Today, August 7, 2011 I gave a talk at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Santa Paula. The title was iPhone Theology. The real topic was how to use low and high technology to understand ordinary reality and transcend it. I showed some of my photos to demonstrate the use of symbols and metaphors to better understand the messages we are receiving all the time. I did not write down or record my talk. After the talk I was reminded of an essay I wrote for the local paper more than 10 years ago. I was writing a column every two weeks. I could write on anything I wanted. Here is one sample. It ties in to what I was talking about in church this morning.
Chapter 57
As Above So Below
Hermes Trismegistus is my new main man. He is one heavy dude. I’m really surprised that his name is not a household word. It is around my household. My next cat is going to be named after him. In the morning I will open the door and yell, “Here Trismegistus. Here Trismegistus.” He will come running for that can of mackerel.
Who is Hermes Trismegistus? Why, he is the father of alchemy. Where would we be without alchemy? Our world would be a lesser place without the contributions of Hermes. I do hope that it will show no disrespect to call him by his first name. I feel as if I know him personally, even though he has been dead for centuries.
I first studied alchemy during a college course in medieval history. That’s the middle ages. Whose middle ages I don’t know. Someday students will be studying our time period and perhaps calling it the middle ages. I did my paper on alchemy and learned a lot of neat stuff. i didn’t get a very good grade on it but it is one of the few papers that I did that has had any lasting impact on me. I don’t remember now but i am sure that Hermes was mentioned.
High school chemistry taught me that alchemy was an early form of chemistry. A bunch of foolish men during a time when nobody had any brains thought they could turn lead into gold. How stupid can you get. After endless experimentation they discovered the principles of modern chemistry, almost by accident, as an afterthought. What were these people thinking of?
Schools plant seeds. They teach a little but mostly they plant seeds. The high school chemistry class and the college history class planted seeds about alchemy. I had to water the seeds and tend the soil around them myself. Great concepts like alchemy can only be grown from seed. They can’t be transmitted from one head to another in a public school setting. I don’t think that there has been a single time in all the years that I went to school that a teacher tried to teach about things like alchemy and about the existence of a hidden reality that constitutes the underlying essence of all truths and all religions.
Maybe it isn’t a seed that was planted way back when I first heard about alchemy. Maybe it was more like a beneficial virus that I was exposed to that showed up in my life after a couple of decades. It showed up one day when I was searching around for just the right title for a photograph I had just printed. I hung the photograph on the wall and thought about it for several days and tried out several titles that didn’t stick. Finally one came to me and it was just right. Just like Goldilocks’ bed. I titled the photo “As Above So Below”.
I showed this new photo to a visitor in the gallery and told her that the title was the essence of hermetic wisdom. She acknowledged that she didn’t rightly know what hermetic wisdom was. It was at that point that I decided that I had better be able to explain a little of the ol’ crapola that I was slinging around.
Hermes gave his name to the hermetic philosophy. That’s alchemy. Today hermetic means completely sealed, especially against the escape or entry of air. That’s good to know when you buy food. In alchemy the hermetic vessel is a glass container within which a transformation occurs.
Now here’s the trick. Hermes Trismegistus and a lot of other alchemists right down to modern times talked about one thing but really meant another. What they talked about was the transmutation of base metals into gold. What they really meant was that consciousness can be radically altered and transmuted from the ordinary, lead-like level of everyday perception to a subtle, gold-like level of perception. Alchemy is a rainbow arching from the earthly to the heavenly plane, between matter and spirit. Like the rainbow, it may appear within reach, only to recede if it is chased by an unworthy person who only wants the pot of gold.
I imagine that it must have been very threatening to the ruling powers in the middle ages to be faced with a philosophy such as alchemy. It was threatening because alchemy presented a method for self transformation. If base, lead-like humans could, using the spiritual and symbolic tools of alchemy, transform themselves as a means of achieving oneness with the world, then what need would there be for organized religion and politics? This is what the medieval alchemists must have been saying to themselves. Their ideas were obviously a threat to the status quo. A threat to those who maintained control over the individual by dispensing knowledge and salvation.
The alchemists were not dumb. They knew they would be in big trouble if the authorities ever found out what they were really teaching. What they did to protect themselves from being burned at the stake was to encode their messages in symbols and stories. The symbols and stories led most people to think that the purpose of alchemy was to turn base metals into gold. The alchemists succeeded in hiding their knowledge from the crass masses who were only interested in gold. For those who were interested in spiritual transformation the message was there, in powerful symbolic form.
The alchemists learned to create within a sealed vessel a model of the universe and of human consciousness. The hermetic vessel is our consciousness. Within that vessel opposing complementary forces, symbolized by male and female, sulphur and mercury, earth and air, fire and water, attain the perfect synthesis, of which gold is the emblem.
By this time you are probably saying to yourself, “This defies linear logic!” I hope you are saying that, because that is the point of presenting these concepts in that way. The limitations of the mind must be transcended to achieve recognition of reality. Recognition of reality seems simple enough but when it is really achieved enlightenment results. Or so I’ve been told. Most of the time I’m stuck in this body getting flabbier by the minute. I really must start exercising and eating properly.
The photograph with the new title was hanging on the wall for just a couple of days before a poet from Bakersfield bought it to add to her collection of John Nichols photographs. It was an image of a rock in a stream in the Sespe. It looked like the swirling cosmos mirrored in a small portion of a small creek near a small town in California. Certain images can be used to perpetuate the miracle of the one thing. That’s what alchemy is all about. That’s what photography as art can be all about.
Please don’t tell anyone I told you about this. It was supposed to be a secret.
