Terence McKenna ~ The Alchemical Dream
“A day will come when men will no longer care for the earth and that day the gods will depart and everything will be thrown into primal chaos.”
“Perhaps we are the naive ones; perhaps we too quickly assumed that we had understood all there was to know about matter. After all, even to this moment, we cannot locate the seat of the imagination in matter; we cannot trace the evolution of a human thought or hope in matter. It’s almost as though the alchemists, through their humility, had a deeper insight into the workings of the world than we have achieved today.”
“And then by distillation and then by coagulation and then by concentration through firing, the alchemical body is brought to completion. These are processes that go on both within the chemical retort, the alembic, in the alchemist’s laboratory and their processes which go on in the heart and mind of the alchemist. One process dissolves, another process separates the dross, the gross matter, from the precious; another concentrates the subtle essence; another raises the subtle essence to another level of refinement. And over time, the great friend of the alchemist, this process of rarefaction and growth, both metallic and psychological, both internal and external, both personal and impersonal, proceeds and feeds upon itself, and eventually, not through any logic discernible to the scientific mind, there is a kind of miracle: the production of the stone, the union of spirit and matter, the fusion of these two contradictory aspects of the universe into a new and third thing, the quintessence, the rubedo, the lapis philosophorum, the aqua vitae, the nostra aqua felix, philosophorum.”
Or left my lamp at midnight hour be seen in some high lonely tower where I may oft outwatch the Bear with thrice-great Hermes or unsphere the spirit of Plato to unfold what worlds or what vast regions hold.
All you that fain philosophers would be and night and day in Geber’s kitchen toil, wasting the chips of ancient Hermes’ tree, we need to turn them to a precious oil. The more you work, the more you lose and spoil. Do you, I say, how learning so e’er you be, go burn your books and come and learn of me.
The whole of the cosmos is reflected in the mystery of man and woman, the mystery of the human mind-body interface. It’s important to see Dee as a kind of culmination of a tradition that had been at work for over a hundred and fifty years in Europe. The use of astrology, numerology, Hebrew Kabbalah, and the doctrine of signatures to produce a magical theory of nature and man’s place in it can be traced to a generation before Dee: people like Henry Cornelius Agrippa, , who became the prototype for Faust, the bishop Trithemius, the great developer of codes and ciphers, one of Dee’s great passions, the Florentine magician Marcello Ficino, who was the great rediscoverer and promoter of the hermetic knowledge and upon which he drew very heavily. But he took their work and added the dimension of the idea of an angelic intercession into politics of the time, essentially in support of the values of the young Queen Elizabeth and her Astraea reign.
Alchemy and the history of alchemy is full of contradictions, inconsistencies, unions of opposites, if you will. The very year that the Rosicrucian manifestoes claimed the attention of the European public, 1608, Dee died in poverty and disappointment in his now half-looted and abandoned home at Mortlake. The alchemical dream that Dee had sought to live was to be completed, if at all, by personalities other than him.
Our revels now are ended; these are actors, as I foretold you, are all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air, and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Frederick and Elizabeth: The Alchemical Marriage
Frederick the Elector V, Palatine Prince of Heidelberg, 16 years old, was betrothed by an arranged marriage to Elizabeth Stewart of England, the daughter of James the First, the great-granddaughter of Henry the Eighth of England. She too was but 16 years old when they were married in one of the most dramatic nuptials that London had ever witnessed. Frederick had come to England to claim his queen, accompanied by courtiers, alchemists, and his advisor Christian von Anhalt, an alchemical dreamer who saw in the marriage of the young couple the opportunity for the establishment of a Protestant alchemical kingdom in Central Europe. The young couple, lost in love, made their way back to Frederick’s beautiful Palatinate in southern Germany, and there they intended to dwell and found a dynasty, but such was not to be. They were the center of a movement of alchemical reformation and revolution of spiritual freedom and, to my mind, a very sort of psychedelic world, a rarefaction—good alchemical word—a rarefaction of the human imprint on this planet, a spiritualization of humanity and a new order of mind folded into this pair of sixteen-year-olds. So to take an incident like the career of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of Heidelberg, and his bride and make of it a kind of exemplar, a parable, a myth, if you will, the myth of the alchemical marriage, a myth that takes innocence and naiveté and belief in the power of ideas to make a new world.
The Alchemical Laboratory at Heidelberg
This is ground zero for the Rosicrucian enlightenment. I’m standing here in the alchemical laboratory of the palace in Heidelberg; we are essentially at the center of the alchemical hopes of the Rosicrucian enlightenment. It was here, in the years before the adventure in Bohemia, that Frederick’s alchemists, astrologers, and soothsayers toiled directly under the king’s observation and control. Here came Michael Mayer, Heinrich Khunrath, the great names of alchemy. It’s entirely possible that John Dee was in this room; it’s entirely possible that Edward Kelly stood where I am standing now. It’s almost impossible to conceive of the hopes and the fantasies and the labors and the dreams that have been generated by and are centered on this room and the objects in it. This is the last alchemical laboratory in the world to fully function before the rise of modern science, and these tools in many ways reflect the internal cosmology of the men and women who used them. This, for example, a typical alchemical distillery, is called the Pelican, another example of the colorful nature of alchemical vocabulary. It’s called the Pelican because it is associated with the myth of a bird which plucks blood from its own breast. The prima materia—faeces, black coal, charcoal, salt—lighter heated in here, brought to a high temperature of fevered caloric state, rises into the higher empyrean of the vessel, and there rarified, it condenses, liquefies, and flows down into the cooler domain of the child of the Pelican. Here the essence is collected, the quintessence, and always the hope was that the next experiment, the next combination of materials, would yield the elixir vitae, the lapis philosophorum, the completion that the alchemists sought. And so all this fantastic apparatus that we see around us is really not so much in the service of channeling liquids and gases but in the service of channeling spirit out of matter and into the higher realms where it then can be refluxed, recondensed, and the lapis philosophorum, the stone of the philosophers, the central mystery brought to completion.
The Quintessence and the Self
It’s the self that we are trying to recover. This is lumina de lumina, the light trapped in matter, the lux materia. This is universal medicine, curing all ills; it is the answer, it is what everyone is looking for and no one can find. And so the alchemist toiled over the centuries, the torment of the sulfur, the torment of the cinnabar, the search for the triumphant chariot of antimony, the search for the quintessential essence that represented the union of all the world that the alchemists saw around them. We have come to understand that the work of alchemy was not about the transmutation of crude metals into gold but was in fact a kind of dance of the imagination in which the psychological complexes within the alchemists were mingled in an amalgam with chemical processes, creating a kind of mythology of matter, a landscape in which the green lion, the red dragon, the hermaphroditic queen, four-headed dog were figures moving to and fro in the fevered speculations of the so-called philosophers. And the belief was that man could work with nature, a full partner with the divine process, and redeem the light fallen into matter and, in so doing, redeem himself.
The alchemical philosophers were living in a waking dream, and many of their recipes were designed to wipe out the boundaries between waking and sleeping. The stages in a great work, beginning in the nigredo, the blackening, then the rubedo, the reddening, the citrinitas, the yellowing, the viriditas, the greening, the albedo, the whitening, and finally the purification—so at each stage there are substages of dissolution, coagulation. It’s a melting and a recasting and a purifying cycling contents. Images are full of ravening beasts, incestuous mother-son pairs, brother-sister pairs, hermaphrodites; all taboos are broken. This stuff just boils up from the unconscious, then is sublimed through the stages and is somehow fixed, and this fixing is the culmination of alchemy.
If you bring off this trick, then you possess the stone, the philosopher’s stone, the lapis, the sopha hydra, the stone of the wise. In the swirling of the alembic, in the chemical processes going on in the retort, you begin to be able to project your unconscious material. We are never really able, except in the psychedelic state, to transcend the belief in the inner world and the outer world as being somehow separate.
Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone. The shamans of the Amazon have attained a sufficient sophistication to explicitly understand that the vessel of our chemical transformation is the body and the head of the experience. This is the alchemical vessel; this is where you will encounter the three-headed dog and the queen dissolving in her bath and the incestuous couple that combines Sol and Luna to produce the white essence of the panacea of the universal medicine. These are psycho-mental processes. Nature is a great distillery of complexity, alchemical gold, novelty, connection. We have read what was forgotten during the reductionist centuries of modern science: we have read that the world is one thing, and it’s a living thing; it’s a thing with an intent and a spirit.
And rational analysis tells us that matter is simply atoms flinging themselves through space, obedient to certain mathematical laws that are invariant, and all the creativity, all the sense of connectedness that we experience as living beings, as members of a society, as human beings in contemplation of nature—all of that was denied. And it reaches its ultimate culmination in a statement made by Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, who said, “Nature is mute.” You understand what I mean: nature gives no clue. He tells you man is alone in the cosmos with his complexes and his obsessions; he confers meaning. I reject this. I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is that nature seeks to communicate, all being is pregnant with language, all reality wants to include the human side of nature in its ongoing intent. One of the most famous of all alchemical axioms is “as above, so below,” meaning always that in every small part of reality there is a tiny reflection of the great overstructure of reality, and in the largest structures are hidden the secrets of the smallest and vice versa.
We have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science where we have mind firmly separated out from the world, but in an earlier age, mind and matter were seen to be alloyed together throughout nature. And I think it’s very interesting that at this very high-tech moment in our adventure, the plants return and almost stand before us as a beacon and a promise. They stand for absolute Tao; they stand for the correct way for life to relate to its environment. If you look around you, the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown. The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of alchemical retort; the prima materia to be transformed are the nuclear stockpiles, the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands. The I Ching says never confront evil directly and never name it directly because it finds weapons to defend itself. We are not an army, so our strategy must be stealth. It’s an alchemical strategy, and what I mean by stealth, I mean the house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art, by dream, by vision.
The Subversive Power of Art
Find the others, find the others, and then you will know. All truth which springs from the individual is subversive. And then, using this technology which was designed to keep track of us, to pick our pockets and to sell us junk we don’t want, use this technology to produce art, massive amounts of subversive art. All culture is some kind of myth; all cultural stories then have a psychic dynamic to them. We are not an army; this is what Frederick didn’t understand. He was a king, but he was not an army.
The Fall of the Alchemical Kingdom
Unfortunately, the alchemical dream was not to be. Frederick’s advisors had seriously misjudged the situation. James was not supporting an alchemical revolution; he was playing one side against the other, and to the idealists in Prague, such cynicism is unimaginable. The Habsburgs back in Madrid quickly got wind of what was going on and laid siege to Prague, and the story of the alchemical kingdom and the Rosicrucian enlightenment, for all purposes, ended at an incident called the Battle of White Mountain. Elizabeth fled to the Netherlands with her children. Frederick was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain, and the alchemical dream died. And this was really, in some sense, the beginning of the 30 Years War, and as you know, going into the 30 Years War, Europe was a place of popes and kings; at the end of the 30 Years War, it was a place ruled by parliaments and peoples, and the entire medieval world was swept away. And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity.
The Enduring Alchemical Thread
But there was an unbroken thread that, however thinly drawn, persists right up to the present moment. So the idea is to show the way back to the high magic of the late Paleolithic. I think that what we want to do is make our way back to the alchemical garden; that’s where our roots are. That’s where meaning is. Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction, the coincidentia oppositorum, a rediscovery of the real ambiguity of being, a deeper possibility, a rebirth of the human spirit. In their way, Frederick and Elizabeth were acting out the dream of Camelot. In their way, they were acting out the alchemical dream of the rebirth of the king and queen. In their way, they were laying the groundwork for a new dispensation of human thought, freed from the medieval assumptions of guilt and the need for redemption, a point of view that made human beings co-creators in a magical universe with a loving deity. All that passed away with the fall of the Winter King and Queen.
The Coda: Descartes and the Angel
Well, until recently, I thought that that was the end of the story, but there is a coda that is amusing, if nothing else. This Habsburgian army, having laid siege and destroyed the alchemical kingdom, began to retreat across Europe. In that Habsburgian army, there was a young soldier of fortune, only 19 years old, still wet behind the ears, happily soldiering and wenching his way around Europe, and his name was René Descartes. On the night of September 16th, Descartes had a dream, and in this dream, an angel appeared to him, and the angel said to Descartes, “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.” And that revelation laid the basis for modern science. It’s the alchemical angel which will not die; it returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and peoples toward an unimaginable conclusion.