Symbols ana a

- Goblet D Alviella, I.a migration dcs symboles (Paris, 1891), 151 -206, jacna. 9 and 10.
' Zohar. 1226b; 1.2.56a, 3.61a_; 3.128b; 2.61b; 1.225b; 1.131a Cl D'AlvicIla, Migration.
chose of Holger and Prester John, whom we have mentioned elsewhere.²⁸ In these legends the Tree is often doubled—the Tree of the Sun and the Tree of the Moon.
Hermetism repeats the same primordial symbolic tradition and the same asso­ciation of ideas, and the symbol of the tree is quite prevalent in alchemical texts. The tree shelters the "fountain” of Bernard of Treviso, in whose center is the symbol of the dragon Ouroboros, who represents the "All.”²⁹ It personifies "Mer­cury,” either as the first principle of the hermetic Opus, equivalent to the divine Water or "Water of Life" that gives resurrection to the dead and illuminates the Sons of Hermes, or else it represents the "Lady of the Philosophers.” But it also represents the Dragon, that is, a dissolving force, a power that kills. The Tree of the Sun and the Tree of the Moon are also hermetic symbols, sometimes producing crowns in the place of fruits. '
This quick glance at the stuff of religion, which we could expand indefinitely, is enough to establish the permanence and universality of a tradition of vegetable symbolism expressing the universal force, predominantly in feminine form. This vegetable symbolism is the repository of a supernatural science, of a force capable of giving immortality and dominion, but at the same time warns of a multiple danger that complicates the myth in turn to various purposes, different truths and visions.
In general, the danger is the same anyone runs in seeking the conquest of immor­tality or enlightenment by contacting the universal force; the one who makes contact must be capable of withstanding overwhelming grandeur. But we also know myths in which there are heroes who confront the tree, and divine natures (in the Bible, God himself is hypostasized) that defend it and impede access to it. And the result, then, is a battle variously interpreted, according to the traditions.
There is a double possibility: in one case the tree is conceived as a temptation, which leads to ruin and damnation for anyone who succumbs to it; in the other, it is conceived as an object of possible conquest which, after dealing with the dragons or divine beings defending it, transforms the darer into a god and some­times transfers the attributes of divinity or immortality from one race to another.
Thus, the knowledge that tempted Adam³⁰ to "become as God” and that he attained only by immediately being knocked down and deprived of the Tree of Life by the very Being with whom he had hoped to equalize himself. Yet this is the same knowledge, supernatural after all, chat the Buddha acquires under the tree, despite
all the efforts of Mara, who, in another tradition, stole the lightning from Indra.³¹
As chief of the Devas, Indra himself, in turn, had appropriated amr/ta from a lineage of anterior beings having characters sometimes divine and sometimes titanic: the Asuras, who with amrita had possessed the privilege of immortality. Equally successful were Odin (by means of hanging himself in self-sacrifice from the tree), Hercules, and Mithras, who after fashioning a symbolic cloak from the leaves of the Tree and earing its fruits, was able to dominate the Sun.^{32 33} In an ancient Italic myth, the King of the Woods, Nemi, husband of a goddess (tree = woman), had to be always on guard because his power and dignity would pass to whomever could seize and kill Him.¹¹ The spiritual achievement in die Hindu tradition is associated with cutting and felling the "Tree of Brahma" with the powerful ax of Wisdom.³⁴
But Agni, who in the form of a hawk had snatched a branch of the tree, is struck down: his feathers, scattered over the earth, produce a plant whose sap is the "terrestrial .soma"; an obscure allusion, perhaps, to the passing of the legacy of the deed to another race (now terrestrial). The same advantage Prometheus gained by similar daring, but for which he fell, was chained, and suffered the torment of the hawk or eagle lacerating his innards. And if Hercules is the prototype of the "Olympian ” hero who liberates Prometheus and Theseus, we have a quite different personification in the heroic type of Jason, who is of the "Uranian” race. After Jason returns with the Golden Fleece, found hanging on die tree, he ends by dying under the ruins of the Argo, die ship which, built of Dodona’s oak, conveyed the very power that had made the theft possible. The story is repeated in the Edda of Loki who stole the apples of immortality from the goddess Idhunn who was guarding them. And the Chaldean Gilgamesh, after cultivating the "great crystal­line fruit” in a forest of "trees like those of the gods,” finds the entrance blocked by guardians.³⁵ The Assyrian god Zu, who aspiring ro the supreme dignity took unto himself the "tablets of destiny” and with them the power of prophedc knowledge, is nevertheless seized by Baal, changed into a bird of prey and exiled, like Prometheus, on a mountain top.
The myth speaks to us of an event involving fundamental risk and fraught with elemental uncertainty. In Hesiod's theomachies, typically in the legend of the King of the Forest, gods or transcendental men are shown as possessors of a power that can be transmitted, together with the attribute of divinity, to whomever is capable of attaining it. In that case the primordial force has a feminine nature (tree = divine woman). It conveys the violence which, according to the Gospels is said to be necessary against the "Kingdom of Heaven,” But among those who try it, those who are ahle to break through, triumph, while those who fail pay for their audacity by suffering the lethal effects of the same power they had hoped to win.
The interpretation of such an event brings to light the possibility of two opposing concepts: magical hero and religious saint. According to the first, the one who succumbs in the myth is but a being whose fortune and ability have not been equal to his courage. But according to the second concept, the religious one, the sense is quite different: in this case bad luck is transformed into blame, the heroic undertaking is a sacrilege and damned, not for having failed, but for itself. Adam is not a being who has failed where others triumph, he has sinned, and what happens to him is the only thing that can happen. All he can do is undo his sin by expiation, and above all by denying the impulse that led him on the enterprise in the first place. The idea that the conquered can think of revenge, or try to maintain the dignity that his act has confirmed, would seem from the "religious” point of view as the most incorrigible '’Luciferism.”
But the religious view is not the only one. As we have already shown above, this point of view is associated with a humanized and secularized variation on the "sacerdotal” (as opposed to "royal”) tradition and is in no way superior to the other—the heroic—which has been affirmed in both Eastern and Western tradi­tions and whose spirit is reflected in great measure by hermetism. One exegesis gives us, in fact, the "rod of Hermes”³⁶ as a symbol of the union of a son (Zeus) with his mother (Rhea, symbol of the universal force), whom he has won after killing the father and usurping his kingdom: this is the symbol of "philosophic incest” that we shall encounter in all of the hermetic literature. Hermes himself is, of course, the messenger of the gods, but he is also the one who wrests the scepter from Zeus, the girdle from Venus, and from Vulcan, god of "Fire and Earth,” the tools of his allegorical art. In the Egyptian tradition, as the ancient authors tell us, Hermes, invested with treble greatness—Hermes Trismegistus—is confused with the image of one of the kings and teachers of the primordial age that gave to men the principles of a higher civilization. The precise meaning of all this can escape no one.
But there is still more. Tertullian refers to one tradition that reappears in Arab-
Syrian alchemical hermetism and brings us back to the same point. Tercullian³⁷ says that the "damned and worthless” works of nature, the secrets of metals, the virtues of plants, the forces of magical conjurations, and "all those alien teachings that make up the science of the stars”—that is to say, the whole corpus of the ancient magic o-her me tic sciences—was revealed to men by the fallen angels. This idea appears in the Book of Enoch, wherein it is completed within the context of this most ancient tradition, betraying its own unilaterality to the religious interpre­tation. Merejkowski³⁸ has shown that there is an apparent correspondence between the B’nai Elohim, the fallen angels who descended to Mount Hermon that are mentioned in the Book of Enoch}³⁹ and the lineage of the Witnesses and Watch­ers— iypfiyopoi—(about whom we are told in the Book of Jubilees}⁴⁰) and who came down to instruct humanity. In the same way Prometheus "taught mortals all the arts.”⁴¹ Moreover, in Enoch (69:6-7), Azazel, "who seduced Eve,” caught men the use of weapons that kill, which, metaphor aside, signifies that he had infused in men the warrior spirit. Here we can understand how the myth of the fall applies: the angels were seized with desire for "women.” We have already explained what "woman” means in connection with the tree and our interpretation is confirmed when we examine the Sanskrit word shakxi, which is used metaphysically to refer to "the wife” of a god, his "consort,” and at the same time to his power.⁴²
These angels were prey to the desire for power and, in "mating,” fell—descended to earth—onto an elevated place (Mount Hermon). From this union were born the Nephelim, a powerful race (the Titans— Tiroiveg— says the Giza Papyrus), allegori­cally described as "giants,” but whose supernatural nature remains to be discovered in the Book of Enoch (15: i 1): "They need neither food, nor do they thirst and they evade (physical) perception.”
The Nephelim, the "fallen” angels, are nothing less than the titans and "the watchers,” the race that the Book of Baruch (3:26) calls, "glorious and warlike,” the same race that awoke in men the spirit of the heroes and warriors, who
invented the arcs, and who transmitted the mystery of magic.²¹ What more decisive proof concerning the spirit of the hermetico-alchemical tradition can there be than the explicit and continuous reference in the texts precisely to that tradi­tion? We read in the hermetic literature: "The ancient and sacred boohs,” says Hermes, "teach that certain angels burned with desire for women. They descended to earth and taught all the works of Nature. They were the ones who created the [hermetic) works and from them proceeds the primordial tradition of this Art.”²² The very word chcmi, from chema, from which derive the words alchemy and chemistry, appears for the first time in a papyrus of the Twelfth Dynasty, referring to a tradition of just this kind.
But what is the meaning of this art, this art of "the Sons of Hermes,” this "Royal Art”?
The words of the theistieally conceived God in the biblical myth of the tree are the following: "The man has become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and cake also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” (Gen, 3:22-24). We can distinguish two points in this quotation: first of all, the recognition of the divine dignity of Adam, which he has won; and after that the implicit reference to the possibility of transferring this achieve­ment to the rank ol universal power, symbolized by the Tree of Life, and of confirming it in immortality. In the unfortunate result of Adam’s adventure, God, being hypostatized, was unable to interfere but he could keep him from the second possibility: access to the Tree of Life would be barred by the flaming sword of the cherubim, In Orphism, the myth of the Titans has an analogous sense: lightning strikes & scorches "with a thirst that burns and consumes" those who have "devoured” rhe god, a thirst that is itself symbolized by the bird of prey that pecks at Prometheus. And in Phrygia Attis was mourned, ^r/peov uxa'xpv&vrjdivta, "corn cut while still green,” and his emasculation, chat is to say, the deprivation of the virile power that Attis suffers, corresponds well enough to the prohibition "of the powerful tree at the center of Paradise” and to the chaining of Prometheus to the rock.
But the flame is not extinguished, rather it is transmitted and purified in the secret tradition of the Royal Art, which in certain hermetic texts is explicitly identified with magic, extending even to the construction of a second "Wood of ⁷¹ In rlie more original conception, which we also find in Hesiod, "rhe watchers” are identified as beings of the primordial age, the Golden Age, who never died but simply made themselves invisible to men down through the ages thereafter
¹² In M. Bcrrhelot's anthology, La chimie nu moyen-age (Paris, 1893) 2:238 (hereafter cited as CMA). The same tradition is found in the Koran (2:96). which speaks of the angels Harut and Marut, both ’’enamored” of the "woman” and who descended to teach magic to men; and who fell into a hole with their feet sticking up. Tin's could be interpreted as the Vedic tree, whose head is below and its roots are "above.”
Life” as a substitute for the lost one.²³ It persists in seeking access "to the center of the tree in the midst of the terrestrial paradise” with all that that terrible struggle implies.²⁴ It is no more and no less than a repetition of the old temerity, in the spirit ol the Olympian Hercules, conqueror of the Titans and liberator of Prometheus; of Mithras, subjugator of the Sun; in a word, of that very personality that in the Buddhist Orient received the name of "Lord ol Men and Gods. ’’
What distinguishes the Royal Art is its character of necessity or compulsion. Berthelot, by way of Tertullians statements cited above, tells us.- "Scientific law i.s fatalistic and indifferent. The knowledge of nature and the power derived from it can be turned equally to good or evil,” and this is the fundamental point ol contrast with the religious vision that subordinates everything to elements of devout dependency fear of God and morality. And Berthelot continues, "Sometiling of this antinomy in the hatred for the [hermetic] sciences runs through the Book of Enoch and Tertullian. ”⁴³ Nothing can be more exact than this: although hermetic science is not material science, which is all it could have been in Berthelot’s view, the amoral and determining character that he sees in the latter pertains equally to the former. A maxim of Ripley in this regard is quite significant.- "If the principles on which it operates are true and the steps are correct, the effect must be certain, and none other is the true secret of the [hermetic] Philosophers.”⁴⁴ Agrippa, quoting Porphyry, speaks of the determining power of the rites, in which the divinities are forced by prayer, overcome and obliged to descend. He adds that the magical formulae lorcc the occult energies of the astral entities to intervene, who do not obey prayers but act solely by virtue of a natural chain of necessity,⁴⁵ Plotinus’s idea is no different: the fact in itself of the oration produces the effect according to a deterministic relationship, and not because such entity pays attention to the words or intention of the prayer itself.⁴⁶ In a commentary of Zosimos, we read; "Experience is the supreme taskmaster, because on the foun­dation of proven results, it teaches chose who understand what best leads to the goal.”⁴⁷ The hermetic Art consists, then, in an obligatory method that is exercised over the spiritual powers, by supernatural means if you will (the symbolic hermetic Fire is often called "unnatural” or "against nature”), but always excluding every kind of religious, moral, or finalistic tie or any relationship that is alien to a law of simple determinism between cause and effect. To return by way of the tradition to those who "are watching”—iypfjyopot—those who have robbed the tree and possessed the "woman,” this reflects a "heroic” symbolism and is applied in the spiritual world to constitute something that—as we shall see—is said to possess a worthiness higher than anything we have mentioned before;³⁰ and this is not defined by the religious term "holy,” but by the warrior of the "King.” It is always a king, a being crowned with a royal color, the purple, the final color of the hermetico-alchemical opus, and with the royal and solar metal, gold, that constitutes, as we have said, the center of all this symbolism.
And as for the worthiness of those who have been reintegrated by the Art, the expressions in the texts are precise. Zosimos calls the race of Philosophers: "autonO' mous, nonmaterialiscic and without king,” and "custodians of the Wisdom of the Centuries”—dfiacnXevTog yap avtcbv rj ysved xm ai)z6vopog^?A "He is above Destiny”— ti tjfiXdaotjxjogyevogdvcorspov rrjg sipappivrfg imov³²—"Superior to men, immortal,” says Pebechius of his master.³³ And the tradition passed on as far as Cagliostro will be: "Free and master of Life,” having "command over the angel natures.”³⁴ Plotinus has already mentioned the temerity of chose who have entered into the world, that is, who have acquired a body, which, as we can see, is one of the meanings of the fall,³⁵ and Agrippa³⁶ speaks of the terror that inspired man in

30. 
    It must lie borne in mind that this superiority depends on the specific perspective of the heroic point of view; to which, in the final analysis, it is relative. The dark ages of the primordial tradirion can be seen here, with their "generations." brum the purely metaphysical point of view the essence of all authentic initiation is always the reintegration of man with the "primordial” state.
    
31.