5

The Gnostic Alchemy of Robert Fludd

Nature comprehends the visible and invisible Creatures of the Whole universe. What we call Nature especially, is the universal fire or Anima Mundi, filling the whole system of the Universe, and therefore is a Universal Agent, omnipresent, and endowed with an unerring instinct, and manifests itself in fire and Light. It is the First creature of Divine Omnipotence.

—GOLDEN CHAIN OF HOMER

When surveying changes in the Hermetic imaginary one must be cognizant that these changes are more accurately characterized as developmental deformations of unitary underlying structures, structures that despite superficial differences, remain functionally unchanged. The Hermetic alchemy of the doctor and Hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd (1574–1637) represents just such a “developmental deformation” in regard to the fundamental Hermetic figuration of the anima mundi. In chapter 4 considerable space was given to elucidating the function and meaning of what I have called the circle/sphere attractor. This attractor seems to be the elementary figuration underlying the Hermetic notion of the anima mundi and its virtual instantiations, psyches. As I stated in chapter 3, this figuration represents or realizes the relationship of self to kosmos, or of psyche to anima mundi. The circle and its central point pictorialize the structure of this metaphysical relationship.

In Truth’s Golden Harrow, Fludd revitalizes the Gnostic mythologem of the spinther, (σπινθηρ) or “alien spark,” by equating it with a hidden propensity within the psyche: in the work of Fludd it becomes equivalent to the subtle hypercorporeity of the Hermetic alchemist. Furthermore, he imagines the task of the alchemical operation to be the realization of an alchemically perfected hypercorporeity. He calls this perfected hypercorporiety the “mental beam.” This developmental deformation of the hypercorporeity into a “mental beam” is a logical advance of the figuration of the circle/sphere attractor as anima mundi. Fludd’s alchemical work may then be seen to be predicated on the metaphysical/geometrical notion that a line drawn from the central point of a circle or sphere becomes a ray: a dynamic vector that must inevitably intersect with the sphere of the anima mundi.

This chapter is organized in two parts. In the first part I provide a vertigralist reading of Robert Fludd’s Hermetic imaginary (particularly as found in his text Truth’s Golden Harrow), concentrating on the central importance accorded the Gnostic mythologem of the “alien light” within the Fluddian imaginary and the imaginal deformation it undergoes to become his “mental beam.” In the second part, I explore the relationship of Fludd’s ideas to certain ideas that emerged in the late twentieth century.

It may not be immediately apparent that an examination of the Hermetic alchemy of Robert Fludd could contribute in any way to a revitalization of certain discourses in the early twenty-first century. Yet a careful reconsideration of his particular Hermetic figurations and the meanings behind them suggests otherwise. Such a reconsideration of alchemical ideas was argued (with some urgency) in the late 1950s by Norman O. Brown in his influential Life Against Death. In the final chapter, “The Resurrection of the Body,” Brown proposed that Freudian psychoanalysis was the indirect (and inadequate) heir of the alchemical tradition. He further proposed that there was a strict identity between the dream of a “magical body” as imagined by certain poets (Rilke, Blake, and Valéry are his examples) and the subtle body of Occidental tradition, the “diamond,” vajra (adamantine) body of the Orient and the “polymorphously perverse body of childhood.”¹

By maintaining the formal equivalence of these diverse notions he asserts that each of these manifestations reflects the desire to overcome the Western division between matter and thought, body and soul. He approvingly notes Needham’s fascination with the “body mysticism” of Chinese neijia Daoism (Daoist sects devoted to the psycho-physical practices of “inner alchemy”) and concurs with Needham that the Daoist “quest for a more perfect body transcends the Platonic dualism of soul and matter.”² Brown notes that the body mysticism found in Daoist alchemical literature and in the Western doctrine of the subtle body takes seriously the idea of human perfectibility, of a union or interpenetration of mind and matter, while orthodox psychoanalysis refuses to countenance such an eventuality. He says that while it is true that “psychoanalytical therapy involves a solution to the problem of repression, what is needed is not an organismic ideology, but to change the human body so that it can become for the first time an organism—the resurrection of the body.”³

As noted in the first two chapters of this book, Ficino’s “Hermetic revolution” (if one may call it that) reintroduced an erotic sensibility into the natural philosopher’s apprehension of the natural world, a sensuous awareness of the relatedness and interconnectivity between the apparently diverse phenomena presented to the senses. Brown notes that both Needham and Alfred North Whitehead are similarly motivated in their respective reevaluations of twentieth-century sensibilities and knowledge practices.

Whitehead and Needham are protesting against the inhuman attitude of modern science; in psychoanalytical terms, they are calling for a science based on an erotic sense of reality, rather than an aggressive dominating attitude toward reality. From this point of view alchemy (and Goethe’s essay on plants) might be said to be the last effort of Western man to produce a science based on an erotic sense of reality.⁴

It is the task of this chapter to elucidate the importance of this aspect of the Hermetic sensibility by examining the figurations of the Hermetic alchemy of Robert Fludd and evaluating its significance for contemporary thought.

As an introduction or prefiguration of this fundamental figure within Fludd’s imaginary, we may recall Hegel quoting Meister Eckhart: “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him; my eye and his eye are one. . . . If God were not, I should not be; if I were not he would not be either.”⁵

Here Eckhart (and Hegel) pictures the relationship of mind to nous in terms of the operations of the axis visualis, the “prince of rays” as Alberti called it, here invoked to establish the noetic connection between God and humankind. The reestablishment of a direct relationship between the Holy Spirit (equated by Fludd with the anima mundi) and the alchemical philosopher is imagined by Fludd as being accomplished by this “mental beam,” taking the form of a “straight-line” relationship that connects mankind with the intelligential.

PART 1: THE RADIATION ECONOMY

The followers of Pythagoras knew their teacher as autos, “he who is himself.” For Pythagoras’s disciples he was one of the very few people who were completely or truly “themselves.” The notion that there is a true (and therefore unchanging) reality hidden deep behind appearances still attaches itself to our contemporary usage of such words as author and authority, both of which are derived from the ancient Greek autos. In its “naturalized” (i.e., “scientific”) form this authentic self became the object of twentieth-century “ego psychology” and the “individuation” process advocated by psychologist Carl Jung.

One of the most important aspects of this notion is not the unchanging authenticity of a “completed self,” but rather the Gnostic process by which this was attained or realized. One of the most significant aspects of both Gnosticism and Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy is the conception of gnosis or alchemy as a quest to uncover and realize the “authentic” autos-self. This autos-self was pictured by both Gnostic thinkers and Fludd as the alien light hidden within. (Similar conceptions also pertain within Lurianic Kabbalah.) As a fragment of a greater whole, “authenticity” was realized when the Gnostic process reified the fact that some part of the self was indeed part of a greater whole. This of course is the defining characteristic of Magian consciousness—the belief that true individuality only comes in recognition of the non-separateness of the self in relation to the All. Within Magian consciousness community both precedes and participates in the actuality of individuals. Fludd’s approach to alchemy, then, is a perfect example of one of Spengler’s pivotal definitions of the Magian character.

Whereas the Faustian man is an “I” that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas Apollonian man, as one soma among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a part of a pneumatic “We” that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him.⁶

It was the aim of Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy to reveal this luminal “alien entity” hidden within the human form, thus ensuring its community with the cosmic corporeity (or anima mundi). As Spengler rightly observes:

In Alchemy there is deep scientific doubt as to the plastic actuality of things—of the “somata” of Greek mathematicians, physicists and poets—and it dissolves and destroys the soma in the hope of finding its essence. It is an iconoclastic movement just as truly as those of Islam and the Byzantine Bogomils were so. It reveals a deep disbelief in the tangible figure of phenomenal Nature, the figure of her that to the Greek was sacrosanct.⁷

Spengler is perhaps overstating his case in asserting that alchemy sought to “destroy” the soma in search of its essence. Alchemy may just as accurately be characterized as seeking to expand notions of that which constitutes corporeality, to propose a surreality of the somatic. Certainly this was the case with Robert Fludd. As a physician Fludd was undoubtably concerned with soma or physis in all its aspects. A primary theme within Fludd’s imaginary seems to have been the conviction that the human corporeity is the urgrund from which the knowledge practices of natural philosophy should be derived. It must be borne in mind, however, that Fludd’s conception of corporeity was of his times—a combination of the subtle physiology imagined as being coterminous with the venal system (following Galen’s ideas) and the newly developing “hydraulic” schema perhaps first initiated by Fludd’s close friend, William Harvey.^*69 In any case, Fludd’s sense of corporeity was certainly quite different from the comparatively limited mechanical model that was soon to usurp it.

Fludd regarded the study of medicine as much more than the description of the diseases that could assail the body, or the explanation of its “material” corporeal workings—for him it was the science that would lead the natural philosopher to an understanding of God and his works. This understanding was achieved through the agency of the double exchange that traced a vertical trajectory between microcosm and macrocosm. In his major work on the micro/macrocosmic economy, Utriusque Cosmi Historia, he pictorializes this double movement through the use of images foregrounding two interpenetrating triangles, one ascending, the other descending. It is not too difficult to read the significance of this figure: the descending triangle is the vector of the Trinity, the ascending that of the tripartite mens (after the Platonic model: nous [rational mind], thumos [affective soul], and the psyche [or appetitive function]) of humankind. Fludd also relies on textual images to amplify this notion of mutual psychic interpenetration. Making reference to the well-known Hermetic dictum Deus est sphaera cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi (refer to chapter 3) and contemporary theories regarding the geometrical underpinnings of optical phenomena, he notes, “The greater chorus of philosophers (among whom are named Democritus and Orpheus) concludes that GOD contains every name, since all is in him and he himself is in everything, not unlike the manner in which all straight lines drawn from the centre to the circumference are said to be in the centre.”⁸

The rhetorical origins of Fludd’s analogy would no doubt have been clear to his contemporaries: it combines a geometrical/metaphorical reference to the deity first “popularized” by Cusanus with a theory of the mechanics of his relationship to the individual. This latter is inherent in the concept of “lines” in the above quotation. These refer, one suggests, to the metaphysical importance that the idea of “rays” (in draftsman’s parlance, a line with a definite direction or vector) holds in the imaginary of light itself and the central importance accorded to photic phenomena in Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy.

Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy is essentially the Gnostic quest to realize/reify the facts of cosmogony within the individual alchemist her- or himself. Fludd imagined the anima mundi/Holy Spirit as being the intermediary in the participatory relationship of the alchemist with God (or, as we might say today, the Real), and the same processes that caused both cognition and change in the world were embedded in the nature of this quintessential template, at least as Fludd conceived of it. Following the Stoic and Epicurean/Lucretian tradition, Fludd imagined the quintessential medium that mediated this relationship as being composed of rays that moved in straight lines from a source to a receiver, and this coding was channeled both ways: from sublunary nous to divine Nous, and vice versa. Considered as a whole, as a vast economy of interpenetrating rays (this economy determined by the number of organisms distributed along the curvature of the Great Chain of Being), this intercommunicative matrix formed the field of potentiality behind the periodic appearance of actualities. In the work of Fludd, the “principial space” of Coomaraswamy (symbolically represented by the circle and bindu according to Coomaraswamy) of the Platonic receptacle or chora becomes Hermetically reconfigured/imagined as being composed of striations of the first principle—light.

IMAGINAL LOGIC OF AN IDEAL OBJECT: MATTER AND LIGHT

Hermetic philosophers and Paracelsians in general felt that the most important textual source providing an understanding of nature was the account given in Genesis of the creation of the world. As this text also privileges an account of the creation of humankind, it seemed logical that an explication of the true nature of the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm should be found therein. For further explication and confirmation of the Mosaic account of Creation Fludd relied on the Hermetic Pymander (Corpus Hermeticum I), which was immediately and naturally associated with the account given in Genesis first by Ficino, his example to be followed by many succeeding natural philosophers. I propose to examine Fludd’s development of the imagery found within these two texts as a prelude to the examination of Truth’s Golden Harrow, as this imagery provides the metaphysical pre-text and foundations for the process enfolded within the latter text.

In the beginning, there was Light; and from this originary Light everything proceeded. The account of the beginning in Genesis is seemingly echoed by the enquirer in the Pymander when she or he asks Poimandres (the divine being speaking in the text) to reveal the secrets of the “things that are” and “to understand their nature.”

I saw an endless vision in which everything became light—clear and joyful—and in seeing the vision I came to love it. After a while, darkness arose separately and descended—fearful and gloomy—coiling sinuously so that it looked to me like a (snake). Then the darkness changed into something of a watery nature, indescribably agitated and smoking like a fire; it produced an unspeakable wailing roar. . . . But from the light . . . a holy word mounted upon the (watery) nature.⁹

These early passages in the Pymander bear a clear relationship with the account in Genesis and echo for the Hermetic philosopher descriptions also found in Plato’s Timaeus and Neoplatonic mythology generally. A connection between the “holy word” (logos) of the Pymander with the “word” (logos) in the gospel of Saint John was first perceived by Ficino: “Ille (Moses) potenti verbo domini cuncta creata nunciat, hic (Mercurius) verbum illud lucens, quod omnia illuminet ... filium Dei esse asseverat.”¹⁰

That the logos of Saint John was the “Son of God” was an accepted notion of biblical exegesis in Ficino’s time, but he was probably the first to directly connect this with the logos of the Pymander. Further development of the logos figure would became central to the imaginary of Robert Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy.

According to Fludd, the first section of the Pymander is a description of the appearance of the primal matter or “philosophical hyle” as he called it. Fludd relates that Thales was the first to consider that water was the primal matter of nature, and attesting to this were both pagan writers and Holy Scripture. Yet in what way, we may ask, is water the “primal matter” as opposed to being but one among four of the four elements? Evidently Fludd is here referring to a long Neoplatonic tradition in which water was symbolic of “matter.” This tradition stems from at least the time of Porphyry (but probably originates a century before in the work of Numenius¹¹) where the description of Odysseus’s journeys across the ocean in the Homeric text were read by Neoplatonic hermeneutes as an allegory for the soul’s tribulations while trapped in the world of matter. Fludd was one of the few thinkers in his time to insist that many biblical stories should be regarded as allegories rather than literal truths (a notion considered quite controversial, yet not quite the opinion of an apostate). This is doubtless a manner of thinking inherited from his Neoplatonic and Hermetic forebears.¹²

In Genesis the light is “upon [or above] the waters” (where water = the “philosophical hyle.”) For Fludd the allegorical figure of the waters is equivalent to Moses stating that the Earth was “without form and void”; the formless being the Neoplatonic hyle. He further notes that Hermes speaks of the “dreadful shadow, turning into a watery substance;¹³ Plato to the mother, nurse, and house of things that are born”¹⁴ (i.e., the Platonic chora or hypodoche of the Timaeus), adding that Augustine compares it to darkness and silence. By invoking this imagery Fludd is foregrounding the importance of the particular ideal object represented by the circle/sphere attractor within the imaginary of Hermeticism, an object that was given important consideration in the twentieth century by Whitehead, for whom it represented the first appearance in the West of a model of universal intercommunication.

The term hyle is not originally Platonic, but rather Aristotelian. We know, however, that Aristotle—as with Fludd—identified his hyle with the “receptacle” (hypodoche) or chora of Plato’s Timaeus. Plato defined the receptacle as the “nurse of all becoming”¹⁵ and the “natural matrix for all things”¹⁶ stating that the receptacle is a “receiver” without any qualities of its own. As Whitehead interprets this figure, the receptacle

receives its forms by reason of its inclusion of actualities, and in a way not to be abstracted from those actualities. The Receptacle . . . is the way in which Plato conceived the many actualities of the physical world as components in each other’s natures. [This] mutual immanence of actualities [is] Plato’s doctrine of the medium of intercommunication.¹⁷

Fludd’s identification of the chora with Moses’s “formless void” seems also to be logically aligned with Whitehead’s interpretation of the Platonic receptacle, as Whitehead concludes that while the Platonic receptacle and the Epicurean/Lucretian void “differ in some details,” both conceptions “are emphatic assertions of a real communication between ultimate realities. . . . It is part of the essential nature of each physical actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and that the qualifications of the Receptacle enter into its own nature.”¹⁸

Lucretius famously stated, “Everything is but bodies [atoms] and the void.” According to Whitehead’s interpretation—and, as I have implied, Fludd—the one (void) qualifies the other (atoms or bodies), and the “principle of intercommunication” represented by the all-inclusive receptacle cannot in its turn be abstracted from these corporeal actualities. There is an important point to note about this characterization of the Platonic account of intercommunication. By ignoring the priority Plato evidently allows the receptacle in regard to the manifestation of corporealities (it is aligned with Plato’s famous notion that time is “the moving image of eternity,” i.e., we see atomized moments [bodies] but not their “eternity” or interconnection), Whitehead’s reading is consequently characterized by a circularity that allows one to bring his conception within the purview of modern cybernetic theory. As outlined in chapter 4, Wiener’s “cybernetics” grew from his initial interest in the phenomenon of “feedback” where systems are generated and maintained by recursive or self-referential structures and processes. Recently Humberto Maturana has privileged this particular aspect of cybernetic theory, focusing on those systems he calls autopoietic, that is, “selfcreating” systems or machines that are

organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. It follows that an autopoietic machine continuously generates and specifies its own organisation through its operation as a system of production of its own components.¹⁹ (my italics)

One should particularly note the circularity foregrounded in Maturana’s concept of a autopoietic system or machine. It then becomes clear that a metaphysical precedent for Maturana’s conception may be found in Whitehead’s reading of the principle of intercommunication (participation, methexis) as it was initially conceived within the Platonic tradition. Even if one leaves out the self-referential (“feedback”) aspect of Whitehead’s interpretation, the proximity of this Platonic figuration of eternal receptacle and temporary actualities with Serres’s and Wiener’s imagery of temporary vortices within an eternal flow of information exchange can only support the idea that we are here observing the continuing recrudescence of a single ideal object.

One hypothesizes that within this Platonic figuration we observe the appearance of the most fundamental of cognitive distinctions, that which Gestalt psychologists call the figure-ground discontinuity. Importantly, this fundamental discontinuity is ineluctably “enfolded” within a unity that comprises the relationship of figure to ground. It is this fundamental binary figuration that is the beginning of the logical entailments that form the ideal object of which the notion of the hypodoche and its embedded actualities is but one early manifestation. Aristotle hypostatized the notion of the receptacle (ground) into the notion of a substance (hyle) that “remained beneath” (sub-stance) all the perceived “qualities” in objects (figures), thus completely atomizing the interconnectivity and “medium of intercommunication” implied in Plato’s original idea. As Whitehead notes, the intercommunication implied in the notion of the receptacle is in the form of the omni in omnibus model, where all existents “participate,” or are enfolded within an interpenetrative matrix, yet it was the Aristotelian atomization^*70 of reality that would eventually triumph within the scientific tradition. But at the very beginnings of the scientific project Robert Fludd was instrumental in further articulating and foregrounding the notion of the (Hermetically reconfigured) ideal object of the receptacle as the principle of intercommunication.

The original etymological meaning of hyle was “timber,” and this allows us to see how a certain imagery led to the notion of, in Fludd’s terminology, the “philosophical hyle.” For example, the image of a “massy” substance (wood) combined with a formal structure (the “plan” or “design”) produced a house. By analogy, according to Aristotle, all actualities are unintelligible unless one asserts the copresence of matter and formal pattern. From this combination would later be derived the neo-Aristotelian notion (interpreted through Neoplatonic eyes) of “intelligible form” so dear to Leibniz.

This early characterization of hyle gradually became transformed into a connective principle that assured the ultimate unity of the kosmos. When Platonic theory traveled to Arabia after the closure of the Academy, philosophers like Avicenna, al-Ghazzali, and Averroës conceived of matter as being the “common corporeity” underlying all objects. This led to some unusual corollaries: Averroës, for example, took Aristotle’s idea of the “active intellect” (nous poetikos) to be something incapable of division (because everywhere extended) and therefore there was only one nous poetikos in which all human beings shared—the very definition of Magian consciousness, as Spengler defines it. Likewise the Spanish rabbi and Kabbalist Avicebron thought that the corporeal extension of matter was continuous throughout the universe.²⁰ This syncretic amalgamation of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas is also one of the signal contributions of the Hermetic tradition, a product of the vertigral vector of the Alexandrian mentalité.

Most importantly in terms of the Hermetic tradition we should note the doctrine that “a ‘material’ principle operates at the highest and lowest level of the universe, as the immediate correlate of the unitary first principle as well as the ultimate substratum of the system of Forms in the physical realm.”²¹ There is, in other words, a continuum, united by a “material” substratum, that encompasses (in virtue of its being a continuum) the lowest forms of life—that which we would nowadays call “inanimate matter”—and the highest forms within the Great Chain of Being.

Robert Fludd’s innovation within this imaginary was the new emphasis he placed on the centrality of lux or light. For Fludd the significance of the extensive “primal matter” or philosophical hyle recedes before the unifying activities of the first existent, lux. When the Hermetic/alchemical texts asserted that “All matter is One,”^*71 Fludd envisaged the primacy of light rather than the darkness and silence of the traditional (Aristotelian) hyle. Fludd conceived of light as

this fiery creation, made on the first day in the divine image, this first best gift given by God to perfect the remainder of his construction, Moses called light . . . Plato, the Idea, Aristotle, the First principle . . . Mercurius Trismegistus . . . the blessed brilliance. . . . In short, all of them with almost complete unanimity, usually called it the first Action, Pattern, Species and Essence.²²

This passage reveals much about Fludd’s Magian conception of “substance” and its place within the general metaphysics of light. Principally it demonstrates the inversion of the relationship of matter to light within Fludd’s Hermetic outlook. Like Robert Grosseteste centuries before him, Fludd imagined light as being the originary force in nature.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL HYLE AND THE METAPHYSICS OF LIGHT

Fludd’s mention of the word species strongly connects him with the tradition initiated by Grosseteste that considered that the common corporeity—previously ascribed to the dull, “material” hyle—was light itself. This was because it had the ability to instantaneously expand in all directions from a single point. In a theory that would please contemporary physicists who champion the big bang or inflationary universe models, Grosseteste conceived of the universe as being created from a single point of light “auto-diffusing” itself in all directions.^*72 Like Fludd, Grosseteste reasoned that as lux was created on the first day, it must be the basic energizing force of the universe and was therefore the key to understanding the metaphysical and physical world.²³ He thought that all objects emitted something he called species, and that these were instrumental in producing vision. The species “project in straight lines, in all directions, from every point on every object in the universe,”²⁴ a concept, it would seem, that he drew directly from the work of the Arabic scientist Alhazen who held that light was emitted from every point on a body’s surface. As a consequence Grosseteste came to realize that mathematics and geometrical optics “were the foundation of physical reality.”²⁵

Grosseteste’s cosmogonic conception of the fiat lux and his figuration of emanating rays are closely aligned with the imaginary of Fludd. For both Grosseteste and Fludd the functioning of the philosophical hyle was subsumed under that of light; they both expressed a form of monism in which all actualities become an expression of the primal lux. Light, then, becomes the primary unconditioned substance, the “matrix of all things.”

This must be considered a key aspect of Magian consciousness. Similar conceptions are found, for example, in the Hindu conception of akasha or space. Akasha derives from the root kas, which means “bright,” “to radiate,” or “to shine.”²⁶ According to one authority it more fully means “to shine from every side, as a presence whose shine spreads everywhere.”²⁷ We observe here an unmistakable homology with Grosseteste’s “auto-diffusion” of light and the reduction of space (the common corporeity) to light rather than matter or hyle. According to ancient Indian tradition akasha is that by virtue of which things are manifest, and it is the medium both of movement and extension or corporeality.²⁸ In the Buddhist Abhidharma tradition akasha is that aspect of reality (dharma) that is unconditioned; that is, not subject to the law of pratitya samutpada or “codependent arising.”²⁹ One can assert, then, that the figure of akasha is formally equivalent both to the atomist notion of the void and the Platonic concept of the receptacle. By virtue of this formal equivalence, one may further suppose that the same ideal object subtends the figurations of both Robert Fludd and ancient Indian tradition.

In his Avatara Antonio de Nicolás further notes that akasha is instrumental in the process of gnostic perfectibility as noted in the Bhagavad Gita. He does not mention a specific passage, yet perhaps he is thinking of the following lines: “Where there is gnosis, light shines forth from the orifices of the body, then be it known that ‘being has matured.’”³⁰

A very similar imagery and mythology is the vertigral key to understanding Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy. As the Bhagavad Gita states, when “being has matured” the unconditioned akasha, space, or the common corporeity of light, pervades the human body. Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy is predicated on just such a configuration of imagery and its attendant metaphysical structure.

RAYS AND LIGHTS: THE GNOSTIC ALCHEMY OF TRUTH’S GOLDEN HARROW

Robert Fludd’s Truth’s Golden Harrow is in the form of a reply to a work by Patrick Scot, The Tillage of Light (1623), in which Scot maintained that the lapis philosophorum, the Philosophers’ Stone, was not a material substance. He held that the lapis philosophorum was an immaterial entity, an entirely spiritual substance partaking of no corporeity. Fludd, a medical doctor and Paracelsian iatrochemist, wanted to include the substance of the Philosophers’ Stone in rerum natura, in the nature of things. To do this, he had to prove that its nature was somehow within the elemental realm, even if at the most attenuated extreme. The manner in which he does this reveals the close connection between an alchemy conceived of as a revivification of the Adamic/Christ “logos-code” encrypted in the subtle body and the connection between Hermetic alchemy and the imaginary of early Christianity.

Fludd’s reply to Scot is evidence in support of the view that alchemy was primarily an experiment of the spirit (a conclusion widely publicized by Jung, but originally proposed by Silberer in his Probleme der Mystik und ihrer Symbolik, 1914), as opposed to proto-chemical research (which is the “standard account” of science viewpoint). Spengler’s description of the Magian concern with the greater corporeity (the “pneumatic we”) as opposed to the atomistic “I” is revealed in Fludd’s Hermetic approach to alchemy, as is Spengler’s characterization of the primacy of the concept of the alien light within Magian consciousness. This latter Gnostic mythologem is clearly revealed to be the core of Fludd’s alchemy in Truth’s Golden Harrow, for his “answer” to Scot is the remarkable assertion that the lapis philosophorum is neither a stone nor immaterial substance, rather it is the perfected hypercorporeity of the alchemist become one with the Holy Spirit.

Fludd leads the reader gently toward this remarkable contention, however, patiently answering each of Scot’s points or “furrows” with Fludd’s own “harrows,” one after the other. Then, in the middle of his fourth “harrow,” Fludd says, “Now the Elixir is the temple of wisdom, or the earthly sun of the philosophers which is as well the tabernacle of the divine emanation as the heavenly. The earth shall open and bring forth a saviour. Light is in darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it.”³¹

Almost a non sequitur, the sudden evocation of the image of Christ emerging from the earth must have come as a surprise to the reader of Truth’s Golden Harrow. Yet the sense generated by the two final sentences is produced by a compound of Neoplatonic figurations the concatenation of which would have been a familiar rhetorical strategy to his learned contemporaries: the body, like the darkness of the earth, has a light hidden within (the savior-Christ), and it is only ignorance of this fact that distinguishes the hoi polloi from the philosopher (by Fludd’s lights an alchemical philosopher). The sources for this imagery could not be more distinct—it is clearly Gnostic in inspiration.

After an examination of several allegories in the Scriptures, Fludd says,

The spiritual rock . . . which is Christ risen again, [and is] composed of a divine spirit and a spiritual body, of which the true philosophers’ Elixir is said to be the type or pattern, we must not nor cannot justly affirm that this divine and spiritual stone can be excluded from materiality. . . . It consists of a divine and plusquamperfect spirit and a body exalted from corporeity into a pure and spiritual existence, from mortality to immortality.³²

The Philosophers’ Stone (“spiritual rock”), then, is a body “exalted from corporeity” such that it becomes immortal. Yet despite this, one should not be so rash as to suppose that it is thereby “excluded from materiality.” Fludd next asserts that “this light” (that is, the immortal body) is part of the universal emanation from the “fountain of light which was . . . present with God when he made all things,” noting that Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Democritus thought that “all things were full of gods,” which amounts to the same thing as the (Neo)Platonists maintaining “a peculiar soul or beam of light to be in every particular and individual creature, but the universal soul of the world was the head and fountain to which they all referred.” He concludes that all these ideas meet in the assertion in Holy Scriptures that Spiritus Dei incorruptibilis est in omni re: God’s incorruptible spirit is in everything.³³

Fludd uses two principal Hermetic, Neoplatonic images in this cosmogonic landscape: the anima mundi as the “fountain or head” and the individuated lights that “refer”—that is, Platonically “participate” or are “modeled” on—the originary ground or medium of the anima mundi. How did Fludd come upon these “peculiar souls or beams of light”?

First, I propose that Fludd is actually thinking of the “starry vehicle” or subtle body when speaking of “beams” or “rays.” He is quite clearly familiar at least with the tradition that considers the astral body a “vehicle” or okhema. This becomes apparent if we examine key passages in another important work devoted to Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy, the Philosophical Key. In this text Fludd describes an alchemical experiment in which he subjects a quantity of wheat to varying degrees of heat to separate the “elements,” noting at different stages the philosophical significance of the observed chemical breakdown of the wheat grain. According to Fludd, the most difficult stage was the extraction of the quintessence, the element that is “the very life by which the four elements do act in man’s body by virtue of the central or inward motive principle.”³⁴ To produce this element Fludd had to “invent a peculiar heat” that allowed him to recover “this aetherial humour & purify it to its greatest brightness.”³⁵ Through a lowering of the temperature it “congealed into a perfect diaphan and transparent substance, like a precious stone, mingled partly with a clear crystal substance . . . as a crystal glass all to be seamed with sparks and streaming stars of light.”³⁶ Fludd then breaks off his description of the chemical experiment to distinguish between soul and spirit:

The vital soul is a bright light from God which is carried as in a chariot in a clear spirit on whose wings it flyeth . . . the spirit is a female . . . and the light is the male or agent by which all things do live; and by that reason we do (affirm) that the thin and limpid diaphan matter like white crystal is the vehicle of the soul.³⁷

This passage is significant for the way in which Fludd succinctly unites the classical metonymic associations of the subtle body. The “chariot” of the “clear spirit” is the okhema that Proclus and others derived from Plato’s Phaedrus (246a), transforming this key figure into the subtle bodies that the individual soul assumes in its katabasis from the realm of the fixed stars. The actual term okhema is not used by Plato in the Phaedrus (it rather appears in the Timaeus where, contrary to later Neoplatonic interpretations, the sense is of the earthly, material body as a vehicle for the soul), but the vehicle for the nous is described as being drawn by winged horses—and this metaphor is hereafter associated by Neoplatonists with the astral body. In Fludd’s time the astral or subtle body had become both extended and refined, being regarded as the quintessence that vivified bodies. Fludd demonstrates his awareness that the quintessence is the agent for procreation after the Aristotelian model—an essential contribution to the dynamo-morphology of the astral body—and that it is the same or a similar substance to that of the subtle vehicle.

Where did Fludd derive his knowledge of the luciform body/matter? A key source is perhaps Jean Fernel’s Physiologia, first published in his De Naturali Parte Medicinae in 1542.³⁸ A reference and textbook for doctors for over a century after its publication, Fludd would surely have been familiar with this text, as his medical practice was much respected. In book 4 of the Physiologia Fernel explains the function of the “animal spirits” in the body and the means by which “information” (as we might say today) was passed along the nerves, by way of the concept of the subtle body.

The Academics were the first to suppose, when they realised that two entirely dissimilar natures cannot be associated together without the interposition of a suitable mean, that our soul, created by the supreme maker of all things, before its emanation and immigration into this thick and solid body, put on as a simple garment a certain shining, pure body like a star, which, being immortal and eternal, could never be detached nor torn away from the soul, and without which the soul could not become an inhabitant of this world.³⁹

By “Academics” Fernel means of course the Neoplatonists, and he goes on to explain that there is another “aetherial” body enclosing the soul as well, following the Neoplatonic morphology. It is important to bear in mind that there was never an exact agreement on particulars in regard to the functioning of the astral body in the Neoplatonic tradition, yet nearly all thinkers distinguished at least two subtle bodies or vehicles (except Porphyry who only admitted of one) for the soul or nous, as Fernal reports. The relation between the subtle bod(ies) and the “animal spirits” for Fernel was basically the system of their functioning as transmitted by Stoic pneumatological physiology and the explication of this through the work of Galen. In this tradition the pneumatological system of “animal spirits” constituted itself the subtle body of the Neoplatonists. As Walker notes, this description of physiological functioning was inherently dangerous in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the admixture of medical with religious/philosophical notions, quite apart from leading perhaps to logical and metaphysical contradictions, signaled a distinct religious unorthodoxy.⁴⁰ In particular there was a blurring of the distinction between the corporeal body (the medical/animal spirits were, after the Stoic conception, material, but much more refined, i.e., quintessential) and the incorporeal soul, a confusion, notes Walker, “likely because of the orthodox Christian meanings of the term spirit, i.e., either the superior, divine part of the soul, or the third part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.”⁴¹

Clearly for Fludd there was no particular confusion: he identified the Holy Spirit with the quintessential part of humanity, an identification that marks his Gnostic outlook unmistakably. Yet it is also important to realize that while Fludd considered himself an orthodox Anglican, the nature of his conceptions certainly distinguished him from his more conservative peers, making him quite “unorthodox,” as Walker would no doubt assert. We should observe here the absorption of the conception of the anima mundi into the mediatory Holy Spirit of Christian mythology, an important stage in the morphology of the concept of the world soul. We should also note the development of the idea (through Fernel, Galen, and of course Descartes^*73) that the subtle body is coextensive with known corporeal transmission systems, such as the bloodstream and nervous system.

Quite apart from the likely influence of Fernel, as a Hermeticist Fludd would of course have been familiar with the passage in Corpus Hermeticum X where it states, “A human soul is carried in this way: the mind is in the reason; the reason is in the soul; the soul is in the spirit; the spirit, passing through veins and arteries and blood, moves the living thing and, in a manner of speaking, bears it up.”⁴² As Daniélou notes, this passage clearly adumbrates Proclus’s later descriptions of the relationship of the astral vehicle to the body.⁴³ The mind (nous) is carried (literally, “charioted”) such that the soul is the vehicle of the logos (“the reason is in the soul”), the logos is in the pneuma (“the soul is in the spirit”), and the pneuma of the earthly body moves through the veins, arteries, and blood (which is exactly Fernel’s description of the passage of the medical/animal spirits.)

It is notable that Fludd was able to combine his medical knowledge with his Paracelsian and Hermetic studies, and that he did so using the subtle corporeity as the key that united these diverse pursuits. He was able to do this because, at least where the subtle body is concerned, each knowledge domain availed itself of the same ideal object.

ORIGINS OF FLUDD’S RADIATION ECONOMY

In Truth’s Golden Harrow Fludd gives special mention to the “reverend Bishop Synesius” and his conception of the functioning of the “mental beam.” If the number of times that Synesius is mentioned or acknowledged by Fludd is any indication, it is clear that Fludd held Synesius’s views in high esteem. According to Couliano, the synthesizing of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic elements that make up the theoretical basis for Renaissance magic (and hence, all later Hermetic theory and practices) can be principally attributed to Synesius of Cyrene, the foremost disciple of the martyred Neoplatonist Hypatia of Alexandria. Principally known for his Neoplatonic conceptions, Synesius later—most expediently, considering his teacher’s murder at the hands of a Christian mob—converted to Christianity,⁴⁴ an act that no doubt raised him in the esteem of Fludd and other Christian thinkers.

Synesius believed that the Stoic pneumatic hegemonikon was responsible for both soothsaying and magic. His De somniis, translated by Ficino in 1489, provided the basis, according to Couliano, for Ficino’s own philosophical system, conceived of as an “initiation into the mysteries” as Eugenio Garin tells us.⁴⁵ Synesius held that it was because of the activities of the pneumatic synthesizer that we “can communicate with the Gods, either through sight, through conversation or by other means.” He notes:

The parts of this universe that sympathize and cooperate with man must be joined together by some means. . . . And perhaps magic incantations provide such a means, for they are not limited to conveying meaning but they also invoke. He who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe is truly wise: he can derive profit from the higher beings by capturing, by means of sounds (phonas), substances (hylas), and forms (schemata), the presence of those who are far away.⁴⁶

In the end this is all made possible because “the human intellect contains within itself the forms of all things that exist.”⁴⁷ We know that Fludd himself was not adverse to using “incantations” to heal his patients, and the idea that there was a pneumatic communication system (as we would say today) that could traverse great distances was a fact the efficacy of which was well attested to by both Cornelius Agrippa and his teacher Trithemius.^*74 The medium of this communication was the same luciform medium that traversed the veins of the human subtle corporeity.

Within the long history of the metaphysics of light, perhaps the most influential thinker was al-Kindi. Of particular importance is his text De radiis stellarum. According to al-Kindi every single thing in the universe was the site for the production of, and was subject to the influences of, fiery stellar rays: “It is manifest that everything in this world, whether it be substance or accident, produces rays in its own manner like a star. . . . Everything that has actual existence in the world of the elements emits rays in every direction, which fill the whole world.”⁴⁸

These rays constitute a vast web of interconnecting emanations such that everything in the world, every object and its effects, influence and are in their turn influenced by everything else; a conception of reality that is the embryonic type, one suggests, for future twenty-first-century accounts of the field organization of matter. In fact it is no exaggeration to say that it is al-Kindi’s “radiation theory” of matter that provided the central figural conception that would much later develop into the concept of the “luminiferous aether,” then the “lines of magnetic force” of Faraday and finally the field theory of Einstein, an idea pursued at length in the final chapter of this book.

As Couliano points out, al-Kindi’s theory of universal irradiation is really an elaboration of Synesius’s system of magical “correspondences” whereby the “signatures” of all things were always already imprinted on the soul (through, of course, the process of the katabasis of the astral vehicle) and were able to interact/intersect with all other things.⁴⁹ To invoke a more recent analogy, we may imagine the apparent manifestation of bodies within this pneumatological economy as being the result of the interference patterns produced by the holographic mechanism set up by the original Demiurge.

Fludd concatenates a series of linked images that operate almost as a hieroglyphic language in his descriptions of the mental beam. He states that there exists a “virtue^*75 . . . which is able to call [people] back again to heaven” and, “Happy is he who, after death, after labours and bitter cares of the earth, by entering into the ways of the mental beam, sees the altitude of things shining and glittering with divine light.”⁵⁰

He then invokes Saint Paul’s metaphor of the grain of wheat as harboring the “pattern of resurrection” and says that the mental beam inhabits this grain or else it could not “rise again.”⁵¹ It should be remembered that, to his mind at least, Fludd proved this to be the case in his earlier mentioned Philosophical Key wherein he describes how he subjected a grain of wheat to chemical decomposition, finally revealing the “limpid, diaphan matter”—that he now notes is of the same substance as the mental beam.

The locution “entering into the ways of the mental beam” strongly suggests that for Fludd this “mental beam” was an instrumentality, an instrument that required (possibly a series of) attendant practices to activate it. Once activated from its hylic slumber, the logos-code of the mental beam allowed the adept to fully appreciate the “altitude of things” (that is, their “highest” nature). Here the Gnostic emanationist schema is clearly adopted by Fludd. That which is “highest,” closest to the Creator, is the divine light within.

Fludd believed that just as the “external beam of gold aspires to the common perfection allotted to gold,” so too the subtle material spirit within all lesser matter contains an “excellent formal light” that can be worked to the “plusquamperfection of itself and so causes a resurrection after the passive spirit is made all one with his agent, so that this matter will be transmuted into the nature of incorruptibility and immortality.”⁵² A little later he plainly states that this “spiritual vehicle, of the mental beam, or this material temple of the incorruptible spirit of wisdom,” is “a spiritual body made worthy by the action of Nature and the assistance of Art. . . . And this exalted body is the true pattern of the perfect and spiritualised body of Adam.”⁵³

To disentangle the threads of this passage we must first recognize that an Alexandrian/Gnostic anthropology is accepted by Fludd. According to both anticosmic Gnostic mythology and Hermetic philosophy the soul descends to the material world in its okhema successively accruing influences from the planets—such a trajectory is recounted in the Pymander for instance. If an individual “awakes” to the fact of his divine origin, he has the chance (through gnosis) to survive bodily decomposition and return to the celestial spheres through the agency of this same subtle vehicle. If, however, an individual remains irredeemably hylic, the subtle body can weigh him down such that no resurrection is possible. As Walker observes, “This conception of spirit . . . would account for its being peculiarly subject to astral influences, since it derives from the stars, and for the great urgency of its purification, since it does not leave the soul at death, but can drag it down, or, if light and dry enough, ascend with it.”⁵⁴

He notes too that it would have a special affinity with the celestial spheres because of its shape (which is spherical), and its proper motion, which is circular.^*76 In describing the “excellent formal light” and the striving for its “plusquamperfection” Fludd also invokes a Gnostic/Hermetic syncretic use of the Aristotelian notion of formal and final causes.

By “formal light” Fludd clearly means a luciform pattern that gives shape to things; it is a Neoplatonic variation on the Aristotelian conception of substantial form. The “plusquamperfection” of this formal light can be achieved after the “passive spirit” is become one with its “agent.” I suggest that the passive soul is the supplicatory alchemist, while the agent is the Holy Spirit conceived of as the luciform medium of the anima mundi or world soul of which the human subtle body is akin in both substance and form. He likens the final product of this process, the “mental beam” or “spiritual body” (that is, the vivified subtle body) as being isomorphic to the perfect and “incorruptible” body of the original creature, Adam (that is, the “Hermetic Adam” of the Pymander). The idea that the alchemist pursues a process that leads to a perfected, adamantine (“incorruptible”) spiritualized body is very similar to conceptions within Oriental yoga, particularly the bodhisattva tradition within Vajrayana Buddhism and the Tantric siddha tradition of India. In regard to the latter, yoga historian Georg Feuerstein has noted that the Tantric masters sought to “create a transubstantiated body, which they called adamantine (vajra) or divine (daiva)—a body not made of flesh but of immortal substance, of Light . . . they viewed [the body] as a dwelling-place of the Divine and as the cauldron for accomplishing spiritual perfection. For them, enlightenment was a whole-body event.”⁵⁵

Not insignificantly Feuerstein notes that this transubstantiated body is sometimes called ativahika-deha, “superconductive body,” a body that “is really the Body of all” and that can therefore “assume any form at will.”⁵⁶ The idea that the transformed body in the Tantric siddha tradition becomes a translucent “superconductor” has remarkable affinities with Fludd’s Hermetic conception of the alchemist becoming a conduit for the Holy Ghost, a kind of perfected communciative node within the intercommunicative economy represented by the figure of the anima mundi. I suggest that something similar to the yogic process is the “secret” behind Fludd’s Truth’s Golden Harrow. If we remember that the word yoga is derived from the proto-Indo-European root yug, which means “to unite,” then I think that this cannot be a totally illegitimate assessment of Fludd’s alchemical project.

The idea that Fluddian alchemy was a system of psychophysical practices, or more particularly a form of ascesis resembling the yogic practices of the siddhas or the Buddhist Vajrayana “pure light” practices, seems much less of a conceit when we consider the model of the Pythagorean and neo-Pythagorean communities. The fifth-century Neoplatonic philosopher Hierocles, in his commentaries on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, states that the object of the purificatory rites of the Pythagoreans was to “restore the quintessential element to its original state.”⁵⁷ “Together with the discipline (askesis) of virtue and the recovery of truth, he shall also be diligent in the purification of his radiant (augoeides) body, which the [Chaldean] Oracles also call the subtle vehicle of the soul.”⁵⁸

Fludd too talks of the necessity of purifying the alchemist’s body into “transparent virgin earth or [a] vessel of purity” preparatory to receiving “the golden beam of formal perfection.”⁵⁹ Fludd’s alchemy therefore seems much more akin to a yogic process predicated on the perfection of the equivalent of the Pauline “resurrection body” (see the Origen quotation) than it does to any laboratory “chemical” experiment. If we are to take both the alchemist Sendivogius (whose New Chemical Light is referred to in Truth’s Golden Harrow) and Fludd at their word when they state that the alchemist should “not be led astray by those who waste their time and money on herbs, animals, stones and all kinds of materials but the right ones” (Sendivogius⁶⁰) and that “the true operation of this mystery differs so far from the Vulcanian and torrid artifice of spurious Alchemists as white is from black or light from darkness” (Fludd⁶¹) then we can only suppose that a definite form of spiritual/magical practice was pursued by both of them.

HYPOSTASIS OF CHRIST

In a significant passage, Fludd locates his discussion of the Philosophers’ Stone within ongoing debates as to the nature of Christ’s incarnation.

We cannot deny but that Christ the author of salvation (whose image and pattern this our mystery is) did rise both body and soul and so of two united together in perfection made one unity . . . and these are only one thing by the connection and unity of one spirit which is all one with them both. What, shall we therefore imagine him not to be because (he is) not material, or shall we deem him not material because spiritual, when every form imparts a matter, be it corporal or spiritual? Admit therefore that the Elixir be of a spiritual substance, [and that] excludes [not] it[s] . . . materiality, when corporality and spirituality vary not but in the refining and purifying.”⁶²

The “mystery” Fludd refers to is the alchemical operation itself, conceived of as an initiation (for as Fludd was doubtless aware, the word mystery literally means “initiation”) or rebirth. This rebirth is “patterned” after the resurrection of Christ, as well as, no doubt, the death/rebirth ritual that was the central “mystery” of the ancient Eleusinian rites. Fludd says that the body and soul of Christ were unified by “one spirit” (the Holy Ghost, conceived of in the Magian form of a participatory “we” rather than the Faustian/Cartesian “me”^*77) and indicates that both corporeity and the immaterial spirit are but modes or aspects of one another, depending on their “refinement” or “purity.”

For Fludd there was no mind-body duality such as we find emerging after the Cartesian bifurcation. When he notes that “corporality and spirituality vary not but in the refining,” he is stating the essence of the panpsychic hypothesis in its alchemical form. In Fludd’s imaginary the nature of mind or psyche is light, and as everything is composed of rays of light, then everything is mind, at least to some degree. This being the case, Fludd considers it entirely the mark of precipitancy to declare the Elixir immaterial, as Scot asserted. Furthermore, the unity of Christ’s two natures—in this case body and soul—is achieved by a tertiary spirit. This idea signals Fludd’s rallying of the Hermetic imaginary in defense of certain ideas that were a matter of continuing debate even in his own time. This discourse took the form of the controversy concerning the hypostasis of Christ.

Invoking Spengler again: “The controversy concerning the nature of Christ . . . was just those problems of substance which in the same form and with the same tendency fill the thoughts of all . . . Magian theologies.⁶³ The controversies Spengler alludes to are those of the Nestorian controversy over the hypostasis of Christ. After the conversion of Constantine, debates over the nature of Christ and the Trinity were to continue for over four hundred years. Much of this debate surrounded the rather indiscriminate use of the term hypostasis, which could mean either nature, substance, or person depending on context. Eventually the meaning of the word was delimited by the Council of Constantinople (381 CE) as being equivalent to the word prosopon, “person,” and that the Trinity was definitely “one substance and three hypostases.” In 451 CE the Council of Chalcedon stated that Christ was a single entity, possessed of two natures (en dyo physeis), “in a single person and hypostasis” (eis hen prosopon kai mian hypostasin).⁶⁴

In 431 CE, the Council of Ephesus, through the machinations of Cyril of Alexandria, condemned Nestorius of Constantinople for his duophysite conception of Christ. For Nestorius, God and humanity in Christ were two separate ousiai, two hypostases admitting no admixture, but Christ himself was only one prosopon. Cyril’s position that Christ was one physis and one hypostasis was used to explain how Christ ascended bodily to heaven—there could not be “two Sons enthroned together” next to God, but only one, the union of logos and flesh.⁶⁵ As Cyril held that Christ’s body was not heavenly, yet ascended to heaven, he has been seen as professing a form of Docetism, an issue only resolved at the Second Council of Ephesus (449 CE) when it was finally asserted that Christ was of two natures before his incarnation, but only one nature afterward. But this was not the end of the debate either; suffice to say that whereas the conception of Cyril of Alexander would continue to hold a reasonably respectable status, as a result of the council’s decision Nestorius of Constantinople would always be scorned as a heretic.

While these protracted debates might seem rather absurd today, the resolution of these problems was clearly necessary if the church was to make any sense out of the belief in the “resurrection of the flesh.” The Western Quicunque (Athanasian Creed) clearly states, “All men shall rise again with their bodies. . . . This is the catholic faith.”⁶⁶ The early church father Tertullian held to an extreme materialistic interpretation of this creed—for him the human body in all its fleshy corporeity would rise again. Origen, on the other hand, while rejecting the extreme Docetism of which he accused the Gnostics (rather ungenerously, for his views overlap with theirs at many points), seems to have proposed something akin to a subtle body as the vehicle of resurrection: “Another body, a spiritual and aetherial one, is promised us—a body that is not subject to physical touch, nor seen by physical eyes, nor burdened with weight. . . . In that spiritual body the whole of us will see, the whole hear, the whole serve as hands, the whole as feet.”⁶⁷

Quoting Saint Paul, Origen says that this body will be a whole new schema or plan. He uses the metaphor of the seed of a tree wherein the ratio or logos for the future tree is embedded. The principle in the seed he calls spintherimos, a neologism that literally means “emission of sparks” or “sparking.”⁶⁸ (In Truth’s Golden Harrow Fludd describes the long struggle of the alchemist for the Elixir, the quantity of which might well resemble the “weight of a grain of mustard seed,”⁶⁹ clearly a reference to the image of the mustard seed in the New Testament, e.g., Matthew 13:31–32; Luke 13:18–19, and Mark 4:30–32.)^*78

BAPTISMAL IRRADIATION

Origen’s opponent Methodius of Olympus criticized Origen for saying that after death the soul “has another vehicle [okhema] analogous in form to the sensible vehicle. This is to declare that the soul is incorporeal, in the Platonist manner.”⁷⁰ No doubt Origen did derive his knowledge of the astral body from Middle Platonism, but other Christian writers less disposed to Neoplatonic ideas (and especially that of an astral body) were wont to use the term okhema in ways that indicate a surprising connection between the idea of a starry vehicle and the rite of baptism.

The linking of the pneumatic vehicle both with an imagery of rays and the rite of baptism is clearly stated by Gregory of Nazianzus: “It was light which carried off Elias in the fiery chariot (αρμα), carried him off without consuming him . . . light is the baptismal irradiation which contains the great and wondrous mystery of our salvation.”⁷¹ (my italics) This remarkable statement is a further link in the vertigral configuration that suggests that Fludd, in conceiving of the world as constituted by interpenetrating rays, thought of his alchemical endeavors as taking advantage of this so as to institute some sort of ancillary, esoteric baptism.

In his commentary on the above quotation by Gregory of Nazianzus, Daniélou notes, “Again light is a symbol of the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the fieriness of Elias’s chariot that is considered here, rather than its being a vehicle to Heaven. But it is still the same context, in which baptismal grace is signified in its aspect of power of the Holy Spirit which carries one away into the life of Heaven.”⁷² Just as importantly, Daniélou demonstrates that early Christian art subsumed Hellenistic representations of Helios and his chariot into the mythology of the luciform vehicle of God, and even represented Christ himself as the “Sun of Justice.”⁷³ Baptized Christians were imagined as ascending to Heaven in this solar chariot of God, baptism often being referred to as okhema pro ouranos, by which was meant the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit in raising the soul to the heavens.

The idea of a sunlike vehicle that escorted souls to heaven is also found in the Chaldean Oracles, a series of fragments that were to have an enduring affect on European thought, especially after their reexamination by Ficino. The apotheosis of the initiate in the Chaldean Mystery rites was referred to as “elevation,” where the soul of the initiate becomes one with a ray sent toward him or her from the sun.⁷⁴ Importantly, the entire process of cognition is related to the apperception of the Supreme Intellect that “flashes with noetic divisions” (that is, the Platonic Ideas), the organ of apperception being the Platonic “eye of the soul” rather than the terrestrial organs of vision. Lewy notes that the Chaldean Oracles seem to be strongly influenced by Philonic interpretations of Plato, as they describe the activity of spiritual cognition in equivalent metaphors: the initiate, after purifying his senses through various ascetic practices, “stretches out” the “eye of the soul” toward the light of the Ideas. As he or she stretches out the rays of the “flower of the intellect”^*79 (as the Oracles have it), they are reciprocally met by rays sent from the divine Intellect. This conception of both Philo and the Chaldeans is ultimately drawn from Plato’s Republic where the “eye” of the human soul, after being “cleansed” of impurities is able to “incline its own beam upwards” to gaze on the primordial light that presents itself “last of all, and is seen only with an effort.”⁷⁵

The importance of these conceptions is that they had, either directly or indirectly, a determining influence on Robert Fludd. In fact, one can say that the figure of the reciprocal interpenetration of rays is the symbol ne plus ultra of Fludd’s alchemical and philosophical system. The basis of Fludd’s system of Hermetic alchemy can now be clearly delineated: the creation of the lapis philosophorum was accomplished by some sort of ascetic regimen (Fludd mentions the necessity of the purity of the practitioner many times in Truth’s Golden Harrow) that emulated similar regimens followed by Neoplatonists (Plotinus is a perfect example), the followers of Pythagoras, and the Chaldean initiates;^*80 the alchemist, through purity of heart, or perhaps merely the alignment of the rational intellect (mens) with the divine Nous, awakens the Gnostic “mental divine beam” within him- or herself, projecting it toward the reciprocal influx of the Holy Spirit, itself conceived of as a beam or ray of fiery light. Again invoking a contemporary figuration, one may say that the interference pattern produced by these intersecting irradiations is the perfected adamantine body of the alchemist, the entire process forming a baptismal irradiation or rebirth.

This entire process is predicated on the central Gnostic mythologem of the alien light within, a mythologem that Fludd extends to include a vectorial component. This is an important extension of the morphology of this particular ideal object. Rather than a static spark hidden within, the alien light is imagined as having a spiritual and temporal direction or alignment—it is no longer a trapped scintilla, but rather a ray or beam that is literally projected toward the reciprocating influx of the Holy Spirit from which it originated.

By interpolating the figure of the subtle body between the extreme poles of mind and matter Fludd was able to assert that the lapis philosophorum was indeed within the “material realm,” as the difference between mind and matter was one of degree or subtlety rather than of kind. In this way Fludd proposed an alchemical solution to the mind-body dualism that plagued Christian reinterpretations of the Platonic division between the physical and intellectual worlds. The division between subject and object as hypostasized by modern science is sometimes said to be a continuation of the relationship between the spirit and the flesh as envisioned by Christianity. Physicist and philosopher Carl F. Freiherr von Weizsäcker unequivocally states, “I believe that the distance which in the modern mind exists between subject and object is a direct legacy of the Christian distance from the world.”⁷⁶

Robert Fludd’s conception of the quintessential “mental beam” and its functioning within the Hermetic pneumatic economy is a solution that bridges this distance by insisting on the coextensive corporeality of things, yet it is a conception that (as one would have supposed considering his Anglican background) is shorn of the more obvious erotic sensibilities such as are evidenced in the works of Ficino. Nonetheless one may assume that such a sensibility operates in the background, as it were, of Fludd’s work, as the figuration of a “perfected body” would surely indicate.

In closing this first part, I will recall Joseph Needham’s characterization of the essentially scientific endeavors of the Daoist alchemists in their search for the Elixir of immortality: “The philosophy of Taoism . . . though containing the elements of political collectivism, religious mysticism, and the training of the individual for a material immortality, developed many of the most important features of the scientific attitude.”⁷⁷ The essential suppositions within this scientific (that is, experimental) attitude are very significant when seen in relationship to Fludd’s own Hermetic alchemy. As Maspero notes:

The Graeco-Roman world early adopted the habit of setting Spirit and Matter in opposition to one another, and the religious form of this was the conception of a spiritual soul attached to a material body. But the Chinese never separated Spirit and Matter, and for them the world was a continuum passing from the void at one end to the grossest matter at the other; hence “soul” never took up the antithetical character in relation to matter.⁷⁸

A similar notion supported the alchemical vision of Robert Fludd, and for whatever reason, one suggests that similar “yogic” practices to those of the Chinese alchemists underpinned his own alchemical practices. If only for this reason alone, the Hermetic/alchemical ideas of Fludd are in need of reevaluation if we are to develop a postmodern perspective on the mind-body duality still sanctioned by modernist science.

PART 2: NEO-MIKROKOSMOS

The idea of the presence of a logos-code within matter was interpreted by Robert Fludd as the reflection of the divine structure of the universe within all things. This Fluddian “pattern of resurrection” is but one facet of an ideal object adumbrated by the notion of the subtle corporeity. Furthermore the logos-code figure has resonances that have exerted their “alchemical” fascination over the centuries. Even a cursory examination of such a homeomorphology would reveal such varied expres-sions as Leibniz’s entelechies, Mary Shelley’s “modern Prometheus,” and the possibility of patenting the DNA code of living tissue. One might say that each of these—and perhaps especially the latter—are the modern equivalents of Fludd’s hylarchic quest, especially if one avails oneself of the vertigral perspective.

Robert Fludd’s pursuit of the logos-code has reverberations within our own era. It is possible, for example, to establish a connection between the Hermetic notion of a communicative economy of interpenetrating rays and the ideas of embryologist J. Z. Young and mathematician René Thom that reveal the deployment of similar figurations and similar attendant ideas.

Young has developed the notion that each species of animal exhibits the functioning of its own “cosmology.” A cosmology is a system of representations within the brain: representations of the particular environment in which the organism exists. Like Uexküll at the turn of the last century, Young sees different species as being constitutionally limited by a combination of their sensory apparatus and the “mental models” that are the direct consequence of a history of sensory input. Noting the highly influential 1959 essay by Lettvin and colleagues, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” Young states that the point of this paper is that “the frog does not witness the fine scene we see, with the willows waving in the breeze. He sees only those things that are necessary for him,”⁷⁹ such as the movements of a bug, or the larger movements of a predator. This is a consequence of the fact that the maintenance of life depends on correct response to the environment. We should notice here a hierarchy of organisms, an order of increasing complexity determined by their responses to the increasingly complex “worlds” in which they exist, a “naturalized” (that is, scientific) version of the Great Chain of Being.

Young’s idea of an internal cosmology is mirrored in the work of Thom, who acknowledges the similarities of Young’s conceptions to his own.⁸⁰ Thom states:

I have reached the conviction that there are simulating structures of all natural external forces at the very heart of the genetic endowment of our species, at the unassailable depth of the Heraclitean logos of our soul, and these structures are ready to go into action whenever necessary. The old idea of Man, the microcosm, mirroring World, the macrocosm, retains all its force: who knows man, knows the Universe.⁸¹

Thom believes that not only are there “local charts associated with the organism that describe all the metrical structure of Euclidean space”⁸² as well as models of all relevant aspects of the organism’s environment represented within the mind, but also models of the activities and mental contents of all predators as well. In other words, the minds/mental models of other animals are modeled within the mind/mental models of any particular organism, taking the form of (presumably), I know that you know that I know . . . and so on. This is the force behind his assertion that “who knows man knows the Universe,” an idea distinctly reminiscent of Synesius’s conviction that “the human intellect contains within itself the forms of all things that exist.” This idea that a mind contains models of all other minds is also found in Leibniz’s concept of the monad, as will be seen in the following chapter. We may further say that Synesius’s “signatures,” so important to Paracelsus, Fludd, and Agrippa, are at least thematically equivalent to Thom’s geometric, chreodic structures. They serve the same function within a universal economy imagined as being composed of intersecting geometrical figures (Fludd’s interpenetrating twin triangles, for example) and rays.

But Thom goes further than this when he maintains that all particular individuals are “derived by specialization (as is said in algebraic geometry) from a universal model” and that the “big evolutionary advances of history will be described by global deformations of this universal model.”⁸³ Thom is not particularly forthcoming in regard to a detailed description of this universal model; he relies instead on a suggestive metaphor. Where, in the final analysis, does life come from, “but from the continuous flux of energy from the sun?”⁸⁴ The flux of solar photons is intercepted the moment they reach the surface of the ocean or earth, their energy converted to heat, and this conversion takes the form of a “shock wave.” Life, according to Thom, takes the form of the “smoothing out” of this shock-waveform through the action of the “subterranean circulation” of energy in the form of chemical energy. This circulation echoes “the inverted pyramid of the ecology of living beings,” each species being “a structurally stable singularity, a chreod of this energy.”⁸⁵

This highly abstract portrait of the “universal model” is not particularly helpful from a “hard science” point of view, but on the level of a qualitative, even poetic description of the global model from which all terrestrial forms are derived it certainly displays strong resonances with the Hermetic model of the anima mundi and the idea that all individuated organisms “refer” (as Fludd would say) to this universal “font.” One also needs to remember that Thom considers rocks, human beings, and a jet of water as all being formally equivalent, structurally stable chreods or attractors. In other words, at a certain level of description—the most fundamental, according to Thom—everything becomes a function of certain geometrical relationships. According to Thom’s argument, all these diverse forms or functions are but simple deformations of the one, universal model: an anima mundi. Quite plainly, this imagery also recalls Spengler’s Magian, pneumatic “we” that supervenes over and above the egoistic, Faustian “I” that characterizes the modern period.

We observe in Thom’s work, perhaps to a greater extreme than that of Young, the notion that highly abstract structures (chreods) are the medium by which the delimited, mutually exclusive categories of organism and environment are dissolved. In fact Thom regards his geometrical, chreodic descriptions as being the only viable monistic solution to the mind-body duality, “reducing the paradox of the soul and body to a single geometrical object.”⁸⁶ Both thinkers place great stress on the fact that the “environment” and the nisus of homeostasis are the determining factors in the formation of “cosmologies” (Young) and “archetypal chreods” (Thom) that ultimately delineate the “singularities” (Thom) that are organisms. This manner of talking, I suggest, is but of its times, a fact that fails to mask the Hermetic notions they plainly revive. The ascendancy of biologic descriptions of organisms and their environment in late twentieth-century discourse, and of molecular biology as the research area where the “secret of life” may be found, reflects contemporary interest in “complex” and negentropic structures (such as the phenomenon of life). On a formal level, I propose, discussion of chreods or cosmologies reflects Hermetic and Neoplatonic conceptions of the relation of the sublunary mens to nous. By ascribing the instantiation of geometrical chreods or cosmologies to brains rather than minds, these thinkers have substituted a biologic for a mentalistic vocabulary. But this simple act of substitution merely postpones rather than provides convincing answers to all the problems associated with mental representations and the apprehension of meaning.

The point, surely, is this: that both the Hermetic/Neoplatonic and the (monistic) materialist descriptions of an organism’s place in the world are formally equivalent. The biologic “material” description, like the mentalistic “immaterial” description, relies on the notion that there is a covariance “between the very structure and organisation of the animal and the demands of the environment. Animal structure might thus in a sense reflect the nature of the world itself,” as Young states.⁸⁷ From the “mentalistic,” Neoplatonic point of view, the “survival” of mind relies on the “structure and organisation” of thought reflecting the rational organization of the world. To invert Young’s biologic model, the nous structure must reflect the essential nature of the world. Following the logic of both Synesius and Thom therefore, all and everything must always already be modeled within the human mind: omni in omnibus.

The ideas of both Thom and Young are striking examples of late twentieth-century natural-scientific ideas that bear a clear homeo-morphic relationship with the intercommunicative radiation economy first articulated by Synesius and subsequently advanced by Robert Fludd. Particularly in Thom’s case we observe the notion of primary reality as being composed of sets of geometric patterns, the ultimate result, as they must be, of the interpenetration of rays. This homologous relationship demonstrates the necessary periodic reappearance (or insistence) of an imaginary constellated around certain ideal objects. There exist therefore certain objects structured by an inferential economy of entailment relations whose changing morphology cannot mask the reappearance of the same functional relationships within a given imaginary. Young and Thom’s substitution of a late twentieth-century biologic/materialistic vocabulary is an example of a changing jargon, but not of a new set of functions or relationships.

The geometric imaginary of a communicative economy predicated on pneumatic rays was Robert Fludd’s manner of articulating the fundamental description of reality. Geometry is primarily a set of invariant relationships between rays, points, and curvatures. It was Fludd’s conviction, just as it became for a thinker like René Thom, that this set of relationships, reified within the fundamental pneumatic realm, both proved and provided the rational undergirding of phenomena.

RAYS AND VIBRATIONS

Fludd pictured the panpsychic doctrine in terms of an economy composed of communicative radiation. This radiation paradigm continued in various guises (“magnetic lines,” “luminiferous aether”) up until its fundamental transfiguration after the advent of non-euclidean geometry in the mid-nineteenth century. When Riemann and Lobachevsky demonstrated the contingent nature of Euclid’s fifth postulate (and that, in fact, parallel lines could and do meet on a geodesic), a worldview in which the figuration of rectilinear rays was fundamental was beginning to become unraveled. The telling blow was delivered at the turn of the last century when Eddington, in the company of a select few other scientists, observationally confirmed Einstein’s prediction that light rays produced by a star would be “bent” when coming within the vicinity of planetary^*81 gravitation, itself the product of the curvature of space-time. This experimental confirmation came as no surprise to Einstein, but rang a note of finality to one particular aspect of the Hermetic imaginary. The “monstrous,” “imaginary” geometry of Lobachevsky and Riemann, so influential on the development of Einstein’s ideas, became the basis for a new paradigm of curvatures, unfoldings of space-time, and continuous fields.

As a consequence of the Einsteinian conception, so paradigmatically at variance with the Hermetic imaginary, it might be thought that we have lost the force of the Hermetic worldview and that its imaginary has finally become abandoned. But this is far from the case. While non-euclidean geometry significantly modified the nature of rays (i.e., they could be curved or bent rather than universally rectilinear), Einstein’s universe would ultimately reject them for a more comprehensive account that dispensed with the idea of rays altogether. By this I mean that with the introduction of the idea of the curvature of space-time, and the conviction that “spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move” while “mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve,” as physicist John Wheeler puts it,⁸⁸ we observe the return of an imaginary resonant with such Hermetic conceptions as the spherical body of the anima mundi of Plato’s Timaeus (for Einstein the shape of space-time is that of a hypersphere), the spherical soul of Plotinus and Ficino, and the spherical hypercorporeity of the okhema or sidereal vehicle. Rather than an economy of “rays” and spheres, of a God who is like a circle “in which all straight lines drawn from the centre to the circumference are said to be in the centre” (Fludd), Einstein/Minkowski space-time enfolds all communicative “emissions” (causal forces) into the one all-encompassing description of the meshing of curvatures.

Nor was this particularly an innovation on Einstein’s or Minkowski’s part. It had been “in the air” since the popular interest in the idea of the fourth dimension in the late 1800s. In 1876 William Clifford, the translator of Riemann’s work into English, developed a theory of matter and its activity based on the notion of the curvature of space. Matter thus became the localization of curvatures of space, taking the form of “little hills” in the continuum. “This property of being curved or distorted is continuously being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave, such that, this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter.”⁸⁹

Clifford further postulated that electricity and magnetism were the result of the bending of higher-dimensional space, antedating Einsteinian theories that unite the (Newtonian) notion of force with the geometry of space by about fifty years.⁹⁰ Fourth-dimensional theorist Charles Hinton believed that the phenomenon of light itself was a “vibration” of the unperceived fourth dimension. It its essentials, this is the conclusion of contemporary physics as well.⁹¹

Within the Fluddian imaginary we also observe a similar concern with the communicative and constitutive nature of vibration. Some of Fludd’s most well-known images are of the Pythagorean monochord on which are inscribed the various attributions of notes, harmonics, celestial and sublunary beings. This instrument in its entirety (i.e, the full gamut of its intercommunicative “correspondences”) is operated by God in his aspect of Tetragrammaton (fourfold name), which Fludd described as “the infinite dimension in and between all things.”⁹² Vibration was imagined by Fludd as that which communicates “in and between” all actualities, a figuration that, as we have seen, is still with us today. Interestingly, Fludd’s conviction that the Tetragrammaton or deity was the infinite dimension within and between all things is an early precursor of late nineteenth-century conceptions (such as those of William Clifford) that saw the fourth dimension as precipitating phenomena such as the appearance of matter. In the imaginary of Robert Fludd, light was the fundamental reality behind all appearances, all matter: it was found within the interstices of reality, between the atoms, if you like, and certainly not in some far-off realm. In this way Fludd imagined that the Holy Spirit was infused within all matter.

In contemporary times the equivalent of the unitary “element” behind the hylomorphic world is that of electromagnetic radiation, even if this radiation is no longer imagined as traveling in straight lines. Light, radio waves, X-rays, in fact all phenomena, all appearances, are but various amplitudes of one underlying “stuff ”: radiation. Everyone knows that it was the Curies who first recognized the energetic properties within a naturally occurring element, but why did they call it radium? The present examination of Robert Fludd’s imaginary would propose that they were merely following a logical line of development in the Hermetic imaginary of interpenetrative rays. There was no “scientific” reason to expect that the properties of radium manifested themselves as straight lines (and none nowadays), but there certainly is an imaginal logic that would precipitate such a conclusion. Contemporary science is able to place all phenomena along a continuum of radiation—a Great Chain of Radiation. If one were to hand such a description to Robert Fludd, we can only suppose that he would be happy to see the continuing influence of the Hermetic imaginary down through the centuries.

It is no exaggeration to say that all phenomena are considered by contemporary science to be examples of amplitude positions within a radiation continuum. One of the most interesting aspects of late twentieth-century science was the reappearance of the Pythagorean doctrine of the vibratory harmony of matter, that all things are the result of harmonic ratios. “Superstring” theory proposes that all fun-damental particles (electrons, quarks, leptons, muons, etc.) are but differing vibratory frequencies of a single filamentous string. According to this latest development in theoretical physics the entities that are the ultimate constituents of atoms are but differing vibratory levels of a single substratum imagined as a string or line. Matter, then, actualizes the form of an image observed in an oscilloscope: a single line forms on the screen (its lowest vibratory state), which, when “energized,” begins to change shape into a wave (an electron perhaps) that eventually becomes a chaotic, spaghetti-like image observed at its highest vibratory level. In superstring theory each level of vibration, from undisturbed filament to violent spaghetti-chaos (and all states in between), represents some fundamental particle.

The idea of vibration as being the fundamental characteristic behind phenomena (and subatomic theory is considered to be the most fundamental aspect of description in twentieth-century physics) was first proposed by the Pythagorean school. Yet, following the logic of vertigrality, we would be mistaken in thinking that the reappearance of this idea is sporadic or unusual. Isaac Newton in his Optics recognized that color was merely the result of “colorless” vibrations entering the sensorium, “as sound in a bell or musical string, or other sounding body, is nothing but a trembling motion.”⁹³ Leibniz held to the same view, extending this vibratory character to sensuous phenomena in general. Behind the charm of music was the “harmony of numbers,” an “account that we do not notice, but which the soul nonetheless takes, of the beating or vibration of sounding bodies, which meet each other at certain intervals,” and the pleasures “caused by the other senses amount to much the same thing, although we may not be able to explain it so distinctly.”⁹⁴ We observe in Leibniz, furthermore, a hierarchy of the senses with the “beauty of proportion” apprehended by sight and the harmonies of music afforded by hearing accorded the highest value. The impressions recorded by the other senses were less distinct, and therefore less “close” to the rational faculty.

CONCLUSION

It is a truism within the standard account of science to maintain that the force of Newton’s depiction of universal gravitation was the final straw that broke the still-lingering Aristotelian division between the celestial and sublunary realms; realms with their own, not necessarily reconcilable, laws. Newton finally demonstrated that the movements of the quintessential stars and the falling of an apple were governed by a single universal “law.”

Yet this famous truism is rather inaccurate. The Hermetic world-view, influential for centuries before the close of the seventeenth century, held to the notion of the interconnectedness of all phenomena in the universe. Indeed, Aristotle himself saw the universe in organismic terms, with its various parts working in harmony like the physiology of some gigantic beast. The Hermeticist saw the universe in terms of correspondences and “signatures,” powers and intelligences (the pan-psychic hypothesis) all cooperating within a vectorial continuum. Jacob Bronowski characterized Kepler’s astronomical studies in this manner:

Kepler wanted to relate the speeds of the planets to musical intervals. He tried to fit the five regular solids into their orbits. None of these likenesses worked, and they have been forgotten; yet they have been and they remain the stepping stones of every creative mind. Kepler felt for his laws by way of metaphors, he searched mystically for likenesses with what he knew in every strange corner of nature. And when among these guesses he hit upon his laws, he did not think of their numbers as the balancing of a cosmic bank account, but as a revelation of the unity in all nature.⁹⁵

For Kepler and Robert Fludd, science was a revelation of the logos-code of the world. Both were informed by the same ideas, but only one has entered into the general discourse about early science. This is primarily because of Kepler’s chance discovery of his third law of planetary motion, a discovery that was instrumental in the subsequent development of Newton’s ideas. The difference between the Hermetic and Newtonian views hangs on the notion of the “law” of gravitation. Newtonian laws are deterministic, irreversible, and mechanistic (in fact all of these qualifications amount to saying the same thing), whereas the laws of the Hermetic world were determined by a transcosmic Legislator and were perhaps as periodically mutable as was his will.

This logos-code was the structure that united the unconditioned with the conditioned, the receptacle with the individual. John Muirhead’s summation of the fundamental orientation of the Platonic tradition is just as apposite a characterization of the Hermetic view: “There is nothing more vital to the Platonic tradition, or that distinguishes it more sharply from its Democritan rival, bent on explaining the whole in terms of the parts into which ‘victorious analysis’ resolves it, than that, in the Order of reality, the whole preceeds the parts.”⁹⁶

Most importantly in relationship to the Hermetic alchemy of Fludd, from the previous statement it follows “that to know the reality or essence of things we have to look at them not in their feeble beginnings, but in the light of what they are when most fully developed, when the parts or phases which they exhibited are most completely permeated with the form or idea of their function in the whole.”⁹⁷ This might well serve to characterize Fludd’s hylarchic alchemy, a quest to discover the “perfection” of the hypercorporeity or “mental beam.”

J. Z. Young believes that the workings of the cerebral “cosmologies” of humankind are undergoing a subtle shift—a shift that, like Fludd’s figure of the “mental beam,” signals a transcendent awareness of the operation of the rational (logos-code) in the world.

[Humankind] is limited by [its] very brain structure to [gather information] in certain ways. [It seeks] for patterns of order similar to those personal and social ones that maintain [its] own homeostasis. But [it is] beginning to transcend these limitations in seeing some thing of the whole ordered pattern of life on earth and at least in looking for it in the Cosmos.⁹⁸

Comparing Young’s statement to Bronowski’s assessment of Kepler’s work, we observe that Young is thinking along lines already understood by Kepler centuries ago. The notion that the “whole ordered pattern [i.e., logos]^*82 of life on earth” may be found throughout the kosmos, that a cognitive and cognizable order (the “cosmology” of human “brain structure”) obtains throughout, is demonstration that an imaginary predicated on the micro/macrocosmic couplet may yet again be reasserting its vertigral influence.

Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy brings to the fore the notion of the ineluctible interpenetration of mind within nature and that the experiential scientist (experimental alchemist) is pursuing a metaphysical quest in his explorations of the world of “matter.” Transformation of matter therefore becomes transformation of self. The idea that consciousness has something “real” to contribute within a material, experimental process was perhaps first reannounced by Heisenberg and Schrödinger in the early decades of the twentieth century with, respectively, their uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. What both these announcements amount to, in the context of the examinations of this chapter, is that the intuition of Robert Fludd and the Hermeticists—that mind permeates all “matter”—is in need of reassessment (and reconfiguration) in recognition of its vertigral status within the history of knowledge practices.