Symbols ana a

Twenty-Nine
cbe DRg PACb
ADO
cbe cuev PACb
Before moving on to an examination of the hermetic symbols of the albedo we need to say a few words about the techniques for bringing about the experience. Essentially, there are two: we can proceed by directly provoking the detachment, such that as a consequence, the individual faculties conditioned by the body and brain are suspended and thereby the obstacle they constitute is overcome; or, we can proceed from said faculties, submitting them to an action, such that as a consequence, the possiblity of detachment and resurrection into Life are virtually assured.²⁹²
In the first case it is primarily the force of the liberated Waters that is used. In the second, however, it is that of the "Fire” or ego that acts upon itself. We can refer to the two ways respectively as the wet path and the dry path. In the terms of the secret hermetic language, in one path one is burnt by water, in the other, washed by fire; one liberates us from slavery by freeing the life principle ("Our Mercury”); in the other the principle of life liberates itself from slavery by its own
power. Among the many possible meanings of the rwo hermetic paths, dry and wet, the following predominate.²⁹³
In his Liber singularis de alchimia. Barchusen says, among other things, that the dry path is characterized by the direct action of the naked ''Fire” and by an absence of the "black,” which expresses mortification. This is also associated with the method that employs the so-called double Mercury, which is androgynous or counterbalanced. "Some,” says Salmon,²⁹⁴ "use a simple Mercury [wet path]; others, like Bernard of Treviso, a more active double Mercury, obtained by stimulation, adding a vivifying Spirit to it, a Gold artificially prepared,"
Symbolism aside, the absence of the "black” of which Barchusen speaks alludes to the possibility of working in a way that avoids crises, jerks, and abrupt changes, obtaining thereby as far as possible a continuous process of transformation; chat is, by the use of a principle that is not only a Mercury having the. raw power of life, but a Mercury that, being animated by a certain Gold brought to a given degree of purity (its "artificial” preparation), is now ready to participate in the double Nature that is the aim of the Work.
Ideographically, the succession of I , , and I (see chapter 23) would not be
obtained, but instead, the gradation of a "double substance” +, in which predomi­nates the active principle whose starting point is in the waking consciousness (©). The center of action then is not which is too far from the limit that ordinary consciousness can reach directly, but rather $. With this Mercury which now contains the Fire within itself, it can go on subtilizing and purifying—without reaching the "black” first and then the "white,” but having from the start a much higher degree of luminosity and a certain condition on which it can be made to work without the ascending and descending phases of separation, maintaining itself instead, always in lull and active consciousness within the body and corporeal systems to which the different powers correspond.
In the dry path the difficulty is the overcoming of the barrier set up by the ordinary faculties with no further help than these same faculties, which—it cannot be denied—implies a special privilege, a kind of natural "dignity” or prior initiation. In the wet path, especially when the means used are violent and external, the greatest problem is to maintain the consciousness, which has been brusquely
deprived of "fixed” support—che body. The difficulty in the dry path is all the greater when our sense of individuality has been more developed, with that pre­domination of the cerebral faculties so characteristic of Occidental modern man.


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^{For ancient man, for the Oriental, and in general for every being whose mind is still open or semi-open to the noncorporeal world, the wet path has offered and continues to offer more immediate possibilities—owing to a lesser dependence ot the deeper organic circuits on the control and fine tuning of the brain. On the other hand, in this case a supreme effort must be made if the accomplishment is to remain active and not fall into passive mystico-ecstatic states.4}
In the dry path it is a matter, above all, of destroying by means of an appropriate, rigorous inner discipline, all the infections that the amalgam with the body has evoked and fixed in the subtler principles of life, and by means of which the body exercises its power over che superior nature. This requires asceticism and purification, but in an analogous spirit to that of a person who has carefully gathered all the necessary ingredients for a physical phenomenon to take place. Asceticism in this case is the equivalent of an exercise and a cechnique: chat is why certain rules of life are prescribed that if carefully observed, result indirectly (passing through §) in certain modifications in the subtle elements of the human being that are propicious or indispensable to the Works’
Thus, a hermetic master will not say that to feed an inclination, for example, toward concupiscence or hate is something "bad” (whoever wishes is free to do so), but that it is contradictory for a person to intend to indulge that freedom and at the same time aspire to anything that the direction of the energies set by greed or hate has made impossible.
And a hermetist will ask only that what is desired and the implications of that desire be well understood. Moreover, the full waking consciousness and the direct action of the ego are to be maintained in a clearly moral discipline, and when certain conditions and qualities of the Soul have been established and reduced to a habkus by virtue of constant practice, the corresponding modifications are transmitted from $ to Then, if the right path has been taken, one can better decide what is necessary as a favorable provision for the "separation." ^ ²⁹⁵