Psychogenesis Text

POSTMODERN BAPHOMET

PRIMA MATERIA EST ULTIMA MATERIA

EGO DEATH: BLACK SUN/THE RAVEN’S HEAD

Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

IGNIS PHILOSOPHORUM: CONCEPTUAL CALCINATIO

THE ALCHEMICAL HOMUNCULUS

ALCHEMICAL PEACOCK'S TAIL

MAGICKAL CHILD MANDALA

SOMA SOPHIA
BODY WISDOM: THE NATURAL SENSES

PRIEST OF THE MYSTERIES

Again I beheld the divine and holy bowl-shaped altar, and I saw a priest clothed in a white robe reaching to his feet, who was celebrating these terrible mysteries, and I said "Who is this?" And the answer came: "This is the priest of the inner sanctuaries. It is he who changes the bodies into blood, makes the eyes clairvoyant, and raises the dead."

The Visions of Zosimos

Socially-recognized mediators, the priests of various paths may have little in common except their alleged ability to establish contact with gods and spirits. Their basic function is to communicate with the divine for the community. When priests intercede they come between the suppl;icant and God; when they step aside, direct mystical experience of the Magus becomes possible. In ancient times, priest and magician shared a common arena. They functioned as medicine-men or shamans, specialists in the supernatural. However, we also have an indwelling priest of our own inner mysteries who can function as a personal soul-guide

One claim to priesthood comes from the spontaneous experience and expression of transcendental powers deriving from psychological states interpreted as the chosen of the divinity by the process of vocation. Shamans usually begin their service with a schizophrenic breakdown which they intuitively learn how to heal and can therefore heal others with their new knowledge. The magician is called upon to restore disturbed relations with the supernatural powers and set things aright. This is an art and a power available only to the predisposed, developed through apprenticeship.

Where priests receive formal insturction, the first period of training consists in learning religious beliefs and performing various rites, while the second is devoted mainly to self-training in the course of which the novice seeks mystical experiences and a direct relationship with divine powers. The social position of priests may inspire awe of these mouthpieces of the gods, and often provides them with privileges.

Worship of the Great Goddess through the aeons represents reverence for the Divine Feminine from the Paleolithic times to the Present. Her continued worship through time is shown by the myths, shrines, and sanctuaries around the world that honor this powerful symbol of creation. The cave was one of her original symbols. She is worshipped in Native American, Egyptian, Indian, and Asian civilizations, and more. Although her worship has sometimes been forced underground, it never disappeared.

In ancient Babylon she was Anat, in Egypt Isis and Hathor; Dana in Celtic Ireland; Rhea and Demeter in Greece; and in India, Anapurna. Kwan Yin, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Persephone, Madonna and many more names and faces, yet all one primal Goddess. She is the symbol of Earth and the giver of life, the Vast Mother, who represents all the powers and mysteries of creation for early humanity.

Shifting her solar association onto masculine deities and blackening those of her symbols that, like the serpent, could not be assimilated, patriarchal societies forced the preeminent power of the feminine into an obscure and subservient position. Yet, the Goddess did not simply disappear when her position was usurped. The power she represents has been the source of continuous religious devotion from acient times through the Middle Ages, and up to the present day. There is abundant evidence of the extraordinary permanence of her worship--even at the heart of those religions that tried to destroy Her.

The myth of Eros and Psyche comes to us from a Greek initiate in the Eleusinian or Isis Mysteries. It is of great psychological value, revealing the development of an initiate's relationship with the anima. Eros, the reproductive passion is transformed through its relationship with Psyche. In a sacred marriage with his mother/daughter/sister, Eros repeats the ancient Egyptian formula, Isis- Apophis-Osiris, concerning the mysteries of rebirth and immortality.

The action of the anima/animus archetypes means we project our unconscious ideas of the All-Woman or All-Man onto an individual in whom we seek this idea essence. No single person can be the carrier of all the divine attributes or qualities we might project onto them. When they fail to realize our expectations, the process of consciousness-raising begins if we reown our projections and seek the Self.

Eros moves from sexual objectification toward soulful love. The polarity between sexual passions, secret feelings, and spiritual strivings exerts a definite hold over the ego. Psyche moves through her four archetypal tasks toward empowerment, empathy, and compassion through active introspection. Each is compelling in a magical, magnetic way. The ego cannot detach itself from either of them in our reality since each belongs to this inner reality. We can break free and withdraw projections from both instinctual draws and find mature, soulful love.

Passionate involvement in life unites our spiritual and emotional lives. Facing our fears and pains--becoming conscious of our conflicts--we can find peace. New realizations appear in their embryonic stage as conflicts which offer us choices in life. These decision points become either our life's path or roads-not-taken. Eros, like Fate, is symbolic of the fatal power of attraction which brings opposites together. He is the incarnating life principle, which ushers in the irrational, passionate intensity which makes transformation possible. He "turns up the heat" on the psychic process. He is that spiritual or divine fire which can unite with instinct.

Penetration into the Abyss of the Transcendent Imagination carries its own perils. It is not without trouble that we storm heaven's gates, that infinite abyss of the mysteries. There are pathologies at every level of reality. It is the attempt to penetrate to the nondual state of the condition that is beyond forms. Hence its ritual is that of the "bornless one." Magician, Aleister Crowley attempted to reach this initiation. In his magical efforts he had a Faustian encounter with egotism and psycholoigcal danger--ending his life as an addict and setting himself up as a false god, choking with guilt over his arrogance. There are psychic dangers in magic even for the adept. His cult of personality still survives, but his legacy is dubious, and often seems pre-rational rather than trans-rational.

The critical point is that collective is not necessarily transpersonal. Most of the Jungian archetypes are simply archaic images lying in the magic and mythic structures of our being. They exert a pre-rational pull, but there is nothing mystical, or transpersonal about them. It is imnportant to come to terms with these archetypes, to differentiate them and integrate them (transcend and include), but they are not themselves the source of a transpersonal or genuinely spiritual awareness -- including the so-called Holy Guardian Angel, the magical symbol of higher Self or the Neshamah. In fact, for the most part, they are regressive pulls in awareness and inhibit higher development. They need to be overcome, not merely embraced as so-called divine immanence.

Just because something is collective or non-rational does not mean it is transpersonal. Magic and myth are collective prepersonal (magic and mythic) structures. There are also collective personal structures (rational and existential), and collective transpersonal structures (psychic and subtle). Collective simply means that the structure is universally present.

Gods and goddesses are not transpersonal modes of awareness, or genuinely mystical luminosities, but simply a collection of typical, everyday self-images and self-roles available to us. They are self-concepts and self-roles. To go beyond into formlessness is therefore characterized as the bornless babe of the abyss. Transpersonal archetypes are anemic compared to that transpersonal domain of meditative Light and Sound, the foundation of the world...God within.

The Sun of the One I love has risen in the night,
Resplendent, and there will be no more sunset...
I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart, and I said
"Who are you?" and he said, "Your Self."

Hallaj, the mystic

One may become utterly silent inside, in a gap between thoughts, completely perception-free of mental or sensory conteent, yet awake and fully conscious. Therefore, this pure consciousness event (PCE) may be defined as wakeful but contentless (nonintentional) consciousness. Advanced mystical experiences result from the combination of regular PCEs with the minimization of the relative intensity of proprioception, emotions, and thoughts. De-intensifying of emotional attachments (detachment) means that, over the years, one's attention is progressively available to sense its own quiet interior character more and more fully. It unites soul and spirit while placing the body in a death-like state.

The experience of peace in self, expanded core interior silence, requires the voluntary mystical death that is explicitely connected with the alchemical unio mentalis, the first stage of the three-stage coniunctio. Direct self-recollection leads toward the I AM experience, but requires becoming utterly dead to the things of the world, and void of conceptions. It is no less than the emancipation of the soul from nature--separation from the suffering and grief that nature brings on the soul.

Unio mentalis is the interior oneness Jung called individuation...a psychic equilibration of opposites "in the overcoming of the body," a state of equanimity transcending the body's affectivity and instinctuality. The unio mentalis corresponds precisely to the philsophers who make "dying" their profession: mystics. Desires (anger, greed, lust, attachment, vanity) are to be killed in their obsessive, projected forms for communion with primal Being. Then one may abide in the "Fullness of Emptiness," awareness of consciousness itself.

In the solificatio, the operation of the sun, this transient state becomes a permanent or semi-permanent development of that quiet empty interior silence of original consciousness, even during activity. One maintains a clear sense of the interior awareness, a persisting sense of an unmoving silence at one's core, even while working and living. One has deleted everything inside, becoming "Nothing," blank. This dualistic mystical state (DMS) creates oceanic feelings, the experience of being expanded, quasi-larger or more spacious than one's own body. Consciousness is encountered as more like a field than a localized point, a field that transcends the body and yet somehow interacts with it.

This second stage involves reuniting the spiritual position with the body, manifesting insights. It corresponds to the Indian concept of purusha-atman, and implies bringing the consciousness of wholeness into full-blooded reality, that is lived out fully in everyday life.

"The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane."

--Grey Eminence, Aldous Huxley

The mental union is not the culminating point which is experienced when the unity of spirit, soul, and body is made one with the original unus mundus. The primal unity of the world is experienced as the unitive mystical state (UMS). It means first turning away from the world of senses, then turning toward the inner world of mind and the hidden celestial substance, the image and truth of God, and finally contemplation of the transcendental unus mundus, the potential world outside time, the unity of the psychic man with the cosmos.

The background of our empirical world thus appears to be a unus mundus, analogous to the phsycial energy field or quantum vacuum field which resides at the basis of matter and the whole of creation. They are immanent within and also trancendent to any particular expression. Unity with all that can be expressed as the realm of WE ARE; the ground of being, the field of awareness may be common to all. The object perceived and the perceiving soul are no longer separated from one another. This temporary vision becomes a permanent way of seeing and knowing.

Ther perceived expansion of the soul is experienced as permeating with and through the objects of the world. The expanded selff seems to be experienced as of the same metaphysical level, or of the same 'stuff' as the world. Mystics develop this ability through meditation. The UMS is a permanent shift in the structure of awareness and never fades away whether one is in nature or a busy environment, or has the eyes open or closed.

The transcendental psychological background corresponds to a "potential world,"--the forms of empirical phenomena are inherent in it. It is the pristine "first day of creation." The individual who has been reconnected with the body, is now joined with the world through conscious realization of oneness with the cosmos. The creation or realization of the unus mundus is a transcendent condition, a superlative experience of unity in which subject and object, inner and outer, are transcended in the experience of a unitary reality.

The universal psychological expression of the unus mundus is the mandala, here represented by mandalic cross-sections of sacred DNA, the basis of all life. The most sacred text of the alchemists, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, is the cryptic epitome of the opus, a recipe for the second creation of the world, the unus mundus, via the operation of the sun, coniunctio. Then one truly experiences first-hand the truth of "That which is above is like that which is below." Now the Philosopher's Stone as the savior of the Macrocosm--the great world--has been created. Time and eternity are unified.

Like the Godhead, or primal creator god, Mercurius has the ability to beget himself. He claims, "The mother bore me and is herself begotten of me." As the uroborous dragon, he impregnates, begets, bears, devours, and slays himself, and "himself lifts himself on high," as the Rosarium says, paraphrasing the mystery of God's sacrificial death.

Urobouros is the hieroglyph of eternity. For the alchemists, the self-devouring dragon was hermaphroditic because it begot and gave birth to itself. They therefore called the sapphirine flower (i.e. the lapis) "Hermaphroditi flos saphyricus." Mercurius is the uroborous, the One and All, the union of opposites accomplished during the alchemical process, the homunculus.

The lapis carries the double significance of prima and ultima materia: "Take wisdom with all thy power, for from it thou shalt drink eternal life, until thy [stone] is congealed and thy sluggishness depart, for thence cometh life." lapis contains the four elements and their quintessence can be extracted from them. It is the panacea, universal medicine, or tincture. The

In shamanism much importance is attached to crystals, which play the role of ministering spirits. They come from the crystal throne of the supreme being or from the vault of the sky. They show what is going on in the world and in the sould of the sick, and give man the power to "fly."

The uroborous is the goal of the Opus or Great Work, a symbol of a circular self-contained, self-referential, self-organizing process--the union of opposites and immortality.

These mandalogs or numberwheels are variations on the symbol of the spiralling serpent. The serpent is Mercurius, the fundamental substance, which forms itself in water and swallows the nature to which he is joined. The transcendental recursive movement (biting the tail) implies "trans-gression" not regression. The Stone itself--or the secret of its production--is revealed to the operator by God. Knowledge of the procedure is a gift of God, generally through the instruction of most experienced Master.

The source of it all is the Divine Will. In Chaos, Kunrath states that we can "perfectly prepare our Chaos Naturae (=prima materia) in the highest simplicity and perfection" from a special Secret Divine Vision and revelation. This divine illumination transcends reason and only a supernatural and divine knowledge knows the exact time for the birth of the stone. This means that God alone knows the prima materia.

The dragon symbolizes the visionary experience of the alchemist as he works in his laboratory and "theorizes." The dragon in itself is a monstrum--a symbol combining the chthonic principle of the serpent and the aerial principle of the bird. It is a variant of Mercurius, or the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter as the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp or soul guide--the liquid metal argentum vivum, which glistens and animates from within--the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisioned in matter.

The dragon is probably the oldest documented pictorial symbol in alchemy. It appears as the tail-eater in the Codex Mercurius of the tenth or eleventh century, as the One, the All. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. It is therefore called circulare (circular) or rota (wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work; he is the prima materia.

As dragon he devours himself and dragon he dies, to rise again as the lapis. He is the play of colors in the cauda pavonis and the division into four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison yet healing draught--a symbol uniting all opposites.

As Caduceus, Mercurius unities the paired opposites of mythic polarities: creation/apocalypse; nurturance/deprivation; achievement/failure; completion/fragmentation; affirmation/cynicism; acceptance/debilitation; hope/despair; reconciliation/polarization; wisdom/ignorance; celebration/betrayal; rebirth/death; questing/passivity; intimacy/separation. The issues are love, redemption, identity and acceptance--teleology rather than reductionism. A similar idea appears in Kundalini yoga: all higher levels of consciousness exist in us as unrealized potential, which lies coiled up like a serpent.

Maslow found that people who were persistent self-actualizers were prone to peak experiences--akin to mystical awareness, the 'oceanic feeling,' a sense of fuller vision extending to apparently limitless horizons. Maslow's description of peak experiences are like acute, episodic experience of Atman-consciousness: there is loss of identity with the purely personal ego and its replacement by a sense of general identity with everything that exists, that will ever exist, and has ever existed. In this way we become 'what we are capable of becoming.'

True alchemy was never a business or career, but a genuine opus to be achieved by quiet, self-sacrificing work. Each individual tries to express his own particular experiences, quoting the dicta of masters only when they seemed to offer analogies. All agreed their art was sacred and divine and only completed with the help and grace of God. This science of theirs is given only to the few, and none understnds it unless God or a master has opened his understanding. The material of the materia lapidis may be found only by divine inspiration.

Sometimes the nature of the coveted substance will be revealed in a dream. Since all the essentials are expressed in metaphors they can be communicated only to those who possess the gift of comprehension, rather than making literal interpretations. Rather than compensating for the disintegrative forces at work in our culture, the arts in the twentieth century have become symptomatic of them.

Hillman conceives of soul and 'soul-making' as a self-sustaining and imagining process on which consciousness rests -- 'an unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern'. . .'the imaginative possibility of our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy--that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.' It is what happens below (depth, darkness) that reveals the signficance of what happens above (consciousness, light).

In antiquity, the Pythagoreans, Orphics and Platonists taught that the soul possessed a kind of radiating subtle body as a vehicle (ochema) for its manifestation. The Pythagorean life principles served to free the soul from course matter and make it "bright" (augoeides). The "brightness" of Plato became the "light soul" in Neoplatonism. It embidied the idea of the body of light or of a higher immortal subtle body. This eternal shining vehicle is also called 'star-like.' This shining soul, this radiant body and the light body of the soul do not blend abruptly into the coarse material body. There is a body-spirit between them, which animates the corporeal.

The alchemists and hermeticists held similar ideas and attempted to produce in their work the transformation and regeneration of the inner spirit of the subtle body. Islam has the idea of the two-part resurrection body--the Diamond Body. The essential subtle body is archetypal, eternal, imperishable, the eternal individuality, the corpus supracoeleste in man, his transcendental alter ego and the light body. Alchemy emphasized the continuous element of soul. This work aims at making a unity of them by incorporating the "layers" which are closer to the body.

Man is a microcosm and possesses a divine and a mortal body. The mental nature corresponds to the fixed stars, the mind to Saturn, the social aspect to Jupiter. These are followed by the unreasonable parts, consisting of passions (Mars), eloquence (Mercury),. desire (Venus), perception (Sun), and the vegetative aspect (Moon). The radiating soul vehicle (augoeides ochema) corresponds to the sky. This radiating soul vehicle consists of the quintessence of the four elements whose form is spherical. For Aristotle this quinessential body is transparent and crystal-like--an emanation of the heavenly sphere.

The cosmic aspect of the collective unconscious continues to exist, separated from the deceased, while there remains with him only that aspect which has been incarnated in him. Active imagination gives shape to that which is psychologically objective and true and is the source of all religious experience, of visions, revelations, true insight. There is a coincidentia oppositorum, a region where the soul and body meet indistinguishably in the center. Then this "archetypal earth" is united with the archetype of the Self, we perceive the union of the unus mundus, the background of synchronistic events.

In the highest state, the separation of all form is dissolved into absolute unity and formlessness. Only that part which one has made conscious is taken along as "fruit," into that Beyond, and depends finally on the connection of the ego with the infinite or with something divine. Conscious realization of the Self as spiritus rector of all biological and psychological occurrences, represents the eventual unity of all archetypes, a possession which cannot even be lost in death. This is similar to the sages of India who emphasize the unity of the personal Atman (Self) and the cosmic Atman.