by Mark Booth
Today’s historians of science try to present Bacon as a thorough-going materialist, but this is wishful thinking. Although he believed that interesting new results would emerge if you looked at sense data as if they were not infused with meaning, this is not what he believed to be the case. We know, for example, that he believed in what he called ‘astrologica sana’, which is to say receiving the magical celestial influences into the spirit in the way that the Renaissance magus Pico della Mirandola had recommended. Bacon also believed in the same ethereal intermediary between spirit and matter as Newton, and that this same intermediary existed in humans who are ‘inclosed in a thicker body, as Ayrein Snow or Froath’ — what he called the ‘Aetheric body’.
Bacon said: ‘It is no less true in this human kingdom of knowledge, than in God’s kingdom of heaven that no man shall enter into it “except he become first as a little child”.’ This seems to be saying that a different and child-like state of mind needs to be reached first in order for higher knowledge to be reached. Paracelsus had said something similar, writing of the process of experimentation also using biblical phrasing: ‘Only he who desires with his whole heart will find and to him only who knocks vehemently shall the door be opened.’
The implication is that higher knowledge of the world comes from altered states of consciousness. Working in the same circles as Bacon and Newton, Jan Baptiste van Helmont wrote: ‘There is a book inside us, written by the finger of God, through which we may read all things.’ Michael Maier, who wrote about the Rosicrucians as if from the inside and published some of the most beautiful alchemical literature, said: ‘To drink the interior life in a long draft is to see the higher life. He who discovers the interior, discovers what is in space.’ In all these sayings there is a clear implication that the key to scientific discovery somehow lies within.
Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh. The Scottish roots of Freemasonry were deliberately covered up in the eighteenth century because they had become entangled with the Stuart dynasty, supporting its claims to the throne. Rosslyn Chapel, built in the fifteenth century by William Sinclair, the first Earl of Caithness, incorporated replicas of the twin pillars of Solomon’s Temple — Jakim and Boaz — in a way that anticipated every Masonic lodge in the world. A carving on the lower frame of the window in the south-west corner of the chapel seems to be of a Freemasonic First Degree. Scottish lodges of some description undoubtedly existed at least a hundred years before the recorded English ones.
We’ve seen that throughout history small groups have worked themselves into altered states. Is the suggestion by Bacon and his followers that the scientist needs somehow to tune himself to the etheric or vegetable dimension? That if you can somehow work yourself into the dimension of interweaving forms, you are on your way to understanding the secrets of nature?
We have seen that great scientific geniuses, the founders of the modern age, have tended to be fascinated by ideas of ancient wisdom and altered states. Could it be that it is not so much that genius is next to madness but that genius is next to the altered states brought on by esoteric training?
IF THE HEROES OF THE ROSICRUCIANS — Dee and Paracelsus — were wild and strange, the magi of the next epoch came on like respectable businessmen.
Freemasonry has always presented a straight face to the world. The Anglo-Saxon lodges in particular have been coy about their esoteric origins. The notion that Freemasons at sufficiently high levels of initiation are taught the secret doctrine and history of the world outlined in this book might seem implausible, even to many Freemasons.
In Freemasonic lore the society’s roots may be traced back to the building of Solomon’s Temple by Hiram Abiff, the suppression of the Knights Templar, and to secretive guilds of craftsmen such as the Compagnons Du Devoir, the Children of Father Soubise and the Children of Father Jacques.
An often overlooked influence on the formation of secret societies, especially Freemasonry, is the Co-fraternities. Founded in the fifteenth century, they were originally lay brotherhoods affiliated to monasteries. The brothers pursued the spiritual life while also working in the community, organizing charities, commissioning art and leading processions on holy days. Their secrecy was originally designed to ensure that charitable works remained anonymous, but it gave rise to rumours of robes, secret rituals and initiates. In France in the fifteenth century these Co-fraternities, which had been absorbing ideas from Joachim and the Cathars, were eventually driven underground.
But modern ‘speculative’ Freemasonry is dated by its official historians to the seventeenth century.
It’s sometimes claimed that the first recorded case of initiation into Freemasonry was that in 1646 of the celebrated antiquary and collector, and founder member of the Royal Society, Elias Ashmole. He was certainly one of the earlier English Freemasons and very influential.
Born in 1617, the son of a sadler, Elias Ashmole qualified as a lawyer, and became a soldier and a civil servant. He was restless collector of curios. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, built around his collection, was the first public museum. He was also a man of boundless intellectual curiosity. In 1651 he met an older man, William Backhouse, owner of a manor house called Swallowfield. This turned out to have an extraordinary long gallery, a treasure house of ‘Inventions and Rarities’, including rare alchemical manuscripts. Backhouse was evidently a man much after Ashmole’s heart, and Ashmole’s diaries reveal how Backhouse invited him to become his son.
By this, we learn, Backhouse meant that he intended to adopt him as his successor and heir. Before he died, he promised, he would pass on to Ashmole the ultimate secret of alchemy, the true matter of the Philosopher’s Stone, so that Ashmole could carry forward a secret tradition that dated back to the time of Hermes Trismegistus. Over the next two years Backhouse’s teaching of the eager Ashmole was slow and apparently hesitant. But then in May 1653 the younger man recorded ‘my father Backhouse lying sick in Fleet streete over against St Dunstans Church, and not knowing whether he should live or dye, about eleven o clock, told me in S.lables the true Matter of the Philosophers Stone which he bequeathed to me as a Legacy’.
Illustration to Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, an anthology collected by Elias Ashmole.
Ashmole’s is an unusually clear and unambiguous account of the passing down of secret knowledge, but there is other evidence, too, hints and allusions of occult activity among the intellectual elite. The second grand master of the London Lodge was John Théophile Desaguliers, a follower of Isaac Newton who likewise spent many years poring over alchemical manuscripts.
The symbolism of Freemasonry as it was formulated in this period is shot through with alchemical motifs from the central notion of the Work to the ubiquitous cornerstone and philosopher’s stone — ASHLAR — to the compasses and l’equerre.
Depiction of the English king, Charles I in 1649 awaiting execution. This event was predicted with astonishing accuracy by the French prophet and astrologer Michel de Nostradamus in 1555. As David Ovason, the most learned of the Nostradamus scholars, has pointed out, his line ‘CHera pAR LorS, Le ROY’ is cabalistic code for ‘Charls Le Roy’, so that the apparently bland line ‘It will come about that the King’ actually contains a prediction of the name of the man who, as parts of the quatrain make clear, was to be ‘kept in a fortress by the Thames’ and be ‘seen in his shirt’. Charles made a point of wearing two shirts, as he stepped outside on to the executioner’s platform, so that he would not shiver from the cold and appear fearful.
THE TIME HAS FINALLY COME TO ASK
What exactly is alchemy?
Alchemy is very old. Ancient Egyptian texts talk of techniques of distillation and metallurgy as mystical processes. Greek myths such as the quest for the Golden Fleece can be seen to have an alchemical layer of meaning, and Fludd, Boehme and others have interpreted Genesis in the same alchemical terms.
A quick survey of alchemical texts ancient and modern shows that alchemy, like the Cabala, is a very broad church. If there is
one great mysterious ‘Work’, it is approached via a remarkable variety of codes and symbols. In some cases the Work involves Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, in others roses, stars, the philosopher’s stone, salamanders, toads, crows, nets, the marriage bed, and astrological symbols such as the fish and the lion.
There are obvious geographical variations. Chinese alchemy seems less about the quest for gold and more about a quest for the elixir of life, for longevity, even immortality. Alchemy also seems to change through the ages. In the third century the alchemist Zozimos wrote that ‘the symbol of the chymic art — gold — comes forth from creation for those who rescue and purify the divine soul chained in the elements’. In early Arab texts the Work involves manipulations of these same Four Elements, but in European alchemy, rooted in the Middle Ages and flowering in the seventeenth century, a mysterious fifth element, the Quintessence, comes to the fore.
Illustration to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton often wrote about the way his muse dictated poetry to him. It is tempting to modern sensibility to see this as mere metaphor. But Milton’s journals also show how much he was influenced by Boehme in his descriptions of Paradise and by Fludd in his cosmology. Milton’s writings also make it clear that he was used to encounters with disembodied beings: ‘If answerable style I can obtain Of my Celestial Patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitation unexplored; or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse’.
If we begin to look for unifying principles, we can see immediately that there are prescribed lengths of time or numbers of repetitions for the various operations, the distilling, the applying of gentle heat and so on.
There are obvious parallels, then, with meditative practice and this suggests immediately that these alchemical terms may be descriptions of subjective states of consciousness rather than the sort of chemical operations that might be performed in a laboratory.
Tying in with this we have also seen repeated suggestions, particularly from Rosicrucian sources, that these operations are often intended to have an effect during sleep and on the border between sleeping and waking. Could they be to do with visionary dreams or lucid dreaming? Or are they to do with the carrying over of elements of dream consciousness in waking consciousness?
There are many hints of a sexual element, too, from the recurring image of the Chemical Wedding to Paracelsus’s teasing references to the azoth. The Codex Veritatis in a commentary on the Song of Solomon advises, ‘Place the red man with his white woman in a red chamber, warmed to a constant temperature.’ Equally, Tantric texts equate alchemical Mercury with sperm.
There is a school of thought that interprets alchemical texts as manuals giving techniques to make the kundalini serpent rise up from the base of the spine through the chakras to light up the Third Eye.
Yet another school, inspired by Jung, sees alchemy as a kind of precursor of psychology. Jung wrote a study of the alchemist Gerard Dorn, making this case, and Dorn certainly lends himself to this interpretation as he is an overtly psychological kind of alchemist. ‘First transmute the earth of your body into water,’ he says. ‘This means your heart that is as hard as stone, material and lazy, must become subtle and vigilant.’ In Dorn we see both the practice of working on individual human faculties that we noted in Ramón Lull, and the combining of esoteric training with moral development that we saw earlier in esoteric Buddhism and the Cabala.
Alchemical-sexual practices certainly exist — we will look at these in Chapter 25. And there may well be alchemical texts which deal with the kundalini rising, but in my view this is not central to the golden age of alchemy that reached its peak with the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons.
Jung’s purely psychological alchemy is interesting in its way but it is totally uninteresting from an esoteric perspective, because it disregards notions of journeys into the spirit worlds and communication with disembodied beings.
The key to understanding alchemy surely lies in the surprising phenomena we have been following in this chapter. Bacon, Newton and the other Rosicrucian and Freemasonic adepts were interested in both direct personal experience and in scientific experiment. As idealists they were fascinated by what connects matter to mind, and like all esotericists they conceived of this subtle connection in terms of what Paracelsus called the ens vegetalis, or vegetable dimension.
Did it perhaps provoke them that the vegetable dimension seemed immeasurable, even undetectable by any scientific instrument? Maybe, but then perhaps what sustained them, what prompted them to explore further, was the belief that this vegetable dimension had apparently been experienced in all times and all places, and that there was an ancient authentic tradition of manipulating it to which many of the great geniuses of history had subscribed.
Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and others had developed scientific, experimental procedure. They had tried to find universal laws to make sense of the world viewed as objectively as possible. Now they applied the same methodology to life viewed as subjectively as possible. The result was a science of spiritual experience, and this is what alchemy really is. The gold they experienced at the end of their experiments was a spiritual gold, an evolved form of consciousness that meant a mere metal bringing worldly wealth no longer interested them.
In the golden age of alchemy, Sulphur represents the animal dimension, Mercury is the vegetable dimension and Salt the material dimension. These dimensions are centred in different parts of the body, the animal down below in the sex organs, the vegetable in the solar plexus, and Salt in the head. Will and sexuality are seen as deeply intertwined in the esoteric philosophy. This is the Sulphurous part. Mercury, the vegetable part, is the realm of feeling. Salt is the precipitate of thinking.
In all alchemical texts Mercury is the mediator between Sulphur and Salt.
In the first stage of the process the vegetable dimension must be worked on to achieve the first stage of mystical experience, the entering of the Matrix, the sea of light that is the world between the worlds.
The second stage is what is sometimes called the Chemical Wedding, when soft, female Mercury makes love to hard, rigid, red Sulphur.
By meditating on images which inspire a loving feeling repeatedly and over long periods — it takes twenty-one days for any exercise to make a material change in human physiology — the candidate brings about a process of change which sinks down into the obstinate Will.
The Alchemist by William Hogarth.
If we succeed in making our selfish, sexual desires into living, spiritual desires, then the bird of resurrection, the Phoenix, rises. If our heart is overtaken by these transformed energies then it becomes a centre of power. Anyone who has met a truly holy person will have felt the great power that a transformed heart radiates.
Love fascinated the alchemists of the golden age. They knew that the heart is an organ of perception. When we look at someone we love, we see things other people cannot see, and the initiate who has undergone alchemical transformation has made a conscious, willed decision to see the whole world in this way. An adept sees how the world really works in a way that is denied to the rest of us.
So if we persist with our own alchemical spiritual exercises, if we succeed in purifying the fragmentary material barrier between ourselves and the spirit worlds, as the French mystic St Martin urges, then our own powers of perception will improve. In the first instance, the spirit worlds will begin to shine through into our dreams, less chaotically than they routinely do and more meaningfully. The promptings of the spirits, first in the form of hunches or intuition, will also begin to invade our waking life. We will begin to detect the flow and operation of the deeper laws beneath the everyday surface of things.
In the specifically Christian alchemy of Ramón Lull and St Martin, for example, the Sun-spirit that transforms the human body into a radiant body of light is identified with the historical personage of Jesus Christ. In other traditions, though this historical identification may not be made, the same process is described. The Indian sage Ramalinga Swamigal wrote: ‘
O God! You have shown me eternal love by bestowing on me the golden body. By merging with my heart, you have alchemized my body.’
These phenomena, reported in different cultures, show that the Third Eye is beginning to open.
It would be all too easy to interpret all this as some kind of fuzzy mysticism. But the stories about scientists like Pythagoras and Newton suggest that by means of these peculiar kinds of altered states they were able to discover new things about the world, to see its inner workings and understand patterns that are perhaps too complex or too large for the human mind to grasp with its everyday, commonsensical state of consciousness. Alchemy confers on its practitioners a supernatural intelligence.
A common word in alchemical texts is VITRIOL. This is an acronym for Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. Visit the interior of the earth to find the secret stone.
When alchemical texts recommend visiting the interior of the earth, this is a way of talking about sinking down into one’s own body. Alchemy, then, is concerned with occult physiology. By acquiring a working knowledge of his own body’s physiology, the alchemist was able to gain a degree of control over it. Great alchemists like St Germain were said to be able to live as long as they wanted.
But on a more down-to-earth level alchemists were also able to advance science in practical ways. We have seen alchemists who have made contributions to the growth of modern medicine. In altered states of consciousness men like Paracelsus and van Helmont were able to solve medical problems and devise treatments that were beyond the understanding of the medical profession of the day. By going inside themselves, these initiates saw the Outworld with supernatural clarity. To put it in cabalistic terms, man is the synthesis of all the Holy Names. All knowledge is therefore contained inside ourselves if we learn how to read it. The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali allude to travelling the heavens and shrinking to the size of the smallest particle as being among the powers that reward those who practise its arcane techniques. Indian adepts still talk of being able to travel to the far reaches of the cosmos and also to so concentrate their powers of perception that they see right down to the atomic level.
