Symbols ana a

beRcnedc


RoyAlarc
Introduction to Part Two
cbe ReALity
of PALioqeoesis
Before we engage ourselves in the practical details of the "Royal Art,” we need to decide on the most exact terms to convey the character of its reality.
It would be very far from understanding the essence of the Art if, misled by the analogy of mystical and religious expressions, such as "death and resurrection,” "rebirth,” "mortification," and so on, one were to believe that it all comes down to something "moralistic,” vaguely spiritualistic, or merely mystical.
And in fact, to some degree, almost everyone tends to adopt such a view, because of such expressions. But we have said from the beginning that the very fact that the hermetic doctrine has always and continuously been disguised, even in periods when to speak of palingenesis "mystically” did not constitute a heresy indicates that in reality something quite different has been involved: something that in itself again demanded that law of silence, which had been so rigorously observed in the pagan mysteries.
To indicate (see the preface) the derivation of the hermetic tradition from a primordial "royal” and "heroic” vein is itself enough to explain its concealment in the period when Christianity dominated. But the fact is, there is also another reason encapsulated in the maxim, "The. Sage, in his wisdom, should not disturb the mind of the ignorant.” This is a maxim that had to be observed even more rigorously in a time when the number of "ignorant” had come to be almost total.
To account for this, we must go back to a fundamental traditional teaching already cited: that of the two natures.
There is the nature of the immortals and the nature of the mortals; the higher region of ''those who are” and the lower region of "becoming.” The idea that these two branches could have originally been one single thing (according to Hesiod's thinking, by which "one is the lineage of men and the other of the Gods, both proceeding from a single matrix”) and that the duality is simply the consequence of the fall of the one and the ascension of the other (according to the hermetico- Heraclitean conception of the god as an "immortal man” and of man as a "mortal god”), did not keep the differentiation from being intrinsic and essentially twofold.
Passage from one to the other was considered possible, but exceptional and on condition of an essential, effective, and positive transformation from one mode of being into the other. This transformation was acquired by initiation, in the strictest sense of the word. By initiation some men could escape from one nature and achieve the other, ceasing thereby to be men any longer. Their arrival at the plane of another form of existence, constituted an event on the new plane exactly equivalent to generation and physical birth.
So those who were reborn, were regenerated. In the same way that physical birth involves the loss of the consciousness of the higher state, so death implies die toss of the consciousness of the lower state, with the result that, to the degree ro which all consciousness of the higher state is lost (that is, and according to the terms we already know), to the degree in which the "identification” (the "self­absorption") occurs, to that same degree the. loss of consciousness of the inferior (human) state caused by death and the disintegration of the support of such consciousness (the body) results in the loss of a// consciousness in the personal sense. In the eternal sleep, in the larval existence of Hades, in the dissolution—which is rhought to be the destiny of all those for whom this life and the forms it takes constitute the beginning and end of everything human—in all this only those wilt escape who, while still in life, have learned how to locus their consciousness upon the higher world. The Initiates, the Adepts, find themselves at the end of this road. Memory—dvdpvecng— according to Plutarch, having been acquired, they have freed themselves, they have broken their chains, and wearing crowns, celebrate the "mysteries” and consider the masses of uninitiated and "impure” men on earth to be asleep, all crammed Together and stuck in mire and darkness,²⁴¹
To tell the truth, the traditional post mortem teaching has always emphasized a difference between survival and immortality. Various forms of survival can be conceived that are more or less contingent, passive, and conditional survival tor this or that human principle or complex. But this has nothing to do with immor­tality, which can only be thought of as "Olympian" immortality, as "becoming a god." Such a conception prevailed in rhe West up to Hellenic antiquity. But directly out of the doctrine of the "two natures" proceeded the knowedge of the destiny of a death, or of a larval and precarious survival for some, and a conditional (on the condition of initiation) immortality for others.
It was the vulgarization and abusive generalization of a truth valid exclusively for initiates—a vulgarization that began in some degenerate forms of Orphism and was soon fully developed by Christianity) that was to give birth to the strange idea of an "immortality of the soul,’’ and then extended unconditionally to the same for all souls. From that moment until today that illusion has been perpetuated in diverse forms of religious and "spiritual" thought: the chimera chat the soul of a mortal is immortal; that immortaliry is a cenainry, not a problematical possibility.²⁴²
Once the false notion was established and the truth perverted in this way, initiation could no longer be presented as necessary; from that moment its value as a real and effective operation ceased to be understood. Little by little, all cruly Transcendental possibility was forgotten, and now when men spoke of "rebirrh," it had dwindled into a sentimental fact with merely a moral and religous meaning, into a more or less undeftnable "mystical" state.
From then on it would have been futile to try to suggest, during the centuries dominated by such an error, that "something different” was possible; that that which some considered a sure thing and others an arbitrary hope was actually a privilege bestowed by a secret and sacred Art; and it would have been useless to cry to explain -just as in the deterministic world of matter and energy, so in the operations of this Art that morality, faith, devotion and all the rest are ineffectual weapons against human frailty "As the gods must one be, not as good men. It is not that one must free oneself from sin, but chat one must transform oneself into a god—that is the goal," Plotinus had already said.²⁴³ To declare the relativity of everything that is religion, speculation, and human morality from the. standpoint of reality in its transcendence of all mortal construction;²⁴⁴ to speak of the divine as ol a symbol for the other state of consciousness; of the coming ol a Messiah as ol the meh'or spes nourished by those seeking initiation; or to speak of the "resurrection of the flesh" as of just another symbol for the regeneration of the same principles of the organism that can be realized while we are still in life—to make such attempts would henceforth prove to be utterly useless.
And how would it haw. been possible to avoid the most tragic misunderstand­ings if these same words and primordial symbols now degraded by religion had been employed? Much better then to speak of Mercury and Sulfur, of metals and puzzling things and impossible operations, better to attract the greedy attention and curiosity of the "puffers" and "charcoal burners," of those who then gave, birth to modem chemistry; and best of all, in order to keep others from suspecting that the rare and enigmatic allusions were actually metallurgical symbolism referring to things of the spirit, to pretend, on the contrary (as those positive souls who write the history of science still believe to this day), that it was nothing more than a mystical allegory for metallurgical questions and the workings of natural and profane science, standing in opposition to the supernatural terrain of faith and dogma.
As far as we are concerned, on such grounds, we can understand the occukarion and even deplore the fact chat it doesn’t go far enough to impede, in our time, certain "spiritualistic” interpretations of alchemy which, while not lessening the naive incomprehenson of historians of science one bit, have raised it to a mystical- moralistic plane—and even to psychoanalysis²⁴⁵—and thereby simply made it worse for those who do not want to jump from the skitter into the fire.
On the contrary (and perhaps we have said as much already [p. 77) about the faculties or "vulgar" metals that have presaged it), perhaps the very ones who positively believe that every psychic and spiritual faculty is conditioned and
determined by empirical factors (organic, hereditary, environmental, etc.) and who since Nietz,sehean nihilism have been led to the idea of the relativity of all values, as well as that greatest of renunciations, the "renunciation of belief"—perhaps such persons are better situated today to understand the effective reach of the hermetic and iniriatic work.
Here "rebirth'' is neither a sentiment nor an allegory, but a concrete fact that no one can understand who has not passed through the Mystery. Its true meaning— as Macchioro justly points out⁶—might just be glimpsed today, if at all, by abandoning mystico-religtous conceptions and turning to whatever remains among the primitive peoples of the world, as a degenerated residue of a superior primordial teaching. "For them,” writes Macchioro, "palingenesis is not an allegory, but a reality so real that frequently it is considered a physical and material fact. The mystery does not aim to teach but to renew the individual. There is no need to justify or impose the renewal: palingenesis occurs and that is chat.”⁷
And in the same way that if the necessary circumstances were present to produce some physical phenomenon, the phenomenon would reliably be produced; so, when the necessary conditions to produce an initiation are provided, the rebirth is just as reliably produced—independently of any question of worthiness. It is as though in Eleusis, if it could have been affirmed, coherently, that a bandit was an initiate, then he participated in immortality, while an Agesilaus or an Epaminondas, if not an initiate, would after death find no better destiny than any other mortal. If already, in those days, a Diogenes could be scandalized by such an idea, how many more today would be prepared to agree with him!
Those who have, instead, abandoned the unrealistic conception of the noncorporeat and who at the same time are capable of considering the spirit as an objective force - an active force, reacting, necessitating, determined, and determin­ing—would not find the thing to be more against nature than if today we were to submit a bandit, Agesilaus, or Epaminondas to a high-tension wire and find that rhe current would certainly not forgive Epaminondas and Agesilaus for their virtue and electrocute only the bandit, because of his crimes.
It is proper, then, for the hermetic Art, as for any other initiation—whether oriental or occidental—to turn the individual from "human values” to the problem of the spirit in terms of realicy. But then the individual finds himself confronting his body, which is the fundamental nexus of all the conditions of his state. The consideraton of the connection between the ego principle in its double form of thought and deed, and corporeality (in the complete sense of this term), and the
^h V Macchioro, Heraclitus (Bari. 1922), 119-20 ' Ibid.