"The Golden Chain of Homer that Binds Heaven and Earth" was spoken by Manly Palmer Hall on Sept. 13, 1981 at the PRS in Los Feliz. This lecture appears on several channels on YouTube, but this restored version should be a little more clear and listenable. MPH Golden Chain #alchemy #homer #manlypalmerhall ©Manly Hall Society
Transcript
This morning's lecture, I think, requires a slight preamble to establish a setting which is concerned with our problem. According to Greek mythology, the deity Hermes was the son of Zeus and Maya, one of the daughters of Atlas. He was originally a deity of agriculture and fertility, but in the course of the rise and sophistication of Greek culture, he was raised to the station of the messenger of the gods. As such, he is generally depicted with wings on his heels, a winged helmet, and carrying a caduceus, which has since been associated with the medical profession.
Hermes was one of the more benevolent deities and was often associated with the principle of knowledge, also the communication of messages from the heavenly worlds to the abodes of mortals. When the Romans dominated the area, they knew Hermes as Mercury, a god of swiftness, of messages, and to a sense, of the ability to read the human mind. In the meantime, the T Dynasty in Alexandria in North Africa began to associate the concept of Hermes and Mercury with the deity of the Egyptians, the god of writing, who was also called the Scribe of the heavenly assembly of the Orion rites. So, we now have a deity that, by the beginning of the Christian era, was known under three names and who was to become a tremendously important psychological force in the origin and descent of what we term today as mysticism.
The names were brought together in a curious way to create in Alexandria a hypothetical person who was known to these people as Hermes Trismegistus. Trismegistus, meaning "the three times great." No one seems to be quite sure when Hermes lived. They cannot give us any evidence as to whether he is simply a composite of earlier beliefs or whether there actually was a person by that name or that some sage took that name. One thing is certain, however: he became the personification of the wisdom of the world. He was believed to be the true author of all the books that were ever written because, actually, all of these books depend upon a dimension of wisdom, a power of knowledge, man's capacity to think, to learn, to know, and to transmit. He also became, in particular, the guardian of what was called the Hermetic arts, and the Hermetic arts have descended to us as chemistry, astronomy, music, geography, and medicine.
Now this itself is very interesting, especially when we find that this mysterious being, whoever he was, has also left a series of books or writings, especially attributed to himself. This was the Hermetic literature, and the most important of the Hermetic books was *The Shepherd of Man*, a mysterious dialogue between Hermes and Universal Mind. Where it came from and how it was compiled is one of the unsolved mysteries of history. But one thing is rather evident: it first came into prominence, first came to be known, and first came to be venerated in Alexandria about the beginning of the Christian era.
This mysterious book, *The Shepherd of Man*, brings in another dimension, because in many of the old representations of Hermes, he is shown carrying a lamb on his shoulder and also carrying a shepherd's crook, thus tying him to the concept of the Good Shepherd and the Shepherd of Men. This mysterious being came to have a very profound influence upon the development of knowledge. He was one of several composite beings or persons developed among the Alexandrian Gnostics and the Neoplatonists to personify forms of learning and attitudes toward truth, the search for reality.
Our knowledge today on Hermeticism is largely centered in alchemy and also, of course, in the works of the Rosicrucians and the Cabala. All of these groups consider Hermes as their patron saint. He is the mysterious power by means of which the esoteric truths of sciences came to be made available to humanity. Now, at a long ago period when problems were not as complex as they are today, our forbears had a certain attitude toward knowledge, which has been called hermetic. Hermetic, as we use it now, means to seal or to close tightly, and we can hermetically seal a bottle or a package, but in those days, it had a somewhat larger implication.
Hermeticism was a system of thought that placed a very strong line across the advancement of arts and sciences. The theory behind Hermeticism is quite simple, yet today remains as much unfulfilled or misunderstood as it was in ancient times. The Hermetic doctrine is based upon the belief that all existing things are locked within containers. They are hermetically sealed. Among the most important of these sealed things is the solar system. Another very important enclosed material locked in a bottle is the planet Earth, and a third sealed mysterious container is man himself. Now, this mysterious container which locks all things within its own nature makes it necessary for everything to save itself. Every problem of existence has its solution within it. Solutions do not come from the outside; they come from the inside.
For example, we have today chemistry, which is a very important branch of learning. The Hermeticist would have said that frankly, modern chemistry is locked in a bottle of its own. It is locked in a small container, and this bottle is the internal attitude of the chemists. Every form of knowledge is controlled by a materialistic group, a group that has declared itself to be peculiarly qualified to devote its attention to the solution of universal mysteries. Yet, generally speaking, all of the groups, regardless of what mystery they have selected as their province, all of them have failed. They have failed because they have not been able to escape from the little bottle in which they enclosed themselves. They declared what truth had to be, they declared that they had a way to find it, and they also declared that what they found by their way was true. And the Hermeticists would have denied this. They would not have accepted this idea at all.
They would not have believed, for example, that it would be possible for science, while oriented to a physical solution of all mysteries, could ever solve anything because the answers are not to be found in matter. They are not to be found in the material phases of things. They cannot explore the material structure of the universe long enough to discover what the universe means. They can find out its chemical components; they can discover forms of life evolving. How the life got there, they do not know. What the life actually is, they do not know. What its purpose was in the large plan of things, they do not know. All they are able to do is to classify a pattern, a lattice of unknown facts, and try to discover from this classification the reason for these facts. And it can't be done.
Now, the Alexandrians discovered that nearly two thousand years ago, and probably it was known generally at a still earlier date in various parts of the world. The Alexandrians were fortunate in that their city was at the crossroads between Asia and Europe, and therefore, the wisdom of two hemispheres mingled in their community. Also, several religions functioned there, and many great philosophies were adequately represented. The Alexandrian Hermes followed a pattern which came also from Egypt. The Egyptians had a hieroglyph of a serpent swallowing its own tail, and everybody tried to figure out what that meant. Some gave it up as a pure hallucination, but others, going more carefully into the situation, came to an interesting conclusion that parallels and agrees with the Hermetic conviction.
The serpent, by swallowing its tail, is feeding itself, and it has nothing to feed on but itself. And the Hermeticists said, this is the perfect system and symbol of creation. Existence has nothing to feed upon but itself. We find this in what they later presented to us in the form of the golden chain of Homer. Homer's chain is a chain that links Heaven and Earth, the material world with the heights of the Olympian deities. It is a series of links, and these links became levels of research; they became levels of consciousness, and perhaps most of all, they became the basis of astronomy and the sidereal geography of space.
Now, the idea of something living off of itself can perhaps be best exemplified today by what we call the food chain. If you have been watching the nature pictures and so forth that are among the better things we occasionally get on television, you will realize that every living thing lives from and of other living things. This mysterious food chain, by means of which life, living upon life, nourishes itself upon itself, and therefore, like the tailed serpent of the Egyptians, is nourished out of its own body. It lives by devouring itself, and yet at the same time, by this mystery, it becomes a symbol also of eternity and immortality. There is a balance of nature in which nature, continually subsisting from itself, maintains itself. This great cycle of nutrition is probably a symbol that the Neoplatonists and the Hermeticists of Egypt would have rejoiced in had they been able to put the elements together, or perhaps they did.
Anyway, empirically they knew the facts. They knew also that all forms of knowledge nourish themselves from themselves. If you learn something, this becomes the basis of something else, and the new knowledge is matured or informed by the old. Everything is living upon its own processes, and these processes are all locked within a Hermetic retort, a laboratory vessel, and all the transmutations and transmissions of energy and force that make up the planet and its life and the solar system with its life—all of these things exist sealed within vessels. These vessels being composed of the outer atmosphere which encloses a planet, or the magnetic field of the solar system, so that everything that we see and have is more or less internally generated.
It comes to bear its natural fruit because of
a system which we call in the human body digestion and assimilation, but to the Hermeticists, these words meant the transmutation of forms of life, a chemistry and ultimate mystery going on constantly in which base elements, which are themselves merely physical matter, can be transformed into digestible material by means of which bodies are maintained. And that within the body itself, every mystery that is found in the legends of alchemy and the transmutation of metals within the human body—these legends are lived out as practical, natural, inevitable procedures.
Therefore, we have to say for the moment that alchemy, or the transmutation of base metals into gold, is the secret of nutrition. And every time we eat a meal, we are alchemists, but we do not know it. And this problem also gives us the word by which we understand chemistry today. Chemistry is the science of the land of Khem, K-H-E-M, and this land was Egypt. The prefix “al” or “el” in Hebrew, “a” in Arabic, is divine or God, as Elohim in the opening chapters of Genesis, the deities, or Allah, the Muslim supreme deity whose name begins with “A.” This “A” prefix means divine. Therefore, alchemy is divine chemistry. It is a chemistry rooted in the mysteries of God rather than in some physical laboratory.
Consequently, to these people—and I think we are beginning to think their way now after a long time—these people believed firmly that without the mystery, the understanding of the mystery of deity, it would never be possible to come to the final conclusion and truth of any art or science. All equally depend upon a divine principle, and this divine principle must be understood before any question relating to knowledge can have its ultimate answer. Up to that point, the answers are all tentative and suppositional; there is no final conclusion. Now, we have just sent a spaceship out to ride around Saturn and Jupiter and, if all goes well, take a long-range peek at Uranus and Neptune. This is going to come back and is going to be regarded as one of the supreme achievements of modern man. We are going to learn more about the motions of these planets; we may learn something of their chemical analysis; we may gain a better dimension and knowledge of the moons that move about them; we may also find something about their temperature or something about the density of the materials of which they are composed.
But when we come back with all this information, we are in the same position as the old Arabic philosopher who, surrounded by the wisdom of the world, said, “Man is born, man suffers, and man dies.” This is an essential. All the rest seemingly is highly theoretical. It is interesting, it is amazing, it stimulates a certain type of mind, it is magnificent to hold the attention of children, but when all these explorations end, man will still not have the answer to what is life, what is consciousness, what is energy. We will gain, but the triad of powers that are at the source of all things remain locked forever in the mystery of the divine nature. And therefore, if we are going to explore, if we are going to search for the true answer to things, we have to begin to consider an entirely different approach to our search for realities.
The Hermeticists, the Neoplatonists, the Sufis, and many other mystical groups of the Far East—Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism—all these different faiths and doctrines realized with the words of Omar that from man's own base metal must be filed the key to unlock the door. The others howl without; we are all howling outside the gates of knowledge. We are all seeking some way, to use the term of Uranus Filus, the Alchemical Key, to open the shut palace door of the King. We are looking for the answers to things, and instead of finding answers, we simply find more questions. And the further we research, the greater the number of questions, and the more difficult it is to discover an answer.
What then is the answer that the Greeks and the Egyptians decided on? They pointed out that according to legend—and they in their legendary bestowed great wisdom upon the poet Homer—they pointed out that there was a mysterious chain of links between the Earth, which was a kind of island, and the mountain of the gods upon Olympus. This golden chain was what bound heaven and Earth, and this golden chain was the pure principle of life itself. And this pure principle of life, the Alchemists declared, to be the Hermetic Mercury. They held that Mercury, as we know, is a solvent; it dissolves other metals into itself. But this is the base Mercury, and alchemy says that of all metals, of all substances in everything in nature, there are two kinds: one the base and the other the purified.
Man himself is composed of elements, and these elements are either in their base condition or in their purified condition. Man also has a mind, which is either a material mind or a purified, regenerated mind. All his emotions, even the cells of his body, go through processes of refinement, and the more refined they become, the more accurately they bear witness to the will of the power within the body. All through alchemy, then, we say, in those days at least, the masters of the subject declared that there were natural things, which were called the prima materia, the base substance of everything. And in this base substance of everything is concealed everything else. There is a dark earth that is matter, and there is a regenerated, redeemed dark earth that is soul power. There is the darkness, which is the darkness of ignorance, and there is the supreme darkness in which all things that are important are concealed from the profane.
There are many levels and conditions of the regeneration of substances, but all these regenerations have to take place within the substance itself. This is another lesson that they try to tell us that is timely at the moment. Many people today are trying to find ways of growing spiritually, and they are following mostly the pattern, the attitude, and processes of other forms of knowledge, like education. They believe that inner light is to be attained by a kind of schooling. They attend classes, they join organizations, they listen carefully to the words of the so-called wise, they read the approved texts, they do all these things assuming that the mystery is going to be communicated. It cannot be communicated according to the Hermeticists. It can only be experienced. The answer has to lie within. In as much as man himself is locked within a bottle and everything that is necessary for his survival is within that bottle, he must use his own ways of reducing his materialistic pressures and releasing his spiritual convictions and overtones.
So, we have in the Hermetic philosophy this concept that all things arise from within the forms in which they are generated. All things existing have the seed within themselves for the perpetuation of their material kind, and they also have within themselves the Hermetic seed of life by means of which all forms less than perfection can be gradually brought to perfection by causing this seed to grow. The growth of the seed of divinity within man is also part of the philosophy of Jakob Boehme, the great German mystic. He describes the human soul as a tree with its seed in the heart, which grows from within and finally becomes the basis of the tree of all knowledge and all wisdom, which in the Book of Revelation is for the healing of the nations. The seed of the great mystery is in each person. Transmutation, therefore, is a transformation from the person's own experiences.
The Alchemist was referred to sometimes as Saturn the Gardener, and all the planets were involved in this story. Saturn was the gardener who had to take care of the garden of the soul. He had to weed it and water it; he had to protect it against all forms of invasion. He had to make certain that it was not neglected. Saturn, as the wise counselor, is also, in Oriental and North African mysticism, the symbol of karma, the symbol of repentance, the symbol of repayment, the symbol of the inevitable operation of cause and effect. Therefore, it is Saturn who protects the growth of the seed. He surrounds it with protecting forms. He permits it to be discovered only by the pure of heart. He also, in guarding it, must, if necessary, draw out or take out the weeds that have been allowed to gather there—the weeds being false doctrines, false ideas, false concepts of life that try to squeeze out or destroy the true seeds of wisdom.
Now, this same seed has so many meanings, but we remember in the Bible it says, "And the seed is the word of God." In this particular meaning, the seed is the root of the inevitable in all things that live. There is no creature, from the tiniest little gnat in the sunbeam to the greatest galaxy of stars, in which the seed of perfection is not present. The seed is the thing that lives, and all the rest is a protection or a husk around the seed. It is the seed that transmits life from generation to generation. It is the seed within which is the final transformer of all things, for everything has within itself, within its own locked nature, the secret and means of its own ultimate perfection. Everything that exists is destined to be perfect. It is destined to fulfill the reason for itself, but it cannot know the reason for itself until it perfects itself.
All the experiences of life which have a tendency to advance the good work, the good deed, is a seed. It is a nutrition. It is a form of life. It is something that helps things to grow, but this growth, this seed of life, this good deed, grows by devouring itself. It eats up itself; it lives off of itself, and every form of growth lives off of itself. Love lives off of
itself; it lives not because of its attachments or because of its associations; it grows within itself, and it grows in a sense by devouring the lesser aspects of itself as it ascends. This is the food chain that applies to every form of life in nature.
Now, among these people also there were these superior ideas of science. In one of his books, I think, if I remember, it is the *Novum Organum*, Lord Bacon points out very clearly that when physics is properly understood, there is no need for metaphysics. Metaphysics is probably more nearly than anything else true physics. That which we call physics is a diluted, partial, distorted aspect of a science that is in itself part of the divine plan of things. But no physics can be perfected unless the internal life of the physicist releases the power to understand. The physicist can only understand physics as an experience within himself, and until this experience is available to him, he is still going to be plodding around, trying to advance step by step. Even in this process of advancement, whether he knows it or not, he is still obeying this law in a strange manner. He’s growing by eating up his own predecessors. He is building by devouring the wisdom of those that went before him and casting off most of it. He is constantly growing and building by using the background, the substance, the body of his own science. The physicist is living off of the body of physics, and if he does it correctly and does it long enough, again physics will become the serpent living from itself and will gradually attain the transmutation that is necessary.
The transformation of knowledge implies the presentation of a new, deeper, fuller dimension of knowledge. In our thinking, also, we can mention another Hermetic field which has need of some work, and that is the field of astronomy, as it particularly applies to the difference between astronomy, astrology, and astrotheology. Astronomy we are pretty well acquainted with. Very few people really understand it, and among those who do not really understand what they are seeing are most of the astronomers. The astrologer believes that he has found this physics—he has ascended from the physiology to the psychology of the subject. He has discovered something that is not yet fully appreciated either by himself or by physical astronomy. He has discovered that all bodies in space have influence; they have organisms of their own; they are part of something that is inside of another bottle, and that is the solar system. And then this solar system is enclosed in still a larger flask, and that is the cosmos, but each of these levels is self-contained, and every form of ignorance must be transmuted by using its own previous mistakes as the food for its progress.
In the highest phase of astrology, we have the astrotheology which was again developed in Egypt—namely, the realization that astrology and all the elements that compose it is one of the great maps or charts by means of which the universal purpose can be charted. It is not until, however, that the divine meaning of these elements is realized that the astrologer will gain a new dimension, not of skill, but of intuitive and internal spiritual apperception.
Music—we know the problem of music. We realize what is happening to it today. We know what is happening to art. All these things are living off of the husks of each other or upon material derived from outside sources. The artist is dependent upon the techniques that he learns. These techniques, however, must feed themselves; they must swallow themselves. The true artist must transcend them. He uses the techniques in order to release something from within himself, and if he has nothing within himself, the techniques are in vain. Everything depends, therefore, upon this internal power of the person.
The Alexandrians tried to give a concept of how the human being can attain to the highest part of his own nature. The highest part of the nature of the solar system, according to them, was a series of steps, a ladder connecting heaven and Earth. This ladder was the golden chain attributed to Homer but very much interpreted, at least by the Alexandrians. This ladder of ascent was not merely an ascent to space but because of the wall and shell that encloses everything, the ladder is the ascent within self—the steps of transformation that are necessary to transform the base nature of man into a divinely enlightened soul.
The Alchemists had ten such steps, and they concealed them under chemical terms to represent the various degrees of refinement, the various cycles through which metals and substances must pass in order to be perfected. Basil Valentine and the old Hermeticists said and pointed out, as Spelling also did, that if man as a soul-being can perfect himself, if he can transform or transmute the base substances of his own existence and create a psychological gold or a psychological universal medicine for the healing of every ailment that can arise within himself, then also these philosophers believed that it would be conceivable that physical gold could actually be achieved through the similar transmutations of chemical elements.
We know that gold has been made. It has been made in recent times, but the amounts made are very minute, and the time and effort stupendous. But the ancients claimed that with the proper internal enlightenment, as that of Nicholas Flamel, it would be perfectly possible in the growth of self to parallel this growth by the transmutation of the base substances of nature. Also, by the same procedure, the growth of the individual can become the basis and archetype for the perfection of human society, for the regeneration of the policies of government. It can, if it is properly developed, transform all material institutions subject to and usually involved in corruptions to clarify, purify, and redeem themselves so that every art and science can become a blessing and can continue to unfold from the seed of itself until it achieves the fullness of its own potential.
As it ascends, it also devours its adversaries; it swallows up the worms that prevent its own perfection in the course of ascending from one degree of refinement to another. It also casts off that which is incompatible with its new higher insight or transforms that which was previously inadequate. So, out of the same pattern of things, we develop a concept which we find in Buddhism very clearly set forth, namely, the idea that the individual and space are in each, each one is a commonwealth, a commune of life. Buddha pointed out very definitely that the inner structure of the human body is a political system. It is just as political as any structure governing a state or a nation. The politics of the human body is also subject to every corruption that the politics in the world is subject to. It is subject to lobbies; the human being is filled with lobbies, with parts of itself forever seeking special privileges. It can also bribe itself more quickly than any politician can possibly do. It is also subject to being infested by spies and all kinds of foreign factors attempting to take over.
It is seeking to achieve its own internal maturity while within itself are elements which wish to enslave it. But it can never be enslaved by an outer power unless it first enslaves itself. So that the human body becomes more or less a microcosm of practically everything that concerns the human being and what it constitutes. The answer to it lies perhaps in again the Hermetic legend. When Alexander the Great came to the valley of Hebron, he was told that he stood in the presence of an ancient monument that was the tomb of Hermes. He ordered the tomb to be opened, and he found inside nothing but dust. Whatever had been there had gradually disappeared and disintegrated. But in the midst of the dust was an emerald, a magnificent stone, some say produced by art and therefore an artificial, synthetic stone. But it was a stone inscribed, and it is inscribed with the great analogical statement attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, supposed to be the greatest secret of knowledge in all the world. For it said on this stone, "That which has been will be," and further than that, "That which is true of the greatest is true of the least. All things are the same in pattern, differing only in magnitude. And whatever exists in space is like to that which exists below, and everything that exists below is like to that which exists above. The microcosm and the microcosm are tied together by indissoluble sympathies that can never be broken."
This emerald tablet has become probably the great textbook or the great text statement around which the Hermetic arts were built. But it is also a very splendid statement of what we all need in the form of knowledge. One point that is, of course, always a difficulty because of materialistic attitudes is that we assume that each art and science must find its own answer. We assume that each individual must work from complete ignorance, must find his own answer to everything, and cannot, under any condition, unite his efforts in any common pattern with the rest of the different fields of knowledge. The Hermeticists would say that all fields of knowledge are seeking the same answer, and that one answer, when it is the final and complete answer, answers every question that humankind, consciousness, or divine need can create. There is one answer that is so universal, so infinite, so complete that it ends forever all uncertainties in every field of learning.
This was the work that the Alchemists were concerned with, was to discover this answer, and in order to find it, they had to explore a way to transmute or transform the substances in themselves. In one of the Hermetic bottles or retorts or vessels is a miniature solar system which indicates very definitely that the whole solar system and every energy that is required is within the planet's body and within the human body. Man is the solar system. Everything that occurs outside of man is reflected into him, and every question that arises from outside circumstances can be answered from the inside by research of the
parallel circumstances and factors. Thus, wherever we look for questions, we look out; when we look for answers, we look in. For all answers available to man are released through the eternal divine principle which is the seed of all individual things in existence as much as the gnat in the sunbeam or the vastest galaxy in space. Each one is part of a single great pattern, and every development of life or every development of culture in the universe or in space is guided by the same infinite laws. And the purpose of the Hermetic philosophers was to trace these laws as adequately and as well as they could with the facilities that nature had given them.
They realized, of course, to begin with, that you do not start out in a mad dash for perfection. You do not believe that instantly you will be able to answer all the questions. This you cannot do. You cannot take an answer from anyone else and make that answer your own until you build it into your own life as an experience of consciousness. Until, while it is an intellectual acceptance, it has no vital purpose. But it can be possible for the individual, as Hermes points out in his great tablet, to observe the outside and use this observation to stimulate the inside. This is probably the reason why we have human beings, each one completely isolated. The Hermeticists perhaps were the first to realize that no two human beings have ever been able to exchange places; that no one has ever been able to experience identically the inner life of any other creature. Man is therefore completely isolated. He cannot intuit it completely. He may have sympathy; he may have a great measure of understanding, and he may share experiences which he has previously found and used to enrich his own consciousness, but he cannot be anyone but himself. And everything that he has, every experience of his life, every element of his growth has contributed to making him a separate being.
Therefore, separateness is, in a sense, the great problem. It is separateness that is giving us our problem in the Near East today. It is separateness that is stirring up trouble in Africa. It is separateness that is filling our courts with crime. Separateness is isolation, and isolation can become one of the most terrible forces in the world. Yet, isolation is the only way in which nature is able to demand and attain its own end, namely that each living thing shall become strong enough to control and regulate its own destiny. Unless this separateness was as it is, there could be no way of forcing the individual to outgrow separateness, to rise above it by a long series of patient experiences, these experiences being a problem of ascent, of going upward gradually into a higher and fuller state of insight. If, therefore, we really want to know the answer to anything, the answer begins through the cultivation on the beginning of the transformation of our own natures. This transformation has been variously represented in the alchemical experiments by all kinds of symbols, all kinds of creatures, beings, colors, and sounds have been drawn in to make possible this immense and complicated series of alchemical symbols.
They are all, however, simply names for processes that take place within ourselves. One of these symbols, for instance, is the Raging Wolf. This wolf comes in time and time again as a factor in the development and transformation of base metals. Now, this ravenous wolf can be in man a whole series of impediments that are not a wolf at all, but are like it—the characteristic of the wolf, the power of the animal, the hunger of the animal, the difficulty of subduing it, the fact that it ravages the land. It reminds us of things about ourselves. There are a great many people who are rather wolfish in their demands. The wolf, therefore, is in a sense man's appetites, ambitions. He is the wolf, represents a phase of physical error by means of which the individual is defeating himself. Therefore, the wolf has to be transformed. It has to be transmuted. It has to become a new creature, and it has to change its colors as in the processes of alchemical transmutation in which finally the various elements change colors until they develop what is called in chemistry the peacock's tail, a mass of iridescent lights. These iridescent lights being descriptive of the unfoldment of the multicolored, multiform nature of the soul itself.
Actually, the thing that the Alchemist is searching for is the soul, to release it from bondage to everything else that exists. That it shall be completely and entirely liberated, that it shall be free to be itself, that it shall then be able to bestow itself, for within it lies all that is necessary to the common good. It is in the soul that essential wisdom exists, and the soul can give the wisdom to the rest of the personality. It is within the soul that true love is experienced. It is within the soul that integrity comes into clear and defined proportions and dimensions. Everything that is important is bestowed by the soul, and everything that is lacking in human relationships is lacking because of the lack of soul maturity.
So we have this mysterious thing called a chain. Of course, it's again, I think, the Alexandrians in all probabilities, reaching back for ancient symbols, developed this concept of the chain in a way very different from what might have been Homer's original intention. But in alchemy, let's see what we have, another point here. Alchemy certainly existed in China. It existed there at least from 500 to a thousand years before the beginning of the Christian era. It existed in several other nations; it probably existed in India and existed in many places. But in those areas, alchemy seemingly was for the most part a physical chemical study. The primary purpose was the transmutation of metals physically in order that wealth might be accumulated.
Now wealth is the false value. It is the false gold, the fool's gold, which the chemist searched for in vain, and even if they found it, most of them died from possessing it. This physical gold was the goal of the early chemical experiments in most ancient countries. And today, another type of gold, and that is some form of utility, is lying behind nearly all the advancements of our arts and sciences. We are not looking into the sciences and arts that we may become better human beings, but rather that we may have more conveniences. We may still further increase our standard of living and can gradually escape from the inevitable proper consequences of our own misdeeds.
Therefore, alchemy and chemistry in those days were not a philosophical and religious art, but were not based upon a concept of profit. And, of course, material profit paralyzes any art and destroys completely the possibility of its fruition. Any art or science which is commercialized is set back a thousand years at least. It cannot escape into its own integrities. Therefore, prior to the Alexandrian period, it seems that the transforming of base metals was regarded as a literal thing, and it was in Alexandria that this entire concept was made metaphysical, and the Alchemist became an alchemistic philosopher, one in whose nature the transformations were of a higher and more exalted nature.
Having faced the problem of the literal chemist, we then can go to the consideration of the literal. Almost everything that we know today, we know all the various chemists, the great industrial institutions that maintain chemists, the cosmetic institutions. We know the pharmaceutical houses that have chemists working day and night to make new pills or serums or something of that nature. We are aware that chemistry is tied to all of these problems. We also realize how physiology and physics and anatomy and biology are tied to laboratory experimentation and to all kinds of repeated experiments that have been done a thousand times and actually have very little to do with the final shape of anything.
There were rules that were to be set up but never were effectively enforced. For example, in vivisection, where it was assumed that it would be perfectly possible for one animal to be sacrificed, the entire record be preserved in film with all its details and circulated among all the institutions that needed the information. The fact that each one of them had to torture some poor creature by the dozen to have exactly the same results and not to gain one new bit of knowledge would have been a perfect example of what the Alexandrian Hermeticists considered to be debased on false knowledge. But we have it. We have it because the higher aspects of the matter were never really considered.
Now, in India, we have mystical sects, and we have them also in China and Japan, that had to do with yoga. And the more we study the Hermetic tradition, the more certain it becomes that these people possessed some kind of yoga. They possessed a chemistry and alchemy of disciplines within themselves. It would not be difficult to explain this, because we know that East Indian, Chinese, and many other nations traded in Alexandria. There is no doubt that scholarship went along the caravan routes and reached Egypt even earlier. There is no doubt in the world that the philosophies of Alexandria were influenced by Buddhism and yoga. This is now admitted even by the most skeptical thinkers. If we take Platonism or Neoplatonism or if we take the Hermetic science and impose a yogic structure upon it, I think we have exactly what the ancient symbols of alchemy tell us, namely that the entire system was founded upon a process of unfolding the potentials in the individual.
Yoga became a term in the East, and alchemy became its equivalent in the West. And to a large measure, this is true of Kabbalism, and it was true of the Rosicrucian mystics of the seventeenth century, the original ones. They all seem to have been nourished by the same general concept and belief, namely that there were a series of steps by means of which the individual ascending moved upward from the Earth to the abode of the deities. Now,
in man, the abode of the deities, according to alchemy, would be in man himself because everything must be solved within this bottle. Everything that is conceivable, and if everything that is necessary for the perfection of the individual must be derived from the individual himself. He has certain nutritional relationships with the planet; he also has a certain electrical relationship with the sun and a magnetic one with the moon. But these provide energy like the energy on a wire from an electric source, but all the uses of that energy must be evolved within the individual himself.
He must take one pure energy that is distributed throughout all space and must apply it to his own requirements. And in so doing, he must gradually live off of this energy; he must gradually use this energy to perfect his own nature. And not long ago, I happened to see a very interesting film which showed part of the internal structure of insects. And here we have something that is so small that it is practically invisible to the human eye without a microscope. And yet the structure of that little insect is itself an incredible mystery. No scientist knows why and how that elaborate, involved inner function came into existence. Details so small we cannot see them are a thousand times more intricate than that to be found in the highest and most expensive watch. Here are eyes that no human being can fully understand. Here are structures of motion and various digestive structures in something which is no larger than the point of a pin.
Everything that is necessary is there, and it is there age after age. It is perpetuated from cycle to cycle, and it is a mystery which we have not yet been able to understand. We cannot understand the larger phases of it in our own daily life. We see energy; we see constant motion; we see the evidences of long-range evolutionary processes, which ties with Homer's golden chain. We see the constant presence of a tremendous pattern of processes, lawful processes, yet the source of them remains always elusive. There is no faculty in man's physical nature that can discover the source of himself or the source of anything else. He has to go behind the physical part of himself; he has to transcend even the endocrine system. He has to transcend his sensory perceptions, also his reflective powers. There is something still deeper. He must go on to the point where he is able, as a being, to have the direct experience of the cause of all things.
Until then, his ignorance cannot be cured. He has, however, a certain participation, which the Alchemists also recognized. The Alchemists declared that there were several orders within their own group. There were the Adepts, who were the ones who had perfected the great work. Then there were the Illuminates, and the Illuminates were the mystics. They were the ones who understood the work. They were the ones who had been given a certain participation through inner experience, through mystical reveries, through and through various types of clairvoyance. These Illuminates had seen or sensed the reality. They had not performed the transmutation themselves, but they knew that it existed. And because of the nature of the psychic life within themselves, they had been given glimpses of it.
And we find in the laws, even as the Alchemists point out themselves, that there were glimpses that every sincere growing person has as he goes along. Glimpses that give courage to proceed, glimpses by means of which the end to be attained comes to be recognized, even if not actually attained. So, these Illuminates, as they were called, like Boehme and several others, Saint-Martin, all the mystics were able to sense what was happening. They lifted some of the veils, but even the mystics saw as through a glass darkly. They were not able to really attain, but they became capable of a tremendous faith because inwardly they had begun to sense. The Illuminate was the one who sensed the reality, and he was on a higher level than those who had not sensed it.
So, the yogic system there undoubtedly corresponds with Homer's chain. It is a series of internal steps by which the individual ascends to the final union with the Divine. It is represented in Hermetic philosophy by the egg and the embryo, and the steps that correspond with the chain are the eleven of the eleven periods or levels of initiation which are necessary to bring things into life through the gradual change of their internal structure. Finally, the last change comes when the child or the creature is born. So, we have the nine months of the prenatal epic and the tenth month, which is the birth, and this corresponds with the ten links of Homer's chain. But there is also another birth—the birth of a mystery. There is the birth from the womb of the alchemical art, which is the sea, which is the eggshell.
But within the shell, in the alchemical sense, the magnetic field of the individual himself is his aura. That which encloses him, that which turns all energies back upon themselves, that which forms the Great Wall which, if properly maintained, protects him from infections and all kinds of contagion, but which, if depleted, allows death to come in. The magnetic field is the wall of the castle, and it is that which protects everything within it. Within this is an embryo, the embryo of the Divine Being, the homunculus. It is this embryo, growing up within man, of which his present state is a phase or aspect, which ultimately will come to spiritual birth when it breaks through the shell of its own isolation and mingles itself with the cosmic purpose.
All these symbols go on and on and on, and there are so many of them that it's hard to limit them. But we do know that they are analogous to most of the doctrines of the great world religions. That they represent perhaps the Hermetic science or art, the clear scientific process by means of which we can understand the purpose of life. In other words, we do not gain it by long periods of education; we do not gain it by the commendations of our associates. We have to grow, and growth is the release of the seed of immortality. As the alchemists say, there are two kinds of growth. There is the growth of the physical seed in the ground, which becomes nutrition, and on this nutrition we live, and we in turn become the nutrition of something else.
I remember very definitely one day when I was talking to Luther Burbank. He said, “You know, when I die, I don’t want to be buried somewhere; I don’t want to just go into a cemetery. I want to be buried under the apple tree in my own garden, so that my life can then become a nourisher of apples.” Well, this the Alchemist would understand because he would know it is part of the serpent eating its own tail. It is life supporting life; it is one living thing after another surviving. It begins with the most primitive forms of existence and that which lives on it, and it goes on and on to things that live on other things all the way to the top, because there is no nutritional process, according to alchemy, except this—this continual dependence of life upon life. But in this we have form only. All that we have to really concern us is that out of this interdependence, this constant use of life to sustain life, Nature has set this up, and for all these different steps and chains there is no great evil. The only evil is abuse.
But actually, all of these various steps and degrees are helping to develop and cause all types of creatures to improve and increase. They go on and on and on, step by step, until they achieve their own perfection and fruition. Nature is not doing this to be unkind. Nature is doing it because it is the only way in which separate things can remain separate, and until the time when they earn their union with all the rest of life, everything has to have its own experience. This experience seems very mysterious and strange to us, but everything is growth, and every form of life is growing, and every form of life manifests a degree of growth. And each form of life, from the least to the highest, from the tiniest gnat in the sunbeam, from the small electron or ion up to the vastest cosmos, each form of life, every step between, is a link in the golden chain. For all these processes are part of the unfoldment and the release of that divine power, which is our inevitable right.
Now, when we get this power, what do we do with it? Assuming that sometime in the remote aeons of aeons we do get it, what will then happen? Well, according to the old beliefs and according to the alchemical concepts, when that time comes that we have fully blossomed, that we have become complete in every sense of the word and have become a sun, a tremendous center of released eternal brilliance, when the little seed in us has grown up and become a cosmic sun, then at that moment, there will burst from us, our solar system, a new order of life, vaster and more remarkable than anything we have known. And we will become a center of life for another great order of evolution in space.
We do not know how far this goes on. Even the most optimistic of the Hermeticists didn’t try to find an ultimate end. But to them, if you can conceive of an ultimate end, that ultimate end is not to settle back in peace and rest forever playing hops in space. The end, whatever it may be, is that the soul itself, the inner life in man, will explode into a great cosmic usefulness, and that which has been the child will become the parent of children. That which has grown up will pay for its growth and the love and attention that it received by becoming a parent. And a sun is always a parent in a solar system. The sun and the moon and
all the parts of the solar system are parental forces that have themselves grown up in space and have passed through all of the various great processes. These great processes may be difficult to understand, and it certainly is a little difficult to understand how people two thousand years ago, without most of the advantages that we have of instrumentations today, were able to conceive of so vast an abstract concept.
And it even is impossible for the average person, even the thoughtful person, to present their concept in a complete and comprehensive manner. But that they had this idea of an eternal growth, as an eternal release, all change as progress, all things passing out of existence but not ceasing, but returning better, that all experiences, incidents, accidents of life are part of this great alchemical cycle of transformations, of regenerations, of coagulations, of condensations, all things passing through a vast cycle of moral chemical factors. So that we discover that chemistry is also a vast morality, that related to it are processes which we must experience psychologically, as the chemist experiences them in his laboratory. Over the whole chemical field were the great chemists of so-called symbolic time. The Alchemists declared that among others, the great master of the chemists was Elias the Artist, a figure drawn from Biblical symbolism, that among the great adepts were the great teachers of mankind.
And many of those who were called the adepts of chemistry are never known to have made a physical chemical experiment. As far as we know, they may have done so, but they had reached that point in which the chemistry was taking place within themselves. The Illuminate is working with a higher degree of chemistry. The mystic, such as Plotinus, who beheld the mystery of the universe, is working with another level of this power within himself. We are all working with some level of it, and all the great adepts of alchemy are those who have warned us, as Basil Valentine did, “Woe, woe unto the gold makers.” It was not to be a physical experiment. The gold was perfection, the gold was purity, because the gold was the only element known to the ancients that was immortal, that never changed, that could not be tarnished, that could not be decayed. Gold was the symbol of eternal life, eternal light, and eternal truth.
These are the things the chemists were looking for, and by retiring into themselves and moving step by step along a great path which was outlined for them in their own literature, they ascended by natural degrees through the mysteries of chemistry, then into a psychological chemistry, which used the same terms but with a much deeper meaning, until finally they achieved and performed the great transformation or transmutation within themselves. The Rosicrucians, working on the subject politically, were searching for the universal reformation of society. The Esculapian of Greece and the healers of Egypt, the followers of Maat, the goddess of healing, were looking for the universal medicine, that which was to be the healing of all sickness, and they followed the same path with medicine.
Paracelsus of Hohenheim, one of the greatest of all pharmacologists, made a great research into physical medicine, but also into mystical. And today, our pharmacologist is very heavily loaded with the recipes, formulas, and discoveries of chemists of five hundred to a thousand years ago. The Arabs, the Persians, the Greeks have all added to our knowledge of medicine, but they were all searching for the same thing—not just the remedy for this ailment or that ailment, but the sovereign remedy to the supreme illness of man. And that illness is imperfection. It is not a sin, it is not a misfortune, it is inevitable. It is inevitable that the child must grow up. It is inevitable that little things must become greater. It is inevitable that small knowledge must increase. It is not that process that is wrong, it is the individual who doesn’t understand this principle, and therefore makes no effort to grow or makes a highly mistaken effort by simply assuming that it is a trick of the mind or some secret that can be imparted for a few dollars.
While these situations exist, a great deal of unnecessary delusion is also present, but each one in his own way must climb the ladder, the Esculapian ladder, a mysterious ladder of links, the chain of Homer, by means of which, in the end, he comes to union with the Olympian mountain and the spirits that dwell therein. And that mountain is inside of himself also, and in the magnetic theories, the North Pole of the aura is well represented, and its Earthly equivalent in the great desert of Shambhu in Tibet and China. All these ancient beliefs tie together into geography, physiology, anatomy, art, music, literature, everything you can think of. There is the master plan, and what everyone should be searching for to the best of his ability, and as enthusiastically as possible, is to become aware of this master plan.
We may not be able to achieve it immediately, but if we can become aware of it, we will overcome the futility we feel in ourselves. We will overcome the sense of hopelessness or despair or isolation or frustration. We will no longer blame everything that happens as a misfortune of circumstances. We will see a plan, and we will know that the plan is right, that it is a divine plan, that it is the inevitable way in which the deity, as the supreme Alchemist, transmutes all things into the likeness and identity of himself.
Well, I guess that's all for the morning, folks.
