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aving arrived an the white, as we have said, the condi­tions for immortality have been met. "When the materia turns white, our king has conquered death.” The "white stone” having been obtained, the preservation of consciousness stops depending on the ordinary body state and its continuity can maintain itself in states and modes of existence that no longer participate in the material world. At death, "the soul does not cease to live: it goes on to live with the purified body illuminated by the :ire, in such a way that soul, spirit, and body illuminate one another with a celestial clarity, and are so embraced that they can never again be separated.”¹ Then, for man, death becomes nothing more than the ultimate "clarification.”
So the Diana whom the disciples of Hermes suddenly get to see completely naked is the equivalent, from this point of view, of the luminous form that, according to the Hindu tradition, is liberated amid the flames of the funeral pyre Irom the physical body and serves as a vehicle for the liberated to take celestial voyages that symbolize leaps to other conditions of existence, having no resem- - B. Valentine, Dodici chiavi, 10.
blance to the "Earth.”^{402 403} This is equivalent, also, to everything that other traditions always designate in the most varied ways to indicate something like or analogous to the body, that replaces the fleeting flesh and expresses, metaphysically, the group of possibilities brought to the surface, by the consciousness that has been victorious over death in the new modes of existence.
The closest agreement is found in alchemical Taoism. According to this doc­trine, the condition for immortality is the actual construction of a subtle form to substitute for the gross body; this is obtained by a sublimation that returns said body to that "ethereal" state from which all things emanate, and by an extraction and concentration of the immortal and nonhuman elements making up the foun­dation of ordinary life.⁴⁰⁴ In this case, as in occidental hermetism with its similar opposition to the mystical orientation, immortality relies on the concept of a "condensation” or "coagulation,” and does not correspond to turning a light on or off, but to a return of the self to individualization.
It would not be amiss to emphasize the positive aspect that the idea of physical regeneration presents in such traditions. A contemporary Hindu alchemist has ex­pressed it in very clear terms, and those who are beginning to understand will observe that the same teaching frequently lies behind the symbols of the ancient, Occidental hermetic literature. Narayana-Swami⁴⁰⁵ speaks of the power of life which, phase by phase, like a plant from a seed, has evolved the physical and psychic organization of man from the masculine germ deposited in the womb. This power lies at the base of every function and pattern of the organism, once its complete development has been reached. The goal of Hindu alchemy was to introduce consciousness into this vital force, causing it to become part of it; then to reawaken and retrace all the phases of the organization, reaching thereby an actual and creative rapport with the completed form of one’s own body, which could then literally be called regenerated. "The living man,” as opposed to the tradition of the "sleeping” and the "dead,” esoterically would be precisely the one who has realized such direct contact with the innermost source of his corporeal life: with the force that makes his heart beat, the power that makes his lungs breathe and that by which the various physico-chemical transfor­mations become what are considered to be "higher" functions.
When this happens the transmutation has been completed: it is no longer a question of physical transformation, but of the change from one function into another function. The relation that the regenerated man maintains with his own body is no longer the same as that of its previous tenant and indicates a new existential condition. When the ego is simply joined or united to one’s body, we can say with Boehme, that it is almost as if it were the body that generates the ego, that shapes it and gives it the clear sense of self, and by which the ego rules and falls according to the rule and fail of the organism—of a particular, unique and intransferable organism. But when the center of the body is situated in the life-force—which is nor the body but that which produces, forms and sustains it—then things are competely changed. This life force is not exhausted by that which it has animated, but can be continued, from one body to other bodies, like a flame that jumps from one log to another; and whoever has come to be dominated by this force—which is altogether outside all ordinary consciousness—naturally will hardly be affected by the dissolu­tion and the death of the body. He will not be touched by death, any more than the :acuity of speech is lost when we fall silent or when a word has been interrupted, yet remains fully capable of being spoken sooner or later.
So much for the connection between re-{= newjbirth and immortality. In Diana— White Stone, Silver, or Moon, etc.—"extracted” from the material body—Lead or Saturn—or in that which the material body has been transformed, one no longer has a "body, ” but rather the general power that can manifest a soul in a body in the fullest sense. Rene Guenon rightly says that "the glorious body” of Gnostic-Christian lit­erature, to which corresponds the aforesaid Silver, "is not a body in the proper sense ot this word but is its transformation (or transfiguration), that is, the transposition beyond the form and other conditions of individual (human) existence, or again, in other words, it is the attainment of the permanent and immutable possibility of which the body is no more than a transitory expression of manifested form. ”^{406 407} Whence, also, the truly profound sense of the permanence and fixation attributed by the hermetic texts to the new body and in which Body and Spirit have become one thing.
Finally, everything we have just explained can give us the meaning of this concordance—indeed even of the identity and simultaneity—of the two things to he done: the embodiment of the spirit and the spiritualization of the body, which as we already know, is an explicit teaching of alchemy. In fact, the spiritualization ot the body is not—as the materialism of certain modem "occultist” views sup­pose—simply its becoming less physically dense, as though passing into a gaseous, atomic, or similar state. Quite the contrary it is a matter of the body while remaining as it is on the outside,⁴⁰⁸ now existing solely as a function of the spirit and
no longer for itself, on the basis of a certain coincidental "cosmic” conjunction and on obscure processes falling below the threshold of the waking consciousness.
According to such an interpretation, the body is not ''spiritualized” until the first moment that the spirit can live out the existence of the body as its own actualization, while the spirit at the same point "embodies” itself with the help of a "projection” and "coagulation,” and it is this in-corporation as actualization that allows the body to become "nonphysical,” that is, nonexistent, as a thing in itself.
The soul has already been dissolved, has reached that which possesses neither form nor conditions, that is, the pure state. Once it has done all this, it goes on to regenerate forms, conditions, determinations—hi sum, those things from which it has been dissociated—so that bv its own action, the "fixed” is no more than an active "fixation” of the "volatile.” "Tills dissolution,” says one text, "comes to reduce the body, which is terrestrial, to its First Matter [that is, to the state of pure, undifferentiated power or ether, of which it is the coagulation], so diat the body and the spirit are made inseparably one . . . this is done in order to reduce, the body to the same quality as the spirit, and then the body mixes with the spirit, inseparably [as the outer word mixes and is made one with the action of the voice that recovers it and says it again] without ever separating itself from it, just like water poured into water. To such an end the body, at first, is raised with the spirit and finally the spirit is fixed to the body. ”^{409 410}
Obviously the chemical terms "sublimate” and "elevate” must be understood metaphorically as it is understood, for example, when one is spoken of as having been elevated to a certain charge or dignity G in the case of the body it is exactly the assumption of a superior function, which is that of the superindividual spiritual principles to which symbolically correspond the most noble metals: first Silver, then Gold.⁴¹¹
Likewise, the word androgyne (or Rebis), used so frequently in the present special practice to designate the union of the two natures at different stages, should not give an impression of two separate and different substances or principles, as if they could be two things. The "materia” is no more tlian a stage, a phase of the Spirit’s being; the Spirit, on increasing, incorporates nothing different from itself; on the contrary, in nothing other than in the practical inner realization of this nondiversity consists the true conjunction—says Rouillac in the Abrege du Grand Oeuvre.- "it is called Rebis, because they are two things that are not two.”
And Pernety: "It is called Rebis because it makes the two one, indissolubly, although the two are nothing less than one and the same thing and Materia.”^{412 413} Artephius says even more explicitly of the reduction of Body and Spirit "to the same simplicity that will render them equal and similar," which is obtained pre­cisely not by the addition of one thing to another, but by an action: "spiritualizing the one and corporeal icing the other.’’¹¹
The analogy to which we have already alluded here, can be expanded as follows: let us imagine ourselves before a manuscript written in an unknown language. The only thing that this writing means to me is that it is a group of signs that 1 have simply found and contemplated. Very similar is the ordinary state ot the "fixed”: such as I am, as far as a living individuality with given organs, faculties, possibili­ties, etc., for the most part I simply accept, I merely "am." "To be” is one thing, but to wish, comprehend, to be able to want something different, is something else altogether.
We can expand the analogy by saying that I know the language in which the inscription is written, and then I am no longer limited just to looking at it, but I can read and understand; the signs are then converted for me into a mere prop, a mere point of departure for an action of my spirit. In their physical sense it is as if they no longer existed: the inscription can be destroyed, but 1 will always be able to reproduce it beginning with my spirit and finishing with those signs instead of starting and ending in them, as was the case when they were nothing but incom­prehensible hieroglyphics to me.
Carrying the analogy⁴¹⁴ to the corporeal being, one can understand how the corpo­real in something can be transformed into that which is noncorporeal, without chang­ing outwardly: because in fact, from the materialist point of view, no change has taken place in the signs. It is the same whether they have been encountered so or written automatically or if they have been produced creatively as a free expression of a spiritual sense. So, a "spiritual body” would be completely indiscernible—externally— from any body, insofar as the supernormal possibilities that the former can manifest are left out and, in the scond place, if we disregard the fact that in this case "body” is no longer limited to an expression of the single condition of human existence.