Two

LIVING NATURE

The fundamental issue in our study is the human experience of nature. The average modern man's relationship with nature is not the one that prevailed in the premodern "cycle," to which, along with many other traditions, the hermetico-alchemical tradition belongs. The study of nature today devotes itself exhaustively to a conglomeration of strictly reasoned laws concerning various "phenomena"—light, electricity, heat, etc.—which spread out kaleidoscopically before us utterly devoid of any spiritual meaning, derived solely from mathematical processes. In the traditional world, on the contrary, nature was not thought about but lived, as though it were a great, sacred, animated body, "the visible expression of the invisible." Knowledge about nature derived from inspiration, intuition, and visions, and was transmitted "by initiation" as so many living "mysteries," referring to things that today have lost their meaning and seem banal and commonplace—as, for example, the art of building, medicine, cultivation of the soil, and so forth. Myth was not an arbitrary or fantastic notion it arose from a necessary process in which the same forces that shape things acted upon the plastic faculty of the imagination, unfettered by the bodily senses, to dramatize themselves in images and figures that were woven into the tapestry of sensory experience and resulted finally in a "significance" of moment.¹

"Universe, hear my plea. Earth, open. Let the Waters open for me. Trees, do not tremble. Let the heavens open and the winds be silent! Let all my faculties celebrate in me the All and One!"—these are the words of a hymn that the "Sons of Hermes" recited at the beginning of their sacred operations; ² such was the height to which they were capable of elevating themselves. The following is an even more emphatic version:

The gates of Heaven are open;

The gates of Earth are open;

The Way of the Current is open;

My spirit has been heard by all the gods and genii;

By the spirit of Heaven—and Earth—the Sea—and the Currents.³

And such is the teaching of the Corpus Hermeticum "Rise up above every height; descend deeper than any depth; concentrate into thyself all the sensations of created things of Water, Fire, Dry and Wet. Think of finding yourself simultaneously everywhere, in the earth, sea or sky; think of having never been born, of still being an embryo: young and old, dead and beyond death. Embrace everything at the same time: all times, places, things, qualities and quantities."

These possibilities of perception and communication, this aptitude for connections, despite what we believe today, were not "fantasies," wild superstitions, or extravagant exaggerations. On the contrary, they were part of an experience as real as that of physical things. More precisely the spiritual constitution of the man of "traditional civilizations" was such that any physical perception had simultaneously a psychic component, which "animated" it, adding to the naked image a "meaning" and at the same time a special and powerful emotional overtone."⁴ This is how ancient "physics" could be both a theology and a transcendental psychology it derived from quite universal metaphysical essences, primarily from the superconscious world, in sudden flashes of light wherein matter was provided by the sense organs. Natural science was a corollary spiritual science and the many meanings of its symbols reflected different aspects of a single knowledge.