Science and Art probe Reality for different Truths. They may examine the same exact phenomena we encounter as sentient beings, however, by different methods and questions. Both are Ultimate Manifestations of Consciousness and both require and inspire Creativity. Assigning rank or capability is possible only when enforcing specific situations and even then that would be based on the individuals background and biases, therefore rendering it no longer ‘Absolute’ on the grand scheme of things.
Of the many human disciplines, there are few that could seem more divergent than Art and Science. The artist employs image and metaphor; the scientist uses number and equation. Art creates illusions meant to evoke emotion, while science engages in the pursuit of empirical verification. There is, to some degree, a physiological cause for this apparent divergence: the two halves, or hemispheres, of the brain. The right side of the brain is responsible for emotions and intuition, the left for logic and reason. Yet the notion of two brains gives rise to the function of one Mind. Perhaps it is this one “Undivided Mind” that presents a way forward through the monumental cultural changes we now face, enabling us to surf this dynamic moment in history from a platform of Balance and Symmetry.
Neil deGrasse Tyson also discussed the possibility for Universal Truths within the Realms of Science and Art. He notes that one of the definitive differences is that with Science, the same answer should be uncovered regardless of the observer in pursuit. Art, however, produces answers completely unique to the observer. This intellectual collision of seemingly disparate bedfellows, that something magical and unexpected happens: new patterns emerge; new connections are forged between previously unconnected ideas and inspiration reigns. The main difference between Science and the Arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin, even different parts of the same Continuum, but rather, they are Manifestations of the same thing. The Arts and Sciences are Avatars of Human Creativity.
The pyramid of emanation is a reality map that can be used to understand more about existence through the connection, and relativity of the emanations. The Pyramid of emanation is a combination of the monistic understanding of source, the dualistic system of the metaphysical law of gender, the triadistic system of the three principles of alchemy, and the tetradistic system of understanding of the 4 western classic elements. This is a personal understanding, and has not been completely flushed out yet.
The tetractys also known as a tetrad, the mystic tetrad, the tetractys of the decad, and the pyramid of emanation is a equilateral triangular figure consisting of ten points arranged in four rows. The Tetractys is a reality map that can be used to understand more about existence through the connection, and relativity of the points, or emanations that make up it. The Tetractys is a geometrical representation of the fourth triangular number in mathematics, and creates a perfect equilateral triangle. It is also connected to pythagoreanism, which is the teachings, and beliefs held by Pythagoras, and his followers, who saw the symbol as very important mathematically, and philosophically. Pythagoras understood that the tetractys was a symbol of the musical, arithmetic and geometric ratios upon which the universe is built, and because of this it was considered sacred geometry.
The first row consists of 1 point, the second row consists of 2 Points, third row consists of 3 Points, and the fourth row consists of 4 Points. The Tetractys is a combination of the monistic understanding of source, the dualistic system of the metaphysical law of gender, the triadistic system of the three principles of alchemy, and the tetradistic system of the 4 western classic elements. All of the points of the tetractys add up to ten, which corresponds to unity, completion, and higher order, and makes the Paradigm a decadistic system.
Monistic:
The Monistic row of the Tetractys represents:
Source
Monad
Unity
Singularity
Divinity
Divine wisdom
This is the first point of divinity where all other emanations are created from. It represents all the raw power of being, while also acting as a divine essence of everything.
Dualistic:
The dualistic row of the tetractys represents:
The Dyad
Masculine/Feminine
Creation/Destruction
God/Goddess
Yin/Yang
Love/Strife
Light/Darkness
Activity/Passivity
Limit/Unlimited
Peras/Apeiron
The dualistic row of the tetractys is the first separation of the whole, and the beginning of motion. Where two forces of the whole push against each other changing, creating, and destroying as they do so.
Triadistic:
The triadistic row of the tetractys represents:
Sulfur, Mercury, Salt
Mother, Child, Father
Body, Mind, Spirit
The triadistic row of the tetractys separates out the states of being, and the canvases in which the universe will be painted upon.
Tetradistic:
The tetradistic row of the tetractys represents:
Fire, Air, Water, and Earth
Hot, Dry, Wet, and Cold
The tetradistic row of the tetractys is the separation of the core aspects of existence mostly being elements, and qualities that make up everything, and put the rest of existence into being.
“The Lips of Wisdom are sealed except to the ears of understanding.”
I. THE PRINCIPLE OF MENTALISM.
“THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.“This Principle embodies the truth that “All is Mind.“It explains that THE ALL (which is the Substantial Reality underlying all the outward manifestations and appearances which we know under the terms of “The Material Universe”; the “Phenomena of Life”; “Matter”; “Energy”; and, in short, all that is apparent to our material senses) is SPIRIT…
II. THE PRINCIPLE OF CORRESPONDENCE.
“As above, so below; as below so above.“This Principle embodies the truth that there is always a Correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of Being and Life.
III. THE PRINCIPLE OF VIBRATION.
“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates."This Principle embodies the truth that "everything is in motion”; “everything vibrates”; “nothing is at rest”; facts which Modern Science endorses, and which each new scientific discovery tends to verify.
IV. THE PRINCIPLE OF POLARITY.
“Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet…”It explains that in everything there are two poles, or opposite aspects, and that "opposites” are really only the two extremes of the same thing, with many varying degrees between them.
V. THE PRINCIPLE OF RHYTHM
“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”This Principle embodies the truth that in everything there is manifested a measured motion, to and fro; a flow and inflow; a swing backward and forward; a pendulum-like movement; a tide-like ebb and flow; a high-tide and low-tide.
VI. THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT.
“Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law."It explains that: "Everything Happens according to Law”; that nothing ever “merely happens”; that there is no such thing as Chance… only law unseen.
VII. THE PRINCIPLE OF GENDER.
“Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles Gender; manifests on all planes."This Principle embodies the truth that there is GENDER manifested in everything — the Masculine and Feminine Principles ever at work. This is true not only of the Physical Plane, but of the Mental and even the Spiritual Planes.
A
L C H E M Y may be described, in the words of Baudelaire, as a process
of ‘distilling the eternal from the transient’. As the art of
transmutation par excellence, the classical applications of alchemy have
always been twofold: chrysopoeia and apotheosis
(gold-making and god-making)—the perfection of metals and mortals. In
seeking to turn ‘poison into wine’, alchemy, like tantra, engages
material existence—often at its most dissolute or corruptible—in order
to transform it into a vehicle of liberation. Like theurgy, it seeks not
only personal liberation—the redemption of the soul from the cycles of
generation and corruption—but also the liberation (or perfection) of
nature herself through participation in the cosmic demiurgy. In its
highest sense, therefore, alchemy conforms to what Lurianic kabbalists
would call tikkun, the restoration of the world.
Almost
invariably, the earliest alchemical texts describe procedures for
creating elixirs of immortality—of extracting transformative essences
from physical substances in order to render metals golden and mortals
divine. Through this, the earliest alchemists innovated physical
processes such as distillation and fermentation, extraction and
refinement, and the analysis and synthesis of various chemical
substances. However, it must not be forgotten that the earliest contexts of ‘material’ alchemy were not proto-scientific, but ritualistic.
Whether one looks at the Taiqing (Great Clarity) tradition of
third-to-sixth century China, the Siddha traditions of early medieval
India, or the magical and theurgical milieux of Hellenistic Egypt, the
most concrete alchemical practices were always inseparable from ritual
invocations to and supplications of the divinities whose ranks the
alchemist wished to enter. Moreover, in east and west alike, the
alchemical techniques themselves were allegedly passed down from
divinity to humanity. Alchemy was a divine art (hieratikē technē).
Whether
stemming from the entheogenic properties of physical elixirs, or
developing independently, the desire to encounter the divine directly
through inner experience (gnōsis, jnāna) was soon cultivated
via internal practices of a meditative or metaphysiological character.
Here the elixir began to be generated within the vessels of the human
body in order to transform it into an alchemical body of glory. Thus,
the two basic traditions—external and internal alchemy; neidan and waidan,
laboratory and oratory—can, in the final analysis, be regarded as
complimentary approaches to the same end: the attainment of perfection
through liberation from conditioned existence.
Despite
these generalising remarks, and despite the unusual aptness of
Baudelaire’s phrase, it must nevertheless be conceded that the effort to
define alchemy to everyone’s satisfaction may well be impossible. On
one hand, alchemy needs to be defined in a way that encapsulates the
living breadth and depth of the world’s alchemical traditions. On the
other hand, such a definition must also be internally consistent with
the many specific, historically contingent (and at timescontradictory)
expressions of alchemy. Moreover, the very attempt to strike such a
‘golden mean’ between the universal and particular, between the
‘synchronic’ and the ‘diachronic’, is something of an alchemical act in
and of itself—the elusive, indeed transformative, point where ‘art’
becomes science and ‘science’, art. In this respect, alchemy may well be
seen to inhere precisely in such ‘nodal points of qualitative change’
(as Jack Lindsay called them in his landmark study of Graeco-Egyptian
alchemy), or in instances of
‘qualitative exaltation’ (as the twentieth-century alchemist, René
Schwaller de Lubicz, described them with regards to the ‘teratological
proliferations’ of biological species).
Rather
than offer a single, rigid definition (which will quickly become
restrictive), what I would like to do in this introduction is present a
series of linguistic, historiographical, and phenomenological
‘circumambulations’ around the alchemical mysterium. In so
doing, I seek to trace some of the more salient contours of the
alchemical landscape, and, if possible, glimpse the presence of its
elusive ‘centre’. One of the merits of approaching alchemy by
circumambulation is that it affords a much wider circumscription of the
phenomenon than the narrowly fixed parameters of disciplinal specificity
usually permit; it therefore allows a more eidetic or phenomenological
insight to develop—an approach that, in German philosophical traditions,
is seen to promote actual understanding (Verstehen) rather mere explanation (Erklären). As Hans Thomas Hakl points out in a recent study of Julius Evola’s alchemical works, circumambulatio is
precisely the approach taken in order to engender an actual experience
of the realities that allegedly underpin the multiplicity of Hermetic
symbols. It is, potentially, a
method of ‘knowledge by presence’ rather than simple ‘representational
knowledge’. Of course, such approaches, which are fundamentally
morphological in their method, are also ahistorical in character, and so
what must be offered here is not an exclusivelyphenomenological
approach, but a circumambulation that is also tempered in the fires of
historical rigour. Such an approach, in my experience, is fundamentally
more balanced than either of the extremes.
At
the same time, it must be recognised that there is an inherent tension
to this balance; a tension that requires one to embrace a Heraclitean
‘harmony of contraries’ between deeply opposed methodologies. In
circumambulating a centre, whether as an ‘essentialist’ or ‘relativist’,
the ultimate nature of the centre, indeed the substantial existence of
the centre itself, must remain an open question. As the Dao de Jingremarks,
‘thirty spokes meet in the hub of the wheel, but the function of the
wheel is in the empty part’. Without the concrete spokes of
empirical-historical data, we may not become aware of the centre, and
yet this centre, which is empty, is precisely the function (the
phenomenological Verstehen) around which the spokes revolve,
giving them their form, their function and thus their meaning. Both
aspects are interdependent and both must be equally accounted for. Thus,
before we open up to any deeper phenomenological perceptions, our
circumambulations must begin by first situating alchemy in its concrete
historical-linguistic and historiographic contexts.
The
historical purview of what came to be called alchemy includes an
undeniable current of influence stemming from Pharaonic and Hellenistic
Egypt on one hand, and another stemming from ancient China, medieval
India and Tibet on the other―currents that appear to have
cross-fertilised before converging in Arabic alchemy, whence the term
proper: al-kīmiyā. Scholars have long known that the word alchemy points to an Arabic transmission (alkīmiyā becomes Spanishalquimia, Latin alchimia, French alchimie, German Alchemie, etc.) [The Arabic definite article al- points clearly to this, yet the precise origin of the lexeme kīmiyā is far from certain. Academic consensus has generally favoured Greek sources, notably those published by Marcellin Berthelot, suggesting an origin from the term chyma(‘that
which is poured out’; ‘flows, fluid’; ‘ingot, bar’; metaphorically,
‘confused mass, aggregate, crowd’; ‘materials, constituents’), whence chymeia, ‘the art of alloying metals’) named from its supposed inventor, Chymēs. As Harris observes in his 1704 Lexicon Technicum:
Chymisty,
is variously defined, but the design of this Art is to separate
usefully the Purer Parts of any mix’d Body from the more Gross and
Impure. It seems probably to be derived from the Greek word chymos, which signifies a Juice, or the purer Substance of a mix’d Body; though some will have it to come from cheein, to melt. It is also called the Spagyrick, Hermetick, and Pyrotechnick Art, as also by some Alchymy.
The
idea of fluid essences, extracts or elixirs is clearly central to the
alchemical purview, and as will be seen throughout this volume, it is
also inherent to the very names for alchemy in Chinese and Indo-Tibetan
traditions (Chinese dao jindan, Sanskrit rasāyana, Tibetan bcud len).
In addition, the Greek etymology distinctly emphasises the idea of
metallic fusibility, and the idea that metals are fundamentallyfusible entities proves central to the alchemical perception. The word ‘metal’ itself (metallon, metalleion) is homophonous with—and most likely derived from—a whole series of words indicating ‘transformation’, such as metalloiōsis, which is formed from the preposition meta– (‘between, with, after; taking a different position or state’) and the substantive alloiōsis (‘alteration’ or ‘change’).
Whether derived from chyma, chymeia, Chymēs, or chymos, the term alchemy appears to
come to the Latin west from late Greek sources through the same kinds
of channels that preserved Platonic and Aristotelian texts, in Arabic
translation, after the fall of the Greek Academy. While the lines of
historical transmission are well known, matters are not quite as simple
as they first appear. Egyptologists and Sinologists have both brought
forward diverging evidence that the origins of alchemy lay not in Greece
but in the Ancient Near or Far East.
The Egyptian Etymology
In addition to the Greek etymology, the root kīmiyā has also been traced to the Egyptian name for Egypt, km.t (Coptic keme, kēmi), which Plutarch gives as chēmia,‘the blackest earth’ (malista melangeion). The implications of this etymology are explored in detail elsewhere in this volume. Suffice
it to say for now that a wealth of theological and cosmological
significations deeply pertinent to alchemy emerge from Plutarch’s
identification of the name of Egypt with not only the blackness of the
soil, but also with the blackness of the pupil of the eye. On a basic,
symbolic level, this coheres with the fact that the Nilotic black earth,
which literally (and geographically) defined Egypt, was fertile soil—the
perfect receptor of life-giving seed; in the same way, the transparent
openness that forms the pupil of the eye is the perfect receptor of
light.
As will be seen,
these significations directly tie the early conception of alchemy to
genuine Egyptian theological conceptions on one hand, and to the Greek
Hermetic corpus on the other, a point that has already been articulated
in some detail by Erik Iversen with regard to the Memphite cosmology of
the Shabaka stone and its clear recapitulation in the Corpus Hermeticum itself. Furthermore,
as the late Algis Uždavinys makes abundantly clear, this current of
alchemy cannot be divorced from the numerous morphological continuities
that exist between Egyptian mortuary cult on one hand, and Homeric,
Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic and hieratic Neoplatonic traditions on the
other. And as scholars such as
Peter Kingsley have shown, these morphological connections are not
merely apparent: they are deeply rooted in a fine web of mutual
historical and geographical interactions between the initiatic
traditions not only of Egypt itself, but those of southern Italy and
Sicily (whence the Pythagorean current that would retain such a strong
presence in the Hermetic tradition down through the centuries, from
Bolus of Mendes to the Turba Philosophorum).
The Chinese Origin of the Chem- Etymon
Joseph Needham, in the alchemical volumes of his magisterial Science and Civilisation in China, makes a very plausible case for the Greek and Arabic borrowing of the Chinese term jin (‘gold’) or jin i (‘gold
juice, gold ferment’), terms explicitly linked to aurifaction,
aurifiction and elixirs for perfecting bodies, all of which appears to
place kīmiyā in an original context not only of Taoist
metallurgical practices, but also of traditions of physical immortality
(macrobiotics). After one of the most lucid and thorough surveys of the existing etymological evidence for alchemy, Needham, concludes:
If some have found an influence of jin (kiem) on chēmeia (chimeia, chymeia) difficult to accept, there has been less desire to question its influence on al-kīmiyā.
No Arabic etymologist ever produced a plausible derivation of the word
from Semitic roots, and there is the further point that both jin i and kīmiyā could and did mean an actual substance or elixir as well as the art of making elixirs, while chēmeia does
not seem to have been used as a concrete noun of that kind. We are left
with the possibility that the name of the Chinese ‘gold art’,
crystallised in the syllable jin(kiem), spread over
the length and breadth of the Old World, evoking first the Greek terms
for chemistry and then, indirectly or directly, the Arabic one.
Needham
makes it saliently clear that alchemy is not simply a product of
Hellenistic culture. Although it is difficult to accept an exclusively Chinese
origin for alchemy, the copious evidence adduced by Needham and his
collaborators over four large volumes irrevocably transforms (and
complicates) the overall picture of the genesis of alchemy. In short,
not only must one come to terms with the Ancient Near Eastern influence
upon Hellenistic and Islamicate alchemical traditions, one must also
contend with the Ancient Far Eastern influences upon the intellectual
and technical history of alchemy. This is especially pertinent given the
attested lines of cultural exchange between the Asian, European and
African landmasses along the Silk Road, which were established during
the Han Dynasty (206 bce – 220 ce).
The most important Chinese term for alchemy was jindan,
or ‘golden elixir’, which was conceived in both an external sense (as a
macrobiogen) and an internal sense (as a spiritual embryo). Jindan also
referred especially to cinnabar, the red salt of sulphur and mercury,
and the raw ingredient from which mercury was refined. As such, cinnabar
points to one of the most ancient and pervasive mineral theophanies of
the world’s alchemical traditions: the marriage of mineral sulphur and
metallic mercury to form a red crystalline stone (mercuric sulphide).
Around this naturally occurring substance, multiple layers of
historical, cultural and mythological meaning would accrue not only in
Chinese and Indo-Tibetan but also in Islamicate and European alchemical
traditions.
With regard to
our previous remarks on metal as a quintessentially fluid substance, it
may also be added here that in ancient Chinese cosmology, metal (for
which jin was also a generic term) was regarded as one of the five elements (wu xing);
not only was it regarded as the ‘mother’ of the water element, the
metal element itself was defined precisely by its double capacity to melt and to solidify into new form (as in a mould). This
ability to revert from a solid form to an amorphous or liquid state,
and back again, is a very important principle. In the western alchemical
canon it would inhere in the formula: solve et coagula,
‘dissolve and coagulate’, a formula that possesses deep symbolic value
in regards to ontologies of ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ (pointing to a more
paradoxical ontology embracing both ‘permanence in flux’ and ‘flux in
permanence’). It also underscores the universal value almost unanimously
given to mercury as the ‘essence’ of metals. For next to gold and
cinnabar, mercury figures as the most universal of all alchemical
substances in eastern and western traditions alike. When alchemically
refined, moreover, it came to be regarded less as a ‘substance’ per se, as more as the underlying principle of pure sublimity—of absolute volatility—with the unique power to penetrate and transform all things, especially minerals and metals (the most dense things).
Occult Aspects 