Alchemy, myths and rationality
Before undertaking a more thorough development on the Art of Hermes, we let ourselves digress to the theme of mythology surrounding Alchemy.
Numerous are the newcomers interested in our Science for the wonders she offers to understanding. This sensational nebula surrounds our Science with a diffuse cloud made of dreams and fantasies, covering an attraction for the profane that the epochs never could erase, generated most of the time by our own Philosophers in their hermetic treatises. In disorder, and according to the legends peddled or the writings studied, we find the urban legend of an eternal Flamel supported by the Count of Saint Germain with his masonic tones, a Cyrano de Bergerac dreamer in his Comical History of the states and empires of the Sun, together with a Nostradamus doctor, alchemist and visionary who will bequeath us a very curious Treatise of the jams. Many others exist but the list would quickly become inconvenient. This inventory shows us that dream and visions have their place in our Art but that it would be futile, maybe perilous, to risk oneself giving life to this magic by trying to install these mirages as indisputable facts because proved, manifested and realized. The symbol contained in these dreams, whose existence is due to an intensified sensibility, expresses itself in a poetic movement where a certain spirituality rules to unite with an imagination which takes its magnitude in the hermetic aesthetics. He is vowed to finally become integrated then exceeded by the seeker's own sensibility.
We also know that some of our contemporaries have used this fantastic and romantic subterfuge to drive away the novices in Hermes from the Philosophers' Banquet. Alternately Eugène Canseliet allowed himself to speak of the corporeal resurrection of his Master, Fulcanelli, more than centennial (113 years) in his Sevilian apparition. Without fearing any mockery nor the grotesque nature of his testimonies, the "master" of Savignies risked himself to explain the apparition of an aurora borealis in 1938 according to one of his Alchemical Coctions in his crucible of which here is the affirmation : "Many musical notes had already resounded when tuesday january 25th, at about 6.30pm, for an unknown reason, the coction stops abruptly; almost without a noise a small sun rises from the athanor, and disappears through the roof. All dogs from the vicinity started barking. This night, our hemisphere was coated with an immense red array, with long green branches, irradiating from the north : the gigantic aurora borealis of 1938" (extract from the "Alchemical Laboratory", Atorène, Ed Trédaniel). But if the adepts of the dry path have an inexhaustible imagination, they own their pendant in the Humid Path from Roger Caro who did not fail to spread the rumor that he could modify the states of the Materia by applying a magnetic fluid on the Matrasses through his hands. This rumor is still being peddled today by some of his distraught "disciples" and more theoreticians than practitioners.
We are not afraid to affirm that no manifestation of a supernatural order could interfere or influence the Materia in the crucibles or matrasses. However, it is evident that the neophyte who would take this fact to be true would be propelled to a magical world where pragmatism and reasoning would be replaced by the occult, kingdom of approximation and external phantasmagorical influences. All is One, Fire is in Everything, especially in the Materia Prima, so why look elsewhere unless it's to not find it and to try to justify these errings and this ignorance in our Science by staging "astral" or thaumaturgic forces?
So let us leave Cyliani's nymph to the field of poetry and let us try to exercise primarily our reason on the possibilities of the transformation of our Materia by the action of the Secret Fire. Because myths, if they call to imagination, ask also for perseverance to bring our thinking back to that of the Ancients. We must be subtle and persevering to overcome the passed myths and legends, by deciphering the symbols to translate them in Practice and firmly unite the symbolic to the alchemical operation, here and now, not in a mind conducive to amplify and swell.
Myth disguises to teach, veils to sharpen the mind, but it should step aside to make room for a set of methods and simple, accurate means summed in a dexterous Turn of the hand, essentially made of Soakings, Coctions and of Conjunctions.
Fables have but one end, to leave objective tags under the guise of symbolic facts, to find the bodies induced in these stories related to laboratory manipulations. These wondrous descriptions will never reflect but one color, a shape, or a quality that the Materia takes in a given Phase.
Again, we do not deny the reality of Universal Medicine nor of a Philosophers' Stone, but all the dragons, spirits, thaumaturgic powers, all aurora borealis, corporeal eternity, and gift of bi-location will always remain epiphenomena real or imaged of poor value next to the ultimate experience of the Artist's Metanoïa.
By Jean de Lisle-Deyfran