Thirty-Three

DENUDATIONS AND ECLIPSES

To a certain degree, the work of asceticism and purification is also a condition for the "wet path" by way of "preparation." It so happens that every psychic element remaining after the "separation" acquires the capacity to transform the most profound powers that manifest themselves. We encounter them polarized according to their nature. So, if the appropriate preparation has not eliminated the dregs of the passions, sensations, inclinations, and irrational complexes tenaciously rooted in the penumbra below consciousness, the result will be an inordinate empowerment of all these elements, which will then be transformed into so many different channels through which will violently course elemental energies never before imagined. Hence the saying: "Fire increases the virtue of the wise and the corruption of the perverse."¹ In the field of cognition all vision will be deformed, obscured, or falsified, if not replaced by mere hallucinatory projections of subjective impulses and complexes with repercussions in the organic functions. Every danger that can overload the circuit with a high voltage that will limit resistance and the capacity for transformation is concentrated in the force field.

All this must be expected if the "mortification" has been insufficiently rigorous. For this reason, the alchemists exhort us to beware of the rosy and golden colors that may appear after the black but before the white: they indicate a residue of the ego quality (in the negative sense, as human ego in the animal body), that may alter the experience to follow; the true red color (active reaffirmation) must appear after the white, as only in the white can the new condition of existence be reached.²

On this subject Della Riviera says that it could happen that, once the Vulture of the dry and arid Earth³ has obtained a part of the "virgin’s milk reserved for feeding the delicate, newborn infant," marvels and astonishments take place: "Eclipses, new darkness, furious winds, hurricanes and venemous breezes, which may cause you to think that they are neither infusion of the Soul nor an illumination of the Body, but death and destruction for both." Only after the heavens return to calm, will the earth depart from night, green and flowering: and the symbolic Child, divested of his many-colored garments, will assume a pure white attire, "symbol of celestial purity"—the albedo—after which will follow the royal purple and imperial sceptre.⁴ Andreae also mentions an unleashed wind and a darkening of the Moon,⁵ and Philalethes points out the malignity of Air (in the no-longer earthly state) and the formation of dark clouds that are cleared by the Waters (purified) up to the lunar whiteness.⁶

The Greek alchemists mention magical conjurations—δαιμονοκλησύαι—that they use for paralyzing the demons that might wish to prevent the divine Water from transmuting Copper into Gold;⁷ demons that, aside from possible references to effective operations of ceremonial magic, have the same symbolic value as the onrush of unclean animals to drink the blood of the bull struck by Mithras. Only by scaring them off does the miracle of vegetation continue, which said blood causes to spring from the Earth.⁸ In the hermetic interpretation of the classical myths this is the labor that Hercules must fulfill by killing the Harpies, black birds rising out of the separation, "rapacious spirits unleashed in the magical world";⁹ and it is also the extermination of every last one of the armed warriors who, in the myth of Jason, are born on the Field of Mars, where the extracted teeth of the Dragon have been sown.¹⁰

Finally, in mystical terms, Gichtel speaks of the danger that appears at the moment when the power of the Virgin is transmitted to the "Igneous Soul," because this last may then depart from humility and equanimity and fall back in love with itself, turning thereby into an egotistic and puffed-up demon. Nor can the Virgin help because her husband (the Soul) can neither be liberated nor dissolved, but always becomes only more fiery and exalted, and repels anything that is not fire; so that Sophia retreats into her principle of Light and darkens the fire of the soul, which thereupon falls into the state of "sin."¹¹

It is a matter then of allusions to what can be derived from the dregs and elements that have not been reduced to "ashes" (such that they can no longer be "rekindled") that have been left behind when the deeper forces emerge from the life, reinforcing and multiplying—and being unable to stop reinforcing and multiplying—everything they encounter. In the wet path, the separation would not take place until there is nothing left but the pure ego principle to be invested and transported. On the dry path this would be when this same principle has reduced its own nature to a "quintessence" of all the superior faculties, suitably equilibrated and purified.

We might, at this point, recall the disconcerting caveat that Andreae issues concerning the "trial of the balance"—which indicates precisely in what sense the polarization of the power, by virtue of the greater "weight," is produced. He said, "You must know that, no matter what path you have chosen, by virtue of an immutable destiny you may not abandon your decision and go back without running into the greatest peril of your life. . . . If you have not purifed yourself completely, the wedding will be for ill." And in the moment of trial he warns; "If anyone now in this company is not completely sure of himself, he should quickly depart . . . because better is it to flee than to take on what is beyond one’s strength."¹²

In this sense, apart from the differences between paths, the texts are in accord about the necessity for a preparation of the substances. In the Work no substances will be utilized as they are, but only prepared (whittled down) substances. A recurrent theme in alchemy is "getting rid of the heterogeneous parts": everything that is not itself or that is an irrational interference of one faculty with another.

A second theme is the denudation, which extracts and isolates the useful elements. The initiate’s use of the symbol of "nudity," on the other hand, is traditional.¹³ We must, nevertheless, emphasise two different understandings of the hermetic "garments" and their "stripping": the first refers precisely to the ascetic preparation, to the innermost simplification of the soul which, while the general conditions of the human state of existence remain, must be returned to itself; the second refers to a plane of reality and corresponds to the separation, understood as the putting into action of the consciousness and the power underneath its garments that now represent the conditions of the same general human corporeality.