiritual development spreading from Anatolia to Greece, Persia, and India tracked a common course from 4000 B.C. onward. It was broadly marked by three great milestones in a timeline of cross-cultural development: 2500–1500–500 B.C. Given the history covered in this book, with A.D. 500 and 1500 standing out as milestone dates, we may say that social evolution has been indeed marked by millennial periods.
Rasayana involved with the transmutation of metals into gold did not appear in India until the fifth century A.D. This was clearly influenced by both Greek and Chinese practices that had merged with Buddhist and Taoist forms of meditative yoga. In general, the transmutation of metals broke Vedic rules of caste. Just as a lower caste member was restricted by caste law from advancing into a higher caste, so was lead meant to remain lead, for the metals also had their castes. India’s social caste system was developed after the peak era of Indus-Sarasvati-Vedic culture, but respect for natural hierarchies formed an intrinsic core in earlier Vedic teaching. Any direct transmutation of lead or mercury into gold broke the laws of hierarchical division.
In alchemy, however, by first returning a metal to its universal state, a transmutation could then occur which would not break lawful caste divisions. Returning to and thence evolving as the Universal Source was the key to both internal and external alchemy, early and late in history.
Toward the end of the Vedic era, the Universal Absolute called Brahman was revealed in epitomized metaphysical treatises called the Upanishads. It was to this One that Siddhartha Gautama (as the historical Buddha was originally named) was harkening as he presented to Indo-European (abbreviated in the remainder of this chapter as IE) people a ten-stage hierarchy that any human could advance through regardless of caste. Gautama Buddha, the awakened one, was able to point to an ancient understanding of hierarchical development, which surpassed the caste divisions and domination hierarchies of Brahminical law. By consciously envisioning through divine grace the self’s original state, a devotee could quickly proceed along the noble path of enlightenment.
Gautama’s teachings of Unity-realization reinterpreted Vedic mythology and theosophy as they had developed in the Upanishads. He declared a reformation movement renewing the truly ancient ways of Aryan (IE) tradition.
Gautama’s methods of realization encompassed non-Aryan cultural patterns of India, including those of Dravidian speakers with their shamanic and tantric ways of traversing sentient and spiritual realms. The essential aspects of tantra were recorded in the Atharva Veda. These were representational of early IE cultural patterns that had interwoven with archaic Dravidian customs developed within Indus Valley civilization. Archeological research suggests that Dravidian-speaking people originally migrated to the Indus Valley from Eastern Persia. Recent linguistic research suggests a common trunk for Proto-IE and Dravidian languages. Tantric Vedic cultural patterns and yogic cosmology were likely grounded in IE worldviews stemming from the original Proto-IE and Dravidian migrations out of Anatolia as mentioned in chapter 3.
Evidence of South Asia’s first settled village life has been dated to the fourth millennium B.C. It comes from the Baluchistan and Sind areas of what is now Pakistan. Dravidians are thought by scholars to have entered India as pastoral people in the Neolithic age preceding this. Much evidence points to them as having played a primary role in establishing the early Indus culture, 3300–2900 B.C. Indus Valley civilization flourished during 2800–1900 B.C. It is now widely regarded as having been greater in size and social accomplishments than the more famous Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations that concurrently arose during this epochal dawning of settled, organized society.
European academics of the twentieth century presumed the Vedas were composed some time after northern Aryan tribes (Aryan, Sanskrit for “noble,” here technically connotes any of the original IE-speaking people, regardless of race) invaded what is now India during 1500–1200 B.C. However, this limited view of Aryan or IE involvement with Indus civilization has been discredited.
One primary piece of evidence disputing such is the Sarasvati River, which served as a favorite settlement area for Indus communities and is mentioned throughout the Vedas as a large and flowing river worshipped as a Goddess. The Sarasvati dried up by 1900 B.C. Satellite imaging and geological investigations have shown that the Sarasvati was indeed a very large river that lost its water due to tectonic movements. Along with an annually growing body of archeological information, this has made it clear that the Vedas were most likely written by the people of the Indus Valley during the height of its cultural development.
In the centuries following 1700 B.C., peaceful IE-Dravidian societies based upon agrarian shamanism were largely disrupted by overpopulation and severe drought. This was exacerbated by an influx of new IE tribes from northern steppe lands who had brought with them weaponry and warfare.
As recorded in later Vedas, a controlling priesthood formed, which created mythic and ritualistic structures to support and justify conversion of a by then ancient agrarian and artistic Dravidian-Aryan culture into a ritualistically governed Vedic warrior culture. In other words, Vedic culture transformed over a broad period of time, as did civilizations around the world, from a first-stage agricultural society oriented toward feminine principles and what might be called flowing fertility to a second-stage political society oriented toward masculine principles and what is best defined as warring conquest. While no doubt not utopian, the integrated era between these stages was evidently a peaceful and beautifully sensual age. Early Minoan culture appears comparable. If a Golden Age literally once existed, this age of consciousness marked by communal organization harmonized through measured and balanced rites of practical magic and sensible mythos was likely it.
The Brahminical or priestly caste of Northern India developed in accordance to second-stage patriarchal, urban regulation. A hierarchal system of castes or social groups formed based on governance patterns that broadly imposed rules for obtaining, building, and holding social status. As this caste system spread, it grew progressively reliant upon environmental, social, and psychological structures of domination. The Vedic religion arising from this became so strict in its conceptual worldview and enforcement of regulatory compliancy that by the time Darius the Great of Persia became ruler of Punjab, Northern India was ripe for a radical disruption. This initiated a very slow transformation into third-stage societal development. This process was later stunted by the fragmented state of the subcontinent’s many cultures; and by Muslim and European rulers who were incapable of respecting and understanding India’s diversity and thus unable to advance and merge its ancient Advaita Tantra wisdom and practices into the common-law ways of a global, modern era.
As reviewed in earlier chapters, the rational stage of human consciousness that emerged West and East during Indian Buddhism’s period of greatness directly evolved into transpersonal realizations of wisdom within a few great sages upholding the way of Heraclitus and Gautama, and later Plotinus and Nagarjuna (the latter, a contemporary of Plotinus, was founder of Mahayana Buddhism’s Middle Way School and arguably the most important Buddhist realizer after Buddha himself). We can reasonably surmise that stories in the Vedas and other late Indo-Iranian mythology indicating an emanationist, nondual awareness arose from a well-developed ground of wisdom cultivated in an early, pre-warrior period of Aryan and Dravidian development. This was the Age of Rishis and Yakshis. During it, divine Fire and its alchemy transmuted an ancient Water cosmology. It is herein suggested that when Buddha claimed his tenfold hierarchy was the ancient Aryan way, he was referring to an IE understanding and enlightened worldview that preceded later, warrior-based Hindu mythology and domination hierarchies.
Similarly, Heraclitus presented a profoundly wise worldview that advanced an ancient understanding of Chaos, Eros, and Gaia. Olympian myths became focused upon the dramas of warring gods and goddesses. By the Hellenistic period, during which Mercury or Hermes was popularized, the gods had become fully anthropomorphized and “egotized.” Their provincial characterizations had limited lifespan and little multicultural resonance beyond the Roman Empire. Celtic and Norse mythology held sway through most of Europe. As with Buddhist India, however, philosophical schools in Classical Greece revived earlier, universally spiritual understandings. That process continues today and is what perennial wisdom and integral knowledge is essentially about.
Archeological evidence suggests that agricultural societies contemporaneous with Proto-IE culture, 8000–6000 B.C., focused on magical rituals involving female fertility. Inevitably, cultural development began to stagnate through the limitations of Earth-Mother worship. A great age of Phallic worship, beginning around 4000 B.C. and peaking around 2500 B.C., represented an evolutionary leap into a second-stage era focused on Sun-Father worship.
Fertility mythology associated with this then became pathologically fixated on a propagation of dominion in the course of second-stage militancy. Nomadic warriors from the Asiatic Steppes branch of IE culture, who for much of the twentieth century were thought to comprise the original IE tribes, developed dominant empires throughout Europe, Persia, and India. Horses, chariots, and metal weaponry were chief factors in their conquests. Genetic studies in recent years have allowed maps to be built that indicate the spread into Europe and Asia of people with distinct genetic markers. These show two waves of migration, affirming archeological theories of an initial spread of IE people out of Anatolia with a second wave thousands of years later coming from the Central Asian steppelands. Russell Grey, a New Zealand professor, analyzing linguistic data using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology, has convincingly dated the initial split of IE language into Hittite, the language of ancient Turkey, and all other branches at 6700 B.C. Tocharian, the Western Chinese IE language, was next to split off, circa 5300 B.C.
Before the many horse-rider invasions of Mediterranean lands, Central Asia, and Northern India that occurred during second millennium B.C., IE beliefs involved a balanced blending of water and fire, feminine and masculine cosmologies. There is little trace of warfare during the late agrarian period. Harmonious coexistence of opposites generated a view of cosmic unity that can be found in the sacred icons of the time. Ritualistic practices of physical fertility celebrated the beauty of male potency along with female fecundity. Evidence of this is found in the oldest Iranian myths of Ahura Mazda. It is found in the ecstatic myths of Dionysus the Godboy, who preceded Hesiod’s dualistic theogony of heavenly gods and earthbound warrior-heroes. It is found in the Mediterranean artifacts and myths of Minoan, Etruscan, and early Mycenaean cultures.
The linguistic roots of the former two have yet to be determined, though evidence minimally points to close IE involvement with Etruscan linguistic and cultural development. In any case, early IE culture was intertwined with these great civilizations. The mysterious, tantric beauty of Etruscan and Minoan art makes for a most gratifying study. A superb view of IE art from this era can be found in Colin Renfrew’s inspection of Cycladic sculpture.
Female fecundity and male potency par excellence are found in the Yakshi and Shiva traditions of the Indus Valley. While the name Shiva was not prominent in early Vedas, icons and cultural patterns traditionally associated with him evidently held an important place in early Vedic society. Perhaps the best-known artifacts from the Indus Valley are soapstone seals of sexually erect yogis and small copper figures of lithe dancing girls. The latter beautifully depict nubile young women striking sensual, spirited poses. The former depict shaman-masked men seated in yogic asanas (or “postures”) that indicate tantric cultivation used to sublimate sexual energy into spiritual power.
Ananda Coomaraswamy’s re-edited treatise Yakshas brilliantly speculates upon the common metaphysics indigenous to Aryan and Dravidian cultures of Europe and India. His revelations regarding a water cosmology pervasively found among non-nomadic, agrarian-age societies encompassing communities stretching between Europe, Anatolia, Persia, and the Indus Valley are radically insightful. Yahshas presents a bridge between Vedic stories of patriarchal fire gods and warriors that have popularly defined – in a mistakenly limited manner – “Aryan” culture with Vedic myths of rishis and phallic, flowing fertility gods and goddesses of an earlier Dravidian-Aryan culture complex. The latter was never in truth displaced by the former, be that through an imagined Indus Valley conquest or a largely co-opted insurgence of steppe-land, chariot-driving warrior tribes.
Water and Fire cosmologies merged in the great traditions. For instance, Christian stories of the fiery Holy Spirit of Jesus evince similarity to those of the mysterious and regenerative Fertility of Dionysus. Heavenly Fire was drawn down to permeate earthly bodies through ablutions of water. Early water-based fertility traditions were ensconced in shamanistic magic, which remain reflected in the rites of Christianity. Jesus presented to his people and Hellenized cultures around him an age-old wisdom-way that included entry into the Underworld and a magical rite of purification and resurrection redolent of shamanic initiation and divinization. While we have not had space to explore the body of evidence that has come to light concerning this, interested readers would do well to start with Morton Smith’s first edition of the Secret Gospel of Mark. (Footnoted conjectures by Smith regarding esoteric stages of initiation and resurrection prompted writing of the present treatise.)
Dionysus and Zeus for the Greeks, Shiva and Agni for the Dravidian-Aryans, were old and new gods representing earthly Eros realizing heavenly immortality. A full and true alchemy or union of opposites occurred during periods of maturation in every era of IE cultural development. Essential fire has been understood through and wedded to vital water throughout the Great Tradition. These polar traditions stemmed from a common trunk. The next chapter considers this history in relationship to the Immortal Love-Wisdom of Eros.
It appears that in order for consciousness to evolve, innate feeling-states of unity need to bifurcate into perceived developments of primary polarities. After which, consciousness of unity is re-attained within a holistic level of greater complexity. This is the case in every body, environment, and world until a ninth stage of absolute Radiance outshines all else. Being, consciousness, and bliss fully identified with the Bright translate all manifestation as the Tao. Ultimately, universal polarities such as male/female and heaven/earth are immortally transcended. That is the way of Justice and the World.
Historical study conveys to observant minds insights concerning evolutionary development. Stages of evolution found in the Triumphs can be observed on four primary levels of natural growth: psychological, social, cultural, and environmental. Every stage of natural evolution is initially marked by harmonic resonance established by individual nodes that initially set unique modalities. Group resonance tends toward creative emergence. Polar tension and exchange is intrinsic to this process. Through nested valuations of synchronicity and awareness of common sources, individuals and then communities are able to transcend chaotic change and emerge at new levels of hierarchical growth.
When a cultural stage matures in development, societies involved are gradually affected until encompassed by the culture complex; as societies are encompassed, so too are individuals strongly affected, even when otherwise at conflict with the nodal centers effectively causing such change to begin with. After peaking in growth, decay then naturally occurs; complexity that no longer can be maintained tends to devolve into chaos. At this point in evolution, socio-pathological attempts to arrest change will likely become structured through law-enforcement and behavioral restrictions.
Such conservativeness inevitably runs its course until exhausted. Liberation from imposed environmental, sociological, cultural, and psychological limitations comes as individuals and consequently their societies split from established ways into new stages of being, knowledge, and bliss. The whole culture-complex does the same once more. The process of evolution always begins with individuals, just as the process of devolution is always initiated through mass culture.
The Law of the World is what many have called the Will of God. To have insight into this is to touch upon realms of prophecy and wisdom. The Tarot became known as a divining tool because it imparted to the studied and contemplative user a true and profound awareness of natural law. In the Christian West, the power and knowledge that arose from such awareness was often condemned as heretical, if not belonging to the Devil’s realm. Our next chapter explores the history of Diablos as it developed out of the Judeo-Christian concept of a Satan. First, though, let us enter the Dionysian realm of Eros, into and out of which sacred consciousness has always flowed.
