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A QUICK GUIDE TO NEOPLATONISM

The Neoplatonists were a school of Greek philosophers around 250 AD who drew upon Platonic and Neopythagorean philosophy to talk about God. While they were not magicians in and of themselves, their ideas about the nature of God and reality would be influential for everyone from the church fathers to jewish mystics to Islamic polymaths.

According to the Neoplatonists, we live in the sensible world. It is composed of all the things we can sense and understand. Things like rocks, trees, meat, dreams, ideas, and women, are all part of the sensible world. But where did it all come from? To answer this question, the Neoplatonists introduced three main ideas: The One, emmanation, and the many.

Think of yourself. You came from somewhere. You had parents who produced you, and they in turn had parents who produced them, and so on and so on all the way back to the biological Adam and Eve. But something had to cause them: be they sneezed into being by Atum, or evolved over time from some primordial froth, or shaped from clay by Ki. But something had to cause Autm, or Ki, or the primordial froth, and so on and so on until you reach the simplest, earliest, most original state of the world. This is The One. It is the simple, transcendent, and infinite cause of the universe that is furthest from comprehension. 

But we live in the sensory world, the thing made of rocks, trees, dreams, ideas, and women, all things that are notably not transcendent. This is the many, the fragments of The One that make up the world. This raises a question: How does an Infinite, transcendent One become the finite, manifest world? The Neoplatonists answer: emmanation. 

The One has to go through steps to break itself down into the world. These middle-states, called hypostates, are the bread and butter of why Neoplatonism has stuck around for the rest of magical history. Because no two Neoplatonists could really agree on exactly how many hypostates there were, what order they would happen in, or their relationship to each other. Discourse around how exactly the One became the many formed the basis for nigh on two thousand years of theological discussion. 

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Early Christians interpreted Neoplatonic ideas as such, equating The One with the father, and the many with Christ, with the Holy Spirit serving as a hypostate between the two. 

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Plotinus, as edited by Porphyry, posited some notably more complex hypostates. 

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Sharp-eyed viewers may notice the similarities between these complex diagrams, and the kabbalistic tree of life, whose framers were undoubtedly influenced by neoplatonic ideas. 

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WHO WERE THE GNOSTICS?

To explain Gnosticism, we have to talk about the formation of the Catholic Church. This will be the first of a repeating theme throughout history: Influential magical concepts being created from Catholic priests getting into fights.  

The year is around 100 CE. Jesus is dead, and the “Jesus cult” is trying to figure out how to become the Catholic Church. Early Christians knew that the death of Jesus was pretty important, possibly the most important thing to ever happen. The death of Christ was an event of titanic, cosmic significance, but among the church founders, there was significant argument over what exactly it meant for the rest of us ordinary humans. 

The crux of the matter was salvation. Did Christ’s death wipe the sin-slate clean? Were we all saved? Were only the believers saved? If you accepted Jesus as the son of god, were there extra steps we had to take? And what was the role of the church in all of this? Did you have to be part of the church to be saved? The answers to these questions would fundamentally shape the Catholic Church. 

There were two big sides in this fight. The “orthodox” position, represented by church fathers like Ireneus, was that to be considered Christian you had to meet some requirements. One had to follow the teachings of the church, accept baptism, participate in worship, and obey the clergy. He said that for those outside of the church, “There is no salvation.” [1] Not everyone agreed with this. The other side of this argument, were people who taught that salvation could be acquired outside of the church, through the acquisition of secret knowledge. Irenaeus did not like these folks. The idea that salvation could be acquired outside of the church was a fundamental challenge to the validity of the burgeoning institution of Catholicism. Iraneus derisively referred to these heretics Gnostics, after “Gnosis”, the ancient Greek word for knowledge. 

Gnosticism as a term did not originally refer to a religion, but what many Catholics understood to be a type of heresy. Because of this, there are many, many different texts, groups, and theologies that fall under the category of “Gnostic.” Texts are often described as ”Gnostic in character” or “a gnosticism” rather than “Gnostic”. Additionally, Gnostic texts are infamous for their complexity, and resistance to summarization. In the interest of time, we will discuss the sects and mythologies most commonly cited in modern magical thought. 

[1] Pagels, xxiii

AN OVERVIEW OF GNOSTIC MYTHOLOGY, THE APOCRYPHON OF JOHN

Gnostic mythology can be difficult to penetrate. The stories themselves are often remixes or elaborations upon existing biblical mythology. Take a story that may be familiar to our Abrahamic readers; the Garden of Eden. There are many (conflicting!) Gnostic versions of this story, each with new characters, events, and cosmologies. If this weren’t enough, the original texts are often written in cryptic, poetic language that makes translation difficult. For the interested party, finding a good place can be a struggle. 

The Apocyrphon of John is not a comprehensive overview of Gnostic mythology, but it is a good place to establish a base camp. 

In the beginning, there was The Monad. It is infinite, supreme, absolute, transcendent in all ways. The Monad is inconceivable perfection. Eventually, The Monad has a thought. This first thought becomes a being known as The Barbelo, a divine androgynous being referred to as ”the mother/father”, “the holy spirit”, and “the first man”. She [1] is the first of a new class of being known as Aeons. 

The Monad reflecting upon The Barbelo created Light, being called “Christ Autogenes” or “Christ the Self-created.” The gnostic trinity completed, Christ asked for a fellow worker, a being called Mind. The four work in concert to create further Aeons, each arranged into syzygies, or pairs. The sum of all these beings, the Aeons and The Monad, is referred to as The Pleroma, The Fullness. The Pleroma is perfect and good. 

The last Aeon to be created was a being known as Sophia, or Wisdom. She attempts to create her own little micro-pleroma. This goes wrong. In some versions of the story, it is because she attempted to create something without the assistance of her divine partner. In others, it is because she wished to emulate The Monad, but could not due to her fundamentally lesser nature. 

The result of Sophia’s mistake is imperfect, a malevolent being with the face of a lion and the body of a great serpent. She names it Yaldabaoth, a name likely based on the Imperial Aramaic yaldā bahôt, roughly translating to “Child of Chaos.” Seeing her creation is arrogant and malicious, Sophia attempts to hide Yaldabaoth from the rest of the Pleroma, and secrets him away inside a luminous cloud so he is ignorant of the higher gods. 

Yaldabaoth is the first of a new class of being, the imperfect and malevolent dieties known as Archons. Yaldaboth is powerful enough to mimic the processes of the Aeons. He creates additional archons in his own image, and fashions his own little world out of darkness, animating it with a spark of light stolen from Sophia. The result is a world “neither light nor dark” (Apoc John 12) Yaldabaoth declares himself the sole and jealous god of this realm. 

Sophia, realizing her error, finally fesses up to the rest of the Pleroma, who assist Sophia in redeeming her bastard creation. They devise a plan to reunite the sparks of the divine present in Yaldabaoth’s creation with the Pleroma. The Monad speaks to the Archons, the sheer magnitude of its voice shakes the foundation of the tiny universe, and leaves images on the “waters” that serve as its borders. The Monad says something along the lines of “Hey, you aren’t perfect sovereign here, there are sparks of the divine light running around inside of this thing, human spirits. You didn’t make those.”

The Archons, hoping to harness these divine sparks, create a “psychic vessel” a copy of the human spirit. But the vessels are only vessels, inanimate, motionless, and lightless. Seeing an opportunity, the Barbelo sent some angels to advise Yaldabaoth on why its creation was not moving. They instructed him to blow his mothers essence into the psychic bodies. Yaldabaoth does this, relinquishing the portion of his mothers spark, and animating Adam. 

Realizing that they have been tricked, Yaldaboth and the Archons attempt to destroy their creation, but they cannot. Yaldabaoth attempts to draw the light from Adam’s body, but fails, accidentally creating the female form, and Eve. The Archons resort to trapping their creation in the Garden of Eden, a prison meant to keep Adam and Eve ignorant of the Pleroma. 

Within this narrative, it was Christ who told Adam to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, giving him knowledge of his greater role in creation, and the ultimate goal of returning to the Pleroma. 

Not to be outdone, Yaldabaoth gives humanity the ability to procreate, in the hopes that this will dilute and confuse the knowledge of humanity's possible salvation, hiding the path to salvation among lies. 

JEWISH MAGIC IN ACTION

[Talk about how in this part, you’re gonna look at how one practiced magic and how that magic worked in this context. One or two lines.]

The day-to-day practice of Jewish magic had three main types: exorcisms, magical amulets, and aggressive/erotic magic. 

Exorcisms fall into three distinct types. The first is the use of animal, vegetable, or mineral products that possess a natural anti-demon effect, such as in the book of Tobit, when the heart of a certain type of fish is smoked to drive away the demon Asmodeus. The text is clear that it is specifically the smell that drives the demon away. There is no ritual or charismatic component to the fish heart’s effects beyond the smell of its smoke. The magic lies in the inherent properties of the fish, and in the laws of nature. 

There were exorcists that did not consider natural or charismatic elements sufficient on their own. In Josephus’sThe Jewish War, he gives an account of an exorcism that involves natural and charismatic components with a significant degree of development. I would be remiss for not quoting the colorful passage in its entirety:

“In the ravine which encloses the town (Machaerus) on the north, there is a place called Baaras, which produces a root bearing the same name. The root has a flamelike color and towards evening it emits a brilliant light; it eludes the grasp of persons who approach with the intention of plucking it, as it shrinks up and can only be made to stand still by pouring upon it a woman’s urine or menstrual blood. Yet even then to touch it is fatal, unless one brings the very same root, suspended from one’s hand. Another innocuous mode of capturing it is as follows. They dig all around it, leaving but a minute portion of the root covered; they then tie a dog to it, and the animal rushing to follow the person who tied it easily pulls it up, but instantly dies – a substitute, as it were, for the one who intended to remove the plant, since after this, the root poses no danger to those who handle it. With all these attendant risks, it possesses one virtue for which it is prized; for the so-called demons – that is, the spirits of wicked men which enter the living and kill them unless aid is forthcoming – are promptly expelled by this root, if merely applied to the patients.”

The name of the plant, the ba’aras root itself, seems to be a transliteration of the Aramaic word for flame, and related to a similar Greek plant called aglaophotis, or “wonder-shine.” (Bohak 91) Josephus seems to emphasize the similarities between the two plants, the ba’aras and the aglaophotis, making it clear that both are “soul-drawing” roots, as in roots that will draw out the soul of any who tries to pick it. It is a trope that readers may recognize from the lore surrounding the Mandrake Root. 

[PUT THE THING ABOUT JEWISH MAGICIANS LEARNING HERBIARY FROM ANGELS HERE ITS THE PERFECT TRANSITION, leave some commentary about how even with the razor of “magicians learn and prophets are,” the categories still blend together]

ANCIENT JEWISH CHARISMATIC EXORCISMS

Any magical practice that relies on the innate power of the practitioner can be difficult to study, as no two practices are ever alike. The Christian New Testament and rabbinical literature are both full of accounts of itinerant holy men performing miracles. They heal the sick, control the rain, ford rivers and lakes, raise the dead*, and occasionally even perform miracles on accident when someone touches their robes or shadow. (Bohak 94) These charismatic holy men generally model themselves after biblical archetypes like Elijah, Elisha, and Moses, but make ample use of exorcisms, which were outside the repertoire of such figures. 

While these charismatic holy men rarely describe themselves or their practices, there is ample “outsider” (read: biased, corrupted, and apocryphal) evidence of others observing and commenting on their work. Descriptions of charismatic exorcisms run the gamut. In the Genesis Apocryohon we see Jesus make simple, repeated demands like “dumb and deaf spirit, I command you to come out of (the demoniac) and no longer enter him.” Rabbi Shimeon Bar Yohai and miracle-worker Hanina ben Dosa take a more involved approach, performing exorcisms through extended dialogues or negotiations with the demons. 

RITUAL EXORCISM

Rather than relying on innate power or the occult properties of natural materials, some Jewish exorcists used elaborate rituals and incantations to expurge demons. These rituals were generally taught from master to student, handed down through generations of practitioners in writing. Thankfully for us, that means that much of what they wrote survives today. 

The Book of Jubilees and the Book of Antiquities of the Bible each feature passages where a prayer is incanted aloud to drive away a demon. (They’re long quotes but they’re on Bohak 99) While Jewish exorcisms would evolve over time to become significantly more elaborate, the examples from Jubilees and Antiquities feature elements that would become commonplace in exorcisms well into the present day.

First, the exorcist addresses the demon in the second person accompanied by taunts, threats, and rhetorical questions. In earlier incantations the exorcist never spoke to the demon directly: this was an innovation. Second, the exorcist details the demon’s origins in the greater order of creation, chastising the demon for straying from its divinely intended place in the underworld. 

Josephus makes a critical bridge between this type of ritual exorcism and the work of King Solomon: 

“And God granted him knowledge of the art used against demons for the benefit and healing of men. And he composed incantations by which illnesses are relieved, and left behind modes of exorcisms by which the possessed drive out the demons so that they would never return.” 

This passage makes several distinctions that will be critical in the development of western magic. First of all, though this knowledge is divine in origin, it is the sort of thing that can be learned and reproduced. Second, the incantations and modes of exorcism (read: spells) are things that Solomon composed. It is clear that while Solomon was given knowledge from God, it was given in a form that left room for application. It is as if God gave Solomon the knowledge that exorcisms can be performed by playing the lyre, but it was still up to Solomon to compose the song. 

Josephus continues:

“And this was the mode of healing: He would bring to the nose of the demoniac the ring which had under its seal one of the roots prescribed by Solomon, and then, as the man smelled it, drew out the demon through his nostrils, and, when the man at once fell down, adjured the demon never to return, while mentioning Solomon’s name and reciting the incantations which he (i.e., Solomon) had composed.” (Bohak 101)

Here we see a mixture of the two previously discussed methods of exorcism. The ritual features both the manipulation of natural elements like roots alongside charismatic elements like incanting and adjuring the demon to leave. 

The ring is a crucial ritual element of this exorcism. It is unclear whether the ring is necessary for the root to work, or is simply amplifying its power in some way. But the fact that it is there evinces a developing system of ritual jewelry, furniture, clothing, and other accouterments that will come to dominate western magic. Josephus does not describe the ring, but given King Solomon’s association with magical rings, we can safely speculate that it may have been inscribed with the tetragrammaton in some form of paleo-hebrew lettering. (Bohak 104) Similarly, Josephus does not describe the root in question, only mentioning that Solomon prescribed it for the ritual.

(we need a conclusion for this section)

AMULETS

So why the amulets? Well, for the time, it was understood that oftentimes exorcized demons would come back. Any exorcist worth their salt would provide some sort of countermeasure to ensure that the demon did not return. 

This was not a belief common to the second temple period, however. Jesus never prescribed amulets to demoniacs, and in the book of Tobit, raphael assures Sarah and Tobias that the demon will never return again, so it is safe to assume that the production of amulets was a later invention. In fact, it is more than likely that the production of apotropaic amulets did not have its roots within jewish culture at all. 

However, past a certain point in history, the writing of the tetragrammaton becomes an apotropaic mark par excellence. How exactly this became this case is a matter of speculation, but contemporary judaism already placed a deep spiritual importance on written text, so magical amulets inscribed with the name of god seems a natural fit. 

Rabbinic sources from roughly the year 200 CE reference writing the Name on everything from ones body (but not tattooing it), to furniture, to utensils, to moses's staff, to the weapons of the Israelites at Sinai, to the ring and chain used by Solomon to capture Ashmedai. The sacredness of the Name gave way to several ritual practices within Judaism that utilized its unique power through inscribing it on objects. 

JEWISH CURSES ET CETERA

Magic is not an easy thing to draw clear borders around. Any foray into a cultures magical milieu will reveal evidence of practices that don’t fit neatly into any one specific category. The term “curse” is broad and flexible. The jews besieged in the city of Jerusalem probably heaped many a curse upon Josephus, who was encouraging them to surrender to the romans, but their curses were likely more rude than magical. 

It can be difficult to determine how “magical” a particular piece of “jewish magic” may be, but it is often equally difficult to determine just how “jewish” a practice might be. A good example would be a pair of graves on the island of Delos which feature the following inscription:

“I invoke and beseech the Most High God, Lord of the spirits and all flesh, against those who treacherously murdered or killed with pharmaka the wretched Heraclea, untimely dead, spilling her innocent blood in unjust fashion, so that the same would happen to those who murdered or killed her with pharmaka and also to their children. Lord who oversees all things and angels of God, before whom every soul humbles itself in supplication on this present day, may you avenge this innocent blood and seek [justice?] speedily.” (Bohak 126)

Tomb curses like these were extremely common in the Greek world, often invoking Helios, Nemesis, Isis, or the Syrian goddess. These graves are unique, in that they invoke the Jewish god. 

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW MAGICAL PAPYRI

There are two types of written sources for Jewish magic in practice in this era. First, there are Magical Papyri, which are akin to magical cookbooks where “spells” are written one after another. Second, there are what Bohak calls books of Literary Magic, which are collections of magical knowledge framed within a story. 

Some of the most famous Jewish Magical Papyri were recovered from the Cairo Genizah. (A genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery for storing damaged or worn-out texts and ritual objects so they can be ritually disposed of. They are treasure troves for religious scholars.)  The magical texts recovered were written on highly perishable materials like papyrus or vellum, and only survived due to being mummified by the dry air of northern africa. Even for the time, papyrus was not the sturdiest of materials, and texts like these had to be regularly copied by scribes to preserve the knowledge within. 

Magical papyri are often abysmally preserved and poorly translated. They were generally owned by individuals, copied haphazardly, and discarded upon the death of the owner, but even through these myriad roadblocks, we find something invaluable: Multiple copies of the same text. We are given a firsthand look at how magical knowledge develops from generation to generation, how it lives and breathes. Prof. Bohak describes it well, and his words are worth quoting in their entirety:

“We may say that magical recipes are a bit like the DNA of a living organism, containing the information which enables the creation of a new organism, and the mechanism by which to replicate itself. Moreover, just like DNA, some of the longer spells are actually made up of smaller units or “blocks” which could be grouped together in different forms, so that a passage from one recipe or “finished product” bears close resemblance to a passage from another recipe or “finished product,” while the remaining parts of the two texts may differ.” (148)

This conception of magic holds true today. Ideas that practitioners like, ideas that fit within the broader cultural milieu, are reproduced to the next generation. Magic moves through the waters of history like cuisine, like music. 

BOOKS OF “LITERARY” MAGIC

In stark contrast to the Hebrew and Aramaic magical papyri, there are also books of magic in the more common sense of the term “book”. These texts have a story with a beginning, an end, and a narrative structure in which the spells are embedded. It is here that we will encounter a repeating theme throughout magical history: dubious authorship. These texts are strange, attempting to place them neatly in any one cultural milieu or attributing them to any specific author with a specific agenda is risky at best and ahistorical at worst. Even attempting to date these texts is difficult. Attempting to find some untarnished, untranslated, untransformed, “original” is difficult, if not impossible. The texts must be taken as they are. 

THE SEPHER HA-RAZIM

The Sepher Ha-Razim or “Book of Mysteries” stands out from other magical texts of the time because unlike the more common “recipe book” style of magical text, the Sepher Ha-Razim has a narrative structure. Mythologies are nothing new, but the Sepher Ha-Razim constructs its own mythology in such a way as to reinforce the importance (and power?) of its contents. 

The text begins by establishing its supposed angelic origins: “This is one of the books of the mysteries given to Noah, the son of Lamech . . . by the angel Raziel in the year when he entered the ark, before his entry.” This acts as an appeal to the texts credibility, as well as a way to sidestep existing biblical prohibitions against magic, essentially claiming “This magic book is allowed because it came from angels, and the Jewish patriarchs of antiquity love it.” Magical texts claiming divine inspiration will be a recurring theme throughout the rest of magical history, with varying degrees of success. 

The body of the text is structured as a description of the seven heavens. (bohak 171) Each heaven features a description of its interior structure, the list of angels that can be found within that heaven, and the “overseer” or “minister” angel who commands them. Following each list of angelic names is a short description of the role those angels play in creation, as well as a series of recipes that allow the practitioner to call on said angels should the need arise. 

For example “the first heaven has seven “camps,” the fourth of which is commanded by the overseer KLMYYH, who has some forty-four angels serving under him – ’BRYH, ’YMRHY, DMN’Y, ’MNHR, and so on; they are all in charge of entertaining kings and grandees and granting grace and charm to whoever approaches them in purity.” (Bohak 171)

If the practitioner wishes to call upon this angel for assistance, they must perform an intricate ritual that involves standing before the planet venus, slaughtering a lion cub with a bronze knife, mixing the blood with wine and aromatics, and mentioning the name of the overseer and his underlings. (In this case, KLMYYH and company) If performed properly, “And when you finish reciting this adjuration twenty-one times, look upwards and you shall see something like a flame of fire descending into the blood and the wine.” (Sepher Ha-Razim)

What follows is a series of modifications for the same ritual, edited for applying that angelic grace and charm to different situations. Perhaps the practitioner wants to go before the king? Then the ritual should be modified in X way. Perhaps the practitioner wants to curry favor with the populace? They would modify the ritual in Y manner. 

Through this, the Sepher Ha-Razim demonstrates a notably more complex interaction with magical ideas than was common for the time. What we see here is something new, a methodology, an attempt at optimizing magical rituals for specific purposes. 

The seventh heaven features no angels, only the abode of god. As such, the text bares no description except for an elaborate hymn in praise of god. This is a structure we will see repeated later in our discussion of Merkava mysticism. 

(Talk about the sword of moses?)

“We may say that magical recipes are a bit like the DNA of a living organism, containing the information which enables the creation of a new organism, and the mechanism by which to replicate itself. Moreover, just like DNA, some of the longer spells are actually made up of smaller units or “blocks” which could be grouped together in different forms, so that a passage from one recipe or “finished product” bears close resemblance to a passage from another recipe or “finished product,” while the remaining parts of the two texts may differ.” (148)

Babylonian Aramaic starts showing up on Incantation bowls

**A second feature of these magical texts is that in spite of some variation between the different types of magical products (e.g., magical papyri vs. magical gems), they all display a common set of magical techniques, “words of power,” and visual designs, images, and symbols, most of which are unique to this specific magical idiom. (195)

THE PHILOSOPHERS STONE

Chrysopoeia! Is an ancient greek term that literally means “the production of gold.” It is the long term goal of every alchemist. Sure, some may have wished to produce acids capable of melting anything, or new and powerful furnaces, or divine mystical wisdom, but these were just side projects. The Holy Grail of alchemy was always chrysopoeia.

Its the second century. You’re an alchemist in the city of Alexandria. Let’s say a traveler from across the mediterranean has stopped by. They ask you “Can you really transmute metals into gold?” Your answer is of course! You’ve seen it happen! Transmutation happens by accident all the time! You’ve seen miners accidentally drop their steel tools into a vat of molten copper sulfide, and pull them out completely transmuted into copper! (Dropping steel into molten copper sulfide will give the appearance that the metal has actually transformed into copper.) So all alchemists had to do was find the right mixture of acids and metal baths to turn base metals into gold. Easy as pie. 

That theoretical mixture of base metals came to be known as the Philosophers Stone. It assumed a number of mythological powers from curing disease to prolonging life, (but never immortality here in the west, eternal life is a sin.) While no alchemists ever figured out how to make a philosopher's stone, many of them tried. And we owe modern chemistry to their efforts!

THE EMERALD TABLET

The legend goes that someone, be it Apollonius of Tyanna, or Alexander the Great, or occasionally even the biblical figure Sarah, discovered a tomb. Sometimes the tomb is near the Palestinian city of Hebron, sometimes its not. Inside the tomb was the skeleton of legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus, and clutched in his arms was a mysterious tablet made of pure emerald. Inscribed in an ancient language, sometimes Aramaic, sometimes Phonecian, was a poem that contained all of his earthly and divine wisdom. 

Before we can discuss what we know about the Emerald Tablet, we must discuss its mangled and mysterious textual history. There is no emerald tablet. Or, more accurately, there is no singular emerald tablet. The likely earliest edition comes from the Kitab Sirr Al-Khaliqa, The Book of the Secrets of Creation, a 9th century text ascribed to Apolonius of Tyanna. The Arabic form of the tablet claims to be a translation from Syriac, which itself was a translation from classical Greek. This claim is considerably debated. Partially, because there are two more Arabic translations from the same period, which differ significantly. One from the Secretum Secretorum, and another from the Jabirian corpus, which is notably shorter and corrupt. 

Generally, when you translate an alchemical text from Greek to Arabic, your translation will have words associated with the Greek terminology. What all these Arabic emerald tablets have in common, is a lack of Greek alchemical terms. So while they are likely based on an earlier text, their origins are firmly in the Arabic world, most likely the Isma’ili esoteric circles. This goes even further. Europe knows the tablet via the Latin translation of the Secretum Secretorum, the most corrupt Arabic original. This formed the basis for centuries of dead-end attempts at decoding by western esotericists. 

So! We have no idea what the tablet means! Why are we talking about it? 

What the tablet was interpreted to mean had a significant effect on occult history. Isma’ili Shia esotericists treated Trismegistus as a pseudo-prophetic figure who revealed knowledge in the form of scientific literacy. This also paralleled him with Idris, the Islamic parallel for Enoch, who ascended up to heaven to become an Angel. The Isma’ili helped to develop interpretations of Hermetic literature from a more mystical, gnostic transcendence angle. 

RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISTS 

It is May 29th, 1453. You are Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, and you have just taken the city of Constantinople. You’ve been scaring the daylights out of the Christian world for a while now, but now you’ve really gone and done it. Your little jaunt through Asia Minor is causing a bunch of Greek theologians to pull up and run further west into Europe. The Catholic Church already has their hands full with a whole mess of internal conflicts. You wonder how they’re gonna handle this influx of new ideas. Sure would be a shame if you accidentally contributed to some sort of reformation. You can’t think about that right now though, you’ve got to think of a better name for your cool new city. I might suggest Istanbul.

Meanwhile, back in Christendom, a sin is being committed. A sin so grievous and dangerous that it will eventually tear Western Europe in two: people are translating the Bible into Dutch. 

This may not seem like the biggest deal, but back then, the Bible wasn't something you just read. Books were expensive. You couldn't just let any muck-shoveling peasant pick up and read the Good Book. The Bible was printed in Latin and only Latin. Maybe Greek if you were special. Masses were conducted in Latin exclusively. 

Is the word of God something that can even be translated? Some in the church argued, “Sure, why not? If we translate the Bible into other languages, it would probably help with conversion, right?” Others argued, “Translating the Bible into vernacular languages isn’t theologically possible. Latin is the most pure, most proper form of the word of God and that’s that.”

This was a period of explosive change for the theological landscape of Europe, a process that was accelerated by the invention of the printing press in the mid 15th century. Bookmaking is now significantly cheaper, and suddenly it’s not so easy for the church to control the production of religious knowledge.

NOMINALISM VS REALISM

What’s the relationship between a thing and its name? For a while, the medieval world was split on this question. 

Nowadays, we are nominalists. When we say the word “dog”, we know that the word “dog” is just a series of noises we use to represent the animal, the word has no direct effect on the furry creature known as a dog. This was not always held to be the case. The vast majority of medieval thinkers were “realists” in how they understood words. They believed that “dog” meant “the furry animal with four legs that barks” in the same sense that one plus one equals two.

For a moment, we must put ourselves in the jingly little shoes of a medieval person. For them, this debate had widespread consequences for the nature of reality. We know humans exist, but does the category “human” exist as a privileged part of the fabric of reality? If it does, how is it defined? What is it made of? If it doesn't, how can we be humans?

Practically, if everything in the universe has a True Name, that brings up the problem of how there are many languages on earth. If dogs have a True Name, how do we know which word is the true one? This becomes a real problem if you’re the Catholic Church and you need to translate the bible. If God wants to talk about a dog, what language does She speak?

AD FONTES! 

If the Renaissance had a war cry, it would be this: Ad fontes! Back to the sources! In many ways, the entire Renaissance was built on the influx of classical texts slowly being translated into Latin at the library of Baghdad. Europe always had old classical texts floating around, but the 15th century saw Europe surfing a wave of hot new translations of old classics, never-before-seen sources, and thanks to the printing press, higher circulation than ever before. 

But where did this knowledge come from in the first place?

If you asked most medieval scholars, they would tell you that knowledge came from the past. Knowledge came from tradition, or legendary teachers like Socrates. This was a bit of a problem for the Church. Plato and Aristotle didn’t have much to say about Catholicism, having died long before the birth of Christ; and if you go back far enough in the tradition of Catholicism, you end up in Judaism. In other words, Christian scholar’s oldest sources of knowledge were very often not Christian.

Up until the close of the 15th century, the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) was controlled by the Umayyad Caliphate. Often, when Christians reconquered a place, they demanded conversion from the populace. For some Rabbis and Imams, conversion meant they would be able to stay with communities they had been leading for their entire lives. Rabbis who converted were known as Conversos. This meant that Iberia had a relatively large academic population of Christians who spoke Hebrew, a population that would be a rich resource for anyone engaging in a radical syncretic project. 

THE RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISTS

By the time of the Renaissance, the Christian world was awash in new theological ideas. A synthesis of Neoplatonic, Orphic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic works would form the basis of a new school of Christian esoterica. It would be assembled by Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin. Later it would be syncretized by Heirnich Cornelius Agrippa, and extrapolated upon by John Dee. 

WHAT IS CHRISTIAN CABBALA?

This section will require some clarification of terms. 

Kabbalah - Literally translates to “reception” or “tradition”. Kabbalah is an esoteric method and school of thought unique to Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah spelled with a ‘k’ will refer to the original, highly specific, school of Jewish mystical thought. 

Cabbala - This will refer to “Christian Cabbala”, the form of 16th century Christian occult theology which incorporates dubious interpretations of Kabbalah, along with Neoplatonic doctrine, Orphic theology, and Hermetic mysticism. 

Qabalah - This refers to “Hermetic Qabalah” the late 19th century esoteric revival system developed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which incorporates elements from Egyptian mythology and numerous other esoteric sources. 

MARSILLIO FICINO

After yet another failed attempt to heal the schism between the eastern and western churches, fabulously wealthy Italian banker Cosimo de’ Medici decided to revive Plato’s Academy except Italian and in Florence and without Plato. He needed the most Greek-obsessed scholar he could find, so he put Marsillio Ficino in charge and gave him a stack of Greek manuscripts so large you could fit a Trojan army inside. Notably, he was the first person to translate the works of Plato into Latin. But he was also the translator of a stack of works from Porphyry, Iamblicus, and Plotinus called Hermetica. 

The trouble with this influx of new philosophies and ideas is that not all of them jived with the Catholic Church.  If you were the guy translating a work from Plato or Aristotle, you had to have a good argument that the text wasn’t heretical. 

Ficino would come out the other end of the translating process as “A Catholic priest in 1492 with a deep and enthusiastic understanding of theologies that are almost definitely heretical.” However, he believed that Platonic philosophy was compatible with Christianity, a dubious proposition for the time: not impossible, but it would take some elbow grease. His masterwork was a book called Platonic Theology, which attempted to use Platonic ideas to logically prove the existence of the soul.

[get some about his mysticism. The divine mania and on the platonic theology]

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

Pico della Mirandola allegedly mastered Greek and Latin by the age of 13. In 1484 he met Marsillio Ficino and fabulously wealthy Italian banker Lorenzo De Medici, and charmed both of them. From Ficino, he gained tutelage, and from Cosimo, he gained financial support. During his time in Florence he would write the 900 Theses, a text which claimed that not only were Plato and Aristotle reconcilable, but that they were compatible with Christianity. He was quite confident in the strength of his work. In fact, he was so confident that he ended the 900 Theses with the following announcement: 

“THE CONCLUSIONS will not be disputed until after the Epiphany. In the meantime they will be published in all Italian universities. And if any philosopher or theologian, even from the ends of Italy, wishes to come to Rome for the sake of debating, his lord the disputer promises to pay the travel expenses from his own funds.”

His plan was to travel to Rome, have the theses published, hold a conference defending his work, defeat every challenger with facts and logic, and ride the wave of success to theological glory. On his way to Rome he stopped in the town of Arezzo, had an affair with the wife of one of Lorenzo de Medici’s cousins, attempted to run away with her, got beaten nearly to death, thrown in prison, and then released by order of Lorenzo himself. While recovering from his wounds, he became obsessed with magic. 

When it comes to magic, calling Pico an eclectic is an understatement. While recovering from his injuries, he had time to read all the fresh manuscripts flowing into Europe. Orphic, Chaldean, Hermetic, Kabbalistic, you name it. Pico threw it all into the pot, but how exactly he cooked it will take some explaining:

For Pico, and most Catholics of the time, Christianity was inevitable. All of history was leading up to Christianity being the one true religion. This was simply taken as a given, a fact of life. However, the Christianity of Pico’s day was fighting with itself, constantly in danger of fracturing. When Pico dipped into all this ancient esoterica he made two big assumptions: One, that all these different forms of esoterica were actually just the same esoterica. And two, that the secret knowledge in this ancient magical tradition could be used to fix theological arguments tearing apart the catholic church. In mysticism, he saw religious unity, and in that unity he saw peace. 

PERENNIALISM 

Pico was what’s called a Perennialist. He believed that all the world’s religions share a single, metaphysical truth from which all doctrine grows, they are all branches of a single tree. 

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this idea. Religions share truths all the time. It’s a lovely idea in theory, but it tends to be applied in troublesome ways. In theory, all the world’s religious conflicts could be solved if only we all realized that they are simply different expressions of the same truth. In practice, perennialism functions by treating similarities as inherent truth, and differences as meaningless. More often than not, is a steamroller that flattens diversity of thought. 

Additionally, Pico was a Catholic theologian in the 14th century. His idea of inherent truth is “accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior” Which did not go over well with Jews and Muslims. His perennial philosophy is first and foremost a tool of conversion, a way of planting Christianity into other religions rapidly and rationally (as in, in a way that can be argued logically as opposed to spiritually.)

The foundation of Pico’s radical synthesis is a theory called the Prisca Theologia. (literally “Ancient Theology”) In which he argues that God actually revealed himself to Pagans several times in the form of the Divine Logos (Mind) to guide humanity to the point where it would be ready for Jesus. Specifically, he names six historical figures as the Six Sages who gave us pre-Christian divine wisdom that was actually secretly Christian this whole time. They are: Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Agleophemus (Proclus mentions this guy. Supposedly he is the Thracian Orphic Initiator who taught Orphic secrets to Pythagoras), Pythagoras, and Plato. 

PICO AND KABBALAH

(The Kabbalah chapter will be before this)

Pico getting his hands on some translated Kabbalistic texts will mark a sea change for occult history. Pico’s fascination, even admiration for Kabbalsitic theology would cement its place in occult history for better and for worse. 

For Pico, Kabbalah was theological scrap that could be melted down into weapons of conversion against the Jews. In his work the Heptaplus, he literally states: “Oh, Christian brothers, I pray that you consider a little more diligently how true and sound is my exposition, when to you there will be furnished, against the stony hearts of the Hebrews, very powerful darts taken from their armaments.”

These “darts” will only be as effective as Pico’s understanding of Kabbalah. To understand how well Pico understood Kabbalah, we should take a moment to discuss Pico’s Jewish teachers. 

Elia del Medigo, called The “Last Jewish Averroist” by his students, considered himself a staunch follower of Maimonides. He was a sober, down-to-earth sort with a notable distaste for Kabbalah. In fact, he became disillusioned with radical syncretism after a certain prominent student of his got beaten up and thrown in jail for sleeping with the wife of a Medici. He went so far as to write the Sefer Bechinat Ha-dath, a philosophical treatise against said student’s perennial philosophy. 

Flavius Mithridates was a converso with a skill for oration, referred to by his colleagues as a “clever charlatan” who preached anti-Jewish ideas from the Pugio Fidei before the papal court. Known for the Bibliotheca Cabbalistica, a translation of over 70 kabbalistic works into Latin. Modern scholarly revisions of his works have found them to be “erratic” and it is likely that he added entirely fabricated christian elements to his translations to make his patrons happy. This is where Pico gets the majority of his Kabbalistic knowledge from. 

https://www.ibiblio.org/expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/h-orient_to_rome/Orient_to_rome.html 

And finally, Yohannan Alemanno. A full-blown astral magician, mystical syncretic, and the only actual kabbalist on this list. His works include everything from a Kabbalistic commentary on the Torah, to a treatise on magically achieving eternal life, to a book of fun anecdotes about King Solomon. 

Given that Picos’s Jewish teachers were an anti-kabbalist who later disavowed him, a known charlatan, and an astral magician, it is safe to say that his understanding of Kabbalah was incomplete. His work on Kabbalah would go on to influence generations of occultists. 

–

JOHANNES REUCHLIN

(Entry begins on 990 of the Haanegraf dictionary)

Johannes Reuchlin doesn’t quite fit into any one box. He was unique among the renaissance occultists in that his Hebrew was reportedly quite good. This was a christian theologian studying Hebrew during a time of extraordinary antisemitism, when Jewish people and their theology was regarded with extreme suspicion at best, and outright hatred at worst. His first Cabbalistic work, De Verbo Merifico (The Wonder-working Word) was published in 1494, two years after the Alhambra decree, which resulted in the expulsion of Jews from Spain. 

So, when Gershom Scholem calls Reuchlin “first great Christian scholar of Hebrew” he deserves a fair amount of credit. At the same time, Wouter Hanegraaff also points out that “There is no inherent connection between Reuchlin’s endeavors as a Hebraist and his theological writings in the field of the kabbalah.” Reuchlin could read the words, but he didn’t necessarily understand them how they were intended to be understood. 

Reuchlin’s work systemized Cabbala. He took what Ficino and Pico introduced, and fit it together into a comprehensive system. The core of Reuchlin’s proposed system is what he calls “soloquia” or magically powerful divine names. While the specific content of his work is highly complex and resists summary, Reuchlin does quite a bit of work to reinforce the centrality of language to magic. 

To Reuchlin, magic, specifically his version of kabbalah-flavored magic, is the missing piece to Judaism. Reuchlin positions Cabbala as the thing that will finally “complete” Judaism. He illustrates this at great lengths in De Verbo Merifico, in which he uses Cabbalistic techniques to “complete” the tetragrammaton, adding the hebrew letter “shin” to the middle, turning the “YHWH” into “YHSWH”, claiming “Yeshua” to be the secret esoteric name of Christ. 

While evocative, this did very little to impress jewish people, who generally didn’t see their religion as something in need of “completion”. It should also be noted that “YHShWH” does not actually spell Yeshua. 

HEINEICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA

Mercenary, feminist, lawyer, and occultist, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was likely the strongest wizard in European history. Not necessarily in terms of magical power, but in terms of physical bodily strength. He was also one of the most influential occult writers in history. Agrippa took every piece of esoteric history he could get his beefy hands on, and carefully assembled it into a single comprehensive system. 

Born in 1486 to a family of the middle nobility in the service of the House of Hapsburg, Agrippa studied at the University of Cologne for three years before earning the title of Magister Artium. After earning his masters degree in 1508, he did the natural next move for his career and became a mercenary in the army of Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I. This likely makes him the only occultist in European history who has killed people with a sword. He was good at being a mercenary too. He did so well that he was awarded the title of ritter, or knight. 

His academic career began in earnest in 1509, when he was given the opportunity to lecture on Johannes Reuchlins De Verbo Merifico at the university of Dole. It was here that he wrote his first work, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminae sexus (On the Nobility and Excellence of the Feminine Sex) a short serious-not-serious theological treatise which used concepts from Kabbalah and Neoplatonism to prove that women were inherently divinely superior to men. It was likely written to impress his then patron Margaret of Austria, the only daughter of Maximillian I. It should be underscored how radical this was for the time. The word “feminism” would not be coined for another few centuries, but De Nobiliate is often regarded as a proto-feminist work. 

He did well as an academic, enough to earn him a doctorate. However, he was forced to flee Dole in 1510 under pressure  from Franciscan prior Jean Catilinet, who claimed Agrippa to be a Judaizing heretic. It was around this time that he began writing his major work, De Occulta Philosophia, a radical restoration of magic. He discussed this with his tutor, Johannes Trithemius, who told him to keep writing but to “talk about arcane secrets only with proper friends”, a lesson he promptly refused to take to heart. 

After fleeing Dole, he continued to defend himself against the accusations of judaizing, claiming that his Christian faith was in no way incompatible with his appreciation for Jewish theology. Saying ‘I am a Christian, but I do not dislike Jewish Rabbis’ a downright radical sentiment for the time, especially for someone who just had to flee the country after being accused of judaizing by a powerful friar. 

From 1511 to 1518, Agrippa settled in Pavia in northern Italy, and then in Metz, modern France. Here, he lectured on Neoplatonism and Hermeticism and got into more theological conflicts (this time with the Dominicans.) Additionally, in 1519, in his capacity as legal advisor to the magistrate of Metz, Agrippa defended a woman accused of witchcraft and got into serious trouble with the Inquisition. 

The woman in question was accused because her mother was considered a witch, and the inquisition was arguing that the pact with the devil was passed down hereditarily. Agrippa argued that baptism was stronger than any pact with the devil, and that the woman could not be held responsible. However, he went his trademark extra mile, and implicitly accused the Inquisitor of acting against the spirit of human decency and Christianity, even implying that denial of the power of baptism was heretical. Although he did succeed in saving the woman’s life, he was forced to flee Metz.

After a period of rapid relocation, the death of his first wife, a series of new patrons, an expedition to Turkey, the death of his second wife to the plague, additional conflicts with church authorities, and a short stint in debtors prison in Brussels in 1531, Agrippa published the first book of De Occulta Philosophia. It got him in more trouble with church authorities, earning the text a denouncement from Konrad Köllin, Inquisitor of Cologne.

His last letter was published in 1533. For information on his final days, we are reliant on the recounting of his student Johan Weir. According to him, Agrippa moved to Lyon, where he was imprisoned by King Francis, but was released thanks to appeals from his friends. He died in Grenoble, and was buried, ironically, in the graveyard of a Dominican church. 

The completed version of Three Books of Occult Philosophy was finally published in 1533. It is a comprehensive synthesis of the ideas of his predecessors. It focuses mainly on the work of Ficino and Reuchlin, but also contains ideas from lesser-known figures like Ludovico Lazzarelli. The texts real triumph, however, is its deft synthesis of ancient magical writings with modern esoteric discourse. Agrippa fits the three ostensibly unrelated fields of natural magic, astronomy/astrology, and ritual magic, into a single cohesive whole. The text is written with simple, accessible language, and Agrippa’s distinct dry wit. 

In his dedicatory letter to Trithemius, Agrippa describes magic in his own words. To Agrippa, magic was something that the ancients considered to be the highest science, but also something that had been diluted by charlatans and false philosophers, who committed heresy and called it “magic” to disguise their superstition. Agrippa believed that magic, and all esoteric work, was an ancient, lost art in need of restoration. The point of reviving this art was to achieve a more pure form of religion. For Agrippa, a religion with no room for new ideas was by definition incomplete. 

(Biographical information comes from the Haanegraaf biography published by Brill)

PARACELSUS

Sometimes, good ideas need a bastard. Doctor, lay-theologian, grandfather of toxicology, and quite possibly the most important alchemist in history, Phillipus Aruelious Theophrastus Bombastus von Hoenhiem –better known as Paracelsus– was a preeminent shit-talker in a Europe that already contained Martin Luther. He was the five-foot-nothing, always-armed-with-a-sword bastard who would shit-talk his way into laying the groundwork for modern medical science. 

PARACELSUS THE DOCTOR

Before we discuss how Paracelsus changed medicine, we must discuss medicine before Paracelsus.

Welcome to the year 1530. You are a doctor in the city of Nuremberg. A sick person comes to you, and asks for healing. The first thing you do is consult your advanced, cutting edge medical textbooks. You’re a pretty wealthy and successful doctor, so you’ve got all three books: Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. You, like your other respected contemporaries, are a humorist, meaning you understand that all bodies have a unique balance of four substances called humors. Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and Yellow Bile. If this person is sick, it means that their humors have become unbalanced in some way. Your job is to balance them again. 

The first thing you would do is determine what type of illness they have. Is it hot or cold? Is it dry or wet? Their forehead is warm to the touch, and their nose is running. Bingo, this is a hot, wet illness. You’ve studied quite a bit, so you know which herbs are good, and which herbs are bad.  You need to prescribe them cold, dry herbs. You write them a prescription with dozens of ingredients. After all, the more different types of cold herbs in the medicine, the more effective it will be. Your patient will take that prescription to an apothecary, who will assemble the medicine for a price. 

Someone comes to you with a huge infected wound on their leg. It needs to be amputated. You are insulted that they came to you. You’re not some lowly surgeon. Surgeons are glorified butchers, people who saw off limbs on battlefields. Maybe some surgeons have the good sense to learn anatomy at a university, but even then, they don’t garner anywhere near the respect that you do as a doctor. 

Paracelsus thinks you’re an idiot. He hates your guts, and he tells you to your face every time he sees you. He calls himself Theophrastus, which is like calling yourself “Einstein 2.” Instead of Theophrastus, you and your other doctor friends call him Cacophrastus, literally “shit-speaker.” But what really pisses you off is that, infuriatingly, he is a better doctor than you and most of your friends.

Where humorists believed that all illness was the result of an imbalance of the humors, Paracelsus believed this was only scratching the surface. He believed that humoric imbalances were themselves only symptoms of a deeper problem; conflict between the fundamental forces that made up the body. Paracesus outlines three different types of disease:

One: There are natural diseases, problems which result from physical damage or imbalance of the body. A broken leg, a poisoning, starvation, etc. These were easily treated by keeping the patient clean and safe while the bodies natural healing abilities did their work. 

Two: There are astral diseases, problems which result from the influence of the greater macrocosm. Meaning, Paracelsus believed that when the planet Mars passes over your country, it bathes that physical location in Mars Energy, an abundance of which can cause some materials to produce clouds of poison and corruption. This was his theoretical explanation for mass illnesses. 

Curiously enough, this was also his explanation for psychological illnesses. Consider how an interaction with an angry stranger can ruin one’s mood for the rest of the day. Paracelsus points out the physiological effects of strong emotions on the body, and quite logically ties this into his hermetic theory of disease. If reading a nasty letter can affect the body, surely the signs in the stars also affect the body. These were tricky to treat, requiring a good deal of astrological math to produce metal amulets stamped with the signs of the planets to counteract the mix of astral forces causing the illness. 

Three: Divine diseases. There are some illnesses which resist all attempts at treatment. God has decided that you must shit your brains out. Perhaps this is a punishment for some sin, perhaps it is not. It is not for the doctor to question the divine will. The only thing to do is pray. 

[include the humor chart]

PARACELSUS THE ALCHEMIST

Paracelsus was a man who believed that wisdom can come from anywhere. He was a doctor, but he was also an alchemist, an astral magician, and a Hermetic mage. By the time he had established his practice in Strasbourg in 1526 he had already traveled Europe, learning medical techniques from military surgeons, barbers, bathers, village women, alchemists, monks and those regarded as magicians. [1, 29] 

Medical knowledge at the time held that some substances were good, and others were bad. In practice, this led to medicines prescribed in poisonous doses. The logic was that if two aspirins are good for a headache, then two thousand aspirins will make you immune to headaches for the rest of your life. Paracelsus thought this was nonsense. He railed against apothecaries, saying “the poison makes the dose” and thereby inventing the field of toxicology. Without this foundational precept, toxicology as a field of science would not exist.

But Paracelsus didn’t pull this out of thin air. Paracelsus’s medical theories are a direct result of his interest in the recently-translated alchemical works of Hermes Trismegistus. The paracelsian body is a Hermetic microcosm, a small system governed by the same rules as the greater universe. Just as alchemists could use alchemy to chemically “distill” precious metals from ore, Paracelsus believed that a doctor should be able to distill the helpful essences from a substance, creating a more effective, pure medicine. 

Paracelsus made what is likely the final great contribution to alchemy, the Sulphur-Mercury-Salt theory. First mentioned in his 1530 work Opus Paramirum, Paracelsus agreed that there were two alchemical substances: Sulphur, which gives substances form, and Mercury, which drives activity, but there is also Salt which denotes mass. 

PARACELSUS THE MAGICIAN

In Paracelsus, we see elements of both the Hermetic school of thought, and the Christianity-influenced grimoire tradition. To the Hermetic mage, the body is a microcosm of the greater macrocosm. The dance of the planets and the movement of fluids through the body are, in some fundamental way, linked. Paracelcus theorized that particular types of disease were caused by the influence of particular planets. By inscribing the sign of a particular planet on a pendant, one could protect themselves from their unbalancing influences. 

Paracelsus also held the St. Augustine’s conception of magic: . There was good, divine “Magie” and evil, diabolical “Zauberei.” To Paracelsus, a true magus always acted in concordance with God, combining what is natural with what is holy. BTo Paracelsus, becoming a mage required learning from books, but also a higher spiritual calling. [1, 159]

Paracelsus’s world was one governed by spirits. The atoms of the world were moved with intent by invisible beings in accordance with the divine plan. Perhaps there was a logic to their motion, but every minute change in creation was the result of a living, thinking, spirit.

Paracelsus was a Christian. He believed that all spirits came from God, but some spirits were closer to God than others. For most Christians, there were two sub-categories of spirits. There were the good spirits, the angels who helped administer creation, and there were evil spirits, the demonic entities who consorted with necromancers and witches. Paracelsus believed in a third type: the Elemental. 

Paracelsus was a Hermetic. For the Hermetics, the material world was just about the least godly thing in creation, the furthest thing from the pure spirit of divinity. Paracelsus believed that the spirits who administered the basest four elements of the material world were so far removed from divinity that they should be considered their own sub-type. 

In 1566, several years after his death, Ex Libro de Nymphis, Sylvanis, Pygmaeis, Salamandris, et Gigantibus etc.) was published. He argues that each of the four elements has its own type of governing spirit: g. Gnomes for earth, slyphs for air, nymphs for water, and Salamanders for fire. He depicts these spirits as much like us: they have societies, wear clothes, and are even capable of bearing children. However, they would occasionally give birth to monsters like dwarves, sirens, giants, and will-o-the-wisps. 

Like any sensible being in Renaissance Europe, elementary spirits desired salvation through Christ. Unfortunately, elementals were not born with immortal souls, and the only way to get a soul is to marry a human. Mind you, elementals do not steal souls, but Paraceclsus warns against the dangers of consorting with them. Marry a salamander, and her nature will draw her back to the flame, causing her to vanish into the fireplace with her new soul in tow. 

Paracelsus even recounts the tale of Peter Dimringer von Staufenberg, a nobleman who married a Nymph, only to denounce her as a devil and marry a new woman; a dire mistake, as the nobleman turned up dead shortly after the wedding. In Paracelsus’s eyes, this murder was entirely justified. By falsely repudiating his wife as a demon, God had granted the nymph the right to punish her husband for adultery. [1, 143]

PARACELSUS THE NECROMANCER, AND THE NECROMANCY OF PARACELSUS 

Paracelcus and his followers were, much like Agrippa, hounded by accusations of nefarious magic throughout his life. This reputation as a necromancer would only increase after his death, as Paracelcus was no longer able to talk shit to defend himself. However, many of these accusations, and a large part of his enduring legacy as a magician, rest on a single work: The Archidoxes of Magic.

I will take an editorial stance, paracelsus did not actually write the Archidoxes of Magic. The text was published after Paraeclsus’s death by Robert Turner, a man now infamous for falsely attributing magical texts to prominent historical figures. He published Agrippa’s Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, which was not written by Agrippa. He published Peter D’abano’s Heptameron, which was not written by Peter D’abano. And now, he published Paracelsus’s Archidoxes of Magic, which was not written by Paracelsus. 

Archidoxes is spurious but make no mistake, Paracelsus was absolutely a magician. His critics were right about one thing: he encouraged doctors to study magic, even evil magic! Especially evil magic! If maladies can be caused by nefarious magicians, is it not a doctor’s responsibility to cure their ills? If the world was full of evil sorcerers flinging spells at innocent Christians, the only logical response would be to protect and heal the afflicted. 

So while Paracelsus’s cures were a revolutionary improvement on Galenic treatments like bloodletting, his treatments regularly included things like amulets made from planetary metals, stamped with the signs of planets, and charged with astral energies. Indeed, part of his success as a doctor was that his cures did nothing, while his contemporaries were actively bleeding their patients to death. 

Paracelsus was not immune to this! His Hhermetic theories of medicine led him to occasionally prescribe tinctures that contained astrologically potent yet biologically toxic substances like mercury, or antimony. 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ALCHEMY

What would it mean to un-bake a cake? 

These days, that would mean something atomic. It would mean throwing baked goods into the beam of a particle accelerator, or leaving a tin of pastries in an unshielded atomic reactor. Theoretically, it could be done, but peeling a cake apart, proton-by-proton, would be a painstaking and ludicrously expensive process. 

In the second century, it would mean something alchemical. It would mean distilling the cake down to its elemental essences, purging its impurities, and then slowly reintroducing new materials until it transmutes into what you want. However, you aren’t even sure if such a thing is possible. 

The eternal question with alchemy is how. How did we get from essences and alembics run by mercury-poisoned scholars, to particle accelerators and nuclear reactors run by radiation-poisoned scholars? The simple answer is practice, and a whole lot of writing things down. The slightly less simple answer is that modern science is built on the work of alchemists theorizing about the nature of the world, and finding ways to practically test those theories. The difference between alchemy and chemistry is theory. Once people learned they were working with atoms, not essences, chemistry became the dominant paradigm. But, that transition to modern experimental science was fueled by millenia of alchemical knowledge. Alchemy is one of the many great rivers that feed the lake of modern science. We, dear reader, are the horny salmon making our way upstream. This is easier said than done. 

To understand alchemy, we have to see the world like the alchemists did. Chemistry is complex enough, and we are going to spend the next few thousand words doing it wrong on purpose. For example: Alchemists did not think the world was made of atoms. The fundamental particle of alchemy is called the “corpuscle.” They are like atoms, but where atoms are all the same size, and cannot be divided, corpuscles can be any size, and they are infinitely divisible. Where nowadays we understand atoms to be clouds of particles, corpuscles are like infinitely small wads of clay. Modern atomic science hinges on standardized weights and measurements, but alchemical particles can be different sizes, weights, and masses. They can nested inside of each other, or marbled together in many different textures and forms like the nuts and marshmallows in a scoop of rocky road. 

Why did they think the world worked that way? Try to put yourself in some 2nd century alchemical shoes. If you knew nothing about the universe,  what seems more likely: “Iron is just a big lump of metal.” or “Iron is made of a pattern of trillions of little orbs that are uniform and identical in every way.” And let us say you want to argue with another alchemist about this. How would you go about proving your theory? It’s going to be a while before you can get your hands on an electron microscope. You can only use what materials you can get your hands on. How long do you think it would take to invent the particle accelerator?

ALCHEMY: A PRIMER

Alchemy is difficult to study. Many of these texts are written in coded language, and properly deciphering them requires knowledge of historical chemistry, theology, and languages. Sure, you can read classical Arabic, but do you know enough about 4th century metallurgy, and Alexandrian Judaism, to decipher what chemical process is happening? 

The last century or so has been disastrous for alchemical scholarship. The sheer difficulty of these texts has led to a rash of scholars who reject the idea that they are even about proto-chemistry at all, claiming that alchemical literature is simply coded psychological allegory. This idea is nonsense, and there is no basis for it. But if I want to claim that alchemy “isn’t really about the chemicals” what are you going to do? Learn classical Greek just to prove me wrong? The result of this is a vicious cycle of bad citations that is only now being untangled. Even good scholars routinely get lost among the twisting popular misconceptions of alchemical history. So let us take a moment to debunk some misconceptions: 

One: Alchemy is not a monolithic tradition. There is no “one alchemy” handed down from master to student. It is not a single tradition that “goes back to the Egyptian god Thoth.” Physics works the same wherever you are. Two people on opposite sides of the world can independently figure out how to mix flour and water together to make bread. Theories of alchemy are complex as cultures, and as diverse as cuisines. 

Two: Alchemy is not primarily concerned with the psychic, the spiritual, or the self-transformative. Alchemy is about physical materials, not what the physical materials may represent spiritually. Some alchemists were indeed mystics and magicians, and pondering the nature of nature is a natural fit for religious thinkers, but alchemy is always primarily about ordinary metallurgy. 

Three: Alchemy was not “opposed to science.” Alchemy, like mathematics, was one of the practices that became modern science. See our earlier metaphor about horny salmon. 

Four: Up until around 1800, alchemy and chemistry were the same thing. Similar to the early days of astrology/astronomy. They were not meaningfully distinct in any way. The only exception to this is the label “Chymistry” used to describe the transitional period between alchemy and chemistry in the late 1700s.

Five: I am not afraid to name names. Carl Jung is not a reliable source on alchemical history. His theory that alchemical literature is some form of coded psychological self-help literature is unsupported and ahistorical. The idea that alchemy was “never really about the metals” has been actively harmful to the field. For the last century or so, even credible historians have seen alchemy as a bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo, and thus denied it a place in proper scholarship, or worse, described it as backwards superstition in opposition to the logic and reason of the enlightenment. 

THE GREAT WORK

Alchemy attempts to produce precious metals, stones, and medicines through the manipulation of elemental essences. There are several theories as to how this might be done. One camp theorizes that substances can be changed via altering the ratios of their platonic elemental essences. Another camp theorizes that all materials can be reduced to a primal form the Prima Materia. Once this is achieved, a substance called the philosopher's stone can be added to the vessel like yeast in bread, causing the desired substance to form. This process is known as the “Opus Magnum'' or Great Work. 

The Great Work comes in several basic stages. These stages are named according to the colors that appear in the vessel. They are: blackening (nigredo), whitening (albedo), yellowing (citrinas), and reddening (rubedo). These colors are the result of heating a copper-mercury amalgam. As the mercury evaporates, the substance will change color. This process has been described by alchemists as cauda pavonis, “peacock’s tail.”

These stages can additionally be broken down into several steps. The number of these steps will vary from alchemist to alchemist, but the most common form of the process involves ten steps. They are: 

• Calcination. Meaning oxidation by heating. Whenever you see an alchemist describe something as a “calcinate” that means its oxidized. Rusty iron is “iron calcinate” old green copper is “Copper Calcinate”

• Solution. Meaning ”dissolution in “sharp” (or mercurial) liquids.” This means breaking a substance down by bathing it in acids. 

• Putrefaction. Decomposition. Now that you’ve broken your substance down with acids, you’ve got to boil it in warm compost to induce fermentation. At this stage the substance turns a nasty black color, and is often described by alchemists as the “Black Raven'' which is soon resurrected as the “white dove,” thus marking the end of nigredo, and the beginning of albedo. 

• Reduction, The recovery of the fugitive “spirits” (“spirit” in this context means a volatile substance) during the calcination process by means of a fluid (“philosophical milk”), whereupon a yellow coloration (citrinitas) appears. Basically, you’re adding back what you boiled off earlier. You know you’re doing it right when it turns yellow.

• Sublimation. Adding the volatile, “spiritual” matter back to the vessel causes a violent reaction, and a red coloration. Alchemists often describe this as the raging of the “red dragon.” This is where rubedo occurs. 

• Coagulation or Fixation. The reaction dies down, and the substance begins to solidify. This is the coagula part of solve et coagula. Congratulations, you have yourself some stable Prima Materia. 

• Fermentation. This is a rare step. Some alchemists like to add a little bit of gold at this stage to act as a sort of “Yeast of Gold” to speed up the process. 

• Lapis philosophorum. The Philosopher’s Stone. Now your prima materia can grow into ultima materia, (supreme matter). This bit is usually described as a heavy, dark red, mildly shiny, powder or stone. When you heat it up, it turns kinda waxy, but solidifies again when it cools. (What the alchemist has probably done at this point is produce mercury(II) sulfide, better known as Cinnabar.)

• Multiplication. Now that you have your philosopher's stone, you can shave off bits of residue, and use that to make more. This is similar to how you can cut a mushroom in half, plant both halves, and get two mushrooms. 

• Projection. Now that you've got your philosopher's stone, it’s time to make some gold. All you’ve got to do is get some dust from the philosopher's stone, and mix it into your base metal. If you’ve done your alchemy right, it should make the base metal change color until it looks like gold. In later, medical applications of alchemy, this is the point where you apply your panacea (universal medicine that cures all ills.)

Keep in mind that there are many different ways to bake a cake. These ten steps and four stages are only the most common recipe. Every alchemist will have their own version of the Magnum Opus. There are versions with as few as seven steps, and others with more than 24. Some versions only have three stages, going from black, to white, directly to red. Part of what makes alchemy so difficult to study is the sheer diversity between thinkers. It helps to tackle the subject chronologically. 

ALEXANDRIA, CRADLE OF ALCHEMY

What we would recognize today as alchemy started in the Ptolmeic era. For those that don’t know, that was the period of Egyptian history when Alexander the Great  conquered his way through Egypt and died, leaving a buddy of his in charge. That buddy was a guy named Ptolemy. The Ptolemaic dynasty would last from around 305 BCE until around 30 BCE, when an Alexander the Great fan club called the Roman Empire would try their hand at slaughtering and conquering their way through Egypt. 

One thing that both Romans and Greeks understood was that while tactics and logistics could win you your empire, culture was a big part of what preserved it. If Ptolemy could take the capital of his Empire, Alexandria, and make it the beating heart of Greek literature, philosophy, and science, it would go a long way towards elevating the prestige and legitimacy of his regime at home and abroad. Such was the impetus behind the creation of one of the most storied institutions in Hellenic history: the Library of Alexandria.  

Supplying the library was the kind of task that only people as wealthy and powerful as the Ptolemies could orchestrate. According to Galen, the Ptolemies set down a rule: Any book that entered Alexandria’s big fancy port would be taken to the Library and copied, and you would get your book back when the Librarians were done with it. This made Alexandria an excellent place to be if you liked to learn things, or if you were a librarian who enjoyed bullying merchants.

Alexandria was a crossroads for Greek natural philosophy, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, as well as mythologies from Greece, Egypt, and Judea. When diverse knowledge is brought together in one accessible space, it creates an explosion of innovation. What you have here is a recipe for a Unique Moment in History. In this case, that moment was the birth of Alchemy. 

We do not know who wrote the first complete alchemical texts in history. Physika kai Mystika (“Natural and Secret Questions”) and Peri Asēmou Poiēseōs (“On the Making of Silver”) are both attributed to the Greek philosopher Democritus, but in all likelihood they were likely authored by a 3rd century Egyptian Neopythagorean named Bolos of Mendes. 

The books themselves are unseasoned chicken compared to the spicy buffalo hot wings that Alchemy would become. They contain a primordial version of alchemy, all theory, no style, without a trace of magic or mysticism. On one hand, this is where we see the first recipes for gold-production, (chrysopoeia), but on the other hand, the primary concern of these texts seems to be the counterfeiting of precious metals and stones. Alchemical practice is not rooted in grand mystical or psychological aspirations: it is grounded in the same ordinary, material desires that make a merchant overcharge for sub-par copper. 

MIRRIAM OF ALEXANDRIA

There are plenty of philosophers who could claim the title of “The First Alchemist”. Philosophers love philosophizing about what the world is made of. Empedocles came up with the doctrine of the elements, Plato had a concept called the “primal clay”, Anaximander had his own musings on the nature of substance. To a certain degree, picking The First Alchemist is a matter of opinion. For the purposes of this text, I wanted to start with someone who contributed to both the theory, and the practice, of ancient alchemy. So meet Mirriam of Alexandria, aka Mary the Copt, Maria Hebrea, Maria Prophetessa, The First Alchemist. 

In the 1st century, most alchemical practice in Egypt was tied to the House of Life, the state temple system. Most of what Egyptian temple alchemists did was build statues of the Gods, and when one was making statues of the Gods, it was essential to get the details right. Color especially was essential to Egyptian religion. When one was building a statue of the gods, its coloration was of utmost spiritual importance. Each of the big gods got their own color association: white for Horus, black for Anubis, green for Osiris, and so on. While Egyptian alchemists were primarily concerned with transforming the color of metals, they didn’t seem to care much about making metals from scratch, or using alchemy for anything other than what the temple prescribed. 

But the state-funded House of Life had private competitors. Running an alchemy lab is expensive: it takes expert labor and all sorts of expensive and exotic ingredients, not to mention the cost of fuel for the most basic of alchemical operations. That’s why some of the only institutions that could afford to compete with the House of Life were Alexandria’s synagogues. 

Where the House of Life alchemists enjoyed government funding, they also did not have much professional freedom. If the government wanted 500 statues of Osiris, you had to fill the order precisely and with no exceptions, and there wasn’t much room for independent experimentation outside of that. Alchemists weren’t just making religious idols, either. All sorts of metal goods needed production. Someone had to make door hinges, hand mirrors, jewelry boxes, and likely blown glass. So whereas the Houses of Life benefitted from lucrative state contracts, Jewish alchemists had to compete by learning and innovating as fast as possible. As a result, Alexandria’s Jewish quarter was a wellspring of cutting-edge alchemical theories, techniques, and technology. 

Mirriam of Alexandria was one such innovator. In her work, we see the first evidence of alchemical theory and practice as we might recognize them today. Mirriam did not simply create recipes for gold: she theorized about its nature, and explored different methods for how those theories could be tested. It is difficult to summarize the sheer magnitude of her contributions to alchemical and scientific history without getting lost in an ocean of technical details she herself pioneered or perfected. She is credited with the invention of dozens of materials, techniques, theories, and devices that would shape alchemy for centuries. Among her myriad contributions is the Bain-Marie, literally “Mary’s bath.” While she likely did not invent the technique, whenever chefs today make a double-boiler to melt chocolate, they are performing a technique popularized nearly two thousand years ago by an Alexandrian alchemist. 

Miriam’s work represents a snapshot of alchemical history. Think of it like a cookbook from the 2nd-ish century. She may not have invented every tool and technique at her disposal, but she was certainly using everything she could get her hands on. Her work is a catalog of cutting-edge alchemical technology, and this book would be remiss without a peek at some of her innovations.

The Tribikos: A type of alembic with three “arms”, long tubes with vessels at the ends, used to distill substances and collect their vapors. 

The Kerotakis: When used properly, this device creates an airtight seal in which substances are continually distilled, congealed, and distilled again. This “circulation” process of purification is often depicted as an ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail, which itself became a central image of alchemy. If you are familiar with chemistry, the kerotakis is essentially a Soxhlet extractor.

Miriam Original Alchemical Theories:

The Inversion of Nature: To volatilize the fixed, and fix the volatile. In other words; to make the solid into fluid, and to make the fluid into solids. We all know an alchemist needs to break substances apart into their constituent parts, but Miriam proposes that the best way to do this is by inverting their natures.

The Union of Opposites: At some point, an alchemist has to try and make a new substance. Mirriam proposes that the way to do this is by combining things with opposite natures. If something is hot, mix it with something cold. If something is fluid, mix it with something solid.

The Axiom of Maria: These previous two ideas can be summarized in Miriam's most famous quote; “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” This describes the process of splitting a substance into its constituent parts so that it may be recombined into a new form. The concept is powerful in its simplicity: Take it apart, put it back together differently. As such, it has become a foundational concept for alchemy, and western esotericism at large. 

(These are gonna be fodder for some good illustrations)

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS AND ALCHEMY

If you’ve tried to study alchemy, you’ve probably come across the name “Hermes Trismegistus.” Hermes the Thrice-Great is often referred to as the mythical sage who invented everything from alchemy to mathematics to Judaism. (As in, his followers would claim Trismegistus was the teacher of Moses) There is no evidence he ever existed, but the legend of HermesTrismegistus is the mortar holding together the bricks of western alchemy. 

First, it gave us a legendary sage that supposedly all knowledge came from. A common problem with religions is that they disagree. Hermeticism says that if two theologies have a similar idea, that’s because they both came from Trismegistus. Additionally, the history of alchemy and magic is a complicated, contradictory mess of different methodologies and traditions. By saying “it all comes from Trismegistus” you can harmonize things that are otherwise at odds with each other. Because of this, Hermeticism serves as a scaffolding for the otherwise chaotic history of alchemy. 

Second, where the Gnostics saw the world as an impure thing made by a malicious God, the Hermetics think God did a pretty good job with the world, and aim to learn about God by studying the world. Where the Gnostics turned their back on the created-ness of the universe, the Hermetics took a far more rationalist approach. They weren’t exactly fond of the material world, but they figured it was worth studying. This made Hermeticism natural allies with things like natural philosophy, and eventually science. 

If we are going to talk about Hermes Trismegistus, we have to talk about authorial ethos, which is a fancy way of saying “How intellectual clout works.” Remember that in ancient times, capital-T Truth came from three places: tradition, divine revelation, and legendary sages. The idea that people could somehow find new Truth lying around using ordinary human faculties was seen as ridiculous, and a bit arrogant. “What, you say you have new Truth? You think you’re smarter than Aristotle? You think you’re better than the way we’ve been doing it for a thousand years? Yeah right, buddy.” if you wanted people to care about your religion or philosophy, it needed to be ancient, or you needed a legendary sage. The figure of Hermes Trismegistus solved both these problems. Trismegistus was the ancient-est, legendary-est sage, which made Hermeticism the ancient-est most traditional-est tradition. It follows logically that this ancient ur-wisdom would touch on damn near everything from God to magic to math. 

Hermetica comes in two types: The “technical” Hermetica, which deals with things like astrology, mathematics, magic, and alchemy, and the “philosophical” Hermetica, which deals with proto-anthropology, cosmology, and theology. As for the alchemical Hermetica, not much of it still exists. What fragments we have are preserved in the writings of later alchemists, who were familiar with Hermetic ideas. 

Hermeticism has one foot in religious philosophy, and the other in natural philosophy. If you have some great ideas about God and some great ideas about how to test the purity of copper, but you just can’t figure out how to combine the two bricks, Hermeticism serves as an excellent conceptual mortar. 

(maybe talk about the emerald tablet here?)

ZOISMOS OF PANOPOLIS

If you want to divide alchemy into eras, the first era ends with Zosimos of Panopolis. Before Zosimos, Alchemy had a theory and a practice. After Zosimos, alchemy had a theory, a practice, and a full-fledged theosophical system underlying it. He was a practical innovator, experimenting with new techniques for gilding and dying, but he was also a mystic who tried to talk directly to God. 

Very little is known about Zosimos’s life, but his writing carries clear influences from Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, as well as broader Greek and Egyptian traditions and philosophy. The man wrote like a machine. It is likely that he wrote far, far more texts than have survived today, on a wide variety of topics. For instance, one of his works is titled “On the sacred letter òmega”, a magical, symbolic exploration of the Greek letter. He likely wrote a treatise like this for every letter of the Greek alphabet. 

Zosimos’s work comes in two types. The vast majority are practical, full of things like descriptions of alchemical vessels, catalogs of materials, and commentaries on ideal conditions for alchemy. These are catnip for scholars of alchemical history like myself, but it’s the second type that’s gotten all the attention from esotericists. These theo-philosophical texts have titles like Authentic Commentaries or “Authentic Memorials” (gnèsia hypomnèmata), and it is here that we see the birth of the idea of “spiritual alchemy.”

The thing about terms like “spiritual alchemy” is that “spiritual” in 1970 means something very different from “spiritual” in the 3rd century. If we want to approach Zosimos properly, we have to understand what he sees as the spiritual elements of alchemy. 

For example: 3rd century alchemical theory had a significant astrological element. Even Miss Hebrea referenced the belief that transmutation could only be properly done in a specific month. Zosimos, however, thought this was nonsense.  He believed that alchemy needed exactly two things: for the alchemist to meet the right material conditions, and for the alchemist to undergo a significant ritual purification beforehand. 

This spiritual purification occasionally had a moral element to it. There are myriad references to the idea that transmutation simply would not work unless your intentions were pure or holy. Most of these alchemists believed wholeheartedly in some sort of God, and turning stuff into other stuff is his job, isn’t it? For many non-alchemists at this time, alchemy meant something blasphemous. It meant you might be trying to do God’s job. This was a topic of debate in alchemy that was never fully resolved; how far could you go without being sacrilegious? 

For Zosimos, really truly learning about the world meant something Gnostic. It meant gaining the knowledge necessary to achieve a union with god. As in, he was trying to march his soul right up to the front porch of the almighty. Easier said than done. It meant dodging the influence of malicious spirits who sought to obscure the divine truth. 

In Zosimos’s version of the Garden of Eden, man is seduced twice. First he is first born as pure spirit, only to be seduced by fate into a body. Then he is seduced again by the creation of a woman, which only binds him further to material reality. It is knowledge of that spiritual, inner, self that Zosimos considers essential for alchemy. The stars and planets? Those are the augurs of seductive fate. They are “watchers” or the “pretenders,” divine planetary beings whose purpose is to distract man from knowledge of their inner self. * [footnote: With the humorous implication of it being important to eventually destroy the moon.]

Zosimos was equally influenced by Hermetic literature. His most famous text is Visions, a bizarre, dreamlike work which seems to describe an intricate purification ritual. The images of steps to an altar, sacred mixing bowls, and white-garbed priests are clearly evocative of Hermetic ritual. There are two main competing views of the text. One holds that the ritual language is a metaphorical description of the preparation of alchemical reagents. The other view, infamously pioneered by C.G. Jung, claims that the text is representative of some inner, psychological experience that has nothing to do with metallurgy. This is nonsense, but like most proper nonsense, it has some kernels of truth. 

Zosimos was notably more mystical than other alchemists. One cannot ignore the ritualistic elements of his theory. It would be just as incorrect to ignore the practical elements. An alchemist can be as mystical as they like, but no metals? No alchemy. Yes, ancient alchemists were often spiritual, but the nature of that spirituality is often poorly represented. The mistake is in thinking that proto-chemistry and spirituality cannot co-exist. God made the world, didn’t he? To the ancient alchemist, what is more spiritual than lending a hand?

ARAB ALCHEMY (one page)

Around the 6th century, alchemy moves east. The Roman Empire isn’t as cool with alchemy as it used to be. The empire is being run by some peasant named Justin who converted to Christianity, and anything with the faintest whiff of heresy is coming under scrutiny. The Christians are the top dogs now, and they need to consolidate power. Writing about metallurgy is not explicitly condemned in scripture, but Zosimos and Trismegistus talked quite a bit about the nature of God, and their theories didn’t exactly gel with the early church. These alchemist-mystics were looking real heretical. Alchemy needed to flourish elsewhere.

If you wanted to learn stuff in the 6th-8th centuries, the Sassanid Empire was the place to be. While the Romans were working overtime trying to keep the empire together, the Muslims were expanding all the way to Andalusia, and boy did they love translating Greek and Latin texts. Plato, Aristotle, Zosimos, Trismegistus, guys pretending to be Plato and Aristotle, you name it, it was all getting translated, organized, and compiled into big dense convenient compendiums. 

Western alchemical texts often resembled mystical riddles. Now, we all love some mystical books of alchemical riddles, it’s half the fun of early alchemy, but Arabic alchemical works are written more like teaching materials. This is because they were often used as teaching materials. Where earlier alchemists needed to encode their works as a form of proto-copyright, Islamic alchemists were trying to efficiently collect and distribute information. Though be warned, “easier to read” by the standards of medieval alchemists is still pretty dense. Hope you like neoplatonism, because in terms of density, Islamic alchemy is a neoplatonic pound cake, with nuts. (The nuts are hermeticism in this metaphor.)

“But who cares?” I hear you ask “Isn’t this supposed to be a book about magic? Why are we talking about these dead Arab philosophers?” Remember, dear reader, that some of the first esotericists in western history were Plato and Aristotle, but their ideas didn’t mesh all that well. 

Many a wizard-philosopher tried and failed to glue them together. Most failed. Some resorted to pretending to be Aristotle, publishing books under his name. For the Byzantines, the idea of reconciling Plato and Aristotle was almost laughable. The neoplatonists said they could do it, but few took them seriously. By the time the Baghdad House of Wisdom, neoplatonism had time to mature. For the Muslims, it was damn near philosophy 101. The idea that Plato and Aristotle conflicted at all was laughable to them. “What do you mean Plato and Aristotle don’t fit together? Everyone knows they fit together.” And thus, one of the greatest roadblocks to early magic was smoothed over. The twin cities of early magic were separated by a river, the neoplatonists would cross it, and the Baghdad House of Wisdom would build a bridge. 

(ASIDE: PLATONIC ALCHEMY VS ARISTOTELIAN ALCHEMY)

The eastern Byzantine alchemists spent a lot of parchment on arguing which was the superior interpretation of alchemy. Was it Platonic or Aristotelian? By combining the theories, the Arabs were free to explore beyond Plato and Aristotle. The Arabs could simply strip both theories for parts, make something of their own design, and then spend a few hundred years iterating. 

THE JABIRIAN CORPUS (2-3 pages)

The Baghdad House of wisdom was a crowning achievement of human history. The Great Library was the stuff of dreams, the beating heart of a five hundred year golden age. 

The Grand Library of Baghdad was a titan of the scholarly arts, an unparalleled intellectual machine powered by coffee and one of the wealthiest empires in human history. Scholars could spend their entire lives translating text after text into Arabic. By a century into what we now call the Islamic Golden Age, generations of scholars had dedicated their lives to collecting and translating texts into comprehensive volumes. It was here that Arab alchemy was codified. This is the milieu where we get Jabir ibn-Hayyan. (Put the juicy details HERE in this paragraph)

Scholars debate whether or not he was a real person. The name “Jabir ibn-Hayyan” was probably several authors writing under a single, semi-legendary name. It is possible that there was an original Ibn-Hayyan, and his students simply continued writing under his name after his death, but there is no concrete evidence for either theory. I’ve found it convenient to approach Ibn-Hayyan like a Trismegistus; as many authors contributing to a more nebulous group of ideas. For this reason, scholars refer to his writings as “The Jabirian Corpus” meaning “The group of texts attributed to Jabir ibn-Hayyan.” And by “group” I mean “more than three thousand titles that cover damn near every corner of natural science.” 

Jabir is important because he’s what makes Arab alchemy different from Byzantine alchemy. We cannot cover all of his work, so we will run through the most important developments. 

[ADDITION: The Substance Trad]

In The Open Letter of Ja’far as-Sadiq regarding the Science of the Art and of the Noble Stone, Hayyan is the first alchemist to divide all substances into three parts: Body, Mind, and Spirit. 

[ADDITION: Organic Materials]

The One-Hundred and Twelve Books (of which only thirty survive) are a series of short, vaguely-related treatises on alchemy. A notable innovation here is the introduction of organic materials like plant and animal products. Previously, the closest alchemists would get to living tissue was old eggshells. Now, alchemists were theorizing about the alchemical effects of all sorts of plants and fluids. This was a significant paradigm shift for alchemy. Now semen could be involved. 

[ADDITION: Sulfur-Mercury Theory]

The Seventy Books. If you wanna start with the Jabirian Corpus, do it here. This text is a general overview, a summary of all the big ideas that would eventually define the Jabirian Corpus. This is where we get the Sulphur-Mercury theory of alchemy “ which Jabir probably derived from Balinas (Pseudo-Apollonios of Tyana).” [Hanegraff 27] (Honestly we should do a whole page on S-M theory)

Jabir introduces two new important concepts: Sophic Mercury, and Sophic Sulfur. (Sophic means “of the philosophers.”) Every physical thing has a Sophic Mercury and a Sophic Sulfur that can be extracted from it. You get sophic mercury by fermenting something. You get sophic sulfur by distilling something down to its essential oil.“

Let us play alchemist for a moment. Let’s say you have a rose, and you want to extract its sophic mercury. You would seal it in a vessel to ferment down to a spirit. (As in an alcoholic spirit.) The fluid left over would be some form of ethyl alcohol, but the alchemists would call it something like “spirit of rose” or “sophic mercury.” If you want to extract some sophic sulfur of rose, you would put the flower in an oil still, and distill it down to rose essential oil. 

But hey, that sophic mercury seems real similar to other plant sophic mercuries. If you reduce down any flower, you’re probably gonna end up with some sort of ethyl alcohol. Arab alchemists noticed this, and thought “well then, this spirit must be a shared, common essence to all plants. What we have here is a jar of plant-ness.” The same thing happened for essential oils. Arab alchemists noticed “well hey, this rose juice still smells quite strongly of rose. This essence must be a distilled form of rose-ness.”

To Arab alchemists, sophic mercury was what made substances similar, and sophic sulfur was what made substances unique. Theoretically, you could mix-and-match mercuries and sulfurs to “breed” new substances. (Mercury is often referred to as feminine, and sulfur as masculine.) 

(Learned readers may be expecting a discussion of sophic salt here, but that doesn’t show up until Paracelsus. Give it a few centuries.)

[ADDITION: Balance, aka Alchemical Equilibrium]

The Book of Balances was actually one hundred and forty-four books, but we only have forty left. This text deals with a wide array of subjects, from medicine to astrology to botany, all in service of Jabir’s specific idea of “balance.” [we need to find a better source that goes more into this, because this is important]

(The Book of Seven Metals develops this theory of Jabirianic balance, specifically in an alchemical context. ) combine with above paragraph

The Development of the Potential into the Actual is tough to describe, even by the standards of an alchemical text. It deals with the idea of a single theory underlying all natural sciences. 

The Great Book of Properties has 71 chapters and they are mostly out of order. The most notable thing about the text is the innovation of iatrochemistry, meaning the idea of using alchemy to prepare medicines. An important development that will be foundational for History’s Angriest Alchemist, Paracelsus. 

(basically for this section we need to combine the description of every idea with a text, why its important, and what it changed from byzantine alchemy )

ARAB ALCHEMY: THE BOOKS (move this section)

 If you’re looking to dive into Islamic esoterica, start with the Kitab al-Fihrist. Its title literally means “The Book Catalog.” Compiled in the 10th century by Ibn al-Nadim, it is a directory to damn near every important Arabic text published in the preceding 200 years. 

Alchemy loves a legendary founder. In the Fihrist, ibn-Nadim introduces us to the legend of Abū Hāshim Khālid ibn Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān, known in the west as Khalid ibn Yazid, or simply “Prince Khalid.” According to legend, his father snubbed him for the throne, and so he  dedicated the rest of his life to intellectual pursuits like math, astronomy, and alchemy. He was the model for all Islamic alchemists to come. 

The point here is that alchemy was royal now. Where Alexandrian alchemists were professional craftsmen and oddball mystics, Arab alchemists were typically nobles. Noble second-sons tend to be big on cash, free time, and land, but short on respect, and alchemy was a good way to transmute one into the other. This is a model we will see for the rest of history. The European alchemical renaissance is flush with bored nobles picking up alchemy on the side. In fact, when alchemy was reintroduced to Europe in 1144, the first book translated from Arabic into Latin was Liber de compositione alchemiae, credited to who else but Prince Khalid.

THE BIG FIVE: JABIR IBN-HAYYAN

First and most prolific of the Big Five, Jabir Ibn-Hayyan is the foundation of Islamic alchemy. The man himself probably died around 816, but his students and other scholars continued writing under the name of their departed teacher. As such, more than three thousand texts carry the name Jabir Ibn-Hayyan. This body of work–The Jabirian Corpus–introduces a litany of occult and scientific concepts, the most important being the Sulfur Mercury Theory, the introduction of organic matter, full transmutation of base metals into noble metals, and the first medical applications of alchemy. This collection of ideas are what draw the line between Byzantine alchemy, and the much more complex, systematic, Islamic alchemy.

JABIR IBN-HAYYAN: MERCURY-SULFUR THEORY

Jabir introduces two new important concepts: Sophic Mercury, (meaning “mercury of the philosophers”) and Sophic Sulfur (meaning sulfur of the philosophers). Every physical thing has a Sophic Mercury that can be extracted through fermentation, and a Sophic Sulfur through distillation. 

To explain what these are, lets pretend that you are an islamic alchemist, and you want to use alchemy to make a rose from the ground up. You’re gonna need two ingredients: sophic mercury of rose, and sophic sulfur of rose. 

Let’s say you have a rose, and you want to extract its sophic mercury. To do this, you would seal it in a vessel to ferment it into a spirit. (As in an alcoholic spirit.) The fluid left over would be a form of ethyl alcohol, but the alchemists would call it “spirit of rose” or “sophic mercury” If you want to extract some sophic sulfur of rose, you would put the flower in an oil still and distill it into rose essential oil. 

Ferment a rose, you get sophic mercury of rose. In this case, you get ethyl alcohol. Ferment some lavender, you also get ethyl alcohol. Islamicate alchemists noticed that when you ferment most plant matter, it gives you more or less the same substance. Therefore, ethyl alcohol must be some essential component of plant-ness. 

But! Distill a rose, you get rose essential oil. Distill some lavender, you get lavender essential oil. The sophic sulfurs of these substances are unique! The rose oil smells distinctly of rose, the lavender of lavender. Therefore, the sophic sulfur of a substance must be a unique essence. 

To Arab alchemists, sophic mercury was what made substances similar, and sophic sulfur was what made substances unique. Theoretically, you could mix-and-match mercuries and sulfurs to “breed” new substances. Mercury is often referred to as feminine, and sulfur as masculine.

(Learned readers may be expecting a discussion of sophic salt here, but that doesn’t show up until Paracelsus. Give it a few centuries.)

JABIR IBN-HAYYAN: ORGANIC ALCHEMY

The One-Hundred and Twelve Books (of which only thirty survive) are a series of short, vaguely-related treatises on alchemy. A notable innovation here is the introduction of organic materials like plant and animal products. To many previous alchemists, the human body was higher on the divine ladder of being than things like rocks and stones. The idea that something as special as the human body would be subject to the exact same rules as lowly lumps of metal was a dramatic change from established alchemical logic. 

Previously, the closest alchemists would get to living tissue was old eggshells. Now, alchemists were theorizing about the alchemical effects of all sorts of plants and fluids. This was a significant paradigm shift for alchemy. Now semen could be involved. Which was important. Don’t laugh. It was important. In the medieval world, there was a hard, hard line between living things and dead things, and this was one of the first cracks in that boundary. This was also one of the first steps towards iatrochemistry, the idea that alchemy could be used to cure diseases. Jabir barely dipped a toe into the pool of iatrochemistry, but that toe was a pioneer. 

JABIR IBN-HAYYAN: BALANCE AND TRANSMUTATION

If a pre-Jabir alchemist wanted to make some gold, they needed some gold to act as a “seed” to transmute the base metal. It was ibn-Hayyan who introduced the idea that you could transmute lead into gold. This was a radical departure from established alchemical logic. Jabir placed no limits on what the alchemist could theoretically achieve. According to Jabir, if you had a big enough flask, a big enough furnace, and a big enough chunk of time, you could make your own tiny planet earth. You just had to get the ratios right. 

The key to this new theory of transmutation was what Jabir called “The Science of Balances.” If you’ve ever tried your hand at baking, you understand Jabirian balance. It’s all about ratios. You need the right ratio of flour to water, sugar to salt, milk to butter, etc. When all the ingredients coalesce in the oven into something delicious, its because you have achieved Jabirian balance. 

To Jabir, all non-gold material are simply improperly baked cakes. Tin needs another cup of elemental air, iron has too much elemental earth, lead is burned to a crisp, etc etc. Transmutation was the process of rebalancing, adding what your substance lacked. 

Readers might compare this concept to balancing chemical equations in a high school chemistry course. While Jabir formed the bedrock of modern chemistry, his idea of balance extended beyond gold. To Jabir, everything –and I mean everything– affected Jabirian balance. The position of the stars and planets affected Balance. The numerical values of letters in the Arabic word for gold affected balance. Additionally, if medicine healed a sickness, it is because it rebalanced the condition of your humors to a ratio similar to gold. 

None of this is layed out systematically. If you are looking for some grand philosophical system of harmony between the heavens, the body, the world, and God, you will need to wait a few centuries. These concepts are divided across dozens of books, likely written decades apart, that repeatedly contradict and argue with each other. It's messy as all hell. 

Western esotericism is also messy as hell. It is built on harmonies, associations between the four elements, the seven classical planets, the twelve zodiacs, and the letters of the alphabet. In the Jabirian corpus, the keen reader can see the unrefined, jurassic ancestors of western esotericism, yet to walk upright. 

JABIR: TRANSMUTATION 

Byzantine alchemists didn’t think you could make gold from scratch. You needed some starter gold that could be “fed” base metals until they were transmuted into gold. Jabir was different. Jabir theorized that you could cook yourself some gold from scratch.

Imagine that you live in the 10th century. Most of your world is made of living things. Your clothes are made from plant or animal fibers. Common tools are made from wood or bone or other animal products. Even the earthen bricks and clay that make up your home have a biological element to them. Most of the physical objects in your life are either alive, or were at one point alive. 

The idea that you can just manufacture gold, without needing to “breed” it from some existing gold, was quite radical. Its also correct. Modern physics understands that if you could assemble atoms by hand out of protons, neutrons, and electrons, you can in fact make yourself some gold. 

Except the Jabirian alchemists didn’t know about protons, neutrons, and electrons. Their basic building blocks were the four elements, Sophic Mercury and Sophic Sulfur. If you wanted to make gold, and all you had was some lead, you needed to distill that lead down to its separate essences, and then recombine them in the right ratios. 

The language Jabir uses to describe transmutation is explicitly medical. To Jabir, the balancing of elemental essences in a metal and the balancing of humors in a body are  similar processes. 

According to Jabir, an alchemist can create any material simply by manipulating the physical world, and this extends to the human body. So theoretically, if the alchemist wanted to, they could make a tiny human from scratch inside their alchemical vessel. The Jabirian corpus stops just short of discussing whether or not this homunculus would have a soul, but the implications were not lost on later alchemists and theologians.

That said, there is little evidence that any religious authority ever took the alchemists seriously enough to consider this a threat. Imagine if a theoretical physicist in this day and age claimed they could manufacture a human soul: the reaction would be a series of polite nods and a quick changing of the subject. The Abbasid Caliphate had more important things to deal with, and the alchemists never did manufacture a homunculus with a soul, but they did lay the groundwork for modern chemistry. 

THE BIG FIVE: RHAZES

If you’ve ever read a chemistry textbook, you can thank Rhazes. He invented them.

Rhazes was a teacher. His primary goal was to teach. He writes in a straightforward, no-nonsense, easy-to-understand way. He is not interested in the broader religious and philosophical implications of alchemy. He is interested in his students avoiding death by smoke inhalation. As such, his major work “The Book of Secrets” is one of the most grounded and straightforward alchemical texts ever written. 

“Secrets” in this context essentially means “technical knowledge.” Rhazes is not making claims to occult knowledge; quite the opposite. Rhazes took the fire hose of the Jabirian Corpus, and pruned it down to something more practical. 

Practical is the key word when it comes to Rhazes. His biggest addition to alchemical history is a focus on reproducibility. All the theory in the world doesn’t do you much good unless you can produce reliable, useful results. Reproducibility requires standards, and Rhazes introduced standards for laboratory alchemy that formed the foundation of modern laboratory chemistry. 

If you’re ever read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, you were probably a bit surprised by how common-sense Mr. Tzu’s advice was. Of course you need to feed your army. What idiot wasn’t feeding his army? The thing was, nobody had actually written this stuff down in one place yet. 

Think of Rhazes like the Sun Tzu of Alchemy. The Kitab al-Asrar is full of ancient occult wisdom like “make sure the room you’re doing alchemy in has windows so you don’t inhale metal fumes and die.” Rhazes assumes the would-be alchemist has access to five things: Literacy, technical knowledge, space, financing, and reproducibility. These standards would become so influential, people would quote Rhazes as an authority on alchemy and medicine well into the 17th century. 

Like many academics of his day, Rhazes was an alchemist, but he was also a doctor and an astrologer. Academics often separate his work into chemistry and medicine, but this can flatten the broader picture. Rhazes was a systematic thinker, a combiner of ideas. Through the course of his work, he draws comparisons between the heavens, the body, and the flask. The connections are not as strong as some of the thinkers he would later inspire, but the groundwork for thinkers like Paracelsus, who we will discuss at length in a later section.

THE BIG FIVE: AVICENNA

Avicenna, the great doctor Ibn-Sina, is widely regarded as the greatest scholar of the Islamic golden age. We cannot do him justice in a text like this -we have magic to discuss- but suffice to say that modern science would not exist without him. He was educated on alchemy, but he was not an alchemist. Though dozens of later alchemical texts claim they were penned by his hand, they are only pretenders. In reality, Avicenna was famously critical of alchemy, specifically the Jabirian corpus. His work was so influential that his criticisms of alchemical doctrine would be cited for nearly 600 years. 

We return to the “by art or by nature” debate. Can materials created by alchemists ever measure up to the same quality as materials created by nature? The Jabirian Corpus says yes. There are no limits on what alchemists can theoretically recreate, given the time and materials. Avicenna says no. Materials created by alchemists cannot ever match natural materials, and base metals can never be transmuted into noble metals. 

Crucially, he cedes one important point to alchemy. He believed that if alchemy had some genuine, practical, use, it was in the creation and preparation of medicines. 

https://archive.org/details/the-metaphysics-of-the-book-of-Healing/page/52/mode/2up

THE TURBA PHILOSOPHORUM

One of the most enduring and popular alchemical texts in history, the Turba Philosophorum, or “convention of the philosophers” is what happens when you try to fit Greek philosophy into an islamicate-shaped hole. The text itself is a neat little summary of Greek alchemical theory, framed as a sharing of knowledge between several pre-socratic Greek philosophers. In the Plessner translation, the ultimate conclusion the Greek sages reach is “[One:] The creator of the World is Allah, the God of Islam;[two] The world is of a uniform nature; [three]  All creatures of the upper as well as of the lower world are composed of all four elements.”

JOHN DEE

John Dee changed what it meant to practice magic. Occultist, Alchemist, Astronomer, Mathematician, Wife-swapper, Court Magician to Queen Elizabeth I, and quite possibly the most educated person alive at the time, John Dee represents the pinnacle of Renaissance magic and learning. He is a figure so influential, he threatens to take over an introductory text like this one. 

The son of a wealthy Welsh textile merchant, young John Dee was characterized by two things: courtly ambition, and an overwhelming thirst for knowledge. He spent his early days studying, hopping from prestigious college to prestigious college where he rubbed elbows with the intellectuals of Europe. 

By 1550, Dee was working as a teacher for the children of the nobility, eventually becoming personal tutor to a young Edward VI. Dee was a devout Protestant, and the deeply Catholic Queen Mary did not seem to like him all that much. Conflict between Protestants and Catholics was intense at this point in English history, as Henry VIII had recently disbanded every monastery, convent, priory, and friary in the country. None of this stopped Dee from proposing an ambitious plan for establishing a court library by collecting all the rare and valuable texts they could from the recently dissolved monasteries. 

His proposal went unanswered, so he decided to do it himself, and promptly spent the next 30 years turning his estate at Mortlake into the most extensive private library in England, complete with an observatory and an alchemical laboratory. 

When Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the throne, it opened a lot of doors for Dee. Elizabeth, a more religiously tolerant monarch, seemed to like Dee much more. He was given the task of astrologically determining an auspicious day for the coronation. Shortly after, he was able to publish his first academic text: Propaedeumata aphoristica, which provided an improved system for determining the positions of astronomical objects. For Dee, this was a foot in the door.

At this point in history, the distinction between astrology and astronomy had not formed. Whether or not astrology was a magical heresy was still a bit of a gray area. Astronomy-astrology (At the time, astronomy didn’t quite exist. What Dee did would have been called astrology) was regarded with suspicion, but it was also quite useful for nautical navigation. England’s globe-spanning empire was built on their ability to get huge ships across the world safely and efficiently in large part due to their understanding of the heavens. Dee’s work was vital to the British Empire, a phrase Dee himself coined.

Up to this point, Dee’s interest in astrology was not necessarily magical in nature. However, Dee came to believe that they were complimented by the Neoplatonic-Hermetic beliefs of the Renaissance occultists, specifically the works of Cornelius Agrippa, Francesco Giorgi, and Paracelsus. In 1564, Dee published his first magical work: The notably hermetic Monas Hieroglyphica. 

ASIDE: A QUICK GUIDE TO THE MONAS HIEROGLYPHICA

John Dee’s lifelong goal was to “read the book of nature.” But to explain what that means, we must consider his perspective on the world. Put yourself in Dee’s shoes for a moment. You are an extraordinarily skilled mathematician, astronomer, and mapmaker. From the comfort of your writing desk at Mortlake, you can use math to make accurate maps of countries you have never been to. Without leaving your home, you can make maps of the seas that allow ships to reach their destinations faster. If you can do all of this, it follows that theoretically, you could do the same for all of natural philosophy. Theoretically, the beakers and flasks in your alchemical laboratory are unnecessary. Theoretically, you can perform alchemical experiments from your writing desk, using only a pen and paper. Theoretically, there is a logic underlying the entirety of creation that can be known and manipulated. When Dee says he wishes to “read the book of nature”, this is what he means. He wants a peek under the hood of creation. The Monas Heiroglyphica is how he thinks the engine works.

Consider the sun. If every drawing of the sun represents the same sun, those drawings are probably going to have similarities. Dee is arguing that if every depiction of the sun can be deconstructed into a few basic elements, that gives us an almost-universal sign for “the sun.” Dee is arguing that this ur-sign is metaphysically meaningful in some important way. Dee also extends this process to written language, as the word “sun” represents the same thing as any drawing of the sun. 

Dee argues that this process of deconstruction can be applied to everything, that everything can be broken down to a small handful of essential signs and symbols, and that these symbols fit together into the MH. 

This process can also be reversed. Sometimes, a drawing of a sun isn't just a sun. Sometimes, a drawing of the sun represents something like God’s love, alchemical perfection, or imminent death by dehydration. Dee argues that the essential sign of the sun also represents those things as well. Therefore, the entirety of creation can be derived from the MH. 

The Monas Hieroglyphica was a flop. While the MH would go on to become a foundational prop for the Rosicrucians, he received little recognition for the text while he was alive. His contemporaries found it incomprehensible, perhaps rightly so. The ideas in the MH were a generation ahead of its time. 

—

After publishing influential texts on navigation and geometry, and spending some time in an elite milieu of England's best and brightest to further the political aims of Elizabeth I, John entered his overtly esoteric period (Haanegraaf 303). Much ink has been spilled speculating why John became preoccupied with the occult, but it is important to remember that Dee did not “turn” towards the occult in the same way a modern scientist might. While attempting contact with angels was unorthodox, his investigations into esoteric authors were well within the bounds of a natural philosopher. Compared to now, natural philosophy and the occult were not entirely separate. What made Dee scandalous–the reason he hid his activities–were his dealings with the spiritual. For if one believes in angels, they generally believe in demons as well, and one can never truly be sure what is on the other end of a call.  

John was aiming for perfect knowledge of natural philosophy. The logic seems reasonable: When you’ve read all you can, and you’re still in the dark, why not ask the angels –the beings who actually administer the universe– directly? As for how he contacted the angels, John was largely working from the Lesser Key of Solomon. John’s exact methodology is difficult to pin down, but it appears to be heavily influenced by earlier grimoire traditions like the Ars Notoria, and “Solomonic Magic.”

The rituals themselves would have resembled what we now call seances. A small, smoky room. Candles. A table covered in arcane symbols. A crystal ball, or polished mirror in which the images of the angels would appear. John uses of the term “scrying” or “scrying sessions” for this activity.

While the first proper angelic conversation would take place in 1581, things really kicked into high gear when Dee met a wandering alchemist and medium named Edward Kelley. (No relation.) The pair were a dream team. Their occult work together struck some magic balance of academic rigor and dramatic ingenuity that would revolutionize western occultism.

MEET EDWARD KELLEY

Our modern idea of a wizard has its roots in John Dee. The image of a wise yet eccentric old man with a robe and a long white beard surrounded by books and telescopes and flasks of bubbling fluids, fits Mr. Dee perfectly. But for the vast majority of history, wizards were not seen as wise and scholarly old men. Most wizards were not like John Dee. Most wizards were like Edward Kelley. 

Alchemist, medium, con-man, counterfeiter, and man of ill-repute: Edward Talbot, better known by his assumed name, Edward Kelley, was John Dee’s medium-on-retainer, the man who spoke to angels. 

Scholarship around Kelley’s early life is full of phrases like “claimed to be”, or “allegedly”, or “may have”. We know for a fact that he was born at Worcester on 1 August 1555, at 4pm, and that at some point in his life he was cropped, meaning had his ears cut off as punishment for a crime. Most accounts say he was cropped as punishment for counterfeiting. This cropping was supposedly the reason for his iconic cap, which covered the sight of his mutilated ears.

Dee was in contact with several scryers by this point, but had found them unsatisfactory. On March 8th, 1582, Dee was introduced to one Edward Kelley, a thick-set man who walked with a cane and wore a cowl. He was an angry drunk with a reputation for fighting, forgery, and necromancy. But Dee didn’t know that yet: all he knew was that Kelley was a gifted scryer. 

Kelley claimed that not only could he see the various spirits and angels that populated the world, but that he could interact with them directly, and even allow them to speak through him. Dee allowed him a trial run, and was quite impressed. We don’t know what Dee saw that impressed him so much, but it was clear that Kelley knew exactly what Dee wanted. Kelley was in his element.

He was even able to detect the presence of an evil spirit within Dee’s current scryer, a man named Barnabas Saul. Kelley, out of the goodness of his heart and for no other reason, informed Dee that Saul was haunted by evil spirits! Saul was being tricked, and slandering Dee by way of these malicious spiritual interlopers. Barnabas left Mortlake quickly after this, leaving Kelley the sole recipient of Dee’s attention, and income. [Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels, 19] 

Kelley was hired on a retainer of fifty pounds a year, nearly three times the yearly wages for a skilled craftsman for the time. For the next seven years, Kelley would act as Dee’s scryer, or medium, and the two would devote their lives to these “spiritual conferences” with the beings Kelley channeled. 

Over the next few years, Dee and Kelley’s work would lead to some of the most influential esoteric texts ever written. 

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MYSTERY

The Mysteriorum libri quinque, or Five Books of Mystery, can be thought of similar to forklift certification. It is a book of blueprints, techniques, tools, and general safety information for communicating with the angels of the lord. It is a graduated system. Angels are spiritually pure creatures, and each new set of tools and techniques requires greater and greater degrees of spiritual purification from the practitioner. These are the tools Dee would need to “read the book of nature.”

BOOK ONE: How Not To Hurt Yourself With An Angelic Conversation

The first book contains instructions for the Holy Table of Practice, what could be called a highly advanced ouija board. The instructions for producing one are extremely specific and shockingly expensive, requiring both a two yard square silk carpet, and letters written in “perfect oil” like the type used in church. On a particular day, the archangel Uriel lectures Dee and Kelley on the importance of observing the “Ritual Workplace Safety Protocols,” and makes an ominous warning that the grounds of Mortlake are haunted by a malevolent spirit named Lundrumguffa. 

The very next morning, Kelley called Uriel. A being appeared with sparkling eyes, dressed in fantastic robes of purple and gold, a wreath of gold upon his head. When Dee asked if the table had been produced correctly, the being assured him that it was perfect, not a sigil out of place. When Dee asked if the spirit was indeed Uriel, another entity arrived, threw the apparition to the ground, beat him with a whip, and stole his clothes, revealing the entity to be none other than Lundrumguffa. Uriel then continued to beat the spirit, shouting “Lo, thus are the wicked scourged.” He then dragged Lundrumguffa by the legs, threw him into a pit, washed his hands with the sweat of his angelic brow, and appeared to the magicians in full radiance with his co-worker Michael. The angels blessed Dee and Kelley, encouraging them to continue the sessions. 

You may be wondering what the angels get out of talking to a wizard through an earless con artist. In short: Subcontractors. As one reads the angelic conversations, it becomes increasingly clear that while the angels administer creation,they don’t actually understand humans. They don’t understand ideas like agency, desire, free will, linear time, or even physical distance. They need humans like Dee and Kelley, who have the curiosity, piety, and knowledge, to be the angels’ “man on the ground” for God’s plan. If the disparate churches of the world are middle management for the angels, Dee and Kelley were Research and Development. 

BOOK TWO: The Sigillum Dei Aemeth

The second book explores the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the now-famous symbol that forms the basis of the magical temple furniture. There were several extant versions of the symbol already, but Michael appeared to teach the magicians its “perfected” form. This will be a common theme for the Five Books of Mystery. Much of the early work is based around the angels “refining” and “correcting” concepts found in earlier magical texts. This process of synthesizing new ideas, while gesturing to a mythological past, is something we will see throughout magical history. 

[We will need a picture here]

The Sigillum is made up of seven layers, one for each classical planet. As the layers progress inward, they map out the transitions from the celestial to the terrestrial world. It is here that Dee approaches something that is neither Jewish Kabbalah, nor Christian Cabbala, but a third branch: a Hermetic Quabala. 

From the Outermost to innermost layers: 

• Seven names of God drawn from forty alphanumeric characters, and corresponding sigils.

• Archangels of the planets, from a seven-by-seven magical square.

• Seven names of God, from another seven-by-seven square. 

• A set of seven angels called The Daughters of Light, who appeared in green silk dresses, each carrying a blue tablet on their forehead bearing their name.

• Another set of seven angels called The Sons of Light. These held a metal ball reminiscent of the planetary attributes, as well as a tablet of gold on the chest bearing their names. 

• The Daughters of the Daughters of Light. These appeared as children in white, with white ivory tablets bearing their names. 

• The Sons of the Sons of Light, also children, with robes of purple silk, long sleeves and scholar’s hats, and green triangular tablets bearing their names.

• The inner pentagram, which bears the remaining angelic names.

• The crosses, which were placed about the design after its completion. 

This symbol describes the hierarchy of angels that administer the heavens. When God has a thought, this is how the angels hand down the divine marching orders. It should be said that symbols like the Sigillum Dei Aemeth don’t function like Agrippa’s planetary seals. This is not a magical sign in the traditional sense, something written to impart magical qualities onto an object. This is celestial magic, not natural magic. Think of the SDA as a combination of a phone directory, an access pass, and a conference room. Inscribing the SDA is akin to roping off an area with caution tape that says “Caution! Angels at Work!”

BOOK THREE: The Ensigns of Creation

Five weeks after being given the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the magical table and lamen had not been made. The Archangel Michael chastised Dee and Kelley for not carrying out his instructions fast enough. Dee complained that he could not afford the gold, silver, and silk required to build the objects. Michael did not care, and responded with a vision of a mountain of gold covered in serpents, which he obliterated with a sword. 

Next, Uriel revealed to Dee the seven Ensigns of Creation, a set of seven talismans, each corresponding to a different classical planet. They were to be made of purified tin, and be placed around the Sigillum on the Holy Table. 

[include a picture here] 

Uriel said that if they could understand these symbols, they would gain the ability to invoke forty-nine angels who could work to “quiet the estates”[Peterson, John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery, 170.], meaning they could pacify the quarreling crown heads of Europe. 

Dee’s work is apocalyptic. At the time he was writing the Five Books, Europe was tearing itself apart. Nations and nobility were embroiled in conflicts between an increasingly violent Catholic church, an increasingly violent Protestant Reformation, and an Ottoman Empire that was getting way, way too close for comfort. Dee’s world was headed for apocalypse. An antichrist could be born at any moment, and the world would need protecting until Christ’s return. For Dee, assisting the Angels in “quieting the estates” was of not just political, but spiritual importance. 

The Ensigns of Creation were Dee and Kelley’s access passes for the next stage of the Heptarchic system. They are a set of symbols that correspond to the seven angels, each corresponding to a planet, that administer the physical universe. These are, in short, the phone numbers of the angels that Dee must talk to to avoid apocalypse. Once he learned these by heart, he could graduate to the next step. [include the seals image]

BOOK FOUR: Heptarchic Princes

So far, the angels have spoken at length of angelic hierarchies, the aims of magic, and parts of the world in need of correction. The fourth book explains how all of these things fit together. 

Here, Uriel explains that each age of the world is governed by a different spirit, and that the next age of the world would be governed by a spirit named King Camara (aka Baligon). Uriel then introduced the pair to King Camara, as well as their myriad attendants, who explained that they could be commanded, but only once their allotted age arrived. Uriel explains that the form of magic that Dee and Kelley were learning could be used to influence and command these Heptarchic Princes, thus giving Dee and Kelley significant influence over the realms of men that these spirits governed. 

Crucially, Dee asked if magic could be used to influence, say, King Phillip II of Spain. Michael reassured him that as long as his intentions were good and glorified God, it could. He told Dee that this was only the beginning of what could be done with the Heptarchic Princes. 

A common element of Solomonic magic is the lamen. These are paper-thin sheets of some material that have been inscribed with magical symbols, and worn about the neck like an amulet. Within Solomonic magic, they often function as magical hazard gear, protecting the practitioner from the spirit, or giving the practitioner a degree of power over it. 

Dee and Kelley got an upgrade to the lamen they had been using to conjure the angels. The previous lamen, ones based on earlier Solomonic magic, were corrupt, given to them by evil spirits (even though the diaries say that they had been given by Uriel.) The new lamen were to be made of gold. Lamen in the Heptarchic system do function as protections from evil spirits, but they can also be conceptualized as divine access passes that show the angels that Dee and Kelley are allowed to talk to them. 

They were to start with a seven-by-seven-by-seven square of 343 alphanumeric characters, and from this they could extract the names of the Heptarchic Princes. The names of these princes were assembled into the Tabula Bonorum. From the Tabula Bonorum, they would extract the characters of the new lamen. Crucially, the lamen were to be written in Enochian, not Latin. [include a picture of the second lamen, Empire 37%]

Dee and Kelley had systemized and overhauled Solomonic Magic into a new system: The Heptarchic system. Solomonic magic was a loosely organized collection of ideas, refined and expanded over centuries by various authors from a myriad of cultures. What Dee and Kelley did was create a synthesis of Solomonic magic and mystical ascension literature, and the glue holding it all together was the Enochian language. 

Uriel and Michael also explained that Heptarcic magic was was only the first of a “threefold art” which would “join man with his knowledge of the world.” [Empire 37%] The remaining two parts being the Watchtowers and the Thirty Aethyrs. 

BOOK FIVE: Enochian, and the Angelic Calls

Book five concerns the Enochian language. First, the angels relayed the Enochian alphabet, along with each letter's name and corresponding latin letter. 

On Good Friday 1583, an angel thrust its sword from the scrying stone and pierced Kelley’s head. The scryer immediately broke into a sweat, saying he felt something “creeping within his head.” [Sic. Peterson Heptarchia 287]

Dee and Kelley had made quite a bit of progress with the angels. After receiving what I can only imagine was a positive angelic performance review, the wizards were allowed to commune with some higher-ranked beings. Angels named Me, Nalvage, and Illemese, would each give them a new element of the system. 

The angel Me revealed the Liber Loageth, or “Book of the speech of God.” Transcribing the text would take Dee and Kelley several months of painstaking work. When the book was complete the following year, it spanned forty eight manuscript pages, each featuring a grid of forty nine by forty nine characters for a grand total of 115,000 squares. These were the “primal calls”, the divine marching orders given by God to the angels in the earliest moments of creation. [Skeptic Cap] The Liber Loageth remains “untranslated.” Linguistic analysis has revealed the text to largely be gibberish, with no detectable pattern. 

The angel Nalvage then explained a key element of the system: Each of these 49 Primal Calls correspond to 49 “gates of understanding” that must be unlocked one by one if Dee were to gain the knowledge he would need. Nalvage explained that Dee could be given 48 keys to the 49 gates, as “one is not to be opened.”

The angel Illemese then gave the 19 Angelic Calls, short poems that, when spoken aloud in the right ritual setting, would unlock the first 19 gates. This is where the Enochian language becomes truly important to Dee’s metaphysics. The Calls were given in both Latin and Enochian, as the act of speaking aloud in Enochian was itself a magically important act. Reading the calls aloud in Enochian would “cast the spell.” 

Let’s say you wanted to talk to the angels, and learn about the structure of reality. Michael and Uriel are messengers. Their job is to interact with humans, so it’s pretty easy to talk to them. Even so,they are low on the divine ladder. They don’t know everything. If you really want to start working with the angels, you’ve got to learn how to talk to the angels that administer the physical world, the angels in charge of doing things like “making fire hot” or “making water wet.” These guys are gonna be much harder to talk to, they’re not designed to speak English like Michael and Uriel. 

To these entities, we might as well be ants attempting to interact with humans by wiggling our little antennae. But if we learn Enochian, we can call up humans, and speak to them through a ritually-constructed metaphysical ant telephone. 

The first 19 Gates of Understanding concerned the material world. The 19 Angelic Calls are the divine phone numbers that allowed the practitioners to speak to, and petition the angels for their knowledge. 

(Crowley, Aleister; DuQuette, Lon Milo; Hyatt, Christopher S. (1991), Enochian World of Aleister Crowley: Enochian Sex Magick, Scottsdale, AZ: New Falcon Publications)

(James, Geoffrey (1983), The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee, Gillette, NJ: Heptangle Books,)

WHAT IS ENOCHIAN?

Enochian is an occult language constructed by John Dee and Edward Kelley. The pair claimed that they learned it from angels, and it has since become a cornerstone of western ceremonial magic. Dee never calls the language “Enochian” primarily calling the language “Angelical”, but also "Celestial Speech", "First Language of God-Christ", "Holy Language", or "Language of Angels", and “Adamical.” Later writers settled on “Enochian” due to Dee’s assertion that the biblical patriarch Enoch was the last human to speak the language. 

The remarkable thing about Enochian is that it is not just a set of words: it is a functioning language. This is an innovation in western occultism. There are plenty of earlier examples of occult alphabets–several are featured in Agrippa’s work–but they are largely one-to-one replacements for letters from an existing alphabet. Enochian has its own grammar, syntax, and conjugation. It is a small and incomplete language, with barely 250 words to its name, but it is a language. Even if this was not a divinely revealed angelic language, Dee and Kelley underwent the time and effort to create an entire new language from scratch, something that very few people had ever even attempted before.

Enochian represents the pinnacle of Renaissance magical thought. 

It is the metaphysical, semiotic bridge between divinity and humanity. If Dee wanted to “read the book of creation” (empire of the angels), here was the language it was written in. If one can read the book of creation, it follows logically that with the right tools, one might be able to reach in and alter the story. 

Dee saw himself as a prophet, but he would never say that. His diaries are full of dire warnings from the angels, heralding a looming apocalypse that must be avoided with Dee’s help. Enochian was one of the angelic tools given to Dee for the purpose of getting creation back on track. For all his eccentricities, Dee was a devout Christian. The idea of attempting to rewrite reality in his own vision, against the will of God, would have been unthinkable. In his mind, Dee was not trying to bend the world to God’s will, but to assist in fulfilling God’s plan.

Laycock, Donald (2001). The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Boston: Weiser. ISBN 1578632544.

REAL LIFE CALLS

In 1583, close to the completion of the Five Books of Mystery, John Dee was visited by a Polish nobleman named Olbracht Òaski, a bizarre man known for his interest in the mystical, who was quite interested in Dee and Kelley’s mystical dealings. Dee and Kelley trusted him enough to allow him to sit in on a few of the scrying sessions, and Òaski was impressed enough to invite Dee and Kelley to return to Poland with him, and continue their experiments there. In 1584, they obtained the permission of the Queen, and relocated their mystical dealings to the continent. England is a small, isolated island. The continent would give Dee and Kelley something crucial: access to more people who might give them money. 

Łaski was a voivode under the service of Stephen Báthory, uncle of infamous alleged serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. His station gave him ample legroom to experiment with alchemy and magic without drawing too much ire from church officials. He was known as a generous, sweet man with expensive fashion choices, an impressively long beard, and a talent for languages. 

He was also a bona fide scoundrel. In the words of Polish Historian Jan Kasprzak “ [Łaski] would do anything in order to obtain money. He squandered his wives’ dowries and ruined their lives, and at one time, he kidnapped the wife of a nobleman, whom he kept imprisoned at his estate and tortured. A contemporary historian, who recorded Łaski’s infamous deeds, complained bitterly that there was no crime which Łaski would not have committed.” [Zantuan, “Olbracht Łaski in Elizabethan England,” 10.]

Moving to the continent to do highly illegal magic with a wizard and a mad Polish aristocrat would be stressful for anyone, and Kelley had the emotional stability one would expect of an earless alchemist who talks to angels. 

While serving as patron to Łaski, Kelley became enraged with a servant named Alexander, and threatened to cut off the man’s head. After a momentary apology, Kelley learned that Alexander spoke ill of him, and subsequently attempted to kill Alexander in the street with a rapier. It took Dee and two other men to stop Kelley from killing the man. The stress was getting to him.

This was a bad time to be a traveling wizard in Europe. The Protestant Reformation just happened. Witch burnings were at an all-time high. The Catholic Church in the 1580s was, in a word, touchy.  As the pair and their families traveled Europe, receiving patronage from Rudolph II and King Stefan I of Poland, they gradually attracted the attention of the Catholic Church. On 27 March 1587 the wizards were required to defend themselves in a hearing with the papal nuncio (a diplomatic representative of the Pope). While Dee weathered the questioning with composure, the nuncio found Kelley infuriating, and at one point considered throwing him out a window. [3]

WATCHTOWERS, AETHYRS, AND A TRUE AND FAITHFUL RELATION

True and Faithful relation, originally published by Meric Casaubon, picks up five days after the completion of the Five Books of Mystery. 

The Watchtowers:

Let’s say you’re a whiz at Heptarchic magic. You can speak Enochian with the best of ‘em, and send messages wherever you like up the angelic chain of command. Now you’re ready to meet your boss. You want to ascend to the throne of God. First problem: You’re made of meat, and that meat is made of some combination of the four elements. For you to ascend, you need to gain the permission of the angels that administer your meat. 

The Watchtowers and the Thirty Aethyrs are another concept that threaten to overwhelm an introductory text like this. On June 20th, an angel clad in feathers woke a sleeping Kelley by patting him on the head. It showed him a vision of the world with four great towers at each cardinal direction, from which ranks of angels flowed to the center. This diagram describes how angels enter and administer the physical world. 

Put simply, the watchtowers are the angels in charge of the laws of physics. There are four of them, one for each element and cardinal direction. But they’re not just angels. A watchtower is a spirit, a multitude of spirits, an office of spirits, a rank a spirit can hold, a metaphysical location, and an organizing principle of the universe. Imagine if the idea of the x-axis was an entity that you could speak to, and that entity was what administered the divine clockwork behind mathematics. Also, that entity is a physical location you can visit through astral projection. 

Think of Enochian angels as massive anthills. The anthill is itself an angel, made up of dozens of smaller angels whose being is contiguous to the larger whole. Additionally, an anthill is a place. You can interact with an anthill, but you can also stand inside of an anthill. 

The Aethyrs:

Let’s say you’ve successfully run your way through the first 18 angelic calls. You’ve successfully gained permission from the watchtowers to temporarily leave your meat, and ascend up to the Celestial Plane. Good job making it to the Celestial plane, but you’ve still got a ways to go before you hit the throne of God. It’s time for you to make the 19th, and final call. This one opens the way to the 30 Aethyrs. 

The Aethyrs are the angels who administer the space between the celestial plane, and the throne of God. In Dee’s metaphysics, the Aethyrs administer the will of complex things like nations and peoples. They are the clockwork behind politics, fate, and history. Specifically, they were the angels who watched over the scattered tribes of Israel, who must be brought together for the world to be saved. Dee only wished to contact the Aethyrs for the purpose of averting the apocalypse. Later occultists would have other ideas. Where Agrippa layed out a comprehensive metaphysical theory for western magic, Dee and Kelley created a practical structure for navigating it. 

DEE, KELLY, AND CON-ARTISTRY

When Dee died, his Mortlake estate was purchased by an antiquarian named Robert Cotton. Among its considerable library were Dee’s personal diaries, containing his meticulously recorded conversations with angels. These were given to Meric Casaubon, who published them not out of admiration for Dee’s work, but out of spite. A devout Protestant and opponent of Queen Elizabeth while she was on the throne, he was no friend to people like Dee. In the preface he denounces the magician, depicting him as a bumbling fool who dealt with devils and mistook them for angels. 

Was Kelley a con artist? Absolutely. His past as a convicted fraudster, his erratic behavior, and the fact that he abandoned Dee the moment he was financially independent are all points under the “Edward Kelley was a con artist” column.

He arrived at Mortlake as a man pretending to speak to angels with theatrical confidence in the hopes that he could charm a few pounds out of some wealthy aristocrats. A good-old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth con. But one day he met John Dee, a man with money, and one of the greatest occult libraries ever assembled. Something happened to Kelley that changed him. He was still a grifter, but now he wasn’t entirely a grifter.

Many of the rituals contained in Dee’s library ask the practitioner to do things like fast for several days, or forgo sleep for significant periods of time, things that have significant physiological effects on perception. causing what are generally referred to as altered states of consciousness (ASC). It is entirely conceivable that Kelley started off not believing, and something happened that made him seriously question himself. It would be easy to see from “I definitely don’t see angels” to “I’m not sure what I saw.”

THE DAUGHTER OF FORTITUDE

By 1587, Dee and Kelley were tired. After barely escaping questioning by church authorities and several failed attempts to garner new patronage, the pair had settled in Trebon with their money dwindling, their political influence exhausted, and their prospects scant. Kelley was at his psychic limit. Dee began to doubt, writing he found “much halthing and untruth” in Kelley’s work, fearing that he was under the influence of improperly-repelled spirits. [1] Yet, he remained firm in his belief in angels. 

When the Angel Madimi appeared, and said that Kelley had to be punished for taking a wife against the angels wishes (even though the angels asked him to in the first place), the pair were confused. When Madimi said the wizards had to share their wives, the pair were even more confused. They asked if the angel meant spiritually, or sexually. Madimi responded “I speak concerning both.” [2] Later, it was explained that this act would unify Dee and Kelley as a single being, which would usher in the first phase of the apocalypse. 

On May 22nd, the coupling commenced. Kelley and Jane Dee consummated, but Dee himself could not, and simply spent the night with Joanna Kelley. The next morning, during their scyring session, one of the most important events in all of magical history occurred. 

There appeared a spirit, a man astride a white horse in gleaming white armor. He held a flaming spear in one hand, and a long sword in the other. A steel target hung on his back by a length of blue lace around his neck, and upon the shield were painted circles of cherubim with faces like burning gold. He said:

HORSEMAN: “Kelly, was thy brother’s wife obedient and humble to thee?”

E.K.: “She was.”

HORSEMAN: “Dee, was thy brother’s wife obedient unto thee?”

DEE: “She was obedient.”

HORSEMAN: “Even as you were one obedient unto another, even so shall the Lord deal with you.”13

At this, there appeared a green woman. She asked Dee if he had carried out the deed. He confirmed that he did not. Suddenly, there was a new spirit before Kelley. An entity with a crystal cross upon her forehead, neck and breasts exposed, naked down to a girdle of beaten gold, and a pendant of gold that reached to the ground. This was the Whore of Babylon, the mother of demons referenced in the Book of Revelations. She spoke:

“I am the Daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour, from my youth. For behold, I am Understanding, and Science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me, they covet and desire me with infinite appetite: few or none that are earthly have: embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Sonne, and covered with the morning Clouds.” [cont. Its short, we should include the entire DoF speech.]

Dee and Kelley had now attained wisdom. “No man is illuminated, that is not sanctified: neither is there any man perfectly sanctified, that is not joyfully illuminated,” the angels explained. [3] This link between the breaking down of inhibitions, and spiritual enlightenment, would become a foundational element of western occultism for centuries to come. 

[1] Casaubon, Dr. John Dee’s Spiritual Diaries, 587.

[2] Skinner, Key to the Latin, 281–83.

[3]. Casaubon, Dr. John Dee’s Spiritual Diaries, 603.

THE END AND LEGACY OF JOHN DEE

The divine wife-swap, and subsequent conversation with the angels, would prove too much for Dee and Kelley. Dee had burned through his reputation, and was regarded as a crank by the nobility of Europe. At the same time, Kelley had found some success with practical alchemy. The balance of power in the relationship had shifted. Dee was now the social outcast, and Kelley had the marketable skill.

Kelley was pulling away. In fact, it is likely that the only reason he continued to associate with Dee at all was access to his library. Kelley had borrowed a copy of The Bosome Book, the alchemical text that was the source of his newfound talents. If this weren’t enough, Jane Dee was pregnant, possibly by Kelley. She would give birth to his newest son Theodore in February of 1588. 

Dee’s then-patron Rožmberk all but threw him out of Trebon. Dee gave up on his former partner after learning that Rožmberk had made Kelley a baron of Bohemia. After six years of magic and adventure on the continent, Dee returned home to Mortlake on December 3, 1589. To his horror, he found his estate picked over, his library gutted, and his laboratory sold off for parts. Elizabeth, for her part, found Dee some gainful employment with the church, but Dee was in such poverty that he was forced to rent from his brother-in-law Nicholas Fromoundes, the man who gutted Mortlake in the first place. 

Dee would attempt to rebuild his life at Mortlake, even continuing the angelic sessions with another scryer, though few records survive. Meanwhile, Kelley succumbed to another of his manic rages and killed an imperial officer in a duel. He was thrown in prison, where he was forced to continue his alchemical work. This was a fate shared by many alchemists of the time. Kelley died as he lived, a victim of his own legend. 

As Dee neared his final years he was not destitute, but his finances were meager. By 1605 he lost his wife and three of his children to disease. For a time, Dee was kept relatively safe from the religious and political turmoil of the court, but Elizabeth could not protect him forever. With the ascent of James I to the throne, Dee saw the writing on the wall. It was time to leave england. He sold off his library, and even relinquished Mortlake to build funds for another expedition to the continent. He never made it, and died on the witching hour of March 26th, 1606.

A year later, William Shakespeare staged The Tempest. Prospero, the reclusive court magician, is the spitting image of Dee. He is an exile from court. He muses on the legacy of the magician, on power, and death. 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were 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,

Yes, 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.

WELCOME TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Magic is a plant that enjoys the shade. It flourishes in the murky fringes of philosophy where adherents and critics alike must spend significant effort to find it. The enlightenment was a spotlight on magical thought, a complex intellectual movement that sought to deny magic its obscurity. The light of reason was here, and there was nowhere to hide. 

Except there is always a place to hide, always a new intellectual frontier to expand to. Magic isn’t a cockroach, it is a galapagos finch. It does not endure: it adapts. Waning are the days of clerical esotericists and secluded alchemy labs. Now is the resurgence of the natural philosopher, the rise of the poet-mystic, and the reign of the secret society. 

The people doing magic are different now. The renaissance mages were your scholars and clerics. Your Pico Della Mirandolas, Your Moshe De Cordoveros, your John Dees. Deep sea divers building theological submarines to explore the extremes of creation. 

There are two broad species of enlightenment mage. First are our Alchemist Almost-Scientists, our Sir Issac Newtons, our Lavoisiers, and Athanasius Kirchers.These are the men holding the candle of reason to the renaissance mages, trying to figure out if this magical silver talisman actually does cure syphilis. 

Second are our Poet-Mystics. Our William Blakes, Emmanuel Swedenborgs, our Martinez de Pasquallys. Men who, in the face of a world turning a critical eye upon the occult, remained deliciously, decadently, enthralled with the mystical, reputation be damned.

Perhaps the most significant change is a new element for magical history: the secret society. The Freemasons, and their hundreds of para-masonic cousins, provide a whole new way for magical thought to move through europe and beyond.

MEET THE FREEMASONS:

The Freemasons are one of the most influential groups in occult history, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. On one hand, we have the mythological freemasons: the globe-spanning fraternal society of philosopher sages, elite guardians of ancient secretive wisdom reaching back to the construction of the temple of Solomon. One of the most important organizations in the history of humanity. On the other hand, we have the actual freemasons: A social club and charitable organization for upper-middle-class oddballs whose major contribution to history is occasionally connecting intellectual and ambitious to the bored and wealthy. But occult history happens when mythology and reality meet. To understand how the freemasons became one of the most influential groups in occult history, we need to understand how these two images of the Freemasons fit together. 

Experts cannot agree on an exact date for the birth of the freemasons. Records are blended with mythologized history, and the Freemasons themselves can’t really agree. That said, we know they go back to around the 14th century with a document called the “Old Charges.” The document, likely written by a cleric, is a mythological history of stonemasonry that ties the work of current cathedral builders back to the construction of legendary sites like the Temple of Solomon and the Tower of Babel. While the nature and purpose of these documents are debated, they establish that there was an organization of stonemasons with a special-ish relationship to the church. 

The 14th century was a good time to be a stonemason. Political power among nobles was often demonstrated by competing to build the biggest, fanciest, most glorious Cathedral. There was profit to be made and respect to be gained. If you were good at stonemasonry, you had a serious incentive to protect your techniques. How do you keep the rabble from learning your highly valuable construction techniques? Simple, you keep your techniques a secret.

But how do you stop the rabble from joining your club, learning your secrets, and then leaving immediately? You establish a ranking system. New recruits start off with smaller secrets. As they prove they can be trusted, as they are “initiated” you hand out larger and larger secrets. 

(around the 1700s, thats when the rosicrucians show up. Theyre the first paramasonic group to contribute majorly to esoteric history. Discuss the social material history that made them a force to be reckoned)

By the time we hit the 1700s, the Freemasons have diversified somewhat. They are less mystical order, more proto-labor-union meets trade guild meets social club. They were essentially a trade guild made of middle-class professionals. Stonemasons, carpenters, plumbers, etc, would all regularly meet to share professional knowledge and generally get out of the house. Membership even had perks. Being a Freemason offered access to business connections, professional services, discounts at mason-affiliated stores, and even burial services. 

The point here is the Freemasons were a mundane part of everyday life for Europe in the 1700s. The average person was aware of them.They were not seen as a shadowy order of elusive wealthy mystics. They were commonly associated with middle-class professional craftspeople and businessmen. So, if you were trying to create a secret society of wizards, they were damn near the ideal blueprint. 

That blueprint has two essential ingredients: One, Secret Knowledge. They promised secret knowledge that could only be learned within the organization. Two, an Initiatory Structure. The organization had ranks. Ranking up required undergoing some intimate experience that led to mysterious inner changes. In short; when it comes to occult history, the structure of the Freemasons was far more influential than the Freemasons themselves. 

. (Here is where we introduce the rosicrucians?)

THE MASONS AND ESOTERIC SYMBOLISM

Normal language always comes before esoteric language. The Masons did not start out as this esoteric, initiatory order. There is little evidence (Hanegraaff 385) that the Masons contracted to build the great cathedrals of Europe were given any special knowledge beyond their ordinary trade secrets. They had normal secrets they needed to discuss, and a good way to do that was in visual code. Coded language evolves just like any other language. People get poetic with it. Give it 200 years, and you’ve got a complex and evocative system of esoteric symbolism that can be used to convey ideas in ways that ordinary language cannot. 

This idea of Masonic symbolism is shared by Andrew Michael Ramsay: 

“‘We have secrets; they are figurative signs and sacred words, which comprise a language sometimes mute, sometimes most eloquent, to communicate over great distances and to recognize our Brethren no matter what their language or their native land’. It was only by playing on a much later, indeed quite recent interpretation, that these symbols assembled on the “tracing boards” could be compared to mantras, to supports for meditation opening onto an inner experience. That some minds were capable of such a development is probably due to the fact that these figures and boards play a major role during the ceremonies in which the masonic degrees are conferred.” (Hanegraaff 385)

Even if Masonic symbolism cannot be considered explicitly magical how magical symbolism evolves, changes, and functions. So while Masonic symbolism is esoteric almost by accident, it would be massively influential on later magical societies, who would leverage these same concepts for explicitly magico-religious aims. 

There are hundreds of different paramasonic sects, each with their own spin on Masonic doctrine, secret teachings, and magical ideas. Even early on, Masonic groups were incorporating concepts from Christian Theosophy, Spiritual Alchemy, and Theurgy. Some tied their mythology to the wisdom of the Alchemists, others to the Knights Templar, others to the Kabbalists and Cabalists, others still to a newly-rediscovered ancient Egyptian religion. These different threads of thought would constantly split off, recombine, and intermingle in ways that are fascinating, but frankly make them a pain in the ass to summarize. This is compounded by their penchant for self-mythologizing. Paramasonic groups love to create faux-historical documents about how their particular sect is the ancientest order with the wisest wisdom and the secretest secrets. The kayfabe of ancient secret wisdom is an essential marketing tool. Who would join a secret society founded last tuesday? But as a pop-historian, I cannot help but feel I am the butt of the joke. 

 ( smol bean PROHIBIDO)

Esoteric doctrines need careful pruning. Spread a doctrine too fast, and you risk diluting it with misinterpretation. Spread a doctrine too slow, and you risk death by obscurity. The Masonic lodge system was the sweet spot, a machine that refined and spread esoteric doctrines just fast enough. Lodges were places where a doctrine could be discussed and practiced, and the basic ranked system of Apprentice, Fellow, and Master, was the spigot which regulated and directed the flow. This was the blueprint for damn near every magical group that came after. (emphasis on the social network nature of the Lodge system)

In 1774, a young woman named Fracisca Osterlin suffered from constant vomiting and irritation of the bowels. She came to see a doctor named Franz Anton Mesmer. He fed her a solution continuing high amounts of iron, and then passed powerful magnets over her body. Osterlin said she felt her symptoms instantly vanish, and that it felt as if a current of some mysterious energy were travelling through her. 

Mesmer believed that a “Impalpable fluid” permeates the entire universe. All maladies are the result of improper circulation of this fluid. All medicine is that which regulates the flow of this impalpable fluid. This fluid is magnetic, and thus Mesmer named his new theory of medicine Animal Magnetism. 

Mesmer himself was a medieval mind trapped in an increasingly modern world. Born in 1734 in the german town of Iznang, he would study theology, and in 1776, he would publish a thesis on the influence of the planets on medicine. After his apparent success with Osterlin, he would develop a schema of medicine based on the principles of Animal Magnetism. This usually involved staring directly into his patients eyes, massaging them, waving magnetized wands over their skin, resting their feet in magnetized water, until they had a ‘crisis’ of some sort, after which the patient was declared cured. 

Mesmer was explosively popular in Vienna. In 1775 Prince Elector Max Joseph of Bavaria would invite him to observe a priest performing healing via the laying of hands as part of a larger investigation of seances and exorcisms. Mesmer concluded that the priest was sincere, but didn’t realize that he was actually conducting the cosmic fluid. 

This is how the theory of Animal Magnetism was truly born, out of a desire to rationally study phenomena like exorcisms through the lens of newly discovered phenomena like electricity and magnetism. This will be a major theme throughout the rest of history. If a new scientific phenomena is discovered, someone, somewhere will posit “What if that’s how the soul works?” Humorously, if the phenomena of faith healing works by the mechanism of Animal Magnetism, that makes Mesmer a faith healer. A contradiction that was not lost on the Viennese public. Mesmer gained a reputation as a miraculous healer, and significant public scrutiny as a charlatan, and subsequently hightailed it to Paris in 1777. 

Parisians loved him. They loved him so much that Mesmer developed several methods of group cures in which several patients at once could stick their hands in a tub of magnetized water, hug a magnetized tree, or simply hold hands while one person was “mesmerized.” He was a sensation with the rich and well-to-do of France, and Mesmer charged prices to match. At one point, the brother of Louis XVI came to his clinic for treatment. 

He was so famous that a comitte was convened to test whether or not Animal Magnetism was legit. This committee included scientific powerhouses like Antoine Lavoisier, Jean-Sylvaine Bailly, and Benjamin Franklin.

Their initial findings were paradoxical. They couldn’t prove the existence of the cosmic fluid, but they also couldn’t disprove the existence of the cosmic fluid.  People seemed to be healed, but this was attributed to some “faculty of the imagination.” Mesmer was doing something, but the nature of that something was anyone’s guess. I will also mention that Mesmer’s cures could be dubiously sexual at some times, and this absolutely came up in the report. The committee issued a challenge to Mesmer. He was the one asserting the truth of the theory of Animal Magnetism, of course, surely he could produce some experimental proof?

1784 was peak mesmer. Challenged by the committee, and unable to properly respond, he eventually fell from grace. He died in seclusion in 1815. 

Mesmer’s students would immediately pick up the torch. Armand Marie Jacques Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur, would carry on Mesmer’s healing practices after his death. He had to stop for a bit between 1789 and 1799, but after the revolution was finished he revived the practice, calling it “Magnetic somnambulism.” 

In 1837, the Frenchman Charles Poyen travelled to the good old USA, which had even less scrutiny in regards to medical practices compared to europe. Animal Magnetism was even more popular in the states. Many words have been written as to why, but I venture there are more material reasons for the popularity of Mesmerism. Medicine in 1837 sucked, and Americans love a con artist. 

When homeopathy was invented in 1796, the vast majority of doctors in Europe were still following medieval doctrines of medicine. For all the innovations made by our dear friend Paracelsus, doctors often caused more harm than good. Homeopathy has no effect whatsoever, and was therefore often preferable to bloodletting and induced vomiting. Mesmerism benefitted from a similar relationship. It was often more popular than institutional medicine, simply because it was not making the problem worse. That said, Mesmer wouldn’t give you cocaine. 

By 1837, the comission offered 3000 francs to anyone who could prove that they could read text through a solid opaque object. Nobody could. In 1842, the academy of medicine stopped accepting papers on animal magnetism. This did nothing to hamper the popularity of Animal Magnetism as a health doctrine. 

In 1843, a scottish doctor student of Mesmeric doctrine named James Braid proposed a slightly modified form of Animal Magnetism. He called it “hypnosis.” He believed there was no occult phenomena behind mesmerism. No secret force or eternal impalpable fluid, just autosuggestion that resulted in somnambulism. Braid never outright rejected that there was no occult phenomena behind mesmerism. “ “He contented himself with saying that he had not produced these results with his particular method.” (Hanegraaff 78) This clever rebranding with more scientific-sounding terminology made Animal Magnetism –I mean hypnotism– acceptable to medical institutions of the time. This was not necessarily a bad thing. In 1878, a french doctor named Jean-Martin Charcot used the theory of hypnotism to study “hysterics” thus kickstarting the field of neurology. 

None of this is to say that Mesmerism as a doctrine had a consistent throughline. After Mesmer’s death, Mesmerism was never just one thing. His students theories regularly conflicted and often directly contradicted each other. One could understand Mesmerism more as a spectrum between orthodox materialists like Charcot who rejected ideas of cosmic fluids for a more grounded “vital electricity”, to Puységur’s centrist “Psycho-Fluidists, which were both material and occult, and the unorthodox occultists. 

Mesmeric doctrine hit western culture like a bomb. Its proponents saw it as a runway for exploring the mysterious potential of the human mind, its detractors saw it as a charlatanic perversion of science that must be stopped at all costs. They are both right! 

THIS IS WHERE SWEDENBORG WOULD GO

IT IS BLAVATSKY TIME

Historians love to describe their favorite generals and statesmen as “big personalities.” They are not wrong, but they suffer from a problem of scale. The most eccentric Roman senator, the most madcap wwii tank commander, the maddest Spanish king, all are dwarfed by the titan of personality that is Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. 

Baboon-owner, world-traveling perennial syncretist, self-admitted huckster, proto-feminist marajuana icon, occult trendsetter, and innovative antisemite, Mme Helena Blavatsky would combine the mythology of spiritualism with the doctrine of western esoterica. She is a revolution. There is occult history before Blavatsky, and there is occult history after Blavatsky. 

(She combined Spiritualism with the doctrine of Western Esotericism)

-(biggest knock-on effect of this was a significant secularization of western esotericism)

(She was the first big East-West syncretist)

Born August 12 1831 to a mishmash of European nobility, Blavatsky herself is our only source for her early life.  She is a fantastic liar, in every sense of the word. Her lies are both skillful, and damn entertaining. She would claim to have psychic abilities since childhood, and that her grandfather was a high-ranking mason who gave her access to his vast occult library. But regardless of her access to magical libraries, she was a strange young woman with an interest in the religious and esoteric. 

As a young woman, Blavatsky had an unprecedented level of freedom for a woman. She was married at 17 to Nikifor Blavatsky, a man significantly older than her. Blavatsky was not happy with this arrangement. She made so many attempts to escape and return to her family at Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) that Nikifor eventually relented and let her go. The result was a young, married woman with access to significant wealth and social currency. Blavatsky could effectively travel anywhere she liked, whenever she liked. Over the course of her life, she would damn near circumnavigate the globe several times over. She ended up everywhere from North Africa to India to Canada to South America. For all her tall tales, Blavatsky did actually visit the places she described. 

Cairo was a particular early favorite for her. Here, she supposedly met with a Coptic mage and the pair founded her first esoteric society, the Société Spirite. Which was initially a more “scientific” occult investigation group that rapidly became a magical society for doing wizard stuff. 

Around 1873 she would travel to the United States, where she became popular on a Victorian form of Social Media known as the newspaper. Through this, she would meet a man named Henry Steele Olcott. The two would become fast and lifelong friends. This was a double-edged sword. A lifelong friendship with Mme Blavatsky is a “high drama” ordeal, one plagued with constant infighting, disagreements, and public conflicts. Blavatsky was not one for criticism. 

Spiritualism was the hot topic of the day. (there will be a Spiritualism section before this dw) While Blavatsky would initially gain popularity defending spiritualism, she would gain more attention by turning against the grain. Where Spiritualism accentuated a scientific approach to the magical, Blavatsky emphasized the opposite. Her conception of Occultism was in part a reaction to the scientific trappings of spiritualism. Blavatsky would emphasize the esoteric, hidden, inner teachings she claimed were present within all religious doctrine. 

The idea of western esotericism having some form of shared hidden doctrine is nothing new. The Renaissance esotericists loved some comparative religious study. But when Pico Della Mirandola looks at the hidden inner doctrine present in pagan texts, the result looks suspiciously like Christianity. 

Blavatsky’s Occult doctrine is secular, in the sense that it does not belong to any particular sect. It is a Stew of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic, concepts. Plus, an innovative new ingredient. Blavatsky was one of the first westerners to incorporate (dubiously understood) concepts from eastasian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. Given that she was one of the only occultists who had actually been to East Asia, she had a significant degree of authority over western occult conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism. The local library probably didn’t have a comprehensive translation of the Pali Canon, or the Bhagavad Gita. People had to take Blavatsky at her word, and Blavatsky’s world was odd.

Blavatsky posited the existence of secret occult brotherhoods that passed down secret knowledge of the original true religion. Evidence of these secret brotherhoods could be found through esoteric analysis of scripture from around the world. While this theory was not out-of-step with the occult thought of the time, Blavatsky was eye-catchingly radical in her preaching. Where most spiritualists were content to simply compare the religions of the world, Blavatsky would claim they were all branches of the same ancient, esoteric, tree. But she wouldn’t stop there. She would claim to be in contact with an Ascended Master, an ancient, immortal priest of this lost religion who would appear to her in spirit form. His name was Koot Hoomi.

ASIDE: KOOT HOOMI AND THE ASCENDED MASTERS

Initially, Blavatsky would describe Koot Hoomi more in the vein of a tutelary spirit. He was a teacher, a spiritual guide that showed Blavatsky the way. Blavatsky would describe him as a “Kashmiri Brahman” with long hair and blue eyes. As her mythology developed, Koot Hoomi would take a more significant role. He would become one of many Ascended Masters, a person of supreme theosophical wisdom who appears on earth to guide members of the Theosophical Society towards the true path. For the more spiritually inclined members, the Ascended Masters were a load-baring brick. They were the source of spiritual wisdom that proved the Theosophical Society was on the right path. If it turned out that Blavatsky was lying about being in contact with an ancient spiritual being, it could be trouble for her. END ASIDE

In 1874, Blavatsky was living in New York and working on her first major work: Isis Unveiled. (More on this in a moment.) She became a celebrity. American occultists and socialites would regularly visit her apartment to hear wild tales of her adventures in Africa and The Orient. (give us some flavor here, add the anecdote about cornering the ostrich feather market or some shit). . These impromptu salons would eventually become the Theosophical Society. 

BLAVATSKY PART 2: THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

On September 7th 1875, a man named George Henry Felt was giving a lecture to the local spiritualist community. It was titled “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians”. Felt used the Egyptian zodiac to prove the existence of numerous elemental spirits present in all things. He claimed that these elemental spirits could potentially be harnessed to supernatural effect. The legend goes that during the lecture, Olcott passed Blavatsky a note that said “[would it] not be a good thing to form a society for this kind of study” Hanegraaf 180. (There was something about Felt being a grifter who ran off with a bunch of money but I need to find the citation for that.)

In 1875 the Theosophical Society is co-founded by Olcott and Blavatskty. Two years later, Blavatsky published Isis Unveiled, to widespread success. Blavatsky had a gift for surveying the field of occult writing, figuring out what people wanted, and giving it to them. (This honestly deserves a whole sidebar of its own. IU is a watershed text for Occultism.)

In 1879, Bavatsky moves to India. She will never return to the United states. In many ways, this is a smart move. She was explosively popular in the West, but she had fans in India. Her arrival in Delhi is given press attention, as the editor of a local newspaper was a follower. She would almost immediately start a newsletter of her own; The Theosophist, which is still in print today. This choice to move would prove a double-edged sword. 

On one hand, being closer to the oriental wellspring of magical knowledge will be a massive source of clout for her followers.

 On the other hand, magical societies are not known for internal discipline. The Theosophical Society was already suffering from internal fractures. Without Blavatsky to assert direct control, the Theosophical Society would suffer near constant infighting. 

In 1880, Blavatsky and Olcott would accept the Five Precepts and Three Gems, effectively becoming Buddhists, (Although Blavatsky had been calling herself a buddhist for some time) and they would receive a series of letters from the Ascended Masters, who tell them the Theosophical Society is the true inheritor of the secret wisdom religion. 

By this point, the Theosophical Society is at the peak of its popularity. It is knocking on the door of mainstream popularity, but it shall not pass without scrutiny from the gatekeepers. Here, many of the choices Blavatsky made earlier in her life come back to bite her. Initially, her attempt to promote Occultism along the same “scientific” line as spiritualism gave her a battering ram of credibility. Under scrutiny from her detractors, it became a glaring weakness. 

In 1884, Blavatsky and Olcott agreed to travel to England to meet with the Society for Psychical Research. In terms of actual scientific approaches to the magical and esoteric, the SPR are the gold standard. They are initially impressed with Blavatsky, but this will not last. 

That same year, the Madras Christian Collective (fact check this, it could be Collective or College) would publish a scathing expose. The contents were largely based on correspondences between Blavatsky and Emma Coulomb, a former accomplice in many of Blavatsky’s scams, now turned traitor. The details of the so-called “Coulomb Affair” are hotly contested, but the end result was strong, public, evidence that Blavatsky was a huckster who knowingly falsified her supernatural abilities. The effects were, to say the least, disastrous. 

“For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history”

Blavatsky left for India in disgrace, but became ill, and was forced to return to Europe. She would settle in Wurtzburg for a short while but loyal Theosophists eventually convinced her to return to London. She would cloister herself in this London apartment, and begin work on her next great work: The Secret Doctrine. This apartment would become known as The Blavatsky Lodge. (fact check: was it an apartment? Or was she staying with some wealthy theosophist?) Once she was all settled in, she would do what she did best; establish a small newspaper. This one was called Lucifer. This publication was essentially a vehicle to build hype for the release of The Secret Doctrine. 

In 1890 she meets Annie Besant, a fascinating woman even by Blavatsky standards. Under Blavatsky’s guidance, Besant would found the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, an even more explicitly magical sub-group. Later that year, Secret Doctrine is published. 

SIDEBAR: THE SECRET DOCTRINE

The Secret Doctrine is an occult text par excellence. It claims to be sourced from “hitherto unknown” Tibetan texts called the Book of Dyzan and the Golden Precepts respectively. These books likely never existed. 

The Secret Doctrine is a syncretic text between Biblical and Vedic theology. A text like this was inevitable. Stick a Victorian theologian in a room with the Bible and the Upanishads, it’s only a matter of time until things get syncretic. The Secret Doctrine may be a Frankenstein, but it's a walking Frankenstein. 

Volume one of the Secret Doctrine deals with cosmogenesis, it lays out the structure and origin of the universe. Volume two deals with anthropogenesis, the origins and role of humanity in that cosmology. 

To summarize volume one: One, the Theosophical Society is the inheritor of the ancient wisdom religion. History is filled with enlightened seers who transmit this doctrine, and convey wisdom from the higher beings watching over the “childhood of humanity.” Two, there is a single divine principal who manifests as the myriad divinities of world religion. One god, many faces. Three, the world follows the eastern concept of Maya. The world is illusory, like a great dream, and its nature is that of thought and consciousness. Four, the world follows the spiritual-alchemical Law of Correspondences, as above, so below. (There’s technically 6 stanzas here, but two of them are just reinforcing the earlier stanzas.)

To summarize volume two: This is the one with all the weird race science. If you’ve ever heard the term “Root Race” this is where it comes from. This section is an explicit rejection of darwinian evolution. (this would be a huge platform for the nazis and reinforced eugenecist ideas)

What’s more, the book fell under criticism from fellow occultist William Emmette Coleman, who claimed the book was plagiarized from contemporary occult sources. He names over one hundred sources that Blavatsky copied from without credit. While the book is undoubtedly a tower of plagiarism, it is unclear whether or not Blavatsky intended to plagiarize. None of the authors she plagiarized from ever called her out. It is entirely possible she was simply unconcerned with proper citation. But plagiarism is plagiarism, intentional or not. 

On May 8th, 1891, after years of grappling with a toxic reputation, Mme Blavatsky would kick the bucket. She died in disgrace, but also as one of the most influential occult writers of all time. While lacking in originality, she was undeniably a skilled syncretist. Her influence can be seen in everything from the New Age, to Nazi race science, to the science fiction and fantasy novels of the early 20th century. 

(give us a little blavatsky retrospective. How do we evaluate her career at the end of her life.)

THE HERMETIC ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

Nobody would let Kenneth Mackenzie practice magic. He became a Freemason and worked his way up the ranks. But no matter how high he climbed, nobody would let him practice magic. So, he joined the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, the biggest baddest secret society there was. It was closer. The SRIA were an esoteric order, but they were still very Christian. You could read about magic to your heart’s content, but still, nobody would let Kenneth Mackenzie practice magic. So he decided to figure it out himself. 

Mackenzie shopped around. He met with different organizations, like the Royal Oriental Order of Sikha and the Sat B’hai, to research their structures. He was looking for a magic school: a system with graded tiers like the SRIA, but for learning magic. He did not find what he was looking for, but he took extensive notes on what his ideal organization would look like. He took these notes in code, specifically a Trithemius cipher. Named for Johannes Trithemius, who supposedly taught both Paracelsus and Agrippa. Over the course of his adventures, he quietly compiled a notebook which detailed the structure of his ideal magical order. Then, on 3 July 1886, Mackenzie died. 

William Wynn Westcott  was a London coroner and prominent member of the SRIA, but he looked more like a retired cavalry commander, the type of man who shouts “Tally Ho!” He had just taken over as leader of a small Masonic body known as the Swedenborgian Rite. He discovered the Cipher Manuscripts among his predecessors' papers. Curious, he identified the cipher (Trithemius’s Polygraphae) and translated the document. If you want to understand the type of person Westcott was, he immediately understood he was holding the opportunity of a lifetime, and he knew just how to play it. 

His first order of business was to ask for help. Westcott was a schmoozer. His real skill was networking, advertising, putting wizard butts in wizard seats. He was not the type to write rituals or build systems. The man for the job was fellow occultist Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a man who was simply the correct choice for the task. If you want a visual, every picture of Mathers depicts him in full druid regalia, or blonde with a coiffed middle part. He was a man who believed in the value of rigorous textual analysis, staunch orthodoxy, the closest thing the 19th century occult had to a monk. If anyone could build an entire system of rites, with lectures and rituals to go along with them, it was Samuel Mathers. Their new system would be a combination of the SRIA, the Swedenborgian Rite, and the Cipher Manuscripts. 

Westcott did not tell Mathers where he actually got the manuscripts. He claimed that he acquired them from a masonic historian named A.F.A. Woodward, who died two months later before anyone could corroborate the story. 

Westcott added another document to the manuscript, a letter written in the same cipher, from an unidentified “Frau Sprengel.” This mysterious figure was a “Chief among Chiefs” of an ancient organization called the Order of the Golden Dawn, who gave Westcott the authority to start a lodge in her name. Said lodge needed three chiefs. The first two were Westcott and Mathers, the third was William Robert Woodman, the current supreme magus of the SRIA. 

SO WHAT DOES THE HOGD ACTUALLY DO?

If wizards had a bar exam there would be ten levels, each with their own exam you have to pass. Learn the right chants and rituals, study the lectures, and show up for your test. If you perform the ritual correctly, you get upgraded to the next level. These rituals require discipline and devotion over the course of months, if not years. Requirements for ritual purification range from “say the required prayer at sunrise every day for nine months” or “abstain from sexual intercourse for three months.” Ascending a grade gives one access to new materials, new things to learn, new concepts to play with, and a new test to practice for. Think of it as a field of religious philosophy expressed through a system of meditation and performance. 

By 1894, they had 331 initiates, but they’d only actually written the first five of ten grades. Westcott didn’t care what the actual rituals were, so he gave Mathers free reign to write the higher mysteries. Westcott focused on recruiting, placing cryptic ads in local papers that would entice the sort of person they were looking for to sign up and learn the mysteries for themselves. 

SECTION 2 DA TROUBLE STARTS

In 1981, Woodman dies. Mathers is now in relatively uncontested control of the ritual elements of the Golden Dawn. People begin to question his strict orthodoxy. By 1893 he expelled Theresa O’Connel, one of the earliest initiates of the order, over a minor disagreement. (look more into this) Despite the Golden Dawn being a relatively egalitarian organization, Mathers and Westcott tried to limit female access to the Vault of the Adepts, and thus the higher grades. This kicked off a larger conversation about Mather’s leadership.

[great place to talk about how the women in the golden dawn basically wrote all the doctrine while the men actually performed the rituals.] 

This was especially pertinent for Annie Horniman, (some little anecdote about who she was), one of the wealthiest patrons of the GD, who had been providing significant funds for the temple. She expressed unease at the “unorthodox sexual doctrines” of fellow adept Dr. Berridge. Mather’s response was a raving, power-mad letter that did nothing to make Annie feel more comfortable. (did she withdraw?)

To make matters worse, in 1897 Westcott was forced to withdraw from the order. Turns out the English government didn’t like the idea that one of their paid coroners was also a wizard. With Westcott under investigation, Mathers was left in complete control of the order. 

Infighting is one thing, but a government investigation combined with overbearing leadership was too much for some lodges. Mathers received several formal letters from other lodges, asking for permission to shut down their lodges. Mathers denied the requests, and went further. He claimed that he was the only one truly in communication with the Secret Chiefs, and that the Sprengel Letter had been forged. 

This concretized his leadership, rallied the remaining lodges to his banner, and quadrupled the membership of the golden dawn within the space of a year- Im just kidding it had the exact opposite effect. If the letter was forged, then obviously there were never any secret chiefs to begin with. This effectively destroyed any remaining confidence in Mather’s leadership. Foot, meet bullet. 

FALLIN APART

Immediately after the Sprengel Letters were accused of being a forgery, Florence Farr approached Westcott to ask him about the allegations. If the Sprengel Letter was a forgery, it raised some serious questions about the spiritual authority of the Golden Dawn, and more importantly, the bureaucratic authority of Mathers. For his part, Mathers had no proof beyond good old fashioned Unverified Personal Gnosis. He had to be evasive. (how?)

Mathers also made the mistake of trusting one Aleister Crowley, and admitting him to the Second Order in Paris after he had been denied access in London. This gave Crowley the authority to “show up in London as Mathers representative, charged with reclaiming the Order for its erstwhile Chief.” Those are sarcasm quotes. 

Mather’s only play was to claim he met the real Anna Sprengel, in the form of a woman named Madame Horos. Horos turned out to be a con artist, stole the Golden Dawn’s books, fled to London, and started her own fake version of the order. She and her husband were eventually arrested, tried, and jailed, for criminal fraud and rape. Very publicly tried, I might add. This was disastrous for the Golden Dawn. For the general public, organizations like the Golden Dawn were already a source of mistrust and pearl-clutching. For the magically inclined, their rituals were made public, which detracted from the sacred-ness of it all, and was frankly embarrassing for many of the members. Many chose to leave. 

The remaining members were split. Half wanted Farr’s smaller, informal ceremonies among cadres of adepts. The others were loyal to Mather’s strict orthodoxy. No compromise was reached, and the order disbanded in 1903. 

Although, Waite did manage to scrape together the orthodox mystics, and wrangled the Isis Urania temple into shape, founding the “Independent and Rectified Rite” on July 8th 1903. This new temple was now explicitly Christian, which attracted some members that otherwise balked at the Golden Dawn and magic in general.

They would attract some other stragglers from the shattered order, eventually naming the new temple the Alpha Et Omega. Although, Mathers was already an old man. He would die in 1918 leaving his wife Mina in charge. “Her management of the Order was no less idiosyncratic and authoritarian and she alienated the most able members, among them most of her American followers and the young Dion Fortune, who left to found the Fraternity of the Inner Light.”

Some folks did break off to start their own temples, to humble success. Felkin (who?) started the Smagardium Thessalay temple in New Zealand. The Amoun Ra temple in England stayed active, even though a former member C.M. Stoddart, was convinced they were a force of supernatural evil. 

Waites Independent and Rectified Rite caused problems. They kept trying to reach out to other societies like the Stella Maturtina, printing rituals for both societies to use, but this quickly ended over interpretation of terms. Over time, Waite became increasingly skeptical of the Cipher Manuscripts. One of his co-chiefs, Blackden, and a majority of his followers, insisted that they were of Egyptian origin, meaning that Waite did not have complete control over their interpretation. From a more cynical perspective, this could be seen as a move to prevent another Mathers from happening. But within twelve months, Waite (I think) created a new order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, but it was in no sense a continuation of the Golden Dawn. 

DEATH AND REBIRTH

The traditional Golden Dawn did survive. It continues today thanks to the actions of a rogue member of the Stella Matutina: Francis Israel Regardie, who entered the Hermes Temple in 1933 following an earlier initiation into the Societas Rosicruciana in America (a quasi-masonic body that had borrowed the Outer Order rituals of the Golden Dawn). Regardie firmly believed that the teaching and rituals of the ORder should be available to all. So, over a four year period, from 1973 to 1940, he published the greater part of them. This allowed smaller temples to pop up, claiming not illegitimate lineage from the original body. They were doing the same rituals after all. 

The continued existence of the Golden Dawn is a testament to the impact they had on magical history. Damn near every organization attempting to formally practice magic these days has its roots in the Golden Dawn, or a member of the Golden Dawn. They were the blueprint. If anything, they were proof that formal magico-religious practices can exist outside of traditional religious structures, a mystery cult who studies other mystery cults, mystics of all mysticism. 

CROWLEY TIME

Edward Alexander Crowley was Born in 1875 in Warwickshire England to a family of wealthy and pious alcohol magnates. The Crowleys were members of the Plymouth Brethren, a low church known for being some of the strictest religious fundamentalists in England. Young Edward did not seem to mind this. It wasn’t until his father died in 1875, and his more religiously overbearing mother came into control of his life, that he began to tack away from his religious upbringing. 

In 1895 he began studying at the prestigious Trinity College, where he would develop a knack for the liberal arts. He would publish a book of poetry –at great personal expense– that received generally favorable reviews. This would make him a regular in England's avante-garde arts and cultural scene. An encounter with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would be inevitable. 

He would be initiated as a Neophyte at the Isis-Urania Temple in London in 1898. Here he would meet English Buddhist convert Allan Bennet, who would show him the ropes of ceremonial magic, and GD founder Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. It was around this time that Mathers would publish his translation of the Book of Abramelin the Mage, which would be a watershed text for Crowley. 

The Book of Abramelin serves as a short overview of occult history up to the fifteenth century or so in a narrative form. This type of text would prove to be Crowley’s specialty. Be it a consequence of his literary education or a quirk of personality, Crowey had a genius for the narrative elements of magic. His ability to summarize a complex idea with an elegant phrase would carry him far. As would his ability to make enemies. Crowley was never a quiet person. He was equal parts charming and antagonistic, often at the same time. He was very good at making friends and enemies. 

He was initiated as a neophyte in the Isis-Urantia temple of the Golden Dawn, where he would quickly and enthusiastically climb the ranks. All the while, he would pay special attention to the Book of Abramelin. Many sources on Crowley will mention this obsession, but the details of why Crowley enjoyed this particular text so much is important to the development of his philosophy. (add this later)

KICKED OUT OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

The turn of the century would mark a tumultuous year for the Golden Dawn. An internal feud would pressure Mathers to resign as leader of the organization. Crowley would eventually side with him, and the two would be expelled. 

His time with the Golden Dawn was influential and educational. Crowley had attained what was effectively an undergraduate degree in the occult. At the same time, he was freed from his obligations to his family and its religious strictures. It was time travel. He would bring Bennet along for the first few legs of the journey, traveling to Mexico and then India to study buddhism and Yoga. 

In 1902, he would indulge one of his other great passions: Mountaineering. He would attempt to summit K2. Crowley was actually an experienced mountaineer. In fact, at one point he wrote that mountain climbing was one of the few times he felt truly at peace. (find this citation i think its in Perdurabo or confessions) The comparisons between mountain climbing and the search for occult knowledge practically write themselves. Unfortunately, the trip was a disaster. K2 is infamous for being particularly dangerous and inhospitable. Crowley nearly died of malaria. His partner, Oscar Eckenstein also nearly died of a respiratory infection. Three porters died. 

(do some lead up to the aiwass thing) In 1903 he would marry Rose Kelly, a medium and fellow diehard occult enthusiast. In the spring of 1904, the two would put Crowley in contact with Aiwass, his own personal guardian angel. Who would dictate to him the Book of the Law. This would be the foundational text of Crowley’s new religion: Thelema. 

1905 he travels across china, during this travel he performs the ritual of the Augoeides, which is a continuation, in another form, of the ritual of Abramelin for the attainment of the knowledge of his Holy Guardian Angel. (Was this Aiwass at this point in time?) Notably, this ritual takes place in an “imaginative” or “astral” form, meaning that as Crowley travelled, he was performing the ritual in his mind. 

He returns to england with a brain full of oriental wisdom and a burning desire to write. He publishes three works. A collection of his poetry, Collected Works. A collection of essays called Conx Om Pax, and a book on Golden Dawn correspondences, the Liber 777. 

THE ABORTED ARGENTUM ASTRUM

In 1907(ish check this, definitely in Confessions) John Frederick Charles Fuller wins a contest to write the best review of Crowley’s collected poetic works. He was the only entrant. As a result of this, he meets Aleister and becomes one of his most enthusiastic supporters. Crowley would help Fuller found his own esoteric order, the A∴A∴ (the initials are usually interpreted as “Astrum Argentinum”, or “Argenteum Astrum”, i.e. Silver Star). This would become a laboratory where Crowley could get a feel for running his own magical order, rather than simply being a part of one. 

Also in 1909, together with his disciple Victor B. Neuburg (1883-1940), he “explores” the magical system of John Dee, through an important series of invocations and astral travels in the desert of Algeria. He publishes these experiences as a text called The Vision and The Voice. These experiences with Dee’s mysticism would form significant pillars of Crowley’s work. Babalon the Great would become a central fact of thelemic mythology. The biblical mother of demons re-cast as both mother of demons, and giver of secret wisdom, would become a recurring theme throughout the development of Thelema. 

Come 1910, WWI is brewing and Aleister Crowley had penises on the mind. His study of tantric practices in India led him to a novel conclusion: All the pageantry and theater of the Golden Dawn’s rituals could be shortcutted with sex. Everything about the Golden Dawn rituals, all the swords and robes and ritual altars were themselves based on the same basic ingredients: The four elements, the seven classical planets, the ten sephirot, and the twelve signs of the zodiac, to name a few. Many Western occultists have tied these elements to sections of the body. The Kabbalistic sephira of Kether already means crown, Agrippa writes that the stomach is ruled by the sun, the head ruled by the planet mars, the body is an alchemical microcosm of some greater divine whole, etc etc. Crowley says The temple is not strictly necessary, because the body is the temple.

Perhaps not what Agrippa or Moshe de Leon had in mind for their work, but one could say the same for the folks they were citing. But in Crowley’s case, it takes two to tango. He needed folks to help with sex magic experiments.

The man Crowley found for the job was Mr. Theodor Reuss, a music journalist with a fantastic moustache, and similar magico-sexual ambitions to Crowley; meaning he was willing to get naked for wizard reasons. This made him and Crowley fast friends. They called it the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Eastern Star. 

In true Crowleyan fashion, the OTO almost immediately becomes a crucible for Thelema. Now with ample resources and disciples to experiment with, Crowley deepens his understanding of magic. He publishes his magnum opus, Liber ABA, Book 4. There is no book one, two, or three. The four is a bit of numerical symbology. Four elements, four cardinal directions, it is the number of foundations and stability. The numerical value of “ABA” adds up to four. The book itself has four sections, each detailing a foundational pillar of Thelema. 

When World War One broke out, Crowley fled to the states. He had almost entirely burned through his family money, and sought work writing propaganda for a German newspaper. An act that would become yet another source of criticism. Times were suddenly a lot less certain. WWI was a tough time. While the apocalyptic and uncertain atmosphere spurred interest in the occult, people were also less willing to spend money on following folks like Crowley. Membership in the A.’. A.’. and the OTO began to flag, leaving only those most dedicated to the order. 

In 1920, he moves to Cefalù, Sicily, where he establishes the infamous Abbey of Thelema. While “abbey” is not an inappropriate term, commune is a better term. This would be an experiment in living life according to Thelemic law. This would be an extremely productive period for Crowley. He publishes another novel, The Diary of a Drug Fiend, his “autohagiography” The Confessions, and his Magnum Opus, Magic in Theory and Practice. His experiments at the Abbey, full of lurid details I will not repeat here, lasts all of 3 years before he is expelled by the Italian Authorities. 

He moves to Paris in 1923. Also in 1923, Reuss passes away, and Crowley takes over as leader of the OTO. At the same time, there is a meeting in Germany between several Rosicrucian organizations. They are holding a conference to debate who will get to lead this new German Rosicrucian movement. Crowley throws his hat in the ring, to little success. Only a few follow him, but one of them was a bookseller named Karl Germer who will financially support Crowley for a while, and will eventually succeed him as head of the OTO after he dies. 

1926 to 1929 are comparatively uneventful years. Crowley is approached by a young Israel Regardie and Gerald Yorke, who collaborate with him until early 1930. Regardie, an influential occult author in his own right, would write until well into the 1960s, and would be instrumental to the rediscovery of Crowley’s work in the New Age. Yorke, for his own part, would become a hagiographer, and the biggest collector of Crowley paraphernalia in the world. 

After some travelling around Spain and Portugal, 1932 rolls around and Crowley shoves off to England, where he will spend the rest of his life. In 1934, he was defeated in a Libel suit. He cannot pay the fees, and is declared bankrupt. He will largely be supported by allowances from his followers, especially the remaining Agape Lodge in California. Even while couch-surfing between friends houses and boarding houses, he writes extensively. This period would produce Equinox of the Gods, where he narrates the events related to the revelation of the Liber Legis. The Book of Thoth, in which he expounds his personal interpretation of the Tarot. This design is then implemented with artist Frieda Harris, which results in the publishing of the Thoth Deck, which is the second most popular form of the tarot, after the classic Rider-Waite-Smith. 

He died in a boarding house in 1947. Although, a strange thing about crowley. Almost every text written about him does not end with his death. The man dies, and yet he remains preserved in the works of friends and enemies alike. The man is dead, yet there he is, ever-slouching towards bethlehem. 

POSTHUMOUS ERA / SO WHAT WAS THIS GUY ACTUALLY WRITING ABOUT?

Do not be fooled, dear reader. Behind the abrasive personality and obscure prose, Crowley was one of the sharpest theological minds of the last century. His desire to read everything, synthesize everything, made him a bottleneck of occult history. Head to any bookstore, find the occult section, find yourself a book, and chances are you’re reading something by a student of a student of Crowley. 

Crowley influenced Satanists, but he was not a Satanist. “His mythical and symbolical references went well beyond Christianity, and his aim was to propose a full-blown, original religious alternative to it.” (316pdf / 284 txt) His goal with Thelema was not to invert Christianity, but to build something new. What exactly that “something else” might be, is the question of the day. There is some Abrahamic imagery in there, to be sure, but Crowley’s influences extend as far as Buddhism, Taoism, and the I Ching. 

CROWLEAN MAGICK: 

When Crowley says “Magick” he means two things. One: A pragmatic method for achieving goals through means that cannot be explained scientifically, but can empirically tested, i.e. the classic examples like “suddenly learning mathematics overnight, coming into a large sum of money, gaining the affections of a young woman, or achieving favorable weather conditions for a trip. And Two: “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” (Magick in Theory and Practice, 1929-1930, xii).

That may seem like a broad definition, because it is, and that is intentional.  The key word here is “Will.” When Crowley says “Will” he is referring to a precise set of concepts based in traditional ceremonial magic. The level of philosophical rigor here is deceptive. Not will as in the casual conception of one’s will to do something, but Will as in an active principle of capital-B Being. Something on the same level as ideas like The Soul. This is one of those circumstances where the term “Will” ought to be left untranslated. Leave it as θέλημα. 

Crowley’s understanding of “Magick” and how it relates to Thelema changes over time. Generally, it referred to Golden Dawn type traditional ritual magic, with all the chanting and robes and magic daggers. But, come crowley’s experiments with sex magic, the term gains a more holistic definition.

The chief goal of Thelema is a form of personal spiritual attainment. What that means is intentionally up to interpretation by the individual Thelemite. The reccomended path to this attainment is the initiatic path of the A.’. A.’. and OTO, and an important aspect of said path is the constant interpretation and re-interpretation of that path. Every Thelemite is constantly training to be their own rabbi. 

A central pivot of this whole system is the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA for short.) Crowley’s understanding of the term changed over time, and Thelemites still debate this term. Initially it referred to Aiwass, the being which gave him the Book of the Law. But Aiwass was entirely separate from Crowely, a guide that did not originate from within him. As time went on, Aiwass assumed a role more akin to Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters. By the end of his career, the HGA was similar to a higher self, similar to an augoides. 

THE NEW AGE

World War Two is over! People are frail, destiny is uncertain, death and disease are our constant companions, and Americans have cars now. These existential terrors have always existed, and there have always been folk practices who came up with responses to stave off that terror, but the world of 1970 is connected like never before. The catastrophe of the previous generation has given way to a breeding ground of new options and alternate ideas, for better and for worse. 

The New Age was a movement that emerged during the 1970s and 80s. Ideologically, it was loosely focused around ideas of healing and spirituality. In practice, it was a bricolage of divination, eastern religious practices, psychoanalysis, and various alternative medical practices. 

The overall structure of the New Age is a bit unique. The term Wouter Hanegraaff uses is “bricolage,” a french term meaning something halfway between “a mish-mash” and “a DIY project.” When it comes to religion, a bricolage is something that’s more organized than a cultural movement, and functions like a folk religion. It’s a bit like if everyone in the 1970s bought copies of the same magico-religious lego set. They’re all going to build different practices with the parts, but because they’re all working from more or less the same material, the practices tend to rhyme. 

The scheme of that rhyme, what could be said to be the core doctrine of the new age, is as follows:

The world is not material objects bumping into each other, but a web of interconnected meaning. The fundamental fabric of that web is not atoms or quarks, but some cosmic stem-cell goo of energy and consciousness. Humans contain a spark of this energy with us, which allows us to understand and manipulate the universe to our will. Humans are not just a physical body, but a mind-body, and a spirit-body. These other bodies can be trained to manipulate the underlying energy-consciousness goo, but they can also get sick, and this is part of the cause of illness. 

To properly understand the world, and thus the underlying energy-consciousness goo, the world must be understood intellectually, but also spiritually, with the tools of instinct and intuition. Pieces of this spiritual wisdom have been revealed to cultures across time and space, to everyone from ancient Egyptians to native Americans to Martians. Whatever the most recent scientific innovations are, they confirm all of this to be true. But this is not always important, as spiritual truth is attained not through following doctrines, but through individual experience, and the world would be a better place if we all practiced this type of individualist spirituality. 

THE NEW AGE AND HEALING

Healing is a central pillar of the new age. But, when New Agers say “healing” they don’t mean the relatively strict medical definitions of health and freedom from illness. They mean something superhuman. To the New Ager, humanity is a fallen race whose nigh-immortal longevity and phenomenal psychic power are being dampened by the myriad excretions of modernity. Everything from radio waves, to high fructose corn syrup, to toxic smog, to vaccines, are poisoning the body, mind, and spirit. These poisons must be purged with the ritual consumption of fresh fruits and seed oils and whatnot, along with methods of spiritual healing like reiki, the application of crystals, and the laying of hands. 

The human body is not just meat and bones. It also contains spiritual organ system of auras and chakras which move occult energies throughout the body. These occult organ systems can become diseased, which can cause bodily illness, and vice versa. 

To this point, stress can have negative effects on your immune function, and being sick can ruin your mood. These fairly universal experiences of having a body provide, to new agers, real experimental proof for the validity of their beliefs. Illness can happen without warning, and without apparent cause. Illness can resist treatment almost as if by magic. The human body is incomprehensibly complex, and modern medical science regularly fails the ill. To explain this, the New Age constructed a metaphysics in which the mysteries of illness are explained by the movements of an occult consciousness-goo. 

CHANNELLING 

The concept of Channelling is the prophetic tradition for the new age, but rather than contacting a specific god, New Age channellers draw from many wells. They act as mediums for everything from divinities, to the spirits of the departed, to extraterrestrial government employees, to atlantean warrior-poets, to the raw torrential flow of the impalpable consciousness-goo. These channelling sessions are occasionally the result of some in-born talent, but can also be achieved through spiritual cultivation. Anyone can learn to channel the cosmic forces of the New Age. That personal freedom is important, a key tenant of New Age thought is that we create our own reality. Therefore, people who want things badly enough will get what they want, as long as they are pure of heart and free of negative emotions. Therefore, people who have things deserve them. The implications for affluence are plain to see. 

The result of this was a slew of Channeled Texts, in which the author slips into a channeling state, and acts as a stenographer for some higher cosmic presence. The most famous of these being the oprah-show favorite of 80s Christian Moms “A Course in Miracles”, and the works of clairvoyant stock analyst and lay-theologian Edgar Cayce. The two are considered founding figures in the New Age. 

Though, this is not to say the Channelled Text is unique to the New Age. The technique of slipping into an altered state to produce a written work is as old as time. The New Age saw a resurgence of the practice, in part because metaphysics provided an easy-to-use metaphysical toolset for the would-be channeler. 

Divination follows a similar occult development. Astrology and Tarot cards saw a resurgence in popularity as not a magical practice, but an internal, psychological, Jungian method of self-development. Which is to say still magical but the metaphysics were a bit different. Obviously, the planet venus was not influencing your life with rays of occult energy as written by Al-kindi, no sir. The archetype of Venus, the inner Venus of the mind, was subtly shaping one’s perception of the world, and thus their reality, through some definitely-not-occult “acausal relationship” as written by Carl Jung.

NEOPAGANISM: A PRIMER

The 20th century rolls around and the last few centuries have not been kind to the philosophical authority of religious institutions. Religious authorities are not the unquestioned philosophical default that they used to be. Lots of folks, as in more than usual, are wondering: “What if we could be druids?”

Neopaganism is a big tent. Around the 20th century, there was an explosion of religious practices inspired by a combination of history, archeology, literature, and the practices of indigenous peoples across the globe. These practices came in three broad categories. There were reconstructionists who tried to recreate these historical practices as authentically as possible. Constructionists who were intentionally trying to make something new, and eclectics, who were some combination of the two. 

Neopagan practices tended to be de-centralized, with no governing body or institution. No popes, no rabbis, just loose networks of initiates in conversation with each other. All of this is wrapped in an air of critique, if not outright rejection, of Christianity and its cousins. While the early days of Neopaganism as a movement attempted to legitimize itself with constructed pseudohistories and explicit rejection of religious institutions, this has lessened over the years. Many groups embrace the less-than-orthodox shenanigans up to which historical Christians have got. Who among us can resist a good angelic talisman? 

Neopaganism as a movement has its roots in the late 19th century, in the braid of influences that was Theosophy, The Golden Dawn, Crowley, and his student Dion Fortune. If you will recall our section on the early history of the Golden Dawn, many paramasonic organizations were already flirting with the aesthetics of a revived Druidry amid the broader fascination with the pagan world. 

Perhaps “romance with” pagan history is a better turn of phrase. All of this was stepped less in academic study of history, and more in a poetic interest in the idea of pagan religion. Writers like William Blake, Sam Taylor Colridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats, all had a massive influence over the burgeoning roots of the movement. Those last three specifically even went on a big road trip to Greece and Italy that strengthened the pagan romanticism of their writing. Writers like Algernon Charles Swinburne went so far as to mourn the triumph of Christianity over Paganism. This would provide a small but fertile mythological seedbed for the Neopagan movement. 

WICCA

Neopaganism in the strict sense began in england in 1940 with the foundation of Wicca by Gerald Brosseau Gardner. He built a whole witch religion based on the writings of dubiously accurate historians like Margaret Murray and Robert Graves, and the writings of Aleister Crowley. Gardener himself was a Freemason, a Rosicrucian, a member of the OTO, and a member of a co-mason sect called the Fellowship of Crotona, which allegedly contained a secret inner coven of hereditary witches. 

In England, the 1736 Witchcraft Act, was repealed in 1951, and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. This meant that you could do your weird magic club stuff, as long as you weren’t hurting people or property. Gardener was doing neither, so it was off to the publishers. 1954 saw the publication of Witchcraft Today, followed by The Meaning of Witchcraft in 1959. While Gardener would die in 1964, the Gardenian Tradition had crossed the Atlantic, and firmly established itself in American culture. The states were home to numerous covens, often founded by witches personally initiated by Gardener. 

Injected into this current was Alex Sanders, who claimed one of his ancestors was a Welsh witch. He and his wife established a new strain, now called Alexandrian Wicca, which went even harder on the ritual magic aspects. By 1970, he was called the King of the Wtiches, and was known as a bit of a maverick in the world of witchcraft. He and Gardener were adept hands at sensationalist media appearances, and made excellent use of the publicity. 

Also in 1970, a group of Wiccans established the Pagan Front, which published an official newspaper called The Wiccan, with the goal of attracting and coordinating wiccans across the world. By 1989, it changed its name to the Pagan Federation, and became a de facto representative organization for Neopagans in England. This spawned several autonomous branches in France, the Netherlands, Austria, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.

DRUIDRY

The number two most popular movement within neopaganism was the druidic reconstructionist movement. The Druids benefitted from ample historical sources like the writings of Pliny, Caesar, and the relatively recent bardic colleges. Recent as in “existed up to the 17th century.” To the point where Druidic practiecs were revived in england all the way back in the 1650s by men like John Aubrey, John Toland, and William Stuckeley. This development continued with the famous, or infamous, writings of Edward Williams, better known as Lolo Morangwang, who we do not have time to cover in this text. 

Philip Peter Ross Nichols (1902-1975) joined the Ancient Druidic Order in 1954, but after the founder died, the order split. Phil managed to reconstitute the order, with a newly added graded system, and himself as the new founder. He would go on to produce a definitive account of the history of druidry The Book of Druidry (1990). Additionally, he is said to be the originator of the eight wheel of the year festivals celebrated by many neopagans, even beyond the druidic tradition. 

In 1980, the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, developed a correspondence course in Druidry. The three grades of this druidry-by-mail course evoke the distant yet prevalent influence of the Golden Dawn. The first grade, bard, involves studies of the four elements, the cycles of the heavens, and introductory poetry for developing the self. The second grade, Ovate, focuses on divinatory skills, the study of plants and animals, sacred sites, and Arthurian legend. The final grade, Druid, focuses on conducting and managing rituals, as well as management of groups of initiates. 

Grail lore is an important aspect of many, but not all, druidic practices. Many neo-druidic groups predate the neopagan movement, and many are styled more by the old paramasonic charitable groups that overlapped with christianity. Debate continues as to whether Druidry is a religion, a philosophy, or a science. This is no surprise. The same could be said of any attendant of Plato’s academy. Such debate only illustrates the multifaceted nature of neopagan reconstructionist movements. A sincere attempt to revive a dead religion can only take so long before it runs up against history and philosophy. One could consider it a sign of healthy growth. 

HEATHENISM

The third largest thread within neopaganism is Northern Heathenry. Where many things from Greco-Roman paganism were incorporated into a young Christianity, Northern Heathenry is defined by lands conquered by a dominant Christian culture. Heathenry is, in this sense, a genuine paganism. A religious practice that exists wholly outside Christianity, and survives despite it. 

Some Heathens consider themselves neopagans, others do not. For example, many Heathens reject celebration of the celtic-influenced Wheel of the Year, instead following a calendar of “blots” more influenced by the various Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian cultures. As a practice, Northern Heathenry is centered around worship of the Aesir and Vanir. Many Heathens refer to themselves in this fashion, calling themselves Asatrú (meaning trust in the Aesir) or Odinists. 

Asatrú specifically was revived in the 20th century and in 1973 was recognized as an official state religion, alongside Christianity in Iceland. Followers of Asatrú can conduct legally binding weddings and child-naming ceremonies. 

Asatrú Free Assembly was founded in 1972 by Stephen McNallen. It held until around 1987, publishing journals and holding annual festivals, but the presence of National Socialists forced the assembly to disband. It was succeeded by Asatru Alliance and the Ring of Throth.

(This section feels vesitigal. I think we can rework all of this into a single smaller section. Readers don’t really care about the administrative history of Heathen neopagan alliances)

CONCLUSION

JUNG

Jung is perhaps the most influential occultist of the 20th century. His contributions to the vestigial field of psychology got us out of Freud. Where Freud theorized the psyche was a machine defined by sexuality, driven by sexuality, and that kept all the trauma in the trunk, Jung’s model of the psyche is a complex interplay between the multiple aspects of the self. This was undoubtedly a step forwards for the study of psychology, and opened the door for a far more complex and nuanced understanding of the human mind. That said, I call him an occultist because he was one. Every single one of his theories, down to the letter, is steeped in the study of western esotericism. For better and for worse. 

Jung was a philosopher of experience. Child of a profoundly religious household and fascinated with the religious writings and mythological epics of history, Jung wanted to understand why some things felt important, and others didn’t. This train of thought has regular stops in the occult, and Jung practically threw himself onto the tracks.

Take the concept of synchronicities. The human experience is filled with little coincidences. Something bad happens and it starts to rain. A dove lands on the windowsill while you and a friend make up after a fight. Something strange and inexplicable occurs on Halloween night. Jung wonders why these little coincidences feel meaningful. Obviously, your emotions are not emitting invisible rays of energy that manipulate the weather or the flight patterns of birds. But, Jung supposes, the rain is associated with sadness, isn’t it? So what is the nature of this association? Why do we associate those two things? And why do we seem to associate those two things across cultures and time periods? A fair and legitimate question to ask!

Jung posits that rain and sadness are aspects of some fundamental mechanism in the mind, both expressions of some psychological tool that our mind uses to measure the world. Jung calls these fundamental psychological tools Archetypes. You parents had the same archetypes, and they were passed down to you genetically. From the moment of your birth, your ability to understand the world was defined by the archetypes passed down to you. 

Sharp-brained readers may have caught something. “Hey,” you might have said “Isn’t that just the medieval doctrine of correspondences?” Yes dear reader, yes it is. But where a medieval magician might say that sadness and rain share a nature because they are both ruled by the planet Saturn, Jung says that rain and sadness share a nature because they are aspects of a similar archetype, a sort-of internal planet Saturn of the mind that the brain uses to understand the world. 

For something to be true about the human mind, it needs to be true about every human mind, ever, across all of time and space. If you’re trying to map the psyche, history –especially occult history– is full of weirdos with some weird brains. If something is true for the average joe in 1920, and an unwashed itinerant mystic in 1320, you might be onto something. This is where I admire Jung’s ambition, and where his mission, for lack of a better term, begins to fall apart. 

In an effort to fit the sheer breadth of humanity into a unified theory of the mind, corners had to be cut. I don’t want this section to become a Jung Criticism extravaganza. My understanding of Jung is specific, and far from comprehensive, but there are some specific claims he made that must be addressed. 

The major corner he cut, is that Alchemy is a purely spiritual practice. Indeed, Jung claims that all alchemical literature, throughout the entirety of history, is actually coded spiritual writing. This is not true. However, this is not to say that alchemy was never spiritual. Many historical alchemists hailed from the clerical classes of their respective cultures. Their understanding of the world was fundamentally one created by god. There are religious elements to alchemical writing, but no two alchemists have the same relationship to god. Additionally! This is not to say that alchemical literature never had a personal, self-transformative aspect! The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, one of the most influential occult texts ever produced, deals with this exact concept. Alchemical imagery, used as the backdrop for a story of spiritual transformation. My personal theory is, that Jung saw the psychological elements in Chymical Wedding, and applied that same logic to his readings of Zosimos and Jabir Ibn-Hayyan. 

We are talking about Jung because his work made up roughly a third of the New Age. Remember that God died back in 1882. Nietzche was there and he saw it happen. Traditional modes of religious thought, as in the dominant position that religious institutions held in western society, was on the way out. Jung’s responses to this issue were influential for occult history. Jungian ideas are very good at melding old religious ideas with new secular ones. This gave him a position in popular culture reminiscent of our good friend Burach Spinoza, an occasional favorite of both theists and anti-theists. Additionally, all of this was happening during the dawn of mass media. His ideas were disseminated into popular culture in ways that cannot be traced back to any one text or thinker. Concepts of archetypes, divine feminines, and synchronicities, popped up all over the place, from geopolitics to Feminism. 

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE

Were it not for Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare would have been the most influential occultist of the 20th century. This is both strange and impressive, as the entirety of his magical writings could be read in an afternoon. Primarily an artist, author and poet, he occupies a similar space in occult history to William Blake; less an occultist, more poet-mystic. His influence lies less in obscure iterations on masonic rites, more in poems and short screeds about the soul, paired with his sensual and grotesque art. Magic has always crossed over with art, but Spare makes this a central focus of his work. He made art about magic, and did magic about art. 

For other occultists, it is a simple task to comb through their life and influences, and construct a story which explains how they arrived at their worldview. This is difficult for Osman Spare. We know he was well read, and enjoyed symbolist and Art Nouveau art, but that does not cast much light on how he arrived at his idiosyncratic worldview. We know he was friends with occultists like Aleister Crowley and Victor Nyberg, and was influenced in kind, but to call Spare’s work Thelemic would be a bit far. He was an artist with an exemplary imagination, and an interest in the ecstatic and mysterious elements of human experience.

His worldview is idiosyncratic, even among 20th century occultists. Equal parts a reaction to Nietzche, Freud, and William Blake, the hub of Austin Osman Spare is the unconscious. To him, it is the source of all mystery and magical power. Much of his work involves the magician working themselves into a magical trance that allows the conscious mind to take a back seat, which then allows ideas to flow freely from the hidden depths of the soul. 

That soul is quite deep. The depth of that soul comes from a concept he calls “atavistic resurgence” a combination of evolution and reincarnation, in which the compounded souls of millions of ancestral animals exert influence upon the human. You are you, but you are also all of the monkeys, lizards, fish, and blobs of amorphous proteins that we collectively evolved from. Each human being is like one of those ice cores researchers drill into the arctic to study ancient glaciers. Ten centimeters wide, two kilometers deep. 

That soul is created through the interaction of two fundamental forces, Zos and Kia. The exact meaning of these terms is deliberately obscure, and unique to Osman Spare, but nonetheless essential for a good chunk of 20th century occultism. Where Crowley’s work is rigorous metaphysics buried under poetry, Spare is metaphysics as poetry, but also normal poetry. 

Zos is literally derived from the greek root for life, but Spare seems to mean something both biological and unconscious. It is the desiring part of the world-soul, the component of the universal spirit with an animal impulse to continue existing. 

Its counterpart, Kia is similar to the concept of the Tao. It is always hidden, beyond comprehension, because it never actually manifests. It is a force constantly on the brink of manifestation, an eternal almost-completeness that spurs the world into being. 

Accessing these fundamental forces requires death, but not literal death. A repeated theme throughout his work is Thanatos, and the death-posture. We are conscious and comprehending beings in an incomprehensible world, made manifest by even more hyper-incomprehensible forces. To truly navigate the world, we have to get out of our own way, so to speak. The ego is the enemy, to have any fun it needs to be knocked out. By death-posture, he means the moment of clarity immediately following orgasm. 

What Spare offered by way of praxis, as in things a spare-ian could actually do, was methods of creating art. One of the suggested forms of practicing the death posture is automatic writing. A method of writing in which the user simply does not think about the next word coming out of their fingertips. For example, writing for twenty minutes, without stopping, no pausing or backspaces. Spare didn’t invent this practice, but he offered a simple magical explanation for how it worked. 

[INCLUDE THE I WANT A FAT BOTTOMED GIRL FOR THE PURPOSES OF SOCIAL CONGRESS IMAGE from the zoetic grimoire of zos vel thanatos available on the internet archive]

The most influential concept from spare, is likely his conception of, and method for creating sigils. This method has become so popular that many today consider it to be an essential component of all magic that goes back centuries. This is not so. I will repeat it here in its entirety. 

CHAOS MAGIC

Chaos magic is a magical tradition that arose in the 1970s from a combination of occultists, artist, and fiction authors. It is a magical tradition, but also an artistic movement. As for what magic meant to the Chaos Magicians, Phil Hine provides eight definitions of magic in his book “Oven Ready Chaos.” These definitions range from the Crowleyan “to bring about change in accordance with will” to “a practice to increase confidence and personal Charisma.” to “A means to disentangle yourself from the attitudes and restrictions you were brought up with and which define the limits of what you may become.” 

The earliest contributors to Chaos Magic as a doctrine were Peter Caroll and Ray Sherwin, whose work provided a bare-bones outline for what would become chaos magic. Stylistically, it takes bits from Crowley and Osman Spare, plus elements from popular science fiction and fantasy literature of the time. Doctrinally, Chaos Magic does not have a doctrine per-se. It demonstrates an atheistic, eclectic iconoclasm. Which is to say, it advocates for lying for fun, and changing your beliefs so rapidly that nothing has time to take root. The goal being a state of enlightened non-belief. This, combined with a focus on sigil-based art magic borrowed from Osman Spare, developed into a system that was both highly adaptable, and highly personalize-able, which made it ideal for the volatile mass-media landscape that defined the 1970s and 80s. Anyone can do it. 

In 1978, Caroll published a pair of texts which are generally considered the foundational text of Chaos Magic, Liber Null, and Psychonaut. In them, Caroll places central importance on the human imagination, and its ability to invent and disinvent gods at will. Rather than constructing a magical tradition, and dedicating oneself to its study, Caroll emphasizes rapidly switching between belief systems. Believing in say, wicca one day, Christianity the next, and atheism the next day. The purpose of this, Caroll says, is not to arrive at a single conclusion. The beliefs themselves are not actually important. The point is to discover what the mind is capable of. To explore this, he also established his own magical society, the Illuminates of Thanateros. 

If you, dear reader, sat down to read the Liber Null and Psychonaut right now, you could probably finish reading before dinner. They are not long texts, nor are they particularly deep. When I sat down to read them for the purposes of writing this book, I felt as if I had only finished the introduction to a text that did not exist yet. The rest of that book is, effectively, the second generation of Chaos Magicians. 

The early growth was characterized by small magazines and periodicals which discussed the concepts. In fact, It wasn’t until 1986 that another grimoire of chaos magic would be published. Julian Wilde’s Grimoire of Chaos Magic was immediately controversial. It treats Chaos Magic as yet another system of thought to be syncretized alongside the likes of yoga and shamanism. By late 1987, the Lincoln Order of Neuromancers (L.O.O.N.) declared that Chaos Magic was dead, irrevocably split by argumentation that failed to be constructive, and only resulted in petty derision. Long live chaos magic. 

A SHORT OVERVIEW OF CHAOS MAGIC IN PRACTICE

Most magical traditions have an organizing principal, be it a canon of texts, or some philosophical ordering concept like the Great Chain of Being. Chaos Magic does not have this. Chaos magic is not supposed to have a structure. In practice, bits of Chaos Magic are often slotted in alongside other structures. You can be a Wiccan or a Christian and still do bits of Chaos Magic. Those bits are as follows:

Chaos Magic resists dogma. It does not have dogmas. It has catmas. These are often nonsensical, self-contradictory statements like “us discordians must stick apart!” Preserving the freedom to be wrong is tantamount. 

Personal experience is vital. The point of chaos magic is the doing of the magic, and the effects produced, not the underlying belief system. Chaos magicians have come to the conclusion that much of the metaphor and pageantry of traditional magical doctrines are not worth the trouble. This places much more importance on technical skill. I.e. being able to slip in and out of the required mental states at will. 

This rejection of belief extends to the concept of deconditioning, or stripping oneself of preconceived notions to better achieve the chaos magic no-mind enlightenment state. It should go without saying that an ideological here is an explicit rejection of the beliefs one was raised with.It is no secret that some people wish to shed their religious upbringing, and chaos magic explicitly structures itself for stripping such beliefs away. The rejection of dogma also extends to a rejection of praxis. There is no one way to be a chaos magician. If there was a consistency in practice, it is an emphasis on approaching issues from multiple angles. 

The goal of all this being what Phil Hine calls a “physiological gnosis.” A seamless flow between the various daydreams, automatic muscle actions, moments of sober focus, and wild confusion, that make up the experience of human consciousness.