Terence McKenna On Carl Jung, Hermeticism And The Fall of Empires

[Music] [Music] it was my intent lately to focus on the Hermetic Corpus and Alchemy I've just gotten tired of talking about psychedelic drugs and always saying the same things over and over again nevertheless it's a challenge to go outside my own Bailey wish I mean I've had an interest in hermeticism and Alchemy since I was about 14 and read yung's psychology and studies on Alchemy and it opened for me the fact of the existence of this vast literature a literature that is very little read or understood in the modern context the yans have made much of it but to their own purposes and perhaps not always with complete Fidelity to the intent of the tradition we'll talk a lot about the yian approach but there are other approaches even within the 20th century uh I believe since I don't have the catalog I'm not absolutely certain but I believe the catalog urged you to read jordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition by Dame Francis Yates and this is though Francis yates's scholarship is very controversial I think that to get an overview of the landscape her book is probably the best single book between cover it's not pleasing to some factions and we can talk about that I mean we will probably discover within the group all strains of alchemical Illusions and delusions that have always driven this particular engine but I thought to get one book that sort of covered the territory that was a good one to start with well then I found out that it's very hard to get this book I didn't realize that because it's been sitting on my shelf for years Richard bird found a reprint at the book B tree I wasn't aware of this particular addition so though probably none of you brought it with you in heavily underlined form if after this weekend you want to try and get it it is available and if you can't get that addition why a good book service can probably come up with the first edition which is rout ledge Kagan Paul I wouldn't hold a weekend like this simply to go over a body of ancient literature if I didn't think it had some efficacy or import for the modern dilemma and some of you may know the song by The Grateful Dead in which the refrain is I need a miracle every day I think any reasonable person can conclude that the Redemption of the world if it's to be achieved can only be achieved through magic it's too late for science it's too late for hortatory politics well it's very interesting that every ancient literature has its apocalypses and in the Hermetic literature there is a prophecy I think it's in book two but that really doesn't matter and the prophecy is that a day will come when men no longer care for the Earth and at that day the gods will depart and everything will be thrown into Primal chaos and this prophecy was very strongly in the minds of the strains of non-Christian thought that evolved at the close at the centuries of closure of the Roman Empire when you look back into historical time it's when you reach the first and second centuries after Christ that you reach a world whose Psychology was very much like the psychology of our own time it was a psychology of Despair and exhaustion this is because Greek science which had evolved under the egis of democrati atomism and platonic metaphysics had essentially come to a dead end in those centuries we can debate the reasons why this happened an obvious suggestion would be that they failed to develop an experimental method and so everything just dissolved into competing schools of philosophical speculation and a profound pessimism had spread through the helenistic world and out of that pessimism and in the context of that kind of universal despair that attends the dissolution of great Empires a literature was created from the 1st to the 4th centuries after Christ which we call the Hermetic Corpus or in some cases the Tris magistic hymns now this body of literature was misunderstood by later centuries especially the Renaissance because it was taken at face value and assumed to be at least contemporary with Moses if not much older so the Renaissance view of hermeticism was based on a tragic misunderstanding of the true Antiquity of this material and there are people who still would have us believe that this literature anti-at the Mosaic law that it is as old as dynastic Egypt but this is an indefensible position from my point of view in the early 16th century two men a father and son Isaac and Merrick cabin showed through the new science of philology that this material was in fact late helenistic now I've always said that I am not a classicist in the vioni sense in the sense that there is a certain strain of thought that always wants to believe that the oldest stuff is the best stuff this is not the case to my mind to my mind what is amazing is how recent everything is so I have no sympathy with the fans of Lost Atlantis or any of that kind of malarchi because to me what is amazing is how it all is less than 10,000 years old anything older than 10,000 years puts us into the realm of an aceramic Society relying on chipped Flint for its primary technology the Hermetic Corpus is the most poetic and cleanly expressed outpouring of ancient knowledge that we possess but it was reworked in the hands of these late helenistic peoples and it is essentially a religion of the Redemption of the earth through magic it has a great de to a tradition called civilian which means that mandanis and mandanis was a kind of Proto helenistic nosis that laid great stress on the power of Life zoa bios and in that sense it has a tremendously contemporary ring to it we also are living in the Twilight of a great Empire and I don't particularly mean the American Empire I mean the Empire of European thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern industrialism the empire in short of science science has exhausted itself and was desacralized it's still able to perform its magical tricks but it has no claim on a metaphysic with any meaning because the program of rational understanding that was pursued by science has pushed so deeply into the phenomenon of nature that the internal contradiction of the method are now exposed for all to see in discussing Alchemy especially we will meet with the concept of the coincidencia oppositorum or the union of opposites this is an idea that is completely alien to science it's the idea that nothing can be understood unless it is simultaneously viewed as both being what it is and what it is not and in alchemical symbolism we will meet again and again the symbolical expression of the coincidence Denia oppositorum it may be in the form of a hermaphrodite it may be in the form of the Union of soul and Luna or it may be in the form of the Union of mercury with lead or with sulfur in other words alchemical thinking is thinking that is always antithetical and always holds the possibility that by a mere shift of perspective its opposite premise will gain power and come into Focus there's a wonderful book called The Forge and The Crucible by Mira eliade in which he shows that the shaman is the brother of the Smith the Smith is the metallurgist the worker in metals and this is where Alchemy has its roots in a sense Alchemy is older than the Tris magistus Corpus and then it is also given a new lease on life by the philosophical underpinnings which the Corpus her medum provides it the word alchemy can be traced back to mean Egypt or a blackening and in its early EST strata it probably refers to techniques referring to dying meaning the coloring of cloth and gilding of metals and the forging and working of metal I mean we who take this for granted have no idea how mysterious and Powerful this seemed to ancient people and in fact it would seem so to us if we had anything to do with it I mean how many of us are welders or casters of metal it's a magical process to take for instance cinear a red soft ore and by the mere Act of heating it in a furnace it will sweat liquid mercury onto its surface well we have unconsciously embi the ontology of science where we have the Mind firmly separated from the world we take this for granted it's effortless because it's the ambience of the civilization we've been born into but in an earlier age and some writers would say a more naive age but I wonder about that but in an earlier age mind and matter were seen to be alloyed together throughout nature so that the sweating of mercury out of cinear is not a material process it's a process in which the mind and the observations of the metal worker maintain important role and let's talk for a moment about Mercury because the spirit mercurious is almost the patron deity of alchemy you all know what Mercury looks like at room temperature it's a silvery liquid that flows it's like a mirror for the Alchemists and this is just a very short exercise in alchemical thinking for the Alchemists Mercury was mind itself in a sense and by by tracing through the steps by which they reached that conclusion you can have a taste of what alchemical thinking was about Mercury takes the form of its container if I pour mercury into a cup it takes the shape of the cup if I pour it into a test tube it takes the shape of the test tube this taking the shape of its container is a quality of mind and yet here it is present in a flowing silvery metal the other thing is is mercury is a reflecting surface you never see Mercury what you see is the world that surrounds it which is perfectly reflected in its surface like a moving mirror you see and then if you've ever as a child I mean I have no idea how toxic this process is but I spent a lot of time as a child hounding my grandfather for his hearing aid batteries which I would then smash with a hammer and get the Mercury out and collect it in little bottles and carry car it around with me well the wonderful thing about Mercury is when you pour it out on a surface and it beads up then each bead of mercury becomes a little microcosm of the world and yet the Mercury flows back together into a Unity well as a child I had not yet emed the assumptions and the ontology of science I was functioning as an alchemist for me Mercury was this fascinating magical substance onto which I could project the contents of my mind and a child playing with Mercury is an alchemist hard at work no doubt about it well so then this is a phenomenon in the physical world and then the mind is a phenomenon in the cartisian distinction which is between the res extensa and the res Varin this is the great splitting of the world into two parts I remember Al Wang once said to me we were talking about the yin yang symbol and he said you know the interesting thing is not the yin or the Yang the interesting thing is the shaped surface that runs between them and that shaped surface is a river of alchemical mercury now where the Alchemists saw this River of alchemical mercury is in the boundary between waking and sleeping there is a place not quite sleeping not quite waking and there flows this River of alchemical mercury where you can project the contents of the unconscious and you can read it back to yourself this kind of thinking is confounding to Scientific thought where the effort is always to fix everything to a given identity and a given set of behaviors now the other hermetic perception that is well illustrated by just thinking for a moment about Mercury is the notion and this is Central to all hermetic thinking of the microcosm and the macrocosm that somehow the great world the whole of the cosmos is reflected in the mystery of man meaning men and women it's reflected in the mystery of the human mind and body interface so for an alchemist it makes perfect sense to extrapolate from this internal uh what we call internal psychological processes to ex internal processes in the world that distinction doesn't exist for The Alchemist and let me tell you the longer I live the more I am convinced that this is absolutely the truth the myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast into matter that we are lost in a universe that has no meaning for us that we must make our meaning this is what SRA kirkgard and all those people are saying that we must make our meaning it reaches its most absurd expression in sra's statement that nature is mute I mean this is as far from alchemical thinking as you can possibly get because for The Alchemist nature was a great book an open book to be read by putting nature through processes that revealed not only its inner mechanics but the inner mechanics of The Alchemist well in other contexts I've talked about the importance of language and how our word world is made of language and part of the problem in understanding Alchemy is that the language is slipping out of our reach we are so completely imbued with the cartisian categories of the res Varin the world of thought and the res extensia the world of three-dimensional space causality and the conservation of matter and energy and so forth that in order to do more than carry out a kind of scholarship of alchemy we have to create an alchemical language or a field in which alchemical language can take place some of you may have been with me a couple of weeks ago in Malibu when Joan Halifax and I debated the roots of Buddhism and I think Joan deserves great credit for saying that Buddhism would never have taken root in America were it not for the Psychedelic phenomenon not that Buddhism is psychedelic it in fact is fairly touchy about that but Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root and I wager that I would never have gotten to first base with proposing a weekend on Alchemy at esselin were it not understood that psychedelics have prepared people for the notion that mind and world can be ped together like Mercury and sulfur like the sophic waters to create a new kind of understanding because otherwise modernity has fixed our minds in the category of cartisian rationalism and so I will not claim and do not in fact think it's so that there was anything overtly psychedelic in the sense of pharmacologically based about alchemy when we look back through the alchemical literature there's very little evidence that it was pharmacologically driven only when you get to the very last emptions of the alchemical impulse someone like paracelsus do you get the use of opium however it is interesting that the great drugs of modern society were accidentally discovered by Alchemists in their research distilled alcohol is a product of alchemical work and then as I mentioned opium was very heavily used by the paracelsian school but what they possessed was an ability to liquefy their mental categories and then to project the contents of the Mind onto these processes and read them back now this is what made Alchemy so fascinating to the yungan school because the jungians were discovering the unconscious and they realized before yung's involvement with alchemy that the best material for Psychotherapy to work upon was dreams and mythology and these were the two poles of the data field that the discovery of the unconscious was working on well then Yung had the pressions to realize that Alchemy which to that point as the gentleman over here said had been dismissed as a naive effort to turn base medals into gold this is the first fiction that you have to absolutely Purge from your mind the only Alchemists who ever tried to turn base medals into gold were charlatans the so-called puffers they were called that not only for their exaggerated speech but for their use of Bellows to drive their fires Alchemy has always had a core of true adepts and then a surround of misguided souls and outright con artists who are trying to change base Metals into gold now it's interesting that science in its naivity in the 20th century has actually completed the program of swedo alchemy you can if you have a sufficiently powerful nuclear reactor change lead into gold I mean the cost is staggering it has no economic importance whatsoever but it can be done by bombarding gold with a sufficient amount of heavy particles lead you can change it into gold but this is not what the original intent was in fact when we look at the history of 20th century science we will see that in a way it's a misunderstanding of what the alchemical goals were to be and one by one it has done these things that were stated goals of the Alchemists except that the Alchemists always spoke in simbolize and in a secret control language that was symbolic okay now another point that was brought up in going around the circle was the externalization of the soul and what we're trying to do in this lecture is study and talk about the idea of redeeming the world through magic and how is this to be done well the philosopher stone is a complex Lex of ideas that no matter how you divide it no matter how you slice it it's very difficult to hold the pith essence of this concept but what it really comes down to is the idea that spirit is somehow resident in matter in a very diffuse form the goal of hermetic thinking and later Alchemy is the concentration and Redemption of this Spirit a focusing of it a bringing of it together this this is an idea that was common in the helenistic world not only to hermetic thinking but also to gnosticism gnosticism is the idea that somehow the pure holy real light of being was scattered through a universe of darkness and of saturnine power and that the goal is that by a process which we can call yogic or alchemical or meditative or moral ethical the light must be gathered and concentrated in the body and then somehow released and redeemed all esoteric Traditions East and West talk about the creation of this body of light and this is one metaphor for the externalization of the soul the Philosopher's Stone is another and I will challenge you to try and imagine what the achievement of the Philosopher's Stone would be like because it's in trying to think that way that you begin to dissolve the categories of the cartisian Trap so image for a moment an object a material which can literally do anything it can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever so what do I mean I mean that if you possessed the Philosopher's Stone and you were hungry you could eat it if you needed to go somewhere you could spread it out and sit on it and it would take you there if you needed a piece of information it would be become the equivalent of a computer screen and it would tell you things if you needed a companion it would talk to you if you needed to take a shower you could hold it over your head and water would pour out now you see this is an impossibility that's right it's a coincidencia oppositorum it is something that behaves like imagination and matter without ever doing damage to the ontological status of one or the other this sounds like pure pathology in the context of modern thinking because we expect things to stay still and be what they are and undergo the growth and degradation that is inimical to them but no the Redemption of spirit and matter means the exteriorization of the human soul and the interiorization of the human body so that it is an image freely commanded in the imagination imagination is Central to the alchemical Opus because it is literally process that goes on the realm of the imagination taken to be a physical Dimension and I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination we have exhausted the world of three-dimensional space we are polluting it we are overpopulating it we are using it up somehow the Redemption of the human Enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination and to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of Science and Christianity and rationalism and we have to re-empower and reencounter the mind and we can do this psychedelically we can do this yogic or we can do it alchemically and hermetically now there is present in the world at the moment or at least I like to think so an Impulse which I have named the archaic revival what happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble and you can use this in your own life when you really get in trouble what you should do is say what did I believe in the last sane moments that I experienced and then go back to that moment and act from it even if you no longer believe it now in the Renaissance this happened the Scholastic Universe dissolved new classes new forms of wealth new systems of navigation and new scientific tools made it impossible to maintain the fiction of the medieval cosmology and there was a sense that the world was dissolving and at that moment the movers and shakers of that Civilization reached backward in time to the last sane moment they had ever known and they discovered that it was Classical Greece and they invented classicism in the 15th and 16th centuries the text that had Lain in monasteries in Syria and Asia Minor forgotten and untranslated for centuries were brought to the Florentine Council by people like gisto PLO and others and translated and classicism was born its laws its philosophy its Aesthetics we are the inheritors of that tradition but it is now once again exhausted and our cultural crisis is much greater it is global it is total it involves every man woman and child on this planet every bug bird and tree is caught up in the cultural crisis that we have engendered our ideas are exhausted the ideas that we inherit from Christianity and its half brother or its bastard child science so what I'm suggesting is that an archaic revival needs to take place and it seems to be well in hand in the Revival of goddess worship and Shamanism and partnership but notice that these things are old 10,000 years or more old but there was an unbroken thread that however thinly drawn persists right up to the present so the idea of this lecture is to show the way back to the high magic of the late Paleolithic to show that there were intellectual Traditions there were minority points of view that kept the faith that never allowed it to die and to my mind this alchemical hermetic Gnostic Egyptian caldian thread is the thread and if we unravel it with sufficient care and attention then we can build a bridge from the otherwise nearly incomprehensible High magic of the late Paleolithic we can get it as near to ourselves as John D who died in 16004 we can discover that it's no further away from us than the beginning of the 30-year war and for my money after that it gets pretty mucked up I mean after alipes Levy who's already waffling I'm not very interested in the occultism of the 17th 18th and 19th century but it's not necessary because scholarship gives us the Chelan oracles the Tris magistic hymns the library at nagam and so forth and so on so my impulse is to in the most AER sense repop poize and reintroduce this kind of thinking so that people can live it out then step by step we can evolve our language and evolve our understanding to make our way back to the Garden Back to Eden it's occurred to me recently you know it said that Christ opened the doors to Paradise yes but he closed the doors to Eden and Paradise is a very airy place where everybody sits around on clouds strumming their Liars I think that what we want to do is make our way back to the alchemical Garden that's where our roots are that's where meaning is meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction the coinci that's what we really feel not these rational schemas that are constantly beating us over the head with the Thou shalt and thou should but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak Noble and ignoble future oriented past facing we each need to become Janus based and to incorporate into ourselves the banished contradictions of being that so haunt the Enterprise of science we can leave that behind and when we do we reclaim our authentic being and our authentic being make no mistake about it is what alchemical gold really is

Channel: Agrippa's Diary

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Keywords: Carl Jung, Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna on Carl Jung, Hermeticism, Alchemy, Hermetic Corpus, Ancient Wisdom, Esoteric Traditions, Spiritual Alchemy, Psychedelic Philosophy, Hermes Trismegistus, Mental Alchemy, Magic, Hermetic Magic, Carl Jung Lectures, Psychological Alchemy, Gnosticism, Jungian Archetypes, Inner Alchemy, Jung and Alchemy, Spiritual Awakening, Cosmic Consciousness, Jungian Psychology

Id: y3yShHanIIE

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2024