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  Iamblichus claimed to have found his doctrine of passifying the demons of the soul (to neutralise the passions of the body) in the Hermetic books, where the liberation of the soul from the bonds of Fate, (that is : the star-demons), was many times described. Iamblichus was convinced that the Hermetic writings, while having been translated into Greek by those familiar with Greek philosophy, had their origins in the ancient Thoth (=Hermes) literature : the pristine wisdom of the East.

  The late-antique Neoplatonists did have problems in dealing with the demonology or vulgar magic (goetia) of some Hermetic writings, an abiding problem which seems to have been due to the fact that magic in its intellectual phase bore within it essentially gnostic characteristics, and while it was the inherent gnosis of the Hermetica which appealed to the Neoplatonists, magic and gnosis were really inseparable. It is clear that gnostic theory in its primitive state derived much of its mythological and technical ‘equipment’ from the ancient magical theories of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, a gnosis without magical quality would be a pretty anaemic affair.

  In spite of the magical context in which Neoplatonist and Hermetic works would often come to be received, the more philosophical texts were nonetheless devoid of obvious magical references, being pious, revealing a God beyond magic, a God to be worshipped in silence and thanksgiving, beyond Fate (the zodiacal heimarmene or ‘night-cloak’). In Corpus Hermeticum XIII.8. and in the text called The Ogdoad reveals the Ennead, the access of the divine power, experienced as ‘light’, is immediately preceded by an embrace between master and pupil, a sign of divine love and mutual thanksgiving. This gnosis of God, according to the Hermetic tradition, enabled the aspirant to step onto the moving ladder which passed through the created cosmos directly to the life at its heart.

  Iamblichus' idea of the practice of Theurgy - a set of rituals involving the pacification of the controlling demons of the material realm, also took from the Hermetists the cult practices of praying in the pure temple, praying at the setting and the rising of the sun, and the singing of hymns. Iamblichus also took the view from the Hermetic texts that once one had penetrated the seven spheres of Fate (the realm of astrology), magic ceased to be necessary : a compromise view which attempted to reconcile Theurgic magic with the pure philosophy of which Plotinus approved. Theurgic rites represented a preparation for eventual illumination, but were not to be identified with that illumination; man stood between two worlds, though these worlds were not in any way sundered : Theurgy was for the lower world; pure philosophy was for - and from - the higher. The classic sorcerer was seen as one addicted to the hidden powers of the lower world with little or no interest in the exalted spiritual philosophy. Herein lies the perennial ambivalence regarding the role of magic in western religion.

  The beliefs of the Theurgists, handed over to the western Middle Ages by the Sabians of Harran and Baghdad, preserved the realisation that man could be a free agent within a divine cosmos, that he could engage directly with cosmic powers, that he shared in the being of the primal man, called Phos (=Light), that he was in potentia a being of light closed in a shell, and that man, like the gods which lived within him was endowed with immortality and the spark of gnosis, which if used properly could bring him out of a world of constraint and darkness into a world of freedom, love, light and truth. This optimistic picture was necessarily held discretely, not least since it stood in head-on collision with the Catholic Church's concept of original sin and purgatorial redemption. Hermes was an uncomfortable guest at the Church's festive board.

  Chapter Two

  Alchemy

  Since the early Christian Era, the name of Hermes Trismegistos has been tied to one art above all arts : alchemy, the mysterious fons of modern chemistry. Hermes is, so to speak, the patron-saint of the art : the quick-change artist par excellence. The word alchemy is derived from the Arabic al-kimiya, preserving the tradition that the art was associated chiefly with Egypt, for the Arabic appears to be a transliteration from the Egyptian kam-it or kem-it, ‘the black’, referring to the dark soil of Egypt, following the Nile's annual inundation, an image also suggesting perhaps the alchemist's fascination for carbonised substance. For all that, we do not know when or where alchemy first began to be practised, though it is reasonable to assume that it had its technical beginnings among the mysteries of the smithy, the glass-maker and the jeweller, where the observer enjoyed ample opportunity to witness the startling transformations wrought by the action of fire, earth, air and water : the four essential elements of which, according to Aristotle - and to alchemical theory - the universe is composed. That theory can be broken down into three basic premisses:

  All metals share a common essence, hidden within them, so transmutation from one to another is possible.

  Gold is the purest metal, with silver next to it.

  There is a substance capable of transforming base to pure metals, namely the Stone.

  One name associated with our earliest historical knowledge of western alchemy is that of Bolus of Mendes (in the Nile Delta), a canny savant who wrote under the name of Democritus in circa 250 BC8. He made catalogues of the occult (hidden/invisible) properties of substances and organisms with notes as to their uses. His work physika & mystika shows that something like alchemy existed in the third century BC and already had a mystical and philosophical aspect worthy of separate mention, as well as a purely utilitarian one9. For example, the author attacks “those who, on an inconsidered and irrational impulse, want to prepare a remedy for the soul and a release from all suffering, and do not think of the harm they will come to.” This is strongly suggestive of the known attempt (in third century AD Neoplatonic circles) to isolate spiritus from matter in the form of a draught for imbibing, as a quick route to spiritual experience and transcendence of the body. It could also be a quick route to death. Bolus recorded the case of the Persian alchemist Ostanes who, in an attempt to separate the soul from (his) body, died : a victim of, or perhaps martyr to science, depending on your point of view. Ostanes' dates are uncertain (he is referred to by Gaius Plinius [AD 23-79] in his Natural History), but there is no doubt that Ostanes' reputation in the Art was well-established by the time of the Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis (circa 300AD).

  Zosimos, a great devotee of the Hermetic philosophical corpus, was familiar with the age-old alchemical interest in a transforming stone as both agent and goal of the alchemical work. In his Concerning the Art and its Interpretation, Zosimos quotes from a fascinating and suggestive passage which he attributes to Ostanes :

  Go to the waters of the Nile and there you will find a stone that has a spirit [pneuma]. Take this, divide it, thrust in your hand and draw out its heart : for its soul [psyche] is in its heart.10

  The search for this stone - the famous lapis philosophorum - would occupy the time and practical resources of alchemists for at least 1500 years after the time of Zosimos.

  The explosion of Gnosis in the second century AD made a definite and permanent impact on the development of alchemy. On the one hand, gnostic theories enriched and personalised it, but on the other, gnosticising the Art took it far from its experimental and utilitarian aspect. The Hermetic Cyranides explicitly states with reference to alchemy that the major opus is nothing less than the liberation of the ‘soul’ from ‘body’. It is however never altogether clear in alchemical texts whether the operation of transmuting the lower metals, (viz : lead) to higher metals (silver and gold) might not simply be an analogy for a spiritual exercise or indeed vice versa. A mystical and a physical practice often seem to go hand in hand. For by the second century it was normal to think of metals as being composed of both a lifeless physical base (uniform for all metals), and an invigorating and distinguishable ‘soul’, (becoming visible through the action of fire). The ‘soul’ of the metal was thought to exist in varying degrees of purity, and this not only indicated the dignity of the metal but also provided analogies for the spiritual awareness of the alchemist. It also followed, according to the
physics of the time, to see the ‘soul’ of the metal as subject to stellar influences, as people were thought to be. In this context it was logical to envision the possibility of transmuting the metal by influence upon the ‘soul’ of the metal. This explains why operations had to be undertaken according to appropriate astrological configurations. Each planet corresponded to a particular metal : Mercury with mercury; gold with the Sun; silver with the Moon; lead with Saturn; iron with Mars; copper with Venus and tin with Jupiter. The highest state of the soul was identification with God, and in alchemical language, this state was Gold : the Sun, the “visible god” of the Hermetists. The transmutation of the soul, as understood by the sages of Alexandria (where alchemy flourished), required the sympathy, in the deepest sense, of the alchemist with the work. If you wished to advance in alchemy, you had to advance in gnosis.

  The great question was how to arrive at the Gold, for which purpose it was necessary to know how to release the spirit (pneuma) or mercurius (principle of transformation - Mercury was of course the Latin form of Hermes), hidden or imprisoned within the chemical substance11. In order to effect the transformation, a system of more or less standard but polyvalent operations was employed, whereby higher substances impacted on lower ones in the belief that the mercurius of the superior substance would swallow the impurities of the lesser. Thus mercurius was frequently portrayed as a devouring serpent. As a symbol of the totality of the cosmos and its cyclic nature, we sometimes see the gnostic figure of the ouroboros, the serpent devouring its own tail, forming an unbroken process of transmutation : the cosmos. And since mercurius or philosophical (not chemical) mercury was thought to be the quintessence of the four elements, seventeenth century Christian alchemists were content to see the striking image of the serpent nailed to a crucifix (symbolizing the four elements) as Christ : the principle of the redemptive suffering of the metal's soul. Death and Resurrection are meaningful ways of interpreting the transformation of substances within the alchemical vase to the spiritual mind. By the sixteenth century, (in the works of Joseph Quercetanus12, who drew on the medieval manuscript tradition), the processes associated with alchemy, forever watched over by the arch psychopomp Hermes Trismegistus, had been systematised as involving more or less the following stages :

  Calcination.

  Solution.

  Elementary separation

  Conjunction.

  Putrefaction

  Coagulation.

  Cibation

  Sublimation

  Fermentation

  Exaltation

  Augmentation

  Projection.

  Note that last process, projection : a common enough term now in the argot of psychology, and taken from the esoteric jargon of alchemy. Indeed alchemy is full of processes we should now regard as interior psychological ones. For example, the annihilation of opposites through the mysterium conionctionis, sometimes represented in the image of the copulating couple, Sol and Luna. This drive to transcend duality has very clear parallels in gnostic philosophy. The gnostic conception within alchemy could not be expressed more clearly than it is in the prologue to the Hermetic Cyranides where the author quotes from Harpocration of Alexandria (mid-second century BC) who says he found the following inscription in Babylon “carved in Syrian characters” and which he had translated in Alexandria :

  O immortal soul, clothed in a mortal body, you are borne from on high by the evil bonds of Necessity, for God Himself declared that you would rule over mortal bodies and bear with the sinful, being the yarn spun by the fates and Necessity. For like a man who is imprisoned and in bondage, so you too are held by the harsh bonds of Necessity. But when you escape from the mortal and oppressive body, you will truly behold God ruling in the air and in the clouds. He who eternally brings upon the earth thunder and earthquakes, lightning and thunder-bolts, and moves the foundations of the earth and the waves of the sea. Such will be the eternal works of God the mother of all things. God has made known to mortals all things, and their opposites.

  This account is reminiscent of the legend surrounding what is probably the most significant alchemical text of all time : the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos, also known as the Tabula Smaragdina. This was variously thought to have been the only inscribed wisdom to survive the Great Flood, or to have been written on a tablet, found in the tomb of the Thrice Greatest himself. It was transmitted in Arabic texts from the eighth to the ninth centuries from a text of Syrian origin and was translated into Latin in the twelth century and made subject to continuous commentary throughout the Middle Ages. The Emerald Tablet was almost certainly in existence in the fourth century AD, since it appears to have been paraphrased by the ‘Gnostic Jesus’ of the Nag Hammadi Library13.

  We find in the Emerald Tablet the quintessential doctrines of the Hermetic Art of alchemy : the interaction of the microcosm and macrocosm - the two coming from a single source; the universe created out of the four Aristotelian elements; the universal power of the spirit to penetrate the macro and microcosm, and even the luminous couple of the Chemical Nuptials, Sol and Luna : the two opposed principles which must be united. The Emerald Tablet expresses the Great Work of the alchemist in a nutshell:

  It is true, without lie, certain and of all truth,

  That which is below is like that which is above,

  and that which is above is like that which is below,

  to work the miracle of the one thing.

  And as all things have been and came from one

  thus all things were born in this unique way by adaption.

  The sun is the Father,

  The moon is its mother,

  The wind carries it in his belly,

  The earth is its nourisher,

  The Father of all, the Will of the whole cosmos is here;

  Her power is complete if she is converted in earth.

  You will separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross,

  carefully with great industry.

  It climbs from the earth to the sky, and then it descends in the earth,

  and it receives the power of the superior things and the inferior.

  You will have by this means all the glory of the world,

  and all obscurity is removed from you.

  This is the strong power of all power,

  because it will conquer everything subtle and everything solid.

  Thus the world has been created.

  From this will be and will follow the innumerable adaptions

  for which the medium is here.

  That is why I have been called Hermes Trismegistus,

  having the three parts of the philosophy of the world.

  That which I said on the operation of the sun is accomplished and perfected.14

  Zosimos of Panopolis

  From the fourth century onwards, the substantial name mercurius would be inseparably linked to Hermes or Mercurius Trismegistus. Instrumental in forging this link was the third to fourth century Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis, (Akhmim), who operated in Alexandria, the heart of the gnostic world at that time. Zosimos is an extremely interesting figure. His dreams have been subjected to positive analysis by Carl Jung, while Garth Fowden writes of him in his excellent book The Egyptian Hermes : “Zosimos' spirituality is clearly the product of his contact with the philosophical Hermetica.”

  The vogue for timeless Hermetic study may have had something to do with the times. The century in which Zosimos was born has been described by Dean Inge as “an age of lengthening shadows and waning light. So we think; and so, on the whole, thought those who lived in it. ‘The world has grown old.’ ‘This is indeed the fin de siècle’ (ipsa clausula saeculi). ‘Humanity is at its last gasp.’ Pagans and Christians are equally pessimistic. To both alike, civilisation seemed to have no future. This feeling of hopelessness is intelligible. The government of the Empire had fallen into anarchy. There were seven puppet emperors, set up and deposed by the army, between 235 and 249.15” In spite of all
this, Dean Inge asks the question, “May not political calamities actually liberate philosophy and religion, by compelling them to attend exclusively to their own business?” A good point, and one which may explain why we find Zosimos, obviously a brilliant individual, inspecting an alchemical furnace in a temple at Memphis fifty years after the period described.

  While our inheritance of Zosimos' works is fragmentary, they nonetheless tell us a great deal about his inner life. Here was a man driven more by spiritual impulse than academic curiosity, a drive whose powerful urges found expression in his acquaintance with Platonism, Gnosticism, Judaism and the wisdom ascribed to Hermes and the oriental Zoroaster. “Like many men of his period, Zosimos reflected on how his soul might be freed from the world of flux and illusion; and his preoccupations occasionally invaded his sleeping hours, and gave rise to dreams and visions.”16 In one dream, Zosimos describes climbing steps towards a bowl-shaped altar, strongly reminiscent of the Hermetic bowl of nous (νους) described in Corpus Hermeticum IV. At the altar stood a priest who announced to Zosimos that he had :

  accomplished the descent of these fifteen steps of darkness and the ascent of the steps of light, and he who sacrifices is himself the sacrificial victim. Casting away the coarseness of the body, and consecrated priest by necessity, I am made perfect as a spirit…I am Aion, the priest of the sanctuaries, and I have submitted myself to an unendurable torment. For there came one in haste at early morning, who overpowered me and pierced me through with the sword, and dismembered me in accordance with the rule of harmony. And he drew off the skin of my head with the sword which he was holding, and mingled the bones with the pieces of flesh, and caused them to be burned with the fire that he held in his hand [?], till I perceived by the transformation of the body that I had become spirit. And that is my unendurable torment.17